FS20 What Is Worthless WEB

ETH Zürich Professur Adam Caruso FS 2020
WHAT IS WORTHLESS
READER
2 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,

Karl Marx
26 Walden, Henry David Thoreau
58 Staying with the Trouble, Donna J. Haraway
68 The Education of the Un-Artist, Allan Kaprow
84 Decoys and Disruptions, Martha Rosler
100 The Artistic Mode of Revolution,
Martha Rosler
128 The Loneliness of the Project, Boris Groys
140 An Interview with Pierre Huyghe, George Baker
180 The Promise of The Flat Field,
a Reflection on Non-productive Expenditure,
Helen Thomas
190 Molloy, Samuel Beckett
Professur Adam Caruso
Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich
www.caruso.arch.ethz.ch
Assistants
Emilie Appercé, Martina Bischof, Benjamin Groothuijse,
Claudio Schneider, Barbara Thüler
Student Assistants
Jasper Buchmann-Ebbert, Ramona Wey
Concept design
Moiré, Marc Kappeler, Markus Reichenbach &
Ruth Amstutz
Printing and binding

Druckzentrum ETH Hönggerberg
The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte
Karl Marx
from Die Revolution, New York:
Foreing Language Press, 1852.
translated by Saul K. Padover.
2
I
Hegel remarks somewhere1 that all great world-historic facts

and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the
first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for
Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848
to 18512 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the
uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the
second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they
please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances,
but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted
from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like
a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to
be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating
something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of
revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the
past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans,
and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history
in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther
put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814
draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and
the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing
better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary
tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned
a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue,
but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses
himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the
old and when he forgets his native tongue.
When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world
history, a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins,
Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the
parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed
the task of their time – that of unchaining and establishing
modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with Roman
phrases. The first one destroyed the feudal foundation and cut
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Karl Marx
off the feudal heads that had grown on it. The other created
inside France the only conditions under which free competition
could be developed, parceled-out land properly used, and the
unfettered productive power of the nation employed; and beyond
the French borders it swept away feudal institutions everywhere,
to provide, as far as necessary, bourgeois society in France with an
appropriate up-to-date environment on the European continent.
[…]
Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served
the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the
old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling
from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of
revolution, not making its ghost walk again.
From 1848 to 1851, only the ghost of the old revolution
circulated - from Marrast, the républicain en gants jaunes
[Republican in yellow gloves], who disguised himself as old Bailly,
down to the adventurer who hides his trivial and repulsive features
behind the iron death mask of Napoleon. A whole nation, which
thought it had acquired an accelerated power of motion by means
of a revolution, suddenly finds itself set back into a defunct epoch,
and to remove any doubt about the relapse, the old dates arise
again – the old chronology, the old names, the old edicts, which
had long since become a subject of antiquarian scholarship, and
the old minions of the law who had seemed long dead.
[…]
The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take
its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin
with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the
past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world
history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of
the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order
to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the
content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.
The February Revolution was a surprise attack, a seizing
of the old society unaware, and the people proclaimed this
unexpected stroke a deed of world importance, ushering in a new
epoch. On December 2 the February Revolution is conjured away
4
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
as a cardsharp‘s trick, and what seems overthrown is no longer

the monarchy but the liberal concessions that had been wrung
from it through centuries of struggle. Instead of society having
conquered a new content for itself, it seems that the state has only
returned to its oldest form, to a shamelessly simple rule by the
sword and the monk‘s cowl. This is the answer to the coup de main
[unexpected stroke] of February, 1848, given by the coup de tête
[rash act] of December, 1851. Easy come, easy go. Meantime, the
interval did not pass unused. During 1848-51 French society, by
an abbreviated revolutionary method, caught up with the studies
and experiences which in a regular, so to speak, textbook course
of development would have preceded the February Revolution,
if the latter were to be more than a mere ruffling of the surface.
Society seems now to have retreated to behind its starting point;
in truth, it has first to create for itself the revolutionary point
of departure – the situation, the relations, the conditions under
which alone modern revolution becomes serious.
[…]
For the rest, every fair observer, even if he had not followed
the course of French developments step by step, must have had
a presentiment of the imminence of an unheard-of disgrace for
the revolution. It was enough to hear the complacent yelps of
victory with which the democrats congratulated each other on the
expectedly gracious consequences of the second Sunday in May,
1852. [day of elections – Louis Bonaparte‘s term was expired] In their
minds that second Sunday of May had become a certain idea, a
dogma, like the day of Christ‘s reappearance and the beginning of
the millennium in the minds of the Chiliasts3. As always, weakness
had taken refuge in a belief in miracles, believed the enemy to be
overcome when he was only conjured away in imagination, and lost
all understanding of the present in an inactive glorification of the
future that was in store for it and the deeds it had in mind but did
not want to carry out yet. Those heroes who seek to disprove their
demonstrated incapacity – by offering each other their sympathy
and getting together in a crowd – had tied up their bundles,
collected their laurel wreaths in advance, and occupied themselves
with discounting on the exchange market the republics in partibus
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Karl Marx
[in partibus infidelium – in the lands of the infidels] for which they
had already providently organized the government personnel with
all the calm of their unassuming disposition. December 2 struck
them like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, and those who in periods
of petty depression gladly let their inner fears be drowned by the
loudest renters will perhaps have convinced themselves that the
times are past when the cackle of geese could save the Capitol.4
The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic
parties, the blue and red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the
thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press,
the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual
reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberté, egalité,
fraternité, and the second Sunday in May, 1852 – all have vanished
like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his
enemies do not make out to be a sorcerer. Universal suffrage
seems to have survived only for the moment, so that with its own
hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all
the world and declare in the name of the people itself: “All that
exists deserves to perish.”[From Goethe‘s Faust, Part One.]
It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation
was taken unawares. Nations and women are not forgiven the
unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who came along
could violate them. Such turns of speech do not solve the riddle
but only formulate it differently. It remains to be explained how a
nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised and delivered without
resistance into captivity by three knights of industry.
Let us recapitulate in general outline the phases that the
French Revolution went through from February 24, 1848, to
December, 1851.
Three main periods are unmistakable: the February period;
the period of the constitution of the republic or the Constituent
National Assembly - May 1848 to May 28 1849; and the period of
the constitutional republic or the Legislative National Assembly
– May 28, 1849, to December 2, 1851.
[…]
6
VII
The social republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy, on

the threshold of the February Revolution. In the June days of
1848, it was drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but
it haunts the subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost. The
democratic republic announces its appearance. It is dissipated on
June 13, 1849, together with its deserting petty bourgeois, but in
its flight it redoubles its boastfulness. The parliamentary republic
together with the bourgeoisie takes possession of the entire state;
it enjoys its existence to the full, but December 2, 1851, buries
it to the accompaniment of the anguished cry of the coalesced
royalists: “Long live the Republic!”
The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the
working proletariat; it has brought the lumpen proletariat5 to
domination, with the Chief of the Society of December 10 at
the head. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the
future terrors of red anarchy – Bonaparte discounted this future
for it when, on December 4, he had the eminent bourgeois of
the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot
down at their windows by the drunken army of law and order.
The bourgeoisie apotheosized the sword; the sword rules it. It
destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press is destroyed. It
placed popular meetings under police surveillance; its salons are
placed under police supervision. It disbanded the democratic
National Guard, its own National Guard is disbanded. It imposed
a state of siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it. It supplanted
the juries by military commissions; its juries are supplanted by
military commissions. It subjected public education to the sway of
the priests; the priests subject it to their own education. It jailed
people without trial, it is being jailed without trial. It suppressed
every stirring in society by means of state power; every stirring
in its society is suppressed by means of state power. Out of
enthusiasm for its moneybags it rebelled against its own politicians
and literary men; its politicians and literary men are swept aside,
but its moneybag is being plundered now that its mouth has been
7
Karl Marx
gagged and its pen broken. The bourgeoisie never tired of crying
out to the revolution what St. Arsenius cried out to the Christians:
“Fuge, tace, quiesce!” [“Flee, be silent, keep still!”] Bonaparte cries
to the bourgeoisie: “Fuge, tace, quiesce!”
The French bourgeoisie had long ago found the solution to
Napoleon‘s dilemma: “In fifty years Europe will be republican
or Cossack.” It solved it in the “Cossack republic” No Circe
using black magic has distorted that work of art, the bourgeois
republic, into a monstrous shape. That republic has lost nothing
but the semblance of respectability. Present-day France was
already contained in the parliamentary republic. It required only
a bayonet thrust for the bubble to burst and the monster to leap
forth before our eyes.
Why did the Paris proletariat not rise in revolt after December 2?
The overthrow of the bourgeoisie had as yet been only
decreed; the decree was not carried out. Any serious insurrection
of the proletariat would at once have put new life into the
bourgeoisie, reconciled it with the army, and insured a second
June defeat for the workers.
On December 4 the proletariat was incited by bourgeois and
shopkeeper to fight. On the evening of that day several legions of
the National Guard promised to appear, armed and uniformed,
on the scene of battle. For the bourgeois and the shopkeeper had
learned that in one of his decrees of December 2 Bonaparte had
abolished the secret ballot and had ordered them to put a “yes”
or “no” after their names on the official registers. The resistance
of December 4 intimidated Bonaparte. During the night he had
placards posted on all the street corners of Paris announcing the
restoration of the secret ballot. The bourgeois and the shopkeeper
believed they had gained their objective. Those who failed to
appear next morning were the bourgeois and the shopkeeper.
By a coup de main the night of December 1-2 Bonaparte
had robbed the Paris proletariat of its leaders, the barricade
commanders. An army without officers, averse to fighting under
the banner of the Montagnards because of the memories of
June, 1848 and 1849, and May, 1850, it left to its vanguard, the
secret societies, the task of saving the insurrectionary honor of
8
Paris, which the bourgeoisie had surrendered to the military so

unresistingly that, subsequently, Bonaparte could disarm the
National Guard with the sneering motive of his fear that its
weapons would be turned against it by the anarchists!
“This is the complete and final triumph of socialism!” Thus
Guizot characterized December 2. But if the overthrow of the
parliamentary republic contains within itself the germ of the
triumph of the proletarian revolution, its immediate and obvious
result was Bonaparte‘s victory over parliament, of the executive
power over the legislative power, of force without phrases over
the force of phrases. In parliament the nation made its general
will the law; that is, it made the law of the ruling class its general
will. It renounces all will of its own before the executive power and
submits itself to the superior command of an alien, of authority.
The executive power, in contrast to the legislative one, expresses
the heteronomy of a nation in contrast to its autonomy. France
therefore seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only to
fall back under the despotism of an individual, and what is more,
under the authority of an individual without authority. The struggle
seems to be settled in such a way that all classes, equally powerless
and equally mute, fall on their knees before the rifle butt.
But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling
through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December
2, 1851, it had completed half of its preparatory work; now it is
completing the other half. It first completed the parliamentary
power in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has achieved
this, it completes the executive power, reduces it to its purest
expression, isolates it, sets it up against itself as the sole target, in
order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And
when it has accomplished this second half of its preliminary work,
Europe will leap from its seat and exult: Well burrowed, old mole!6
The executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and
military organization, with its wide-ranging and ingenious state
machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million,
besides an army of another half million – this terrifying parasitic
body which enmeshes the body of French society and chokes all
its pores sprang up in the time of the absolute monarchy, with
9
Karl Marx
the decay of the feudal system which it had helped to hasten.

The seignorial privileges of the landowners and towns became
transformed into so many attributes of the state power, the
feudal dignitaries into paid officials, and the motley patterns of
conflicting medieval plenary powers into the regulated plan of
a state authority whose work is divided and centralized as in a
factory.
The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking all
separate local, territorial, urban, and provincial powers in order
to create the civil unity of the nation, was bound to develop what
the monarchy had begun, centralization, but at the same time
the limits, the attributes, and the agents of the governmental
power. Napoleon completed this state machinery. The Legitimate
Monarchy and the July Monarchy added nothing to it but a greater
division of labor, increasing at the same rate as the division of
labor inside the bourgeois society created new groups of interests,
and therefore new material for the state administration. Every
common interest was immediately severed from the society,
countered by a higher, general interest, snatched from the
activities of society‘s members themselves and made an object
of government activity – from a bridge, a schoolhouse, and the
communal property of a village community, to the railroads, the
national wealth, and the national University of France. Finally the
parliamentary republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found
itself compelled to strengthen the means and the centralization
of governmental power with repressive measures. All revolutions
perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The parties, which
alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of
this huge state structure as the chief spoils of the victor.
But under the absolute monarchy, during the first
Revolution, and under Napoleon the bureaucracy was only the
means of preparing the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Under the
Restoration, under Louis Philippe, under the parliamentary
republic, it was the instrument of the ruling class, however much
it strove for power of its own.
Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to
have made itself completely independent. The state machinery
10
has so strengthened itself vis-à-vis civil society that the Chief of

the Society of December 10 suffices for its head – an adventurer
dropped in from abroad, raised on the shoulders of a drunken
soldiery which he bought with whisky and sausages and to which
he has to keep throwing more sausages. Hence the low-spirited
despair, the feeling of monstrous humiliation and degradation
that oppresses the breast of France and makes her gasp. She
feels dishonored.
And yet the state power is not suspended in the air. Bonaparte
represented a class, and the most numerous class of French society
at that, the small-holding peasants.
Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of the big landed
property and the Orleans the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes
are the dynasty of the peasants, that is, the French masses. The
chosen of the peasantry is not the Bonaparte who submitted to
the bourgeois parliament but the Bonaparte who dismissed the
bourgeois parliament. For three years the towns had succeeded
in falsifying the meaning of the December 10 election and in
cheating the peasants out of the restoration of the Empire. The
election of December 10, 1848, has been consummated only by
the coup d‘état of December 2, 1851.
The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose
members live in similar conditions but without entering into
manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production
isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into
mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France‘s poor
means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their
field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor
in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no
multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth
of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost
self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and
thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with
nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the
peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another
peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a
village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the
11
Karl Marx
great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition

of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack
of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions
of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests,
and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them
in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as
there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding
peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community,
no national bond, and no political organization among them,
they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of
asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through
a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves,
they must be represented. Their representative must at the
same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an
unlimited governmental power which protects them from the
other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The
political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds
its final expression in the executive power which subordinates
society to itself.
Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants‘ belief
in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory
back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be
that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence
of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: “Inquiry into paternity
is forbidden.” After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of
grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man
becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew
was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most
numerous class of the French people.
But, it may be objected, what about the peasant uprisings in
half of France,7 the raids of the army on the peasants, the mass
incarceration and transportation of the peasants?
Since Louis XIV, France has experienced no similar
persecution of the peasants “on account of demagogic agitation.”8
But let us not misunderstand. The Bonaparte dynasty
represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant;
not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his
12
social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to
consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with
the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own
energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within
this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings
saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not
the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his
judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his
modern Cevennes but his modern Vendée.9
The three years‘ stern rule of the parliamentary republic
freed a part of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion
and revolutionized them, even though superficially; but the
bourgeoisie violently repulsed them as often as they set themselves
in motion. Under the parliamentary republic the modern and
the traditional consciousness of the French peasant contended
for mastery. The process took the form of an incessant struggle
between the schoolmasters and the priests. The bourgeoisie
struck down the schoolmasters. The peasants for the first time
made efforts to behave independently vis-à-vis the government.
This was shown in the continual conflict between the mayors
and the prefects. The bourgeoisie deposed the mayors. Finally,
during the period of the parliamentary republic, the peasants of
different localities rose against their own offspring, the army. The
bourgeoisie punished these peasants with sieges and executions.
And this same bourgeoisie now cries out against the stupidity of
the masses, the vile multitude that betrayed it to Bonaparte. The
bourgeoisie itself has violently strengthened the imperialism of
the peasant class; it has preserved the conditions that form the
birthplaces of this species of peasant religion. The bourgeoisie, in
truth, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses so long as they
remain conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they
become revolutionary.
In the uprisings after the coup d‘état, a part of the French
peasants protested, arms in hand, against their own vote of
December 10, 1848. The school they had gone to since 1848
had sharpened their wits. But they had inscribed themselves in
the historical underworld; history held them to their word, and
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Karl Marx
the majority was still so implicated that precisely in the reddest

departments the peasant population voted openly for Bonaparte.
In their view, the National Assembly had hindered his progress.
He has now merely broken the fetters that the towns had imposed
on the will of the countryside. In some parts the peasants even
entertained the grotesque notion of a convention with Napoleon.
After the first Revolution had transformed the semi-feudal
peasants into freeholders, Napoleon confirmed and regulated
the conditions in which they could exploit undisturbed the soil
of France which they had only just acquired, and could slake
their youthful passion for property. But what is now ruining the
French peasant is his small holding itself, the division of the land
and the soil, the property form which Napoleon consolidated
in France. It is exactly these material conditions which made
the feudal peasant a small-holding peasant and Napoleon an
emperor. Two generations sufficed to produce the unavoidable
result: progressive deterioration of agriculture and progressive
indebtedness of the agriculturist. The “Napoleonic” property
form, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the
condition of the emancipation and enrichment of the French
countryfolk, has developed in the course of this century into the
law of their enslavement and their pauperism. And just this law is
the first of the “Napoleonic ideas” which the second Bonaparte
has to uphold. If he still shares with the peasants the illusion that
the cause of their ruin is to be sought not in the small holdings
themselves but outside them – in the influence of secondary
circumstances – his experiments will shatter like soap bubbles
when they come in contact with the relations of production.
The economic development of small-holding property has
radically changed the peasants‘ relations with the other social
classes. Under Napoleon the fragmentation of the land in the
countryside supplemented free competition and the beginning of
big industry in the towns. The peasant class was the ubiquitous
protest against the recently overthrown landed aristocracy. The
roots that small-holding property struck in French soil deprived
feudalism of all nourishment. The landmarks of this property
formed the natural fortification of the bourgeoisie against any
14
surprise attack by its old overlords. But in the course of the

nineteenth century the urban usurer replaced the feudal one,
the mortgage replaced the feudal obligation, bourgeois capital
replaced aristocratic landed property. The peasant‘s small holding
is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw profits,
interest, and rent from the soil, while leaving it to the agriculturist
himself to see to it how he can extract his wages. The mortgage
debt burdening the soil of France imposes on the French peasantry
an amount of interest equal to the annual interest on the entire
British national debt. Small-holding property, in this enslavement
by capital toward which its development pushes it unavoidably,
has transformed the mass of the French nation into troglodytes.
Sixteen million peasants (including women and children) dwell
in caves, a large number of which have but one opening, others
only two and the most favored only three. Windows are to a
house what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order,
which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard
over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilized them with
laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their
hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist‘s caldron
of capital. The Code Napoléon is now nothing but the codex of
distraints, of forced sales and compulsory auctions. To the four
million (including children, etc.) officially recognized paupers,
vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes in France must be added
another five million who hover on the margin of existence and
either have their haunts in the countryside itself or, with their
rags and their children, continually desert the countryside for the
towns and the towns for the countryside. Therefore the interests
of the peasants are no longer, as under Napoleon, in accord with,
but are now in opposition to bourgeois interests, to capital. Hence
they find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat,
whose task it is to overthrow the bourgeois order. But “strong and
unlimited government” - and this is the second “Napoleonic idea”
that the second Napoleon has to carry out – is called upon to
defend this “material order” by force. This “material order” also
serves, in all Bonaparte‘s proclamations, as the slogan against the
rebellious peasants.
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Karl Marx
In addition to the mortgage which capital imposes on it, the

small holding is burdened by taxes. Taxes are the life source of
the bureaucracy, the army, the priests, and the court – in short, of
the entire apparatus of the executive power. Strong government
and heavy taxes are identical. By its very nature, small-holding
property forms a basis for an all-powerful and numberless
bureaucracy. It creates a uniform level of personal and economic
relationships over the whole extent of the country. Hence it also
permits uniform action from a supreme center on all points of
this uniform mass. It destroys the aristocratic intermediate steps
between the mass of the people and the power of the state. On
all sides, therefore, it calls forth the direct intrusion of this state
power and the interposition of its immediate organs. Finally, it
produces an unemployed surplus population which can find no
place either on the land or in the towns and which perforce reaches
out for state offices as a sort of respectable alms, and provokes the
creation of additional state positions. By the new markets which
he opened with bayonets, and by the plundering of the Continent,
Napoleon repaid the compulsory taxes with interest. These taxes
were a spur to the industry of the peasant, whereas now they rob
his industry of its last resources and complete his defenselessness
against pauperism. An enormous bureaucracy, well gallooned and
well fed, is the “Napoleonic idea” which is most congenial to the
second Bonaparte. How could it be otherwise, considering that
alongside the actual classes of society, he is forced to create an
artificial caste for which the maintenance of his regime becomes
a bread-and-butter question? Hence one of his first financial
operations was the raising of officials‘ salaries to their old level
and the creation of new sinecures.
Another “idée napoléonienne” [Napoleonic idea] is the
domination of the priests as an instrument of government. But
while at the time of their emergence the small-holding owners, in
their accord with society, in their dependence on natural forces
and submission to the authority which protected them from
above, were naturally religious, now that they are ruined by debts,
at odds with society and authority, and driven beyond their own
16
limitations, they have become naturally irreligious.

Heaven was quite a pleasing addition to the narrow strip
of land just won, especially as it makes the weather; it becomes
an insult as soon as it is thrust forward as a substitute for the
small holding. The priest then appears as only the anointed
bloodhound of the earthly police – another “idée napoléonienne.”
The expedition against Rome will take place in France itself next
time, but in a sense opposite from that of M. de Montalembert.
Finally, the culminating “idée napoléonienne” is the
ascendancy of the army. The army was the “point d’ honneur” of
the small-holding peasants, it was they themselves transformed
into heroes, defending their new possessions against the outer
world, glorifying their recently won nationhood, plundering
and revolutionizing the world. The uniform was their own state
costume; war was their poetry; the small holding, enlarged and
rounded off in imagination, was their fatherland, and patriotism
the ideal form of the sense of property. But the enemies whom the
French peasant now has to defend his property against are not the
Cossacks; they are the huissiers [bailiffs] and the tax collectors.
The small holding no longer lies in the so-called fatherland but in
the registry of mortgages. The army itself is no longer the flower
of the peasant youth; it is the swamp flower of the peasant lumpen
proletariat. It consists largely of replacements, of substitutes,
just as the second Bonaparte is himself only a replacement, the
substitute for Napoleon. It now performs its deeds of valor by
hounding the peasants in masses like chamois, by doing gendarme
duty; and if the natural contradictions of his system chase the
Chief of the Society of December 10 across the French border,
his army, after some acts of brigandage, will reap, not laurels, but
thrashings.
It is clear: All “idée napoléonienne” are ideas of the
undeveloped small holding in the freshness of its youth; they
are a contradiction to the outlived holdings. They are only
the hallucinations of its death struggle, words transformed
into phrases, spirits transformed into ghosts. But the parody
of imperialism was necessary to free the mass of the French
nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure
17
Karl Marx
form the opposition between state power and society. With the
progressive deterioration of small-holding property, the state
structure erected upon it collapses. The centralization of the
state that modern society requires arises only on the ruins of the
military-bureaucratic government machinery which was forged in
opposition to feudalism.
The condition of the French peasants provides us with the
answer to the riddle of the general elections of December 20
and 21, which bore the second Bonaparte up Mount Sinai, not to
receive laws but to give them.
Obviously the bourgeoisie now had no choice but to elect
Bonaparte. When the Puritans of the Council of Constance10
complained of the dissolute lives of the popes and wailed about
the necessity for moral reform, Cardinal Pierre d‘Ailly thundered
at them: “Only the devil in person can still save the Catholic
Church, and you ask for angels.” Similarly, after the coup d‘état
the French bourgeoisie cried out: Only the Chief of the Society
of December 10 can still save bourgeois society! Only theft can
still save property; only perjury, religion; bastardy, the family;
disorder, order!
As the executive authority which has made itself independent,
Bonaparte feels it to be his task to safeguard “bourgeois order.”
But the strength of this bourgeois order lies in the middle class.
He poses, therefore, as the representative of the middle class
and issues decrees in this sense. Nevertheless, he is somebody
solely because he has broken the power of that middle class, and
keeps on breaking it daily. He poses, therefore, as the opponent
of the political and literary power of the middle class. But by
protecting its material power he revives its political power. Thus
the cause must be kept alive, but the effect, where it manifests
itself, must be done away with. But this cannot happen without
small confusions of cause and effect, since in their interaction
both lose their distinguishing marks. New decrees obliterate the
border line. Bonaparte knows how to pose at the same time as
the representative of the peasants and of the people in general,
as a man who wants to make the lower classes happy within the
framework of bourgeois society. New decrees cheat the “true
18
socialists”11 of their governmental skill in advance. But above

all, Bonaparte knows how to pose as the Chief of the Society of
December 10, as the representative of the lumpen proletariat to
which he himself, his entourage, his government, and his army
belong, and whose main object is to benefit itself and draw
California lottery prizes from the state treasury. And he confirms
himself as Chief of the Society of December 10 with decrees,
without decrees, and despite decrees.
This contradictory task of the man explains the contradictions
of his government, the confused groping which tries now to win,
now to humiliate, first one class and then another, and uniformly
arrays all of them against him; whose uncertainty in practice
forms a highly comical contrast to the imperious, categorical style
of the government decrees, a style slavishly copied from the uncle.
Industry and commerce, hence the business affairs of the
middle class, are to prosper in hothouse fashion under the strong
government: the grant of innumerable railroad concessions. But
the Bonapartist lumpen proletariat is to enrich itself: those in the
know play tripotage [underhand dealings] on the Exchange with the
railroad concessions. But no capital is forthcoming for the railroads:
obligation of the Bank to make advances on railroad shares. But at
the same time the Bank is to be exploited for personal gain and
therefore must be cajoled: release the Bank from the obligation
to publish its report weekly; leonine12 agreement of the Bank with
the government. The people are to be given employment: initiation
of public works. But the public works increase the people‘s tax
obligations: hence reduction of taxes by an attack on the rentiers, by
conversion of the 5-percent bonds into 4½-percent. But the middle
class must again receive a sweetening: hence a doubling of the wine
tax for the people, who buy wine retail, and a halving of the wine
tax for the middle class, which drinks it wholesale; dissolution of
the actual workers‘ associations, but promises of miraculous future
associations. The peasants are to be helped: mortgage banks which
hasten their indebtedness and accelerate the concentration of
property. But these banks are to be used to make money out of the
confiscated estates of the House of Orleans; no capitalist wants to
agree to this condition, which is not in the decree, and the mortgage
19
Karl Marx
bank remains a mere decree, etc., etc.

Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor
of all classes. But he cannot give to one without taking from
another. Just as it was said of the Duke de Guise in the time of
the Fronde that he was the most obliging man in France because
he gave all his estates to his followers, with feudal obligations
to him, so Bonaparte would like to be the most obliging man in
France and turn all the property and all the labor of France into a
personal obligation to himself. He would like to steal all of France
in order to make a present of it to France, or rather in order to buy
France anew with French money, for as the Chief of the Society
of December 10 he must buy what ought to belong to him. And
to the Institution of Purchase belong all the state institutions, the
Senate, the Council of State, the Assembly, the Legion of Honor,
the military medals, the public laundries, the public works, the
railroads, the general staff, the officers of the National Guard,
the confiscated estates of the House of Orleans. The means of
purchase is obtained by selling every place in the army and the
government machinery. But the most important feature of this
process, by which France is taken in order to give to her, are the
percentages that find their way into the pockets of the head and
the members of the Society of December 10 during the turnover.
The witticism with which Countess L., the mistress of M. de
Morny, characterized the confiscation of the Orleans estates –
“It is the first vol [the word means both “flight” and “theft”] of the
eagle” – is applicable to every flight of this eagle, who is more
like a raven.13 He and his followers call out to one another like
that Italian Carthusian admonishing the miser who ostentatiously
counted the goods on which he could still live for years: “Tu fai
conto sopra i beni, bisogna prima far il conto sopra gli anni” [Thou
countest thy goods, thou shouldst first count thy years]. In order not
to make a mistake in the years, they count the minutes. At the
court, in the ministries, at the head of the administration and the
army, a gang of blokes of whom the best that can be said is that
one does not know whence they come – these noisy, disreputable,
rapacious bohemians who crawl into gallooned coats with the same
grotesque dignity as the high dignitaries of Soulouque – elbow
20
their way forward. One can visualize clearly this upper stratum
of the Society of December 10 if one reflects that Veron-Crevel
[A dissolute philistine character in Balzac‘s novel Cousin Bette]
is its preacher of morals and Granier de Cassagnac its thinker.
When Guizot, at the time of his ministry, turned this Granier
of an obscure newspaper into a dynastic opponent, he used to
boast of him with the quip: “C’est le roi des droles” [He is the king
of buffoons]. It would be wrong to recall either the Regency14 or
Louis XV in connection with Louis Bonaparte‘s court and clique.
For “often before France has experienced a government of
mistresses, but never before a government of kept men.” [Quoted
from Mme. de Girardin.]
Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and
being at the same time, like a juggler, under the necessity of
keeping the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon‘s successor, by
springing constant surprises – that is to say, under the necessity of
arranging a coup d‘état in miniature every day – Bonaparte throws
the whole bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything
that seemed inviolable to the Revolution of 1848, makes some
tolerant of revolution and makes others lust for it, and produces
anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping
the entire state machinery of its halo, profaning it and making
it at once loathsome and ridiculous. The cult of the Holy Tunic
of Trier15 he duplicates in Paris in the cult of the Napoleonic
imperial mantle. But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the
shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will
come crashing down from the top of the Vendôme Column.16
21
Karl Marx
NOTES
1
Marx never believed that “history repeats itself,” but in a famous quote he said:
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear,
so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as
farce.” [Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonapatre, Chapter 1.]
This seems to come from Engels‘ letter to Marx of 3 December 1851:
“it really seems as though old Hegel, in the guise of the World Spirit, were
directing history from the grave and, with the greatest conscientiousness,
causing everything to be re-enacted twice over, once as grand tragedy and the
second time as rotten farce, Caussidière for Danton, L. Blanc for Robespierre,
Barthélemy for Saint-Just, Flocon for Carnot, and the moon-calf together with
the first available dozen debt-encumbered lieutenants for the little corporal and
his band of marshals. Thus the 18th Brumaire would already be upon us.”
– words quoted almost verbatim by Marx in Eighteenth of Louis Bonapartre.
Marx makes similar points in Critique of Hegel‘s Philosophy of Right, Introduction.
Possible sources in Hegel are The Philosophy of Right, §347 and The Philosophy of
History, §32-33 though another version of this work published as Introduction to The
Philosophy of History, published in 1837, said:
“A coup d‘état is sanctioned as it were in the opinion of the people if it is
repeated. Thus, Napoleon was defeated twice and twice the Bourbons were
driven out. Through repetition, what at the beginning seemed to be merely
accidental and possible, becomes real and established.”
but this is hardly the point being made by Marx. See The Philosophy of History, where
Hegel contrasts Nature, where “there is nothing new under the Sun,” with History
where there is always Development.
2
Montagne (the Mountain) – representatives in the Constituent and subsequently
in the Legislative Assembly of a bloc of democrats and petty-bourgeois socialists
grouped round the newspaper La Réforme. They called themselves Montagnards or
the Mountain by analogy with the Montagnards in the Convention of 1792-94.
3
Chiliasts (from the Greek word chilias – a thousand): preachers of a mystical
religious doctrine concerning the second coming of Christ and the establishment of
the millennium when justice, universal equality and prosperity would be triumphant.
4
Capitol: A hill in Rome, a fortified citadel where the temples of Jupiter, Juno and
other gods were built. According to a legend, Rome was saved in 390 B.C.E. from an
invasion of the Gauls, due to the cackling of geese from Juno‘s temple which awakened
the sleeping guards of the Capitol.
5
Roughly translated as slum workers or the mob, this term identifies the class of
outcast, degenerated and submerged elements that make up a section of the population
of industrial centers. It includes beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers,
petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been
cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements. In
times of prolonged crisis (depression), innumerable young people also, who cannot
find an opportunity to enter into the social organism as producers, are pushed into
this limbo of the outcast. Here demagogues and fascists of various stripes find some
area of the mass base in time of struggle and social breakdown, when the ranks of the
Lumpenproletariat are enormously swelled by ruined and declassed elements from all
layers of a society in decay.
The term was coined by Marx in The German Ideology in the course of a critique of
22
Max Stirner. In passage of The Ego and His Own which Marx is criticising at the time,
Stirner frequently uses the term Lumpe and applies it as a prefix, but never actually
used the term “lumpenproletariat.” Lumpen originally meant “rags,” but began to be
used to mean “a person in rags.” From having the sense of “ragamuffin,” it came to
mean “riff-raff” or “knave,” and by the beginning of the eighteenth century it began to
be used freely as a prefix to make a range of perjorative terms. By the 1820s, “lumpen”
could be tacked on to almost any German word.
The term was later used in the Communist Manifesto (where it is translated as
“dangerous classes”) and in Class Struggles in France, and elsewhere.
6
Paraphrase from Shakespeare‘s Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5: “Well said, old mole!”
7
This refers to the participation of peasants in the republican uprisings in France in
late 1851 in protest against the Bonapartist coup d‘état. These uprisings, involving
mainly artisans and workers of small towns and settlements, local peasants, tradesmen
and intellectuals, embraced nearly twenty departments in south-east, south-west and
central France. Lacking unity and centralisation they were fairly quickly suppressed
by police and troops.
8
Here Marx compares the Bonapartist authorities‘ reprisals against the participants
in the republican movement, including peasants, with the persecution of the so-called
demagogues in Germany in the 1820s and 1830s. Demagogues in Germany were
participants in the opposition movement of intellectuals. The name became current
after the Karlsbad Conference of Ministers of the German States in August 1819,
which adopted a special decision against the intrigues of “demagogues.”
9
Cévennes – a mountain region in the Languedoc Province of France where all
uprising of peasants, known as the uprising of “Camisards” (camise in old French
means shirt) took place between 1702 and 1705. The uprising, which began in protest
against the persecution of Protestants, assumed all openly anti-feudal character.
Vendée – a department in Western France; during the French Revolution of 1789-94 a
centre of a royalist revolt in which the mass of the local peasantry took part. The name
“Vendée” came to denote counter-revolutionary activity.
10
The Council of Constance (1414-18) was convened to strengthen the position of
the Catholic Church at that period. The Council condemned the teachings of John
Wycliffe and Jan Huss, and put an end to the split in the Catholic Church by electing a
new Pope instead of the three pretenders competing for the papacy.
11
The reference is to German or “true socialism” which was widespread in Germany
in the 1840s, mostly among petty-bourgeois intellectuals. The “true socialists” – Karl
Grün, Moses Hess, Hermann Kriege – substituted the sentimental preaching of love
and brotherhood for the ideas of socialism and denied the need for a bourgeois-
democratic revolution in Germany. Marx and Engels criticised this trend in the
following works: The German Ideology, Circular Against Kriege, German Socialism
in Verse and Prose and Manifesto of the Communist Party.
12
From Aesop‘s fable about the lion who made a contract in which one partner got all
the profits and the other all the disadvantages
13
This witticism of Countess Lehon and the caustic remark of Madame de Girardin on
the Bonapartist regime, which Marx quotes at the end of the paragraph, were forwarded
to him, together with many other items used in The Eighteenth Brumaire, by Richard
Reinhardt. a German refugee in Paris, Heinrich Heine‘s secretary, In his letter to
Ferdinand Lassalle of February 23, 1852 Marx quotes a letter to him from Reinhardt,
in the following passage: “As for de Morny, the minister who resigned with Dupin, he
was known as the of his mistress‘ (Countess Lehon‘s) husband, which caused Emile de
Girardin‘s wife to say that while it was not unprecedented for governments to be in the
23
Karl Marx
hands of men who were governed by their wives, none had ever been known to be in
the hands of hommes entretenus [kept men]. Well, this same Countess Lehon holds a
salon where she is one of Bonaparte‘s most vociferous opponents and it was she who,
on the occasion of the confiscation of the Orleans‘ estates let fall “C‘est le premier
vol de l‘aigle”. [A pun: “It is the first flight of the eagle” and “It is the first theft of the
eagle.”] Thanks to this remark of his wife‘s, Emile de Girardin was expelled.”
14
The reference is to the Regency of Philippe of Orleans in France front 1715 to 1723
during the minority of Louis XV.
15
The Holy Coat of Trier – a relic exhibited in the Catholic Cathedral at Trier, allegedly
a garment of Christ of which he was stripped at his crucifixion. Generations of pilgrims
came to venerate it.
16
The Vendôme Column was erected in Paris between 1806 and 1810 in tribute to the
military victories of Napoleon I. It was made of bronze from captured enemy guns
arid crowned by a statue of Napoleon; the statue was removed during the Restoration
but re-erected in 1833. In the spring of 1871, by order of the Paris Commune, the
Vendôme Column was destroyed as a symbol of militarism.
24
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
from Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Yale:
Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 33–61.
26
ECONOMY
So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and

also studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many
communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself, –
Men say they know many things;

But lo! They have taken wings, –
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that any body knows.
I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs
on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side,
leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and
much stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised
or tenoned by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this
time. My days in the woods were not very long ones; yet I usually
carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the newspaper
in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine
boughs which I had cut off, and to my bread was imparted some
of their fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of
pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the
pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having become
better acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the wood was
attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over
the chips which I had made.
By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but
rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for
the raising. I had already bought the shanty of James Collins,
an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards.
James Collins’ shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one.
When I called to see it he was not at home. I walked about the
outside, at first unobserved from within, the window was so deep
and high. It was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof,
and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all
around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest
27
Henry David Thoreau
part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun.
Door-sill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens
under the door board. Mrs. C. came to the door and asked me to
view it from the inside. The hens were driven in by my approach.
It was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy,
and aguish, only here a board and there a board which would not
bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the
roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extended under
the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust
hole two feet deep. In her own words, they were “good boards
overhead, good boards all around, and a good window,” – of two
whole squares originally, only the cat had passed out that way
lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the
house where it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass,
and a patent new coffee mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told.
The bargain was soon concluded, for James had in the meanwhile
returned. I to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents to-night,
he to vacate at five to-morrow morning, selling to nobody else
meanwhile: I to take possession at six. It were well, he said, to
be there early, and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust
claims on the score of ground rent and fuel. This he assured me
was the only encumbrance. At six I passed him and his family
on the road. One large bundle held their all, – bed, coffee-mill,
looking-glass, hens, – all but the cat, she took to the woods and
became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set
for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.
I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails,
and removed it to the pond side by small cartloads, spreading the
boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun.
One early thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland
path. I was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor
Seeley, an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the
still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to
his pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of
day, and look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the
devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to
represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant
event one with the removal of the gods of Troy.
28
Walden
I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where

a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach
and blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet
square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not
freeze in any winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned;
but the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its
place. It was but two hours’ work. I took particular pleasure in this
breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the
earth for an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house
in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their
roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared
posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort
of porch at the entrance of a burrow.
At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some
of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for
neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my
house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his
raisers than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising
of loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the
4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards
were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly
impervious to rain; but before boarding I laid the foundation of
a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill
from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing
in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my
cooking in the mean while out of doors on the ground, early in
the morning: which mode I still think is in some respects more
convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed
before my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire,
and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant
hours in that way. In those days, when my hands were much
employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which
lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much
entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.
It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately
than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door,
a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and
perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a
29
Henry David Thoreau
better reason for it than our temporal necessities even. There is

some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that
there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Who knows but if men
constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided
food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the
poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally
sing when they are so engaged? But alas! We do like cowbirds
and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have
built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical
notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the
carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience
of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man
engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his
house. We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who
is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the
merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end?
And what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also
think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so
to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
True, there are architects so called in this country, and
I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making
architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and
hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well
perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the
common dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he
began at the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to
put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar plum
in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in it, – though I
hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar, – and
not how the inhabitant, the in-dweller, might build truly within
and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. What
reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were something
outward and in the skin merely, – that the tortoise got his spotted
shell, or the shellfish its mother-o’-pearl tints, by such a contract
as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man
has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than
a tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as
to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The
30
Walden
enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes.
This man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly
whisper his half truth to the rude occupants who really knew it
better than he. What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has
gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and
character of the in-dweller, who is the only builder, – out of some
unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought
for the appearance and whatever additional beauty of this kind is
destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious
beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as
the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts
and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants
whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces
merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting
will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be as simple
and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining
after effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of
architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale
would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the
substantials. They can do without architecture who have no olives
nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the
ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles
spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our
churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and
their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks
are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed
upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense,
he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out
of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin, – the
architecture of the grave, and “carpenter” is but another name
for “coffin-maker.” One man says, in his despair or indifference
to life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your
house that color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house? Toss
up a copper for it as well. What an abundance of leisure he must
have! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better paint your
house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. An
enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! When you
have got my ornaments ready I will wear them.
31
Henry David Thoreau
Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my

house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and
sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was
obliged to straighten with a plane.
I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide
by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a
large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end,
and a brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying
the usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the
work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give
the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their
houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various
materials which compose them: –
Boards $ 8.03½, mostly shanty boards.

Refuse shingles for roof sides, 4.00
Laths, 1.25
Two second-hand windows with glass, 2.43
One thousand old brick, 4.00
Two casks of lime, 2.40 That was high.
Hair, 0.31 More than I needed.
Mantle-tree iron,. 0.15
Nails, 3.90
Hinges and screws, 0.14
Latch, 0.10
Chalk, 0.01
Transportation, 1.40 I carried a good part
In all, $28.12½ on my back.
These are all the materials excepting the timber stones and
sand, which I claimed by squatter’s right. I have also a small
wood-shed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left
after building the house.
I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the
main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases
me as much and will cost me no more than my present one.
I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can
obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the
rent which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than
is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than
32
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for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not

affect the truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much cant and
hypocrisy, – chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my
wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any man, – I will breathe
freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both
the moral and physical system; and I am resolved that I will not
through humility become the devil’s attorney. I will endeavor
to speak a good word for the truth. At Cambridge College the
mere rent of a student’s room, which is only a little larger than my
own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the
advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof,
and the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy
neighbors, and perhaps a residence in the fourth story. I cannot
but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not
only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more
would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense
of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. Those
conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or
elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice
of life as they would with proper management on both sides.
Those things for which the most money is demanded are never
the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is
an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable
education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of
his contemporaries no charge is made. The mode of founding a
college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents,
and then following blindly the principles of a division of labor to
its extreme, a principle which should never be followed but with
circumspection, – to call in a contractor who makes this a subject
of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives
actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be
are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights
successive generations have to pay. I think that it would be better
than this, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by
it, even to lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures
his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any
labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable
leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can
33
Henry David Thoreau
make leisure fruitful. “But,” says one, “you do not mean that
the students should go to work with their hands instead of their
heads?” I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which
he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not
play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at
this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end.
How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the
experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as
much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about
the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common
course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some
professor, where any thing is professed and practised but the art
of life; – to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope,
and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn
how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is
earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the
motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or
to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while
contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would
have advanced the most at the end of a month, – the boy who
had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and
smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this, – or the
boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute
in the mean while, and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his
father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?... To my
astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied
navigation! – why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should
have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is
taught only political economy, while that economy of living which
is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in
our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam
Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred “modern
improvements”; there is an illusion about them; there is not always
a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest
to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments
in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract
our attention from serious things. They are but improved means
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to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy

to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are
in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to
Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important
to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who
was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but
when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put
into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to
talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the
Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new;
but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad,
flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the
whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a
minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an
evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey.
I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.
One says to me, “I wonder that you do not lay up money;
you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg
to-day and see the country.” But I am wiser than that. I have
learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to
my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is
thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day’s wages. I
remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this
very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I
have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the
mean while have earned your fare, and arrive there some time to-
morrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a
job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working
here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached
round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and
as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I
should have to cut your acquaintance altogether.
Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and
with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is
long. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind
is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have
an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks
and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next
35
Henry David Thoreau
to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the

depot, and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke
is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that
a few are riding, but the rest are run over, – and it will be called,
and will be, “A melancholy accident.” No doubt they can ride at
last who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so
long, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire
to travel by that time. This spending of the best part of one’s life
earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the
least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went
to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to
England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret
at once. “What!” exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all
the shanties in the land, “is not this railroad which we have built a
good thing?” Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might
have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you
could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.
Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve
dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet
my unusual expenses, I planted about two acres and a half of light
and sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, but also a small part
with potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips. The whole lot contains
eleven acres, mostly growing up to pines and hickories, and was
sold the preceding season for eight dollars and eight cents an
acre. One farmer said that it was “good for nothing but to raise
cheeping squirrels on.” I put no manure whatever on this land,
not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not expecting to
cultivate so much again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got
out several cords of stumps in ploughing, which supplied me with
fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould, easily
distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of
the beans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable
wood behind my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have
supplied the remainder of my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team
and a man for the ploughing, though I held the plough myself.
My farm outgoes for the first season were, for implements, seed,
work, &c., $14.72½. The seed corn was given me. This never costs
anything to speak of, unless you plant more than enough. I got
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twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes, beside

some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn and turnips were too
late to come to any thing. My whole income from the farm was
$23.44
Deducting the outgoes, 14.72½
There are left, $8.71½,
beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this

estimate was made of the value of $4.50, – the amount on hand
much more than balancing a little grass which I did not raise. All
things considered, that is, considering the importance of a man’s
soul and of to-day, notwithstanding the short time occupied by my
experiment, nay, partly even because of its transient character,
I believe that that was doing better than any farmer in Concord
did that year.
The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land
which I required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the
experience of both years, not being in the least awed by many
celebrated works on husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest,
that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he
raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for
an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things,
he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it
would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plough it,
and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old,
and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left
hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied
to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak
impartially on this point, and as one not interested in the success
or failure of the present economical and social arrangements. I
was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not
anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my
genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment. Beside being
better off than they already, if my house had been burned or my
crops had failed, I should have been nearly as well off as before.
I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of
herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the
37
Henry David Thoreau
freer. Men and oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary

work only, the oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage,
their farm is so much the larger. Man does some of his part of the
exchange work in his six weeks of haying, and it is no boy’s play.
Certainly no nation that lived simply in all respects, that is, no
nation of philosophers, would commit so great a blunder as to use
the labor of animals. True, there never was and is not likely soon
to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that
there should be. However, I should never have broken a horse or
bull and taken him to board for any work he might do for me, for
fear I should become a horse-man or a herds-man merely; and
if society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that
what is one man’s gain is not another’s loss, and that the stable-
boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied? Granted that
some public works would not have been constructed without this
aid, and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse;
does it follow that he could not have accomplished works yet
more worthy of himself in that case? When men begin to do, not
merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with
their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange
work with the oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves of the
strongest. Man thus not only works for the animal within him,
but, for a symbol of this, he works for the animal without him.
Though we have many substantial houses of brick or stone, the
prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to which
the barn overshadows the house. This town is said to have the
largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is not
behindhand in its public buildings; but there are very few halls
for free worship or free speech in this county. It should not be
by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract
thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves?
How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins
of the East! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A
simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any
prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material
silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent. To what end,
pray, is so much stone hammered? In Arcadia, when I was there,
I did not see any hammering stone. Nations are possessed with
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an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by

the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains
were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of
good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high
as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of
Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall
that bounds an honest man’s field than a hundred-gated Thebes
that has wandered farther from the true end of life. The religion
and civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid
temples; but what you might call Christianity does not. Most of
the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries
itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at
in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found
degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some
ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to
have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I
might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have
no time for it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders,
it is much the same all the world over, whether the building be an
Egyptian temple or the United States Bank. It costs more than it
comes to. The mainspring is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic
and bread and butter. Mr. Balcom, a promising young architect,
designs it on the back of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler,
and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons, stonecutters. When the
thirty centuries begin to look down on it, mankind begin to look
up at it. As for your high towers and monuments, there was a
crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to
China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese
pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way
to admire the hole which he made. Many are concerned about
the monuments of the West and the East, – to know who built
them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not
build them, – who were above such trifling. But to proceed with
my statistics.
By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other
kinds in the village in the mean while, for I have as many trades
as fingers, I had earned $13.34. The expense of food for eight
months, namely, from July 4th to March 1st, the time when these
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Henry David Thoreau
estimates were made, though I lived there more than two years, –
not counting potatoes, a little green corn, and some peas, which I
had raised, nor considering the value of what was on hand at the
last date, was
Rice, $1.73½
Molasses, 1.73 Cheapest form of the saccharine.
Rye meal, 1.04¾
Indian meal, 0.99¾ Cheaper than rye.
Pork, 0.22
All experiments which failed.

Flour, 0.88
Sugar, 0.80 Costs more than Indian meal, both
Lard, 0.65 money and trouble.
Apples, 0.25
Dried apple, 0.22
Sweet potatoes, 0.10
One pumpkin, 0.06
One watermelon, 0.02
Salt, 0.03
Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly
publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were
equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no
better in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish
for my dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck
which ravaged my bean-field, – effect his transmigration, as a Tartar
would say, – and devour him, partly for experiment’s sake; but
though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding
a musky flavor, I saw that the longest use would not make that a
good practice, however it might seem to have your woodchucks
ready dressed by the village butcher.
Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same
dates, though little can be inferred from this item, amounted to
$8.40¾
Oil and some household utensils, 2.00
40
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So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and

mending, which for the most part were done out of the house, and
their bills have not yet been received, – and these are all and more
than all the ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part
of the world, – were
House, $28.12½
Farm one year, 14.72½
Food eight months, 8.74
Clothing, etc., eight months, 8.40¾
Oil, &c., eight months, 2.00
In all, $61.99¾
I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to

get. And to meet this I have for farm produce sold
$23.44
Earned by day-labor, 13.34
In all, $36.78,
which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a

balance of $25.21¾ on the one side, – this being very nearly the
means with which I started, and the measure of expenses to be
incurred, – and on the other, beside the leisure and independence
and health thus secured, a comfortable house for me as long as I
choose to occupy it.
These statistics, however accidental and therefore
uninstructive they may appear, as they have a certain completeness,
have a certain value also. Nothing was given me of which I have
not rendered some account. It appears from the above estimate,
that my food alone cost me in money about twenty-seven cents a
week. It was, for nearly two years after this, rye and Indian meal
without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses,
and salt, and my drink water. It was fit that I should live on rice,
mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India. To meet the
objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that
if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall
have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment
of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, as I
41
Henry David Thoreau
have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a

comparative statement like this.
I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost
incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this
latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and
yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner,
satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane
(Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled
and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of the
trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire,
in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of
ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even
the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of
appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass that
they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of
luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost
his life because he took to drinking water only.
The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather
from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not
venture to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-
stocked larder.
Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine
hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle
or the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house;
but it was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavor. I tried
flour also; but have at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal
most convenient and agreeable. In cold weather it was no little
amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession,
tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching
eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had to
my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept
in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a study
of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting
such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and
first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of
nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement
of this diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies through
that accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed, taught
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the leavening process, and through the various fermentations

thereafter, till I came to “good, sweet, wholesome bread,” the
staff of life. Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the
spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved
like the vestal fire, – some precious bottle-full, I suppose, first
brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for America,
and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian
billows over the land, – this seed I regularly and faithfully
procured from the village, till at length one morning I forgot the
rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered that
even this was not indispensable, – for my discoveries were not by
the synthetic but analytic process, – and I have gladly omitted it
since, though most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and
wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly people
prophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not to
be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am
still in the land of the living; and I am glad to escape the trivialness
of carrying a bottle-full in my pocket, which would sometimes pop
and discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler and
more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who more than any
other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances. Neither
did I put any sal soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It
would seem that I made it according to the recipe which Marcus
Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. “Panem
depsticium sic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam
in mortarium indito, aquæ paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre.
Ubi bene subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu.” Which I
take to mean – “Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your hands and
trough well. Put the meal into the trough, add water gradually,
and knead it thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well, mould
it, and bake it under a cover,” that is, in a baking-kettle. Not a
word about leaven. But I did not always use this staff of life. At
one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw none of it for
more than a month.
Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs
in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and
fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity
and independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely
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Henry David Thoreau
sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are
hardly used by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle
and hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at
least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. I saw that
I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn, for
the former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does not
require the best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do without
rice and pork; and if I must have some concentrated sweet, I found
by experiment that I could make a very good molasses either of
pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out a few
maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these were growing
I could use various substitutes beside those which I have named.
“For,” as the Forefathers sang, –
“we can make liquor to sweeten our lips Of pumpkins and

parsnips and walnut-tree chips.”
Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this

might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did
without it altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do
not learn that the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.
Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food
was concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain
to get clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were
woven in a farmer’s family, – thank Heaven there is so much virtue
still in man; for I think the fall from the farmer to the operative
as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer; – and
in a new country, fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I
were not permitted still to squat, I might purchase one acre at the
same price for which the land I cultivated was sold – namely, eight
dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I considered that I enhanced
the value of the land by squatting on it.
There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask
me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food
alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once, – for the
root is faith, – I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live
on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot
understand much that I have to say. For my part, I am glad to hear
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of experiments of this kind being tried; as that a young man tried

for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth
for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded.
The human race is interested in these experiments, though a few
old women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their
thirds in mills, may be alarmed.
My furniture, part of which I made myself, and the rest cost
me nothing of which I have not rendered an account, consisted of
a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches
in diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and
a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three
plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and
a japanned lamp. None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin.
That is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of such chairs as I like best
in the village garrets to be had for taking them away. Furniture!
Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture
warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to
see his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed
to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account of
empty boxes? That is Spaulding’s furniture. I could never tell from
inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so called rich man
or a poor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed,
the more you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load
looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and if one
shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what do we
move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuviæ; at last to go
from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be
burned? It is the same as if all these traps were buckled to a man’s
belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our lines
are cast without dragging them, – dragging his trap. He was a lucky
fox that left his tail in the trap. The muskrat will gnaw his third leg
off to be free. No wonder man has lost his elasticity. How often he
is at a dead set! “Sir, if I may be so bold, what do you mean by a
dead set?” If you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you will see
all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown, behind
him, even to his kitchen furniture and all the trumpery which he
saves and will not burn, and he will appear to be harnessed to it
45
Henry David Thoreau
and making what headway he can. I think that the man is at a dead
set who has got through a knot hole or gateway where his sledge
load of furniture cannot follow him. I cannot but feel compassion
when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all
girded and ready, speak of his “furniture,” as whether it is insured
or not. “But what shall I do with my furniture?” My gay butterfly is
entangled in a spider’s web then. Even those who seem for a long
while not to have any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find
have some stored in somebody’s barn. I look upon England to-day
as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage,
trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping, which
he has not the courage to burn; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox
and bundle. Throw away the first three at least. It would surpass
the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk,
and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and
run. When I have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle
which contained his all – looking like an enormous wen which had
grown out of the nape of his neck – I have pitied him, not because
that was his all, but because he had all that to carry. If I have got
to drag my trap, I will take care that it be a light one and do not
nip me in a vital part. But perchance it would be wisest never to
put one’s paw into it.
I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for
curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon,
and I am willing that they should look in. The moon will not sour
milk nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture
or fade my carpet, and if he is sometimes too warm a friend, I
find it still better economy to retreat behind some curtain which
nature has provided, than to add a single item to the details of
housekeeping. A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room
to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to
shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before
my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.
Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon’s
effects, for his life had not been ineffectual: –
“The evil that men do lives after them.”
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As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun

to accumulate in his father’s day. Among the rest was a dried
tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and
other dust holes, these things were not burned; instead of a
bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or
increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them,
bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets
and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they
will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust.
The customs of some savage nations might, perchance,
be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the
semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of
the thing, whether they have the reality or not. Would it not be
well if we were to celebrate such a “busk,” or “feast of first fruits,”
as Bartram describes to have been the custom of the Mucclasse
Indians? “When a town celebrates the busk,” says he, “having
previously provided themselves with new clothes, new pots, pans,
and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all their
worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and cleanse
their houses, squares, and the whole town of their filth, which
with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast
together into one common heap, and consume it with fire. After
having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in
the town is extinguished. During this fast they abstain from the
gratification of every appetite and passion whatever. A general
amnesty is proclaimed; all malefactors may return to their town.
–”
“On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood
together, produces new fire in the public square, from whence every
habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame.”
They then feast on the new corn and fruits, and dance and
sing for three days, “and the four following days they receive visits
and rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns who have in
like manner purified and prepared themselves.”
The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end
of every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world
to come to an end.
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Henry David Thoreau
I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the

dictionary defines it, “outward and visible sign of an inward and
spiritual grace,” than this, and I have no doubt that they were
originally inspired directly from Heaven to do thus, though they
have no biblical record of the revelation.
For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by
the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about six
weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole
of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear
for study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that
my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to
my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think
and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As
I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for
a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found
that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that
then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually
afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good
business. When formerly I was looking about to see what I could
do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes
of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought
often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could
do, and its small profits might suffice, – for my greatest skill
has been to want but little, – so little capital it required, so little
distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my
acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions,
I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the
hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and
thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of
Admetus. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or
carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the
woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned
that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in
messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the
business.
As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my
freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish
to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture,
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or delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style

just yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire
these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I
relinquish to them the pursuit. Some are “industrious,” and
appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps
them out of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing to
say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than
they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,
– work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers. For
myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most
independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty
days in a year to support one. The laborer’s day ends with the
going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his
chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who
speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of
the year to the other.
In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that
to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime,
if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler
nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary
that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless
he sweats easier than I do.
One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some
acres, told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the
means. I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any
account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have
found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many
different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each
one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not
his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead. The youth
may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing
that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical
point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps
the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our
life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but
we would preserve the true course.
Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still for
a thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more expensive
49
Henry David Thoreau
than a small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and
one wall separate several apartments. But for my part, I preferred
the solitary dwelling. Moreover, it will commonly be cheaper to
build the whole yourself than to convince another of the advantage
of the common wall; and when you have done this, the common
partition, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one, and that other
may prove a bad neighbor, and also not keep his side in repair.
The only coöperation which is commonly possible is exceedingly
partial and superficial; and what little true coöperation there is,
is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men. If a man
has faith, he will coöperate with equal faith everywhere; if he
has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest of the world,
whatever company he is joined to. To coöperate, in the highest as
well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. I heard it
proposed lately that two young men should travel together over
the world, the one without money, earning his means as he went,
before the mast and behind the plow, the other carrying a bill of
exchange in his pocket. It was easy to see that they could not long
be companions or coöperate, since one would not operate at all.
They would part at the first interesting crisis in their adventures.
Above all, as I have implied, the man who goes alone can start
to-day; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is
ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.
But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my
townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little
in philanthropic enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a
sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also.
There are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to
undertake the support of some poor family in the town; and if I
had nothing to do, – for the devil finds employment for the idle, –
I might try my hand at some such pastime as that. However, when
I have thought to indulge myself in this respect, and lay their
Heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poor persons
in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and have even
ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all
unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and
women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows,
I trust that one at least may be spared to other and less humane
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pursuits. You must have a genius for charity as well as for any
thing else. As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which
are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may
seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my
particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to
save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but
infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves
it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to
him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and
soul and life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing
evil, as it is most likely they will.
I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no
doubt many of my readers would make a similar defence. At doing
something, – I will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce
it good, – I do not hesitate to say that I should be a capital fellow
to hire; but what that is, it is for my employer to find out. What
good I do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from
my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say,
practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without
aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness
aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in
this strain, I should say rather, Set about being good. As if the
sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor
of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a
Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring
lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead
of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of
such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then,
and in the mean while too, going about the world in his own orbit,
doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the
world going about him getting good. When Phaeton, wishing to
prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the sun’s chariot
but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burned several
blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched the
surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the
great desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong
to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his
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Henry David Thoreau
death, did not shine for a year.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness
tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty
that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design
of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and
parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which
fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are
suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to
me, – some of its virus mingled with my blood. No, – in this case I
would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man
to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm
me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should
ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will
do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one’s fellow-man in the
broadest sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and
worthy man in his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively
speaking, what are a hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy
do not help us in our best estate, when we are most worthy to be
helped? I never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was
sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me.
The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being
burned at the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their
tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes
chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the
missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you would be done
by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for
their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their
enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving
them all they did.
Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though
it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money,
spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We
make curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so
cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his
taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he will
perhaps buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish
laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes,
while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable
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garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped into the
water came to my house to warm him, and I saw him strip off three
pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the
skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and
that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered
him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking was the very thing
he needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would
be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole
slop-shop on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches
of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who
bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is
doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he
strives in vain to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the
proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday’s liberty for the rest.
Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their
kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed themselves
there? You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in
charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with
it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. Is this
owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found, or
to the remissness of the officers of justice?
Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently
appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is
our selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny
day here in Concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because,
as he said, he was kind to the poor; meaning himself. The kind
uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true
spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard a reverend lecturer on
England, a man of learning and intelligence, after enumerating
her scientific, literary, and political worthies, Shakespeare,
Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of her
Christian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him,
he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the
great. They were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must
feel the falsehood and cant of this. The last were not England’s
best men and women; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.
I would not subtract any thing from the praise that is due to
philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives
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Henry David Thoreau
and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man’s

uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and
leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb
tea for the sick, serve but a humble use, and are most employed by
quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance
be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our
intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory
act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of
which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude
of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the
remembrance of his own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls
it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair,
our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this
does not spread by contagion. From what southern plains comes
up the voice of wailing? Under what latitudes reside the heathen
to whom we would send light? Who is that intemperate and brutal
man whom we would redeem? If any thing ail a man, so that he
does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels
even, – for that is the seat of sympathy, – he forthwith sets about
reforming – the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers,
and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it, – that
the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the
globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to
think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and
straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and
the Patagonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese
villages; and thus, by a few years of philanthropic activity, the
powers in the mean while using him for their own ends, no doubt,
he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush
on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and
life loses its crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live.
I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I
never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.
I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy
with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God,
is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him,
the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous
companions without apology. My excuse for not lecturing against
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the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty
which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are
things enough I have chewed, which I could lecture against. If you
should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not
let your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not
worth knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings.
Take your time, and set about some free labor.
Our manners have been corrupted by communication with
the saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing
of God and enduring him forever. One would say that even the
prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than
confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple
and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable
praise of God. All health and success does me good, however far
off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps
to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it
may have with me or I with it. If, then, we would indeed restore
mankind by truly Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means,
let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the
clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life
into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but
endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.
I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi
of Shiraz, that “They asked a wise man, saying; Of the many
celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and
umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress,
which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this? He replied;
Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed season, during
the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during
their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the
cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are
the azads, or religious independents. – Fix not thy heart on that
which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow
through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has
plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give
away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.”
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Henry David Thoreau
COMPLEMENTAL VERSES
The Pretensions of Poverty
“Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,

To claim a station in the firmament
Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub,
Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue
In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs,
With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand,
Tearing those humane passions from the mind,
Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish,
Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense,
And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone.
We not require the dull society
Of your necessitated temperance,
Or that unnatural stupidity
That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc’d
Falsely exalted passive fortitude
Above the active. This low abject brood,
That fix their seats in mediocrity,
Become your servile minds; but we advance
Such virtues only as admit excess,
Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence,
All-seeing prudence, magnanimity
That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue
For which antiquity hath left no name,
But patterns only, such as Hercules,
Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath’d cell;
And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere,
Study to know but what those worthies were.”
T. CAREW
56
Staying with the Trouble
Donna J. Haraway
from Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene,
edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit, London:
Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 1-8.
58
INTRODUCTION
Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-

century French verb meaning “to stir up,” “to make cloudy,” “to
disturb.” We–all of us on Terra–live in disturbing times, mixed-up
times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable,
with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response. Mixed-
up times are overflowing with both pain and joy–with vastly unjust
patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness
but also with necessary resurgence. The task is to make kin in
lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and
die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make
trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as
to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent times,
many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an
imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that
looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in
order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the
trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the
future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be
truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic
pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters
entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times,
matters, meanings.1
Chthulucene is a simple word.2 It is a compound of two
Greek roots (khthôn and kainos) that together name a kind of
timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying
in response-ability on a damaged earth. Kainos means now, a
time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, for freshness. Nothing in
kainos must mean conventional pasts, presents, or futures. There
is nothing in times of beginnings that insists on wiping out what
has come before, or, indeed, wiping out what comes after. Kainos
can be full of inheritances, of remembering, and full of comings,
of nurturing what might still be. I hear kainos in the sense of thick,
ongoing presence, with hyphae infusing all sorts of temporalities
and materialities.
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Donna J. Haraway
Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, both ancient and up-
to-the-minute. I imagine chthonic ones as replete with tentacles,
feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair.
Chthonic ones romp in multicritter humus but have no truck with
sky-gazing Homo. Chthonic ones are monsters in the best sense;
they demonstrate and perform the material meaningfulness of
earth processes and critters. They also demonstrate and perform
consequences. Chthonic ones are not safe; they have no truck
with ideologues; they belong to no one; they writhe and luxuriate
in manifold forms and manifold names in all the airs, waters,
and places of earth. They make and unmake; they are made
and unmade. They are who are. No wonder the world’s great
monotheisms in both religious and secular guises have tried again
and again to exterminate the chthonic ones. The scandals of times
called the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene are the latest and
most dangerous of these exterminating forces. Living-with and
dying-with each other potently in the Chthulucene can be a fierce
reply to the dictates of both Anthropos and Capital.
Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best
to domesticate. Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in
addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles
important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible. Who
lives and who dies, and how, in this kinship rather than that one?
What shape is this kinship, where and whom do its lines connect
and disconnect, and so what? What must be cut and what must
be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and
other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance?
An ubiquitous figure in this book is SF: science fiction,
speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism,
science fact, so far. This reiterated list whirls and loops throughout
the coming pages, in words and in visual pictures, braiding me and
my readers into beings and patterns at stake. Science fact and
speculative fabulation need each other, and both need speculative
feminism. I think of SF and string figures in a triple sense of
figuring. First, promiscuously plucking out fibers in clotted and
dense events and practices, I try to follow the threads where they
lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns
60
Staying with the trouble
crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places
and times. In that sense, SF is a method of tracing, of following a
thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where
who lives and who dies and how might become clearer for the
cultivating of multispecies justice. Second, the string figure is not
the tracking, but rather the actual thing, the pattern and assembly
that solicits response, the thing that is not oneself but with which
one must go on. Third, string figuring is passing on and receiving,
making and unmaking, picking up threads and dropping them. SF
is practice and process; it is becoming-with each other in surprising
relays; it is a figure for ongoingness in the Chthulucene.
The book and the idea of “staying with the trouble” are
especially impatient with two responses that I hear all too frequently
to the horrors of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. The
first is easy to describe and, I think, dismiss, namely, a comic
faith in technofixes, whether secular or religious: technology
will somehow come to the rescue of its naughty but very clever
children, or what amounts to the same thing, God will come to the
rescue of his disobedient but ever hopeful children. In the face of
such touching silliness about technofixes (or techno-apocalypses),
sometimes it is hard to remember that it remains important to
embrace situated technical projects and their people. They are
not the enemy; they can do many important things for staying with
the trouble and for making generative oddkin.
The second response, harder to dismiss, is probably even
more destructive: namely, a position that the game is over, it’s
too late, there’s no sense trying to make anything any better, or
at least no sense having any active trust in each other in working
and playing for a resurgent world. Some scientists I know express
this kind of bitter cynicism, even as they actually work very hard
to make a positive difference for both people and other critters.
Some people who describe themselves as critical cultural theorists
or political progressives express these ideas too. I think the
odd coupling of actually working and playing for multispecies
flourishing with tenacious energy and skill, while expressing an
explicit “game over” attitude that can and does discourage others,
including students, is facilitated by various kinds of futurisms. One
61
Donna J. Haraway
kind seems to imagine that only if things work do they matter – or,
worse, only if what I and my fellow experts do works to fix things
does anything matter. More generously, sometimes scientists and
others who think, read, study, agitate, and care know too much,
and it is too heavy. Or, at least we think we know enough to reach
the conclusion that life on earth that includes human people in
any tolerable way really is over, that the apocalypse really is nigh.
That attitude makes a great deal of sense in the midst of the
earth’s sixth great extinction event and in the midst of engulfing
wars, extractions, and immiserations of billions of people and
other critters for something called “profit” or “power”–or, for
that matter, called “God.” A game-over attitude imposes itself
in the gale-force winds of feeling, not just knowing, that human
numbers are almost certain to reach more than 11 billion people by
2100. This figure represents a 9-billion-person increase over 150
years from 1950 to 2100, with vastly unequal consequences for the
poor and the rich–not to mention vastly unequal burdens imposed
on the earth by the rich compared to the poor–and even worse
consequences for nonhumans almost everywhere. There are many
other examples of dire realities; the Great Accelerations of the
post–World War II era gouge their marks in earth’s rocks, waters,
airs, and critters. There is a fine line between acknowledging the
extent and seriousness of the troubles and succumbing to abstract
futurism and its affects of sublime despair and its politics of
sublime indifference.
This book argues and tries to perform that, eschewing
futurism, staying with the trouble is both more serious and
more lively. Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin;
that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and
combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other
or not at all. That kind of material semiotics is always situated,
someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly. Alone, in our
separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too
much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and
neither is a sensible attitude. Neither despair nor hope is tuned
to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal
earthlings in thick copresence. Neither hope nor despair knows
62
how to teach us to “play string figures with companion species,”

the title of the first chapter of this book.
Three long chapters open Staying with the Trouble. Each
chapter tracks stories and figures for making kin in the Chthulucene
in order to cut the bonds of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene.
Pigeons in all their worldly diversity–from creatures of empire, to
working men’s racing birds, to spies in war, to scientific research
partners, to collaborators in art activisms on three continents, to
urban companions and pests–are the guides in chapter 1.
In their homely histories, pigeons lead into a practice of
“tentacular thinking,” the title of the second chapter. Here, I expand
the argument that bounded individualism in its many flavors in
science, politics, and philosophy has finally become unavailable to
think with, truly no longer thinkable, technically or any other way.
Sympoiesis–making-with–is a keyword throughout the chapter,
as I explore the gifts for needed thinking offered by theorists and
storytellers. My partners in science studies, anthropology, and
storytelling–Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Thom van Dooren,
Anna Tsing, Marilyn Strathern, Hannah Arendt, Ursula Le Guin,
and others – are my companions throughout tentacular thinking.
With their help, I introduce the three timescapes of the book: the
Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, and the Chthulucene. Allied with
the Pacific day octopus, Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon, figured
as the Mistress of the Animals, saves the day and ends the chapter.
“Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the
Trouble,” chapter 3, spins out the threads of sympoiesis in
ecological evolutionary developmental biology and in art/
science activisms committed to four iconic troubled places: coral
reef holobiomes, Black Mesa coal country in Navajo and Hopi
lands and other fossil fuel extraction zones impacting especially
ferociously on indigenous peoples, complex lemur forest habitats
in Madagascar, and North American circumpolar lands and
seas subject to new and old colonialisms in the grip of rapidly
melting ice. This chapter makes string figures with the threads
of reciprocating energies of biologies, arts, and activisms for
multispecies resurgence. Navajo-Churro sheep, orchids, extinct
bees, lemurs, jellyfish, coral polyps, seals, and microbes play
63
Donna J. Haraway
leading roles with their artists, biologists, and activists throughout

the chapter. Here and throughout the book, the sustaining
creativity of people who care and act animates the action. Not
surprisingly, contemporary indigenous people and peoples, in
conflict and collaboration with many sorts of partners, make a
sensible difference. Biologists, beginning with the incomparable
Lynn Margulis, infuse the thinking and playing of this chapter.
“Making Kin,” chapter 4, is both a reprise of the timescapes
of Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene, and a plea to
“Make Kin Not Babies.” Antiracist, anticolonial, anticapitalist,
proqueer feminists of every color and from every people have
long been leaders in the movement for sexual and reproductive
freedom and rights, with particular attention to the violence
of reproductive and sexual orders for poor and marginalized
people. Feminists have been leaders in arguing that sexual
and reproductive freedom means being able to bring children,
whether one’s own or those of others, to robust adulthood in
health and safety in intact communities. Feminists have also been
historically unique in insisting on the power and right of every
woman, young or old, to choose not to have a child. Cognizant of
how easily such a position repeats the arrogances of imperialism,
feminists of my persuasion insist that motherhood is not the telos
of women and that a woman’s reproductive freedom trumps the
demands of patriarchy or any other system. Food, jobs, housing,
education, the possibility of travel, community, peace, control of
one’s body and one’s intimacies, health care, usable and woman-
friendly contraception, the last word on whether or not a child
will be born, joy: these and more are sexual and reproductive
rights. Their absence around the world is stunning. For excellent
reasons, the feminists I know have resisted the languages and
policies of population control because they demonstrably often
have the interests of biopolitical states more in view than the
well-being of women and their people, old and young. Resulting
scandals in population control practices are not hard to find.
But, in my experience, feminists, including science studies and
anthropological feminists, have not been willing seriously to
address the Great Acceleration of human numbers, fearing that
64
to do so would be to slide once again into the muck of racism,

classism, nationalism, modernism, and imperialism.
But that fear is not good enough. Avoidance of the urgency
of almost incomprehensible increases in human numbers since
1950 can slip into something akin to the way some Christians
avoid the urgency of climate change because it touches too
closely on the marrow of one’s faith. How to address the urgency
is the question that must burn for staying with the trouble. What
is decolonial feminist reproductive freedom in a dangerously
troubled multispecies world? It cannot be just a humanist affair,
no matter how anti-imperialist, antiracist, anticlassist, and pro-
woman. It also cannot be a “futurist” affair, attending mainly to
abstract numbers and big data, but not to the differentiated and
layered lives and deaths of actual people. Still, a 9 billion increase
of human beings over 150 years, to a level of 11 billion by 2100 if
we are lucky, is not just a number; and it cannot be explained away
by blaming Capitalism or any other word starting with a capital
letter. The need is stark to think together anew across differences
of historical position and of kinds of knowledge and expertise.
“Awash in Urine,” chapter 5, begins with personal and intimate
relations, luxuriating in the consequences of following estrogens
that connect an aging woman and her elder dog, specifically, me
and my companion and research associate Cayenne. Before the
threads of the string figure have been tracked far, remembering
their cyborg littermates, woman and dog find themselves in
histories of veterinary research, Big Pharma, horse farming for
estrogen, zoos, des feminist activism, interrelated animal rights
and women’s health actions, and much more. Intensely inhabiting
specific bodies and places as the means to cultivate the capacity
to respond to worldly urgencies with each other is the core theme.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and ants and acacia
seeds populate chapter 6, “Sowing Worlds.” The task is to tell
an SF adventure story with acacias and their associates as the
protagonists. It turns out that Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of
narrative comes to the rescue, along with biologist Deborah
Gordon’s theories about ant interactions and colony behavior,
to elaborate the possibilities of ecological evolutionary
65
Donna J. Haraway
developmental biology and nonhierarchical systems theories for

shaping the best stories. Science fiction and science fact cohabit
happily in this tale. With Le Guin as their scribe, the prose of
acacia seeds and the lyrics of lichens give way to the mute poetics
of rocks in the final passages.
“A Curious Practice,” chapter 7, draws close to the
philosopher, psychologist, animal-human student, and cultural
theorist Vinciane Despret because of her incomparable ability
to think-with other beings, human or not. Despret’s work on
attunement and on critters rendering each other capable of
unexpected feats in actual encounters is necessary to staying with
the trouble. She attends not to what critters are supposed to be
able to do, by nature or education, but to what beings evoke from
and with each other that was truly not there before, in nature
or culture. Her kind of thinking enlarges the capacities of all
the players; that is her worlding practice. The urgencies of the
Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene demand that kind
of thinking beyond inherited categories and capacities, in homely
and concrete ways, like the sorts of things Arabian babblers and
their scientists get up to in the Negev desert. Despret teaches
how to be curious, as well as how to mourn by bringing the dead
into active presence; and I needed her touch before writing
the concluding stories of Staying with the Trouble. Her curious
practice prepared me to write about the Communities of Compost
and the tasks of speakers for the dead, as they work for earthly
multispecies recuperation and resurgence.
“The Camille Stories: Children of Compost” closes this
book. This invitation to a collective speculative fabulation follows
five generations of a symbiogenetic join of a human child and
monarch butterflies along the many lines and nodes of these
insects’ migrations between Mexico and the United States and
Canada. These lines trace socialities and materialities crucial to
living and dying with critters on the edge of disappearance so that
they might go on. Committed to nurturing capacities to respond,
cultivating ways to render each other capable, the Communities
of Compost appeared all over the world in the early twenty-first
century on ruined lands and waters. These communities committed
66
to help radically reduce human numbers over a few hundred

years while developing practices of multispecies environmental
justice of myriad kinds. Every new child had at least three
human parents; and the pregnant parent exercised reproductive
freedom in the choice of an animal symbiont for the child, a
choice that ramified across the generations of all the species. The
relations of symbiogenetic people and unjoined humans brought
many surprises, some of them deadly, but perhaps the deepest
surprises emerged from the relations of the living and the dead, in
symanimagenic complexity, across the holobiomes of earth.
Lots of trouble, lots of kin to be going on with.
NOTES
1
Critters is an American everyday idiom for varmints of all sorts. Scientists talk of
their “critters” all the time; and so do ordinary people all over the U.S., but perhaps
especially in the South. The taint of “creatures” and “creation” does not stick to
“critters”; if you see such a semiotic barnacle, scrape it off. In this book, “critters”
refers promiscuously to microbes, plants, animals, humans and nonhumans, and
sometimes even to machines.
2
Less simple was deciding how to spell Chthulucene so that it led to diverse and
bumptious chthonic dividuals and powers and not to Chthulhu, Cthulhu, or any
other singleton monster or deity. A fastidious Greek speller might insist on the “h”
between the last “l” and “u”; but both for English pronunciation and for avoiding the
grasp of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, I dropped that “h.” This is a metaplasm.
67
The Education of the
Un-Artist, Part 1
Allan Kaprow
from Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993, pp. 97–109.
68
Sophistication of consciousness in the arts today (1969) is so great
that it is hard not to assert as matters of fact
that the LM mooncraft is patently superior to all

contemporary sculptural efforts;
that the broadcast verbal exchange between Houston’s

Manned Spacecraft Center and the Apollo 11 astronauts
was better than contemporary poetry;
that with their sound distortions, beeps, static, and

communication breaks, such exchanges also surpassed
the electronic music of the concert halls;
that certain remote-control videotapes of the lives

of ghetto families recorded (with their permission)
by anthropologists are more fascinating than the
celebrated slice-of-life underground films;
that not a few of those brightly lit plastic and stainless-

steel gas stations of, say, Las Vegas, are the most
extraordinary architecture to date;
that the random trancelike movements of shoppers in a

supermarket are richer than anything done in modern
dance;
that lint under beds and the debris of industrial dumps

are more engaging than the recent rash of exhibitions of
scattered waste matter;
that the vapor trails left by rocket tests – motionless,

rainbow-colored, sky-filling scribbles – are unequaled
by artists exploring gaseous media;
that the Southeast Asian theater of war in Vietnam, or

the trial of the “Chicago Eight,” while indefensible, is
better theater than any play;
that . . . etc., etc., . . . nonart is more art than Art art.
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Allan Kaprow
MEMBERS OF THE CLUB (PASSWORDS IN AND OUT)
Nonart is whatever has not yet been accepted as art but has
caught an artist’s attention with that possibility in mind. For those
concerned, nonart (password one) exists only fleetingly, like some
subatomic particle, or perhaps only as a postulate. Indeed, the
moment any such example is offered publicly, it automatically
becomes a type of art. Let’s say I am impressed by the mechanical
clothes conveyors commonly used in dry-cleaning shops. Flash!
While they continue to perform their normal work of roller-
coastering me my suit in twenty seconds flat, they double as
Kinetic Environments, simply because I had the thought and have
written it here. By the same process all the examples listed above
are conscripts of art. Art is very easy nowadays.
Because art is so easy, there is a growing number of artists who
are interested in this paradox and wish to prolong its resolution, if
only for a week or two, for the life of nonart is precisely its fluid
identity. Art’s former “difficulty” in the actual making stages may
be transposed in this case to an arena of collective uncertainty
over just what to call the critter: sociology, hoax, therapy? A
Cubist portrait in 1910, before it was labeled a mental aberration,
was self-evidently a painting. Blowing up successively closer views
of an aerial map (a fairly typical example of 1960s Site art) might
more obviously suggest an aerial bombing plan.
Nonart’s advocates, according to this description, are those
who consistently, or at one time or other, have chosen to operate
outside the pale of art establishments–that is, in their heads or
in the daily or natural domain. At all times, however, they have
informed the art establishment of their activities, to set into
motion the uncertainties without which their acts would have no
meaning. The art-not-art dialectic is essential–one of the nice
ironies I shall return to several times hereafter.
Among this group, some of whom do not know each other,
or if they do, do not like each other, are concept makers such
as George Brecht, Ben Vautier, and Joseph Kosuth; found-sound
guides such as Max Neuhaus; Earthworkers such as Dennis
Oppenheim and Michael Heizer; some of the 1950s Environment
70
The Education of the Un-Artist, Part 1
builders; and such Happeners as Milan Knízák, Marta Minujin,

Kazuo Shiraga, Wolf Vostell, and me.
But sooner or later most of them and their colleagues
throughout the world have seen their work absorbed into the
cultural institutions against which they initially measured their
liberation. Some have wished it this way; it was, to use Paul Brach’s
expression, like paying their dues to join the union. Others have
shrugged it off, continuing the game in new ways. But all have
found that password one won’t work.
Nonart is often confused with antiart (password two), which
in Dada time and even earlier was nonart aggressively (and
wittily) intruded into the arts world to jar conventional values and
provoke positive esthetic and/or ethical responses. Alfred Jarry’s
Ubu Roi, Erik Satie’s Furniture Music, and Marcel Duchamp’s
Fountain are familiar examples. The late Sam Goodman’s New
York exhibition some years ago of varieties of sculpted dung piles
was still another. Nonart has no such intent; and intent is part of
both function and feeling in any situation that deliberately blurs
its operational context.
Apart from the question whether the historical arts have
ever demonstrably caused anybody to become “better,” or
“worse,” and granting that all art has presumed to edify in some
way (perhaps only to prove that nothing can be proven), such
avowedly moralistic programs appear naive today in light of the
far greater and more effective value changes brought about by
political, military, economic, technological, educational, and
advertising pressures. The arts, at least up to the present, have
been poor lessons, except possibly to artists and their tiny publics.
Only these vested interests have ever made any high claims for
the arts. The rest of the world couldn’t care less. Antiart, nonart,
or other such cultural designations share, after all, the word art or
its implicit presence and so point to a family argument at best, if
they do not reduce utterly to tempests in teapots. And that is true
for the bulk of this discussion.
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Allan Kaprow
When Steve Reich suspends a number of microphones

above corresponding loudspeakers, sets them swinging
like pendulums, and amplifies their sound pickup so that
feedback noise is producedthat’s–that’s art.
When Andy Warhol publishes the unedited transcript of

twenty-four hours of taped conversation–that’s art.
When Walter De Maria fills a room full of dirt–that’s art.
We know they are art because a concert announcement, a

title on a book jacket, and an art gallery say so.
If nonart is almost impossible, antiart is virtually inconceivable.

Among the knowledgeable (and practically every graduate student
should qualify) all gestures, thoughts, and deeds may become art at
the whim of the arts world. Even murder, rejected in practice, could
be an admissible artistic proposition. Antiart in 1969 is embraced
in every case as proart, and therefore, from the standpoint of one
of its chief functions, it is nullified. You cannot be against art when
art invites its own “destruction” as a Punch-and-Judy act among
the repertory of poses art may take. So in losing the last shred of
pretense to moral leadership through moral confrontation, antiart,
like all other art philosophies, is simply obliged to answer to ordinary
human conduct and also, sadly enough, to the refined life-style
dictated by the cultivated and rich who accept it with open arms.
When Richard Artschwager discreetly pastes little black

oblongs on parts of buildings across California and has a
few photos to show and stories to tell–that’s art.
When George Brecht prints on small cards sent to friends

the word “direction”–that’s art.
When Ben Vautier signs his name (or God’s) to any

airport–that’s art.
These acts are obviously art because they are made by

persons associated with the arts.
72
It’s to be expected that in spite of the paradoxical awareness

referred to at the beginning of this essay, Art art (password three)
is the condition, both in the mind and literally, in which every
novelty comes to rest. Art art takes art seriously. It presumes,
however covertly, a certain spiritual rarity, a superior office. It
has faith. It is recognizable by its initiates. It is innovative, of
course, but largely in terms of a tradition of professionalistic
moves and references: art begets art. Most of all, Art art maintains
for its exclusive use certain sacred settings and formats handed
down by this tradition: exhibitions, books, recordings, concerts,
arenas, shrines, civic monuments, stages, film screenings, and the
“culture” columns of the mass media. These grant accreditation
the way universities grant degrees.
So long as Art art holds on to these contexts, it can and often
does costume itself in nostalgic echoes of antiart, a reference that
critics correctly observed in Robert Rauschenberg’s earlier shows.
It is self-evident in later Pop painting and writing, which make
deliberate use of common clichés in content and method. Art art
can also assert the features, though not the milieu, of nonart, as
in much of the music of John Cage. In fact, Art art in the guise of
nonart quickly became high style during the 1968-69 season at the
Castelli Gallery warehouse shows of informal dispersions of felt,
metal, rope, and other raw matter. Shortly afterward, this quasi-
nonart received its virtual apotheosis at the Whitney Museum’s
presentation of similar stuff, called Anti-Illusion: Procedures/
Materials. A hint of antiart greeted the viewer in the title, followed
by the reassurance of scholarly analysis; but far from fomenting
controversy, the temple of muses certified that all was Cultural.
There was no illusion about that.
If commitment to the political and ideological framework
of the contemporary arts is implicit in these seemingly raunchy
examples, and in those cited at the beginning of this account, it
is explicit in the bulk of straightforward productions of Art art:
the films of Godard, the concerts of Stockhausen, the dances of
Cunningham, the buildings of Louis Kahn, the sculpture of Judd,
the paintings of Frank Stella, the novels of William Burroughs,
the plays of Grotowski, the mixed-media performances of E.A.T.–
73
Allan Kaprow
to mention a few well-known contemporaries and events of

achievement. It is not that some of them are “abstract” and this
is their Art or that others have appropriate styles or subjects. It is
that they rarely, if ever, play renegade with the profession of art
itself. Their achievement, much of it in the recent past, is perhaps
due to a conscious and poignant stance taken against an erosion of
their respective fields by emerging nonartists. Perhaps it was mere
innocence, or the narrow-mindedness of their professionalism. In
any event, they upheld the silent rule that as a password in, Art is
the best word of all.
It is questionable, however, whether it is worthwhile being
in. As a human goal and as an idea, Art is dying–not just because
it operates within conventions that have ceased to be fertile. It
is dying because it has preserved its conventions and created a
growing weariness toward them, out of indifference to what I
suspect has become the fine arts’ most important, though mostly
unconscious, subject matter: the ritual escape from Culture.
Nonart as it changes into Art art is at least interesting in the
process. But Art art that starts out as such shortcuts the ritual
and feels from the very beginning merely cosmetic, a superfluous
luxury, even though such qualities do not in fact concern its
makers at all.
Art art’s greatest challenge, in other words, has come
from within its own heritage, from a hyperconsciousness about
itself and its everyday surroundings. Art art has served as an
instructional transition to its own elimination by life. Such an
acute awareness among artists enables the whole world and its
humanity to be experienced as a work of art. With ordinary reality
so brightly lit, those who choose to engage in showcase creativity
invite (from this view) hopeless comparisons between what they
do and supervivid counterparts in the environment.
Exemption from this larger ballpark is impossible. Art artists,
in spite of declarations that their work is not to be compared
with life, will invariably be compared with nonartists. And, since
nonart derives its fragile inspiration from everything except art,
i.e., from “life,” the comparison between Art art and life will be
made anyway. It then could be shown that, willingly or not, there
74
has been an active exchange between Art art and nonart, and
in some cases between Art art and the big wide world (in more
than the translational way all art has utilized “real” experience).
Relocated by our minds in a global setting rather than in a
museum or library or onstage, Art, no matter how it is arrived at,
fares very badly indeed.
For example, La Monte Young, whose performances of
complex drone sounds interest me as Art art, tells of his boyhood
in the North-west when he used to lean his ear against the high-
tension electric towers that stretched across the fields; he would
enjoy feeling the hum of the wires through his body. I did that as
a boy, too, and prefer it to the concerts of Young’s music. It was
more impressive visually and less hackneyed in the vastness of its
environment than it is in a loft space or a performance hall.
Dennis Oppenheim describes another example of nonart:
in Canada he ran across a muddy lot, made plaster casts of his
footprints (in the manner of a crime investigator), and then
exhibited stacks of the casts at a gallery. The activity was great;
the exhibition part of it was corny. The casts could have been left
at the local police station without identification. Or thrown away.
Those wishing to be called artists, in order to have

some or all of their acts and ideas considered art,
only have to drop an artistic thought around them,
announce the fact and persuade others to believe it.
That’s advertising. As Marshall McLuhan once wrote,
“Art is what you can get away with.”
Art. There’s the catch. At this stage of consciousness, the

sociology of Culture emerges as an in-group “dumb-show.” Its sole
audience is a roster of the creative and performing professions
watching itself, as if in a mirror, enact a struggle between self-
appointed priests and a cadre of self-appointed commandos,
jokers, guttersnipes, and triple agents who seem to be attempting
to destroy the priests’ church. But everybody knows how it all ends:
in church, of course, with the whole club bowing their heads and
muttering prayers. They pray for themselves and for their religion.
75
Allan Kaprow
Artists cannot profitably worship what is moribund; nor can

they war against such bowing and scraping when only moments
later they enshrine their destructions and acts as cult objects in
the same institution they were bent on destroying. This is a patent
sham. A plain case of management takeover.
But if artists are reminded that nobody but themselves
gives a damn about this, or about whether all agree with the
judgment here, then the entropy of the whole scene may begin
to appear very funny.
Seeing the situation as low comedy is a way out of the bind.
I would propose that the first practical step toward laughter is to
un-art ourselves, avoid all esthetic roles, give up all references
to being artists of any kind whatever. In becoming un-artists
(password four) we may exist only as fleetingly as the nonartist,
for when the profession of art is discarded, the art category is
meaningless, or at least antique. An un-artist is one who is
engaged in changing jobs, in modernizing.
The new job does not entail becoming a naïf by beating a
quick retreat back to childhood and yesterday. On the contrary,
it requires even more sophistication than the un-artist already
has. Instead of the serious tone that has usually accompanied the
search for innocence and truth, un-arting will probably emerge as
humor. This is where the old-fashioned saint in the desert and the
newfangled player of the jetways part company. The job implies
fun, never gravity or tragedy.
Of course, starting from the arts means that the idea of art
cannot easily be gotten rid of (even if one wisely never utters the
word). But it is possible to slyly shift the whole un-artistic operation
away from where the arts customarily congregate, to become, for
instance, an account executive, an ecologist, a stunt rider, a politician,
a beach bum. In these different capacities, the several kinds of art
discussed would operate indirectly as a stored code that, instead
of programming a specific course of behavior, would facilitate
an attitude of deliberate playfulness toward all professionalizing
activities well beyond art. Signal scrambling, perhaps. Something
like those venerable baseball aficionados in the vaudeville act that
began, “Who’s on first?” “No, Watt’s on first; Hugh’s on second…”
76
When someone anonymous called our attention recently

to his or her slight transformation of a tenement
stairway, and someone else directed us to examine an
unaltered part of New York’s Park Avenue, these were
art, too. Whoever the persons were, they got the message
to us (artists). We did the rest in our heads.
SAFE BETS FOR YOUR MONEY
It can be pretty well predicted that the various forms of mixed

media or assemblage arts will increase, both in the highbrow sense
and in mass-audience applications such as light shows, space-age
demonstrations at world’s fairs, teaching aids, sales displays, toys,
and political campaigns. And these may be the means by which all
the arts are phased out.
Although public opinion accepts mixed media as additions
to the pantheon, or as new occupants around the outer edges of
the expanding universe of each traditional medium, they are more
likely rituals of escape from the traditions. Given the historical
trend of the modern arts toward specialism or “purity”–pure
painting, pure poetry, pure music, pure dance–any admixtures
have had to be viewed as contaminants. And in this context,
deliberate contamination can now be interpreted as a rite of
passage. (It is noteworthy in this context that even at this late
date there are no journals devoted to mixed media.)
Among the artists involved in mixed means during the past
decade, a few became interested in taking advantage of the arts’
blurry boundaries by going the next step toward blurring art
as a whole into a number of nonarts. Dick Higgins, in his book
foew&ombwhnw, gives instructive examples of vanguardists’ taking
positions between theater and painting, poetry and sculpture,
music and philosophy and between various intermedia (his term)
and game theory, sports, and politics.
Abbie Hoffman applied the intermedium of Happenings
(via the Provos) to a philosophical and political goal two or three
summers ago. With a group of friends, he went to the observation
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Allan Kaprow
balcony of the New York Stock Exchange. At a signal he and

his friends tossed handfuls of dollar bills onto the floor below,
where trading was at its height. According to his report, brokers
cheered, diving for the bills; the tickertape stopped; the market
was probably affected; and the press reported the arrival of the
cops. Later that night the event appeared nationally on televised
news coverage: a medium sermon “for the hell of it,” as Hoffman
might say.
It makes no difference whether what Hoffman did is called
activism, criticism, pranksterism, self-advertisement, or art. The
term intermedia implies fluidity and simultaneity of roles. When
art is only one of several possible functions a situation may have,
it loses its privileged status and becomes, so to speak, a lowercase
ttribute. The intermedial response can be applied to anything–
say, an old glass. The glass can serve the geometrist to explain
ellipses; for the historian it can be an index of the technology of
a past age; for a painter it can become part of a still life, and the
gourmet can use it to drink his Chateau Latour 1953. We are not
used to thinking like this, all at once, or nonhierarchically, but
the intermedialist does it naturally. Context rather than category.
Flow rather than work of art.
It follows that the conventions of painting, music,
architecture, dance, poetry, theater, and so on may survive in a
marginal capacity as academic researches, like the study of Latin.
Aside from these analytic and curatorial uses, every sign points
to their obsolescence. By the same token, galleries and museums,
bookshops and libraries, concert halls, stages, arenas, and places
of worship will be limited to the conservation of antiquities; that
is, to what was done in the name of art up to about 1960.
Agencies for the spread of information via the mass media
and for the instigation of social activities will become the new
channels of insight and communication, not substituting for the
classic “art experience” (however many things that may have
been) but offering former artists compelling ways of participating
in structured processes that can reveal new values, including the
value of fun.
78
In this respect, the technological pursuits of today’s

nonartists and un-artists will multiply as industry, government,
and education provide their resources. “Systems” technology
involving the interfacing of personal and group experiences,
instead of “product” technology, will dominate the trend.
Software, in other words. But it will be a systems approach that
favors an openness toward outcome, in contrast to the literal and
goal-oriented uses now employed by most systems specialists.
As in the childhood pastime “Telephone” (in which friends in a
circle whisper a few words into one ear after the other only to
hear them come out delightfully different when the last person
says them aloud), the feedback loop is the model. Playfulness and
the playful use of technology suggest a positive interest in acts of
continuous discovery. Playfulness can become in the near future a
social and psychological benefit.
A global network of simultaneously transmitting and

receiving “TV Arcades.” Open to the public twenty-four
hours a day, like any washerette. An arcade in every
big city of the world. Each equipped with a hundred or
more monitors of different sizes from a few inches to
wall- scale, in planar and irregular surfaces. A dozen
automatically moving cameras (like those secreted in
banks and airports, but now prominently displayed)
will pan and fix anyone or anything that happens to com
e along or be in view. Including cameras or monitors if
no one is present. People will be free to do whatever
they want and will see themselves on the monitors in
different ways. A crowd of people may multiply their
images into a throng. But the cameras will send the same
images to all other arcades, at the same time or after a
programmed delay. Thus, what happens in one arcade
may be happening in a thousand, generated a thousand
times. But the built-in program for distributing the
signals, visible and audible, random and fixed, could
also be manually altered at any arcade. A woman might
want to make electronic love to a particular man she
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Allan Kaprow
saw on a monitor. Controls would permit her to localize

(freeze) the communication within a few TV tubes.
Other visitors to the same arcade may feel free to enjoy
and even enhance the mad and surprising scramble by
turning their dials accordingly. The world could make
up its own social relations as it went along. Everybody
in and out of touch all at once!
P.S. This is obviously not art, since by the time it was

realized, nobody would remember that I wrote it here,
thank goodness.
And what about art criticism? What happens to those keen

interpreters who are even rarer than good artists? The answer is
that in the light of the preceding, critics will be as irrelevant as the
artists. Loss of one’s vocation, however, may be only partial, since
there is much to be done in connoisseurship and related scholarly
endeavors in the universities and archives. And nearly all critics
hold teaching posts anyway. Their work may simply shift more
toward historical investigation and away from the ongoing scene.
But some critics may be willing to un-art themselves along with
their artist colleagues (who just as often are professors and double
as writers themselves). In this case, all their esthetic assumptions
will have to be systematically uncovered and dumped, together
with all the historically loaded art terminology. Practitioners
and commentators–the two occupations will probably merge,
one person performing interchangeably–will need an updated
language to refer to what is going on. And the best source of this,
as usual, is street talk, news shorthand, and technical jargon.
For example, Al Brunelle, a few years back, wrote of the
hallucinogenic surfaces of certain contemporary paintings as
“skin freak.” Even though the pop drug scene has changed
since, and new words are necessary, and even though this essay
is not concerned with paintings, Brunelle’s phrase is much more
informative than such older words as tâche or tracks, which also
refer to a painting’s surface. Skin freaking brought to picture
making an intensely vibrating eroticism that was particularly
80
revealing for the time. That the experience is fading into the past
simply suggests that good commentary can be as disposable as
artifacts in our culture. Immortal words are appropriate only to
immortal dreams.
Jack Burnham, in his Beyond Modern Sculpture [New York:
Braziller, 1968] is conscious of this need for accurate terms and
attempts to replace vitalist, formalist, and mechanistic metaphors
with labels from science and technology like cybernetics, “responsive
systems,” field, automata, and so forth. Yet these are compromised
because the reference is still sculpture and art. To be thorough,
such pietistic categories would have to be rejected totally.
In the long run, criticism and commentary as we know them
may be unnecessary. During the recent “age of analysis” when
human activity was seen as a symbolic smoke screen that had to
be dispelled, explanations and interpretations were in order. But
nowadays the modern arts themselves have become commentaries
and may forecast the postartistic age. They comment on their
respective pasts, in which, for instance, the medium of television
comments on the film; a live sound played alongside its taped
version comments on which is “real”; one artist comments on
another’s latest moves; some artists comment on the state of their
health or of the world; others comment on not commenting (while
critics comment on all commentaries as I’m commenting here).
This may be sufficient.
The most important short-range prediction that can be
made has been implied over and over again in the foregoing;
that the actual, probably global, environment will engage us in
an increasingly participational way. The environment will not be
the Environments we are familiar with already: the constructed
fun house, spook show, window display, store front, and
obstacle course. These have been sponsored by art galleries and
discotheques. Instead, we’ll act in response to the given natural
and urban environments such as the sky, the ocean floor, winter
resorts, motels, the movements of cars, public services, and the
communications media…
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Allan Kaprow
Preview of a 2001-Visual-of-the-USA-Landscape-Via-
Supersonic-Jet. Every seat on the jet is equipped with
monitors showing the earth below as the plane speeds
over it. Choice of pictures in infrared, straight color,
black-and-white; singly or in combination on various
parts of the screen. Plus zoom lens and stop-action
controls.
Scenes from other trips are retrievable for flashback

cuts and contrasts. Past comments on present. Selector
lists: Hawaiian Volcanos, The Pentagon, A Harvard
Riot Seen When Approaching Boston, Sunbathing on
a Skyscraper.
Audio hookup offers nine channels of prerecorded

criticism of the American scene: two channels of light
criticism, one of pop criticism, and six channels of
heavy criticism. There is also a channel for recording
one’s own criticism on a take-home video cassette
documenting the entire trip.
P.S. This, also, is not art, because it will be available to

too many people.
Artists of the world, drop out! You have nothing to lose but your
professions!
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Decoys and Disruptions
Martha Rosler
from Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, Boston:
The MIT Press, 2006, pp. 57–69.
84
PART I: PREHISTORY
[…]
Central to the growing hegemony of the newly ascendant
middle classes, bearers of materialist values and beneficiaries of
these new social dislocations, were the media of communication–
not excluding those physical means, such as the railroads, that
welded communities together with bands of steel and inescapably
added to the repertoire of perceptual effects. Although the new
mass press aided communication among classes and factions vying
for social power, its overweening function was the continuous
propagation of bourgeois ideology among members of the still-
developing middle classes and, beyond them, to the rest of society.
And it was this ideology that accorded science a central position.
“Science;’ as sociologist Alvin Gouldner has noted, “became
the prestigious and focally visible paradigm of the new mode of
discourse.”1 One need hardly add that this focus on science and
technology incorporated the implicit goals of conquest, mastery,
and instrumentalism responsible for the degradation of work and
the destruction of community.
The new technologies of reproduction, from the early

nineteenth century on, were not segregated for the use or
consumption of ruling elites but soon became embedded in cultural
life. Perhaps the most public examples are the growth of the mass
press, as previously noted, and the invention of photography,
both before midcentury. The birth of the press in the previous
century has been identified with the tremendous expansion
of the public sphere, frequented by the cultured, including the
cultured bourgeois tradesman alongside the literate aristocrat.
The growth of the mass press coincided with the pressure for
broader democratic participation, to include the uncultured
and unpropertied as well. The erosion of forms of traditional
authority, which had rested with the aristocracy, helped bring the
previous ruling ideologies into crisis.
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Martha Rosler
Conflict over cultural values and the machine stemmed,

then, from the aristocracy and from the newly proletarianized
“masses” as well as from traditional craftspeople, tradespeople,
and artists. Artists’ revolts against the technologization and
commodification of “culture” and its ghettoization as a private
preserve of the ebullient middle classes took place in the context
of the artists’ own immersion in the same “free-market system”
that characterized those classes. Thus, technological pessimism
characterized diverse social sectors, for a variety of reasons. In
England, the home of the industrial revolution, both cultural
conservatives, such as John Ruskin, and political progressives,
such as his former student William Morris, sought to find a
synthesis of modern conditions and earlier social values. It may
not be stretching a point too far to remark that the centrality of
instrumental reason over intellectual (and spiritual) life is what
motivated the search of these figures and others for countervailing
values. The romantic movement, in both its backward-looking and
forward-looking aspects, incorporates this perspective.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours ...
–William Wordsworth2
To some, the political struggles of the day, the growth of

turbulent metropolises housing the ever-burgeoning working
classes, and the attendant depletion of rural life were the worst
aspects of nineteenth-century society. To others, like Morris,
the worst aspect was the situation of those new classes, their
immiseration of material and cultural life, and its deleterious
effect on all of society, which he came to see as a matter of political
power. Technological pessimism and an attempt to create a new
“humanist” antitechnological culture marked the efforts of these
latter critics.
The American history of responses to technology differs
from the English, if only at first. Initially mistrustful of technology,
American thinkers by midcentury looked to technological
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innovation to improve the labor process and develop American

industry while safeguarding the moral development of women
and children. The American transcendentalist poet and writer
Ralph Waldo Emerson was initially one of the optimists, but,
fearing technology’s potential to deaden rather than illumine
sensibilities, he had turned pessimist by the 1860s.
Despite the doubts, stresses, and strains, there was, of
course, no turning back. In European as in American cultural
circles, even those most suspicious of technological optimism and
machine-age values incorporated a response to, and often some
acceptance of, science and the technologies of mass reproduction
in their work. The impressionist painters, for example, placed
optical theories drawn from scientific and technical endeavors
(such as the weaving of tapestries) at the center of their work,
while keeping photography at bay by emphasizing color. They
also turned away from the visible traces of industrialism on the
landscape, in a nostalgic pastoralism. Photography itself quickly
forced the other visual (and poetic!) practices to take account of
it, but strove in its aesthetic practices to ape the traditional arts.
As Richard Rudisill has demonstrated, in America
inexpensive visual images, which precipitated a collecting mania
even before the invention of daguerreotypy, went straight
to the heart of American culture as soon as the processes of
reproduction became available.3 Rudisill notes that Emerson
had referred to himself as a great eyeball looking out during his
moments of greatest insight. As John Kasson observes, Emerson
was “most concerned with the possibilities of the imagination in a
democracy” and “devoted himself not so much to politics directly
as to ‘the politics of vision.’ ... For Emerson, political democracy
was incomplete unless it led to full human freedom in a state of
illuminated consciousness and perception.”4 The identification of
the closely observed details of the external object world with the
contents of interiority, landscape with inscape, and with the ethical
and intellectual demands of democratic participation, provided a
motif for American cultural metaphysics that we retain.
Just before photography appeared, the popularity of
American art with Americans reached a zenith with the art clubs,
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Martha Rosler
in which ordinary people, through subscription or lottery, received

American artworks, most of which were carefully described in the
popular press. The decline of these clubs coincided with the rise
of the new photo technologies, which rested far closer to the heart
of private life than did paintings and graphics. Artists took note.
It is worth noting that the person who introduced photography
to America was Samuel F. B. Morse–not only a painter but also
the inventor of the telegraph; Morse received the photographic
processes from Daguerre himself. While they chatted in Morse’s
Paris lodgings, Daguerre’s diorama theater, based on the protofilmic
illusions of backdrops, science, and variable lighting, burned to
the ground. This is the stuff of myth. Despite their conjuncture in
Morse’s person, the technologies of sound and image reproduction
did not come together for close to one hundred years.
The subsequent history of Western high culture included
efforts to adapt to, subsume, and resist the new technologies.
Although artists had had a history of alliance with science since
the Enlightenment (and despite their market positioning via-
à-vis the middle classes, as previously described), even such
technologically invested artists as the impressionists, and even
photographers, were likely to challenge the authority of scientists,
often by stressing magic, poetry, incommensurability. (The lament
over demystification and the loss of a “pagan creed outworn” fills
out Wordsworth’s sonnet, cited above.)
The powers of imagination were at the center of artists’ claim
to a new authority of their own, based on command of interiority
and sensation or perception, notwithstanding the fact that the
formulation of those powers might be based on the methods
and discoveries of the rival, science. Sectors of late-nineteenth-
century art practice, then, stressed occultist, primitivist, sexist, and
other irrationalist sources of knowledge and authority, spiritual
insights often based not on sight per se but on interpretation
and synesthesia, and on a rejection of “feminine” Nature. The
dialectic of these impulses is the familiar one of modern culture,
as Nietzsche suggested.
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John Fekete, in The Critical Twilight, has called symbolism,

whose genesis occurred during this period, “aesthetics in crisis,
protesting hysterically against commodity pressures.”5 Fekete
refers to its attempt to shut out all of history and the social
world as “the sheer despair of total frustration and impotence.”6
Wordsworth’s lament about “getting and spending” was
transformed by fin-de-siècle artists into aesthetic inversion and
mysticism. Fekete notes, significantly, the transformation from
the formalism of Rimbaud’s insistence on “disordering of all the
senses” to more modern versions of formalized aestheticism,
which “make a fetish of language and [embrace] its principles of
order;’ promoting “the unity characteristic of the contemporary
ideologies of order.”7 Including social order.
The capitulation to modernity is associated with cubism,
which identified rationalized sight with inhuman culture. We
should note that rejecting realism, as cubism did, allowed painting
to continue to compete with photography, partly by including in
a visual art analogies to the rest of the sensorium, and partly by
opposing simultaneity to the photographic presentation of the
moment. The sensorium and its relation to form remained at
the center of artists’ attention. Futurism’s apologia for the least
salutary shocks of modernity and urbanism featured a disjointed
simultaneity that abolished time and space, history and tradition.
Its perceptual effects were composed into a formal whole in which
figure and ground were indistinguishable and ideological meaning
suppressed. Although futurism handled modernity through
abstraction and condensation, Picasso’s cubism incorporated
African and other “primitive” (premodern) imagery as a
technique of transgression and interruption, signifying, one may
speculate, incommensurability and mystery lost to modernity–a
break in bourgeois rationality. Both cubism and futurism rejected
photographic space (but not, it seems, photographic tropes, such
as overlaid temporal sequencing or multiperspectival views).
So far I have cast photography in the role of rational and
rationalizing handmaiden ofbourgeois technological domination.
There is another side to it. By the turn of the twentieth century,
photography was well established as a rational and representational
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Martha Rosler
form, not only within private life and public spectacles of every
type, but implicated in official and unofficial technologies of social
control: police photography, anthropometry, urban documentation,
and time-and-motion study, for example. Photographs were
commodities available to the millions by the millions, and they
could easily produce their own. But, as previously noted, aesthetic
practice in photography was interested in the model provided by
the other arts. European aesthetic photography after the middle
of the nineteenth century was associated both with the self-image
of the intellectual and social elite (through the work of Julia
Margaret Cameron, for example) and with an appreciation of
fairly up-to-date painterly realism or pictorialism, though in coolly
distanced form (P. H. Emerson).
The first important art-photographic movement in the
United States, Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession Group, was
modeled after the European fin-de-siecle secession movements,
with which Stieglitz had had some firsthand experience. Stieglitz
melded symbolist notions with the aestheticized pictorial realism
of his mentor, Emerson. The sensory simultaneity of symbolist
synesthesia appealed to this former engineering student, who
also revealed his enthusiasm for the mechanical reproduction of
sound offered by the wireless and the player piano.8
The photographic example provides an insight into the
choices and silences of aestheticism with respect to technology.
In addition to the use of a camera–a still-confusing mechanical
intrusion–this new art photography depended for its influence
on the latest technologies of mass reproduction. In Stieglitz’s
publication Camera Work, which helped create a nationwide,
or worldwide, art-photography canon, current and historical
photographs appeared as gravures and halftones, the products of
processes only recently developed for the mass press. Thus, an
art apparently hostile and antithetical to mass culture, preserving
craft values and arguing against “labor consciousness,” in fact
depended on its technologies: a seeming paradox worth keeping
in mind. The camera and print technologies were perceived as
neutral, tool-like machines to be subsumed under the superior
understandings of an aesthetic elite. The aesthetic sensibility was
90
an alchemical crucible that effected a magical transformation.

Still, by 1916, Stieglitz had so thoroughly acceded to the
photographic modernism of Paul Strand that he devoted the last
two issues of the moribund Camera Work, specially resurrected
for this purpose, to his work. After Strand, the camera apparatus
and its “properties” prevailed, displacing the negative-to-print
handiwork at the center of art-photographic practice. For Strand
and others, the camera was an instrument of conscious seeing that
allowed for a politicized “cut” into, say, urban microcosms, peasant
counterexamples, and the structures of nature. Photography was,
for them, mediation toward, not away from, social meaning. For
others, of course, photographic modernism meant a new abstract
formalism or, through the rapid growth of product photography,
a corporate symbolism of commodities.
Thus, photographic modernism accepted science and
rationality but also allowed for an updated symbolism of the
object in a commodified world, a transformation that advertising
made into its credo. Whereas photographic pictorialism had
suggested a predictable alliance of aestheticism and elitism as a
noble bulwark against the monetary measure of the marketplace
and sold proletarian labor, formalist modernism united the high
arts with the mass culture of modern entertainment forms and
commodity culture. Modernism, in Kantian fashion, favored the
material artwork while remaining vague (or ambivalent) about
the meaning it was supposed to produce. Formalist ideologies
were furthered by such Bauhaus figures as László Moholy-
Nagy, who propagated a scientific vocabulary of research and
development, therapeutic pedagogy, and experimentation. In
art and architecture, formalist modernism promised a healthier,
more efficient and adaptive–and liberatory–way of life, for all
classes. The possibly revolutionary intent, to pave the way for
democratic participation, could quickly turn into accommodation
to new, technocratic elites.
It has been observed that postwar American modernism,
despite its strict separation of the arts from each other as well
as from the social world, and with its fetishization of materials,
nevertheless institutionalized the avant-garde. To discover what
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Martha Rosler
this represents for our concerns, we must look at the aims of the
classic twentieth-century European avant-garde movements, dada
and surrealism, which appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, when
modern technological society was already firmly established. The
use of, or transgression against, the media of communication and
reproduction was on their agenda, for the avant-garde saw art
institutions as integrated into oppressive society but as ideally
positioned nonetheless to effect revolutionary social change; this
was a reworking of the symbolist effort to disorder the senses,
perhaps, but with new political intentions. The aim of dada and
surrealism was to destroy art as an institution by merging it
with everyday life, transforming it and rupturing the now well-
established technological rationalism of mass society and its
capacity for manufacturing consent to wage enslavement and
rationalized mass killing. Peter Bürger has described the activity
of the avant-garde as the self-criticism of art as an institution,
turning against both “the distribution apparatus on which the
work of art depends, and the status of art in bourgeois society
as defined by the concept of autonomy.”9 Thus, Duchamp’s
readymades, which, through their validation of despised objects
by the agency of the artist’s signature, exposed the real operations
of the art-distribution apparatus. Bürger writes: “the intention of
the avant-gardists may be defined as the attempt to direct toward
the practical the aesthetic experience (which rebels against the
praxis of life) that Aestheticism developed. What most strongly
conflicts with the means-end rationality of bourgeois society is to
become life’s organizing principle.”10
The disruptive efforts of expressionism, dada, and surrealism
were intended to transgress not just against the art world but
also against conventional social reality and thereby to become
an instrument of liberation. As Bürger suggests, the avant-garde
intended on the one hand to replace individualized production
with a more collectivized and anonymous practice and on the
other to get away from the individualized address and restricted
reception of art. But, as Bürger concludes, the avant-garde
movements failed. Instead of destroying the art world, they were
taken into an art world that swelled to encompass them, and
92
their techniques of shock and transgression were absorbed as the

production of refreshing new effects. “Non-art” became “ART-
Art,” to use the terms set in opposition by Allan Kaprow in the
early 1970s. Kaprow–himself a representative postwar U.S. avant-
gardist, student of John Cage–had helped devise a temporarily
unassimilable form, the “happening,” a decade or so earlier.
Kaprow wrote, in “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I,”
At this stage of consciousness, the sociology of culture emerges

as an in-group “dumb show.” Its sole audience is a roster of
the creative and performing professions, watching itself, as if
in a mirror, enact a struggle between self-appointed priests
and a cadre of equally self-appointed commandos, jokers,
gutter-snipers, and triple agents who seem to be attempting
to destroy the priests’ church. But everyone knows how it all
ends: in church, of course.11
As Kaprow plainly realized, the projected destruction of

art as a separate sphere was accomplished, if anywhere, in the
marketplace, which meant a thwarting of avant-gardist desires.
But nothing succeeds like failure, and in this case failure meant
that the avant-garde became the academy of the postwar world.
The postwar American scene presented a picture of ebullient
hegemony over the Western art world. Stability and order
seemed to have been successfully erected on an art of alienation
and isolation. High culture appeared to have conquered the
negative influences of both politics and mass culture by rigorously
excluding–or digesting and transforming–both through a now
thoroughly familiar radical aestheticism. Art discourse continued
to draw upon the dialectic of scientific experimentation on
technique and magical transformation through aestheticism and
primitivism, veering toward an avant-garde of technical expertise.
This hegemonic condition lasted about as long as “the
American century” it seemed to accompany–that is, until the
new decade of the 1960s. The rapid growth of television and the
cybernetic technologies, which had gotten a big boost from the
war and American militarization, precipitated a crisis. Television
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Martha Rosler
had no difficulty building on the structure and format of radio,

with pictures added. Radio had established itself in a manner like
that of the mass press and photography in the previous century
and had played a vital role in disseminating the new ideologies
of consumerism, Americanism, and statism. Like photography,
radio depended on action at a distance, but with the added fact
of temporal simultaneity. It appeared to be a gift, free as air. The
only direct sale came through hardware–which took on the fanciful
forms of furniture, sky-scraping architecture, cathedrals, and the
hearth, the mantelpiece, and the piano, all in one, with echoes of
the steamship. Bought time appeared as free time, and absence
appeared as presence. Radio had the legitimacy of science (and
nature) and the fascination of magic.
Television was able to incorporate into this array all the
accommodations of photography and film, though in degraded
form with respect to image quality. As with advertising, the all-
important text was held together with images of the object world,
plus the spectacle of the State and the chaos of the street, as well
as voyeuristic intrusions into the private lives of the high and
the low, the celebrity and the anonymous. Television was like
an animated mass magazine and more. As commentators from
Dwight Macdonald, Gunther Anders, and Marshall McLuhan to
Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard have observed, the totalizing,
ever-whirling and spinning microcosm of television supplanted
the more ambiguous experience of the world.
Alvin Gouldner comments on the war between the “cultural
apparatus” (using C. Wright Mills’s term) and the “consciousness
industry” (Enzensberger’s term). Gouldner quotes Herbert
Gans’s essay of 1972, “The Politics of Culture in America,” to
the effect that “the most interesting phenomenon in America ...
is the political struggle between taste cultures over whose culture
is to predominate in the mass media, and over whose culture will
provide society with its symbols, values and world view.”12
This struggle, the reader will immediately recognize, is the
continuation of that of the previous century, which appeared
at that juncture as a conflict between the culture based on
aristocratic values and that based on new, middle-class-centered,
94
scientistic values. Abstract expressionism had followed the path

of an impoverished bohemian avant-garde with strong aestheticist
elements, but it was neither as dismissive of proletarian sympathies
as the Stieglitz set nor as comfortably situated. (It also developed
in a warweary world.) With relative speed, abstract expressionism
found itselfblessed with success–or cursed. Suddenly its artists,
used to a marginal and secessionist existence, were producing
extremely expensive commodities and bearing highly fetishized
biographies. Jackson Pollock appeared on the cover of Life and
was shown in poses bearing some similarity to those identified
with James Dean, another rebel figure and beloved prodigal son.
Artists’ enshrinement as mass-media celebrities inverted their
meaning. The dominance of the distribution system over the
artists who stocked it was proved again to those who cared to
see. Others have also demonstrated the way in which this elite
art, an art that suggested doubt and abstraction, freedom and
impoverishment, an art that dismayed populists of the Right and
the Left, became the ambassador of the American empire.13
Pop art followed a logical next step, a public and ritualized

acceptance of mass culture through an emphasis on ironized
passivity and a renunciation of patriarchy, high-culture aura,
and autonomy. It was mass culture and the State, after all, that
had made abstract expressionism a “success,” made it a product
bearing the stamp “Made in the USA” much like any other product.
Warhol’s pop was a multifaceted and intricate “confession” of
powerlessness, accomplished through productions, entourages,
modes of production, and poses, that mimicked, degraded,
fetishized, and “misconstrued,” in slave like fashion, the slick,
seamless productions of corporate mass culture, especially those
of the technologies of reproduction. The slave’s ironic take on the
relation between art and technology was to retain the older, craft-
oriented media of oil paint and silkscreen, but to use them to
copy or reorder the reified icons of the photographic mass media.
The apotheosis of the avant-garde was its transmutation into the
servant of mass culture. Aura had passed to the copy.
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Martha Rosler
As Kaprow wrote about the social context and “art consciousness,”

as he termed it, of the period:
it is hard not to assert as matters of fact:

that the LM [Lunar Module] mooncraft is patently superior
to all contemporary sculptural efforts;
that the broadcast verbal exchange between Houston’s
Manned Spacecraft Center and Apollo 11 astronauts was
better than contemporary poetry;
that, with its sound distortions, beeps, static, and
communication breaks, such exchanges also surpassed the
electronic music of the concert halls;
that certain remote control video tapes of the lives of ghetto
families recorded (with their permission) by anthropologists,
are more fascinating than the celebrated slice-of-life
underground films;
that not a few of those brightly lit, plastic and stainless-steel
gas stations of, say, Las Vegas, are the most extraordinary
architecture to date;
that the random, trancelike movements of shoppers in a
supermarket are richer than anything done in the modern
dance;
that the lint under beds and the debris of industrial dumps
are more engaging than the recent rash of exhibitions of
scattered waste matter;
that the vapor trails left by rocket tests–motionless, rainbow
colored, sky-filling scribbles–are unequaled by artists
exploring gaseous mediums;
that the Southeast Asian theater of war in Viet Nam, or the
trial of the “Chicago Eight;’ while indefensible, is better than
any play, that ... etc., etc., ... non-art is more art than ART-art.14
Apprehending the collapses of public and private spaces,

Kaprow, too, representing the aesthetic consciousness, could
only bow before the power of science, technology, the State,
and the ephemera of modern urbansuburbanism, especially as
orchestrated through television. The “antihegemonic” 1960s
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also brought a different relation to issues of power and freedom,

more populist than avant-gardist, more political than aestheticist.
Students rebelled against the construction of what emigre
philosopher Herbert Marcuse termed one-dimensional culture
and its mass subject, while the politically excluded struggled against
the conditions and groups enforcing their powerlessness. The
iron grip of science and technology became a focus of agitation,
particularly in relation to militarism and the threat of total war.
The twin critique of technological and political domination
helped beget a communitarian, utopic, populist, irrationalist, anti-
urban, anti-industrial, anti-elitist, anti-intellectual, antirnilitarist,
communitarian counterculture, centered on youth. Hedonic,
progressive, rationalist, antisexist, antiracist, anti-imperialist, and
ecological strains also appeared. The severe stress on the reigning
ideologies also put models of high culture in doubt, not least
among its own younger practitioners.
Artists looked to science, social science, and cultural
theory–anywhere but to dealers, critics, or aesthetic theories–
for leads. New forms attacked head-on the commodity status of
art. “Objecthood” was an issue not only because art objects were
commodities but because they seemed insignificant and inert next
to the electronic and mass-produced offerings of the mass media.
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Martha Rosler
NOTES
1
Alvin W Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar, and
Future of Ideology (New York: Seabury Press, 1976; New York: Oxford University Press,
1982), p. 7.
2
William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us” (1806), published in Complete
Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (London: Macmillan, 1888). Wordsworth’s sonnet
traces a failure of poetic imagination to the aggressive materialism of modernity.
3
Richard Rudisill, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971).
4
John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Uiliies in America,
1776-1900 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
5
John Fekete, The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-American Literary
Theory from Eliot to McLuhan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 15- 16.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
In Camera Work, cited by Sally Stein in “Experiments with the Mechanical Palette:
Common and Cultivated Responses to an Early Form of Color Photography” (unpublished
paper, 1985), Stieglitz wrote: “on the Kaiser Wilhelm II, I experienced the marvelous
sensation within the space of an hour of Marconi-graphing from mid- ocean; of listening to
the Welte-Mignon piano which reproduces automatically and perfectly the playing of any
pianist ...; and of looking at those unbelievable color photographs! How easily we learn to
live our former visions!” Cited by permission.
9
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 22.
10
Ibid., p. 34.
11
Allan Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I:” ArtNews (February 1971), p. 20.
12
Herbert J. Gans, “The Politics of Culture in America:’ in Denis McQuail, ed., Sociology
of Mass Communications (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 378, cited in Gouldner, The Dialectic
of Ideology and Technology, p. 173.
13
See Max Kozloff, “American Painting during the Cold War:” Artforum (May 1973),
on abstract expressionism as the emblematic U.S. artistic product, and Eva Cockcroft’s
subsequent rereading of the situation, “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold
War:” Artforum (June 1974). See also Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of
Modem Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983).
14
Kaprow, “Education of the Un-Artist:’ p. 18.
98
The Artistic Mode of Revolution:
From Gentrification to Occupation
Martha Rosler
from Journal #33, New York City: e-flux, 2012.
100
A discussion of the struggles, exoduses, and reappropriations
of cognitive labor, especially in the field of visual art, and
especially when taken as the leading edge of the “creative class,”
while critically important, is trumped by the widespread, even
worldwide, public demonstrations and occupations of the past
year, this year, and maybe the next. I would like to revisit the
creative-class thesis I have explored here in a recent series of
essays in order to frame my remarks in light of these occupations,
and to make a few observations about the relationship between
artists, the positioning of the creative class, and the Occupy
movement.1
Even before “the multitude” became a common touchstone
for dreams of revolution, there was, famously, Seattle 1999, when
anticorporate protests brought environmentalists and community
activists together with organized labor to block a meeting of
the World Trade Organization, a scenario repeated at multiple
locations in several countries in the years since.2 It is not news
that the processes that go under the name of globalization, which
center on the flows of capital, goods, and labor, create a unity that
does not always serve the interests of capital or the capitalists.
Nouriel Roubini, channeling Marx, wrote in “The Instability
of lnequality”that “unregulated capitalism can lead to regular
bouts of over-capacity, under-consumption, and the recurrence
of destructive financial crises, fueled by credit bubbles and asset-
price booms and busts.”3
Roubini is saying that capitalism tends toward catastrophic
collapses–no news here. But the point is that neoliberalism and
its rampant financialization have created a capitalism that eats
its young. Roubini goes on to remind his readers that even before
the Great Depression, the enlightened bourgeoisie realized that
worker protections and a redistributive system providing “public
goods–education, health care, and a social safety net” were
necessary to prevent revolution.4
Roubini remarks further that the modern welfare state grew
out of a post-Depression need for macroeconomic stabilization,
which required “the maintenance of a large middle class,
widening the provision of public goods through progressive
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Martha Rosler
1 The share of US total income held by the top 1 percent is the highest since
the Gilded Age. From Facundo Alvaredo, et al., “The World Top Incomes
Database:” Paris School of Economics.
102
The Artistic Mode of Revolution: From Gentrification to Occupation
taxation, and fostering economic opportunity for all”; but all this
went under during the massive Reagan-Thatcher deregulation,
which Roubinino–no Marxist after all–traces in part to “the flaws
in Europe’s social-welfare model [...] reflected in yawning fiscal
deficits, regulatory overkill, and a lack of economic dynamism.”5
Roubini, unlike most, goes on to proclaim the failure of
this “Anglo-American economic model” of embracing economic
policies that increase inequality and create a gap between
incomes and aspirations, accompanied by the liberalization
of consumer credit and thus rising consumer debt, as well as
public debt because of decreased tax revenues, all of which is
then followed by counterproductive austerity measures. This is
precisely the financial model that seized the imagination and
drove the policies of former Eastern bloc governing elites, many
of whom, in implementing the prescribed austerity measures, are
destroying their present and future middle classes (see Latvia),6
as is neo-Thatcherite Great Britain.7
In the United States, Citibank, which required two US
government rescues after the financial crisis of 2008, posted
record quarterly profits of $3.8 billion dollars in the fall of 2011,
a 74 percent increase over the previous quarter, while its CEO,
Vikram Pandit, expressed his sympathy with the Occupy Wall
Street protesters and offered to meet with them.8
The ongoing round-the-world occupations, which have
drawn inspiration from the uprisings across the Arab world in
2011, are driven by the frustration of the young educated middle
classes – the Arab case fairly new ones–confronting societies
controlled by hugely rich ruling elites but having little hope of a
secure future for themselves despite their university educations.
These are societies that had made no effort to create modern
welfare or even neoliberal states, nor to control corruption,
bureaucratic indifference, and flagrant nepotism, nor to institute
more than the appearance of democratic governance. Protesters
in the developed world are aware of sharing conditions that are
functionally quite similar.9
Such protests–as in France in 2006, which saw widespread
mobilization against “precarization” (alternatively, precaritization),
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Martha Rosler
as well as the subsequent uprisings in the Paris banlieues or in

England in August 2011–also reflect the anger of working-class
youths, especially their rage against racist police violence. In the
English case, these young people were out there smashing and
looting together with young members of the middle class. Some of
the latter group had mobilized months earlier–as young Chileans
are doing still–thanks in no small part to crushing increases
in school fees driven by the Tory/Liberal Democrat governing
coalition. The protests of these groups, these classes, have been
fired by the recognition that there are likely no secure jobs for
them, or perhaps any employment at all.
But precarization is not a necessary consequence of any
particular form of labor. Precarization now joins mechanization
(the replacement of workers with machines), delocalization
(capital’s worldwide search for the weakest labor and
environmental regulations), and financialization (the maintenance
of excess value in the stock market as opposed to surplus value
extracted from manufacturing) as one of the great strategies
used to restore profitability since the late 1960s. These strategies
supplement the more widely noted assaults on the welfare state
and workers’ rights.10 Many of the protesting students and young
postgraduates, for their part, were preparing for jobs in what we
have come to call the knowledge industries, or, more recently, the
creative industries, a branch of the former.
1. University as Engine, Lifeways into Lifestyle

Let me step back a bit, to the consolidation of this sector in
the newly dawning information age of the early 1960s. Clark Kerr,
labor economist, first chancellor of the University of California’s
elite Berkeley campus, and then president of the entire UC
system, saw the university as a site for the production of knowledge
workers. In 1960 he oversaw the creation of an expansive master
plan for growth into the twenty-first century that harmonized the
state’s higher education institutions and organized them into three
tiers: research universities, state colleges, and two-year “junior
colleges” (renamed “community colleges”). This “benchmark”
plan acknowledged a need to unify the training and administration
104
of the entire knowledge sector, from the elites to the working

classes, in a politically divided world. Kerr called the university
a “prime instrument of national purpose,” and he envisioned the
“knowledge industry” (his term) as eventually supplanting the
industries surrounding new modes of transportation–railroads
in the nineteenth century and automobiles in the twentieth–in
unifying the nation, acting as its economic masthead, and serving
as the motor of US world dominance.11
The foundational student protest movement of the 1960s,
Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, was triggered in part by Kerr’s
educational and managerial policies and goals. It was a movement
of a leading sector of the middle class who were destined to
become the elite workers of the new knowledge industries, if not
their leaders. Ironically, today the UC system is almost broke,
confirming the exemplary use of college campuses by Apple’s
dictionary, in defining “bellwether,” that “college campuses are
often the bellwether of change.”12
In contrast, the 1970s British punk subculture was arguably
a working-class response to a diminished future, despite its
partial traceability to art school, which in any case was a newly
experimental repository for working-class misfits. As Dick
Hebdige described it:
Despite the confident assurances of both labor and

conservative politicians [...] that “we never had it so good,”
class refused to disappear. The ways in which class was lived,
however, the forms in which the experience of class found
expression in culture, did change dramatically. The advent
of the mass media, changes in the constitution of the family,
in the organization of school and work, shifts in the relative
status of work and leisure, all served to fragment and polarize
the working-class community, producing a series of marginal
discourses within the broad confines of class experience.13
Punk was anti commodity and anticorporate, and followed a

tactic of uglification and self-mutilation, a fuck you! response to
bourgeois culture; the fact that it was quickly com modified and
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Martha Rosler
2 Symbolic book tents at the steps of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley after the
student encampment there was cleared. Photo by Alfredo de la Rosa, 2011.
106
heavily promoted in the music industry is beside the point ... until,
at least, it became the point. For the post- 1970s generations,
lifestyle politics became almost indistinguishable from either
politics or daily life, and that frame of reference has now spread
around the world.
Indeed, lifestyle has been intensively developed as a major
marketing point for consumer goods. In a prime nugget of lifestyle
marketing analysis offered in 1984 (when the thinking was new),
Theodore Levitt, Harvard professor of business administration
and marketing; commented on the failure of the Hoover
corporation to sell washing machines in Europe: “It asked people
what features they wanted in a washing machine rather than what
they wanted out of life.”14 Levitt, editor of the Harvard Business
Review, is credited with popularizing the term “globalization.” In
The Marketing Imagination, his bestseller of 1983, Levitt pointed
out that as a result of media expansion worldwide, the United
States was in a unique position to market its goods everywhere,
making its so-called hightouch goods–jeans and Coca-Cola–right
up there alongside high-tech ones (and integrally, along with
them, Americanism and the English language) into the world’s
most desirable possessions.
A powerful force drives the world toward a converging

commonality, and that force is technology. [...] Almost
everyone everywhere wants all the things they have heard
about, seen, or experienced via the new technologies.15
In short, without naming it but simply placing it under the

rule of the “imagination,” Levitt defines the new key to marketing
dominance as a wholesale subordination of rational product
claims to universalized Bernaysian psychological modeling, which
is the basis of lifestyle marketing. Levitt refers to homogenization
as both the means and the result of globalization.16 He
differentiates multinationals from the more forward-thinking
global corporations, which, he says,
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Martha Rosler
sell standardized products in the same way everywhere–autos,

steel, chemicals, petroleum, cement, agricultural commodities
and equipment, industrial and commercial construction,
banking and insurance services, computers, semiconductors,
transport, electronic instruments, pharmaceuticals, and
telecommunications, to mention some of the obvious.17
Thirty years on, we have placed many of these categories in

Levitt’s rather jumbled array under the rubric of the knowledge
industries, including the management of Fordist industrial
production (of “autos, steel, chemicals, petroleum, cement,
agricultural commodities and equipment [...] computers,
semiconductors [...] electronic instruments, pharmaceuticals”).
Thirty years on, lifestyle politics, as both a unifier and a
differentiator, help determine how we live or are supposed to live.
People form alliances based on taste, above all via the tribalism
of appearance-as-identity. Commodified lifestyle clusters include
not merely possessions but persons, achievements, and children,
and they tend to be costly to acquire and maintain. Punk is now
another lifestyle choice, albeit an urban-romantic one. Along
with goth and other ways of life associated with New York’s East
Village, punk also provides the preferred uniform of suburban
and small-town mall-dwelling malcontents, while the “Bronxish”
hip-hop style, which is popular worldwide, does the same for
workingclass people of color. In this taxonomy, hipsterism is the
lifestyle of arty types–the triumph of surface over substance–and
is a direct consequence of the easy availability of cultural goods
through technological means.
But there are times when the professionalization of art
training in colleges and universities, combined with the capture
and branding of artist-led, artist-run initiatives–the ones that used
to reside outside the purview of art institutions–can broaden the
social network and the vocabulary of action. It is a commonplace
that in a postindustrial economy virtually all work falls in some
sense under the reign of language and symbolic behavior.
Certainly, all cultural products are flattened into “information,”
mashing together writing, research, entertainment, and, of
108
course, art. The popular reception of art and its greatly expanded
audience have allowed, in the present moment, a mutual visibility
between artists and other underemployed groups, both educated
and undereducated. Or perhaps more directly, looking for a series
of master. texts the newly professionalized discourse of artistic
production settled on continental theories of aestheticized capital.
How else to explain the peculiar position of artists at or near the
vanguard of capitalist organization? Thus, even if the tendency
may be toward the professionalization and embourgeoisement of
artists, along with other members of the symbolic sector, when
the future hits a brick wall those ideas and alliances in potentia
can have revolutionary consequences. The artists and artist-run
groups, and others belonging to the creative-class demographic–
which often overlaps with the group of those who identify as
grassroots activists, whether or not they have been to art school–
have been at the center of instituting, strategizing, and energizing
the Occupy Wall Street movement at New York’s Zuccotti Park
(renamed Liberty Park).18
A way of life that relies on virtue and secular good living, as sold
to a generation raised on school and media campaigns promoting
civic responsibility and morality–such as Just Say No to Drugs,19
Smoking Kills, and Save the Earth–is no doubt more likely to be
adopted by urban art-school grads than any other demographic
group. These are young urban professionals, perhaps, but not the
“yuppies” of the past (though I am interested to see that the term
has resurfaced). The latter were high-earning lawyers, ad-agency
honchos, and magazine editors while these new young urban
professionals are low-level workers and wannabes in their field.
City life appeals to members of these industries, which themselves
are made up of networks of small shops that benefit from face-to-
face relations and the excitements of the urban environment.
2. The New Creative City

This wave of renewed preference for the city can be traced to
the postwar economic boom in Western industrial democracies–I
am looking at the United States–which led to the rising affluence
of the middle class. Immediately after the war, many city dwellers,
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Martha Rosler
3 Poster agitating against excessive student debt by Chelsea Pell Roger

Peet, and Katherine Ball for the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative.
110
having gained some measure of financial security, migrated to

small towns and freshly built suburbs, causing urban shrinkage.20
One effect of this depopulation was the evacuation of many city
business centers and the failure of many urban industries. But
the direction of migration began to be reversed as bored children
of the suburban middle class (along with corporate managers
and the newly defined yuppies) were drawn to the organized
pleasures of city life, not least the museums and theaters, as
well as the dizzying mixture of anonymity, community, diversity,
and possibility that fills the urban imaginary.21 To point out the
obvious, the stultifying, homogeneous experience of life in the
suburbs, with its identical malls and fast-food joints, doesn’t offer
the would-be creative much in the way of identity formation; and
insofar as the local exists today, it is found either in the city or in
rural small towns, not in fenced-in suburbia.
This repopulation and transformation of cities–from spaces
bereft of shops and manufacturing, starved of resources, and
inhabited by poor and working-class people or squatters living in
ill-maintained housing stock, into spaces of middleclass desire,
high-end shopping, and entertainment–took at least a generation.
It also required the concerted effort of city leaders. New York’s
SoHo and East Village had proved, by the late 1970s, that the
transformation of old warehouses and decaying tenement districts
into valuable real estate could be accomplished by allowing
artists to live and work in them–if nothing else, city government
recognized or identified with such people and understood their
needs. Those elected officials who might, in an earlier era, have
supported organized labor found that such constituencies were
fading away. Artists, in addition, were not going to organize and
make life difficult for city governments. In the following decades,
the So Ho model became paradigmatic for cities around the
world. (Another popular tactic was to attract small new industrial
shops, mostly high-tech ones.) But no matter how much the arts
(whether the performing arts or the institutionalized visual arts
in museums) have been regarded in some cities as an economic
motor, that remedy is not applicable everywhere, and not every
city has proved to be a magnet for the arts. A new urban theory
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Martha Rosler
was required.
The civic usefulness of educated but often economically
marginal young people was first popularized by a young professor
of urban planning at Carnegie-Mellon University in postindustrial
Pittsburgh. What Professor Richard Florida saw around him in
that declining city were neighborhoods made cozy and attractive
by the efforts of recent grads, who were setting up coffee shops
and other small businesses in low-rent locations. The customer-
friendly environment–friendly to middle-class customers–
emphasized shared tastes passed down since the mid-1960s
via schools, music, movies, and magazines, tastes that define a
particular niche among the educated, professional middle class.
Elements of what might ironically be seen as suburban virtue, from
recycling to gardening to arts and crafts (perhaps rescued from
the lore of small-town Edens by nostalgic lifestyle magazines),
were now being brought back to decaying city neighborhoods.
Professor Florida developed a new theory based on selling
these congeries of young, generally underemployed people–as
well as such subcultural categories as gays, who also tended to
congregate in what used to be called bohemian neighborhoods–
to urban planners as a surefire remedy for urban desuetude. (Or
apparently selling them, for there is a bait-and-switch tactic at
work here.) His book The Rise of the Creative Class: And How
It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life
offered a crafty new turn in business evangelism, creating a catchy
new way of thinking about city marketing as lifestyle marketing–
much as Theodore Levitt had done for brand marketing–and
throwing a lifeline to often desperate city managers.22 With his
apparently systematic analyses, Florida parlayed his popular book
into a new job and a consulting career. He is now the head of the
Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, and he
is a consultant to cities, corporations, museums, and nonprofits
around the world. Prosperity, like the lovely name Florida, is a
keyword. His website says:
The Creative Class Group is a boutique advisory services firm

comprised of leading researchers, communication specialists,
112
and business advisors. CCG combines a pioneering approach

of global thought leadership and proven strategies offering
clients worldwide the market intelligence critical for
competitiveness and greater economic prosperity.23
I have addressed Florida’s “creative class”thesis in earlier

articles; here I offer an abbreviated digest, to flesh out the
argument.24 There is a certain irony to revisiting this matter now,
as the long-term financial downturn has cast some doubt on
the appeal of creative-class theorizing, but the thesis has had a
decade to catch hold, and catch hold it has.25 Florida’s analyses
have struck a chord with city managers by appearing to promote
diversity in ways that often replicate what is already in place. Many
who have scrutinized his data have demonstrated the insufficiency
of his analyses and thus his conclusions. 26 Critics point out that in
relying on standard census categories, he sweeps into the creative
class all knowledge-industry workers, from those in call centers to
professional data analysts, scientists, and mathematicians–hardly
artists.27 A consensus on his conclusions is that they amount to
the well-established “human capital” thesis of urban development
placed within new linguistic frames, and most importantly with
the “creative” moniker generously washing over everyone in the
knowledge industries. A small, relatively poor group of urban
dwellers, the ones offering consumer friendliness and local color,
becomes the face of the other, larger, richer but basically invisible
members of Florida’s “supercreative core” grouping.28 In his shell
game, creatives are defined under one shell as people whose mental
engagement is at the heart of their work and under another as
people who know how to live nicely, decoratively, and cheaply, and
under yet another as primarily a high-earning, tax-paying economic
grouping. As policy follows prescriptions, inconvenient, poorly
accoutered working-class people are marginalized, pushed further
out to the edges of the city or to the suburbs, while in the newly
reclaimed city precincts, bourgeois predilections–of ego-centered,
commodified, and mediated rituals–enfold every milestone in
life, from birth to premarital stag and hen parties, weddings baby
showers, births, communions, and maybe even deaths.
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Martha Rosler
4 Members of the Arts & Labor affinity group carrying their Art Strike banner
at the combined labor, immigrant, and Occupy Wall Street May Day march,
New York City. Photo by Martha Rosier, 2012.
114
3. The Limits of Creativity, and of Liberalism

Many critics naively fail to realize that Florida like Clark
Kerr, is a social liberal. Like most neo-liberals, he is out there
on the rhetorical barricades arguing for tolerance, subsidies, and
the right of the creative class to perform the work of the patrician
class for little or no compensation. In a strange way, then, he
can be taken as the collective projection of a certain branch of
the liberal elite. Liberals are happy to celebrate artists, or even
better, creatives–that amorphous group of brewers, bakers, urban
farmers, and baristas–as long as their festivals and celebrations
can be sponsored by banks, corporations, and foundations, and
their efforts civically branded. Architectural institutes hold
meetings and publish newsletters touting “livable” cities. Arts
institutions benefit from the attention of governmental agencies
and foundations, but the costs are also worth considering.
Artists, already complicit (wittingly or unwittingly) In the
renegotiation of urban meaning for elites have long been called
upon to enter into social management. Real-estate concessions
have long been extended to artists and small nonprofits in the
hopes of improving the attractiveness of “up and coming”
neighborhoods and bringing them back onto the high-end rent
rolls. The prominence of art and “artiness” allows museums and
architecture groups, as well as artists’ groups, artists, and arts
administrators of small nonprofits, to insert themselves into the
conversation on civic trendiness.
Artists are hardly unaware of their positioning by urban
elites, from the municipal and real-estate interests to the high-
end collectors and museum trustees. Ironically, perhaps, this is
also the moment in which social engagement on the part of artists
is an increasingly viable modality within the art world, and young
curators specialize in social practice projects. Many artists have
gone to school in the hopes of gaining marketability and often
thereby incurring a heavy debt burden. Schools have gradually
become the managers and shapers of artistic development; on the
one hand, they prepare artists to enter the art market and, on the
other, through departments of public practice and social practice,
they mold the disciplinary restrictions of an art that might be
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Martha Rosler
regarded as a minor government apparatus. These programs are

secular seminaries of “new forms of activism, community-based
practice, alternative organization, and participatory leadership in
the arts” that explore “the myriad links between art and society
to examine the ways in which artists [...] engage with civic issues,
articulate their voice in the public realm.”29
To look again at the United States–but not only there–
arts and architecture institutions are quite pleased to be swept
along by the creative-class urban-planning tide. The distinctly
old-economy, luxury-vehicle maker BMW has joined with the
Guggenheim Museum to create “a mobile laboratory traveling
around the world to inspire innovative ideas for urban life,” with
the names of some high-profile artists and architects attached.30
The “Lab” firmly ties the corporation, the museum, architecture,
art, and entertainment to the embourgeoisement of cities. Urban
citizenship has replaced other forms of halo polishing for so-
called corporate citizens. By the way, they all like bikes. As does
Urban Omnibus–which also likes “Art as urban activator.”
The Urban Omnibus is an on line project of New York’s
venerable Architectural League and is funded by foundations, New
York City, and the federal government.31 Its recent feature, “Civic
Action: A Vision for Long Island City,” describes a new venture,
developed by two local contemporary art museums, that “invites
artist-led teams to propose visions for the future of Long Island
City,” a neighborhood in the borough of Queens, New York, that
is a postindustrial ruin with new high-end waterfront residential
development. Another feature, “Making Room,” is “a research,
design, and advocacy project to shape New York’s housing stock
to address the changing needs of how we live now.”32 As I write,
in March 2012, there is a feature on the site in which a freelance
writer describes an open house at the newly renovated jail, the
Brooklyn House of Detention, an event designed to placate the
neighborhood gentrifiers.33 I am here using the Lab and Urban
Omnibus to represent the myriad efforts of city agencies and
elite institutions–and some freestanding ones or those attached
to public universities that still follow a noncorporatized path, to
adopt the now virtually naturalized creativity and hipster-friendly
116
memes posed in terms of imagination, design, and advocacy, just

as in some respects I am using the name Florida to represent the
creative-class thesis that his work has helped turn into dominant
urban-policy lingo.
The Florida version of the SoHo urban transformation
model, as I have argued, fails to capture the agency of the actors
in his transformational scenarios. Just as science has been seen
in the capitalist mind as a necessary stepping-stone to technology
(a business term), creativity is regarded as the necessary
ingredient of “innovation.” The creative classes as constructed
by Florida operate strictly within the worldview pictured by the
capitalist imaginary; even those who are not simply employees
in high-tech firms are seen to be instituting small businesses and
learning to deliver retro boutique services that bear echoes of
prewar American neighborhood shops and delicatessens or even
nineteenth-century “purveyors” (next up, the milk wagon and
the seltzer deliveryman!) or idealized French or Italian shops in
cities and villages. They have no agency outside the application of
their imaginative abilities to the benefit of the gentrifiers and the
well-to-do. They have no agency in respect to large-scale political
and social transformation. It is true that the Florida model is not
strictly invested in those whom the present readership recognize
as artists. But here the picture of agency is even worse in respect
to the market artists whose potential social worth is quite directly
to serve the interests of the international clientele inhabiting the
most rarefied income heights, a highly paid service role to which
several generations of artists have been trained to aspire.
But this is not the picture of ourselves that most of us artists,
curators, critics wish to recognize. Like other participants in the
movements taking place around the world, and like participants
in earlier ones, artists tend to want to lend themselves and their
energy and abilities to social betterment and utopian dreaming, but
not necessarily as participants within sanctioned institutionalized
frames. The artistic imagination continues to dream of historical
agency. In a protracted economic downturn such as we are
experiencing now, while the creative-class thesis is showing its
limits in respect to saving cities, it becomes clearer that artists
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Martha Rosler
5 Film stills from the climactic scene, written and directed by Bertolt Brecht,
in Slatan Dudow and Brecht’s feature film, Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehört
die Welt?, 1932
118
and other members of the art community belong to the pan- or

non-national class whose composition is forged across boundaries
and whose members are inclined, as the cliché demands, to think
globally and act locally.
Political movements are perpetually dogged by accusations of
1960s nostalgia and even Luddism, a result of the antimodernism of
much ‘60s counterculture. People on the Left are routinely derided
by the Right as dirty fucking hippies, and once the occupations
began, the Right was not slow to use this picture to discredit the
occupiers. But the constellations of dissent have largely changed
since the 1960s. If people are aiming to secede from modernity,
they do so with a different range of continental theorists to draw
upon, and without the three-worlds model of political contestation,
in which the land-bound peasant figured strongly as an ideal, or
the tribal nomad for those not inclined, to socialist revolution.
Revolution now looks more anarcho-syndicalist, or perhaps
council communist, than Marxist-Leninist. The city is not simply
the terrain to be evacuated, nor is it the site of guerrilla warfare;
it is a conceptual puzzle as well as a battleground in which the
stakes are slow-motion class war, and farming is brought to the
city not by dreamers in homespun clothing but by those who
might adopt the garb of the professional landscape architect or
beekeeper. “Creatives” may bring not only a training in design and
branding, and often a knowledge of historical agitprop and street
performance, but also the ability to work with technological tools
in researching, strategizing, and implementing actions in virtual as
well as physical spaces. Actually or functionally middle class, they
are at ease with the discourses and modes of intellectual endeavor
required in higher education, or in college prep.
Craft and skill are enfolded in a framework that differs
significantly from their earlier understanding; but the hegemonic role
of the knowledge industries and the “devices” of electronic production
and communication render that framework near ubiquitous.34 The
often flexible schedules of artists and other members of the precarious
sectors of Florida’s creative/bohemian classes also permit a freedom
to come and go at encampments and meetings, an ability to shift time
and work commitments that is not available to all.
119
Martha Rosler
We can see the occupation activists as staking a claim,

creating a presence, setting up a new public sphere, demanding the
reinstatement of politics by refusing to simply present demands
to representative governments and instead enacting democracy
themselves. (Democracy has long been part of the American
particular brand, albeit usually combined with double-barreled
neoliberalism–or neoimperialism.) While welcoming the new, I
can’t resist pointing back to the old; not to the eighteenth-century
demands for self-governance led by a group of bourgeois colonial
rebels in the American colonies but to the American Civil Rights
Movement and one of its children, the Free Speechinspired,
antiwar, worldwide student movement of the 1960s, for which
democracy–direct democracy, without representation–was a
foundational idea, at least as the degree zero of the movement
in the early years.35 In this current iteration, the contributions
of celebrity artists such as Shepard Fairey (made famous by his
Obama/Hope campaign poster of 2008) have been politely greeted
but are beside the point, as it is not hard to see the occupations
themselves as grand public works of process art with a cast of
several thousand.36 The vast majority of artists–forming the core
of the underpaid, unpaid urban army whose activities Florida
acolytes wish to harness–live in a state of precarity that may lead
them to seek social solutions in new and unexpected ways. This is
where the so-called artistic mode of production comes in.
Urban sociologist Sharon Zukin, writing in 1982, identifies
this precariousness of bohemian life as one of the five major
ways in which this artistic mode of production affects the urban
environment. The others include the “manipulation of urban
forms [and] the transfer of urban space from the old world of
industry to the ‘new’ world of finance, or from the realm of
productive economic activity to that of nonproductive economic
activity”; diminishing expectations about the provision of housing
resulting from the substitution of “bohemian” living arrangements
for contemporary housing; and, finally, the ideological function:
120
While blue-collar labor recedes from the heart of the financial

city, an image is created that the city’s economy has arrived
at a post-industrial plateau. At the very least, this displaces
the issues of industrial labor relations to anotherterrain.37
If the creative-class thesis can be seen as something of a

hymn to the perceived harmony between the “creatives” and the
financiers, together with city leaders and real-estate interests,
guiding the city into the postindustrial condition, perhaps the
current grassroots occupations can be seen as the eruption of
a new set of issues related to a new set of social relations of
production. The mode of production, we remember, includes the
forces of production but also their relations, and when these two
come into conflict, a crisis is born. It is interesting, in this respect,
that the battle cry has been “Occupy” (which echoes Florida’s
similar injunction to gentrify); that is to occupy space, to occupy
the social and political imagination, in a way analogous to the
way previous movements radicalized freedom into emancipation,
republic Into democracy, and equality into justice. Florida says
gentrify, we say Occupy.
That leads us to the next step, now underway. What the
occupations have done is to make members of disparate groups–
neighborhood advocacy groups, immigrant-rights groups, and
working-class labor groups, both organized and not, visible to
each other-and in Occupy’s first phase put them into temporary
alliances. It is these alliances that form the nuclei of the occupation
of the present and future.
121
Martha Rosler
NOTES
1
See “Culture Class” Parts One- Three in this volume.
2
The movement generally pegged as antiglobalization is more properly referred to by
its members and supporters as the “alt-globalization” movement or some variant of that
term, and is anti corporate more than antiglobalization–although globalization is a term
derived from its enthusiasts; see the discussion of Theodore Levitt below.
3
See Nouriel Roubini, “The Instability of Inequality,” EconoMonitor, October 14, 2011,
http://www.economonitor.com/nouriel/2011/10/14/ from-project-syndicate-the-instability-
of-inequality/; and “Full Analysis: The Instability of Inequality,” EconoMonitor, October
17, 2011, http://www.economonitor.com/nouriel/2011/10/17 /full-analysis-the-instability-
ofinequality/. Roubini begins the blog post of October 14, 2011, by alluding to “social
and political turmoil and instability throughout the world, with masses of people in the
real and virtual streets”: “The Arab Spring; riots in London; Israel’s middle-class protests
against high housing prices and an inflationary squeeze on living standards; protesting
Chilean students; the destruction in Germany of the expensive cars of ‘fat cats’; India’s
movement against corruption; mounting unhappiness with corruption and inequality in
China; and now the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement in New York and across the United
States.”
4
I addressed this issue in an essay of 1981 (“in, around, and after thoughts: on documentary
photography,” first published in Martha Rosier: 3 Works [Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia
College of Art & Design, 1981]). I was pointing out that ideological images were employed
in the United States, during the Great Depression, to mobilize support for the very poor
under the Roosevelt administration, with the understanding that alleviating suffering
would forestall revolt.
5
Roubini, “The Instability of Equality.” I am using Roubini here as a convenient figure,
since one might quote from quite a few other economists, particularly Joseph Stiglitz,
Dean Baker, and Paul Krugman of the New York Times, or Simon Johnson, former chief
economist of the IMF, to outline the fears of the left-liberal wing of Western economists.
6
Latvia, a tiny Baltic country that (like the other two Baltic states, Estonia and Lithuania)
broke free of the collapsing Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is so far the sharpest example
of this syndrome; one might also cite Ireland and possibly Greece, Spain, and Portugal in
the coming year-all of which stand in contrast to the course of Iceland (the tiniest economy
of all of these, but, as luck would have it, not a member of the eurozone), which was prompt
to reject any terms imposed by international financial agencies, instead defaulting on its
debt and pursuing its top bankers for criminal fraud. In the early 2000s, Latvia’s center-
right government instituted aggressive neoliberal measures in large part to join the euro
and escape the dominance of Russia. After the financial crisis of 2008, Latvia experienced
the most precipitous financial decline of any nation, losing about a quarter of its GDP in
two years. its government then applied stringent fiscal austerity, including slashing pensions
and wages. The budding middle class, in a familiar story, had been induced to buy homes
on cheap credit, but this mortgage debt (owed largely to Swedish and German banks)
cannot be repaid, while property values have also plunged. The austerity measures have
failed to improve Latvia’s balance sheets but have sent the middle class, not to mention
the poor, into subsistence mode-or emigration. Tens of thousands of Latvians have left,
and unemployment stands at or above 20 percent. A reference from 2010 is http://www.
counterpunch.org/ 2010/02/15/ latvia-s-road-to-serfdom/; and from 2011, http://krugman.
blogs.nytimes.com/2011 / 07/ 18/lats-of-luck/. Yet, like Ireland, Latvia is bizarrely hailed as
a successful example of austerity budgeting. (Krugman writes: “A few more successes like
this and Latvia will be back in the Stone Age.”)
7
The European Commission in 2011 voted in “the six pack,” a group of measures that
overrides member states’ abilities to control their budgets, reinstituting the Maastricht
Treaty’s limit of 3 percent on deficits and 60 percent of GDP on debts, beyond which
large fines will be levied, among other oenalties According to economist Susan George,
the EC 1s also engineering a shift in worker protection leading to longer work weeks,
lower pay, and later retirement. See Susan George, “A Coup in the European Union?,”
122
CounterPunch, Oct. 14, 2011, http://www.counterpunch. or~/2?11/10/14/a-coup-in-the-

european-union/. The still-developing situation in regard to Greece (which will have EC
monitors in place enforcing austerity measures) shows the antilabor direction, a hallmark
of neoliberalism, of the European financial governors.
8
See http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-12/panditsays-he-d-be-happy-to-talk-
with-wall-street-protesters.html; http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2011/10/12/n_vikram_
pandit_protesters. fortune/; and for JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon, making
essentially the same point, see http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/1450365871001/dimon-
policies-made-recovery-slower-and-worse/?playlisLid=87247.
9
Although Western European protests in response to the prospectless future, such as the
indignados or encampados in Spain and the many demonstrations in Greece’s Syntagma
Square, were critical examples, and the uprising in Tunisia was ultimately at least a
partially successful one, the sheer scale and unlikely success (similarly only partial) of
the occupation in Cairo’s Tahrir Square made it the touchstone for the movement and
it remains so regardless of its as-yet unfulfilled aims. In recognition of its role, veteran
occupiers of Tahrir Square sent a message to Occupy Wall Street: “The current crisis in
America and western Europe has begun to bringth1s reality home to you as well:that as
things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public
austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare
state, capitalism and the austerity state now even attack the private realm and people’s
right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves
both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets. So we
stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with
the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them
for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of
public practice that have been com modified, privatized and locked into the hands of
faceless bureaucracy, real estate portfolios and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these
spaces, nurture them and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built
these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why
should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined?
Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of
our legitimacy.” See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/25/occupy-
movement-tahrir-square-cairo.
As we go to press in mid-2013, the Egyptian revolution is in the process of complete
collapse, heading back toward military control; revolutionary processes are inherently
unstable.
10
See Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, trans. Kristina Lebedeva
and James Francis McGimsey (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011 ).
11
For further discussion and context, see Culture Class, Part Two, pages 110-11, in the
present volume.
12
The New Oxford American Dictionary has since 2005 come installed on Apple computers
using the operating system version OS X.
13
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), 78.
14
Levitt writes, in distinguishing what he considers a multinational mind-set from a global
one, “The Hoover case illustrates how the perverse practice of the marketing concept and
the absence of any kind of marketing Imagination let multinational attitudes survive when
customers actually want the benefits of global standardization. The whole project got off
on the wrong foot. it asked people what features they wanted in a washing machine rather
than what they wanted out of life. Selling a line of products individually tailored to each
nation is thoughtless. Managers who took pride in practising the marketing concept to the
fullest did not, in fact, practice it at all. Hoover asked the wrong questions, then applied
neither thought nor imagination to the answers.” Theodore Levitt, “The Globalization of
Markets,’’ The McKinsey Quarterly (Summer 1984): 13.
15
Theodore Levitt, “The Globalization of Markets,” 2.
16
In the homogenizing world market, certain goods, such as pizza, tacos, and bagels,
become near-universal signifiers of difference.
123
Martha Rosler
17
Levitt,4.
18
The Wall Street occupation was set in motion by a number of events, which I can only
partly sketch out here. The occupation had been foreshadowed a couple of months earlier
by Bloombergville, a three-week encampment of labor leaders and grassroots activists held
at City Hall Park against draconian budget cuts and named after the mayor of New York.
(Another important precedent: the weeks-long occupation of the Wisconsin State House
in Madison, supported by unions, including police unions).An article speculating on the
possibility of emulating Tahrir Square by anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber was
published by Adbusters, a Situationist-inspired, high-gloss Canadian magazine. Adbusters
subsequently put out a general call for a Wall Street occupation to be held on September
17. Discussions about the possibility of building a movement had been held over the
summer at 16Beaver, an artist-run discursive space in the Wall Street area. An ad hoc
meeting at 16Beaver, after a “Debt/Commons” seminar heavy with activists and academics
at which Graeber discussed his work on debt (Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House,
2011 ), was the final impetus toward the occupation centering on a General Assembly. The
Bloombergville group put together the September 17 occupation, but Graeber, together
with Japanese anarchist activist Sabu Kohso and anarchist artist and activist Georgia
Sagri, whom he had encountered at the 16Beaver seminar, then organized the General
Assembly along anarchist lines.
In October 201 1, Ad busters offered some further tactical advice that was more art-world
than old-school activist, but still familiar since the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, if not
since the days of Yippie in the late 1960s or even the prewar Dada performances: “It’s
now time to amp up the edgy theatrics [...] deviant pranks, subversive performances, and
playful detournements of all kinds. Open your insurrectionary imagination. Anything,
from a bottom-up transformation of the global economy to changing the way we eat, the
way we get around, the way we live, love and communicate. [...] Be the spark that sustains
a global revolution of everyday life!” The performance-studies department of New York
University soon after began hosting a weekly series of lectures and workshops focusing on
social change through “creative tactics and strategies.”
19
Drugs, that is, not considered part of the approved Big Pharma formulary. This is
important because among other things it allowed adolescents to make distinctions between
good and bad drugs, but often based on criteria other than legality.
20
I am minimizing the all important role of capital flight and runaway shops here. Since
racism was an important motivator, the resulting urban shrinkage is often attributed in no
small part to “white flight.” Small towns often became dormitory towns for city workers.
The small town has remained the preferred location of US residents for most of its history
and was idealized during the high point of American sociology that spanned the Second
World War. Several other essays in the present volume, including Culture Class, Part One,
develop this theme in somewhat more detail.
21
Although the demonization of working-class and poor residents in areas ripe for real-
estate harvesting is a tactic of long standing, the incoming “good people” have only recently
been granted a profile of their own; previously, class privilege was taken for granted as a
deserved entitlement.
22
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Closs: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure,
Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Florida did not come
up with the idea of the creative class, but he did populate it with statistical categories.
According to his thesis, the creative class makes up about 30 percent of US workers, but as
we shall see, the groupings he uses are problematic.
23
See http://www.creativeclass.com/.
24
See “Culture Class” parts One-Three in this volume.
25
Toronto, Florida’s base, is currently afflicted by a mayor with a take-no-prisoners, right-
wing populist style, complete with racist and anti-gay pronouncements and actions. In
repudiating the previous government’s agenda, Ford has cut funding for bike lanes and
light rail. Asked about Florida’s response, Torontonians with whom I spoke said that he
has been largely quiet but had complained that the city was cutting all the things that made
Toronto “his city.”
124
26
Florida has again come under criticism for sloppy interpretation and aggregation of
polling data and econom_ic statics in his article “Why America Keeps Getting More
Conservative,” published in the venerable magazine The Atlantic (these days politically
center- right), where he is one of nineteen editors. See http://www.theatlanticclties.
com/politics/2012/02/why-america-keeps-getting-more-conservative/1162/.
Many other commentators read the data quite the opposite way and claim that the
US electorate is, on the contrary, growing increasingly liberal in its beliefs while US
politics, thanks to the radicalization of the Republican Party, have moved to the right.
See, for example, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/02/ta021612.html; and
http://www.alternet.org/election2012/154182/why_right-wingers_(and_media_hacks)_
are_totally_wrong_abouLwhaLamericans_believe_--_we>re_becoming_less,_noLmore,_
conservative_l?page=entire.
27
Florida ingeniously includes in his mix a statistically small bohemian group, which
includes gay people, but as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has reluctantly noted, his
data regressions suggest that in only two cities–in, yes, the state of Florida–does the gay
population help the economy.
28
“To harness creativity for economic ends, you need to harness creativity in all its forms.
You can’t just generate a tech economy or information economy or knowledge economy;
you have to harness the multidimensional aspects of creativity.[ ... ] There are three types
of creativity: technological creativity,[ ... ] economic creativity[ ... ] turning those things
into new businesses and new industries; and cultural and artistic creativity [...] new ways of
thinking about things, new art forms, new designs, new photos, new concepts. Those three
things have to come together to spur economic growth.
“The creative class is composed of two dimensions. There is the supercreative core [...]
scientists, engineers, tech people, artists, entertainers, musicians-so-called bohemians that
are about 12 percent of the workforce. [...] The supercreative core is really the driving force
in economic growth. In addition to the supercreative core, I include creative professionals
and managers, lawyers, financial people, healthcare people, technicians, who also use
their ideas and knowledge and creativity in their work. I don’t include people in service
or manufacturing industries who use creativity in their work.” Richard Florida, interview
by Christopher Dreher, Salon, June 7, 2002, http://www.salon.com/2002/06/06/florida_22/.
29
These quotations are from a job announcement put out by a department at a major
university that offers “a Master’s Degree in Arts Politics which treats, in an activist key,
the nexus between the politics that art makes and the politics that make art.” Despite my
skepticism, I don’t want to dismiss the potential of such training and network formation;
the problem lies in the short life span that such initiatives can have before the institution
render them zombies. See Parts Two and Three of the “Culture Class” essay in this volume
for a discussion of the culturalization argument of Fredric Jameson and its adoption by
George Yudice to argue that art that can be framed as social practice may put the artists
in the position of unwittingly serving the aims of the state and, by focusing on melioration,
of abandoning the possibility of critique. See also note 4, above.
30
See http://www.bmwguggenheimlab.org/. There was an unsuccessful effort by artists to
occupy the Lab during a day of artists’ actions.
31
See http://urbanomnibus.net/. Urban Omnibus is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s
New York City Cultural Innovation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York City Council. The
Architectural League was founded in 1881 by Cass Gilbert and has long sought to promote
the importance of the arts in relation to architecture.
32
The phrase “how we live now” evidences a predictable set of assumptions about who
constitutes the “we.”
33
See http://urbanomnibus.net/2012/02/field-trip-brooklyn-detention-complex-housewarming/.
34
The most prominent sign of technological sophistication is the frequent visual reference
to Anonymous, an amorphous group of hackers, or hacktivists (of which one small
international groupuscule, LulzSec, was arrested in February 2012), in the form of the Guy
Fawkes masks from the V for Vendetta franchise (worn by protesters and occupiers and
used on signage). Anonymous apparently has carried out denial-of-service attacks against
125
Martha Rosler
the websites of the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, and Bahrain during the attempted
revolutions there, and it has expressed or enacted support for Occupy.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6jdkpQjueo.
I do not have the space here to dissect further the possible role of this pointedly
anarchic, often playful, assemblage of hackers. But in more workaday fashion, a range
of technological ease is suggested by the facility with which the Occupy movement has
made use not only of the widely known popular media sites such as Facebook and Twitter
but also of less well-known ones, sites such as Vibe, the older \RC, the now indispensable
Livestream, or Redd it, according to PC magazine, as well as Tumblr and Google docs.
See, for example, http://mappingthemovement.tumblr.com/.
An early assessment:” ‘We set up shared Google docs so we could communicate. [...] And
we set up Google Voice numbers for everyone.’ One Tumblr page, ‘We Are The 99 Percent’
[...] reveals the plight of people, who see themselves as far outside the top 1 percent of
Americans.” http://news.discovery.com/tech/occupy-wall-street-tumblr-111006. html.
35
Here I am looking not only to the town meetings of the early days of the American
colonies but explicitly to the model of nonviolent participatory democracy propounded
by one of the groups central to the Civil Rights Movement, the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Many of the young student activists had joined
SNCC’s Freedom Rider campaign to disrupt racial segregation in the American South,
which influenced the principles outlined shortly after in the Port Huron Statement, a
foundational document of the student/antiwar movement. Naturally enough, the history,
origins, and influences of these movements are more complex than I can sketch out here.
The widely noted, galvanizing speech of Berkeley student leader Mario Savio, delivered in
the Berkeley campus quadrangle on December 2, 1964, during a standoff with university
police, includes the following in its preamble:”) ask you to consider-if this is a firm, and
if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the
manager, then I tell you something-the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw
material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be-[to] have any process
upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! […] Don’t mean to end up being
bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry, be they
organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!”
36
Artists’ groups are increasingly making this point, for good or ill; see, for example,
http://newamericanpaintings.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/the-art-of-occupation; and
http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-10-19/art/what-does-occupy-wall-street-mean-for-art.
37
Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1989).
126
The Loneliness of the Project
Boris Groys
from Going Public, New York City:
Sternberg Press, 2010, pp. 70–83.
128
The formulation of diverse projects has become a major
contemporary preoccupation. These days, regardless of what
one sets out to do in the economy, in politics, or in culture, one
has first to formulate a project for official approval or funding
from one or several public authorities. Should this project be
initially rejected, it is then modified in an attempt to improve its
chances of being accepted. If the revision is rejected a second
time, one has no choice but to propose an entirely new one in
its place. In this way, all members of our society are constantly
preoccupied with devising, discussing, and rejecting on endless
number of projects. Appraisals are written, budgets meticulously
calculated, commissions assembled, committees appointed, and
resolutions tabled. And quite a few of our contemporaries spend
their time reading nothing but proposals, appraisals, and budgets,
all for projects that will mostly remain forever unrealized. After
all, it only takes one or two reviewers to assess a project as being
difficult to finance, lacking promise, or simply undesirable, and all
the labor invested in formulating the project has been rendered a
waste of time.
Needless to say, a considerable amount of work goes into
presenting a project. And projects today are submitted with
ever-greater detail so as to suitably impress their various juries,
commissions, and public bodies. Accordingly, this mode of
project formulation is gradually advancing to become an art form
in its own right–one whose significance for our society remains
little acknowledged. For regardless of whether or not a particular
project is actually carried out, it nevertheless stands as a draft
for a particular vision of the future, and can for this reason be
fascinating and informative. Yet most of the projects generated
ceaselessly by our civilization simply vanish or are thrown away
once they are rejected, and this negligent treatment is highly
regrettable indeed, as it bars us from analyzing and understanding
the hopes and visions for the future that have been invested in
them–hopes and visions that might offer the greatest insights
into our society. And while this is not the place for a sociological
analysis of contemporary projects, the real question concerns
what hopes are linked to the project as such. Why would people
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Boris Groys
even choose to do a project at all, rather than just sail into the
future unfettered by projections?
We may answer this question with the following: above
all else, each project strives to acquire a socially sanctioned
loneliness. Indeed, to lack a plan of any kind inevitably puts us at
the mercy of the general flow of world events, of overall universal
fate compelling us to maintain constant communication with out
immediate surroundings. This is strikingly apparent in the case of
events that per definitionem occur without prior planning, such as
earthquakes, major fires or flooding. These sorts of events bring
people closer together, forcing them to communicate with one
another and act in unison. But the same also applies to any kind of
personal misfortune–whoever has just broken a leg or been struck
down by a virus immediately becomes dependent on outside help.
But in everyday life, even when it mindlessly ticks on without
purpose, people are held in a common bond by a shared rhythm
of work and recreation. In the prevailing conditions of daily life,
individuals who are not prepared to enter into communication at
any moment with their fellow men rate as difficult, antisocial and
unfriendly, and are subject to social censure.
But this situation undergoes a volte-face whenever someone
can present a socially sanctioned individual project as the
reason for his self-isolation and renunciation of any form of
communication. We all understand that when somebody has to
carry out a project, he is under immense time pressure that leaves
him no time whatsoever for anything else. It is commonly accepted
that writing a book, preparing an exhibition or striving to make
a scientific discovery are pastimes that permit the individual to
avoid social contact, to discommunicate, if not to excommunicate
himself – yet without automatically being judged to be a bad
person. But the paradox is that the longer the project is scheduled
to run, the greater the time pressure one is subjected to. Most
projects that are approved in the present framework of the artistic
world are scheduled to run for a period of up to five years at the
most. In turn, after this limited period of seclusion, the individual
is expected to present a finished product and return to the fray of
social communication–at least until submitting a proposal for yet
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another project. In addition, our society still continues to accept

projects that might preoccupy a person for the entire length of
his life, as for instance in the fields of science or art. Someone in
avid pursuit of a particular goal of knowledge or of artistic activity
is permitted to have no time for his social environment for an
unlimited duration. And yet this person is nonetheless expected
to present, by at least the final moments of his or her life, some
form of finished product–a work–that will retroactively offer
social justification for a life spent in isolation.
But there are also other kinds of projects with no set time limit,
infinite projects such as religion or the building of a better society
that irrevocably remove people from their social environment
and place them within the timeframe of the lonely project. The
execution of such projects often demands collective effort, and
their isolation thus frequently becomes a shared one. Numerous
religious communities and sects are known to withdraw from
their social environment to pursue their own project of spiritual
improvement. During the communist era, entire countries severed
their ties to the rest humanity in order to achieve their goal of
building a better society. Of course, we can now safely say that
all these projects have failed, since they have no finished product
to show, and because there were so many cases in which their
proponents eschewed their self-isolation in favor of returning to
social life. Accordingly, modernization is generally understood
as a constant expansion of communication, as a process of
progressive secularization that dispels all states of loneliness and
self-isolation. Modernization is seen as the emergence of a new
society of total inclusion that rules out all forms of exclusivity.
But the project as such is an altogether modern phenomenon–
just as the project to create an open, thoroughly secular society
of uninhibited communication ultimately remains an ongoing
one. And the reality that each project amounts to a proclamation
and establishment of seclusion and self-isolation gives modernity
an ambivalent status. While it fosters a compulsion for total
communication and total collective contemporaneity on the one
hand, on the other hand it constantly generates new projects
that foster the repeated reconquest of radical isolation. This
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Boris Groys
is how we must perceive the various projects of the historical

artistic avantgarde, which devised their own languages and their
own aesthetic agendas. While the languages of the avant-garde
might have been conceived as being universal, as the promise of
a common future for one and all, in their own time they required
the hermetic (self-)isolation of their advocates–clearly branding
them for all to see.
Why does the project result in isolation? In fact, the
question has already been answered. Each project is above all the
declaration of another, new future that is thought to come about
once the project has been executed. But in order to build such a
new future, one first has to take a leave of absence, a time in which
the project shifts its agent into a parallel state of heterogeneous
time. This other timeframe, in turn, disconnects from time as
society experiences it–it is de-synchronized. Society’s life carries
on regardless–the usual run of things remains unaffected. But
somewhere beyond this general flow of time, someone has begun
working on a project–writing a book, preparing an exhibition,
or plotting a spectacular assassination–in the hopes that the
completed project will alter the general run of things and all
mankind will be bequeathed a different future: the very future, in
fact, anticipated and aspired to in this project. In other words, every
project thrives solely on the hope of being resynchronized with the
social environment. And the project is deemed o success if this
resynchronization manages to steer the social environment in the
desired direction, while it is deemed a failure if the run of things
remains unaffected by the project’s realization. Yet the project’s
success and failure share one thing in common: both outcomes
terminate the project, and both resynchronize the project’s parallel
state of time with that of the social environment. And in both cases
this resynchronization typically prompts a feeling of malaise, even
despondency, regardless of whether the project ends in success or
failure. In both cases, what is felt to be lost is this suspension in
parallel time, a life beyond the general run of things.
If one is involved in a project–or, more precisely, is living
in a project–one is always already in the future. One is working
on something that cannot yet be shown to others, that remains
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concealed and incommunicable. The project transports one from

the present into a virtual future, causing a temporal rupture
between oneself and those who still wait for the future to happen.
The author of the project already knows the future, since the
project is nothing other than a description of it. And this is why
the approval process is so highly unpleasant to a project’s author:
at the earliest stage of its submission, the author is already asked
to give a meticulously detailed description of how this future will
be brought about and what its outcome will be. While the project
will be turned down and refused funding if the author proves
incapable of doing so, successfully delivering such a precise
description will also eliminate the very distance between an author
and the others–a distance critical to the entire development of the
project. If everyone knows from the very outset what course the
project will take and what its outcome will be, then the future will
no longer come as a surprise. And with that, the project loses its
inherent purpose, for the project’s author views the present as
something that has to be overcome, abolished, or at least altered.
This is why he or she sees no need to justify the project to the
present, but it is rather the present that should justify itself to
the future that has been proclaimed in the project. It is precisely
this precious opportunity to view the present from the future
that makes the life lived in the project so enticing to its author–
and that ultimately makes the project’s completion so upsetting.
Hence, in the eyes of any author, the most agreeable projects are
those that, from their very inception, are never intended to be
completed, since these maintain the gap between the future and
the present. These projects are never carried out, never generate
an end result, never bring about a final product. But this is by no
means to say that such unfinished, impossible to realize projects
are utterly excluded from social representation, even if they do
not resynchronize with the general run of things through some
specific result, successful or not. These projects can, after all, still
be documented.
Sartre once described the state of “being-in-the-project”
as the ontological condition of human existence. According to
Sartre, each person lives from the perspective of an individual
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Boris Groys
future that necessarily remains barred from the view of others. In

Sartre’s terms, this condition results in the radical alienation of
each individual, since everyone else can only see this individual
as the result of his or her personal circumstances, and never
as a heterogeneous projection from these circumstances.
Consequently, the heterogeneous parallel timeframe of the
project remains elusive to any form of representation in the
present. Hence for Sartre, the project is tainted by the suspicion of
escapism, the deliberate avoidance of social communication and
individual responsibility. So it is no surprise that he also describes
the subject’s ontological condition as a state of “mauvaise foi”
or insincerity. And it is for this reason that the existential hero
of Sartrean provenance is perennially tempted to close the gap
between the time of his project and that of the social environment
through a violent “action directe,” thereby synchronizing both
frames, if only for a brief moment. But while the heterogeneous
time of the project cannot be brought to a conclusion, it can, as
previously observed, be documented. One could even claim that
art is nothing other than the documentation and representation
of such project-based heterogeneous time. Whereas historically
this meant documenting divine history as a project for world
redemption, it is nowadays about individual and collective projects
for diverse futures. In any case, art documentation now grants all
unrealized or unrealizable projects a place in the present without
forcing them to be either a success or a failure. And Sartre’s own
writings could be considered documentation of this kind as well.
In the past two decades the art project–in lieu of the work
of art–has without question moved center stage in the art world’s
attention. Each art project may presuppose the formulation of
a specific aim and a strategy designed to achieve this aim, but
we are most often denied the criteria that would allow us to
ascertain whether the project’s aim has or has not been achieved,
whether excessive time was required to complete the project,
or even whether the target is intrinsically unattainable as such.
Our attention is thereby shifted away from the production of a
work (including a work of art) onto life in the art project – a life
that is not primarily a productive process, that is not tailored to
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developing a product, that is not “result-oriented.” Under these

terms, art is no longer understood as the production of works of
art but as documentation of life-in-the-project–regardless of the
outcome. This clearly has an effect on the way art is now defined, as
art no longer manifests as another, new object for contemplation
produced by the artist, but as another, heterogeneous timeframe
of the art project, which is documented as such.
A work of art is traditionally understood to be something
that wholly embodies art, lending it immediacy and palpable,
visible presence. When we go to an art exhibition we generally
assume that whatever is there on display–paintings, sculpture
drawings, photographs, videos, readymades, or installations–must
be art. The works can of course make references to things that
they are not, whether to real-world objects or to certain political
issues, but they do not allude to art itself, because they themselves
are art. However, this traditional assumption defining visits to
exhibitions and museums has proven to be progressively more
misleading. Besides works of art, in present-day art spaces we
are now increasingly confronted with the documentation of art
in various guises. Similarly, here too we see pictures, drawings,
photographs, videos, texts, and installations–in other words, the
same forms and media in which art is commonly presented. But art
cannot be presented through these media, only documented. For
art documentation is, by its very definition, not art. Precisely by
merely referring to art, art documentation makes it quite clear that
no actual art is present and visible, but is rather absent and hidden.
Art documentation thus signals the use of artistic media
within art spaces to make direct reference to life itself, to a form
of pure activity or pure praxis–indeed, to life-in-the-art-project–
yet without wishing to represent that life directly. Art is here
transformed into a way of life, whereby the work of art is turned
into non-art, to mere documentation of this way of life. To put
it in different terms, art now becomes biopolitical, because tt
has begun to produce and document life itself as pure activity
by artistic means. Not only that, but art documentation as such
could only have evolved under the conditions of our biopolitical
age, in which life itself has become the object of technical and
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Boris Groys
1 Roman Opalka, self-portraits from the series OPALKA 1965-∞. 1965-.

Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lembert Gallery, Paris.
136
artistic creativity. So we are once again faced with the question

as to the relationship between life and art–but in an utterly novel
constellation characterized by the paradox of art in the guise of
the art project, now also wanting to become life, instead of, say,
simply reproducing life or furnishing it with art objects. But the
question arises as to what extent documentation, including art
documentation, can actually represent life itself?
All documentation is generally suspected of inexorably
usurping life. For each act of documentation and archiving
presupposes a certain criteria with regard to its contents and
circumstances, to values that are always questionable, and
necessarily remain so. Furthermore, the process of documenting
something always opens up a disparity between the document
itself and the documented events, a divergence that can neither
be bridged nor erased. But even if we manage to develop a
procedure capable of reproducing life in its entirety with total
authenticity, we would again ultimately end up not with life itself,
but with life’s death mask, for it is the very uniqueness of life that
constitutes is vitality. It is for this reason that our culture today
is marked by a deep malaise with regard to documentation and
the archive–and even by vociferous protest against the archive
in the name of life. The archivists and bureaucrats in charge of
documentation are widely regarded as the enemies of true life,
favoring the compilation and administration of dead documents
over the direct experience of life. In particular, the bureaucrat
is viewed as an agent of death who wields the chilling power of
documentation to render life grey, monotonous, uneventful,
and bloodless–in a word, deathlike. Similarly, once the artist
too becomes involved in documentation, he or she runs the risk
of being associated with the bureaucrat, and is consequently
suspected of being a new agent of death.
We know, however, that the bureaucratic documentation
stored in archives does not consist solely of recorded memories,
but also includes projects and plans directed not at the past but at
the future. These archives of projects contain drafts for life that
have not yet taken place, but are perhaps meant to take place
in the future. And in our own biopolitical era this is a matter
137
not of merely making changes to the fundamental conditions
of life, but of actively engaging in the production of life itself.
While the term “biopolitics” is frequently understood to mean
the scientific and technological strategies of genetic manipulation
that, theoretically at least, aim to reshape individual living beings,
the real achievement of biopolitical technology has far more
to do with shaping longevity itself, with organizing life as an
event, as pure activity occurring in time. From procreation and
the provision of lifelong medical care to the regulation of the
balance between work and leisure and medically supervised (if
not medically induced) death, the life of each individual today
is permanently subject to artificial control and advancement.
And precisely because life is no longer perceived as a primeval,
elementary event of being, as fate or fortune, as a result of time
unraveling on its own accord, but is seen instead as time that can
be artificially produced and formed, such a life can be documented
and archived before it has even taken place.
Indeed, bureaucratic and technological documentation
serves as the primary medium of modern biopolitics. The
schedules, regulations, investigative reports, statistical surveys,
and project outlines that comprise this kind of documentation
generate new life constantly. Even the genetic archive contained
in every living being can ultimately be understood as a part of this
documentation–one that both documents the genetic structure of
previous, obsolete organisms, but also enables the same genetic
structure to be interpreted as a blueprint for creating future living
organisms. This means that given the current state of biopolitics,
the archive no longer allows us to differentiate between memory
and project, between past and future. And incidentally, this also
offers a rational basis for what the Christian tradition has termed
the resurrection–and for what in political and cultural domains
is known as a revival. For the archive of elapsed forms of life can
at any moment turn out to be a blueprint for the future. By being
stored in the archive as documentation, life can be repeatedly
relived and reproduced within historical time–should anyone
resolve to undertake such reproduction. The archive is the site
where past and future become interchangeable.
138
An Interview with Pierre Huyghe
George Baker
from October, Vol. 110, New York City:
The MIT Press, 2004, pp. 80-106.
140
George Baker: I would like to start by asking you why you are now
living in New York, and invite you to introduce the project
of your recent Dia installation, on view here in New York
before the Dia Center closed last January.
Pierre Huyghe: I came to New York for that project.
GB: But are you living in New York now?
PH: Yes, I have been here for more than a year. I originally came
to New York to begin work on my Dia project, some nine
months or so before the date of the exhibition. The exhibition
is now closed, but the project still continues.
GB: Already in the summer of 2003, I saw–or rather listened to,
since it was a recorded lecture–a piece of yours in Nicolas
Bourriaud’s Mapping show at the Palais de Tokyo. This
lecture seemed to consist in part of thoughts leading to the
Dia work Streamside Day Follies. There was also a whole
series of documentary images of the area in the Hudson
Valley with which the work is concerned.
PH: That lecture was a sort of thinking out loud about the
intentions and parameters of the project, from the theories
of Fourier to early American proto-communist communities
to the town of Celebration, Florida. It was also an attempt
to understand how the artists originally involved with the
Dia, like Robert Smithson and others, had played with the
protocols of exhibition, and how they shifted the notion of
representation.
GB: What do you mean by protocols of exhibition?
PH: There is one word which I can never translate into English
and that word is instance. Lyotard used it in the sense that
interests me in L’instruction Paienne, where he speaks about les
instances du récit. It refers to the momentum of a narrative. But
you don’t understand what the protocol of an exhibition is?
Broodthaers played with the protocol of exhibitions, the rules.
GB: The conventions? The display?
PH: Yes. Land art, Minimal art, Conceptual art–these artists were
all involved in the reformulation of protocols of exhibition
and representation.
GB: But the Dia has a very specific history of engaging with this
141
George Baker and Pierre Huyghe
generation of artists and allowing for new types of projects

and exhibitions to emerge.
PH: Absolutely. So being aware of this, I wanted to try to
incorporate the history of this practice and in a certain way
to register the manner in which there had been a shift in
terms of these issues between the “Dia generation” and my
own generation of artists. The earlier artists were mostly
concerned with space and sculptural resolution, whereas
temporal issues seem to be more important today.
GB: So you wanted to stress a shift from strategies that
reformulated exhibition protocols in terms of space to one
that would open up these protocols in terms of time?
PH: Perhaps. Think of Smithson’s Spiral jetty (1970). My interest
was not in creating an object that escapes the exhibition
frame only to merge with the landscape in its scale, but to
do this more in a temporal sense. It would no longer be
something in the middle of nowhere, no longer subject to
this fascination of the Earth artists with the empty desert.
My work would be precisely in-between the city and nature,
in-between this place of meetings, signs, and corporations,
which is the city, and nature.
GB: Your terms here though are spatial. You are saying that you
wanted to locate your work between the city and nature, and in
fact in Streamside Day follies you locate the work in suburbia.
Temporally, I guess the parallel would be a desire to locate
your work between history and nature, history and myth.
PH: You can call it suburbia, and this in-between often collapses
into what we call suburbia, but the work was not about
suburbia. I simply wanted the work to be neither in nature
nor in the city, and ultimately to base my action not on the
production of a physical form but on an event. And yet, at the
same time, this event would have a kind of permanence not
unlike Smithson’s production of a material object like the
Spiral Jetty. The event would not be a performance exactly,
because a performance arrives and it dies. Although, as in
the theater, it can sometimes be replayed. The replay really
is the most important thing. It is not the event anymore
142
1 Pierre Huyghe. Streamside Day Follies. Dia Art Foundation, New York,
2003. Photo: Pierre Huyghe. All images courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery,
Paris and New York, unless otherwise indicated.
143
that is important, it is the replay. If artists in the 1960s and

the ‘70s used to deal with this idea of event, performance,
action–Kaprow, for instance–the representation of the event
was not incorporated into the conception of the project. But
now things have changed, and ultimately representation or
images became more important than real events. We can see
this with the current war, we can witness the way the media
twists an event, the way representation is dictating the event.
Today, an event, its image, and its commentary have become
one object. There is an interchangeability in their occurrence
and an anthropophagy.
GB: Okay, that is very complicated, although you wrote about it
a little in the short piece that I translated for October 100.
We need to unpack what you have just said. Your focus here
on a replay, on repetition, on the use of representation–it
would allow us to link Streamside Day Follies to your earlier
projects, to the repetition embodied in a work like Remake
(1994-95), for example, where you remade Hitchcock’s
Rear Window scene by scene with amateur actors, or the
ambiguities occasioned by your various billboard projects,
insertions of fictional representations into the spaces of
everyday life. First, however, can you comment on the Dia
work’s title?
PH: Streamside Knolls is a new village in upstate New York on the
Hudson River. Streamside Day is the celebration of a custom
invented for this new place, and it took place a month before
the opening of the exhibition at the Dia called Streamside
Day Follies.
GB: It is the “follies” that I want to hear more about. Can you
detail very quickly the work’s various elements, as a viewer
experienced them at the Dia?
PH: The exhibition is a mise-en-scène for Streamside Day and
presents a project for a community center. The galleries
are empty. Walls situated in different rooms slowly begin to
move toward the main space. The migration ends when they
form a new territory in the center of the space. A temporary
pavilion thus appears in the exhibition space. It remains in
144
2 Streamside Day, 2003. (Production shots.) Photo: Pierre Huyghe, Aaron S.

Davidson, and Guilherme Young.
3 Streamside Day. 2003. (Video still.)
145
this form for as long as it takes to project the film that I

made about the celebration in Streamside Knolls. When the
film ends, the pavilion comes apart and the walls go back
to their original places. The pavilion prefigures what will be
the mechanics of the community center. As the white mobile
walls move away from their original position, they reveal a
green iridescent verso, evoking perhaps the Emerald City, but
also revealing a series of green drawings on the walls of the
space. The one at the entrance announces the construction
of the community center.
GB: Let’s return to your notions of an event and of representation,
and how they work in this project. Representation was the
key critical term for art practices in the 1980s. One often
spoke then about the “critique of representation.” Your
understanding of representation, however, is quite different
from the artists of that moment. As is your desire to double
events with new representations, to submit historical
representations to further repetitions, to disseminate in a
certain way an event, a representation, an image.
PH: What interested me was to investigate how a fiction, how
a story, could in fact produce a certain kind of reality. An
additif of reality. I’m not speaking about change here. In
Streamside Day Follies, I wanted to create a fiction that would
lead to a fête, a celebration, an event that could be repeated.
If we take up a musical metaphor, we can call this fiction a
“score,” and its enactment a “concert.” If we take up the
metaphor of cinema, we could call it a screenplay. And if we
take up the metaphor of theater, we can call my intervention
the creation of a script, after which comes the play–and even,
a few years later, the possibility for the reinterpretation of
this same play.
GB: So how precisely “scored” was the event in Streamside Day
Follies?
PH: The “score” was before the event; the event in that work-the
celebration-is the “play.”
GB: Well, did you write a scenario?
PH: I didn’t write anything. It was not about planning. It involved
146
the provision of a kind of structure, within which things could

happen.
GB: You were involved in the creation of a situation, almost in the
Situationist sense of the term.
PH: It is the production of a situation: that was the project of
Streamside Day Follies. Inventing the rules of a game, the
scenario for a situation that can locally affect a reality. It is a
ritournelle, a time-score.
GB: Are you interested in the Situationist precedents here? Some
relation to détournement or dérive runs through so much of
your work (like Trajet [1992], or Extended Holidays [1996],
or Les Passagers [1996]). But for this project, were you
specifically interested in the Situationist negotiation of what
Bataille called la fête?
PH: Yes, I’m interested in the idea of a celebration, in festivals
and rituals. I wouldn’t say, though, that the Situationist ideas
constitute the main horizon of the work. And yet what is
important to me in this regard is the idea of play, and of the
game, le jeu. The purpose of art is to involve both; the game
is the quintessence of art. The situation I created was about
setting up a platform, creating some characters–or elements,
if one doesn’t want to use the theatrical metaphor–for others
to use.
GB: So what were these elements in Streamside Day Follies?
PH: My score involved the idea that I would set up a time-based
event, and it would be a celebration. Hopefully, if the event
is successful, this celebration will be repeated, on the same
day every year. It will be like Halloween, or like Christmas.
What is Halloween, at its source? There is a scenario for this
event too. What are we celebrating? We are repeating the
fact that children in Ireland, at the moment of the famine,
had to go from house to house to beg for food. It is now more
complicated than that; there have been many added layers.
But Halloween is a commercial fiction.
GB: It is interesting that you pick Halloween. It has been celebrated
for a long time in the United States. But I remember when I
was living in France in the late 1990s, it seemed a new import
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at that time, with a marketing campaign to match. Halloween

is a relatively new celebration in France, right?
PH: It is like four years old there. We used to import products,
and now we import traditions, invented traditions. I wrote
a small piece on this, published in the Munich catalog on
my work.1 What is a celebration? A celebration is supposed
to be something that we have in common, that we share,
and that we celebrate because of this common basis. It is
like a monument. But unlike a monument, an event can
be renegotiated each time it is repeated, although this is
rarely the case. Mainly, planting a custom is about setting
up a stable repetition. It is a marketing strategy, and all you
need is to fill the year with traditions, to create a permanent
celebration.
For Streamside Day, I was searching for something
that the community shared–what was the minimum common
denominator between all these people? The answer I came
to was that everyone came from a completely different place,
and so the idea of migration would have to be important. Of
that, at least, I was sure. And I was sure about another thing:
with this community, they were coming to this specific place
because of nature, an attraction to something like that old,
old American idea of the wilderness. Streamside Day Follies
wasn’t really about new home developments; it wasn’t Dan
Graham’s Homes for America (1966-67). The community here
was attracted to ideas of ecology, ecotourism, environmental
issues. They were interested in going backward–it was, in
a sense, postmodern. The homes in Streamside Day Follies
were being advertised, literally, as “postmodern housing.” It
was about going back to the past, tradition, nature, animals–
ways of life from the past.
Now, I was not interested in critiquing any of this. I
happened upon this real-estate development by chance. In
my language, we would call this a “village,” something like
a small town that had just been born, like in the gold rush.
It had just been created. Given that newness, I would create
a past for this place, or I would link this place to a past,
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something like the idea of a Founding Day for the community.

The score as I envisioned it would concern itself with the two
elements of migration and environmental issues, and then it
would take the form of a celebration day, like Halloween, or
Christmas.
GB: Exactly what elements constituted your score? What was
planned out? How did you work with the community?
PH: You are assuming a lot about what I did. I just came to the
community and proposed that there should be a celebration.
They were in agreement, and wanted such a celebration. I
wound up being a kind of celebration designer.
GB: But what did you design?
PH: An event that would focus on the shared ideas of migration
and the celebration of nature. The village was decorated
with white and green and silver balloons and banners. My
first idea was to start with a long parade, beginning with all
of the city service vehicles parading into the town–a police
car, fire truck, school bus, Mr. Softee. The parade reenacts
the idea of migration. This is exactly what happens in New
York City, with all the different immigrant parades. The
fact that they walk here, it signifies the fact that they have
arrived. I wanted there to be some floats, very simple floats.
It should all have this very polystyrene smell, very artificial,
the smell of Dunkin’ Donuts. I was looking at images of many
American celebrations. Also, I was thinking back to pagan
rituals, and so decided that this parade should then progress
to what you always have since man lived in the caves: music
and food. I was interested in finding out what was pagan in
this neoliberal community.
I had the Mr. Softee music slightly altered by a musician.
We set up a stage. On the stage, ultimately the mayor of
the town gave a speech, a lecture of welcome. Then the
developers spoke. After this there was time for the people
to eat, there was a small concert, and the children of the
community played games.
GB: You contributed these ideas for the event? Or was the
community involved in planning the day?
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PH: I drew up all the aspects of the day, but then I let it go.
GB: And you filmed it.
PH: From the moment of my early work, I never script something
in a totalizing way. I provide a framework, and then I let
the framework go and things happen within the framework
that are subject to chance, to interaction. These things are
beyond my control.
GB: How would you say Streamside Day Follies connects to your
earlier work? There is the obvious connection to your
early event La Toison d’or (1993)–the costumes, the mythic
elements, the children. Literally, your “score” seemed to
borrow various elements from cinema, from representations,
to be inserted into the space of a new community–I think
of the references that your film of the event makes to Walt
Disney’s Bambi (1942), but also to the Halloween scene in
Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extraterrestrial ( 1982). There are
surely mythic references as well–with the parade and the
children one thinks inevitably of the Pied Piper. Some of your
earliest works were billboard projects, where you would hire
actors to pose at a construction site, or at a supermarket,
performing the actions of labor or of consumption that take
place in reality at those sites. You doubled the real here with a
fictional documentary image, as if one were to take something
like the staged documentary of a Jeff Wall photograph and
assert that the truly disruptive place for such a construction is
not the gallery wall but the space of the street. Streamside Day
Follies seems a logical outgrowth, however more complex, of
those early works.
PH: It is absolutely linked to the Association of Freed Time –
L’Association des temps libérés–which is otherwise one of the
bases of all my work.
GB: Can you describe this project? I think we might call the piece
in English the “Society of Freed Time.”
PH: The Association of Freed Time was my contribution to a group
exhibition, Moral Maze, organized by Philippe Parreno and
Liam Gillick at the Consortium in Dijon in 1995. I associated
all of the artists in this exhibition, giving a social reality to
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4 Huyghe. La Toison d’or. I 993. (J,’vent in thefardin de l’Arquebuse, Dijon.)

Photo: Pierre Huyghe.
5 Huyghe. Chantier Barbes-Rochechouart. I 997. (Billboard, Paris.)
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the time of a collective show. The result was to turn the

exhibition not into the end goal for various artists’ works,
a simple place for the exhibition of products, but to turn
the time of the exhibition into a departure point for other
projects, other scenarios. It was a way to extend the time
of the exhibition to other projects of indeterminate length–
The House or Home? (1995), Mobil TV (1995/1998), or
Temporary School (1996), and even later on the project
No Ghost just a Shell (1999-2002).
GB: This seems a key idea for you for a long time. To open the
space of exhibition, to make of its time a time of process.
PH: It is less a question of “process,” which is too linear, but of
a vibrating temporality. I was thinking of the exhibition as
a departure point, not a place of resolution or conclusion–
I was interested in how one can free an exhibition from
this temporal format. I mean, why should an exhibition last
five weeks? Why not six months, why not a year, why not a
lifetime? Why not one day? Why not an hour? The time of
visibility should be set in accordance with the project and it
should be open to discussion. I am always concerned with
the notion of a format, and with reformulating whatever
the given conventions might be–whether I’m considering
a magazine, a film, a television program, a celebration, an
exhibition. Daniel Buren in a sense “freed” space from its
given scenario, and from its conventional uses. I associate
myself with a linked impulse. It is a re-negotiation.
GB: Two things come together in the Association of Freed Time that
seem to run through all of your work. On the one hand, you
react to the conventions of an art exhibition by collectivizing
the work of exhibition itself. You form groups, you collaborate
with other artists. This is an old avant-garde ideal. On the
other hand, this collectivity and this collaboration work to
frustrate the notion of any sense of the completion of an
exhibition or the production of a stable art object. You often
refuse to produce an object for a specific exhibition space,
but you instead use the time of the exhibition to do other
things. The idea seems to be to open the exhibition to further
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projects, to a set of proliferating events. I think especially of

your work with and collaboration with Philippe Parreno. You
de-emphasize the idea of a singular artist producing work for
an exhibition space, and you de-emphasize the production as
well of an object for that space. It is extremely difficult as an
art critic to even react to such a practice. We have neither
a singular author nor a complete object in any one given
scenario or situation or exhibition.
PH: That is an accurate description of some of my work, but it is
not a rule. It is not the only way I work.
GB: You are fearful of this working mode becoming its own
convention then?
PH: In a certain way.
GB: But unfortunately, despite your efforts, that
conventionalization seems to have happened. Maybe this is
part of the reaction of other artists and curators to your work,
as well as a more general reaction to Nicolas Bourriaud’s
arguments in the book Relational Aesthetics. Collaboration
and the open work have been taken as an increasingly
dominant recipe for exhibitions and for art practice today.
However problematically, collectivity is asserted and the art
object disappears.
PH: We are not interested in this vaunted “disappearance” of the
art object. We are not returning to that old trap.
GB: In fact, Streamside Day Follies, while it involved a temporal
event and a community, resulted in a rather well-defined set
of objects in the space of the Dia.
PH: Actually there were no objects in the exhibition. I do believe,
however, that art objects should be seen as transitory, they
are in-between, they are not ends in themselves. They have
an outside. I shouldn’t keep returning to him, but this is
exactly what Buren showed us. Buren revealed the outside
of painting.
GB: The outside: I associate this term with the thinking of
Maurice Blanchot or Gilles Deleuze, especially his books on
cinema. What are the important “outsides” to your practice?
I should clarify what I mean: we could have a discussion of
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the importance of certain artistic histories for your current

ideas and strategies. We could talk about Buren, but we
could talk too about John Cage, it seems to me ... both you
and Parreno have made works referencing Cage, like your
Silence Score (1997), or Le carillon (1997) ...
PH: Rirkrit Tiravanija has too.
GB: ... we could talk about Situationism, or the décollagistes, or
Nouveau Réalisme more generally. That discussion of artistic
precedents is one thing, and it is a discussion we should have.
But the “outside” of your practice often seems to be related
to fields that touch upon the visual arts but are not proper
to them. I am thinking of the following fields: architecture,
design, cinema, and music. These four seem especially
symptomatic and important to your specific practice as a
visual artist.
PH: There are others.
GB: I ask this question because one of the reasons I am interested
in your work is precisely the difficulty I feel in attempting
to “place” it–within avant-garde traditions, within a history
specific to visual art. Your questioning of what you have
called “formats,” your opening up of exhibition conventions,
has led to the production of new forms and alternative
formats that are extremely puzzling at times and difficult to
place. This, it seems to me, is of course a good thing. We
are not reassured by any stable reference to the past in your
work, at least not all too often.
PH: I am interested in an object that is in fact a dynamic chain
that passes through different formats. I am interested in a
movement that goes through and between some of the fields
that you mentioned.
GB: You mean that you are trying to create a chain of connections
between these fields? Between art and architecture and
cinema ...?
PH: No, I don’t care about that at all. I am not saying that
everything is equal. I am not echoing that sentiment from
the early 1990s that you can just abandon specificity and say,
okay, now I am acting as an architect, now I am a designer, and
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6 Huyghe. Remake. (1994-95)
155
7 Huyghe. Les Incivils. 1995.

8 Huyghe. Le Château de Turing installation. Venice Biennale, 2001.
(Les Grands ensembles, 2001.)
156
so on. I believe each field is absolutely different and singular,

and what in fact is interesting about each is its difference. I
am more interested in what we can call topological systems.
GB: This term “topology” comes up a lot in discussions of your
work, or that of Parreno. It is a term Parreno uses, for
example, when he writes about your work. I know artists
here in New York, like Gareth James, who are completely
devoted in their practice to an idea of topology, but perhaps
it is understood differently. What do you mean by it?
PH: It is about how you use something. It refers to a process
of translation. However, when you translate something,
you always lose something that was in the original. In a
topological situation, by contrast, you lose nothing; it is a
deformation of the same.
GB: It sounds like you are referring to a process of exchange, as
in capitalist exchange.
PH: It refers to an equivalence.
GB: Why are you interested in this idea, in this activity? It has
become a working method–for you, for Parreno, for others
too.
PH: In a way, it is rather structuralist.
GB: Okay, but I’m not understanding why there is this attraction
to topology, to choosing a model of practice that has to do
with translating one object into another type of object, one
practice into another field of practice. Let me cite Parreno on
topology and your work. He seems to connect the topological
to specific works by you such as the billboard images, Trajet,
the movie Remake, the film Les incivils (1995), your works
dealing with pieces by Cage. Parreno writes:
Topology is concerned with the relative positions of figures, a
question of points, the set of which defines spaces .... A donut
and a cup of coffee are topologically equivalent because
they describe the same space. An object is a more or less
complex situation which can be transformed into another.
By deforming it, by pushing it to its limits, we discover its
affinities with what exists outside of it. ... To blow up an inner
tube is to transform it topologically.2
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Can you describe how topology might be said to work in some

specific works that you have completed?
PH: It is the fold of a situation. It’s a way to translate an experience
without representing it. The experience will be equivalent
and still it will be different.
GB: I am wondering why the fields into which you shift your own
practice seem so consistent–architecture, design, cinema,
music. All four fields were present in your 2001 Venice
Biennale installation, Le Château de Turing.
PH: You mean, why am I not interested in anthropology, medicine,
sociology? Why these fields?
GB:Yes.
PH: I am interested in fields which at the given point of my
own practice are actively shaping behaviors. And I am
also interested in those fields that are part of what we
call “entertainment,” basically. So I would add television
to your list of course too. I mean, think of a Frank Gehry
building. I don’t know what you call such a practice. Sure,
it’s architecture, but. ... It is also entertainment. There is a
friction and a transformation now in these fields. So when
I work with an architect, like François Roche, he is aware
of this transformation, and the work is very different. We
exchange ideas that are not primarily specific to our own
practice.
GB: What have you done with Roche?
PH: What have we actually built? Nothing. But as happens
in architecture, we have completed two proposals for
architectural competitions, and we are thinking about a
project for a community center for Streamside Knolls. My
first encounters with Roche centered on an investigation of
the practice of building housing developments in Italy, which
led to the work Chantier permanent (1993).
GB: When I think about your projects as a whole, it seems to me
that this early work–it was one of your first–can be seen as an
allegory for your own practice, for all of your work.
PH: Perhaps.
GB: How would you translate “chantier”? Shanty?
158
9 Huyghe with Francois Roche. Chantier permanent. 1993.

Photo: Pierre Huyghe.
159
PH: Construction site.

GB: Permanent construction site.
PH: Exactly. It does have the smell of Cage about it, doesn’t it?
But I didn’t set out to make a work about my own working
procedures.
GB: In retrospect, however, Chantier permanent seems to be a
model for a practice. The project deals with homes that are
built in Italy and the Mediterranean that are left unfinished
even after they are purchased, in some cases with the
intention that they should be perpetually unfinished.
PH: The project revolves around the ideas of planning and
scenario, ideas that were becoming important to artists with
whom I have been associated. Planning, for example, has
been taken up as a model by Liam Gillick and developed in a
much more theoretical way.
GB: It occurs to me: if Chantier permanent can be seen as a model
for your practice, at the same time you can’t get any further
from the ideas embodied by the content of that early piece as
you do in Streamside Day Follies. What I mean is that they are
completely opposed types of housing projects. But perhaps
they are also bookends within your own practice, and its
internal transformations from the early 1990s to today.
PH: I don’t know if I can respond to that.
GB: Then let’s discuss in more detail the earlier work.
PH: Chantier permanent focuses upon the negotiation between
the necessary and the contingent in architecture. It looked
closely at a type of vernacular architecture that was left
purposefully open to a future potential. Actually, it is about
the present. It concerns the establishment of what we can call
an “open present.” One responsive to any and all incidents
that may occur. These houses were forms that were created
as platforms, ready to be activated. It was in fact less about
planning, less about what Gillick has been interested in,
than about scenario. The instability of the situation creates
a permanent transitory state. The houses are a form of
construction done without an architect, but more than that,
they represent an open scenario, a form of potentiality, of
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possibility.
GB: And your work with this housing type consisted simply in
documenting it photographically? Writing about it with
Roche? These houses reappear in one of your earliest and
most important films, Les incivils.
PH: It was an imperfect piece. The first idea was indeed to
document and record this type of architecture. I traveled
to the Mediterranean with a professional architectural
photographer from Domus magazine. I originally hoped to
give these documents to an architecture critic in order that
this person might write about these buildings.
GB: And ultimately you gave them to Roche?
PH: Yes, in the end, it was Roche.3 The change being that he is
not a critic but a practicing architect himself. No matter. In
fact, the interest at the beginning was to have a whole series
of interpretations of one thing.
GB: So, just as the homes are available to infinite adjustment and
future additions ...
PH: … I would invite a group of people to interpret and read these
buildings, this phenomenon. The project was to produce a
document, and then distribute it to a series of commentators,
in effect. Later, in my work, I would do much the same thing
in Mobil TV or in the No Ghost Just a Shell project. And I have
also done the same thing with Streamside Day Follies. There,
I have made a film, documenting the event. I have given it,
again, to Roche for commentary; he will build a community
center. I will give it to Dave Eggers, the novelist, and to other
writers to write about it. Some people made drawings and
photographs, and a singer came to produce a song.
GB: Interesting. But what I find compelling about Chantier
permanent is that the “open houses” that you were
documenting are left open as a form of fraud. Leaving the
building unfinished is a way that property owners can escape
paying taxes.
PH: Precisely.
GB: Well, then that becomes more interesting if we can accept
that this piece is a model for your own practice, for this focus
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on the open work. Chantier permanent is a deeply fraught

type of open work. It is born from fraudulence. It’s a tax
shelter.
PH: It is about “making do,” as Michel de Certeau put it. Yes, it
is a tax issue, and this occurs all across the Mediterranean. If
you don’t finish the house, you don’t pay taxes on it.
GB: In your early work, you seemed attracted to working in Italy.
After Chantier permanent would come the film Les incivils,
which returned to the same Italian landscape and to the
content of Pasolini’s film Hawks and Sparrows (1966).
PH: This is what I was trying to point to earlier with my ideas about
the work of art. This is basically one project, starting with
Chantier permanent. Then, about six months later I realized
that Pasolini had shot his film in the same landscape as these
homes. So it is a chain, one work leads to other works. I did
a project entitled Casting (1995), having been invited to do a
gallery show in Milan.
GB: At a gallery called, interestingly, Galleria Fae-Similé.
PH: The time for the casting of the film Les incivils became the
duration of the exhibition. Amateur actors were invited to
a casting session in the gallery, and were asked to perform
a scene from Pasolini’s Hawks and Sparrows. They were in
the space, waiting around for their turn, it was impossible to
know who were the visitors to the exhibition and who were
the actors for the film. It is a moment before an image. After
that came what I guess you would have to call a journey,
where I set out to “embody” the film. Pasolini’s film, for me,
became a score. I took Hawks and Sparrows as a point of
departure. It wasn’t about seeing the film as a dead set of
shots at the end result of a process, but as an open guide for
experiences.
CB: You used Hawks and Sparrows as a score.
PH: Whereas in Streamside Day Follies, I had to invent the score. I
took Pasolini’s film, and used it like one would use a manual
for building a telephone. I took the film, looked at it in
various ways, and attempted to “embody” the film, I would
“replay” the film. It is not a citation.
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10 Huyghe. Casting. 1995. (Event,Galleria Fae-Simile, Milan.)

© Galerie Roger Pailhas, Marseille.
163
GB: Can you describe exactly what this meant in the case of Les
incivils? What did using the film as a score produce?
PH: A return as a new experience, a new encounter with a series
of situations through which Pasolini himself had passed. It
involved looking through the eyes of someone else, meeting
with Ninetta Davoli and the current inhabitants of the
Roman suburbs.
GB: What does it mean to do this to and with cinema? What does
it mean to use a cinematic work as a score for an event, an
intervention in reality? Before Les incivils, you had enlisted
amateur actors to redo Hitchcock’s Rear Window in the
film Remake, which was filmed, significantly, with residents
of a specific apartment complex that was in fact under
construction. But the Pasolini film was the first time you
would enlist the actual actors or subjects from a previous
cinematic product–in this case Ninetta Davoli, but then later
you would do something similar with Bruno Ganz in your
use of Wim Wenders’s The American Friend for your project
L’Ellipse ( 1998), or then John Wojtowicz in relation to the
movie made about his actions, Dog Day Afternoon, in your
work The Third Memory (2000). And Les incivils amounts to
the first time you used a movie as what you are now calling
a score, a representation that produces a new chain of
representations, or perhaps even a real event. What does it
mean to do this with a movie?
PH: A film is a public space, a common place. It is not a monument
but a space of discussion and action. It’s an ecology. Yes,
that Les incivils was the first is significant. Pasolini had
this famous sentence: “Cinema is the written language of
reality.” If this is true, then it becomes possible to imagine
taking up this language to effect reality. For Pasolini, it was
the “sequence shot” that was the capture of reality, but it was
then in the editing that one arrives at a “written language of
reality.” The editing is a sentence and one sequence shot is
just a word.
GB: He calls it a “subjective.” Meaning one view on the world,
one view on reality.
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PH: Exactly. And what then becomes crucial is to imagine all

the possible sequence shots on the real, the multitude of
subjective points of view.
GB: At the end of your Munich catalog, you allow a citation from
Pasolini’s essay “Observations on the Sequence Shot” to
stand alone, as a kind of enigmatic conclusion to your book.
It is the passage concerning Pasolini’s thoughts on the film
footage of the assassination of President Kennedy. You
leave it in French only–the rest of the book is in English and
German. But the passage is, more or less, this one, you place
it under the subtitle Prévision:
In the possible film on the death of Kennedy all the
other visual angles are missing .... Supposing that we had
some short films shot from all those visual angles, what
would we have? A series of sequence shots which would
reproduce the real things and actions of that hour, seen
contemporaneously from various visual angles: seen, that
is, through a series of “subjectives” ... [Now suppose that
someone was able to coordinate these shots.] After this work
of choice and coordination, the various visual angles would
be dissolved, and the existential subjectivity would give way
to objectivity, there would no longer be the pitiful pairs of
eyes-ears (or cameras-recorders) to capture and reproduce
the escaping and so scarcely cordial reality, but in their place
would be a narrator.4
Your citation differs slightly from this, in the French.
You end by calling this a “reproduction of the present.” Why
is this idea and this passage important to you?
PH: I’m actually going to Texas later today and I’m going to go see
where Kennedy was assassinated tomorrow. Really, I’m not
kidding. Imagine: you have Kennedy shot, right here. And
then surrounding this event, you have all the sequence shots,
all the subjective points of view on one event. This has always
fascinated me. What I have always wanted to do is to make
the film of all these different points of view on an event while
removing the event itself. Can you see what I mean? You
could imagine doing the same thing right now with the war
165
in Iraq. You would take into account the media coverage and
all the talk about it, but not only that, you would take into
account each person who was there and now comes back.
You would also have to take into account the views of the
people who weren’t there but saw the media version. And you
would take into account the person who didn’t see the media
but heard the person who did talking about it. What is this
infinite set of perspectives? It is the story of the narratives
of a story. It is like an organism. This is what I am interested
in. When I speak about a dynamic chain, I’m speaking about
such an organism.
GB: You have to explain that to me better.
PH: It is like a hologram image of a situation.
GB: I am intrigued by the divergence of connections and
references raised by your project. While on the one hand
we could be discussing your reflection on Cage or on Buren,
we are now finding a model for your practice in Pasolini’s
thoughts on cinema. Other filmmakers whom I have talked
to about your work see an indebtedness in your project to
Jean-Luc Godard. This is a new position, I think, in which to
be: within recent histories of contemporary art, I’m not sure
that the range of practices to which one responded have ever
been so divergent.
PH: l am supposedly linked to Godard?
GB: I’m wondering if you do reflect upon his legacy, just as
Pasolini is obviously an explicit reference point for your
activities. It is hard to think of two more opposed figures
from the cinema of the 1960s and ‘70s.
PH: You can judge things for their diversity. Anyway Pasolini is not
the reference: The thing specific to Pasolini that is crucial for
me is the complexity and the urgency of his various practices
and all the inner paradoxes with which he had to deal.
GB: You are specifically interested in Pasolini’s counterintuitive
claim, for the 1960s, that cinema has a unique purchase on
reality. His continuance of a kind of “heretical” realism.
PH: Sure, but though the means differ, one could say much the
same thing about early Godard, about the nouvelle vague and
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its breaking of the conventions of narration, its more direct

contact with reality.
GB: Would you accept the supposition that Pasolini ‘s essay on
the sequence shot has served you as a working model for the
production of an open work, just as the houses documented
in Chantier permanent did? An essay by an intellectual, a
vernacular architectural type, all of these divergent things
can serve as a model for work?
PH: For Pasolini there is always an address, a “for who” and a “for
where.” An address that produces a tension and an outside.
GB: Pasolini has been an important reference point for your
collaborator Parreno too, and instead of the sequence
shot essay he speaks more about Pasolini’s elegy to the
disappearance of fireflies, the firefly essay.5 But I disagree
with Parreno that Pasolini’s essay on the fireflies was simply
about the “end of ideologies” in postwar Italy. I don’t believe
in the end of ideologies, and I don’t think Pasolini did either.
PH: The relation between the two forms of the poetic and the
political is the key. I like what Pasolini said about his project
The Gospel According to St. Matthew. He speaks about viewing
something through the eyes of someone else. Deleuze too
takes up this idea from Pasolini ...
GB: The idea of what Pasolini calls “free indirect discourse.” For
him, this was the essence of cinema.
PH: For me it is a technique, a tool, that I absolutely put to use.
So you spoke about “models.” But I’m taking tools–from
Pasolini, from Cage, from Roche. And it is hardly new at
all to make such links between divergent practices. Think of
Cage himself, borrowing from Satie, from Duchamp, from
Mallarmé. A musician, but also a poet, and a visual artist.
GB: Okay, you just brought up Pasolini’s and Deleuze’s idea of free
indirect discourse, and now you speak of a kind of strategic
borrowing from divergent fields. This may be our opportunity
to speak about the rhetoric of “rclationality” in contemporary
art–in your project, but also the understanding of this that we
witness in Bourriaud’s idea of a relational aesthetic.
167
PH: In terms of relations, your implication that one form of this

is to interrelate divergent fields–art, architecture, cinema–is
not interesting. This is a means for me, it is hardly a goal.
GB: But your work’s idea of the relational seems to focus upon
ideas of the open work, the link between practices, the
permanent construction site .... Why is it important to work
in this way now? Is it a political gesture? A linkage, like
Pasolini‘s, between poetics and politics?
PH: It is an expanded field. The more tools, the more one
can expand the game. The more one can play. The tools
themselves are not important in comparison to the ability to
play. Think about Robert Filliou.
GB: You seem to resist, however, thinking about these strategies
in political terms. Let me clarify the stakes of my question. I
am asking you directly about politics because it seems to me
that the question of the relational–I’m thinking specifically
of Bourriaud now and of the artists that he has supported–
has functioned in the artistic discourse of the 1990s to
displace a model of politics and critique that was central to
advanced art in the 1980s. Think of Hans Haacke, think of
Barbara Kruger; this clarifies what I’m trying to point out. So
how are we to understand this displacement? Is a “relational
aesthetic” about a reformulation of a political project? Is it
instead about an avoidance of the term political? Or is it a
kind of pragmatism or realism that we face here–a realization
that false political claims for artistic practices were made in
the 1980s, and one must not falsely claim immediate political
functions for cultural or aesthetic projects?
PH: Your last point is key. And it should apply as well to critics
and historians. It is obviously difficult to define oneself after
a postmodern period where we all became extremely self-
conscious and aware about the consequences of our actions.
This is why conclusions should be suspended but the tension
should remain. There is a complexity that must be recognized
and that produces a fragile object.
And this is why I have had some problems with the last
two Documenta exhibitions. A false claiming of the political.
168
It is a huge problem when the “political” becomes a subject

for art. For me, Buren is a political artist. It is a practice that
is political, not the subject or the content of art. Politics is
not an apple that you paint in order to legitimate the fact
that you paint. That is a moral issue.
GB: You are interested then in a politics of form?
PH: Always, what is crucial is not the arrangement but the rules
of arrangement.
GB: Do you accept Bourriaud’s term “relational aesthetics” as an
accurate description of your own practice?
PH: No. I do not believe that Bourriaud’s book was written
with any ambition of being an historical record. It was an
experiment, an attempt to capture what was new about a vast
array of recent artistic practices. It wasn’t a history, it wasn’t
an attempt to predict the future either. Bourriaud was simply
capturing a moment, a set of new practices that he saw arriving
at that moment. Over the last few years, however, more and
more people are using the term “relational aesthetics” as a
label to frame a certain practice. I cannot use it as an “-ism”
very simply because I don’t accept it as a term to describe a
set of practices including my own.
What is new and crucial, the shift that Bourriaud
captured–it has to do with economies. In the 1960s, it was
important for artists to deal with the product and the object.
Perhaps then, you can speak of modes of production and
along with the product you analyze the factory as well, the
production line, the process. But today this former economy
of industrial products has shifted to an economy of service.
Human relations are directly involved in such an economy.
The downfall of industrial economies and objects, the rise of
a service economy, the new importance of entertainment–
within this nexus, the idea of relations, of inter-human
relations, co-habitation, and social context become crucial.
GB: It is a pity that Bourriaud’s account does not analyze that
social nexus in the precise way that you just did, however.
PH: Whether we agree or not with Nicolas’s groupings of artists,
the importance of relationality in the last decade of cultural
169
practice is undeniable.
GB: But we need clarification as to how artists understand the
relational, which is why I was raising the possibility that it
signals a displacement of a former understanding of the
political in art. In your work, sometimes the relational seems
to be embodied simply by working collectively, by working
together with other artists in groups. Your relations arc
relations with other artists; a perfect example of this is the
outgrowth of your project L’Association des temps libérés
that you called The House or Home? There you purchased an
unfinished house and all the artists in the Association lived
there together collectively, adding to and altering the space
in various ways.
This was a work you created with Parreno, and in
fact you have worked closely with Parreno many times. It
is interesting, for while there are strong linkages between
your work and his, there are many significant differences
too. But with other artists with whom you work, aside from
Parreno, you often seem to have extremely little in common.
It reminds me really of the Dadaists as a group formation.
Here was a group formed in contradiction more than
commonality. Think about Duchamp and Picabia–what did
they really have in common as figures in the end? But their
projects were at times indistinguishable, and presented in
parallel and in tandem. I think about this when I wonder
what you could possibly have in common with the project of
Rirkrit Tiravanija, or, well ... Maurizio Cattelan ....
PH: Nicolas was instrumental to setting up this group of artists,
and sure, I agree with you, it is a group that on the surface
doesn’t seem to share too many things. I do think that I share
many things with Philippe; we work together closely, as I do
with Rirkrit Tiravanija, with Liam Gillick, or Dominique
Gonzalez-Foerster. And yes, in fact I do share concerns with
Maurizio Cattelan in a certain way.
GB: Do you want to specify what it is that this group might share?
PH: Sure, we could do that, but you might find it arbitrary. And
then you would say, basically, we are just talking about
170
a group of friends–but a group that understands their

differences, which allows them to escape from the strictures
of a monomaniacal practice.
GB: One could surely conclude that it is just about friendship. At
times, the “sociality” discussed by recent critics and curators
and artists seems to amount to little more than that, which is
okay as far as it goes. I have nothing against having friends!
But I want to know what artistic concerns might be shared.
PH: In a certain way, Nicolas’s book was like the production
of a new scenario, in the manner I discuss this in my own
practice. His book and his words provided the linkage
between various artists and people. For if you really focus on
the idea of human interrelation in art practice, this was really
the primary concern of Rirkrit.
GB: I agree, the term relational aesthetics as Bourriaud uses
it seems to apply and to emerge mostly from the work of
Tiravanija.
PH: Absolutely. But the “production of scenario” can be linked
to many figures, more even than Bourriaud mentions in his
book.
GB: Can you tell me exactly what you mean when you keep using
this term the production of a scenario? You use the term as
a title in your work Multiscénarios (pour une sitcom) (1996).
PH: Of course, yes, that needs to be defined. It is a rather abstract
term. What is a scenario? What do we mean when we refer
to this? Well, we could use the tools of Liam Gillick to
define this further. Liam opposed the idea of planning–the
modernist or communist or early capitalist model of social
planning–to the production of scenarios used in the late
capitalist system, one based on possibilities, a free-market
economy constantly re-adapting itself to the needs of an
audience. Liam linked the term “scenario” to the economy,
where speculation becomes a mode of action or prévision.
But, of course, you can link the word “scenario” to
the cinema, the justbefore, when things are still potentially
changeable. Human society is structured by narratives,
immaterial scenarios.
171
11,12 Huyghe and Philippe Parreno. Anna Sanders Films:

Blanche-Neige, Lucie. 1997.
172
GB: Which would be your interest.

PH: I use the term “scenario” interchangeably with the word
“screenplay,” and with the word “score.” So the production
of a scenario is the production of the set of possibilities and
rules that will give rise to something.
GB: Is this definition of a scenario–you applied it interestingly
just now to Bourriaud’s book, meaning Bourriaud’s book
allowed for a kind of artistic production to coalesce and take
shape–is this a term we could apply to your recent activities
with Parreno in the founding of what you call Anna Sanders
Films? I would really like to discuss Anna Sanders Films,
because I don’t think I understand at all what Anna Sanders
Films is.
PH: I should start by explaining that we decided to write a
scenario for a film. We ended up deciding to publish a part of
the scenario, revolving around a character. This became the
magazine Anna Sanders, the story of a feeling (1996). Further
issues would have introduced other characters. It was an
attempt to define a feeling (sentiment) through a character,
through images and text. We were interested in the format of
the magazine for presenting this, because it is not involved
in a linear reading like the form of the novel. You can flip
through, flicking back and forth, reading in different areas.
Eventually, we formed a film production company and we
named it after this fictional character.
GB: Why Anna Sanders?
PH: It is an invention.
GB: When did you form this company? I think your film Blanche-
Neige, Lucie was one of the first Anna Sanders films, right?
PH: Yes. It was the first film, produced in 1997.
GB: Do you view Anna Sanders Films as a simple production
company? Is it just that? Does it function like a normal film
production company? By now, Anna Sanders has produced
films by a very wide range of filmmakers. How do you define
it?
PH: This is difficult to answer, because the project has only been
defined by the films produced. At the beginning there was the
173
intuition that one could do things like portray the landscape

as a character, try and catch something like a feeling, produce
a mental map of a group of people, a relation between
reality and fiction, focus on the “off-screen.” There was no
real theorization, just intuitions. It is not yet clear, though,
what the Anna Sanders films share. The things shared are far
outnumbered by the divergences.
GB: Then why is it important to have this collective tool? This
grouping? Anna Sanders seems another machine for
producing collectivity. But it is clearly a capitalist machine,
right? You offer a model of collectivity on the model of the
film production company.
PH: Not at all. Anna Sanders has existed for eight years, but we
don’t “show” the film company as a project. It is a tool that
is at the service of a group of authors.
GB: There have been screenings of the Anna Sanders Films.
There has been a book published on Anna Sanders Films.
PH: As with any film production. We came from the world of
visual art but just like some independent filmmakers we built
an alternative tool for production. Kubrick did it in the 1960s
and ‘70s, and today you would look to Lars von Trier. Or
Nanni Moretti in Italy.
GB: It is interesting that you mention von Trier. More or less,
Anna Sanders Films was founded at the same moment as
Dogme. Is there a comparison here?
PH: We should be up front and admit that von Trier is someone
who is highly skilled in using the media, highly aware of it.
You must know that Dogme is simply a marketing strategy.
What is interesting about Lars von Trier is his accepting of a
system of internal constraints in order to produce something
new. So this is an example of a filmmaker producing his own
tool, his own system, and his own advertising. Anna Sanders
is not that.
GB: I still feel no closer to understanding the project. Maybe you
are trying to tell me that you don’t feel the need to define
Anna Sanders or understand it either.
PH: No, it is not meant to be mysterious. I’ve been telling you
174
what it is. As I said before, it is not a project in itself. Anna

Sanders is a tool that serves as a point of reunion, a meeting
of people who have an intuition and wish to bring it to life,
and who share some ideas.
GB: Ideas about cinema?
PH: No. Well, some ideas about cinema are shared, even though
we came from a different field and slowly explored this
territory. But it is not about resolution, not always pointing
toward the end point of a work. It is a group of people who
share ideas with each other. It is difficult to define what
these ideas might be, for the group is in constant movement
and flux; sometimes there are moments of clarity and
sometimes things are more blurry. For sure, in the films,
there is the shared concern with mise-en-scène. You can see
it in the films of Parreno, in Gonzalez-Foerster, in Charles
de Meaux’s films. There is the idea of a mise-en-scene, on a
transportation to an elsewhere. This is in my films too.
GB: Should the films be understood in connection to ethnographic
film?
PH: No, it’s not Jean Rouch. Of course,Jean Rouch is really
interesting, but I prefer Chris Marker. You simply cannot
take up again today this innocence or direct gaze, that is
from another time. I am, though, very much interested
in documentary. This was my starting point as an artist.
However, I just don’t know how today you can go and take
a camera and put yourself in front of something, record it,
and think that this is realism. All you see is a set of academic
conventions. I can’t understand this, say, after Pasolini,
realizing the necessity of going through the eyes of someone
else.
GB: Okay, let’s leave Anna Sanders Films then and instead
take up what you just said about mise-en-scenc in these
films, also about your distrust of documentary. One tactic
that characterizes your work is to use representational
conventions as a mode for doing things in reality, as
opposed to documenting reality within representation.
You are interested in reversing a former understanding of
175
documentary. You don’t “capture” the real in an image; you

are interested in using representation to effect the real.
PH: That is one possibility.
GB: Can you talk more about such a strategy? Because the
danger in it, for me, is that it almost seems to imply a type
of aestheticist position, an aestheticism. One uses the
conventions of art forms to produce reality–I mean how
different is this than Huysmans?
PH: I see where you are going. But don’t forget that I am dealing
with form.
GB: As opposed to thinking of l’art pour l’art, you could see such
a strategy in relation to spectacle, which would be more
relevant, I suppose. At times yours seems like a strategy of
allowing the spectacle to run wild, making of spectacle a form
of life. Which I guess for a long time now it actually has been.
But what are you doing with this strategy? Is it allegorical? Is
it a form of mimicry of the conditions of spectacle and how
they shape reality and life today?
PH: First, we must dispel one received idea and that is that the
spectacle is a fatalism, inherently alienating. The spectacle is
a format, it is a way to do things. It is a “how.” This “how” is
a tool, not an allegory.
GB: It is a social form.
PH: Yes, it is a social form with an ideological setting. But spectacle
has always been linked with illusion, with manipulation, with
the culture industry. It is though a format and a way of doing
things that can be taken and appropriated, and used for other
purposes. The point is not as an artist to occupy the position
of simply rejecting the spectacle or entertainment as bad;
this is a form of escapism. Nor is the point just to incorporate
spectacle, and occupy the position of an artist saying, “I will
also just be an entertainer.” The point is to take spectacle as
a format, and to use it if the need presents itself.
I do use conventions of representation to frame,
catch, and affect reality. I know quite well the traditions of
documentary film and photography. Documentary form has
always been important to me. The problem is that the form
176
of capturing reality has become itself a convention. So the

problem then becomes, again, one not about the arrangement
itself, but about the rules of arrangement. One has to
transform the conventions. I am still interested in capturing
reality. But the way of capturing it has been conventionalized.
What we see now when we look to representations for a
record of reality are a set of conventions.
GB: The lesson of spectacle and the point of departure for your
work is that the distance between reality and its representation
has collapsed in a certain sense.
PH: Sometimes a pure fiction film, even a science-fiction film, tells
us more about reality than a documentary. I am interested in
this. I am attempting, in my work, to “re-scenarize” the real.
GB: My question here began, however, by wondering if the danger
with this isn’t a form of aestheticism. You are using art and
its conventions to reformulate the real.
PH: I mentioned science fiction. But the most extreme opposite
of a documentary film is a musical. This is why, in my recent
work, I am actually very interested in the format of the
musical. Sometimes science fiction or a musical will tell you
more about the reality of the moment or of a situation than
a director going with his own camera out onto the battlefield
of a war. We have known this ever since we have known
what television is doing. Television is a direct assault on the
idea of documentary, on the reality that it could represent.
Television simply presents reality under the false subjective
of one point of view, hardly in any sense the multiple points
of view of Pasolini’s musing about the possible film of
Kennedy’s death, not even the technique of Godard in, say,
Two or Three Things I Know About Her. In that film, through
a fiction, Godard was able to reach an exposition of a reality
that no documentary technique could ever achieve. He used
the format and the tools of representation in order to catch
a reality.
When I turned to Bruno Ganz and asked him to cross this
bridge in my film L’Ellipse–filling the empty jump cut between
two scenes in Wenders’s film–I used a tool that allowed me to
177
catch a moment of accident and chance, things which I never

put into the mise-en-scene. I never plan this out. I put up the
frame and whatever happens within the frame happens. We
are back to the tactics of Streamside Day Follies.
GB: How so?
PH: In Streamside Day Follies there was the score, and then things
happened.
GB: You mean that your work is always opened onto chance?
PH: Yes, that is what I am saying. In Streamside Day Follies I
announced that we would have a parade, and then some talks,
and then a concert. But that is it. I had no further control
over what was going on. On the one side, I created a scenario
and set it into motion. Then, letting it go, I could approach
on the other side with my camera and film the entire thing
objectively, like a documentary filmmaker happening onto
this pagan event surrounded by postmodern houses. I occupy
both sides of a divide: I build up a fiction and then I make a
documentary of this fiction. The point is: we should invent
reality before filming it. We need to “re-scenarize” the real.
– New York City, May 13, 2004
178
13 Huyghe. L’Ellipse. 1998.
NOTES
1
See Pierre Huyghe, „Halloweenism,“ in Pierre Huyghe (Munich: Kunstverein München,
Kunsthalle Zurich, 2000), p. 190.
2
Philippe Parreno, “Pièces versées au contentieux relatif au temps libre,” Speech Bubbles
(Paris: Les presses du reel, 2001), p. 80. Originally published in Pierre Huyghe, p. 35.
3
See Frarnçois Roche, “Note of Intent,” Exposé la maison I, no. 3 (Orléans: Édition HYX,
1997), reprinted in Pierre Huyghe, pp. 28-29.
4
Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Observations on the Sequence Shot,” Heretical Empiricism, trans.
Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp.
233-35.
5
Philippe Parreno reproduces and translates Pasolini’s essay in relation to his own work
The Firefly Article (1993). See Parreno, Alien Affection (Paris: Musee d’art moderne de la
Ville de Paris, 2002), pp. 226-31, 384-85. Pasolini’s essay was originally published under
the title “The Power Vacuum in Italy,” in Corriere della Sera in February 1975.
179
The Promise of the Flat Field,
a Reflection on Non-productive
Expenditure
Helen Thomas
from OASE #105, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2020.
180
1 George Aitchison (1825–1910), Designs for the interior decoration of 9
Chesterfield Gardens, London, for Henry, Lord Leconfield: elevation of the
Morning Room with door and chimneypiece, 1881. © RIBA Collection.
2 Detail from Designs for the interior decoration of 9 Chesterfield Gardens
181
Helen Thomas
THE PROMISE OF THE FLAT FIELD, A REFLEXTION ON

NON-PRODUCTIVE EXPENDITURE
The contemporary practice of architecture, on the surface and

in order to maintain itself, is a business with a sensitive response to
flows of income and expenditure. As in yogic meditation, when the
ebb and flow of breath is used to focus the respiring subject on the
singularity of its individual present, so it is with money for a business.
In an architectural practice, then, economic survival requires that
this time passes in productive expenditure that is, usefully.
The time-consuming activity of drawing has been at the heart
of architectural practice since the Renaissance, when architecture
became elevated from a craft to an intellectual pursuit carried
out remotely from the site of construction. In this separation of
the bodily labour of craft and construction from the conceptual
work of art, drawing became the means through which intentions
were imagined, resolved and communicated. As the medium
of endeavour continues to migrate from the corporeal to the
conceptual: from vigorous manual labour constructing a final
product, a building, to the fine control of the hand producing a
drawing, and then to almost purely intellectual exertion within a
virtual environment, so transforms the relationship of the worker
to their work.
Embodied in every architectural drawing, whether made
by hand or on the computer, is the time expended in making it.
The pecuniary cost of this labour is offset in the value accrued
by the various roles that the drawing might play – as a document
communicating instructions, or selling ideas, or acquiring
cultural capital, or as an iteration of thought, for example. Some
drawings have more tangible uses than others, and the cost of
their production is more easily measured and balanced within the
economy of practice.
“Every time the meaning of a discussion depends on the
fundamental value of the word useful” wrote Georges Bataille,
“it is possible to affirm that the debate is necessarily warped and
that the fundamental question is eluded” within a system where
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The Promise of the Plat Field, a Reflection on Non-productive Expenditure
“all individual effort, in order to be valid, must be reducible to the

fundamental necessities of production and conservation.”1 When
other qualities embodied in the drawing through the process of its
making are considered, however, such as conscious thought and
expert decision taking but also meditation, reflection and even the
opportunity for boredom, the debate moves towards the question
to which he refers. In Bataille’s terms, an alternative perspective
arises from an intellectual but non-rational state than can be
achieved through the non-productive expenditure of energy or
time, an idea that has fascinated artists and writers in its many
varieties since Karl Marx used the term “unproductive labour” in
‘Theories of Surplus Value’, written 1862-3 and developed in Das
Kapital, first published in 1867.
Fourteen years after the publication of Das Kapital, British
architect George Aitchison made one of his dense, intensely
worked presentation drawings for an aristocratic client,
Lord Leaconfield of Petworth. At first glance the object is as
conventional as its subject: a wall elevation for a morning room in
an elegant Mayfair house, made to entrance his patron and also
perhaps a record of a design whose realisation and its duration
was contingent on the fashions of the time.2 Centred on a long
rectangle of paper, the edges of the drawing trace the cut of the
section that isolates the room. It is surrounded by an emptiness
that presses in from all sides, that is shut behind the double doors
and blankly reflected in the mirror above the ornate fireplace. The
top meets with a simple cornice, the bottom with a deep skirting
board that connects the two closed, dark wood-encased openings.
These framing devices serve to accentuate the substance
of the drawing: a thicket of golden brush strokes that describe
a repeated pattern painted over a wash of archaeological red,
the colours of which congeal underneath darker blood-coloured
randomly distributed, irregularly-shaped spots that suggest a
different order of things. The flat field compresses this amorphous
arrangement, which is so easy not to see, with the web of repeated
elements whose swags divide the plane into a nominally regular
grid. The inhabitants of this imaginary world dance, sometimes
alone and sometimes squashed together or conversing in pairs;
183
Helen Thomas
each one is slightly different. A purely manual production – partly

measured and inscribed and partly judged by eye, the drawing
embodies many hours of time and attention focussed on repeated
actions of the hand. In her book Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
Doris Lessing, like Aitchison, used a flat surface to engage the
intellect in a performance enacted outside the usual flow of time.
She evoked a similar decorated field (in this case a full-scaled but
fictional wallpapered room) as an imaginative device – this time
operated by the viewer rather than the producer – that provides
access to worlds beyond reality, in which the problems that beset
life can be lived through differently, as in a dream.
The journey into Aitchison and Lessing’s fantasy realms –
via an active gaze that drifts into distraction – is echoed in the
writing of Bataille, who seeks a state beyond rational order that
is not the product of constructive impulses towards a useful end.
The method, purpose and reason for his desire for the dissolution
of knowledge and its classification that lead to this condition are
expounded in great depth in his writing on Inner Experience. 3
Here, he explored the possibility of capturing a moment that is real
and sacred, a “privileged instant” beyond reason achieved through
a questioning of knowledge, a “movement of contestation”. This
provides the conditions for hegemonic interpretations of the
world to be dismantled, or at the least, conceived afresh from
a different perspective – a useful move for the creative mind.4
Bataille’s desire for the “night of non-knowledge” is resolved not
in a solution or a response: nothing is revealed except an insight
into incompleteness, a surplus of nothingness, which produces
the anguish of modernity that the inhabitants of Aitchison’s
late-19th-century world were beginning to experience. An empty
void reveals not God, totality or immortality, but an encounter
with humanity. This experience is not the mystical synthesis of
established religion or the freedom underlying false consciousness
sought by the Situationists, nor is it a utopian ideal, it is simply
recognition of infinite possibility in the world.5 In this Bataille’s
proposal is a precursor to later experiments, including Pierre
Huyghe’s curiosity in “Freed Time”, through which another facet
of inner experience can be explored:
184
“Inner experience is the opposite of action. Nothing

more. “Action” is utterly dependent upon project.
And what is serious, is that discursive thought is itself
engaged in the mode of existence of project. Discursive
thought is evinced by an individual engaged in action: it
takes place within him beginning with his projects, on
the level of reflection upon projects. Project is not only
the mode of existence implied by action, necessary to
action – it is a way of being in paradoxical time: it is the
putting off of existence to a later point.”6
In 1995, Huyghe registered l’Association des Temps Libérés

(Association of Freed Time) as “a French Association as Defined
in the 1901 Act”. This deed instigated a work of art manifest as
discursive thought, the start of an open project with the declared
intention “to develop unproductive time, to reflect on free time”
anticipating a renewal of possibilities for life in a series of “social
experiments as distinct from the packaged and controlled leisure
time of the work economy.”7 This could be seen as a project with
a utopian intention if it were not for the deliberately fictional
quality of the project manifest in iterations over time, which, since
there is no evidence to the affirmative, may or may not have been
enacted. Freed Time is that which is embodied in the potential of
stated intentions, making a virtue of the putting off of existence
to a later point. Huyghe had begun to explore this potential in
Chantier permanent (permanent construction site, 1993-99) –
a project concerned with recording unfinished but inhabited
dwellings, which he perceived as physical representations of freed
time and “open to any and all incidents that might occur.”8
Bataille’s description of project as discursive thought could
be reflecting on Huyghe’s investigations, but in the hiatus – the
paradoxical time, a step outside its forward flow - that Huyghe’s
projects create and define, there is also the chance to reach the
state of inner experience. In the protracted process of painting a
miniature rendition of the wallpaper for the morning room of 6
Chesterfield Gardens, Aitchison also took a step outside time, one
which is enhanced by the potential for an architectural drawing
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Helen Thomas
to be finished but not complete. In this case, consummation

of purpose occurred perhaps when the room itself had been
constructed full-size, but it is possible that it was the room’s
destruction that ultimately brought the drawing’s potential as a
useful object to fruition.
One last word on Bataille’s notion of non-productive
expenditure in relation to Aitchison’s drawing must consider the
luxury and dense glamour of its embroidery-like surfaces, from
which a wave of time consumed washes over the attentive viewer
to create an overwhelming effect.
“The living organism, in a situation determined by the

play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily
receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining
life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the
growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can
no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely
absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without
profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or
catastrophically.”9
Loss without profit, the basis of non-productive expenditure,

underlies Bataille’s theory of economy. In his essay “The Notion
of Expenditure” he defines two levels of consumption – the
minimum to conserve life and the individual’s productive activity
in a given society, and then expenditure that is unproductive,
that is unconditional expenditure only rational in the narrow
sense of the word – luxury, mourning, war, games, arts, and ‘great
competitive spectacles’ that he associates with “a sumptuary
process of social classification.”10 In Aitchison’s drawing the
consummate technique and the squandering of its brilliance in
useless spectacle grasp the viewer’s attention. In a commercial
sense, this expenditure is non-productive. As one of a series of
beautiful objects, however, this labour resulted in rewards of
social status and cultural capital, almost to the extent that the
practice of potlatch plays in Bataille’s thinking.11
186
In conclusion, it becomes clear that the process of making

architectural drawings embodies potential that is not immediately
obvious. In the opportunity it affords for daydreaming, both the
producer and the viewer can find a form of inner experience that
can give access to a non-rational and potentially creative state,
and, taken to a Bataillean extreme, challenge the hegemonic
structures of knowledge and thought. For Huyghe, this move
outside the capitalist system allows a reclaiming of self and has a
social meaning. On the opposite side of this coin, such squandered
time embodies a luxury of waste, whose essence can become
currency within a cultural system. And finally, the step outside the
flow of time provides room to take a wider perspective: to discern
the wood from the trees.
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Helen Thomas
NOTES
1
Georges Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’ (1933) in ed. Fred Botting and Scott
Wilson, The Bataille Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997) p. 167, 168
2
For further discussion on George Aitchison’s intentions and practice of drawing
see: Daniel Robbins, ‘Aitchison’s Drawings’ in Caroline Dakers and Daniel Robbins
George Aitchison, Leighton’s Architect Revealed (London: Leighton House Museum,
2011) pp. 52-57. On p. 55, Robbins addresses the issue of authorship of the drawings,
suggesting that Aitchison would have carried out the painting and detailed work, with
the initial setting out sometimes performed by an office assistant.
3
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1988) first published as L’éxpérience intérieure (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1943) and
‘Part 1: Inner Experience’ in Botting and Wilson op.cit. pp. 35 – 118.
4
Ibid. For discussion of the movement of contestation see p. 51. For the relationship
between the movement of contestation and inner experience see p. 111.
5
Gerhard Poppenberg, ‘Inner Experience’ in, ed. Mark Hewson and Marcus Coelen,
Georges Bataille: Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2016) p. 120
6
Bataille, ‘Inner Experience, The Torment IV’ in Botting and Wilson op. cit. p. 76
7
Laura Rotenberg, ‘The Prospects of Freed Time: Pierre Huyghe and the Association
des Temps Libérés’ Public Art Dialogue vol 3. No. 2 2013 p. 186
8
Pierre Huyghe, The Trial (Munich: Kunstverein; Zurich: Kunsthalle, 2000) p. 33.
9
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share. An Essay on General Economy (New York:
Zone Books, 1988) p. 21
10
Ed. Botting and Wilson op. cit. p. 170
11
Bataille’s understanding of the term potlatch is as expenditure offered with the goal
of humiliating, defying and obligating a rival, who has to return a gift, or sacrifice of
property, with interest, resulting in a situation where the spectacular destruction of
wealth occurs. To read Bataille’s description of potlatch see: ed. Botting and Wilson
Ibid. pp. 172-4.
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Molloy
Samuel Beckett
from Molloy, London: Grove Press, 1955, pp.1-19.
190
PART I
I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t

know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle
of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone. There’s
this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him.
He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So
many pages, so much money. Yes, I work now, a little like I used
to, except that I don’t know how to work any more. That doesn’t
matter apparently. What I’d like now is to speak of the things
that arc left, say my good-byes, finish dying. They don’t want that.
Yes, there is more than one, apparently. But it’s always the same
one that comes. You’ll do that later, he says. Good. The truth
is I haven’t much will left. When he comes for the fresh pages
he brings back the previous week’s. They are marked with signs
I don’t understand. Anyway I don’t read them. When I’ve done
nothing he, gives me nothing, he scolds me. Yet I don’t work for
money. For what then? I don’t know. The truth is I don’t know
much. For example my mother’s death. Was she already dead
when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury.
I don’t know. Perhaps they haven’t buried her yet. In any case
I have her room. I sleep in her bed. I piss and shit in her pot. I
have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more. All I
need now is a son. Perhaps I have one somewhere. But I think
not. He would be old now, nearly as old as myself. It was a little
chambermaid. It wasn’t true love. The true love was in another.
We’ll come to that. Her name? I’ve forgotten it again. It seems to
me sometimes that I even knew my son, that I helped him. Then I
tell myself it’s impossible. It’s impossible I could ever have helped
anyone. I’ve forgotten how to spell too, and half the words. That
doesn’t matter apparently. Good. He’s a queer one the one who
conics to see me. He comes every Sunday apparently. The other
days he isn’t free. He’s always thirsty. It was he told me I’d begun
all wrong, that I should have begun differently. He must be right.
I began at the beginning, like an old ballocks, can you imagine
that? Here’s my beginning. Because they’re keeping it apparently.
I took a lot of trouble with it. Here it is. It gave me a lot of trouble.
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Samuel Beckett
It was the beginning, do you understand? Whereas now it’s nearly

the end. Is what I do now any better? I don’t know. That’s beside
the point. Here’s my beginning. It must mean something, or they
wouldn’t keep it. Here it is.
This time, then once more I think, then perhaps a last time,
then I think it’ll be over, with that world too. Premonition of the
last but one but one. All grows dim. A little more and you’ll go
blind. It’s in the head. It doesn’t work any more, it says, I don’t
work any more. You go dumb as well and sounds fade. The
threshold scarcely crossed that’s how it is. It’s the head. It must
have had enough. So that you say. I’ll manage this time, then
perhaps once more, then perhaps a last time, then nothing more.
You are hard set to formulate this thought, for it is one, in a sense.
Then you try to pay attention, to consider with attention all those
dim things, saying to yourself, laboriously. It’s my fault. Fault?
That was the word. But what fault? It’s not goodbye, and what
magic in those dim things to which it will be time enough, when
next they pass, to say goodbye. For you must say goodbye, it would
be madness not to say goodbye, when the time comes. If you think
of the forms and light of other days it is without regret. But you
seldom think of them, with what would you think of them? I don’t
know. People pass too, hard to distinguish from yourself. That is
discouraging. So I saw A and C going slowly towards each other,
unconscious of what they were doing. It was on a road remarkably
bare, I mean without hedges or ditches or any kind of edge, in the
country, for cows were chewing in enormous fields, lying and
standing, in the evening silence. Perhaps I’m inventing a little,
perhaps embellishing, but on the whole that’s the way it was. They
chew, swallow, then after a short pause effortlessly bring up the
next mouthful. A neck muscle stirs and the jaws begin to grind
again. But perhaps I’m remembering things. The road, hard and
white, seared the tender pastures, rose and fell at the whim of
hills and hollows. The town was not far. It was two men,
unmistakably, one small and one tall. They had left the town, first
one, then the other, and then the first, weary or remembering a
duty, had retraced his steps. The air was sharp, for they wore
greatcoats. They looked alike, but no more than others do. At
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Molloy
first a wide space lay between them. They couldn’t have seen each
other, even had they raised their heads and looked about, because
of this wide space, and then because of the undulating land, which
caused the road to be in waves, not high, but high enough, high
enough. But the moment came when together they went down
into the same trough and in this trough finally met. To say they
knew each other, no, nothing warrants it. But perhaps at the
sound of their steps, or warned by some obscure instinct, they
raised their heads and observed each other, for a good fifteen
paces, before they stopped, breast to breast. Yes, they did not pass
each other by, but halted, face to face, as in the country, of an
evening, on a deserted road, two wayfaring strangers will, without
there being anything extraordinary about it. But they knew each
other perhaps. Now in any case they do, now I think they will
know each other, greet each other, even in the depths of the town.
They turned towards the sea which, far in the east, beyond the
fields, loomed high in the waning sky, and exchanged a few words.
Then each went on his way. Each went on his way, A back towards
the town, C on by ways he seemed hardly to know, or not at all, for
he went with uncertain step and often stopped to look about him,
like someone trying to fix landmarks in his mind, for one day
perhaps he may have to retrace his steps, you never know. The
treacherous hills where fearfully he ventured were no doubt only
known to him from afar, seen perhaps from his bedroom window
or from the summit of a monument which, one black day, having
nothing in particular to do and turning to height for solace, he
had paid his few coppers to climb, slower and slower, up the
winding stones. From there he must have seen it all, the plain, the
sea. and then these selfsame hills that some call mountains, indigo
in places in the evening light, their serried ranges crowding to the
skyline, cloven with hidden valleys that the eye divines from
sudden shifts of colour and then from other signs for which there
are no words, nor even thoughts. But all are not divined, even
from that height, and often where only one escarpment is
discerned, and one crest, in reality there are two, two escarpments,
two crests, riven by a valley. But now he knows these hills, that is
to say he knows them better, and if ever again he sees them from
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Samuel Beckett
afar it will be I think with other eyes, and not only that but the
within, all that inner space one never secs, the brain and heart and
other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath, all
that too quite differently disposed. He looks old and it is a sorry
sight to see him solitary after so many years, so many days and
nights unthinkingly given to that rumour rising at birth and even
earlier. What shall I do? What shall I do? Now low, a murmur,
now precise as the headwaiter’s and to follow? and often rising to
a scream. And in the end, or almost, to be abroad alone, by
unknown ways, in the gathering night, with a stick. It was a stout
stick, he used it to thrust himself onward, or as a defence, when
the time came, against dogs and marauders. Yes, night was
gathering, but the man was innocent, greatly innocent, he had
nothing to fear, though he went in fear, he had nothing to fear,
there was nothing they could do to him, or very little. But he can’t
have known it. I wouldn’t know it myself, if I thought about it.
Yes, he saw himself threatened, his body threatened, his reason
threatened, and perhaps he was, perhaps they were, in spite of his
innocence. What business has innocence here? What relation to
the innumerable spirits of darkness? It’s not clear. It seemed to
me he wore a cocked hat. I remember being struck by it, as I
wouldn’t have been for example by a cap or by a bowler. I watched
him recede, overtaken (myself) by his anxiety, at least by an
anxiety which was not necessarily his, but of which as it were he
partook. Who knows if it wasn’t my own anxiety overtaking him.
He hadn’t seen me. I was perched higher than the road’s highest
point and flattened what is more against a rock the same colour as
myself, that is grey. The rock he probably saw. He gazed around
as if to engrave the landmarks on his memory and must have seen
the rock in the shadow of which I crouched like Belacqua, or
Sordello, I forget. But a man, a fortiori myself, isn’t exactly a
landmark, because, I mean if by some strange chance he were to
pass that way again, after a long lapse of time, vanquished, or to
look for some lost thing, or to destroy something, his eyes would
search out the rock, not the haphazard in its shadow of that
unstable fugitive thing, still living flesh. No, he certainly didn’t see
me, for the reasons I’ve given and then because he was in no
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Molloy
humour for that, that evening, no humour for the living, but rather
for all that doesn’t stir, or stirs so slowly that a child would scorn
it, let alone an old man. However that may be, I mean whether he
saw me or whether he didn’t, I repeat I watched him recede, at
grips (myself) with the temptation to get up and follow him,
perhaps even to catch up with him one day, so as to know him
better, be myself less lonely but in spite of my soul’s leap out to
him, at the end of its elastic. I saw him only darkly, because of the
dark and then because of the terrain, in the folds of which he
disappeared from time to time, to re-emerge further on, but most
of all I think because of other things calling me and towards which
too one after the other my soul was straining, wildly. I mean, of
course, the fields, whitening under the dew, and the animals,
ceasing from wandering and settling for the night, and the sea, of
which nothing, and the sharpening line of crests, and the sky
where without seeing them I felt the first stars tremble, and my
hand on my knee and above all the other wayfarer, A or C, I don’t
remember, going resignedly home. Yes, towards my hand also,
which my knee felt tremble and of which my eyes saw the wrist
only, the heavily veined back, the pallid rows of knuckles. But that
is not, I mean my hand, what I wish to speak of now, everything in
due course, but A or C returning to the town he had just left. But
after all what was there particularly urban in his aspect? He was
bare-headed, wore sand-shoes, smoked a cigar. He moved with a
kind of loitering indolence which rightly or wrongly seemed to me
expressive. But all that proved nothing, refuted nothing. Perhaps
he had come from afar, from the other end of the island even, and
was approaching the town for the first time or returning to it after
a long absence. A little dog followed him, a pomeranian I think,
but I don’t think so. I wasn’t sure at the time and I’m still not sure,
though I’ve hardly thought about it. The little dog followed
wretchedly, after the fashion of pomeranians, stopping, turning in
slow circles, giving up and then, a little further on, beginning all
over again. Constipation is a sign of good health in pomeranians.
At a given moment, pre-established if you like, I don’t much mind,
the gentleman turned back, took the little creature in his arms,
drew the cigar from his lips and buried his face in the orange
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Samuel Beckett
fleece, for it was a gentleman, that was obvious. Yes, it was an

orange pomeranian, the less I think of it the more certain I am.
And yet. But would he have come from afar, bare-headed, in
sand-shoes, smoking a cigar, followed by a pomeranian? Did he
not seem rather to have issued from the ramparts, after a good
dinner, to take his dog and himself for a walk, like so many
citizens, dreaming and farting, when the weather is fine? But was
not perhaps in reality the cigar a cutty and were not the sand-
shoes boots, hobnailed, dust-whitened, and what prevented the
dog from being one of those stray dogs that you pick up and take
in your arms, from compassion or because you have long been
straying with no other company than the endless roads, sands,
shingle, bogs and heather, than this nature answerable to another
court, than at long intervals the fellow-convict you long to stop,
embrace, suck, suckle and whom you pass by, with hostile eyes,
for fear of his familiarities? Until the day when, your endurance
gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the
first mangy cur you meet, carry it the time needed for it to love
you and you it, then throw it away. Perhaps he had come to that,
in spite of appearances. He disappeared, his head on his chest,
the smoking object in his hand. Let me try and explain. From
things about to disappear I turn away in time. To watch them out
of sight, no, I can’t do it. It was in this sense he disappeared.
Looking away I thought of him, saying, He is dwindling, dwindling.
I knew what I meant. I knew I could catch him, lame as I was. I
had only to want to. And yet no, for I did want to. To get up, to get
down on the road, to set off hobbling in pursuit of him, to hail
him, what could be easier? He hears my cries, turns, waits for me.
I am up against him, up against the dog, gasping, between my
crutches. He is a little frightened of me, a little sorry for me, I
disgust him not a little. I am not a pretty sight, I don’t smell good.
What is it I want? Ah that tone I know, compounded of pity, of
fear, of disgust. I want to see the dog, see the man, at close
quarters, know what smokes, inspect the shoes, find out other
things. He is kind, tells me of this and that and other things,
whence he comes, whither he goes. I believe him, I know it’s my
only chance to – my only chance, I believe all I’m told. I’ve
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disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallow

everything, greedily. What I need now is stories, it took me a long
time to know that, and I’m not sure of it. There I am then,
informed as to certain things, knowing certain things about him,
things I didn’t know, things I had craved to know, things I had
never thought of. What rigmarole. I am even capable of having
learnt what his profession is, I who am so interested in professions.
And to think I try my best not to talk about myself. In a moment
I shall talk about the cows, about the sky, if I can. There I am
then, he leaves me, he’s in a hurry. He didn’t seem to be in a
hurry, he was loitering. I’ve already said so, but after three minutes
of me he is in a hurry, he has to hurry. I believe him. And once
again I am, I will not say alone, no, that’s not like me, but, how
shall I say, I don’t know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself,
free, yes, I don’t know what that means, but it’s the word I mean
to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws
of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in
proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least
no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the
holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly
business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless
misery. So I doubtless did better, at least no worse, not to stir
from my observation post. But instead of observing I had the
weakness to return in spirit to the other, the man with the stick.
Then the murmurs began again. To restore silence is the role of
objects. I said. Who knows if he hasn’t simply come out to take
the air, relax, stretch his legs, cool his brain by stamping the blood
down to his feet, so as to make sure of a good night, a joyous
awakening, an enchanted morrow. Was he carrying so much as a
scrip? But the way of walking, the anxious looks, the club, could
these be reconciled with one’s conception of what is called a little
turn? But the hat, a town hat, an old-fashioned town hat, which
the least gust would carry far away. Unless it was attached’ under
the chin, by means of a string or an clastic. I took off my hat and
looked at it. It is fastened, it has always been fastened, to my
buttonhole, always the same buttonhole, at all seasons, by a long
lace. I am still alive then. That may come in useful. The hand that
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Samuel Beckett
held the hat I thrust as far as possible from me and moved in an

arc, to and fro. As I did so, I watched the lapel of my greatcoat
and saw it open and close. I understand now why I never wore a
flower in my buttonhole, though it was large enough to hold a
whole nosegay. My buttonhole was set aside for my hat. It was my
hat that I beflowered. But it is neither of my hat nor of my
greatcoat that I hope to speak at present, it would be premature.
Doubtless I shall speak of them later, when the time comes to
draw up the inventory of my goods and possessions. Unless I lose
them between now and then. But even lost they will have their
place, in the inventory of my possessions. But I am easy in my
mind, I shall not lose them. Nor my crutches, I shall not lose my
crutches either. But I shall perhaps one day throw them away. I
must have been on the top, or on the slopes, of some considerable
eminence, for otherwise how could I have seen, so far away, so
near at hand, so far beneath, so many things, fixed and moving.
But what was an eminence doing in this land with hardly a ripple?
And I, what was I doing there, and why come? These are things
that we shall try and discover. But these are things we must not
take seriously. There is a little of everything, apparently, in nature,
and freaks are common. And I am perhaps confusing several
different occasions, and different times, deep down, and deep
down is my dwelling, oh not deepest down, somewhere between
the mud and the scum. And perhaps it was A one day at one place,
then C another at another, then a third the rock and I, and so on
for the other components, the cows, the sky, the sea, the
mountains. I can’t believe it. No, I will not lie, I can easily conceive
it. No matter, no matter, let us go on, as if all arose from one and
the same weariness, on and on heaping up and up, until there is
no room, no light, for any more. What is certain is that the man
with the stick did not pass by again that night, because I would
have heard him, if he had. I don’t say I would have seen him, I say
I would have heard him. I sleep little and that little by day. Oh not
systematically, in my life without end I have dabbled with every
kind of sleep, but at the time now coming back to me I took my
doze in the daytime and, what is more, in the morning. Let me
hear nothing of the moon, in my night there is no moon, and if it
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Molloy
happens that I speak of the stars it is by mistake. Now of all the

noises that night not one was of those heavy uncertain steps, or of
that club with which he sometimes smote the earth until it quaked.
How agreeable it is to be confirmed, after a more or less long
period of vacillation, in one’s first impressions. Perhaps that is
what tempers the pangs of death. Not that I was so conclusively, I
mean confirmed, in my first impressions with regard to – wait – C.
For the wagons and carts which a little before dawn went
thundering by, on their way to market with fruit, eggs, butter and
perhaps cheese, in one of these perhaps he would have been
found, overcome by fatigue or discouragement, perhaps even
dead. Or he might have gone back to the town by another way too
far away for me to hear its sounds, or by little paths through the
fields, crushing the silent grass, pounding the silent ground. And
so at last I came out of that distant night, divided between the
murmurs of my little world, its dutiful confusions, and those so
different (so different?) of all that between two suns abides and
passes away. Never once a human voice. But the cows, when the
peasants passed, crying in vain to be milked. A and C I never saw
again. But perhaps I shall see them again. But shall I be able to
recognise them? And am I sure I never saw them again? And what
do I mean by seeing and seeing again? An instant of silence, as
when the conductor taps on his stand, raises his arms, before the
unanswerable clamour. Smoke, sticks, flesh, hair, at evening, afar,
flung about the craving for a fellow. I know how to summon these
rags to cover my shame. I wonder what that means. But I shall not
always be in need. But talking of the craving for a fellow let me
observe that having waked between eleven o’clock and midday (I
heard the angelus, recalling the incarnation, shortly after) I
resolved to go and see my mother. I needed, before I could resolve
to go and see that woman, reasons of an urgent nature, and with
such reasons, since I did not know what to do, or where to go, it
was child’s play for me, the play of an only child, to fill my mind
until it was rid of all other preoccupation and I seized with a
trembling at the mere idea of being hindered from going there, I
mean to my mother, there and then. So I got up, adjusted my
crutches and went down to the road, where I found my bicycle (I
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Samuel Beckett
didn’t know I had one) in the same place I must have left it. Which
enables me to remark that, crippled though I was, I was no mean
cyclist, at that period. This is how I went about it. I fastened my
crutches to the cross-bar, one on either side, I propped the foot of
my stiff leg (I forget which, now they’re both stiff) on the projecting
front axle, and I pedalled with the other. It was a chainless bicycle,
with a free-wheel, if such a bicycle exists. Dear bicycle, I shall not
call you bike, you were green, like so many of your generation. I
don’t know why. It is a pleasure to meet it again. To describe it at
length would be a pleasure. It had a little red horn instead of the
bell fashionable in your days. To blow this horn was for me a real
pleasure, almost a vice. I will go further and declare that if I were
obliged to record, in a roll of honour, those activities which in the
course of my interminable existence have given me only a mild
pain in the balls, the blowing of a rubber horn – toot! – would
figure among the first. And when I had to part from my bicycle I
took off the horn and kept it about me. I believe I have it still,
somewhere, and if I blow it no more it is because it has gone
dumb. Even motor-cars have no horns nowadays, as I understand
the thing, or rarely. When I see one, through the lowered window
of a stationary car, I often stop and blow it. This should all be re-
written in the pluperfect. What a rest to speak of bicycles and
horns. Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her
who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my
memory is correct. First taste of the shit. So I shall only add that
every hundred yards or so I stopped to rest my legs, the good one
as well as the bad. and not only my legs, not only my legs. I didn’t
properly speaking get down off the machine, I remained astride
it, my feet on the ground, my arms on the handle-bars, my head
on my arms, and I waited until I felt better. But before I leave this
earthly paradise, suspended between the mountains and the sea,
sheltered from certain winds and exposed to all that Auster vents,
in the way of scents and langours, on this accursed country, it
would ill become me not to mention the awful cries of the
corncrakes that run in the corn, in the meadows, all the short
summer night long, dinning their rattles. And this enables me,
what is more, to know when that unreal journey began, the second
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Molloy
last but one of a form fading among fading forms, and which I
here declare without further ado to have begun in the second or
third week of June, at the moment that is to say most painful of all
when over what is called our hemisphere the sun is at its
pitilessmost and the arctic radiance comes pissing on our
midnights. It is then the corncrakes are heard. My mother never
refused to see me, that is she never refused to receive me, for it
was many a long day since she had seen anything at all. I shall try
and speak calmly. We were so old, she and I, she had had me so
young, that we were like a couple of old cronies, sexless, unrelated,
with the same memories, the same rancours, the same expectations.
She never called me son, fortunately, I couldn’t have borne it, but
Dan, I don’t know why, my name is not Dan. Dan was my father’s
name perhaps, yes, perhaps she took me for my father. I took her
for my mother and she took me for my father. Dan, you remember
the day I saved the swallow. Dan, you remember the day you
buried the ring. I remembered, I remembered, I mean I knew
more or less what she was talking about, and if I hadn’t always
taken part personally in the scenes she evoked, it was just as if I
had. I called her Mag, when I had to call her something. And I
called her Mag because for me, without my knowing why. the
letter g abolished the syllable Ma, and as it were spat on it, better
than any other letter would have done. And at the same time I
satisfied a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need, the need to
have a Ma, that is a mother, and to proclaim it, audibly. For before
you say mag, you say ma, inevitably. And da, in my part of the
world, means father. Besides, for me the question did not arise, at
the period I’m worming into now, I mean the question of whether
to call her Ma, Mag or the Countess Caca, she having for countless
years been as deaf as a post. I think she was quite incontinent,
both of faeces and water, but a kind of prudishness made us avoid
the subject when we met, and I could never be certain of it. In any
case it can’t have amounted to much, a few niggardly wetted goat-
droppings, every two or three days. The room smelt of ammonia,
oh not merely of ammonia, but of ammonia, ammonia. She knew
it was me, by my smell. Her shrunken, hairy old face lit up, she
was happy to smell me. She jabbered away with a rattle of dentures
201
Samuel Beckett
and most of the time didn’t realize what she was saying. Anyone
but myself would have been lost in this clattering gabble, which
can only have stopped during her brief instants of unconsciousness.
In any case I didn’t come to listen to her. I got into communication
with her by knocking on her skull. One knock meant yes, two no,
three I don’t know, four money, five goodbye. I was hard put to
ram this code into her ruined and frantic understanding, but I did
it, in the end. That she should confuse yes, no, I don’t know and
goodbye, was all the same to me, I confused them myself. But that
she should associate the four knocks with anything but money was
something to be avoided at all costs. During the period of training
therefore, at the same time as I administered the four knocks on
her skull, I stuck a bank-note under her nose or in her mouth. In
the innocence of my heart! For she seemed to have lost, if not
absolutely all notion of mensuration, at least the faculty of
counting beyond two. It was too far for her, yes, the distance was
too great, from one to four. By the time she came to the fourth
knock she imagined she was only at the second, the first two
having been erased from her memory as completely as if they had
never been felt, though I don’t quite see how something never felt
can be erased from the memory, and yet it is a common occurrence.
She must have thought I was saying no to her all the time, whereas
nothing was further from my purpose. Enlightened by these
considerations I looked for and finally found a more effective
means of putting the idea of money into her head. This consisted
in replacing the four knocks of my index knuckle by one or more
(according to my needs) thumps of the fist, on her skull. That she
understood. In any case I didn’t come for money. I took her
money, but I didn’t come for that. My mother. I don’t think too
harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except
of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me
unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate
sewers. But it was well-meant and that’s enough for me. No it is
not enough for me, but I give her credit, though she is my mother,
for what she tried to do for me. And I forgive her for having
jostled me a little in the first months and spoiled the only
endurable, just endurable, period of my enormous history. And I
202
Molloy
also give her credit for not having done it again, thanks to me, or
for having stopped in time, when she did. And if ever I’m reduced
to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it’s in that
old mess I’ll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of that poor old
uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither
man nor beast. I should add, before I get down to the facts, you’d
swear they were facts, of that distant summer afternoon, that with
this deaf, blind, impotent, mad old woman, who called me Dan
and whom I called Mag, and with her alone, I – no, I can’t say it.
That is to say, I could say it, but I won’t say it, yes, I could say it
easily, because it wouldn’t be true. What did I see of her? A head
always, the hands sometimes, the arms rarely. A head always.
Veiled with hair, wrinkles, filth, slobber. A head that darkened
the air. Not that seeing matters, but it’s something to go on with.
It was I who took the key from under the pillow, who took the
money out of the drawer, who put the key back under the pillow.
But I didn’t come for money. I think there was a woman who came
each week. Once I touched with my lips, vaguely, hastily, that
little grey wizened pear. Pah. Did that please her? I don’t know.
203

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ETH Zürich Professur Adam Caruso FS 2020

2 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,

Printing and binding

translated by Saul K. Padover.

Hegel remarks somewhere1 that all great world-historic facts

as a cardsharp‘s trick, and what seems overthrown is no longer

The social republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy, on

Paris, which the bourgeoisie had surrendered to the military so

the decay of the feudal system which it had helped to hasten.

has so strengthened itself vis-à-vis civil society that the Chief of

great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition

the majority was still so implicated that precisely in the reddest

surprise attack by its old overlords. But in the course of the

In addition to the mortgage which capital imposes on it, the

limitations, they have become naturally irreligious.

socialists”11 of their governmental skill in advance. But above

bank remains a mere decree, etc., etc.

So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and

Men say they know many things;

I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where

better reason for it than our temporal necessities even. There is

Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my

Boards $ 8.03½, mostly shanty boards.

for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not

to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy

to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the

twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes, beside

beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this

freer. Men and oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary

an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by

All experiments which failed.

So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and

I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to

which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a

have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a

the leavening process, and through the various fermentations

“we can make liquor to sweeten our lips Of pumpkins and

Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this

of experiments of this kind being tried; as that a young man tried

“The evil that men do lives after them.”

As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun

I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the

or delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style

death, did not shine for a year.

and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man’s

The Pretensions of Poverty

“Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,

Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-

how to teach us to “play string figures with companion species,”

leading roles with their artists, biologists, and activists throughout

to do so would be to slide once again into the muck of racism,

developmental biology and nonhierarchical systems theories for

to help radically reduce human numbers over a few hundred

that the LM mooncraft is patently superior to all

that the broadcast verbal exchange between Houston’s

that with their sound distortions, beeps, static, and

that certain remote-control videotapes of the lives

that not a few of those brightly lit plastic and stainless-

that the random trancelike movements of shoppers in a