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A review of J. Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud and the Gods Black People Make

This review of Review: J. Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud and the Gods Black People Make will appear later this year in the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Review: J. Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud and the Gods Black People Make

Max Haiven (Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice, Lakehead University)

The notion of the fetish is commonplace in conversations at the intersections of cultural studies and political economy. Yet the term often goes undefined, used as a shorthand for an irrational belief or fixation. For those working in the Marxist tradition, fetishism names that dangerous mystique that clouds an understanding of commodities and the relations of capitalist exploitation from which they spring. For those in the Freudian tradition, the fetish is the residue of a hiccup in the development of the individual’s libidinal economy, a pathological (though often harmless) obsession where objects, body parts or practices become the sources of or prerequisites to pleasure. In common parlance today, the “fetish” names a popular and lucrative catch-all for “kink” sexual practices or an unhealthy obsession with a false idol.

J. Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited shows us that much more is at stake in the term The very idea of the fetish stems from a self-aggrandizing European discourse through which the diverse material practices of non-European civilizations were cast down as childish and primitive. Matory directs the anthropological gaze back on Europeans who made a fetish (an object endowed by the human imagination with supernatural power) of the very idea of the fetish. Beyond simply a critique, his text is also a singularly insightful, thoughtful and provocative engagement with the present-day practitioners of traditional West African religions whose ancestors’ practices were so fatefully misrecognized as mere “fetishism” by Europeans. Matory’s bold revisitation of the fetish will be important for moving the cultural study of economics and the economic study of culture beyond Eurocentric presumptions and teleologies.

The notion of the fetish emerged in European theory as early as the 15th century based on a fundamental misunderstanding of West African cultural practices. Like the looted artifacts of the non-European world that are still today put on display in European and North American anthropological museums as evidence of their original owner’s barbarism (and of their current custodians’ benevolence – see Hicks 2020), the notion of the fetish is itself stolen and made,  retroactively, to justify the conditions of its theft. When the Catholic Portuguese and, later, the Protestant Dutch, began to expand their empires from the 15th century onward, they encountered and developed trade relations with West African civilizations whose cosmologies were vastly different, but whose complex and nuanced spiritual practices threw European’s strange fixations into stark relief (Pietz 1985). As David Graeber (2005) has argued, when met with the exotic customs of West Africans, European were faced with the provincialism of their own weird spiritual customs. As Anne McClintock (1995) notes, This jarring experience led Europeans to invent the kind of universalist ideals of human development that would become the key legitimations for imperialism, notably in the myths of civilizational stages and racial hierarchy. These were given scientific gloss in the 18th and 19th centuries and still haunt us today, with tragic effect. But back in the 15th century, the notion of the fetish, based on a word borrowed from Yoruban cosmology, would become a convenient catch-all by which European travelers, traders, missionaries–and, later, anthropologists, scientists and colonial administrators–could defame all the vast range of non-European spiritual practices involving objects, practices Europeans deemed barbaric, infantile, misguided or perverse. Matory argues, brilliantly, that the notion of fetish was itself a kind of fetish for Europeans: an almost supernaturally powerful “word-weapon.” Through its discursive magic non-European cosmologies could be denigrated as fetishistic and Europeans could develop their own cosmology of supremacy that would, by the 19th century, resolve itself around the fetishistic notion of whiteness.

Matory traces a genealogy of the concept of the fetish through European thought, including its role in the emergence of anthropology (his own field) and philosophy (notably Hegel). But Matroy takes special aim at the two thinkers with whom the term is now firmly associated: Marx and Freud. Through an engagement with both thinkers’ complex biographies, Matory notes that these Germanophone Jewish intellectuals (both of whom died in London as what we would today call refugees) were struggling to find a place within a highly anti-Semitic cultural climate of capitalist imperialsm. Through a process Matory calls “ethnological schadenfreude” (by which upwardly mobile actors in a racial hierarchy secure or elevate their acceptance and belonging within the dominant paradigm by proverbially throwing those below them under the bus), Marx and Freud, independently of one another, drew on and reproduced a racist notion of the fetish as a means to both critique and also establish a place within the European intellectual canon. This analysis alone is worth the price of admission: Matory’s reading of the lives and ideas of these foundational thinkers is lucid, illuminating and convincing. The Fetish Revisited represents the best of the kind of anthropological work that turns its attention back on the cosmology and culture of the colonizer. It is not only a deconstructive critique but also opens new horizons for how we imagine and contend with the work of crucial thinkers.

Matory, for instance, draws on the work of Peter Stallybrass (1998) to note Marx’s anxieties about his ability to survive in London and raise his children in a bourgeois household, free from the stigma of his Jewish ancestry. To do so, Marx depended on his brother-in-arms Engels’ largess, which the latter could afford thanks to his family’s ownership of Manchester textile mills spinning cotton from the slave empire of America. Yet the Black subject and the regime of slavery on which Marx literally, materially depended is barely mentioned in his work, relegated to a footnote in Capital. And what are to make of Marx being literally surrounded by the stolen “fetishes” of the world’s non-European civilizations as he wrote Kapital in the central reading room of the British Museum?

Matory likewise observes that Freud was fixated on his role as the patriarch of psychoanalysis: a largely homosocial order of secretive specialists that Freud orchestrated through gifted objects, notably intaglio rings. This is to say nothing of the doctor’s obsessive collecting of the (often looted) spiritual objects of non-European civilizations that adorned his office, still to be seen to this day in situ at the North London museum at his final place of residence. There is no doubt these objects inspired his work, notably his book with the widest impact beyond psychoanalysis: Totem and Taboo.

Both theorists, in a sense, rely on invisibilized Black labours and, at the same time, draw on and redeploy the colonial and racist notion of the fetish. Marx delights in wielding the word-weapon of the fetish to demonstrate how, far from the bastion of enlightenment, progress and reason, capitalism is, at its core, organized around the fetishism of commodities (with money as the jealous chieftain of that pantheon). Capitalism, which proclaims itself the apex of civilizational progress, is just as barbaric, bloodthirsty and brutish as his contemporaries assumed were the African “savages” on whose customs the notion of the fetish was based. Freud’s theory of the unconscious depends on a similar maneuver: darkly astir in the deep recesses of even the most civilized European is an “inner Africa,” a savage remainder, the id, that cannot ever be transcended, only tamed and restrained by the civilized development of the ego. Freud’s contemporaries believed the taming of the id was something of which “primitive people” were largely incapable and at which Europeans excelled, except in the case of pathological fetishists.

Matory is neither a Marxist nor a Freudian and worries aloud that adherents to these academic kinship groups will take offense at his materialist approach and psychoanalysis of their revered (dare we say fetishized?) ancestors. Fear not: Matory assures us that he comes not to bury them but to praise them, at least half-way.

Ultimately, Matory is interested in Marx and Frued not only as the notable critical theorists of the fetish but also as European thinkers striving to understand the triangular relationship between people, societies and things. He agrees with the general thrust of Bruno Latour and the New Materialists that we must contend with the agency of non-human (more-than-human) things. But whereas Latour et al. derive their position from a critique of European traditions (including, notably, those of Marx and Freud) that present the Enlightenment subject as the only true historical agent in the world, Matory advances from what he frames as “Afro-Atlantic thought”: the very source of the misunderstood notion of the fetish.

Roughly half of Matory’s book is a deep engagement with the way objects — ”fetishes” — function in the spiritual practices and cosmologies of Yoruba-Atlantic religions of West Africa and the Black diaspora.  Yoruba-Atlantic religions continue to be practiced by millions of adherents today, despite the transatlantic slave trade, the influence of Christian and Muslim missionaries, the colonization of West Africa and a pervasive anti-Black world system. In addition to archival materials, Matory’s study draws on decades of interviews, conversations and debates with contemporary priests and initiates of these Yoruba-Atlantic faiths in their diverse manifestations in Nigeria, the United States, Haiti, Brazil, and Germany. Matory is also a professional collector of these spiritual artifacts, and deeply personally faithful to them.

Matory’s position gives him unique insight. He is a lauded and established self-reflexive Western anthropologist and cultural theorist at an elite private American university (Duke), a skeptical practitioner of Yoruba-Atlantic spirituality, an ambivalent collector of its artifacts and a Black citizen of the United States whose ancestors were enslaved and whose thought and whose experience has been shaped within the regimes of anti-Black racism.

From this complex and contradictory space Matory advances what stands as this book’s pivotal argument: priests of the Yoruba-Atlantic are theorists of the triangular relationship between individuals, societies and things just as much as Marx or Freud were; likewise Marx, Freud and other European theorists were both adherents to and in a sense priests of a Eurocentric cosmology that sought to explain this triangular relationship. What has hitherto stood in the way of understanding this parallel work of Yoruba-Atlantic priests and European theorists is the notion or “word-weapon” of the fetish through which European theorists at once defamed their Afro-Atlantic peers as superstitious savages and masked their own participation in a cosmology that fetishized whiteness.

And yet when stripped of its inherited defamatory and reductionist meanings, when we return to explore what the priests and initiates of Yoruba-Atlantic religions actually use and think of “fetishes,” a very different picture emerges. Those objects that Europeans mistook for “mere fetishes” are, in fact, complex, evolving, living and creative products by which people make sense of the complex social forces of which they are also a part. Yoruba-Atlantic “fetishes” are, in other words, theoretical concepts, just as much as the falling rate of profit or the Oedipus complex. Or, if you prefer, these famous theoretical concepts are also fetishes that both draw on and reproduce a broader cosmology for making sense self, other and relationality in a changing world.

Matory’s analysis of the diversity and nuance of Yoruba-Atlantic faiths and practices is astounding, but beyond my capacity to review and too rich to detail here. For our purposes it is worth noting how, equipped with his broader insights, he is able to stage a fruitful dialogue between the Yoruba-Atlantic priests and Marx and Freud in the book’s concluding pages.

Marx historical materialism concerns itself with the ways that humans always live in relationship to the objects they create. But Marx wields the word-weapon of the fetish to describe how we learn to forget the origins of objects in our shared labours and, instead, treat them as god-like totems with their own inherent powers. Yoruba-Atlantic priests, by contrast, believe/theorize that people and communities are defined through manifold relationships of material and symbolic exchange and trade with kith and kin, as well as with a diversity of nearby and distant others. Objects are the residue of these exchanges, and so are sacred, especially when they represent difficult, ambiguous or ambivalent relationships – in other words, encounters of difference.

Likewise, the Yoruba-Atlantic priests Matory interviews and convenes with certainly agree with Freud that the human subject is animated by multiple spirits of which they are unaware, but would balk at the idea that they number only three: the id, the ego and the superego. Matroy explains that Yoruba-Atlantic religion sees the subject as animated by dozens of spirits, including shared gods, family gods, ancestors and mythological figures. Yoruba-Atlantic priests and initiates use “fetish” objects to honour, communicate, placate, encourage, discourage, bribe or protect themselves from these spirits, as need be, all the while recognizing that each person is subject to forces beyond their control. Freud saw libidinal cathexis towards objects (as well as, let us recall, towards members of the same gender) as a pathological deformity in the proper development of the subject. According to Matory, Yoruba-Atlantic priests and practitioners mobilize objects as a much more community-oriented mechanism for producing and maintaining what Freud would have called sanity: the ability to function in a socially acceptable way in a complex world at the triangular intersection of individuals, societies and objects.

Matory is not suggesting that theory and religion are the same thing: each has its advantages and disadvantages, its own risks and rewards, its own anthropological context. Just as Matory applies his critical scalpel to the pathologies and dangers of European theory, he also admits and analyzes his discomfort with many of the spiritual and cultural practices of the Yoruba-Atlantic priests he studies. In the case of both his cosmologies (European-theoretical and African-spiritual) he notes that the profound insights these theorists/priests offer must be taken along with the profound violence they can enable or justify.

While a work of anthropology, the importance of Matory’s book is important for those of us interested in the interdisciplinary study of cultural economy. The book stages an important conversation between three European schools of thought with which many of us are familiar (Marxian, Freudian and New Materialist) along with, and inflected by, one of which the vast majority of us are woefully ignorant: Yoruba-Atlantic thought. This conversation has incredible potential and not only as the field of cultural economy seeks to move beyond its original Eurocentric focus and explore the complexities of the world. Matory’s approach gives us fresh resources through which we can revisit the concepts of Marx and Freud, not simply to rehearse their vices as Eurocentric humbugs but as the complex and ambivalent racialized products of a capitalist-imperialist-patriarchal Europe grappling, materially and ideologically, with its encounter with the world.

The collapsing of Marx and Freud’s projects is worrisome to those who inherit these traditions. I am among those who still see the profound potential for Marxist theories to contribute to both an analysis of capitalist society and a project of liberation. While I do not share the same optimism about Freud, many do, including Slavoj Žižek (1989) who also encourages us to embrace rather than eschew the fetish, albeit in a very different way than Matory. If taken to one extreme, Matory’s analysis might encourage us to apply Yoruba-Atlantic cosmology (or perhaps any cosmology) to state economic planning, or to formalize academic devotion for Marx or Freud into an actual religion. Having argued that the European “theory” summons itself into existence, materially and historically, through the defamation of African “cosmology,” we are left perplexed as to if there ought to be a line between concepts and, if so, where to draw it.

Though it is not Matory’s stated objective, The Fetish Revisited demands that we fundamentally reevaluate the origin of the tools we use to understand the relationship between culture and economics, between the making of meaning and the creation and exchange of things. By asking us to place the evolving and dynamic thought and practices of Yoruba-Atlantic priests on the same pedestal as our reverend theoretical forefathers (or, better, remove the pedestal entirely) we are compelled to undertake a more worldly consideration of the many ways we make sense of the relation between culture and economy. He is certainly not the first anthropologist to do so, but he does it with great skill.

At stake in Matory’s approach to the fetish, then, is not merely a critique of Eurocentric thought or a redemption of Afrocentric thought. It is a call to think the economic subject anew, not only to understand our motivations, vices and frailties but also the profound power we have to shape our world as it shapes us. Which, in a sense, was at the core of both Marx and Freud’s projects all along.

References

Graeber, D., 2005. Fetishism as social creativity. Anthropological Theory, 5 (4), 407–438.

Hicks, D., 2020. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence. London and New York: Pluto.

McClintock, A., 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London and New York: Routledge.

Pietz, W., 1995. The Spirit of Civilization: Blood Sacrifice and Monetary Debt. Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 28, 23–38.

Pietz, W., 1985. The problem of the fetish. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 9, 5–17.

Stallybrass, P., 1998. Marx’s Coat. In: P. Spyer, ed. Border Fetishisms Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. London and New York: Routledge, 183.

Žižek, S., 1989. The sublime object of ideology. London and New York: Verso.

 

The post A review of J. Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud and the Gods Black People Make appeared first on Max Haiven.

Money and art: The worst of friends, the best of enemies

The following essay appears in English and Romanian a special issue (#48/49) of the highly-regarded Romanian journal ARTA,  edited by the artist Dan Mihălțianu, whose excellent work I have written about elsewhere.

We have learned  that art and money are diametrically opposed. But this myth is, in actuality, two mutually supporting ideas which, like arches in the crypt of a cathedral, support the massive weight of contemporary capitalism on top.

On the one hand, the history of Western “art” is one that insists that art is, wholly or at least in part, the expression of the transcendent soul or of the uniquely human capacity for creativity, that it represents the ageless antithesis of the material world. On the other hand, we have been led to believe, primarily by the field of mainstream economics, but with assists from other disciplines including anthropology, history and political science, that money is a purely rational material substance that comes down to us in its perfected capitalist form from a prehistory of barter and economic reason. These two notions reinforce one another while appearing separated.

It is plain to see that the history of Western art mirrors the history of money

Simply put, art is art because it is not money; money is money because it is not art.

Yet, of course, the connections between the two, historically and in the present, make them inseparable. The historically constituted category of art (as a distinct from or a subcategory of the broader swathe of human creative activity) only comes into existence as such when capitalism and its bourgeois ruling class arrive on the scene. As numerous theorists (including Pierre Bourdieu) note, art as we know it and the norms of aesthetic judgment by which it is now identified emerge largely as a means through which the capitalist ruling class, empowered by money (rather than land, title or inherited station) desire “refined” objects, experiences and relationships which signal their “distinction” and cultural capital.

It is plain to see that the history of Western art mirrors the history of money. Art’s “rise” has been devised by those who have the money to commission and collect, the money to sponsor exhibitions and collections, the money to allow their sons to be artists or become the patron of someone else’s son. The world’s great capitals of art are also the capitals of finance: Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai. Indeed, for capitalists today and throughout history, art served numerous roles,  well beyond offering a pretty picture: an alternative asset class for investment portfolios; a vehicle to launder or move money or avoid taxation; a passport into a rarified and stimulating world of international elites; an object of self-congratulatory philanthropy; it even has a psychotropic effect , stimulating the capitalist imagination to new heights of “creative destruction” and “disruptive innovation.”

And yet, for all of this, art can only be “art,” and can only be valued by capitalism’s elites as art (bought, sold, traded, exhibited, celebrated) so long as it vociferously—albeit falsely—insists on its difference and separation from money.

And yet, for all of this, art can only be “art,” and can only be valued by capitalism’s elites as art (bought, sold, traded, exhibited, celebrated) so long as it vociferously—albeit falsely—insists on its difference and separation from money. Hence the bourgeoisie don’t care so much if artists are anti-capitalist malcontents or stormy romantics. All the better! This is the very guarantee that the special commodity they produce, art, is legitimate; it’s not money. Art’s performative allergy to money is the invisible signature that, paradoxically, guarantees art its value under capitalism.

Meanwhile, the history of capitalist money while, indeed, a history of bloodshed, colonialism and exploitation, is presented as the natural, neutral and benign evolution of a fundamental and noble competitive human nature. According to both classical and neoclassical economists and historians, contemporary semi-digital fiat currencies inherit the lineage of humanity’s innate and virtuous urge to truck and barter, a presumption that, as David Graeber and others have noted, hardly stands up to scrutiny. But nonetheless this presumption is ideologically useful. It not only suggests that the ludicrous and violent monetary system we have today—one that dominates nearly every aspect of society—is “natural,” normal and right. It also encourages us all to believe in an erroneous, bourgeois, revisionist history and in the inherently (and predominantly) competitive nature of the human animal. Money is a kind of ubiquitous, constant participatory artwork with which we all engage, spreading its less-than-subtle message that we are, each and every one of us at our core, homo economicus, shrewd, competitive, hyper-rational and acquisitive.

And yet money has always been a work of the collective imagination. Even when minted from precious metals, or even when it took the form of useful necessities, like salt, money has always depended on a million acts of the imagination. Under capitalism, money is always an encrypted form or a hologram of the society of which it is a part, of the totality of cooperative energies and labours from which it arises. As the young Marx put it, money is a fetishized  representation of one’s social bonds: we take it for being powerful and natural in its own right, but it is, in fact, a symbol of our power to command the labour of others, a token for access to the resources of our own world, the world that we, ourselves, have helped create. More poetically, Marcel Mauss spoke of money as the “counterfeit of our own dreams,” a kind of externalized proxy for our collective imaginative power to shape and share the earth. In other words, money is perhaps the fundamental measure by which capitalist subjects imagine society and their relationship to it.

Money under capitalism… must present itself as necessary, eternal, natural, rational and inevitable in order to prevent us from recognizing that it is, like all social institutions, something we imagined and are continuously imagining.

All systems of power and domination are desperate to hide the fact that they are works of the collective imagination: the king is a man in a shiny hat whose power is held in place not only by direct violence but also by the widespread, shared belief in his inherent superiority and right to rule. No regime survives long on violence alone, it also depends on presenting itself as right, good, necessary, or, if all else fails, inevitable. No regime can tolerate either the recognition that the legitimacy of power is imaginary or the revolutionary possibilities that this would create for imagining a different kind of life together. Money, under capitalism, is the same: it is both the outward manifestation and the lifeblood of a system of exploitation and oppression. It must present itself as necessary, eternal, natural, rational and inevitable in order to prevent us from recognizing that it is, like all social institutions, something we imagined and are continuously imagining. Hence the ideologues and theocrats of capital spare no effort to insist that money is natural, necessary, inevitable and good. Though no one utters the words, the message is clear: money is money because it is not art.

In my book Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization I argue that money-art—visual and performance art which engages directly with or integrates money—gains its critical and even radical potential by addressing this tension. These works succeed not by reifying the myth that money and art are diametrically opposed but, rather, by putting on display their profound complicity and tight entanglement, begging the question, if only for a moment: how might our cooperative and imaginative energies might be mobilized and organized differently? This is the work of the radical imagination which is tied to no ideology, in particular. Rather, this work strives to show us that money, art and everything else in our world is, at least in part, a collective fabulation of the imagination, and that the imagination never fails to question, challenge and destroy what it, itself, has created.

Notes

I am here thinking of Jacque Derrida’s reinterpretation of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theory of the crypt. See Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok.” In The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, translated by Barbara Johnson. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984; Velthuis, Olav. Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007.

See Harvey, David. “The Art of Rent.” In Rebel Cities, 89–112. London and New York: Verso, 2012.

Adam, Georgina. Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century. Farnham, Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2017.

See Malik, Suhail. “Critique as Alibi: Moral Differentiation in the Art Market.” Journal of Visual Art Practice 7, no. 3 (December 2008): 283–95. https://doi.org/10.1386/jvap.7.3.283_1.

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

McNally, David. Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire. Chicago: Haymarket, 2020.

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5000 Years. New York: Melville House, 2011.

Wynter, Sylvia, and Katherine McKittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick, 9–89. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015.

Haiven, Max. “Money as a Medium of the Imagination: Art and the Currencies of Cooperation.” In Moneylab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy, edited by Geert Lovink, Nathaniel Tkacz, and Patricia De Vries, 173–88. Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2015. http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/moneylab-reader-an-intervention-in-digital-economy/.

Nelson, Anita. Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

Graeber, David. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Castoriadis Reader. Translated by David Ames Curtis. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Haiven, Max. Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization. London and New York: Pluto, 2018.

 

The post Money and art: The worst of friends, the best of enemies appeared first on Max Haiven.

Money and Art: The Worst of Friends, the Best of Enemies

The following essay appears in English and Romanian a special issue (#48/49) of the highly-regarded Romanian journal ARTA,  edited by the artist Dan Mihălțianu, whose excellent work I have written about elsewhere.

We have learned  that art and money are diametrically opposed. But this myth is, in actuality, two mutually supporting ideas which, like arches in the crypt of a cathedral, support the massive weight of contemporary capitalism on top.

On the one hand, the history of Western “art” is one that insists that art is, wholly or at least in part, the expression of the transcendent soul or of the uniquely human capacity for creativity, that it represents the ageless antithesis of the material world. On the other hand, we have been led to believe, primarily by the field of mainstream economics, but with assists from other disciplines including anthropology, history and political science, that money is a purely rational material substance that comes down to us in its perfected capitalist form from a prehistory of barter and economic reason. These two notions reinforce one another while appearing separated.

It is plain to see that the history of Western art mirrors the history of money

Simply put, art is art because it is not money; money is money because it is not art.

Yet, of course, the connections between the two, historically and in the present, make them inseparable. The historically constituted category of art (as a distinct from or a subcategory of the broader swathe of human creative activity) only comes into existence as such when capitalism and its bourgeois ruling class arrive on the scene. As numerous theorists (including Pierre Bourdieu) note, art as we know it and the norms of aesthetic judgment by which it is now identified emerge largely as a means through which the capitalist ruling class, empowered by money (rather than land, title or inherited station) desire “refined” objects, experiences and relationships which signal their “distinction” and cultural capital.

It is plain to see that the history of Western art mirrors the history of money. Art’s “rise” has been devised by those who have the money to commission and collect, the money to sponsor exhibitions and collections, the money to allow their sons to be artists or become the patron of someone else’s son. The world’s great capitals of art are also the capitals of finance: Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai. Indeed, for capitalists today and throughout history, art served numerous roles,  well beyond offering a pretty picture: an alternative asset class for investment portfolios; a vehicle to launder or move money or avoid taxation; a passport into a rarified and stimulating world of international elites; an object of self-congratulatory philanthropy; it even has a psychotropic effect , stimulating the capitalist imagination to new heights of “creative destruction” and “disruptive innovation.”

And yet, for all of this, art can only be “art,” and can only be valued by capitalism’s elites as art (bought, sold, traded, exhibited, celebrated) so long as it vociferously—albeit falsely—insists on its difference and separation from money.

And yet, for all of this, art can only be “art,” and can only be valued by capitalism’s elites as art (bought, sold, traded, exhibited, celebrated) so long as it vociferously—albeit falsely—insists on its difference and separation from money. Hence the bourgeoisie don’t care so much if artists are anti-capitalist malcontents or stormy romantics. All the better! This is the very guarantee that the special commodity they produce, art, is legitimate; it’s not money. Art’s performative allergy to money is the invisible signature that, paradoxically, guarantees art its value under capitalism.

Meanwhile, the history of capitalist money while, indeed, a history of bloodshed, colonialism and exploitation, is presented as the natural, neutral and benign evolution of a fundamental and noble competitive human nature. According to both classical and neoclassical economists and historians, contemporary semi-digital fiat currencies inherit the lineage of humanity’s innate and virtuous urge to truck and barter, a presumption that, as David Graeber and others have noted, hardly stands up to scrutiny. But nonetheless this presumption is ideologically useful. It not only suggests that the ludicrous and violent monetary system we have today—one that dominates nearly every aspect of society—is “natural,” normal and right. It also encourages us all to believe in an erroneous, bourgeois, revisionist history and in the inherently (and predominantly) competitive nature of the human animal. Money is a kind of ubiquitous, constant participatory artwork with which we all engage, spreading its less-than-subtle message that we are, each and every one of us at our core, homo economicus, shrewd, competitive, hyper-rational and acquisitive.

And yet money has always been a work of the collective imagination. Even when minted from precious metals, or even when it took the form of useful necessities, like salt, money has always depended on a million acts of the imagination. Under capitalism, money is always an encrypted form or a hologram of the society of which it is a part, of the totality of cooperative energies and labours from which it arises. As the young Marx put it, money is a fetishized  representation of one’s social bonds: we take it for being powerful and natural in its own right, but it is, in fact, a symbol of our power to command the labour of others, a token for access to the resources of our own world, the world that we, ourselves, have helped create. More poetically, Marcel Mauss spoke of money as the “counterfeit of our own dreams,” a kind of externalized proxy for our collective imaginative power to shape and share the earth. In other words, money is perhaps the fundamental measure by which capitalist subjects imagine society and their relationship to it.

Money under capitalism… must present itself as necessary, eternal, natural, rational and inevitable in order to prevent us from recognizing that it is, like all social institutions, something we imagined and are continuously imagining.

All systems of power and domination are desperate to hide the fact that they are works of the collective imagination: the king is a man in a shiny hat whose power is held in place not only by direct violence but also by the widespread, shared belief in his inherent superiority and right to rule. No regime survives long on violence alone, it also depends on presenting itself as right, good, necessary, or, if all else fails, inevitable. No regime can tolerate either the recognition that the legitimacy of power is imaginary or the revolutionary possibilities that this would create for imagining a different kind of life together. Money, under capitalism, is the same: it is both the outward manifestation and the lifeblood of a system of exploitation and oppression. It must present itself as necessary, eternal, natural, rational and inevitable in order to prevent us from recognizing that it is, like all social institutions, something we imagined and are continuously imagining. Hence the ideologues and theocrats of capital spare no effort to insist that money is natural, necessary, inevitable and good. Though no one utters the words, the message is clear: money is money because it is not art.

In my book Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization I argue that money-art—visual and performance art which engages directly with or integrates money—gains its critical and even radical potential by addressing this tension. These works succeed not by reifying the myth that money and art are diametrically opposed but, rather, by putting on display their profound complicity and tight entanglement, begging the question, if only for a moment: how might our cooperative and imaginative energies might be mobilized and organized differently? This is the work of the radical imagination which is tied to no ideology, in particular. Rather, this work strives to show us that money, art and everything else in our world is, at least in part, a collective fabulation of the imagination, and that the imagination never fails to question, challenge and destroy what it, itself, has created.

Notes

I am here thinking of Jacque Derrida’s reinterpretation of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theory of the crypt. See Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok.” In The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, translated by Barbara Johnson. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984; Velthuis, Olav. Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007.

See Harvey, David. “The Art of Rent.” In Rebel Cities, 89–112. London and New York: Verso, 2012.

Adam, Georgina. Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century. Farnham, Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2017.

See Malik, Suhail. “Critique as Alibi: Moral Differentiation in the Art Market.” Journal of Visual Art Practice 7, no. 3 (December 2008): 283–95. https://doi.org/10.1386/jvap.7.3.283_1.

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

McNally, David. Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire. Chicago: Haymarket, 2020.

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5000 Years. New York: Melville House, 2011.

Wynter, Sylvia, and Katherine McKittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick, 9–89. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015.

Haiven, Max. “Money as a Medium of the Imagination: Art and the Currencies of Cooperation.” In Moneylab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy, edited by Geert Lovink, Nathaniel Tkacz, and Patricia De Vries, 173–88. Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2015. http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/moneylab-reader-an-intervention-in-digital-economy/.

Nelson, Anita. Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

Graeber, David. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Castoriadis Reader. Translated by David Ames Curtis. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Haiven, Max. Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization. London and New York: Pluto, 2018.

 

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Conspiracies and Countergames Online Summer Institute (19/7-05/8)

Hosted by RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab

What?

A three-week online Summer Institute bringing together artists, activists, scholars, students, gamers and weridos to learn about reactionary and oppressive conspiracy fantasies and craft creative games to respond to them in the name of social, racial and economic justice.

How?

Twice-weekly 2h sessions begin with a Q&A session with artists, activists, scholars, novelists and game designers (see schedule below)…

…followed by creative workshops where participants are invited to design their own “countergames” to intervene against reactionary conspiracy fantasies.

Background readings and preparatory work will be provided in advance (2-4h per week of work extra).

When?

Mondays and Thursdays, July 19-August 5

10h00-12h00 Pacific 13h00-15h00 Eastern 19h00-21h00 Central Europe

Where?

All events will take place on Zoom and supplemented by a Discord chat channel.

Q&A sessions with speakers will be broadcast to and archived on RiVAL’s YouTube channel.

Speaker schedule

19/07/2021 – ON CONSPIRACIES OF DANGEROUS PLAY

with Max Haiven, A.T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, coordinators of the Conspiracy Games and Countergames project.

22/07/2021 – ON COUNTER-GAMING AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

with TESA Collective (TBC), a social movement training and game design platform.

26/07/2021 – ON WHITE FEARS AND BLACK UPRISINGS

with El Jones, Black liberation and abolition activist, poet and scholar.

29/07/2021 – ON CONSPIRACISM, GENDER AND EMPIRE

with Jack Bratich, Rutgers University professor, expert on ideology and conspiracism.

02/08/2021 – ON RED PILLS, WHITE TEARS AND NOVELS

with Hari Kunzru, bestselling and award-winning novelist, essayist and podcaster.

05/08/2021 – ON HOLOGRAMS AND OTHER FEMINIST CONSPIRACY GAMES

with Cassie Thornton, artist and convenor of The Hologram **peer-to-peer viral health project.

Who?

Three ways to participate:

Watch the speakers’ on YouTube and engage through comments section.

Join the Zoom conversation with the speakers.

Participate in the conversation and take part in the game-building workshop.

Registration

RiVAL welcomes applications to participate from all people who desire to overthrow capitalism, white-supremacy, cis-hetero-patriarchy, colonialism and/or other systems of domination including workers, people who refuse to work, formal or informal students, artists, scholars, activists/organizers and other people.

Participation is limited to ensure quality of experience. Selections will be made on the basis of (a) ability to attend and participate in all sessions, (b) diversity, (c) fit. Successful and waitlisted applicants will be notified by July 5, 2021.

REGISTRATION IS FREE.

To apply to participate, please complete this form by June 28, 2021 —> https://forms.gle/yUoEH9mR3JGCLqE58

Host

RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab is a workshop for the radical imagination, social justice and decolonization located physically on Anishinaabe terriroties on the northern shores of Githi-Gami (Thunder Bay, Canada) and with activities online and around the world.

Coordinator

Dr. Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice. His most recent book is Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he co-directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).

Participants will also be joined by students from Dr. Max Haiven’s Lakehead University graduate course “Conspiracy, Disinformation and Games,” for whom participation in the Summer Institute comprises one part of the course requirements. If you would like to earn university credit for participation, please contact mhaiven [at] lakeheadu.ca.

Why?

The neoliberal economic game we’ve all been made to play is rigged, and everyone seems to know it. Is it any wonder that, in a world saturated by corporate disinformation, the relentless lies of advertising, craven news media, political hucksters and relentless bullshit people are increasingly spellbound by “fake news,” emotive online propaganda and virulent conspiracy fantasies?

In this three-week intensive Summer Institute, hosted by RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab we examine conspiratorial thinking from a critical perspective. Directed by Dr. Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice, the Institute is part of the Conspiracy Games and Counter Games project (which also includes a podcast) which seeks to understand conspiracism, fake news and how to confront them in a gamified capitalist world.

What would it mean to invent games that confront and resist that games of survival we are forced to play?

That is a world where corporations (and many public and non-governmental organizations) are eager to transform all aspects of life, from health to love to learning, into digital games. But this all transpires within a bigger game in which we are all forced to be players: global neoliberal capitalism.

Dark forces are brewing within such a system, where we are all forced to compete to survive and thrive at the expense of our ecosystems, one another, and our wellbeing. Revanchist white-supremacy and other forms of ethno-nationalism and fundamentalism animate a turn towards authoritarian parties and pundits around the world. Often mobilized around fears of a loss of established power and privilege, these reactionary forces harness their war chariots to cis-hetero-patriarchal tropes and promise to “return” society to a fictional bygone era of purity.

In order to hold together this dangerous make-believe we have seen the rise of reactionary conspiracism: the development of popular narratives where social power and resistance to it is presented in a skewed or fantastic form to distract people from the real sources of oppression, exploitation and alienation or, even worse, to redirect people’s rage at its victims and survivors, rather than its true perpetrators.

But without diminishing the roots of many forms of reactionary conspiracism in this poisoned soil, we must contend with the fact that the popularity of QAnon, anti-vax and other conspiracist “movements” flowers in an atmosphere of profound social alienation. Among many other things, such movements can be framed as forms of “dangerous play,” where individuals find a sense of meaning, validation, common cause and even fun in an otherwise disenchanted world.

What if confronting dangerous conspiracy fantasies was about more than just banishing disinformation but included inventing new ways to be and to play together?

Conspiracism’s playful elements cannot be disentangled from the rise of the internet as a forum where cynical grifters, die-hard evangelists and bored dabblers can, together, engage in imaginative world-building… with sometimes disastrous consequences…

This online Summer Institute is dedicated to helping us better understand this set of phenomena, and to challenge it. If conspiracism is, in a sense, a kind of gaming within a gamified capitalist world, (how) can games be part of the response of those who would challenge it? All too often mainstream experts and pundits assume that the antidote to disinformation, fake news and conspiracism is simply “sharing better, more reliable information and analysis.” But this perhaps noble impulse is based on a profound misrecognition of the socio-cultural and political-economic roots of the problem which cannot be solved by information alone.

This online Summer Institute is also a laboratory: can we compliment our learning about these issues by creating experimental games aimed at challenging the grip over the imagination of conspiracy fantasies and, instead, open new horizons for thought and action?

Over the three weeks of the Institute participants will hear from and discuss with guest speakers and design “counter-games” to challenge reactionary conspiratorialism. Blending art, activism and rigorous inquiry, this Institute is for anyone who wants to more deeply explore these phenomena and dream of creative ways to confront them.

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Conspiracy Games and Countergames podcast

Launched in June 2021, this is a podcast, research and intervention project about conspiracies fantasies in a gamified capitalist world, led by Max Haiven, A.T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou.

More information –> http://conspiracy.games

The podcast is the second season of THE ORDER OF UNMANAGEABLE RISKS whose first season focused on capitalism and anxiety. This season we’re back with anew coh-host and a new focus!

Our first guest is Wu Ming 1, an original and ongoing member of the Wu Ming collective, which was founded in Bologna in 2000 and has, since that time, published several collaboratively written novels including 54, Manituana, Altai, The Army of Sleepwalkers, and The Invisible Everywhere, which have been translated into many languages.

Wu Ming evolved out of the experimental collective project Luther Blisset whose famous 1999 novel Q focused on conspiracies of liberation and of repression during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

More recently, that novel and the Wu Ming Collective have been the subject of a great deal of speculation around the rise of the QAnon conspiracy fantasy. Regarding that, Wu Ming 1 has just published a book in Italian, La Q di Qomplotto (The Q in Qonspiracy: How Conspiracy Fantasies Defend the System), which presents a highly original and important analysis of the genesis and dangers of this strange hallucination.

We speak to Wu Ming 1 about this new book and more!

Interviews with excellent future guests are ahead, including:

Jess Rowan Marcotte on queer gamingArun Kundnani on Islamophobic conspiracy theories

Stay tuned!

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Revenge Against Revenge: Biden’s Revenge Politics and “The Cure at Troy”

This essay first appeared on March 8, 2021 in The Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/revenge-against-revenge-bidens-revenge-politics-and-the-cure-at-troy/

An audio version can be found here.

WITH JOE BIDEN now established in the White House without the feared retaliation of his predecessor’s rabid and well-armed supporters, it is tempting to imagine that the age of revenge politics is at its close. But those politics remain, tethered as they are to a vengeful form of neoliberalism that Biden helped foster throughout his political career. In their now-subtler form, they threaten to germinate in the years of his administration, and bloom again afterward. A closer look at the new president’s mobilization of Seamus Heaney’s famous poem about forgiveness offers clues to the past, present, and future of revenge politics in America.

On October 29, as the drama of the 2020 American election climaxed, Joe Biden’s campaign released a stylized, three-minute montage video accompanied by haunting choral music and a reading by Biden of one of his favorite poems, an astonishing excerpt of late Irish poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s play The Cure at Troy.

The video featured a series of stark, black-and-white images of Biden (by a flag-draped coffin, on the hustings, praying, taking a knee before a Black child), of ambiguous vigils and protests (including one in front of Trump Tower), and of front-line and first responders wearing masks in front of hospitals or wildfires (and one with a sheriff at the front door of a Latinx family).

The poem begins:

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The poem’s now-iconic, unforgettable hinge:

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

As a political maneuver, Biden’s emotive mobilization of Heaney’s poem was probably intended to shore up support among his base and perhaps his legions of fearful volunteers. It’s unlikely that many Trump stalwarts or swing voters could be seduced by contemporary Irish verse, let alone by Sophocles’s original play Philoctetes, which Heaney translated as The Cure at Troy. Rather, this poem was likely intended to announce the spirit of his candidacy.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells. 

The poem’s imperative to hope for “a great sea-change on the far side of revenge” was likely calculated by the Biden campaign to awaken in its preferred audience a strong attachment to a vague sense of a promised land beyond the tempests of then-President Donald J. Trump’s increasingly vicious revanchism. Though the video lacked any discussion of policy or platform, it was (perhaps precisely for this reason) compelling. When his victory in Pennsylvania was announced, the Irish public broadcaster RTÉ played a video of Biden reciting the poem. Days later The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, echoing many of his counterparts in the media, swooned: “This appreciation of one of the wisest and subtlest of poets marks out Biden as a truly rare politician.”

“Rare” is a surprising adjective to describe a man crowned with his party’s nomination because of his ideological banality, his factional neutrality, and his stereotypically generic “presidential” appearance and demeanor. In fact, my argument is that, in Biden’s hands, this beautiful poem is far from innocent: it aimed to seduce those (justifiably) eager to see the end of Trump’s vicious and racist revenge politics. But it served to mask the role both Biden and his party have played in creating the vengeful neoliberal conditions of poverty, alienation, and moral decline that paved the way for Trump’s ascendency. After four years of racist dog whistles, vitriolic megalomania, and the daily terror of a nuclear-armed narcissist at the helm of an empire in decline, we might be forgiven for succumbing to Biden’s liberal sentimentality, but at our peril. The politics of vengefulness that Trump tapped and distilled into such an intoxicating moonshine still flows in the veins of America and its vindictive form of capitalism, and Biden’s political instrumentalization of the poem itself subtly off-gasses the same liquor, although of a more refined variety.

¤

Commentators gushing about Biden’s poetic spirit is somewhat ironic, given that a central theme of Sophocles’s Philoctetes is a mistrustful skepticism of the political suasion of seductive words. Near the beginning of the Heaney’s translation of the play, which takes place during the long stalemate of the Trojan War, the wily Odysseus instructs his subordinate soldier, the earnest Neoptolemus (literally, “new warrior,” the son of the slain Greek hero and paragon of martial virtue Achilles):

… experience has taught me: the very people
That go mad at the slightest show of force
Will be eating from your hand if you take them right
And tell the story so as to just suit them.

The elder Greek commander is instructing his young compatriot in how to beguile the rage-filled Philoctetes (translated literally as “lover of gain” but metaphorically as “friendship through good deeds”), on whose barren prison island they have just arrived, in order to obtain from him the prized bow of Hercules. The soldiers have been ordered to retrieve the bow by their generals, based on a prophecy that the Greeks cannot succeed at Troy unless the sharpshooter Philoctetes, whom Odysseus and his colleagues abandoned on the island years before on their way to besiege Troy, rejoins his erstwhile comrades of his own free will. Philoctetes was betrayed and exiled by his brothers-in-arms (orchestrated by Odysseus) after he was bitten by a snake. The wound putrified, disgusting his compatriots and leading them to fear it would offend the gods if he came close to their altars, though this was likely a shallow excuse to rid themselves of his stench. In the intervening years, the lonely, festering, exiled Philoctetes has nursed his grudge, living for nothing but the dream of revenge against his fellow Greeks.

Impatient, conniving, and driven by military expediency, Odysseus hatches a plan in which he, the object of Philoctetes’ vengeful wrath, will hide, while the fresh-faced Neoptolemus will befriend the wounded castaway by also claiming to hate wily king of Ithaca. In the first half of the play, Neoptolemus does as he is ordered and, in the name of his country, seduces Philoctetes by encouraging the old man’s grievance. By falsely promising to take the wounded soldier back to Greece, Achilles’ son peacefully obtains the unerring bow from a lonely old man desperate for friendship and affirmation. But in the second half, the noble-spirited boy courts treason by rebelling against Odysseus. He returns the magic bow to Philoctetes, swearing to transport the exile to Greece rather than, as planned, abduct him to Troy to fulfill the fated prophecy. When Neoptolemus shows virtue, choosing honor and truth over obedience to nation and chain of command, the spirit of Hercules appears and instructs the recalcitrant Philoctetes to drop his grudge and obey his duty to fate. The play ends as the three heroes prepare to set sail for Troy to return to the battlefield and onward to their famous, bloody victory.

Biden and his many laudators have likely not read the entire play carefully. They are perhaps instead relying on the seemingly unerring emotive accuracy of the oft-cited poetic excerpts, which, like Philoctetes’ bow and arrows, “never miss and always kill” their quarry. They would not be the first to trade a careful meditation of the play’s complexity for the poem’s political expediency.

Heaney wrote the play for the Field Day Theatre Company in 1990 as an explicit commentary on the gruesome hostilities of the Northern Irish conflict and its weaponization of pain, moral courage, and vengeance. It premiered to a riveted audience in war-torn Derry in the same year. In spite of the ongoing and seemingly intractable conflict, Heaney’s play broke in a global moment of rising neoliberal idealism, buoyed by the triumph of the human spirit that had seen uprisings against Soviet rule in Poland and would soon see the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Good Friday Agreement. The poem has become indelibly associated with the righteous optimism of the early 1990s, the so-called End of History when it appeared that not only would capitalism triumph over all ideological adversaries but also over war, poverty, and other human frailties. Biden’s mobilization of the poem recently evokes a nostalgia not for neoliberalism, which after all remains very much with us, but for its lost optimism.

Almost as soon as the play was penned the stirring lines quoted above became canonical. They were first uttered in a political context in the inaugural address of iconic Irish president Mary Robinson, whose election of 1990 certainly felt like a “great sea-change” of modernity, liberalism, and peace in a country hitherto benighted by postcolonial melancholia, conservative and Catholic reaction, and never-ending conflict. With blithe plagiarism and imperial swagger, Biden’s chum Bill Clinton recited these same lines upon visiting Northern Ireland in 1995 to celebrate the cease-fire that would eventually lead, three years later, to the Good Friday Agreement. In Ireland, the poem is in many ways indelibly linked to the peace process. Around the world, Clinton has recited it on several occasions since on his lucrative corporate and philanthropic lecture circuit. Biden himself quoted the poem in his campaign for the 2008 Democratic Primary and was clearly eager to revivify it in 2020, only partly as an homage to his own much-cited Irish heritage.

The poem, in a sense, has been made to represent the battle hymn of a kind of revanchist neoliberalism. In its first, triumphant incarnation in the 1990s, neoliberalism prophesied the arrival of peace, justice, modernity, and global prosperity so long held back by rigid 20th-century ideologies. If first as tragedy, now as farce: the poem’s reappearance today, after 30 years of neoliberal rule, sounds from a tired clarion to awaken an outdated ideological enthusiasm that can only sustain its luster and dignity in the face of the deformed reactionary evils it helped to breed.

¤

It cannot be denied: the passage Biden quotes is a beautiful and captivating poem. In the context of the larger play the lines are recited by the chorus at the very climax, when Neoptolemus’ display of insubordinate virtue causes the spirit of Hercules to appear to Philoctetes and instruct the wounded archer to lay down his rancor, embrace his fate, and return to the Trojan War with his one-time betrayers. The passage reaches its summit with heart-catching gravitas:

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightening and storm
And god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

What miraculous self-healing these lines today represent, in a moment when we all too often find ourselves quoting Heaney’s predecessor William Butler Yeats’s dark words of 1919 on the unheard or inchoate outcries and birth-cries in an age of disaster:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Written during the last global pandemic, as his pregnant wife struggled for her life, Yeats’s grim poem has lately appeared on the social media accounts of many horrified liberals and progressives who bore witness to Trump’s rise to power in 2016. A perennial favorite of the undergraduate literary canon, it has enjoyed a renewed pedagogical vitality as a prescient if dismal comment on current events. It was even read aloud by Hillary Clinton at a Dublin fundraiser in 2019 in reference to the vengeful, lie-driven political culture instigated by her triumphant opponent.

Biden’s recitation of Heaney in the 2020 election implied that he, like the noble Neoptolemus, rejects the “policy of lies” so characteristic of Trump and that he, like Achilles’ son, would “rather fail and keep my self respect / than win by cheating.” It was performative, though perhaps truly believed for all of that: narcotic self-deception is today’s designer drug of choice. In fact, Biden, the Clintons, and the faction of the Democratic Party machine they represent might be said to both lack all conviction and be filled with little more than passionate intensity.

To say that the Democrats represent a faction of corporate America and its global imperial ambitions should not come as a surprise. In any case, the donations made to their coffers by investment banks, industry groups, and weapons manufacturers tell the story. The way in which the Biden/Harris ticket outmaneuvered Bernie Sanders and his supporters is every bit Odyssean in its conniving political expediency. In the midst of a huge, Black-led uprising against racist policing (the cutting edge of institutionalized white supremacy), the ascendent Biden named a police lawyer as his running mate and never swerved from his paternalistic tough-on-crime rhetoric, playing to the most reactionary (and eldest and whitest) constituents. Though Harris’s ascendency to the vice presidency is indeed historic and meaningful, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor rightly notes that her conservative orientation and track record bode ill for the prospect of true racial justice.

During the last Democratic administration, in which Biden was vice president, the costs of the 2007–’08 financial crisis were displaced onto the poorest Americans while drone strikes did the dirty work of empire with little to no reduction in American imperial presence abroad. Its signature domestic achievement, Obamacare, did little to spare the nation’s poor and working class the predations of corporate health and pharmaceutical corporations. Its figure-head, Obama, rose to power on similar promises of a “tidal wave of justice.” Yet over his presidency, floods, literal and metaphorical, ravaged the nation, from the aqueous vengeance of global climate chaos to the scourge of opioids that preyed upon the abandonment, alienation, and sense of hopelessness. In those years, the hitherto upward trend in average life expectancy flatlined in the United States and declined for the poorest and most marginalized. Net worth of Black people and poor and working people of all backgrounds dropped. Together, these economic terrors of racial capitalism represent a form of systemic or structural revenge that, if unplanned and unintended, is no less deadly and cruel for all of that. Though capitalism’s vengefulness was naked, fanged, and boastful under Trump’s regime, we should not fail to recognize its quieter, more genteel former incarnations in the previous and subsequent administrations.

Yet like the annoyed Odysseus, sent by fate to retrieve the abandoned, rage-filled Philoctetes from his barren island prison, in 2020 the Democrats (and many of their supporters) were somehow oblivious to their own role in fomenting the pain, sense of betrayal, and vengefulness that they found among voters. I am making no excuses for the heinous rise of revanchist white supremacism and neofascism, nor rehearsing the mistaken notion that it is solely held among the poor “left-behind” whites of middle America. The core of Trump’s base (like Hitler’s) are less to be found among the poor and abject but more among the precariously entitled: the willfully ignorant, reactionary, mostly white members of what we used to call the petit bourgeoisie. These subjects imagine that they benefit from and could succeed under neoliberal capitalism (unlike poverty-waged workers, doomed to failure) but also have no control over it (unlike the corporate class, doomed to success) and who constantly fear falling from their perch. Yet Biden and company’s casting of Trump and his ilk as reckless, vengeful, subhuman “deplorables,” like Odysseus’ characterization of the abandoned man-animal Philoctetes, makes at least three crucial but expedient mistakes (and all Odysseus’ mistakes, let’s recall, end up working in his favor).

First, revenge politics which cast Biden (through Heaney) as the “cure” substitute sentiment for politics, as if this were a battle between the forces of light and dark rather than between two visions of the management of a capitalist empire as it declines into chaos. Trump and his core of enablers, devotees, and hangers-on are white supremacists and neofascists, though many of them are too politically illiterate or beguiled by their own weaponized rhetoric of freedom and democracy to know it. Yet the sentiment of vague but white-hot vindictive political rage that Trump tapped into, and that led some 46.8 percent of vote-casting Americans to seek to reelect him in spite of his blathering incompetence, is very real. It has been forged in that war-torn no-man’s-land between experience and ideology that Raymond Williams called the “structures of feeling,” the way a political “common sense” is formed through a sentimental reckoning with a hypercomplex reality.

Second, today’s “mere anarchy” of revenge politics has a material basis to which the Democrats have contributed to profoundly. It was their neoliberal policies as much as the Republicans’ that drove the gap in wealth in America to perilous extremes. The Democratic leadership and their corporate backers superintended and benefited from the putrefaction of capitalism into a form of economic revenge against poor, working, and racialized people, and revenge politics, taking many forms, was the result. Biden’s promise of a politics “on the far side of revenge” is like Neoptolemus’ deceptive promise to Philoctetes (orchestrated by Odysseus): get on the ship and we’ll sail back to your beloved Greece together. In fact, they sail on the “blood-dimmed tide” for Troy and that endless, stupid war of revenge that calls itself justice.

Biden’s turn to poetry is no less a politics of sentiment than Trump’s crass declarations of wounded love and rough care for his followers, though it takes a more refined form. As beautiful and meaningful as the poem itself is, and as ugly as Trump’s politics are, the quoting of emotive poetry (without any substantial link to policy, promise, or platform) panders to a politics of revanchist pleasure. Like the admonishment that “This is not who we are!” that follows every (predictable) appearance of far-right political sadism, Heaney’s poem in Biden’s hands is less a statement of principle than a sentimental placeholder based not on positive affirmation of ideals but on negation. Beyond the virtues of the poem itself, Biden’s use of it aims to evoke in his followers a cheap politics of feeling. The political subtext is that all must love and support Biden as the candidate who quotes poetry and pledges to “return” American politics to a fabled civility. But this is a form of narcissism that can only be sustained so long as those who do not love him (both right and left) are cast as incomprehensible, vengeful savages. It paints the “normal,” to which Biden promises a return as a kingdom of justice and peace; reality is far different for all but the most privileged.

¤

Had Biden or his speechwriters read Heaney’s play carefully, they might have been arrested by these opening lines from the chorus, which caution against just such aggrieved moral superiority:

Heroes. Victims. Gods and human beings.
All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,
No matter what.
People so deep into
Their own self-pity self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they’re fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones.
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
Licking their wounds
And flashing them, around like decorations.
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself.

Biden’s Odyssean, seductive rhetorical manipulation of Heaney’s poetry is emblematic of the campaign he ran and the necrotic “centrist” politics of which it is a part. Like the tactics of the reactionary charlatans they decry, here cheap political sentiment aimed at pleasuring its quadrant of the voter-base substitutes for meaningful policy or needed change. Like its intimate far-right enemy, this fork-tongued liberalism thrives on projecting its own flaws onto its now-loathsome opponent so it need not face them. The political vengefulness of Trump and his neofascist cult is real enough: like Philoctetes’ foot, the rotting wound weeps for all to see and smell. What this overpowering noxiousness helps hide is the rot in his enemy Odysseus’ own soul, a rot incubated by the latter’s high-minded paternalistic notions of political expediency.

Biden’s campaign might have accurately been summed up in the contradictory slogan “revenge against revenge.” An important part of its strategy was to whip up a self-congratulatory and fear-mongering sentimentality against the hyperbolic revenge politics of Trump. At the same time, it promised the exiled (but no less arrogant) Democrat establishment and their supporters revenge for the “humiliation” and “embarrassment” it suffered when the people, in their loathsome ignorance, elected Trump. Voting for Biden would, we were told, be “The Cure at Troy,” the act of redemption and reconciliation that restored the holy and fated order: “America is back,” he declared in the days after his victory.

And yet, in closing, let’s recall that, at the end of both Sophocles’s play and Heaney’s translation, Philoctetes and Neoptolemus travel back to Troy together with their unerring bow to wage genocidal war. The chorus, moments after uttering Biden’s beloved lines, instructs the now-reconciled young man and revenant exile to be

… twin in arms and archery.
Marauding lions on that shore,
Troy’s nemesis and last nightmare.

Perhaps unsettled by Sophocles’s chauvinistic and bellicose worldview, Heaney exercises his poetic translator’s license to add these instructions to the happily reunited imperialist man-family:

Win by fair combat. But know to shun
Reprisal killing’s when that’s done. […]
When the city’s being sacked
Preserve the shrines. Show gods respect.
Reverence for the gods survives
Out individual mortal lives.

A passing familiarity with the myth of Trojan War reveals that precisely none of this high-minded advice was followed. Neoptolemus and Philoctetes were particularly prolific and gruesome in their destruction of the city and its people. A passing familiarity with American imperialism overseas, or its own domestic wars against workers, enslaved people, Indigenous people, Black people, racialized migrants, and others reveals a saga of bloodcurdling, sadistic, and vindictive violence of which the deadly pathologies of the Trump years are a grim but unmistakable echo.

The rub of Sophocles’s play and Heaney’s translation is that we come to sympathize with the moral drama of characters whose participation in a larger, terrifying war is mystified, a contradiction both inherited and disappeared in Biden’s mobilization of the excerpted poem. In the case of Biden, the hidden conflict is a vengeful class war on two fronts: the domestic, as Dylan Rodríguez notes, in the form of neoliberal capitalism’s deadly austerity politics and unceasing racist policing to protect them; the international, in the form of the long arc of American imperialism, now appearing to many to be in its twilight but no less murderous for all of that. Biden draws on Heaney to, by contrast, spectacularize the explicit political vengefulness of his monstrous opponent while, at the same time, disguising the systemic and structural violence and vengefulness whose perpetuation his own party, policies, and program represent.

The sentimental lure of revenge politics are familiar and repugnant to many when they appear in the reality-TV, hicksploitation variety preferred by Trump, who regularly croons to his followers how much he loves them, how special they are, how unfairly they’ve been treated, how they are owed a debt for a stolen America payable in blood. The liberal drama of revenge politics is harder to recognize when it is produced by HBO-caliber writers, staged by veteran actors, and quotes a Nobel laureate’s translation of an ancient Greek classic. And yet our lives and the fate of the planet may rely on recognizing their dark affinity, as Heaney trusts us to do.

The post Revenge Against Revenge: Biden’s Revenge Politics and “The Cure at Troy” appeared first on Max Haiven.

“From the radical imagination to revenge capitalism (and back)” (March 23, 2020, 09h00 EST)

Online public  talk for the Royal Institute of Art’s Collective Practice Research Course. More information coming soon.

Ours is an age when the contradictions of a capitalism rooted in patriarchy and imperialism have accelerated to such an extent that it appears to be taking a needless, warrantless vengeance on people and the planet. It is no surprise, then, that the global revenge economy finds its expression in various insidious revenge politics. These are characterized by the rise of far-right political formations around the world that offer no vision of a bright future but leverage sentimental illusions of a stolen past. Even movements for liberation often get caught up in the revanchist turn. What are the prospects for the radical imagination? Beyond the call to imagine and strive for post-capitalist futures, how are the forms of relationally and reproduction that movements are practicing prefiguring the world that we might build—and are building–in the ashes of revenge capitalism?

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Was the GameStop frenzy an artwork?

This essay originally appeared in HyperAllergic –> https://hyperallergic.com/624288/was-the-gamestop-frenzy-an-artwork/

Was the GameStop scandal some kind of massive, participatory activist artwork? In late January and early February tens of thousands of small-time investors seemingly organically organized themselves on Reddit and other online forums to use stock trading apps to get their revenge (and make some money) at the expense of several Wall Street hedge funds.

For those of us who have followed the ways that contemporary art has responded to finance, the digital swashbuckling, mass participation, and symbolic jouissance of the GameStop frenzy felt very familiar, almost as if it had been curated by the New York political social practice platform Creative Time or orchestrated by the Yes Men to reveal just how ludicrous and vindictive the economic system of late capitalism is. In spite of frankly silly pronouncements on the internet that the GameStop frenzy would or could lead to the dethroning of Wall Street, it did, for a moment, reveal a kind of collective power hidden in plain sight. It also revealed the depth and breadth of a lust for vengeance against a financial sector whose investment banks and hedge funds have made out like bandits in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis (that they caused) and have profited from the ongoing pandemic.

There is no evidence that any artist catalyzed the GameStop online peasant’s rebellion that attempted to use the masters’ tools (investment apps) to dismantle his steel, glass, and fiberoptic house. But one might be forgiven for the optical illusion that it was an art project in the era of the “participatory turn.” Indeed, the idea of using the armature of art to sculpt social energies into some kind of impossible rebellion against finance has been appealing to many artists, especially in the past decade.

Perhaps the best known such attempt came from activists allied to Occupy Wall Street who realized that many were in some way artists, and most were deeply in debt. Strike Debt emerged as a platform for creative resistance which first tried to organize a coordinated boycott of repayment of student debt. This is a tactic they soon abandoned but is today being very successfully mobilized by a subsequent group involving many of the same members: the Debt Collective. In 2012 Strike Debt found a way to use Wall Street’s own tools to crowdfund a war chest to buy up heavily discounted sub-prime medical debt for pennies on the dollar and simply forgive it. Strike Debt never presumed their tactic, the Rolling Jubilee, would eliminate all debt. (Ironically, they were helping create a market for such derelict debts, driving up the price.) Their actions, like many participatory art interventions in recent years, aimed to rupture the way society imagines debt, money, and power and offer a taste of the kind of solidarity that, if embraced, might make radical change possible. This inspiring tactic has also led to a recent efforts in the UK under the banner of The Bank Job, which culminated in the performative explosion of an armored bank van.

Screenshot by the author of the Rolling Jubilee web page (February 2021)

Strike Debt and similar projects mobilize art to find a new constellation of grassroots political power hidden in plain sight. If neoliberalism and financialization have transformed us all into competitive risk takers, how can we take new, radical risks together for different futures?

Such questions were the impetus for another Occupy Wall Street offshoot, Occupy Museums, who began to curate shows of art about debt based not on style or theme but on to whom the artist owed their medical, personal and student debts. For their station at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Occupy Museums used digital screens to display works submitted by artists across America and Puerto Rico and took the opportunity to chastise museum board member and multi-billionaire Black Rock CEO Larry Fink for his profiteering from the debt economy. But their effort was not simply aimed at drawing the visitor’s attention to the scourge of debt and its impacts on artists (and everyone else). Their database of artists, arranged by common creditor, was intended to become a platform for debt refusal and rebellion for people who have never met and would never otherwise meet but who were bound together by a shared framework of oppression. It is in this invisible mass, what in another context Gregory Sholette calls the “dark matter” of the art world, that some new, yet unforeseen power resides, a power that briefly flashed in problematic ways in the GameStop frenzy.

Occupy Museums, Debtfair, (2017) installation view at the Whitney Biennial (courtesy the artists)

Why has it become art’s job to challenge finance in these ways? We have been led to imagine that art stands nobly above the vain, venal, and material concerns of the world and has a privileged moral vantage on the crass world of money. But that is far from the truth. In fact, “art” as a category of human activity distinct from craft and ritual only came into existence in the shadow of and because of the market created by capitalists from the Italian Renaissance onward. From the age of imperial looting to today’s equally violent global capitalist network, art has always been shaped by finance — one need only look to the boards of major contemporary art institutions to see the links. But, ironically, it is this intimacy that gives art its critical edge to upset and challenge finance and, importantly, to help us discover the otherwise hidden sources of collective potential in a financialized world.

As the gap between rich and poor has widened since the 1970s and the neoliberal revolution, and as public services have been cut back to pay for tax breaks for the rich and corporations, poor, working and (supposedly) middle-class individuals and families have increasingly had to borrow to make ends meet. One element of this matrix of financial oppression is the credit rating industry whose opaque algorithms have massive impacts of individuals’ ability to secure employment, education and housing.

In response to the way debt, foreclosure and poor credit had punished her own working-class family on the outskirts of Chicago, artist Cassie Thornton used a small arts grant to found Give me Cred! Extremely Alternative Credit Reporting , a kind of tongue-in-cheek but nonetheless effective anti-capitalist startup. The artist developed template forms and advertised on Craigslist to do long interviews with debtors about their financial and personal story of poor credit, which would then become material for an alternative document Thornton would pen that participants could ostensibly use instead of their besmirched official credit report. Thornton reports that many of the participants found success with their alternative reports, not because landlords or employers paid much heed to the weird artwork but because the process of telling their stories and having the artist reflect those stories back was deeply validating and affirming, giving them renewed confidence and a sense they weren’t simply hopeless losers. Thornton had hoped that those who received these alternative credit reports would, in their turn, interview and create reports for others, but it was not to be. However, her latest project, The Hologram, which is a lightweight, viral framework for peer-to-peer health support, has thrived in this way in the pandemic, and in a moment when medical debt continues to be a leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States. (Full disclosure: the author and Thornton are partners, having met during the research for the book that informs this article.)

Cassie Thornton, “Give me credit!” (2013) alternative credit report template (courtesy of the artist)

Other examples abound of art that intervenes in and seeks to mobilize the world that finance and financialization have made. In Loophole for All Paolo Cirio got access to a list of corporations registered in the notorious tax haven of the Cayman Islands and fabricated new incorporation certificates which he sold for pennies online, theoretically allowing anyone to establish an offshore bank account, “democratizing” a tool of finance usually jealously hoarded by the super wealthy. Like the Rolling Jubilee, this form of art-activism may indeed be useful for a few but is more importantly revelatory for many: It displays just how profoundly undemocratic the economy really is, in spite of neoliberalism’s false claims to once and for all wed economic freedom to political freedom.

Paolo Cirio, “Loophole For All” (2013) installation view (courtesy the artist)

All of these projects represent efforts by artists working amidst and as part of the participatory turn to find, assemble, and organize a new form of power that appears, tantalizingly, to have accidentally been placed in our hands by the needs of financialized capitalism — the power to wield increasingly digital forms of money not out of individual desperation but with collective political intent. None have succeeded in their wildest ambition, but they have kept alive hope that this potential might be realized, which, perhaps, is art’s job in a disenchanted world where we have been taught to settle for little more than a slow motion economic and ecological apocalypse. In the GameStop frenzy, the power of collective action within, against, and maybe beyond financialization sparked for a moment on the public stage and the financialized world looked, for a moment, a little different: Some shadows deepened; others evaporated.

In terms of its impacts on capitalism and finance, the GameStop frenzy is practically meaningless, no threat whatsoever to the power of Wall Street. But when contextualized in a longer history of attempts to seize the moment to mobilize collective power otherwise, perhaps it points to a different potential that artists and others might yet seize.

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“The struggle for the post-pandemic imagination” (April 7, 2020, 09h30 EST)

Part of the “Pivot(al): Possibilities for a Post-pandemic World” lectures series of the Third Age Learning program of Lakehead University. Details coming soon.

What if we imagined the imagination as the basic building block of our society and everything in it? Take today’s increasingly digital form of money for example: an imaginary substance given value by our shared imaginative energies, but with a profound power over life and death around the world. Money is only one of many social and political institutions that depends on the imagination. Indeed, most of what we consider normal, necessary or eternal is imaginary. If so many aspects of our shared life are the products of our imagination, of what other life, together, are we capable? As we imagine emerging from the pandemic into a changed world, what will the role of the imagination be? In the face of the urge to return to a “normal” that was destroying the planet and so many lives, how can we orchestrate the imagination towards fairer, more peaceful and more abundant ways of living together?

Dr. Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, where he co-directs RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, a workshop for the radical imagination, social justice and decolonization. We writes and edits for academic and non-academic publications and (when not in pandemic) lectures around the world on the topics including the imagination, revenge, art, literature and social movements. More information can be found at maxhaiven.com.

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Revenge capitalism and the drug war

I was interviewed by  the fascinating Podcast The Brief about the opioids crisis and revenge politics. It’s available here: http://thebriefpodcast.com/revenge-capitalism-the-drug-war/

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