UNDERSTANDING ACTS OF VALUING AND DEVALUING AS SOCIAL PROCESSES

NEIL CUMMINGS AND MARSHA BRADFIELD

REFLECTIONS

PART 1: MARSHA BRADFIELD

We first met anthropologist David Graeber back in 2008 when he held a stall in the Market of Ideas at Chelsea College of Arts. We’d organised this ‘knowledge fair’ as members of Critical Practice, a cluster of artists, designers, curators, academics and other researchers.¹Hosted by Chelsea College of Arts, Critical Practice is a cluster of artists, designers, curators and other researchers. Through our Aims and Objectives we intend to support critical practice within art, the field of culture and organization. Our cluster seeks to avoid the passive reproduction of art, and uncritical cultural practice. We explore new models for creative practice, and engage these in appropriate public forums, both nationally and internationally. Our practice takes various forms: exhibitions, seminars, unconferences, screenings, walks, bike rides, practical workshops and curriculum development. We work with archives and collections, publications, broadcasts and other distributive media while actively seeking to collaborate.
Critical Practice has a longstanding interest in public goods, spaces, services and knowledge and a track record of producing original participatory events. These include PARADE, an international series of research activities exploring the disagreeable, contentious, exhilarating, messy, efficient, live, improvisatory and provisional nature of publicness. And, more recently, we realised #TransActing: A Market of Values, which the preceding article aims to describe. Visit http://www.criticalpracticechelsea.org/ for more information.

That Graeber’s stall was on the theme of debt may explain its limited popularity, with only a few of the market’s milling crowd sitting down to chat. These were the days before the American activist’s meteoritic rise as arguably the definitive theorist of being in the red. Many now look to Graeber to make sense of their condition as chronically precarious and practically indentured.

As fate would have it the Market of Ideas took place on Sunday 16 March 2008, the last day of the first week of the banking crisis in the US.²See Nick Mathiason’s ‘Three Weeks that Changed the World’, 28 December 2008. [online] The Guardian, available from https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/dec/28/markets-credit-crunch-banking-2008 [accessed 14 June 2016]. On Tuesday 11 March, the US Federal Reserve injected $236bn into the American banking system; on Thursday, the price of gold reached a record, trading at $1,000 an ounce; on Friday, Bear Stearns received an emergency bailout from the Fed and JP Morgan Chase. It was the American equivalent of Northern Rock. Of course, not even Graeber knew then what the long-term consequences would be. Though by our next meeting some years later, the carnage in the UK was all too clear: the banking crisis has been used as a pretext to decimate public funding, tuition fees have been introduced, an ongoing disregard for environmental destruction – the list goes on.

We, the majority, had learned the hard way that our financial system wasn’t resilient enough to absorb unforeseen setbacks without paying a huge social price. But there were a few in this winner-takes-all economy who remained resolutely sanguine. To their mind the system’s sheer persistence was proof positive of its resiliency. It was homeopathy à la Nietzsche. By crushing but not killing the markets, the crisis assured their ascension. That this expansion would likely result in more and even greater volatility begs the question: a resilient financial system for whom and at what cost to the rest?

Fast forward six years almost to the day. Several members of Critical Practice joined Graeber at the Showroom for a seminar on 9 March 2014. Now instead of talking debt, he was talking value; and now, too, there were many more listening. This topic of value, had, by now, superseded Critical Practice’s interest in ‘publicness’ as our main research interest.³‘Being in public’, public services, public goods – the public sphere – had preoccupied Critical Practice from 2006 to 2010. Something that our cluster finds so disorientating is the widespread acceptance of austerity measures as a done deal. We’re observing the things our community values most – hard-won things like publicly funded art, education, infrastructure and healthcare – being dismantled and disappeared without opposition. One reason why this tends to catch us unawares is that we struggle to understand how it is that distributing resources equitably and using them responsibly aren’t commitments that everyone shares. A naïveté, perhaps. But when expressed in a voice full of defiant optimism that a better future is possible over the post-post-political horizon, it cannot fall on deaf ears.

This worldly idealism echoes the ethos of Critical Practice as a potent cocktail of pragmatism, resourcefulness and socio-cultural diversity. These things are shot through with the eccentricities of its members, who self-organise to work in ways that are less hierarchical and more transparent. From this matrix of values, emerged a concept that has come to motor our collaborative practice-based research. We coined the term ‘communities of evaluation’ to help us understand judgement and assessment as social processes. Acts of valuing and devaluing can assemble and organise communities but they can also be divisive.

The idea that communities are fundamentally value-driven chimes with thinking outlined in Graeber’s text, ‘It is value that brings universes into being’ (2013), which we read for our seminar on 9 March 2014. A few of his anthropological insights are schematised below, along with questions and reflective response. These gather significance when brought to bear on the social ties and social forms that have sustained Critical Practice for more than a decade. Those impatient for examples of this resilient community formation should skip to Part 2 of this text, where a brief but thick description traces flows of value through the fabrication, inhabitation and dissemination of our most recent project, #TransActing: A Market of Values. First, though, a few thoughts from Graeber…

(1) Culture is always already value-based: Johan Gottfried von Herder introduced the concept of culture in the eighteenth century, in part to challenge state-of-nature theories like those of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They assumed that early humans lived in constant competition as a consequence of all pursuing the same sorts of things (e.g. pastures for the flocks). In fact, argues Graeber by way of Herder, they quickly clustered into language groups. Here members enjoyed not only solidarity with each other but also differentiation from others, in keeping with their pursuit for different things. Since time immemorial and second only perhaps to meeting universal needs (i.e. food, water, shelter), communities have been driven by the values pursued through their cultures. Egyptian culture, for instance, pursued order and security while for the Greeks, the values of political freedom and aesthetic expression reigned supreme (p. 220)⁴Graeber, D. ‘It is value that brings universes into being.’ HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (2): 219-43..

Question: If all communities are necessarily value-driven, what differentiates communities of evaluation?

Response: Critical Practice gives pride of place, to a particular conviction – something we’ve dubbed ‘transforming through doing’ – with this pointing to creative practice as a core value of our community. More specifically, we understand our collaboration, cooperation and collectivity as explicitly pursuing certain forms of value (care, trust, equitability, responsibility) while actively rejecting others – e.g. wealth as an end in itself. And we evaluate this pursuit based on acts of critical and creative production in contrast to outcomes, which may or may not embody our ideals. This emphasis on ‘process as product’ differentiates us from other communities that share with us a preoccupation with evaluation but tend to prioritise ends over means, as in the case of for-profit cultures.

(2) Value and Values: The system of exchange value, asserts Graeber, does more than just promote exploitation by camouflaging the fact that value comes from labour, ‘[It] operates on an even more insidious level by encouraging us to believe that only certain forms of labour (waged labour, or at best, labour that contributes to producing remarkable commodities) produce value in the first place’ (p.224). One of the problems, of course, is that this evaluation marginalises reproductive labour, rendering it invisible. Under capitalism things like child and elder care don’t count because by reproducing the workforce instead of producing ‘remarkable commodities’, this other labour only generates profit indirectly. This puts its value beyond measure (p.224).

In a related observation Graeber notes that we reference value when speaking of labour that is commoditised. But when labour does not fit this bill, as in the case of reproductive labour, we speak instead about values and everything they connote (p.224). Good housekeeping, for example, is often extolled as an embodiment of ‘family values’. Pressing this thinking home, Graeber opines, ‘That which is thus rendered comparable can be considered under the rubric of “value” and this value, like that of money, lies in its equivalence. The value of “values” in contrast lies precisely in their lack of equivalence; they are seen as unique, crystallized forms. They cannot and should not be converted into money’ (p.224).

Question: How does Critical Practice negotiate the interplay of value and values, in keeping with Graeber’s distinction?

Response: The business of money is a tricky one. It both galvanises our community of evaluation against for-profit and privatizing forces and it risks dividing us, one from another, when there’s not enough in the common purse to go around.⁵In fact, there has never in the history of Critical Practice been enough money to go around. Ironically, Critical Practice might find negotiating the interplay of value and values easier if the cluster simply valued value more. But that we don’t is just as well, as volunteering is a condition of our sustainability, including our social reproduction through ‘housekeeping practices’ like documenting and disseminating our activity as publicly available.

To supplement our limited budget, Critical Practice trades on other resources, especially friendship, something that is both priceless and free. Like the other interpersonal relations enabling social reproduction writ large, friendship both benefits from and is disadvantaged by its escape from commodification. One of the ways we offset this is by placing such a high premium on peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange. We hold fast to Critical Practice as a project of reciprocal creation with mutual benefit.⁶Graeber argues that at heart, Marx’s theory of value is a ‘way of conceiving human creativity (“production”) as the endless pursuit of alienated refractions of itself’ (p.220). This tracks with a German sense of society as a ‘mode of coordinating projects of human interaction’ (p.220). The sociological traditions of France and Britain tend instead to hold social worlds to be collections of people and things. On Graeber’s view this cultural distinction explains why so many debates on Marx’s labour theory of value tend of miss the point. When we appreciate that for him society is a project of mutual creation, his theory prompts understanding that just might be compelling enough to actually motivate change. As Graeber puts it, ‘assuming that we do collectively make our world, that we collectively remake it daily, then why is it that we somehow end up creating a world that few of us particularly like, most find unjust, and over which no one feels they have any ultimate control?’ (p.222). It’s a good question, one that begs to be asked from a pre-neoliberal position, where people came before profit. Getting back to and operating from this mindset is so important because ‘[it] understands human beings as projects of mutual creation, value as the way such projects become meaningful to the actors, and the worlds we inhabit as emerging from those projects rather than the other way around (p.238). Our commitment to each other is evidenced by P2P as the lynchpin of our practice in common.

PART 2: NEIL CUMMINGS

Critical Practice’s current preoccupation with value springs from a sensitivity to the bonds that tie one to another as a community. We are interested in values and the communities that produce, share and distribute them.

Through our collaborative research we have come to recognise that values are usually expressed as things, all kinds of things – from foodstuffs, to artworks, currencies and living labour and distributed via bundles of technologies, including markets.

The most visible form of the market is a competitive one. The neo-classical economic model pictures rational individuals pursuing their own self-interest – without regard for others – as the motive force for markets. The laws of supply and demand that organise these homo economicus extrude the financial price, for the values exchanged.

Except of course, not all markets are competitive and nor can all values be expressed as a price. Yet art, artists and their artworlds reproduce through competitive markets; even art and design education is riven with ‘market forces’.

Why have we enabled the values of competitive markets to dominate our recent evaluations of art, design? Clearly, we inhabit a mono-culture of evaluation but this is not resilient.

Taking our model from ecosystems – where biodiversity is essential for their reproduction – Critical Practice set about identifying and tracing diverse evaluative communities. Once the values shared were identified (what Bruno Latour might call ‘matters of concern’⁷Latour, B. ‘What is the Style of Matters of Concern?’ Spinoza Lectures, University of Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 2008. [2008]) various research communities – i.e. working groups – formed around them. There were seminars to investigate the theoretical and historical speculation of values, their production and distribution; practical workshops to explore the physical infrastructure of markets and their materiality; a fundraising committee to secure money to stage a one-day market as a means of sharing and embodying our research; and a loosely-knit archiving initiative to document and disseminate the process.

#TransActing: A Market of Values was assembled from diverse, temporary, evaluative communities that shared a common commitment to exploring value through collaborative production. These gatherings were as fluid and porous as the interests of those involved were engaged and disengaged.

One of these communities formed around the production of the ‘market stalls’ that composed a physical infrastructure for #TransActing. To embody their interest in resilient evaluative practices, the working group recycled materials from the recently de-installed 2015 degree show at Chelsea College of Arts. In previous years a suite of skips collected unwanted artworks, trashed exhibition making materials, unloved things, etc. #TransActing, however, aspired to be more resourceful by repurposing what was otherwise ‘waste’.

Andreas Lang of the Hackney-based art and architectural practice public works helped us to reintrpret the autoprogettazione furniture series of Enzo Mari⁸Mari, E. Autoprogettazione, Mandova: Edizioni Corraini, 2014. (1974, 2014). The series uses standard timber sections to produce a range of tables, chairs, beds and bookshelves. The plans, with dimensions and cutting log for the furniture, were also freely published in a premonition of a Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) ethic, and a gesture towards a cultural and material commons.

Taking Mari as our guide, we salvaged materials and set about measuring, cutting and screwing them together into stalls. Jigs helped a lot. Our jigs exemplified the tacit protocols embedded in any community, and enabled pre-cut components to be connected by volunteers with limited knowledge of the overall design, or its intention. People with modest DIY skills could contribute; Adam Smith would have been proud. The jigs, like the Guidelines for Open Organisations that are used by Critical Practice to self-organise and coordinate the cluster’s activity, stem from a commitment to keeping things simple, transparent and functional. It was the easy-to-assemble structures that proved key to producing the volume of stalls, some sixty and facilitating their necessary customisation. We ordered some additional timber, 60 tarpaulins and mountains of screws. We organised a common tool bank from our collective tool kits, and signed-up for daily working groups during the ten-day construction period.

And we learnt a lot while figuring out how to manage this emergent system, with our new knowledge feeding into our expanded understanding of markets. We considered, for instance, their improvisatory nature. We discussed reusing the stalls for other things after #TransActing. Too often in ‘art’ projects the incredible labour necessary for upcycling and producing stuff for exhibition results in little more than a temporary spectacle and, moreover, one destined for skips or landfills. To be true to the values we value, we made provision for the stalls’ afterlife. For several months some dotted the Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground, providing much-needed public seating for working, lunching and socialising en plein air. Other stalls found new homes around London, with several going to an anti-gentrification project in Deptford. The form of this has been inspired in part by #TransActing’s use of furniture to build and organise community.

Of course markets aren’t usually designed, and yet there is a recognisable coherence, a beautiful logic of practice at work. From the ancient bazaar, through the 19th century marché aux puces, on to the 20th century flea, thrift and street markets, and even in contemporary peer-to-peer digital exchanges: diversity and co-dependency are vital.

Another of #TransActing’s working groups cohered around producing a Local Currency (LC). We thought it would be good to have a medium which could be used to exchange knowledge, goods and services, with this technology also heightening our awareness of what was being transacted, i.e., attention, time, care, values and by whom. Things that, traditionally, money tends to erase. We wanted the currency to be one of the places where the various values transacted at the market would leave a trace.

After hours of discussion and some prototyping, we decided that the currency would be composed of four denominations. Each would be identified by a different material, and represented by an appropriate icon.

The currency is hexagonal in shape to encourage interlocking and interdependency. It has five key features:

1. to act as a medium of exchange; to encourage value transactions at #TransActing through time and space
2. to question the primacy of money as a ‘universal solvent’, in exchanging goods and services
3. as a unit of account, to intensify attention on the moment when values are transacted
4. to act as a claim on future value
5. for its intrinsic value, as a beautiful thing

‘Exchange’, wrote sociologist Georg Simmel in The Philosophy of Money, ‘[…] is one of the purest and most primitive forms of human socialization; it creates a society, in place of a mere collection of individuals.’⁹Simmel, G. The Philosophy of Money. Third Enlarged Edition. London: Routledge, 2004. (2011, p.175)

Distributive markets are networks of interrelated interests and values. Obviously, these can only function in useful combination with others. Markets therefore, as Simmel so perceptively observes, are social mechanisms that enable people to swap, trade, bargain, compete, and cooperate; essentially to transact. Which makes transacting, first and foremost a communication praxis and distributive markets communications technology. Peoples come together to transact, perhaps for quite different reasons. They do not need to exchange equitably, or even communicate in the same language. All that is required is that they have some goods or services to trade, the social protocols to enable the transaction and a distributive market.

Transactions are possible without physical goods or ownership. What is necessary – like language itself – is that one value be substituted for another, and that interested parties, these temporary communities, can apprehend the substitution. Social relations as deep, subtle and complex as this could never be subsumed by mere competitive financialization.

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