art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

220
Žarko PAIĆ
The Spectacle of the Nature of Capital
(An afterword to the artistic project of Dalibor Martinis, Variable Risk Landscape)
“Get rich, invest, propagate and multiply your capital, for the old world is passing
and a new one is being born”. This paraphrase of the celebrated words of Adam
Smith on the essence of capitalism with its supplementation to the words of Jesus
from the Apocalypse of St John no longer sounds so very scandalous. In the age of
the information society, the only scandal that cannot be pronounced a phantasm
appears in the many figures of transnational corporate capitalism.
Global IT-based capitalism marks a system of financial power defining all areas
of the world of system and the world of life.[1] The idea of transnational corporate
capitalism then is a perfect correlate of the spectacle of the nature of capital as IT
culture.[2]
The concept of the society of spectacle derives from the neo-Marxist theory of Guy
Debord.[3] Spectacle for him does not mark the form of capitalism in the “last phase”
of its transformation into the world of visual phantasmagoria. The fetishist character
of commodities is seen as a universal form of the representation/presentation of the
world of images in which the object of desire or need becomes the structure of the
subject itself. The idea of spectacle does not refer expressly to the world of the mass
media, but to the total alienation of primary human sociality. The spectacularisation
of global capitalism confirms Debord’s diagnosis to the extent to which it is glaringly
apparent that the hyperproduction of the visual medium is coincident with the
hyperproduction of consumer capitalism, in which every form of denial has already
become the logo for the new production of objects of consumption.[4] The age of
global capital and IT culture is the age of the spectacular happening of the world
as new image.[5]
It goes without saying that contemporary art in this new environment can no
longer repose on fake bases of a reality that no longer exist as an image of the real.
The real, the imaginary and the symbolic of capital as spectacle are the end of its
rational nature. In a network subject-free society, its substance is de-subjectivised.
Instead of Beuys’s formula for the equation of art and capital (Kunst = Kapital), the
equals sign has to be done away with, for contemporary art is not just the symbolic
and cultural capital of individual, collective or nation state, rather the social power
of realistic criticism to be a spectacle of the nature of capital itself.
Art surmounts the logic of the rule of capital over the world in general in that it
negates itself, negating the “nature”, “necessity”, and “eternity” of history in the sign
of the power of capital as present and absent God of the global epoch of the world.
For a contemporary artist to be able to work in the happening of the performative
and conceptual reversal of the image of the virtual reality of capital, there are many
metamorphoses to be undergone.