"The Outside Can't Go Outside"

by Merlin Carpenter

Why has there been so much interest in “surplus value” in recent years? In  “The Outside Can't Go Outside” , artist Merlin Carpenter considers how this term has been inserted into contemporary art theory following the financial crisis of 2007/8. The book focuses on the idea that the value of art is located in unpaid mental, educational, and communicational labor that is gradually accrued and then exploited according to the logic of Marx's central thesis on exploitation. This much-hyped view is rejected in favor of a more rigorous Marxist interpretation of the nature of surplus value, and its role in a systematic law of value. Carpenter counterposes value to what exists outside of it—a dream, an imaginary, what he describes as a “trance” or the location of revolutionary thought and desires. The outside, however, is not proposed as a physical location, but as an outside inside the body that functions as a line of control within. Moreover, the author suggests that the new revolutionary subjects might be the new groups that form in order to push against control networks, in a reordering of class struggles. Institut für Kunstkritik Series

72 pages, Paperback

Published April 13, 2018

Reviews

[ordanJ · Rating 1 out of 5]

72 pages of cryptic and verbose ramblings on tangentially related art slash economic ideas.

I can barely resolve the title's meaning, let alone the content. There's no structure, no beginning or end. The thesis seems to be that art's value is held in unpaid mental, educational and communicational labor that can be gradually accrued then exploited by the big mean capitalist. “I am setting out a possible case for this reading of the work: that there is a potential to extract surplus value from social relations." Ok cool, but Dale Carnegie figured this out in 1936.

The verbiage is so caught up in post-modern abstract ideas, it loses focus of elucidating even a single clear point. Here's an extracted sample, verbatim, largely representative of the book's abstruse style:

‘In this sense the speculative-realist rejection of post-structuralist pseudo-contradiction is extremely useful for clearing the way to arguments more adequate to the movements of today, via the deeper abstraction of a Marxist theory of contradiction.’

10 pages in I was wondering whether this was an elaborate troll in the form of machine learning generated post-modern text à la http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/

Avoid authors who need to use the word ‘Heideggereque’ to explain something.

[Caleb Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

somewhat surprised by the responses to this on the formidable website for intellectuals, good reads . com. Apart from the foray into speculative realism (which i'll never even try to make pretense to understand) this read to me as fairly lucid application of value theory onto carpenter's practice and into the art world in general -- he's asking 1) how the art object has value (is a luxurious object an exchangeable object? Is it even ossified labor? does exchnage value apply? can the art capitalist extract surplus value? is it knowledge that the capitalist extracts from the art object? Is knowledge valuable?) 2) how the art world is able to capitalize on that value (indirectly he's asking this, it's the conversation he's involved in, the one about knowledge) and 3) how a practice might circumvent, utilize, or undermine this mechanism (not insitutitonal critique, he answers! except john knight). The answer to these questions (and more!) is that surplus value is created when value is systematized, encompassing, and completely social (see: the real subsumption of capital). The principle is that surplus value is like a social practice... you have to go out and buy your little commodities to survive like a stupid idiot, thus lining the smart guy's pockets, and all this money they receive back is paid by a wage, which you get back, and then the cycle repeats (more to it, but thats the gist)... so when an artist consumes, produces, etc... they are not outside the system. Hence why institutional critique et al., are so easily subsumed. Anything that's outside the art market can just be subsumed because it guides the market (the market as some sort of autonomous character asks itself: how do i make money here?) (see also his discussion about trance x value -which is the more original portion of this). it's actually a fine value theory 101, at least when you skip over the speculative realism part.

Wish he'd discussed more about how this informs his practice (it's somewhat evident,) but it would be nice

[a r g · Rating 4 out of 5]

pretty confusing but potentially revolutionary