Economy of Love

An Economy of Love reflects on and gives some context for our project Capital at Tate and the Bank of England Museum. It was first printed in Economising Culture: On The (Digital) Culture Industry in 2004.

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An Economy of Love

In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed an influential critical theory that analyzed the effects of new forms of mass culture on society. Adorno and Horkheimer suggested that in a society driven by relationships of production, there was an inevitable drive for capital to extend itself into leisure, consumption and communication, and eventually the space remaindered by labour—that of culture—would begin to obey the rules of production just like any other industry. Through this trajectory, they reverse the traditional liberal view of culture within society; the evolution of capitalism through culture could no longer hold the promise of freedom, but offers only ever tighter discipline and domination. Adorno and Horkheimer’s influential thesis has passed into common knowledge, but there is another, perhaps an even more sinister vector we would have to add to their trajectory. In recent years, as much as culture has become a re-productive industry, due to the shift in emphasis from the manufacturing of material goods towards the sale of intangible products like services, information and loyalty, there has been a seductive cultural ambition emerging in the ‘economy’. The new ‘cultural’ status of the economy has become a mirror reflection of the economically determined character of culture; the ‘market’ has become an aesthetic experience in and of itself.

If capital dissolves the historical dialectic between work and leisure, production and culture, or production and consumption then many of the traditional theoretical tools bequeathed by Karl Marx for modeling our political economy – like Labour Value or purposeful rationality- loose their critical purchase. Labour might now be reproduced for the sake of the reproduction of labour itself – like paying subsidies to farmers not to harvest their produce. The much derided sociologist Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993) attempts to develop new theoretical tools to deal with what he considers as ‘the structural revolution of value’. The hypertheorist Baudrillard reaches far back to archaic forms of symbolic exchange, and particularly the gift, to animate forces capable of contesting the power of contemporary capital. Through money, commodity exchange establishes arbitrary quantitative differences between things, expressed as the price someone is prepared to pay; it’s an abstract system of general equivalences. It’s this arbitrary equivalence that enables capital to infect all spheres of a given society, and that allows Baudrillard to make the leap to de Saussurian linguistics by characterising capital as predicated on semiotic exchange. In absolute contrast gift or symbolic exchange establishes personal qualitative relations between the people transacting. While money cancels obligations between people and things, gifts establish obligations between people through things. Within commodity or semiotic exchange the desire for the object – let’s imagine some beautiful shoes- is an extension of the subject extinguished at the point of consumption, the gift object fuses the subject to another through relationships that can never be disentangled, exhausted or made equitable. In many respects the gift is the source of the very idea of an economy itself. While the ideal gift is replete with love and generosity – like blood donation - the gift also carries a destructive power. The unreciprocated gift is a constant reminder of indebtedness, and if the gift cannot be forgotten – and it can never be forgotten- it turns vengeful and nurtures hatred; those who receive a gift are always beholden to the giver.

On Capital

Our project Capital was developed at Tate Modern (May-October 2001), aiming to reflect the Tate’s immediate environment, its geographical location, the social and cultural environment in Southwark, and more generally London. The ambition and power of the Tate is made evident in its different departments and components: Tate St Ives, Tate Liverpool, Tates Britain and Modern, the vast stores in high-security but non-descript industrial buildings in south London, the archive of the artworld that it is buying from artists, galleries and other institutions, the best art library in Britain, huge conservation department, vast art handling, aggressive publicity and development, and its huge educational ambition – from working with teachers and schools, to conferences with internationally renowned writers, historians, theorists and artists. The practice of exhibition, the most public of faces of Tate, is a mere sliver of its activities. With its huge cultural ambition and image in the public consciousness, the Tate may resemble in some ways a central bank: a central bank in a different kind of economy, what Baudrillard and others designate as a symbolic economy; something perhaps like the Bank of England.

Bank

The Bank of England is the banker to the whole British financial system and also plays a major role in structuring global monetary relations. This major role is essentially as the ‘lender of last resort’. Which means the Bank will decide to rescue an ailing financial institution if its economists fear a systemic collapse, or a catastrophic loss of confidence in the whole British or world financial system. The role as ‘lender of last resort’ gives the Bank the authority to guarantee the necessary trust and confidence, to secure the various interlocking domestic, foreign commodity and financial markets. In short, it regulates or distributes trust and confidence through these various economies, by managing the availability and price of debt. Effectively it adjusts the cost of borrowing to accelerate or decelerate the flow of capital debt into the markets, with cuts or raises in interest rates. And this debt, this black hole, this lack that the Bank manages the price of, is principally the governments.

Managing the price of government debt was the function that founded the bank in 1694. When William of Orange and Queen Mary jointly ascended the throne of England in 1689 they needed cash money to continue the war with France in William’s homeland of the Netherlands. The government Exchequer declined, so a group of people got together to form a joint-stock company and on-leant money to the king in return for the loan with interest, but also (eventually) for a royal charter to enable the fledgling company to issue paper notes. The Bank, later to become the Bank of England is founded upon a debt, and the continuation of this debt, or the continuation of the repayment of this debt, is the motor of our present domestic and international financial economies. It would be fair to say that our global financial structure is fueled by debt repayments.

The rise of the joint stock company in the 17th Century coincided with new ways of capitalizing assets through extending credit, and creating debt; like the speculation in all manner of commodities - from slaves to tulips, and the investment in various immaterial potentials - like New Worlds. Debt, the evil twin of credit becomes a key feature in the imaginary of the 17th Century, it’s a figure of anxiety because there are terrifying debtors prisons, and yet it’s a source of hope; it can drive a whole nations economy.

Linked to the cost of loan to the king, was the Bank’s demand to issue notes "paper money" in return for a Royal Charter. Previously all value found its form, as, or in relationship to gold. Coin for instance would embody the actual value in material, as that depicted on its face. These new paper notes, colloquially referred to as 'imaginary money' had little intrinsic value but were contractual agreements against which objects or services could be bought or sold for the value represented. Of course these paper promises were backed by gold in the vaults. The ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds’ printed –and still printed- on British paper notes implied that you could present the note at the bank and retrieve your ten pounds of gold. Paper money linked to credit was in its social impact like the internet of the 17th century. It multiplied previously untapped sources of value because Government debts could be incurred against assets such as stocks of merchandise, or even potential stocks, tax receipts, revenues on land or commercial contracts, and money issued against these potentials. These new, let’s call them ‘obligations’ against which credit or ‘imaginary money’ could be advanced and distributed speeded up and exponentially expanded the economy, to all intense and purposes ‘doubled the effect of our coined Money’ . Money became backed by a collective act of faith, trust and obligation.

The Bank began to undertake what is called a ‘fiduciary issue’, it’s a term to denominate paper money in circulation which is no longer backed by bullion in the vaults ; money which is authorized by other paper promises, to pay, sell or loan services, debts, trades and obligation at some point in the future. It’s clear that the dematerialization of value from gold to paper was continuing out into new instruments and technologies. The first telegraph was installed between the bank in London and another in Hamburg in 1845 to swap stock and currency prices; the first Atlantic telegraph in 1858, and by 1877 telegraphic transfers had overtaken the Bill of Exchange as a means of inter-government remittance. These are the roots of our virtual money, as communication accelerated the means by which value is transacted- the first credit card introduced in 1950 – trust and confidence moves from the material object, to the institutions that evolve to construct, guarantee and manage value through particular economies. Released from the post World War II, Bretton-Woods agreement in 1971, and devolved of political management during the unprecedented ‘ free market’ ideology of the 1980’s, financial markets have grown exponentially in their size, ubiquity and liquidity. The current scale of the principle markets that trade currency, bonds, stock, derivatives and commodities, are staggering. For example the turnover on the currency markets alone are estimated at 1trillion dollars a day, which means that in two months the volume of trade dwarfs the annual turnover from manufacturing and retail of the entire planet.

And yet, ironically, the dematerialization of financial value has accelerated the penetration of the ‘market’ into all aspects of contemporary life. Into healthcare, education, transportation, culture and broadcasting which - in Britain at least - were previously State funded and so protected from the vagaries of the ‘market’. And even if the use of money is inappropriate as a disciplinary system, our ever expanding cultures of audit, service, quality assurance and account use the language of capital to regulate all kinds of social exchange.

Values expressed as money haunt everything; a punch line in a popular TV advert suggests ‘we are all bank managers now’ and another that ‘we are all fluent in finance’ . So, as the signs for financial value become increasingly vast but immaterial, does the central Bank’s role as guarantor grow inversely to compensate?

Tate

On the other side of the same coin/note, would it be possible to situate the Tate - through its ambition and constant expansion - as the principle institution in a parallel symbolic economy? Like the Bank, Tate connects with a vast network of other institutions and agencies; from museums, galleries, curators, collectors, dealers, to various funding and sponsoring bodies both nationally and internationally, that make up the global economy of art. Does Tate guarantee the integrity and value of the artworks - the objects, images, experiences and knowledge it stores, collects and distributes within this economy? And, in a close parallel with a central bank, is its basic currency becoming increasingly insubstantial, and difficult to represent - artworks and images are dissolving into digital media, fieldwork and activism? If artworks are indeed becoming less materially present -partly as a consequence of artistic practice, it also stems from the dissemination of ‘aesthetic experience’ beyond the regulated symbolic economy, out into the culture of promotion, sponsorship, branding, Cities of Culture status, economic regeneration, advertising and marketing. Like the Unilever Turbine hall commission at Tate Modern, Egg the online banks ‘live art’ sponsorship at Tate Modern, and Tate have also issued a range of paints through the B & Q DIY superstores.

Clearly, values expressed through image and information haunt everything. And, as the signs of aesthetic value become increasingly immaterial, does the Museum’s role as regulator and guarantor grow inversely to compensate?

If the Tate and the Bank have more similarities than differences, there is a major structural difference. The Tate was founded by a gift from Sir Henry Tate, in 1887. From a family of sugar refiners and slave traders, Sir Henry bought the rights to manufacture sugar cubes, and like many 19th Century merchants made so much money he did not know what to do with it; he founded hospitals, colleges, libraries, and collected works of art . And again, like many wealthy collectors, he donated his collection of modern British art to the nation as a gift when he neared the end of his life. He also donated funds to build a new gallery to house the collection on the site of an old penitentiary at Millbank - now Tate Britain - on the Thames in London. And although it was officially called the Gallery of British Art, it inevitably took its founders name; is that our reciprocal gift to cancel a nations debt to Tate?

The Gift

The contested idea of the gift has been a central theme in anthropology since Marcel Mauss’ seminal publication The Gift (1950) and more recently its influence has been profound in the other social sciences. Mauss’ work on the gift – a gift received by Baudrillard and retuned in Symbolic Exchange and Death - proposes an economy outside or alongside of the calculations encouraged by the purely financial - the gift economy predates money and yet has not been erased by its presence. Receiving a gift triggers the obligation to reciprocate; the counter gift necessitates a return, and so on, endlessly. Pierre Bourdieu’s reworking of the idea of the gift suggests that one of its astonishing characteristics is our ability to ‘misrecognise’ giving as a disinterested gesture, we pretend it’s replete with charity; while actually it’s a gesture of power and domination. If the gift is surrounded by indebtedness and obligation, these are contractual agreements which cannot be recognised as such, and so the ‘return’ of the gift is left unspecified. Therefore an economy founded on gifting is based on the misrecognition of the financial value, or the social and cultural force that the gift entails, it is an un-economic economy; a symbolic economy.

Clearly the Tate and virtually all other public museums and galleries are completely indebted to private, public and corporate gifting; most public collections are the result of endless private gifts of art, and many public institutions rely on financial gifts to meet exhibition and running costs. These patterns of gifting bind cultural institutions into economic networks of obligation and indebtedness, obscured from public scrutiny. And this in itself is further complicated by the enormous growth in sponsorship: exchanges where some of the repayments on the apparent gift are specified - my logo on your publicity - but others as with the true gift are left unspecified . In an economy of value represented by the movement of money, a debt guarantees a contractual and interested return. That’s why a loan is never misunderstood as a gift. As debt drives our financial systems, the gift is at the heart of our cultural economies.

In the Reading Point on Level 5 West at Tate Modern and in the Bank of England Museum, at unspecified times during the day a visitor might be approached by a gallery or museum official. ‘This is for you’ will accompany the presentation of a beautifully wrapped limited- edition print.

With such a simple gesture, habituated museum visits (the cool aesthetic exchange between an audience and an artwork or exhibition) was transformed into emotional exchange between the visitor and the institution. Curators, administrators, maintenance people, sales staff and others who nominated themselves to give away the gift found themselves trying to explain what they were doing, or, what they thought was happening. And the chosen visitors wonders ‘Why me’? or those not chosen but watching the giving wonder ‘Why not me’? The work of the work of art resides in these encounters, this moment of critical reflection, where the visitor and the representative of the institution negotiate the nature of the exchange; the very nature of the ‘work’ of the work of art.

The gesture of authorising the giving of the gift in the project Capital, was using public money and giving it back (with interest?) to the anonymous tax payer or visitor; to those whose contributions - like that of the blood donor - go unacknowledged and unreciprocated because their contributions are not the calculated bequeathing or sponsorship of the wealthy and famous, but the invisible support of a truly disinterested generosity.

An economy of Love

The intention with the issue of the gift in Capital, and by extension to all those individuals that enter into its orbit - through rumour, publicity, the project, or even this text - was to initiate an engagement with some sense of the social imagination, and to set in motion a series of future encounters or economies; each beautiful print-gift might trigger unpaid debts or cancel others, perhaps it will encourage acts of generosity or love, and that these are obligations have no reciprocal object other than the economy over which the institution through which they received the gift, preside over. Is this the root of a ‘public good’, the commons, the welfare state, and culture itself?

Through the issue of the gift in Capital, the artwork becomes nothing other than a temporary point of punctuation, relevant for those that encounter it in shifting fields of value, attention and exchange. Such artworks are not points of origin or termination but nodes in a network and site of exchange. As huge areas of social life are spiraling into abstraction - largely as a result of the complexity of our globally networked economies - the most basic functions of our daily life, the simplest purchase involves lines of debt and credit, chains of labour relationships and complex supply routes; of materials, capital, images, aspiration and information which circle the globe. If art has traditionally been able to make visible, and give form to the most subtle yet powerful of beliefs, it is understandable therefore that the most ambitious contemporary art would seek to engage with these immaterial forces.

In networked economies the exchange of accumulated value as capital, whether cultural or financial, has becomes slippery and complex. It is no longer clear where the creation of value, the foundation of political economy, fits into our accelerated exchange of signs, services and information. Potentials manufactured in cultural, entertainment and creative industries like Museums and Galleries merge into Public Relations, Development and Sponsorship and produce profit’s, profits of all kinds for Advertising, Retail, Branding and Consultancies. These economies emerge, function and then dissipate, only to be reformulated elsewhere in a slightly different format; like a credit-rating. But what is clear is that art is no longer a luxury by-product of financial capital, but central to these ‘new’ economies, it’s the place where the symbolic economy interfaces and has the potential to interrupt the frictionless running of the merely financial.

So, the financial expert can no longer ignore the force of ‘aesthetic’ or ‘cultural’ experience’, and likewise, the artist cannot be ignorant of the forces of capital, as they increasingly merge with, dissolve and influence the very terrain on which artists are encouraged to work. This is not merely to acknowledge that art is bought and sold, or that artists should be conscious of a ‘market’, but to recognize that exchange is a powerful aesthetic object in and of itself. Clearly capital, as an index of creativity is peerless. The formal structures that frame different economies, their institutions, rules, restrictions and subsidies give form to exchange, and through Marx’s famous extrapolation, the social and creative relations they facilitate.

To contest these forces we have to learn to have an interest in disinterestedness, and invest in a generosity that is not calculated. The gift has the potential to contest the economizing of culture, the reduction of all exchange to financial calculation. Through giving and generosity, economic domination is transformed into mutual dependence, kindness, devotion and love.

1. See the US debt clock

The United States needs foreign investment of around $505.6 billion dollars a year to service this debt. Wthout this investment, the US and eventually the world economy would slowly grind to a halt.

2. Briefing paper World Financial Markets J.P Morgan 10th December 2002

3. Britain’s National Debt was £12 million in 1700 and is currently estimated at £470 billion.

4.The philosopher Michel Foucault in The Order of Things suggests that money is ‘(a) privileged instrument within the domain of representation’ (195)

5. Political economist Sir William Petty (1862) quoted in From A National to a Central Bank Bank of England Publication, undated.

6. Britain removed itself from the Gold Standard in 1931. The Gold Standard was a monetary system between trading nations in which the unit of account is a fixed weight of gold. Typically under a gold standard paper money circulates as a medium of exchange but the issuer makes it convertible into gold on demand.

7. The Bretton Woods system of international economic management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the major industrial states in July 1944. The agreement anchored national currencies to the dollar, linked the value of the dollar to the price of gold and in many respects it replaced the Gold Standard.

8. Britain’s principle representative at the Bretton Woods conference was the brilliant economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes went on to found and become the first chairman of the Arts Council of Britain in July 1945

9. Personal debt in Britain has broken through the £1 trillion (£1,000,000,000,000) barrier and is increasing by £1 million every four minutes; the interest we pay on this debt is running at £6 billion every month. see credit stats

10. We have little interest in the financial value of art-objects, it’s obvious that everything can evolve a price and grow a market; even cans of shit.

11. See our previous project Free Trade at the Manchester Art Gallery

12. Was this a guilt-debt of a wealthy capitalist being repaid? What network of obligation was Sir Henry Tate canceling, or setting in motion?

13. Particularly the essay Marginalia-Some Additional Notes on the Gift in The Logic of the Gift (231)

14. see particularly chapter 5 Wu, Privatising Culture (122)

15. Recently, there has been a popular eruption of the symbolic power of the gift characterized by the struggle surrounding Open Source software and the astonishing growth of peer-to peer file sharing networks of exchange. Commons based peer production, where everyone contributes to a collective good has reanimated a gift based economy to produce global systems and services. The Symbolic Exchange advocated by Baudrillard cannot be better exemplified than by Apache web server software which is currently running %67 of the world wide web, the open-content collaborative encyclopedia wikipedia, or the fastest growing operating System –Linux

Printed in Economising Culture: On The (Digital) Culture Industry the first DATA browser, a series that presents critical texts that explore issues at the intersection of culture and technology.

Bibliography

Bataille, George (1988) The Accursed Share: Vol 1(1967) New York, Zone Books.

Baudrillard Jean (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death, London, Sage Publications

Bourdieu Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972) Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Goux, Jean Joseph (1990) Symbolic Economies; After Marx and Freud, Cornell University Press

Cummings, Neil & Lewandowska, Marysia (2000) The Value of Things, London/Basel, August/ Birkhauser

Cummings, Neil & Lewandowska, Marysia (2001) Capital, London, Tate Publishing.

Foucault Michel (1974) The Order of Things (1966), London, Tavistock Publications

Leyshon, Andrew & Thrift, Nigel (1997) Money Space, London, Routledge

Mauss, Marcel (1954) The Gift (1923) London, Routledge

Schrift Alan D. (1997) The Logic of the Gift, London, Routledge.

Simmel, Georg (1999) The Philosophy of Money, (1900) London Routledge

Spalding, Frances (1998) The Tate, London,Tate Publishing.

Strathern, Marilyn (1999) Property Substance & Effect, London, Athlone Press

Wu, Chin-tao (2002) Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980’s, London, Verso

An Economy of Love reflects on and gives some context for our project Capital at Tate and the Bank of England Museum.