Where and Why You Shouldn’t Read Any Further

Considering that the concept of value was the focal point of our discussion Bleibender Wert? (Lasting Value?¹), which is intended also to reflect the practice of this magazine, then we run the risk of displaying a knee-jerk, schizophrenic reaction to this topic. Involuntarily, we connect the question of values with the financial crisis; on the other hand, we respond to the question of “lasting values” in debates on art theory and methodology retrospectively, by recapitulating our long and intensive collaboration with this magazine. How do we forge a link between our experience in art-critical writing and the new forms of value appraisal that come with the financial crisis? In our past articles we have often made the case for a moment of dedication against values, for placing a “minus” before the value promised by goods and discourses, for negation. We would prefer to continue to argue along those lines, but we are unsure whether we would succeed, or if our plea would be silenced by the ongoing disenfranchisement and destruction of all social rights and structures that is concealed within the so-called recovery of markets.
So let us take a deep breath and take a look far back into the past in order to find our arguments. We would first like to quote an extensive passage from Michel Foucault’s lecture at the Collège de France on the 21st of January, 1976, in which he talks about the development of a political-historical discourse that replaced the philosophical-juridical discourse that legitimized rule in the late Middle Ages.² From that point onwards, rulers can never quite shed the suspicion that their sovereignty is based on violence rather than justice. It is a discourse of war. We will cut short the lecture at one point and offer an explanation as to why we are doing so, through which we hope to relate back to the endurance of negation in art and art-critical practice.
“When, how and why did someone come up with the idea that it is a sort of uninterrupted battle that shapes peace, and that the civil order – its basis, its essence, its essential mechanisms – is basically an order of battle? Who came up with the idea that the civil order is an order of battle?”³ Foucault describes how towards the end of the Middle Ages war became a monopoly of the State. The emergence of the discourse of war in society seems paradoxical:
“The paradox arises at the very moment when this transformation occurs […]. When war was expelled to the limits of the State, or was both centralized in practice and confined to the frontier, a certain discourse appeared. A new discourse, a strange discourse. […] a discourse on war, which was understood to be a permanent social relationship, the ineradicable basis of all relations and institutions of power. And what is the date of birth of this historico-political discourse that makes war the basis of social relations? Symptomatically, it seems […] to be after the end of the civil and religious wars of the sixteenth century. The appearance of this discourse is, then, by no means the product of a history or an analysis of the civil wars of the sixteenth century. On the contrary, it was already, if not constituted, at least clearly formulated at the beginning of the great political struggles of seventeenth-century England, at the time of the English bourgeois revolution. […]
What is this discourse saying? Well, I think it is saying this: No matter what philosophico-juridical theory may say, political power does not begin when the war ends. The organization and juridical structure of power, of States, monarchies, and societies, does not emerge when the clash of arms ceases. War has not been averted. […] The law is not born of nature, and it was not born near the fountains that the first shepherds frequented: the law is born of real battles, victories, massacres, and conquests which can be dated and which have horrific heroes; the law was born in burning towns and ravaged fields. […] Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions and order. […] peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary. […] the subject who speaks in this discourse, who says “I” or “we,” cannot, and is in fact not trying to, occupy the position of the jurist or the philosopher, or in other words the position of a universal, totalizing, or neutral subject. In the general struggle he is talking about, the person who is speaking, telling the truth, recounting the story, rediscovering memories and trying not to forget anything, well, that person is inevitably on one side or the other […] And if this subject who speaks of right (or rather, rights) is speaking the truth, that truth is no longer the universal truth of the philosopher. It is true that this discourse about the general war, this discourse that tries to interpret the war beneath peace, is indeed an attempt to describe the battle as a whole and to reconstruct the general course of the war. But that does not make it a totalizing or neutral discourse; it is always a perspectival discourse. It is interested in the totality only to the extent that it can see it in one-sided terms, distort it and see it from its own point of view. The truth is, in other words, a truth that can be deployed only from its combat position, from the perspective of the sought-for victory and ultimately, so to speak, of the survival of the speaking subject himself.”⁴
At this point we will cut short the lecture and add a different quote from contemporary social struggles: “An uprising, we can hardly even imagine anymore how it could start. Sixty years of pacification […], democratic anesthesia and administering of events have weakened in us a certain abrupt perception of reality, the partisan sense of constant war. It is this consciousness that we must regain, in order to begin.”⁵
We cut off Foucault’s lecture at this point because we find it going on to denounce society’s perception of perpetual war as the discourse of a “race war.” Earlier, Foucault speaks of the dual nature of this discourse’s inception; on one hand, the movement of the Fronde in France against the new absolutism that was beginning to take hold, and on the other, the anarchist movements during the English civil war. The aims and concerns of these movements, he says, are articulated through myths of European conquest, for example, in the way the Norman invasion and oppression of the Anglo-Saxons spurred the anti-enclosure movement in England.⁶ Their war is now described as a discourse of previously conquered social classes, as resentment against the emergence of modern state sovereignty. In the following three lectures, Foucault goes on to describe how this racial discourse finally becomes the ideology of the nation state that considers itself the enforcer of the people’s will, and which now has to protect the people, their genetic heritage, from invaders. The lectures explain brilliantly how the discourse of war becomes a discourse of race, by showing how a sort of historical inevitability is demonstrated within it. The “partisan sense of constant war” is described as a tendency leading to the crimes of the 20th century.
We seek to break with the inevitability of this ideological critique and follow a different course. In his lecture on the 4th of February, Foucault mentions briefly that techniques of colonial domination in the 16th and 17th centuries reflect back on Europe, and could have influenced the discourse of race.⁷ However, Foucault leaves us without any closer description of these colonial techniques of dominance such as war and the detention, displacement and mass murder of farmers in order to force them into industrialized work and a system of “cash crops” instead of one of subsistence.
The dual discourse of war, the war of races within society, might be a way of visualizing a force of colonial power that moves back and forth between oceans with new techniques of violence and value creation, as it is expressed by the concept of perpetual primitive accumulation. It is a historical Janus face that reiterates and in some cases generates simultaneous, perpetual, international and historically varying situations of domination. These are focused on survival, as if they were each happening for the first time: the forced displacement of people from their land in order for them to produce goods for the world market, the displaced as the crews of ships and inmates of workhouses, the murder of those considered superfluous, the control of survivors through fear. The dual discourse of war does not involve race as a point of reference for the formation of identity, but as a multi-ethnic human resource that can be made into an international proletariat.
Here we would like to refer to a discussion that we have been conducting over the last few years with the artists responsible for the exhibition project “Principio Potosí.”⁸ The discussion explores the Potosí Principle of primitive accumulation, which Marx situated in the 16th century: the industrialization of agricultural production in Europe following the surges of capital accrued through the extraction of precious metals in the colonies, and the eviction of farmers who, through the reign of terror and starvation, are finally shaped into a human resource to be used as a workforce.
However, the anti-enclosure movements mentioned by Foucault show – like so many other social uprisings against this process that occurred simultaneously in Europe and South America – that the discourse of race he describes might also be juxtaposed with a cosmopolitan social practice, specifically, that of the transatlantic proletariat and the motley masses that appeared even before the American Revolution and accompanied and “commented on” the final throes of England’s colonial power with constant riots.⁹
The birth of the discourse of war could also be read as a “history of women and reproduction in the transition of capitalism.” This history – says Silvia Federici, the second important reference point in our project – must begin “with the struggles that the European medieval proletariat – small peasants, artisans, day labourers – waged against the feudal power in all its forms. Only if we evolve these struggles, with their rich cargo of demands, social and political aspirations, and antagonistic practises, we can understand the role that women had in the crisis of feudalism, and why their power had to be destroyed […] by the three-century-long persecution of the witches. […] We can also see that capitalism was not the product of an evolutionary development […] Capitalism was a counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that emerged from the anti-feudal struggle.”¹⁰
In his lecture on the 4th of February, Foucault describes the policies of the anarchist Diggers and Levellers groups in 17th-century England: their aversion against a form of sovereignty they regarded as neither rational nor God-given, but rather as the result of a historical series of power relations.¹¹ He concludes from this that the realization of the falsehood of sovereignty implies revolts as a logical necessity. At this point he reminds us that the rioters’ imperative was not to reach a logical conclusion, to find the truth, but was a question of their very survival, as he describes it in the last quoted sentence from the 21st of January 1976 – before we cut the lecture short.
The lecture on the 4th of February concludes with a further reference to Hobbes, whose work “Leviathan” was deployed against the discourse of war, like a dog trained by one and all to slay the nine-headed Hydra, a monster that grows two heads for every one that is severed off and whose image philosophers have invoked time and again since the days of the English civil wars as an admonishment against “the riots to come.”
Hobbes worked for some time as Francis Bacon’s secretary. In the 1620s Bacon was the attorney general for the King and the author of a treatise about the Holy War, in which he describes the elimination of vagabonds and rioters as a religious duty. During the storming of London prisons by sailors and apprentices on May Day in 1640, Hobbes wrote the following dialogue;
“B: You have read, that when Hercules, fighting with the Hydra, has cut off any one of his many heads, there still rose two other heads in its place; and yet at last he cut them off all.
A: The story is told false. For Hercules at first did not cut off those heads, but bought them off; and afterwards, when he saw it did him no good, then he cut them off, and got the victory.”¹²
This dialogue helps us understand Silvia Federici’s thinking when she writes that capitalism emerged as a counter-revolution to the social movements of the late Middle Ages.

Let us not wait any longer...
So far we have placed our focus on history in order to explain our case in favor of negation through the metaphor of perpetual war. However, we find it hard to propagate this reasoning as a plausible option for action. It sounds strangely hollow in view of the discrepancy between our possibilities for action and the current political situation. Therefore, we will conclude with a series of questions.
The techniques described, tested in the colonies, are obviously still being used today. They are the classical categories of value creation, and they are currently experiencing a vehement offensive. About 70 percent of the world’s population lives on the basis of subsistence. The huge new waves of displaced farmers worldwide are due to investment capital, which is now stocking its portfolios with shares in agricultural businesses. The parallels between the statistical curves for the financial crisis and for famines since 2008 are well known, as is the emergence of new slums in Europe and the USA, which grow up next to vacant real estate where the residents have been evicted. A protest letter drafted by French philosophers is currently making the rounds that rails against the plundering of the Greek national economy by the international banks with the support of the EU.¹³ It is also useful to remember Andrea Fraser’s discovery of the coincidence between the rise in prices on the art market and growing income inequality.¹⁴ It seems as though an awareness of the enrichment accompanying the so-called crisis, and of its shock strategy for the last remaining structures of social solidarity, has arrived in the academic fields of art theory and production. But who do the protest letters and essays address? Or, to speak in the metaphor of war: whom do they attack and how can they damage those attacked?
springerin is a magazine with a comparatively large number of artist contributors. In order to criticize art, it is necessary for artists to acquire a discerning power of judgment that is normally applied in or to their work. Over the last fifteen years, through a variety of collective working contexts, we have developed research methods and political knowledge that was formerly unknown in the academies and institutions. Like all critical movements, we have also experienced the usual course of appropriation and inversion of our approach and our values: attempts at the improvement of urban public spaces became strategies of gentrification, self-organization came to be understood as business consulting for self-employment, autonomous research into political and artistic knowledge became Artistic Research and threatens to devolve into another element of repression in the Bologna process that seeks to submit every form of artistic unpredictability to a dictate of rationality. Have the propagated methods and contents been corrupted as a historical inevitability, by which criticism is transformed into a social value? And does this now silence us in the face of a global societal situation that looks far gloomier even than our dark predictions of the 1990s?
We might now plead for the creation of collective structures within which we could conduct an authoritative discussion of artistic and art-critical methods that is materialistic in the sense that it aligns strictly with current political and economic power structures. We might urge that militancy not be universalized but instead directed against our surroundings. But would this appeal be more than just another test of the patience of paper, as if self-organization and militancy are things that can be mobilized at any time?
Finally, we would like to quote the French philosophers’ appeal: “When a movement of support is woven around the world, where Internet networks buzz with initiatives of solidarity, are French intellectuals the last to raise their voices for Greece? Without further delay, multiply articles, media appearances, debates, petitions, demonstrations. For any initiative is welcome, any initiative is urgent. As for use, this is what we propose: quickly move towards the formation of a European community of intellectuals and artists in solidarity with the Greek people in resistance. If we can’t do it, then who will? If we don’t do this now, then when?”¹⁵ This might sound like idealistic salon activism. But there is one argument therein that holds strong despite all the laughable powerlessness. “If we can’t do it, then who will? If we don’t do this now, then when?”