Figure It Out: The Art of Living through Systems Failure

figure it out, comrade ~ figure it out, comrade ~ rules are just meant ~ for you to alter ~ and circumvent ✧ follow your heart, comrade ~ you are not lost ~ king of the forest ~ needs no signpost ✧ remember, comrade ~ blossoming plants ~ all indians ~ and partisans ✧ let’s close ranks, comrade ~ together in need ~ your hand in my hand ~ and marching feet ✧ improvise, comrade ~ and play your part ~ lies might be soft ~ while truths are hard ✧ deal with it, comrade ~ love is what counts ~ colors we count ~ and restless sounds ✧ figure it out, comrade ~ and comradess ~ tomorrow’s sun ~ is our address!!!

poem⁄Snađi se, druže by Škart / Translated collaboratively by Ljiljana Ilić, Milan Marković, and Paul Murray

1. Introduction¶

…where we give an overview of the concerns behind our inquiry, introduce our subject matter of popular illegalisms and ingenuities, storytelling and bonfires as methodology, and the ethics of refusal that underwrites it all. If you’re eager to dive right into the stories, head to the bonfires, where you’ll find them—though heavily redacted to preserve the anonymity of those living through systems failure. To uncover key concepts and explore the myriad ways folks colloquially capture the art of ‘figuring it out,’ visit the abécédaire section, where these expressions and ideas are laid out, complete with a library of references to deepen your exploration.

Figure it Out (FIO) is an artistic and research project engaging practices and phenomena of coping, tinkering, making-do, and circumventing exclusions that are developed by marginalized, underserved, discriminated, and vulnerable people. Gendered, racialized, bordered, disabled, and exploited, these constituencies are often forced to develop tools and strategies that are considered unacceptable to the institutions of the system. Sometimes these tools and strategies are forged out of necessity, of survival, sometimes to exercise rights or to secure access to basic services available to those deemed more “deserving”. Other times, these coping mechanisms reclaim rest, beauty, or pleasure as part of a dignified life. What FIO practices and phenomena have in common is that they are not about scamming peers or those more vulnerable than them. Instead, they are practices that take issue with formalized, normative forms of oppression (state, welfare institutions, corporations, workplace, credit, housing, utilities etc.) that have sets of rules and conditions of access that specific populations or individuals cannot meet. They are actions directed at the conditions that produce and reproduce systemic violence and which reformist approaches aim to fix in the long run. Fio practices instead inhabit different temporalities from the perspective of those who cannot and will not wait. In their urgency, they open up spaces where different ethical practices can emerge, where knowledges are passed on in ways that complicate claims to a universal and transparent public sphere.

1.1. Cheating, Lying, Stealing¶

The FIO project begins with tales of individuals or entire communities outwitting the system. By “system,” we mean any administrative structure or organization that sets and upholds the “rules of the game”. These rules are composed of numerous “small rules,” which are specific conditions we must fulfill to participate in the game. We all recognize this experience: for example, to rent a house or cross a border we need proof of identity, which usually requires various types of evidence. Similar conditions apply to receiving social services, refugee status, or to enroll in public schools or colleges. These prerequisites can be political, economic, demographic, or social. When we fail to meet some of these conditions, we face a choice: either give up or use our ingenuity. Sociologist Robert K. Merton’s strain theory—which became the basis of criminal sociology in the 1950s and 1960s—described innovation as accepting socio-cultural goals (like citizenship) but finding alternative ways to achieve them when regular processes fail. Innovation, in this context, involves bending the rules, employing charm, deceit, forgery, hacking, or other means considered illegal, criminal, or at least immoral.¹ According to Merton, while excluded groups must innovate to participate, the system often views their innovations as scams.

But what if we start from the idea that the game itself is rigged? Historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann has shown that since the 1970s mechanisms for single mothers in America to access social support have been set up as a nearly impossible game.² The rules prohibited them from working or having a partner’s support, while the aid they received was insufficient for survival. As a result, many women had to cheat the system, such as by hiding their employment. Is this a scam or a survival strategy? Such borderline cases reappear over and over again across times and geographies. As political theorist Kathi Weeks put it recently, the contemporary ubiquitous reliance on minor forms of illegalism hints to a becoming lumpenproletariat of vast segments of society, calling for a re-conceptualization of this class as one of the major uncompleted projects inherited from Marxist and anarchist debates of the previous century.³

Over the past two decades, the weight of what David Graeber called “total bureaucratization,”⁴ a tangled web of surveillance, punishment, and neglect, has only grown heavier. This bureaucratic machinery was already reconfiguring capitalist societies when Fourierist and anarchist movements at the turn of the last century took notice.⁵ Later, it seeped into the critiques of autonomists, Maoists, Black Panthers, and public intellectuals like Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon, as they all took aim at the insidiousness of institutionalized production of delinquency.⁶

Thus, deceiving an unjust or biased system can be justified. In the FIO project, we wanted to focus on the ingenuity of socially excluded groups trying to survive. No one who is not in serious economic need would bother buying broken light bulbs at a flea market to swap them out with functioning ones at their workplace, to take those home instead, as some urban poor do. These practices arise from necessity. We must ask ourselves what kind of society creates a market for broken light bulbs or forces single mothers into impossible situations—without questioning the morality of their “cheats.”

These scenarios blur the line between personal gain and survival strategies. Historically, this distinction was made by officials in administrative offices—immigration officers, social workers, bank clerks, insurance employees, state institutions, and municipal offices. The judgment of these street-level bureaucrats, based on context, experience, political views and empathy, differentiated fraud from survival.⁷ As digitalization and automation transfer ever more decision-making power to algorithms, this bureaucratic boundary becomes less permeable for those struggling to participate in social processes. The digital realm thus became a crucial topic within the FIO project because it interacts with idiosyncratic life circumstances and automated procedures, leading to new forms of knowledges and subcultures aimed at overcoming digital governance’s unintended consequences. For example, Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud’s Picidae web application helps users bypass Chinese internet censorship by transforming websites into digital pictures. Conversely, activists repurpose surveillance technology to expose illicit “push-backs” of asylum seekers when authorities violate prescribed procedures. The FIO project focuses on sousveillance practices and little scams that are developing in response to algorithmic decision-making models that reproduce or exacerbate existing exclusions and injustices.⁸ People adapt to these models by deceiving them.

1.2. Storytelling¶

Knowledge about ways of coping with failing systems is shared in ways that continuously need to negotiate their right to opacity in order to exist. The FIO research collective has been tracing, sharing and finding uses for stories of FIO practices beyond the locals that generated them. This specific process has being carried out by Mara Ferreri, Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Davor Mišković and Tomislav Medak, in collaboration with Kiosk, !Mediengruppe Bitnik; RYBN.ORG, Labomedia, Škart and the many people they in turn co-produced with.

This process was conceived as an idiosyncratic methodology to generate a zone of contact between the different processes of artistic, academic and militant research within the project itself. The collection of stories has happened via a mixed method of online and desk based research, word of mouth, interviews, and inquiries through personal and professional networks, and also, more crucially, through witnessing during short research visits hosted by other project members. These visits were organized around a bonfire gathering, that is, an unplugged (unrecorded) collective storytelling session.

While a fire might or might not have been literally present at the bonfires, these gatherings—across diverse languages and locations—have followed a scripted dramaturgy, in the first part, followed by a convivial and spontaneous second part. During the first part of the bonfire, a collective reading takes place, performed by all present. After a brief introduction of the FIO project’s subject matter and motivations, a print-out of around twenty stories of FIO practices is introduced by facilitators into the circle of attendees. Everyone is invited to pass around the manuscript and, if so desired, to lend their voice to reading one of the stories aloud, before passing it on to the next person. If someone prefers not to read aloud, they can just pass the print-out onwards.

The short stories in the print-out have been written down by the researchers and various collaborators beforehand. Some have been adapted from existing articles or books, shortened and modified to work as short individual tales. Others are transcriptions and adaptations from first- and second-hand accounts of bottom-up ingenuity that the researchers were told in conversations, interviews, and previous bonfire events. In the contexts where this was preferable, the stories have been translated and read in different languages, thus a unique roster of stories has been shared at each event. Sometimes these were prearranged to follow a theme or a narrative arch, other times they were presented in a random order.

After all the stories have been read aloud, all attendees are invited to a conversation and collective reflection on the techniques and strategies they heard about, what can be learned from them, their political potential as well as pitfalls. During the second part, participants also shared further anecdotes that might have come to mind during the listening. With their permission, such stories were then recorded and might be included in the next storytelling gathering and in the e-zine.

1.3. Bonfires as methodology¶

The bonfire events function simultaneously as a presentation strategy and as a research methodology centered around storytelling. While a number of excellent critical research projects analyze the ubiquitous rise of contemporary storytelling as a corporate, managerial and governmental technique of power,⁹ we were interested in the conditions and ambiences that can foster counter-storytelling to take place. Across our practices, there is a shared sense that the rooms in which certain stories can be shared, the spaces that have been variously addressed as third spaces or convivial places, or even temporary autonomous zones, are under threat.

In the hope of contributing to “other genres of liberatory storytelling and listening,” to borrow the expression of Katherine Brewer Ball,¹⁰ our approach has been instead of relying upon the existing communities of practice that surround the cultural centers that hosted us. In this sense, the events, while public or semi-public, were indeed conversations with specific constituencies, rather than attempts at engaging with the general idea of abstract audiences. This commitment to the specificities of their contexts and pre-existing relations was reinforced by the fact that the events were not recorded.

The idea of staging a collective storytelling session came from a commitment to finding a form for sharing the kind of stories of illegalism, workarounds, and everyday hacks that we were interested in learning from. Often, these are shared not in the first person, but as stories that one has heard from someone else, an acquaintance, a cousin, at the bar, etc. We were interested in this practice of retelling someone else’s stories as a form of minor politics, a reflection on class and subjectivity, and on the ways in which various delinquent knowledges gain currency in specific scenes.¹¹ The performativity of re-telling, of passing on of stories that are second hand, not owned but borrowed, was a mechanism that interested us as a countering gesture to the predominant authorial mode of the ownership of imaginaries. Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Storyteller”, noted that each retelling recontextualizes the narrative within a new socio-political framework.¹² For him, storytelling is a communal activity that transmits collective knowledge and cultural memory, contrasting sharply with the individualistic turn inaugurated by modern literature. This performative aspect of retelling allows for the continuous negotiation and redefinition of subjectivities and postures of resistances, making the act of storytelling a living, breathing political practice, where each act of retelling not only preserves but also transforms the story.

As Christian Salmon aptly noted, “Modern ’storytelling’ practices are not simply technologies for formatting discourses. They are also the very space within which discourses are elaborated and transmitted, a dispositive in which social forces and institutions, storytellers and the tellers of counter-stories, and encoding and formatting technologies, either come into conflict or collude with one another."¹³ This insight resonates with our approach, as we too see storytelling as constitutive of counter-spaces for knowledge and affect production.

This was also an experiment in glitching the model of public talk that is predominant in cultural, artistic, and academic spheres alike, while at the same time offering some scaffolding to hold space for meaningful conversations to take place even in the short span of a self-contained event (however hosted by milieus traversed by long-standing relations). The stories selected for the bonfires referred to different modes of lying, cheating, and stealing that reflect a spectrum of class positions, from undocumented migrants to unemployed folks, from benefit recipients to exhausted workers. Given the predominant discourse that pushes subjectivities in identifying with a glorified hustle culture of endless productivity, the discussion of cheating techniques across class lines reveals a potential for solidarity based on strategies of refusal of labour, of exclusion, and of humiliation.

Moreover, given the criminalized, transgressive, or quasi-illegal nature of many of the strategies taught by the FIO stories, we wanted to avoid putting contributors in a confessional mode. We are aware that stigma and personal shame can be associated with such survival techniques, as not everyone sees them as a reflection of a capacity for resistance against systemic failures. The invitation to read others’ stories therefore functioned as a simple dispositive to enact, collectively, a minor ethical gesture: by lending others’ voices to those stories that the protagonists cannot or should not be telling in the first person, we wished to open up a space for positioned listeners and re-tellers to perform an act of entrustment and custodianship of such knowledges.

A final po-ethic dispositive that was key in shaping the bonfire storytellings has been the laughter. Henri Bergson’s seminal work on laughter saw it as a mechanism for making a space of collectivity “[o]ur laughter is always the laughter of a group”. Moreover, he proposed that it serves as a social corrective, a means of revealing the absurdity of hierarchical and strict social structures.¹⁴ In our context, laughter operates not merely as a response but as an active engagement with power dynamics, embodying a subversive pleasure in exposing and circumventing systemic injustices. While Bergson viewed laughter as a collective social corrective, Franco Berardi’s reflections on cynicism and irony suggest another layer to this dynamic: Neither the cynic nor the ironist “believes in the true foundation of law,” yet each navigates this disbelief differently: “the cynical person bends to the law while mocking its false and pretentious values, while the ironic person escapes the law altogether, creating a linguistic space where law has no effectiveness.”¹⁵ If the whys behind the anecdotes are often tragic as they reveal the systemic injustices that shape impossible conditions of living, the hows often evoke a giggle that positions the participants vis-a-vis power structures: the affect of joy felt when hearing about a way to escape an unjust system reveals lines of partisanship that might not even be known to those laughing before the event. Such moments of shared chuckles during storytelling undermined the isolating effects that the power structures have on acts usually performed in secret and deemed illegal.

1.4. Ethics of refusal¶

The bonfire gatherings have functioned as processes of production, research, and presentation simultaneously. When thinking about this book, as it marks the closure of FIO, we have been confronted with the political and ethical question of making these stories public in printed and digital form, sharing their knowledges beyond the original settings where we encountered them.

The practice of ethnographic refusal presented us with a powerful toolbox to orientate our approach.¹⁶ First developed within the context of social science research, particularly when studying marginalized communities, strategies of ethnographic refusal are aimed at addressing ethical and political problems inherent in mainstream research practices. We believe this insight offers much that is of importance for the context of art and cultural production more broadly.

A strategy of refusal starts with an exhortation to move the focus of research away from individuals and communities positioned as “social problems” and towards institutions and power structures. By examining policies, practices, and historical forces that create and maintain inequality, ethnographic refusal aims to disrupt the cycle of objectification and exploitation inherent in traditional research. Predominant research approaches often focus on “pain and humiliation,” commodifying these narratives for authorial gain while failing to offer substantial benefits to those around which the study is centered. This demand for “pain stories” perpetuates harmful power dynamics, turning research into a form of “inquiry as invasion.” Furthermore, the pursuit of objectivity, often driven by those in power, can obscure the ethical implications of research and further stigmatize the subjects of the study. In this sense, in FIO we sought to challenge this paradigm by acknowledging the inherent power imbalances in the relationships that underpin the sharing of the stories. Moreover, proponents of ethnographic refusal highlight the importance of recognizing and honoring refusals from participants, for example by respecting instances where research participants choose to withhold information or decline to engage with certain lines of inquiry. These refusals, often communicated through coded language or silence, represent an assertion of sovereignty over knowledge and experience. Thus, we strive to understand and interpret these acts of resistance, even if it means limiting the scope of our inquiry and interactions.

By implementing these strategies and remaining attentive to the ethical and political dimensions of our research, tracing the stories in the e-zine has made use of two approaches. The first is the inclusion of a note specifying the context in which the story was first encountered. This process wants to draw attention to the relational conditions of the telling and of the retelling.

The second dispositive was inspired by “blackout poetry,” a technique that involves taking a page of preexisting text (typically a few pages from a newspaper, book, or any other printed source) and blacking out with a black or otherwise dark color most of the words, leaving only a select few words or sentences that create a new meaning when read in order. This approach uses the redaction of the stories as a way to mask sensitive information and make them unavailable for access while at the same time allowing readers to remain aware of their presence and importance.

Moreover, to introduce this multi-faceted exploration, we commissioned three short essays for the publication by Irene Peano, Amit S. Rai, and Delio Vásquez. These articles, alongside our own reflections, function as an unruly, reflexive framework that invites readers to lean in and trace the winding paths of the project’s themes. They help sketch a topography of urgent refusal and radical care, setting the stage for an assemblage of interventions that challenge the punitive architectures of today’s normative orders.

Contemporary popular illegalism is situated in the broader social environment as it interfaces with institutional rules, whenever institutions cease to be functional and collective agency seeks alternative routes. As practices of institutional tinkering and popular illegalism serve as both a means of survival and a form of resistance within various social, political, and economic frameworks, they further undo the distinction between political, productive, and reproductive regimes of practice. For those who are not (and were never) considered by the laws of the liberal state and/or the market as full subjects – of citizenship, of democracy, of humanity, of rationality, of morality – tinkering is often the only chance for actualizing their constitutive power. This is an essential characteristic of the political agency of the lumpenproletariat and we propose it should become an important component of institutional analysis in the present.¹⁷

1.5. Notes¶