Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

eng
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
the proponent and the beneficiary of a range of public policies for culture, without the
need of mediators (without having to open a small business or otherwise “purchasing”
invoices from third parties, or issuing overtaxed autonomous receipts etc.).
ReCultura Movement acknowledges it is work in general that becomes (just as
cultural production work) precarious, informal, “intermittent,” and dependent on
occasional contracts, projects or servile service demands — while all kinds of work
take on cultural and cognitive characteristics.
In cognitive capitalism, work is separated from employment and takes the form
of a personal provision: it is a new form of servitude but, on the other hand, it has
an unprecedented potential of freedom and creativity. It is servitude because culture
mobilizes a kind of work that coincides with life itself — the emotions, the linguistic
and communicative abilities — without this being acknowledged, except on the
forms of increasing informality and precariousness of the workers’ rights.
But it brings potential freedom, because the productive dimension of this kind
of work depends on the insertion of everyone’s lives in networks that allow the realization
of their autonomy. Here is the rise of a new type of conflict: capital is not
anymore opposed to work within the confines of the corporation and of the wage
relation; the corporation format itself is what is at stake.
On the one side we have the modulation of fragments: the corporation format
continues in force only due to the uncountable mechanisms that keep it alive, and
the same happens with the forged invoices that those who work in the cultural field
are obliged to obtain in order to become a fictitious legal person. On the other side,
the materiality of the work depends on the extent of social cooperation networks
that, as they no longer fit in the corporation format, coincide with the very public
space that draws the metropolitan networks of production and circulation.
The culture movement can play, in this sense, a key role as its struggle refers to
the new conditions of work, and not to the double fiction of cultural specificity.
We must defend the rights not only as a result of employment, but also as the
conditions that allow the new qualities of work — cultural, communicative, linguistic
qualities — not to be limited to the phenomenology of a new servitude, but to
update its potential of freedom.
The Cultural Hotspots policy developed by Brazilian Ministry of Culture under
the Cultura Viva program (in English: “Alive Culture”) is pioneering, for instead
of supporting exceptions it upholds the multiplicity of cultural movements: the
governmental fund recognizes that the productive dimensions of the movements are
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