Coffee, Nicotine Gum, and David Graeber

Jean-Luc Godard, Masculin, féminin (1966)

I woke this morning to find an e-mail in my inbox announcing an upcoming lecture at SVA’s Art Criticism Program by David Graeber with the description:

DAVID GRAEBER, On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream-Time

The twentieth century produced a very clear sense of what the future was to be, but we now seem unable to imagine any sort of redemptive future. How did this happen? One reason is the replacement of what might be called poetic technologies with bureaucratic technologies. Another is the terminal perturbations of capitalism, which is increasingly unable to envision any future at all.

—

The name sounding more than vaguely familiar and the topic sounding more than vaguely interesting, I put the coffee on popped a nicotine gum and got to work (re)discovering the work of this (sometimes labeled) radical scholar. 

I discovered that David Graeber had been an influential professor in anthropology during my time at Yale. Being in the history department I didn’t come into contact with his lectures directly, but I do remember his name being floated around various dinner party attempts at reviving the intellectual salon. This happened most frequently in 2007, my final year at Yale, due to the fact that David Graeber, beloved scholar mascot for the liberal left and socio-anarchists at Yale had not been offered an opportunity for tenure and was in fact going to have his contract lapse at the end of that year. The expected outcry ensued and petitions were signed, all to no avail. 

Since then, Graeber has gone on to bigger and better things than the juggernaut of Yale would conceive of allowing, namely his influential role in the occupy movement, the publication of his most recent book Debt: the First 5000 Years, and his position as reader in social anthropology at Goldsmiths here in London. 

I was curious to understand why this activist academic and social theorist was speaking at SVA and what his relationship to art theory was in general, just as I am curious about the relationship of all social/media theory to art theory as well. I came across a 2008 piece of writing by Graeber called “The Sadness of Post-Workerism or “Art and Immaterial Labour” Conference A Sort of Review.” In this, Graeber writes his reflections from a conference that took place at Tate Modern in early 2008 and invited a group of Italian post-worker theorists/autonomist scholars Tomi Negri, Bifo Berardi, Marizio Lazzarato, and Judith Revel to speak about art and social theory in this, the most revered of contemporary art ampitheatres. 

As it turns out, in this short piece of writing alone, Graeber has a lot of insightful commentary to make on the parallels between the artworld, the political world, and magic, art as industry, the false claim of immateriality, and nostalgia for the political power of the work of art - to name but a few. The following quotes on these subjects are useful reminders about the links between politcal and social theory and art history and criticism, as well as the informative perspectives that can be had when the art world opens its doors to criticism from outside itself. 

The following is a sort of outline of his ideas illustrated by quotation at length:

Speakers: Maurizio Lazzarato, Judith Revel, Bifo, Toni Negri

The Unique Historical Moment, Art, and Revolution:

 Why, for example, would one wish to argue that in the year 2008 we live in a unique historical moment, unlike anything that came before, and then act as if this moment can only really be described through concepts French thinkers developed in the 1960s and ‘70s—then illustrate one’s points almost exclusively with art created between 1916 and 1922?  

 This does seem strangely arbitrary but I suspect there is a reason. We might ask: what does the moment of Futurism, Dada, Constructivism and the rest, and French ’68 thought, have in common? Actually quite a lot. Each corresponded to a moment of revolution: to adopt Immanuel Wallerstein’s terminology, the world revolution of 1917 in one case, and the world revolution of 1968 in the other. Each witnessed an explosion of creativity in which a longstanding European artistic or intellectual Grand Tradition effectively reached the limits of its radical possibilities. That is to say, they marked the last moment at which it was possible to plausibly claim that breaking all the rules—whether violating artistic conventions, or shattering philosophical assumptions—was itself, necessarily, a subversive political act as well.  

 This is particularly easy to see in the case of the European avant garde. From Duchamp’s first readymade in 1914, Hugo Ball’s Dada manifesto and tone poems in 1916, to Malevich’s White on White in 1918, culminating in the whole phenomenon of Berlin dada from 1918 to 1922, one could see revolutionary artists perform, in rapid succession, just about every subversive gesture it was possible to make: from white canvases to automatic writing, theatrical performances designed to incite riots, sacrilegious photo montage, gallery shows in which the public was handed hammers and invited to destroy any piece they took a disfancy to, objects plucked off the street and sacralized as art. All that remained for the Surrealists was to connect a few remaining dots, and the heroic moment was over. One could still do political art, of course, and one could still defy convention. But it became effectively impossible to claim that by doing one you were necessarily doing the other, and increasingly difficult to even try to do both at the same time. It was possible, certainly, to continue in the Avant Garde tradition without claiming one’s work had political implications (as did anyone from Jackson Pollock to Andy Warhol), it was possible to do straight-out political art (like, say, Diego Rivera); one could even (like the Situationists) continue as a revolutionary in the Avant Garde tradition but stop making art, but that pretty much exhausted the remaining possibilities. 

The Dilution of the Power of the New, Consuming the Avant-garde:

Just as purely formal avant garde experiment proved perfectly well suited to grace the homes of conservative bankers, and Surrealist montage to become the language of the advertising industry, so did poststructural theory quickly prove the perfect philosophy for self-satisfied liberal academics with no political engagement at all.  

It is, ultimately, a subtle form of conservatism—or, perhaps one should say conservative radicalism, if such were possible—a nostalgia for the days when it was possible to put on a tin-foil suit, shout nonsense verse, and watch staid bourgeois audiences turn into outraged lynch mobs; to strike a blow against Cartesian Dualism and feel that by doing so, one has thereby struck a blow for oppressed people everywhere. 

The Concept of Immaterial Labor:

The classic definition, by Maurizio Lazzarato is “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity”—the “informational content” referring to the increasing importance in production and marketing of new forms of “cybernetics and computer control”, while the second, the “cultural content”, refers to the labor of “defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion,” which, increasingly, everyone is doing all the time.

Marxism, Capitalism, and Reproductive Labor Reduced

One could, even, start from the belated recognition of the importance of women’s labor to reimagine Marxist categories in general, to recognize that what we call “domestic” or even “reproductive” labor, the labor of creating people and social relations, has always been the most important form of human endeavor in any society, and that the creation of wheat, socks, and petrochemicals always merely a means to that end, and that—what’s more—most human societies have been perfectly well aware of this. One of the more peculiar features of capitalism is that it is not—that as an ideology, it encourages us to see the production of commodities as the primary business of human existence, and the mutual fashioning of human beings as somehow secondary.  

Immaterial Labor and Culture as Fluff(or not!):

that very notion that there is something that can be referred to as “immaterial labor” relies on a remarkably crude, old- fashioned kind of Marxism. Immaterial labor, we are told, is labor that produces information and culture. In other words it is “immaterial” not because the labor itself is immaterial (how could it be?) but because it produces immaterial things. This idea that different sorts of labor can be 

sorted into more material, and less material categories according to the nature of their product is the basis for the whole conception that societies consist of a “material base” (the production, again, of wheat, socks and petrochemicals) and “ideological superstructure” (the production of music, culture, laws, religion, essays such as this). This is what’s allowed generations of Marxists to declare that most of what we call “culture” is really just so much fluff, at best a reflex of the really important stuff going on in fields and foundries.

The Art World as a Form of Politics:

Consider Negri’s contribution to the conference. He begins by arguing that each change in the development of the productive forces since the 1840s corresponds to a change in the dominant style of high art: the realism of the period 1848-1870 corresponds to one of the concentration of industry and the working class, impressionism, from 1871-1914, marks the period of the “professional worker”, that sees the world as to be dissolved and reconstructed, after 1917, abstract art reflects the new abstraction of labor-power with the introduction of scientific management, and so on. The changes in the material infrastructure—of industry—are thus reflected in the ideological superstructure. The resulting analysis is revealing no doubt, even fun if one is into that sort of thing, but it sidesteps the obvious fact that the production of art is an industry, and one connected to capital, marketing, and design in any number of (historically shifting) ways. One need not ask who is buying these things, who is funding the institutions, where do artists live, how else are their techniques being employed. By defining art as belonging to the immaterial domain, it’s materialities, or even its entanglement in other abstractions (like money) need not be addressed. 

 This is not perhaps the place for a prolonged analysis, but a few notes on what’s called “the art world” might seem to be in order. It is a common perception, not untrue, that at least since the ‘20s the art world has been in a kind of permanent institutionalized crisis. One could even say that what we call “the art world” has become the ongoing management of this crisis. 

The crisis of course is about the nature of art. The entire apparatus of the art world—critics, journals, curators, gallery owners, dealers, flashy magazines and the people who leaf through them and argue about them in factories-turned-chichi-cafes in gentrifying neighborhoods…— could be said to exist to come up with an answer to one single question: what is art? Or, to be more precise, to come up with some answer other than the obvious one, which is “whatever we can convince very rich people to buy.”  

 I am really not trying to be cynical. Actually I think the dilemma to some degree flows from the very nature of politics. One thing the explosion of the avant garde did accomplish was to destroy the boundaries between art and politics, to make clear in fact that art was always, really, a form of politics (or at least that this was always one thing that it was.) As a result the art world has been faced with the same fundamental dilemma as any form of politics: the impossibility of establishing its own legitimacy. 

The Art Market, and the Creation of Value:

If so, for the art world to recognize itself as a form of politics is also to recognize itself as something both magical, and a confidence game—a kind of scam.  

 Such then is the nature of the permanent crisis. In political economy terms, of course, the art world has become largely an appendage to finance capital. This is not to say that it takes on the nature of finance capital (in many ways, in its forms, values, and practices, is almost exactly the opposite)—but it is to say it follows it around, its galleries and studios clustering and proliferating around the fringes of the neighborhoods where financiers live and work in global cities everywhere, from New York and London to Basel and Miami.  

Contemporary art holds out a special appeal to financiers, I suspect, because it allows for a kind of short-circuit in the normal process of value-creation. It is a world where the mediations that normally intervene between the proletarian world of material production and the airy heights of fictive capital, are, essentially, yanked away. 

Ordinarily, it is the working class world in which people make themselves intimately familiar with the uses of welding gear, glue, dyes and sheets of plastic, power saws, thread, cement, and toxic industrial solvents. It is among the upper class, or at last upper middle class world where even economics turns into politics: where everything is impression management and things really can become true because you say so. Between these two worlds lie endless tiers of mediation. Factories and workshops in China and Southeast Asia produce clothing designed by companies in New York, paid for with capital invested on the basis of calculations of debt, interest, anticipation of future demand and market fluctuations in Bahrain, Tokyo, and Zurich, repackaged in turn into an endless variety of derivatives—futures, options, various traded and arbitraged and repackaged again onto even greater levels of mathematical abstraction to the point where the very idea of trying to establish a relation with any physical product, goods or services, is simply inconceivable. Yet the same bankers and traders who produce these complex financial instruments also like to surround themselves with artists, people who are always busy making things—a kind of imaginary proletariat assembled by finance capital, producing unique products out of for the most part very inexpensive materials, objects said financiers can baptize, consecrate, through money and thus turn into art, thus displaying its ability to transform the basest of materials into objects worth far, far more than gold. 

Perhaps the problem runs even deeper. Perhaps this is simply the kind of dilemma that necessarily ensues when one two incommensurable systems of value face off against each other. 

The original, romantic conception of the artist—and hence, the very idea of art in the modern sense—arose around the time of industrial revolution. Probably this is no coincidence. As Godbout and Caille have pointed out, there is a certain complementarity. Industrialism was all about the mass production of physical objects, but the producers themselves were invisible, anonymous—about them one knew nothing. Art was about the production of unique physical objects, and their value was seen as emerging directly from the equally unique genius of their individual producers—about whom one knew everything. Even more, the production of commodities was seen as a purely economic activity. One produced fishcakes, or aluminum siding, in order to make money. The production of art was not seen as an essentially economic activity. Like the pursuit of scientific knowledge, or spiritual grace, or the love of family for that matter, the love of art has always been seen as expressing a fundamentally different, higher form of value. Genuine artists do not produce art simply in order to make money. But unlike astronomers, priests, or housewives, they do have to sell their products on the market in order to survive. What’s more, the market value of their work is dependent on the perception that it was produced in the pursuit of something other than market value. People argue endlessly about what that “something other” is—beauty, inspiration, virtuosity, aesthetic form—I would myself argue that nowadays, at least, it is impossible to say it is just one thing, rather, art has become a field for play and experiment with the very idea of value—but all pretty much agree that, were an artist to be seen as simply in it for the money, his work would be worth less of it. 

Artists as Revolutionaries, Still:

For two hundred years at least, artists and those drawn to them have created enclaves where it has been possible to experiment with forms of work, exchange, and production radically different from those promoted by capital. While they are not always self- consciously revolutionary, artistic circles have had a persistent tendency to overlap with revolutionary circles; presumably, precisely because these have been spaces where people can experiment with radically different, less alienated forms of life. The fact that all this is made possible by money percolating downwards from finance capital does not make such spaces “ultimately” a product of capitalism any more than the fact a privately owned factory uses state- supplied and regulated utilities and postal services, relies on police to protect its property and courts to enforce its contracts, makes the cars they turn out “ultimately” products of socialism. Total systems don’t really exist, they’re just stories we tell ourselves, and the fact that capital is dominant now does not mean that it will always be.  

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Reflections on Politics, Art, and Revolution

I am in some senses skeptical of Graeber’s declaration of the political aspects of art as both a radical sphere for revolution and divorced from capitalism. In the case of new media art, distributed art, and non-profit arts I can see a more direct relationship existing, but this is complicated in the commercial art world and it is somewhat of a false belief in the “pure” motives of starving artists as creative geniuses compelled to create regardless of money or fame. In fact, the (knowing) cultivation of this persona is directly proportional to the value of the work of art (as Graeber himself notes).

I am thinking mostly here of cases of the art superstar or the self-consciously capitalistic artists of the 1990s and before along a Duchamp-Warhol-Hirst trajectory, and although you could argue that the very self-conscious manipulation of commodity and capitalism was a commentary on the marriage of art and capitalism that had occurred in the twentieth century after a very long engagement that had been taking place since they first started seeing each other in the Renaissance, the radical and revolutionary aspects of art, even in its most politicized form, seem to have been overwhelmingly drowned out by the commodified and capitilistic approach to art driven by the market. Even the museum falls prey to this kind of activity in curating and inviting shows that will draw the largest crowds (either to bolster entrance sales ala MOMA) or to provide continued justification for its existence to belt-tightening austerity governments.  

Ultimately, some of Graeber’s most intriguing delineations of the shoulder-rubbing of the art and finance worlds comes as he talks of financiers and consumers of art as producers of value in a duchampian readymade sense, and the paradoxical parallels of replication and commodification of industrialization returning to artists as a sort of a proxy for the invisible labor of everyday. In this way is it a sort of unacknowledge exculpation of guilt for the outsourced and invisible labor on which their fortunes rely? The glue guns and bolts and images of made in america labor hanging on their walls at night is a protection from the ghosts of the invisible labor that the denim they sell by day invite. 

Near the end of his essay Graeber returns to the role of art and art theorists in this age of immateriality and their role in the production of culture with the notion of the “permanent need to conjure up a sense that we are in a profoundly new historical moment.” This certainly seems to be the case for art scholar standouts such as Nicolas Bourriaud. But as Bourriaud himself has argued, we are in an age of the “death of the new” and I would say that is what is new is new but what is new is also old (see earlier posts on retromediation for example). This can be taken in two senses, the old is reflected in the aesthetics of the new (as in new media art revisiting concepts of material art history) as well as in the currency afforded to artists working with older technologies in the face of technological change (such as 16mm film for example). 

Graeber may relate this retromediating impulse to the “terminal perturbations of capitalism” and the collapse of the future into the present as he does at the end of his essay. But perhaps this return to old(er) methods and old(er) modes of inquiry is not as stale as it first appears. I have begun to question if the end of postmodernity is marked instead by a return to modernity - Late modernity as Robert Kaufman would call it, or as others have suggested, the return of the real. Is this once again part of a larger trend towards a search for authenticity in the hyperglobalized and hypermediated world we live in? It is already too late to protect the realm of the local and the authentic from capitalism’s long arm. The very products we consume in rejection of big brands are really extensions of those brands themselves, albeit carefully concealed and crafted to obscure this fact. But this conversation will have to wait for a different day. Suffice it to say that we have certainly exercised a collective cognitive dissonance in which we, even the artists, are unsettlingly comfortable and at ease with our existence as the hybrid children of marx and coca-cola.