»It’s The Political Economy, Stupid!«

Following the understanding that under neoliberal rule we have moved »from imperialism to empire«, Christian Marazzi has described financialilization as the disappearance of the divide between first and third world in the traditional sense »the dichotomy between inside and outside breaks down, […] ›Financialization represents the adequate and perverse modality of accumulation in this new capitalism.‹«¹ Yet, as more and more of us do not see neoliberal capitalism as the only available project anymore, and are looking for a way out, the shows like »It’s The Political Economy, Stupid!«² ask us to notice this empire is collapsing.
The show opens with Wall Street and ends with Wall Street – at the entrance from East 52nd Street plays Dread Scott’s 2010 performance »Money to Burn«.³ In it we see the artist wearing a shirt pinned with dollar bills, which he removes from his body and burns with a lighter whilst chanting the title of the piece. On the top floor, the exhibition ends in a seminar–piece by Yevgeniy Fiks, Olga Kopenkina, and Alexandra Lerman, »Reading Lenin with Corporations« (2009). It includes a seminar room, a monitor showing interviews taken on Wall Street, and a copy of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s 1917 »Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism«. From the burning of money notes to discussing Lenin’s analysis of capital’s insatiable need for expansion, the exhibition draws trajectories that go from the market crash of the 1920’s (Isa Rosenberger’s »Espiral – A Dance of Death in 8 Scenes«, 2010–2011), to that of post–Menemismo Argentina (Alicia Herrero’s »Bank: Art & Economies«, 2011), from bankers’ mumble (Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler’s »The Bull Laid Bear«, 2012) to spontaneous dancing demonstrations in banks (anti–capitalist Flamenco group, flo6x8’s »Body Versus Capital«, 2011), from a talk–show like adaptation of a 1922 story by Fernando Pessoa »The Anarchist Banker« (Jan Peter Hammer's »The Anarchist Banker«,⁴ 2010), to a slide–show with the reuse of large retail stores and strip malls after they go out of business (Julia Christensen’s ongoing project »How Communities Are Reusing the Big Box«).
The title for the show, a quote from Slavoj Žižek’s »The Ticklish Subject«: “it’s the › political‹ economy, stupid!«⁵, is in itself a paraphrase of another quote – Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign motto: »It’s the Economy Stupid!«. This 1992 slogan defines for the curators of the show, Oliver Ressler and Gregory Sholette, the settling of neoliberal capitalism at the heart of politics; no longer an exclusively right–wing project that can be contested politically, but the only project available, with a Democrat US government subscribing to all its features: Globalization and outsourcing, Privatization and union busting, flexible work schedules and deregulated markets, a financialization of life and a general ›Genocide of the Welfare State‹. The curators describe this in a poignantly beautiful manner: »the deterritorialized flow of finance capital melts down all that was once solid into raw material for market speculation.«
The timing of the show seems to work as part of the political reality, as the famous »cunning of Reason«, which Hegel proposes in his lectures on the philosophy of history, comes to mind. He proposes that it is not by criticizing something from outside, but rather by allowing it to freely evolve its potential and thus arrive at its ›Truth,‹ that you destroy your opponent. As the neoliberal system has come to meet its own limits and inner contradictions on every level – political, environmental, social, psychological, libidinal – this show, two years in the making, can be seen as working shoulder–to–shoulder with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, simply stating that – this is the end. When discussing this Hegelian notion, Žižek claims that the »cunning of Reason«, simply takes into account the split that is ontologically constitutive of the other as it entices it to reveal its truth and by that dissolve – transform – itself. Žižek goes on to quote Hegel: »Cunning ›List‹ is something other than trickery ›Pfiffigkeit‹. ›The most open public activity is the greatest cunning‹ (the other must be taken in its truth) […] Cunning is the great art of inducing others to be as they are in and for themselves, and to bring this out to the light of consciousness«.⁶ As neoliberalism acts itself to its end by the powers of the cunning of reason, the exhibition offers the Žižekian truism on political–economy being the drive of our social and economical order, but with a twist. Set in Midtown Manhattan, at the heart of a financial and over–consumption setting, where the Austrian Cultural Forum is located, the exhibition departs from the position of the critic, and moves to that of the saboteur. This is actually achieved because of one fundamental rule that many of the works in the exhibition are aware of, that is that life, exchange, socialization, promise, belief – all things that neoliberal capitalism extracts profits from – can never be fully monopolized or colonized. They can only be shared. The cunning of reason teaches us that with regards to our current stupid political economy.