In June 2015, Author 1 and Author 21 were invited to have a conversation under

the title How art performs society, in the context of the Cambridge
Interdisciplinary Performance Network. 2 The point of departure for this
conversation was the recent publication of Author 1s Art, Anthropology and the
Gift (Bloomsbury, 2015), a monograph about the relation between art and
anthropology. In recent decades, the dialogue between contemporary art and
anthropology has been both intense and controversial. Art, Anthropology and
the Gift proposes a comprehensive overview of this dialogue, whilst also
exploring the reciprocal nature of the two subjects through practice, theory and
politics. The central contention of the book is that art and anthropology don't just
share methodologies, but also deeper intellectual, theoretical and even political
concerns. One of the central arguments of the book is that the problem of the
'gift' has been central to both anthropological and artistic practice.

The event was framed differently from a book symposium, as an open

conversation about gifts and relations in art and anthropology. The following text
is an extended version of this conversation, starting with Author 1s answer to
the title of the event: How art performs society: gifts, relations and exchanges.

AUTHOR 2 wishes to thank Michael Stevenson for the original invitation, and
for allowing her to here draw on personal correspondence
1

The authors wish to thank Jonas Tinius, convener of The Cambridge

Interdisciplinary Performance Network, for organising the seminar that lead to
this piece. The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network is a threeyear running research group at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social
Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) in Cambridge, UK.
2

Author 1 The theme of the gift has always been central to Anthropology, but
also to Art, if perhaps in less explicit ways. So much has been written about the
gift In Anthropology; it is indeed one of its key concepts, one of the hallmarks of
ethnographic theory. It is hard to imagine what else or what more could be said,
what could be added. Can the concept of the gift in art effectively say something
more, something else, to what Anthropology has already proposed?

This question came first to me as a surprise, when I encountered a number of

art practices explicitly based on gift giving in the late nineties. Felix GonzlezTorres more emblematic works were piles of candy in geometrical shapes,
rectangular carpets or pyramids leaning against a wall, all Untitled. They were
left in process: the aim of Gonzlez-Torres was that the audience took the
candy, and then the pile has to be filled up again by the gallery. The process by
which they are constantly being deconstructed and reconstructed in an endless
act of gift-giving. Rirkrit Tiravanijas work rose similar questions. Tiravanijas first
shows basically consisted in cooking meals for the people who visited the
gallery. The aim was to bring people together, participating in a meal. For
Tiravanija, "It is not what you see that is important but what takes place
between people 3.
More than what they represent, what is interesting about Gonzlez-Torres and
Tiravanijas work is what they make happen: a situation of encounter, a social
relation. Both Tiravanija and Gonzlez-Torres were central to Nicolas
Bourriauds arguments in Relational Esthetics (2002). Bourriaud described the
relational art of these artists as taking as its theoretical horizon the whole of
3

http://www.artandculture.com/users/5-rirkrit-tiravanija. Last accessed 2/2/2013

human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an
independent and private symbolic space(2002:14). The real object of
Gonzlez-Torress or Tiravanija s work was to invite people to eat and talk to
each other, to construct a social relation. For Bourriaud, art is a situation of
encounter (Bourriaud 2002:18) All works of art produce a model of sociability,
which transposes reality or might be conveyed by it.(2002:18). The form of the
art work is in the relations it establishes: to produce a form is to create the
conditions for an exchange. In other terms, the form of the artwork is in the
exchange with the audience. Hence the artist becomes a mediator, a person
that fosters and provides situations of exchange, rather than a creator of
objects. For Bourriaud, relational art practices establish particular social
relations for particular people; the artist tries to keep a personal contact with the
public that participates in the exchange, fostering what he calls a friendship
culture (Bourriaud 2002:32), in contraposition to the impersonal, mass
production of the culture industries.

Relational artworks as gifts would be free, spontaneous, personal and

disinterested events, in opposition to commodification and mass consumption.
These kind of free gifts are deeply engrained in Western philosophical
esthetics: the very notion of the esthetic experience in Kant, as free of interest
and finality, is described as a gift. More than two centuries after Kant,
arguments on the free gift are still very present, not just in contemporary art, but
in a larger sphere of debates on free culture and the cultural commons that
have re-emerged in the last decades with the new digital media and the free
software movement (see Hyde 2007, 2010).

This understanding of the gift is very different from what many anthropologist
have said since Mauss: in opposition to the ideology of freedom, improvisation
and egalitarianism of the gift in modern art and esthetics, anthropologists, in
their ethnographies and theories, have often described gifts in terms of
obligation, ritualisation, and hierarchy. Mauss first paragraph in the gift
concludes with the statement: in theory these [gifts] are voluntary, in reality
they are given and reciprocated obligatorily. (Mauss 1990:3). Many decades
later, you [Author 2] described gifts that convey no special connotations of
intimacy. Nor of altruism as a source of benign feeling (Author 2 1991: 295).

Does this distinction between theory and reality also apply to the gift in modern
art? Are gifts in art voluntary and egalitarian, in theory, but obligatory and
hierarchical, in truth? This false consciousness or misrecognition would be at
the basis of the rules of art, and of all social life as a matter of fact, for Bourdieu
(1996). The criticism to many of the different forms of relational and participatory
art that have emerged in the last decades also have been built, directly or
indirectly, on arguments of false consciousness. Claire Bishop has described
how communitiy arts have been embraced as a sort of soft social engineering
(Bishop 2012:5) in the UK, promoting participation in the arts as a form of
preventing social exclusion. For Bishop, social inclusion policies in the UK
were deeply rooted on a neoliberal agenda, seeking to enable all members of
society to be self- administering, fully functioning consumers who do not rely on
the welfare state and who can cope with a deregulated, privatised world.
(Bishop 2012:12). Notions of creativity as innate talent of the socially

excluded, an energy that could be transformed from a destructive to a

constructive impulse, are also quite common in these cultural policies.
Participatory and community art could become, in this context, devices of
neoliberal governmentality (Miessen 2011).

And yet, there is something more to the question of the gift than false
consciousness. Mauss did not just describe the gift as a misrecognised form of
symbolic capital but he also presented it in direct relation to the notion of the
person: how a gift is an extension of the person who gives, hence blurring the
very distinction between people and things. Mauss opened the door to imagine
other ontological possibilities to Western individualism, where this division is
clearly established from the onset. The relation between gift and personhood
was a central question for Melanesian anthropology all along, but in particular in
the eighties and nineties in the work of Weiner, Munn, Author 2 and Gell. Gell
famously extended the discussion of the distributed person to a general theory
of art in Art and Agency (1998). In that book Gell proposed to look at works of
art as indexes of agency. Indexes of agency are the result of intentions:
Whenever an event is believed to happen because of an intention lodged in
the person or thing which initiates the causal sequence, that is an instance of
agency (Gell 1988:17). To have intentions means to have a mind. The life we
attribute to things, and works of art in particular, would be the result of a process
of abduction or indirect inference of a mind in a thing.

Artworks dont just index the agency of the artist, but of all the agents that have

been entrapped by the artwork: they contain their distributed person, or

distributed mind, which for Gell were the same thing. Gell argued that works of
art can be seen as persons because as social persons, we are present not just
in our singular bodies, but in everything in our surroundings which bears
witness to our existence, our attributes, and our agency (ibidem, p. 103). For
Gell this is not an exotic belief, but on the contrary, he affirms that works of art
are some of the more accomplished objectifications of human agency. Artworks
can contain several different agencies from the artist, to the person represented
or the person who commissioned it, to the person who bought it, to the curator
that is displaying it. An artwork can be a trap of agencies sometimes
contradictory, sometimes complementary (Gell 1998).

Gell didnt seem to be aware of participatory and relational art practices at his
time, and yet his understanding of the distributed person can help engage with
these practices in particular ways: artists like Gonzlez-Torres and Tiravanija
distribute their personhood through the events of gift giving they perform. And
yet, this distributed personhood does not necessarily have to be understood in
terms of the free gift, of egalitarianism, but it can also create hierarchies
between those who distribute their personhood and those who are
encompassed entrapped by the personhood of others.

Still, there are limits to Gells approach. For Gell, agency is always originally
human, and often seems to give primacy to the (first) agent, namely the artist,
even if other agencies are entrapped in the process. Art works have power;

but for Gell this power is always bestowed upon them by people with minds,
whose intentions are distributed in art objects. But the notion of distributed or
partible person may be much wider. For Author 2, partible persons may not start
or generate from a single human person but they may assemble collectives of
humans and non-humans in multiple ways. In these terms, tracing back the
origin of agency is less important than describing the particular relation, where
relations take precedence over entities: it is at the point of interaction that a
singular identity is established (1988: 128). This shift of the question from
agency to relations is important also to understand one central issue in modern
and contemporary art, what Grant Kester has called the disavowal of agency
(2011:4): allowing chance to guide the process of production of art, modern and
contemporary art have proposed to open up the space of possibilities of the
artistic process by explicitly withdrawing the agency of the artist, and describing
these process as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements, human and nonhuman, without a pre-established order of agency.

Shifting the discussion towards an ontology of relations also brings further the
contradictions of the concept of the gift as an object of exchange. We owe to
Jacques Derrida the explicit formulation of the ontological antinomy of the gift:
taken to its logical conclusion, a pure gift cannot be reciprocated; because if a
return is expected, the gift always implies its opposite: interest, benefit, utility,
accountancy, commodification. The gift, like the event, as event, must remain
unforeseeable () It must let itself be structured by the aleatory; it must appear
chancy or in any case lived as such. (Derrida 1992: 122). The gift is not in the
thing given, but the event of giving; an event that gives itself, and that has to be

forgotten as such. In part, this understanding of the gift as an event goes back
to the notion of the spontaneous, free gift that we have described before as key
to modern art and aesthetics, but bringing it to a deeper phenomenological
level. Derridas understanding of event and gift are explicitly indebted to
Heideggers discussion of the thing as a gift (1971), as the establishment of a
relation, of giving itself as an event. The gift happens as an event before there
is a division between subject and object, before there is being as substance
(Derrida, 1992: 24). To put it in your terms [Author 2], the gift as a relation takes
precedence over the entities it constitutes. The gift is not a given: it is not there
before it happens; it cannot be easily be naturalized or reduced to a sociological
model (like exchange).

At this point I should stop spinning around the concept of the gift. But that is
precisely the point I wanted to make: we have a number of definitions of the gift
as a concept and practice, from the free gift of art and aesthetics, to the
hierarchical gift of Mauss and the anthropological and sociological tradition, to
the distributed person that has been more recently reclaimed, to the gift as an
event. These definitions are not contradictory or in dialectical opposition, but
they add upon each other: the gift is a recursive concept. Martin Holbraad
defines the notion of recursivity as a concept that changes every time it is used
to express something (Holbraad 2012: 76), but the change is built upon the
previous uses. The gift is the core anthropological example of recursion both as
an event and a concept, as it is constantly changing and adding up. In these
terms, rather than what the gift is, as a given, in art and elsewhere, is perhaps
less interesting that what it can be, its performativity.

If we approach the gift as a recursive concept rather than as a social fact, we

can shift the focus toward its performative potential. This could help us address
for example the key role of the gift in the utopian vision of Siituationism, to come
back to the field of art. Situationists explicitly engaged with theories of the gift, in
particular Batailles reading of the potlatch in his theory of an economy of
expenditure and excess (1993). Bataille envisioned a human condition that was
not determined by need and utility, but empowered by pleasure and play. But
still Batailles notions of free play didnt have much to do with the democratic
and libertarian utopias of contemporary art, like in Bourriauds relational
esthetics: on the opposite, his image of the gift as expense are transgressive
and destructive.

After Bataille, for the situationists the gift, the potlatch and the economy of
excess prefigured a form of exchange radically different to commodity
exchange. In The Revolution of Everyday Life (2009 [1967]), Raoul Vaneigem
made a sharp distinction between two different kinds of gift, one that would
imply hierarchy, another that would be the gateway to revolution. The first was
the feudal gift; the gift of what Mauss or Bataille would call archaic societies,
before capitalism. For Vaneigem, the feudal mind seemed to conceive the gift
as a sort of haughty refusal to exchange- a will to deny exchangeability; hence
its competitive, agonistic character, where one has to be the last to give, to keep
their reputation, rank and hierarchy (Vaneigem 2009: 57). Vaneigems vision
was not to return to the feudal gift, but the opposite: moving forward to the pure
gift (ibidem, p. 59). The pure gift would be the don sans contrepartie, the gift

without return, that would characterize the future society, in opposition both to
bourgeois society, based on the market, and the previous aristocratic society
based on the agonistic gift that didnt play for benefit, but for fame and rank. In
this sense, the situationists dismissed the hierarchical aspects of the potlatch
that were central to Mauss, Bataille, and most of the anthropological and
sociological tradition. In the pure gift, instead, the young generations would
play for the pleasure of playing itself. The gift for the situationist has the
subversive potential of questioning commodification and the property relations
in themselves. Following Bataille, the transgressive, excessive, character of the
gift is put forward, very far away from the measured, liberal humanism of the
aesthetic utopia. And yet, this transgression for the situationists doesnt have
the aristocratic tone of cosmic tragedy of Batailles sacrifice, but on the
opposite, it is an utopian hope. It is interesting to note how Vainegem had a very
clear understanding of the ontological aporia of the gift, as we have formulated
it before: the impossibility of thinking the pure gift if not in opposition to the
commodity. In these very terms, situationism describes this pure gift as a
revolutionary, utopian project of subversion of the existing social relations,
which comes not just in contradiction, but in direct opposition to commodity
exchange. It is also interesting to note that the main example of Vaneigems
pure gift is nothing but theft: The growing passion for stealing books, clothes,
food, weapons or jewelry simply for the pleasure of giving them away. Can
theft be a gift? Vaneigem clearly elaborates on the connection between the two
notions, by emphasizing the idea that the young generations steal objects out
of desire to give them away, not to hoard them. Perhaps this connection is a bit
far fetched, but still, any anthropologist can recognize that giving is always the

counterpart of taking; often the anthropological literature has made reference to

poaching, freeloading, the aggressive soliciting of gifts by people who feel
entitled to have them, or even the simply act of taking the gifts without
permission, if they are not given. This poaching may take place in confrontation
to commodity exchange, for example in colonial situations or during fieldwork,
when the colonists or the anthropologist are asked to share what they define as
their private property (e.g. Sahlins 1993). In this sense, Vaneigems
understanding of the pure gift as theft emerged clearly as an aggressive form
of questioning commodity exchange, after commodity exchange, in response to
it, as a revolutionary act.

To conclude, I would only add that, although many contemporary art practices
(like relational art) are inspired by situationism, their transgressive potential is
quite mitigated. The forms and notions of the gift that circulate in the world of
cultural production today are not very transgressive, but constructive: there is a
widespread discourse on the commons, care, participation, co-labour etc, that
is, narratives on the autonomous creation of an utopian alternative, based on
the libertarian ideology of the free gift, rather that on the creative destruction of
capitalism. Perhaps the sphere where the radical pure gift of the situationists
thrives more openly is in digital media, not only through active hacking, but
through the everyday practices of piracy of many of its users, operating in a
grey area between gift and theft, and forcing the culture industries to
constantly re-invent their business model.

Author 2. For me Art, Anthropology and the Gift (2015) was quite thrilling to
read. There are several wonderful moments in this book, from which I pick two.
One just to mention, and one that leads to a question.

At the outset let me say how much I appreciated the whole handling of the gift.
It is an incredibly slippery topic, but you [AUTHOR 1] at once hold it and extend
it with finesse. You both discriminate the ways in which the concept has been
used, and continue using it yourself to great effect. In particular I enjoyed the
explication first of its crucial character in the aesthetic regime that sees it as
building communities of free individuals (ibidem, p. 101), as against the
obligation or coercion of reciprocity as is so often emphasized in anthropology,
and then of just how that second (anthropological) understanding can also be
brought into play when we look at participatory art and the way value is created
for the artist. But this is among many analytical staging posts in the way you set
out the broader argument.

The particular moment that demands mention concerns the isomorphism

between, on the one hand, developments in anthropological thinking about
ethnography, and the continuing search for a way to be with the people whom
one is with, and, on the other hand, the relentless distribution or dissipation of
agency in artists encounters with the world, as it has evolved through ideas
about participation, relationality and living life. Parallel trajectories, keeping
pace almost decade by decade! It is comforting in a manner of speaking to
realize that as anthropologists worry away along what they think are their own

grooves, others are doing it too (and along similar grooves). Given the
reflective-critical positioning in which we might say both artists and
ethnographers place themselves, and I shall return to this, we can see the
alliance.

The isomorphism reminds me of the sense of the uncanny I got when reading
Donna Haraways Primate Visions (1989), and her account of the changes in
primate biologists treatment of their subjects over the twentieth century: one
could track the unfolding paradigms of fieldwork and analysis in primatology, if
not quite decade by decade, certainly in concert with what was happening in
anthropology. What Art, Anthropology and the Gift shows in such a compelling
way is that this being in step with the times isnt simply due to there being some
special relationship between art and anthropology, although there are, as it
also shows, several points of relationship, including self-conscious crossreferencing. It is significantly due to the unfolding mediation as in media of
production and consumption in late capitalism through the de-materialization of
products and processes of production alike (2015: 114), not to speak of the
burgeoning of the participative society.

This leads to my question; but before it is broached the book brings something
else to mind, which requires what may seem but hopefully isnt a digression.

I feel a bit like the lady at the art production centre in Can Xalant (Barcelona)
who, after a day of intense discussion about experimentation with processes

and methodologies, said she could not see any artworks in the room (2015:
113). Well Ive brought a bit of artwork into this room [where the conversation
took place]. It is like one of those incidental archives that is all that is left of an
occasion. The object in question is a file with pieces relating to an event in
which I participated ten years ago. It was completely out of context for me and
your book, Author 1, has named and explained it: relational art, no less.

A letter came out of the blue from Michael Stevenson: it was about a project he
was making in association with a group of art collectors in Germany. They fund
an artwork each year, under the unusual stipulation that at the conclusion of the
exhibition the piece be apportioned among the collectors relative to their
financial contributions. The artist simply called his exhibit The gift: The form and
reason for exchange in archaic societies. Wishing to draw attention to the
social economy of the art community, and arguing that there has to be more
than monetary exchange involved, he constructed a series of gifts of various
kinds (from himself to the collectors) handed over both before and after the
dismemberment of the artwork in 2005. (The work had already had quite a
journey from other locations in Australia and the UK.) He got me over I suppose
as a kind of gift too, an anthropologist who would talk about the gift before the
dismemberment. As a footnote, the talk later appeared in a volume on his work,
which included diverse writings intended to draw out Stevensons strategies in
relation to the interconnectedness of things (Stevenson 2013).

The object for dismemberment was a replica of a craft lashed together from
three wartime fuel tanks by a destitute artist, Ian Fairweather, who had travelled
from Darwin to London in 1952 without spending money. The raft itself got as far
as the island of Roti, off Timor, where local residents in Stevensons words
(pers. comm.) took the aluminium, this useful metal having currency in the
local economy, probably divided it as gifts among themselves, and in
exchange nursed Fairweather back to health, whence he was eventually
shipped to London. One of Stevensons plans for the aluminium replica was to
take the pieces that the art collectors cut up and rework them into implements
common in Indonesia at the time, these new artworks (his word) to be gifted
back to them. There are many things one could say about his vision; thus, on
the last point, the artist would be demonstrating the (free) gift of his refashioning
his labour, his energy, his skill, his insight, his grasp of the world of the very
metal pieces that the art collectors had paid for as parts of a replica he too had
fashioned.

What comes through for an anthropologist is the social criticism that informs the
questions Stevenson is asking. He is not alone, and perhaps I can use the
coincidence that Fairweather was aiming for London because he had heard that
a work of his was hanging in the Tate Gallery, to mention the long running
interest of Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska in the late nineties on
possession and the value of things. Thinking of a project that would take
advantage of the sitting of the new Tate Modern across the Thames from the
Bank of England, they also wanted an anthropologist to write about the gift.
One of the purposes of Capital (mounted in 2001; catalogue of same date)

specifically looked to the gifts behind the commodities, beginning with the fact
that the bank was founded through public subscription, the original Tate Gallery
through a donation. The Director of the Tate Modern described Cummings and
Lewandowska as exploring the zone or field everything in their surroundings
through which diverse activities reveal meanings, power systems and values
(introduction to Catalogue). But to what extent is it an anthropological (re-)
appropriation to see social criticism in the projects of such artists? Or rather,
what kind of alliance is this?

Being situated within the field of production and consumption in late capitalism,
not to speak of the participative society: the digression leads us all over again to
the question. The digression has been about the gift located within an earlier,
thoroughly material, critique of commodity forms. One of Author 1s questions
apropos new models of de-materialized capitalism is about what art then
becomes, and what the gift then becomes. My question looks backwards: are
we going to have to re-invent some of the forms of agency that, once their
historicity is acknowledged, otherwise seem inevitably left behind?

The question is for both anthropology and art interested in the roads that Art,
Anthropology and the Gift lays out. If the end of the road is an assimilation of
artistic and anthropological activity into the rhythms of life, its also follows that
all that seems distinguishable between them is, as the book points out, the
label: this is being done by artists (entries for their portfolios); that is being
done by anthropologists (their dissertations in the library). We can be cynical

about the agency that emerges in the end, but for myself that (self)
consciousness about both artistic and anthropological agency, with its now old
fashioned ring, demarcates something I wouldnt want to disappear. How do we
speak about interests and prejudices? It would indeed be turning back the clock
if the participatory vocabularies of many contemporary art practices refuse to
recognize interest, prejudice, and other issues that only work play,
intervention will reveal. And between art and anthropology, maybe we should
indeed start with alliance rather than assimilation; we do not need to measure
how close social criticism is or is not to (say) the situationists utopian project of
subversion when it is allies we are looking for.

What links them is that being an artist or anthropologist is not performing being
an art collector or an NGO, let alone an entrepreneur or medic or a destitute
person or anyone else with particular interests and standpoints or prejudices.
At the moment, the notion of ordinary people somehow saves the day: you do
art or ethnography with them. But in truth nobody is an ordinary person
everyone has his or her interests and prejudices. Taken to its extremes,
wouldnt an assimilationist ethos also mean the artist / ethnographer dropping
the labels altogether and performing / becoming an entrepreneur or medic or
destitute person in which case why not just leave things to the real
entrepreneurs, medics and destitute people. I cant be the only person who
thinks we still want critical observers artists and anthropologists in the mix.
I do not mean that entrepreneurs, medics and destitute people cannot also be
critical observers; indeed, quite apart from what he did in his art, Fairweathers

audacious journey without money can be constructed from such a position. But
it is not their principal work or focus of communication and effort.

So, otherwise asked, the question is: how to take a view of that agency, of
critical observation?

Author 1 The assimilation to Everyday life, the dissolution of art into life,
heteronomy, is a constant utopian drive in modern art. In my book I have tried to
show how there is a parallel between the avant-garde reaction against
academicism and the rejection of armchair Anthropology in search for
fieldwork as a context of life. There is a lot in common between participant
observation and participatory art from the onset. Of course everyday life is
always a slippery concept: as you say, ordinary people dont think of
themselves as ordinary- that is rather our image of them. Both art and
Anthropology have constructed a (perhaps utopian) image of the everyday.
What is interesting about some art practices of heteronomy on the other hand is
that they dont stop at proposing an idealised image of the everyday: they
explicitly intervene in everyday life, they perform it. This is something that
anthropologists have always been more ambiguous about: it has been hard to
recognise that we dont simply make representations of a field that is already
there, but that becoming a part of it, we make it happen in particular ways. The
anthropological field is a participatory event.
So the question is not just how artists and anthropologists have built an
utopian image of everyday life, but how they have intervened into it, how they

have performed it. And this performance entails a certain politics, as you point
out. This was quite explicit in the case of situationism, where the dissolution of
art in everyday life entailed a criticism of the very division between work and life,
the alienation of labour that capitalism was based upon. Gilles Debord famously
said: In a classless society there will no longer be painters, but only
situationists who, among other things, sometimes paint. (Debord 2006 [1958]:
41). What this implied was that in the future classless society, there would be no
professional painters, or professional artists, or professional critical thinkers, but
that everyone would be, in their own time (sometimes), an artist or critical
thinker. To be consequential with this objective. situationists renounced to their
career as artists, abandoned the production of artworks as commodities and
dedicated their life to the situationist revolution.

Many decades after, there have been many different, contentious readings of
the outcomes of that revolution. Many think it never happened: by the early
seventies there was only one situationism left: Debord himself! And yet others
think it did happen, but it went in the opposite direction that what the
situationists aimed. The separation between art and life, the alienation of labour
was indeed questioned by the new kind of society that emerged from the
seventies. And yet this new society was still a new form of capitalism, with a
new spirit, as Boltanski and Chiapello have defined it (2006). The new spirit of
capitalism re-appropriates the artistic critique, and proposes a new form of life in
which the worker is creative, entrepreneurial, identifies with his work, doesnt
really make a distinction between his life inside and outside of his work: his
social relations are part of what he does for a living. This is the new model of

management, also an utopian model, because it does not correspond to

reality, of course, but is enforced through performative mechanisms of
bureaucratic enforcement that try to bend reality (everyday life!) to the model:
mechanisms of accountability and auditing, which quantify creativity, the value
produced by everyday life as it becomes a commodity, transforming relations
into objects.
So in the new spirit of capitalism, the division of labour has been
cancelled in particular ways. The autonomy of different fields of practice has
been superseded, to an extent, by the imposition of a model of life and work
that is transversal: management. Nowadays, artists and anthropologists are
also managers: they have to demonstrate they are able to raise money,
independently from the quality of their work in the autonomous terms of their
practice as art or anthropology. To give one specific example: a colleague giving
a presentation some weeks ago (November 2015) commented en passant that
in the Netherlands today to become a full professor, the candidate has to
demonstrate the ability to raise 300.000 euros in the private sector. Regardless
of the content or quality of their research and (!) teaching, which one thinks
should be the definition of their job. That is indeed one of the outcomes of the
participative society, in which nobody should expect just getting money from
the Welfare state, but everybody should be able to participate in raising funds.

There are several possible reactions to this management utopia or dystopia, of

which I could point out three. The first, which in my experience is quite common
both in the art world and academia, is what I would call out-smarting. It is born
from the conviction that we (artists and scholars) are indeed the chosen few.

We are smarter than the managerial- bureaucratic machine that is imposed

upon us and we will be able to use it to our own benefit, getting lots of grants
and making whatever we want with them, because anyways these bureaucrats
wont know. Of course it never works, the managerial machine always ends up
imposing its own logics, it doesnt depend on our individual cunning. I have to
say that I have always been surprised by these discourses, in particular in the
mouths of scholars and artists who know the work of Foucault very well. In the
end perhaps it reveals a deeply engrained belief in individualism and the
survival of the fittest that lays deep in the habitus of many scholars and artists
beyond layers of sociological theory. In other terms: some think that they will do
fine because they are brilliant and that bureaucracy is only a problem for losers.
Of course, this is precisely what the managerial machine expects them to think:
it is their own merit that has taken them to success. And if they dont succeed, it
is their own fault.

The second reaction is the autonomist. This is a conservative reaction, and I

dont mean it in a negative sense, but as a statement of fact: of preserving
things as they were, or as they were meant to be; defending the autonomy of
intellectual labour and art, and state the necessary autonomy of critical thinking.
The division of labour in modern Western society also had a political sense, as
a necessary complement of the division of powers in the public sphere.
Intellectuals should be separated from the executive power, to be able to have a
critical perspective. We could ask if this ever did actually happen, but there
certainly is an argument to be made, against the banalisation of intellectual life.

The ironical fact is that these arguments in defence of the autonomy of art and
the university are often accused of ivory tower elitism by the advocates of
management: ironically, the situationist and Maoist arguments against elitism in
the sixties have become the arguments of the zealots of the managerial utopia
(as in the participative society).

There is indeed a case to be made for autonomy. Or in other terms, there is a

case to be made for detachment: not everything can be reduced to relations,
participation, commonalities, inter- or trans-disciplinarity. For example, in his
work on the relations between anthropology and archaeology, Yarrow found that
it is precisely the disconnection and difference between the ways in which these
disciplines produce knowledge what sets up the possibility for productive
engagement (Garrow and Yarrow 2010). There is no question that any relation
produces a form of disengagement, just like any detachment is premised on a
previously existing relation (Candea et al. 2015: 24), there is always a moment
of separation and cut, like your own work, Author 2, already pointed out (1996).
In any case, I personally think that autonomist arguments are very valid, and yet
inevitably limited if we confront the extremely powerful and pervasive relational
machinery of management, that is ideologically inoculated against them.

The other possible reaction is more pro-active, and it would involve taking the
bull by the horns, or in other terms confronting the enemy in its own terms:
neither through cunning and outsmarting, or by detachment, but by multiplying
the relations. The fact that the old forms of critique have been re-appropriated
does not mean that the potential for critical thought and action that has

emanated from art and anthropology in the last century has been cancelled.
The proposal that everybody is an artist, may still have a potential, if we see in
direct confrontation to the dominant everybody is a manager. This
confrontation may reveal, first of all, that both are based on utopia- they are not
a description of reality but a political project. We can also say (why not?) that
everybody is an anthropologist. That does not mean to diminish the value of
Anthropology as an autonomous form of knowledge (beware!), but on the
opposite, it proposes the necessity of making Anthropology part of public life.
What makes Anthropology a part of public life, what makes it political, is
radically opposite to the managerial utopia: it proposes opposed notions of the
person, of the world, of the relation between people and things, etc. And hence
it implies a certain politics, in contraposition to the politics of utility, impact and
added value. This different politics entails working in collaboration with others,
and this collaboration, I think, must start from what we have in common, not
from what makes us different; not from our expertise, but from a common
political ground. Then, once we start working together, it is quite clear than the
collective political process will make emerge the different forms of knowledge
and skill of all the actors involved, and certain forms of detachment, and
hierarchy, will emerge. But I think that starting from the common ground is still
necessary, in political terms.

Author 2 Imagining that we might out-smart the management machine, or that

critical thinking could be autonomous, are beautifully put in their place by this
response [above]. Naming the machinery relational shows us what we are up
against. Perhaps I had in mind something more isomorphic about interests and

prejudices (by which I meant to capture a whole range of motivating issues, at

whatever scale, that we do not have to pin on class or other systemic
materialisms / structures). Interest and prejudices can equally divide art from
anthropology, or separate the alliance between them from their objects of
description, depiction and so forth. And of criticism. What you say earlier about
the gift as a recursive concept, rather than a social fact, can surely be borrowed
for (social) criticism. Its performative potential, in other words, is literally of
incalculable, non-auditable, value.

Naming the machinery relational performs just what I think we have been talking
about. At least in your hands [Author 1], it has enlarged a critical vocabulary: if
the problem is the kind of relationality that seemingly gobbles up every critical
counter-move, then multiplying the relationalities is surely the answer. To do so
is not being smart or innocent it is being implacable. Or at least it can be when
the multiplication takes place through instigating objects of knowledge (work,
play, intervention, and such) that have their own specificity.

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