Reviews
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︎ December 15th, 2019
Hito Steyerl (Post-Capitalism) vs. Jodi Dean (Anti-Capitalism)
Hito Steyerl is an artist who combines documentary, fiction, filmmaking, installation, and performance. Her work is critical of both authoritarianism and neoliberalism for these systems’ violence, surveillance, and other abuses of power. The scope of her work travels the globe in terms of content, which targets both past and present conflicts in America, the Middle East, Europe, and on the internet. Steyerl is an internationally recognized artist. Her work has been shown at MoMA, the Whitney, and in several biennales. She is award-winning and has been praised in the New York Times (Bradley). Her writing circulates often in academic spaces. By these standards, Hito is a conventionally successful artist. This review does not intend to condemn her success, nor negate her talent or intellect. The goal of this essay is to make sense of Hito’s attitude toward the art market, and detect any inconsistencies between her writing in Duty Free Art and the financial decisions she makes in her practice.
Steyerl’s primary concerns with the art market rely on two central themes. First, the art market is unregulated and lacks transparency. The second issue is with the practice of ‘artwashing’ state and corporate violence. Steyerl dedicates enormous energy in researching and articulating these two problems clearly. She also offers some remedies, suggesting individual actors should challenge monumental forces of oppression by creating more ethical parallel structures, improving representation of marginalized people, and through a ‘gaming the system’ strategy. While these solutions seem like empowering starting points to reimagine a more equitable (art) world, it is not clear how this individualistic approach could affect long term structural change to our society. Steyerl’s proposed ‘new deal’ for museums could potentially redistribute hyper-consolidated power in the art market (Zefkili), but that outcome seems even less likely considering how embedded Steyerl is within a rigid capitalist framework dominated by art collecting oligarchs and billionaires. Institutional critique does an excellent job of pointing out issues that should disturb all of us, but how meaningful is this endeavor if the results are quickly absorbed by anti-revolutionary institutions? Here it is helpful to examine the differences between post-capitalism and anti-capitalism, and perhaps think seriously about what possibilities could emerge from more militant action against our oppressors.
Steyerl describes the world as “a state that shrouds most of its operations in secrecy, retracting behind secret legislation; a deep state in which inequality is simultaneously on the rise” (Steyerl 43). Narrowing in on the art market, Steyerl agrees that “contemporary art is a kind of layer or proxy which pretends that everything is still ok” (52). She sites how shady tax exemption laws, corporate sponsorships, museum flagships built within authoritarian regimes, and the language used to talk about art (dubbed ‘International Art English’) are all agents of the market that obscure massive exploitation (81). Art’s conditions of possibility are “no longer just the elitist ‘ivory tower,’ but also the dictator’s contemporary art foundation, the… weapon manufacturer’s tax-evasion scheme” (58). This directly impacts art professionals by diverting investments from sustainable job creation, education, and research. Steyerl writes about these observations to explain a phenomenon called ‘artwashing,’ which has created a deradicalizing effect in the art world and contributes to the increasingly globalized stagnation of politics, economy, and culture. Steyerl equates stagnation with perpetual war and class struggle, a toxic loop strengthened by neoliberalism. Stagnation also relates to the capitalist process of producing, using up, and discarding the workers needed to uphold our current political economy. Steyerl is blatantly critical of capitalism, noting how this system compromises the ability of people to speak openly about exploitation, stating “we are indeed lacking authors attacking or even describing, in any language, the art world’s jargon-veiled money laundering and post-democratic Ponzi schemes. Not many people dare talk about post-mass-murder, gentrification-driven art booms in, for example, Turkey or Sri Lanka” (80).
Fortunately for us, Steyerl is one of those unique authors who dares speak against the financial corruption of the global art market. She also proposes a few delicate solutions. Steyerl believes that life is like a video game, and that “an art professional who rejects games as either socially irrelevant or not real enough is definitely in denial” (97). Steyerl uses this analogy because like in games, in life there are two sets of rules: the ones superimposed that all must follow, and the rules that individual players invent for themselves out of resourcefulness and the desire to level up. Games are powerful generative fictions, where players can “imitate a not-yet-existent reality and game it into being. This is how playing grows into acting” (97). Steyerl builds this principle into a complex and sophisticated learning tool to explain her ideas. She distinguishes between ‘desirable’ games, and other types of games that are used to exploit and manipulate people. Those games unfortunately lead to increased social surveillance and undermine human rights.
Steyerl points out that games are not only playgrounds for free choice, but also training grounds for habits. They rehearse certain response patterns and create muscle memory. She believes that most games in contemporary society use first-person perspectives and reward rational self-interest. This is training people to be better participants in the neoliberal free-market economy and further points to the idea that games can be used for both good or bad.
“A desirable game, as I define it, is one that is restricted to a dedicated space and time; it can be reset, and its scores can be erased. A correlation game is the opposite of this. It is not limited, and you have no idea where, when, how, and through whom you were captured for participation. The details...what it consists of, how it’s manufactured, who it was inferred from, to whom it is sold and for what purpose---are kept secret from you. Its effect may or may not be reversible, one just doesn’t know” (94).
Steyerl believes we must create parallel structures to the greed-based consumer society that poisons our people and our land. Within these hypothetical art spaces, people play ‘desirable’ games and should follow what this artist names as the bare minimum: “declining the most mortifying sponsor and patron relationships (instead of artwashing fossil extraction, weapons manufacturing, and banks bailed out with former cultural funding)” (106) because refusing sponsorship of this sort helps us move away from “the unsustainable and mortifying dependency on speculative operations that indirectly increase authoritarian violence and division” (106). Bluntly, Steyerl suggests: “spend free time assisting colleagues, not working for free for bank foundations” (106).
Steyerl also examines the dynamics of modern-day representation, claiming that political power is being systematically eroded so that political representation as a tool matters less and less. Meanwhile, the cultural representation of marginalized groups has skyrocketed thanks to ‘communicative’ capitalism. Cultural visibility is falsely being treated as a proxy for absent political and economic empowerment. Steyerl also stresses the importance of economic representation. She suggests ‘reintroducing’ checks and balances to ‘renegotiate’ value and information in a way that establishes better political and economic representation, “and human solidarity” (102).
Does Steyerl’s artistic practice adhere to her own intense politics? No, it does not. For the opening of MoMA’s $450 million renovation, one of Steyerl’s best-known installations, Liquidity Inc. is on view in an exhibition sponsored by Bank of America. There seems to be cognitive dissonance regarding Steyerl’s writing (where she insists actors in the art market reject banking industry affiliations) and the way she conducts business in her own career. Another point of confusion is the duality between Steyerl’s support for activism calling MoMA to divest from weapons manufacturing, mass incarceration, and immigration detention (New Sanctuary Coalition), but then also donating her artwork to the permanent collection of this museum. Furthermore, Steyerl’s artwork at MoMA lacks basic accessibility; viewers are not allowed to record video of the installation, take photos of the installation transcript, nor read the transcript while looking at the artwork. This calls into question Steyerl’s so-called fear that securing artworks in elite tax-havens disadvantages the public, as we see her placing her own work within the very conditions that create the dystopian projections she writes about.
What are the consequences of Steyerl’s business maneuvers? The easy answer is to call her a hypocrite. While it is easy to see how she is co-opting radicality for careerist motivations, this situation also offers the possibility of deeper analysis. We can start by acknowledging the value of bringing awareness to global and financial conflict by placing post-capitalist criticism in front of crowds at MoMA. Truthfully, if all the radical artists boycotted our primary cultural establishments and academic centers, the only people who would benefit from this vacancy are those in power looking to preserve the status quo. With this in mind, the way Steyerl lays out ample resources and context for other academics who also want to criticize the system, merits applause. She is undeniably well researched, articulate, and skillfully creates nuance in her writing and art. This all contributes positively toward the noble mission to change the consciousness of our sick, misinformed, resentful, and apathetic society. But beyond satisfying these benchmarks, what else can be done to advocate for “pluriform, horizontal forms of life” (16) … “in a language that takes on and confronts issues of circulation, labor, and privilege” (83)?
Here it is useful to define ‘post-capitalism’ and explain why this appellation describes Steyerl. The term post-capitalist intentionally implies an empty relationship to capitalism, favoring critique and personal commentary over concrete opposition and universal alternatives. Scholar Jodi Dean lays out the similarities and differences between post- and anti-capitalism in her book The Communist Horizon. Both are forms of resistance against authoritarianism and neoliberal politics, and both scrutinize the financial dealings of the art market. However, a key difference lies in what each ideology believes is possible. This is best seen in the ways post- and anti-capitalism treat communism. On one side, anti-capitalists attach themselves to communism, believing collective strength creates new potentials that replace both melancholic fatalism and the discursive dominance of capital. On the other side, post-capitalists (like Steyerl) distance themselves from communism while simultaneously evoking the principles of communism in both deliberate and unconscious ways. Interestingly, Steyerl quotes Marx often throughout her writing, using his work as a frame of reference while at the same time never fully embracing communist desire or idealism. Instead, Steyerl advocates for ‘cooperative autonomy,’ which she defines as "not a taking over or occupation of the state, but the creation of parallel structures within existing ones” (Steyerl 41). Dean adeptly calls out this post-capitalist fixation on autonomy as “politics thought primarily in terms of…playful and momentary aesthetic disruptions, the immediate specificity of local projects, and struggles for hegemony within a capitalist parliamentary setting” (Dean 11). This attitude “treats collectivity with suspicion and privileges a fantasy of individual singularity” (Dean 12). This fantasy leads to the misconception that “general inclusion, momentary calls for broad awareness, and lifestyle changes” (Dean 12) will converge as a plurality that, through networks and sharing, can change the world. Relating specifically to the art world, Dean observes:
“Some activists and theorists treat aesthetic objects and creative work as displaying a political potentiality missing from classes, parties, and unions. This aesthetic focus disconnects politics from the organized struggle of working people, making politics into what spectators see. Artistic products, whether actual commodities or commodified experiences, thereby buttress capital as they circulate political affects while displacing political struggles from the streets to the galleries. Spectators can pay (or donate) to feel radical without having to get their hands dirty. The dominant class retains its position and the contradiction between this class and the rest of us doesn’t make itself felt as such. The celebration of momentary actions and singular happenings—the playful disruption, the temporarily controversial film or novel—works the same way” (Dean 14).
In direct contrast, anti-capitalists draw inspiration from communism’s advocacy for militancy, occupation, tight organizational units, collective voice, strikes, and revolution. None of these methods of resistance are on Steyerl’s radar in her book Duty Free Art. As predicted by Dean’s characterization of the pessimistic post-capitalist agenda, Steyerl cynically references a failed attempt to strike within the art world (Steyerl 17), further confirming Dean’s position that leftist melancholy takes root wherever communist desire has been discredited and removed.
Dean is critical of what she refers to as the ‘playful disruption,’ citing Jacque Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of ‘drive’ to make her argument. In describing ‘drive,’ Dean writes, “we perpetually miss our goal and get satisfaction through this very missing. Or we don’t have an actual goal, and we take the absence of a goal to be a strength… Activity becomes passivity, our stuckness in a circuit, which is then mourned as the absence of ideas or even the loss of the political itself and then routed yet again through a plea for democracy” (Dean 66). This attitude is reminiscent of Steyerl’s affinity for the repetitive engagement of attempting to ‘game’ the system, even though Steyerl tries to make a distinction in Duty Free Art between senseless ‘reenactment’ and generative play-acting. According to Dean, play-acting, and therefore gaming, still registers as ‘drive’ by treating a feature of our setting as an alternative without actually establishing a different political formation. Steyerl’s ‘parallel’ approach also fails to address this problem.
Dean is suspicious of Steyerl’s post-capitalist pleas for democracy and representation. Often, calls for democracy actually express a will to make channels of wealth more accessible to working-class people, which does little to challenge the superimposed system. This is why Steyerl’s insistence on economic representation is seen as a limited, short-sighted demand by anti-capitalists who are interrogating the function of individual wealth at a macro level. In a strongly-worded passage, Dean remarks that post-capitalists fear the bloody violence of revolution (58), and hence focus on displacing anger into safer procedural, consumerist, and aesthetic channels. This explains the difference between post-capitalist participatory inclusivity and anti-capitalist collective power. When post-capitalists emphasize identity politics, issue politics, and celebrate their own fragmentation into a multitude of singularities, there is little space to truly examine the way egocentrism fuels both capitalism and activism alike. Resistance rooted in the individual (individual survival, individual capacity, and individual rights) does not do enough to challenge the wealthy elite’s stronghold over our state, markets, and psychology. While many of us, myself included, take comfort in the small efforts of change we are able to procure in our humble lives, the truth is that these efforts are meaningless if we are not also building collective, militant strength that unifies the power of the people through radically ambitious goals.
The time is now to figure out how post- and anti-capitalists can cooperate and develop each others’ strengths. Steyerl, as an artist that embodies contradictions and cynicism, is not exactly the model we should be aspiring to. However, we can still learn from her example. A telling coincidence: Jodi Dean and Hito Steyerl are represented by the same publisher, Verso books.
There are many things Steyerl gets right with her practice, especially when it comes to her methodical investigative research, her confident analysis of the internet’s role in all this, her ability to contextualize new technologies like captchas and 3D printing, her defense of fundamental values like transparency and freedom… Overall, artists have the potential to overthrow the daunting and unjust structures of our society, and replace them with the blessed and equitable future we deserve. We can harness this potential, and maximize its effect, by embracing far-reaching visionary thinking, believing wholeheartedly that people have all the power (we do), and be willing to take great risks to prove it.
︎ Works Cited
Bradley, Kimberly. “Hito Steyerl Is an Artist With Power. She Uses It for Change.” Art & Design, The New York Times, 15 Dec. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/12/15/arts/design/hito-steyerl.html.
Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon. Verso Books, 2012.
“MoMA BlackRock Divest Statement.” New Sanctuary Coalition, 2019, www.newsanctuarynyc.org/moma_divest.
Steyerl, Hito. Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. Verso Books, 2017.
Zefkili, Despina. “Hito Steyerl: How To Build a Sustainable Art World.” Ocula, 18 Oct. 2019, www.ocula.com/magazine/conversations/hito-steyerl. Accessed 15 Dec. 2019.
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