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]]>When a project is “before” Capital, seeking forms of benevolent capital, which by definition only exist buried within capitalist exploitation (across platforms and across institutions), and then fails to register with the powers that be as “of value,” there is the fall-back position of, or return to, personal capital – i.e., an existential justification for the work that redeems the work in the face of failure. Beckett’s “Fail, fail again, fail better” is of this order. Works that are of no use to Capital, while often dismissed as “neo-hermetic” (a claim often levelled at the avant-garde), will fail repeatedly in the attempt to find the necessary agency to go forward, while that forward motion will not depend entirely on external sources of benevolent capital.
“Before Capital” is not so much the test of the value of the work but a test of the merits of the work for Capital (for appropriation, expropriation, and assimilation). “Failure” before Capital is, therefore, the repeated step in the development of works in search of benevolent capital. The return to personal and symbolic capital is the return to the project as such, or to works for works. The author returns to the “Muse,” “Muse” signature gesture of the event of the emergence (incarnation) of the work. As a fictive ontology for works, “Muse” signals the cosmological, immemorial figures inhabiting the work – the constellation of forces and factors (lights, intelligences, aeons) that brought the project or work into being. “Muse” is the proverbial backstory for works.
Personal capital in search of the transpersonal inhabitation across works toward the life-work also represents not so much a banal investment of labour as the comprehensive configuration of what is irreducibly a confraternal order – origins for works always being multiple or polyvalent. Origins being half-unconscious, the conscious half is the artistic endeavour (labour), whereas the unconscious half is the name of the Muse (theft, appropriation, inspiration).
Return endlessly follows upon event, and “return” can be an inevitable aspect of the productive or generative élan of works that edge toward works for works. Event, Fall, Return (c.f., Badiou, Žižek) – while apparently setting up eternal recurrence for works – is often an element of the field of the work that is incomprehensible to authors, experienced but non-negotiable in the accounting houses of capitalization for works. Fidelity to such works (c.f., Badiou) is the key. Capital vanishes at such moments – symbolic or otherwise – and personal capital is the “zero degree” works pass through en route to archive, nominal extinction, or re-play. Cultural systems betray a half-conscious knowledge of this ancient generative economy, while it is also quite evident that the guardians and gatekeepers of cultural systems rely on this vague knowledge to manipulate cultural production in the pursuit of privileges. Avant-garde works are assimilated to forms of cultural patrimony once they are rendered harmless to patrimony or converted to historical artifacts.
What appears in this process of cyclical return from the search for benevolent capital is the delineation of the damaged ecosystems engaged – the forays into markets determining not the value of the work as work for works but the value of the work for capitalization across markets. This pernicious reduction of free intellectual inquiry to market ideology includes academic systems of exploitation (c.f., Harvey, Eagleton, Giroux) that masquerade as platforms open to all (the ubiquitous open calls), claiming to privilege works versus reputations, though increasingly these platforms spell out in excruciating detail the rules of engagement (generally formulated in language and terms reducible to “return on investment” or “deliverables”). Justification of research merit proceeds in such instances as “product development” for institutions plugged directly into external industries of one kind or another. In the Arts and Humanities, the games of expropriation via residency, fellowship, or exhibition, while indirectly playing to the vanity of all concerned, are often openly or covertly constructed according to networks of privilege that service the professoriate – the openly careerist maneuvers of key players directly linked to escalating opportunities for key players. Works for works (forms of free inquiry without imposed ideological bias) cancel this opportunistic gambit simply by existing as use-less to what is nothing other than an institutionalized form of the production of cultural capital masquerading as benevolence offered; offered nominally on behalf of authors and works. If truly “open,” such calls are benevolent insofar as they are not also ideologically sustained or “gamed” (set up in advance to bring in fellow travellers for those who act as gatekeepers). The ecosystems involved may be judged by the language games perpetuated. These games include the use of “linguistic agents” as denoted by Bourdieu et al., if the platform is sociologically biased, while any number of other “linguistic agents” may be brought into play to turn the operation toward “cultural hacking” or neo-avantgarde posturing. “Return to zero” for works qua free works is, then, the equivalent of return to resistance within the system, with the resultant electrical discharge producing new doors left ajar or new windows through which to pitch the proverbial paper airplane. That the majority of these doors and windows are electronic doors and windows is the fundamental trait for exposing the class who partake of such vectorial systems that consistently and progressively act as protective borders for privilege, and as filters for “discovery” of works to be appropriated. It is not authors who are of interest to the vectorial class and their enablers in academia and elsewhere, but works. And it is the accrual of works to the ledgers of the privileged that allows the game to move forward, with capture of works to systems the primary vehicle for the production of the matching precariat.
In most cases today truly free works are to be found outside of academia in both the accidental and the intentional wildernesses that form beyond the reach of Capital, in the most use-less of endeavors (e.g., poetry and literature). The irony is that while these use-less endeavors may undergo a renaissance or revitalization outside of academia, they will then begin to attract attention from within, and academia will attempt to reincorporate what it has formerly driven from its hallowed halls.
The extensive and insidious links between academia and various for-profit industries on the prowl for harvesting works from within academia for external capitalization is on display in the various internal and external offers for scholars to “sign on” to programs and events as guests. This includes the widening array of conferences, which may be judged or justified by their connections to industry or their distance from industry. Rarely do such opportunities offer the visiting scholar the freedom to do whatever s/he pleases. While this seems a foundational consideration for the Arts and Humanities, especially when understood as a super-discipline versus a discrete set of studies, the Arts and the Humanities historically offer two of the last places for something altogether “off the map” to be developed – e.g., works for works (orphaned or use-less works). If it is increasingly a matter of pleasing one’s masters in the age of the neo-liberalization of the so-called knowledge commons, the proliferation of networks between the art world (which has been thoroughly neo-liberalized) and academia (which is approaching complete capitulation to Capital) makes sense. Benevolent patronage may still exist within both worlds, but it will become increasingly difficult to locate until there is a widespread rebellion from within against the importation of market ideology to two worlds that once favoured free inquiry.
Atop this layer of manufactured significance for programs and platforms is the proliferation of institutes and “cross-disciplinary” activities led by scholars from within the fold of programs and disciplines that require external sources of “meaningful activity” to prop up the general lack of meaningful activity within academia other than the questionable production of platforms. These programs and platforms all substitute for research at the base, or for the absence of significance within disciplines that are internally exhausted. If PR-value reigns supreme within neo-liberalized academia, use-less works justified only by their abject and intentional uselessness will be either valorized as intellectual fashion statement or shunned as trivialities.
The ideological underpinnings of the discursive operations are generally spent generative causes that are also generally safe because they are spent causes – circularity of discursive appropriations the chief sign of the re-cycling of motivation in absence of the “Muse.” Thus, personal capital is almost always imported into academia by way of the residencies, fellowships, and conferences utilized to compensate for the moral vacuum within universities beholden to the production of degrees, the securing of reputations, and the fostering of the horizontal networks of procurement, production, and dissemination of equity that substitute for the creation of works for works. These networks are eminently careerist in nature, as are most all bespoke or custom-designed institutes, and the personnel is vested insofar as their presence delivers vertically organized and capitalized cultural goods. The conference leads to the book-publishing enterprises of for-profit companies allied with academic networks that feed the increasingly digitalized production of value (e.g., the proliferation of online journals and e-books), whereas the institutes lead to external funding by industry or non-profit organization toward the perpetuation of an ideological project (e.g., foundation grants for the mass digitalization of research, in whatever form that might take). The ideological underpinnings for such activities are in most cases crafted for public consumption as “progressive” or “liberal” causes, while they are quietly neo-liberal. The actual production of works then is incidental to the platform, and the platform is the primary means (primary venue) for leveraging works as intellectual property for regimes of privilege. “Author retains copyright” is a common refrain in most all instances of expropriation by academia of personal capital (e.g., author rights), appropriation from within or from without, while the author’s presence as co-production assistant within the networks more closely resembles a case of “work for hire” than research as such. “Author retains copyright” is relative nonetheless to the useful life of the work within the network or system of appropriation, with digitalization of works dialogically locking down all works submitted to platforms (“dialogically” in this case meaning that the work in question is the property of the author only when it is no longer of any use to the platform).
Reputations rise and fall in a vast, interconnected system that requires incessant replenishment of spent intellectual goods. Works are assimilated and mined for value (e.g., scalability) and forgotten or assimilated as fodder for the next-generation platform. Authors (and artists) are curated into oblivion and, if they are not assimilated to the machine as day labourers, replaced by the next generation of recruits trained to submit their wares in pursuit of holographic, stereophonic, or hyper-mediatized glory.
Work for works (i.e., free works) are first of all inassimilable and use-less to Capital. If they are also of no use to platforms, within the art world or within academia, they are paradoxically of maximum use for the development of alternatives. Shades of grey in this mathesis also suggest that some works might co-inhabit platforms or systems that are transitional states between parasitical and benevolent capital. Yet all such works are essentially developed on the performative-formalist side (as lived works), and they may be re-naturalized “downstream” in markets or sent “upstream” toward extant spectral ecosystems, so-called weeping meadows (c.f., Angelopoulos), where no market is to be found. In the latter case, the role of the utterly use-less work is to wear the appropriate crown of thorns – as martyred work. It is here that a Christic development occurs for works of such an order. There is no “sublunary” place of taking-place present, while the proverbial and dynamic absence of a place of taking-place ironically takes precedent. In the Arts and Humanities this empty “place” or “space” used to be called the avant-garde. The simple solution, without “scholastic” equivocation (c.f., Ockham, Scotus et al.), is the transfer of moral rights to works as such – with the knowledge commons as new-old “address” (place) for use-less works. With this transfer of rights to the commons comes the responsibility of the commons for the author or artist. Notably, collectivization without respect for the individual has been – historically – a disaster. That the disaster has occurred both on the left and on the right is well worth noting.
In the annals of literary and artistic history, for example, there are innumerable examples of such errant works belatedly assimilated to cultural patrimony. Yet they generally return only as mockery of their former selves – tidily commodified for consumption by the art and literary worlds, where they only half existed previously as aberrations (c.f., Debord, Marker et al.). What is self-evident in the age of hyper-mediatic performance for both scholarship and the arts is that works that head “upstream” will generally vanish in the process – appearing here and then appearing there, ultra-temporally, but having no “proper” home address. Chris Marker’s epistolary works are exemplary in this respect. The role of the author in such cases is transfigured by the orphaned work for works. Yet for very different reasons than the fate of authors under structuralist or post-structuralist critique (c.f., Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida), the author or artist does not exist in the multiple worlds consumed by neo-colonial capitalist conquest.
The search for benevolent capital advances with the work, on cat’s paws. The work for works inhabits multiple dimensions of socio-economic and socio-cultural intrigue simultaneously. It hovers here, and it dashes over there. It is cat’s meow and it is cat’s grin. Often it is “a grin without a cat” (c.f., Carroll, Marker). Benevolent capital approaches insofar as the work is captivating, beguiling, or reminiscent of something Capital regrets having destroyed – wildness in a sense, but primordiality as cipher for freedom from exploitation and domestication. The next-level paradox is that Capital may need that beguiling something to redeem itself – not to save itself, which is hardly in the best interest of all, but to sacrifice itself to a cause other than itself. Mimicking the sacrifice of aeons as theorized in Gnosticism, and suggesting a War in Heaven, concealed or vanquished prospects are revealed or reborn. Immemoriality and eschatology (c.f., Levinas, Derrida, Marion) reveal themselves as, secretly, one thing. Far from “immanentizing” the immemorial or the eschaton (a common complaint levelled against privileging that which formally transcends any direct relation with thought), both remain at a distance in works, effectively crossing works, and connoting the metric of the work (c.f., Agamben). Alternatively, criticism of such a nuanced view of immemoriality and eschatology indicates an aversion to non-relational works, or to works that remain wilfully unsituated or ill-situated in mere utilitarian orders. All utility is internalized, and all relations are sublated (c.f., Cacciari et al.). Notably, such works for works open onto elective nihilism, or forms of revelation and reverie (dream-states and anamnesis). The law disappears …
Can Capital step out of its own way? Can Capital facilitate its own redemption? Is the figure of benevolent capital a figment of the imagination (wishful thinking) or a figure eight within the ravages of rampant, bloodthirsty contemporary capitalism? The mining of the “commons” by Capital, while a long-standing affair, grows more desperate today as untapped resources to assimilate to the circuit of capital diminish. Additionally, there is the odd “mis-use” of the public domain or the commons, by Capital, to effectively “park” resources while awaiting a means (usually technological and legal) to convert collective capital into private capital. Rights for works as works is the corrective to this theft.
The hypostatization is evident. There is no one thing named Capital. Capital is a mask worn by souls – many waiting for another cause other than the worship of Mammon. The theological precepts are basically a-theological. There is no religion involved. There is only the hoped-for respite from centuries of hard-bitten penury for works, which always infers “for authors.” As all authors are, after all, mere day labourers, such also launches the necessary search for benevolent capital, while suggesting the transfer of rights to works, to benefit all concerned, is one way out of the present stalemate. The most abstruse work of all is to work on behalf of all. Artist and author, demoted over time to wage slave, represents Everyman. Shelley clearly knew this, while dodging creditors back in England, both before and when he drowned at sea off of Venice, Italy … Did he know it after he drowned? The life-work is a vector of another order. Certainly he left this impression.
Titian’s Hour returns at evening under the right atmospheric circumstances. The glow is spellbinding. Yet for many it is merely a postcard to mail home after a day trip elsewhere.
FINIS
Photo credit: “Trapped in the Victoria and Albert Museum,” London, England, 2018. Photo: Ishita Jain.
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]]>Benevolent capital is not benevolent capitalism, the latter a contradiction in terms or an apparent oxymoron. Benevolent capitalism would seem to not exist, as such, even under the auspices of patronage and classical philanthropy, insofar as the latter operates as exception to capitalism while the former has suffered across centuries, if not millennia, the distortions induced in systems held in thrall to Capital – pre-modern forms included. As apparent oxymoron, “benevolent capitalism” invokes all of the latent and overt games of capture Capital plays with cultural production and labour (both material and immaterial). In the case of cultural production in the age of neo-liberal capitalism, those games include the production of platforms and networks of privilege that are constantly in pursuit of “content” or “data,” arguably what neo-liberal capitalism has reduced cultural production to.
Works that resist assimilation to Capital do not necessarily need to refuse all forms of capitalization. Non-monetary forms of capital are first-order representations of benevolent capital, whereas monetizing works for works versus for exploitation and expropriation suggests the representational field where capital may take innumerable inappropriable forms – “inappropriable” signalling the presence of an older order of cultural production that has, in most cases, long since been assimilated to Capital. “No works for/before Capital” then suggests forms of cultural production that either resist assimilation and appropriation to markets as “content” or utilize those markets and “delivery systems” toward entirely use-less ends for Capital per se. To invoke benevolent capital is, therefore, to secure for works semi-archaic and immemorial forms of capitalization that do not enter into the self-serving games of Capital. Yet given the present state of hyper-capitalist exploitation, it is highly possible that all future forms of benevolent capital are to be found through the chinks in the armour of Capital.
Such then is the potential for cryptocurrency and blockchain or distributed-ledger technologies as applied to works. Works developed in this manner may draw on the latency of forms of semi-archaic benevolent capital buried within the neo-liberal capitalist machinery of the world while never being able to fully exit the circuit of Capital.
It is this paradox that introduces the necessity of a full accounting for authors and artists of the vagaries and smokescreens of ecosystems associated with publication and exhibition systems within the twin worlds of the Arts and Humanities (e.g., the art world, the literary world, and the academic world). Both worlds suffer the same indignities today, mined by Capital for value, with the author and artist orphaned in the process, or de-funded by Capital, as judgment visited upon their otherwise use-less wares. Vague promises delivered to aspiring authors and artists by both worlds suggest that half the game is the promise of privilege of the order of the privileged (the vectorial class), yet endlessly deferred, privilege always offered, by definition, at the expense of the orphaned (the artistic precariat). The invitation and temptation, then, is to join the privileged and abandon the abandoned.
Any attempt at a correction to this stilted version of mining cultural production for inherent value (with explicit value hardly the game when the vast majority of works will never produce anything resembling “return on investment” and implicit value relevant only to exploiting works across platforms) requires a singular re-definition of terms of engagement in the form of the allocation of rights – author rights transferred to works, and works transformed to life-work (works for works). Works for works, as complex, opens onto collective rights. The necessary and hoped-for transformation of rights is stalled today due only to the fact that the vectorial class (and it must be clarified that the privileged include those who are in high positions within the art and academic worlds functioning as self-anointed or self-appointed gatekeepers to platforms) refuses a key article in the history of author rights – moral rights. It is the transfer of moral rights to works by/from authors that might correct present-day imbalances, yet only if that elective renunciation of rights by authors is followed by a system that prevents the presumption of such abandoned or transferred rights to exploitation by Capital. The point of transfer is the key; for the point of transfer is where the crimes of centuries have historically taken place. This “place” is the “place of taking-place” of/for Capital, with all of the attendant, twisted Greek-Mallarméan-Heideggerean etymologies and/or lexical mystifications one might wish to muster. It is the theft of “coming into presence” or “birth to presence” (aletheia, parousia, etc.) – of the “gift of the world” and the Gnostic “sacrifice of aeons.”
In such a scenario, where and when benevolent capital steps forth, parasitical or malevolent capital will step back and away – wary of the interloper, and no doubt perplexed in the process. This is far more than mere wishful thinking because, historically, avant-garde or radical works have often had avant-garde or radical patrons, whether individuals or institutions. But this is not an instance of the re-justification or reification of the non-profit sector of civil society or anarchistic processes of barter. Nor is it indicative of a black market or the dark web. The necessary measures require an entirely new methodology for exchange, for production, and for re-naturalizing works of an otherwise abstract, universalizing, and often-abstruse kind. The key terms in this abstruse political economy become “immemoriality” and “eschatology” (the “beginning” and the “end” of/for works that have no “home” address at the time of their “incarnation” as works). This de-personalization of the work for the life-work (the life of the work) brings with it half-forgotten maneuvers and measures buried within capitalist exploitation and partly the presumption of, or basis for, so-called non-profits or confraternal orders (c.f., Polanyi, Veblen et al.). The overriding figure of privilege returns – yet privilege as rights for works. Privilege as privilegio … De-personalization leads toward transpersonalization (c.f., Tzara, Simondon); and, notably, the latter term opens up whole new prospects for works to be developed as autonomous subjects – a re-subjectivization process that will also only work for certain kinds of works.
The cryptic terms of engagement for work as life-work can only be developed existentially – en passant and in extremis. The abstruse call to works “of a certain kind” is also a call to works that counter practices associated with neo-liberalized finance capitalism. These practices function on the side of massive indeterminacy, and they take post-modern incommensurability to new heights. The irony and the pain are telltale. It is often also a neo-gothic repertoire of vampirism and sadism.
Therefore, all discursive games fall apart and the pragmatics of neo-realism collapse. There is no realism in the lower circles of Hell. Consigning souls to Hell is a fool’s errand – and such is the game of finance capitalism. Yet there is an inverse relation involved.
From Bourdieu we much launch ships to the proverbial elsewhere. Reciting and re-reciting the authorities of left critique will only favour the propagation of reputations and rhetoric. Rhetoric that is not lived rhetoric is idle and/or gratuitous. What is to be done? The Leninist question returns. Under-funded fellowships for scholars rise and fall like the seas. Revolutionary creditors hover, awaiting the crown jewels in return for financing the latest revolution to fail. Whether it takes ten years or one hundred years to fail is of no concern to creditors. Capitalism has presumed the rights of souls, and then transferred those rights to corporate fiat, which outlives mere subjects anyway, a spectral stamp with congealed blood for wax. Corporate fiat is piracy writ large – transition to enslavement for all. The work as life-work is pariah to edict, fiat, and law. This law.
The odd thing about parasitical capital is that it does not know how to produce works – it needs to cannibalize those works it can set its claws into. This is the role of the vectorial class, previously the managerial class. The odd thing about benevolent capital is that it only exists today as embedded in parasitical capitalism or as a result of parasitical capitalism – as nascent other state and/or address for works. Thus, the foremost game for works “of a certain kind” is to redeem forms of parasitical capitalism by converting them to forms of benevolent capital. What else is possible? This can only proceed incrementally, inexorably in some parallel trans-historical dimension, where the Arts and Humanities hit a primordial re-set button and everything turns golden, not unlike the evening in Venice, Italy – otherwise known as “Titian’s Hour.”
Valorous souls drop one by one, seduced by privilege. One by one becomes the thousands and the tens of thousands. Academia eats souls alive, consigning them to pits where they are enslaved in service to Research or Teaching. A few escape to alt-academia – as librarians. The art world devours works, one by one. The author or artist is left as a few bones on the desert of what used to be called the Real. Most are never heard from again, after assimilation to the carnivorous machine. Biennale, bespoke exhibition, art book, catalogue, festival – it matters not. The refuse pile at the end of the affair is almost always human refuse. Publishers devour souls, inhaling works across myriad platforms to extract data and rent, the book hardly mattering, the meta-data extremely valuable. Writing becomes a contract, the contract dictates terms, the terms are salubrious for the vectorial class. Physical book becomes electronic data, publicity machine manufactures reputations, vertical integration extrapolates maximum value across media, and celebrity status beckons or vanishes. Book returns to dust, dust breeds phantom regrets, and authors dust themselves off and rise again – reborn in another place, in another time, and in another work looking for a publisher.
To be continued …
Image credit: “Seeing and Hearing Things Again” (three-screen presentation, re-performance of “Library of Tears,” “Will It Cry?,” “Emptiness within Emptiness,” and “The End of CEPT as Viewed by Archangel St. Michael”), w/ C’est la CEPT Troupe, GIDC Bhavan, CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India, April 12, 2017. Photo: Harsh Bhavsar.
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