Art/Commons

Anthropology Beyond Capitalism

Massimiliano Mollona

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786997005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

Art/Commons is the first book to theorise the commons from the perspectives of contemporary art history and anthropology, focusing on the ongoing tensions between art and capitalism. This study is grounded in an analysis of contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, which the author describes as practices of commoning, based on co-production, participation, mutualism and the valorization of reproductive labour. Mollona proposes a novel theoretical approach to current debates on the commons, and shows that art can provide both a language of anti-capitalist and post-colonial critique as well as a distinctive set of skills and practices of commoning.

Part I

TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY OF ART/COMMONS

PROLOGUE

This text discusses the conditions of life under capitalism and art’s contribution to it. I define capitalism as a movement of systematic abstraction and reification of life culminating in its capture by the commodity form (that is, in the monetization of all that is human and non-human) and in a class system polarized between those who make a living out of other people’s labour and those who survive by selling their labour power. Entangled with imperialism and colonialism, capitalism is a violent process of occupation, devalorization and annihilation of life based on the social construction of a racialized and sexualized ‘other’. That is to say, every capitalism is racial and patriarchal.

I frame the relationships between art and political economy through anthropology, particularly Alfred Gell’s seminal book Art and Agency which looks at art as a system of social actions and considers artefacts like people, that is, endowed with the power to affect and be affected and hence as relational beings. Going beyond a certain Western anthropocentrism, I discuss art in terms of ‘flow of matter’, partly outside human control,¹ multisensory and embodied in different human and non-human media.² I define Western art as a historical attempt to bypass the conditions of life under capitalism (La Berge, 2019) – by replacing ugliness with beauty, material enslavement with abstract contemplation, competition with a hierarchical system based on spiritual enlightenment – but one which, in fact, provides the conditions for capital’s social reproduction.

The aim of the book is to sketch a general theory of commons, agency and art, based on some practices and ontologies of movement, creativity and beauty celebrated by non-Western societies and in black radical philosophy, to mount a critique of the alienated political economy of life under capitalism, and to sketch the contours of a non-alienated and ‘good’ life.³

Movement is the way humans come to valorize, understand and reproduce life. In movement we hunt and are hunted; return home and become strangers; communicate with our parents when still in the womb; relax, work, trade in the market, and generate images of each other in fleeting encounters. Dwelling in movement, resisting it slightly and folding it into patterns that return, we carve out practices and forms of living. But countering movement are the enclosures – physical or immaterial – set up by those in power with the aim of extracting value from them. The issue of how to animate, immobilize and choreograph people was once the domain of gods, then of kings in their thinking around questions of sovereignty and limits to their subjects’ autonomy, and lastly of the bourgeoisie, who had the opposite problem of how to enforce movement and make it productive.

Western epistemology and historical forms of ‘governmentality’ revolve around constructed hierarchies between agents endorsed with different degrees of animacy.⁴ During infancy we learn that humans are superior to objects because the latter lack the power to move on their own. We cease to be transported and moved by them and use them just instrumentally, as tools or commodities. We also learn that we are separate individuals with a separate capacity for movement from our parents and siblings and from the other entities that exist outside our bodies, which we call environment. We learn that this disembodied and lifeless environment is a limitless resource to be exploited and used carelessly. Moreover, through movement we learn to control our emotions. By moving closer and travelling into other bodies we identify and empathize with the other. By pulling back we cut social relations and create emotional distance.

Thus, under capitalism we gain agency, by disentangling, distancing and severing ourselves from life’s sensuous movement, and simultaneously, internalizing, entrapping and enclosing this movement within our individual bodies. In other words, we become free by neutralizing and immobilizing all that surrounds us.

I argue that by abstracting, extracting and freezing life through systematic enclosures of humans and non-human entities, capitalism is a speculative process which creates value negatively and through its opposite: that is, through waste and annihilation. Examples of capitalist enclosures that devalue what they enfold are factories, private land, prisons and intellectual patents. The negative and speculative logic of capital is also the logic of Western art, which de-functionalizes, neutralizes and renders inoperative everyday objects and social relations by turning them into abstract – material or mental – images/commodity forms, with the aim of reproducing existing class relations. If the violent physical enclosure of objects, nature and people is the precondition for primitive accumulation, it is through the abstraction of art and the unpaid labour of artists that capitalism ‘puts the soul of the beholder/proletariat to work’. A royal portrait by Titian beautifies the colonialist; a monument to the unknown soldiers justifies imperial expansion; a photo of a working-class slum legitimizes its clearance. Hence, I consider art as ‘capitalism’s double’ – the bourgeois ideology of aesthetics as a separate realm of life is the double of the bourgeois ideology of the separate realm of economics and the figure of the artists is the double of the Homo economicus.

But with Adorno, I am also intrigued by the magical power of Western art in constructing fictional spaces in which images are entrapped, neutralized and frozen – and yet they also appear to be in motion. Thus, I consider Western bourgeois art to be the magical technology of entrapment of movement associated with the capitalist mode of production. Moreover, I locate the origins of ‘modern’ bourgeois art and economics in the encounter between capitalism and colonialism when, as well as the development of the North being premised upon the stillness and underdevelopment of the South, the material and cultural resources extracted from the South re-enchanted and animated the European world.

The supposedly neutral realm of aesthetics, as envisaged by Kant, in fact transposed indigenous categories into figures of European modernity against the backdrop of racial domination.⁵ Sublime works of art mediated between the magical fetish of indigenous communities,⁶ with the power to animate or freeze people, and the capitalist commodity; the de-commodified regime of the circulation of art mediated between the free circulation of objects in indigenous gift-giving and the free market; the ‘unproductive’ labour of the artist mediated between slavery and ‘free’ wage labour; the aristocratic virtuosity of the artist/master mediated between the magical power of Amerindian shamans or the Afro-Atlantic priests – which animated the inanimate or conversely made people stand still like sculptures or objects – and the capitalist master; the ethnographic museum mediated between the regime of production of the plantation and the Taylorist factory.

Of course, the whole idea of kings, managers and artists having the power to control the movement of their subjects and beholders is not only authoritarian but also ethnocentric. In a non-capitalist and non-Western world, value is relational and does not stem from autonomous and individual gestures. On the contrary, personhood is dividual and fractal rather than individual and self-contained, and individual gestures are interruptions of movement – holes in the communal texture.

Indeed, countering the movement of capital are the acts of commoning, the pooling and sharing of resources for the reproduction of life in common. I call this socialist and postcolonial space where knowledge, gestures and social relations go towards the reproduction of the commons ‘art/commons’. Art/commons is the reproductive labour of shamans, storytellers or priests, revealing the continuous and unbroken temporality and the unfolding social texture out of which humanity emerges.

Movement and the political economy of life

‘A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing. They would not laugh at him, I imagine, could they suppose that the whim had suddenly seized him to sit down on the ground. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary.’

– Bergson, H. Laughter, an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

How many times have we stumbled, slipped or fallen and, in the act of falling, noticed the suppressed laughter of the occasional witness?

For Bergson, laughter is the automated response to witnessing someone moving clumsily, mechanically and inelastically and losing control of his or her body. It is a detached echo without feeling – purely mechanical – that reverberates contagiously and generates ‘its own closed community’.

Indeed, life under capitalism demands that our bodies be continuously in sync, tense and infinitely elastic – as consumers, producers, friends, parents or partners. To lose control, to stumble, to grind to a halt – like a broken machine – is punished with laughter. Unlike Kleist’s puppets or the automata of classical antiquity, whose fall had a precise arc of movement and a weightless grace, the fall of the exhausted capitalist individual is laughable because it always contains an attempt to resist, a barely perceptible countermovement, which is then suppressed in the act of falling. Charlie Chaplin, the anti-hero of modern cinema, falls, lags behind and moves in awkward quivers and spasms, jamming and jarring, together with vagrants, children, women and the lumpen, against the smooth flow of industrial capitalism in cuts, close-ups and fades which, as Walter Benjamin observed, keep the audience in a state of irritable suspension.

It seems that the great political controversies of our time – the unrestrained flow of migrants and refugees, or the free movement of suspected terrorists; labour and capital deregulation; forced exile, intergenerational mobility and anti-immigration borders; intellectual property rights, economic protectionism and cultural appropriation; mass incarceration, gentrification and slummification – are fundamentally struggles over movement – that is, over the real or imagined consequences of the unrestricted flows of objects, people and knowledge in an environment that is also continually moving and transforming. For some, movement, or the lack of it, underpins a new kind of global class polarization, pitting a mobile, cosmopolitan, multiculturalist and financialized elite against a socially and geographically bounded working class which is also increasingly localist, nativist and xenophobic.⁷

In a polemical exchange with Toni Negri, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that the (ab)use of the term ‘movement’ by left-wing scholars betrays their lack of trust in democratic institutions including the role of ‘the people’.

But I argue quite the opposite: that the emergence of capitalist institutions – centralized states, factories, land, money, machines, finance, markets, nuclear families and even some versions of ‘the people’ as fictitious political subject – marks the end of political movement. These institutions lead to violent physical and mental enclosures and a stasis that goes against life. Beyond its fictitious ideologies of movement, autonomy and freedom, the world of capitalism is enclosed, frozen and solidified.

I also argue that outside capitalism, the human condition is experienced as a relational flow, whereby the lives of people and those of non-humans and their environments are deeply entangled. But as much as humans strive to enter ‘the flow’, they also fear oblivion and self-annihilation and develop institutions and support structures – families, clans, congregations, markets, armies or states – that make their ‘selves’ unique, memorable and even immortal; hence, they block the flow and cut the social network. But it is the interests of the rich that these institutions are built to protect. The autonomy and freedom of people and the closure and fixity of their institutions are in constant tension so that the outlines of personhood and human agency need constant redefinition through the lenses of religion, art or economics.

Anthropological literature shows that throughout history, commons have strived to challenge, break and socialize the ossified human institutions of kinship, clans and states (the phantasmatic embodiments of capital) and their control by male elders, and that countering such movement of commoning, colonial capitalism has imposed even stronger and more violent boundaries and enclosures locally, through various versions of the market ideology.

The anthropologist Marcel Mauss understood that movement is a central component of how societies are organized – of the ‘political economy of life’. In the non-capitalist societies he describes in his book The Gift (1950) it is believed that all organic and inorganic beings are endowed with movement and that objects and people should circulate openly and freely. In this context, gestures of permanence – gestures which put things and people back into circulation and keep the flow open – are more valued than gesture of impermanence – that is, the ‘productive’ gestures that carve objects, wealth and individuals out of the relational flow of life. But these impermanent gestures and their agents remain invisible, as they partake to a world in movement. In other terms, in non-capitalist societies, there is no separation between productive and reproductive labour, since they are part of the same principle of productivity – or ‘vital energy’ (hau) – of social relations.⁸ In these non-capitalist zones, life is relational and in motion but experienced as a ‘steady state’ (Bateson, 1942) and without hierarchies.

Unlike those societies, capitalist societies set a high value on those impermanent – ‘productive’ – gestures that freeze movement, block circulation, cut relationships, and build borders and boundaries. This forced separation between productive and reproductive gestures creates an inverted relationship⁹ between humans and things. Capital (money, land, machines or commodities) is the invisible energy that puts humans in motion and gives to the bourgeoisie the power to compartmentalize life, freeze movement, and make and cross thresholds. Labour consists of those humans who – disentangled from circulation, emptied out of life, excluded from relations and left without movement – exist only in the abstract and lifeless commodity form.

Thus, the dialectic of movement and stasis and the social construction of hierarchies based on differential forms of animacy and ‘geontopower’ (Povinelli, 2016) are the central dimensions of the political economy of life under capitalism. The living machines, commodities and money of the capitalist cosmos push people and nature violently into the background as they forcibly move to the foreground. Alienation is the state of consciousness where objects, machines and money attack humans with overbearing force – rendering them motionless, helpless and abstracted. This splitting between a frozen humanity and a moving capitalist cosmos is never resolved. Existing in-between hollowed-out existences and enchanting virtual realities, the capitalist ‘individual’¹⁰ oscillates between depression and aggression, hard work and overconsumption, acceleration, impotence and stasis.

Under the capitalist spell, the inanimate becomes animate and the animate dies out. Ossified humans, objects and organic matter circulate in remote markets, while capital parasitically roots itself in the micro-texture of everyday life, becoming increasingly vibrant. The more capital embeds itself in the material texture of life, the more extreme is its movement of objectification, dehumanization, expulsion and abstraction, in the forms of xenophobia, sexism and homophobia. The greater the dehumanization, the stronger the force of expulsion and the broader the trajectories of capital circulation. Capital’s enclosures are holes in the relational texture of life out of which value originates negatively as ‘anti-value’ (Harvey, 2018). The dazzling movements and the vitalism of capitalism are nothing more than an optical illusion generated by the fall (often mistaken for progress or self-determination) of the capitalist subject through the holes, cuts and rips in the web of life.

Yet, for Castoriadis (1994), human imagination has a magmatic logic – egalitarian, utopian and anti-capitalist – that continuously strives to destroy human enclosures, consolidations and institutions and to restore movement (Haiven, 2018). The figure of the magma prefigures revolutionary societies – based on forms that are also formless, closures that remain open, collectives sharing autonomy and a movement that never ceases or disperses. The magma is the threshold between movement and stasis – between the flow that erases differences and liberates people, and the institutions that protect them but also occupy their spaces and freeze their development. For Castoriadis, humanity’s magmatic logic is tragic, as humans are the only living creatures who can imagine the horizon of their own destruction.

COMMONS

Commons are worlds in movement (Stavrides, 2016). They are communities that create forms of life in common and that together produce and share and are continuously transformed. The term ‘commons’ can signify three things: (1) a pool of natural and/or human resources, (2) a community of people with reciprocal and sharing relations and (3) acts of working together towards the reproduction of the community (De Angelis, 2017). It is only when these three dimensions come together that we have real commons. ‘Commons’ also implies specific forms of participatory governance (collective monitoring and conflict resolution, self-determination and nested levels of authority) reflecting the practical urgencies, the grassroots knowledge and the embodied skills of the commoners. In spatial terms commons are neither private nor public – neither collective nor individual. They are relational thresholds and spaces of radical openness reflecting the autonomy of the collective. Affectively, they refuse ideological forms of identification and belonging and the cynicism or ‘cruel optimism’ of capitalism. They demand fugitive attachments, precarious affects; silent, sensuous and embodied knowledge production and continuously shifting and co-evolving relations.

The movement of the commons wants to break the ossified life enclosures produced by the capitalist institutions of money, work, property and market consumption and the associated ideologies of scarcity, competition and self-interest. But commons cannot exist in isolation from capitalism (Stavrides, 2016). For instance, the egalitarian societies described by anthropologists Clastres (1974), Overing (1975) and Graeber (...