To live and work. in London in 2011 is to be exposed to an experience of social, cultural, political, financial, educational, economic, public and aesthetic crisis that bears no resemblance to these
specific conditions of generalised crisis that are endured by the subjects that inhabit the towns and cities and suburbs of Spain, Tunisia, Greece, Egypt, Italy, Portugal, Libya, France, Ireland, Germany, South Africa, USA and beyond. In Britain today we find ourselves walking dazed and appalled, exhilarated through an ideological junkyard that is strewn with the rubble of market fundamentalism. Around us lies the remnants of business ontology. The detritus of a bankrupt system that destroyed itself in the banking crash of September 2008. Beneath our feet lies the wreckage of many systems. The systems of financial governmentality that have possessed our throats, occupied our desires, hacked our appetites for the last 32 years.
Our coalition government is intent on restoring the power of the markets that triggered this crisis in the first place. 2011, London. Between those that sense the possibility for constructing a new culture from the wreckage of discredited beliefs. and those that want to reconstruct old privileges upon the new wreckage that runs a fault line, an antagonism that divides Britain. It is this struggle against financial dictatorship, this struggle that seeks, in whichever way it can, in whichever field it finds itself situated in, to participate in the destruction of the resurgent disaster capitalism that explains the intensity peculiar to Britain in 2011. How does financial governmentality pose as the solution to the failures that it creates?
If we don't cut the deficit, we'll never regain our competition. Austerity on competition, it is through alternatives such as these that market fundamentalism takes hold of our affects, inspires resignation, instills our paralysis, and produces powerlessness. It is these infernal alternatives that bind us to the logic of capitalist realism, to the obvious choice of having no choice except to choose between the lesser of two unlivable evils. This capture by twin infinities can be diagnosed as capitalist sorcery. Capitalist sorcery, the widespread refusal to believe that things could ever be any different from how they are now. The conviction that things have always been the way they are now.
Capitalist sorcery, a sorcereric capitaliste. According to Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Piñaré, it is our so-called modernity that prevents us from naming this condition and the fact that because we take pride in no longer believing in sorcery, we have failed to produce the necessary protections. Capitalist sorcery and capitalist realism both diagnosed with widespread belief that there is no alternative to capitalism. What is key to realise is that the term belief The term belief is itself misleading. The logic of catalyst realism does not only reside in the heads of individuals, it is externalised in the institutional practices of workplaces, education, art worlds, the media and beyond.
In his discussions on ideology, Louis Althusser cites Pascal's doctrine, kneel down, move your lips in prayer and you will believe. Psychological beliefs follow from going through the motions of complying with official languages and behaviours. This means that however much individuals or groups may have disdained or ironised the language of competition, entrepreneurialism and consumerism that has been installed in USA and UK institutions since the 1980s, our widespread ritualistic compliance with this terminology has served to naturalise the dominance of capital and helps to neutralise any opposition to it.
2011. On his blog, Pinocchio Theory, Stephen Chaviro confronts the essence of capitalism as an inhuman condition. He types, this is capital's essential project, the ever-expanding accumulation of itself, of capital. This process is both economic, that is, quantitative, and aesthetic, that is, qualitative. This goal of complete subsumption is never entirely realised, precisely because accumulation can never come to an end. Nor can we see, feel, hear or touch this project of endless accumulation, of complete subsumption. Given this imperceptibility, one way to understand the broad field of the aesthetic is as a kind of counter-magic. What happens if we follow this line of thought, posted and positive by Stephen Shavira?
If we approach the aesthetic as a series of spells, invocations, conjurations, performatives, instructions, operations, principles, methods, executable commands, capable of forcing the monstrosity of capitalist subsumption to reveal itself. An effort to make ever-expanding accumulation visible, audible, palpable. The field of the aesthetic does not act directly upon the monstrosity of subsumption. Instead, in the words of Brian W. Rogers, it lures out this monstrosity, out into the open. What if aesthetics were to be understood as bait, left in a clearing for the animal spirits of capitalism? It is to tap into the capacity of aesthetics to demoralise. To disenchant. To tempt the monstrosity of total subsumption into visibility.
To envision the monstrosity of accumulation, not as the modulation of animal spirits. But as a bestiary of spirit animals, what form might this bestiary adopt? Through the associative logic of montage, the essayistic, the film essay, the video essay, reconstructs the mystery and the puzzle of the financial system as an argument of images and of sounds. This is the essayistic as epic, as a montage of the political, able to render market fundamentalism visible as a system. A system whose horrors are indivisible from its powers of its aspiration to totality, its powers of occlusion, its forces of abstraction. If the origin of the current crisis of market fundamentalism can be located in financial instruments of such complicated construction
that even their users are said not to have understood exactly what they were and how they worked, then the implications for aesthetics, understood as that which makes visible, makes audible, makes sensible and makes public, are clear, insofar as these implications actively resist clarification, push back against enlightenment and withdraw into opacity. October 2009, Nina Power and Michelle Sayur asked the question, how does one illustrate a credit default swap? How would you shoot a video of a counterparty ready to pay up on a sketchy derivative trade? What is missing are moving images and sounds that are capable of making understandable the equations that make things happen. What is missing is a melodrama
in which algorithms are the actors and the agents whose recursive presence plays a decisive role in the fear index of financial crisis. In which algorithms are executable commands materialized in liquid crystals. Our sentient entities materialise in the blood mineral of Coltown. The financial system begins to appear. In all its monstrosity. November the 4th, evening, 1927. Eisenstein sits at his desk, wondering how to invent images and sounds for a film treatise that was informed by a libretto by Karl Marx. Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Kritik des Politischen Economien. Eisenstein writes, In America, even cemeteries are private.
100% competition, bribing of doctors, etc. The dying receive prospectuses, which read, quote, Only with us will you find eternal peace in the shade of trees and the murmur of streams, end quote. Eisenstein's notes for a film of capital were not translated into English until 1976. The translation was published in October, Volume 2, Summer of 1976, three years after the derivation of the Black-Scholes equation. This is a lecture extracted from preoccupations that impress themselves upon us, from obsessions that prey upon our exhaustions, fascinations that choose us, fascinations that pass through us,
that do not belong to us. We are seized by questions that we cannot formulate, answers that we cannot articulate, Enthusiasm that take hold of us only to leave us uncertain, unsure, unstable. From these insecurities will emerge a new work that will bear little or no resemblance to the images or sounds assembled in this evening, and yet which could not have become sensible without this articulation. Thank you.