Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization 0745338240, 978-0745338248

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
Figures......Page 8
Acknowledgements......Page 14
Introduction......Page 16
1. 3.5 Artistic Strategies to Envision Money's Mediation......Page 44
2. 6 Artists x 2 Crises x 3 Orders of Reproduction......Page 79
3. 0 Participation: Benign Pessimism, Tactical Parasitics and the Encrypted Common......Page 126
4. ∞ Encryption: Art's Crypt, Securitization in Numbers, Derivative Socialities......Page 169
Conclusion: Toward Abolitionist Horizons......Page 228
Notes......Page 243
Subject Index......Page 284
Name Index......Page 290

Citation preview

Art after Money, Money after Art

Art after Money, Money after Art Creative Strategies Against Financialization

Max Haiven

Between the Lines TORONTO

First published 2018 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Max Haiven 2018 The right of Max Haiven to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 3825 5 978 0 7453 3824 8 978 1 7868 0318 4 978 1 7868 0320 7 978 1 7868 0319 1

Hardback Paperback PDF eBook Kindle eBook EPUB eBook

Published in Canada 2018 by Between the Lines 401 Richmond Street West, Studio 281, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8 www.btlbooks.com Cataloguing in Publication information available from Library and Archives Canada ISBN 978 1 77113 398 2 Paperback ISBN 978 1 77113 400 2 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 77113 399 9 EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed in Europe All images in this book remain the copyright of the artist unless otherwise stated. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Contents

Figuresvii Dedicationxi Acknowledgementsxiii Introduction1 Financialization and the imagination 6 The best of enemies, the worst of friends 11 Why bother? Activist questions 18 Caveats toward abolition 22 Overview 25 1.

3.5 artistic strategies to envision money’s mediation29 Crises of representation 31 Money, abstraction and transformation 37 The art of money, the financialization of art, and a half-strategy 39 Strategy 1: Revelation 43 Strategy 2: Reflexivity 46 On mediation 50 Strategy 3: Rendering labor visible 55

2. 6 artists x 2 crises x 3 orders of reproduction64 Three theories of reproduction 67 Three artists, c.197374 Dawning financialization 88 Three artists after financialization 97 Conclusion 107 3. 0 participation: Benign pessimism, tactical parasitics and the encrypted common111 You can’t give it away like you used to 112 Social practices 117 Cruel optimism 123 Benign pessimism 127 Tactical parasitics 134 The encrypted common 142 Conclusion 153

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4. ∞ encryption: Art’s crypt, securitization in numbers, derivative socialities154 The cryptic market 157 A financialized society of control 160 Freeport empire 163 Palaces of encrypted culture 169 A crypt within a crypt 172 Popular Unrest186 Derivative sociality 189 Debtfair 197 Epilogue: Beyond crypto 207 Conclusion: Toward abolitionist horizons213 An abolitionist approach 213 Another reproduction 218 Beyond fascism 221 Art after money, money after art 224 Notes228 Subject index269 Name index275

Figures

  1. Michael Marcovici, Rat Traders, 2011. Promotional image 5   2. Robert Wechsler, The Caryatid, 2014. Installation view 10   3. Robert Wechsler, The Caryatid, 2014. Detail 10   4. Art Reserve Bank coin: “Shadow Economics” designed by Gabriel Lester 13   5. Art Reserve Bank installation view, Amsterdam 14  6. SUPERFLEX, Investment Bank Flowerpots/Deutsche Bank Cannabis Sativa, 2010 16   7. Newspaper advertisement related to the K-Foundation’s burning of £1,000,000, August 1994 24   8. Undated photograph of Boggs with a large edition work and cat, 2018 29   9. Femke Herregraven, Geographies of Avoidance, 2011 32 10. John Baldessari, Money (with Space Between), 1991 35 11. Blu, Untitled (El Tiburón), 2009 44 12. William Powhida, The Game, 2010 46 13. Cesare Pietroiusti. Image from an untitled 2007 performance in Brussels, in which the artist treated money with sulfuric acid 56 14. Cesare Pietroiusti, Untitled (Three thousand US dollars to take away), 2008. Detail from installation and performance 57 15. Cesare Pietroiusti and Paul Griffiths, Eating Money: An Auction, 2005–7. Performance at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK 57 16. Cesar Pietroiusti, Money watching, 2007. Performance and social action at a Birmingham shop-front 58 17. Máximo González, Numismagia, 2011. Side view 59 18. Máximo González, Numismagia, 2011. Detail 60 19. Máximo González, Big magma CCCLXX-I, 2011. Installation view60 20. Máximo González, Basura sin paisaje (Landfill without landscape), 2012. Detail 61 21. Máximo González, La basura del mundo (The world’s garbage), 2012. Detail 62 22. IAIN BAXTER&, Monopoly with Real Money (1973/2009), still of performance 68 23. Cassie Thornton, Physical Audit, 2012. Performance still 70 24. Yoan Capote, Rate (fucking money), 2015 (detail) 72

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25. George Washington “Bo” Hughes, The “Dicer” Hobo Nickel, 193976 26. Hans Haacke, MOMA-Poll, 1970 79 27. Lee Lozano, Untitled (Party/Paranoia, Painting, Real Money), 196984 28. Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, 2004. Installation view 90 29. Blake Fall-Conroy, Minimum Wage Machine, 2008–10 and 201293 30. Constantina Zavitsanos, Sweepstakes, 2015. Installation view  95 31. Constantina Zavitsanos, 1737/1921/2010 (It was what I wanted now), 2015. Installation view 96 32. geheimagentur, Schwarzbank, 2012 98 33. Zachary Gough, Bourdieux, 2014 101 34. Nuria Güell and Levi Orta, Arte Político Degenerado, 2014. Stock certificate 105 35. Fran Ilich, Spacebank, 2005–18 109 36. A panel from Epistolier and M. Trublin’s 1977 comic The Yippies at the Exchange113 37. Global Ultra Luxury Faction intervention at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, March 29, 2014 115 38. Mel Chin and collaborators, Fundred Project, 2006–present119 39. Darren Cullen, Pocket Money Loans, 2013–present. Installation view at the 2016 Glastonbury Festival 124 40. SUPERFLEX, Today we do not use the word “Recession,” 2015 128 41. Axel Stockburger, Quantitative Easing (for the street), 2014. Vienna installation view 132 42. Paolo Cirio, Loophole For All, 2013. Installation view, House of Electronic Arts, Basel—Switzerland 138 43. Mathieu Beauséjour, SURVIVAL VIRUS DU SURVIE, 1991–9 141 44. Valentina Karga and Pieterjan Grandry, Valentina and Pieter invest in themselves, 2013 144 45. Valentina Karga and Pieterjan Grandry, Market for Immaterial Value, 2015–ongoing. Instance at Sixty Eight Art Institute, Copenhagen, 2017 146 46. Cassie Thornton, Give Me Cred!, 2013. Installation view at Southern Exposure, San Francisco 149 46. Cassie Thornton, Give Me Cred!, 2013. Alternative credit report template 149 47. Mark Curran, from THE MARKET, 2010–present. Bethlehem, Trader (negotiation 1.5 years), Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX), Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, September 2012 158

figures   ix

48. C.K. Wilde, Against the Common Good, 2005 161 49. Image of Le Freeport Singapore’s website, May 15, 2018 164 50. Micah Lexier, A Coin in the Corner, 2012. Installation view at Mass MoCA 173 51. Michael Marcovici, How I Used Your Credit Card to Pay for This Book Online, 2009 178 52. Karen Ay, Exchange, 2009 182 53. Wilfredo Prieto, One Million Dollars, 2002 185 54. Melanie Gilligan, Popular Unrest, 2010. Film still 186 55. Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, Ten Thousand Cents, 2008192 56. Ahmet Ögüt, Anti-Debt Monolith, 2014 196 57. Thomas Gokey, $49,983: Total Amount of Money Rendered in Exchange for a Masters of Fine Arts Degree to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pulped into Four Sheets of Paper, 2011 200 58. Occupy Museums, Debtfair, 2017. Installation view 205 58. Occupy Museums, Debtfair, 2017. Installation view at the Whitney Biennial 205 59. Austin Houldsworth, Wealth Beyond Big Brother, 2014 208 60. Austin Houldsworth, Walden Note Money, 2014 211 61. C.K. Wilde, Saturn Eating His Children, 2006 215 62. Caroline Woolard, Exchange Cafe, 2013. Installation view at the Musuem of Modern Art (MoMA) 220 63. Susan Stockwell, SAIL AWAY, 2013. Installation view at Tate Modern Turbine Hall 226

This book is dedicated to the memory of Randy Martin, who danced with the derivative with militant optimism, and to my friends and former students and colleagues at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Acknowledgements

This book had its origins in the challenges I met striving to teach critical theory and political economy at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, beginning in 2011, which led me to seek out the work of contemporary artists working with money as a medium of critical and creative expression. Along the way, it racked up many debts indeed. Thanks to various people who read and offered feedback on various parts of this book, or with whom I conversed about its themes, though they may not have known they were doing so at the time. They include Franco Berardi, Jody Berland, Stephanie Boluk, Enda Brophy, George Caffentzis, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Jim Costanzo, Mark Curran, Greg Elmer, Teraneh Fazeli, Silvia Federici, Zach Gough, Stefano Harney, Brian Holmes, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Leigh Claire La Berge, Noah Fischer, Baruch Gottlieb, Dmytri Kleiner, Marc James Léger, Suhail Malik, Miguel Marques, Randy Martin, Evan Mauro, Christian Nagler, Ahmet Ögüt, Rachel O’Dwyer, Martha Rans, Renée Ridgway, Emily Rosamond, Oliver Lerone Schultz, Danny Spitzberg, Brett Scott, Imre Szeman, A.K. Thompson, Tobias C. VanVeen and Krystian Woznicki. This book would not have been possible without a long series of engagements with activists, artists and scholars made possible by the hospitality of many comrades and colleagues, who invited me to their communities or published work related to this project. These include Krystian Woznicki and Magdelena Taube of the Berliner Gazette, Geert Lovink, Patricia De Vries, Inte Gloerich and everyone at the Institute for Network Cultures and others associated with their Moneylab conference series, George Vassilacopoulos and Toula Nicolacopoulos at La Trobe , Rui Matoso, Sara Moreira, Paul Wittenbraker, Flo6x8, Johnna Montogmerie and Clea Bourne at the Political Economic Research Centre at Goldsmiths, Alice Meyer, Claire Wilkinson and Steven Connor at Cambridge, Helmut Draxler, Nora Ní Mhurchú, Ned Rossiter, Lana Swartz and Michael Palm, Jörg Metelmann, Daniel Cuonz and Scott Loren at St. Gallen, Angus Cameron, Detlev Zwick, Stephanie Rothenburg, Christpher Lee and Jordan Geiger at Buffalo, Taylor Nelms and Bill Maurer at Irvine, Stevphen Shukaitis, Daphne Dragona and Kristoffer Gansing at Transmediale, and the staff at the Halifax Public Library, where I taught a class on Art and Money in 2015. And no book, but especially this one, would be possible without the support of friends,

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including Phanuel Antwi, Ezra Winton, Svetla Turnin, Ardath Whynacht, Alex Khasnabish, Candida Hadley, Judy, Larry and Omri Haiven. The project of which this book is a part was funded in part through a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, in part through the Canada Research Chairs program. I am deeply grateful for these forms of public support. Thanks to my students, friends and colleagues at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, especially the Art and Activism collective (Karin Cope, Carla Taunton and Ericka Walker) and to my colleagues at Lakehead University in the Department of English and the Social Justice Studies program. Special thanks to my research assistant Diana Somuah Adu-Gyima. I also want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the artists whose work is featured in this book and who graciously allowed me to reproduce their images. I won’t name them here because they appear throughout the book, though there were many more whose work we could not include. One of the great joys of researching and writing this book has been meeting so many fascinating and inspiring people. Parts of Chapter 1 appeared in “Art and Money: Three Aesthetic Strategies in an Age of Financialisation” in the journal Finance and Society in 2015. Parts of Chapter 3 appeared in “Participatory Art within, against and beyond Financialization: Benign Pessimism, Tactical Parasitics and the Encrypted Common” in the journal Cultural Studies in 2017. Parts of Chapter 4 appeared in ‘The Crypt of Art, the Decryption of Money, the Encrypted Common and the Problem of Cryptocurrencies’ in the Moneylab Reader 2, edited by Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink, and Patricia De Vries. Thanks to David Shulman and everyone at Pluto for making this book a reality. My greatest thanks go to Cassie Thornton, my favorite artist and so much more.

Introduction

At the very outset let me assure the reader that I do not believe art needs to be saved from money’s undue influence. Nor do I believe that money needs to be reformed to be more functional, rational and unambiguous—which is to say, less like art. Rather, I think that money and art, as they exist under capitalism, must be abolished, along with that economic system. And it is toward the horizon of that abolition that this book is oriented. But while you might not agree with that orientation, it is my hope that any reader with an interest in the relationship between art and money, and more broadly with an interest in the relationship between culture and economics, imagination and value, will find something useful or at least provocative in the coming pages. I am interested in what the work of visual, performance and participatory artists who use money as a medium or material for artistic intervention and expression—what I term “money-art”—can teach us about our particular moment of capitalism and how to overcome it. With increasing regularity, critical, radical and experimental artists have incorporated coins, banknotes, credit cards and more ephemeral money-like substances (debt, blockchains, financial instruments, tax havens) into their work in ways that can offer us insights into the system of which they (both the artists and the money) are a part. Truth be told, most of this work is atrociously bad: theoretically misinformed, conceptually lazy, technically banal, politically confused and/ or aesthetically boring. But some of it is brilliant, and I think that the brilliant work, which I focus on in this book, can illuminate the darker contours of a system of global death and exploitation, the better that we might light our collective way out of it. Ultimately, then, this book uses money-art to help me tell a story, or really a suite of short stories, about the relationship between culture and the economy in a time when the line between the two is increasingly blurred. These are not heartwarming stories about the capacity for the heroic, transcendental imagination to vanquish the crass materialistic profanity of money. Rather they are stories about how radical artists respond to and work through an evolving if chaotic form of capitalism, a system of money’s rule over society, that actively and necessarily incorporates, harnesses, recodes and commodifies our imaginations, our sense of agency and our creative and communicative powers.

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I have no faith that art can transformatively challenge or defeat this system. Art cannot save us from financialization and we cannot save art from it. Indeed, one of the core arguments of this book is that, in spite of much romantic ballyhooing to the contrary, art and money have never been as far apart as we might like to imagine: money and art have been encrypted in one another since capitalism as a system began to form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With activists and artists in mind, as well as scholars, the chapters of this book hold art and money in an uncomfortable proximity in order to help us to better reckon with the possibilities and perils for the radical imagination in a moment of financialized, neoliberal capitalism as it spirals further and further out of control. This book comes at a moment when the art market is booming, largely thanks to the sickening way that rising global inequality also gives rise to a growing legion of super-elites—euphemistically termed “High Net Worth Individuals” (HNWIs)—who have a hankering for art, especially, it seems, contemporary art.1 In the last 15 years or so, astronomical records have been set, then broken for the hammer price of works by still-living artists at the world’s duopoly fine art auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, but this represents only a fraction of all the work sold in the notoriously murky, cronyistic, and one might even say deeply corrupt, market for art. Beyond market sales, multinational corporate behemoths are eager to sponsor spectacularized exhibitions of blue-chip artists at branded museums and galleries in order to associate themselves with the au courant charisma of “the contemporary.” Cities and regions around the world, grappling with the massive economic changes of neoliberal globalization, look to contemporary art institutions as catalysts for economic growth and social revitalization. Glitzy art fairs—temporary trade shows where galleries sell hot new work—have expanded and multiplied around the world. While we might (wrongly) imagine the super-wealthy as all conservative patricians with a refined taste for art treasures that have stood the test of time, many of today’s smash-and-grab oligarchs and coked-up fast-money financial magnates seem to hunger for the frisson of daring, provocative, boundary-pushing, offensive and sometimes even “political” art, renegade in both form and content. Yet worries that this overheated, vain and spectacular art market assigns “incorrect” prices to art works—essentially that the market is broken—seems to me to miss the point entirely, as does the concern that it represents a bubble that must inevitably burst. Such concerns rest on a belief in the exceptionalism of art, the idea that it isn’t and should not be like any other commodity under capitalism. In this book I argue that,

introduction   3

as with all exceptionalist arguments, these concerns largely function to reproduce the order they claim to be critiquing, even if that critique does have an element of truth. Instead, along with Suhail Malik, I see the financialization of contemporary art as particularly interesting not because it is the quirky exception to the broader system of financialization, but precisely because it represents the norm that is hidden in plain sight.2 The art market is an important instance and example, almost a living satire, of the frankly weird and obscene dynamics of financialization in capitalism more broadly: the dance of appearances, speculations and mystifications, wrought both by and for the beneficiaries of growing (and deadly) global inequality. If there is one concern about the financialization of art that is vital to stress, it is that, like the financialized capitalist economy at large, the art economy is defined by massive and growing inequality. It’s not only that a tiny fraction of working artists make a living while the rest toil in (allegedly romantic) obscurity. It is also that the production of this abject and impoverished obscurity is the very condition for the glitz and glamor of the upper echelons of the art world. As Gregory Sholette argues, it is the hidden dark matter of artistic labor, the work of innumerable unsung artists or would-be artists, that allows the stars to shine so brightly.3 More than that, the art world and art market sit astride of a global capitalist economy where the vast majority of people are never afforded the time or resources to exercise meaningful creative expression, let alone have it celebrated. For all the talk of the rise of the creative economy, most people lead lives haunted by exploitation, drudgery and poverty. A political-economy of contemporary art must take this as its starting point. As artist and writer Andrea Fraser, among others, insists, it can be all too comfortable and beguiling to assume that the pathologies of financialization simply feed parasitically on the otherwise neutral or benign art world; instead, we need to pay close attention to the way the entire field of contemporary art is embroiled in this game, not only the auction houses, art dealers and mega-museums but also the whole global art production chain: independent galleries, art schools, art writers and critics, even artists themselves.4 As we shall see throughout this book, financialized money trickles down (unevenly, unfairly) and influences all art-world spaces in some way, even spaces that are avowedly independent and allegedly radical. As Martha Rosler has pointed out some time ago, “contemporary” art functions by mining its own margins, by endlessly seeking the experimental or once-excluded frontiers of artistic creation and bringing them to the center of its operations.5 Obsessed with the production of newness, coated in many layers of extremely

4  art after money, money after art

sophisticated and erudite commentary, “contemporary” art is relentlessly imperialistic in its hunger for new sources of value to tap, just like finance itself. And yet in order for contemporary art to be financialized, to become a financial asset, it can’t just be relentlessly subordinated to the needs of profit. In order to be “contemporary” and produce saleable newness, it needs to retain a latitude for freedom, a sense of play, a measure of cryptic (and encrypted) semi-autonomy. Contemporary art is economically valuable as both “contemporary” and as “art,” and can therefore be financialized, precisely because it somehow retains and manifests its own refusal of capitalism’s axiom of value.6 Later in this book I will offer the notion that such art represents a crypt within a crypt, hence the potential source of its haunting power and limited radical potential. This is one of the key contradictions that animates this book, and it has larger implications. My approach to financialization is one that does not see it simply as a dystopian nightmare imposed on the world from above (thought its machinations and impacts are indeed horrific) but also a reorganization of capitalism toward harnessing and putting to work the ingenuity, creativity, imagination and “autonomy” of each social actor.7 I’m not arguing against a notion of financialization as the game of a small number of global elites who use their incredible financial power to transform economics, politics and society more broadly—it is largely that. But this game also depends on making each of us into a financialized subject, a vector by which a financialized logic enters into ever more spheres of life. I am interested in financialization as a way that capitalism, in an age of globalization, digitization and crisis, percolates into the fabric of society, or into the practices of sociality. My wager in this book is that looking at the way this is happening in the field of “contemporary art” might reveal something important about how financialization works more broadly, and how we might better fight back. I am less interested in the capacity of art to challenge this socioeconomic order and more interested in how the strange status of this (ever widening) set of activities we classify as “contemporary art” offers a unique (though also highly limited) laboratory to experiment with new tactics and strategies of rebellion, subversion, refusal and revenge. This may be why, while recently there has been a growing cynicism toward “political art” and its possibilities to transform the imagination, there has at the same moment seemingly been an explosion of people (only some of whom call themselves artists) using art as a method, a weapon or an alibi toward activist ends.8 So “art after money” implies at least two things: (a) the way contemporary art is both pursuing and pursued by financialization and (b) the

introduction   5

Figure 1  In his 2011 piece Rat Traders Austrian artist Michael Marcovici employed scientific methods to discover if lab rats could be taught to correctly predict the behavior of financial markets. Marcovici transformed segments of historical records of the fluctuations of various futures markets (currency, oil, etc.) and used an algorithm to transpose them into a series of tones within rats’ hearing range. Placed inside a standard “Skinner Box” used in laboratories worldwide to study animal behaviors, rats were played segments of sonified market data and given the option of going “long” or “short” on the investment. If they were correct, they would get a small ration of food. If incorrect, a small electric shock. 80 lab rats (40 male, 40 female) were trained for three months by this method, at the end of which certain rats were clearly top performers. These rats were bred together to create a new generation of rat traders, which Marcovici reports generally outperformed their parents. The experiment was ended shortly thereafter, however, according to Marcovici because he didn’t have room in his apartment for any more rats. The project received worldwide media attention, which Marcovici met with an ironic earnestness, suggesting even that he had begun negotiations with hedge funds to sell them specimens from the (presumably patented) eventual strain of super rat traders. Image courtesy of the artist.

possibilities of art and the radical imagination to refuse and resist this situation, and to shoot beyond it. Conversely, “money after art” implies: (a) the roles contemporary art plays in the reproduction of financialized capitalism and (b) the reorientation of (at least certain aspects of) financialized capitalism toward creativity, representation, the imagination, speculation, spectacle and participation.

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financialization and the imagination The notion of financialization is taken up at some length in this book’s second chapter. There, we contrast three radical artists working with money around the year 1973 and three parallel artists working in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to discover how the vast increase of the power and influence of the financial sector has transformed aesthetic, economic, political and cultural conditions. We dig deeper than the commonplace definitions of financialization that see it merely as the meteoric rise of the so-called FIRE (high Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) sector in the globalizing capitalist economy. No doubt this rise is important, but not only because of the sheer might it affords to the CEOs and executives of hedge funds, investment banks, private equity firms, bond-rating agencies, wealth management companies, and asset-management behemoths (many of whom are key art collectors and sit on the boards of leading art institutions, not coincidentally). As numerous authors demonstrate, this dominance gives these firms, who are largely interested in maximizing short-term returns by any means necessary, incredible disciplinary power over practically every other actor, large or small, in the capitalist economy. Nation-states and sub-state public bodies (municipalities, metropolitan transit services, public utilities) must increasingly go, year after year, cap in hand to global financial markets to borrow money to make ends meet, much thanks to years of neoliberal economic policies (pushed by the FIRE sector) in the name of tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.9 Corporations themselves, in fields like manufacturing, retailing, research and development or logistics and transportation must reorient themselves away from producing a good or a service and toward improving quarterly stock performance, even if it means sacrificing long-term strategy or unleashing human or ecological chaos in the frantic search of lower costs and greater profits.10 Meanwhile, most of the world’s basic foodstuffs are now traded on global futures markets: the substances themselves may not move an inch but the rights to them may transfer hundreds of times a week, with sometimes catastrophic effects on those who rely on them. Housing and land has become a realm of intensive speculation in a global marketplace, both in terms of urban property gambling and rural land-grabbing.11 As De Pryke and Gay note, financialization is the process where practically any source of social or economic wealth is transformed into a revenue stream to be purchased and put into play on globalized markets.12 Crucially, financialization has facilitated and been facilitated by the acceleration of digital technologies which have created a network of global speculative markets. Arcane methods like derivatives contracts,

introduction   7

counterbalanced portfolios of assets and securitization have, with the help of both new theories and ever more sophisticated computers and algorithms, created a system of interlocking if chaotic gambits among the world’s wealthiest people and corporations.13 But as abstract and occult as these gambits may indeed be, their effects on the global economy at large and on almost every company, government, commodity, institution and person are dramatic and often, in sum and in specific, disastrous. But here we come to a deeper meaning of financialization as well: it is not only this set of structural changes in the capitalist economy, and it is not only a period of time (roughly 1973 to the present) within which this shift occurred). It is also, according to a number of theorists, a wholesale transformation of the fabric of social and cultural life, the rise of what Randy Martin calls a new “logic” of sociality, a new grammar of relations and relationships in an interconnected world.14 For instance, education, healthcare and other basic human necessities that were formerly, in some jurisdictions, considered public goods have been reconfigured as personal “investments.”15 Indeed, as Wendy Brown notes, in a neoliberal epoch when we are all instructed to envision ourselves as entrepreneurs, an increasing number of qualities, capacities and relationships become assets to be leveraged in an unapologetic but, we are told, meritocratic free market that has largely consumed society.16 While largely this investor persona is targeted at the would-be middle class, the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, as well as the recent enthusiasm for social impact investing and microfinance schemes is a fine indication that, increasingly, financialized capitalism is invested in transforming the very precarity, poverty, marginalization and inequality it has helped create into vectors for speculation.17 As I argued at some length in my 2014 book Cultures of Financialization, as dystopian and megalithic as this paradigm may appear at first glance, it is vital we see it as the product of the competitive and seemingly autonomous agency, creativity and imagination of many social actors.18 On the one hand, financialization is not some vast conspiracy by elites, though some degree of elite collusion and cooperation is necessary for the system’s reproduction. More importantly, it is a system driven forward ultimately by competition and antagonism between financial players, each seeking to outdo one another and survive in an unforgiving market ecosystem. Second, while most of us struggle to survive under greater debt burdens and navigate a world of increasingly exploitative corporations and austere governments, financialization also depends on each of us non-financiers cultivating, harnessing, reorienting or recalibrating our own creativity, agency, imagination, subjecthood and relationships

8  art after money, money after art

toward financialized survival, and this is sold to us as freedom and empowerment, even a means to achieve greater, more noble ends.

Imaginary money In this sense, I have tried to understand financialization from the perspective of the imagination. My curiosity has been marked by the horrific and destructive power of what at first glance appears to be completely “imaginary money.” Today, financial derivatives alone—essentially freely circulating agreements to make some exchange at a future date that can be priced and sold as if they themselves are commodities—circulate annually at a volume many times in excess of the planet’s gross domestic product. If financial flows of imaginary money today have evolved into a rapidly churning global maelstrom, and if they have infiltrated almost all spheres of life, then to a very real extent humanity and the earth more generally exists in thrall of a nightmare of our own collective hallucination. The financialized imagination, as I have framed it, then encourages a transformation of our individual and collective imaginations such that we not only accept the legitimacy of the speculative order but also participate in reproducing it, internalizing its logic and importing it into the fields of daily life and sociality; and in turn that broader system of the imagination is fed by the transformation of our imaginations.19 But a closer look reveals the limits of this perspective. It is all too easy to imagine that financialization is just an aberration from “normal” or well-functioning capitalism, a moment of excess that allows the “imaginary” speculative economy to detach itself and rule over the “real” economy.20 But when, precisely, was money not imaginary? Part of the theoretical infrastructure of this book is meant to question the artificial separation of a realm called “economics,” which is allegedly the purview of the rational, the material and the profane, from a realm we call “culture,” which is assumed to be the preserve of the imagination, the intangible and the sacred. We should certainly not lose sight of the moral depravity of a system that, for instance, leaves most of the world’s farmers so poor they are malnourished while, at the same time, facilitating the engorgement of arbitrageurs and speculators who simply take advantage of split-second price differentials to trade the grains, lands and agricultural inputs.21 But rather than being some sort of fundamental paradigm shift, I think that financialization really reveals something much more profound about the way the “economy” as such has always been, in part, imaginary or imaginative and, conversely, how the imagination has never been free of the influence of, or participation in, “the economy.” And it is my conviction that we can learn a lot about these

introduction   9

fraught, complex and historically contextual intersections by looking at money-art.

A materialist theory of the imagination Very briefly, my understanding of the imagination here approaches it less as an individual cognitive capacity and more a sociological phenomenon. This understanding is indebted to the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, a dissident psychoanalytic and Marxist thinker who developed a unique approach that stressed the importance of the imagination in a project of radical autonomy. For Castoriadis, all social institutions, from nation-states to the institution of marriage to the form of money we use is, in significant part, imaginary.22 After all, materially speaking nation-states are just lines on a map, marriage is just a string of magic words, and money is (these days) useless tokens, until and unless we, as individuals and a society, invest them with meaning, enact them in our daily social relations, and/or use coercive force to back them up. For Castoriadis, the radical imagination is the essential magma-like substance of negation and disruption from which all social institutions—and indeed all individual subjectivities and identities—are the momentary solidifications.23 While they may seem necessary, eternal or unconquerable, the radical imagination can erupt and sweep them back into the molten flow, to solidify differently.24 In my work, I have sought to develop a theoretical articulation of this theory of imagination with a Marx-inspired theory of value. For Marx, of course, all value ultimately derives from labor.25 Traditionally, his radical version of a labor theory of value has been interpreted in a fairly conservative, mechanistic way. I have been inspired by thinkers like Harry Cleaver who seek to recall that underneath the exploitation of labor power lies the much bigger question of how human cooperation ought to be organized.26 My contribution has been to insist that this cooperation is always also imaginative, and the structures, systems and models we use to organize our cooperative energies in any society requires an orchestration or semi-synchronization of the imagination between social subjects.27 Economies, in this sense, are frameworks for organizing imaginative cooperation: they are shaped by the ways we imagine the value of people and things, and in turn they shape this imagination. As such, I have sought to see capitalism as not only a system for the ruthless exploitation of workers’ bodies, but also one that depends on the way it can shape the imagination. This process has both transformed and intensified in a financialized age also marked by the rise of what some have called “cognitive capitalism.” And it is with this in mind that I seek

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Figure 2  Robert Wechsler, The Caryatid, 2014. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 3  Robert Wechsler, The Caryatid, 2014. Detail. Image courtesy of the artist.

introduction   11

to develop a theory of finance and financialization that doesn’t simply castigate it as the imagination run wild. It is more accurate to say that, like all economic orders, financialization is actually a methodology for organizing sociality, which is to say the fabric of imaginative cooperation; it is particular logic by which we imagine who and what is valuable and reproduce social life together.28 I have held fast to this approach because it offers a theory that can accommodate both an awareness of structure and contingency, the resilience of systems and the power of intervention, the terrible tenacity of oppressive institutions and the relentless negation posed against this power by resistance. But I want to hasten to note that I have almost no faith in the power of individual acts of imaginative resistance. My notion of the power of the radical imagination stems from the way it manifests in and through disruptive, antagonistic and revolutionary social movements that organize for collective power and transformation. As Alex Khasnabish and I have argued in our study of contemporary social movements, the radical imagination is not something an individual has, but something collectivities do.29 I think individual and collective acts of artistic and creative radicalism can contribute to movements, but they cannot, in and of themselves, threaten the broader systems. Capitalism and other systems of power are ultimately vested in how we cooperate; they can only be overcome or changed if we cooperate differently, not only on the level of small experimental collectives or individual subcultures, but as a society. If the radical imagination is something we do together, art can and should be part of that doing. But in a better society, where that doing was truly liberated, I find it implausible that we would still have a discrete category of activity known as “art.” Creativity, imagination, autonomy, symbolic communication and intellectual play would, I should hope, be integrated into the fabric of life, not (as today) encrypted, dead and yet alive, in a rarified sphere of “art.”

the best of enemies, the worst of friends From the perspective of the paradigm of the imagination sketched above, I propose to investigate money and art as particular methodologies or tools by which we imaginative-cooperative subjects reflect on and help organize our imaginative cooperation. They are both highly unique and structurally important forms of mediation, which is to say necessary but ultimately incomplete or flawed ways that we, as a society, reflect on our own capacities, our own potentials. Precisely for this reason they are far from immune from the influence of power, and, in various societies and historical moments, both art and money become weaponized by

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the ruling order or its agents in various ways. Both art and money have extremely particular (if sometimes changing) characteristics under the system of capitalism, and I want to be categorical that my interest here is exclusively in these particularities—in an even smaller subset of these particularities, those having to do with the period and processes of financialization, which I am dating to around 1973 (see Chapter 2 for more on why). I am explicitly not at all interested in theorizing art or money as trans historical human categories and only court such a perspective in order to highlight, by contrast, their particular existence under capitalism or financialization. Both money and art, while arguably ancient human tools or arts, become categorically different beasts within and as part of capitalism, in ways that change as capitalism (d)evolves.

The money in art Ultimately, my argument about art and money is this: under capitalism we are accustomed to and comfortable with comprehending this thing we call art and this thing we call money as mutually opposed mythical forces. The reality is more complex. To better understand this complexity we will need to see both money and art each as both socially constructed and historically contingent categories and as structural elements within a system. In other words, the thing we call “art” and the thing we call “money” are not eternal features of human civilization but specific boxes or bundles of associations that have formed under capitalism in very specific ways. At the same time, as abstract, arbitrary and socially constructed as these categories may indeed be, they still play important, even vital roles within capitalism. They are both, to use the Marxist terminology, realabstraktions, or, to use the terminology I will build throughout this book, mutually encrypting structures.30 My desire to frame art and money in this way has to do with trying to cut through a certain unhelpful narration of financialization. On the one hand, the fate of art today is often held up as a particularly horrific example of the pathological and intensive power of finance capital. As global wealth has grown and grown since the 1970s there has emerged a new global super-elite hungry for contemporary art baubles, accelerating art markets into high gear in ways that critics, artists and spectators decry. The news is filled with the mind-boggling prices set at auction for the works of still-living artists, work that often seemingly trades in aesthetic or critical depth for kitsch brand-able saleability.31 New intermediary institutions have arisen to help facilitate this bull market: online auctions and sales platforms to contest the hegemony of the traditional market makers, art investment funds where specula-

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Figure 4  Art Reserve Bank coin designed by Gabriel Lester: “Shadow Economics.” Courtesy of the Art Reserve Bank. The Art Reserve Bank (ARB) is a sophisticated yet mirthful cooperative venture that, from May 1, 2012 to April 29, 2017, engaged in an experiment to test the caliber of art as reserve of value. Over the five years, the bank, which was given special permission by the Dutch Central Bank, minted 25,000 coins designed by different artists and released weekly in editions of 100 (there being roughly 250 weeks in the five-year period, for a total of 25,000 coins). Coins could be purchased at an exchange rate set by the bank (it is and has always yet been €100) and, more importantly, sold back to the bank at any time at the current exchange rate plus 10 percent (non-compound) interest per year. In other words, if I were to have bought a coin for €100 in May of 2013, I could sell it back to the bank in June of 2015 for €120. In this sense, the coins were not so much units of currency but more like a token or a bond issued by the bank. But each coin was also a unique work of art, with its own economic value somehow also tied to its artistic value. The relationship between these values is precisely what the ARB was created to test. The ARB cooperative facilitated, on their website, a “dealing room” where investors/ depositors/collectors could buy and sell coins. Indeed, this speculative play over and above the “face value” of the coin is what actually determined the functional value of the coins: the amount of hard currency they could fetch. But the ARB was also a gamble itself: if all the investors/depositors/collectors lose faith in the project, or need cash at once, and all come calling to exercise their guaranteed right to sell, the bank would fail. The bank would also fail if it didn’t sell at least a third of the minted coins: this income was necessary simply to cover the costs of overhead. But if, at the end of the five years, the bank was still afloat, and if the circulating price of the artwork/coins on the secondary market is higher than the original value (plus interest), then the bank would have added credence to the idea that the aesthetic represents a seemingly stable and autonomous store of value. In the end, the bank almost survived its full term. The final friendly reminder to clients about the bank’s planned end on April 29, 2017, sent some days before, triggered a run which led to its bankruptcy a mere twelve hours before its planned closure.

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Figure 5  Art reserve bank installation view, Amsterdam. Courtesy of the Art Reserve Bank.

tors can pool resources and ownership of works purely for speculative gain, new forms of collateralization and insurance, freeport art storage facilities to cache these treasures tax-free, new galleries, museums and discursive venues to legitimate this art and present it to wider publics, glitzy international art fairs and more.32 The comforting narrative is that money has corrupted art; financialization is the ultimate corruption of the sacred by the profane.33 The fate of art represents the depraved dream of endless, limitless commodification and corporatization that the speculative fever of financialization instills in the social body. Here, capitalism has conquered its final frontier, the realm of the autonomous, critical imagination itself. Contemporary art, that bastion of liberty, that purposeless enfant terrible of modernity, the last hope for civilization, has fallen to the green-eyed barbarians. Certainly, to some extent that is all true. But this book will argue more is at stake. The reality is that the category of activities and artefacts we call “art,” as distinct from ritual objects, public monuments, craft, kitsch and ornament, only emerged under capitalism and coevolves with it. “Art” as the unique product of a creative genius is a derivative of the rise of the moneyed bourgeoisie who, unlike previous versions of the ruling classes, did not imagine themselves to have an inherent right to rule.34 Collecting,

introduction   15

patronizing and cultivating an appreciation of “art” as such offered them not only a means to ornament themselves and sequester their ill begotten wealth in precious objects, it also offered a point of individual and collective pride in their intellectual caliber, their social benevolence and their moral and cultural rectitude.35 Indeed, for this reason the forms of colonialism and white supremacy that have characterized the history of capitalist accumulation also define the value systems of art history: the supreme valorization of the white male creative genius and the exclusion of the rest of humanity from the pantheon of cultural excellence both stems from and helps legitimate a system of racialized global capitalist pillage that continues to this day, and that is still reflected in the predominance of white male artists in high-priced contemporary art auctions and exhibitions. To put it bluntly, art cannot be corrupted by capitalism because it has always already been derivative of capitalism. As Pierre Bourdieu taught us, money has always shaped taste.36 If some artists and art movements have made critical, radical or dissident work within this paradigm, it is not just the exception to the rule, it is because for art as a category of capitalism to produce a kind of saleable “contemporaneity,” a sense of modernity, movement, cultural vitality and forward motion it is structured to produce and then incorporate a margin of experimentation, resistance, refusal and antagonism. By framing art this way I want to do away with the unhelpful myth that art is somehow autonomous from capitalist influences so that we can, (a) better see how art’s changing economic role today both serves and illustrates the dynamics of financialization and (b) have a more honest and useful discussion of how artists might actually bring themselves into alignment with movements to abolish financialization and capitalism.

The art in money The argument I am building in a circuitous way throughout this book is that the unhelpful mythology of art’s autonomy from capitalism is held in place and reinforced in some small but significant ways by an equally unhelpful mythology about money. Just as we believe that money has, under financialization, corrupted art, we also, perhaps unconsciously, believe the inverse: art has corrupted money. Here, in the first place, I mean “art” in the more suspicious and derisive, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense of the term, implying illusion or deception in the tradition of Plato’s distrust of mimesis and theatre as threatening to the rational ordering of social life. Today there is, we are told, altogether too much “artfulness” in finance. Whereas we assume the

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world of money ought to be the realm of disinterested, dispassionate and routine calculation, common perceptions of the depravities of finance points the finger at “greedy” individuals or corporations who game the system, at nefarious central banks that use fiscal necromancy to concoct money out of ether, or at a kind of actuarial wizardry. Financialization itself gives rise to a stunted political imagination that can only perceive the contradiction-driven structural and systemic crises of finance capital in a moralizing frame, blaming them on corrupt individuals who spin elaborate illusions to enrich themselves. The reality, as we shall see in the coming chapters, is much more complex, but we are extremely ill-served by the limiting notion that, essentially, the rational economy has been corrupted by a surplus of artfulness or “cultural” distortions.

Figure 6 SUPERFLEX, Investment Bank Flowerpots/Deutsche Bank Cannabis Sativa, 2010. Image courtesy of the artist. In this work, models of the world’s leading investment banks were used as pots for hallucinogenic plants.

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What is certainly true, in ways that we will also explore at some length, is that financialization is part and parcel of a set of shifts that have dissolved the line between culture and economics, art and finance, as never before. A number of theorists, for instance, have put forward complex and materialist accounts of the way today’s forms of financial speculation need to be described using frameworks originally developed for the study of arts and culture. Christian Marazzi, for one, has suggested seeing financial speculation as a language game;37 Donald Mackenzie has, in a very different way, suggested that the language of performativity is more accurate.38 When financial wealth seems to circulate with no earthly referent we can sympathize with Malik’s persuasive argument that the market for fine art is not the weird exception to, but actually paradigmatic of broader financial markets.39 More than one theorist has developed the felicitous conjunction of the terms speculation and spectacle to note that financial markets are largely driven by the production of appearances and illusions.40 Likewise, we might observe the equally intriguing etymology of credit in the Latin word for belief (credero), and the way that, as David Graeber shows, it resonates with a diverse array of cultural formations that seek to connect economic power to moral authority.41 Hito Steyerl has explored the imbrications of contemporary art with new financialized architectures and media of control.42 And Marina Vishmidt has, with great acuity, made a case for recognizing not only the analogies but also the structural intertwining of new forms of contemporary art and new methods of contemporary financial speculation.43 This book’s title, Art after Money, Money after Art is precisely aimed to antagonize what I see to be the false distinction between the two, or more accurately to point toward the way that our unhelpful myths about art and money are in a strange way mutually reinforcing. In spite of the fact that art is becoming more financialized and money is becoming more “cultural,” these myths seem stronger than ever. In the latter chapters of this book I will discuss these myths more as crypts, or encryptions, to signal the way they both enclose something and enclose or encode our imaginations. In such a crypt, our notions of both art and money are kept alive and dead at once. My project here is to use money-art to bring money and art, the best of enemies or the worst of friends, into a critical proximity precisely to see what lies encrypted within them. And as the forgoing discussion suggests, what I see at their cores is the tectonics of the radical imagination. In the end, it would be all too easy to write a book on the relationship between art and money that only focuses on alienation, which is to say, takes the commodification, monetization and financialization of

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art as an index of the horrific degree to which capitalism has corrupted, profaned and cheapened one of the most important and profound realms of human activity: the expression of individual creativity, art. As important as that point may be, there is more to be gained, this book argues, from also focusing our attention on how the tension between art and money is also connected to the shifting patterns of exploitation in this financialized, neoliberal capitalist world order. In other words, I am far more interested in questions of labor and economics, questions that for me are really about how we, as a cooperative species living in a complex, globalized society, organize and coordinate our collaboration.

why bother? activist questions Beyond an abiding curiosity toward these themes, my ultimate motivation for writing this book is based on a number of underexplored conundrums for activism and resistance to financialized capitalism, which I want to list in no particular order. (a) Whereas once it was easy to imagine art and artists as creative renegades against capitalism, that illusion is harder and harder to sustain. Today, we have seen the wholesale integration of “creativity” and the imagination into the circuits and cycles of capitalist accumulation, on a number of levels. It is not only that notorious or nefarious corporations now use their sponsorship of (contemporary) art to “artwash” their images in the eyes of the public.44 As we shall see, in addition to fulfilling its historic role as a kind of prop for the social reproduction of the ruling class, contemporary art today appears in part as an investment vehicle for the world’s super elite.45 One ought not overstate the importance of this market: it is almost insignificant in the scheme of things,46 but it is highly demonstrative of broader trends. It’s not just the upper echelons of the art market and blue-chip artists; this system relies on its partial incorporation of public and independent arts institutions and on reproducing itself by robbing the wayward and dissident margins of the “art world” that it itself creates and marginalizes. Meanwhile, as Angela McRobbie noted over fifteen years ago, responding to the UK Labour government’s attempt to pivot that nation’s political economy away from now offshored industrial manufacturing and toward “intangible” assets like cultural production, artists have come to be positioned as “pioneers of the new economy,” held up as paragons of how to approach life and work in precarious times.47 This framing works hand-in-glove with the mobilization of unwitting artists as “shock troops of gentrification,” used to open up once poor and marginalized, often highly racialized neighborhoods for speculative investment.48 These trends have been celebrated

introduction   19

and advanced under the banner of “creative cities” and the romance of the “creative class.”49 As neoliberal policies eviscerate any possibility of collective security or planned economic development, art also comes to be seen as a weird panacea to social ills. Meanwhile, in contrast to earlier moments of capitalism that prized convention, obedience and massification, today each of us is exhorted to embrace our own inner creative spark either to improve our human capital for later resale on the austere job market or simply as a way of retaining some sad individuated shred of humanity in an ever-more alienating world and workplace.50 While we should heed Ben Davis’s cautions to neither overstate the centrality of art to capitalism nor lionize artists as quintessential workers when there is a strong argument to be made for considering them part of the petit bourgeoisie, my argument retains an insistence that we can look to the financialization of art for important broader trends at the intersection of money and the imagination.51 (b) While we can all agree that a major problem for changing the world is the transformation of the imagination, we aren’t clear how to do it. It has been clear to social movement organizers and agitators throughout the history of capitalism that one key problem is the stunted or fearful imagination of the oppressed and exploited.52 Sometimes this comes in the form of the exploited and oppressed succumbing to the hegemony of the ruling class. Other times it takes the equally pernicious fatalism and resignation that comes from imagining resistance is futile and the system of power is inevitable. Today, as I have already noted and will explore in more detail, neoliberal financialization, which proposes itself as the “end of history” and ultimate and inevitable plateau of civilization, foments what Mark Fisher characterizes as a corrosive “capitalist realism” that not only defeats our imaginations but then puts them to work.53 Financialization is driven forward by the reorientation of each of our creative or imaginative capacities toward discovering new ways to leverage our positions, skills and relationships for speculative gain. Those of us who desire radical change, then, know that some aspect of this project depends on the transformation of the imagination, but it is unclear where to start. There are a whole array of comforting myths about how, if one creates disruptive spectacles, ideologically challenging art work, temporary zones of antagonism and experimentation or elaborate pranks, it might spur or catalyze the radical imagination.54 Part of my project in this book is to suggest that matters may be more complicated. The imagination is not and has never been some pure transcendental realm that becomes sullied, enclosed, incarcerated or corrupted by capitalism; It is and has always been a contradictory terrain of struggle.

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(c) Oddly, more and more acts of radicalism, resistance or revolt have recently adopted the mantle of “art.” As we shall see, art since the 1970s has taken on an increasing activist edge, often explicitly dedicated to anti-capitalist or anti-oppressive politics.55 But at the same time (and this is difficult to prove or quantify), a whole range of subversive or radical acts and actors are inhabiting the realm of “art” or the cloak of the artist in order to carry out their work. Community organizers, radical teachers, queer activists, racial justice movements, migrant solidarity campaigns and other actors appear to be using art as a vehicle or simply an alibi for advancing their agendas. In part, this comes from the general financialized neoliberal euphoria for “art” and “creativity” (as above) which opens up new opportunities for funding and legitimacy in an increasingly austere climate. In part, this has something to do with a transition toward what some have called cognitive capitalism,56 semiocapitalism57 or communicative capitalism:58 a system where, in ambiguous and complex ways, the cycles of accumulation pass through the circuits of representation. Here I am interested not only in the activities of the formal “art world,” but also what Greg Sholette calls the “dark matter”: the hidden mass of invisiblized artistic and creative activity occurring in the fields of everyday life.59 Beyond this, Yates McKee has explored how today’s forms of highly mediated, creative and spectacular forms of activism have learned from and incorporated techniques of radical art, and how radical art has, in turn, learned a great deal from activism.60 But I would also hazard, along with Stevphen Shukaitis, that here “art” holds a space open for experimenting with alternative forms of organization and collective power.61 As we will explore in greater detail in Chapter 4, for Randy Martin, art becomes one of the only mechanisms through which we can come to terms with a world fundamentally (re)scrambled by financialization and thereby undertake the work of charting this “unknown country that we nonetheless call home.”62 Hence, throughout this book, my attention is drawn time and again to parasites and interlopers who are occupying or camping in the terrain of art. In part, these are refugees, forced into the realm of art as, progressively, every other social and cultural space for refusal and resistance is enclosed or, maybe worse, appropriated and commodified into the latest aestheticized trend. In part, these are the proletarian servants and the banquet of the wealthy, surviving on scraps. But a whole other history of humanity could be told by the servants who, for one reason or another, forestalled poisoning their masters. (d) Recently, the financialized imagination has itself given rise to what I think are wrong-headed proposals and practices of “resistance” which appear radical but often do very little to challenge power. As we shall

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explore in Chapters 3 and 4, I see many (though not all) attempts to create alternative economies or (especially) new currencies within capitalism as exemplary of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” one particularly germane to financialization, which has so infected our imaginations that we cannot fathom any form of intervention outside of the very “logic” of financialization itself.63 Likewise, I am deeply skeptical of all sorts of schemes that seek to soften capitalism, to offer debt or credit to those habitually denied them, or to create incentives for capitalism to invest in spheres or territories that, hitherto, its angels have feared to tread, such as microfinance loans. I feel it is important to point this out because, as I have noted, financialization advances not as some grim dystopian machine, but as a set of compelling seductions that encourages each of us to express our compassion, our imagination, our heartfelt values and earnest desires, in financialized form. Imagining that you can change the financialized system “from the inside” is acutely dangerous for a number of reasons: you are always already inside to begin with; the system is designed to take advantage of precisely this impulse; and you can’t (no one person can) outsmart or outmaneuver capitalism.64 (e) If we are caught up in a system of mandatory complicities, what can art teach us? The realm of contemporary art is, unfortunately, a hothouse of bad forms of resistance. Precisely because art offers a crypt-within-a-crypt, a sacralized zone of erotic play within a system of actuarial death. Money, in fact, demands that “contemporary” art pose itself as resistant the better to incorporate it. This doesn’t mean that no art can succeed in resisting, only that not all art that explicitly or implicitly claims to resist merits belief as such. And anyway, it all too often relies on a half-baked idea of what “resistance” means. This question really gets at the heart of why I am even interested in art at all, if, as I have already argued, it has always been a pet of capitalism (though one with some teeth left). I am interested in art precisely because it is and has, since its inception, been complicit, corrupted by, and in cahoots with capitalist accumulation in that system’s various forms and manifestations. For very particular reasons we will explore in more detail throughout the book, art is never completely or fully incorporated: what allows it to generate its saleable contemporaneity is precisely the small latitude of incomplete freedom, obstreperousness, antagonism and radicality it is afforded. As such, I think the techniques radical artists are using today can teach us something about how to fight within, against and beyond a form of financialized capitalism that conscripts all of us, that marshals everything, and that cannot be escaped as such.

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caveats toward abolition A few caveats are in order. First, as I make clear early on, this book focuses on the political and cultural economy of “contemporary art,” by which I mean, quite specifically, activities and artifacts that circulate under that rubric or that feel the need to explicitly disclaim or problematize it. Contemporary art can (and probably has) incorporated any human activity (from cooking to sex work, from riots to sitting still and being quiet, from getting tattooed to paying migrant workers to be tattooed) and every conceivable medium. It is partly this omnivorous metabolism that makes it “contemporary.” Yet in spite of its seemingly boundless appetite, contemporary art remains highly exclusionary through a set of codes, practices, institutions and relationships that have the almost magical ability to transform anything into this magical substance, much as finance capital can transform practically anything into an object of consequential speculation (species extinction rates, weather patterns, or tendencies in criminal recidivism). For readers frustrated that my analysis excludes all sorts of other formal and informal, paid and unpaid “artistic” activities, I beg forgiveness and ask, instead, that they explore with me the political-economy of that exclusion: by what mechanisms, under what paradigms, within which circuits, and with what implications are some acts rendered “art” while so many others, worthy as they may be, are denied this valorization? And what, precisely, are the desirable privileges and, more importantly, the powers associated with the label of “art” in the first place? As should hopefully by this point be obvious, I’m neither an art historian nor an economist; I’d prefer to think of myself as a well-spoken troublemaker. As such, the reader should not expect either a comprehensive theorization of the political economy of art under financialization, nor a systematic overview of money-art. As noted earlier, this book is better read as a series of short stories with recurring characters who we return to in different costumes, or at different ages. Like a set of short stories, this book is less of a cohesive narrative and more a set of windows. It is perhaps best framed as a set of exercises for the imagination. You’ll likely also have already realized that this book is written with a polemical tone, but that should not be mistaken for a liability. All serious texts are polemical in some way or another; unfortunately most are, in form or content, simply unreflexive and boring polemics for the murderous status quo. Second, while this book attempts to think through both financialization and contemporary art as global phenomena, it is heavily skewed toward the “First World” experience and, even more so, the Anglophone

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North Atlantic (The UK, the US and Canada). In my defense, I’d simply say this is the heart of the nightmare factory: It’s not a coincidence that London and New York are both the world’s preeminent financial capitals and the world’s preeminent art markets. While other cities or regions are rising to challenge Anglo-American hegemony, mostly they aim to beat it at its own game. If the capital of money and/or art perchance moves to Shanghai, Tokyo or Frankfurt, I’m not sure much would really change for the vast majority of humans. In spite of their competition with one another, the world’s capitalist elites have more in common than not. It’s long overdue that the rest of us proletarians realized the same thing about ourselves and got rid of the lot of them. Third, I am not, by any stretch of the imagine, an art-world insider. The origins and motivation for this book rest in the challenges of my position teaching political economy and cultural theory to students at Halifax, Canada’s Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, a small but influential institution renowned for being a key hub for conceptual art in the 1970s and since then for its political and artistic activism. I’m not an artist and, aside from the occasional invitation to give a lecture at some art institution (none so far very prestigious), I have very little investment in contemporary art or its institutions. In this book, that represents both a benefit and a liability. The “art world” and the “art market” are notoriously opaque and cliquish (in spite of the seemingly endless text they produce about themselves), which means, paradoxically, that only those inside of them can really begin to understand them, but that the condition of being inside almost immediately typically clouds one’s vision. Perhaps that’s why, as noted earlier I don’t believe we can or should save art from financialization, or that art can or should save us. While I believe art can radicalize the imagination, I mean this in a very specific way, and I think it only really matters to the extent it can align with radical—indeed revolutionary—movements. That doesn’t mean art can or should subordinate itself to those movements—I speak of alignment, not subsumption, and alignment is a complex thing when nothing travels in a straight line anymore. The horizon of the vision I am seeking to outline in this book is not the salvation of art or money, but their abolition. By abolition I am not in any simplistic way gesturing to some utopian future where we will all be artists and no one will use money (though, why not give that a try?). Rather, I am drawing on the Black radical tradition to signal an interest in cultivating strategies that work within, against and beyond dominant institutions to (a) redirect resources away from power; (b) build powerful, grassroots movements of solidarity and collective power; and (c) start to build the institutions and protocols of a new future now.65 Prison

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Figure 7  Following the improbable rise to stardom of the anarcho-discordian electronic music ensemble The KLF, the band’s members reformed as the K-Foundation to undertake, among other interventions, the burning of £1,000,000 in August of 1994. The events themselves are shrouded in an intentional obscurity and rumor, though the Foundation did record the burning, which took place on the isolated Scottish island of Jura, and screen the film at a series of locations throughout the UK. The screenings were widely advertised in mainstream news publications, like this one in The Guardian in 1995. This act was the culmination of the K Foundation’s leveraging of the funds raised from the KLF’s success to experiment with counterspectacles about art, money and spectacle. In late 1993, the K-Foundation announced the launch of an award for the “worst artist of the year,” a mockery of the notoriously controversial Turner Prize awarded by the Tate Gallery. Unsurprisingly the same artist, British sculptor Rachel Whiteread, won both. At the same time, the Foundation produced a series of works of stacks of banknotes (rumored to total £100,000) nailed to planks of wood, culminating in a proposed exhibition titled Money: A Major Body Of Cash which, unsurprisingly, no public or private gallery in the UK elected to stage. Denied a home in the art world, this money, the residue of the KLF’s success within the mainstream cultural sphere, became the base material for the notorious burning event, following which the members of the Foundation signed a pact to close their para-institution for 23 years and keep mum about the Jura events.

introduction   25

abolitionism, for instance, develops forms of community organizing and activism that refuses to see the prison as a legitimate institution or as a solution to society’s problems, but rather sees it as a structure of racial capitalism.66 It seeks to build movements that can create safety, security and care outside of police, prisons and other carceral institutions.67 And it actively experiments with the structures and habits of the world it seeks to build. By seeking the abolition of art and money both I am signalling the need to decrypt these artificial terms and see what’s inside them, while also at the same time recognizing the structural roles they play under capitalism as it intersects other systems of power. I want us to think through how both money and art are capitalist structures, tools, or methods for organizing our imaginative cooperation, or what I will later call the common. I want us to ask ourselves how else, by what other means and mechanisms, might our imaginative cooperation be organized? I want this to be part of a project of the increasingly militant refusal of capitalism’s financialized ordering of our imaginative cooperation, a project that advances through creative negation: a struggle within, against and beyond at once. For this reason I will be most interested in this book in the work of artists who parasite (as a verb), leverage and steal from “art” to support, produce or open a meaningful space for the radical imagination, for new or repressed anti-capitalist forms of imaginative cooperation.

overview The first chapter, “3.5 artistic strategies to envision money’s mediation” explores the work of visual artists who use money as a means to address financialization or its broader social and cultural conditions and ramifications. Fundamentally, it seeks to answer the question: why are so many contemporary artists drawn toward working with money, and why is so much of their work atrociously bad—conceptually lazy, aesthetically banal and theoretically infantile? The answer, I suggest (drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson, David Graeber and Randy Martin), stems from the fact that money is already an active mediation or “realabstraktion,” and its further dematerialization and financialization leaves many artists nostalgic for its material legacies. In examining the work of critical contemporary visual artists, I identify three strategies at play (in addition to a half-strategy of the blithe and insidious celebration of money’s power). The first, represented by the world of Barbara Kruger and the street artist Blu, is to use art’s residual romantic esteem to index money’s evils. The second, represented by artists like Christian Jankowski and William

26  art after money, money after art

Powhida, is to turn the critical gesture inward, exploring the financialization of art itself. The final strategy, represented by artists Máximo González and Cesare Pietroiusti, is a more subtle but potentially more powerful strategy of revealing a secret affinity between money and art: both are power-laden forms of mediation, methods for reflecting on and manipulating the fabric of shared human cooperation. The purpose of Chapter 2 “6 artists x 2 crises x 3 orders of reproduction” is to insist that the conditions for a radical artistic intervention in the field of money and finance are profoundly changed since the 1970s. To do so, it takes up the work of six radical artists working with money, three (Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke and Lee Lozano) active around the crisis of 1973, three (Nuria Güell, Zach Gough, and the collective geheimagentur) in the decade following the financial crisis of 2007/8. Drawing on and expanding a conceptual apparatus I developed in Cultures of Financialization, these artists are plotted in terms of three “layers” of the capitalist crisis of reproduction: first, the fraught reproduction of capitalist circulation and profit itself, as theorized by Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Louis Althusser; second, the reproduction of social institutions and identities as charted (diversely) by Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Stuart Hall; finally, the reproductive labor of social life as explored by materialist feminists like Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser. The chapter takes up art and finance as interwoven throughout the crises of these three realms of reproduction and their contradictions. It compares and contrasts the situations and strategies of artists in 1973 and today in these terms. Its overarching claim is that, while in 1973 it may have been possible to pose an artistic threat to capitalism in each distinct realm of reproduction, today no such clarity exists: radical artistic strategies need to be more cunning. Chapter 3, “0 participation: Benign pessimism, tactical parasitics and the encrypted common,” explores money-art that mobilizes the tactics associated with the realm of what is heralded as social practice, relational aesthetics or participatory art. Rejecting the typical euphoria surrounding the socially benevolent impulses of this work, I echo the observation that the imperative to “participate” is germane to the logic of neoliberal financialization. For that reason, artists engaging such tactics need to be cognizant of their own participation in the reproduction of that order. But this should not be cause for despair or cynicism. Examining the work of six artists, I identify three subversive strategies. First, I call on the work of artists like the ensemble SUPERFLEX and Alex Stockburger to illustrate the strategy of benign pessimism, an inversion of Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism: these social sculptures, puncture the bubble of ever-deferred, poisonous anticipation that underwrites finan-

introduction   27

cialized reproduction. Second, I propose that the collective Robin Hood Minor Asset Management’s “hedge fund for the 99%” and the work of Paolo Cirio are examples of a strategy of tactical parasitics. Drawing on Michel Serres, I argue that such a strategy complicates our understanding of democracy and money by reframing the social order as the multiple enfolding of parasitic life forms without an originary “host.” Finally, I explore the minting of a speculative art coin, [Valentina] Karga and [Pieterjan] Grandry Invest in Themselves, and Cassie Thornton’s Give Me Cred alternative grassroots credit-reporting initiative as examples of a strategy of the encrypted common. Drawing on the work of Antonio Negri, as well as Jacques Derrida’s reinterpretation of the psychoanalytic concept of the crypt, I propose that these works stage a decryption of “the common,” which is both dead and alive within money and financial transactions. Chapter 4: “∞ encryption: art’s crypt, securitization in numbers, derivative socialities” takes up and unfolds the theoretical term of the crypt introduced in Chapter 3, weaving together close readings of the works of three artists to expand our understanding of financialization now. It begins with Irish artist-researcher Mark Curran’s evolving exhibition THE MARKET, arguing that the artist’s pictures, collectively, reveal what’s hidden: that financialization has become the logic of capitalist totality, saturating society to such an extent that political agency seems impossible to locate. Social life is, in a sense, encrypted by money. Next we travel to Le Freeport in Singapore: the luxury art warehouse where countless cultural treasures lie encrypted; the inventory is unknown even to the building’s owners. This, I argue, is a key example of the infrastructure being built to ensure art’s financialization, and it has a lot to teach us about the “society of control” of financialization being implemented in all sorts of social, economic, political and cultural spheres. Here opaque, shifting crypts and codes of access and denial are the norm. Yet, as I have done throughout the book, here I am keen to reject the idea that financialization is purely an elite and alien realm. I turn instead to the films of Melanie Gilligan and the theoretical work of Randy Marin to explore what the latter calls the “social logic of the derivative”: the way the fabric of everyday “sociality” is being rewoven by finance. Martin, for one, refuses pessimism, instead arguing that this presents new opportunities for radical social justice based not on a return to the fabled “security” of the post-war welfare state, but on new solidarities of mutual indebtedness. In the final section of this chapter I assess some of the collective artistic-activist projects that emerged from Occupy Wall Street—notably the anti-debt work of the Rolling Jubilee and the Debtfair ensemble—to seek out what this emergent form of

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solidarity within, against and beyond financialization might look and feel like. The book’s conclusion “Toward abolitionist horizons,” attempts to sum up and recast a number of the core arguments that thread throughout this book, notably that money and art are the best of enemies and the worst of friends: in various ways these two forms of mediation and mutual encryption reflect and, indeed, support one another. As such, I restate my call for an abolitionist approach, this time explicitly engaging with the archive of abolitionist thinking that stems from the Black radical tradition. Here, I try and draw some inspiration and lessons from the struggle against prisons and other carceral institutions to offer some notions of what a politics that sought to abolish both art and money might look like. Ultimately, I suggest, this would be a matter of building and rekindling autonomous forms of cooperation, social reproduction and the radical imagination.

1 3.5 artistic strategies to envision money’s mediation

Perhaps the best-known and most written-about artist to work with money is the late American J.S.G. Boggs. Famously, Boggs developed a practice of painstakingly replicating banknotes in pen and ink, creating uncannily mimetic but one-of-a-kind replicas of currency, usually with one or two small adjustments: his signature and title would replace that of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve (or other national bank head, in other countries). Sometimes, he would insert his own portrait in place of a dead president. In any case, in spite of growing interest in his notes throughout his career, Boggs never directly sold the works. Instead, he would engage in earnest participatory rituals with shopkeepers, waiters and cashiers at stores and museums in which he acknowledged that his drawings were art, but that he wished them to be accepted at the face value of the currency depicted. While Boggs would later develop

Figure 8  Undated photograph of Boggs with a large edition work and cat. Photo: Bob Donaldson. Copyright © Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2018, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

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a practice of selling the residue of his successful transactions (receipts issued, items purchased, change given) as art, his real goal, according to Lawrence Wescheler’s wonderful book on the artist, was the social engagement the art provided, as well as the official reaction it elicited, including several legal entanglements for counterfeiting.1 At stake in Boggs’ well-known work is a knot of questions about representation at the intersection of art and money. On one level, Boggs produces a representation of money which he asks be accepted as art, but as if it were money. He is essentially selling a drawing, but selling it as if it were money, which you don’t sell but spend. You don’t sell money because you can only sell something for money: what defines a sold object or service is that it was exchanged for money. And you can’t “spend” art, because art is not money. There is much at work here, including questions about the fundamental nature of value itself, which is Weschler’s concern. Mine is about the riddle of representation. His art re-presents money, but seeks to be present in the economy as money. Implicitly, it begs the question of what money represents. Does it represent a share of social wealth, and if so is Boggs’ counterfeit a form of skullduggery, a parasitic forgery that makes a false claim to that wealth? Or is money (as most dominant schools of economics insist) the natural evolution of barter, hence Boggs’ rituals of exchange where art is offered in return for (other) goods and services somehow a more earnest or authentic act of transaction? Or is the paper money Boggs emulates simply the (angelic or demonic) creation of state fiat, a worthless piece of paper whose value is guaranteed only by the signature of the implicitly violent sovereign (or that sovereign’s duly appointed representative), hence Boggs’ intervention is a subversive promethean act of appropriated authority? My approach in this chapter, which also aims to lay out some foundational terms for the rest of this book, begins from the observation that it is not accidental that Boggs’ successful artistic career coincides with the period of neoliberal financialization, when, in the so-called Post-Bretton Woods era of free floating exchange rates and the increased proliferation of so-called fictitious capital, the meaning and value of money is everywhere in crisis. But while we will delve into this history more in Chapter 2, in this chapter I wish to sketch this crisis as connected to a much broader suite of crises of representation in politics, culture, society and economics. Ultimately, understanding these crises, and the way they all stem from and help reproduce fundamental contradictions within the capitalist version of money, helps contextualize the work of artists like Boggs, who seek to transform money into a creative and critical medium of expression and experimentation.

mediation   31

I identify three strategies critical artists use to engage with money. Well, actually, three and a half: the first half-strategy is simply the uncritical (or cynically, performatively hypo-critical) glorification of money in art, which, I argue, is highly germane to the growing market for artwork about money stimulated by the crass desires of a new breed of so-called High Net Worth Individuals: the financially engorged super-elite who are the agents and byproducts of the growth of fictitious capital. Beyond the production of money-themed “baubles for billionaires,” critical artwork that mobilizes money might be said to engage in three strategies, each of which cross cut various media and styles, from the sculptural to the performative to the digital. The first strategy is one of revelation, where art’s residual critical and moral authority is mobilized to reveal the pathological cannibalism of society by money. The second strategy of reflexivity, however, implicitly or explicitly problematizes the first: it seeks (correctly) to call attention to the way art is far from innocent in this process but, indeed, a more or less crucial part of the circuits of increasingly speculative accumulation of economic, social and cultural capital that define the chaotic world system today. Yet as much as this strategy is important, I have reservations, and I am keen to identify a third strategy of rendering labor visible, by which I mean to indicate something deeper and more profound about money (and art) that will preoccupy me throughout this book: the way that money, like a holographic shard, holds encrypted within it the capitalist totality of which it is a crucial part and mediation. More importantly still, money refracts, in skewed and fragmentary form, the potential that labor, which is to say the human relational creative energies on which capitalism feeds and which it seeks to organize, might form itself otherwise. In other words, in this third strategy money is mobilized by artists to offer us a momentary glimpse of the potential for a very different society, one where labor (cooperative, imaginative energies) is organized on bases other than exploitation and accumulation. But in order to arrive at that conclusion, we need to start with the conundrum of the impossible imperative to represent a capitalist totality, which I think, especially today, manifests as a general crises of representation, not only for artists but also for economics, finance and other fields. And so it is to these questions we must first turn.

crises of representation In the introduction to his book Representing Capital, Frederic Jameson articulates a conundrum that has run throughout his career as a prominent Marxist cultural critic: the fact that capital, that massive force

32  art after money, money after art

in our world, that inhuman yet all-too-human intelligence or agency at the core of the capitalist economy, both demands representation and refuses to be represented.2 His book, which is a reading of the first volume of Marx’s Kapital, focuses on how that famous text is at once the most robust attempt to represent capital through language, and also, ultimately, a beautifully failed project. Drawing on the insights of György Lukács, Jameson explains that this is because, in contrast to the hypotheses of mainstream economists, capitalism is not simply an economic system whose power is limited to the ebb and flow of commodities and the exploitation of labor. Rather, capitalism is a “totality”: its economic components rely, ultimately, on

Figure 9  Femke Herregraven, Geographies of Avoidance, 2011. Courtesy of the artist. Like much of Herregraven’s work, Geographies of Avoidance attempts to make visible or tangible the typically invisiblized or dematerialized operations of global financialized capitalism. Here, Herregraven painstakingly researched the addresses listed for thousands of corporations officially located in Amsterdam’s financial district of Zuidas and compiled them in a hefty tome. The vast majority of these firms exist only on paper, created as decoys or shell companies to allow their offshore masters to take advantage of the Netherland’s notoriously deregulated corporate legal landscape. In this work, Herregraven mobilizes a kind of tactical naïveté, earnestly trying to create an index of these companies’ physical homes, precisely as a means to capture and reveal their skulduggery. The quaint, outdated artefact of the physical book amplifies this contradiction. In a follow-up piece (Taxodus 2013), Herregraven created a computer game simulation to model and help players understand the otherwise mystifying dark arts of offshore finance. Subsequent work has explored financial infrastructure such as the undersea cables through which algorithmically managed markets communicate.

mediation   33

political choices; these political choices in turn rely on a set of cultural meanings; these cultural meanings in turn rely on aesthetic conventions; and these conventions in turn rely on economic fundamentals.3 Or, if you prefer, the social, cultural, economic, political, aesthetic and ideological components of capitalism all fit together in a non-linear, non-causal way. In answer to the charges of economic reductionism that have so long dogged Marxist cultural critique, Jameson wants us to develop an understanding of capitalism that sees all these dimensions as interconnected and inter-reliant, like a proverbial house of cards.4 In this sense, capitalism is a form of power that is intimately stitched into the fabric of everyday life and which animates and is animated by a host of social institutions (in the broadest sociological sense of the term), from investment banks to heterosexual monogamy, from the aesthetics of postmodern pastiche to the structures of representative democracy. A notion of capitalist totality does not mean that resistance is futile, or that all individuals and all social structures robotically and uncritically obey the grim dictates of capitalism in every case. Rather, it means that each and every social, aesthetic, political, cultural or economic process must be unpacked and understood dialectically. That is, we must approach everything as a site of power and contestation, capture and flight, difference and repetition, utopianism and dystopianism, price and value. Yet unlike a cheapened quasi-Foucauldianism, with its blithe celebration of “resistance” for its own sake, such an approach insists that we recall the way in which all these forms of power are unified or contextualized within the most remarkable, unique and (in light of the current global ecological catastrophe) dangerous form of social organization in human history.5 By the same token, recalling capitalist totality also reminds us and reveals that this whole paradigm is the product of some perverse and almost unrecognizable formation of human cooperation, and that, as a result, for all its power it is open to radical and revolutionary transformation. Such an approach to capitalist totality also implies, for Jameson, an understanding of the so-called crisis of representation, a term familiar in many disciplines. It pervades, for instance, the postmodern aesthetic scene, animated as it is by a distrust of modernist, Romantic and Enlightenment representational strategies, from realism to surrealism to socialist realism. Such a crisis has delivered us to an artistic moment more than ever dedicated to endless introspection, deconstruction, cynicism, irony and a concern with process, where the objective of art is no longer to represent the world but to (often ostentatiously) call into question the very desire to represent in the first place.6

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This crisis of representation, tied as it is to the rise of postmodernity (or “late capitalism”) is familiar in other spheres as well. For instance, political studies have, for years, been struggling with the question of how to justify the claims of so-called “representative governments,” especially in an age of globalization.7 This is an age when multiculturalism is a (sometimes thorny) fact of life, when indigenous nations around the world are making their rightful claims against colonial-settler states, and when human migration seems to have become more common and more liquid than ever.8 More profoundly, it is an age where the seemingly borderless force of transnational capitalism wreaks utter havoc on economies and societies around the world with impunity, and often with government complicity.9 Whom the state represents and how that representation ought to be imagined is everywhere in crisis, a crisis, it should be noted, that worryingly has been leveraged by reactionary and revanchist forces, eager to generate political capital through the abjectification of already marginalized populations.10 So too might we point to a crisis of representation in the realm of economics, one brought so horrifically home to roost in 2008 when literally trillions of dollars worth of equity seemingly disappeared into the ether over a matter of days. This was, in effect, a double crisis of representation. First, it was a crisis for the hegemonic discipline of mainstream economics that was ultimately forced to concede that its quasi-scientific measures and formula for representing global wealth and its movements had failed in their task. Or, in perhaps other words, economics was revealed to be what Pierre Bourdieu always told us it was: a particularly powerful and utile, if deeply problematic, form of sociology.11 From this perspective, economics might be imagined better as a form of socioeconomic praxis which, through the orchestration and promulgation of a sophisticated yet ideologically constrained and skewed representational paradigm, managed to conscript and merge the vast majority of mainstream political interests (whether allegedly free-market or allegedly socialist) under the same banner. Neoliberal economism has largely been able to insist that there was essentially an almost mimetic relationship between social reality and the representational forms of economic measurement and theory, largely by masquerading as a quantitative “science” whose discourse could only be challenged at the level of statistic minutia, and only by duly ordained experts. It is as if economics has actualized and fulfilled the dreams Peter Bürger assigned to the twentieth century avant-garde, collapsing the distinction between life and art, collapsing the hiatus between presence and representation.12 Second, the 2008 financial crisis was also the moment when the main instruments of a financialized global economy showed themselves to be

mediation   35

functional—or perhaps more accurately weaponized—representations that can change the reality they claim to represent. Social scientists of finance, including Donald MacKenzie and Brian LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, have argued that financial models and instruments operated as, in MacKenzie’s terms, “performative” structures: they do not simply represent objective financial realities, they bring those realities into being.13 This occurs in ways reminiscent of Foucault’s exploration of the way discourses or regimes of truth, rather than describing objective realities, create new orders of power and knowledge.14 Christian Marazzi, though he does not employ Mackenzie’s language of “performative” speech acts, has likened the play of financial markets to a linguistic game, though one intimately connected to the struggle over language, power and labor germane to the contemporary politics of the “general intellect” and cognitive capitalism.15 Likewise Marazzi’s associate Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has likened the imaginative acrobatics of the financial sphere to a form of perverse poetry.16 Brian Massumi has characterized this

Figure 10  John Baldessari, Money (with Space Between), 1991. Courtesy of the artist.

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more of power that creates its own ontological basis through generative speculation and relentless preemption as onto-power.17 I have elsewhere sought to show how the financial realm both generates on an order of the imagination and creativity within its own institutional auspices, but also transforms the imagination in “financialized” society at large.18 Beyond the financial sector’s depraved antics, this crisis of representation in the global economy at large has dramatic and sorrowful impacts. It is borne out, for instance, in the fact that a startling percentage of the world’s farmers are themselves malnourished thanks to the way global financialized capitalism undervalues their labor, gambles with global crop prices and drives corporate biopiracy.19 More broadly, it manifests in the cruel ironies of austerity, where somehow countries that were rich yesterday are poor today, though the nuts and bolts of their economies have not substantively changed.20 In other words, the crisis of representation is also a crisis that emerges from and reinforces some profound disconnection between the price of things and their actual value. There is some fundamental and terrifying chasm between, on the one hand, the quantity and qualities of money in a globalized age and, on the other, all those things that, today, increasingly, money seems to unduly influence: the value of food, the value of art, the value of human life, the value of culture, the value of land, the value of the public sphere, the value of the climate itself in an age of “carbon credits” and “carbon markets.” Such a realization goes beyond the impressive but ultimately unsurprising (though somehow extremely popular) conclusions of Thomas Piketty, which tracks the growing gap between rates of return on private investments and the overall rate of economic growth, and the rising rates of inequality which such a gap portends.21 There is, somehow, a deeper philosophical issue at work, one about what money and what wealth actually represents.22 Money seems to measure or represent everything today, or, more accurately, mismeasure and misrepresent everything. Whatever the case, the crisis—or crises—of representation outlined here are reflected in the strategies and idioms of today’s social movements, as Dario Azzelini and Marina Sitrin note in their demonstratively titled survey They Can’t Represent Us!23 Here, they show how the tenor of today’s movements around the world cleaves toward the production of autonomy and horizontal grassroots power on the level of daily life. High profile, charismatic manifestations such as the Movement of the Squares in Southern Europe or the Occupy Movement strive to create immanent modes of direct, participatory democracy that reject a logic of representative leadership and encourage the direct engagement of all members. But, as Azzelini and Sitrin note, this is evidence of a

mediation   37

deeper tendency to see the field of everyday life and social relationships as the terrain of power and solidarity, reflected in the way many social movements, especially in the Global South, are occupying workplaces, mobilizing communities and developing new popular social and economic institutions.24

money, abstraction and transformation As Leigh Claire La Berge reminds us, it is all too easy to castigate today’s postmodern financial regimes for their abstraction of value and forget that such abstraction has always been at work under capitalism.25 In today’s popular parlance, it is all too easy to decry “Wall Street” based on an ahistorical and political questionable nostalgia for “Main Street.” It is notable that, even in spite of the fact that he himself bore witness to many financial panics and crisis, Marx spent relatively little time analyzing them, instead insisting that a firm understanding of the abstraction of value at the level of labor exploitation was of primary concern.26 For Marx, all prices, even those in the most seemingly straightforward economic transactions, are skewed representations of “real” value. Value is, ultimately the productive capacity of labor that, through the process of capitalist exploitation, becomes encrypted in the commodity.27 Yet the price at which the commodity circulates is always already an inaccurate measure of the value inherent to it for two reasons. The first, and most concrete, is that commodities circulate within a capitalist economy that is fundamentally skewed and distorted by inter capitalist competition, the presence of non-capitalist or para-capitalist forms of exploitation within capitalism (colonial pillage, serfdom, slavery, etc.) and the economic chaos of financial markets, rent and countless other factors.28 So the price of, say, a loaf of bread, is never quite “equal” to the quantity of labor power invested in production. The second reason is more complicated and slippery. Price is a measure of value denominated in money, yet money is also the means by which the producer of value (labor) is disciplined. There is an inherent contradiction between money’s role under capital. It must, at once, be the medium of exchange, the measurement of value, the standard of deferred payments and the store of value, as per the standard, non-Marxian definition of money’s four essential functions (i.e. unit of account, store of value, medium of exchange and standard of deferred payment). Within a Marxian framework, money must both represent value and discipline the production of value. That is, money must at the same time be a credible and useful way of measuring and manipulating the world’s wealth (labor power, solidified into commodities) and be the symbolic

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weapon used to extort that wealth from proletarians.29 It is this latter contradiction that leads to all manner of difficulties, and to the centrality of struggles around wages within capitalism. As much as these struggles are about “bread and butter” issues of how much workers will be remunerated, they are also about an attempt to partially liberate workers from the discipline of money, and the ultimate goal of organizing production based on non-monetary values.30 Within capitalist economics, this leads to a whole array of contradictions that manifest themselves as familiar crises: the crisis of the falling rate of profit, of overproduction (or underconsumption), and so on.31 The particular dynamics of the system are too complicated and hotly debated to entertain here; I merely wish to signal that the historically specific role money takes under capitalism is both necessary to that system and in constant crisis, a crisis borne from the fundamental fact that money is supposed to represent value, yet never quite does. Within this framework, we can understand neoliberalism as the increased subordination of all spheres of value to monetary price. Privatisation represents the combustion of some (problematic) Keynesian notion that the value of health, education and social care ought to be partially insulated from the market and the offering up of these spheres to the measure, management techniques and direct control of financialized markets. Likewise, the cultures of neoliberalism see a certain free market fundamentalism enter all spheres of life, one that holds that the most universal, fair and reliable measure of value is price.32 Hence “economies” of value like education, charity, personal relationships and (notably) art, which once (problematically) appeared to enjoy some relative autonomy from direct market influence, now seem everywhere increasingly dominated by economic imperatives.33 Of course, the idea that money has somehow overstepped its bounds and become too powerful is ancient and ubiquitous. Practically everyone today would agree, from anarcho-communists to Christian fundamentalists. But here I concur with Jameson: blaming money itself is wrongheaded, or at least incomplete.34 It’s not that money is or should be a neutral tool, as per the illusion of bourgeois economists.35 Rather, money is just one element (though a vital and unique element) of capitalist totality. His book notes that Marx himself was quite hostile to critics of his day who sought to reform the system through legislative changes to the monetary system, or who sought to “correct” capitalism’s imbalances and excesses by inventing new currencies.36 Rather, as Anitra Nelson shows, Marx saw money as a crucial manifestation and mechanism of capitalism—a system that is, ultimately, based not on who has the most money, but who controls the means of production (though these two

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usually do overlap).37 Money facilitates this system by disciplining us all and forcing us to conform to the system’s dictates. The ruling class uses money to buy labor time and transform it into commodities, commodities that can be withheld from their very producers until money is rendered in exchange. As we all know, all too well, lack of money (or the fear of lack of money) is the invisible whip that is held over all our heads, and also the heads of governments large and small, to ensure we all fall in line. This is why, for Jameson, money is a necessary mediation: the circuit of accumulation is at once interrupted and enabled by money.38 We might suggest that money is the mandatory state of exception to capital’s sovereignty, a crucial, compulsory absurdity. Money is, of course (and as we somehow never tire of learning), largely worthless: today it takes the form of token-like coins with no intrinsic metallic value, or printed slips of paper or, increasingly, some mass immaterial hallucination of credit and debt, held somewhere in a vast global computer network, haunting our lives like some digital panoptic superego, always watching. So for Marx and Jameson, money is not the root of all evil, but it facilitates the evil of a system that fundamentally values accumulation over human life and happiness, and which subtly and not-so-subtly coordinates and reorients individual human ambitions, motivations and relationships toward those ends. As mentioned above, Jameson, following Lukács, sees the capitalist totality as driven by a fundamental paradox: it is inherently unrepresentable, yet it demands representation. The capitalist totality in which we live is made up of far too many moving, interconnected, inter-reliant moving parts to be fathomable to any single imagination. The sublime interdependency of the system, one that incorporates each of us, all art, all science, all politics, exceeds our ability to create what he calls “cognitive maps” of our social world.39 As such, any cultural text (and, for that matter, any economic formula, theoretical excursus or visual representation) will always be an incomplete, partial and flawed representation of the world, a mediation. And yet, tantalizingly, money seems to do precisely this representative work. Because (unlike any other cultural or social object) it stands in for the capitalist totality.

the art of money, the financialization of art, and a half-strategy It is on this note that I want to turn to the question of art and money and, in particular, works which use coins, bills, credit cards or representations thereof as artistic material, what I am in this book thinking of as money-art. A few initial observations might be made about this practice.

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The first is that it is an aesthetic growth area. Early pioneers in the exploration of money as an artistic medium include Marcel Duchamp, and a collection of turn-of-the century American tromp l’œil painters including William Michael Harnett, John Haberle, John Frederick Peto, Otis Kaye and Victor Dubreuil. In the decades following the Second World War, experiments by Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Cildo Meireles, Akasegawa Genpei and Chirs Burden.40 But since the mid-1980s we have witnessed a massive global explosion of artists working with money as a medium. The other initial observation is that much of this more recent work is atrociously bad: conceptually lazy, aesthetically immature and politically tepid. On the level of symptomatology, we can understand the enthusiasm for working with money as a medium as a relatively direct response to the post-Cold War globalisation of financialized neoliberal capitalism, which has, as we have seen, witnessed both the vast geographical expansion of monetary flows thanks to deregulation and new communication technologies, as well as an ever more intensive imbrication of money in the folds of institutions, everyday life and the play of subjectivity. But I also want to suggest that this work with and on money is something of a desperate (sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious) attempt to grapple with the magnitude of a capitalist totality increasingly coordinated by money. Money is, despite all its flaws and its inherent inability to represent “real” underlying value, an almost mesmerizing cypher for the capitalist totality that it helps coordinate and facilitate. My hypothesis is that artists’ fascination with money stems from the strange way it expresses the central contradiction outlined at the beginning of this essay: the way capitalist totality at once calls for representation and refuses to be represented. Beyond the more apparent meanings and gestures of any particular artist or work in this field, I believe this contradiction animates both the inspiration and the reception of art that engages money as a medium. I want to identify three strategies I see at work in art that mobilized money as a medium. Well, really three and a half strategies. The first is not really a strategy at all: it is just rank opportunism. Given that today, the financialized ruling class is defined largely by their access to money (rather than their direct command of the means of production, as was the case with industrial capitalists of the nineteenth century), many so-called artists have dedicated themselves to ornamenting the rich with images of this magical substance. From painting to fashion to jewelry, there are plenty of artists who simply use the aesthetics of money as a means to create uncritical and often atrociously bad commodities that cater to the vanity of the wealthy for the so-called-artist’s own personal enrichment. A

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simple search on the popular online craft market Etsy.com will reveal hundreds, if not thousands of people trying to sell hackneyed bric-a-brac that uncritically revels in money’s mysterious power in various solidified forms: portraits of family pets rendered in shredded currency collage, evening gowns created with printed fabric depicting or inspired by American greenbacks, or jewelry made of coins or pieces of credit cards. Beyond the “dark matter,” as Gregory Sholette calls it, of the online para-art market, we can see plenty of professional artists and designers using the same techniques.41 Here the allegedly provocative juxtaposition of “money” and of “art” (both understood in the most simplistic ways) fire a false surprise sufficient only to set the art-commodity in question slightly apart from the rest, to add a quizzical patina to kitsch. This half-strategy is, in and of itself, revealing. It typically speaks to aesthetic sensibilities at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum that are mirrored at the higher. As Marc Taylor notes, there is something qualitatively different about the new breed of collectors and the financialisation of art that have emerged over the past 20 years.42 For Taylor, artist superstars like Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst represent a paradigmatic break even from a previous generation of market-savvy artists whose figurehead might have been Andy Warhol. Under the new paradigm, artists not only coyly court the market as a means to further question and destabilize the modernist distinction between art and life, and express a post-modernist skepticism to the pretensions of the avant-garde. Rather, financialized artists actively embrace their identity as a “brand” without irony or reluctance, and also readily accept their role as the producer of speculative commodities within an elite and elitist art market.43 In his thoughtful response to Taylor’s pessimistic and perhaps crypto-romantic castigation of these artists, Noah Horowitz (an astute researcher of art markets and more recently director of high profile international art fairs) confirms that, indeed, art today is deeply and profoundly affected by the financial power of a new breed of so-called “high net worth individuals” (HNWI). 44 The HNWI’s crass and unapologetic approach to art as a luxury investment has drawn the ire of even art-world bogeyman, superstar collector, Margaret Thatcher propagandist and (seemingly) domestic abuser Charles Saatchi.45 But Horowitz also questions Taylor’s desire to make a clean distinction between a “financialized” now and a seemingly more innocent “then.” Horowitz himself has been amongst the most cogent and insightful researchers in revealing the brave new world of art investment funds and the curious economics of fine art financing, insurance and auctions.46 Yet he rightly points out that Taylor’s enthusiasm to draw a clean break between the

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allegedly more savvy and critical gestures of Warhol and the supposedly unreflexive and blithe posturing of Hirst or Koons may be ill advised. Whatever the case, the presence of the new class of high net worth individuals eager to collect and speculate on contemporary art cannot be denied, nor can its impacts on artistic production at the dawn of the twenty-first century.47 And it would appear that the veritable explosion of artworks that are either made of money or that feature or reflect on money cannot be separated from the growth of this lucrative market, and the simultaneous rise of international art fairs and branded multi-national galleries. So the first half-strategy of art and money is simply a desire to cater to the market based on the conscious or unconscious recognition that, in an age when the bourgeoisie have lost almost all pretensions to refinement and taste, in the sense Bourdieu outlined, uncritical art with or of money is highly saleable.48 What might have at one time seemed either avant-garde or ugly (possibly both) today sells with shocking alacrity.49 Yet something remains. Much of money-art’s power relies precisely upon (a typically soft) critique of money: it generates its heat and light from the friction between money’s price and the world of value, by slyly and self-consciously drawing attention to the alchemy of money. We might ask: what is it about the relationship of culture to economics today that would allow this (minimally) critical work to find an audience amongst those whom it seeks to criticize, those masters of money, those HNWIs? Is there a certain symbolic masochism at the heart of the financialized economy, wherein those who manage and benefit from money’s postmodern empire throw their contorted souls into relief through their limited exposure to critique, like the proverbial CEO who hires the services of a dominatrix to exorcise his fraught, repressed soul and so enable him to better dominate his workers the following morning?50 Or in some sense do the financial “masters of the universe” accumulate critical art as a means to inoculate themselves from that very critique, as if to immunize themselves with the tattered shred of a virus in order to train their systems to mitigate future exposure? Or perhaps this is simply the hubris of the victor: the financier-collector claims the most critical and provocative artifacts of the art world as if to display radicalism’s head on the Wall Street’s ramparts, or as if to keep some dangerous beast in a private zoo for the thrill of seeing it pace behind bars or (worse) to watch it come to love its captivity. Perhaps… though I would offer another proposal too. Taylor is entirely correct in noting that the new breed of collectors eager to speculate on critical, contemporary art are, to a large extent, the beneficiaries and functionaries of the massive growth of the global financial

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apparatus. Those whose were made in the financial sector (or whose fortunes are kept and grow in the financial sector) are by far the most prevalent among the lists of the world’s most powerful art collectors.51 I would suggest that, in addition to the explanations listed above, we might also consider that something about contemporary art appeals to and reflects the “soul” of financial practice.52 Unlike the capitalists of the industrial age, who profited through the relatively direct management of workers and production of commodities, today’s financial capitalists profit almost exclusively (at least for those at the very top) about navigating an immaterial world of relationships, probabilities, conjectures and opportunities, what I would call “ætherwork.” As noted, financial markets are effectively and essentially spheres of representation where real-world wealth is translated into the abstractions of derivative contracts, securitized and collateralized assets and other flights of financial fancy. The degree to which these financial assets lose their connection to underlying wealth is a matter of debate, but suffice it to say that there is a great deal of merit in the observation that, from at least a certain perspective, financial work is cultural.53 It is about convincing others that one’s immaterial, abstract assets have value, that one’s representations of wealth are credible.54 Perhaps the new financialized elite’s seemingly voracious appetite for contemporary, critical art is based on a hunger for artifacts whose production resonates with their own experience and socio-economic conditions. After all, ours is a moment of postmodern skepticism toward any essentialist claims to art’s value, when the practice of art itself has been thoroughly “dematerialized,” and when, as Boris Groys points out, critical art can be defined (at least in part) by the way it calls attention to its own process of transforming objects/spaces/practices into art.55 It is for this reason that Marina Vishmidt has posed art as a crucial sphere of activity to examine in mapping the rise of a “speculation as a mode of production.”56 In other words, contemporary, critical art creates itself by somehow calling attention to its own production as art. It is art to the extent it gives itself value as art, to the extent it earns our credulity, to the extent it calls attention to its own procedures of representation. Like financial assets, contemporary, critical art gains its legitimacy and value as a gesture within a field of other similar gestures, and in ways that, ultimately, rely not on any objective criteria, but on their capacity to achieve (at least temporary) credibility and believability within a specific economic realm.

strategy 1: revelation The half-strategy of glorification or tepid critique aside, the first critical strategy is a relatively naked attempt to use art’s particular aesthetic

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power and associated moral gravitas to comment on money’s social and political power. If art somehow has (at least in myth, if not in fact) survived the neoliberal subordination of all spheres of social value to money’s measure, perhaps art can mobilize that tenuous relative autonomy to reveal and expose money’s phenomenal power that otherwise is insidiously normalized. Here I’ll take two examples. Barbara Kruger, for one, has used her iconic and idiosyncratic style, one that developed from her background in print advertising design, to provide poetic but a relatively direct and didactic revelation of money’s social power.57 Her work on money and economics alone has been compiled in a recent collection, and has included the infamous 1987 “Untitled (I Shop Therefore I am)”, which would become a hit marketing gimmick when silkscreened on totes for sale at gallery and museum shops.58 Over her 40 year career, Kruger has found an ever broader and more appreciative audience for this work. While once the mainstream art world saw Kruger’s work as unsightly and pedantic aesthetic activism, today, ironically (or perhaps fittingly?) it hangs in many world-class museums and the homes of wealthy collectors. In a successful attempt to reveal money’s social and cultural power through art, her art itself has become part of the economic circuit of money in very interesting ways. I note this not as a criticism but an observation of something curious and telling. Another example of this first strategy is Blu, the Italian street artist, whose phenomenal murals have appeared around the world. Emerging from a radical Marxist milieu of Bologna (notable as a hub of the radical and militant Autonomia movement of the 1970s and 80s),59 Blu’s work

Figure 11 Blu, Untitled (El Tiburón), 2009. Photograph courtesy of Dan Blystone.

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dramatizes money’s power to transform human agency and possibility, often mobilizing natural themes to contrast the utterly unnatural or supernatural power of money over our lives and our world.60 This populist symbolism is magnified by a brilliant integration of the particularities of local surfaces and a keen but subtle attention to political-economic circumstances. For instance, in a well-known 2010 piece, Blu transformed a tapering wall in Barcelona into a massive shark composed of dollar bills, a grim commentary, perhaps, on the paroxysms of austerity forced on Spain as a result of the global financial meltdown. In another 2010 piece, Blu created a mural on the side of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles depicting wooden coffins draped in American dollar bills in a fashion reminiscent of the pageantry, ritual and propaganda of military funerals. Citing the potential offence the mural might cause to visitors to a nearby war memorial, the museum had the piece whitewashed within days.61 Both Kruger and Blu’s work have proven powerful and transformative. Their direct and unflinching critique of money’s power, as well as their attention to its ironies and influences, have elevated these artists above their contemporaries who either ignore money entirely in their allegedly “political” work or who engage with money on the level of esoteric abstraction and self-indulgent cleverness. In an art market hungry for the trace of subtlety, nuance, complexification and the flavor of the savant, art that unapologetically engages power is rare indeed. Yet this first strategy remains largely within the romantic and modern idiom, even in spite of some more postmodern aesthetic elements. It posits the artist as the autonomous creative subject, revealing the truth of the world. It takes for granted that the representative power of the artist him or herself remains untainted or uncompromised. It leaves intact the mythology that art (“real” art) obtains a sacrosanct location of critique because it obeys a non-monetary set of values. But, in the face of the almost unimaginable power of today’s financialized capitalist class, are such romanticist resonances all that impeachable? Beyond the mind-numbingly boring and politically insidious accusation of hypocrisy (which today all too often stands in for substantial critique), my interest in the limits of this strategy of revelation stem from the curious way, already alluded to and which we will take up in more detail in the coming chapters, that the romanticist myths of art’s autonomy are precisely the magical thing that animates the art-commodity. In an age when art can quite literally be any object (or non-object), it is precisely the durability of the myth of some critical autonomy from capital which, when refracted through some sort of art institution, marks a typical urinal or the act of cooking dinner as more valuable than a typical urinal or the conventional act of cooking dinner.62

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strategy 2: reflexivity A second strategy, by contrast, seeks to show that art is not only sullied by but also complicit in money’s terrible power. This work attempts to reveal the deeper intersections of art and money, either in the historical or the contemporary frame. Unlike the first strategy, whose earnest intervention in some sense relies on the myth that (“real”) art’s guiding

Figure 12 (above and opposite)  William Powhida, The Game, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

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values are antithetical or at least resistant to market domination, this second strategy places this mythology squarely within its sights. The politics here are largely deconstructive and, for that reason, court a sense of irony. As such, this strategy has at least two angles, one that I find laudable, the other I find despicable. On the laudable side, we have the work of artists like Christian Jankowski, whose 2008 video/installation Kunstmarkt TV depicts art

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for sale on the equivalent of the home shopping network. The art trio SuttonBeresCuller’s 2009 conceptual sculpture Distribution of Wealth is a stack of one hundred one-dollar bills, sliced vertically into segments that correspond to the percentage of the work’s sale price taken by the gallery, the dealer and the  artists themselves. These works inherit the legacy of earlier conceptual and political artists like Marcel Duchamp, who, in 1919, paid his dentist with a hand-drawn check from “The Teeth’s Loan & Trust Company Consolidated of New York,” or Joseph Beuys, who famously scrawled “Kunst=Kapital” (Art=Captial) on Deuschmark notes and passed them back into circulation. Perhaps most famous is the aforementioned work of J.S.W. Boggs.63 Likewise, Brooklyn-based William Powhida, who uses large-scale pencil and pen diagrams to illustrate the way power and money influence the art world. His works are unapologetically literal, and are aimed at puncturing the overinflated mythology that somehow the realm of contemporary art is based on the noble and unassailable virtues of aesthetic value alone. The cartoonish and diagrammatic quality of this work resonates with a sort of lackadaisical Dadaism, a “fuck you” to an art world that we all know no longer flinches at profanity. Powhida is fully aware of the limits of his intervention and has few pretensions about it. This is art with revolutionary implications (at least within the art world), yet made without any hope it will inspire revolution. Do the responses this work elicits rise above the mirthless chuckle of the creative class? Does it do more than furnish those of us who “already know better, yet still participate” a prop or fetish object to reaffirm and reify the sort of cynical work-of-the-self that allows us to return to work again? Does this work circulate like an interoffice memo in the art world, making fun of the boss (money), who really couldn’t care less what we think of him? It does indeed do much more than this. As Angela McRobbie and many others have pointed out, the artist (or at least the idealized myth of the artist) is held up today as the avatar of successful precarity, a figure who eschews any desire for stability, dependency or conformity, dedicates themselves, body and soul, to navigating the “brave new world of work” defined by multiple part-time contracts, a prestige-based job market, and the idiom of the passionate entrepreneur.64 While the hyperbole surrounding the emancipatory promise of the “creative economy” may ring hollow for most workers in the creative sector (let alone for those workers outside of it), the ideal of the artist remains a paradigmatic figure, a false idol in an economy of self-sacrifice. In this context, Powhida’s work, which debunks this mythology, is much more than simply self-indulgent irony and morose navel gazing. It seeks to destabilize the cruel optimisms of meritocracy, freedom, egalitarianism, creativity and individual fulfillment central not only to the exploitation of labor in the art economy, but

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to the broader economy at large. More profoundly still, Powhida’s work draws attention to the hidden organization and exploitation of cultural labor, which is otherwise rendered opaque or mystified in the field of art. On the one hand, his work illuminates the political economy of artistic labor, the ways in which the art economy depends on hierarchy, exploitation and the extraction of value—it positions artists as workers, part of a longer tradition of aligning artists with the proletariat.65 And in this way it also uses the condition of art workers as a means to illuminate the changing nature of work in allegedly post-industrial countries, where each of us is compelled to take on the mythologized non-worker identity of the artist, precisely to expedite and normalize new forms of the exploitation of precarious labor. But, in contrast, this second strategy of reflexivity has its more despicable side as well, which finds its origins, perhaps, in the work of Andy Warhol and its ultimate apotheosis in the work of Damien Hirst. This is a sort of art that candidly and unapologetically admits the influence of money and, indeed, embraces the market’s influence as not only natural but also right and good. While Warhol’s work might have been generative and important in its performative juxtaposition of money and art (Warhol famously quipped that “being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art”), his successors (seemingly an endless parade of art-world bad boys) largely capitalize on the perennial surprise and delight this now-pedestrian juxtaposition somehow still elicits. By the turn of the millennium, it is safe to say that Warhol’s cool irony and post-innocent auteurism had become the baseline around which a scatterplot of branded artist identities diffused. All these works and the rest of their ilk self-consciously and blithely reveal art’s dirty secret: the incredible power of the market and of money and the “big lie” of art’s autonomy. As all forms of political and social power and influence become subordinated to money in a financialized economy, this work functions to reveal and revel in the sad truth that the “relative autonomy” from capital that art might once have enjoyed (and which gave the avant-gardes of the past their hope) is defunct. Yet now that the revelation of this depressing fact is widely acknowledged, what is the profit in it? For artists like Powhida, such a project is part of a broader search for alternatives and for new forms of cooperation and collectivity. For artists like Hirst, Murakami, Koons and others, it is about offering up irony, cleverness, sensation, and a whiff of brimstone in the form of highly priced vanity items for the financialized ruling class. At stake here, perhaps, is the secret of the alchemy that transmutes criticality into contemporaneity, and vice versa.66 Here criticality would

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name the way in which art today (and throughout the era we are identifying with financialization) has increasingly embraced a certain critical stance toward society, aesthetics and convention. In order for this gesture to function, it needs to at least make a claim to some political or socially enlightened purpose. But whether we believe the artist’s intentions (as they express them, or as they are expressed by intermediates like gallerists, publicists, critics, scholars and the like) what seems undeniable is that under certain circumstances this seemingly renegade criticality can be transmuted into a saleable contemporaneity, a generative presentness that signifies little more than to warrant that the work in question ought to be admitted into a league of “contemporary art” worthy of being collected and speculated on. Some work that is accepted as “contemporary” retains some degree of its critical function. Other work mobilizes criticality merely as a means to generate contemporaneity. In any case, my curiosity toward how criticality is conscripted, mobilized and transformed under financialized capitalism is part of my broader question of the fate and prospects for the imagination in a moment when it seems everywhere put to work, and where the problem of our complicity in the reproduction of capitalism and other systems of power is altogether everywhere and unclear.

on mediation Whither art then, if revelation of money’s influence is haunted by transcendentalism and in any case too didactic; if an admission of art’s complicity is too cynical and mercenary; and if both strategies are, somehow, implicated in contemporary art’s perverse valuation under capitalism. How else can and should artists address money, the most insidiously powerful force of this or any age? A force so ubiquitous and intimate we, each of us, now, today, wear it like a hidden badge or charm upon our persons, and which so preoccupies our individual and collective imaginations that we can quite literally not envision a world without it?67 Of course artists cannot avoid this theme. The third and final strategy, then, is something more subtle, but also potentially quite radical. It is art that draws specific attention to the deep affinity of both art and money as forms of mediation. For Jameson, and other Marxist cultural critics, mediation is a complicated and fraught term.68 Capitalism is, ultimately, a system of material relationships whose ultimate horizon is its own endless pathological replication.69 But history has shown us that this system is extremely mutable, sometimes developing complex systems of dynamic equilibrium like Keynesianism in order to placate (some) workers and regulate (some)

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markets, sometimes throwing itself open to (seemingly) unfettered (allegedly) free markets, sometimes descending into Fascism and authoritarianism to protect class interests.70 Constantly transforming in response to internal crises and external challenges, capitalism is never simply a pure system of accumulation. Rather, within its operations it develops, out of crisis-prone necessity and inexorable contradictions, all manner of “mediations”: institutions, social structures, systems of value and processes that are somehow at once peripheral to capitalism’s core logic yet vital to the system’s reproduction. Money is a singularly special form of mediation. Capitalism is not simply the rule of money over all of life. Rather, it is the rule of capital, in whose service money—in its specifically capitalist form—exists.71 The concept of mediation allows us to understand the way capitalism creates structures and social institutions that are at once very real and largely imaginary. For instance, we might likewise imagine the institution of monogamous heterosexual marriage as a mediation. While it is not a central part of the economic logic of the system, it remains essential to the system in the way it structures the division of labor (which creates the “bourgeois” family as a space to extract surplus reproductive labor from women and provide economic security), everyday economic and social realities, and, more generally, a cultural system based on individualism and normative notions of “success.”72 Marriage is a real thing (like money) with consequences, but it is also an idea, a set of practices or performances, and a socially and culturally enforced norm. Capitalism could, theoretically, do without marriage, but marriage plays a key role in the reproduction of capitalism today and, so, can’t simply be discounted as “merely cultural.” As we have already explored, as we shall explore further, money under capitalism is an utterly unique and in some ways quintessential form of mediation. Like the water in the earth’s biochemical systems, money is both the pivotal element of circulation and reproduction and, on a molecular level, perplexingly singular. Nearer the end of this book we will explore money’s cryptic character as a means to speak about the way it at once encloses and commands cooperative energies and social relations. Art, too, then is a form of mediation. Above and beyond any pieties about the inherently creative dimension of the human soul (no doubt true), “art” is a very particular social institution that arises under capitalism and, in various complicated and crisis-prone ways, exists to help reproduce that system. The history of the emergence of “art” as a response to an early bourgeois demand for exclusive and prestige-granting objects of taste and distinction is, by now, well known.73 The career of

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“art” as such, and knowledge about art, has largely been preoccupied with affording the ruling classes with a tool or prop for their reproduction, providing them a means to distinguish themselves from the working class by recourse to taste, and an arena of cultural and social engagement where relationships (both business and pleasure) might be formed to consolidate and reinforce power, privilege and wealth. Art today, at least the art that circulates in the upper echelons of the “art world,” still largely fulfills this role.74 It is a form of mediation that helps ameliorate (or at least defer) a central contradiction in capitalism: the ruling class must both compete and cooperate in order to make the system run. In addition, art today provides a variety of other “services” to capital: as mentioned earlier, it has become the North Star of freedom, fulfillment and individualism on which increasingly all workers are expected to fix their gaze; it can offer an “alternative asset class” investment to shore up other aspects of an investor’s portfolio;75 donations and service to art in the public interest (museums, galleries, etc.) creates the illusion that the financialized elite actually care about the fate of culture and humanity (and also offers potentially highly lucrative tax exemptions).76 These are but a few examples. Suffice to say that art, as a form of mediation, plays a variety of important roles in the reproduction of capitalist social and economic relations. But the other dimension of the Marxist approach is to note that, within various mediations, the seeds of crisis and of resistance are germinating. In the case of art, its utility to capitalist reproduction has afforded it a strange dimension of “relative autonomy,” although one quickly disappearing. Because art’s functionality within capitalism has relied on it being imbued with a mythology of freedom, creativity, individuality and obedience to a non-economic logic of value, these qualities have opened a space for critical and potentially radical critique. This, at least, was the hope of the avant-garde, who found in art all those values and qualities otherwise obliterated and subjugated under capitalism. Likewise, Herbert Marcuse was, in his final work, to make a passionate argument for the way art and beauty could puncture the otherwise seemingly hermetically sealed cultural idiom of capitalism that reduced all (other) things to their instrumentalities.77 It would appear that this sliver of critical, dialectical distance has been, in the past decades, not so much foreclosed as enclosed by capital: this autonomy has been carefully folded within the financialized capitalist circuits of accumulation and reproduction, a fertile riot of weeds in a walled garden. With the enfolding of what I have here termed the second strategy of reflexivity into the mainstream aesthetic regime of capital, with the hunger of the financialized bourgeoisie for critical, contempo-

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rary art, where might we find the radical potentials of art at large, and more specifically, art that mobilizes money as a theme? To gain some purchase on this question it is insightful to revisit the Marxian distinction between exchange and use value. A common misreading of Marx hinges on the idea that capitalism is simply about the subordination of use value to exchange value, the domination of everything by its price. This is only partially true; it is complicated by a few factors. One is that, in addition to raw prices, capitalism depends on certain objects or processes still having a use value. A loaf of bread’s value in capitalism isn’t just the price it earns on the market, it is also its utility in the reproduction of society: it feeds a worker. Occasionally, the contradictions and complexities of the system reach such a degree that the exchange value totally overshadows this use value, such as when a market crisis causes massive inflation, meaning the worker can’t afford to eat. But in less dire times, all commodities under capitalism are, in actuality, circulating in many different economies of value at the same time, both use and exchange. This is not only the source of conflict and crisis (such as various crises of over-production or under-consumption), it is also the source of resistance (like a bread riot).78 The second and derivative point here is that, in a world of mediations, we never have unadulterated access to the use value of anything. Our sense of a thing’s usefulness and its “true” value is, under capitalism, always mediated. That is, even though we might “use” a commodity in ways unrelated to the market (like eating a loaf of bread), we can never experience its “pure” use value because that sense of value is always mediated by its many other functions (not only its exchange value). Hence, something like art, even to the extent it is commodified, and even to the extent it is increasingly subordinate to the raw calculus of the market, remains “useful” in a variety of (contradictory) ways. We have already seen the various “uses” for art in the reproduction of the ruling class, especially today’s critical, contemporary art in the reproduction of a highly financialized ruling class. We can also point to the more hopeful and uplifting “use values” of art for the rest of us: its capacity to break us out of our habitual modes of thinking, feeling and engagement; it’s odd little crack of freedom in an otherwise commodified and instrumentalized world, through which an emaciated beam of light might shine; its ability to disrupt what Jacques Rançiere calls the “distribution of the sensible’—to challenge our preconceived or habitual notions of who and what “belongs” (in the gallery, in the nation, in the heart) and who and what is valuable.79 But the key lesson from Marx is that none of these values is ever pure. The value of a Warhol canvas can be and usually is all of these layers of value together in a palimpsest: its market value at

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auction; its value in art history; its value as a domesticated object in the collection of a hedge fund manager; and its value as a critical work of art that opens new horizons of thought and action. Money is a special case commodity and mediation, one where, at least ideally, the object’s only use value is its ability to represent exchange value. As we somehow never tire of hearing, money is, otherwise, useless: you can’t eat it, you can’t have a relationship with it, its only use is to facilitate and expedite exchange. It functions to the extent that it becomes the measure of value for all other things, and the neoliberal, financialized moment of capitalism is one where, increasingly, all other spheres of life and value are in the process of being collapsed into money’s insatiable measure. For this reason, Marx refused to understand money as simply a neutral tool, a means to achieve and negotiate other values, which was (and still is) the mainstream opinion among economists.80 Under capitalism, money does not facilitate value; it subordinates it in the interests of capitalist reproduction. It is unique among commodities in this sense. And because of its universalized power, money also becomes a sort of false reflection of the capitalist totality discussed earlier. To the extent that money becomes our key means of negotiating value in capitalist society, money comes to stand for everything. Marx was to famously write, “the individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket.”81 What is important here, and key to Marx’s concept of “commodity fetishism” is the way money is a misrecognition of our own creative potential—or in terms I will introduce later in the book, a crypt for that potential. The totality in which we live is the product of “our” constant, collaborative, creative labor, a labor that we fail to remember because our relationship to our fellow laborers is mediated by money (we are paid a wage for commodifying our time and creating commodities, with which we buy back commodities, the frozen fragments of others’ labors). Money in this sense consummates art’s alleged ideal: stark mimesis, no latency, pure signal. To the extent we take money to be a real representation of value, to the extent we (individually and, more importantly, collectively), without pause, accept its claims to represent the real world, we surrender our power to it. Of course, overcoming capitalism is not merely a matter of ceasing to believe in money’s claims to value—it demands a fundamental transformation of the economic system and social relations. But it is to say that money is, as David Graber poetically puts it paraphrasing Marcel Mauss, “the false coin of our own dreams,” the cruel residue of our own labor.82 In other words, money is an incredibly

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powerful means by which we mediate our cooperation, and a means that transforms our cooperation toward its ends. This seemingly meandering detour opens onto the following observation, which I hope sheds light on the art of money and the question of art that involves money. Both money and art, in each their own mirrored way, are mediations: corrupted, impure and largely unconscious means by which we come to terms with, negotiate and reproduce socially co­ operative labor. If that is the case, perhaps the most promising and radical money-art is that which sensitizes us to our stolen collective power, that allows us to remember what we are always in the process of forgetting: that the social world and all its mediations are both the products and the producers of our social bonds.

strategy 3: rendering labor visible Both art and money are holographic shards of a greater totality, holographic in the sense that each shard somehow contains the illusory memory of the shattered whole. The nature of that totality is not simply the saturation of all social and cultural life with the dictates of capital but something deeper. The totality refers to that unimaginable, sublime ever-fluctuating sum of cooperation and creativity that capital seeks to discipline, shape, colonize and transform. The third strategy of money-art speaks (always in a partial, incomplete, fraught way) to this unimaginable, interconnected, inter-reliant whole, and to money’s power over and emergence from within it. But it also speaks to the creative and cooperative would-be collective potential underneath (what I will later identify as the common), which is the source of all our hope and, perhaps, of all beauty (if we can still talk of such a thing). I close with two examples. The first is the work of Italian performance, installation and conceptual artist Cesare Pietroiusti whose work with money has been particularly thoughtful, playful and profound. For instance, Pietroiusti routinely uses his artist fee (translated into banknotes) as a medium itself, creating work that is difficult or impossible to sell or value. In an October 2007 performance in the context of the group show Looking for the Border (curated by Roberto Pinto, Francesca di Nardo, Luk Lambrecht and Koen Leemans), Pietroiusti invited the audience to lend him banknotes of no less than €20, which he modified with sulfuric acid and returned to the audience member with a certificate of artistic authenticity. In his 2008 installation Untitled (Three Thousand US Dollar Bills to Take Away) for the exhibition Art, Price, Value: Contemporary Art and the Market at Centro de Cultura Contemporanea a Palazzo Strozzi in

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Figure 13  Cesare Pietroiusti. Image from an untitled 2007 performance in Brussels, in which the artist treated money with sulfuric acid. Photo by Martina Della Valle. Courtesy of the artist.

Florence, Pietroiusti conducted a series of experiments applying sulfuric acid to 3,000 American one-dollar and five-dollar bills, then stamped the back with a note explaining that “ogni transazione in denaro riguardante quest’opera invaliderà la firma del suo autore e di conseguenza trasformerà l’opera stessa in un falso” (“each monetary transaction involving this artwork will invalidate the signature of its author and consequently transform it into a fake”). The bills were hung on the wall of the gallery and visitors were encouraged to take one. In these pieces, Pietroiusti draws the audience into a speculative set of relationships through money’s materiality. This complex, multi-layered piece, which deconstructs the value of both art and money on a number of levels is not simply satisfied to reveal the contradictions and ironies as per strategy 2 (reflexivity). Rather, Pietroiusti is mobilizing art’s peculiar location at the

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intersection of multiple conflicting forms of value to create a temporary space where, for a moment at least, we can pay attention to the work we are all always already doing to reproduce capitalist social relations. More illuminating still is his performance Eating Money, where he (and sometimes collaborators) hosted a gallery-based auction where the audience bids with paper money. The person offering the largest denomination gives it to the artist who promptly swallows it. After it passes through his system, the bill is cleaned, sanitized, framed and given “back”

Figure 14  Cesare Pietroiusti, Untitled (Three thousand US dollars to take away), 2008. Detail from installation and performance. Photo by Serge Domingie. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 15  Cesare Pietroiusti and Paul Griffiths, Eating Money: An Auction, 2005–7. Performance at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK. Photo by Caters News. Courtesy of the Ikon Gallery.

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to the original “investor.” Here, the artist digests the object and transforms its economic value into aesthetic value. Given Pietroiusti’s reputation, we can imagine that the art-object-that-was-once-money-and-is-now-art has gained a new economic value in excess of the “face value” of the paper money itself. Pietroiusti is not merely cynically calling attention to the intimate (incestuous) relationship between art and money (as per our “strategy 2: reflexivity”), his scatological performance also asks us to consider a deeper question: how do we create value together? How does shit become gold, and gold become shit? How is it that we bestow power on art and money? How are these collective processes? In a sense, this work asks us to recall what we are always otherwise forgetting: that the world of value is something we reproduce on a daily basis, though (to paraphrase Marx), not in the conditions we might choose.

Figure 16  Cesar Pietroiusti, Money watching, 2007. Performance and social action at a Birmingham shop front. Photo by Chris Keenan. Courtesy of Ikon Gallery and the artist.

In another piece, Money Watching, Pietroiusti used the auspices of a shop front in Bristol to open for a one-day money store. Here, passersby were invited to “purchase” a £10 or £20 note in return for 15 or 25 minutes worth of undivided attention, respectively. The “customer” was to stare at the note, placed in a glass vitrine, for 7.5 minutes or 12.5 minutes per side, after which it was given to them. Here, Pietroiusti transforms the art event into (or perhaps reveals the art event to have always already been) a scene of almost meaningless commercial transaction. By harnessing

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the “customer” or audience member’s useless, immaterial labor, they become complicit in a ritual for creating value. This potentially reveals the arbitrary nature of both aesthetic and economic value, and the way this arbitrary nature is enforced and encoded through spaces and objects: the disciplinary space of the gallery which encloses the meaning of art; or the aesthetic form of money itself which, unlike any other visual object, so seamlessly convinces us of its values. Another artist whose work is well worth dwelling with is the Argentine, Mexico City-based Máximo González, who has been working with international bills as artistic media for almost a decade. González joins literally hundreds (probably thousands) of other artists seduced by paper money’s strange and terrible power and beauty, but he ranks among the most conceptually and technically adept. His work expresses a great deal of care and creativity in exploring the formal qualities and potentials of paper money and his work, which often takes the form of large-scale pieces or installation, is marked by a painstaking attention to detail which other money artists, fascinated as they are by the conceptual richness of working with money, all too typically forgo. González has experimented with the textility or textuality of money, transforming bills into thread or yarn with which he has woven elegant tapestries, work which illuminates money’s influence in and reliance on the warp and weft of human activity.

Figure 17  Máximo González, Numismagia, 2011. Side view. Out-of-circulation money, wooden sticks and pins. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 18  Máximo González, Numismagia, 2011. Detail. Out-of-circulation money, wooden sticks and pins. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 19  Máximo González, Big magma CCCLXX-I, 2011. Installation view. Money and glue. Courtesy of the artist.

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In several pieces, González has experimented with punching holes in, stitching together, and otherwise deconstructing paper bills of various nationalities and denominations, almost to the point of its total dematerialisation. Echoing the decaying and decomposing garbage to be found in dumps all around the world, González’ work demands we question what gives money value by all but destroying the object, leaving only enough for us to recognize its original form. There is something post-apocalyptic and melancholy here, as if we are alien visitors observing the wreckage of capitalist totality and the destructive civilization it has wrought upon the earth, as if this shredded, dirty, decomposed money is a twisted sacrament, a prayer shawl or cleric’s robe stripped of its holy power, left to deconstruct itself in the absence of doting believers. Yet so too is there

Figure 20  Máximo González, Basura sin paisaje (Landfill without landscape), 2012. Detail. Out-of- circulation money. Courtesy of the artist.

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a sense of tender fragility. Unlike less subtle works, which simply seek to heavy-handedly reveal that paper money is worthless, this piece seems to allow our disbelief to continue to be suspended, but by just a thread. Here, again, we might be able to move beyond a certain cynicism or pessimism and recognize that, for all the misery it causes, and for all the perversions of value it oversees, money is, in one sense, a tremendously creative medium, or medium of creativity.

Figure 21  Máximo González, La basura del mundo (The world’s garbage), 2012. Detail. Out-of-circulation money and pins. Courtesy of the artist.

I do not mean this is the way that free market boosters champion the inherent creative power of capitalism, lauding the “creative destruction” the system unleashes that allegedly sweeps away inefficiency and drives innovation.83 Instead, I am thinking of the constant, everyday, phenomenal creative work we are all doing all the time to reaffirm money’s value. After all, if money is something of a secret conspiracy to ascribe value to a useless thing, are we not all, on some level, participant in a certain quotidian artistry, a certain daily work of belief and meaning making? Just as the twentieth century has taught us that the art object makes creative subjects of us all, requiring not only a creative genius as a creator but also creative, active and reflexive audiences, so too might we recognize that money demands of us a creative labor we rarely, if ever, recognize as such. Nothing is more banal than the getting and spending

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of money, but in another way nothing more profound, spiritual, and generative. Of course, to this we must add that this is not a creativity or artistry we freely chose. We must add that, while money may indeed be a figment of our imaginations, it is not enough to simply cease to believe in its value for it to cease to control our lives. We must add that money oversees a global division of creative labor, which sees the vast majority of humanity systematically denied the means and the opportunity to exercise their creativity in any meaningful way, or having that creativity valued.84 We must add that, at the same time as it is driven by an everyday creativity, money also stifles, constrains, parches and delimits our imaginations with a feverish intensity. And we must add that money, as Marx explained, causes us to fundamentally misrecognize the creativity we all exercise everyday in reproducing society and the capitalist “economy” which preys on it. And yet perhaps in art that mobilizes money these more profound realizations have a chance to emerge. Perhaps in their explicit failure to represent totality, in the way they call attention to both art and money’s inherent limits, these works provide an avenue by which money’s terrible power might, in fact, be challenged.

2 6 artists x 2 crises x 3 orders of reproduction

In the last chapter we explored in some detail the promises and perils for contemporary artists working with money under the present mode of financialized, neoliberal capitalism. But there we focused on the materiality of money, and therefore on artists working in general with money as a physical, tangible medium of critical and creative expression and engagement. The astute reader will no doubt have already sensed one of the problems with this approach: precisely in the context from which these artworks originate and in which they circulate, which is to say the “first world” North Atlantic heart of contemporary financialized capitalism, most “money” doesn’t actually circulate in a physical form. On the level of daily life, we are encouraged to embrace the dream of a “cashless society,” largely by payments and consumer debt companies (like those that run credit cards) eager to reduce inhibitions toward consumption of commodities, to generate lucrative debt or transaction fees, or to harvest profitable consumer data.1 Meanwhile, the interconnected global financial apparatus is one that is dominated by digitized forms of money or money-like objects that circulate on a vastly greater magnitude than cash or even pedestrian bank deposits.2 Only a small fraction of existing “money” in the global economy is actually represented by cash. For this reason, artworks that engage with the cash as a physical or symbolic entity engage in a kind of critical anachronism. This chapter, then, engages a range of artists engaged with money in its less material or tangible forms as a means to explore the processes of financialization and the possibilities and perils of challenging it. To do so, we will explore the work of three artists in each of two critical periods. First, I explore the work of three artists created in and around the year of 1973 which, for reasons that will become clear, I (and others) mark as the dawn of our current financialized phase of capitalism. I then compare these to three parallel works created in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis, some 35 years later.3 In each case, I am interested in the fate of the radical artist. By radical here I mean to introduce a third term beyond the relationship of the “critical” and the “contemporary” problematized in the last chapter.

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My definition of radical here draws on my and Alex Khasnabish’s theorization of the term in our work on the radical imagination. Briefly, radical means not only approaches that are politically extreme by the conventions of the day (though they may indeed be that), but that are also dedicated to exploring and unsettling the roots of social, economic and political institutions.4 This notion of radicalism and specifically the radical imagination draws on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis who posited this typically-euphemized force as, in fact, the ontological substance of society itself: the radical imagination is that magma-like force that solidifies into social institutions, forms of authority and durable forms of power. But it is also that tectonic power that periodically erupts and melts down these seemingly eternal forms of power and authority.5 We will explore this approach in greater detail in this book’s conclusion. In this chapter I want to signal my interest in a deep radicalism that animates the work of activist artists who are not satisfied with the transmutation of “criticality” into “contemporaneity” for the pleasure of the art market but, instead, aim toward some deeper social transformation based on a confrontation with power. Whether and how their aim is true or errant is another (important) question. My wager in this chapter is that by exploring how these six artists contest money in their respective moments we can triangulate the dimensions of this complex meta-phenomenon we are calling financialization. Further, we can begin to identify the possibilities and limits of radical creativity in the face of this meta-phenomenon. As I shall seek to demonstrate, financialization is in some ways a response or recalibration of capitalism to the manifold threats and challenges posed by radical movements (including to some extent cultural and creative movements) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here I have in mind what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello characterize as the neoliberal incorporation of the “aesthetic critique” of capitalism that, since the 1970s, has co-opted the energies and dulled the antagonisms of radical struggles against alienation by offering artist-like flexibility, “creative” precarity and individualized market participation as the new norms of capitalist society.6 I also have in mind the Autonomist narrative of the transition toward cognitive capitalism, where, also in response to radical struggles, the political-economic base of capitalist exploitation and valorization shifts from the direct industrial extraction of labor power to the production of social and communicative life. As authors including Maurizio Lazzarato and Christian Marazzi have illustrated, financialization and the explosion of personal and collective forms of debt have been both the product and producer of these shifts.7 Financialization is a term that has been greatly employed and perhaps abused in the last decade since the 2008 financial crisis, and we shall

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explore some of its dimensions below. For now I want to merely point out that often the debate on the term orbit the question of to what extent it should be seen to name one of two things (a) a set of processes by which, periodically in the history of capitalism, the FIRE sector of capitalism conscripts, co-opts or contaminates other spheres of the capitalist economy (eg. manufacturing, infrastructure, government), or (b) a specific period, since roughly 1973, within which a wholesale transformation of global capitalism has transpired. My view is that both answers are correct: financialization is a tendency within capitalism that has periodically led to moments of crises; we are amidst one such moment, though our moment has very particular and singular characteristics unlike any that has come before. In order to explore this dymanic more fully I have chosen to weave through this chapter and the exploration of the six artists in question a trifold notion of reproduction. In my approach, this focus on reproduction focuses our attention on three interrelated sets of questions: (1) How does the capitalist economy writ large reproduce itself through the circulation of money and commodities? How and when do these contradictory processes fall into crisis? How do these crises ultimately stem from the resistance of the exploited subjects of capital and how can radical forms of resistance and intervention make the most of the crises of the reproduction of capital? (2) How is the reproduction of capital both dependent on and generative of the reproduction of social institutions (including governments, museums, schools, police)? How do these institutions, in turn, both depend on and generate the reproduction of certain subjectivities and ideologies? How and to what extent are these institutions relatively autonomous from the direct dictates of capital accumulation? And how can the resistance, revolt or refusal of these subjects or institutions be part of a broader struggle? (3) Finally, how does capitalism depend on conscripting, containing or contorting the field of social reproduction more broadly, by which I mean the terrains of where social and biological life itself is reproduced through community, families, care and everyday cooperation? In this chapter I use this triangular framework to examine the works of three artists in each of two periods, focusing in each case on one dimension of reproduction. My overarching effort here is to map out the broad terrain of transformations germane to financialization, rather than to arrive at a singular definition of the meta-phenomenon. Further,

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my desire here is to set the stage for future chapters which continue to explore the prospects and perils for radical creative strategies against financialization. More broadly, by contrasting the work of radical artists in two crucial moments here, we are here seeking to clarify the question: what are the politics of the radical imagination now, in a moment when financialization co-opts, conscripts and contains it as never before?

three theories of reproduction The conceptual framework that organizes this chapter builds on an argument I made in my 2014 book Cultures of Financialization that insisted we see that phenomenon as not just a matter of the subordination of the productive apparatuses of capitalism to the rule of speculation, but more importantly and profoundly as an integrated transformation of the reproduction of capital, institutions and social life. The three critical frameworks of reproduction I am drawing on and interweaving here share a number of points of intersection; notably, they are all critical and radical approaches that are on some level developed as tools for struggles within, against and beyond capitalism. They each have their own sizable archives and internal debates, so my approach to each will necessarily be cursory. For my purposes, I believe that these three approaches between them create a triangular frame that allows us to attend to the complex and nuanced historically and geographically specific nature of capitalist accumulation and transformations. In the interests of allowing the artworks in question to expand our understandings, I will make my overview brief and schematic.

Circulation The first realm of reproduction, which we will henceforth refer to as “the reproduction of capitalist circulation” builds on Karl Marx’s analysis of the accumulation of capital.8 Taking up the work of eighteenth and nineteenth century political-economists, Marx agrees that “capital” and value under capitalism is not a stagnant given but a force that is always in motion, based not on the stability of land or precious metals but on the society-wide orchestration of labor.9 Marx’s signature contribution was to identify that this orchestration of labor was fundamentally based on exploitation and thus riven with inherent crises stemming either from the internal contradictions of the system or from workers’ and other struggles.10 In general terms, capitalism is a unique system insofar as it is entirely composed of circulation. Marx is categorical that

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“capital” is not simply ill-begotten wealth materialized as luxury items, palaces or commodities but, rather, the dynamics of motion whereby this ill-begotten circulates and is put to the task of reproducing itself and thereby accumulating.11 Yet in part because capitalism is driven onward not by any singular scheme or strategy but, rather, then increasingly cut-throat competition between capitalists, the acceleration of circulation and the reproduction of capital is deeply crisis-prone and often imperils the reproduction of the society it depends on. A good example is the acceleration of the global ecological crisis driven almost entirely by the corporate and financial drive for profit through the ever-faster, more socially discordant circulation of capital around the world and into every social process, which now threatens the very foundations of the ecosystem on which capitalism still depends.12 Most of these crises and contradictions are connected to problems of the circulation of capital, where money plays a key role.13 Examples include: the falling rate of profit, where competition between capitalist firms forces prices so low it becomes perilous to the reproduction of individual firms; the overproduction (or underconsumption) of goods based on the system’s productive priorities being driven by competition; the over-exploitation of the working class, leaving them without enough money to reproduce themselves through the purchase of the fruits of

Figure 22  IAIN BAXTER&, Monopoly with Real Money (1973/2009), still of performance at the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), from NIGHTSENSE (2009), curated by DisplayCult for Nuit Blanche, Toronto. Photo: Graham Schmalz, courtesy of DisplayCult.

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capitalist productivity (or, really, their own productivity sold back to them); and manifold contradictions having to do with temporal and geographic limits to capitalist circulation. The list goes on.14 Two things are vital for our purposes now. First, that whatever the root of these crises, they tend to manifest in the realm of capital’s circulatory medium: money. Second, as Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and others illustrated, capitalism’s response to these crises has been the development of institutions or systemic transformations that displace and elevate the contradiction to a higher level.15 So, for instance, as Harvey elucidates, the banking and finance sector emerges to help capitalism “fix” the problem of the temporal and geographic contradictions of circulation, providing an institutional basis for geographically mobile commercial paper (bank scrip, credit notes, etc.) and temporally secure investments (which redistribute profit among capitalist enterprises).16 As Luxemburg noted, colonialism and imperialism are means to reproduce capital in circulation once it has accelerated to a terminal velocity within a specific country: not only does this violence free up new sources of labor and materials, not only does it open new markets for goods, not only does it offer lucrative opportunities to waste misbegotten wealth on military expenditure, it also serves to relieve the class tensions of overaccumulation and conscripting the working classes into a typically xenophobic and militarized alliance with capital under the banner of imperialist nationalism.17 All of these dimensions of the reproduction of capitalist circulation are more complex and contradictory than the present chapter can accommodate. Suffice for now to say that, in this frame of analysis, I am centrally concerned with how capitalism’s inherent contradictions manifest as crises of money’s circulation, and the way these crises offer, on the one hand, openings for decisive struggles but, on the other, also opportunities for (often violent) capitalist restructuring and reorganization. Finally, as Harry Cleaver insists, the crises, contradictions and transformations of capitalist reproduction must ultimately be seen as responses to the radical organization, struggles and demands of those whom capitalism inevitably and inexorably exploits.18

Institutions The second realm of reproduction, which we will here refer to as the “reproduction of institutions” emerges from the work of French sociologists and social critics like Pierre Bourdieu, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault on the one hand and, on the other, the England-based progenitors of the field of cultural studies including Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart

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and Raymond Williams.19 Both schools of thought sought to break with doctrinaire Marxist interpretations of the reproduction of capital writ large which gave short shrift both to the importance and agency of individual actors and the centrality and mutability of economic, political and social institutions, especially in a moment where mass-media and the social, regulatory state had come to mediate capitalism within the post-war industrialized West.20 The importance of social institutions in mediating capitalist accumulation and also generating complicit, docile or specialized subjects was of central importance to this generation of critics who were likewise witnessing a new cycle of grassroots struggles not only by proletarians in factories but also by students in schools and universities, prisoners in jails, psychiatric patients in institutions and

Figure 23  Cassie Thornton, Physical Audit, 2012. Performance still. Photo: Kerry Downey. Courtesy of the artist. In this work, performed as an improvisational dance, participants met at a predetermined bank branch in Manhattan. After ritualistically washing their hands in the lobby, the collective moved into the bank and asked, together, to open a collective savings account. While waiting to meet with the branch manager, and during the subsequent meeting, dancers/participants/auditors moved through the bank, instructed to run their fingers or other body parts along every surface in the bank, collecting the accumulated dirt and grime residual even within the highly manicured office space. After being denied the opportunity to open a collective savings account (they do not exist), the auditors would return to the bank lobby and attempt to collectively use the automatic banking machine, for instance by placing all their hands on a bank card or the screen at once.

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artists within galleries.21 Also of critical importance was the emergence of a larger post-war middle class, one that conscripted increasingly socially isolated citizen-consumers into an obedience to the reproduction of capital by preoccupying their personal hopes and ambitions through an archipelago of institutionalization, including the blue-collar mass factory, the white-collar office, the post-war suburb, the schooling system, the military or, (increasingly) prisons.22 These impacts were also magnified by the increased specialization of labor with the technological acceleration and the rise of new forms of management, which in turn demanded greater levels of education and integration of working subjects into cognitively oriented public and private institutions. In a sense, these theorists were concerned, in part, with the ways in which a traditional understanding of capitalist cultural politics has been shifted by the increased availability of money to workers, without any real change in the actual ownership or control over the means of production. These scholars were centrally concerned with how class dispositions and identities were reproduced and, in turn, how they helped to reproduce (or resist) social institutions, and also how institutions more generally were fields of power that, while not directly subjugated by the monetary axioms of capital, nonetheless helped reproduce it and the diverse subjects germane to it. Such an analysis focused on the semi-autonomous hierarchies and circuits of value at work within schools, the media landscape, prisons, galleries, bureaucracies, the military and public space and, in Bourdieu’s terminology, the reproduction of differential forms of “capital” (symbolic, cultural) whose semi-autonomous circulation could not simply be understood as purely due to the machinations of economic (“big C”) Capital.23 Here, these post-war authors sought to understand, on the one hand, how power might be exercised and reproduced outside of, or alongside, money through institutional environments and subjectivities, and, on the other, how the logics and codes of money might be infiltrating and reorganizing spheres of social life initially thought to be immune or allergic to them. For Foucault, for instance, an entire scholarly and political project for the study of power was advanced by essentially (except near the end of his life) bracketing out money almost completely.

Social life The final realm of reproduction, which we will call “the reproduction of social life,” emerges from the materialist feminist critique of Marxism that developed in tandem with broader Second-Wave feminist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rejecting both a liberal

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feminism that sought reforms within capitalist institutions as well as an overly cultural feminism that understood gender-based oppression as largely a matter of attitudes and dispositions (allegedly natural or nurtured), authors including Maria Mies, Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, Selma James and Maria Rosa Dalla Costa and others sought to understand women as an exploited class of workers whose labor was central to capitalist accumulation and reproduction.24 In contrast to traditional Marxist approaches that focused on the commodification of the energies of formal waged industrial workers, such materialist feminists turned their attention to the production and reproduction of this laboring commodity itself—the worker—and identified

Figure 24  Yoan Capote, Rate (fucking money), 2015 (detail). Courtesy of the artist.

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the patriarchal home as the workshop.25 Thus the reproduction labor of bearing and raising children, cooking and cleaning to maintain the home and caring for and reproducing working class community, all of which have traditionally been expected of or forced on women, became central axes of struggle.26 Hence, for instance, the Wages for Housework campaign aimed precisely at the contradiction between, on the one hand, capitalism’s reliance on women’s reproductive labor and, on the other, its exclusion from the waged economy, thus making women dependent on their husband’s or father’s wage, or on paid work outside the home in addition to compulsory reproductive labor.27 This theoretical paradigm’s emergence was also timely. By the late 1960s, many of the laws and customs that had constrained women’s direct waged economic participation in capitalism were slowly shifting, thanks to stalwart activism, though of course throughout capitalist history women have always worked for wages, usually significantly diminished wages. The prospect of women being economically and legally self-sufficient on a mass scale presented a quandary for feminist thinkers: to what extent should women’s access to money be pursued as a means toward empowerment and fulfillment, and to what extent should it be distrusted? Could capitalism survive without the exploitation of women’s reproductive labor? In recent years, as more and more reproductive labor has been commodified and brought under the direct command of capital (in the form of the meteoric rise of the formal and informal “service sector”), theories of social reproduction have become more widely applied as a framework for understanding the changing nature of work and life in a neoliberal, financialized era defined by precarious work, the decay or weaponization of the welfare state and the subtle, unsung, unpaid and essential micro-labors that reproduce bodies, minds and souls within organizations and institutions.28 At stake here is the way, amidst a general crisis of neoliberalism, the line between the commodification and decommodification of reproductive labor is drawn and redrawn, and becomes a point of struggle.29 On the one hand, struggles today often attempt to force capitalism to recognize the value contributed by reproductive laborers that is unpaid (such as mothering) or underpaid (such as early childhood education or elder care) thanks to the perpetuation of gendered forms of power. On the other hand, many struggles today strive to decommodify certain aspects of social reproduction as a means to create non-capitalist community and social solidarity (such as community gardens or clinics, or cooperatives).30 In essence, both forms of struggle contest the cultural and economic power of money to accurately measure value, when value is conceived in a more holistic, sustainable and egalitarian manner.

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* * * These three frameworks for understanding the politics of reproduction are difficult to hold together, in part because they each primarily focus on a different scale of analysis (systems, institutions and daily life, respectively), but also because, especially in a post–73 age of financialization, those scales and spheres are less and less distinct. In the following two sections we examine the work of six artists, three working around 1973, three around 2008, which we are associating with the transition toward financialization. What becomes clear is that, in the case of today’s artists, the conceptual distinction between these spheres that was enjoyed and leveraged by their predecessors is no longer a simple affair as we may have been tempted to imagine. To be clear, I do not believe that these three realms of reproduction could or have ever been separated: throughout the entire history of capitalist accumulation they have been fundamentally intertwined. Indeed, capitalism is defined in part by an artificial ideological and real economic separation between these spheres. At least within the normative neoclassical imaginary, the realm of the production (capital), of institutions (the state) and reproduction (the home) is strictly defined, even if, as Melinda Cooper has noted, preeminent neoliberal economists have been obsessed with the question of the family.31 Of course, the reality is that, as Angela Mitropoulos illustrates all three realms are mutually reinforcing and orbit the historically specific patriarchal control over the oikos.32 As I have argued elsewhere, and as I hope to illustrate here, financialization can fruitfully be understood as capitalism’s response to three crises of reproduction (addressed by our three pre–73 artists), a response that blurred the lines between systems of circulation, institutions within capitalism, and the realms of subjectivity and everyday life.33 In the case of each artist, we will explore a central contradiction represented by or identified in their work. As will become clear, such an approach can help us understand the transformations of capitalism toward financialization as well as the place of art within it.

three artists, c.1973 A genealogy of the critical artistic use of money is not the project of this book. We can observe early sketches and paintings by Bruegel and Rembrandt that allegorize or depict money and those who handle it in vivid ways, which might be seen as an early indication of art’s fascination with the profane and worldly as a means to disturb or disrupt. As explored in the work of Marc Shell, in an edited collection by Paul

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Crosthwaite, Peter Knight and Nicky Marsh and in a recent bilingual book by Hernán Borisonik, art and artists have consistently sought to understand and in some cases challenge the power of money in their work.34 In the twentieth century, as art has become increasingly conceptual, relational and abstract, it has been able to respond even more fully to money, which has exhibited the same tendencies. The work of J.S.G. Boggs explored briefly in Chapter 1, and documented and theorized by Lawrence Weschler, is a good example.35 Such work draws on earlier experiments by Marcel Duchamp (who invented a bank and drew a check on it to pay his dentist) and American tromp de l’œile painters like Victor Dubreuil in the nineteenth century.36 Since then, as writers like Katy Siegel and Paul Mattick demonstrate, there have been many artists drawn to the theme.37 Gregory Sholette and Oliver Ressler’s book and exhibition It’s the Political Economy, Stupid! likewise takes up these themes in a post-2008 moment, pointing particularly to the role of art and artists as radical critics of the capitalist economy and its baleful effects in moments of crisis.38 Three radical artists and artworks under analysis in the 1973 period have been selected because they work directly with money as a means to address and challenge their contemporary conditions of capitalist reproduction, but also because each, to the extent it is inspired or agitated by a central contradiction or crisis within that moment of accumulation, is in a way prescient toward the changes to come. I am suggesting that each focuses on a particular realm of reproduction and that between them we can create a triangular frame within which to envision the sorts of forces at work that shaped the emergence of financialization. In the following section, we’ll examine three artists working today in the same realms, the better to see what has changed and what might yet be possible.

Circulation: Beuys Starting in the late 1970s (dates are difficult to ascertain), West German sculptor and pioneer of performance and conceptual art, Joseph Beuys, used banknotes of various nations as a canvas and a distribution system for a series of enigmatic messages.39 Primary among them was KUNST=KAPITAL, which he scrawled in marker on an unknown number of bank notes before passing them back into circulation, as well as on a diversity of other objects as well. Such tactics of counter-circulation are not new. Since at least the early nineteenth century individuals had used circulating legal tender as a medium of political expression. In the early nineteenth century incarcerated working class Londoners who had been convicted of

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Figure 25  George Washington “Bo” Hughes, The “Dicer” Hobo Nickel, 1939. Image appears courtesy of Chris Dempsey of hobocollector.com.

petty crimes (including counterfeiting or even handling counterfeited currency) and awaiting colonial transportation and indenture inscribed messages to loved ones on coins of the realm—so called convict love tokens.40 Throughout the Great Depression and after, itinerant American travelers riding the rails developed sophisticated and intricate methods for engraving coins, especially 5¢ pieces, with new images; these Hobo Nickels operated as both a novelty handcraft that could be sold for a little money and also as tokens of an alternative material and symbolic economy among economic nomads.41 Often this technique was used for more explicitly political purposes. For instance, around the turn of the century, Suffragettes, often frozen out of mainstream debate and discourse on account of their gender and (at the time) radical politics, engraved VOTES FOR WOMEN on English currency and passed it back into circulation.42 The Nazis also used this technique to spread anti-Semitic propaganda on devalued German Marks during the Weimar period.43 During the military dictatorship in Brazil, the radical artist Cildo Mireiles famously stamped banknotes with subversive messages as part of his Insertions into Ideological Circuits series of radical interventions.44 My interest in Beuys here has to do with his use of this technique within and against an allegedly democratic capitalist system where, in contrast to the above examples, censorship and repression are not the norm. It would be tempting to read Beuys’ intervention as merely a cynical reaction toward the increasing commodification of art in the 1970s, which was certainly a topic of furious conversation at the time in both the US and in Germany where, thanks in part to post-war prosperity, in part to government support for abstract expressionist art

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as a Cold War strategy to promote “Western freedom,” art markets were booming and “contemporary” or “modern” art was becoming a known quantity and a desirable designation.45 Yet even though Beuys in some ways embraced and leveraged the persona of the romantic artist, cultivating a cult of personality and designating himself a modern shaman with vast social powers and responsibilities, Beuys’ KUNST=KAPITAL message, which was also a frequent if inconsistent topic of other work and lectures, was not some melancholic or furious denunciation of art’s growing proximity to money. Rather, it might be said to represent the irreducible kernel or formula for an expansive quasi-Marxian theory of value that Beuys thought could become the basis of a socialist-humanist philosophy capable of overcoming both “Western” capitalism and “Eastern” statist communism.46 Beuys famously believed that all human beings were inherently artists, entitled to use the imagination to transform the world. For Beuys, arguably this was a highly individualist formula: it would seem that, in general, Beuys’ concern was for the fate of the singular imagination, not society at large. But this notion of the universality of the artistic vocation might also be read to echo Marx (and also perhaps anthropologist Marcel Mauss). From this vantage, the imaginative potential, under the capitalist economic relationship of exploitation, is not so much lost as subsumed or redirected in the interests of reproducing commodities, the same commodities the worker was compelled to purchase.47 The chief mediator and medium of both the exploitation of labor and the circulation of commodities is money, a substance that, especially in the case of paper banknotes, is largely imaginary. From this perspective, Beuys would not be making a simplistic argument that money is an illusion. He might be said to be translating Mauss’s observation that money is the “false coin of our dreams,” our own inherent imaginative power returned to us as a worldly token.48 Beuys’ might be said to have appropriated money’s three predominant functions to critique or reinvent them. As a means of circulation, money is compelled to circulate a radical message (radical in the sense that it seeks to destabilize the root); as a unit of account, money is made to account for a shared humanist ledger wherein imaginative energies are transmuted into (alienated) material wealth; as a store of value, money is asked to reveal what is encrypted within it: humanity’s own collective imaginative potential, cruelly subverted. Beuys coined the term “social sculpture” to describe works that incorporated human social actors as integral components, joining other post-war artists in dissolving the distinction between artist and audience, once again in the interests of revealing the inherent artistic

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element within all humans. In this piece, each banknote is transformed into a social sculpture that is completed by the act of being part of its circulation and returning it to circulation. Beuys’ interventions have force because they leverage a number of contradictions in the reproduction of the circulation of capital. In the first place, as I have elsewhere argued, an additional function of money (apart from the above) is as a medium of the imagination.49 Hence coins and banknotes have long been used as aesthetic canvasses, although usually canvasses monopolized by the powerful, used to circulate images of rulers or of national symbols aimed at insisting on the legitimacy of their sovereignty and their unifying powers over a population.50 Yet the nation-state’s reliance on currency as a vehicle for the reproduction of an imagined community can at times contradict the needs of the capitalist interests that usually stand behind the state, who (as was the case in both the US and West Germany in the late 1960s) were experiencing territorial limits to the expansion of accumulation.51 Further, the late 1960s also represented a moment of profound crisis for the Keynesian, regulatory nation state (more on this in a moment) that had seen profits and the capitalist share of wealth dwindle relative to workers’ economic power.52 Occupying the object (banknotes) where state power and capitalist circulation intersect was a crucial gesture for Beuys in his efforts to stimulate what I am calling the radical imagination. Finally, Beuys rightly identified money’s vulnerability at a moment when, as we saw in Chapter 1, its claims to accurately represent value were tenuous. Whereas at some mythical point (for liberal political economists, essentially the abstract moment immediately “after” barter was transcended) it is assumed that the correspondence of money-measured price and underlying socioeconomic value was relatively direct, by the late 1960s any such correspondence was dubious.53 The post-war monetary system, which pegged most global currencies to the US Dollar (whose fidelity to the gold standard would be severed in 1971), may have been functional for post-war European reconstruction, but was increasingly being manipulated and contested for geopolitical reasons, calling into question paper money’s power to accurately represent value, all the more tenuous in the wake of the OPEC-triggered oil crisis.54 Meanwhile, from a Marxist perspective, money’s value as an expression of the ability to command Socially Necessary Labour Time (SNLT) was being gravely shaken by the increasing complexity of the global capitalist system as well as the emergence and predominance (in West Germany and the US) of white-collar labor and the service sector which were certainly sites of exploitation, but which did not neatly fit into Marx’s nineteenth century categorizations.55

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All of these contradictions played into the success, and perhaps the motivation, of Beuys’s intervention. He capitalized on a historically specific ambient skepticism and seized capitalist money’s own essential qualities to make a distributed intervention that destabilized money’s own influence on the imagination to revalorize the imagination. In so doing, Beuys echoed and contributed to a broader moment of optimism toward the power of the imagination common to the New Left political movements and the period’s counterculture, which encouraged the radical imagination as a means to combat the conservative and establishmentarian idiom of the post-war capitalism.56

Institutions: Haacke Another West German artist (living and working in the US), Hans Haacke, likewise leveraged the contradictions of capitalist reproduction to produce incisive radical work.57 Haacke’s MoMA Poll is an early and influential part of what would, by the late 1980s, be identified as an art tendency toward “institutional critique,” where the artist calls conspic-

Figure 26  Hans Haacke, MOMA-Poll, 1970. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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uous attention to the ways broader systems of power are at work in the institutional environment of the gallery or museum, or in their work itself, or even in their own subjectivity as an artist.58 In this case, Haacke applied to a juried exhibition of works from emerging artists to present a piece that would encourage audience participation. At the time, this was a relatively new and provocative concept, though one that is now old hat and, as we shall see, almost compulsory. MoMA had become a popular recreational and educational destination, thanks in part to a growing educated urban middle class, in part to the rise of tourism and in part to the largess of the US government and capitalist class eager to promote the concept of Western “Modern Art” as part of a Cold War propaganda offensive.59 In Haacke’s proposed piece, MoMA visitors would be asked to cast a vote in a transparent YES or NO ballot box regarding a topical current event. But Haacke only revealed the question at the last minute: “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?” In addition to being scion to the Standard Oil and Chase Bank corporate empire, Nelson Rockefeller was a major New York and Washington Republican, a three-time candidate for the party’s presidential nomination and a frequent appointee to leading security and military committees under the Nixon administration, thanks in part to his long-time friendship with and support for White House National Security Advisor (and later Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger.60 Before taking up his public duties in Washington and Albany, Rockefeller had served as a long-time governor of the MoMA. At the time of Haacke’s poll both his brother and sister-in-law were trustees.61 The considerable pressure the Rockefellers and their allies collectively brought to bear was not sufficient to convince the curator to remove Haacke’s piece from the show, though it did lead to the curator’s dismissal several months later. Haacke meticulously kept records of the visitors to the museum and the piece, as well as the vote tallies. “YES” won handily. Haacke’s intervention was a candid and forthright attempt to set a trap for money that would force it to reveal itself as the sine qua non of the museum. It was also part of a series of actions that targeted MoMA during the Vietnam War and that sought to call attention to the complicity of art and culture in the reproduction of American capitalism and imperialism.62 Yet it was also a moment when “modern art” itself, as an institution writ large, developed an appetite for social critique, hence the inclusion of Haacke and other radical artists in the exhibition. Their ability to occupy that space and make their radical interventions was due

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to a set of contradictions in the institutional reproduction of capital that Haacke’s piece sought to illuminate. In the first place, as Haacke’s correspondent Pierre Bourdieu identifies, artistic taste is by no means a natural affair.63 Especially in the modern epoch, it is educated, refined and manipulated as a means to generate and accumulate cultural and social capital among the wealthy classes.64 As capitalism emerged in Europe (first in Italy, then Holland, then France and Britain), art too emerged as a distinct and secular category.65 Whereas previously art might have been embedded in religion or in the world of craft, as capitalism unfolded an emerging, wealthy bourgeois class developed an appetite for singular, commodifiable artworks whose purchase and collection could be pointed to as proof of intellectual and spiritual uplift. Ironically, it is precisely a class obsessed with and wrought from the worldly circulation of base money that demands artifacts that emerge, allegedly, from transcendental sphere of the romantic imagination. Art connoisseurship, organized around the acquisition of commodities and a series of public rituals (gallery-going, auctions, sponsoring museums, commissioning artworks, going to the best parties) become important to the social reproduction of the capitalist class.66 The rewards that the ruling classes obtain from collecting (modern) art are not only at the level of subjectivity and community (no doubt important). Sitting on the same museum boards or going to the same gala events offers otherwise competitive capitalists an opportunity to collaborate, make common cause, and form alliances and agreements in the interests of their class as a whole, something that can otherwise be difficult to orchestrate given that capitalism crucially depends on their competition with one another.67 Meanwhile, posing themselves as patrons of the arts and therefore facilitators of the higher human pursuits in some senses buys capitalists indemnity or absolution for the crimes of exploitation that begat their wealth. Further still, the canon of art, focused exclusively on the products of white European men, almost all from the elite class, creates a field of ideological legitimacy around this demographic’s right to rule everyone else; their monopolization of the narrative of artistic triumph as the apogee of human achievement justifies their supposedly benevolent rule over women, people of color, colonized populations and the working class.68 Finally, art collecting and connoisseurship offers a number of financial rewards. While art objects are notoriously illiquid assets they have long been used as vehicles for the circulation of capital, standing as collateral for loans or as significant components of the estates of the wealthy.69 Donations or loans of works to museums not only earns opportunities for self-congratulation

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and the admiration of one’s peers, it can also offer lucrative tax breaks and opportunities for tax fraud.70 And more generally, investment in the field of art (especially contemporary art) offers the wealthy a sort of para-financial game, a parody version of “real” markets, where one’s swollen psychosocial muscles of financial speculation get to stretch in a gymnasium of the imagination. All these motivations were certainly at play for the Rockefellers and helped shape the institutional ecology of MoMA in the early 1970s: since its founding by New York financiers in the 1920s the museum served their interests, which masqueraded as the interests of the public and of art writ large.71 But MoMA was unique in ways that are highly demonstrative: from its outset it was dedicated to collecting and showcasing the “modern” or “contemporary.”72 Whereas most large, well-heeled institutions earned their pedigree and prestige from acquiring unambiguous cultural treasures that have stood the test of time, MoMA (and many other institutions afterwards) staked its legitimacy (and the status of its donors and custodians) on celebrating the “new,” for its display of a properly financial acumen for identifying and seizing upon emerging potentials for future return.73 This obsession with “the new” had, of course, long been a feature of capitalist accumulation, especially in the realm of technology which might give a firm a competitive edge. But until the post-war period, it was generally only the high-risk bourgeois art collectors or institutions that would take a risk on novelty: legitimacy (for someone like early twentieth century financial magnate J.P. Morgan, who collected rare and ancient manuscripts) came from acquiring, collecting and “protecting” the great treasures of the past.74 With the rise of the Cold War and the efforts by the CIA to celebrate the work of living US artists (especially abstract expressionists) as the paragons of Western capitalist freedoms, support for the new and the modern accelerate, hence the interest of an establishment capitalist and politician like Rockefeller in the MoMA (rather than, say, exclusively in the more august and conservative Metropolitan Museum).75 By the late 1960s, as we have seen, artists had begun to realize and question their culpability in the reproduction of capitalism and imperialism, and also to seek to escape and reject the circuits of cultural capital and commodification that had begun to embrace them.76 Thus at the same moment that capitalism created new institutional frameworks for the collection and exhibition of modern and contemporary work, it also opened the door to forms of political and aesthetic radicalism diametrically opposed to it. This contradiction was only a particular reflection of a broader crisis of reproduction in the late 1960s, one in which all sorts of oppressed,

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subjugated and exploited populations were rebelling against the capitalist and imperialist system that they were being reproduced to serve.77 As the civil rights movement morphed into the Black Power movement, racialized subjects of empire rejected the reproduction of racial hierarchies in the institutions of prisons, law enforcement, schooling, health, housing and universities.78 Second-wave feminism and queer liberation likewise rejected the institutions of gender, marriage and sexuality that were central to the post-war mythos of middle-class suburban happiness.79 Students were rising up against conservative educational institutions. This was a moment where the bluff was called on the forms of “freedom” and “prosperity” promised as part of the post-war “deal” that (along with anti-communist “witch hunts” in the 1950s) had saved capitalism from collapse and uprising.80 Haacke’s intervention, then, capitalized on these contradictions not only to tweak the nose of power in its own temple, but also to suggest a new set of priorities for art: politically engaged, participatory, explicitly challenging to social norms, even at times purposefully aesthetically ugly. His is a reflection of and a contribution to a more widespread revolt within and against social institutions of the reproduction of capitalism that insist they serve the reproduction of radical democracy. More broadly, Haacke’s interventions resonated with the contradictions of a moment in which once-conservative institutions, intended to produce the next generation of capitalist and state functionaries and their enablers, began to produce radicalized subjects eager to seize upon the arsenal of liberal and humanist legitimations and turn them against the old guard. While not necessarily directly ruled by a monetary logic, museums, universities and other liberal cultural institutions revealed themselves to be the site of the reproduction of class and its privileges. Artists and activists, seizing on the relative autonomy those institutions provided, sought to experiment with transforming them toward the reproduction of other possibilities.

Social life: Lee Lozano Finally, we turn to the work of Lee Lozano, a pathbreaking and enigmatic figure in the history of feminist and conceptual art. Central to Lozano’s practice were experimental pieces of interactive, durational performance art, based on a set of brief, strict instructions to herself or perhaps to others.81 Paradigmatic is her 1969 Cash Piece, also known as Real Money Piece, whose physical trace takes the form of pages of her notebook that begin with the following instructions

Figure 27  Lee Lozano, Untitled (Party/Paranoia, Painting, Real Money), 1969. Photo: Allen Phillips. Courtesy of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, CT).

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NOTE: AT BEGINNING OF THIS PIECE THE JAR CONTAINS BILLS OF $5, $10, $20, ABOUT $585’S WORTH, COILED IN TWO OR THREE PACKETS AROUND THE INSIDE OF THE JAR, UNBOUND. THE MONEY COMES FROM ROLFE RICKE FROM SALE OF PAINTING “SWITCH.” OFFER TO GUESTS COFFEE, DIET PEPSI, BOURBON, GLASS OF HALF AND HALF, ICE WATER, GRASS, AND MONEY. OPEN JAR OF REAL MONEY AND OFFER IT TO GUESTS LIKE CANDY. (APR 4, 69) These instructions to herself (and to perhaps other, future artists wishing to replicate the piece) are followed by a day-by-day journal of the results of the experiment from 4 April to 9 July 1969, documenting the divergent responses of her studio’s visitors, friends and other artists to the piece. These responses range from whimsical to avaricious, from mirthful to furious. On April 27 “Kaltenbach takes all the money out of the jar when I offer it, examines all the money & puts it all back in jar. Says he doesn’t need money now.” On May 1 “Warren C. Ingersoll refused. He got very upset about my ‘attitude towards money.’” On May 23 “Paula Davies and Marilyn Learner drop in unexpectedly. Neither take any [money] but Paula says later she was ‘controlling herself.’” On June 6 “Alan Saret visits again & makes a Piece of the money which is now in two piles on the floor, each shaped similarly to a ‘footstep’ by folding & molding to his hand. It looks good like that & I’m gonna leave it on the floor for a while.” “Real Money Piece” emerged several month after/into Lozano’s “General Strike” piece within which she gave herself the instructions to: GRADUALLY BUT DETERMINEDLY AVOID BEING PRESENT AT OFFICIAL OR PUBLIC “UPTOWN” FUNCTIONS OR GATHERINGS RELATED TO THE “ART WORLD” IN ORDER TO PURSUE INVESTIGATIONS OF TOTAL PERSONAL AND PUBLIC REVOLUTION. EXHIBIT IN PUBLIC ONLY PIECES WHICH FURTHER SHARING OF IDEAS & INFORMATION RELATED TO TOTAL PERSONAL AND PUBLIC REVOLUTION. It came several months before her more extreme, cryptic and ultimately self-destructive Decide to Boycott Women piece (in which she refused to communicate at all with women) and Dropout Piece (in which she essentially severed not only all ties to the art world but also sought to break herself of all artistic habits, often with the assistance of alcohol and powerful narcotics). 1969 was arguably the height of Lozano’s career by conventional measurements, culminating the following year in a career-defining solo show at New York’s Whitney Museum. It preceded a

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period from 1972–81 when she essentially disappeared and after which she did not exhibit art or communicate with almost anyone outside her family until her death in 1999.82 While feminist art and art criticism, as a recognized genre connected to wider feminist movements, was not to emerge until slightly later in the 1970s, Lozano was among a number of female-identified artists who made gender, sexuality and the body central to a radical art practice.83 In so doing, she adopted and implicitly (sometimes explicitly) critiqued the masculinist trends and themes in performance, conceptual and minimalist art, all of which had emerged in the 1960s (and prior) as approaches by which to avoid and critique the increasing commodification and imperialist uses of American post-war contemporary object-based art.84 For Lozano, a “total personal and public revolution” perhaps meant more than just an avowed solidarity to particular causes or groups and also more than creating propaganda for a cause. It appeared to imply a brutally rigorous personal practice of reflexively interrogating power as it worked through everyday life, social intercourse, habitual patterns, evaluative expectations and the gendered body. Hence, we can identify Lozano’s work as a sort of militant research on the field of social reproduction, and an almost desperate seeking out of the often painful yet fruitful contradictions therein. In that sense, Lozano here transforms herself into a kind of test pilot or experimental subject to explore the extreme implications of life in a patriarchal capitalist world. Here, Lozano fruitfully if self-destructively inhabits the subjectivity of the tragic artist whose uncompromising if untimely passion and drive makes them into the sacrificial offering of capitalism, denied the means of (healthy) personal, bodily and social reproduction. In Real Money Piece Lozano uses money to address these themes and challenges, avoiding more theoretical, philosophical or conventionally “political” approaches to currency and, instead, isolating it as a social medium. I use the term both in the sense of something that mediates human social affairs (see Chapter 1), creating striations and complications within the field of relationships, affects and perceptions and also in the sense of an artistic medium, a set of materials of creative expression. Lozano’s quasi-scientific isolation of cash as the “independent variable” in a series of anthropological experiments makes visible its typically invisible (though certainly widely felt) impact and influence on social relationality. Such a piece worked in part because it revealed that, behind the embattled camaraderie of the New York radical art “scene” lay vast inequalities: Lozano herself constantly struggled economically, in

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part because she was an experimental and radical artist fundamentally opposed to commodification; in part because gender oppression militated against her success even amongst the wider field of similar artists. Meanwhile, many of the visitors to her studio were wealthy collectors and benefactors, and some artist friends were also enjoying some degree of monetary success or inherited wealth. So the piece revealed the otherwise overlooked or taboo fault lines in terms of individuals’ relationship with money within the cultural milieu. More profoundly, Real Money Piece illuminated the role of money in social reproduction more broadly. Lozano’s own financial difficulties as a divorcee living alone in New York spoke directly to the reliance of women on men’s access to (higher) wages and desirable, well-paying occupations. While money was still off-limits as a topic of polite conversation—even in the more radical realms of the art world—it continued to structure and delimit social relationships. Offering money “like candy” to visitors not only undermined its fetishistic value, it also transfigured a token of competition into a sacrament of the gift, undercutting the conventional logic of money and, instead, setting the scene for a very different social interaction. At work here is the tension between money as the earthly representative of capitalist circulation and money as a medium of daily life. From a conventionally economic perspective, money’s only role is to mediate commerce in the public sphere, to act as a measure and token of value. Yet as we know, money also has multiple uses and resonances in the private sphere as a cipher or surrogate for deeper, interpersonal and cultural values.85 For Lozano, a “total personal and public revolution” would then require interrogating money as both the medium of capital’s reproduction in circulation and the medium of social reproduction, not only questioning its power to orchestrate productive labor in the public sphere but also reproductive labor in the private. While it is difficult to find data to validate such a claim, numerous anecdotes from art world insiders I spoke with while researching this book confirm that little has changed in this regard in the intervening years since Lozano’s experiments. The art world, which must always proclaim itself to be a meritocracy, is afloat in inherited or relational wealth which allows some artists and other art professionals to attend leading schools and/or focus on their chosen projects full time while others from less affluent backgrounds must work, usually in exploitative conditions, to make ends meet. The results of this situation include the difficult to verify but widely acknowledged condition in which money, via the circuits of ruling class social reproduction, further shapes the political economy of art: the sons, daughter, husbands, wives and other

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relatives of the rich are often, thanks to their access to time and resources (or simply social and cultural capital), able to in various ways set the aesthetic, political and discursive tenor of the age. As one might well imagine, access to these tangible and intangible resources is highly racialized, and success in the art world remains highly gendered. 86

dawning financialization The work of the three radical artists covered in the previous section help illuminate the contradictions and crises that, on the one hand, were caused by and provided opportunities for social and artistic movements and, on the other, triggered systemic transformations in the nature of capitalism. These changes have gone under a number of names, all of which can be fruitfully though not exhaustively associated with 1973, a fateful year, less than two years after Nixon severed the US dollar from the gold standard, which I have chosen here to associate with financialization.87 For our purposes, let us review three seismic intertwined changes that followed 1973 in each of the three spheres of reproduction: derivatives in the realm of reproduction through circulation, neoliberalism in the realm of the reproduction of social institutions, and cognitive capitalism in the realm of the reproduction of social life. As alluded to in the introduction to this chapter, there is a substantial hazard in electing to frame financialization as a periodizing concept and additionally to trying to peg it to a specific year. The difficulty with periodization stems from at least two interrelated factors. First, like money itself, the elemental components of “finance” (in terms of conjectural economic instruments like futures contracts or forms of fiscal insurance) in some ways predate capitalism. Also like money, finance takes on a unique form and is structurally necessary within capitalism. Financial institutions and forms including leveraged speculative investment, complex insurance contracts and autonomous joint stock corporations have always been part of capitalism and helped that system grow. At various moments, what we now call the FIRE sector has risen to prominence and even predominance over other sectors of the capitalist economy. Second and related, such continuities then make it difficult to pinpoint a “start date” for financialization. My focus on 1973, then, is not meant to mark an epochal rift but rather a particularly telling moment when, for reasons I will detail below, we can observe as if in the flash of a camera, a set of intertwined and sometimes contradictory changes either already underway or still germinating, though soon to emerge.

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Derivatives On the level of the circulation of capital, 1973 represents the year in which Fischer Black and Myron Scholes published their famous article outlining a formula for the pricing of derivatives products, a mathematical and theoretical development that was to fundamentally transform the financial realm, and indeed the whole global economy.88 The impacts and process in this case are too varied and complex to give full justice here (we will revisit some of them in Chapter 4), but essentially this development, along with advances in computing and network technology, allowed finance to escape the realm of physical trading floors and conventional investment and, by the 1990s, emerge as a vast, globe-spanning interconnected structure of algorithmic speculative gambles, dominated by a handful of technologically-augmented corporations, investment banks and hedge funds.89 Allegedly and initially devised as a set of techniques for managing and diffusing investment risks, the derivative was to become the central conceptual and fiscal architecture of a financialized age, representing a highly tailored exposure to risk that enabled the ever finer decomposition and rebundling of investments into new speculative vehicles.90 Among other things, the Black-Scholes formula was part of, and also helped enable, the acceleration of transnational financial flows and the increasing mobility of dematerialized capital, leading to the growth of global supply-chains, global brands, transnational corporations and a suite of other forces and transformations associated with “globalization.”91 Insightful here is the work of Randy Martin who suggests that financialization emerged as a means by which capitalism adapted to respond to movements for decolonization that had largely succeeded by 1973 in destabilizing the older world system.92 On the one hand, Martin has in mind the anti-colonial struggles of the Third World and the ways in which the domineering rigidities of formal direct colonialism came to be replaced by the neocolonial politics of indirect debt domination, sabotaged “development” and covert “counterinsurgency.” Beginning in the 1950s but accelerating in the ’70s and ’80s, a global amorphous financial apparatus (not coincidentally headquartered in the capitals of the world’s colonial powers), along with transnational institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, replaced the prohibitively costly methods of old-fashioned capitalist imperialism while offering (the illusion of) self rule, yet still, ultimately, enriching the former colonizers and maintaining colonial relations of dependency.93 Meanwhile, however, Martin is also concerned with the “decolonization”

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Figure 28  Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, 2004. Installation view at Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre, Denmark. Photo: Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre. Courtesy of the artist. The Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, whose name is a pun on the revolutionary Black-Scholes-(Merton) formula that unleashed the modern derivative (“shoal” deriving from an Old English word for multitude), was an art installation originally intended to ornament a restaurant next to the Stock Exchange in the City of London. The artists describe it thus: “each traded company is represented by a star, flickering and glowing as shares are traded. The stars slowly drift in response to the complex currents of the market, while outlining shapes of different industries and the huge multinational conglomerates like the signs of the zodiac. The movement of the stocks is based on calculated correlations between the histories of each stock and those of its near neighbors. The stronger the correlation between the histories of the stock prices of any two companies, the more powerful the gravitational attraction between them. Although they start out randomly distributed in the planetarium, over time the stars clot together and drift into slowly changing constellations, nebulae and clusters. Through this technique different industries naturally start to emerge as galaxies. Any general disturbance in a section of the market will have a visible effect on the sky—the collapse of Enron, for instance, would have caused a sort of black hole—all the companies affected would glow very brightly due to the level of trading and would be pulled in to a single point in a very powerful vortex.”

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of the lifeworld and the body demanded by youth and marginalized people within those colonizing countries with the rise of so-called “New Social Movements” (racial justice, feminism, student, queer, counterculture, etc.). Financialization emerged as a means by which capitalism adapted and transformed to encompass, divide and co-opt these struggles by offering a more flexible, adaptive and personalized capitalism tolerant of various modalities of personalized reproduction. And where real wages (adjusted for inflation) have stagnated since the early 1970s, personal debt has fueled the expansion of consumerism and the production of new financialized subjectivities.94 For a number of scholars, the arrival of the derivative is part and parcel of a massive shift where circulation ceases to be the means by which surplus value under capitalism is realized and, instead, becomes a means by which it (or its proxy) is generated.95 In previous moments, the financial apparatus of capitalism served to provide liquidity to markets to ensure the circulation of commodities that allows for value of exploited labor time to be realized as profit. For instance, finance can extend credit to a retailer to purchase the products of a garment factory in advance of generating revenue from their retail sale to customers. The owner of the factory then can “realize” the surplus value embodied in the garments without waiting or gambling on their eventual sale, and so reinvest (re-circulate) that capital immediately. The incentive for the lending institution is, ultimately, to get a cut of the ultimate surplus value extracted in the form of the interest they charge the retailer. But in any case, ultimately the whole apparatus serves to facilitate circulation in the ultimate interests of the sustenance and expansion of capitalist exploitation. By contrast, the advent of the modern derivative, and the broader shift toward financialization it portends, marks a shift in this logic. The circulation of money appears to become an end unto itself. Financialized speculation ultimately seeks to generate wealth external to any necessary change in the underlying capitalist economy. For some, this signifies a fundamental shift in the nature of value under capitalism.96 For others, this is a new take on the same story of financialization from bygone eras: ultimately all value derives from exploited labor power in the form of realized surplus value.97 While the financial economy may grow and grow, piling speculation on speculation, sooner or later, and usually with extreme social violence, there comes a reckoning, the closing of what I have elsewhere called the “imaginative gap” between the financial flights of fancy emblematized by the derivative and the real-world exploitative capacities of capitalism.98

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Neoliberalism This financial shift was enabled and helped drive a transformation on the level of the reproduction of institutions toward the policies and ideologies associated with neoliberalism. While free-market alternatives to the Keynesian norm had long been proposed, 1973 provided a perfect opportunity for advocates to test their theories on a controlled population when the US sponsored a military coup in Chile that installed the pro-market dictator Augusto Pinochet to power. Pinochet’s American advisors “strongly suggested” he employ the students of University of Chicago free-market guru Milton Friedman, who were invited to oversee a wave of deregulations, privatizations and trade “liberalizations” there were to be the prototypes of neoliberalism, which would become globally hegemonic over the next three decades in both the Third World and the First.99 In addition to the market-oriented policy, neoliberalism also represents a restructuring of the values, measurements and protocols of public and private institutions toward the ideals of market-driven efficiency, instrumentalism, outsourcing and streamlining and institutional risk management.100 More generally, neoliberalism has overseen the elevation of individual ambition, competition and self-promotion to cardinal virtues and compulsory survival strategies.101 Vitally, as Martin argues, financialized neoliberalism represented a means by which capitalism transformed itself to attend to the demands and struggles of workers and others in the 1960s and early 1970s.102 The history of neoliberalism and financialization cannot be disentangled. Among the key tenets of neoliberal thought is that the dawn of globally interconnected markets requires a revolutionary transformation of the economic role of the state away from striving to provide social and economic security for citizens toward securitizing a competitive economic environment to attract and retain investment.103 Financial firms were key advocates for neoliberal policies and ideologies, and conversely, neoliberal policies including tax cuts and trade liberalization made nation states increasingly dependent on financial firms as they ran larger and larger deficits. This dependency in turn allowed “markets” to exert greater neoliberal pressure on state policies toward yet greater market dependency, privatization, deregulation and austerity. Further still, this modality of global financial discipline itself had a kind of trickle down effect throughout public institutions as financialized state actors demanded public institutions and bureaucracies imported financialized models of governance and administration, increasing the use of performance metrics and metaphors that oriented these institutions toward

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Figure 29  Blake Fall-Conroy, Minimum Wage Machine, 2008–10 and 2012. Photograph by Christine Elfman. Courtesy of the artist. This art-machine is programmed to allow the user to work for minimum wage: turning the crank releases pennies at a rate calibrated to the current minimum wage in the jurisdiction in which the machine is installed. For instance: one penny every 4.00 seconds, representing the $9.00 per hour minimum wage in New York State in 2016. The machine has also been exhibited (and recalibrated to reflect the minimum wage) in Canada and Europe

increased economic “performance” in the name of fiscal responsibility.104 In this sense, neoliberalism represents, as Pierre Bourdieu argued, the waning of the relative autonomy of state and non-state social institutions that was the problematic residue of decades of working class and social struggle.105 For Massimo de Angelis, neoliberalism then represents a whole new cycle of struggles against the proliferation of measurements used to quantify nearly every field and sphere of social life, the better to discipline them through market integration.106

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Cognitive capitalism Relatedly, neoliberal financialization has also overseen a shift on the level of social reproduction which can be associated with a number of terms: cognitive capitalism or capitalism’s “new spirit”.107 This shift is dated to 1973 as the apex of a global cycle of struggles.108 From these perspectives, capitalism responded to the critiques, crises and rebellions of workers in the 1960s by adopting a more flexiblized, individualized and diversified field of opportunities and exploitations. In tandem with the deindustrialization of the Global North, and the rise of new communication and production technologies, the notion and the reality of the “mass workers” and mass social institutions gave way to an archipelago of sites of consumption and labor as well as a shift toward forms of employment that are increasingly “precarious”: short-term, part-time, contract-based.109 Reaching its apotheosis in today’s platform-mediated “gig economy,” the new model worker is not the life-long blue-collar “company man” but, ironically enough, the flighty artist whose allergy to long-term fixed relationships allows them to design their own career based on talent and passion.110 The shift toward this new form of capitalism has equally demanded shifts on the level of social reproduction, subjectivity and everyday life. Increases in consumerism make up for the decay of social institutions, collective forms of insurance (such as those provided by community cohesion and the welfare state) and compulsory labor mobility.111 The aforementioned rise of the service sector is both a numeric reality, with more and more tasks related to the reproduction of social life privatized and made into commodities, and a general condition: even “productive” labor is seen as a “service” to be rented.112 Yet these transformations have required the cultivation of a new wardrobe of subjectivities that encourage each of us to address ourselves as competitive entrepreneurs who see all aspects of our lives as a portfolio of assets to be leveraged for future payback, from friendships to hobbies to physical attractiveness to educational attainment.113 A key vector and manifestation of the financialization of social reproduction is, as Silvia Federici points out, the massive expansion of consumer debt, an expansion generated as individuals increasingly took on the costs of social reproduction following the rolling back of the welfare state.114 As George Caffentzis and Andrew Ross note, debt functions as a distributed form of discipline that produces pliant (precarious) workers for global capitalism.115 For Maurizzio Lazzarato, the reign of debt signals a fundamental shift in capitalist organization toward the harnessing and cultivation of financialized subjectivities.116

New York-based artist Constantina Zavitsanos made two contributions to “The Great Ephemeral,” a 2015 exhibition at New York’s New Museum that responded to the “speculative nature of the global market.”   In Sweepstakes Zavitsanos placed pre-paid Visa gift cards, representing unspecified amounts of money (ranging randomly from $25–$500), on a plinth in the museum’s busy, publicly accessible lobby. A didactic note explained that a new card would be offered daily for “participation,” with an additional card on offer Thursday evenings, when the gallery offered free admission. The funds on the card represented a fraction of the $18 million settlement for a decade-long class action law suit against the New York Police Department for wrongful arrests at a 2004 demonstration against the Iraq war, for which Zavitsanos was among the 1,200 successful plaintiffs. Protesters were subject to mass arrests and held (without charge) in a highly toxic temporary facility. Photos: Park McArthur, Andy Robert, Sadia Shirazi.

Figure 30  Constantina Zavitsanos, Sweepstakes, 2015. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist.

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These conditions, by and large, accelerated into the mid-2000s, when capitalist triumphalism reached a fevered pitch. For our purposes, these transformations represent a fundamental shift in the logic of each of the three spheres of reproduction under capitalism, but also their collapsing into one another. Whereas in the later ’60s and early ’70s it may have been possible for artists to isolate or intervene in one or another of these arenas, in recent years it has become hard to imagine, for instance, a social institution that isn’t, on the one hand, dependent on or structured by the global circulation of capital and, on the other, transformative of the sphere of social reproduction and subjectivity. Likewise, any such institution would also be dependent to some extent on the financialization of social reproduction and subjectivity, and in turn, in its way, be part of the reproduction of the global circulation of capital. For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, adapting a classical Marxist term for new purposes, ours is a moment of the “real subsumption” (and opposed to

Figure 31  Constantina Zavitsanos, 1737/1921/2010 (It was what I wanted now), 2015. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist. Also in the exhibition, Zavitsanos’s work 1737/1921/2010 (it was what I wanted now) took the form of a floor-to-ceiling fortified stack of standard 8.5x11'' sheets of paper, representing the artist’s debt, from deep in the past to well into the future. Some of the pages, organized chronologically toward the ceiling, represented a day in the artist’s future, bearing the inscription of her outstanding student debt and the projected interest for the coming 22 years, by which time it ought to be repaid. Other pages represented documents and calculations of the artist and her ancestors’ past debts, including a shipping contract from a 1737 voyage that bore one of her ancestors to Virginia as punishment for a legal infraction.

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the formal subsumption) of society to capitalism, wherein the system shifts away from merely the generation of surplus value and toward what they call “biopolitical production,” that is the production of life itself.117 Transmuted into the discourse of reproduction we have employed here, capitalism under neoliberal financialization is not satisfied merely to ensure the reproduction of capital’s circulation by subordinating social institutions and social reproduction to this end, yet providing them some relative autonomy. Rather, today’s capitalism blends and integrates all three spheres of reproduction in complex and shifting new ways.

three artists after financialization In future chapters we will explore in more detail the precise ways in which financialization has transformed both the institutions and practices of the field we associate with art. Here I want to begin to map out these transformations by exploring the work of three artists working in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis along the three axes of reproduction explored above. By contrasting their strategies to those employed by their predecessors I wager we can bring to glimpse the changed politics of the imagination that we must today contend with.

Social life: geheimagentur In 2012, the amorphous German art and theatre ensemble geheimagentur (“secret agents” or “secret agency”) placed a modified white shipping container in the center of the insolvent former coal-mining city of Oberhausen.118 Stripped by global financial flows of its fossil-fuel livelihood, the city has experienced a significant economic and social crisis in recent years, manifested in the denudation of the once-thriving downtown core of business and vitality. geheimagentur’s shipping container was not only a grim monument to the forces of global standardization and the financially fueled logistic industry which had so stripped Oberhausen of its prosperity, it also contained the Schwarzbank (“Black Bank,” a pun on the identification of dubious financial institutions in the 2008 financial crisis) distributing the Kohle (or coal—also a common slang euphemism for money in German since the industrial revolution), a new unit of local currency. For the duration of the project, the Schwarzbank would offer Kohle to citizens who promised to perform any activity they believed would enhance the vitality and contribute to the value of their community: for instance, taking care of children, cleaning the streets, running errands for the elderly, or simply taking a nice private walk. geheimagentur

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Figure 32  The shipping container containing geheimagentur’s Schwarzbank in Oberhausen, here with a banner from the Banco del Palmas in Fortaleza, Brazil which inspired the project, bearing the Portuguese inscription “Welcome to the solidarity economy neighbourhood.”

negotiated with local business, social services and other commercial and public institutions to accept Kohle for certain goods and services (a daily lunch special, candy, admission to certain cinema presentations, etc.), thus creating what might be termed a temporary parallel currency aimed less at fundamentally and permanently replacing fiat legal tender and more at opening a critical interval in an urban space otherwise seemingly destined for economic oblivion. Schwarzbank revealed the play of other, non-commercial values at work within the terrain of urban social reproduction that, in spite of usually going unsung and unrewarded, are vital to the reproduction of cities and communities.119 By creating a functioning parallel currency, geheimagentur revalidated the forms of labor that are the bedrock of the reproduction of the capitalist order but that can usually find no value within it, especially in economically depressed zones. Importantly, geheimagentur imported to the “first world” a suite of techniques from the “third,” basing their currency on that of the Banco Palmas, a community bank established by social movements in the Favela of Conjunto Palmeiras in Fortaleza, Brazil as an attempt to prevent capital from fleeing precarious communities. Banco Palmas has been cited in international reports as a praiseworthy social enterprise and microcredit institution for its success at managing the accounts of

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small local lenders and borrowers and providing capital and liquidity to grassroots ventures.120 In spite of the very real risks of such initiatives being vectors of bottom-up neoliberal restructuring and the exploitation of the micro-financed, Banco Palmas’ particular successes and challenges are secondary to their importance for Schwartzbank.121 Staging an opportunity for the notoriously fiscally prudent Germans to learn “financial literacy” and financial acumen from the Global South reversed a colonial narrative that had helped elevate the German banking sector (notably Deutschebank) to global preeminence.122 Meanwhile, the lessons of Banco Palmas offered useful correctives to the all-too-common narratives of economic rationality that otherwise preoccupy the imaginary that concerns the reproduction of finance at the level of everyday life. Banco Palmas, for instance, expects and celebrates that customers will be constantly trying to cheat their systems and also reflexively designs its currencies to facilitate the diverse financial behaviors of its users, including gifts, barter and semi-barter exchanges, superstitions and, most importantly, the capacity to cooperate in the common interest on shared projects. Here, geheimagentur picks up on the questions of devalued and secret labor opened up by Lozano’s work, not only taking seriously the value of reproductive labor by opening it up to remuneration and recognition within capitalism, but crafting a public ritual for recognizing and rewarding its value. Further, the art collective draws upon and subverts the present-day enthusiasm for art as a vehicle for urban economic salvation. In the mid-2000s, following the meteoric rise of Richard Florida’s bestsellers on the value of the so-called “creative class,” and thanks to a variety of allied urban planning and state policy orientations that saw “culture” (in all that term’s magnificent generality) as the key to economic growth in post-industrial landscapes, the arts were increasingly turned to as the catalyst for urban renewal.123 Since the 1980s, critics and urban activists have noted the way that artists seeking low rents and studio space have represented the unwitting “shock troops of gentrification,” moving into less affluent and racialized neighborhoods and displacing original inhabitants, before themselves being displaced by even wealthier professionals, had been extant.124 By the 2000s this pattern had been incorporated into official government policy.125 And whereas in general public arts budgets had been slashed in the name of neoliberal efficiency, it was hard to find a city in the Global North (or, increasingly, in the Global South) that was not investing in an “arts hub” or rebranding itself as “the next” hotspot on the global cultural frontier. geheimagentur’s project’s success depended in part on this global milieu, where a city like Oberhausen, having abandoned all hope of an

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economic recovery using any conventional tools of economic development, would be keen to allow artists to try their hand.126 Rather than promise that Schwarzbank would attract the creative class or national or foreign investment, geheimagentur’s bank and its activities resolutely focused on celebrating and sharing the inherent wealth and abundance already at hand in the community itself. In this sense, as in Beuys’ use of legal tender, the Kohle acted as a vehicle for economic exchange as well as social meaning making, opening onto the shared creative potential of the economic actors. These themes are also present in several of geheimagentur’s other projects, or projects by its active members. Notable in this regard is the Fundus Theatre’s Kinderbank initiative in Hamburg, a comparatively wealthier German city (and the country’s largest port), though one riven by stark inequalities. Working in a poorer and racialized neighborhood, Fundus’s (which shares several members with geheimagentur) Kinderbank created a currency for the exclusive use by elementary school children. The currency, that the children named “100 Adventures” could be exchanged for designated goods and services at local businesses. The process of minting the currency took place in democratic assemblies attended by both the participating children and business owners, where they debated and negotiated their interests in limiting or expanding the supply.127 At stake here are the politics of a moment Nancy Fraser characterizes as the crisis of care, wherein the reproduction of capitalism, in certain zones and for certain populations, begins to endanger the potential for the reproduction of social life.128 While Fraser’s approach is generally one that supports the restoration of the welfare state as a means to provide equitable and reliable forms of (fairly remunerated) care labor, there is another approach that, while not entirely abandoning the struggles against neoliberalism, understands reproductive labor as a terrain of activism, advocating radical, grassroots practices of social reproduction as a platform for radical social change.129 geheimagentur’s field of action is the crisis of care as it affects the forgotten or “sacrifice” zones of global capitalism. But to what extent can art actually provide or stimulate the forms of care, or catalyze and sustain the forms of reproductive labor, necessary when the money runs out? Should this be art’s task?

Institutions: Gough Turning to the sphere of the reproduction of institutions, we once again examine a work at the cusp of radical participatory art and institutional critique, but this time one that intervenes at conferences and events

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Figure 33  Zachary Gough, Bourdieux, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.

dedicated to this very topic. On three occasions in 2014 Zach Gough, a Canadian social practice artist (see Chapter 3), orchestrated a demonstrative game played with the Bourdieux, an invented currency, at key gatherings of fellow social practice artists and researchers in New York, Melbourne and Portland (Oregon). The rules were as follows: At the beginning, the currency is distributed in correlation with the hierarchies present at the conference: keynotes get the most, presenters and panelists get lots, artists get some, attendees get just a bit, and the general public get none at all. People are invited to exchange the currency for information and items of social value in whatever way they see fit. Email addresses, ideas, inspiration, influence, contact information, inside jokes, URL links, website coordinates, pdfs are bought, sold and traded with Bourdieux. Participants are encouraged to discuss how they generate power in an art context, who accumulates social capital in socially engaged art works. At the end of the conference, participants use their accumulated wealth of Bourdieux to bid in an auction for prizes rich in social capital. Like Lozano, Gough is using money (or its proxy) to create an artificial ritual that reveals the underlying rituals of value, commodification and

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neoliberal subject formation germane to a financialized moment. Gough continues: The project aims to reveal the economy of social and cultural capital already present within the discipline and at conferences for socially engaged art. It also shows how our economies of power mimic or operate under similar rules to our financial economy. Further, the project presents currency as an abstracted representation of our social relationships and explores the danger of quantifying value. Gough’s intervention resonates with recent commentary from institutional-critique pioneer Andrea Fraser that calls even critical and radical art to task for its participation in financialization. In the face of the Occupy movement and the specter of so many critical artists declaring fidelity to, or creating work reflecting, the struggle against the proverbial 1%, Fraser systematically explores how the art world from which such work emerges and within which it circulates is saturated by the money and influence of the financial subclass.130 It’s not simply that financiers (or those enriched by financial wealth) represent the lion’s share of art collectors and continue to monopolize the boards of art museums, galleries, institutions and funding bodies. It is that this funding, and the entanglements of the “art world” with high finance, exert a gravitational pull on all manner of artistic institutions and initiatives, including those that avowedly (often hyperbolically) seek to reject and escape this influence. The history of twentieth century art shows us that yesterday’s abject “outsiders” are today’s art world innovators and the creators of tomorrow’s most desirable commodities.131 The eventual commodification and marketization of feminist, performance and conceptual art stands as evidence that the structure of the art market is a reflection of the broader financialized markets, which are constantly seeking out the fringes, the new, the frontier, the bleeding edge as an opportunity for future returns.132 As with finance in the age of the derivative, in which financial techniques can be used to cultivate value based on conjectural gambles on not-immediately-commodifiable processes (the weather, for instance), the art world/market need not directly commodify an artwork or art practice to derive value from it. For instance, provocative performances and interventions are regularly commissioned by major galleries and dealers at transnational art fairs as a means to generate a buzz and attract attention to the art for sale, or simply to add to the prestige of the gallery or contribute to the broader mood.133 More elliptically, performances, conceptual works and interventions can be sponsored, curated and cultivated in ways that increase the symbolic capital of funders,

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curators, museum directors and even activists who can be lauded for their daring, their foresight and their courage.134 More generally, the critical fringes of art ultimately though often inadvertently help legitimate the entire field by driving forward (and being driven forward) by the insatiable hunger for contemporaneity. To note this neoliberal turn, where even the non-commodified, dematerialized artwork and art workers are conscripted, is not, however, to suggest that this completely exhausts all radical art’s other values. Like Beuys, Gough’s gesture here is not cynical and derisive: it is compassionate and yearns for transformation. It does not call for the abandonment of the genre but rather the refinement of strategies. As we have seen, part of art’s enduring appeal to capital and to capitalists stems from its constant promise to escape or transcend the forms of capitalism that are the conditions of its emergence. Yet the reality is that art and money have always been entangled, and these entanglements are becoming trickier, more complicated and more contradictory as financialization transforms the nature of money and the nature of art. While Gough’s game/ritual may be uncomfortable and may also feel profane, it calls its participants together to hone their strategic imagination and focus their political lens. As Claire Bishop, among others, has noted, the turn toward “participation” and interactivity in contemporary art since the 1970s (already exhibited in the work of Beuys, Haacke and Lozano) is equally the product of, on the one hand, artistic radicalism seeking to break down the hierarchies between artist and audience and, on the other, a neoliberal tendency toward the consumption of experience and demands that art be “accessible” for the consumption of broad publics.135 As we shall see in the next chapter, for Bishop, “participation” is all too often uncritically accepted as a political virtue in and of itself and in ways that render opaque the increasingly participatory imperatives of a form of cognitive capitalism that demand each of us become “active” participants in our own self management. Hence, for “participatory” art to actually be politically expedient it needs to be more cunning in the way it engages with a financialized moment where money is no longer an alien power threatening art’s virtuous chastity but, rather, an integral element of art’s (even radical art’s) conditions of emergence. Gough’s piece, then, offers not simply a cynical trap but a collective exercise in the radical imagination. In this sense it resonates with the broader corpus of his often-collaborative work, which focuses on cultivating opportunities such as the Radical Imagination Gymnasium, the Commoner’s Almanac or the Precarious Workers of the World Songbook. The latter explicitly draws on the legacy

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of the militant autonomous union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), to encourage artists to understand themselves also as workers: yes, subjects of capital, though also bearing a particular sets of skills, aptitudes and potentials that might reveal radical opportunities to exit capitalist relations or generate resistance at its weakest points. At stake in Gough’s intervention is the curious proposition that, within financialized social institutions (which is to say, practically all social institutions), the artist figures not as the unruly malcontent, but as the model worker. As McRobbie noted over a decade ago, the artist has come to signify the flexibilized, adaptable, passion-driven and enthusiastically precarious subject of a neoliberal age where long-term, secure employment is replaced with a relentless “gig economy” even for manual and service sector workers.136 The new romance of the artist as the idealized worker goes beyond the exaltation of their creative freedom and devil-may-care lifestyle; it also has something to do with their capacity to gain a virtuosic quasi-anthropological vantage on the workplace, its codes of value, hierarchies and customs—all the better to navigate an individualized path of self-maximization. Gough’s work implicitly questions how such aptitudes might be used otherwise, toward the sabotage or subversion of such institutions in the name of other values.

Circulation: Güell and collaborators In 2015, the Catalan artist Nuria Güell, working with the Cuban artist Levi Orta, received an exhibition invitation from a publicly-funded arts institution which they used to start a tax haven in Panama. The action took place amidst a set of tax avoidance scandals in Catalonia and Spain involving prominent political figures and members of the Spanish royal family. The revelations were especially scandalous because of these politicians’ support for the hyper-neoliberal regime of austerity forced upon Spain in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Eurozone crisis, which led to unprecedented rates of home foreclosures, as well as cuts to public services, skyrocketing rates of unemployment and draconian measures to silence and quash dissent.137 Güell and Orta approached a prominent Barcelona private business school whose neoliberal orientation was well known and whose faculty had been key advisors to the indicated politicians, requesting a consultation regarding how to secure the legal services to establish a tax haven that would allow them to embezzle public arts funding in a secret account. Having established the account, one year later Güell and Orta then offered use of the tax haven to a Catalonian network of cooperatives

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Figure 34  Nuria Güell and Levi Orta, Arte Político Degenerado, 2014. Stock certificate. Courtesy of the artists.

and anti-capitalist enterprises, suggesting that they find methods for exploiting the legal impunity and anonymity the offshore accounts offered as a means of rejecting the fiscal regimes of the Spanish state, which have been restructured to favor corporate profits and to funnel wealth to banks and foreign investors. They also convened a meeting of prominent leftist philosophers, economists and art critics to discuss if and how the tools of financial circulation could be appropriated to undermine or challenge that system. In a related 2016 project, Güell, this time with exiled Catalan financial activist Enric Duran (notorious for allegedly having intentionally taken out copious bank and credit-card loans with no intention of repaying in order to fund anti-capitalist projects138) created a Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy (www.disobedience.eu) to provide a new platform for likewise studying and appropriating the techniques of transnational capital. The TFDC, for example, uses shell companies to offer fake invoices for services rendered to social movement-aligned organizations and individuals, allowing them to avoid paying taxes to the state. While Güell and her collaborators proudly establish and announce such tactical projects under their own names as art, they are careful to detach

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themselves completely from the administration of these initiatives, the better to avoid the specter of criminal liability in a notoriously punitive austerity state which has not hesitated to throw the book at disobedient artists.139 In another project, Güell and Orta sent their curators at two Spanish contemporary art institutions to secure €9,500 in corporate sponsorships to create a “Self-Sustaining Creative Economy Award.” While Güell and Orta helped define the criteria, they did not sit on the jury, but instead used their insider information to help their preferred candidate—a platform that facilitates cooperation between anti-capitalist initiatives— apply and win the prize, thus using art as a vehicle to transfer corporate wealth to activist hands. Güell and her collaborators’ work is part of a wider set of techniques at the cusp of art and activism that attempt to appropriate and expropriate a globally integrated financial system in the name of other values. In a moment when the reproduction of the circulation of capital has elevated to a global level, rendering it increasingly immune to any democratic agency—indeed in ways that have corrupted and transformed allegedly democratic institutions into handmaidens of profit—such art exhibits a post-cynical pragmatism. While this radical art may on some level participate in the traditions of “drawing attention,” “revealing” and “problematizing” the excesses of power, it does not stake its success on a moment of democratic revelation, as if the citizen, upon seeing the art, will have the scales fall from their eyes, become radicalized and participate in some vehicle of democratic change. Rather, artists like Güell and Orta are (to my mind, rightly) skeptical of the potential of the nation-state to re-regulate global capitalism, in part because they see the institutions and powers of global capitalism too well entrenched and too powerful to be curtailed by popular will, in part because they harbor no nostalgia for the Keynesian moment, being keen students of the radical protests of the 1973 moment. Rather, Güell and Orta and many other young artists are interested in using the strange semi-autonomy and institutional liquidity of “art” to kick open holes in the capillaries of global capital and redirect energies and funds to living anti-capitalist alternatives. It is these alternatives, such as the aforementioned network of cooperatives and anti-capitalist enterprises, that such artists see as true interventions in the imagination, not simply because they represent models for a different mode of human cooperation but because they actually provide food, housing, information, ideas and care within and against the crumbling system. In this sense, Güell and Orta recognize that, under austerity, the reproduction of capitalist circulation has been sustained and accelerated

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at the expense of the social reproduction of citizens, with wealth and social resources claimed by transnational corporations, financial institutions and elites while public services are cut, taxes are increased and civil rights are curtailed. In this work, they aim to reverse those flows, in some small way redirecting resources from the circulation of financial capital into grassroots efforts to reclaim the means of social reproduction. It is significant that art becomes the vehicle for this work. Part of Güell and Orta’s success, in terms of gaining resources for these actions and avoiding legal ramifications, stems from the odd residual prestige and ideological immunity afforded to art in a moment of austerity. While public art budgets have been slashed, while art institutions have become more neoliberal, and while civil rights to protest and critique have been undermined, “art” still retains a cuckoo or cocoon of possibility. Perhaps this has to do with the enthusiasm for contemporary art by economic elites, which in turn demands an expansive institutional field of resources and indulgences that offers radical artists some space to move and some wealth to appropriate. Perhaps it has to do with the melancholia of the neoliberal nation-state which, denied most of the tools it once used to assert sovereignty over fiscal matters now turns to the protection and support of “culture” as one of its only domains of legitimation (even if that “culture” is ever ungrateful). Whatever the case, Güell and Orta are part of a generation of artistactivists who see art, the art world and the art market as opportunities for theft, expropriation and experimentation with alternatives. There is little hope here in the liberator or enlightening potential of art in itself, but rather a post-cynical, utilitarian and radical approach to art as a platform for other projects of mass creativity and the militant imagination.

conclusion As I noted in this book’s introduction, my concern here is not really about the disruptive potentials of art as such, which I think is largely a bankrupt concept. In the next chapter I will begin to build the scaffolding for an argument alluded to in that introduction that sees money and art as mutually supportive myths, myths which take on new potency in a moment of financialization. My main concern is in the way art indexes the broader politics of the imagination today, and the way the work of radical artists can be fruitfully investigated for the way it tests the boundaries of these politics, with broader implications for social movements and radical cultural workers more broadly. Here I am drawing on work I presented in my 2014 book Cultures of Financialization which, in addition to contributing to arguments that

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insisted we understand financialization as a cultural phenomenon also was grounded in a theory of the imagination under capitalism.140 In order for the imaginary “fictitious capital” of financial wealth to rule a much broader transformation of the imagination is necessary. On one level, this has taken the form of the migration of financial measurements, techniques, ideas, metaphors, symbolism and themes from the FIRE sector into the management of all sorts of financial institutions and into the realm of daily life and subjectivity. Today, somehow, every public or private institution must recognize itself as competing to maximize value for shareholders and or stakeholders, and everything from education to nutrition to housing has been reconfigured as an individualized “investment.” This cultural transformation, however, is not simply ideological in a simplified sense of the term. Financialized capitalism is, in fact, not particularly interested in if we, its subjects, think it is legitimate or benevolent—it presents itself as inevitable. Rather, the cultural politics of financializartion, I argued, has more to do with reshaping each of us as an active agent in its development. We are exhorted or encouraged to reconfigure ourselves as savvy investors in whatever field of activity we might be engaged, judiciously and competitively seeking to maximize our advantages, to leverage our skills, passions and abilities to survive and thrive in ever more marketized spheres of life. With no more geographic frontiers on earth, financialized capitalism increasingly and ever more frantically must encroach in, subsume, recalibrate and recode social life, the field of (what we will in Chapter 4 explore in more detail as) sociality. In order to do so, however, we are each exhorted to become an agent and entrepreneur, encouraged and to various degrees supported in imagining and pioneering new methods for commodifying and financializing any and all aspects of social life. In this sense, the everyday life of financialization is not only one of constant existential and financial stress for most of us, it is also one where we are given financialized means and methods for answering this precarity and where we come to imagine financialization as an antidote to the social and personal crises financialization itself foments. I argued that financialization represents a transformation in the nature of capitalism that is increasingly oriented toward the conscription, cooptation and channelization of the imagination. This is necessary, I argued, because ultimately financialization requires each of us not only to obey some grim top-heavy economic dictates, but embrace ourselves and behave as active and empowered agents. Active, imaginative participation is key to the system’s reproduction as it seeks to transform the spheres of the circulation of capital, the reproduction of institutions and the realms of social life. It is, then, to the question of participation we next turn.

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Figure 35  Fran Ilich, Spacebank, 2005–18. Image courtesy of Diego de la Vega Coffee Co-op. New York-based Mexican artist and activist Fran Ilich started Spacebank in 2005 as an attempt to build a more sustainable funding model for the Possible Worlds internet server. This server helped social movements and individuals around the world communicate (and share space) with the radical, autonomous and Indigenous-led Zapatista movement of Chiapas, with whom Ilich had been associated since shortly after they emerged onto the world stage in 1994 with a declaration of autonomy and solidarity in response to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Demoralized by the episodic and inconsistent nature of many activist projects, Ilich determined that, in order to secure reliable funding for the server, he would need to invest donations given toward its upkeep in more lucrative ventures. While this began with the purchase and resale of Zapatista paraphernalia (iconic ski masks, coffee, textiles and t-shirts) Ilich soon invested the Bank’s capital in a wide variety of other assets, including small amounts of foreign currency, rare collectables, corporate stocks, Chinese beer, and Cuban cigars and rum, based in large part on the needs and desires of the online and offline communities that intersected Ilich, Spacebank and the transnational constellations of Zapatismo more broadly. While Spacebank initially took its name from the method for allocating digital server space, the project quickly became a platform for creating, sustaining and putting into dialogue multiple cultural, economic and radical political spaces, both digital and physical. Having almost by accident invented a startup investment bank, Ilich defied anticapitalist activist conventions by diving deeper: Spacebank soon developed its own tradable currency, the Digital Material Sunflower, and a web-based stock exchange, where various members of the community could exchange goods and services and also propose projects for investment. For Ilich, the objective of Spacebank is not primarily the accumulation of wealth, though the growth of the project has enabled him to purchase a co-op apartment in the Bronx and a small (2.5 acre) piece of land in Baja California. Rather, the investment architecture (and also these physical spaces) is designed and serves as a platform for creating, sustaining and interconnecting

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radical autonomous communities and individuals. The forms of para-financial, playful and speculative exchange Spacebank fosters are not imagined as methods of private accumulation but as new ways to connect radical individuals and groups around the world according to a logic of experimentation, detournment and chance.  Since 2014 Ilich has partnered with Gabriela Ceja, an artist and labor educator, to expand the project further. This has included the development of the Diego de la Vega Coffee Co-op, an initiative that uses the Spacebank infrastructures to import Zapatista coffee to the United States where Ilich and Ceja sell it in bulk by subscription and also by the cup at activist and community events, as a means to thicken and expand their social, activist and economic networks.  Ilich and Ceja have also deepened their practices of what might be termed experimental anti-colonial economic play. They have, for instance, begun a series of initiatives to rekindle the ancient Aztec game of Patolli, which, while mistaken by colonists for mere gambling and outlawed, was a vital method for the redistribution of wealth within and between communities. For Ilich and Ceja, organizing opportunities for the communities they work with (whose members range from the power-brokers of the international art-world to precarious migrant workers, from Silicon Valley technologists to Indigenous campesinos) to “play” the game offers a method for reworking the global economy from below and, as with the broader Spacebank project, sustaining rituals by which value, exchange, money and wealth might be collectively reimagined.

3 0 participation: Benign pessimism, tactical parasitics and the encrypted common

Many of the pieces discussed in the last chapter have, in their engagements with the changing nature of money and capitalist power in the latter half of the twentieth century, embraced dematerialized artistic methodologies of performance, institutional critique and participation. In this chapter, I argue that this is far from coincidental. Financialization, as I argue throughout this book, is fundamentally based on recalibrating and recoding the way social subjects participate or perform. It is no longer the case, if it ever was, that capitalism simply seeks to ruthlessly subordinate social actors to its own grim logic. On the one hand, we appear to be moving toward economies increasingly dependent on what some term “immaterial labor,” where knowledge, relationships, subjectivities and the like are put to work in the cultural, technological and services sectors.1 It is also that financialized capitalism, having exhausted its geographic frontiers, increasingly seeks to speculatively subsume society such that, as we saw in the last chapter, we can no longer delineate a clear border between the (crises of the) reproduction of capitalist circulation, the reproduction of social institutions and the social reproduction of bodies, subjects, relationships and communities. Yet this shift is not merely the merciless dystopian subordination of everything to monetary measure; rather we, are each of us, tasked with becoming an active, “empowered” agent of financialization, scanning our corner of the lifeworld for opportunities to apply (and therefore spread) a speculative logic.2 This is true of the financier who seeks to invest in new technology to “disrupt” traditional industries. It is true of the art collector (or his servants) haunting soon-to-be-gentrified neighborhoods, seeking to invest in the hottest, edgiest young artists found therein. It is true of the indebted student eager to find a way of leveraging a pricy liberal arts education into entrepreneurial acumen. It is even true of the target of subprime loans or microfinance lending, tasked with transforming their poverty and abandonment into self-sustaining wealth.

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In sum, financialization depends not on the subordination of agency, but on the cultivation, exhortation and recalibration of profoundly delimited participation. In this chapter, we examine six artistic projects that seek to explore, problematize, tease and illuminate this condition using the tools and techniques today heralded under the banner of participatory art (also sometimes heralded as social practice or socially engaged art). My effort here is not to offer some unifying theory, though I do want to, along with Leigh Claire La Berge and Marina Vishmidt, insist that participatory art’s rise is deeply structurally connected to financialization.3 I am interested in the ways that these artists are able to make sense, and help develop strategies, that might illuminate the contours and possibly allow us to glimpse pathways beyond the financialization of society.

you can’t give it away like you used to Let us begin with an early work of participatory money-art, the (in) famous action by Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies (the Youth International Party) on August 24, 1967. The ragtag crew dressed in business suits or other outlandish costumes and ascended to the observation deck of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor, abuzz with the frenetic rituals of “open call” trading, and threw thousands of dollars worth of one dollar bills down on the traders below.4 According to Hoffman’s recollections at least, this action, posed at the intersection of art and activism, threw the already frenzied atmosphere into utter chaos, with traders scrambling to collect this manna from heaven.5 We will analyze the Yippies’ stunt in more detail below as both an intervention into and an example of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism.”6 For now, it is simply worth observing how much has changed since 1967. Today such an action would be imprecise at best, anachronistic at worst. In 1983 the NYSE replaced the charismatic scene of open-call trading with computerized exchanges. Most traders today work from nearby (or, increasingly, distant or even offshore) offices. Meanwhile, the trading of the vanilla corporate stocks listed on the NYSE has been replaced with the trading of much more complex financial products and derivatives which, while they may ultimately be based on basic financial assets like shares in corporations, government bonds or raw material commodities, are more accurately described as synthetic assets (made up of thousands of different assets) or derivatives designed to, with surgical precision, manage risk.7 Further to the point, the novelty of handing out money no longer so captures the imagination in an age when a $1 bill buys practically nothing of value in New York City, and

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Figure 36  A panel from Epistolier and M. Trublin’s 1977 comic The Yippies at the Exchange originally published in French and translated and reprinted in Anarchy Comics #2. Image appears courtesy of PM Press who reissued a compendium of Anarchy Comics in 2012.

when, in any case, a huge percentage of the population (especially those who work on Wall Street) perform most of their transactions through digital payments mechanisms. At stake in these questions is the possibility for a critical money-art in an age of digitized money, where money is in some senses everywhere and nowhere at once. In contrast to the 1960s, when it seemed possible to make a critical intervention in the fraught space between money and social life, today all of society is encrypted by money, which is to say that,

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as we have seen, there is practically no domain where money does not seek to recode social life. The transformation of money, capitalism and life at large we have here been discussing as financialization cannot be separated from a series of technological shifts since roughly 1973. The rise and ever-accelerating development of interconnected global computer networks, combined with ever-doubling computing power, has meant that, today, money and finance are more a matter of digits than anything else.8 To a large extent the demands of the financial sector have driven forward technological research toward more rapid methods of intercontinental communication, ever more sophisticated and capacious data algorithmic processing and ever-more durable and wide-reaching set of networks. Today, the apogee of these developments is the scandal of highfrequency and algorithmic trading, wherein the majority of global financial exchanges are executed by the most sophisticated “artificial intelligences” (AIs) humans have ever created.9 The financial sector has become one of the largest employers of those with doctoral degrees in math and physics, who are put to work by hedge funds and investment banks essentially building trading robots that will be able to outcompete their rivals by milliseconds in analyzing and acting upon unfathomable quantities of data. Notoriously, this hyper-comptetitive ecosystem of financial technology both creates and thrives on volatility in financial markets, but has the potential to create cascading crises, “flash crashes” where rival algorithms get locked in self-perpetuating feedback loops or trick one another into taking drastic action with farreaching impacts.10 Would that these impacts were limited to the realm of robotic gladiators created for the gambling pleasure of today’s financial plutocrats. Instead, these technologies are manipulating the very fabric of financial markets which, as we have noted in previous chapters, are inexorably imbricated in the fabric of daily life and the so-called “real economy.” Not only do high-speed and other trading algorithms toy with the shares of the corporations that employ millions and monopolize the necessities of life, they also deal in national currencies and government bonds with the capacity to decimate whole economies by accident or design.11 Further, they are part of the global orchestration of the prices of commodities, the basic materials and foodstuffs of the world that are today exchanged on futures markets (corn, wheat, oil, cotton, soybeans, copper, the list goes on) and have dramatic transformative impacts on urban and rural real estate markets that define the fate of the built environment.12 Among the effects of this shift and acceleration has been the sequestering of financial flows in ever fewer hands: the power to create and use

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Figure 37  On March 29, 2014, the activist ensemble Global Ultra Luxury Faction (GULF) staged an action reminiscent of Abbie Hoffman’s 1967 intervention at the NYSE, releasing thousands of invented banknotes into the Guggenheim Museum’s iconic spiral rotunda during the busy Saturday evening when the museum offers free admission to the public. GULF, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, seeks to raise awareness and hold “blue chip” arts institutions like the Guggenheim to account for abusive labor practices toward migrant workers who are building satellite locations overseas, in this case in Abu Dhabi. One side of the note depicted the “speculative global museum,” represented by the Guggenheim’s other iconic building in Bilbao, flanked by images of financial profligacy and oil derricks, which was deemed “of no sustainable cultural value.” The reverse side featured an image of Occupy Wall Street’s encampment at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and begged the question “what would an ethical global museum look like?” and proposed “free of labor abuse, free of odious debt, artistic freedom.” Images appear courtesy of the artist/activists.

such technologies is far out of the reach of not only most people but also most financial corporations. Amidst the AI arms race between a handful of key players, it is simply impossible for any actor without tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to do much more than bet on the residual or derivative currents kicked up by the leviathans. Meanwhile, would-be regulators must contend with not only the infamous hyper-complexity of financial markets themselves, but now also the speed and sophistication of cutting-edge digital technologies. The expansion of digital infrastructure has been essential to these shifts, though so too has the spread of the logic and practices of finan-

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cialization, such that all manner of social institutions and moments of social reproduction can be directly subsumed into capitalist markets and made, essentially, to speak the same language—or, in terms we’ll introduce late in this chapter and throughout the next, encrypting them in commensurate ways. The expansion of financial metrics into the administration of the public sector, the forms of standardized auditing and reporting demanded of capitalist firms, even the digitization of consumer banking, have all played a role in creating the databases into which financial AIs peer and pry in order to discover the patterns and opportunities.13 The digitization of nearly everything has been part and parcel of the liquefaction of society, opening up new spaces and spheres which can (a) be reconfigured by financially driven capitalism as opportunities for speculative investment and (b) brought under the amorphous discipline of those markets. From surgically precise logistics systems to digitally augmented surveillance technologies to the consumer “big data” harvested by IT giants to the standardization of government statistical reporting, computerized and networked financial markets both read and shape a billion points of light from a global society transformed into a cosmos of databases.14 Further, the technologies developed in part to expedite and accelerate financial markets—for instance, the use of immense algorithms computing power to plumb the depths of astronomical quantities of standardized data to produce actionable predictions—has migrated beyond finance to realms of government and corporate surveillance, micro-marketing and global logistics, essentially allowing capital to spread expansively on a global scale and reach intensively into daily life, social relations and the production of subjectivity.15 In essence, the digitalized financialization of money has encrypted society in a matrix of speculative gambles, methodologies of risk-management, and metrics of evaluation. The risk here is less of Big Brother in any classically dystopian sense but, rather, of the increasing recalibration of nearly every aspect of life to ensure its participation in a massive chaos machine that thrives on uncertainty and volatility, not to mention oppression, exploitation and inequality.16 Crucially, as I have argued at length in Cultures of Financialization, these phenomena are typically not presented or even necessarily experienced as dystopian nightmares but often as forms of individualized participatory empowerment in a volatile world without guarantees.17 We are encouraged or compelled to treat housing as a speculative investment, to gamble on the markets with our retirement savings, or to “invest” in education. While for some personal money management is part of a liberated and empowered middle-class “lifestyle,” for others it is part and parcel of the sabotaged “empowerment” of sub-prime or

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microfinance borrowers, the targets of moralistic “financial literacy” education.18 Accordingly, within the thought-world of neoliberal political and economic elites the problem is not too much financialization, but not enough. New methods and technologies must be created (and deregulated) to ensure that everyone has access to debt and credit and, conversely, that debt and credit markets have access to everyone and everything.19 This faith is not only driven by free-market ideology, it is also structural: Without belaboring the point, capitalist accumulation today is in a phase of rapid acceleration with practically no geographic “outside.”20 Opening new fields to speculative investment is crucial to the system’s continual acceleration. Hence the expansion of financialization into daily life and nearly all social institutions is vital. Participation, then, is not merely a sanctimonious slogan but a shrill command under financialized capitalism.

social practices So, on the one hand, the structures of power and wealth that Hoffman and the Yippies targeted have shifted toward a much more deeply integrated and far-reaching digital financial apparatus. On the other, the artistic methodologies he employed have evolved, even professionalized. In Hoffman’s era it was novel and even radical to suggest that art could succeed while failing to produce an object, that art could consist of concepts, relationships, interventions, happenings and experiences. Today, that’s all old hat and big business.21 Performance art, institutional critique and now participatory art have found a place within (albeit on the fringes of) a massively commodified and monetized art world/ market that is today predicated on, rather than disrupted by themes of experience, provocation, participation and interactivity.22 Many prestigious art colleges in the US have developed programs in participatory art (or social practice, or socially engaged art) and its repertoire has become canonical in contemporary art more generally.23 In the United States, large conferences like Open Engagement or Creative Time further professionalize these fields, and leading authors have set forth a suite of coordinates aimed at comparing and refining processes and practices, although it should be noted that practically all do so, earnestly and meaningfully, in the name of radical politics.24 Participation, social engagement and relationality are even, to some extent, reshaping more conventional media like painting and sculpture as a cognizance of questions of audience, spectatorship, and social location increasingly inform the way art is critiqued and assessed.25 All this takes place in a context in which conventional art display institutions like museums and

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galleries struggle to reach out to new audiences to justify their value in a neoliberal age by ensuring that opportunities for “engagement” and “participation” moderate the residual association of art with some sort of social elite. Paradoxically, the enthusiasm for participatory or socially engaged art also comes at a time when art and culture more broadly is increasingly looked to as an “expedient” to generate social cohesion, improve civic engagement, stimulate economic growth and incubate “innovation.”26 These neoliberal tendencies are joined by the curious ways in which art is now increasingly looked to take up the slack left by the retreat of the welfare state. Seemingly just at the moment ameliorative social programs—for instance, for “at risk” children in urban areas—are slashed (typically much more meager) public, private and foundation funds come available for artists to “engage” with those same populations.27 Often funders and grant writers justify these new arts programs with recourse to financialized neoliberal notions that art and culture ought to enhance individuals’ human capital, offering skills and capacities that will improve their ability to sell their labor power and thus reduce their “dependency” on (increasingly scarce and punitive) social assistance. Meanwhile, of course, as I have noted in earlier chapters, art and “culture” itself has become a key vehicle for financalized urban recalibration with artists and art institutions often becoming (sacrificial) pawns in a game of gentrification.28 Thankfully, the majority of work heralded under the banner of participatory or socially engaged art has stressed activism, radical politics and social justice as compulsory themes, and also developed a set of loose ethical norms for working with communities in non-exploitative ways.29 My aim here is not to undermine or dismiss this approach. Yet as we shall see, there is reason to be suspicious still. In any case, by the standards of the field today, Hoffman’s intervention is jejune: successful participatory artists now are typically much more subtle, patient, cunning and self-reflexive, in ways we will explore, though the question remains if they are any more effective as anti-capitalist activists, or if this ought to be their ambition. Such skepticism is acutely forwarded by Claire Bishop in her evocatively titled study Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship.30 She suggest that while audience participation has long been a fixture of modern art, the forms that have emerged, and have come to worldwide acclaim and popularity, since the 1970s cannot be separated from the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism. It is precisely at the moment when robust mass movements retreat from public life that art begins to accept a role as a catalyst of social intercourse, that “par-

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Figure 38  Initiated in 2006 by the artist Mel Chin, the Fundred Project may stand as one of the longest running and most successful social practice pieces. Partnering with schools and community centers, especially in poor areas, Chin and his colleagues worked with children to illustrate “Fundreds,” a coloring template based on the American $100 bill. Fundreds were collected and sent to policy makers to raise awareness about the destructive effects of lead contamination on children’s health. Following its launch in New Orleans, the Fundred Project expanded through a road trip across America and has been featured in many hundreds of schools, museums and public spaces in the intervening decade. Today, the Fundred has evolved into its own stand-alone organization which organizes workshops and activities. Images courtesy of the Fundred Project.

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ticipation” becomes a watchword for aspirations toward “accessibility,” “democratization,” “inclusion” and “engagement.” Bishop warns that Even though participatory artists invariably stand against neoliberal capitalism, the values they impute to their work are understood formally (in terms of opposing individualism and the commodity object), without recognizing that so many other aspects of this art practice dovetail even more perfectly with neoliberalism’s recent forms (networks, mobility, project work, affective labour). And further, The social inclusion agenda is therefore less about repairing the social bond than a mission to enable all members of society to be self-administering, fully functioning consumers who do not rely on the welfare state and who can cope with a deregulated, privatized world. While it is no doubt true that the vast majority of participatory art works claim to proceed from a critical space or stance, it is vital, to my mind to tether the historical emergence of participatory art to financialization, both at the level first of its material possibility and second at the level of its cultural vitality.31 For my purposes here, I want to tie the rise of participatory art not simply to neoliberalism, but to financialization as we have been discussing it in previous chapters. In this regard, Emily Rosamond is perceptive in her bringing into proximity the emergence of “socially engaged art” and “social impact investing,” seeing both as symptomatic and constitutive of financialization, and in many ways at the vanguard of that set of processes.32 Social impact investing names an array of techniques whereby the logics and processes of the financial markets are applied to pressing social problems, and where, conversely, pressing social problems are reframed as financial dilemmas. Rosamond’s target is the social impact bond (SIB). First conceptualized in the late 1980s but developing into a wholesale industry only in recent years, Rosamond describes SIBs thus: contracts between investors and the public sector, administered through intermediary companies, which outline a commitment to pay for improvements in social outcomes that could lead to public savings, at least in theory … Investors provide start-up capital for charity-run social programs; if agreed social impact targets are met, govern-

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ments pay investors at a fixed rate of return. SIBs attempt to realize a mutuality of interest between investors, governments and non-profits seeking to make a difference to at-risk groups. In this sense, SIBs and the broader world of social impact investing attempt to financialize (what remains of) the welfare state, replacing what are imagined to be ineffective, inefficient and exploitation-prone public services which, while allegedly serving the same ultimate ends, are beholden to and organized by the austere and uncompromising logic of the market.33 The framework behind the vast majority of social impact investing schemes presumes that the market as natural, neutral, efficient and fair is an inherently benevolent force. It is the work of the angels to introduce it to realms of human activity where hitherto it has feared to tread that all might inherit the kingdom of God.34 That social impact investing is the cutting edge of finance should not surprise us. As I have outlined in Chapter 2, as well as in more detail in previous publications, we must understand financialization as more than merely an economic phenomenon: it is a vital part of the methodologies by which capitalism further infiltrates and recalibrates the codes of social life. For Randy Martin, for instance, financialization appears as a capitalist response to the radical demands for the decolonization of the lifeworld that animated the so-called New Social Movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.35 Financialization, in addition to organizing and accelerating the exploitation and integration of capitalist production on a global scale also reaches intensively into daily life, into social relationships and into the realms of subjectivity. As such, its vanguard is not only the production of ever-more sophisticated algorithms and technologies as explored above, it is also the development of methods for speculating upon, harnessing, recalibrating and recoding social life itself.36 Social impact investing is a prime example of this tendency. Social impact investing engages a dialectics of encryption. On the one hand, the euphoric rhetoric and ideological backbone of this tendency is one that presumes the social itself is a legible and transparent affair that has been encrypted within the byzantine vagaries of state bureaucracies and regulations. Obeying a fundamentally neoclassical and neoliberal notion of the social as a collection of individual competitive rational actors struggling to maximize their marginal utility, the ideology that animates social impact investing proposes using the most finely honed tools of the market to decode this true nature of social life.37 Thus social impact investing is imagined to be a practice of decryption. Of course, the effect will in actuality be the further encryption of society within the market. And, indeed, the field of social impact investment is, from

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the perspective of finance capital, the encryption of the social in its terms: risk, reward, volatility and yield. On one level, such schemes are ideological efforts that both depend on and reinforce our imagination of social life in financialized, neoliberal terms. On another, it is the actuality of financialization, the encoding of the complexities of social life into the brutal quantitative simplicities of finance, the better that they might be fathomed and disciplined by it in the name of ever-greater capital accumulation. As Rosamond astutely observes, we must see the rise of “socially engaged art” as imbricated (if not complicit) with these tendencies. the financialization of social impact, exemplified by the social impact bond, nullifies claims (already criticized from many other angles) that acts of social engagement (packaged, at times, within art practices) sit separate from the market, ameliorate alienation, or put something “genuine” back into the reified realm of commodity exchange … [they] envision, and instantiate, new ways to intertwine social investor interests and stakeholder interests. For Rosamond, we must understand the rise of socially engaged art within a broader context of financializaiton that has also financialized the welfare state itself through social impact bonds and other techniques. Within this context the simple fact that a socially engaged art practice usually occurs outside of the market or the gallery is not a sufficient alibi: it still necessarily participates. Thus, it is necessary to take the parallax view and see socially engaged art as operating on what social-impact investing calls a “double bottom-line,” “as both social and immediately financial; as both participated-in by stakeholders and productive of investment-images of participation within (and beyond) the broader commerce of art discourse.” Thus, she insists that a model of the value of socially engaged art practices needs to account for both stakeholder values and investor values. These “investors” could include financial investors, but also those who have staked something of their careers or reputation on the value of a particular socially engaged project [such as] curators, writers, buyers, art professionals and enthusiasts who stake something of their reputations and/or finances as they write, produce accounts, or circulate images, enthusiasm or criticism of a particular project. Yet as Rosamond suggests, accusations of socially engaged art’s hypocrisy or complicity are at best boring and at worst pedantic. As I

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have argued throughout this book, the histrionic horror we are expected to exhibit at the (somehow perpetually novel) news of art’s sacrilege is a bit rich (pun intended). As I have been attempting to demonstrate, art is today an important laboratory for financialization, a curious, unique field of self-reflexive activities that is at once deeply alien and highly germane to the capitalist economy from which it (sometimes antagonistically) emerges.

cruel optimism For Lauren Berlant, cruel optimism names a public feeling made up of the spectrum of affective strategies by which subjects cope with and maintain their participation in the set of ultimately destructive socioeconomic and cultural conditions which we have here heralded under the banner of financialization: the retreat of the welfare state, the decay of social bonds and the conditions of general precarity that characterize our contemporary moment, at least in the Anglo-American context.38 Berlant’s investigation is concerned with the question of how it is that, against all odds, and in spite of so little objective chance of success and happiness, the vast majority of us continue to participate in a system of work, life, debt and social normativity that is objectively killing us (some more slowly than others) and making most of us tremendously miserable. She seeks to trace the outlines and several instances of the mobilization of a kind of pyrrhic hope that better things are around the corner, that the good life awaits. But this hope keeps one trapped in the exploitative present. As she puts it, optimism is cruel when the object or scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel in­sofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming. Berlant insists we see cruel optimism not as some diabolical scheme or mode of false consciousness, but rather a tragic and often highly sophisticated response to the economic and social conditions of capitalist crisis, one that may manifest differently in different communities, yet which share a set of characteristics or hallmarks. Cruel optimism is everywhere, whether it is the good life that is supposed to arrive after we win the rights for queer people to wed, or whether it is the good life that will allegedly arrive after we accept and submit to neoliberal restructuring,

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or whether it is the good life we imagine awaits us after capitalist technological development succeeds in fulfilling its ever-deferred promise to liberate us from physical toil, or whether it is the good life of the post-capitalist commons that will evolve out of our weekend community gardening efforts. Cruel optimism, then, names a diversely implemented and imagined affective strategy of coping, of “making do,” of tolerating the isolating, individuating and alienating conditions of what we are here calling financialized neoliberalism. We might say that Berlant’s model is a theory of the psychic and social techniques we develop to enable our participation in the financialized economy and society that is fundamentally predicated on each of us transforming all aspects of life into points of leverage for future gain.

Figure 39  Darren Cullen, Pocket Money Loans, 2013–present. Installation view at the 2016 Glastonbury Festival. Image courtesy of the artist. Darren Cullen’s ongoing project Pocket Money Loans (Payday Loans for Kids) appropriates the austere but enticing aesthetics of the payday loans or “fringe finance” industry to critically hyperbolize the realities of financialized predation. Cullen installs payday loan shops in urban locations or at festivals that claim to offer children as young as three the opportunity to borrow up to £20 for up to 60 days, at a representative APR of 5,000%. Cullen’s piece responds not only to the proliferation of highly calibrated advertising to children and the general saturation of society by finance, but also the rise of new online payday lenders like Wonga who have so far evaded regulation in many jurisdictions, and also circumvent the traditional credit rating mechanisms and, instead, adjudicate a potential borrower’s trustworthiness based on an algorithmically derived picture of their online behavior. While the piece generated a fair deal of backlash from adults who failed to recognize the satire, it also highlights the tragic dimension of a society where social reproduction is increasingly tethered to access to credit and the experience of indebtedness.

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Perhaps this is easiest to see in the case of the culture of, ironically, investment banks, so acutely depicted by ethnographer Karen Ho.39 Most investment bankers (even senior executives) at least initially see their participation in the bank as a means to a nobler end, either the sort of personal enrichment that will allow them to quit and pursue their real dreams, or some (dubious) idea of service to the neoliberal economy, in which the ruthless competitive acquisitiveness of the bank will lead to greater efficiencies in the market as a whole (and therefore, somehow, a better, more innovative and wealthier world). For the sake of these goals they endure, even relish punishing forms of overwork, insecurity and stress, so much so that they build identities and a sense of community around a kind of shared painful waiting, around the cruel optimism. So strong is this attachment to this adrenaline-soaked cruel optimism that many find it difficult to leave, even when they have achieved the degree of success they initially sought. This is what gives cruel optimism its force: not only our attachment to the subjectivity we have built in waiting, but the way that subjectivity is bound up with our fellows, who we imagine to be enduring the same cruelties. As such, when the object of our cruel optimism is finally delivered it is rarely the happy occasion we imagined but a sometimes violent and unsettling breach in our subjecthood and community: it is to be exiled from that shared condition of abject hope that shaped us. Hence the apocryphal tales of everyday lottery winners who keep their windfall secret and return to work the next day as if nothing has changed for fear of losing the life they have built, for all its suffering. Importantly, for Berlant the key to both potential happiness and meaningful social change is not the relinquishment or transcendence of cruel optimism. We live through our attachments, our fantasies—it is in their wake that subjects and communities form. Rather than imagining we might free ourselves from all delusion and fetishization, Berlant suggests we must more intentionally and compassionately imagine and create new generative obsessions, and dwell transversally and perversely within the imbrications of cruel optimism. Let us return to Hoffman’s intervention, with which we began. The object lesson of this piece is almost wearyingly didactic: here, at the heart of American capitalism is a scene of reckless and frantic greed. Humans become animalistic in their quest for money. Hoffman and company sought to perform a participatory demonstration of reducto ad absurdum, conscripting the Wall Street traders in a hyperbolic pantomime of their own usual roles. To translate into Berlant’s terms, the traders in question were wedded to their positions by a cruel optimism that their daily activities of getting and spending on the abstract markets,

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moving clients’ money around and constantly seeking to outmaneuver other traders, would make them money. The ever-receding goal of “making money” became the shared condition of anticipation that bound together a community of mutually sustaining subjectivities at the dark heart of American capitalism. When the object of their desire, money, appeared as if by magic, raining down from the heavens above, the community and its norms of behavior and decorum (loose as they were) broke: that which had long been anticipated finally arrived, monstrously, tragically. Here the Yippies positioned themselves as enlightened, psychically and communally liberated subjects returning to a world of crass materialism as tricksters and provocateurs aiming at breaking people from their trance. Yet there is no record of the subjective or systemic crisis, either for the traders at the exchange or those who read of the act in the media. The reality is, more likely than not, that the intervention was a failure in these terms: while it may have momentarily disrupted the community of cruel optimism that secured the traders’ service to the stock exchange, the wound was easily healed over. As Berlant illustrates, to lose the conditions of cruel optimism is to lose subjecthood and community. The success of the intervention was to reproduce and reaffirm the community of the Yippies, based on their own cruel optimism: a (doomed) optimism that rambunctious, clever interventions like this might actually create the forms of revolutionary change that (they claimed) they desired. Failure to achieve the sought after goal (a revolutionary transformation of consciousness and behavior) was, indeed, the condition for the reproduction of the Yippie subjectivity, community and consciousness.40 More generally, there is something cruelly optimistic about money, something that goes beyond the fact that most of our fantasies of the good life revolve around the dim prospect of what we might do after winning the lottery, or the notion that the nation-state might finally fulfill its promise if only it could balance its budget or slay its debt. For reasons that I partially explored in the first two chapters, the paired fetishistic presumptions of money as either a neutral tool or a devilish curse reifies in our imagination the fixation that, if only money could be fixed, if only we could realign price and value. If only we could correct money’s source code, all would be well. We are all too often tempted to imagine that getting money “right” (through proper fiscal policy, or inventing new currencies) will, like some chiropractic maneuver, realign the social. Without parsing the origins of this notion, which in any case emerge well prior to Keynesianism, let it suffice for the moment to note

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the way that this posture, with its diverse adherents across the political spectrum, tends to exhibit the features of a cruel optimism that posits a kind of silver bullet, often technocratic fix to complex social problems.41 The optimism here is cruel because such schemes are frequently detached from a concrete analysis of actually existing economic, social and political relations, as well as the manifold complexities, incongruities and fundamental illogics of any economics system, let alone the present global capitalist order. The fetishistic belief in various schemes to correct or recalibrate money, absent also some notion of some mobilization for social transformation, usually locks such approaches in a posture of perpetual (optimistic) waiting for sobriety, order and good governance to prevail in an economic realm characterized by their opposites. To these points we shall return in the next chapter and in this book’s conclusion.

benign pessimism Superflex On June 17, 2010, in honor of the city’s Midsummer Festival, the mayor of the Irish city of Cork issued the following decree the gist of which had been widely publicized in previous weeks though posters, billboards and advertisements in newspapers, radio and television: DECREE TODAY WE DON’T USE THE WORD ‘RECESSION’ Through the power of positive thought and collective action, Lord Mayor Cllr. Dara Murphy decrees that for one day, to lift ourselves out of the doom and gloom the citizens of Cork should refrain from using the word ‘Recession’. The citizens of Cork are invited to join with the Lord Mayor in the collective ambition to help drive Cork out of recession and into recovery from this day forward. To kickstart this recovery the lord mayor requests on Thursday 17th June, 2010, that the people of Cork shall in all public utterances, statements and communications, replace the word ‘recession’ with alternative words or phrases. Citizens are asked to create their own new alternatives, thus contributing to re-imagining the future of the City of Cork. And so recommend to the people of Cork under the Common Seal of the Lord Mayor. Orchestrated by the Danish ensemble SUPERFLEX under the auspices of a commission by Ireland’s National Sculpture Factory, this participatory

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Figure 40 SUPERFLEX, Today we do not use the word “Recession”, 2015. Photo: Peter Cox. Image courtesy of the artist.

work was in keeping with the group’s longstanding antagonism toward the celebratory iconography and rhetoric of neoliberal capitalism. Cork provided a fitting opportunity to pursue this trajectory, a city whose fortunes had tumbled in the wake of the abrupt deflation of so-called Celtic Tiger economy. A magnet for speculative investment in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ireland had been buoyed by massive foreign investment, in part because it offered a highly educated Anglophone population in the EU, mostly because neoliberal policies and notorious tax loopholes allowed technology and pharmaceutical corporations to make out like bandits. During the Celtic Tiger years Irish citizens and the nation as a whole racked up considerable debts, once the dust settled after the 2008 financial crisis housing prices, accelerated by a speculative bubble, had risen precipitously, creating a situation of intensifying precarity and austerity as governments scrambled and scraped to once again woo foreign corporations to Irish shores.42

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Earlier, I have explored the way hype serves to reproduce both the financial and the art economies. In this sense, under financialization, discourse and rhetoric is not merely ideological, it is also directly economic. Words are used not only to conceal the truth or promote particular worldviews, but to actively seek to change financial reality by influencing the speculative economy that is, for all its advocate’s claims to its dispassionate rationality, particularly prone to the power of rumors, hearsay and bombast.43 Today, the speeches of central bank chairpersons are meticulously scripted to prevent triggering cascading panics based on how they might imply interest rate shifts.44 The financial press is just one more terrain to play for high-rolling financiers who use leaks or give special access to journalists to help shift the anticipatory moves of other investors this way or that. It is rumored that high-frequency trading algorithms parse news tickers, Twitter feeds and other spheres of digital discourse as part of their inputs to better be able to predict and therefore capitalize on future market movements.45 As the financialized economy becomes more chaotic (and functionally kleptocratic), a whole variety of other actors are impelled to generate their own hype in the name of attracting “investment.” The majority of Nation States today have largely reoriented policies toward a hyperbolic performance of neoliberalism and austerity in the hopes of impressing New York bond rating agencies whose evaluation determines the degree of usury that nation will endure when selling bonds to finance deficit spending (a charade necessary largely because these same neoliberal policies have so eviscerated their tax base as to make borrowing from global markets obligatory).46 These policies are joined by substantial sums paid to advertising and public relations firms tasked with promoting nations and sub-national entities (states, provinces, cities) to increasingly footloose international investors and corporations in the hopes they will deign to grace them with their fickle benevolence.47 Hospitals, universities and other public institutions also rely on the production of hype in order to generate philanthropic donations to support operations or expansion. Meanwhile, the imposition on these institutions of ever more austere and financialized forms of “accountability” and performance review has almost in and of itself spawned a kind of meta-genre of institutional braggadocio to be found in grant applications, annual reports and PR spin, where accomplishments and achievements are celebrated with effusive buzzwords. Meanwhile, on the level of daily life, in an age where increasingly all workers are instructed to embrace their inner artistic risk taker and recast themselves as liberated freelancers we are each increasingly expected to generate our own hype through fulsome cover letters, carefully groomed social media accounts, curated

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CVs, euphoric testimonials, five-star ratings and all manner of performative hucksterism.48 To offer a formulation here: financialization implies the increased quantitative and qualitative, economic and cultural power of speculative forms of capital. As financialization introduces unprecedented volatility into economics, politics, society and culture, it also reorients all manner of social institutions and actors toward desperately seeking to attract some shred of the ever-accelerating, endlessly unpredictable flows of financial wealth without which one is consigned to penury or abjection. In order to attract this seemingly chaotic wealth, hype is a key ingredient. The form that this hype takes are often based in euphoric, utopian or at least pathologically optimistic predictions or projections of the bountiful outcomes it would bring, not only for the grantee but also the grantor. Creative cities, we are told, will not only attract blue-chip smart companies, but thrive with culture, tolerance, opportunity and diversity. If the applicant’s proposal or resume is accepted, it will fulfill their soul’s true vocation and they will reward their patron with magnificent productivity. In other words, financialization is a massive engine for the compulsory production of cruel optimism, not merely as a symptom of economic realities but as a constitutive part of producing those realities. This helps us frame the context that shaped SUPERFLEX’s intervention in Cork and the patently absurd idea that simply avoiding using the word recession might lift the city “out of the doom and gloom” and contribute to its economic recovery. Through hyperbole, SUPERFLEX stages a performatively self-sabotaging ritual of cruel optimism. Aside from the artists, the curators, the Mayor and their respective assistants, it’s unlikely that anyone in Cork (a major city in a country well known for its wry sense of gallows humor) actually honored the decree, perhaps also illustrating the impotence of self-important municipal dictates in an age of liquefied global capital flows. The participatory ritual of cruel optimism was intentionally a highly publicized failure, already a foregone conclusion. I identify this work with a strategy I call, borrowing from and inverting Berlant, benign pessimism. Benign pessimism here typically works in a participatory, discursive or symbolic field by orchestrating experiences that reveal both the futility and the cruelty of the compulsory optimism and hype production that animates institutions and individuals in a financialized system increasingly out of their control. But what makes this pessimism benign is that it seeks to walk a very fine line between two precipitous yet common pitfalls. On the one hand, it avoids a cynicism that simply takes as its task the revelation of the lie. On the other, it avoids offering a triumphalist narrative of escape or critique which, as

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in the case of Hoffman’s intervention, refines the often equally cruelly optimistic hype of the artist(s) themselves (the astute reader will note the analogue between the limits of the strategies of revelation and reflexivity noted in Chapter 1). Instead, the strategy of benign pessimism usually very subtly gestures to the fact that cruel optimism is also a form of pyrrhic solidarity, a practice of fellow feeling generated in impossible circumstances. Benign pessimism, then, is benign to the extent it gestures to the constitutive power that animates our collective attachments to self-destructive common myths. It offers a small glimpse of the misappropriated or misdirected power and potential of common narrative within the particular atmospheres of financialized capitalism. If we are all investing so much time and creative energy on competitive hype, to what other ends might it be put?

Quantitative Easing (for the street) In 2014, In the center of Vienna, in a street teeming with international tourists and dapper businesspeople, the artist Axel Stockburger erected a two meter golden pillar that, at random intervals, ejected 1€ coins onto the cobblestones. The audience/public was then faced with a choice: whether to approach the altar and stoop to retrieve this ejaculated symbol of value; whether to hold themselves aloof and continue about their business; whether to stop and watch others scramble for that most impossible of sacraments: free money. Here, in miniaturized, almost comical form, is a ritual we already recognize as intimately, perversely familiar: the impossibly absurd and tragically constrained latitude of economic participation that is afforded each of us under today’s financialized capitalism. The effectiveness of Stockburger’s Quantitative Easing (for the Street) stems not merely the political commentary it makes through its name, a reference to the almost unprecedented policies of the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In addition to maintaining absurdly low interest rates to encourage market liquidity, these institutions took the step of buying suspect and toxic financial assets directly from private financial institutions, hoping thereby to replace bad money with good, transferring volatility from private to public hands. In the popular interpretation, governments essentially “printed money” and handed it over to banks to distribute into the economy. Stockburger’s piece, and its sly title, are reminiscent of the thought experiment, popularized by arch-neoliberal architect Milton Friedman and beloved of economists, that macroeconomic stimulus spending

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Figure 41  Axel Stockburger, Quantitative Easing (for the street), 2014. Vienna installation view. Photograph by Iris Ranzinger. Courtesy of the artist.

ought to be judged by if it is any more effective than throwing an equal quantity of money out of a helicopter.49 It also reveals, by force of negation, the fact that the vast majority of central bank and (inter-)governmental attempts to alleviate or remedy the ongoing financial crisis have, by and large, been targeted at the bastions of capital, rather than the “street,” so to speak.50 While bailouts and policies like quantitative easing have restored financial markets to profitability, the neoliberal assumption that this restoration would lead to economic vitality and benefit for all has been cruelly belied (predictably so). Stockburger’s golden pillar is, in a sense, the monstrous materialization of the cruel optimism that surrounds money and macroeconomic policy in an age of financialization: an atavistic obelisk, a monument or altar dedicated to the occult absurdities of the markets that shape our lives. The utter randomness and farcicality of Stockburger’s participatory machine not only dramatizes the uncanny mechanics of fiscal policy in the age of austerity, which privilege and further enrich monolithic financial institutions, it also enrolls participants, who must stoop and scrape between Vienna’s groomed cobblestones for the coins, in a ritualized or pantomime version of their own habituated financialized subject positions: delimited in an attitude of speculative anticipation, beholden to the (seemingly) random whims of an opaque market,

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little more than a vector through which small money passes on its way through the system. Like Hoffman’s intervention, the artist creates an artificial participatory abundance of money in order to contrast the forms of manufactured scarcity and corrosive anticipation germane to financialized cruel optimism. Unlike Hoffman’s gesture, Stockburger does not participate in his own production of a new optimism; he is content to gently deliver the participants into a state of receptive pessimism. He courts and elicits a certain destabilizing disappointment based on a momentary breach in the reign of cruel optimism, but one that offers no succor or escape. In contrast to Hoffman, what makes this intervention potentially transformative, or at least much more interesting, is that rather than addressing participants as beguiled victims of a grand conspiracy, Stockburger instead hails them into a recognition of their own participation within the spectrum of relations of cruel optimism under financialization. The work might render an awareness of the everyday labors undertaken to reproduce the structures of affect, relationality and activity on which the financialized order depends, but also one on which one’s own subjectivity and community relies. The artist is offering a vexed and vexatious version of the desired and anticipated object, money, in order to highlight the individual and collective work of desire and anticipation on which money depends. The implicit question this work provokes yet refuses to answer is: to what other ends might work be turned? I am particularly struck by the crypticness of the pillar itself, the monolithic erection in the middle of the street that randomly disseminates coins based on some seemingly meaningless algorithm. Here is a sculpture that in some fundamental way materializes the gilded terror of what is being dubbed today “algorithmic governance,” though governance is perhaps too fine a word for what amounts to, for most of us, a kind of inscrutable chaos machine.51 We, the plebian pedestrians, have neither the keys nor the technological knowledge nor the technical capacity to decrypt the financial, surveillance and predictive algorithms that shape our lives. While we are constantly exhorted to encrypt everything we care about as financial assets to be leveraged, to (like a fabled artist) embrace a society of endless risks, this task is functionally impossible. Machines calibrated and constantly renovated to assess and take advantage of what Ananya Roy calls the “riskscape,” and move so quickly that our modest if earnest attempts to gain advantage are, at best, merely attempts to stay afloat in the wake of the causality they displace.52 What we are left with is only a cruel optimism: a kind of false-hearted Panglossian credulity toward the financialized imperative which would insist that it is even possible to manage risk and succeed and thrive. Yet

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we know somewhere deep down that if we do, it is largely a matter of chance (adjusted for social privilege based on gender, race, class).53 Horrifically, the spectrum of responses invited by Stockburger’s statue seemingly triangulate the political subjectivities encoded within us in an age when we are all told it is our responsibility to use financial tools and frameworks to take control, yet where financial tools and frameworks are precisely making any notion of such control a farce: askance avoidance of the entire spectacle, cynical mockery of those caught up in it, or earnest participation.

tactical parasitics For critics of finance and financialization like Costas Lapavitsas, the FIRE sector, by and large, “profits without producing.”54 Following and elaborating on Marx’s theory of the generation of fictitious capital, Lapavitsas acknowledges the instrumental role of a financial sector in capitalist development, but shows how, due to the inherent contradictions of capitalist accumulation, it is all too easy for that sector to devolve into an almost hermetically sealed echo chamber, where money begets money with almost no relation to the broader capitalist economy of which it is a part. As David Harvey elucidates, unlike the industrial or mercantile capitalists, rentier or financial capitalists contribute to the production and circulation of monetary and speculative wealth, but not the generation of underlying value, which is based always on the harnessing of labor power toward the creation and sale of commodities.55 The result are, as Giovanni Arrighi demonstrates, waves or cycles of accumulation that culminate in financial crises where the magnitude of over-accumulated financial wealth is revealed to be wildly out of step with actually existing “real world” value.56 Capitalists and whole nations compete to displace this crisis onto one another, as we can well see in our own moment where most nation states hurled themselves into hyper-neoliberal austerity to bail out financial firms, and where powerful states (like Germany) are compelling others (like Greece) to endure the costs of the crisis.57 Thus it is tempting to see the FIRE sector as largely parasitic on an underlying “real economy,” given that it produces almost nothing of value and that its (significant, indeed vital) importance in coordinating global capital flows and investment cannot possibly warrant the astronomical degree of wealth and resources it claims. Certainly this has been the rhetoric of many of today’s social movements, whether Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados in Spain, or those rejecting the extortionate conditions of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank brokered debts in the Global South: the financial world represents a

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parasite that feeds off of the economic productivity of people, nations and even other capitalists.58 One might have reason to question this characterization for all manner of reasons, notably the uneasy resonance of such rhetoric with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. These theories associate a shadowy Jewish financial elite that represents a racially impure contamination of what is presumed to be the otherwise wholesome economic body politic.59 Further, the notion of parasitism presumes a clean separation between the allegedly functional, productive and self-reproducing capitalist “real” economy and the purely extractive manifestations of “fictitious” capital, a distinction I deeply distrust.60 The accusation and metaphor of parasitism operates the realm of cultural politics in part because of (and as a militant answer to) the particular way that the political culture of financialized neoliberalism labels a wide spectrum of “underperforming” economic actors as parasitical on financially led capitalism. Today’s political stage is crowded with such stereotypes: the inefficient government bureaucrat, the lazy teacher, the over-entitled immigrant, the tenured radical, the welfare or benefits cheat, the coddled millennial, the ungrateful artist, even the racialized youth shot down by police: all are cast as parasites on the economic productivity or surplus sympathy of financialized society and its cruelly optimistic subjects.61 Yet so too are these parasites looked to as new frontiers of profit: privatized schools, social impact bonds, microfinance, the austeritydriven restructuring or privatization of public institutions, every sort of boot camp, new online platforms, subprime loans and financialized incentives of all varieties, all these name technologies by which populations of socioeconomic risk and inefficiency are imagined as speculative frontiers.62 Within the order of financialized neoliberalism, the status and objectives of art are usually reduced to parasitism.63 Following the evaporation of the post-war compromise and the ennobling vision of the public it fostered, the idea that art has some inherent value to society has largely been eclipsed, a sentiment that has been fed by and also contributed to the justification of funding cuts for arts institutions. But as art’s purported intrinsic value has waned, its extrinsic values have waxed. We are, as George Yúdice notes, in an age of the “expediency” of culture where art, expression and creative output is increasingly expected to serve bigger often economic ends.64 Hence, for instance, the startling and meteoric rise of enthusiasm art as a technology of the “creative cities” the “creative economy” and the “creative class” among urban planners, neoliberal politicians and many in the cultural and creative industries,

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as we saw in Chapter 2.65 Art and culture more broadly is now conceived largely as a means to other ends, which in part also helps explain the popularity of participatory art in this neoliberal moment: as Bishop notes, it is precisely at the time that the public sphere and social care dissolve that participatory art rises to fill the void. Within the neoliberal, financialized framework, then, art that cannot justify itself through recourse to some social or economic outcome, some value-added experience, is merely parasitical. If, as we have been told, we are at the “end of history” and no further social evolution is necessary or possible, or what Mark Fisher has called capitalist realism, art’s critical role of alerting us to dangerous or hidden social trends or dynamics is largely pointless: this is the best of all possible worlds, or at least the inevitable one.66 Critical art appears increasingly as a weird and pretentious hobby funded either by the idiosyncratic largess of private High Net Worth Individual donors or some residual leaky capillary of the Keynesian state not yet cauterized by austerity. Michel Serres’ robust theory of the parasite offers no clear distinction between parasite and host: each parasite is also a host, each host also a parasite.67 Humans are hosts to millions of different organisms that might be seen as parasitical, though we could be seen as parasitical ourselves on the planet, given the way our actions (at least under capitalism) are destroying whole species and ecosystems at an alarming rate. For Serres, the critical question is not to distinguish parasite from host, but to develop new conceptual tools to name the relations of parasitism that interconnect not only multiple biological organisms and ecological systems, but also social relations, conceptual apparatus and political, economic and cultural institutions and structures. The parasite here is not merely a metaphor that migrates, but a fundamental ontological condition based on the codependent transformation of energetic excess into structural and systemic change: the parasite is the opportunistic beneficiary of surplus created by the host, and in their digestion of that surplus creates the conditions for the host’s evolution and adaptation.68 Parasites are the perfect participants. Drawing on Serres’ concept, the artist duo Post Brothers and Chris Fitzpatrick attempt to plot out a set of coordinates for contemporary art in the period and conditions we have here associated with neoliberal financialization, one where critical contemporary art is at once paradoxically marginalized and belittled as parasitic and at the same time constantly parasitically preyed upon as a source of economic or social innovation, provocation and stimulation.69 As I have argued, neoliberal discourses of creativity, especially “creative destruction” (now largely rebranded as “disruptive innovation”)

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coevolved with financialization as a means to accelerate cycles of urban, technological and financial accumulation.70 For ours is a moment where both the financial world and the art world are characterized by a paradox which is becoming all too familiar across a wide variety of social fields: on the one hand, they are rigidly and oppressively hierarchical, notoriously opaque and impenetrable and highly idiosyncratic. Both fields are overseen by a small number of highly specialized and well-placed insiders whose actions and decisions have wide-reaching impacts. On the other, both systems rely on the contributions of a huge number of participants and, in fact, specialize in seeking out, seducing, harnessing, tapping and integrating the participatory margins to the center.71 So one could argue that both contemporary art and contemporary finance are parasitic on the underlying real economy. But without diminishing in any way the pejorative force of such an accusation, which in both cases is well deserved, it would be more accurate and helpful instead to suggest that both fields of imaginative economic activity are frameworks for parasitism. It’s not simply that both feed off wealth that is external to them. It is that both fields reflect or index the way that financialization as a paradigm recalibrates almost all fields of social activity toward a logic of parasitism in general. For Post Brothers and Chris Fitzpatrick this almost-impossible situation is best addressed by a self-conscious acceptance of the relations of mutual parasitism that define critical contemporary art and looking to the biological world for models of successful parasitism, rather than any wishful thinking (cruel optimism) that would imagine that the “good life” and “good art” awaits us following some perfect autonomous, critical maneuver.

Loophole for All A fine example of parasite-oriented participatory artwork is Paolo Cirio’s 2014 work Loophole for All.72 The artist, whose work has targeted the shadow worlds of data and money, “hacked” the website of the Cayman Islands General Registry of companies, the vehicle through which some of the world’s richest people and corporations set up shell companies in the notorious tax haven in order to avoid paying taxes in their home countries. This allowed Cirio to collect and publish the hitherto unknown names of over 200,000 firms, many of which were simply numbered corporations or ambiguously titled companies, and develop a website where, for prices starting as low at $0.99, anyone could purchase a forged certificate of ownership of that company. Presumably, one could then operate financially as a parasite on that company’s identity, issuing

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invoices and receiving payments in their name, but redirecting the funds to oneself. Depending of jurisdiction, one could declare one’s business in the Cayman Islands yet hold a bank account in one’s actual zone of operations, as is the norm for wealthy people and corporations who abuse tax havens.

Figure 42  Paolo Cirio, Loophole For All, 2013. Installation view, House of Electronic Arts, Basel, Switzerland. Courtesy of the artist.

Here, Cirio ironically creates a recursive parasite. In the first place, corporations have used the Cayman Islands and other such tax havens to escape the democratic redistribution of wealth (taxes) in the societies in which they operate, instead simply extracting as much money as possible, parasitic on those societies. But hitherto this dark magic is reserved only for the world’s most elite corporations and people who can afford the hefty legal and registration fees associated with starting an offshore account.73 Cirio’s intervention allows potentially anyone, presumably citizens of the ripped-off nations now forced to shoulder more of society’s costs, to act parasitically on the parasite, essentially hijacking offshore corporate identities. While ultimately this might be considered a form of fraud, the reality is that the Cayman Islands and other tax havens are so secretive and generally lawless, and the global financial architecture is so complex and mediated by subsidiary law firms and subsidiaries, that proving that the original corporate or billionaire who purchased the company is its “rightful” owner may be challenging. In any case, the Registry of Stocks of the Cayman Islands acted swiftly, both issuing press releases announcing

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Cirio’s work as a hoax and complaining to the online payments platform Paypal, who promptly suspended Cirio’s account putting an end to the sale of certificates and freezing the roughly $700 he had so far earned from the project. This is all especially ironic, given the role that art plays in the offshore machinations of the super-elite.74 To a certain extent, Cirio’s project is resonant with the form of benign pessimism illustrated above. While the project adopts the visage of a democratization of financial tools and a means by which working people can feed at the same trough as the rich, in reality its difficult to imagine a real-world application for such a fake certificate that wouldn’t severely jeopardize the user, and it is unclear if any of Cirio’s clients made any such attempts. Cirio’s project could be said to be aimed to deliver the participant into a reflective moment. Hence the project was aimed less at actually generating purchases and more at mobilizing the potential of participation as a form of interactive spectacle, calibrated to feed off of the online attention economy to magnify its ideological impact. Ultimately, the would-be participant, the figure we might once have called the audience, is hailed into a kind of sly solidarity with the artist. The possibility of parasiting the parasites then works to lampoon power in a way that is particularly germane to the form of digitalized, financialized capitalism we have been exploring here. Unlike Güell and Orta’s work, explored in Chapter 2, Cirio’s Loophole for All is not primarily intended to redirect global resources. It is a deeply cunning intervention at the intersection of multiple overlapping parasitic economies. First, of course, the parasitic economy of the world of tax havens. Second, the parasitic online attention economy that will allow his intervention to travel. Third, the art economy itself because, like Güell and Orta, Cirio here is an activist mobilizing art as an alibi for undertaking para-legal acts, or perhaps an artist using activist tactics to create aesthetic and critical impacts in a deeply changed parasitic economic and political ecology that we are only now beginning to understand. Ultimately, Cirio’s intervention aimed to prove that the seemingly invincible, untouchable transnational financialized elite are in some sense vulnerable. In this sense, the work might appear more spectacular than participatory, more in line with the strategies of tactical media and the prankish interventions of ensembles like RTMark, the Electronic Disturbance Theatre or the Yes Men.75 As in the case of SUPERFLEX and in some ways Stockburger above, participation here functions in some ways precisely through its own abeyance: The would-be participant in Cirio’s piece may not in fact purchase a certificate and engage in allegedly fraudulent activities, but they still must participate in an

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uncanny moment of recognition of themselves as both host and parasite within a parasitical financial system. The deferred promise of participation here, the opportunity to embrace the subjecthood of the parasite, gives the piece its cutting edge.

Robin Hood The Robin Hood Minor Asset Management (RHMAM) advertised itself as a “Hedge Fund for the 99%” and an investment bank for the precariat.76 It slyly and self-consciously existed in the seam between an academic experiment and artistic intervention, an activist project and a corporate enterprise. Registered as a cooperative in Finland (a social democratic nation well known for fostering cooperativism) RHMAM was the brainchild of a collaboration of academics, artists, activists and hackers who set out to test a “parasite algorithm” that followed and made investment decisions based on the behavior of the “big fish,” the world’s most successful financial firms and individuals. Launched in 2012, it cost a mere €30 to join the cooperative (which helped pay for basic overhead expenses) and an initial investment of at least €30 was put into a fund that is invested based on the advice of the aforementioned algorithm, which was informed by a secret set of sources and data-points. In order to gain the trust of the skeptical, RHMAM paid for and publicly posted a financial audit by the global accounting firm Ernst and Young, which affirmed the cooperative’s shocking 30.75 percent return on investment in its first year and 40.15 percent in its second.77 Members were entitled to a portion of that return upon conditions they specify upon joining, usually a 50/50 split where 50 percent was put into the “Robin Hood Projects” fund. Each year, any effort, anywhere in the world, could propose to the Fund a project to build the commons, and members of the cooperative voted on which proposals got access to the financing. A number of important features of this financial technology are important at the outset. First, the rate of return boasted by RHMAM was virtually unprecedented even in the highly exclusive and privileged realm of elite hedge funds, which are only accessible to the very wealthy individuals and large institutional investors. Second, while RHMAM offered a means for the “precariat” to benefit from the acceleration of financial markets, it was an unapologetic participant in those markets. Hence a highly precarious and hyper-exploited Amazon worker who was also a member of RHMAM may have been investing in Amazon—there was no ethical component to the investment at all. They could have also been investing in Exxon, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs and other objectionable firms.

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Figure 43  Mathieu Beauséjour, SURVIVAL VIRUS DU SURVIE, 1991–9. Image courtesy of the artist. Between 1991 and 1999 Quebec artist Mathieu Beauséjour sustained a practice of stamping the back of banknotes with the words “SURVIVAL VIRUS DE SURVIE,” then meticulously recording the serial number of each note before returning it into circulation as money. Beauséjour’s work proposed to inhabit, infect and appropriate the serialized character of paper money, which, in this 1995 precis of the project, he characterizes as already virus-like. Fascinated by the “rectangularist” form of paper money, which is invariant between countries, Beauséjour envisioned a new form (the “survival virus”) that would inhabit and recode money with subversive meaning and potential, in part by drawing attention to the ephemerality of the money object itself: once “damaged” (or “infected”) as “art,” the banknote is destined to be removed from circulation by monetary authorities. Meanwhile, Beauséjour’s piece also slyly leverages institutions of the art world to spread the virus, not only as a material trace on money itself, but also as a kind of tokenized cultural form. Today, we would perhaps identify this piece with the notion of the meme: a freely circulating fragment of culture that, at least in its original meaning provided by Richard Dawkins, seeks to reproduce itself in ways akin to his theory of the “selfish gene.”

Here RHMAM self-consciously and explicitly took on the cruel optimism that surrounds the vast majority of so-called “ethical funds” and other forms of “financial activism” that promise a neoliberal solution to global problems.78 By contrast, RHMAM offered up a much more sly and subversive subjectivity and community, one I’d associate with benign pessimism. RHMAM explicitly adopted the language of the parasite (indeed, cited Serres in many of their documents) as a means to identify the scope of their intervention. They did not conceive of themselves in a triumphant idiom, as in any way prefiguring the world or the social organization yet-to-come. Rather, they present themselves as a revanchist means by which the precariat could gain access to otherwise elite flows of financial wealth, to essentially become a parasite on a system that is parasitically feeding off of all of us. They mobilized art as a vehicle to do so: art here represents less a set of defined coordinates but a floating

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signifier that holds the place for a set of procedures that cleave against the typical order. Just as RHMAM explicitly positioned itself as a parasite on the parasite of speculative financial markets, it was also a parasite on “art” itself, producing hype in order to draw on the excesses and profligacies of the art world to fund and support its operations (by and large, the greatest enthusiasm and opportunities to accrue to RHMAM from the art world, rather than worlds of activism or finance). In this, RHMAM represented a novel conceptual and participatory organism, born of and highly adapted to the financialized landscape. While on the surface it appeared to participate in, even contribute to the reproduction of the forms of participatory neoliberal financialization, in fact, thanks in part to the accompanying RHFund, it also or additionally sought to funnel the resources of that financial world toward the creation of radical grassroots alternatives. In so doing, it conscripted its participants (members) into a different sort of subjectivity and community. RHMAM was not (just) a hedge fund or a mutual fund: it is a cooperative art project or a tactical form of (counter-)parasitism. Beyond the very real money it redirected (back) to the precariat and toward commons-oriented projects, its mere existence was significant: it was a living reminder that the system as a whole is parasitic and that, therefore, parasitic strategies are germane to it. Indeed, they are unavoidable.79

the encrypted common The final practices we will investigate correspond to a strategic orientation I identify as the encrypted common. Here, I do not mobilize the term encryption to speak to the recent trend toward technologically driven cryptocurrencies and blockchains, although we will return to this theme in Chapter 4. Rather, I am drawing on the term’s psychoanalytic resonances as parsed by Jacques Derrida.80 Drawing on the re-reading of Freud presented by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, Derrida’s notion of encryption names a process where a constitutive and essential part of subjectivity, the relation to the other or to others, must be sealed in a structure, a crypt, where it is simultaneously dead and alive.81 For Abraham and Torok, two Freudian psychoanalysts working parallel to the Lacanian turn, encryption occurs in patients who have endured or witnessed trauma involving an idolized figure. In their re-reading of Freud’s analysis of the “Wolf-Man,” the patient’s speech is encrypted because of family traumas encountered in childhood, especially as concerned his older sister and his witnessing as an infant of the “primal scene” of his parents having sex.82 In order to defend the idolized sister-object as a central element of his unconsciousness, he

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encrypted it within his psyche, preserving the projection in a state of both life and death. Symptomatically, the Wolf-Man exhibited fragmentary speech around words and phrases tangentially related to the internal crypt, rendering his testimony an encrypted message for him and Freud to decrypt in the course of analysis. A key feature of encryption is the mobilization of many psychic resources to avoid decryption, for fear of revealing the underlying trauma and being forced to reconstruct the entire psyche without the encrypted object. Meanwhile, however, the Wolf-Man himself became encrypted within his own crypt—because the psyche is built around the preserved lost object in the crypt, it is actually the ego itself that is in the crypt, both dead and alive.83 Without wishing to engage in a lengthy discussion (and problematization) of psychoanalytic methods and theories, the metaphor of the crypt can be highly useful, especially in the capacious sense Derrida gives the phrase: encryption is the process by which a lost object of projection and attachment is secretly maintained in a state that is both life and death. This act of inner encryption exhibits outwardly as encrypted speech or utterance that evades or actively avoids decryption in order to preserve the system or structure between life and death. For Derrida, of course, some sort of final decryption and liberation from the crypt is impossible: it is, in fact, the very condition of the ego. He uses the metaphor of the archway (a term that shares an etymology with crypt in French) to illustrate how a crypt is, in fact, part of a system of mutual supports. Thus for Derrida decryption does not aim to reveal or discover some “true” final meaning beyond this argument but, rather, to engage in a deconstructive process of revealing this architecture of mutual reliances. The task, for Derrida, is not to exorcise or expel the phantoms or complete the work of mourning but accept that there is no subjectivity without them.84 Let us lay this admittedly convoluted set of terms aside for a moment (we’ll return to them in the next chapter) to dwell with our final participatory art works.

Market for immaterial value Writing about Market for Immaterial Value, a suite of participatory works by Valentina Karga and Pieterjan Grandry about the (disastrous) precarious conditions of artistic producers under financialization, Tessa Zettle explains that the collaborators had, in 2013, developed a prototype financial instrument for capturing value generated by the artist but too often accrued elsewhere within (and outside) the

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Figure 44  Valentina Karga and Pieterjan Grandry, Valentina and Pieter invest in themselves, 2013–present. Courtesy of the artist.

art world. Valentina and Pieter Invest in Themselves is a specially minted gold coin whose value is determined by equities sold to an expanding group of public investors, who then collectively own the work. Envisaged as a kind of pension platform for the artists and their small-time investors, its central commodity is not subject to the speculative fluctuations of the art market but steadily rising in value as new investors join. Inspired by Foucault’s observation that neoliberal biopolitics demand the transformation of each individual into an investor of the self, and with a self-evident cynicism toward the art world that offered them the exploitative venue of the Athens Biennale, Karga and Grandry sought to create a mimicry of money, a golden, coin-like social sculpture aimed not only at hyperbolizing the financialization of art, but also the absurdity of the investment in the first place. This absurdity took a number of forms at once. In the first place, the piece called attention to the hunger of the art market for the work of young artists as speculative investments. As contemporary art markets have expanded, they have generated what might be well imagined as a venture capital wing: a set of investors who are interested in getting in on the proverbial ground-floor of young artists’ careers, whose business-model appears to be making a high number of

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extremely high-risk investments in the hopes that one in a thousand will be the jackpot.85 Perhaps more cynically, and accurately, these venture collectors are eager to leverage their influence with other art-market insiders to generate, rather than ride, the wave of interest and speculation in the artist in question and thereby profit from the hype, regardless of what that means for the artist’s long-term prospects, and regardless of any other measure of the quality of the work.86 Notoriously, collecting “contemporary” art is increasingly the domain of what is perceived to be the more venal and thuggish “new money,” wet-behind-the-ears millionaires and billionaires eager to buy the fine art equivalent of glitzy McMansions with the price tags still hanging off them for added effect.87 Yet this nefarious sort of market manipulation is only the most egregious of a form of speculation on emerging art and artists. Curators, gallerists, critics and others also are compelled to speculate on these potentials in the name of their own careers: if, as we have previously explored, what makes art “contemporary” is precisely its ability to continuously generate newness, one of the key markers of prestige (and hence, employment, sponsorship and other material benefits) accrue to art world insiders who prove themselves adept at spotting and fostering this talent. For better and for worse, in a moment of widespread financial crisis, contemporary critical work about economics, finance and debt have become hot commodities, giving off that whiff of critical brimstone that so begets the interest of an art world. Works like Valentina and Pieter Invest in Themselves emerge from a condition in which young artists find themselves located within an exorable contradiction: they are seeking to be critical of and to devise lines of flight from a moment of financialized capitalism, but this financialized capitalism has infiltrated and reconfigured the art world that is precisely the condition of these artists’ emergence. The result of all this pressure is a tightly compressed golden coin which is probably best understood as a self-portrait of the young artist today: one face bears the imprint of the sort of speculative hype that ultimately generates value for others, the other bearing the imprint of a tragic search for a kind of communal integrity. Second, the work calls attention to the false promise of payback for our investments in our human capital. The idea that investing in oneself will produce future wealth and happiness is, evidently, a cruel optimism, especially for artists who, in an age when art schools in global metropoles like London and New York (where one goes precisely to purchase admission into the art world, to invest in contacts and networks) mean taking on an astronomical degree of debt, the idea that artists could ever invest in themselves enough to escape financial precariousness is absurd.88 As Zettle notes, Valentina and Pieter Invest in Themselves can

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Figure 45  Valentina Karga and Pieterjan Grandry, Market for Immaterial Value, 2013–present. Instance at Sixty Eight Art Institute, Copenhagen, 2017. Photograph: Christopher Sand Iversen. Courtesy of the artist.

be read as a sort of alternative pension platform, where the recurring deposits of investors in the artwork will eventually generate a fund capable of sustaining the artists. But even in the artist’s wildest dreams, such a prospect is impossible. The only possibility that the work would ever attract enough capital to be useful in their lives would be if a major art investor were to sink tens of thousands of euros into it, which is extremely unlikely, given that each investor in the work is entitled to an equal share of its value, according to the rules set forth by the artists: an investment of €1 or €1,000 means exactly the same share. The investment here is a false one. As with the artists, so too with the investors. This is the third dimension of art’s financialization slyly mocked by Valentina and Pieter Invest in Themselves: cynical two-way, complicitous manipulation of artists by investor-collectors and vice versa. Here, the artists have devised a kind of poisoned pill that in a strange way levels the relationship between artist and investor. Not only is it equally unlikely the investor or the artist will strike it rich from this scheme, the reality is that the artists have written into the contract their right to continue selling shares ad-infinitum, meaning that even if the work were sold someday (and the sale of the work would require some sort of consent from all the shareholders, and no democratic process for convening them is defined) for €10,000, a shareholder may discover they are merely one among 10,000, and thus only entitled to a single euro payback. Then they

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would know how artists feel when, for instance, their works are flipped and sold for profit on secondary markets, for which artists typically earn nothing or next to nothing.89 So in Karga and Grandry’s piece there is a cynical sort of manipulation of the investor who has essentially bought into a financial vehicle without reading the fine print. But the piece also calls up the naïveté of the artist who is so phobic of money they defer the financial questions to outsiders. The all-too-common aphorism that artists cannot handle their money exists to perpetuate the myth that money and art are antithetical. This myth is highly functional for artists, because it contributes to the specialized aura of decryption that gives the commodities they create value. It is also functional for investors, first because it is this mythology that adds value to the art-commodity, second because of the derivative benefits that accrue to the collector: the sense of moral, intellectual and nigh spiritual superiority that comes from deigning to spend one’s allegedly hard-earned money on a vulnerable work of art in the name of this or that romantic and metaphysical ideal.90 So far my discussion of this work would perhaps place it in the realm of either benign pessimism (the cryptic gift of a useless investment vehicle) or tactical parasitics (artists taking advantage of the art world’s obsession with manifestations of its own repressed dependency on money). What is perhaps most interesting about Valentina and Pieter Invest in Themselves is the way it also participates in a strange sort of conjectural commons, a kind of counter-speculation. As one might expect, the work, in actuality, never gained very many investors—never capitalizing on over €1,000. Most of that investment came from friends, families, curators, fellow artists and a handful of gallerygoers, and most “investments” were basically pocket change. Yet, in a funny way, this failure to generate monetary investment revealed a different set of investments that had already been made in Valentina and Pieter: those non-monetary investments of care, attention, collaboration and gallows-solidarity that had in fact made their careers and lives possible in the first place. The “rules” of the piece are such that the eventual sale of the sculpture, and the prospective payout of investors, will only occur at such a time as those investors elect to meet and vote to liquidate the common venture. No date has been specified and no protocol has been determined: it is a purely speculative democratic moment in the hypothetical future. There is something queerly utopian about this implied but for all intents and purposes impossible moment. The moment when the artists’ friends, comrades, colleagues, supporters and fans would gather around and make some sort of common decision for mutual benefit. Once again, the piece arrives as a kind of self-portrait. After all, in spite of the rhetoric of human capital and entrepreneurial self-maximization so germane to

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financialization, we are not so much the product of our own speculative, acquisitive investments in ourselves as we are the product of the communities that forge us, not out of a hope for future economic return, but simply out of love and common courage.91 The coin-like sculpture of Valentina and Pieter Invest in Themselves is a crypt for precisely this common labor, or this labor of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call the undercommons, only part of which is captured in the list of actual investors.92 The impossible moment when all these common investors would come together to make a collective decision is a kind of utopian speculation, which resonates with the revolutionary dream that, someday, somehow, the “we” of which we are each a part yet from which we have been alienated can come together and encounter a moment of radical, self-actualizing democracy. Meanwhile, as we wait for this utopia, Valentina and Pieter Invest in Themselves operates as a passport into new potential zones of solidarity and also into new art markets for Karga and Grandry: it continues to be exhibited, it continues to attract small-time investors, mostly people they develop human relationships with and who want to share a new experience or a wry smile or be in on a joke against a boss or a landlord we all feel, but that we can’t quite identify: the ambient disciplinary power of money, the falsely empowering, brilliantly seductive rhetoric and tools of financialization.

Give me cred Cassie Thornton is a San Francisco-based artist and activist who often works with a fluctuating network of collaborators under the auspices of the Feminist Economics Department.93 Active since 2012 with the social movement Strike Debt (and, after, the Debt Collective), an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, Thornton began working primarily with the theme and material of debt while pursuing her two-year MFA in Social Practice at the California College of the Arts, an elite and legendary private institution whose tuition fee at the time was $38,850 per year. Drawing on the history of conceptual art and institutional critique, Thornton used art school as a site of intervention regarding debt, using tactics that included creating a yearbook of hypnotic “debt-visualizations” of her fellow students and hiring an actor to play an overleveraged student and have scripted breakdowns in public space.94 Following her graduation in 2012, Thornton continued to work with debt and in 2013 initiated a multi-site, multi-institutional project, Give Me Cred, at the intersection of art and activism. In 2013, during a residency and exhibition at the Cleveland SPACES Gallery, Thornton

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Figure 46 (Top) Cassie Thornton, Give Me Cred!, 2013. Installation view at Southern Exposure, San Francisco. Courtesy of the artist. (Bottom) Cassie Thornton, Give Me Cred!, 2013. Alternative credit report template. Courtesy of the artist.

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launched an alternative credit-rating agency that used personal testimony and one-on-one conversations to create narrative-based credit reports for those whose credit scores were dismal. Over the past decade in the United States, FICO credit scores have become an essential financial technology with grave implications for daily life.95 It is not only the main criterion for approving individuals for access to debt (including credit cards, car loans, student loans and mortgages) and determining the levels of interest they will pay, these days credit reports are often demanded by prospective employers and landlords as a means to weed out allegedly untrustworthy clients.96 The generation of credit reports, monopolized by three corporations, is notoriously opaque and poorly regulated and the generation of single FICO credit scores even more so. Yet their impacts are widely felt.97 Thornton’s practice of creating alternative credit reports continued in the Bay Area in 2015 when she advertised on the online classified site Craigslist to solicit volunteers, most of whom were struggling to find accommodation in San Francisco’s rapidly gentrifying and highly financialization housing and rental markets. Thornton asked participants for their resumes and official credit reports before meeting them in cafes or at their homes for an interview, which clarified the way their personal biography and their economic conditions of debt and delinquency intersected. Then the artist drafted a short alternative credit report explaining the participant’s circumstances and offering her opinion of the latter’s trustworthiness in a holistic sense. Participants were invited to edit the reports before a final, signed digital file on special letterhead was provided to them for their use while searching for accommodation or employment. Thornton reports that participants experienced a surprisingly high level of success using the alternative credit reports, but she measures the effectiveness of the project in the way it helped challenge the frameworks of value and narratives of success and trustworthiness implicit in the official credit-reporting industry and the wider debt-driven financialized economy of which it is a part. The credit reporting industry was born in the US in the wake of the Civil War with benevolent if highly racialized intentions, orchestrated to facilitate the Westward expansion (colonization) of white US settlers by granting them access to a growing consumer debt system.98 While the racist overtones of credit rating and reporting persist, the industry and its methods and measurements have become a fundamental part of the financial infrastructure, though its expectations and logics are frequently punitive and misunderstood. Thornton notes that the bulk of her participants fell out of favor because of unforeseen health or family calamities or other factors beyond their control.

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Give Me Cred also included a series of talks, workshops and presentations on the histories and impacts of the credit reporting industry. At the Southern Exposure gallery in 2015, Thornton set up a temporary office underneath an oversized wooden table. At issue in the work is not merely the revelation of the industry’s cruelties and evils, nor even primarily the supplying of individuals with an effective tool to avoid them. Rather, Thornton’s goal is the possibility of imagining and generating a sense of, and practices of, value and solidarity on other terms. Hence those who received credit reports (for free) were asked and equipped to, in turn, do credit reports for others, turning their attention, care, compassion and trust outwards. Thornton’s hope (still unrealized) was to create an expansive grassroots network of credit reporting that would be both a technology of financial mutual aid, and also a technology of psycho-financial solidarity-oriented therapy. Two levels of encryption and decryption are at work in this project. On the first, the individual debtor becomes the bearer of an encrypted message: their credit history (represented by opaque reports and an inscrutable score) that they bear at once within and outside them. Both living and dead, one’s credit shapes one’s fate, expressing itself in a million minute ways on the level of everyday financial health. Thornton’s procedures act as a form of economic psychotherapy aimed at helping the participant/patient uncover and decrypt the hidden force locked within themselves and within which they are locked and create a new, more generative and liberating narrative. But on another, deeper level, Thornton’s hope for a network of autonomous grassroots credit reporting speaks to a deeper crypt. Here, financialized money, represented in this case by the notion and practices of credit, represent an encryption of our collective potential, as we learned in Chapter 1. The young Marx (and arguably the old as well) was deeply concerned with the way money, as the supreme commodity and the means of capitalist circulation, returned humanity’s collective potential to transform the world in the form of a coin (or bill, or whatever). He famously wrote in the Grundrisse that one “The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket.”99 This sentiment was echoed by anthropologist Marcel Mauss who posed money as the counterfeit of society’s own dreams, a false and fractured, but nonetheless functional, representation of collective potential.100 In this sense, money might be understood as the common in encrypted form. Eli Meyerhoff, parsing the work of Autonomist Cesare Casarino, draws out a distinction between “the common” and the “the commons,” also pregnant (but not defined) in the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.101 The commons, of course, refers historically to

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those lands in England reserved for the use of peasants for the purposes of self-sufficiency, whose destruction and “enclosure” was key to the birth of capitalism and the rise of a proletarian class dependent on wages and commodities (rather than common land and self-sufficiency) for survival.102 Since that time, the term “commons” has come to name a whole range of “resources” managed collectively, democratically and in an egalitarian way.103 For Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics laureate Elinor Ostrom, the commons represent a third option, besides the state and markets, for governing the use of and access to resources.104 For many feminist and Marxist critics and activists, the commons represent both the method and the horizon of social change: building and reclaiming common resources (housing, schooling, health, land) in the present presages and helps set the stage for a more profound system-wide transformation in the future.105 The common is the virtual conjugation of the actuality of the commons, the force or potential that stands behind every experiment in or instance of the actual commons. The common, for Cassarino and Meyerhof, represents the potential for commons-oriented activity pregnant throughout society. The common is precisely what capitalism seeks to organize, co-opt and control for its own reproduction and in the name of the accumulation of private profit. It is the raw force put to work in the capitalist economy, but rather than reproducing autonomous, democratic social life it is made to reproduce commodities for the market. Money, as the supreme commodity and the medium of commodity exchange, is in some sense, then, the representative of the alienation of the common: it is the crypt of the common, where the common is kept alive (as “living labor” for the production of commodities) and dead (as in the “dead labor” in the form of commodities, machines).106 As we have seen, in an era of financialization, money escapes any physical medium and saturates the social world, coming to co-opt or reprogram all manner of social affairs, notably education, housing, the work process, increasingly through the disciplinary and constitutive powers of debt. Thus, in a sense, a credit score or credit report is a testament to our common capacity to cooperate given to us in encrypted form. On a very real level, the credit report delimits and shapes the ways in which we will cooperate and participate as social beings in terms of housing, employment, education and ability to access the fruits of our collective labor (i.e. commodities). Thornton’s work, emblematized by the Give Me Cred! Project, could be said to be aimed at decrypting the common. In Abraham and Torok’s re-reading of Freud, encryption is the result of traumas that result in

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failed introjection, the continued presence of the Other, living and dead at once, in a secret place inside the subject. One of Derrida’s contributions to this theorization is to depathologize this phantom of the Other: there is no subject that is possible beyond this “hauntology.” In the case of Thornton’s work, financialized capitalism represents the latest in a long line of systems of economic and social power that traumatize us individual and collectively, sequestering the possibility of the common (and our capacities to build the commons) within and between us, alive and dead. The Feminist Economics Department, the banner under which she conducts her work, is a kind of experimental laboratory for a kind of collective political-economic therapy to help us decrypt the fragments of the common hidden in plain sight.

conclusion In the next chapter, we further unpack the theoretical possibilities that this concept of encryption provides, especially in an age when many are seduced by the potential for digital cryptographic solutions, notably blockchains and cryptocurrencies, to reform or revolutionize the monetary and financial system. To conclude this chapter I merely want to note that the art practices we have examined here should give us pause when we are tempted to imagine that policies and technologies that promote “financial inclusion” or “economic participation” are in any way subversive.107 Financialization not only relies on participation, it is, ultimately, a format or orchestration of participation. It operates and expands precisely through inclusion and by making us each into agents of its operations and expansion. While we should not for a moment imagine that this somehow makes all participants equally powerful, we also must not fall prey to the equally seductive idea that financialization is merely parasitism in the pejorative sense of the term. The artists I have investigated here each offer experiments that aim, ultimately, to map the contours of participatory neoliberal financialization, of the emerging landscape of capitalism that is predicated not only on the transmutation of labor power into commodities, but on the speculative recalibration of social life, social reproduction or what we in the next chapter will identify as sociality. These artists have mobilized the tools, techniques, rhetorics and, importantly, institutional resources of “art” during the so-called “participatory turn” in order to do this work. If, as we have seen, participatory art is in some sense symptomatic of financialization, these artists have leveraged this genre or habit of art to investigate the broader socio-economic idiom. It is to the deeper nuances of this idiom that we now turn.

4 ∞ encryption: Art’s crypt, securitization in numbers, derivative socialities

Unfortunately, you’ve been lured here under false pretenses: this chapter actually has almost nothing to do with Bitcoin, blockchains or initial coin offerings, at least not explicitly. While these technological developments are no doubt interesting, and have numerous implications for art, creativity and the imagination, not to mention “the economy” at the moment of this book’s publication, my wager is that all too often the enthusiasm for these schemes, accelerated by rampant speculation and techno-utopianism, distracts us from some of the deeper questions about the nature of money, value and collective potential that ought to be our focus.1 In the name of those latter questions this chapter takes as its task to pick up the threads dropped in the previous chapter and explore how art and money are both, or might both be, manifestations of what I called the encrypted common, though we will return briefly to the theme of new digital currencies and systems at the chapter’s end. More specifically, this chapter will seek to develop a set of terms for thinking through the perils and potentials of art in an era of the derivative, or of what Randy Martin calls “derivative sociality,” one where financialization is in a constant process of decoding and re-encoding social life, social intercourse, relationality and subjectivity. It is an age, as we have explored in previous chapters, in which even our most heartfelt hopes and aspirations for alternatives and escape are infected or inflected by the financialization of the imagination, and indeed when financialization as a process proceeds and advances precisely to the extent it can infect or inflect our hopes, aspirations and sense of difference, dissent and deviation. Financialization represents a period and a process in which capitalism both surrounds and is inside of the social fabric to such an extent that we need to develop new terms and frameworks for understanding the latitudes of revolt and refusal that may be possible. In this chapter, I am interested in leveraging the hype around encryption in order to more tightly weave together a story about the finance, social and technological changes that are now underway, but whose horizon is still a matter of conjecture.

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To do this, I am going to continue to delve into the theoretical notion of the crypt developed by Jacques Derrida based on Abraham and Torok’s reinterpretation of Freud’s analysis of his patient the Wolf Man.2 I am going to attempt to mobilize this framework to explain more deeply the relationship between art and money in the age of the derivative, an age that Martin insists we see as quite different than other moments of capitalist accumulation, one where we can no longer convince ourselves of any clean separation between the categories of cultural representation and political economy.3 To do so, I will navigate a few sites of fraught intersection: the cryptic research-based practice of Mark Curran, the rise of luxury freeports, architectural crypts where the world’s financially engorged super-wealthy horde art treasures; the experimental cinematic work of artist and theorist Melanie Gilligan; and the art-activist work of Debtfair, a derivative manifestation of Occupy Wall Street. My general argument is essentially this: while derivative contracts have existed for centuries and arguably predate capitalism as such, today’s form of capitalism has elevated the derivative, or more accurately what Randy Martin calls the “logic” of the derivative, to a central organizing technology and principle. Ultimately, I argue, the derivative represents a self-accelerating and contagious methodology for decoding the sublime complexity of “sociality” into actionable data and also, thereby, re-encoding sociality in financialized terms. As Martin puts it: as a means of bundling together attributes from disparate values, the derivative holds the key to the most salient mode of sociality of our moment, one that makes the future actionable in the present, that connects what is near and far, that assembles bits and moments together for appreciable gain, that melds circulation with production, that hedges knowledge against the unknown ever more intricate indices of risk, that enables movement together from what is already in motion without insisting on unity.4 For reasons we have discussed earlier, art is a particularly important indicator species for these complex and sometimes counterintuitive changes in the economic atmosphere. For this reason, examining the way freeports—hyper-securitized luxury warehouses custom-built in special economic zones to house artworks—function or encrypt art, transforming it into a derivative vehicle, can reveal a great deal about the broader climate of financialization. I want to explore how the notion of the crypt can help reveal the very particular way that art-as-such, whose very being seems like it ought to reject the logic of capitalism, exists as

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an internalized exception to capitalism, dead and yet also alive, inside yet also outside. The argument I have been building in the previous chapters aims to reveal how both art and money are each fragmentary expressions or mediations of the fabric of the common. In other words, both art and money return to us a shard of our own shattered sociality, of our capacity for imaginative cooperation, in a skewed form, though each in very different ways. Here I want to expand that argument by thinking through the metaphor of encryption and decryption through the Derridean lens, in particular because I think it can help us better understand what has changed or shifted in the era of the derivative, or of financialization. Examining Melanie Gilligan’s brilliant 2010 film Popular Unrest, I seek to unpack Martin’s theorization of the derivative as a logic that seeks to generate wealth not through a brutal subordination of sociality to a particular mode of production (as per earlier instances of capitalism) but by encouraging, speculating on, harnessing and bundling and rebundling diverse expressions of sociality: In the terms I developed in Chapter 3, the derivative names a method for managing, coordinating or orchestrating millions of contradictory forms of economic participation. Yet, as Martin theorizes and as Gilligan’s film illustrates, this maelstrom gives rise to new and uncontrolled forms of surplus, new derivative modes of sociality, new collective movements that would not have, in previous moments, been possible or visible. Examining the work of the American ensemble Debtfair allows us to see the growing sensibility among those activists who still retain some strategic fidelity to the frame of “art” to see what radical possibilities might emerge from derivative sociality. I will conclude by briefly revisiting the question of cryptocurrencies, which this essay’s title seems to promise. Briefly, my argument is that, more often than not, they are sophisticated answers to the wrong question. The dreams that animate the development of these initiatives are based on a deeply flawed and ultimately neoliberal mythology of money’s origins and possibilities.5 Throughout this book I have sought to frame money as a capitalist encryption of our capacities for imaginative cooperation—it is therefore both a fundamentally violent and a fundamentally inaccurate method for coordinating and organizing social life. In contrast, the neoliberal approach sees money as ultimately a convenient and neutral expression of humanity’s competitive and acquisitive nature, a means to expedite and expand our inclination to specialize and diversify production and truck and barter. In this sense, I see the vast majority of cryptocurrency schemes as fundamentally flawed attempts to decrypt money and return it to its original or basic

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“source code,” then build some new form of transparent or rational cryptographic monetary infrastructure on top. I’m not so much interested in critiquing this or that particular cryptocurrency scheme: there are literally thousands and some have very interesting features. Rather, it is to argue that the mania and (cruel) optimism for cryptocurrencies today is best framed as symptomatic of financialization, the product of imaginations already saturated by the logic of the derivative, and therefore rarely capable of providing an actually radical alternative to it. To actually discover the potentiality of radical alternatives, we would instead need to look precisely at the fraught intersection that has been my concern throughout this book: the methods by which we, the products of our own sociality, come to reflect on and re-craft our own sociality. That is to say, how we mediate and thereby shape our own cooperative potential. I have sought throughout the book to frame money and art, under capitalism, as two complex, problematic and inaccurate methods or mediations for this shaping or re-crafting of our own sublime and limitless potential. What other forms might be possible? Before we begin: as tempting at times as it may be to think so, this chapter does not advance toward a kind of unified theory of the crypt. It should, rather, be seen as a prolonged meditation or set of imaginative exercises aimed at revisiting and extending many of the themes we have already explored in this book, spurred by the felicitous metaphoric richness of the idea of the crypt. If there is an overarching theory here it is primarily that financialization represents another layer of capitalism’s encryption of sociality, of the common: indeed, an encryption of an encryption of an encryption. Secondarily, it is reaffirmation that art’s unique encryption within capitalism, and within financialization, gives it a special and singular position to help us decrypt these relations and perhaps, as I have intimated in previous chapters, glimpse the raw magma of the common within. But, as Derrida advises, we should never expect to gain from the notion of the crypt some functional model or schematic diagram of a structure: the crypt is the invisiblized core around which systems grow and which therefore encloses them. It contains what is taboo and inconceivable. For this reason, the work of decryption is neither straightforward nor linear nor triumphant; we are likely to find more crypts, deeper labyrinths.

the cryptic market Mark Curran’s THE MARKET is an evolving, context-specific installation of photographs, documents and multimedia work that invite

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gallery­goers into a deeply uncanny atmosphere. The walls are lined with head-on, studio-style portraits of financial workers inside or in front of the offices or trading floors where they ply their trade. Sometimes the image is of the interior or exterior of the financial buildings themselves, curiously devoid of any human subject, as if the walls of banks themselves could speak, or as if their silence speaks its own volumes. Manila folders lie on tables in the center of the room illuminated by goosenecked lamps: they contain transcripts of Curran’s interviews with bankers, financial analysts, traders and brokers, the result of years of work to secure access to facilities and personnel in Dublin, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, Addis Ababa and other financial locales. Some interviewees have so heavily redacted their testimonies that nothing remains except blank pages. Distributed around the gallery, framed on the walls or on lit plinths you might also find the ephemera of Curran’s investigations: printed email

Figure 47  Mark Curran, from THE MARKET (2010–Present), Bethlehem, Trader (negotiation 1.5 years), Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX), Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, September 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

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correspondence seeking permission to photograph or interview workers at stock markets or at major corporations, for instance. Elsewhere in the exhibition one might find ambiguous footage of groomed foliage swaying in the breeze outside the ziggurat of a hedge fund’s office in some ambiguous global metropole, or a loop of a recording of financial television. In some iterations of the exhibition you might come across a projection of a fluctuating rainbow waveform, the aesthetic manifestation produced by a homemade algorithmic experiment that excises and renders a visual representation of audio from speeches by the country’s finance minister. Curran’s research-intensive, multi-year project is, to my mind, a meaningful though purposefully flawed or necessarily incomplete portrait of financialization itself. The sum of all the manifold information presented to the viewer remains so very cryptic. Curran here spectacularizes the cultivation of evidence that ultimately builds a case whose culprit, victim, modus operandi and motive remain ambivalent. THE MARKET that Curran vows to represent remains at once always just outside of the frame (the broader, peripheral context of the images and text) and somehow encrypted within each transcript, architecture, image, visualization and subject. The amassing of photographic and textual evidence positions both the artist and the audience as tragic film-noir detectives, combing through seemingly disconnected and untrustworthy clues and testimonies, seeking to uncover or decrypt some broader plot or conspiracy. Uncannily, as with the noir detective, the conspiracy is at once vaster than we can possibly imagine and somehow implicates us as well. Doggedly, we try and make sense of a crime that appears to encompass all of society, yet that is also unnervingly intimate: no one can be trusted, not even the detective, not even the spectator. A simplistic reading of Curran’s project here would be one that would ascribe to it the kind of cruel optimism I analyzed last chapter: it appears to be driven ever onward by the pyric hope that if enough of the right kind of evidence is gathered, THE MARKET will in fact appear or manifest, the case will be solved, there will be a kind of aesthetic and political closure. Yet the project is actually perhaps closer to the strategy of benign pessimism: Curran’s portrait of THE MARKET invites us to envision its opacity, its crypticness. Whether it is the blank gazes of his photographic subjects, the flat surfaces of the financial architecture, the monotony of the looped video, or the muteness of the redacted transcripts, there is something ominous, ubiquitous and impenetrable about the market that stands both between and behind all aspects of the exhibition. Like any

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good film noir, its shadow is cast everywhere though we can never see it. The shadow is cast even into each of us. I am drawn to this exhibition because I think it is a fine example of the very particular and unique way “art” holds a space within financialization to illuminate or draw our attention to the way this conjugation of capitalism exceeds the imagination at the very moment it also encrypts it. THE MARKET in this work is both everywhere and nowhere, both the encrypted interior of the work and also the encrypting exterior. In other words, Curran’s work here seeks to make us aware of, or to haunt us with, the depth to which THE MARKET has, through financialization, come to recode society. Or, perhaps more accurately, the phantom market, which we can only glimpse by the matter it displaces in the spaces between the artifacts and images of the exhibition, is always at work, decrypting and re-encrypting sociality itself. Sociality here is not simply the social institutions and structures of society but the grammar of the relational imagination, action and potential from which those institutions and structures are made, and from which we social subjects are all made, too. As Martin puts it: Finance not only focuses, articulates, and disseminates a social logic of the derivative but also achieves its potency as a consequence of that very sociality. The social logic of the derivative is therefore a kind of epistemological hedge against the claim that a form of capital is the first cause of all social life, but that it rests on and discloses a mutual indebtedness, a sociality that it requires but that it can neither abide nor sustain.6

a financialized society of control The market does not actually appear and cannot appear in Curran’s work because it is everywhere, all around and also inside. It is, to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze in his “Postscript on the Societies of Control” a form of power that is not so much vested in discrete enclosures (like the school, the prison, the factory) but, like the transnational corporation with coordinated operations around the world, more like “a spirit, a gas.”7 Deleuze in that essay is presciently concerned with the way that oppressive forms of disciplinary drilling, measurement and discursive control that Foucault so thoroughly theorized through the modern period are, in the period we have here been associating with financialization (roughly 1973 onward—see Chapter 2) incorporated and surpassed by the proliferation of codes held in opaque though actionable databanks.8

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Only today, in the age of an almighty algorithm, can we see the full scope of Deleuze’s nightmare.9 It’s not just that biometric passports are used to delimit movement at the borders, it is also the ways our consumer behavior, or social media metadata, or medical histories, or standardized credentials are parsed, reparsed and cross-referenced by mysterious supercomputers to determine our access to everything from loans to medical care to advertising to political messaging.10 Whereas the society of discipline sought to use monolithic institutions to form the subjectivity and harness the productivity of the individual, Deleuze correctly prophesied that the digitalization and transformation of capitalist power would dissolve the distinction between individuals and masses and replace them with a vast social field of relationships and intensities to be segmented and re-bundled based on isolated attributes.

Figure 48  C.K. Wilde, Against the Common Good, 2005. Currency collage. Courtesy of the artist.

A fine if horrific example is the way that, in the momentous Brexit vote and American election of 2016, the algorithmic research firm, Cambridge Analytica, aided neo-authoritarians to develop surgically precise categorizations of voters through big-data analytics so that they might be advertised to in pivotal jurisdictions.11 We are also seeing “FinTech” (financial technology) firms “disrupt” industries like credit reporting and ratings, instead gathering and cross-referencing huge

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swaths of user data to “better” determine who is worthy of credit and at what rate of interest.12 As Deleuze notes, and Lazzarato affirms in greater detail, under the Society of Control, debt replaces enclosure as the key method for extracting value from individuals and communities.13 Importantly, Deleuze is also keen to remind us that the Society of Control is driven and framed by an evolution of corporations into financialized vehicles that no longer simply exploit workers’ bodies to extract surplus value, but instead operate distributed across space to generate profit by creating flows and networks and transforming spaces and processes.14 Deleuze sees this as intimately connected to the disconnection of money from any pivotal referent (he names the gold standard) and the rise of freely floating exchange rates. Both of these transformations are entirely germane to the rise of financialization, and it is vital to also recall that the algorithms that today parse out, bundle and re-bundle voters, consumers or debtors are merely derivative toys when compared to the massively complex and powerful machines that are employed by hedge funds, investment banks and other megalithic corporate actors to intervene in (and thereby co-create) financial markets. A phrase that recurs often in Curran’s work is the “normalization of deviance,” a strange term whose provenance is difficult to pinpoint, but which for Curran signals the fundamental shift germane to financialization, one where the capitalist economy restructures itself around recognizing, leveraging and putting into play momentary differences, distinctions and abnormalities. Curran cites a report from the UK Government Office of Science’s Foresight Group, published in 2012, that, within a decade, human traders will be obsolete, leaving financial markets to increasingly powerful and agile, self-correcting robots each seeking to gain momentary advantage be seizing on and leveraging infinitesimal deviances in normal market behavior, but who will, thereby, collectively, create a new, vastly more chaotic and almost inevitably catastrophic normal.15 In contrast to Foucault’s disciplinary society, based around the attempt to eliminate deviance in the name of security, the society of control is one in which capitalist power is recalibrated to encourage and profit from deviations from the mean. For Martin, as we have seen, financialization emerges as a means by which capitalist power adapts to attempt to subsume “anti-colonial’ revolts against a disciplinary society and its obsession with security, both in the Global North and the Global South. Instead, the financialized order, presided over by the technology of the derivative, sets its site on the constant, relentless process of securitization: the management of risk so as to render moment to moment profit.16

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My reading of Curran’s work is that it is an attempt to show, by way precisely of absence, the way THE MARKET now is not in any way a distinct or discrete presence that can be pictured, identified or indicted: it is a spirit or a gas that both surrounds and is incorporated into all spaces and subjects within capitalism’s reach today. Financialization, in this sense, and as we shall see in more detail, in part names the proliferation of codes, where practically everything is not only quantified so as to be measured and mastered, but also fed into an increasingly interferential and interconnected set of highly proprietary corporate databases to be made actionable. Data-driven financialization, as we have it today, creates a global society of control based on the encryption of sociality, the encoding of social actions and actors as fluctuating data points. It’s worse than even the dehumanizing nightmare of rigid mathematical discipline and anomie imagined in Zamyatin’s We, where each individual body becomes a number to be manipulated by some disinterested centralized intelligence. In our society of financialized control we are each individually and in various collectivities (neighborhoods, workplaces, urban spaces, online communities) of us constantly being measured in multiple grids precisely to better map out and understand our individuality, our particular capacities, our unique qualities, so that these might be better put to work, better assembled with others, better aggregated, disaggregated and recombined into more preferential temporary assortments under the aegis of the competitive and accumulation-oriented securitization of powerful financialized actors (private and public alike).17 Ultimately, of course, the objective of this control is the generation of wealth, though as we shall see in this book’s conclusion, the very meaning of wealth also begins to shift. As Krystian Woznicki points out, this all goes on at once in plain sight and behind our backs, in some middle distance we can’t focus on.18 The market, in this way, is everywhere and nowhere, both inside and outside each of us. While it creates a universal condition whereby social life is everywhere decoded into signals and metrics and encoded into data, it is obviously deeply (and increasingly) unequal in terms of its impacts. Indeed, inequality is the name of the game.

freeport empire As I have argued throughout this book, the field of activities heralded under the title of art presents a particularly interesting location to examine the atmospheric shifts germane to financialization. This is not, I have argued, because art is some transcendental realm of moral and

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creative autonomy being cruelly profaned by money, but rather precisely because art and money have never been as far apart as we habitually like to imagine. As I shall argue momentarily, art has always been encrypted by and/or in money, and perhaps vice versa. While we must not succumb to the anachronistic idea that art was once free and is now everywhere in gilded chains, this book has also been dedicated to examining how today’s moment of financialization is marked by new methods for capitalism’s enclosure or incorporation of creativity, culture and imagination. And I have sought to show in earlier chapters that examining this process in the realm of art, and also the strategies employed by artists to confront it, help us better understand the complex and often contradictory tendencies of financialization as a whole. For that reason I want to now turn to what I think is a paradigmatic example of financialization’s encryption of art. Sequestered in the winding roads of an industrial park, next to the airport tarmac, a mere block away from the garrison of the border police, Singapore’s Le Freeport stands isolated from its neighbors behind layers of razor-wire fences. This is a purpose-built, highly secured luxury warehouse for the storage of artworks. While dozens of freeports of this nature exist around the world—mostly in Europe—Le Freeport is unique in size, ambition and design.19 With an invitation, you might speak through an intercom to guards and be buzzed through several state-of-the-art security gates before you

Figure 49  Image of Le Freeport Singapore’s website, May 15, 2018. © Le Freeport.

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enter the compound itself and take in the black and red facility. Then you will pass through a battery of checkpoints more rigorous than any airport. You will hand your passport, through a two-way drawer, to an invisible guard in an office on the other side of one-way glass. Courteous staff will instruct you to empty your pockets into a small box and place it, along with your bags, in an x-ray machine while you proceed through the cylindrical Millimeter Wave (MMW) body scanner. The millions of dollars of state-of-the-art security, and the slick, chrome, grey and red modernist style, contribute to a feeling of weightless contemporariness, a sort of weaponized neutrality: the aesthetic of financial liquidity itself. Security is only the secondary objective of all this infrastructure, the candid, curious, debonair warden of the horde explained in January of 2017 as he led me into Le Freeport’s massive atrium, enmeshed in a huge specially commissioned sculpture and surrounded by identical security doors. The designers and architects worked as closely as possible with the world’s leading insurance firms to guarantee that the building, mere meters from the tarmac of one of the busiest airports in Asia, presented an almost zero-risk environment. In any case, he joked: were a thief actually able to breach the state-of-the-art security, where would they go? Singapore is a highly militarized island connected to Malaysia by two meticulously secured and surveilled bridges and otherwise surrounded by ocean. The primary reason for the “extreme vetting” of visitors, my guide confides, is the same reason for the “starchitecture” and massive atrium sculpture: it’s a kind of financial theater. It is not only to impress upon wealthy clients that their art treasures are safe in the crypt, but that they are worthy and estimable subjects for owning objects worthy of such concern, and for investing in their protection. Like Foucault’s panopticon, this hyper-securitized, infinitely surveilled dark utopian apparatus not only controls space, it creates subjects.20 But as per Deleuze’s theorization of our shift to a society of control, which I am associating here with financialization, we should focus instead on Le Freeport less as a space of enclosure and more as a density of codes, a node in a network, a place where the spirit or gas of financialized power gathers, concentrates and circulates. Here, an impossible to ascertain number of cultural treasures lie encrypted, from delicate and one-of-a-kind ancient Chinese urns to conceptual artworks printed on a single sheet of A4 paper. “We don’t know and we don’t want to know what’s in the vaults,” the warden tells me, a man who himself marvels at the ironies and contradictions of his vocation. His job, he explains, is to offer Le Freeport’s clients rooms (of variable dimensions, depending on need) that are and will forever be

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22 degrees centigrade, 55 percent relative humidity (unless otherwise requested) and as close to risk free as possible. Access to the vault requires that both the manager of Le Freeport and the client, together, simultaneously input their secret codes on separate keypads. What those clients chose to encrypt in Le Freeport is their private business, with a tiny modicum of state oversight. While technically objects stored in the luxury warehouse exist on Singaporean soil, until they leave the facility by the front door and enter Singapore-proper, their owners pay no tax—it is as if they are still sitting on the airport tarmac, to which Le Freeport has special access rights directly from its back gates. Backup generators stand ready in the unlikely event of power disruption, and a waterless fire suppression system will suck out the oxygen from a room and replace it with nitrogen to ensure no damage comes to the art hoard within. The chain of accountability is nebulous, to say the least.21 The Swiss company that built the facility also has spun off a management company to operate it, which in turn leases space to clients like Christie’s and various other firms specializing in the delicate and secretive world of fine art sales, storage, handling and restoration. These companies might be hired by a museum of a collector or a gallery (or a shell company set up by any of the above) to house an artwork. What precisely is inside the crypt is anyone’s guess, though we can be reasonably sure that expensive works of art must be held therein. The record of ownership, like the owners themselves, could be anywhere in the world. What is certain is that Le Freeport exists in Singapore to take advantage of the quasi-authoritarian capitalist city-state’s unique location (close, but not too close to China), its notoriously strict laws, a militarized population of highly educated native English speakers, a transparent system of property law in accordance with neoliberal international treaties, and, most importantly, proximity to booming Asian (especially Chinese) art markets. In a very real way Le Freeport doesn’t exist in Singapore. It is part of an archipelago of non-spaces that Keller Easterling associates with the practices of extra-statecraft: zones that at once mobilize the increasingly authoritarian and violent powers of the financialized nation-state and yet which exist, largely for the pleasure and profit of the world’s most wealthy and powerful people, partially outside of the laws of nation-states.22 Le Freeport may exist on Singaporean soil, but so long as the works it encrypts never leave the facility they are technically considered to be still in transit.23 It’s not simply that, in this way, the works can avoid paying import duties and taxes, or risking seizure by authorities if their ownership is disputed. It is also that, while the works themselves may

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literally not move an inch for generations, perhaps centuries, they remain constantly in motion as global code. Presuming that there is indeed art within Le Freeport, then it is art’s crypt. I mean this in three interwoven ways. First, freeports are essentially hermetically sealed, risk-free zones where art objects can be placed to ensure that they retain their value purely as an investment vehicle. The structure itself was meticulously designed, in close consultation with the world’s leading insurance firms, to mitigate any and every conceivable risk, from natural disasters to theft. But the purpose is not really to preserve humanity’s greatest cultural treasures for future generations. Rather, it is to guarantee the perpetual condition of the speculative art commodities held within. While there are viewing rooms within Le Freeport where collectors and dealers can show the works, its real purpose is to remove art from material circulation, while preserving it for purely financial or speculative circulation. Hence, we can understand the freeport is a kind of architecture of global financialized capitalism that encrypts art within its walls. As Derrida notes, a crypt is not simply a tomb: a crypt seals in the dead in order that they still might live, after a fashion. We build crypts around the dead to impress their value upon the living, to haunt the imagination. Second and relatedly, freeports encrypt art as a kind of money: the art exists in the world as a kind of financial code, a digitally manipulated asset to be transferred and parlayed. Like an encoded word transmitted in a public broadcast, financialized art still transmits meaning and value, but only to those who bear the keys of decryption, in this case those with enough wealth to buy the work, ship it to elsewhere and uncrate it again as art. Yet, importantly, that moment of decryption may never actually arrive. Conceivably the artwork could continue to function as cipher, as code, forever. And given the labyrinthine complexity of global property and repatriation laws, as well as the habitual acrimony of probate proceedings, it is not altogether unlikely that many treasures of dead billionaires may never leave the facility as their descendants and creditors dispute the rights.24 Finally, due to the way freeports transform art into a purely conceptual object on capital’s terms, under its own economy and order of value, it in a way completes the task of the “death of art” in a way the avant-garde was never able to. In Peter Bürger’s authoritative analysis, the objective of these art movements was to abolish the separation of art and life as a form of political agitation that sought to liberate human creativity from the gilded prison of artistic institutions and its chosen protagonists (those fortunate or privileged enough to be deemed “artists”).25 As we have seen in previous chapters, in the latter part of the twentieth century

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radical artists spearheaded the “dematerialization” of art itself toward this end, developing practices of conceptual art, activist art, performance art, institutional critique and participatory art.26 Le Freeport, and the financialized order that created it and of which it is a part, seems to have succeeded in part based on the radical labors of artists who insisted that art needed no physical presence or trace to function as a socially transformative force. In the case of the Le Freeport, art has dissolved into a financialized meta-landscape, not a horizon of liberation but of terrifying power and inequality. In this sense, the freeport is the tomb or crypt of art’s dreams of liberation: art rests, dead and yet alive, hidden in plain sight. The rise of freeports like this one in Singapore is part and parcel of a broader tendency to transform art into a target of financialized manipulation and generator of speculative wealth. Of course, as we explored in Chapter 1, for as long as there has been a thing we call “art” (since roughly the seventeenth century) it has been tied up with money: the tastes and demands of the wealthy—disproportionately financiers and speculators—shaped the development of Western art history and led to the manifestation of “art” as a discrete area of human achievement, activity and production (as contrasted to craft, ornament, or kitsch). As we observed in Chapter 2, art has long been a key vehicle for the reproduction of the capitalist class. Art appreciation and collecting has long proved a means to cultivate belonging, distinction and esteem within elite worlds.27 But in previous times art proved a notoriously illiquid asset: it was difficult to find a buyer who shared one’s taste and who had ready money to pay. Further, the art market was (and to a large extent remains) opaque, corrupt and confounding to all except insiders. Over the past decade institutions like Le Freeport, responding to the proliferation of financially enriched so-called “high net worth individuals” (HNWIs) the world over, have sought to increase the liquidity of art markets. These include all manner of “innovations”: price indexes like the Mei-Moses that purport to offer a reflection of aggregate art investment trends;28 new online art tracking and pricing applications and websites that provide up-to-the-moment price information for blue-chip and emerging artistic talent;29 developments in art insurance and collateralized lending to allow collectors to leverage the value of their art/ investments, as well as increasing friendliness from banks and financial institutions toward art as investment and collateral;30 the concentration of art sales in the hands of a few branded global mega-galleries;31 the multiplication of art fairs into financial metropoles around the world and their evolution from stuffy trade shows into luxury mega-events;32 the dominance of the auction market by a duopoly of ambitious corpora-

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tions, though challenged by a proliferation of start-up online auction and sales platforms;33 even the (overhyped though still significant) development of art investment funds that essentially allow many investors to jointly purchase portfolios of pieces purely for their speculative value.34 In all cases, art becomes encrypted as code that it might the better play its role in financialized society of control.

palaces of encrypted culture I divulge these instances of the financialization of art, of which the creation of the Freeport art-crypt is a key node, not to shock the reader with the depravity of money’s corruption of art but, rather, because I think it helps us sketch the way financialization is a process that depends upon innovating ever more cunning ways to enclose, incorporate and encrypt the qualities of imagination, creativity, autonomy, individuality, freedom and relationality we typically associate with art. As we shall see later in this chapter, that we associate these qualities with some rarified, transcendental realm we call “art” is itself a form of encryption, based fundamentally on the social trauma of having these qualities otherwise held in abeyance in a disenchanted world of ever-accelerating accumulation and seemingly untamable economic violence. It is for that reason that tracking the fate of art can help us better fathom the dynamics of financialization and the sort of social order it emerges from and that it is helping to create. We are at a point some authors have identified as the “communism of capital,” which implies a number of overlapping trends.35 First, the term attempts to name a moment when the state itself is nearly completely conscripted to facilitating the financialized order— in the case of bank bailouts, surely, but also more generally in terms of providing the FIRE sector with a legal and regulatory infrastructure, subsidies and also methods of enforcement.36 Whereas real communism envisions the nationalization of the banks, the communism of capital enacts a sort of bankification of the nation-state. This can be seen especially in enclave nations like the Cayman Islands, or Luxemburg, or indeed Singapore, that have for all intents and purposes have staked their economic futures on becoming tax havens or nodes for financial flows.37 As Wendy Brown notes, in nearly every jurisdiction the nation-state is reduced to a facilitator of markets and enforcer of an increasingly violent and vastly unequal property rights.38 Ironically, while neoliberalism is supposed to reduce the role of the state in the economy to encourage free markets, the financialized state has become ever more pivotal to the success of financial markets.39 Government debt bonds or (in the case of

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fortunate, usually oil-rich states) sovereign wealth funds are essential to global markets.40 Ultimately, whereas (a certain sort of) communism saw the state as the means by which the proletariat might seize and rationally organize the means of production for their own benefit, rather than the profit of bourgeoisie, the communism of capital seizes state power for the opposite purpose: to irrationally organize society in the interests of (a certain segment of) capital. From a different approach, whereas Karl Polanyi theorized the state as one of society’s defense mechanisms against the destructive, virus-like power of the financialized market, under the communism of capital the state becomes weaponized as a vector by which the financialized market inserts its code into ever-more aspects of society and social life.41 The second notion of the communism of capital points to the way the financial apparatus, even though it is composed of multiple competing firms, has the overall structure of a kind of Central Committee (complete with nasty rivalries) that brutally orchestrates the capitalist “planned economy.”42 Michael Hudson, for instance, has convincingly argued that the period of financialization and its neoliberal ideology is not, as it avers, a departure from the techniques of economic planning and state intervention: it is simply the handing over of that power to increasingly chaotically speculative “free” markets and the semi-oligarchs who dominate it.43 Likewise, Martin has insisted we see financialization not as defined by universal deregulation but, rather, as emerging from and being characterized by the way increasingly volatile speculative capital generates unfathomable wealth by taking advantage of differences and divergences between different regulatory regimes. These regulatory regimes or spaces might be nation-states or particular corporations, they may even be the limits imposed here or there by weather systems, cultural dispositions or infrastructures of the built environment.44 Enabled by the techniques of the derivative, which we will explore in more detail below, financialization is characterized by the cunning navigation of multiple regulatory regimes, the taking-advantage of divergence, difference and contradiction through new financialized techniques. Perhaps the clearest example is the proliferation of a discourse of competition where states and firms and individuals all strive to outdo one another to encourage investment.45 Martin advises that the quintessential financial methodology of arbitrage relies on pitting regulatory zones against one another, leveraging momentary imbalances through weaponized information and access. In any case, this second concept of the “communism of capitalism” refers to the way that neoliberal financialization has essentially created a contradictory decentralized planned economy, planned

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by and for an internally competitive transnational oligarchy of corporate titans. This does not mean that there is some shadowy global conspiracy, though there are certainly conspiratorial aspects to this situation.46 Rather, financialization, which is driven ultimately by innumerable hypercomplex competitive plays, emerges as a kind of meta-governance model which constantly recalibrates nearly every economic, social and political space toward its own inhuman and inhumane “plan.”47 Would that this plan had some telos, some farsighted objective. As I have argued elsewhere, when suggesting that we understand finance as capital’s imagination, there is no endgame.48 The horror of decentralized financialized economic planning is that it simply works to ever more intensely entrench, intensify, infect, recode and encrypt society under finance’s control. Ultimately, then, this meaning of the communism of capital refers to the totalitarian tendency of markets, totalitarian in the sense that this mode of governance infiltrates all aspects of life through a kind of decentralized centralization of financial power. Finally, all these machinations are in the name of a transformation of capitalism toward the capture not merely of worker’s time (as in the classic, Fordist model of accumulation), but their intellectual, affective and communicative energies more broadly, and well beyond the formal workplace.49 Here capital depends on developing new methods and technologies for capitalizing the common, which is to say the fabric of social life itself.50 The so-called sharing economy, which monetizes micro-assets and allows every individual to entrepreneurialize themselves and sell whatever activity they can is one example.51 So too is the missionary euphoria for micro-finance, based on the premise that capitalism can and should solve the problems of inequality it has created by giving exploited and dispossessed people, usually in former colonies, loans to monetize any autonomous aspect of their lives.52 The rise of a financially driven debt economy is another example, where all aspects of life, from health to education are not merely commodified but also financialized: made into an object of speculation, both for the individual “consumer” and for the lenders.53 Ultimately, this final definition of the communism of capital refers to the financialized recalibration of sociality itself, the investment of financialized capitalism in social intercourse and networks of affinity.54 If liberatory visions of communism imagined the socialization of the economy, the communism of capital represents the economization of the social. Whereas the former would imply reorganizing humanity’s economic apparatuses to foster freedom, creativity, social joy, autonomy and imagination, the latter implies the way capitalist economic apparatuses have come to not simply quash but

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to illicit, excite, harness and encourage freedom, creativity, social joy, autonomy and imagination, albeit in fractured and constrained form. I would present freeports like the one in Singapore as one architecture of this communism of capital, a sort of palace of encrypted culture. The freeport, and so many other such institutions, exist largely for the pleasure and use of the world’s most wealthy and elite actors, who enjoy a kind of stratospheric cosmopolitanism, existing and thriving in the space above and between financialization’s ruination. In the palace of encrypted culture, the world’s treasures come under one roof in ways that exceed the dreams of modern regimes, whether they are Napoleon’s fantasy of the Louvre of pillaged European treasures, or Hitler’s fantasies of a master museum for the master race at the heart of Germania (the utopian city that was to replace the racially contaminated Berlin), or whether is the British Museum or the Victoria and Albert Museum in London which, to this day, display the artistic treasures pillaged by the British Empire, or whether it is the MoMA of New York, which (as we saw in Chapter 2), in a previous moment of capitalism, mobilized the power and wealth of the world’s preeminent financial capital to acquire, enclose and foreclose the “modern” itself. The Freeport, by contrast, is a museum for the catastrophic utopianism of money. Its curator is the market itself, which orchestrates the acquisition, accessioning and de-accessioning through hundreds or thousands of individual acts of speculative calculation of atomized collectors or their agents. That no one (even the wardens) ever will see the whole collection—indeed, they do not even know what lies in the crypt— consummates this structure: it is a museum for money’s enjoyment and money’s aesthetic.55 Here, the communism of capital finds its real cultural institution: a sort of distributed collectivist project for the glory of an abstract system based on individual accumulation.

a crypt within a crypt “A Coin in the Corner” was a site-specific installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art by the Toronto-based artist Micah Lexier as part of the 2012 Oh, Canada! Exhibition. Employing a technique he has used several times in the past, Lexier had minted over a thousand nickel-plated coins, 32mm in diameter (significantly larger than most circulating coins in North America), 100 of which were secured to the floor in the corners of many of museum’s galleries, toilets, offices and utility rooms. The engravings on the coins were a simple line-drawn representation of a coin in the corner, a visual and bilingual pun that draws on the ambiguous way that, in French, the word coin means corner. The

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coins in fact remain in the museum today, long past the close of the Oh, Canada! exhibition, as a scavenger hunt, another methodology by which gallerygoers may navigate the space.

Figure 50  Micah Lexier, A Coin in the Corner, 2012. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist.

In keeping with and expanding the legacies of minimalist and conceptual art, Lexier’s method and presentation here is rigorously and disarmingly straightforward: a coin is placed in each corner. Each corner is represented by and on a coin. This coy straightforwardness—in this case the expanded, mirror-like surface of the oversized coins, seen again and again in each corner of the exhibition—impels the viewer into a moment of broader consideration. My reading is that the piece, taken phenomenologically and as a whole, invites the viewer to on some level entertain the notion that, if assembled properly, these permanently scattered coins might reveal a cohesive message or image. This hypothetical or virtual moment of (re)unification is necessarily suspended or endlessly deferred in the name of the piece’s suffusion throughout the

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museum. Innocuous and potentially missed by the majority of visitors, the coins became a sort of hidden infrastructure, perhaps revealing that money, though it has no inherent or integral value or meaning to itself, acts as the secret supporting structure of institutions that in turn produce meaning and value. Indeed, the coins bring to light the promise of a hidden, potential unity that should direct the viewer’s attention to the way the coins jingling in their own pockets or purses might themselves likewise be holographic shards of some larger, capitalist totality. In this way, Lexier’s coins are encryptions of a larger institution of which they are a part, within which they themselves are encrypted. Likewise, as I argued in Chapter 1, money always portends and points toward a totality of which it is a part and whose reproduction it facilitates. I interpret Lexier’s piece as in some ways a commentary on the financialization of the museum, a subtler echo of the strategy of Hans Haacke we explored in Chapter 2. Here, the art museum is both the crypt of money and encrypted by money. Within the museum, the coins become encrypted as art, perhaps to reveal, conversely, that art is being encrypted as money in an increasingly financialized institution. But the crypticness of the coins, their relationship and their placement, should give us pause and invite us to look closer. Ultimately, these coins, affixed as they are to the floor, offer us no chance to reassemble the hypothetical whole. Even though the coins all represent the same minimalist and literal image of themselves, the symbols end up appearing abstract, without any set of co-symbols to affirm their larger story or meaning. Yet we are haunted by the phantom of meaning. This piece affords us a fitting allegory for the fragmentation of meaning germane to financialized society of control, where social life is commodified, monetized and financialized, broken into segments, elements and qualities to be re-bundled later via the logic and practices of securitization. Fredric Jameson, for one, has tracked the impossibility of cognitive mapping in the world this creates, leading to the disjunctive and irreducibly cryptic aesthetics of postmodernism.56 On the other, this piece also brings to mind the discussion of the crypt between Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok and Jacques Derrida outlined in the last chapter. To recap, in the 1960s Abraham and Torok sought to reread Freud’s famous case of his patient, the “Wolf Man,” so named for a dream he related to the analyst that became pivotal for Freud’s understanding of the case. The patient in question, according to Freud, was plagued by neuroses because he, as a youngster, had experienced family trauma, especially circulating around the figures of his father and older sister, and also due to his witnessing, as an infant, the primal scene of his parents having sex.57 For Abraham and Torok, these broken taboos essentially led

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the Wolf Man to create a psychic crypt where the idealized figure of his father and sister (or perhaps more accurately, the relationship between the patient and his family members) remained in suspended animation, living and dead at once.58 In a typical Freudian analysis, patients and analysts, together, are able to use language to link conscious and unconscious symbols.59 For instance, by interpreting a dream they can discover that the appearance of snakes represents fear of castration. Abraham and Torok posit that in certain cases, such as the Wolfman’s, the patient has so deeply encrypted a trauma that the link between conscious and unconscious is fractured and language becomes inaccessible. The crypt is like an invisible presence within the psyche, around which the psyche grows, and which the psyche unconsciously hides from itself and from the analyst. Through a re-reading of Freud’s description of the Wolfman’s case, Abraham and Torok aim to decode not so much the patient’s words but his silences, the taboo words he avoids, the fragmentary speech he exhibits, the symbolic substitutions he makes, or the way some words can only be expressed in dream images.60 Ultimately, for Abraham and Torok, the crypt is a special case in psychopathology that prevents Freud’s psychoanalytic method from working as it ought to. As such, in these cases the analyst must first undertake a difficult work of decoding the analysand’s patterns of fragmentation and avoidance. Abraham and Torok’s notion of the crypt is extremely metaphorically potent, a potency seized upon by Derrida in his reinterpretation of their work.61 I have practically no interest at all in the clinical and therapeutic dimension, though like Derrida, I am interested in the way Abraham and Torok’s framework offers an interesting explanatory framework. For these thinkers, the crypt is both an inside and an outside, both a hermetically sealed container within the psyche and a force that contains the psyche. As Derrida makes clear, the psyche creates the crypt in order to keep an idealized relationship safe. Yet the ego that grows up around the crypt, that hides the crypt from itself, is itself encrypted by the presence of the crypt. It is also inside the crypt. And so the speech of the subject is encrypted, a code to be broken by the analyst. For reasons that will be obvious to readers of Derrida, this impossible or “non-topographical” structure (which can be both inside and outside, both a container and a thing that is contained) is extremely appealing for the project of deconstruction.62 In Derrida’s hands, Abraham and Torok’s framework ceases to be a clinical approach to return a patient to some notion of normalcy and instead, becomes a more general model or riddle for puzzling out broader contradictions of subjecthood. For Abraham and Torok, the purpose of what they term a “cryptonymic” analysis is to decipher the code to make a therapeutic psychoanalytic reading possible.

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For Derrida, on the other hand, the goal is to discover an endlessly encrypted impossible space that “both subverts and sustains” at the core of (and that surround) every subject.63 In Abraham and Torok’s reading, the crypt is created by some sort of indigestible trauma and is such a vexatious problem for the analyst because it resists typical techniques of psychoanalytic therapy: it actively hides itself from being decrypted and the patient actively works to conceal the crypt’s presence, producing phantoms in their speech and psyche to misdirect the themselves and the analyst. Whereas for Abraham and Torok this requires a special set of interpretive techniques based on listening for taboo words and fragmentary symbolism, for Derrida the ghostly manifestations of the crypt are welcome prompts for challenging the system of encryption from within. For Derrida, decryption is a worthy interpretive practice, but an endless vocation. In his framing, there is no “real” subject outside or inside the crypt, just more crypts, interconnected crypts. Here Derrida plays with the idea of the vault and the archway: crypts connect to other crypts endlessly, and haunted by ghosts and specters. Like an archway or a vault, there is a kind of architectural magic at work, where opposing forces hold one other aloft. Crypts hold up and support other crypts, archways build on archways. This is the secret infrastructure of beneath the cathedral. Rather than searching for a final way out, or way in, to arrive at some true, ultimate, essential ontology, we should open ourselves up to the endlessly disruptive hauntology of phantoms, of exploring the interconnected architecture of cryptic systems.64

Art crypt Here I want to see what we can gain from applying this model to the questions we have been concerned with throughout this book: the relationship between art and money amidst the shift toward financialization. This will need to advance in several stages. First, throughout this book I have sought to argue that the presumption that art and money are diametric opposites is deeply flawed, though nonetheless highly functional in the reproduction of both fields and the broader capitalist system of which they are a part. “Art” as we know it and money in its particularly capitalist form arose together and their histories are entangled. But as I have also intimated, this relationship is structural within capitalism. It is not only that, historically, as we explored in Chapter 2, art has been a key vehicle for the reproduction of the ruling class. It is also that art has, historically, reserved an internalized exception within capitalism where the virtues and exercises like

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creativity, cultural expression, imagination, autonomy and critique are preserved alive within a system where elsewhere they are ruthlessly hunted down and killed. In other words, art must exist both inside and outside of capitalism at once. A system that relentlessly subjugates all spheres of life to commodification and exploitation preserves within it a sort of protected zone of freedom, autonomy, creativity, connection and potential, albeit in a fractured and incomplete form. Why does it do so? There are particular contingent historical reasons, some of which I have already noted. For instance, as I discussed in the first two chapters of this book, art connoisseurship and markets offer capitalists a realm of para-economic, quasi-capitalistic play, an arena for the cultivation and exchange of social and cultural capital, which in turn helps the ruling class manage its social reproduction.65 Further, historically speaking, Western European domination of the realm of “art” (which they, themselves, deigned to define) served as part of a system of alibis of racial or cultural superiority that helped justify colonialism and racial and gendered divisions of labor.66 As such, art’s cryptic longevity within capitalism can in part be explained by the way it functions to help reproduce dominant power relations. The leveraging of post-war American and German abstract expressionism into an ideological weapon of the CIA to promote the myth of “Western” capitalist freedoms is an even more explicit example.67 There are also structural reasons, too, which I have sketched in Chapters 2 and 3. As I will explain more clearly in a moment, as much as we must identify capitalism as a system obedient to its own crisisprone and contradictory logics, we should never forget that it is a system driven along by people, notably by capitalist actors who are, necessarily, in constant competition with one another.68 Two observations might be made here. The first is that, for the beneficiaries and agents of that system, the drive to compete cannot purely be credited to venality, greed and cupidity, though surely in many cases it is just this. It is also, to varying extents, because, through the money the capitalist hopes to gain and keep, they hope to achieve or cultivate not only freedom and pleasure but also the nobler things in life: creativity, cultural expression, imagination, autonomy and the latitude for critique. These virtues are placed in capital’s crypt (art) precisely to keep them safe from that very system. The capitalist uses their (overwhelmingly his) ill begotten wealth to procure this symbol we call art (by which I mean not only objects but also a whole economy of mediations, including philanthropic largess to museums, patronage of artists, enjoyment of spectacles) precisely to reward himself for his role in reproducing a system that is objectively destroying or strangling what art is called to symbolize.

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Figure 51  In 2009 Austrian artist Michael Marcovici and an anonymous collaborator published 100 bespoke copies of a book titled How I Used Your Credit Card to Pay for This Book Online, which were then mailed to 100 European credit card holders whose fate the title of the piece describes. According to Marcovici, the book contains a robust description of the clandestine process. The artist reports the subsequent responses from the audience and participants: “Two copies did not reach their destination but came back to me. The 9.90 USD were returned to the accounts of the people that were supposed to receive them. Six recipients did not accept the parcel and I credited them the 9.90 USD, including shipping. Ten asked for an immediate refund and I refunded the money (though they kept the book). Fourteen reacted upset but, after some explanations, accepted to keep the book. [Some] were happy to receive a copy. Forty-four have not shown any reaction so far.” Two participants also threatened legal action. Image courtesy of the artist.

The second and related observation is that, if capitalism is inherently dependent on the competition of capitalist actors, and if this competition has at least something to do with outwitting, outsmarting or out-imagining one’s competitors, there is then a structural necessity to preserve, encrypted inside capitalism (or around capitalism), some sphere of creative, autonomous, non-instrumentalized play precisely so its products (art) may inspire, excite or catalyze the competitive imagination. This point may seem tenuous, especially given the typical banality of capitalist evil. It’s hard to find a smoking gun example of a capitalist

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gazing at his art collection or strolling through the museum he sponsors and having a eureka moment.69 More often than not innovation and creativity in capitalism is stolen from employees, rather than generated by bosses (more on this in a moment). In any case, my wager here is that, on a systemic level, encrypting a special sphere of art within/around capitalism does hold open a kind of dissonant space for generative capitalist ideation.70 This approach perhaps explains why there has consistently been such a premium on art’s crypticness. Indeed, crypticness is precisely the thing that separates art from kitsch. Whereas kitsch evacuates an object of any ambiguity, art preserves it, holds that ambiguity within it, and surrounds itself with that ambiguity. Kitsch objects can “become” art when placed in a museum precisely because the museum encrypts them with a kind of cryptic ambiguity. But beyond simply naming this ambiguity as holographic and arbitrary, I would hazard it has something to do with art’s location inside and around capitalism. This crypticness not only preserves cultural capital (one needs expert knowledge of elite education to “get it”), it also stimulates a speculative, abstract imagination adapted by and for life in the competitive ecosystems of the financialized marketplace. If this explanation of the function of the art-crypt sounds a bit old-fashioned it is likely because our present era of financialization has seen two intertwined trends. The first is that, with rising levels of education and the expansion of the middle class in the Global North (which we might also characterize as the offshoring of hyper-exploitation to the Global South and the concentration of professional-managerial jobs in the North), many of us have been encouraged to mistake ourselves for would-be capitalists.71 As I have explored in previous chapters and above, financialization has exacerbated this tendency: the expansion of speculative capital into every social institution and sphere of life depends on each of us recasting ourselves as flexible entrepreneurs of sociality, in keeping with myths that neoliberalism has delivered a classless society.72 Second and relatedly, whereas once art was seen as largely the domain of elites, today it increasingly appears to be “democratized.” Art appreciation and trips to art galleries has featured as a key part of middle-class education (though recent austerity measures have undermined such initiatives), often imagined as a means to instill marketable capacities for creativity and imagination in future “entrepreneurs.”73 While fine art markets remain the exclusive domain of the world’s financially enriched super-elite, galleries and museums, and the realm of “contemporary art” as such are seen as acceptable, even laudable forms of edu-tainment for middle-class, well educated workers. Almost all workers are told they

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should embrace “art” in their own lives as a means of “self care” to cope with the manifold stresses of capitalist life, or to cultivate defanged forms of creativity and imagination in the name of improving one’s human capital.74 In a fashion, then, financialization has created a situation where the functions of the art-crypt, once largely reserved for the capitalist class, are now drawn on much more widely in an allegedly “classless” society. As I have illustrated, financialization depends on each of us transforming ourselves into a competitive, creative subject, tasked with reorienting our imaginations toward investing in skills, capacities, relationships and potentials to be leveraged on increasingly austere markets.75 Here art’s cryptic role is amplified and expanded dramatically. It remains the case that the virtues of creativity, cultural expression, imagination, autonomy and critique that art encrypts still suffer the traumas of capitalism that caused them to be encrypted in the first place. Yet it is also the case that the reproduction of capitalism today requires that each of us put these virtues to work as never before, albeit in highly fractured, commodified and instrumentalized ways.76 Meanwhile, digitization and globalization have vastly accelerated the cycles of capitalist competition, demanding ever-greater “innovation” of new practices for the exploitation of labor, for the extraction of wealth, for the production of technological fixes, and for methods to increase credit and consumerism. And while financialized capitalism is certainly no more meaningfully egalitarian than in previous moments (the division of wealth is growing in almost every jurisdiction),77 financialized capitalism’s success depends to some extent on creating new avenues through which many individuals can lend their creativity and imagination to corporations eager to transform into market advantages. This perhaps explains the popularity of reality television programing about the discovery of diamonds in the rough: investors, inventors and entertainers who have been quietly, persistently investing in themselves who audition or are found lurking in the recesses of the system and become elevated to stardom.78 We might also cite the myth of the Edenic, humane, flexible, holistic and compassionate Silicon Valley workplace reserved for the truly talented minds that have proven the value of their creative autonomy and may now take their place in the Pantheon of financialized demigods.79 The encryption of creativity, cultural expression, imagination, autonomy and critique in art under capitalism, then, persists, except that now art is not simply a moment in the reproduction of the capitalist class and its exploitative imagination, it is a moment in the financialized reproduction of life and sociality much more generally.80 As

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Torok and Abraham advise, one of the curious qualities of the psychic crypt is that it produces phantoms or ghosts that mislead the ego and the analyst, precisely to keep the crypt safe.81 In this case, creativity, cultural expression, imagination, autonomy and critique appear to be everywhere, and art appears to have been democratized, but all in a phantasmatic aspect. Creativity, cultural expression, imagination, autonomy and critique become ghostly, intangible buzzwords in a mode of financialized sociality dedicated, ultimately, to the endless, accelerating expansion of accumulation. To fully understand how and why we need to now examine another crypt.

Money crypt As I elaborated in some detail in Chapter 1, in the Marxian framework, while money predates capitalism by centuries, money takes on very particular form under capitalism as the universal solvent, the means and the ends of capitalist accumulation.82 Other societies may indeed have used money, but in all other societies money is subordinated to other power relations and structures of authority.83 At least theoretically, no amount of money could make a peasant a lord, or make a slave a citizen, or allow one to transcend one’s caste. While other systems of power and privilege exist alongside and intertwined with capitalism, including notably white supremacy, patriarchy and imperialism, and while indeed capitalism fundamentally depends on and coevolves with these systems, under capitalism the primary and universal power structure is, unlike in any other system, represented by money. Oppression and inequality are most universally felt as monetary privation and dreams of liberation are often expressed as a desire for independence through wealth. Meanwhile, unlike other systems where the exploitation of the masses by a tiny minority is orchestrated through confinement, the threat of violence or enforced custom, under capitalism each subject is at least theoretically “free” to sell their labor power to whomever they choose, so long as they sell it—though of course never under conditions they might choose. Ultimately, while some individuals may horde money, this is a pathological behavior: the norm is for those who have money to return it to circulation, either through spending it, through investing it or through saving it in a bank (which ultimately means investing it, as that is what banks do with deposits). Capital is the force that emerges from and at the same time drives onward money in motion.84 The surface rationale for money’s motion is accumulation, first for the individual capitalist in terms of monetary profit, second, for the capitalist economy as a whole in terms of surplus value. Under capitalism, circu-

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Figure 52  Karen Ay, Exchange, 2009. Photograph: Paul Tucker. Courtesy of the artist.

lation must constantly accelerate. The real reason for ever-accelerating circulation is that it is both the means and ends of the command of labor power, and in that way shapes the way society is reproduced.85 Here I do not only mean to speak of the way commodities are produced for sale, but also more generally the patterns of cooperation by which social life is reproduced, of which the production and circulation of commodities is a key aspect.86 Capitalism, in this sense, represents a pathological, dramatically unequal, self-perpetuating system for orchestrating our capacities for material production and social reproduction.87 Money is both the lifeblood of this system of circulation and also the measure of it. As noted in Chapter 1, money represents both a form of wealth and power and also a means of discipline, it is a worldly thing but also a symbol or a representation of the underlying system of which it is a part. This is one of money’s unique characteristics under capitalism.88 For this reason, as we explored in previous chapters, money represents what Marcel Mauss called the “counterfeit of our own dreams.”89 Money is a dream-like reflection of our own collective power to create and reproduce life under capitalism. In any society we contribute to the

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totality of social reproduction through our imaginative cooperation; under capitalism money shapes how we make that contribution, how we cooperate, and how we imagine; in recompense, we are rewarded with money (wages) by which we buy back some fragment of the totality to which we contributed.90 It is for this reason that, in Chapter 3, I proposed that we understand money as, in part, the encrypted common. Here, the common (singular, in contrast to “the commons” in plural) referred to the immanent potential of imaginative cooperation.91 On the one hand, this is the potential that all systems of power seek to subordinate, usually by force or coercion, but that capitalism extracts and orchestrates primarily through money; on the other hand, the common refers to the wealth of the world this immanent “we” has already created (the built environment, machines and tools, productive apparatuses, utilities, items that are today commodities).92 Put otherwise, the common is a subordinated tendency present in all those practices and things that capitalism transforms into commodities and withholds from the common good.93 If money is at once the manifestation, the measure and the representation of capital, it has the common encrypted within it, dead and yet alive. The common is all around money and also inside of it. While this is perhaps true of all commodities under capitalism, money represents the apotheosis of the commodity form into a universal referent, measurement and manifestation, and hence it bears within it both the phantasmatic trace of the common and also, importantly, is pregnant with the spectral trace of the massive manifold social violence on which the system depends and which it perpetuates. While such a definition of the common risks making it an almost metaphysical entity, the core point here is fairly straightforward: under capitalism money is the key means and ends for orchestrating the imaginative cooperation that produces value and that allows us to reproduce social life. It is a horrific, vastly unequal and completely irrational method that we, as social beings, use to help us imagine and then organize our collective potential.94 What is so terrifying about capitalist money in this sense is the way it can allow us to orchestrate ourselves, our common potential, without any overarching ideal or strategy: money, especially as it comes to shape ever more aspects of life under financialization, becomes the motivator of a million minute acts of individual competitive decision-making that, in sum, have catastrophic effects. Ultimately, what money encrypts is the potential that we might orchestrate and organize our imaginative cooperation otherwise. Money’s relationship to finance is complex.95 On a structural and material level, the realm of finance (which also predates capitalism yet

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takes on very particular forms within capitalism) has taken shape in the way that it has because it helps to “fix” the limits and contradictions inherent in capitalist forms of money, which are many.96 I am seeking to pose financialization as, in part, a process where the disciplinary function of money and the authority of money over our imaginations expands globally and acts intensively in ever more spheres of life.97 Financialization, as we shall see, can name a process whereby the common is ever more subjected to capitalist command, even if that command is ultimately irrational, destructive and perverse. It is, in one sense, an encryption of an encryption: money is already an encryption of the common; the derivative, which we will explore in a moment as the signature technique and symbol of financialization, is an encryption of money again, its transformation into code that it might all the better act like a spirit or a gas in Deleuze’s terms. The ultimate horizon is a financialized society of control, where the derivative recodes, recalibrates and thereby orchestrates nearly every aspect of social life, of sociality itself, which is to say the common.

Art/money crypt In Cuban conceptual artist Wilfredo Prieto’s 2002 sculpture One Million Dollars a one US-dollar banknote rests between two 25cm mirrors. As the viewer approaches and circulates around the plinth on which the piece rests what at first appears to be a narrow monolith is revealed to be an open-topped shaft that infinitely reflects the greenback back upon itself. Not only did Prieto insure and sell the work at the value of $1million, the buyer was also compelled to sign a contract forbidding them from selling it for any other amount of money in the future. In this artistic riddle, Prieto to my mind offers us almost a physical model of the relationship between art and money that is my concern in this chapter and, more generally in this book. On the one hand, the money in the piece, the almighty dollar, is removed from circulation and encrypted in the work as art. Yet precisely because it is no longer money but now art its exchange value (denominated in monetary terms) is magnified a million times: art almost magically transfigures a humble unit of currency into a near-infinite symbol of wealth. On the other hand, the success of the art work’s concept depends ultimately on the piece naming itself as a monetized commodity. Without the concept, the sculpture itself is fairly uncharismatic; all things considered would not be likely to fetch $1million. The work only makes sense and has artistic value when we know the story of the (potential) fiscal contract at its core. Money and art, here, reflect

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Figure 53  Wilfredo Prieto, One Million Dollars, 2002. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy of NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona/Madrid.

one another and encrypt one another: like two halves of an archway, these seemingly independent structures hold one another, and a broader structure, aloft. I think this piece is so demonstrative because it calls to mind, for me, the strange and unusual potential for money-art which has been my concern throughout this book. Like Pieto’s model, money-art essentially creates an arresting paradox: it is a crypt within a crypt. Art encrypts money. Money encrypts art. When light and gaze hit it correctly, it reveals an infinity of unforeseen potential wealth, and at the same time belies some claim to wealth. We have seen that capitalist money is, ultimately, an encryption of the common; we have also seen that art, as encrypted within capitalism, becomes the crypt for the virtues of creativity, cultural expression, imagination, autonomy and critique that are everywhere else in abeyance. When placed in proximity, as money-art seeks to do, a kind of haunting manifests. As in Prieto’s piece, a new, virtual space is opened for the imagination and for critique. It is not only that the value of money

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is shown to be illusory, though that is, of course, important. Nor is it only that art once again expands what Jacques Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible, though this, too, is important.98 In the moment of juxtaposition of these two famous enemies, art and money, my wager is that something flashes into view that is as mysterious and uncanny, yet as familiar as the hall of mirrors in Prieto’s piece, or the architecture of interconnected vaults and archways that Derrida conjures in his theorization of the crypt. We look into the crypt that is, ultimately in each of us and between all of us. Like a flash it illuminates an exterior in which we are trapped that is also an interior within each of us, our own common potential, the fragment of a dream of what we might have otherwise been, and what we might yet otherwise become, together.99

popular unrest Melanie Gilligan’s phenomenal 2010 five-part film, Popular Unrest, takes place in a near-future version of our society stitched together by the World Spirit, a kind of autonomous intelligent global computer system: part social network, part artificial intelligence, part temp employment agency, part global biopolitical disciplinary apparatus. In other words, it is a sort of extrapolated personification of the contemporary financialized market that Curran sought to reveal. Within this world, two inexplicable parallel phenomena are occurring. First, groups of otherwise unrelated individuals from diverse walks of life start seemingly randomly gathering together based on an inexplicable but undeniable feeling on profound geniality and familiar attachment. Second, a series of brutal

Figure 54  Melanie Gillian, Popular Unrest, 2010. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.

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knife murders are occurring, also seemingly at random, as if the killer attacked from above. The film follows the story of one “grouping” in London as they grapple with living collectively in a world of impossible individual riskmanagement. In the course of the film’s five episodes the true nature of the World Spirit is revealed as, essentially, the evolution of today’s financialized capitalism on at least three fronts. First, it presents a nightmare vision of the marriage of speculative finance and digital governance, collecting, collating and acting on data from an almost infinite number of inputs. The World Spirit system seems capable of parsing the most minute information traces, recombining them algorithmically into otherwise inscrutable patterns, and enacting surgically precise interventions into the world it reads and catalogues. It appears to do so not only to respond to, but to preempt disruptions, and to not merely capitalize on but to create opportunities for profit and expansion. Second, the World Spirit represents capitalism in a biopolitical register, one obsessed with endless measurements of human behavior and biometrics. The film opens with a (doomed) call-center worker addressing an irate client frustrated about some minor penalty incurred for failing to adequately perform his economically productive health or well-being. The film itself, which alternates between faux-documentary narrative and dramatic cinema, is interspliced with both news reports about current events and erratic commercials for various aspects of the World Spirit’s empire, most of them exhorting consumers toward financialized biopolitical imperatives like fitness, insurance or selfimprovement. Thus, the final aspect of the World Spirit as an extrapolation on current trends in financialization is as an evolution of money. The World Spirit is synonymous with the economy, the medium through which exchanges take place, the venue where wealth is stored, the universal metric for value and the sovereign to whom one pays tribute. “The spirit is money. It’s more money than money” explains one of the World Spirit’s developers. As the film develops we realize that the Spirit is a vast machine for crunching data and controlling bodies all orchestrated around applying the universal measurement and solvent of a kind of money it itself has replaced as the glue that holds society together. And yet what sort of society is it, this interconnected financialized network? The World Spirit is, of course, a sly reference to Hegel (and therefore, in a film about capitalism, to Marx) who famously theorized it as a force of modern historical consciousness acting through the dialectic. For Marx, of course, the World Spirit became the force of history that

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would bring about capitalism’s downfall from within, encouraging that system to create its own gravediggers in the form of the proletariat and accelerating its own internal contradictions thanks to the chaotic motive power of inter-capitalist rivalry and bourgeois competition.100 For neoliberal Hegelian Francis Fukayama, the world spirit was essentially synonymous with the triumphant world market, which was, at the End of History, supposed to sublimate all human rivalry, conflict and tension into economic competition, resulting in ever-greater efficiency, innovation and wealth.101 In Gilligan’s portrayal, Fukayama’s dream of market freedom has become a totalitarian nightmare where the market not only reaches expansively across the globe, but intensely into daily life to the most molecular biopolitical level. Yet unlike totalitarianisms of old, formal private freedom is maintained. Indeed, the World Spirit depends on and promises to facilitate the freedom of individuals to compete, to work, to self-actualize. The economy here has fully consumed and subsumed society, aided by the ubiquitous digital surveillance and measurement technologies it itself has fostered. And here, in the figure of the World Spirit, the market or the economy evolves into something else entirely. With no externality, no outside, no lifeworld left to colonize, is it still the economy as we thought we knew it? When centralized in a computer system that is composed of, that measures, that can intervene in everything, is it still capitalism or that strange hybrid communized capitalism: the worst of both worlds, totalitarian closure within ruthless market insouciance. The World Spirit, an allegory for financialization in my reading, both surrounds everything and is also inside everything, encrypting sociality itself, transforming everything into code in order to be more advantageously orchestrated. So ultimately the figure of the World Spirit is, in Gilligan’s dystopian film, a kind of crystallized projection of tendencies immanent within our own moment of financialization. It is a projected moment when digital, biopolitical, economic and social techniques of a society of control meet and coalesce into a kind of absolute if distributed institution. For reasons of narrative, Gilligan gives a hypothetical unity to tendencies that today are more diffuse, distributed, competitive, yet nonetheless just as powerful. Of course, something goes wrong; something emerges from the crypt. The World Spirit’s “machine learning” algorithms are so desperate to predict, measure and leverage the minutiae of human feeling and sociality, that it creates within itself what we learn, in the course of the film, is a glitch. In Marxian terms, the inherent logic of the system produces a

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contradiction that manifests as a crisis. As with all such crises, it has its dimension of destruction (the killings) and creation (the groupings).

derivative sociality Here, Randy Martin’s theorization of the social logic of the derivative is invaluable. As we have seen in previous chapters and above, Martin follows theorists including Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty in posing a fundamental break in the architecture and logic of capitalism with the rise of financialization and especially with the ascendency of financialization’s key and constitutive technology, the derivative.102 We explored the derivative briefly in Chapter 2. To recap, a derivative is essentially a contract between two parties to buy or sell some asset at some future point. Historically, such contracts were used as a kind of insurance. For instance, a commercial bakery might pay a fee to buy a futures contract to buy a quantity of grain at an agreed upon price in a year’s time, therefore hedging the risk of a catastrophic increase in the price of grain. Martin perceptively points out that the derivative functions essentially to transform the future into a present-day commodity.103 The derivative allows for investors to commodify and put into play multiple different potential future outcomes, transforming the inherent uncertainty of entropic life into a field of quantifiable monetized risks to be managed and manipulated. While derivatives have existed for millennia, under financialization they move from the periphery to the center of the economic order.104 Today, the value of outstanding “over the counter” derivatives contracts (private futures, options and swap agreements not made on recognized exchanges) dwarfs the entire world’s GDP, and the volume of annually traded OTC derivatives (which may change hands multiple times a minute) dwarfs even that figure.105 For Martin, the derivative not only names a particular set of financial instruments, it identifies a methodological tendency in capitalism. New technological and mathematical instruments have emerged that allow derivatives to be priced and exchanged as their own financial assets.106 Derivatives can be built atop one another in a portfolio, creating a complex cascade of mutually reinforcing or cantilevered speculations. They can be aggregated into complex synthetic derivatives or sliced and diced into new cuts of financial meat to suit the taste of a variety of clients. These promissory notes become the bedrock of a new financial system that is increasingly distant from providing the insurance and security for our hypothetical baker and more about a constant drive toward securitization, a felicitous financial term that means the splitting apart and re-bundling of assets to

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create new securities—as when banks disaggregated and re-aggregated subprime and other loans into the infamous mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) they sold-on to their clients as risk-free investments.107 The example of the subprime MBSs is apt because it reveals one of Martin’s key points: it is not fruitful to imagine that derivatives are simply the plaything of the financialized imaginations of Wall Street or the City of London: they both reach deeply into and depend on the integration of social reality—like urban housing—into the financial fabric.108 Once again, we find an example of financialization encrypting and decrypting social life, transforming the nuanced realities of poverty, policy, power, the built environment, the fabric of community, the motivation of individual borrowers and the intangible fields of hope and fear into a set of codes to be manipulated, disaggregated, re-aggregated and put into play against one another. Financialization here is both the “spirit of gas” that claustrophobically surrounds each and every choice in the whole process (of the politicians, of the banks, of the speculators, of the borrowers, of the regulators, of the ratings agencies), and that is also inside of them. For this reason, along with Bryan and Rafferty, Martin is keen to show how derivatives today essentially function as money (in the sense that they have monetary value and can command labor power) and also have tremendous impacts on the so-called “real economy” such that any artificial distinction is moot.109 As Bryan and Rafferty show, “capitalism with derivatives” introduces new methodologies and intensifies capitalism’s capacity to extract labor from workers, yet does so in ways that operate under a very different logic of value than classical Marxist notions of the labor theory of value.110 For instance, the capacity of derivatives to discipline actors as diverse as small firms, large corporations and whole nation-states with speed and violence is unprecedented.111 Here, value comes from the intensity of financial networks and from the ability to proliferate and interlace derivatives in ways that are socially and economically consequential, but also not directly tethered to the productive capacity or the extraction of surplus value.112 Martin also suggests that the ascendency of the derivative and of the shift toward financialization, of which it is the signature, also portends a wholesale transformation of society and sociality itself. On the surface level, this is experienced and observed as symptomatic of the postmodern character of late capitalism: social fragmentation, hyper-alienation, the unmooring of people from place, the fluidity of identity, the precariousness of employment and life, and the becoming-asset of nearly everything.113 Underneath this, Martin argues, is a completely different logic of how society and subjects are woven together. In an earlier

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moment of capitalism, one that Martin associates with the post-war world order, that system mobilized interlocking institutions, bureaucracy experts and regimes of knowledge to order economic life. This model is similar to what Deleuze identifies as Foucault’s Society of Discipline. Yet Martin notes that, by the late 1960s, as we saw in Chapter 2, manifold revolts erupted to reject this order, which Martin, drawing on Katsfiacas, heralds as movements for decolonization.114 In the Global South, decolonization implied the demand for self-rule through national liberation and a rejection of formal colonial subjugation. In the Global North, these movements for decolonization took the form of struggles to refuse the conservative and exploitative conditions of social life under capitalism and state socialism, including rebellions to demand workers’ autonomy, women’s liberation, sexual freedom and an end to the internal colonialisms of institutional and systemic racism. For Martin, these struggles for decolonization were characterized by demands to move together, to define new zones of autonomous sociality among the oppressed and exploited. And these movements, in sum, posed a grave existential threat to the world system as such. As a result, these movements became the subject of often violent repression. Ultimately, what allowed capitalism to survive was the shift toward financialization and the rise of the derivative, which reorganized the system fundamentally away from a reliance on rigid institutions and structures and toward flexible networks of control, such as Deleuze theorizes.115 Debt is a fine example.116 On the one hand, following formal decolonization institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, at the behest of wealthy, former colonial nation-states, helped facilitate the “neocolonization” of the Global South through the politics of international loans, many of them odious, that essentially re-inscribed Southern nations in familiar relations of extraction and control relative to the North.117 Meanwhile, in the North itself, what Boltanski and Chiapello call the “new spirit of capitalism” emerged that promised cultural freedom of expression and individual identity within a reformed, flexible, agile capitalism, one that encouraged individuals to use capitalist techniques to claim freedom, creativity and autonomy through marketized means.118 As Maurizio Lazzarato notes, this transition toward “cognitive capitalism” relied fundamentally on creating debtor subjects who “empowered” themselves in an increasingly austere, neoliberal and financialized climate by borrowing (literally and metaphorically) to invest in their human capital in the name of competition.119 Ultimately, then, Martin suggests that financalization emerges as a capitalist mutation to incorporate, enclose and encrypt decolonial

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Figure 55  Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, Ten Thousand Cents, 2008. Image courtesy of the artists. In 2008 media artists Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima used the relatively recent development of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) platform to create (or perhaps commission) the work Ten Thousand Cents. Anonymous “Turkers” (workers who use AMT) from around the world were paid $0.01 USD to independently draw one fragment (of 10,000) of the face of an American one hundred dollar bill. When automatically assembled, the result was a likeness of the banknote created collaboratively by thousands of independent artist/workers, though each of them was paid a pittance. From a distance, or if viewed at a low resolution, the note appears to be slightly pixelated replica of the original; a closer look reveals that many “artists” included their own idiosyncratic flourishes or even comments, encrypted in the whole. This piece presciently meditated upon the future (and, a decade later, our present) of so-called platform capitalism, where digital technology has allowed for the fragmentation, deskilling and globalization of cognitive labor in profound new ways. The artists sold high-quality printed editions of Ten Thousand Cents for $100USD, the proceeds of which were donated to the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) foundation.

struggle by reorganizing the economy away into a decentralized, distributed, networked form based less on domineering institutions and stable (if coercive) relationships and more on fluctuating, temporary constellations of power.120 Finance has not only facilitated the rise of the megalithic transnational corporation, global assembly lines, disciplinary international bond markets and the ever-present threat of capital flight from those jurisdictions deemed to be insufficiently market friendly. It has also facilitated the encroachment of monetary discipline into seemingly every aspect of social life. For Martin, the derivative is central, not only because it enabled financialization to advance and answer the challenges of decolonization but also because it reordered social and economic life in the process. In contrast to the post-war Bretton Woods order, where large institutions (governments, corporations, state agencies, etc) managed the lives of aggregated populations, today those populations are disaggregated and the individuals therein cross-cut by affinities, attributes and

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tendencies only some of which they are aware. Under an order of financialization where all our capacities and qualities are interlaced into the system through data-mining, consuming practices, digital profiling, risk metrics and more, inscrutable algorithms and protocols aggregate us into communities of shared risk without our consent and often without our knowledge.121 The subprime borrowers in dozens of cities were, based on a set of criteria opaque to themselves, enrolled in a kind of silent, encrypted community that had consequences for their lives and also for the global economy. Financialization, under the sign of the derivative, orders and organizes people and also different aspects of many people into new, cryptic aggregations all the time, constantly combining and recombining them. Metaphors for such a system are inherently inadequate, but I am brought to mind of the idea that we are each a deck of cards, with each quality or capacity or affinity represented by one card. Financialization means the shuffling of all these decks into a huge pile while various digitally-augmented parties sort us and resort us into different piles: here all the kings, there all the hearts, here all the black prime number cards; now all the red sixes that have not been placed next to the king of clubs in four of the last seven draws; now all the nines of clubs that show miniscule wear on the top left corner that are also more than 92 percent likely to be sandwiched between two jacks. The logic of the derivative is one that seeks to identify, isolate and leverage these small differences, these deviances into large payback, or advantageous temporary configurations, to recognize a fragment of a pattern that can become a transformative moment.122 Yet—and this is crucial—the system the derivative aims to read and act upon, in this case the massive pile of cards, is the world the derivative itself has created. In other words, the derivative does not read and act upon the “real world”; it creates the reality it in turn reads and acts upon. It poses itself as the means to understand and gain agency within the chaos it itself creates.123 This financialized chaos, where everything has been transformed into a speculative asset to be aggregated and disaggregated, is the new order of sociality. The derivative is both its means and ends: it is a methodology of sorting and leveraging that creates the effects and sociality that is, recursively, its quarry. Martin is keen to do away with a nostalgic pining for the “old economy” of post-war Keynesianism only partially because of its manifold crimes and cruelties, notably neocolonialism, systemic racism and conservative and oppressive laws and norms around gender and sexuality. He is more interested in finding what potentials the sociality of the derivative might offer beyond that nostalgia, what new collectivities, forms of power and

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social relations might emerge in the imagination and in a reality no longer tethered to dominant institutions. A pedestrian example might be the kinds of border-crossing online communities that define some dimensions of their participants belonging, identity or agency outside of the nation-state, social class or even ethnicity or religion. Martin also has something more profound in mind. He turns to the world of creative movement to discover how, in the era of financialization where the social lies in ruins, practices including modern dance, skateboarding and break dancing emerge to produce what he calls a new “social kinaesthetics.”124 All these forms of creative movement, he argues, cohere around a community of common risk taking, in which participants encourage (or goad) one another to the extremes precisely to discover the amorphous borders of their own potential collectivity. Modern dancers sorted by financial capitalism into gentrifying lofts, bored teenagers alienated in the suburbs slapping wheels on boards and doing stunts in abandoned backyard swimming pools, kids in the decrepit urban ghettos throwing their bodies on the pavement: all are seeking to derive or, in our terms, decrypt, some new meaningful joy, new bonds of sociality or a new sense of common being within, against and beyond the way financialized capitalism has aggregated them together. This would appear to be precisely the meaning of the Groupings in Gilligan’s Popular Unrest, but also of the killings. It is revealed as the film’s episodes unfold that both phenomena are the result not so much of a glitch in the World Spirit but its own recursive efforts to learn more and parse more deeply the social fabric it itself is creating (which is also the economy, which is also that of the data storm, which is also the terrain of the biopolitical). In order to better understand the murky world of human emotion and sociality, the World Spirit has created a supposed glitch within itself that is aggregating people together based on arbitrary definitions (like all having made the same Amazon order on the same day, or probably something even more arcane). The killings are the byproduct of this maneuver: as the World Spirit seeks to submit even the realm of human somatics to its metrics it loses any and all humane vestiges that may have been programed into it, becoming fully autonomous from those who designed it. It simply executes those bodies deemed no longer useful based on its own inscrutable yet completely rational derivative calculations. All this is discovered by the Grouping that the film follows as they find themselves working with a set of scientists who claim to be trying to discover what is causing the World Spirit, which they see as a benevolent force or harmony and commerce, to glitch. In actuality, they are the agents of the Spirit’s research, putting the Grouping through a battery

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of psychologically and somatically agonizing tests to allow the Spirit to observe their individual and collective emotional reactions at a granular level. In the film itself, this is represented in the form of highly fragmentary postmodern dance, where members of the group, together and individually, repeat minute gestures, reactions and forms of somatic response. Here, Gilligan’s work affirms and fortifies Martin’s notion of a social kinaesthetics, wherein the logic of sociality exists at the affective seam of individual and collective movement. These experiments and the Grouping’s own independent research leads them to realize the true horrific nature of the system of which they are constituent elements: The Grouping’s heartfelt feeling of affinity and connection emerges from the same “logic” as the gory murders. In the final episode, the Grouping is encouraged by the scientists to “enter” into the World Spirit—which, of course, they were always already in—to try and tame its cruelties. This “entering” is less of a shift in geographic space and more of a kind of collective ritual. Once “inside” they learn that many other Groupings have tried this before them, and that they will share their fate: repeating the mantra “I’m sorry, but I have to do this,” the members of the Grouping betray one another and become internalized to the World Spirit: their knowledge and experience and identity folded into its operations. For Martin, this tragic conclusion is one possible fate that awaits us under the social logic of the derivative. It is a logic that is calibrated precisely to integrate an almost infinite diversity of actors, tendencies and ambitions. The logic of the derivative thrives not only when we commodify our dreams, energies and desires, as has happened to so many rebellious cultures, collectives and movements that have traded radicalism for participation in capitalism. The logic of the derivative thrives when it becomes the vernacular of the imagination, when its logic shapes our behaviors and decisions to make them commensurate. A fine example here is the way that financialization leverages and weaponizes the explicitly and avowedly anti-capitalist or at least anti-consumerist ethos of independent artists and culture workers in what Stevphen Shukaitis calls (drawing on and developing Italian autonomist theory) the metropolitan factory.125 As we have seen, in a financialized context of urban property speculation, these would-be renegades become the unwitting “shock troops” of a gentrification that will, inevitably, dispose of them. The logic of the derivative is one that can fold all forms of value into its own order and metrics. “I’m sorry, but I have to do this” is a wincing utterance ubiquitous under financialization. In the terms we have explored in this chapter, the derivative, then, appears as a technique by which society—or more accurately the granular

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micro-practices of sociality itself—becomes increasingly encrypted by finance. As we have observed, this is not only a dystopian imposition from the outside but, fundamentally, relies on the self-financialization of subjects and institutions, the incorporation and application of the derivative logic from within. Hence even the noble ambitions of the Grouping, oriented as they are to reforming the World Spirit, are conscripted to its reproduction. It’s notable that when one member of the Grouping suggests the World Spirit must be destroyed, a scientist scoffs: it’s impossible—we are the World Spirit, it can’t be destroyed. In the film’s tragic epilogue we learn that the Grouping’s revelation of the World Spirit’s inherent violence has

Figure 56  Ahmet Ögüt, Anti-Debt Monolith, 2014. Photo: Aaron Word. Courtesy the artist. In a set of exhibitions at American art institutions developed in solidarity with the US-based activists, The Day After Debt, Ahmet Ögüt commissioned artists to create works that would both speak to the horrific conditions of student debt in that country and also raise funds for struggles against it. Ögüt’s own contribution was a massive black monolith, reminiscent of the sublime Black Rectangle of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the film, the monolith is usually read to represent the ambiguous promethean gift of technology, which enables humans primates to develop sophisticated societies but is also haunted by their capacity for violence. In Ögüt’s piece, the monolith likewise seems to represent the poisonous gift of learning or knowledge when it is sutured to the almost compulsory experience of debt. Ögüt’s monolith is also a machine: when a coin is inserted it plays a prerecorded audio track that explains the growth of student loan debt in the US over the previous decade. As with all works in the piece, money so donated was given to Strike Debt for its Rolling Jubilee project and, later to its successor organization Debt Collective.

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not resulted in it being shut down but in a new, even darker iteration of the global order. Those people and populations that can afford to do so undertake to securitize themselves against the violence of the system of which they are a part. The rest of the world’s population are left subject to violent predation of the World Spirit (of which they are also a part). The film ends with the ominous rumors of riots and popular unrest as those who are fated to derive the system’s abuses and traumas begin to rebel, and as the would-be beneficiaries beef up their securitization efforts, fighting a war on two fronts: to insulate themselves from the World Spirit and from those who cannot insulate themselves. Locking themselves in a crypt, we might say. Dead and yet alive.

debtfair The crypt, again. Suspended between life and death. For Martin this is the temporality of the derivative. In contradistinction to the capitalist economy that preceded it, the order of the derivative never seeks to close a deal or settle accounts: it is the constant configuration and reconfiguration of contracts, the incessant parsing and reparsing, aggregating, disaggregating and re-aggregating qualities, components and attributes. Debts are never amortized (laid to rest) but endlessly refinanced. The derivative encrypts everything and everything is in the crypt of the derivative. Martin’s dance is not a melancholic lament: it brims with a strategic optimism. That optimism is based in what Stevphen Shukaitis, in his meditation on the fate of political art today, calls the Composition of Movements to Come. By this he indexes those collective formations of refusal and the radical imagination that might emerge from what he calls the dark side of the multitude: not only or primarily the explicit, avowed attempts to cultivate a political community but the new weed-like forms of affinity and collective power that might be glimpsed growing amidst the ruins.126 These are collectives that might neither, on the one hand, harken back to an older desire for exclusive institutional security of corporate or state paternalism nor, on the other, embrace the poisonous logic of the derivative and seek to competitively securitize themselves in a financialized jungle of their own co-creation. Rather, they might, in Shukaitis’s turn of phrase, both refuse the present social order and re-fuse that order into new assemblages. Importantly, Shukaitis’s vision includes an important place in this process for art and artists. This is not because he has any faith whatsoever in the romance of the artist as a liberated political or economic subject capable of descrying and leading the rest of us slobs toward the door to

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freedom. Shukaitis rightly points out, echoing a point I have raised earlier and that Pascal Gielen makes more comprehensively, that the activities of the historic avant-garde have often provided inspiration for the reconfiguration of capitalism and its institutions, notably in the way demands for the dissolution of the separation between art and life become the prompt for capitalism to complete its infiltration into the lifeworld.127 As Shukaitis points out, Joseph Beuys’s demand that everyone be recognized as an artist has emerged in perverted form in a moment when everyone is now an artist-worker, and work takes up all the time of life. By contrast, Shukaitis is interested in the way artistic strategies can prefigure or presage the strategies of wider political movements above and beyond the particular ambitions or intentions of the artist-protagonists themselves. Here Shukaitis is less interested in the particular tactics or techniques artists use and more in the general approach they take to finding the specific possibilities of autonomy, antagonism and re/ fusal in the complex political and social milieus in which they work.128 Their privileged position in this regard does not come from any vestige of romantic freedom, not from the distance between art and money (and the economy, and work), but precisely because art is so proximate to capital. Shukaitis encourages us to abandon a kneejerk assessment of activist art on the basis of how well it seems to directly resist, critique or problematize capitalism. Art, even radical art, is already, in the terms I have proposed here, encrypted with capitalism, capitalism is already all around it and inside it.129 Further, imagining that art, no matter how profound or provocative, could substantially challenge or confront capitalism as a system is quite simply cruel optimism, and usually self-serving cruel optimism at that. The only thing that will substantially challenge the system is the re-composition of social life through mass struggle, the fomentation of powerful, resilient movements that not only protest this or that policy or demand this or that government, but that in the fabric of their being, both demand and practice different orders of social value, different organizations of sociality.130 These are practices I have elsewhere, with Alex Khasnabish, associated with the radical imagination: not simply acts of individual cognitive brilliance (as important as these may be) but collective manifestations of visionary struggle.131 For Shukaitis, what artistic avant-gardes can do is help us glimpse the kinds of forms the radical imagination or forms of composition and movements might yet take.132 Art, because of the contradictory space for fragmentary creativity, cultural expression, imagination, autonomy it retains under capitalism, offers what Shukaitis identifies as a rare space for a strategic imagination. Strategy here does not mean a kind

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of military command, but rather an ability to encounter, comprehend and develop radical actions within a system, not simply as a response to power but as an experiment in creating substantial, grounded, strategic, prefigurative alternatives. Such an approach prompts Shukaitis to reread the history of the avant-garde not for the successes and failures of this or that obstreperous groupsicle or individual genius, but for the way they created, in their art work, a kind of laboratory for techniques and practices of liberation and resistance to capitalism that would, later and indirectly, find their expression in mass movements. This reading of the potential of political art resonates with the optimism Martin finds in the radical kinaesthetics or decolonial movement of modern dance, of boarding culture and of break dancing.133 It’s not so much that any of these forms acutely challenge capitalism. Indeed all of them were, almost from their inceptions, encrypted within it: financialized capitalism surrounded them and saturated them, recuperated them as the sources of commodities or the keys to branded identities. Rather, Martin is curious about the way these practices represent a new method for experimenting within the modes of interconnected encrypted sociality fomented by financialization and the order of the derivative. One particularly interesting example is the work of the ensemble Debtfair, a project that derived from Occupy Museums, a New York activist ensemble that derived from Occupy Wall Street encampment of 2011. As with Strike Debt, discussed in relation to the work of Cassie Thornton in the last chapter, Occupy Museums emerged fairly naturally from the Occupy movement in part thanks to the high number of artists and cultural workers present at the encampments. As Yates McKee’s insider theorization of these movements elaborates, this was no accident. In the first place, New York City’s culture, tourism and artistic industries are so concentrated and so deeply exploitative that it is unsurprising the Occupation of Zuccoti Park, near Wall Street, in the fall of 2011 saw so many arts and culture workers participating.134 Further, for reasons explored in detail in Chapter 2, Occupy activists found a convenient local target in the cultural edifices, museums and galleries that represented a kind of soft underbelly of the city’s (and the world’s) financial elites. Finally, as McKee also argues, the Occupy encampment explicitly adopted and reformulated numerous techniques, habits, ideas and practices of the late twentieth century avant-garde: temporary disruptive “happenings,” participatory protest spectacles, the denaturalization of the capitalist spectacle through the creative occupation of space and the disruption of financialized psycho-geographies through derive-inspired wandering marches.

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Figure 57  Thomas Gokey. $49,983: Total Amount of Money Rendered in Exchange for a Masters of Fine Arts Degree to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pulped into Four Sheets of Paper, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Matt Gubancsik. As the title of the piece indicates, Gokey obtained the equivalent (by approximate weight) of the cost of his tuition to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA program in the form of shredded US currency from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which offers this material to customers for a variety of industrial and novelty purposes. The artist, who was also a key protagonist in the Occupy Wall Street offshoot Strike Debt and one of the driving forces behind its Rolling Jubilee campaign, pulped the shredded currency and created sheets of paper, which he then offered to sell by the square inch to interested clients at a rate proportional to the total cost of the debt. Gokey set himself up to sell (fragments of) the work at multiple venues, notably the 2011 edition of the controversial art festival ArtPrize, held annually in the Rustbelt city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the general public is invited to vote on their favorite works, with the winning artist receiving a princely sum. Even in 2011 the festival has come under strong criticism both for commodifying and spectacularizing fine art, and also because of the political orientation of the DeVos family whose fortunes funded both the prize and also numerous right-wing and reactionary Christian causes, notably those that sought to limit the rights of queer people and of women to abortion services. Indeed, Betsy DeVos, the mother of the founder of Art Prize would go on, in 2017, to become the Secretary of Education in the Trump cabinet, overseeing a massive new wave of the privatization of public education and, as of the writing of this book, worrying policy changes toward student loans programs.

Most importantly, perhaps, Occupy consummated a dream of dissolving the line between art and life, making the sociality of the encampments a field of the intentional orchestration of new models of participation. While this was rarely successful in terms of creating some sort of sustainable, “scalable” alternative to capitalism, it did inherit and

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extend the trajectory of radical art that sought to make social life itself a realm of creative expression, to conjugate the common anew. During and in the wake of the collapse and repression of its central spatial occupation, Occupy Wall Street awakened a diaspora of activist initiatives, including Strike Debt and Occupy Museums. The former, also disproportionately, though certainly not entirely made up of precariously employed culture workers, developed an inspirational set of tactics for reimagining debt, a condition common to many artists who had graduated from prestigious but expensive American art colleges yet who found themselves desperately competing for a living in a vastly oversaturated art market—indeed a contemporary art market whose agents and intermediaries thrived on the glut of hopeful would-be artists flowing into the metropole.135 Strike Debt initially sought to organize a mass, coordinated, nation-wide debtor’s strike, though this proved difficult to orchestrate for a number of reasons. They also produced a collectively authored and edited Debt Resistor’s Operations Manual, offering not only advice to debtors as to how to confront their oppression by the financialized system but also an accessible historical and theoretical overview of that system.136 The group’s most successful and charismatic campaign, the Rolling Jubilee, drew on the interventionist artistic sensibilities of many of its key protagonists to orchestrate a spectacular maneuver where debtors and their allies would raise money to buy up and then forgive medical debt on secondary debt markets.137 Briefly, the expansion of financialization in the US and elsewhere has, as we have seen, been facilitated largely by the vast expansion of debt, often extended to private citizens to allow them to purchase services like healthcare, education and housing that were once, under a previous order of capitalism, understood to be (or ought to have been understood to be) public goods, provided collectively to citizens through the state.138 The affordance of debt to ever more and ever poorer people has been facilitated by advances in securitization, the process whereby debts can be bundled, fragmented and resold from the original lender to third parties.139 But, of course, as costs rise, debt expands and interest accumulates, many debtors find themselves unable to pay back their principle or even make regular payments on the interest. In these cases, debts in default or delinquency, or that are simply unlikely to be paid back, get sold off for pennies on the dollar. A $10,000 debt for a hospital stay may be sold for $1,000, the buyer surmising that, while it is unlikely they will get the balance of the debt before the debtor dies, they can be fairly certain they will get more than the $1,000 they invested through harassment, threats and legal action.

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Strike Debt’s tactic was to raise money and create a pool of funds to purchase this heavily discounted debt, then forgive it: as the new creditor they were entirely within their rights to proverbially burn the bond papers and send the former debtor a note explaining they were the beneficiary of a “people’s bailout.”140 For several reasons, this tactic was limited in its potential.141 Not only would it be difficult to buy all or even a tiny handful of such subprime debtors debts, the very act of making such purchases helps make the market, driving the price of this debt up by increasing demand. Further, while the effects of this tactic have a certain magic, it is galling to imagine that the sellers and brokers of these subprime debts would benefit from the hard work of solidarity-oriented fundraising. Finally, the tactic is limited in the sense that, while inspiring, it does not necessarily lead to a broader mobilization. While the note Strike Debt sent the forgiven debtors included an enthusiastic encouragement to join their movement, very few if any debtors did so: many were so burdened with other debts or simply the wages of work and survival in financialized America they could not or did not follow up on the offer to join the movement. Be that as it may, the Rolling Jubilee tactic was a singularly inspiring example of at least two dimensions of the conceptual apparatus we have been exploring here. First, as McKee affirms, the tactic was, like many aspects of Occupy Wall Street and its activist diaspora, deeply indebted to the history of artistic intervention. Here, the mobilization of a disruptive spectacle aimed at radicalizing the imagination around debt emerged from contemporary art encrypted within capitalism to strike back at capitalism from within. The crypt within a crypt offered a particular vantage or strategic location to identify a weak spot, a lapse, a lacunae or a contradiction. This might be identified as a striking example of derivative art, where a small exception or quirk in the financialized system allows for a surgically precise intervention that, for relatively little investment, leverages large outcomes. It might be read as a kind of arbitrage from below, one that takes advantage of a small glitch between regulatory regimes to maximize a certain type of subversive value. Second and relatedly, the Rolling Jubilee action appeared as a mobilization, or the phantom of the mobilization, of a derivative sociality. Unlike other, earlier movements based on some preexisting or essentialized grounds for solidarity, the Rolling Jubilee attempted to make connections and define a collective movement from the relations and sociality fomented and enforced by financialization itself: that of chronic, unassuageable, compulsory indebtedness. The Rolling Jubilee represented, in part, an attempt to recognize and activate an encrypted surplus hidden in plain sight and to catalyze the imagination of social actors around the

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phantasmatic possibility of a new collectivity: if all us debtors assembled, what else might we be capable of? If we, today, pay untold billions of dollars in fees and servicing payments and interest without any hope of redemption, and if the financialized system depends on transforming each of us into revenue streams and objects of speculation, what power could we collectively realize if we stopped paying, or redirected our energies elsewhere? Further still, if today financialized capitalism makes derivatives of us all, organizes us into an encrypted army of extracted subjects who are so far isolated from one another, what other maneuvers and actions might we be capable of if we could recognize how we have been bundled together? If we are the subjects of relentless, remorseless securitization, which in the end, leaves each of us less and less secure, how might we discover new forms of mutual aid to build collective security within, against and beyond this cryptic system? While the success of the Rolling Jubilee led to the creation of Strike Debt chapters in a number of cities around the US over the next few years, the decentralized and voluntary organization ultimately fizzled. In its wake, some participants went on to form an initiative called Debt Collective with a similar impetus but different strategy.142 Debt Collective seeks to mobilize people who all owe their debts to particular creditors to organize strikes or repayment boycotts to press for debt forgiveness or collectively renegotiate conditions. Specifically, they have targeted for-profit vocational colleges in the US who have, over the past 15 years, targeted poor and racialized communities, taking advantage of Federal government support to push predatory loans on would-be students to pay for a highly a dubious “educational product.” For all intents and purposes, these corporations lobbied for loopholes in the federal student loans program that allowed them to transform aspirant learners into cash cows, on the hook for tens of thousands of loans plus interest.143 Launching with a highly successful strike by former students of Corinthian Colleges Inc., Debt Collective was able to litigate some measure of debt relief for former students, force the corporation into bankruptcy and compel the Obama administration to close the loopholes that allowed for such piratical profiteering.144 Debt Collective’s work continues, largely by creating an infrastructure by which isolated debtors across the United States can reverse engineer their derivative sociality and discover the predatory creditor they have in common, in the hopes that they will amass large enough numbers and generate enough resolve to launch similar strike efforts against other scumbags in the future. Meanwhile, Debt Collective maintains both a national network and local chapters where debtors can offer one another mutual aid, advice and resources.145

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Akin to this project, and more fully active in the realm of art, is the Occupy Museums-spawned project Debtfair.146 Created as an imaginative response to the proliferation of glitzy, hyper-commodified art fairs discussed elsewhere in this book, Debtfair entertains the fantasy of a parallel event where, rather than branded mega-galleries setting up booths to display the work of their stable of artists, those booths might instead bear the insignias of major financial corporations and their walls might be lined with the art of those to whom they are creditor.147 Based on this idea, Debtfair works as an ensemble of activist artists to curate and display collections of works by artists organized by the party to whom they owe their debts, rather than any aesthetic or conceptual affinity between the works in question. To hammer home the point, the aesthetic of presentation adopted by Debtfair is to place the works literally within the gallery wall, between the wooden or aluminum studs, with the drywall paneling removed, in order to show the structural reliance of the art system on the work of debtors and the debt system more broadly. Here, Debtfair seeks to spectacularize their decryption of the role of debt in art: debt is both the container within which the art is made and also inside and animating the artworks themselves. But Debtfair’s ambition here goes beyond mere spectacle. The charismatic conceptual acuity and activist flair of the gesture is the passport that in fact allows Debtfair to gain invitations to participate in hegemonic art spaces. It is precisely their mobilization of the activist vernacular and sensibility that affords the work the kind of critical crypticness that maximizes its contemporaneity, making it paradoxically deeply attractive to the very same art institutions it seeks to criticize, institutions funded by and with access to the financiers who are the masters of debt in the first place. For instance, in 2017 Debtfair was given pride of place at the Whitney Biennial, among the most prestigious shows in New York which is tasked with capturing and displaying the moment of contemporary American art every two years.148 Debtfair took the opportunity to target their show at major Whitney contributor Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company.149 Revealing (in their characteristic within-the-walls way) the works of artists who owed debt to some of BlackRock’s subsidiaries, Debtfair named Fink as a key source from whom their woes derived.150 In order to cultivate contributions for the Whitney show, which were viewable in the gallery on computer screens displaying Debtfair’s website, the activists released a survey, using the notoriety and prestige of the Whitney Biennial to get artists with debts to BlackRock and three other financial apparatuses to submit work and also input their personal and

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Figure 58 (Top) Occupy Museums, Debtfair, 2017. Installation view. Courtesy of the artists. (Bottom) Occupy Museums, Debtfair, 2017. Installation view at the Whitney Biennial. Courtesy of the artists.

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financial information. Ultimately, this data allowed Debtfair to construct a website where they could tally the outstanding debt represented by all the artists, learn about the reasons why the debts were incurred, track the personal effects of the debt on the debtor-artists, and, most importantly, begin to sift and sort debtor-artists by creditor and geographic location. Visitors to the Biennial were also encouraged to fill in the survey, leading to, by the close of the show, tens of thousands of unique entries.151 Here, Debtfair might be seen to be creating a subversive medium or technology for the reverse decryption and re-encryption of sociality, though in a very rudimentary, prototypical and aestheticized way when compared to the massively powerful algorithmic data mining that today underscores the behemoths of the financial economy (like BlackRock and the companies in which it invests). Art becomes the catalyst for debtors themselves to begin a process of deriving new insights into their latent sociality, to decrypt their own connections and shared conditions, to discover what is common among them. What differentiates Debtfair from the Debt Collective, which in many ways has a similar approach, is that one of Debtfair’s priorities is to create a correlated visual archive of this derivative sociality. When applicants input their debt and personal data into the database so that they might appear in the Debtfair exhibitions they also upload a demonstrative artwork, either about their debt or created in spite of their debt. The result is a massive image database that, in sum, offers a window into what I have sought to call the encrypted common. I see this quiet collection as in some ways the inverse of the freeport (the museum of the communization of capital, the art crypt) discussed earlier this chapter. Both are, no doubt, both derivative and constitutive of financialization. Whereas the freeport creates a silent, invisible, encrypted museum curated by the force of the market itself, by and for its halcyon agents and beneficiaries, Debtfair opens a prototypical or potential virtual space for those abject agents who are its victims to discover themselves. As I noted at the beginning of this section, it is important we not fall prey to the cruel optimism that would generate hyperbolic prognoses about the potentials of experiments like Debtfair. They are unlikely to thrive for all manner of reasons, though I hope they do. Nor should we accept the cruel pessimism that would suggest that, because these initiatives are so contradictory, cryptic, small, unlikely or in various ways “problematic” they can therefore be safely discounted. Rather, as Shukaitis advises, we should be attentive to the way that these initiatives provide opportunities to trace a line of strategic imagination, the way that they function to make the walls of the crypts that enclose them and that are at

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their cores slightly more visible.152 In this case I am interested in the ways these initiatives, emerging out of the limits and failures of, yet keeping faith with, the Occupy movement that explicitly targeted financialization, reveal some possibilities for organizing what Martin calls a derivative sociality, and for making us more aware of the surplus common hidden in plain sight. I don’t for a moment believe these initiatives can change the world. But I do think they can help inform our imaginations to grapple with the complexities and terrors of financialization and dream of other, broader, likely more violent methods to defeat it.

epilogue: beyond crypto I have elected to mobilize this language of encryption and crypts as a means to conspicuously avoid the question of Bitcoin, blockchains, crypto­ currencies, smart contracts and similar technologies that are allegedly “disrupting” money, finance, payments and economics today. I have opted to leave this work to others except to the extent that I want to suggest, through my theorization of the encryption of sociality by the derivative, that perhaps these technologies are answers to the wrong set of questions. Briefly, Bitcoin refers to an entirely digital, artificially scarce token introduced in 2007. Rather than materializing the tokens in physical form or having one centralized authority keep track of who has a legitimate claim to the digital tokens at any given time, users essentially share a synchronized open ledger of transactions that is constantly updated and cross referenced, ensuring that all participants play by the rules.153 For enthusiasts, Bitcoin represents the future of money: a decentralized, potentially anonymous means of conducting transactions beyond the power of the state, seemingly egalitarian and anarchistic in spirit.154 Critics are legion, many of them pointing out that there are very good reasons for state regulation of or monopoly over currencies, others noting that there is nothing to prevent Bitcoin from becoming the general medium of an even more rapacious and lawless global capitalist system.155 More practically, high profile hacks of the Bitcoin infrastructure, as well as news that the “back end” of the system demands the completely frivolous burning of huge amounts of electricity, have soured many on Bitcoin, though the hype surrounding it has attracted many financial speculators, leading to massive volatility in its price relative to other benchmark currencies.156 Whatever the fate of Bitcoin itself, it has served as a prototype that has inspired a great deal of derivative experimentation with its component parts. Other cryptocurrencies have been or are being

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Figure 59  Austin Houldsworth, Wealth Beyond Big Brother, 2014. Courtesy of the artist. Austin Houldsworth is a UK-based designer who has recently developed a suite of “counter-fictional design” projects that envision forms of money for well known imaginary utopian and dystopian societies. In Wealth Beyond Big Brother, Houldsworth imagines a currency used in the Disputed Territories of George Orwell’s 1984: the resource-rich, hyper-exploited lands fought over by the great empires of Oceana, Eurasia and Eastasia. Houldsworth explains that in these anarchic and war-torn Territories, the bulk of transactions exist in communal gift economies, but for the dangerous matter of inter-communal exchanges bullets become the form of currency. Thanks to decades of constant imperial rivalries, these territories are littered by broken and abandoned weaponry, out of which inhabitants create new hybrid weapons, but live ammunition is scarce. During a transaction, the buyer aims their loaded weapon at the seller as they negotiate a price, then removes the bullets from the gun and offers them to the seller in return for the desired good or service.

developed that purport to avoid Bitcoin’s flaws or add in new features. The underlying technology of Bitcoin’s distributed and synchronized ledger, called a blockchain, has been widely adopted in technology circles for its many potentials to replace centralized databases.157 In spite of anti-establishment rhetoric, blockchains are increasingly being developed by major corporations, banks, states and international financial institutions to secure and expedite their infrastructures.158 The fundamental capacities of the blockchain—the idea of essentially having a shared, secure decentralized arena for communication—has led some to hypothesize and start to build toward the actuality of smart contracts, which would essentially allow users to create and enter into transparent

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agreements with pre-programed rewards and punishments with speculation such mechanisms could “disrupt” fields ranging from property and labor law to environmental stewardship to logistics.159 There remains much, much more to be said about this constellation of technologies, but this is not a chapter about them. I bring them up to signal my suspicion or reluctance toward them, even though there are some quite interesting efforts to use them in the name of anti-capitalist agitation, as in the case of initiatives such as FairCoop or the Economic Space Agency.160 As David Golumbia argues, while there may be some sympathetic applications for these technologies, one ought not lose sight that most of these technologies’ key enthusiasts and designers are driven by various shades of far-right, free-market and/or libertarian ideology.161 The notion of a “true” market beyond state intervention, where each “user” is free to succeed or fail on their own accord, resonates with a revanchist loathing of the alleged distortions of what is imagined to be a completely neutral capitalism by an overly generous or regulatory government and/or the game-fixing of major corporate powers. This approach is especially resonant with the techno-libertarianism associated with the so-called Californian Ideology, which couples this far-right individualism with an unswerving faith in the neutrality or benevolence of technology and a belief in the market’s capacity to deliver “meritocracy,” or rule of the (supposedly) talented or worthy.162 While clearly not all blockchain and cryptocurrency advocates and enthusiasts hold identical ideologies, and while that field is full of fascinating debates and conjectures, my effort here is to merely signal toward it to preface what I really want to talk about, which is a deeper, more profound form of encryption.163 Put very briefly, the vast majority of cryptocurrency, blockchain and smart-contract approaches adopt wholesale neoliberal approaches to money, which is to say they see money as ultimately a neutral tool that naturally develops from human commerce in complex societies.164 Their explanation for the pathologies of today’s economy is that nation-states or powerful economic actors have skewed, controlled or perverted money’s neutral nature, offering us instead politically-manipulated tokens in the form of central-bank issued fiat currency. The gambit of most cryptocurrency schemes is that by “returning” money to its origins we could therefore return society to its rightful path. My contention with this statement will already be clear from previous chapters and I hope to reiterate and complicate it here. Money has never been a neutral tool, and certainly never under capitalism. Today, I see it as intimately stitched into a broader, chaotic, contradictory and crisis-prone system of capitalism in extremis. Money and various

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aspects of the FIRE sector clearly predate capitalism, yet only take on their current form within and in order to help reproduce capitalism. Capitalism has always depended to some extent on transforming, channelizing, harnessing and recoding the imagination, but in our moment of financialization, for reasons I have explored above, this process is intensified. One of the effects of the financialization of the imagination is the naturalization of today’s forms of money and finance. While many cryptocurrency schemes and visions pose themselves explicitly against what I have here been calling financialization, I would posit that the vast majority are in fact symptomatic of the financialized imagination. In their (cruel) optimism that a new distributed, cryptographically enhanced system can restore money to its fabled neutrality and deliver us the virtues of transparency, autonomy, security or decentralization they end up participating in and reinforcing the encryption of sociality by money and finance. Still, the possibilities of decentralized blockchain technology are seductive. But were they to be leveraged by the radical imagination I hazard they should pay much closer, much more multifaceted attention to the expanded notion of the crypt. It is not only that the vast majority of crypto-currency schemes and ideologies fundamentally misunderstand the nature of money under capitalism. It is also that the cruel optimism that drives them is based on the flawed (yet evidently generative) idea that money can be used to decrypt society, that so long as you produce a cryptographically secure, transparent and fair form of money, society will, as if by some magical chiropractic maneuver, realign. If anything, I hope this chapter will have laid out some clues as to why such an optimism may be misplaced, even dangerous. Money under capitalism, as the paragon and weapon of a process through which human cooperation is transformed (encrypted) into abstract labor power and hence commodified, has always been an encryption of the common, and financialization only doubles (or triples, or quadruples) this encryption. Under financialization, money comes to act ever more directly, coercively and corrosively on sociality itself, reconfiguring and recoding the very fabric of social life. Money has been one method or tool we use in order to reflect on the sociality of which we are a part. It is the false coin of our own collective dream, or rather nightmare. It is the medium not only of exchange but also of the imagination: how we imagine and therefore contribute to the generative, self-organizing social organism of which we are a part: the common. The secret, what lies in the crypt, is this: no matter how brilliant the scheme, no matter how sophisticated the theory, no matter how accurate the measurements, no matter how finely calibrated the algorithm, the

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Figure 60  Austin Houldsworth, Walden Note Money, 2014. Courtesy of the artist. In another piece, this one based on mid-century American behaviorist B.F. Skinner’s utopian novel Walden 2, the currency transactions take the form of rituals by which the two parties destroy money together. There is no state in Walden 2, and the community provides all its members’ needs in return for members’ obedience to a shared code of behavior, which is reinforced through social rituals and guided by rational managers and planners. In such a society, Houldsworth’s money takes the form of two components: pellets of potassium nitrate and sugar that, when ignited, produce copious smoke, and a machine that funnels this smoke into pipes to release harmonious music, the notes depending on the denomination of currency deposited. Since workers in Walden 2 create money arbitrarily to reflect their subjective impression of the value of the work they have contributed to the whole it does not precisely measure anything. And since there is no substantial private property in Walden 2, “purchasing” something is moot. The collective ritual of destroying money to release music, then, is designed primarily to reinforce socially beneficial behaviors. It also creates a sonic landscape to help inform the decisions of the community’s scientific managers and planners. The value of Houldsworth’s monetary fabulations, to my mind, rests in no small part in the way they remind us that the form money takes is both a reflection and a reproducer of the social norms, values and relationships of production from which it remerges.

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common is and will always be mysterious to itself. As I have argued elsewhere, the magnitude and scope of the potential for imaginative cooperation exceeds the imagination at the same time as it animates the imagination.165 It is not, ultimately, decryptable. This is why we must find manifold ways to mediate our own interactions with the common, to reflect on the common of which we are a part. We must invent new and rekindle old frameworks and technologies and methodologies through which we can interpret and work on the common toward feedback loops that valorize solidarity, care and ecology.166 Perhaps crypto-currencies and blockchains can be part of that process, but they are a means to that end, not an end unto themselves. As we have observed, money under capitalism, especially financialized money under the sign of the derivative, is one of the most adept and profound tools we have ever developed for reflecting and manipulating—in other words mediating—the common, though with horrific consequences. Money can only take on this powerful role within a capitalist system that elevates it to the means and ends of our collective manipulation of the common. Other methods, other tools, other mediations exist. And this is, finally, the kernel of my hope for art. Because of the very particular and unique way art is encrypted within capitalism, and indeed becomes a crypt for the virtues of creativity, cultural expression, imagination, autonomy and critique within capitalism, it still holds open a kind of paradoxical window into the encrypted common, onto the raw magma of the radical imagination. This is because, I have suggested, of art’s particular status as a crypt-within-a-crypt. The art that has most fascinated and attracted me in this book is that which, even in a fragmentary, indirect, cryptic, prefigurative, exploratory, experimental and ultimately impossible way, holds open a window for other ways the common might manifest and be organized. Ultimately, the question is not how we might create better, more reliable, more autonomous, more trustworthy or even fairer forms of money. Nor, ultimately, is it a question of how art might better express autonomy or creativity, or better critique or castigate the horrors of financialization capitalism. Rather, my goal in this book has been to try and explore how both money and art represent forms by which the common might be understood and acted within and upon.

Conclusion: Toward abolitionist horizons

I opened this book with an intentionally provocative statement that I do not believe the task is to rescue art from money’s influence, or that art can rescue us from a financialized society but, rather, that I think both art and money must be abolished as such. As I have tried to show throughout the preceding chapters, money and art appear as intertwined phenomena, and that they have in some curious and telling ways been part of one another’s transformation under the suite of economic, political, social and cultural shifts I have been identifying here as financialization, which is to say since roughly the early 1970s. I have sought to illustrate that, alongside the much-bemoaned increasing monetization and financialization of art, finance itself has in some key ways become more aestheticized, symbolic, performative, participatory and conjectural, resembling and in some cases mirroring trends in contemporary art. In order to make these arguments, and also reveal why art still might have something important to teach us about financialization and modes of resistance and rebellion possible within it, I also offered some historical and structural arguments for why money and art are tethered together as mutually encrypting entities. This has been made more difficult because I hope to have been categorical that I see both money and art as taking very particular, if shifting, forms under capitalism: I’m not talking about timeless qualities of human civilization but, rather, mutually reinforcing and interdependent realabstraktions, manifestations of the collective imagination that become or function as “real” thanks to the role they play in reproducing a broader capitalist system of which they are a part.1 I have tried to sketch the way that both money and art are very unique mediations of the common, of our collective capacity to cooperate imaginatively. The way these mediations function changes over time, as capitalism lurches from contradiction to crisis, and these tectonics open up cracks and fissures through which the raw magma of “the common” might erupt or seep out, destroying or challenging existing institutions and creating new topographies for the radical imagination.

an abolitionist approach For this reason, I announced at the outset that this book had as its dream, or its preferred horizon, not the salvation of art or money, but

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their abolition. By this I do not mean that, in the better (post-capitalist) future I think it is necessary, there will be no creative expression and no tokens of value. It means rather that, in that future, those roles, virtues, activities and collective powers that are today encrypted by the institutions of “art” and “money” would exceed or surpass these arbitrary capitalist categories, which we are encouraged to imagine as neutral and eternal. On the one hand, creativity, imagination, autonomy, provocative experience, the orchestration of feeling and aesthetics (the cultivation of the senses) would no longer be encrypted in the specialized (still largely elite) realm of “art” but would animate in some way all sensuous life activity, would be the norm and not the exception of our imaginative cooperation. On the other hand, we would find a multitude of methods for organizing and reflecting upon the fabric of our imaginative cooperation (the common) beyond money, which today, ruthlessly and increasingly declares a horrifically destructive monopoly on these processes. In that future society, perhaps there will still be certain people or collectives whose skills, talents, gifts and vocations will single them out as specialized aesthetic or symbolic producers. Perhaps that society will also use tokens or ledgers as a means to facilitate the circulation of what we today call “goods and services.” The key word is “perhaps”: today art and money, in their hegemonic forms, stand like twinned sentinels precisely at the gates of the walled city built to enclose the vital nexus of that sphere we call culture and that sphere we call economics. In the coming society—indeed on the way to that society—those walls will come down, and those sentinels will fall. An abolitionist approach, then, might first keep in mind the arbitrariness and un-necessity of existing social institutions like art and money. The strongest of such thinking comes from prison abolitionist movements, mostly in the US, which draw on the Black radical tradition to weave together feminist, Marxist, anti-colonial and anti-racist threads to envision a society beyond incarceration.2 As such, abolitionism is explicitly and in its essence an activist theoretical paradigm: it offers a methodology for honing struggles, for generating solidarity, for conceiving strategies and for operationalizing tactics. Key abolitionist thinkers and organizers including Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis frame the prison as a particular historical manifestation and engine for reproducing racial capitalism, born of the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial world system and manifesting today in the horrors of the prison-industrial complex.3 More generally, abolitionist thinking takes aim at what Foucault theorized as the broader “carceral archipelago” of mutually-reinforcing repressive, coercive and socially extractive and destructive institutions that are animated by the same

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Figure 61  C.K. Wilde, Saturn Eating His Children, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

punitive logic: bail and bond schemes, policing, private security and surveillance, and also more generally affiliated institutions of confinement including schools, mental-“health” institutions, bureaucracies, militaries and nation-states.4 The abolitionist perspective insists that all these institutions are ultimately arbitrary: their power and authority is reproduced by reigning systems of power, and they in turn help reproduce those systems of power. In the terms of Cornelius Castoriadis presented earlier, they are manifestations of the socially instituting imaginary, a kind of solidification of the magma-like radical imagination of which all social life is formulated. As such, they are not eternal or necessary but can be abolished.5 Second, an abolitionist perspective might pay attention to the ways these institutions are held in place by power relations and help to

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reproduce power relations. Inspired by this approach, I have sought to show how money and art in fact hold one another up, so to speak, to mutually reinforce one another as institutions of capitalism amidst that system’s crises and contradictions. In Chapter 4 I referred to this (in Derrida’s term) as their arch or vault-like structure of the crypt, where two seemingly opposed forces in fact hold one another up, and a broader system or structure besides. Third, an abolitionist perspective might ask: what is the promise of these institutions that legitimates them, and how are they failing to achieve these ends? In the case of art, while today it encrypts creativity, imagination, autonomy, provocative experience and the orchestration of feeling and aesthetics, I have followed in the footsteps of a long tradition of those who have pointed out that it can only do so in a capitalist economy where those virtues are everywhere else vanquished.6 I have also argued that, today, under a form of financialization that depends on the cultivation, exhortation and co-optation of creativity, imagination, autonomy, provocative experience, the orchestration of feeling and aesthetics, “art” as such has become oddly pivotal to the capitalist economy, both as a vector for wealth generation and circulation and as an ideal by which we might each re-craft our subjectivities toward more optimal competitive market participation. Conversely, in the case of money, I have noted the predominance of neoliberal and free-market ideologies that suggest money, and therefore finance, are natural, unavoidable and ultimately virtuous methods by which humans organize complex societies.7 Therefore, these ideologies advocate the stripping away of government regulation or the expansion of financial markets or the technological evolution of money itself, all with the ideal in mind of introducing money to every aspect of life, ultimately coordinated by financial markets. This compounds and extends a more familiar fetishism of money, the “false coin of our own dreams,” our own common potential for imaginative cooperation offered back to us in coercive form, that reorients all of society toward its own pathological reproduction.8 The fourth aspect of an abolitionist perspective then might ask: in a future society, how else could we meet the desires or answer the wishes that animate these institutions? If we indeed want creativity, imagination, autonomy, provocative experience, the orchestration of feeling and aesthetics to flourish, what, beyond “art” as we conventionally understand it, might bring about that flourishing? And if we must, in some way, mediate—which is to say organize and reflect on—the sublime fabric of our imaginative cooperation, what methods, beyond “money” as we conventionally understand it, might allow us to do so? I am not going to answer these questions here: this is a work of criticism,

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not utopianism, though I vigorously endorse and encourage everyone to pose these questions as often and as militantly as possible. The best money-art I have showcased in this book is animate by precisely these questions, and uses art’s particular status as a crypt-within-a-crypt to do so. The fifth dimension of an abolitionist approach, then, might be to perform a maneuver of interventionist prefigurative politics: to “bring back” these visions of a future post-abolition society into the present as a force of radical creative negation.9 In prison abolitionist thinking, this takes at least three forms.10 First, it advocates the strategic defunding and disempowering of the prison industrial complex: abolitionist activists actively work to redirect social resources away from dangerous institutions and to demand “non-reformist reforms” that debilitate the prison, rather than allow it to recalibrate itself. Second, abolitionists ask: if we are to abolish the prison in the future, what alternative institutions, services, forms of care, notions of security, logics of relationality and practices of community might we need to start building, today? Third, what alliances, forms of organization and solidarities need to be cultivated to wage a struggle not only within and against but also beyond carceral institutions. In other words, how can we build movements that can not only resist but also, ultimately, win. With no small degree of trepidation, I am advocating for a similar approach to art and money: an approach which combines both antagonism toward their existing manifestations as well as rigorous and optimistic experimentation with alternatives. These maneuvers are not virtuous or worthwhile in and of themselves; they can easily be co-opted back into the reproduction of the art-money system.11 The twentieth-century avant-gardes that have earnestly sought to abolish art have, it seems, not only helped define the next hot commodity in the art-economy (from pastiche to performance to participation), they have unwittingly helped provide prompts for the evolution of capitalism itself as it transitions toward a system that seeks to harness “autonomous” subjectivities, imagination and creativity.12 Ultimately, there is no currency in the art world more prized than the head of John the Baptist delivered on a plate: the would-be radical prophet’s gory visage on a metaphoric plinth, or, better, on the auction block. Meanwhile, not only can capitalism afford to ignore the vast majority of local or alternative currency schemes, the example of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency and blockchain initiatives seems to indicate that it can often learn from and incorporate these allegedly autonomous or radical techniques and technologies to entrench and even expand its rule. Movements to abolish art and money, then, must have as their horizon the practical work of

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solidarity, of building powerful, organized and revolutionary expressions of grassroots power.

another reproduction Ultimately, in this book I have sought to create a complex diagram of how, today, (1) Money and art are both reproduced in new ways by financializing capitalism, (2) Money and art, each and together, help reproduce financializing capitalism in new ways, and (3) The way financializing capitalist money helps reproduce and circulate this thing we call art, and vice versa, the way art helps reproduce financializing capitalist money. In Chapter 2 we introduced a triple model of reproduction to help us triangulate the shifts in this pattern between the early 1970s, when “financialization” (as a periodizing concept) began to develop, and today, when it appears everywhere in crisis. There, we explored this notion of reproduction as naming, at once (1) The way capitalism, as a system, struggles to reproduce itself in spite and because of its constant internal contradictions, which manifest as crises like the 2008 crash; (2) The way that the reproduction of capitalism, and its inherent inequalities, forms of oppression and modes of exploitation, both depends on but also creates special zones for the reproduction of social classes, institutions and subjects, including schooling, the art world, the mass media, or the prison; and (3) The way capitalism ultimately represents a system for organizing the reproduction of life itself, in a biological and social sense, and the way it increasingly does so through commodifying, monetizing and financializing the realms of care, of culture and of sociality. Capitalism, in this triangulation, appears as a system that seeks to take control of socially reproductive, imaginative cooperation (which in Chapter 3 we identified as “the common”) and orient it toward its own reproduction; it can be likened to a virus of a cancerous formation in the systems of our human “species being.”13 Like a sophisticated pathogen, it not only reorients and recalibrates the behavior of the organism as a whole, but also its individual cells. The metaphor becomes strained here,

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and notions of society as a unified social organism are always haunted by fascistic undertones.14 My suggestion here is that, from an abolitionist perspective, the broader question we might ask is: how might art and money, especially at their points of intersection or mutual encryption, be mobilized to make other, anti-capitalist methods of social reproduction possible? How might they orchestrate our imaginative cooperation toward the reproduction of a radically different kind of system? I am wary here of offering examples because I think that there are a vast diversity of strategies that might be employed, and also because this work promises no easy or straightforward solutions. In general, I would point toward the many examples of artwork offered in the preceding pages, each of which in its own way helps to cultivate a sensibility toward these dynamics. I have been most interested in those artists who retain some connection to the so-called “art world” precisely to take advantage of the resources and the particular latitudes of relative freedom it still affords, though in ways that refuse, as best they might, to reproduce that world. Like Stevphen Shukaitis, I have been interested in the arts of the undercommons: both the arts that emerges from the immanent forms of solidarity we create within, against and beyond financialized capitalism and its attendant systems of oppression and also the arts by which the undercommons reproduce themselves, grow, exceed themselves and avenge their captivity.15 I have focused on these figures only because they represent stars that have not yet sunk below the horizon.16 My broader interest, which is beyond the scope of this book, is the way that “art” is becoming a password for all sorts of reinventions of sociality, all sorts of radical maneuvers, all sorts of abolitionist experiments beyond the confines of what we typically consider “art.” I am most interested in the way art functions in what Gregory Sholette calls the “dark matter,” the hidden mass of creativity in society at large on which the “art world” depends but that it does not include.17 These include all those heavily indebted art students who will never see their name on a gallery wall (as either patron or patronized), all of those so-called amateurs, hobbyists and tinkerers whose creative labor will never be valorized, and especially all those sly activists, slant healers, vengeful tricksters, weaponized malcontents and communist hackers who leverage “art” toward radical ends, or even simply in the name of a yet un-foreclosed possibility of freedom or joy. In other words, my interest in art and money, as I noted in the introduction of this book, is really a means to explore the dialectic of imagination and value, culture and economics in a financialized era where these polarities are somehow merging. I am curious about what radical potentials can emerge in an age when we are all compelled,

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Figure 62  Caroline Woolard, Exchange Cafe, 2013. Installation view. Photo: Ryan Tempro. Courtesy of the artist and MoMA: Artists Experiment. A large proportion of New York-based artist Caroline Woolard’s practice has been dedicated to creating grassroots institutions or temporary environments where monetary transaction is replaced by new modalities of cooperation and reciprocity. Exchange Cafe was a temporary space staged in the Spring of 2013 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s education wing, providing visitors with ethically sourced tea, milk and honey in exchange for Resources, an ephemeral currency represented by money-like slips of paper that asked participants to list what they “created” and “requested,” thus creating a space of meditation, consideration, dialogue and critical questioning

conclusion: toward abolitionist horizons   221 of the underlying value and purpose of conventional money and commercial rituals. Woolard’s other works in this vein have largely been the collaborative creation of alternative, non-monetary institutions. OurGoods, which operated from 2006–16, was a digital platform to facilitate bartering goods and services, primarily but not exclusively among New York creative workers. TradeSchool is a peer-to-peer education platform and freeschool which provides a replicable digital platform to enable willing teachers and willing learners to connect locally to barter knowledge for other (non-monetary) goods and services. TradeSchool at one time boasted over 30 autonomous chapters in cities around the world. More recently, Woolard has helped found BFAMFAHdD, a artists’ research collective that surveys and reports on the economic conditions of artists, especially in reference to the rising costs of fine arts education in the US, begging the provocative question “what is a work of art in the age of $120,000 art degrees.”

cajoled or exhorted to become flexiblized “artistic subjects,” where we must increasingly rely on our own torqued and abused creativity to leverage our individualized, competitive reproduction out of an austere, market-driven society.

beyond fascism In the epilogue to his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin famously wrote of the aestheticization of politics, the horrific way the oppressed of industrial societies come to enjoy the fascistic spectacle of their own annihilation.18 For Benjamin, fascism offers the masses—the form the common takes when concentrated and homogenized by capitalist factories, nation-states and media—neither restitution for their exploitation nor social transformation away from it, but rather a sick form of mass expression through militarized nationalist hyper-mediated faux-communalism. As Susan Buck-Morss explains, mass fascist spectacles and the almost narcotic bliss of losing oneself in revanchist patriotism were, for Benjamin, the logical outcome of an industrial capitalist society that transformed sensuous, imaginative, cooperative, interdependent human beings into machine-like workers and consumers.19 The vital questions at the heart of politics—of how we might live together, of how we might organize our society, of how we might understand and exercise our collective powers—became, under so many layers of cynical manipulation, reduced to the crudest aesthetic: stimulus and response, the exploitation of abused affect at which fascism and its brutal historical antecedents has always excelled. It is hard not to draw parallels to our own time. It is not only that, though we have been promised that the salve of “art” can transform life

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and work, more of us work longer, less securely, for less, with a horrific toll on our minds and bodies. It’s not only that “the media” has evolved into an even more craven, financialized, aestheticized mouthpiece for corporate interests. It’s not only that, today, every notion of liberation, from “creativity” to “freedom” to “revolution” has been cynically transfigured into a marketing gimmick and, worse, transformed from a common dream to an individual imperative, to be cultivated in the name of becoming a better and more economically competitive subject. Nor is it only that, today, all the neoliberal promises of opportunity and peace that accompanied these shifts have been belied by rising levels of inequality, economic precariousness and social alienation, which have in turn swept us into the embrace of revanchist authoritarians. It is also that, today, financialized corporations are transforming the very nature of aesthetics itself, developing communication technologies that “addict” us to proprietary and manipulatable screen-based sociality, or, as we observed in Chapter 4, fragmenting and re-aggregating us into preferential assortments or derivative socialities. Benjamin’s nightmare is worse that he could possibly have imagined. His antidote was the “politicization of art,” a cryptic term much debated. On at least one level, this seemed to be support for socialist realism, the use of art to represent reality, rather than fascistic capitalist mythology, and the aestheticization of workers’ solidarity to offer a triumphant and hopeful image of the necessity of communist victory. On another level, the politicization of art might have meant the more intentional integration of art into communist political strategy, based on the understanding that workers were complex beings and that “art,” even if an artificial category of activities defined by capitalism and destined to be eclipsed along with that system, might be an integral dimension of mobilization and solidarity itself. On still another, deeper level, as Buck-Morss argues, the politicization of art has more to do with the necessity for a radical politics to take seriously that deeper war on the senses that capitalism advances and that fascism seizes upon. In this sense, politicized art would be a matter of developing methods for not only healing and restoring sensuous humanity, but also developing new senses, new aestheses. Today, financialization wages the war on our senses, and new forms of fascism, what Hito Steyerl calls “derivative fascisms,” take advantage.20 These fascisms and their strongmen don’t promise to end the scourge of financialization; indeed, they will accelerate and unleash it. But they promise (falsely) that certain populations (national, ethnic, religious) will be protected. More vitally, like their twentieth century predecessors they have learned to take advantage of the new sensorium of financialization:

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to mobilize algorithms, to hijack social media, to commandeer vengeful affect, to insinuate themselves in the existential poverty and misery of that particular form of anxiety that is bred by a financialized culture that insists that we each have no one to blame save ourselves for our failures to invest in ourselves wisely. These new fascists’ ability to conjure majorities (or at least consequential pluralities) of voters seemingly out of thin air indicates that they have learned to leverage what Martin called the sociality of the derivative, the way the financialized world manifests new distributed populations hidden in plain sight.21 Likewise, that these new fascisms advance not through any coherent unifying agenda or plan, but simply by fomenting division, anger, resentment and bitter affect indicates they are masters of the techniques of a kind of social arbitrage: the moment-to-moment taking-advantage of discrepancies, differences and distinctions. And while their twentieth century predecessors may have aped the industrial bourgeoisie in their desire to create a global empire, to be the pinnacle of human achievement, today’s fascists are truly the students of the derivative: there is no endgame, no closure, just the limitless, borderless accumulation of power, the tapping of every source of wealth for its potential future profits, acceleration in the name of acceleration, and limitless potential for violence. What are the politics of art worthy of this moment? In spite of my sustained skepticism toward the cruel optimism of “political art” throughout this book, I am not one to diminish the importance of speaking truth to power, of creating counter-spectacles, of sharing subjugated histories, of critiquing symbolic and material power relations, of expanding our horizons for sympathy, of rupturing the “distribution of the sensible,” of manifesting the power of subordinated people or communities through representation, of holding open the possibility of other worlds beyond the “reality principle,” or even of simply creating beautiful things in a world growing ever uglier. I also think that this politics might have something to do with helping us cultivate new senses germane to understanding and moving together in this financialized world, in what Martin calls, this “unknown country that we nonetheless call home.” For Martin, this sensibility is to be developed through the discovery of “a wealth already at hand,” one that would render “unimaginable” the presumed scarcity that legitimates financialization.22 Martin insists that financialization ultimately abolishes any distinction we once might have wished to make between the realm of politics and of economics. It’s not just that, under the “communism of capital” we explored in Chapter 4, the financial sector becomes the superintendent of all levels of governance, including the field of governmentalities that extends into the subtle management of

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imagination and daily life that occur in a society of control. The logic of derivative now actively reshapes and recodes (encrypts, in my terms) the fabric of sociality, of how we reproduce life together. The political terrain, the economic terrain and the cultural terrain are entangled as never before under capitalism. What sorts of bodies (individual and collective) have we become under financialization? What senses have we developed and what senses do we yet need to cultivate? Perhaps “artist” today names not an occupation (after all most are not making a living) nor an activist (because nearly every activity can be named as “art”) but rather a sub-species of whatever the human is becoming in a society of control, when survival is not merely about satisfying basic physical needs yet somehow sensing and responding to a world of derivative codes. Perhaps we need to forget all that we thought we knew about art or artists and, instead, entertain the possibility that this strange word now holds open an ambivalent space for the kind of animal that seeks to make a new sense, act in a new way, under the order of the derivative. If that is the case, then we should recognize that there is nothing automatically heroic about this figure. It could equally name the consummation of the financier of the self, the capitalist psychonaut so intimate with the subtleties of the market and its society that s/he develops new frontiers of financialized extraction, exploitation or destruction. The questions artists today are asking themselves, or ought to be asking themselves, about the fraught line between complicity and rebellion, about co-optation and autonomy, are the questions all ought to be asking. In the terms we have introduced here, I think such a politicized art would take the form of pragmatically utopian experiments of generative negation, of attempts to discover the wealth of the common hidden in plain sight all around us. We must, somehow, learn anew how to abolish the current order of financialized capitalist reproduction and institute other orders of reproduction. This abolitionist task is an aesthetic one, in the expanded sense offered by Buck-Morss’s reading of Benjamin: it is in part a task of recognizing, healing and reproducing subjects, communities, movements, relationships and collective powers.

art after money, money after art So let us end with two visions. In the present order, the form of art that comes after money is also the art that chases after money. On one level the “art world” is increasingly oriented toward ultimately producing the artifacts that will fill the crypts at the freeport or entertain (not only delight but also shock,

conclusion: toward abolitionist horizons   225

titillate and beguile) its clients. While this hyper-commodified art may only represent a tiny fraction of the work that goes on in the art world (let alone in the submerged dark matter), I have sought to argue in this book that the influence of these markets, and of the financially enriched super-elite has, a structural and institutional influence over practically all art world actors. We have seen how even some of the most obstreperous, radical, dematerialized and ephemeral artworks can be folded in to the financialized art market apparatus. This is the magic of financialization: it can render practices and processes part of its apparatuses even without their direct commodification or monetization. Meanwhile, we have also seen throughout this book that capitalism increasingly depends on art becoming a watchword for the financialization of daily life and subjectivity toward financialized entrepreneurialism. In this vision, art after money is just that: art conscripted into the service of the reproduction of financialized capitalism on multiple levels. Conversely, money after art would mean the burgeoning and normalization of art as an alternative asset class investment vehicle, presenting as it does a unique and useful set of financial characteristics (volatility, yield, value and risk), a passport for navigating tricky international economic spaces or dodging taxes, or as a familiar philanthropic alibi for normalized capitalist abuse. Money after art would name the nauseating way in which all sorts of capitalist processes have been rebranded with artistic flair, such that today the buzzwords “artisanal,” “curated,” and “creativity” seem to immediately precede gentrification, downsizing, casualization or some other allegedly inevitable socially destructive criminality of the market. It would also imply the way that financial instruments come to increasingly incorporate, mirror or mimic the conceptual, dematerialized, hyper-abstract and, most importantly, socially interventionist experiments in contemporary art. In this vision, financiers would consider themselves artists in the same way Hitler did: supermen bestowed with power and cunning sufficient to reshape the protean material of the social world itself. Here, capitalist money ultimately reaches its own apotheosis: it is not simply measuring and facilitating social intercourse, it actively shapes and commands it. Is there another possibility? Art after money might, as I have argued, imply the leveraging of the residual and structural uniqueness of art under financialization to derive new, abolitionist tactics. Whereas earlier forms of capitalism encrypted art within it in different ways that afforded some measure of (perhaps cruel) optimism toward art’s inherent emancipatory potential, today’s order of financialization should impel us to abandon such vain hopes. Yet the fact that art is encrypted within capitalism should not discourage

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Figure 63  Susan Stockwell, SAIL AWAY, 2013. Installation view at Tate Modern Turbine Hall. Photo: Miles Roberts. Courtesy of the artist. Susan Stockwell’s 2013 installation in London’s Tate Modern Turbine Hall, SAIL AWAY, took the form of a massive flotilla of folded paper boats made from old paper money, maps and travel tickets. Over 800 people participated in creating the boats.

us from struggles within, against and beyond that system, using the resources at hand. This would mean, however, a difficult, systematic and careful study of the precise ways in which this encryption occurs and how it might be leveraged, else it is all too easy to be seduced into a posture where the relationship of parasitism begins to benefit capitalism more than it might benefit those struggles against it. It would also mean a redoubling of a commitment to actual radical, transformative social movements and communities in struggle. Art that imagines it can confront and escape money in the absence of this solidarity is at best self-deceiving. Conversely, money after art might mean a recognition that ultimately, the future depends on us discovering new methodologies for and mediations of our imaginative cooperative potential: the common. Money in its multitude of forms is a unique method for this kind of reflexivity, one way that we, as a society, come to work on our own reproduction. Under capitalism, money becomes a horrific thing, a tool that takes control of its creator and reorients everything to its own endless, pointless expansion. Financialization is the apogee of this process, where money takes on increasingly dematerialized, coercive, accelerating and globalized forms. Thinking about money after art means seeing it, like

conclusion: toward abolitionist horizons   227

art, as a never-neutral tool but as the product of the generative common imagination. Many alternative currency schemes, as we have seen, simply aim to replace state-backed fiat currencies with a more efficient model of capitalist money, enabling and accelerating financialization. Others, more benignly, see their goal as creating some regulatory framework to tame capital, or an apparatus that in some way helps redistribute the vastly unequally concentrated wealth of our world. But, in addition to this noble task, a money after art would need to both stem from and help create a new framework for reimagining value. In other words, it would need to allow us to imaginatively cooperate in new ways, reorganize labor on a mass scale, and ultimately militate against the reproduction of capitalism and for the reproduction of creativity, imagination, autonomy, individuality, and interdependent freedom and sensual joy. In still other words, all those things that today are encrypted in our dreams for art, dead and yet alive.

Notes

introduction 1. Brooke Harrington, Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016); Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (London: Penguin Books, 2013); Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). 2. Suhail Malik, “A Boom Without End: Liquidity, Critique and the Market,” Mute 2, no. 6 (August 13, 2007), www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/ boom-without-end-liquidity-critique-and-art-market; Suhail Malik and Andrea Phillips, “Tainted Love: Art’s Ethos and Capitalization,” in Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets. A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios, ed. Maria Lind and Olav Velthuis (Berlin: Sternberg, 2012), pp. 209–40. 3. Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London and New York: Pluto Press, 2011). 4. Andrea Fraser, “L’1%, c’est Moi,” Texte Zur Kunst 83 (2011). 5. Martha Rosler, “Money, Power, Contemporary Art,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (1997): 20–24; See also Martha Rosler, “The Artistic Mode of Revolution: From Gentrification to Occupation,” in Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity, ed. Michał Kozłowski et al. (London: Mayfly, 2015), pp. 177–98. 6. Boris Groys, “Art and Money,” E-Flux 24 (April 2011), www.e-flux.com/ journal/art-and-money-2/. 7. Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); see also Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008). 8. See for instance Nato Thompson, ed., Living As Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2012); Peter Weibel, ed., Global Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century (Karlsruhe: ZKM, Center for Art and Media, 2015); Deborah Brandt, Wild Fire: Art as Activism (Toronto: Sumach, 2006). 9. Susanne Soederberg, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 10. Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 11. Luigi Russi, Hungry Capital: The Financialization of Food (London: Zero Books, 2013). 12. Michael Pryke and Paul du Gay, “Take an Issue: Cultural Economy and Finance,” Economy and Society 36, no. 3 (2007): 339–54; See also Randy

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007). Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Randy Martin, Knowledge LTD: Towards a Social Logic of the Derivative (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015). Haiven, Cultures of Financialization. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015). Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). Haiven, Cultures of Financialization. Max Haiven, “Finance as Capital’s Imagination?: Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis,” Social Text 108 (2011): 93–124. See Martijn Konings, The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed (Stanford, CA and London: Stanford University Press, 2015). See Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis (Boston: South End Press, 2008); Russi, Hungry Capital. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Cambridge and New York: Blackwell, 1997), 319–37. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy,” in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Cambridge and New York: Blackwell, 1997), 290–318. See also Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish, The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (London and New York: Zed Books, 2014); Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002); Marcel Stoetzler and Nira Yuval-Davis, “Standpoint Theory, Situated Knowledge and the Situated Imagination,” Feminist Theory 3, no. 3 (2002): 315–33. For an admirably lucid rendering, see David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, second edition (London and New York: Verso, 2006). Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press, 2000); Massimo de Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capitalism (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007); Massimo De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism (London: Zed Books, 2017). Max Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (London and New York: Zed Books, 2014) especially Chapter 1. Haiven, Cultures of Financialization; “Finance as Capital’s Imagination?” Haiven and Khasnabish, The Radical Imagination. On the role of abstraction in money and finance, and also cultural production in this case, literature, see Leigh Claire La Berge, Scandals

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31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). See Georgina Adam, Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century. (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington: Lund Humphries, 2017); Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). See Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (London and New York: Verso, 2017); “Art and Finance Report” (Luxembourg: Deloitte, 2016), www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/lu/Documents/ financial-services/artandfinance/lu-en-artandfinancereport-08092014. pdf. Mark C. Taylor, “Financialization of Art,” Capitalism and Society 6, no. 2 (January 9, 2011), https://doi.org/10.2202/1932-0213.1091. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1984). Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). See also Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Marazzi, Capital and Language. Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Malik and Phillips, “Tainted Love: Art’s Ethos and Capitalization.” See for instance Karin Knorr-Cetina, “The Market Spectacle,” Rethinking Capitalism 2, 2011; Aeron Davis, “Defining Speculative Value in the Age of Financialized Capitalism,” The Sociological Review 66, no. 1 (January 2018): 3–19. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011). Steyerl, Duty Free Art. See Marina Vishmidt, “Notes on Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital,” in Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity, ed. Michał Kozłowski et al. (London: Mayfly, 2015), pp. 47–64. Mel Evans, Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts (London: Pluto Press, 2015); Chin-Tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (London and New York: Verso, 2003). Gerlis, Art as an Investment? “Art and Finance Report”. To put matters in perspective, optimistic reports put the value of the global art market (of which “contemporary art” is only a small subsection) at around $45 billion USD, which means that any one of the world’s richest 17 people (according to the Forbes list of 2018) could buy the entire market oughtright. By way of contrast, the whole global art market is more than eleven times smaller than the luxury car market (€489 billion). See Shellie Karabell, “Just How Big Is The Art Market?” Forbes (March 15, 2017), www.forbes.com/sites/shelliekarabell/2017/03/15/just-howbig-is-the-art-market-leaders-do-some-serious-numbers-crunching; Claudia D’Arpizio, Federica Levato, Marc-André Kamel, and Joëlle de

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Montgolfier, “Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study,” Fall–Winter 2017, Bain Reports (December 22, 2017), www.bain.com/publications/articles/ luxury-goods-worldwide-market-study-fall-winter-2017.aspx. 47. Angela McRobbie, “‘Everyone Is Creative’: Artists as Pioneers of the New Economy?” in Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life, ed. Toby Bennett and Elizabeth B Silva (London: British Sociological Association, 2004), 186–202; See also Pascal Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2010). 48. Daniel Makagon, “Bring on the Shock Troops: Artists and Gentrification in the Popular Press,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (August 2010): 26–52. 49. Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Mark Banks, “Creative Cities, Counter-Finance and the Aesthetics of Exchange: Copenhagen’s Artmoney Project,” Cities 33 (2013): 36–42. 50. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Giuseppina Mecchia and Francesca Cadel (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009). 51. Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013). 52. Haiven and Khasnabish, The Radical Imagination; Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th anniversary edition (New York: Continuum, 2000); Kelley, Freedom Dreams. 53. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009). 54. See Max Haiven, “Privatizing Resistance: AdBusters and the Culture of Neoliberalism,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 29, no. 1 (2007), pp. 85–110. 55. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012); Boris Groys, “On Art Activism,” E-Flux 56 (June 2014), www.e-flux.com/journal/56/60343/ on-art-activism/. 56. Carlo Vercellone, “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism,” Historical Materialism 15, no. 1 (2007): 13–36; Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Amsterdam: Institute on Network Cultures, 2008). 57. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (New York: Autonomedia, 2009); Marazzi, Capital and Language. 58. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009). 59. Sholette, Dark Matter. 60. Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (London and New York: Verso, 2016); See also Brian Holmes, “Eventwork: The Fourfold Matrix of Contemporary Social Movements,” in Living As Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2012), pp. 72–85.

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61. Stevphen Shukaitis, The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor after the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). 62. Randy Martin, Knowledge LTD: Towards a Social Logic of the Derivative (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), pp. 78–9. 63. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011). 64. I have written at some length about the problems of “resisting” finance in Max Haiven, “Finance Depends on Resistance, Finance Is Resistance, and, Anyway, Resistance Is Futile,” Mediations 26, no. 1–2 (2013): 85–106. 65. See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013). 66. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011). 67. Mariame Kaba, “Summer Heat,” The New Inquiry, (June 8, 2015), https:// thenewinquiry.com/summer-heat/; Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

chapter 1 1. Lawrence Weschler, Boggs: A Comedy of Values (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 2. Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (London and New York: Verso, 2011). 3. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1991). 4. See Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Culture and Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 31–49. 5. See Max Haiven, “Finance Depends on Resistance, Finance Is Resistance, and, Anyway, Resistance Is Futile,” Mediations 26, no. 1–2 (2013): 85–106. 6. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London and New York: Verso, 1998); Boris Groys, “Art and Money,” E-Flux 24 (April 2011), www.e-flux.com/journal/art-and-money-2/; Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 7. Etienne Balibar, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004); Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010); Angus Cameron and Ronen P. Palan, The Imagined Economies of Globalization (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2003).

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8. Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2013). 9. David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011). 10. See Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Marginalization and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013); Max Haiven, Towards a Materialist Theory of Revenge: The Lives of Witches, VAGABONDS 001 (Thunder Bay: RiVAL, 2017). 11. Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2005). 12. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 13. Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 14. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Vintage, 1980). 15. Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008). 16. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012). 17. Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Power and the States of Perception (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015). 18. Max Haiven, “Finance as Capital’s Imagination?: Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis,” Social Text 108 (2011): 93–124; Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 19. Luigi Russi, Hungry Capital: The Financialization of Food (London: Zero Books, 2013). 20. Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 21. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap, 2014). 22. For a Marxist critique of Piketty’s notion of “capital”, see David Harvey, “Afterthoughts on Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Challenge 57, no. 5 (2014): 81–6. 23. Dario Azzellini and Marina Sitrin, They Can’t Represent Us!: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy (London and New York: Verso, 2014). 24. See also Chris Dixon, Another Politics: Talking across Today’s Transformative Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 25. Leigh Claire La Berge, “The Rules of Abstraction Methods and Discourses of Finance,” Radical History Review 118 (2013): 93–112. 26. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, second edition (London and New York: Verso, 2006). 27. Anita Nelson, Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

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28. Harvey, The Limits to Capital. 29. See Harry Cleaver, Rupturing the Dialectic (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017); George Caffentzis, “The Power of Money: Debt and Enclosure,” in In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2013), 236–40. 30. Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman, eds., Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies (London: Pluto Press, 2011). 31. Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 32. John McMurtry, Value Wars: The Global Market versus the Life Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2002). 33. Massimo de Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capitalism (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007). 34. Jameson, Representing Capital. 35. Examples of the violence unleashed by money and in the name of money in the foundations of capitalism, often by the same people who were propounding its neutrality, can be found in: George Caffentzis, “Clipped Coins, Abused Words and Civil Government: John Locke’s Philosophy of Money” (New York: Autonomedia, 1989); Linebaugh, Peter, “‘Old Mr. Gory’ and the Thanatocracy”, in The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 42–73. 36. Peter North, Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 37. Nelson, Marx’s Concept of Money. 38. Jameson, Representing Capital. 39. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 347–60. See also Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (London: Zero Books, 2015). 40. Marc Shell, Art and Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Katy Siegel and Paul Mattick, Art Works: Money (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004). 41. Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London and New York: Pluto Press, 2011). 42. Mark C. Taylor, “Financialization of Art,” Capitalism and Society 6, no. 2 (January 9, 2011), https://doi.org/10.2202/1932-0213.1091. 43. Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 44. Noah Horowitz, “Comment on ‘Financialization of Art’ (by Mark C. Taylor),” Capitalism and Society 6, no. 2 (2011). 45. Ben Lewis, “Charles Saatchi: The Man Who Reinvented Art,” The Observer (July 10, 2011), www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jul/10/ charles-saatchi-british-art-yba; Charles Saatchi, “The Hideousness of the Art World,” Guardian (December 2, 2011), www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2011/dec/02/saatchi-hideousness-art-world; Alexandra

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Topping and Ben Quinn, “Charles Saatchi: Accepting Police Caution Was Better than the Alternative,” Guardian, (June 18, 2013), www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/2013/jun/18/charles-saatch-caution-nigella-lawson. 46. Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2011). 47. Adam Lindemann, Collecting Contemporary Art (Cologne: Taschen, 2006); Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World. 48. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 49. Ibid. 50. So much more could and should be said about the relationship between art, finance and sex work. See Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Dirty Commerce: Art Work and Sex Work since the 1970s”, Differences, 23 (2012), 71–112; Mixtrix, “This Is How You Dominate Men with Money”, Vice (October 22, 2015), www.vice.com/en_us/article/ppxqgn/how-to-be-a-financialdominatrix-456. 51. See, for instance, “The Artnet News Index: Top 100 Collectors, Part One”, Artnet News (June 13, 2016), https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artnetnews-index-top-100-collectors-part-one-513776. 52. Arjun Appadurai, “The Spirit of Calculation,” Cambridge Anthropology 30, no. 1 (2012): 3–17. 53. See Haiven, Cultures of Financialization. 54. Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, trans. Kristina Lebedeva (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010); Davis, Aeron, “Defining Speculative Value in the Age of Financialized Capitalism”, The Sociological Review, 66 (2018), 3–19. 55. Boris Groys, “Art and Money,” E-Flux 24 (April 2011), www.e-flux.com/ journal/art-and-money-2/. 56. Marina Vishmidt, “Notes on Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital,” in Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity, ed. Michał Kozłowski et al. (London: Mayfly, 2015), pp. 47–64. 57. For undisclosed reasons Kruger declined to have her work represented in this volume. 58. Barbara Kruger and Lisa Phillips, Money Talks (New York: Skarstedt Fine Art, 2005). 59. Wright, Steve, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002). 60. Franco Bifo Berardi and Marco Magagnoli, “Blu’s Iconoclasm and the End of the Dada Century,” E-Flux 73 (2017), www.e-flux.com/ journal/73/60467/blu-s-iconoclasm-and-the-end-of-the-dada-century/. 61. Deborah Vankin, “Blu Says MOCA’s Removal of His Mural Amounts to Censorship – Latimes,” Los Angeles Times, (December 15, 2010), http:// articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/15/entertainment/la-et-moca-mural20101215. 62. For a brilliant and comprehensive excursus on the differential value of artistic labor, see David Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic

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Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). 63. Lawrence Weschler, Boggs: A Comedy of Values. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 64. McRobbie, “‘Everyone Is Creative’: Artists as Pioneers of the New Economy?”; Angela McRobbie, “Re-Thinking the Creative Economy as Radical Social Enterprise,” Variant 14, (2011), www.variant.org.uk/41texts/ variant41.html; Brian Holmes, “The Speculative Performance: Art’s Financial Futures,” Transversal, 2007, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0507/ holmes/en; Gerald Raunig, Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity (Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2013). 65. See Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practices in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2009); for a more skeptical take on artists as workers, see Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013). 66. I am indebted here to the insights of Suhail Malik, as presented in a recent suite of lectures on the necessity of art’s “exit” from the realm of the contemporary, the subject of his forthcoming book on the subject, an archive of which can be found here: http://artistsspace.org/programs/ on-the-necessity-of-arts-exit-from-contemporary-art 67. See Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman, eds., Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies (London: Pluto Press, 2011). 68. See, for instance, Helmut Draxler, “The Drifting of Volition. A Theory of Mediation”, in Performing the Curatorial: Within and Beyond Art, ed. Maria Lind (Berlin: Sternberg, 2012), pp. 89–113. 69. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, (New York: Verso, 2015). 70. Harvey, The Limits to Capital. 71. Nelson, Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities. 72. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Brooklyn, NY and Oakland, CA: Common Notions (PM Press), 2012). 73. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 74. See Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art, Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 75. “Art and Finance Report 2016” (Luxembourg: Deloitte, 2016), www2. deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/lu/Documents/financial-services/ artandfinance/lu-en-artandfinancereport-08092014.pdf. 76. Chin-Tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (London and New York: Verso, 2003). 77. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon, 1978). 78. Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press, 2000).

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79. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 80. Nelson, Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities. 81. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International, 1964), pp. 165–9. 82. David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 83. Max Haiven, “The Creative and the Derivative: Historicizing Creativity under Post- Bretton Woods Financialization,” Radical History Review 118 (2014): 113–38. 84. Max Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (London and New York: Zed Books, 2014).

chapter 2 1. Brett Scott, “The War on Cash,” The Long and Short, (August 19, 2016), http://thelongandshort.org/society/war-on-cash; Bill Maurer, How Would You like to Pay?: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015). 2. See Rachel O’Dwyer, “Things That Transact: How the Internet of Things Is Transforming Payments,” in Moneylab Reader 2, ed. Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink, and Patricia De Vries (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2018), 138–45. 3. For an astute explanation of why these dates are significant, and how they’re related, see Brian Holmes, Three Crises: Thirties – Seventies – Now (Chicago: Online, 2013), http://threecrises.org/. 4. Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish, The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (London and New York: Zed Books, 2014). 5. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary.”,” in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Cambridge and New York: Blackwell, 1997), 319–37. 6. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London and New York: Verso, 2005). 7. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008). See also Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzadra, eds., Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles, and New Political Scenarios (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010). 8. Karl Marx, Capital I: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1992); Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III (London: Penguin, 1981). 9. Costas Lapavitsas, Political Economy of Money and Finance (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).

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10. Michael Perelman, Marx’s Crisis Theory: Scarcity, Labour and Finance (New York and London: Praeger, 1987); Harry Cleaver, Rupturing the Dialectic (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017). 11. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, second edition (London and New York: Verso, 2006). 12. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life.: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015). 13. Harvey, The Limits to Capital. 14. A vital introduction and contemporary explication of 17 of these core contradictions can be found in David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 15. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: a Popular Outline. Revised Translation (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1948); Leo Panich and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of the American Empire (London and New York: Verso, 2012); Harvey, The Limits to Capital. 16. Harvey, The Limits to Capital. 17. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital. 18. Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press, 2000). 19. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature; Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy; Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (London and New York: Verso, 2014); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979); Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialgoues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morely and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 262–75; Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (London and New York: Penguin, 2009); Angela McRobbie, The Uses of Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 2005); Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Culture and Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 31–49. 20. See Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedogogy of the Opposition, second edition. (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2001). 21. George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1987); Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 22. Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

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23. Jon Beasley-Murray, “Value and Capital in Bourdieu and Marx,” in Pierre Bourdieu: A Fieldwork in Culture, ed. Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman (Lanham, ML and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 100–21. 24. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 1986); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, Capitalism and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2005); Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle; Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital (New York: Autonomedia, 1995); Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community (Bristol: Falling Wall, 1979); Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions (PM Press), 2012); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London and New York: Verso, 2013); Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011). 25. See Federici, Silvia, and Arlan Austin, eds., Wages for Housework: The New York Committee 1972–1977 (History, Theory and Documents) (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017). 26. Sue Ferguson and David McNally, “Social Reproduction Beyond Intersectionality: An Interview,” Viewpoint 5 (2015), https://viewpointmag. com/2015/10/31/social-reproduction-beyond-intersectionality-aninterview-with-sue-ferguson-and-david-mcnally/. 27. Weeks, The Problem with Work. 28. Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt, Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art (London: Mute, 2016); Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi, Viewpoint 5: Social Reproduction, 2015, https://viewpointmag.com/2015/11/02/issue-5-social-reproduction/; Meg Luxton and Kate Bezanson, eds., Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). 29. On this tension, see Leigh Claire La Berge, “Wages against Artwork: The Social Practice of Decommodification,” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 3 (2015): 571–93. 30. J. K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy, Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 31. Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, Near Futures (New York: Zone Books, 2017). 32. Angela Mitropoulos, Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2012), www.minorcompositions. info/?p=482. 33. Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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34. Marc Shell, Art and Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight, and Nicky Marsh, eds., Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); Hernán Borisonik, Soporte: El Uso Del Dinero Como Material En Las Artes Visuales (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2017). 35. Lawrence Weschler, Boggs: A Comedy of Values. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 36. Shell, Art and Money. 37. Katy Siegel and Paul Mattick, Art Works: Money (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004). 38. Gregory Sholette and Oliver Ressler, eds., It’s the Political Economy, Stupid: The Global Financial Crisis in Art and Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2013). 39. Alfred Opitz, “The Magic Triangle: Considerations on Art, Money and S***,” in The Cultural Life of Money, ed. Isabel Capeloa Gil and Helena Gonçalves da Silva (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015); Ulrich Rösch, We Are the Revolution!: Rudolf Steiner, Joseph Beuys and the Threefold Social Impulse (Forest Row: Temple Lodge Publishing, 2013), pp. 21–3. 40. Michele Field and Timothy Millett, Convict Love Tokens: The Leaden Hearts the Convicts Left Behind (Adelaide: Wakefield, 1998). 41. Joyce Ann Romines, Hobo Nickles: An Exclusive Upgrade of Hobo Nickel Artistry (Virginia Beach, VA: David Lawrence Rare Coins Press, 1996). 42. Allison Meier, “The British Pennies Defaced in Protest by a Suffragette,” Hyperallergic, (April 18, 2017), https://hyperallergic.com/371316/ suffragette-coin-british-museum/. 43. John E. Sandrock, “The Use of Bank Note as an Instrument of Propaganda” (The Currency Collector, 2007). www.thecurrencycollector.com/pdfs/ The_Use_of_Bank_Notes_as_an_Instrument_of_Propaganda_-_Part_I. pdf. 44. Elizabeth Manchester, “‘Insertions into Ideological Circuits 2: Banknote Project’, Cildo Meireles, 1970,” Tate Gallery, 2006, www.tate.org.uk/art/ artworks/meireles-insertions-into-ideological-circuits-2-banknoteproject-t12526. 45. See Cras, Sophie, “Art as an Investment and Artistic Shareholding Experiments in the 1960s,” American Art, 27 (2013), 2–23; Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2001). 46. See Joseph Beuys, What Is Money? A Discussion (West Hoathly, UK: Clairview, 2010). 47. See Max Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (London and New York: Zed Books, 2014). 48. David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 49. Max Haiven, “Money as a Medium of the Imagination: Art and the Currencies of Cooperation,” in Moneylab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy, ed. Geert Lovink, Nathaniel Tkacz, and Patricia De Vries (Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2015), http://

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50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

networkcultures.org/blog/publication/moneylab-reader-an-interventionin-digital-economy/. On money, symbolism and sovereignty, see for instance Angus Cameron, “Where Has All the Money Gone? Materiality, Mobility, and Nothingness”, Finance and Society, 1 (2015), https://doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.v1i1.1368; Emily Gilbert and Eric Helleiner, eds., Nation-States and Money: The Past, Present and Future of National Currencies (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Harry Cleaver, “Work, Value and Domination: On the Continuing Relevance of the Marxian Labour Theory of Value in the Crisis of the Keynesian Planner State,” The Commoner 10 (2005), www.commoner.org. uk/10cleaver.pdf. See Cleaver; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). On this mythology, see David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011). See Panich and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of the American Empire; Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe, and the Future of the Global Economy, 2nd edition (London and New York: Zed Books, 2013); Harry Cleaver, Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle against Work, Money, and Financialization (Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2017). Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Suhail Malik and Andrea Phillips, “Tainted Love: Art’s Ethos and Capitalization,” in Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets. A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios, ed. Maria Lind and Olav Velthuis (Berlin: Sternberg, 2012), pp. 209–40; Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Jim Fleming (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1984). George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left; Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Hans Haacke, Working Conditions: The Writings of Hans Haacke, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016). Peter Osborne, ed., Conceptual Art (London and New York: Phaidon, 2002). See Staniszewski, Mary Anne, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Richard Norton Smith, On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller (New York: Random House, 2014). Hans Haacke, “Symbolic Capital Management: Or What to Do with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful,” 1999 [1977], www.societyofcontrol. com/research/haacke.htm. See Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practices in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2009).

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63. Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke, Free Exchange (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 64. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 65. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art. (New York: New York University Press, 1984). 66. T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008); Jean Baudrillard, “The Art Auction: Sign Exchange and Sumptuary Value,” in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis, MO: Telos, 1981); Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art, Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 67. On the contemporary culture of the wealthy Elizabeth Currid, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 68. Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963), pp. 206–48. 69. See Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2011); “Art and Finance Report 2016.” 70. See Georgina Adam, Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington: Lund Humphries, 2017); Ben Davis, “‘Panama Papers’ Show Art’s Role In Tax Dodge,” ArtNet News, (April 4, 2016), https://news.artnet.com/art-world/panamapapers-tax-dodging-superrich-465305. 71. See Chin-Tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (London and New York: Verso, 2003). 72. Kristina Wilson, The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–1934 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 73. Staniszewski, The Power of Display. 74. Ethan Wagner and Thea Westreich Wagner, Collecting Art for Love, Money and More (London and New York: Phaidon, 2013). 75. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War.: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, Reprint (New York: New Press, 2001). 76. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers. 77. Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left. 78. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E Martin Jr, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2013). 79. Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism. 80. Richard Day, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London and Ann Arbour, MI: Pluto Press, 2005).

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81. Alexander Koch, ed., General Strike (Berlin: KOW, 2011); Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” October 92 (2000): 71–97; Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece (New York: Afterall Books, 2014); Dorothy Spears, “Lee Lozano, Defiant Painter, Makes a Comeback,” The New York Times, (January 5, 2011), www.nytimes. com/2011/01/09/arts/design/09lozano.html. 82. Smith, Roberta, “Lee Lozano, 68, Conceptual Artist Who Boycotted Women for Years,” New York Times, (October 18, 1999) www.nytimes. com/1999/10/18/arts/lee-lozano-68-conceptual-artist-who-boycottedwomen-for-years.html. 83. Jayne Wark, Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). 84. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973); Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practices in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2009). 85. See Viviana A Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1997); Nigel Dodd, The Social Life of Money (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 86. For some recent research into these topics, see Susan Jahoda, Blair Murphy, Vicky Virgin, and Caroline Woolard, Artists’ Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists (New York: BFAMFAPhD, 2014), http://bfamfaphd.com/wp-content/ uploads/2016/05/BFAMFAPhD_ArtistsReportBack2014-10.pdf; Henri Neuendorf, “Study: 80% of Artists Represented at NYC’s Top Galleries Are White”, Artnet News, (June 2, 2017), https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ new-york-galleries-study-979049. 87. See Cleaver, Harry, Rupturing the Dialectic (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017). 88. Bryan and Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives. 89. Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 90. Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management; Randy Martin, Knowledge LTD: Towards a Social Logic of the Derivative. (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007); Randy Martin, Knowledge LTD: Towards a Social Logic of the Derivative (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015). 91. LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 92. Randy Martin, “Money after Decolonization,” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 2 (January 1, 2015): 377–93. 93. See also Bello, Walden, Capitalism’s Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity (London: Zed Books, 2013); LiPuma, Edward, and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 94. Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man.

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95. For a spectrum of fascinating arguments, see Benjamin Lee and Randy Martin, eds., Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016). 96. Randy Martin, Knowledge LTD; Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Suhail Malik, “The Ontology of Finance: Price, Power, and the Arkhéderivative,” in Collapse Vol. VIII: Casino Real (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014), pp. 629–811. 97. Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (London and New York: Verso, 2013); David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Susanne Soederberg, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 98. Max Haiven, “Finance as Capital’s Imagination?” 99. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise and Fall of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Knopf, 2007). 100. See Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy, eds., The Handbook of Neoliberalism (New York: Routledge, 2016). 101. Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics beyond the Age of Greed (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008); Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin, eds., After Neoliberalism? The Kilburn Manifesto (London: Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 2013), www.lwbooks.co.uk/ journals/soundings/manifesto.html. 102. Martin, Knowledge LTD. 103. Martin, An Empire of Indifference. 104. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015). 105. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: The New Press, 1999). 106. Massimo de Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capitalism (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007). 107. Moulier Boutang, Yann, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. by Ed Emery (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2011); Massimo De Angelis and David Harvey, “‘Cognitive Capitalism’ and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities,” Historical Materialism 17, no. 3 (2009): 3–30; Carlo Vercellone, “Cognitive Capitalism and Models for the Regulation of Wage Relations: Lessons from the Anti-CPE Movement,” in Towards a Global Autonomous University, ed. The Edu-factory Collective (New York: Autonomedia, 2009), 119–24; Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. 108. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 109. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (New York: Autonomedia, 2009). 110. Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a

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111. 112.

113.

114. 115.

116. 117. 118.

119. 120. 121. 122.

Living in the New Culture Industries (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015). Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. (Brooklyn, NY and Oakland, CA: Common Notions (PM Press), 2012). Bue Rübner Hansen, “Surplus Population, Social Reproduction, and the Problem of Class Formation,” Viewpoint 5 (2015), https://viewpointmag. com/2015/10/31/surplus-population-social-reproduction-andthe-problem-of-class-formation/; Rada Katsarova, “Repression and Resistance on the Terrain of Social Reproduction: Historical Trajectories, Contemporary Openings,” Viewpoint 5 (2015), https://viewpointmag. com/2015/10/31/repression-and-resistance-on-the-terrain-of-socialreproduction-historical-trajectories-contemporary-openings/. Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power; Brian Holmes, “The Flexible Personality,” EIPCP, (2002), http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en/ base_edit; Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002). Silvia Federici, “From Commoning to Debt: Financialization, Microcredit, and the Changing Architecture of Capital Accumulation,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 2 (April 1, 2014): 231–44. George Caffentzis, “The Power of Money: Debt and Enclosure,” in In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Brooklyn NY: Common Notions, 2013), pp. 236–40; Andrew Ross, Creditocracy (New York: OR Books, 2014). Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2015). Hardt and Negri, Empire. Simon Broll, “Theaterprojekt ‘Schwarzbank’: Mäuse, Piepen, Kröten,” Spiegel Online, (March 14, 2012), www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/ theaterprojekt-schwarzbank-a-820850.html; By Andreas Jalsovec, “Oberhausen bezahlt mit einer Regionalwährung: Kohle von der Schwarzbank,” sueddeutsche.de, (March 20, 2012), www.sueddeutsche.de/ wirtschaft/oberhausen-bezahlt-mit-einer-regionalwaehrung-kohle-vonder-schwarzbank-1.1313925; “Black Bank—Coal for All!,” Geheimagentur (blog), 2012, www.geheimagentur.net/projekte/schwarzbank-kohle-furalle/. See J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy, Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Martin Jayo, Marlei Pozzebon, and Eduardo Diniz, “Microcredit and Innovative Local Development in Fortaleza, Brazil: The Case of Banco Palmas,” Canadian Journal of Regional Science 32, no. 1 (2009). Milford Bateman, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?: The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism (London: Zed Books, 2010). Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future (New York: Nation, 2016).

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123. Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Richard L. Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent, vol. 1st (New York: HarperBusiness, 2005); Martha Rosler, Culture Class (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013); George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003). 124. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 125. Stuart Cameron and Jon Coaffee, “Art, Gentrification and Regeneration— From Artist as Pioneer to Public Arts,” International Journal of Housing Policy 5, no. 1 (August 2005): 39–58; see also Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin K. Wyly, eds., The Gentrification Reader (London; New York: Routledge, 2010). 126. This process was arguably somewhat successful in the Ruhr area of Germany where Oberhausen is located. Which in 2010 was declared the European Capital of Culture, affording an opportunity for a massive Federal and international investment in the museum and cultural sectors. See Martin Heidenreich, “The New Museum Folkwang in Essen. A Contribution to the Cultural and Economic Regeneration of the Ruhr Area?”, European Planning Studies, 23 (2015), 1529–47. 127. See Sibylle Peters and FUNDUS THEATER, “Let’s make money! Kollektive Geldforschung mit der Kinderbank Hamburg”, in Das Forschen aller: Artistic Research als Wissensproduktion zwischen Kunst, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Sibylle Peters (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013), pp. 73–94. 128. Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” New Left Review, 100 (2016): 99–117. 129. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. 130. Andrea Fraser, “L’1%, c’est Moi,” Texte Zur Kunst 83 (2011). 131. Martha Rosler, “Money, Power, Contemporary Art,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (1997): 199. 132. Suhail Malik and Andrea Phillips, “Tainted Love: Art’s Ethos and Capitalization”, in Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets. A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios, ed. Maria Lind and Olav Velthuis (Berlin: Sternberg, 2012), pp. 209–40. 133. See Horowitz, Art of the Deal. 134. Velthuis, Talking Prices. 135. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012). 136. McRobbie, Be Creative. For a contrarian perspective, see Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013). 137. Costas Lapavitsas, ed., Crisis in the Eurozone (London and New York: Verso, 2012); Ada Colau and Adrià Alemany, Mortgaged Lives, trans. Michelle Teran and Jessica Fuquay (Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, 2012), www.joaap.org/press/pah/mortgagedlives.pdf; Carlos Delclós, “The Logic of Overflow: From the Indignados to Podemos,”

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ROAR Magazine, (December 18, 2015), https://roarmag.org/essays/ podemos-spain-fransisco-jurado-interviw/. 138. Paul Geddis, “This Guy Took Out a Gigantic Loan to Destroy the Financial System,” Vice, (March 16, 2013), www.vice.com/en_ca/article/ppq9xk/ spains-robin-hood-prefers; Nathan Schneider, “On the Lam with Bank Robber Enric Duran,” Vice, (April 7, 2015), www.vice.com/en_ca/article/ wd7edm/be-the-bank-you-want-to-see-in-the-world-0000626-v22n4. 139. Gálvez, José María Jiménez, “Amnesty Report Slams Spanish Government for Restricting Freedom of Expression”, trans. by Simon Hunter, El País, (March 13, 2018) https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/03/13/ inenglish/1520936326_639973.html. 140. Haiven, Cultures of Financialization.

chapter 3 1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, “Precarity and Cultural Work In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work,” OnCurating 16 (2013), www.on-curating.org/index. php/issue-16.html. 2. See Gina Neff, Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries, Acting with Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Max Haiven, “The Uses of Financial Literacy: Financialization, the Radical Imagination, and the Unpayable Debts of Settler-Colonialism,” Cultural Politics 13, no. 3 (2017): 348–69. 3. Leigh Claire La Berge, “Wages against Artwork: The Social Practice of Decommodification,” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 3 (2015): 571–93; Marina Vishmidt, “‘Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated’: Social Practice as Business Model,” E-Flux, (March 2013), www.e-flux.com/ journal/%E2%80%9Cmimesis-of-the-hardened-and-alienated%E2% 80%9D-social-practice-as-business-model/; Marina Vishmidt, “Notes on Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital,” in Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity, ed. Michał Kozłowski et al. (London: Mayfly, 2015), pp. 47–64. 4. John Kifner, “Hippies Shower, $1 Bills on Stock Exchange Floor,” New York Times, (August 25, 1967), www.nytimes.com/1967/08/25/archives/ hippies-shower-1-bills-on-stock-exchange-floor-its-death-of-money. html; James Ledbetter, “The Day the NYSE Went Yippie,” CNN Money, (August 23, 2007), http://money.cnn.com/2007/07/17/news/funny/ abbie_hoffman/; Chris Weigant, “Wall Street Protest, Circa 1967,” The Huffington Post, (October 3, 2011), www.huffingtonpost.com/chrisweigant/abbie-hoffman-occupy-wall-street_b_993325.html. 5. Abby Hoffman, “Museum of the Streets,” in Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, 1980, http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/abbie-hoffman-museum-ofthe-streets. 6. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism. (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011).

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7. Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 8. See Maurer, Bill, How Would You like to Pay?: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015). 9. Alberto Toscano, “Gaming the Plumbing: High-Frequency Trading and the Spaces of Capital,” Mute, (January 16, 2013), www.metamute.org/ editorial/articles/gaming-plumbing-high-frequency-trading-and-spacescapital. 10. Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015). 11. Bryan and Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives. 12. David Harvey, “The Art of Rent,” in Rebel Cities (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 89–112; Stefano Liberti, Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 13. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Penguin, 2016). 14. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, “Extraction, Logistics, Finance: Global Crisis and the Politics of Operations”, Radical Philosophy, 178 (2013), 8–18. 15. Pasquale, The Black Box Society; Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Jasper Bernes, “Logistics, Counterlogistics and the Communist Prospect,” in Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes, 2013, http://endnotes.org.uk/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogisticsand-the-communist-prospect. 16. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (London: Pluto Press, 2015). 17. Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 18. Chris Arthur, “Financial Literacy Education as Public Pedagogy for the Capitalist Debt Economy”, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 30–31 (2014) http://topia.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/topia/article/ view/38425; Haiven, “The Uses of Financial Literacy.” 19. On some of the dark sides of “financial inclusion,” and the hype behind it, see Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (New York: Routledge, 2010). 20. Hardt and Negri, Empire. 21. Elizabeth Currid, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Marina Vishmidt, “‘Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated’: Social Practice as Business Model,” E-Flux, March 2013, www.e-flux.com/journal/%E2%80%9Cmimesis-of-the-hardened-andalienated%E2%80%9D-social-practice-as-business-model/.

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22. Brian Holmes, “The Speculative Performance: Art’s Financial Futures,” Transversal, 2007, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0507/holmes/en; Gerald Raunig, Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity (Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2013). 23. Grant, Daniel, “Social Practice Degrees Take Art to a Communal Level— The New York Times”, New York Times (February 5, 2016), www.nytimes. com/2016/02/07/education/edlife/social-practice-degrees-take-art-to-acommunal-level.html. 24. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: les presses du réel, 2002); Tom Finkelpearl, What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2013); Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011); Grant H Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Ted Purves, ed., What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005); Nato Thompson, ed., Living As Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2012); Gregory Sholette, Chloë Bass, and Social Practice Queens, eds., Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art (New York: Allworth, 2018). 25. See Marc James Léger, “Beyond Socially Enraged Art”, Open!, Commonist Aesthetics series, 2015, www.onlineopen.org/download.php?id=496. 26. George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture; (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003); Max Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons. (London and New York: Zed Books, 2014). 27. Gregory Sholette, “After OWS: Social Practice Art, Abstraction, and the Limits of the Social,” E-Flux 31 (2012), www.e-flux.com/journal/ after-ows-social-practice-art-abstraction-and-the-limits-of-the-social/; Samuel Shaw and Daniel Monroe Sullivan, “‘White Night’: Gentrification, Racial Exclusion, and Perceptions and Participation in the Arts,” City and Community 10, no. 3 (September 2011): 241–64. 28. Cameron and Coaffee, “Art, Gentrification and Regeneration—From Artist as Pioneer to Public Arts”; Shaw and Sullivan, “‘White Night’: Gentrification, Racial Exclusion, and Perceptions and Participation in the Arts”; Anne E. Bowler and Blaine McBurney, “Gentrification and the Avant-Garde in New York’s East Village,” in Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage, ed. Judith Huggins Balfe (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 161–82. 29. Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (New York: Pinto, 2011); Nato Thompson, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2015); Darren O’Donnell, “Social Practice, Children and the Possibility of Friendship,” 2011, www.mammalian.ca/Writing/Darren%20 O’Donnell%20Two.pdf; Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics.

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30. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012). 31. For a brilliant historical, economic and political treatment of the emergence of paticipatory art under financialization, see Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages Against Artwork: Socially Engaged Art and the Decommodification of Labor (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, forthcoming, 2019). 32. Emily Rosamond, “Shared Stakes, Distributed Investment: Socially Engaged Art and the Financialization of Social Impact,” Finance and Society 2, no. 2 (2016): 111–26. 33. See Emma Dowling, “In the Wake of Austerity: Social Impact Bonds and the Financialisation of the Welfare State in Britain”, New Political Economy, 22 (2016), 294–310; Philip Mader, “Contesting Financial Inclusion”, Development and Change, 49 (2018), 461–83. 34. An excellent exploration of this ideology as it relates to microcredit lending can be found in Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (New York: Routledge, 2010); see also Bateman, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?: The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism. 35. Randy Martin, Knowledge LTD: Towards a Social Logic of the Derivative (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015). 36. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 37. On this orientation, see Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. 38. Berlant, Cruel Optimism. 39. Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009). See also Caitlin Zaloom, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 40. Elsewhere, I have more systematically problematized this approach with specific reference to the notion of “culture jamming.” See Max Haiven, “Privatizing Resistance: AdBusters and the Culture of Neoliberalism,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 29, no. 1 (2007). 41. On monetary utopianism, see Nigel Dodd, The Social Life of Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 42. See Kieran Allen and Brian O’Boyle, Austerity Ireland: The Failure of Irish Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2013). 43. For a nuanced examination of finance and langauge, see Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016). 44. Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008). 45. Sahar Sohangir, Dingding Wang, Anna Pomeranets, and Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar, “Big Data: Deep Learning for Financial Sentiment Analysis”, Journal of Big Data, 5 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-017-0111-6. 46. Walden Bello, Capitalism’s Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity (London: Zed Books, 2013).

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47. See, for instance, Clea D. Bourne, “Thought Leadership as a Trust Strategy in Global Markets: Goldman Sachs’ Promotion of the ‘BRICs’ in the Marketplace of Ideas,” Journal of Public Relations Research 27, no. 4 (2015): 322–36. 48. On these and other indignities, see Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012). 49. Neil Irwin, “Helicopter Money: Why Some Economists Are Talking About Dropping Money From the Sky,” The New York Times, (July 28, 2016), www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/upshot/helicopter-money-why-someeconomists-are-talking-about-dropping-money-from-the-sky.html. 50. See Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers (London and New York: Verso, 2017). 51. Pasquale, The Black Box Society. 52. Ananya Roy, “Subjects of Risk: Technologies of Gender in the Making of Millennial Modernity,” Public Culture 24, no. 1 (2012): 131–55; Toscano, “Gaming the Plumbing.” 53. The sociology of living in a world of inscrutable capitalist uncertainty, and the baleful political consequences, was, early on, analyzed in Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming”, Public Culture, 12 (2000), 291–343. 54. Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (London and New York: Verso, 2013); For a more liberal account, see Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business (New York: Crown, 2016). 55. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 56. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Centurt: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London and New York: Verso, 1994). 57. Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future (New York: Nation, 2016). 58. See, for instance, Michael Hudson, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy (Dresden: ISLET, 2015); Zygmunt Bauman, “Capitalism Has Learned to Create Host Organisms”, The Guardian, (October 18, 2011) www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2011/oct/18/capitalism-parasite-hosts. 59. See Anders M. Gullestad, “Parasite”, Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, 1 (2012) www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/2012-parasite/; Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), pp. 356–61. 60. See Haiven, Cultures of Financialization; Martin, Knowledge LTD; Bryan and Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives. 61. On such stigmatizing representations, see Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Marginalization and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013). 62. Zenia Kish and Justin Leroy, “Bonded Life,” Cultural Studies 29, no. 5–6 (2015): 630–51; Roy, Poverty Capital.

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63. Boris Groys, “On Art Activism,” E-Flux 56 (June 2014), www.e-flux.com/ journal/56/60343/on-art-activism/. 64. Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture. 65. Sarah Brouillette, “Creative Labor,” Mediations 24, no. 2 (March 2009): 140–49; Martha Rosler, Culture Class. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013). 66. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009). 67. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 68. For another exploration of the contemporary resonance and economies of parasites, see Jeanette Samyn, “Anti-Anti-Parasitism,” The New Inquiry, (September 18, 2012), https://thenewinquiry.com/anti-anti-parasitism/; Gullestad, Parasite. 69. Post Brothers and Chris Fitzpatrick, “A Productive Irritant: Parasitical Inhabitations in Contemporary Art,” Fillip 15, (2011), http://fillip.ca/ content/parasitical-inhabitations-in-contemporary-art. 70. Max Haiven, “The Creative and the Derivative: Historicizing Creativity under Post- Bretton Woods Financialization,” Radical History Review 118 (2014): 113–38. 71. Suhail Malik, “A Boom Without End: Liquidity, Critique and the Market,” Mute 2, no. 6 (August 13, 2007), www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/ boom-without-end-liquidity-critique-and-art-market; Martha Rosler, “Money, Power, Contemporary Art”; Andrea Fraser, “L’1%, c’est Moi,” Texte Zur Kunst 83 (2011). 72. See http://loophole4all.com/ 73. Brooke Harrington, Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016). 74. See Mar Cabra and Michael Hudson, “Mega-Rich Use Tax Havens to Buy and Sell Masterpieces”, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, (April 23, 2013), www.icij.org/offshore/mega-rich-use-taxhavens-buy-and-sell-masterpieces; Juliette Garside, Jake Bernstein, and Holly Watt, ‘How Offshore Firm Helped Billionaire Change the Art World for Ever’, Guardian, (April 7, 2016), www.theguardian.com/news/2016/ apr/07/panama-papers-joe-lewis-offshore-art-world-picasso-christies. 75. Stephen Duncombe, “It Stands on Its Head: Commodity Fetishism, Consumer Activism, and the Strategic Use of Fantasy,” Culture and Organization 18, no. 5 (2012): 359–75. 76. Pekka Piironen and Akseli Virtanen, “Democratizing the Power of Finance: A Discussion About Robin Hood Asset Management Cooperative with Founder Akseli Virtanen,” in Moneylab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy, ed. Geert Lovink, Nathaniel Tkacz, and Patricia De Vries (Amsterdam: Institute for Network Cultures, 2015), http://networkcultures. org/blog/publication/moneylab-reader-an-intervention-in-digitaleconomy/; Taylor C. Nelms and Bill Maurer, “Is It Art? Is It a Hoax? Hedging Precarity and Protecting the Commonfare: An Interview with Akseli Virtanen,” Journal of Cultural Economy (blog), (February 8, 2016), www. journalofculturaleconomy.org/is-it-art-is-it-a-hoax-hedging-precarityand-protecting-the-commonfare-an-interview-with-akseli-virtanen/;

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77. 78.

79.

80.

81.

82. 83.

84.

85.

Brett Scott, “The Activist Hedge Fund,” The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (blog), (October 2, 2016), http:// suitpossum.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-activist-hedge-fund.html. Piironen and Virtanen. See, for instance, Susanne Soederberg, “Socially Responsible Investment and the Development Agenda: Peering behind the Progressive Veil of Non-Financial Benchmarking,” Third World Quarterly 28, no. 7 (2007): 1219–37. It must be noted that, in 2015/16 RHMAM encountered difficulties that the cooperative’s management reports stemmed from the transition to a new, block-chain backed platform. The result is some uncertainty about the project’s future and the frustration of many members who believe they have lost their investments. Since I am more interested in this project as an artwork, I have not, at the time of writing, vigorously pursued an explanation. Suffice to say that, as of publication, the Robin Hood website promises a 2.0 version is forthcoming, and has done so for some time. Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok,” in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Barbara Johnson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Barbara Johnson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 125–39. Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995). I am deeply indebted to Tobias C. van Veen’s lucid and comprehensive treatment of this paradigm, and also his feedback on my approach to it. See his, “The Crypt and Incorporation,” 2003, www.quadrantcrossing. org/papers/TheCrypt-tV.pdf. On some radical political implications of taking such approach, see Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Second edition, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Specters of Revolt: On the Intellect of Insurrection and Philosophy from Below (London: Repeater Books, 2016). See, for instance, Alexxa Gotthardt, “What You Need to Know about the Emerging Art Market Right Now,” Artsy, (December 3, 2016), www.artsy. net/article/artsy-editorial-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-emergingart-market-right-now; James Tarmy, “Investing in Art? Here Are 10 Young Artists to Watch in 2017,” Bloomberg, (December 16, 2016), www.bloomberg. com/news/articles/2016-12-16/investing-in-art-here-are-10-young-artiststo-watch-in-2017; Anny Shaw, “New Online Auction Site Connects Collectors with Art-School Graduates,” The Art Newspaper, (December 1, 2016), http://theartnewspaper.com/news/new-online-auction-site-aimsto-connect-collectors-with-the-cream-of-british-art-school-graduates.

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86. This sort of market manipulation is common, but difficult to document. See, for instance, Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008); Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 87. See Georgina Adam, Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century. (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington: Lund Humphries, 2017). 88. This was the topic of an important gathering in New York in 2015, The Artist as Debtor: The Work of Art in the Age of Speculative Capitalism, convened by Noah Fischer and Coco Fusco. See Noah Fischer, “The Artist as Debtor: Art vs. Political Agency”, Temporary Art Review, (April 6, 2015), http://temporaryartreview.com/the-artist-as-debtor-art-vs-politicalagency/; Coco Fusco, “Why Debt? Why Now?”, The Artist as Debtor, (February 7, 2015), http://artanddebt.org/coco-fusco-an-introductionto-art-and-debt/. See also Noah Berlatsky, “What Can You Really Do With a Degree in the Arts?”, The Atlantic, (November 6, 2014), www.theatlantic. com/education/archive/2014/11/what-can-you-really-do-with-a-degreein-the-arts/382300/. 89. See Thompson, The $12-Million Stuffed Shark. 90. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 91. This notion of the vitality and worthiness of human bonds has been key to recent radical theorizations of debt activism. See Ross, Creditocracy; George Caffentzis, “Reflections on the History of Debt Resistance: The Case of El Barzon”, South Atlantic Quarterly, 112 (2013), 824–30. 92. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013). 93. In the interests of transparency I am compelled to admit that, in the process of researching and writing this book I met, fell in love with and married this artist, so I hereby deny any and all pretentions to impartiality. 94. Leigh Claire La Berge and Dehlia Hannah, “Debt Aesthetics: Medium Specificity and Social Practice in the Work of Cassie Thornton,” Postmodern Culture 25, no. 2 (2015). 95. Joe Deville, Lived Economies of Default: Consumer Credit, Debt Collection and the Capture of Affect (London and New York: Routledge, 2015); Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: A History of America in Red Ink (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2011). 96. See Miranda Joseph, Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Deville, Lived Economies of Default. 97. Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Stanford, CA and London: Stanford University Press, 2016), pp. 73–6. 98. Hyman, Debtor Nation; Annie McClanahan, “Bad Credit: The Character of Credit Scoring,” Representations 126, no. 1 (2014): 31–57.

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99. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), pp. 156–7. 100. Cited in David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 101. Eli Meyerhoff, “Political Theory for an Alter-University Movement: Decolonial, Abolitionist Study within, against, and beyond the Education Regime” (Thesis: University of Minnesota, 2013), http://conservancy.umn. edu/bitstream/handle/11299/175513/Meyerhoff_umn_0130E_14401. pdf; Cesare Casarino, “Surplus Common,” in In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 1–40; Hardt and Negri, Empire; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (New York: Belknap, 2011). 102. De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia; J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014). 103. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, eds., The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Amherst, MA: Levellers Press, 2012); “Patterns of Commoning” (Commons Strategies Group, 2015), http:// patternsofcommoning.org/; Commons Transition: Policy Proposals for an Open Knowledge Commons Society (P2P Foundation, 2015), http:// commonstransition.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/CommonsTransition_-Policy-Proposals-for-a-P2P-Foundation.pdf. 104. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 105. Massimo de Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capitalism (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007); De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia; Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle; Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons (London: Zed Books, 2016). I have elsewhere sought to make some subtle but important political distinctions between more liberal notions of the commons, gravitating toward Ostrom’s legacy, and more radical approaches that gravitate towards Autonomist Marxist perspectives. See Max Haiven, “The Commons Against Neoliberalism, the Commons of Neoliberalism, the Commons Beyond Neoliberalism”, in The Handbook of Neoliberalism, ed. Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 106. Jason Read, “What Is Living and What’s Is Dead in the Philosophy of Karl Marx: The Political Ontology of Living Labor,” in The Micro-Politics of Capital (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 61–102; Gigi Roggero, The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America, trans. Enda Brophy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011). 107. See Mader, “Contesting Financial Inclusion.”

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chapter 4 1. Some of these themes are broached in Ruth Catlow et al., eds., Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (London: Torque Editions and Furtherfield, 2017). 2. Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995); Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Barbara Johnson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok” in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Barbara Johnson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 3. Randy Martin, Knowledge LTD: Towards a Social Logic of the Derivative (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015). 4. Ibid., 5. 5. David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 6. Randy Martin, Knowledge LTD, 7. 7. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript to Societies of Control,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177–82. 8. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979). 9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 23–35 and section 3.6. 10. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Penguin, 2016). 11. Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr, “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions,” The New York Times, (March 17, 2018), sec. Politics, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/ politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html; Carole Cadwalladr, “‘I Created Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool’: Meet the Data War Whistleblower,” The Guardian, (March 17, 2018), www.theguardian. com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wyliefaceook-nix-bannon-trump. 12. O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction, 2016. 13. Deleuze, “Postscript to Societies of Control”; Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man. 14. See also Hardt and Negri, Empire. 15. Dave Cliff and Linda Northrop, “The Global Financial Markets: An UltraLarge-Scale Systems Perspective,” The Future of Computer Trading in Financial Markets (London: Government Office for Science Forsight Project, 2010), www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 289012/11-1223-dr4-global-financial-markets-systems-perspective.pdf.

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16. Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007). 17. See Max Haiven and Scott Stoneman, “Wal-Mart: The Panopticon of Time,” Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition Working Paper Series 09, no. 1 (2009). 18. Krystian Woznicki, Fugitive Belonging (Berlin: Diamond Paper, 2018). 19. “Über-Warehouses for the Ultra-Rich,” The Economist, (November 23, 2013), www.economist.com/news/briefing/21590353-ever-more-wealthbeing-parked-fancy-storage-facilities-some-customers-they-are; David Segal, “Swiss Freeports Are Home for a Growing Treasury of Art,” New York Times, (July 21, 2012), www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/business/ swiss-freeports-are-home-for-a-growing-treasury-of-art.html. 20. Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 21. The fascinating story of Le Freeport’s origins in the art-scamming of a Russian oligarch can be found in Sam Knight, “The Bouvier Affair,” The New Yorker, (February 8, 2016), www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/ the-bouvier-affair. 22. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London and New York: Verso, 2016). 23. Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (London and New York: Verso, 2017). 24. The question of competing claims to artworks (including contemporary art) can be so harrowing and complex that it has recently spurred a market in art title insurance, which indemnifies beneficiaries against lawsuits or losses stemming from contested ownership and rights. See Daniel Grant, “Art Collectors Weigh Title Insurance,” Wall Street Journal, (April 12, 2015), www.wsj.com/articles/art-collectors-weigh-title-insurance-1428894124. Kevin Peachy, “Art, Royalties and Other Treasures of Unclaimed Estates,” BBC News, (July 31, 2015), www.bbc.com/news/business-33705441; Jason-Louise Graham, “Art Exchange? How the International Art Market Lacks a Clear Regulatory Framework,” in Art, Cultural Heritage and the Market, ed. Valentina Vadi and Hildegard Schneider (Berlin: Springer, 2014); Harriet Fitch Little, “How an Artist’s Legacy Became Big Business,” Financial Times, (August 26, 2016), www.ft.com/content/d77d5e74-69e511e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c. 25. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnestoa Press, 1984). 26. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973). 27. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Olav Velthuis, “The Architecture of the Art Market,” in Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2007), 21–52.

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28. See Iain Robertson, Understanding Art Markets: Inside the World of Art and Business (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). 29. John Dizard, “Art Market Ripe for Disruption by Algorithms,” Financial Times, (May 26, 2017), www.ft.com/content/20ae62be-41ef-11e7-82b6896b95f30f58; Edward Helmore, “Buy! Sell! Liquidate! How ArtRank Is Shaking up the Art Market,” The Guardian, (January 23, 2014), www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/23/artrank-buy-sell-liquidateart-market-website-artists-commodities. 30. “Art and Finance Report” (Luxembourg: Deloitte, 2016), www2. deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/lu/Documents/financial-services/ artandfinance/lu-en-artandfinancereport-08092014.pdf. 31. Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World; Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. 32. Christian Morgner, “The Evolution of the Art Fair,” Historical Social Research 39, no. 3 (2014): 318–36. 33. Stephanie Baker and Katya Kazakina, “Auction Wars: Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and The Art of Competition,” Bloomberg, (June 21, 2015), www.bloomberg. com/news/articles/2015-06-21/auction-wars-christie-s-sotheby-sand-the-art-of-competition; Martin Sosnoff, “Sotheby’s And Christie’s The Goldman Sachs’s Of The Art World,” Forbes, (May 9, 2012), www. forbes.com/sites/martinsosnoff/2012/05/09/sothebys-and-christiesthe-goldman-sachss-of-the-art-world/#79aa939254f1; Don Thompson, “Why Sotheby’s and Christie’s Don’t Operate Like Other Duopolies,” Artsy, (November 24, 2016), www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-whysotheby-s-and-christie-s-don-t-operate-like-other-duopolies. 34. Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market. (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2011). 35. For an overview, see Armin Beverungen, Anna-Maria Murtola, and Gregory Schwartz, “The Communism of Capital?” Ephemera 13, no. 3 (2013): 483–95. 36. Christian Marazzi, Il Comunismo Del Capitale. Finanziarizzazione, Biopolitiche Del Lavoro e Crisi Globale (Verona: Ombrecorte, 2010); Matteo Pasquinelli, “Communism of Capital and the Cannibalism of the Common,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 19, no. 4 (2014): 4–13. 37. Harrington, Capital without Borders; Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014). 38. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. (New York: Zone, 2015). 39. Leo Panich and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of the American Empire (London and New York: Verso, 2012); David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, second edition (London and New York: Verso, 2006). 40. Walden Bello, Capitalism’s Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity (London: Zed Books, 2013). 41. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd Beacon Paperback ed. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001).

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42. Rachel O’Dwyer, “Spectre of the Commons: Spectrum Regulation in the Communism of Capital,” Ephemera 13, no. 3 (2013): 497–526; Beverungen, Murtola, and Schwartz, “The Communism of Capital?”. 43. Michael Hudson, The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and Global Crisis (Dresden: ISLET, 2012). 44. Martin, Knowledge LTD, 56–7. 45. See Massimo de Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capitalism (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007). 46. On the vital importance of developing a structural, rather than conspiratorial, account of finance capital, see Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 47. Martin, An Empire of Indifference. 48. Haiven, “Finance as Capital’s Imagination?”; On the way a “strategy of no strategy” animates the activities of high-level financial workers, see Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009). 49. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext (e), 2003); Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012). 50. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth; Cesare Casarino, “Surplus Common.”,” in In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 1–40. 51. Trebor Scholz, “Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy” (New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, January 2016), www. rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/scholz_platformcooperativism_ 2016.pdf; Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis, “From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-Operativism,” TripleC 12, no. 1 (2014): 356–61. 52. Bateman, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?: The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism; Emma Dowling and David Harvie, “Harnessing the Social: State, Crisis and (Big) Society,” Sociology 48, no. 5 (2014): 869–86. 53. Emma Dowling, “In the Wake of Austerity: Social Impact Bonds and the Financialisation of the Welfare State in Britain,” New Political Economy Forthcoming (September 29, 2016): 1–17; Rosamond, “Shared Stakes, Distributed Investment”; Susanne Soederberg, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 54. Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002). 55. It should be noted that an important client for freeports are, in fact, major museums that cannot or do not (for insurance purposes) wish to display their entire collections. See Christopher Groskopf, “Museums Are Keeping a Ton of the World’s Most Famous Art Locked Away in Storage,”

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Quartz, (January 20, 2016), https://qz.com/583354/why-is-so-much-ofthe-worlds-great-art-in-storage/. 56. Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping”; Fredric Jameson, “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation,” New Left Review, no. 228 (1998); see also Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015). 57. Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” 58. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok,” in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Barbara Johnson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 59. See Tobias C. van Veen, “The Crypt and Incorporation,” 2003, www. quadrantcrossing.org/papers/TheCrypt-tV.pdf. 60. Zoltán Dragon, “Derrida’s Specter, Abraham’s Phantom,” AnaChronisT 11 (2005): 253–69. 61. Derrida, “Fors.” 62. Dragon, “Derrida’s Specter, Abraham’s Phantom”; Maria O’Connor, “Canopy of the Upturned Eye: Writing on Derrida’s Crypt,” Mosiac 44, no. 4 (2011): 109–23. 63. Dragon, “Derrida’s Specter, Abraham’s Phantom”; van Veen, “The Crypt and Incorporation.” 64. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx : The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994); Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, New edition (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Specters of Revolt: On the Intellect of Insurrection and Philosophy from Below (London: Repeater Books, 2016); Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014). 65. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste; Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis, MO: Telos, 1981); Malik and Phillips, “Tainted Love: Art’s Ethos and Capitalization”; Velthuis, Talking Prices. 66. Max Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (London and New York: Zed Books, 2014). 67. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War.: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, Reprint (New York: New Press, 2001). 68. See Harvey, The Limits to Capital. 69. In spite of that, many of those engaged in finance I have spoken with in the course of writing this book have anecdotally confirmed this relationship. Evidently it is commonplace enough to warrant inclusion in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street where the famous financier anti-hero Gordon Gekko reflects on the social alchemy behind the arbitrary nature of financial asset pricing by likening it to the gargantuan abstract artworks hanging on his walls. 70. See David Stark, A Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2009); Brian

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71.

72. 73.

74.

75. 76.

77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Holmes, “Is It Written in the Stars? Global Finance, Precarious Destinies,” Ephemera 10, no. 3 (2010): 222–33. Peter Fleming, The Death of Homo Economicus (London: Pluto Press, 2017); Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?; Nick DyerWitheford, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex, Digital Barricades: Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2015). Haiven, Cultures of Financialization. Michael A. Peters, “Education, Creativity and the Economy of Passions: New Forms of Educational Capitalism,” Thesis Eleven 96, no. 1 (February 2009): 40–63; Rina Kundu and Nadine M. Kalin, “Participating in the Neoliberal Art Museum,” Studies in Art Education 57, no. 1 (2015): 39–52; Pascal Gielen and Paul de Bruyne, eds., Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm: Realism versus Cynicism, 2nd ed, (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2013). Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London and New York: Pluto Press, 2011); Jen Harvie, Fair Play.: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). On this, see the collection Michał Kozłowski et al., eds., A Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity (London: Mayfly, 2015). Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (London: Pluto Press, 2015); Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation. (New York: Autonomedia, 2009). Göran Therborn, The Killing Fields of Inequality (London: Polity, 2013). See Hito Steyerl, I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production, video lecture, (Former West, 2013), www.formerwest.org/ DocumentsConstellationsProspects/Contributions/IDreamedaDream; Zoë Druick, “Property TV: Financialized Femininity and New Forms of Domestic Labour”, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 20 (2017), 560–74. See Corey Pein, Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017). See Sholette, Dark Matter. Abraham and Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy; see also van Veen, “The Crypt and Incorporation.” Nelson, Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities; Harry Cleaver, Rupturing the Dialectic (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017); Lapavitsas, Political Economy of Money and Finance. See David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011). David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Massimo De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism (London: Zed Books, 2017). George Caffentzis, “The Power of Money: Debt and Enclosure,” in In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Brooklyn NY and Oakland CA: Common Notions, 2013), pp. 236–40.

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87. Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” New Left Review, no. 100 (2016): 99–117; Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015). 88. Anita Nelson, Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 89. Quoted in David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 90. I have sought to detail this somewhat unorthodox reading of Marx in Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power; Haiven, Cultures of Financialization. 91. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth; Casarino, “Surplus Common”; Meyerhoff, “Political Theory for an Alter-University Movement.” 92. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 93. See also George Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (New York: Common Notions, 2013); De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia. 94. This approach to money is in no small part inspired by Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary.” 95. See Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All. 96. Harvey, The Limits to Capital. 97. This was the project of Haiven, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life. 98. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. 99. I have addressed this “flash” in a very different context in Max Haiven, “Are Your Children Old Enough to Learn About May ’68?: Recalling the Radical Event, Refracting Utopia, and Commoning Memory,” Cultural Critique 78, no. 1 (2011): 60–87. 100. See Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically. 101. Francis Fukayama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Perennial, 1993). 102. Bryan and Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives. 103. Martin, An Empire of Indifference. 104. Martin, Knowledge LTD. 105. See OTC Derivatives Outstanding, (Basel: The Bank of International Settlements, 3 May 2018), www.bis.org/statistics/derstats.htm 106. MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera. 107. Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management; Max Haiven, “Walmart, Finance, and the Cultural Politics of Securitization,” Cultural Politics 9, no. 2 (2013); Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, “Homemade Financial Crisis,” Ephemera 9, no. 4 (August 2009): 357–62. 108. Martin, Financialization of Daily Life. 109. Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, “Decomposing Money: Ontological Options and Spreads,” Journal of Cultural Economy 9, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 27–42. 110. Randy Martin, Michael Rafferty, and Dick Bryan, “Financialization, Risk and Labour,” Competition and Change 12, no. 2 (2008): 120–32.

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111. LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk; Tony Norfield, “Derivatives and Capitalist Markets: The Speculative Heart of Capital,” Historical Materialism 20, no. 1 (2012): 103–32. 112. Martin, Knowledge LTD: Towards a Social Logic of the Derivative. 113. Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997): 246–65; Martin, Knowledge LTD: Towards a Social Logic of the Derivative; Martin, Financialization of Daily Life; McClanahan, Dead Pledges. 114. Martin, “Money after Decolonization.” 115. See Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man. 116. M. Maurizio, Lazzarato, Governing by Debt, trans. Joshua David Jordan (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2015). 117. Bello, Capitalism’s Last Stand?; Léonce Ndikumana and James K Boyce, Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent (London: Zed Books, 2011). 118. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. 119. Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man; Carlo Vercellone, “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism,” Historical Materialism 15, no. 1 (2007): 13–36; De Angelis and Harvie, “‘Cognitive Capitalism’ and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities.” 120. Martin, Knowledge LTD. 121. Pasquale, The Black Box Society; O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction. 122. Toscano, “Gaming the Plumbing.” 123. Martin, Knowledge LTD; Suhail Malik, “The Ontology of Finance: Price, Power, and the Arkhéderivative,” in Collapse Vol. VIII: Casino Real (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014), pp. 629–811. 124. Martin, Knowledge LTD. 125. Stevphen Shukaitis, “Art Strikes and the Metropolitan Factory,” in Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity, ed. Michał Kozłowski et al. (London: Mayfly, 2015), pp. 227–36. 126. Stevphen Shukaitis, The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor after the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). 127. See also Pascal Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism, Antennae (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2010). 128. Shukaitis, The Composition of Movements to Come. 129. Brian Holmes, “The Speculative Performance: Art’s Financial Futures,” Transversal, 2007, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0507/holmes/en. 130. Max Haiven, “Finance as Capital’s Imagination?: Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis,” Social Text 108 (2011): 93–124. 131. Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish, The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (London and New York: Zed Books, 2014). 132. Shukaitis, The Composition of Movements to Come. 133. Martin, Knowledge LTD.

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134. Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (London and New York: Verso, 2016). 135. See Susan Jahoda et al., “Artists’ Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists” (New York: BFAMFAPhD, 2014), http://bfamfaphd.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/BFAMFAPhD_ ArtistsReportBack2014-10.pdf. 136. The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual, second edition (New York: Strike Debt, Occupy Wall Street and Common Notions, 2012); Silvia Federici, “From Commoning to Debt: Financialization, Microcredit, and the Changing Architecture of Capital Accumulation,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 2 (April 1, 2014): 231–44; Andrew Ross, Creditocracy (New York: OR Books, 2014). 137. Rob Aitken, “Everyday Debt Relationalities: Situating Peer-to-Peer Lending and the Rolling Jubilee,” Cultural Studies 29, no. 5–6 (2015): 845–68; Hannah Appel and Astra Taylor, “Education with a Debt Sentence: For-Profit Colleges as American Dream Crushers and Factories of Debt,” New Labor Forum 24, no. 1 (2015): 31–36. 138. Ross, Creditocracy. 139. Rob Aitken, “Capital at Its Fringes,” New Political Economy 11, no. 4 (October 2006): 479–98. 140. Christian Riley Nagler, “Strike Debt’s Rolling Jubilee: The Promise and the Performativity of Financial Contracts,” TDR/The Drama Review 62, no. 1 (2018): 113–30. 141. See Joshua Clover, “Debtpop,” The Nation, (November 25, 2013), www. thenation.com/article/debtpop/. 142. Laura Hanna et al., “The Potential of Debtor’s Unions,” ROAR Magazine, 2015, https://roarmag.org/magazine/debt-collective-debtors-union/; Terrance F. Ross, “The Guardian Angels of Student Debt,” The Atlantic, (February 23, 2015), www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/ the-guardian-angels-of-student-debt/385756/. 143. Appel and Taylor, “Education with a Debt Sentence. 144. Vauhini Vara, “A Student-Debt Revolt Begins,” The New Yorker, (February 23, 2015), www.newyorker.com/business/currency/student-debt-revoltbegins; Astra Taylor and Ann Larson, “Cancel All Corinthian Colleges Student Debt,” Los Angeles Times, (June 23, 2015), www.latimes.com/ opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0623-taylor-corinthian-colleges-loans-20150623story.html. 145. https://debtcollective.org 146. Sydney Brownstone, “Here Comes Debtfair, a Market for Art Inequality Across the City,” The Village Voice, (May 7, 2013), www.villagevoice. com/2013/05/07/here-comes-debtfair-a-market-for-art-inequalityacross-the-city/. 147. Heather Corcoran, “As the 1 Percent Washes Their Money through Arts Funding, Artists Respond,” Salon, (June 18, 2017), www.salon. com/2017/06/18/museum-funding-occupy-museums-debtfair-museumof-captialism/. 148. Alex Greenberger, “For Its Whitney Biennial Project, Occupy Museums Is Calling on Artists in Debt to Share Their Experiences,” ArtNews, (June 12,

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2016), www.artnews.com/2016/12/06/for-its-whitney-biennial-projectoccupy-museums-is-calling-on-artists-in-debt-to-share-theirexperiences/. 149. Sarah Krouse, “BlackRock’s Larry Fink Is Now a Contemporary Art Exhibit,” The Wall Street Journal, (March 30, 2017), www.wsj.com/articles/ blackrocks-larry-fink-is-now-a-modern-art-exhibit-1490866202. 150. See http://noahfischer.org/sites/default/files/WHITNEY_DEBTFAIR_ OCCUPYMUSEUMS_.pdf. 151. See http://www.debtfair.org. 152. Shukaitis, The Composition of Movements to Come. 153. Brett Scott, “How Can Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology Play a Role in Building Social and Solidarity Finance?” (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute on Social Development, 2016), www.unrisd.org/brettscott; Ole Bjerg, “How Is Bitcoin Money?,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 1 (2016): 53–72; Nigel Dodd, “The Social Life of Bitcoin,” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 3 (2017), 35–56; Quinn DuPont, “The Politics of Cryptography: BitCoin and the Ordering Machines,” H+ Magazine, (May 7, 2014), http://hplusmagazine.com/2014/05/07/the-politics-ofcryptography-bitcoin-and-the-ordering-machines/. 154. See Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin; Nozomi Hayase, “Bitcoin: Innovation of Money and Evolution of Governance,” OpenDemocracy, (July 15, 2016), www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/nozomi-hayase/ bitcoin-innovation-of-money-and-evolution-of-governance. 155. Doug Henwood, “Is Bitcoin the Future of Money?,” The Nation, (April 30, 2014), www.thenation.com/article/bitcoin-future-money/. 156. Izabella Kaminska, “The Environmental Costs of Bitcoin Are Not Worth the Candle,” Financial Times, (November 6, 2017), www.ft.com/content/ c166aa1e-c303-11e7-a1d2-6786f39ef675; Robert J. Shiller, “What Is Bitcoin Really Worth? Don’t Even Ask.,” New York Times, (December 15, 2017), www.nytimes.com/2017/12/15/business/bitcoin-investing.html. 157. Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World (New York: Penguin, 2016). 158. See Martin Arnold, “Five Ways Banks Are Using Blockchain,” Financial Times, (October 16, 2017), www.ft.com/content/615b3bd8-97a9-11e7a652-cde3f882dd7b; “Distributed Ledger Technology in Payment, Clearing and Settlement: An Analytic Framework,” Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (Basel: Bank of International Settlements, 2017), www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d157.pdf. 159. Quinn Dupont, “Experiments in Algorithmic Governance: A History and Ethnography of ‘The DAO’, a Failed Decentralized Autonomous Organization,” in Bitcoin and Beyond: Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains and Global Governance, ed. Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (London and New York: Routledge, 2017). 160. Thomas König and Enrique Duran, FairCoin V2 White Paper (FairCoin, 2016), https://chain.fair-coin.org/download/FairCoin2-white-paperV1.1.pdf; Schneider, “On the Lam with Bank Robber Enric Duran”; Enrique Duran and Pablo Prieto, “FairCoop: Virus of Cooperation Infects

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161. 162.

163. 164. 165. 166.

a New Economy,” ROAR Magazine, (January 9, 2015), https://roarmag. org/essays/faircoop-cooperation-new-economy/; Cat Johnson, “Fair. Coop: Using Cryptocurrency to Bring Economic Justice to the World,” Shareable.Net, (October 16, 2014), www.shareable.net/blog/faircoopusing-cryptocurrency-to-bring-economic-justice-to-the-world; The Economic Space Agency, “From Robin Hood to Economic Space Agency,” Medium.com, (September 19, 2016), https://medium.com/economicspacing/from-robin-hood-to-economic-space-agency-4516e8c01024. Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin. Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens, “The Bitcoin Experience,” Institute of Network Cultures (blog), (January 28, 2015), http://networkcultures. org/geert/2015/01/28/geert-lovink-and-patrice-riemens-the-bitcoinexperience-part-i/. For an engaging exploration of these debates and potentials, see Ruth Calow et al., Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017). Bill Maurer, Taylor C. Nelms, and Lana Swartz, “‘When Perhaps the Real Problem Is Money Itself!’: The Practical Materiality of Bitcoin,” Social Semiotics 23, no. 2 (April 2013): 261–77. Max Haiven, “Finance as Capital’s Imagination?; also Haiven, “Are Your Children Old Enough to Learn About May ’68?” See Massimo de Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capitalism (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007); Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power.

conclusion 1. For a sophisticated exploration of this term, see Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015). 2. Abolitionist thought is animated by a lively and diverse body of work. See for example Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?; Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005); Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Kaba, “Summer Heat”; Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, and David Stein, “What Abolitionists Do,” Jacobin (blog), August 24, 2017, www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/prison-abolition-reformmass-incarceration; Berger, Captive Nation; Jenna M. Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge, eds., Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation 14 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); CR10 Publications Collective, Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008); Joy James, ed., The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 3. Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Davis, Abolishion Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture; Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

notes to conclusion   267

4. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism; Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge, Beyond Walls and Cages; Robert Nichols, “The Colonialism of Incarceration,” Radical Philosophy Review 17, no. 2 (2014): 435–55. 5. Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary”; Castoriadis, “The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy.” 6. Theodor W Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London and New York: Verso, 2005). 7. See, quintessentially, Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: Penguin, 2008). 8. See David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 9. On prefigurative politics, see Day, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements; John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, vol. New Edition (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2005); The Research Group on Collective Autonomy et al., “Prefigurative Self-Governance and Self-Organization: The Influence of Antiauthoritarian (Pro)Feminist, Radical Queer, and Antiracist Networks in Quebec,” in Organize! Building from the Local for Global Justice, ed. Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley, and Eric Shragge (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 156–73; From another perspective, see Adrienne M. Brown, Emergent Strategy (Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2017); Alex Khasnabish, Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 10. See CR10 Publications Collective, Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex. 11. My trepidation here has two interconnected sources, which I feel must be mentioned. First, I have been inspired by the work of abolitionist thinkers in the Black radical tradition, but my analysis here has not kept faith with the key concerns of that paradigm, notably the inherent and inseparable intertwining of capitalism with the histories of race, racism and colonialism. Another book could (and should) do the work of developing a political- and cultural-economic account of contemporary art that theorizes the centrality of these crucial factors, and also one that connects them to carceral institutions. Can it be a coincidence that the rise of contemporary art in America, which has systematically excluded (or outright stolen from) the work of Black people and other racialized groups, keeps pace with the development and expansion of the prison as a means of racial segregation, white supremacy and control? Second, my trepidation stems from concluding this book, which seeks to describe the way the financialized political economy of contemporary art expands by constantly drawing on and drawing in the radical margins, by drawing on a radical theoretical and activist tradition very much on the margins of contemporary art. 12. Pascal Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2010). 13. See Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Species-Being and the New Commonism: Notes on an Interrupted Cycle of Struggles,” The Commoner 11 (2006):

268  art after money, money after art

15–32; John McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 1999); While there is not time for a full elaboration, I would want to problematize and expand our notion of “species being” to encompass the way the “human” is, in fact, a cooperative of sorts in and of itself. See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015). 14. See the discussion of the parasite in Chapter 3, as well as Susan BuckMorss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (1992): 3–41. 15. Stevphen Shukaitis, The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor after the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, New York and Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013). 16. See Bruce Barber, Bruce, Littoral Art and Communicative Action, ed. Marc James Léger, The Arts in Society (Champaign, IL: Common Ground Publishing LLC, 2013). 17. Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London and New York: Pluto Press, 2011). 18. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–51. 19. Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics.” 20. Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. 21. Martin, Knowledge LTD: Towards a Social Logic of the Derivative. 22. Ibid., 77–8.

Subject index

abolition, 1, 15, 22–3, 25, 28, 213–18, 224 debt, 200–3 prisons, 23–5, 214–18 abstract expressionism, 82, 177 activism see struggle advertising industry, 124, 129–30, 161 aestheticization of politics, 221–4 agency, 6–7, 109–10, 111, 116–17, 137, 171–2 alienation, 17–18, 65, 122, 190, 222 arbitrage, 8, 170, 202–3, 223 art in capitalism, 53–4, 96, 99, 102–3, 163–4, 168, 176–81, 195, 197–8 as commodity, 14–15, 82–3, 87, 102, 117, 144–7, 165–6, 224–5 crypticness, 178, 204 death of, 167–8 democratization, 120, 179–80, 216 financialization, 41–2, 101–4, 155, 163–4 history, 51–2, 81–3, 168 politics, 4, 45, 77, 80–3, 200 relation to money, 12, 14, 82, 156–7, 167–8, 176–81, 195 dematerialization, 64, 167–8 see also abolition, contemporary art, conceptual art, installation art, interventionist art, mediation, modern art, participtatory art, performance art, public art, struggle, value artists class position, 19, 48–9, 81, 103–4, 134–8 genius myth, 14–15, 62, 147 incorporation/cooptation, 18, 41, 44, 94–6, 101–4, 118–20, 145, 195, 217

radical, 21, 64–5, 74–5, 104–7, 156, 197–8, 219 romantic image, 2–3, 25, 40–1, 45, 77, 104, 198 art market, 2–4, 18, 22–3, 41–2, 52, 54, 65, 76–7, 82, 102, 107, 117, 139, 144–5, 166–8, 179, 201, 225, 230–1n46 expansion, 11–12, 18, 168 auctions, 2–3, 12, 15, 41, 53–4, 57, 81, 101, 168–9 art investment funds, 12, 41, 168–9 art fairs, 2, 14, 25, 41–2, 102, 168, 204–5 commercial galleries, 2–3, 14, 42, 48, 50, 102, 145, 166, 199, 204 tax avoidance, 14, 52, 81–2, 166, 225 art schools/art education, 148–50, 200–1, 219 art world, 3, 18, 20, 22–3, 42, 44, 48, 52, 85, 87–8, 102, 117, 137, 142, 144–5, 147, 217, 219, 224–5 circuits of value, 101–4 inequalities within, 86–7 audits, 70, 116, 140 austerity, 36, 45, 104–7, 129–30, 132, 134, 179 autonomy, 45, 49, 52–3, 83, 97, 107, 163–4, 177, 188, 191, 198, 216 avant-garde, 36, 41–2, 49, 52, 167–8, 198–9, 200 banks artistic engagements, 13, 70, 97–100, 108–9, 140–2 investment, 6, 14, 16, 33, 69, 89, 114, 125 140, 162 central, 129, 131–2 bailouts, 104–7, 131–2, 169, 117–20 biopolitics, 96–7, 144, 186–8, 194 Bitcoin see cryptocurrencies

270  art after money, money after art

black radical tradition, 23–5, 28, 214 Black-Scholes formula, 89–90 blockchain, 140, 153–4, 207–10, 217 Bretton Woods era (post-), 30, 192 Brexit, 161 capitalism, 50–1, 177, 181–2 art within, 52, 102–3, 195 anti-, 20, 25, 69, 104–6, 169–70, 195, 209, see also abolition Capitalist Realism, 19, 136 cognitive, 9, 20, 35, 65, 94–7, 191–2 communism of, 169–72, 223 contradictions, 4, 16, 30, 38–40, 53–4, 67–9, 73–5, 78–9, 81–3, 134, 145, 177–8, 188–9, 213, 218 late, 34, 43, 190 “New Spirit”, 94, 191 platform, 192 post-war, 75–88, 190–1 subsumption of society, 3, 33, 96–7, 151–2, 182–3, 186–8, 191, 194–5, 225 totality, 31–3, 39–40, 54–5, 174, 183, 187 censorship, 45, 97–83 children, 100, 118–9, 124 cities, 97–8, 118, 168–9, 190, 195, 199 Civil War (US), 150 class artists and, 19, 48–9, 86–7, 94, 168\ classless society, 179–80 “Creative”, 18–19, 49, 99–100, 135 middle, 7, 71, 80, 83, 116–17, 179–80 non-capitalist, 181 petit bourgeoisie, 19 ruling (elites, bourgeoisie), 7, 14–15, 25, 40, 49, 52, 67–8, 81, 87, 102, 136, 139, 145, 168, 176–7, 223 reproduction of, 70–2, 81–3, 87–9, 168, 176–7 working, 71–3, 75–6, 94, 116–17, 151–2, 171–2, 187–8, 222 Cold War, 40, 76–7, 80–3, 177 colonialism, 15, 69, 89–90, 177, 193 collage see mixed media

collectors (of art), 6, 13–15, 41–4, 81–2, 87, 102, 111, 136, 144–7, 166–8, 172 commodities art as, 40–5, 49–50 commodification, 17, 73, 76, 101–2, 177, 225 price, 37–8, 53–4 fetishism of, 54, 216 future as, 189 commons, the common, 26, 55, 140, 147–8, 151–2, 154, 157, 172, 183, 185, 206, 210–12, 213, 218–19 undercommons, 148, 219 competition, 23, 37, 67–8, 81–2, 92, 94, 102, 109, 121, 125, 157, 170–1, 177–8, 180, 183, 188, 221 conceptual art, 5, 23, 32, 68, 75, 83–6, 102, 141, 148, 167–8, 173, 178, 185, 192, 196, 200 contemporary art, 2–3, 15, 21, 22, 41–3, 49–50, 52–3, 102–3, 137, 145, 204, 213 contracts, 88, 96, 120–1, 146, 155, 184–5, 189, 207 control (society of), 159–63, 169, 184, 190–1 cooperation, 7, 9, 11, 18, 25–6, 31, 33, 52, 54–5, 99, 106, 152, 156–7, 182–3, 210–20, 226–7 cooperatives, 13, 73, 104–6, 140 corporations, 6, 36, 104–7, 137–40, 150, 192, 209 creativity, 62–3, 65, 169, 179–80, 197–9, 216, 225 creative economy, 18–19, 48, 99, 105–6, 135 creative destruction, 136–7 instrumentalization, 18–19, 80–3, 135, 179–80, 221 see also class, creative credit, 17, 39, 43, 69, 91, 98, 116–17, 124, 148–51, 124, 167, 180 carbon, 36 credit cards, 1, 41, 64, 105, 178 credit ratings/reporting, 27, 124, 149–54, 161–2 see also debt

subject index   271

crisis 1970s, 30, 78, 82 2008, 6, 34–5, 64–5, 69, 75, 97, 104 capitalism, 38, 51–4, 64, 68–9, 123, 134–5, 213, 218 care/reproduction, 26, 100 environmental, 68 Eurozone, 104–7, 133 finance, 6, 26, 34–5, 65, 97, 131, 134, 145 representation, 33–7, 78, 145 value, 36–91 cruel optimism, 21, 26, 48, 123–7, 142, 145, 157, 159, 209, 223 cryptocurrencies, 142, 153–4, 156–7, 207–10, 217 crypts (theory), 4, 17, 27, 116, 121–2, 133, 142–3, 151–4, 157, 163, 167–8, 173–6, 184–6, 195, 197, 200, 203, 207–12, 216, 225 cultural capital, 71, 81, 101, 177–9 cultural institutions, 69–71, 81–3, 117–18, 172 culture, expediency of, 118–35 curations/curators, 80, 102–3, 106, 122, 145, 147, 172, 204, 225 Dadaism, 48 dance, 70, 194–5, 199 debt, 21, 27, 94, 127, 148–51, 160, 171, 191–2, 196, 200–4 microfinance and subprime, 21, 98, 171 secondary markets, 202 student/education, 200–4, 219 see also social impact derivatives, 7–8, 89–91, 102, 154–5, 170, 184, 189–94, 212, 223–4 sociality of, 154–5, 170, 184, 189–94, 203, 212, 221 design, speculative, 208, 211 digital technology, 32, 111, 113–16, 161, 166–8, 192–4, 206, 209 algorithms, 5, 7, 32, 89–90 114, 124, 129, 133, 140–2, 159, 161–2, 168, 187–8, 206, 222–3 art, 5, 134, 186 artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, 186–9, 192–3

big data, 161–2, 168–9, 192–3, 203, 206 financial trading, 32, 89, 112–14, 140–2 see also cryptocurrencies discipline, society of, 159–62, 191 dollar, US, 45, 48, 55, 57, 78, 88, 112–13, 119, 184–5, 192 drawing, 46 economy attention, 139 distortion of, 16, 135 imaginative aspects, 8, 137, 154 non-monetary, 99, 220 participation, 131–4 planned, 170 “real”, 134, 193 sharing, 172 economics (discipline), 30, 34, 152 euros (currency), 131–4, 146 exploitation, 18, 48–9, 67–8, 72–3, 77, 93–4, 103–4, 134, 171–2, 191, 198, 210 see also labor fascism, 51, 221–4 feminism, 71–2, 76, 83, 86–7, 148, 152, 214 film, 186–9, 195–7 finance ethical, 140–2 ficititous capital, 30–1, 108, 134–5 fire (finance, insurance and real estate) sector, 6, 66, 88, 134, 169, 209–10 performativity, 35, 213 money, 183–4 see also capitalism, crisis, derivatives, value financial inclusion, 120, 153 financial literacy, 99, 117 financialization, 4, 6–8, 12, 40, 65–6, 74, 88–97, 107–9, 111–17, 136, 148, 162–4, 169–71, 179–80, 184, 188, 190–3, 207, 216, 218–19, 225 affects, 123–7

272  art after money, money after art



art, 41–2, 162–9, 213 food, 6, 36, 114 government, 92–3, 120–3 participatory aspects, 26–7, 110–12, 117–25, 131–4, 137, 153, 156 periodizing concept, 88 financiers, 42, 82, 102, 112–13, 129, 168, 204, 225 fintech (financial technology) 161 see also digital technology Fordism, 172 fraud, 104–5, 138–40 freeports, 27, 155, 163–9, 172, 206, 224 future/futurity, 155, 189, 226 futures contracts see derivatives games, 46, 100–4, 108–9 gender, 51, 72–4, 81, 86–7, 171, 192–4 gentrification, 4, 6, 18, 34–6, 89, 99, 111, 118, 150, 180, 195, 225 see also cities ghosts, 176, 181–3, 185, 203–4 globalization, 40, 137–40, 169, 179, 192 Global South, 37, 89, 92, 99, 134, 162, 179, 191 gold standard, 78, 88, 162 government see state hedge funds, 27, 54, 114, 140–2, 159 “high net worth individuals” (HNWIs), 2, 12, 25, 31, 41–2, 136, 168 see also class hobo nickels, 76 hype, 128–9, 142, 145, 207 ideology, 33, 74, 76, 81, 107, 117, 121, 129, 139, 170, 177, 209, 216 imagination, 8, 15, 39, 107–9, 163, 167, 169, 184, 210–12, 214–16, 225 economic aspects, 9, 27, 178–9 exploitation, 19, 179–80, 221

financialization, 8, 20–1, 36, 107–9, 121–2, 154, 156, 169, 184 radical, 9–11, 19, 28, 65, 195, 209, 213, 215 romantic notions, 81–2 theories, 9–11 inheritance, 87, 169 Installation art, 57, 90, 85–6, 141–4, 149, 158, 173, 196 institutions public, 6, 36, 92, 98, 104, 107, 109, 116, 120–3, 129–30, 135, 192–3 reproduction of, 69–71, 81–3, 100–4, 160, 215–16 see also state institutional critique, 79–80, 100–4, 111, 117, 148, 168 insurance, 14, 41, 88, 94, 165, 167–8, 189 interventionist art, 70, 104–7, 112–16, 138, 141, 205 investors, 7, 129, 134–8, 180, 204 see also collectors, inanciers Keynesianism, 50–1, 78, 92–4, 105, 126–7, 136, 193 kitsch, 12, 14, 41, 168, 179 labor, 30–1, 37, 59, 78, 93, 91, 115, 133–4, 179–81, 190–1, 209–10 aetherwork, 43, 178–9, 192 creative, 48, 65, 94, 129–30, 198 gendered, 71–3, 86–7 immaterial, 59, 65, 111, 168, 171–2, 192 investment bankers, 125, 162 living/dead, 152 precarious, 48, 65, 94, 103–4, 134–8, 190–1, 201 reproductive, 72–3, 97–100 service, 73, 94, 104, 111 law, 30, 96, 104–7, 138–9, 166, 169, 178, 201, 209 mediation, 11, 25–6, 39, 50–5, 156–7, 177–8, 210–21, 213 mimesis, 15, 54 mixed media, 60–2, 72, 161, 200, 215

subject index   273

modern art, 80–3 modernity, 14–15, 41, 82, 172 money alternative forms, 21, 97, 108–9, 208–12 banknotes, 29–31, 50–63, 76–9, 100–4, 119, 141 cash, 64, 83–7 coins, 10, 13, 41, 76,-9 131–4, 143–8, 172–4 fiat, 30, 98, 207 functions, 37–8, 77–8, 182 helicopter, 131–2 “imaginary”, 8, 39, 77–8 maxist approach to, 54–5, 181–4, 184–5, 209–10 mediation, 51–2, 226–7 (mis)measure of value, 34, 36–8, 44, 53–5, 73, 87, 93, 111, 182–3 relation to finance, 183–4 theories, neoliberal, 156–7, 208–9 wages, 38, 73, 91, 93, 152, 183 see also cryptocurrencies, value money-art, 1, 17, 22, 25–6, 31, 39–45, 55, 74–6, 185 museums, 3, 80–3, 102, 117–18, 173–6, 199, 204 sponsorship/artwashing, 18, 204 myths/mythologies, 12, 15, 17, 19, 44–9, 52, 78, 83, 107, 147, 156, 179, 180, 208–9, 222 nation see state neoliberalism, 2, 19, 34, 38, 40, 92–3, 104–7, 117–20, 123, 127, 132, 134, 136, 156, 169–70, 179, 188, 209, 216 normalization of deviance, 162 Occupy movement, 27, 36, 102, 115, 134, 148, 155, 199–205, 207 oil, 78, 114, 169–70 painting, 35 panopticon, 165 parasites, parasitism, 20, 27, 134–42, 147, 153, 226

participatory art, 26–7, 58, 68, 70, 79, 98, 100–3, 112, 117–23, 128, 220, 226 pensions, 144–6 performance art, 24, 56–7, 68, 70, 84 pessimism, benign, 26, 127–34, 142, 147 photography, 158–60 postmodernism, 33–4, 37, 42–3, 45, 174, 190, 195 poverty see inequality prisons see abolition psychology/psychoanalysis, 142–3, 174–6 public art, 98, 113–15, 119, 124, 128, 132, 226 public sector see institutions, state quantitative easing, 131–4 race/racism, 15, 18, 81, 83, 135, 150, 177, 181, 191, 214 realabstraktion, 12, 25, 213 reality television, 180 recession, 127–30 relational aesthetics/art see participatory art representation crisis of, 30–9 money as, 37–8, 40, 43 reproduction, 26, 51–3, 66–74, 87–8, 96, 100, 182–3, 218–19 capitalism, 66–9, 182, 216, 218 institutions, 66, 69–71, 100–4 ruling class, 52, 176–7 social and biological, 66, 71–3, 86–7, 100, 183, 218 resistance see struggle risk, risk management, 89, 122, 133, 155, 162, 165, 167, 187, 193–4, 225 sculpture, 10, 14, 59, 77, 93, 85–6, 131–4, 143–8, 165, 182, 184–5, 226

274  art after money, money after art

securitization, 7, 27, 92–3, 154, 162, 189, 197, 201–3 social impact investments/bonds, 7, 120–3, 135 social movements see struggle social practice art, socially engaged art see participatory art sovereign wealth/debt, 169–70 see also state speculation, 17, 43, 116, 127, 135, 148, 156, 167 state, 6, 78, 127–8, 151–2, 169, 192–3, 202, 214–15 money/monetary policy, 78, 131–2, 207 crisis, 33–4, 130 (de)regulation, 40, 92, 115, 170, 227 209, 216 financialization, 116, 120–3, 136 see also neolberalism street art, 44–5 struggles anti-institutional, 70–1 anti-capitalist, 69, 86, 118, 169–70, 197, 200, 212–18, 222 art and, 20, 82, 104–7, 197–202, 223 cooptation, 19–22, 92–4, 195 decolonization, 89–90, 121–2, 191 feminist, 72–3, 76, 86, 91, 100, 191, 214 Indignados, 134–5 new left, 79, 191

refusal/re-fusal, 197–9 social movements, 11, 22, 36, 86, 91, 121, 154, 191, 195–6, 197–9 solidarity, 20, 23, 28, 73, 98, 108, 131, 139, 151–2, 217–18 urban, 97–100 see also abolition, Occupy movement surveillance, 116, 133, 188 symbols, 174–6 taste, 2, 15, 42, 51–2, 81, 168 tax havens, 1, 32, 104–7, 137–9, 166, 169, 225 totalitarianism, 171, 188 trading floors, 112, 126 value, 37–8, 53–4, 91, 151–2, 174, 190 art, 3, 22, 42–3, 53–4, 77, 102, 134–8, 184–5 crisis, 36 financial, 17, 91, 184–5 Labor Theory of, 9, 37–8, 67–8, 78, 190 price, 37–8, 78 use/Exchange, 53–4 Vietnam War, 80–1 volatility, 114, 116, 122, 130–1, 170, 207, 225 women See gender zapatistas, 108–9

Name index

Abraham, Nicholas, 142, 152, 155, 174–6, 180–1 Akasegawa, Genpei, 40 Althusser, Louis, 26, 69 Amazon (corporation), 140, 194 Arrighi, Giovanni, 134 Art Prize, 200 Art Reserve Bank, 13 Autogena, Lise, 89 Ay, Karen, 182 Azzelini, Dario, 36 Baldessari, John, 35 Banco del Palmas, 98–9 Benjamin, Walter, 221–2, 224 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’, 35 Baxter&, Ian, 68 Beauséjour, Mathieu, 141 Berlant, Lauren, 21, 26, 123–7, 130 Bishop, Claire, 103, 118, 136 Breugel, Pieter the Elder, 74 Beuys, Joseph, 26, 40, 48, 75–9, 100, 103, 178 BFAMFAPhD (art and research ensemble), 221 Black, Fischer, 89 Blackrock (asset management corporation), 204 Blu (street artist), 25, 44–5 Boggs, J.S.G., 29–30, 48, 75 Boltanksi, Luc, 65, 191 Borosnick, Hernán, 75 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15, 26, 34, 42, 69, 93, 100–4 British Museum, 172 Brown, Wendy, 7, 169 Bryan, Dick, 189–90 Buck-Morss, Susan, 221–2, 224 Burden, Chris, 40 Bürger, Peter, 34, 167 Caffentzis, George, 94

California College of the Arts, 148–9 Cambridge Analytica (company), 161 Capote, Yoan, 72 Casarino, Cesare, 151–2 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 9, 65, 215 Ceja, Gabriela, 107–8 Chiapello, Eve, 65, 191 Chin, Mel, 119 Christies (auction house), 2, 166 Cirio, Paolo, 27, 137–40 Cleaver, Harry, 9, 69 Cooper, Melinda, 74 Corinthian Colleges (corporation), 203 Creative Time (organization), 117 Crosthwaite, Paul, 75 Cullen, Darren, 124 Curran, Marc, 27, 155, 158–60, 186 Dall Costa, Maria Rosa, 72 Davis, Angela, 214 Davis, Ben, 19 Dawkins, Richard, 141 De Angelis, Massimo, 93 Debt Collective (activist group), 148, 196, 203, 206 Debtfair (art/activist ensemble), 27, 155–6, 200–7 Deleuze, Gilles, 160–2, 165, 184, 191 Derrida, Jacques, 27, 142–3, 153, 155–7, 167, 186, 174–6, 216 Deutschebank, 99 DeVos, Betsy, 200 Dubreuil, Victor, 40, 75 Duchamp, Marcel, 40, 48, 75 Duran, Enrique, 105 Ernst and Young (corporation), 140 Easterling, Keller, 166 Economic Space Agency (alternative economic platform), 209 Electronic Disturbance Theater, 139

276  art after money, money after art

European Central Bank, 131 Exxon (corporation) 140 FairCoop (alternative economic platform), 209 Fall-Conroy, Blake, 93 Federici, Silvia, 26, 72, 94 Fink, Larry, 204 Fisher, Mark, 19, 136 Fitzpatrick, Chris, 136–7 Florida, Richard, 99 Fortunati, Leopoldina, 72 Foucault, Michel, 26, 35, 69, 71, 144, 162, 165, 191, 214–5 Fraser, Andrea, 3, 102 Fraser, Nancy, 26, 100 Freud, Sigmund, 142–3, 152, 155, 174–6 Friedman, Milton, 92, 131–2 Fukayama, Francis, 188 Fundred Project, 119 Fundus Theatre, 100 Grandry, Peterjohn, 27, 143–8 geheimagentur (art/theatre group), 26, 97–100 Gielen, Pascal, 198 Gilligan, Melanie, 27, 155–6, 186–9, 194 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 214 Gokey, Thomas, 200 Goldman Sachs (investment bank), 140 Golumbia, David, 209 González, Máximo, 26, 59–63 Graeber, David, 17, 25, 54 Groys, Boris, 43 Gouhg, Zachary, 26, 100–4 Güell, Nuria, 26, 104–7, 139 Guggenheim, 115 Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F. – art/activist group), 115 Haacke, Hans, 26, 79–83 Hall, Stuart, 26, 69 Hamberle, John, 40 Hardt, Michael, 27, 96, 151 Harnett, William Michael, 40

Harney, Stefano, 148 Harvey, David, 69, 134 Hegel, G.W.F, 177 Herregraven, Femke, 32 Hirst, Damien, 41–2, 49 Hoffman, Abbie, 112–13, 115, 117–18, 125–6, 131, 133 Hoggart, Richard, 69 Horowitz, Noah, 41–2 Houldsworth, Austin, 208, 211 Hudson, Michael, 170 Ilich, Fran, 108–9 International Monetary Fund, 89, 134–5, 191 James, Selma, 72 Jameson, Frederic, 25, 31–4, 38–9, 50, 174 Jankowski, Christian, 25, 47 K-Foundation (KLF), 24 Karga, Valentina, 27, 143–8 Katsfiacas, George, 191 Kawashima, Takashi, 172 Kaye, Otis, 40 Khasnabish, Alex, 65, 198 Kinderbank, 100 Kissinger, Henry, 80 Knight, Peter, 75 Kolbin, Aaron, 192 Koons, Jeff, 41–2, 49 Kruger, Barbara, 25, 44–5 Kubrick, Stanley, 196 La Berge, Leigh Claire, 37, 111 Lapavitsas, Costas, 134 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 65, 94, 162, 191 Lee, Benjamin, 35 Lenin, V.I., 69 Lexier, Micah, 172–4 LiPuma, Brian, 35 London, City of (financial district), 90, 190 Louvre, 172 Lozano, Lee, 26, 83–8, 99, 101, 103 Lukács, György, 32, 39 Luxemburg, Rosa, 69

name index   277

Malik, Suhail, 3, 17 Marazzi, Christian, 17, 35, 65 Marcovici, Michael, 5, 178 Martin, Randy, 7, 20, 25, 27, 121, 154–7, 162, 170, 189–95, 197–200, 223 Marsh, Nicky, 75 Marx, Karl, 9, 25, 26, 32, 37–8, 52–4, 58, 67–8, 77, 151, 187 Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 172 Massumi, Brian, 35 Mattick, Paul, 75 Mauss, Marcel, 54, 77, 151, 182 McKee, Yates, 20, 200–3 McKenzie, Donald, 17, 35 McRobbie, Angela, 18, 48, 104 Meireles, Cildo, 40, 76 Mei-Moses Index, 168 Metropolitan Museum (New York), 82 Meyerhof, Eli, 151–2 Mies, Maria, 72 Monsanto (corporation), 140 Moten, Fred, 148 Murakami, Takashi, 41–2, 49 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 79- 82, 172, 220 Negri, Antonio, 27, 96, 151 Nelson, Anitra, 38 Nixon, Richard, 80, 88 Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 23 Occupy Museums (activist group) 200, 204–7 Occupy Wall Street see Occupy movement Ögüt, Ahmet, 196 Open Engagement (conference), 117 OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), 78 Orta, Levi, 104–7, 139 Orwell, George, 208 Ostrom, Elinor, 152 Our Good (barter platform), 221

Peto, John Fredrick, 40 Pietroiusti, Cesare, 26, 55–9 Piketty, Thomas, 36 Pinochet, Augusto, 92 Plato, 15 Polanyi, Karl, 170 Portway, Joshua, 89 Post-Brothers (artist ensemble), 136–7 Powhida, William, 25–6, 46–9 Prieto, Wilfredo, 184–5 Rafferty, Michael, 189–90 Rancier, Jacques, 53 Rembrandt, 74 Ressler, Oliver, 75 Robin Hood Minor Asset Management, 27, 140–2 Rockefeller, Nelson, 80–2 Rolling Jubilee (activist initiative), 23, 196, 200–4 Rosamond, Emily, 120–3 Rosler, Martha, 3 Ross, Andrew, 94 Roy, Ananya, 133 RTMark, 139 Saatchi, Charles, 41 Scholes, Myron, 89 School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 200 Schwarzbank, 97–101 Serres, Michel, 27, 136 Shell, Marc, 74 Siegel, Katy, 75 Sholette, Gregory, 3, 20, 41, 75, 219 Shukaitis, Stevphen, 20, 197–200, 206–7, 219 Siegel, Katy, 75 Sitrin, Marina, 36 Skinner, B.F., 2011 Sotheby’s (auction house), 2 Steyerl, Hito, 17, 222 Stockburger, Axel, 26, 131–4 Stockwell, Susan, 226 Strike Debt (activist group), 148, 196, 200–4

278  art after money, money after art

SUPERFLEX (art ensemble), 16, 26, 127–31, 139 SuttonBeresCullen (art ensemble), 48 Tate, 24, 226 Taylor, Marc C., 41 Thatcher, Margaret, 41 Thornton, Cassie, 27, 70, 148–53, 200 Torok, Maria, 142, 152, 155, 174–6, 180–1 Trade School (education platform), 221 Troika (financial institutons), 104–7 Trublin, M., 113 Victoria and Albert Museum, 172 Vishmidt, Marina, 17, 43, 111 Wall Street, 37, 42, 113, 125, 190 Warhol, Andy, 40–1, 49, 53 Wescheler, Lawrence, 30, 75

Wechsler, Robert, 10 Wolf Man (pseudonym) 142–3, 155, 174–6 World Bank, 89, 134–4, 191 Whiteread, Rachel, 23 Whitney Biennial, 204–5 Wilde, C. K., 161 Williams, Raymond, 69 Woolard, Caroline, 220–1 Woznicki, Krystian, 163 Yippies (art/activist group) 112–13, 115, 117–18, 125–6, 131, 133 Yes Men (art/activist ensemble), 139 Yúdice, George, 135 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 163 Zavitsanos, Constantina, 95–6 Zettle, Tessa, 143 Zuidas (Amsterdam financial district), 32

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