Projective City — About — Slash Paris

Projective City promotes the creation of new human organs by providing suitable contemplative experiences to the public at large. We believe that this ongoing mutation of humanity is central to our survival as mental beings.

A note on the name

The notion of the projective city comes from The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eves Chiapello. In the context of articulating this “new spirit”, they use the notion of a city as a kind of metaphorical model, and describe the recent emergence of a seventh city, one they managed to detect in the managerial literature of the last half of the 20th century. In this new city, the central focus of life is on flexible and constantly changing networks of people and ideas which converge on diverse projects. Rather than the more hierarchical and monolithic structures that typified earlier times (and which no doubt still exist and play a considerable role in our economic situation), players in the new city are always hustling, “networking”, hooking up, dissolving, and reconnecting. This tends to involve the erosion of a distinction between work life and non-work life, and (worryingly) the commodification of personal relationships.

As one reads their description of the model citizens of this capitalist city, one cannot help but be reminded of contemporary emerging artists. Somehow, in spite of the generally left-wing and anti-capitalist postures of their predecessors, artists today function as the projective city’s best ambassadors (and thus as prophets of the new spirit), often without paying much attention to their ideological role. Hence we have a situation in which art today is both the exemplar of and the last exit from the most dominant cultural engine on the planet. This aporia of art is representative of the aporetic nature of life in this city which we all, to varying degrees, must inhabit. In such a situation, it behooves us all to project the best city possible.