In their recent manifesto, »Economists Are Wrong!«, the Freee art collective, commence by referencing the old leftist conundrum of how to use Marx’s concept of value in conjunction with works of art (if not »the work« of art), in an effort to criticize the very idea of art as an economic activity. The problem being, of course, whether the pricing of the commodity through the hours of labor involved, makes any probable form of sense in artistic production. Whereas other commodities, such as luxury goods, involve both many hours of work and thought, as well as a transformation of the finest materials, this is not really the case with artworks. Indeed, a work that has required very little in terms of production, either materially, physically or mentally, might be valued and priced much higher than more technically proficient works (just think of a spontaneous drawing or painting). Rather, Freee claims, the value of art comes from outside of its immediate conditions of production, given to it not by its producers, the artists, but by its mediators, such as critics and curators.In what follows, I shall not attempt to discuss the correctness of their claims, nor their highly idealist solution to the problem, which is to free art from its possible status of the commodity, through a focus on artistic production as a non–productive endeavor in any industrial sense. It is, rather, to focus on what I think is a crucial point, namely to see value as an interpellation happening outside the production itself, and thus ask how and by whom this value assessment is made, and what it implies for both artistic production and reception, or more precisely for both critical art and art criticism. In other words, value is to be disentangled from the materiality of the object and its production, and instead be seen in terms of image, language and branding. As such, the economic value of art is completely dematerialized and wholly fictitious, and thus more in line with the post–industrial evolution of capital (and labor), such as financial speculation and movement, the notion of derivatives and debts, and investment strategies such as hedge funds. So, the investment into art can perhaps be seen as parallel to the de–evaluation of everything that is the result of the so–called credit crunch of 2008, mainly brought about, of course by the very features of post–fordist capitalism just mentioned.
[b]Semiotics of Capital[/b]
Post–fordism surely affects all areas of production and circulation, including the arts, and thus its mechanisms must also be analyzed in the sector that is contemporary art, whether we define it in terms of commodity production, service work or even unproductive labor time. Here, Felix Guattari’s idea of a semiotization of capital composition and the production process. Guattari obviously takes his cue from the psycho–analytic theories of Jacques Lacan, turning his famous idea of the subconscious being structured like a language onto the logic of capital, its expansions and subjectivations, and claiming that capital is (like) a language. Accounting, measuring and the stock exchange are all linguistic effects, as is the automatization and machinic assemblage of the production and labor process. This notion of semiotization is also a way of describing labor becoming immaterial (and the subsequent dematerialization of value). This linguistic turn can also be found in theories of post–Fordism proper, such as the writings of Paolo Virno, who sees post–industrial production as the development of capital that has included »within itself linguistic experience as such«. That is, a process without a necessary end product, but rather endless communication and language games, that requires of the worker virtuosity and skills of a performative and thus political kind, rather than technical or bodily knowledge.As we know, the linguistic turn has been all–dominant in cultural production, possibly even having its origins in this sphere of production, and is important in relation to our current topic of enduring value in art and critique. First of all, there has been the turn to language in artistic production itself from conceptual art onwards, which has, I believe fundamentally unsettled the power of art criticism and theory: For, if art itself is analytic rather than symptomatic, what then is the role of criticism? In contemporary art criticism, and even art history, no longer has the monopoly on interpretation and articulation, but must compete with art and artists, not to mention gallerists, advisors and collectors in the assessment of value. So, even if value is inscribed from outside the work or object itself, it is nonetheless not very clear who are the subjects that can assess and project this value, who can, in a word, »consecrate«. Indeed, Søren Andreasen and Lars Bang Larsen have accurately described the role of the curator as that of the middleman in trade and economics. Which means that the figures of the critic or curator have not, in their supposed articulatory power, overtaken the historical position of artistic autonomy, but are rather truly relational aestheticians, always caught up not just in a web of meaning, but also in a mesh of economic–discursive transaction.In other words, it is the market, or markets – for goods, for intellectual property, for monopoly rents, etc., that may be the only unifying feature of the many actors in the unregulated industry that is the art world. Which is not too say that the marketization is complete, that all production is commodity production of some sort, and all artistic or critical positions are selling points and market shares, and so on. Nor is it to say that symbolic capital can always be transformed into real capital, and vice versa, since this does not only depend on the nominal role and place of, say, the critic, but also upon his or her scene of address, both in spatial and temporal terms. It is conditioned on what we can call the position of the speaker, so that any given statement (or value assessment) is dependent on where this subject is located within a system that is hierarchical, but not stabile. Indeed, trends and declines in the standing of certain critical positions and pricing of particular groups of works and practices may at times seem as arbitrary as the seasonal changes in high fashion or the fluctuations of the stock market. Hence, the many attempts from commercial gallerists and artists, for example, to try and control the secondary market through various contractual obligations, and secret buyouts. The problem being, of course, that the investment into a specific oeuvre on the one hand fixes capital, making it a long–term investment, all the while the immediate climate is highly volatile and unpredictable. In its own way, the investment into art is as that of real estate, traditionally the relay for fixed capital, but in the contemporary world a highly dynamic market, that is less about long–term investments and profits, but more about speculations into changing credit schemes, wins and losses.In any event, the relation between economic value and art has a timely element, not in terms of labor time, as we have seen, but rather in terms of futurity and speculation, or what we can, with Eric Alliez, designate as a particular »capital time«, in the nexus between temporalization, capitalization, and subjectivation. For the art market and art museums, this nexus can be found in the convergence between a neoliberal economic model and a neo–conservative cultural program, where the new and trendy must necessarily be inscribed with the eternal in an attempt to produce enduring (surplus) value. The ongoing and increasing value of the artwork must be generated through its inscription into art history and thus posterity: time has to appear as stocked–up in the artwork, precisely as in money itself. The value of culture is thus measured in both money and time. For »über–postmodernist« Jean–François Lyotard, the exchange and accumulation in capital had to do with »anticipation«: anticipation of reimbursement, anticipation of advance, of counter–cession, and of surplus, with currency speculation »revealed to be the quickest procedure for accumulating time through exchange.« Interestingly, Lyotard wrote his description of what he called »the economic genre« during the first wave of neo–liberal reform and deregulation, in the early years of Reaganomics and Thatcherism in the 1980s, that was exactly a combination of a deregulated economy and a conservative, reactionary cultural policy.
[b]Trading Places[/b]
As it were, Lyotard published his critique of the economic genre’s hegemony over other genres in his book about unsurpassable difference or antagonism, under the title »The Differend«, in 1983, by coincidence or fate the same year that Hollywood produced what is probably still its most poignant film about finance speculation, »Trading Places«. Ostensibly a comedy of the »The Prince and the Pauper« variety, but set in modern, urban America, »Trading Places« is actually a commentary on insider trading, and about the time of anticipation inherent to speculation. The plot involves the interception of an agricultural crop report, that will allow the protagonists about to speculate on the stock exchange access to inside knowledge before the report is made public, and thus before their competitors. It will allow for an advantage in terms of time, by knowing the results and thus not having to predict. Naturally, this is highly illegal, but crucially the film does not thematize this moral or political aspect, but is rather about whether our heroes will be able to get the report before the nominal villains. And whereas the villains, two elderly white financiers, are the embodiment of old money, the heroes, the characters trading places, are, seemingly, two quite different characters, a boss, portrayed by Dan Aykroyd, and a bum, portrayed by Eddie Murphy. What is significant, is that together they form the perfect subject of capital, combining upper class privilege and knowledge with street smarts and savvy, and, whiteness with blackness.
»Trading Places« is, like »The Differend«, quintessentially postmodern, and contemporary to a new image of the artist, a new technique of branding the artist persona after the fall of any imaginable inherent value of the artwork. The early 1980s also presented the artist as stockbroker, with Jeff Koons and others, a phenotype not that different from Dan Aykroyd’s yuppie character. But Aykroyd could not go it alone, of course, and needed the companionship of a street hustler, in the guise of Eddie Murphy, which, in artistic terms, could possibly be described as a conglomeration between Koons and someone like Jean–Michel Basquiat! Permutations and extrapolations of these types have since then become the model for creating artistic value through the image, either by focusing on the businessman, the hipster, the hustler with the addition of the scientist and the architect. In whatever form this takes, in isolation or combination, the point is always to produce what was known in postmodern theory as sign value, or, if you will, the endless transfer back and forth between surplus and exchange value.
If value as such is dematerialized, while simultaneously evermore tied up in finance capital, what has then been the fate of critique? As mentioned, the art critic no longer has the same privilege, and the line of seminal critics influencing artistic production, from Clement Greenberg to Benjamin Buchloh, has, luckily, been forever broken, and the critic is by now just one of many possible mediators and producers of value. Perhaps, then, this would give us the opportunity to drastically alter the very idea of criticism, finally relegating the Kantian notion of aesthetic judgment to the dustbin of history, and thus move from art criticism to a political critique of culture? Now, if value is not produced through the objects, but external to them, any continued dedication to the judgment of the object would seem non–sensical, and not only nostalgic, but anachronistic and a–historical. Rather, a critical project must address how value is produced, thorough which positions and networks, or, moreover, how it appears in discourse, following Michel Foucault’s by now famous radicalization of Kant in the essay ›What is Critique?‹ Whereas reason for Kant was ultimately about judgment, and thus ethical command, Foucault sees critique as that which suspends judgment, and is instead about a critical attitude towards ways of governance. So, statements directed towards commands, towards the historical order of things, towards the ever–present hegemony.
[b]The Politics of Truth[/b]
This critical attitude towards governmentality has often been understood as an effort of speaking truth to power, from artistic strategies such as institutional critique to political theory such as writings by the late Edward Said, drawing upon Foucault’s reading of the ancient Greek notion of »Parrhésia«. Literally meaning telling the truth, Foucault first describes in similar heroic terms: telling the truth in the face of power, and about power, regardless of the consequences and any personal costs. Indeed, parrhésia involves telling truth even at the possible cost of ones own life. It is thus uncompromising truth, but also compulsory, something that one has to say, and that one believes to absolutely be the truth, fully and fundamentally. But for Foucault, the notion of parrhésia also has to do with the position of the speaker, with his relation to power. Not everyone can speak truth to power, even if one should feel so inclined. The person speaking the truth has to be involved in what Foucault describes as »a parrhesiastic game« involving both the speaker and the sovereign. It involves some sort of vicinity to those in power, that one has – if only nominally and potentially – the ear of the despot. It requires that the powers that be accept the speaker’s authority and knowledge, and is willing to listen. The result may still be death, so the element of risk is great and real, but whether the regent rejects or accepts the truth is dependent on the position of the speaker as a truth–sayer, as someone believable and credible in a specific context, in a relation of, and to, power. A contemporary example would be the protest against the invasion of Iraq, where the leaders of the warfaring nations, all acknowledged the protesters right to demonstrate, but also made it quite clear that they in no way felt obliged to listen. Simply put, such protests may as well have been the incoherent ravings of a lunatic, since the position of the speaker in no way qualified them for being taken seriously, neither as advisor nor threat to the government(s).
However, this description of the parrhésiatic game, that stems mainly from various lectures held in the USA, and in Foucault’s seminar at College de France in 1983, was to undergo further complication and even contradiction in his very last seminar there, of 1984. Rather than focusing on the role and position of the truth–sayer in relation to power, Foucault shifts parrhésia onto the self: what does it mean to speak the truth about one self? This would indicate that speaking the truth also means self–reflection, and the willingness to disclose the position from where one is speaking, and through which means and methods one is constructing the speaking (of the truth). To speak the truth is also to speak the truth about oneself and one's acts of speaking, thus exposing subject and object of the speech equally. At this time, Foucault also, perhaps, provocatively, claimed – in interviews – that he had never really been interested in power per se, but only the nexus of power and knowledge in the sense that it circumscribes the subject, and more precisely, the subject’s relation to truth. In this sense, critique is also self–critique, and concerned not just with claiming the truth, but living truthfully.
What does it mean, though, to lead a true life, both in relation to the self and to governmentality? Here, Foucault again looks for examples in ancient Greece, partly in Socrates, and, mainly, in the cynics and their philosophical truth production as a scandalous event. For the cynics, especially, parrhésia indicates a way of life, a living with the truth, no matter how unpopular it may be: truth is both invasive and proved by example, of how one lives. Following Socrates, they do see parrhésia as mainly political in the pragmatic or technical sense, but as ethical, as a way of entering a discussion not by answering a given problem, but by turning it around, by altering the parameters of the discussion itself. The phrase used for this particular critical attitude is – highly pertinent in conjunction with the issue of value: »changing the currency«. In economic terms changing the currency would usually be understood in the sense of de–evaluation – the mechanism the current Europact wants to remove, of course – but here it refers to not accepting the terms in which a given situation is articulated politically: rather than discussing the pros and cons of such a pact, the cynics would reject the whole economic system. Such an evaluation of critique can, naturally, have wide ranging implications for both artistic critique and critical theory. If the latter has already been noticed in the idea of moving from criticism to critique (in the Foucauldean sense), it is appropriate to make a few comments on currency changing artistic practice as a possible critical practice.
We can, of course, think of many projects, artistic and/or activist, that deal with the implementation of economic structures that are alternatives to capital – Oliver Ressler’s extensive documentary project on the topic springs to mind, but here I am also thinking of practices that attempt to shift the discussion through questionings that ›reframe the frame‹, so to speak. And I am thinking specifically of the figure of the question: the question that asks the speaker to give an account of him or herself, whether the speaker is the interviewer or the interviewee. This is what happens, when Ashley Hunt, in a long line of investigations into the ramifications of the growing prison industry, asks an Estonian human rights officer, herself a former Prosecutor, what the difference is between those who were put in jail during Soviet times and the present, as such historicizing and politicizing the notion of the criminal. Whereas it is here the interviewee as a figure of authority that is questioned, it is really the idea of the reporter or documentarist that is unsettled in Renzo Martens’ »Episode 1«, in which the artist travels to war torn Chechnya, and, rather than asking people how they feel, asking how they think he feels, and, at a critical juncture in the film, ruthlessly admitting that he »is not there to help them, either«. Not just revealing the fallibility of his own position, but adding the crucial ‘either’ [...] And we find the question in Katya Sander’s three part projection of interviews with news–anchors – the epitome of authority, stability and truth in 20th century television – under what circumstances they would or could use the word ›I‹, at once teasing out the personal and impersonal mode of address they employ in their production of credibility, and then doubling it back on itself by filming each scene twice, with the studio cameras and that of the artist, showing both the televisual image and its production set up. These are all examples using language in a parrhésian game, using the question in a refusal to accept established truths. Other forms of changing the currency co–exist in both art and critique, obviously, but by asking how truth is produced and represented, they attest to the importance of moving towards an actual »politics of truth«, not just in terms of the art world, but the world at large.
