Is there any link between the economy and artistic performance? Many, as the performers Elisa Band, Karolina Kucia, Cássio Diniz Santiago and economist Akseli Virtanen assert. For them, the economy is an emotional structure. The production of value is about the production of sensibility and subjectivity, not of commodities.
In the workshop »Finance as a Place for Creation,« which took place at Akademie Schloss Solitude in November 2015, the group investigated the relationship of performing arts and economy – and what the arts can do for understanding the economic system. By thinking finance and economy in a broader sense, they aimed at developing new ways of owning, financing, and doing things together: Generating new ways of creating opportunities, new ways of acting on them, speculating, hedging, and arbitrating together, and a different access to operating systems.
This glossary assembles essential notions of economic language as well as terms of artistic practice. By mixing and intertwining the different perspectives, new meanings emerge which make you look at the affective and performative side of economy. Just as artistic performances are based on concepts of value, exchange, and debt.
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Affects 1) Affects are less dispositions or states, than they are parameters whose critical values mediate transitions from one state to the next.
Affective crisis 1) Personal affective disaster and the disaster on the streets. 2) Damaged goods.
Artist 1) A self-made person. 2) What they are comes from the depth of their body. 3) Genius, different from everyone else.
Attractors 1) Attractors give pathology to ↑affects. From dynamical systems theory, we know there are two kinds of attractors: a) regular attractors and b) strange attractors, the latter of which characterize systems whose dynamics are defined as deterministic chaos. 2) A person, a thing, or an idea that pushes us closer to him/her/it. We can call this magnetic feeling: love, fear, desire, hungriness, need, survival. Under the attraction, lies a lack. Under the lack, lies life itself. Under life, lies an attraction (toward food, love, ideas, survival). It never stops.
Attributes 1) The intention makes the theater. 2) The value of an underlying entity.
Austerity 1) There’s more wealth in the world than ever before!(?)
Bank 1) On the documentary channel on television, there was this experiment: A child was placed in front of a table with a few bars of chocolate. The child was told: »You can eat this chocolate now, or if you wait two minutes, you can have much more.« Then, the experiment was repeated with older children, and then again with slightly older children. Unfortunately, I did not see the end of the program because I had to go to the bank.
Bartleby, the Refusal 1)
»I would prefer not to,« he said and gently disappeared behind the screen.
»What do you mean? Are you moon-struck? I want you to help me.«
»I would prefer not to.«
»Why do you refuse?«
»I would prefer not to.«
Black market 1) Here, I can give one example in my creative pedagogical practices in ↑performance (↑Intangible Assets). In aesthetics, there is a ↑market in creation, with official, established techniques or parameters that are a supposed idea of initial level, without which one could not start. In the collectives I work in, we ↑parasite techniques without this idea of ↑debt or having to reach a certain level to be able to say I can do it, but using them for our purposes. By reshaping theses techniques, we reshape the relationship with ourselves, and in these collectives we can invent other ways of creation, cooperation, and trust. In our processes, we deal with singularities, not with pre-established technical parameters. We deal with ↑risks of inventing new coordinates. We consider uncertainty, risk, as elements that constitute us, and generate practices that embrace this uncertainty in order to create something different, in aesthetics and in our relationships.
Black-Scholes Algorithm 1) Uncertainty converted into a measurable ↑risk. 2) Risk management models produce more risk. 3) How to price volatility?
Blockchain 1) The new Magna Carta (the Great Charter)? 2) It is a time-stamped, digitally distributed public ledger, equipped with autonomous self-governance and n-dimensional peer-to-peer capabilities.
Capitalism and Love and Lust 1) Monogamy/Singularity. 2) Imaginary of the system (not Marxist imaginary) – modernity. 3) Knowledge and reason that requires a return of a form of faith (unknown unknowns). 4) Every person must be self-made.
CEO (Clusters of Exotic Options ) 1) Operators reading and writing exotic option clusters together in n-dimensional, terminable, or interminable permutations, perpetually making, unmaking, and remaking their non-orientable economic surface along a moving horizon. Their fluid, asymmetrical geometric structure is topological and ↑fractal.
C&O 1) Big boss. 2) Big mama. 3) Big daddy. 4) Big brother. 5) Opposite of ↑CEO.
Copoiesis 1) Copoiesis is the aesthetical and ethical creative potentiality of border linking and of metamorphic weaving. The psychic cross-imprinting of events and the ↑exchange of traces of mutually (but not symmetrically) subjectivizing agencies, occurring via/in a shared psychic border space where two or more becoming subjectivities meet and link borders by strings and through weaving of threads, and create singular trans-subjective webs of copoiesis composed of and by transformations along psychic strings stretched between two or more participants of each encounter-event. Thus, a matrix-like border space is a mutating copoietic net where co-creativity might occur.
Circulation and Distribution of Values 1) How can we produce different kinds of circulation of values, of affectivity, of connection? We need first this exercise of understanding the operating systems of how ↑capitalism and ↑finance capture and mold our subjectivity, how it produces acceleration, exhaustion of meanings, and exclusion of the majority. Then, we can try to create fields, create openness, and we can try to find more existential habitable spaces in life. But how to realize these relations in a concrete way, not only in a theoretical approach? How do we open this double morality (excluded/included in the ↑market) to something else?
Crisis 1) Problem of measurement. 2) The objective of the society is to have ↑security.
Debt 1) Is that part of life where you did not think you lived. That what you believe is missing. (Tati, 42 years old, psychoanalyst) 2) Something that people give to you, and, like, you kind of need to return to them, like, with a thank you, a hug, a kiss, or something. (Anita, 8 year old)
Derivatives 1) The fear of non-knowledge. 2) To act in the future of the present. A way to kill off the present. 3) Weapons of mass destruction. 4) A contract that prices ↑risk. 5) Different way to think about time. 6) The face value of all derivatives in the world is 20 times the underlying value. 7) »Lastly, without forgetting here those valuable traffic signals, dual voltage outlets, bus passengers, friends and relatives of the bus passengers, friends and relatives of the makers of the components for the traffic signals, workers on the ship that transported our costumes from China, Chinese worker slaves who made the pieces for the beds of the other Chinese worker slaves so that these Chinese worker slaves could rest and be prepared for the next day to make the props without which this ↑performance could not be possible, and the Thai prostitutes who sucked the dicks of European businessmen, owners of large automobile companies, and inspired them to design cars that we use to come and go from the rehearsal space, and the mothers of the Thai prostitutes that sucked the dicks of great European businessmen, who always find a way to live with things that if we stopped to think about, are things that not just anyone lives with, and that maybe, probably, they still had the tenderness to make cookies for their daughters to eat before setting off for work. Our thanks to all.«
Derivative Practices 1) Shared capacity of self-production. 2) Take the ↑ruins, changing the meaning of the discarded, transforming into meanings of self-production. 3) You can’t do what I’m doing. I like what you are doing, but I want to stop you (de-unifying effect of the calls for unit). 4) To be able to act in a certain gap. 5) To move in spaces in between, to stay in the spread of the wave. 6) To choose the demands that we can obey. 7) The gap.
Derivative as a Young Bride of Frankenstein 1) Just as the »young girl,« synthetic subjectivity unfolds and just as we love young girls, we hate them too, as we fear what they could become or that we could become them. And OMG! I have never grown! There is that possibility in every young girl of uselessness, redundancy, and stupidity that we would rather avoid. And a cognitive worker hates that the most, as he/she is something else, he/she produces him/herself. Let’s pray to young girls, the saints of anorexia: fanaticism of detachment in impossibility to physically participate in the world of commodities, self-destructive cure it seems but maybe, maybe there is method in this madness, in this generic form? A monster is not metaphysical at all – he is psychosomatic!!! He reacts to everything as everything is a part of him, and is detached from everything as everything seems to touch too much and still not make any sense. She moves on quickly. She forgets. It is not her who does not remember, it is that her lifestyle is just too quick. Whatever the costs, withdrawal is not an option. She really believes in solidarity. It is this feeling that makes her pour her properties in each of her relationships and invest love into everything she does. He is lovely, charming, and loving. Love, that is a basic condition for production. Without that, nothing new is possible: new people, new opportunities, new projects, new roles, new becoming.
Distribution 1) There are two qualitatively different modes of economic distribution. There is a) sedentary distribution, and there is b) nomadic distribution.
Economy 1) How you organize the ↑house. 2) New design of economic relations considers social forms before value forms. 3) The new aesthetical dispositive. 4) An emotional structure.
Exchange 1) ↑Money is green paper. Or blue paper. Or yellow paper. It was not always like that. Before, it was also bones, rocks, spices, sugar, and other things. But today it is paper. Or a metal little circle. It sometimes has a face on it. On the other side of the circle, there can be a bird, or a flag. It is used to make exchanges. Money is exchange. It is currency. Money can exchange different kinds of things. It can exchange concrete things, or things that have a shape, and it can be used with things you do not really see. Like love. Love also can be used as money. Or relations. You can exchange relations, words, compliments, in order to get something back. 2) Our body exchanges old cells for new ones in order to keep us alive. Or air, that passes into one’s body and gives back some air into the atmosphere. 3) But then, in these exchanges, ↑time was added. One can give something, wait, and receive it back. But receive a little more, since one waited so long. With air, this is not possible; if you hold in air, you die. With blood, it is also not possible, since the heart needs to continuously exchange old and new blood. And, in the case of the heart, it has to be simultaneous. 4) But outside one’s body, exchanges can happen in different times and spaces. So people could invent coins, the bit coin, the block chain, and ↑banks. And then the goods, or what is being produced and exchanged, show a lot of different forms of being produced and exchanged. 5) When we talk about ↑economy, or ↑finance, we almost forget that we are dealing with necessities, ↑affects. ↑Capitalism and the current financial system formatted our subjectivity in such a way that we lost track of our desires. But it is always good to remember that there are many more different ways of exchange. Forms that lead in another direction from speculation, ↑debt, ↑scarcity, increasing fees, ↑interest – forms that generate openness.
Finance 1) System that will eat us alive, colonize, and take over our lives.
Fractals 1) Fractal geometry, along with ↑topology, is the geometry of deterministic chaos. Fractals denote a fragmented, fractured, and intractable irregularity. ↑Clusters of exotic options comprise fractal geometric structures.
Generating Risk Practices 1) Is it a way to access new possibilities? 2) Can come from any source. 3) Decolonization of art.
Heretic Body 1) My artistic appropriations of the body, the economic modulations of the body, and the philosophical speculations of the body are virtualization of the body, which is indifferent to all of this. This is a postulation without a sufficient reason. A provocation in the last instance is an inconsistent body as void. The lonely hour of heresy, which never comes. I consume this carnal meat, carve into the surface of it, and impose cuts, bruises, knots, and enmeshed conjunctions. The heresy is that I do not inhabit my body, but I am being lived by this indifferent carnality – this advent of a body.
House 1) If we remember the original concept of the word ↑economy (Greek: oikonomía) as household management, or the organization of the house, we can think in some implications of this concept in a broader sense, not only in the objective and subjective measures, preparations, calculations, and guesses one needs to organize a house, but also what is a house. Housing. The place we live. Like our body. Or our subjectivity. Or our social context. So many houses in the same house. One has to think in the architecture of our relations, ↑affects, bodies, and contexts, in order to manage this multiplicity we live in.
Intangible Assets 1) In the ↑performance course at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, we have actors, therapists, and patients from mental health institutions in the collective. We use the singularities of each one as creative material, dismantling the borders between patients, actor, therapists, and placing all the participants in a place that they are individuals with different rhythms, bodies, impulses, memories, and we create the scenes in a superposition of theses singular potencies as unique human and creative material.
Interest 1)
A –– Hi, Honey.
B –– Hi, Darling. You’re such a sweetheart.
A –– Sweet love. You’re the apple of my pie.
B –– Oh, I love you.
A –– I love you more.
B –– I love you more and more.
C –– I love you more and more times twice.
A –– I love you triple.
B –– I love you infinite.
A –– I love you infinite and forever.
B –– I promise infinite and forever love.
A –– I swear infinite and forever love.
B –– I make a pronunciation of our eternal love.
A –– I make a declaration. A testimonial.
B –– I will make a certificate with a golden frame.
A –– I will make a certificate with a golden frame and anti-reflective glass.
B –– I will put a wax seal on this certificate.
A –– I will make a lifetime warranty in the wax sealed certificate.
B –– I will ask for God’s blessing in this document.
A –– I will ask for God’s, Moses’s, Shiva’s, and Alan Kardec’s, and Oxum’s blessing in the document.
B –– And also the devil in a ritual under the tree.
A –– Besides the documents and the blessings and the ritual, I will do a parachute jump and shout your name during the fall.
B –– I will fly a plane and write your name in the sky in smoke.
A –– I will put your name on a star.
B –– I will tattoo your initials on my heart.
A –– I will tattoo your family and that dog on my chest.
B –– I will give you my heart.
A –– I will do a complete blood pact and ↑exchange all the blood in our bodies.
C –– I will give you my kidneys while I am still alive.
A –– I will give you my kidneys, eyes, and ears, and nose.
B –– What is that smell? Oh, I forgot the pan in the oven. Now the ↑house is on fire.
A –– Should you call the fireman?
B –– Yes, I will call the fireman.
A –– Ok, bye. I love you.
B –– Bye. I love you more.
A –– I love more and more. Hang up.
B –– You hang up first.
Intertwining 1) When we intertwine ↑finance, ↑economy with other fields like ↑affects, aesthetics, or relations, we realize that we are not only talking about the interdisciplinary, but we can try to understand them as different aspects of the same thing that rest upon one another.
Lapsus 1) lapse – slip (blunder, errors, misstep), parody, mockery, inconsistency, reanimation, and personal resistance. 2) Would embrace a condition of uncertainty, fuzziness, ↑fractalization, and flexibilization of precarious work structure in cognitive production with its possible collapses. As an event producer in the age of commodification of ↑time, experience, and event, I decided to play with this structure and to invite a lapsus as a moment of disruption to see how we get out of there. Does a collapse produce the reinforcement or reinvention of a norm? It always disrupts consistency of emotions, production, play, drama, and interpretation. I use lapsus to experiment with cooperation, which is not based on sympathy or consensus. I chose lapsus for its sensual, emotional complexity, and immediacy, to be an occasion for alternatives in self-organizing and collective co-emergence. I would choose to search not through affirmation of any exact alternative or potentiality of alternative, but by inhabiting a state of disruption. It is in my opinion a potential and complex moment of confusion, mixed emotion, and fragility.
Leverage 1) Leverage is the acquisition and deployment of ↑debt in order to augment the volume of gains and losses. There are two kinds of leverage: a) artificial and b) natural leverage.
Market 1) To take all available information and come up with one price. Different sensibilities in different markets. 2) Self-dissemination.
Money 1) It is never about money; it is about desires. Desire to realize something. We never talk about money. We talk about doing something together. It is about love and values, monetized values, and the possibility in the background for the future. 2) Do it like Robin Hood.
n-1 1) n-1 refers to a necessity to create new organizational ideas and forms – to which any »one« (leader, value, community, idea, principle, memory …) belongs only as a subtracted element. 2) How is a multiple made? How is it defended from continuously arising »ones?« How does multiplicity organize without any one, with no common task, aim, or purpose?
Odradek 1) Everything that was left behind. 2) The useless part of a commodity. 3) The invisible part of an aesthetical plan. 4) The moral panic. 5) The fear. 6) The restlessness that controls us.
Parasite 1) One who plays the position will always beat the one who plays the content. The latter is simple and naive; the former is complex and mediatized. To play the position or to play the location is to dominate the relation. It is to have a relation only with the relation itself. And that is the meaning of the prefix para- in the word parasite: It is on the side, next to, shifted. It is not on the thing, but on its relation. It has relations, as they say, and makes a system of them.
Parasitic Collaboration 1) A community of art is a peculiar mixture of free individuals and collectives, voluntary and/or paid and/or in debt workers who are at the same ↑time in position creditors of an art production. This means functioning in fluid conditions of precarious labor: short-term employment, voluntary work, unpaid overwork in project-based employment, freelancing, and self-employment. 2) An art community is a labor community mostly based on social interactions. You could picture it as mixed life-work-normalized stress activity – mixing joyful, creative, immediate interactions, which are not based on a drive for ↑money, but rather on some other genuine aims, mixed with hard competing, self-branding, and narcissism … 3) It is a community of people who do not just wait and claim. They invent, propose, work for free when needed, and volunteer for the greater good. And yet, like a ↑parasite – that is not in a position of an independent producer, but always exists on the side of something, artistic domain is from a certain distance, ignorable, and invisible. And this particular form of collective surviving for most ↑artists is a social interaction, not for its own sake, but resulting consistently and regularly with a more or less collaborative product, many products.
Performance 1) How value is made in motion and realized in ↑circulation. 2) Excess of origins. 3) A ↑derivative practice. 4) A way to observe the movement of ↑sensibility (kinesthetic). 5) Regime of measure. 6) A way to think about naturalization of ↑scarcity and ↑austerity. 7) Democratization of what can be valued.
Risk 1) Must be avoided. The population is divided into those who can manage risk and those who are at risk. 2) The heart of the creativity, the core of the art. 3) You gain from taking risks well taken.
Ruins 1) Everything around us, which can be repackaged and put in ↑circulation.
Security 1) A security is the financial asset created in the process of securitization. 2) Asset-backed notes are securities.
Scarcity 1) Enclosure that belongs to modernity. 2) Producing a calculated reason. Kill off the present. 3) Production of distrust in hard times.
Sensibility 1) How we should move together. Reinvesting in a different principle – people moving together but not as one.
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch 1) (↑Exchanges)
Time 1) We have production of excess: of ↑money, of words, of possibilities, of meanings. 2) We have a constant killing of the present. There is no longer a separation between the office and work. One is constantly requested to be productive, to make contacts, network, to have ideas/demands of productivity 24/7. We have sacrificed donations of our own lives that are slowly subtracted from us inside big data. / How could we imagine alternatives for organizing our ↑house? Alternatives that rethink the architecture of our relations with others, with time, in a way that is not based in ↑debt, accumulation, acceleration.
Time is Money 1) Not always. Sometimes ↑money is money, and ↑time is something else.
Topology 1) Topological motions consist of bending, stretching, folding, and twisting over. 2) Economic transformations, or classes of ↑exchange, comprised of topological motions exhibit much less invariance requirements than those governed by Euclidean motions.
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Bibliography
Herman Melville, Bracha L. Ettinger, Tiqqun, Tero Nauha, Robin Hood, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Michel Serres
All drawings by Cássio Diniz Santiago
Video by Karolina Kucia