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JCS14110.1177/1468795X13494721Journal of Classical SociologySansi

Article

The pleasure of expense: Mauss and The Gift in contemporary art

Roger Sansi
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Journal of Classical Sociology 2014, Vol. 14(1) 9199 The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1468795X13494721 jcs.sagepub.com

Abstract
Mausss The Gift has captured the imagination of generations of artists. As artistic practice shifted from the production of objects to the mediation of situations of social exchange, Mausss focus on the pleasure of expense has been central, from Bataille and the situationists to relational aesthetics. In most of these cases, Mausss arguments were used to question the market economy in ways rather more radical than he himself would have done. However, my objective in this article is not to criticize how Mauss has been misunderstood, but to show how his work has opened a field of new possibilities in art theory and practice.

Keywords
Bataille, gift, Mauss, potlatch, relational aesthetics, situationism

The influence of Marcel Mauss and The Gift in modern and contemporary art has been enormous. In Mauss, artists throughout the twentieth century found not only an exotic counterpoint to modern society, but also an inspiration for their actions. As artistic practice shifted from the manual production of objects to the mediation of situations of social encounter and exchange, the questioning of the very notion of exchange offered by Mauss, and the potlatch in particular as an icon of a radically different form of exchange, became a source of both reflection and practice. In many cases, Mausss arguments were used in ways more radical, and perhaps simplistic, than he himself would have wished. One could question the accuracy of the reading that artists and art theorists have made of Mauss, but that will not be my objective: The Gift has had so many different and even contradictory readings within anthropology itself! This is probably a fault of Mauss himself: the density of his writing, the myriad of ideas and directions he points to but does not fully develop, footnotes that could make the argument of a whole book And yet it
Corresponding author: Roger Sansi, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK. Email: r.sansi-roca@gold.ac.uk

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is precisely this density and multiplicity that have also made him extremely inspirational. My objective in this essay will be less to criticize how Mauss has been misunderstood, and more to assess how his work has opened a field of new possibilities in art theory and practice, how The Gift lurks in the background of many of the developments in and around contemporary art, from Bataille up to todays relational art and activism. In the following pages, I will propose a particular history of this influence, and conclude with a general reflection on its actual effects in the first decades of this century.

The potlatch in Bataille and the situationists

Mauss was a direct influence on artists and intellectuals in France in the 1930s, like the Collge de Sociologie formed by Leiris, Callois and Bataille. And it was through Bataille that Mausss ideas on the gift would still be influential in the new generations after the Second World War. In La part maudite, Bataille (1993 [1949]) proposes nothing less than a political economy based on abundance and expenditure rather than scarcity and utility. Mausss description of the potlatch, as recorded among the peoples of the Northwest coast of America, being a manifestation of absolute excess and prodigality, was central to Batailles argument. Bataille was fascinated by what Mauss calls le plaisir de la dpense artistique gnreuse, translated originally by Cunnison as the delight in generous artistic expenditure (Mauss, 1954 [1925]: 67). Mauss was his main inspiration, but there is no question that Bataille went much further in his search for the creative potential of the pleasure of expense (Marcel, 1999). Bataille was not so interested in the circular theory of the gift as a social contract (giftcountergift) as in the very act of giving as expense without return; the potlatch is central to his argument precisely because it turns expense into a public spectacle. The ultimate outcomes of this spectacle in terms of hierarchy, ranking or fame, what it is made for, are less interesting than the very act of expenditure. Bataille does not intend to rationalize the gift in terms of making it reasonable from a bourgeois perspective. On the contrary, he is interested in transgression. It has also been pointed out (Risaliti, 2001) that Bataille combined Mausss ideas with traditional Western aesthetics, such as Kants and Schillers ideas on play and the freedom of the imagination. In the Critique of Judgment (1951 [1790]), Kant had said that beauty is a symbol of freedom, since the aesthetic judgement should be free of need and finality. Schiller pushed forward Kants definition of the aesthetic experience as free play of the imagination, a form of relation to objects not based on finality and utility, but as something fundamental to any aesthetic education towards political and personal freedom. Schillers aesthetic utopia in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1982 [1794]) is still today a core referent to any writings on art and politics (Rancire, 2000), and was certainly in the background of Batailles arguments when he imagined a human condition that was not determined by need and utility, but empowered by pleasure and play. After Bataille, Mausss potlatch was at the very heart of the situationist project. The situationists were in many ways the culmination of the anti-art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Starting with Duchamp and Dadaism, modern art moved away from the manual production of art objects, paintings or sculptures, and established

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that art was only a relation, a point of encounter, an event in which some objects were designated or appropriated as art. The surrealists developed this point further in their obsession for the objet trouv, the found object, which is not a manufactured work of art, but an object which has a particular effect on the surrealist in the event of their encounter. As David Graeber said to me once, perhaps the surrealists were taking commodity fetishism to its ultimate consequences, by explicitly acknowledging it as such. But in embracing it, the surrealists were paradoxically subverting this fetishism; they recognized the power of commodities, but they turned it into a personal power a use value, as it were; the value of the objet trouv was a radically personal value, not an exchange value. The situationists took these anti-art proposals further. Their interest was focused not on the reappropriation of particular objects or commodities, but in more general terms, on the reappropriation of one very big object the city itself: the practices of psycho-geography and dtournement1 transform the city into one enormous objet trouv. The city for the situationists was the world of everyday life, as opposed to the dead world of art galleries, museums and workshops. Following the surrealists, they intended to abandon the art world to engage with everyday life; their objective was not to produce art, but to promote events, situations, that would challenge the established order of society. The event itself, the moment of subversion, was their objective, more than the re-appropriation of particular things: their objective was to subvert the bases of this everyday life. In the potlatch they envisioned an event that questioned the very basis of capitalism, le glacial calcul utilitaire, frigid utilitarian calculation (Mauss, 1954 [1925]: 74), by putting the pure gift at the centre of social relations:
The insufficiency of the feudal gift means that new human relationships must be built on the principle of pure giving. We must rediscover the pleasure of giving: giving because you have so much. What beautiful and priceless potlatches the affluent society will see whether it likes it or not! when the exuberance of the younger generation discovers the pure gift. The growing passion for stealing books, clothes, food, weapons or jewelry simply for the pleasure of giving them away gives us a glimpse of what the will to live has in store for consumer society. (Vaneigem, 1972 [1967]: 39)

What the pure gift means here is the don sans contrepartie, the gift without return, that, according to Vaneigem, would characterize the society of the future, in opposition both to bourgeois society, based on the market, and the previous aristocratic society, based on another form of gift, the agonistic gift that didnt play for benefit, but for fame and rank. In this sense, the situationists, like Bataille, dismissed the agonistic and hierarchical aspects of the potlatch that were central to Mausss argument. In the pure gift, instead, the young generations would play for the pleasure of playing itself. For the situationists, the revolution would be brought forward in everyday life:
Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future. Passageways. Our only concern is real life; we care nothing about the permanence of art or of anything else. Eternity is the grossest idea a person can conceive of in connection with his acts. (Debord, 2006 [1957]: 41)

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Elsewhere Debord has said: It is a matter of producing ourselves, and not things that enslave us (1997 [1958]: 90). That is also a point partially taken from The Gift, where Mauss emphasized the creation of social relations and people, rather than the production of commodities and things, and yet in this sense the situationists combine Mauss with Marxs ideas about alienation. They questioned not only artistic production, but the social division of labour and the organization of life in general terms: as Debord explained, situationist theory supports a non-continuous conception of life, constituted by situations that may not have a lineal trajectory, and that therefore do not constitute unified, but plural subjects. In a classless society there will no longer be painters, but only situationists who, among other things, sometimes paint (Debord, 2006 [1957]: 41). This non-continuous, segmented conception of life is built on a relational and distributed notion of the person, as some anthropologists (for example, Gell, 1998) would say, following Mausss discussion of the notion of the person and, again, The Gift. Their objective was quantitatively increasing human life (Debord, 2006 [1957]: 39), by questioning the division between work and leisure, and putting play at the centre of life. For the art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, Modern art refuses to consider the finished product and the life one lives as separate things. Praxis is poiesis. To create, is to create oneself (1999: 13; my translation).2 In that sense, situationism is the logical conclusion of modern art and modern aesthetics as politics, as they were first theorized by Schiller, questioning capitalist alienation and transforming artistic practice and play into the production of everyday life. Contemporary artists keep on applying situationism, making of the everyday their subject matter. That may be a contradiction up to a point if situationism was the end of art as production; but art theorists such as Bourriaud argue that contemporary art doesnt feel the need to justify itself in opposition to previous forms of art, in an art-historical narrative, as modern art did (Bourriaud, 2002 [1998]). In this sense, contemporary artists using situationist techniques are not delegitimized because these techniques have already been used. What is important for them is where and how these techniques are effectively used, how and where they are applied: their practice makes more sense in relation to its site than to the narrative of art history. This site-specificity of post-situationist art since the 1990s is in fact what has given an ethnographic character to one of the key techniques of contemporary art practice (Coles, 2000; Foster, 1995; Kwon, 2002). Many contemporary practitioners operate in an unstable territory between art, research and political activism. Situationists were basically artists adopting the language, methods and rituals of the social sciences (see Jorn, 1957): they were doing research, psycho-geographic fieldwork, and organizing conferences to discuss capitalism. And they understood their research practice as a form of political activism. That instability is a cause of no small concern, and sometimes outrage, in the quarters that claim legitimate ownership of these forms of praxis in the modern division of scholarly labour. Situationism has been ignored or derided by generations of scholars (Plant, 1992), precisely because it was too close to them.

Relational art
In the late 1990s, the theme of the gift became again a central object of discussion in contemporary art practice and theory.3 This is particularly evident in Bourriauds

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Relational Aesthetics (2002 [1998]), where he develops ideas around what has called relational art, or Art taking as its theoretical horizon the whole of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space (Bourriaud, 2002 [1998]: 14, emphasis added). He discusses, for example, the work of artist Flix Gonzalez-Torres, who made piles of candy that resembled minimalist sculpture; his intention was to allow people to take the candy away, undoing the installation by taking tokens of it. For Bourriaud, art nowadays is a situation of encounter. That is to say: All works of art produce a model of sociability, which transposes reality or might be conveyed by it (2002 [1998]: 18). The form of the art work is in the relations it establishes: to produce a form is to create the conditions for an exchange; the form of the art work is in the exchange with the public. The artist becomes more a mediator, a person who fosters and provides situations of exchange, than a creator of objects. For Bourriaud, relational art practices want to establish particular social relations for a particular people, the artist and the public who participate in the exchange, fostering what he calls a friendship culture (2002 [1998]: 32), as opposed to the impersonality of mass culture. The relational aesthetics described by Bourriaud, these forms of exchange that create personal relations, are in many ways familiar to the model of the gift. As I have argued elsewhere (Sansi, 2005), contemporary theories in the anthropology of art, like Gells ideas on the distributed person (Gell, 1998), also based on Mauss, fit perfectly in the framework of relational art. The situationist bent of these ideas is also quite clear. But it is also obvious that this is a rather conservative reading of situationism, keeping it safely protected within the white box of art, instead of letting it loose in the streets. If the artist really wants to make a social statement, it is apparent that his or her activity as a social mediator has to go a bit beyond the conventional artists immediate sphere of practice in the art world. And yet, it would also be unfair to think that Bourriaud is describing the whole range of contemporary artistic practice; in fact, the turn of the twenty-first century has seen the emergence of much more radically political proposals by groups of artistactivist-researchers who, although taking their inspiration from situationism and relational aesthetics, may work on a more grounded and consistent level around the everyday politics of work, value and property. The revolution of information technologies in recent decades, in the context of emergence of a cognitive capitalism, has stimulated the renewal of these debates.

Postproduction, appropriation, free cultures and gift economies

Bourriaud himself has complemented his writings on relational art with a second book on the subject, Postproduction (2005 [2002]). If Relational Aesthetics was discussing practices that involve interpersonal relations, as opposed to the impersonal relations of consumption produced by mass culture, Postproduction introduces artistic practices that involve processes of reappropriation of this mass culture, or, better, the means of production of the culture industries, to produce relational art forms or, simply, social relations. Technologies like sampling and the internet have made available a wide range of cultural

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products that can be reappropriated, transformed and redistributed, autonomously from the formal market of intellectual property and copyright laws or, better, in direct contraposition to it. The culture industries paradoxically provide the spaces through which artistic practices can contradict property laws. In fact these ideas were already circulating in different spaces, especially in music production and internet art, and more generally in networks such as Creative Commons or Copyleft. In this context, Mauss becomes, once again, a core reference. Thus for example, for Barbrook (1998), the internet and new forms of technology may enable the constitution of a gift-economy from within capitalism itself. Drawing on situationist ideas, Barbrook defined the internet as an already existing anarcho-communism, with a wider social basis than the artistic elite that constituted the situationists.

Pure gifts?
One of the key criticisms of the artistic appropriation of the theme of the gift, from the situationists to the anarcho-communist discourse on the internet, is its limited reading of the potlatch as a pure gift, an egalitarian social practice, as opposed to the much more nuanced reading Mauss gives of it as an agonistic, competitive ritual. The potlatch is about fame, recognition, the expansion of the distributed person. In this sense, Mauss in The Gift endorses the principle of authors rights, since he understands it is fair that artists should receive compensation for their contribution to the public domain:
It took a long time for artistic, literary or scientific ownership to be recognized beyond the right to sell the manuscript, invention, or work of art. Societies have little interest in admitting that the heirs of an author or inventor who are, after all, their benefactors have more than a few paltry rights in the things created. These are readily acclaimed as products of the collective as well as the individual mind, and hence to be public property. However, the scandal of the increment value of paintings, sculptures and objets dart inspired the French law of September 1923 which gives the artist and his heirs and claimants a right of pursuit over the successive increments of his works. (Mauss, 1954 [1925]: 6465)

According to a recent commentator, Mausss view is not that far from that of Lawrence Lessig, one of the main instigators of Creative Commons, for whom the existing legal framework should provide enough room to protect both the public domain and authors rights. The question remains of how to organize a society in which producers-exchangers give, receive and repay to the satisfaction of mutual interests (without the use of arms) (Cox, 2010). When the situationists reclaimed the potlatch, they were also involved in a radical criticism of art and authorship. Fame, the recognition of the artist, and its memory, was the least of their concerns, at least in theory. For Vaneigem, the agonistic gift was a thing of the past, of feudal society, while the new society of abundance of the proletarian youth would be based on the pure gift. This rejection of fame and recognition is probably much more difficult to assume for latter generations of artists, like those identified with

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relational art, who do want to be recognized as artists. And the situation is even more complex when we move from an artistic elite to a much more general sphere of exchange, like the internet.

Critical perspectives: Art, gift, free labour and the new spirit of capitalism
These perspectives on the gift economy of the internet have come under increasing criticism in recent years by a literature that questions the voluntary and participatory aspects of the internet as a form of false consciousness that in fact camouflages free, unpaid labour under the ideology of free access and the production of community (Terranova, 2000). These criticisms cannot easily be dismissed, along with a more general, critical reassessment of the legacy of situationism. Not only have situationist practices and methods been reappropriated by advertising and the society of the spectacle, but in more general terms the artistic critique of capitalism has been incorporated in mainstream capitalist practices, in what Boltanski and Chiapello (2005 [1999]) call the new spirit of capitalism. Autonomy is reduced to flexibility; participation and the production of social relations are reduced to networking and social capital; and the synthesis of praxis and poiesis is reduced to being motivated and creative in the workplace. The revolutionary life politics of the situationists have been reduced to ordinary bourgeois biopolitics. In this context, it is no wonder that artists and activists become advisers, coaches and entertainers for management schools and seminars. The notion that by participating in relational art practices people gain social capital does not seem to lead us very far into the revolutionary horizon that the situationists envisioned, after Mauss; rather than transforming society through la depnse artistique genereuse and the subversive reappropriation of time, artists seem to have become providers of cultural-artistic services (Kwon, 2002: 4), priests of formulaic potlatches. Still, not all the potlatches have become social activities for training sessions, not all artists have become coaches. Of course the best places to look for practices that overflow managerial discipline are not art galleries, but everyday life in the countless and careless acts of appropriation and subversion of intellectual property laws that are inevitably transforming cultural production in ways that we still cannot fully understand. As Vaneigem (1972 [1967]) said, the young generations have rediscovered the pure gift and they are taking it. Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. Psycho-geography is essentially the practice of walking in the city without a fixed objective, allowing the city to take you in unexpected directions. It can be seen as an extension of the surrealist notion of objective chance the random encounter between physical and psychical events. Dtournement is extending the practice of the ready-made to the urban setting, by displacing existing signs or symbols from their context subverting their message.

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2. Lart moderne refuse de considrer comme spars le produit fini et l existence mener. Praxis gale poisis. Crer, cest se crer (Bourriaud, 1999: 13). 3. The exhibition and consequent volume Il dono: Offerta ospitalit insidia/The Gift: Generous Offerings and Threatening Hospitality (Maraniello et al., 2001), bringing together discussions on the issue in anthropology, philosophy, literary theory and contemporary art, is an example of this renewed interest.

References
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Author biography
Roger Sansi received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2003, after studying at the universities of Barcelona and Paris. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, where he convenes the MA in Social Anthropology. He has worked on Afro-Brazilian culture and religion and on contemporary art in Spain. His research interests extend from art to religion, cultural policy, fetishism, the philosophy of history, money, the event, the gift, His publications include Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century (Berghahn, 2007, 2009) and Sorcery in the Black Atlantic (University of Chicago Press, 2011; ed. with L. Nicolau).