Sometimes I like conceptual art. Like this piece above by Manzoni: the base of the world. The base of the world! It stands on nothing but thin air. It’s clever, but it’s a bit of a one liner. And after you tease out its implications — groundlessness, the world itself as a work of creation — there’s not much else, and the work itself is a bit boring. The limits of the concept impose themselves, and then a piece’s unidimensionality spells its own ruin. It becomes “cute” or “trite.”
Othertimes though a piece becomes more interesting inspite of itself. Like another one by Manzoni, “Artist’s Shit.” The gag for this one was a bit more performative than that of the base of the world: Manzoni collected his shit and then split it into 30g specimens, divided into 90 cans. He labeled each can with its contents, and then sold each for its weight in gold. Ho ho! The art world’s luminaries understand this as a comment on commodification and reification of the artist’s product — explicitly here, his solid waste. But this doesn’t really comprehend what’s going on; or it only grasps part of it. Because while there is certainly something like commodification going on here, strictly speaking our 90 cans of Manzoni’s solid waste are not commodities proper. If there were, someone else could have shat in a can and sold it for its weight in silver, and thereby driven Manzoni out of, as it were, the shit business.
So there is something else at play in the sale of art in the upper reaches. Those that shell out 50,000 GBP for a 30g, oxidized tin of what very well might be shit are after something other than commodities, and the amount they pay for something is caught up in far more complex process than its costs of production — even in the most simple picture. To get at this would require looking at the complex sequence of events and choices that lends a certain artist the aura or cachet that makes his or her work appear as a constant store of value — the rich do not spend upwards of a 100,000 dollars on one of Manzoni’s tins only to debase it by opening it up to find out just what is inside.
Commodification and reification are presupposed in the production of works like “Artist’s Shit.” But they are not what the work is about, even on a functional level. In order for the art world to function, in its semi-autonomous way, over and above the more basic and brutal labor-market, a given amount of liquidity has to be transfered to the buyers and devotees that make it up, and this transfer is effected by the motor of commodity-production. Of course this is the case. But this is not sufficient for a given art-object to be vaulted into Sotheby’s ambit. A peculiar anticipation of an object’s continued value, in spite of being a bit of shit, or a heap of junk, is what allows Manzoni’s tins to function as art. Hence there is little irony in the fact that people buy it, or a pissoir, despite both being recepticles of human waste. Not only are the buyers playing a role within a specific social milieu where there is a status attached to owning a bit of Manzoni, they are anticipating future worth.
This does not mean, either, that anything can be art. It means that almost nothing can. So you have to wonder who the joke is on.
That money is more than paper or minted gold is one of Marx’s most important insights. For him, money is a form of value, a way of determining the equivalent exchange of two disparate things. This seems to be obvious: we use money to do so everyday, its use permeates our activity, and its limits come to hold sway over the things we can and cannot do. All the same, its logic is not something that we are compelled to think about; you might even argue that we are encouraged to ignore it. Whether or not we think about money, though, its operation allows the value of what I want to be expressed at the same time that it gives expression to the value of the things I have to offer for it. I want a pizza and some beer, and I can earn a wage to purchase them; the determination of the value of each enables (and enforces) my quotidian existence in current society.
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Resilience Science has a rather interesting piece on investment banks and the like investing in food. Not only for the purpose of commodity speculation, but also in infrastructure. Not surprisingly, much of this investment is taking place in Africa: small holders are being bought out, or forced out, and vast estates are being consolidated. It has all the trappings of being v2.0 of the Green Revolution. Obviously this has all the trappings of being a Very Bad Thing. Besides this, it seems that this effort is in response to the declining profitability of mortgage backed securities, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we see a sort of financialization of food profits, with mark to market efforts and securitization of crop yields.
As the RS piece notes, effects are likely to be ‘unexpected’ and ‘novel’. That is shorthand for ‘unintended’ and ‘devastating’, if the history of like efforts is any indication.
Commodities initially appear as trivially obvious: 3M makes gaskets and they serve a particular need, hence they sell. But, under closer inspection this activity becomes increasingly mysterious. The gaskets sell because they serve a particular need, sure, but why do they sell at a certain price? To take the stock example, why is two ounces of gold worth a ton of iron; or why should the Adobe Creative Suite be worth as much as the beater rust bucket I drive around? In terms of what these objects do, there is little to relate them: a ton of iron is quite qualitatively distinct from a rubber gasket, and neither relate very well to a software program. Nor can we simply say that they are all products of an ethereal labor, since the concrete labor that goes into writing code is qualitatively distinct from the concrete labor that goes into mining ore. Insofar as we look at the natural characteristics of objects, their chemical structures and atomic numbers, there is no reason whatsoever that one should be worth anything in terms of another, any reason why a particular use is worth Y and another Z. This requires something over and above natural characteristics.
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Fred Magdoff has an article on “The World Food Crisis.” I’ve indexed the sources that he argues are leading to the increase in price of food, which is leading us toward the most significant food crisis we’ve experienced in decades if not a century:
- Use of foodcrops as biofuel material
- Increased cost of petrochemical inputs
- Increased middle class demand for meat in developing countries
- Weather phenomena (2007 Bangladesh cyclon, drought in Australia)
- Commodity speculation in effort to hedge against falling dollar
- Migration of small farmers to cities
Money initially appears as the method by which the contradictions of exchange are resolved: it is simultaneously made to represent EV and UV, thereby allowing an individual commodity to be seen as non-evaluable qualitative good and universally equatable exchange value. Hence it is seen as a means of purchase, a facilitator of exchange.
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The Beeb, well, the American Beeb, the Cnut, is talking about the food riots that are beginning to spread throughout the poor World. The article itself is light on analysis and facts, but there are a couple of sections that pop out:
The issue is also fueling a rising debate over how much the rising prices can be blamed on ethanol production. The basic argument is that because ethanol comes from corn, the push to replace some traditional fuels with ethanol has created a new demand for corn that has thrown off world food prices.
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I don’t know what the term to describe this would be — vaccuuming? slurping? — but the post I wrote last night was picked up and linked by an internet site that purports to be about techniques for commodities trading. The entire site is covered over with text adverts. Apparently the selection of data is automated; the site seems to use the technorati database to search for information tagged with “commodities,” sends out a spider to the site and snatches up a portion of the post, and then copies with a link: interesting post on commodities here. Sad, very sad, the information economy: your attention is mined. At any rate, you would be day-traders and financial parasites, welcome!
The study group I worked through the introduction to the GrundrisseContribution to the Critique of Political Economy. This week we’re going to talk about money: money is an interesting topic. It’s the object of so much desire — it is, in fact, the very object of desire, in virtue of its structural function in the economy. Sort of like the gasoline in a combustion engine. Or the oil in it. Or petroleum products in general. All of the explanation of why this is in the Contribution is incredibly opaque, which is a result, I think, of some ambiguity in Marx’s description of the use-value of the money commodity as the exchange-value of the commodities exchanged through it. This isn’t really what’s going on.
with has moved onto the
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The commodity form bears within it the general ‘contradictions’ — centers of tension, the places where structural forces work against each other — of capitalism; this is why Marx begins Capital with a detailed consideration of it. Through analyzing it, we can come to a certain understanding of of the total workings of capitalist systems, and reflect upon the way which capitalist production necessitates the use-value of products to become irrelevant to their exchange-value, and what it means when, in fact, something takes on a use-value in virtue of of being exchanged. The method required to do this, the dialectic, is distinct and intellectually demanding, and its use leads us to an understanding of other ‘positivising’ methods of inquiry that cannot properly grasp said tensions; these methods are shown to be instantiations of the very forces which work to ensure the smooth functioning of things inherently contradictory, such as the commodity form. To see this though, we must approach commodities not on the terms in which they present themselves, but according to the their ultimate logic. That is, we must approach them critically, not as if they were given to us immediately.
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