thinking out loud

as a practice, could be said to embrace the unknowable.  perhaps it could even be said, the furtive, as a practice, performs to underscore this very unknowing.

d. is not a capitalist. he did not buy the “raw material” of his performance (the gesture of the woman on the plane.) however, the woman’s gesture was a “use-value” that d. consumed to produce his own version of the gesture that he himself “owns.” i.e. d. gave a use-value to something that generally would not have a use-value and “stole” this value for himself, the producer of the gesture is more than likely unaware she created a use value.

The labour-process, turned into the process by which the capitalist consumes labour-power, exhibits two characteristic phenomena. First, the labourer works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs…
Secondly, the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the labourer, its immediate producer. p.128 marx, capital

m. is not a capitalist. the “finished product,” the painting of the sleeping venus by giorgione that m. used as a reference, a template, a historical signifier for her tattoo project reiterated the painting’s character as a use-value. it is unlikely that the owner of the painting knows this use value has been accorded to the painting. (however, if m. was to show this painting in a cinematic work that was to be screened, a hefty royalty would probably have to be paid to the “owners” of said painting because the owners of this work do know that the product in question has a use value as a “finished product.”)

If then, on the one hand, finished products are not only results, but also necessary conditions, of the labour-process, on the other hand, their assumption into that process, their contact with living labour, is the sole means by which they can be made to retain their character of use-values, and be utilised. marx, capital. p.126.

the best way to destroy something is to “not use it,” the best way to keep something alive is to “use it.” pockets count as things.

why i would be posting a quote portraying the economics of power…although i figure by now the furtive(s) have figured this out…

but the quote below speaks of structures that we may never see, may never know in terms of their controlling presence in our day-to-day lives (as in anne’s contract pages) which i would say are just as invisible, just as hidden, just as “performed” as any other furtive act. the main difference is not the structure of the act, but rather the position of the player who is performing the act. but further, i would also suggest that many acts called furtive are in response to super structures we feel as somehow unjust – think here of anne’s tulips, josh’s gloves, joceline’s effacement --even though we may not see these structures operating.

In 1960 a royal commission investigated what should be done to save Canadian magazine publishing from extinction by unfair competition from Time and Reader’s Digest. The chairman was one of Canada’s distinguished newspaper editors, Senator Gratton O’Leary. The O’Leary Commission recommended that expenditures on advertising placed in Canadian editions of foreign magazines should no longer be tax-deductible. Implementation of the recommendations of the O’Leary Commission would have driven Time out of competition for the Canadian advertising dollar. The original U.S. edition would of course have continued to enter Canada, like any other American magazine. “It may be claimed, “ wrote the Commissioner, “that the communications of a nation are as vital to its life as its defenses and should receive at least as great a measure of protection.”
No less a person than President Kennedy interceded to inform the prime minister of Canada that he wished Time to be exempt from any legislation based on the O’Leary report. Washington put pressure on the Pearson administration by making exemption a pre-condition for agreement to the pending treaty on partial free trade in automobiles and parts. (…) Time and Reader’s Digest were both exempted from the bill, passed in 1965, which denied tax deductibility for advertising in any foreign-owned publication aimed at the Canadian market. The effect was to leave these two “branch-plant” magazines stronger than ever, protected from future competition from the United States. p.8. Levitt, Kari. “Silent Surrender : the multinational corporation in Canada.” Macmillan of Canada, Toronto. 1970.

furtively. i mean she was already dead, so what was the point of presenting herself in plain view? it would only create a scene and what good would that do her? territories are hard enough to claim for the living, who knows what efforts had already been expended in order for her to claim “here”.

“Our sympathetic co-experiencing of the other does not mean we fuse the I-for-myself with its viewpoint or experience. Indeed, we can never be outside of our own experience (or as Habermas would say, outside the horizon of a lifeworld); we can only be outside the experience of the other. Boundaries or zones are fundamental to both the self and its discourse but they are also passable both in the imaginary and the real. For Bakhtin, “there are events which are in principle incapable of unfolding on the plane of one and the same consciousness and which presuppose two consciousness that never merge.” p. 40.

“Such a transposition, or sympathetic co-experience, Bakhtin notes, is not a copy of one to another but a “fundamentally and essentially new valuation, a utilization of my own architectonic exposition in being outside another’s inner life” (1990, 103.)” p. 41. nielsen greg m. the norms of answerability: social theory between bakhtin and habermas

if we think of theft as the refusal to acknowledge property claims, the erasure of ties of ownership, or conversely, as in the oncomouse case, the privatization of what was once communal (in this instance the labour of many people) how do we position art works that perform a “copy, quote, appropriation…” of another’s labour or gesture? where do we locate the boundary that separates, and in transgressing certain boundaries (as implied in the word theft) where do we position the work in relation to property laws? and could it be the inherent “passability” of boundaries, their very fluidity, that underscores the violence of property laws and our communal adherence to their fiction found therein?

“Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal has evidently turned collecting criteria on their heads. He sells his performance art pieces by means of verbal transactions in the presence of a lawyer with no written contract. Instructions on how to re-enact his works are delivered literally by word-of-mouth, with collectors under strict orders never to photograph or video his “constructed situations”. Yet they sell in editions of four to six for $85,000 to $145,000 each, according to The Art Newspaper.” http://www.ft.com

in order to sell something, it is necessary that the “something” be considered private property, as in the “something” is not owned by everyone. whether this something be immaterial like tino sehgal’s spoken instructions or dupont’s patent on onco mouse, both “products” rely on the legal structure of ownership of labour. what is sold is not “the mouse” or the “body of the performer” but the privatisation of a set of instructions that produces something “in the world” – a performance, a mouse.

artists who are mimicking the new systems of capitalist structures such as copyright of immaterial labour, need to think through the full scope of their collusion with the market.  if sehgal believes himself to be thwarting the system of the market as he himself suggests, perhaps he needs to question his methods a bit more rigorously?

…Effacement
Nous sommes tous confrontés aux contraintes du temps. Organiser la vie selon l’espace-temps est fastidieux et nous naviguons tous d’une activité à l’autre de façon plus ou moins harmonieuse en déblatérant sur la vitesse à laquelle le temps file. Les contraintes augmentent proportionnellement avec la quantité d’obligations (famille/étude/travail/passion) et pour certains artistes pour qui le travail alimentaire occupe un espace-temps déraisonnable, il y a inévitablement conflit dans l’agenda. Conflit parfois sans issu.
L’idéal serait d’effacer les frontières entre toutes ces activités.

gold, used to be the “money-form” of commodities (before the delinking of gold by nixon in 1971)

below (in italics, as in underlined) is marx’s analysis of gold as money-form.

it is interesting, is it not, that gold is capable of both divisibility and solidness…i.e. gold, once divided, can keep its shape. stay within its bounds. once a given amount is decided upon it can be fixed, its boundaries are clear. commerce, i.e. the exchange of commodities, also likes clear, fixed boundaries. if i buy a commodity, lets say a suit, i want the whole suit, not just a portion of it, nor do i want the threads to be frayed, the pockets to be ripped open, or the buttons to be missing. clear boundaries here. no blurring, no holes, no parts missing…the contours of the suit are clear, precise, easily distinguishable. blurring boundaries are messy and blurred boundaries demand our time, the time it takes to distinguish one contour from the other. we want to sort the confusion out, put things in their proper place. make the product presentable for the buyer. but not everything respects boundaries: air, oceans, rivers, gases, bacteria, ideas, viruses, animals, languages, refugees, migrant workers, illegal immigrants… but commerce don’t like that so much, these things that cannot be contained, packaged, owned. who owns the air? …who decides who is to pay for air pollution caused by one country that goes over the border into another country, who can package these things that leak from one place into another? languages that contaminate other languages, ideas that pass from one person to another?

the furtive, as a procedure, often blurs boundaries, erases links of ownership, jumps over or under time frames, digs up graves, disobeys orders, sneaks through, disguises itself, tricks the bystander, intertwines you in its complicity, and steals. in short, the furtive, as a procedure, is counter commerce. i.e. counter private property, i.e.suspect, i.e. policed…and hence furtive.

“The truth of the proposition that, “although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver,”6 is shown by the fitness of the physical properties of these metals for the functions of money.7 Up to this point, however, we are acquainted only with one function of money, namely, to serve as the form of manifestation of the value of commodities, or as the material in which the magnitudes of their values are socially expressed. An adequate form of manifestation of value, a fit embodiment of abstract, undifferentiated, and therefore equal human labour, that material alone can be whose every sample exhibits the same uniform qualities. On the other hand, since the difference between the magnitudes of value is purely quantitative, the money commodity must be susceptible of merely quantitative differences, must therefore be divisible at will, and equally capable of being reunited. Gold and silver possess these properties by Nature. “ Marx, Capital. p. 63

maimonides, moses and al-nakawa, israel ibn, the degrees of jewish benevolence. hebrew union college, new york, 1988.

(i guess they didn’t have pockets…)

erasing ties to ownership, the thief and the sage.

“…the one who gives alms to the needy in such manner that the giver knows not to whom he gives and the recipient knows not from whom it is that he takes. such conduct exemplifies performing the meritorious act for its own sake. an illustration would be the hall of secrecy in the ancient sanctuary where the righteous would place their gifts clandestinely and where the poor people of high lineage would come and secretly help themselves to succor.” maimonides moses, and israel ibn al-nakawa, “the degrees of jewish benevolence” hebrew union college, new york, 1988.

(except the “giver” still knows herself as the “giver”, and the “receiver” still knows herself as the “receiver’, hence not the highest form of benevolence which involves creating the conditions where the receiver no longer is in the position of needing benevolence, yet in all cases the giver knows herself as the giver…which nietzsche would argue affords the giver the sensation of superiority, and hence the giving/helping is not done for its own sake but rather for the power relations it produces. (if i remember correctly i think nietzsche was talking about “helping” the poor rather than “giving” to the poor…but my memory might be wrong.)