Let me start this reflection about reputational economies with a telling example. In 2011, together with my fellow collaborators from the Free/Slow University of Warsaw (F/SUW), ¹ I organized a conference titled “The Labour of the Multitude? The Political Economy of Social Creativity.” Afterward, F/SUW published a post-conference publication, which was coedited by the core group of conveners.
² The book’s editors are named and listed, every published paper is clearly authorized, all the quotations are attributed, and the credits due are paid. All the customary publishing rules were followed and all the editorial boxes were ticked. And yet doubt lingers. During the conference we discussed the “labor of the multitude” as creativity that is diffused throughout the social—in art scenes, intellectual circuits, and creative milieus. But when it comes to the moment of publishing, all those multitudes vanish from the list of contents. There are listed only clearly identified names of individuals.

A vast majority of books, texts, or art pieces that are published have clearly identified authors. In the current state of publishing, the act of authorial attribution is self-evident. That’s what we do when we publish: we authorize. It does not matter if we are critical practitioners, established academics, or commercially oriented artists. We all follow similar patterns. Authorial attribution saturates all sectors of the contemporary art world. It underlines the operations of the competitive art market, public institutions, and the small, informal, critical art initiatives—despite their seemingly opposite stances toward intellectual property.

As I will argue here, authorial attribution is one of the fundamental mechanisms underlying the cruel economy of the arts, to use Hans Abbing’s framework. ³ The problem is located in the structural injustice of reputational economies that perpetuate contemporary symbolic production. They are founded on the invisibility of the labor of the multitudes.

As critical cultural producers, many of us lean on and frequently refer to the notions of diffused creativity. But our own acts of publishing rest on a lack of recognition of the plethora of inputs that thrive beyond narrowly understood authorial or artistic attribution. Our stance toward intellectual property plays only a secondary role. It counts less whether we use creative commons or other public licenses. What matters most is the fundamental act of individual appropriation. Licensing and limiting copyrights might, but does not have to, be used as a way of safeguarding previously acquired privileges. But the efficacy of authorial attribution derives partially from its wide acknowledgment as a customary way of doing things, entrenched in worldviews, habits, and values, rather than in legal formulas.

Let me make a short methodological note. My understanding of cultural production relies on the legacy of a materialistic analysis of the art apparatus. Among many others my method is intellectually indebted to Walter Benjamin. In his seminal essay “The Author as Producer,” he shifted the focus from the author and his oeuvre to the social totality of the apparatus of symbolic production. Following Benjamin, I reject the notion that the apparatus is a neutral infrastructure, a form of institutionalized enablement that simply facilitates production, dissemination, and ownership of artifacts. On the contrary, in my opinion, the main function of the apparatus is to produce and reproduce social conceptions that define artwork, author, public, act of reception, or intellectual property.

From this perspective, I will attempt to disentangle this problematic bundle, dissect the creative economy, identify its structural inconsistencies, and even risk sketching some future prospects. At first, though, let me briefly introduce some of innovative business models developed recently in the creative industries, as they cast interesting light on reputational economies in the arts.

Property Models in Late Capitalism

The most commonly recognized form of profiteering in cultural industries is based on the aggressive copyrighting and safeguarding of intellectual property through rigid licensing. This practice is founded on a fundamental contradiction. The innovation and creation of symbolic contents derives from an unhampered flow of ideas. But if they are to generate profit, the ideas become, by definition, scarcities, and are transformed into commodities through copyright. However, in the world where every symbol has an owner, the creation of new content simply becomes too expensive. ⁴ For this reason, intellectual property owners have to exploit the “tragedy of the commons” ⁵ for their own advantage. They need to appropriate and exploit the non-copyrighted reservoirs of symbolic imagination that can be sourced at small costs. ⁶

Another business strategy is adopted by service providers in information-technology (IT) sectors: Tiziana Terranova refers to specialized programming enterprises for which replenishing intellectual commons enables their commercial operations. ⁷ They participate in open coding to secure access to common pools of knowledge. Their profits are made through providing highly sophisticated programming services. They lower their research and development expenditures by sharing the costs of pooling knowledge with the open source programming community. Moreover, through working for the common benefit, those enterprises establish their reputations, which later attract commercial clients.

Other models characteristic of late capitalism depend on what Yann Moulier Boutang calls the “work of pollination.” ⁸ To explain, Boutang provides the following example: a majority of people believes that the main economic function of bees is to produce honey. But this conviction is misleading, as the true role of bees in an economic cycle is to pollinate orchards and plantations. Honey is only a byproduct of an economically much more significant process. Similarly in cognitive capitalism, the symbolic product emerges only as a result of long and demanding processes of multifaceted exchange—as an effect of a socially dispersed “work of pollination.” The ideas and symbols have to be carried, exchanged, reworked, undone, redone, spoken over, and discussed. In this business model, characteristic for Web 2.0, getting a grasp on a product is much less important than capturing socially produced values “on the move.” What matters is a control over the social processes of valorization and distributed symbolic production. The main mode of profit making is crowdsourcing: attracting communities of users who do unpaid work. They pollinate portals, web pages, blogs, and search engines, creating values harvested by their owners and administrators.

Project Making as Dominant Mode of Production in Contemporary Culture

The models that I outlined above respond to the demands set by the mechanisms of flexible accumulation in late capitalism. These transformations are mirrored by the changes in the art world, and, more generally, in the changes that cultural production has gone through in recent decades. To understand them, one needs to dissect the apparatus of project making and its impact on the reputational economies perpetuating the contemporary art world. In this regard I follow sociological analysis of Pascal Gielen, ⁹ who points out how the art world was reconfigured by following the mechanisms, patterns, and ways of doing things characteristic to what Luc Boltanski calls a projective city. ¹⁰ The theoretical model of the projective city was introduced by Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in their seminal study, The New Spirit of Capitalism. ¹¹ Historically speaking, the projective order of worth emerged between the 1970s and 1990s as the result of tectonic shifts in Western societies. According to Boltanski and Chiapello, it originated in the new management discourses accompanying the rise of neoliberalism, the spread of globalization, the crisis of Fordism, and the financialization of the economy. ¹²

The implications of these transformations are felt across the whole art field, as the general conditions of cultural production have shifted according to the specific logic of the projective city. They unfolded not only in the metropolises of the art world, but also in its peripheries, impacting equally major institutions, biennales, art fairs, independent cultural initiatives, and critical practitioners.

Apparently, the core element of the projective value regime is the very project itself.

A project is a temporary undertaking. Generally speaking, projects emerge and recede. As managerial formats, projects enable flexibility and adaptability, while maintaining a satisfying level of efficiency, accountability, and control. Every project is always a projective endeavor; it projects itself into the future. Due to their short-term character, projects favor tactics over strategies, affairs over relationships, loose ties over friendships, migrations over stiff arrangements.

Projects bind together agents, institutions, things, spaces, pools of resources, channels of distributions, and audiences. A project is an efficient way of investing resources by concentrating them on those undertakings that promise the highest rate of symbolic or economic returns. The resources and agents are assembled on a temporary basis, just to leave and migrate to another nod of the network after the project is done. Projects partially level professional hierarchies, as they have to constitute temporary cooperative environments. The success of any project-based undertaking demands full and creative involvement of its participants. They are encouraged to contribute to a collective brainstorming regardless of their specializations or positions. As a managerial tool, projects have been invented to crisscross corporate bureaucracies and stimulate the flow of previously compartmented knowledge. The aim of a project is to release potentials otherwise contained by rigid divisions between sectors, disciplines, or branches.

Every project provides only temporary employment, which wanes after the task is executed. Projects are always collective undertakings, but their teams often dissolve afterward. Every project maker moves between projects as an individual, whose ability to conduct new promising projects is tested when previous project is already executed, but a new one has yet to begin. ¹³ The majority of project makers works as freelancers, and is involved and engaged for a limited period of time. In the ideal scenario, cultural producers behave like global “joyful riders” migrating from one project to another, roaming the globe in search of new exciting opportunities. ¹⁴ Existential and professional precarity is the reverse side of flexibility, freelancing, and “independency.” Cultural producers as project makers are free to take individualized risks, but their main responsibility is to remain employable. They need to be always ready for new challenges, constantly searching for new opportunities.

In the projective city, the network provides a particular kind of flexible security. It fills the gaps between projects. The network connects together institutions, agents, pools of resources, and audiences. It is a reservoir of latent power. As a hub of communication, it secures conditions for new projects to emerge. The network provides access to accumulated opportunities and stored resources. It endows selected cultural producers with a raw potency, a power to change reality without even “owning” anything. The power of every project maker is to command, assemble, and mobilize resources depends on his position in the network. For this reason, property issues are of secondary importance in projective polity. What matters is the access to opportunities, as mediated by the network. But as the access is limited, the network is a field of fierce competition and intensive struggles.

The Coopetition

If we compare business models in late capitalism with the structural tendencies of the projective city, it becomes quite clear that contemporary cultural producers resemble rather innovative IT service providers than intellectual property holders. They simultaneously participate in a collective production of common values, and need to capture a creative flow for individual benefit. The essential mechanism of the projective apparatus is a cooperative competition—a “coopetition.” Projects are successful only if they stimulate the extended cooperation of an engaged collective. The network operates based on intensive, multifaceted, and cooperative exchange. But the success of every project maker is accounted on an individual basis, which encourages fierce competition.

The basic principle of the project economy results from this paradox: though concepts are created collectively, eventually they have to be attributed to individuals. This is the way to guarantee individual motivation, create competitive advantages, reproduce hierarchies, secure the fluidity and continuation of the network, and enable new projects to emerge.

The ability to link seemingly contradictory strategies of cooperation and competition constitutes the backbone of any successful career in an art field dominated by the “new spirit of capitalism.” Cultural producers, willingly or not, have to capture, reformulate, and publicize “good ideas.” ¹⁵ They are generated and accessed through cooperative exchange and intensive communication—in which cultural producers need to partake. Additionally, they hone their personal skill sets by exercising on collective training grounds and participating in an extended social collaboration.

But despite their participation in a cooperative nexus, cultural producers are eventually obliged to build their own reputations. Being individually recognized (for abilities or “good ideas”) is the main way to move between consecutive projects and secure access to opportunities.

To illustrate this, it let me come back to Free/Slow University of Warsaw. F/SUW is not an exception to this coopetative economy. Every project of F/SUW is the result of extensive cooperation and an intensive flow of ideas. Simultaneously, though, everyone from our team follows individual careers and strives to secure personal stability. In the context of our individual professional tracks, we are assessed according to specific and differing sets of criteria. Something else counts for academics (quantifiable peer reviewed publishing), other factors matter for careers of curators or artists (less tangible, but not least important reputational gains). What links us all is that unless we want to cease to be cultural producers, we are assessed on an individual basis, whether we like it or not.

Authorial Attribution and “Being Seen on the Scene”

”The access to opportunities depends on one’s position in a reputational economy. Every cultural producer needs to be recognized and is ranked according to his own individual reputation. ¹⁶ A “good idea” has to be attributed to an individual, regardless of its collective origins. In this way, the cultural producer is able to secure future remuneration and professional progress. It is important to note that in order to establish reputations, ideas do not need to become anybody’s property—much less do they need to be copyrighted. The networked acknowledgment of an authorial link is much more important.

The process of authorial attribution is not a smooth operation. It is based on a structural inconsistency between demands for extended cooperation and individualized competition for access. Moreover it is underpinned by symbolic violence between (unrecognized) exploited and (celebrated) exploiters of symbolic production.

The network secures authorial attribution by linking it with the specific regime of visibility. As Gielen says, individual authorial rights are secured by “being ¹⁷ Only communicating openly and announcing ideas in public, in front of a peer group, secures recognition. In this way, ideas become more or less formally attached to their announcers, prompting and propelling their reputational advances.

The louder the announcement is, the more people hear it, and the greater the chances are that the act of attribution will be appreciated. Some project makers have fewer opportunities to properly announce their ideas. The ones who occupy central positions and are already recognized as authors are much more eligible to promote “their” “good ideas”; moreover, they cherish access to publishing channels that grant global recognition of their proliferation.

In this system, gatekeepers are able to extract their toll by regulating the flow of communication. Global institutions, publishers, or electronic communication providers guarantee the public staging of ideas, rubberstamping authorial assertions and personal reputations. For this reason, they are able to either charge directly for their services or exhort free contributions from project makers. As this model depends on a skillful capture of a commonly created value, it resembles strategies of Web 2.0 giants, but I will not dwell on this in detail, as it needs another study.

The gains are never distributed equally. They do not directly relate to the workload, but rather to a professional profile in the network, which is reciprocally based on access and visibility. This structural tendency of the projective city prompts the reoccurrence of the freeloader syndrome and of the “tragedy of the commons.” From the individual’s point of view, instead of being involved in the long process of a demanding collaboration, it is more essential to indulge in self-promotion and extensive self-attribution. Of course, such individualization of gains is possible as long as there is a cooperatively constituted resource to be exploited, directly depending on the constant and hidden labor of the multitudes.

The hanging on to the authorial figure results in an automatic feedback loop. If we think about the art scene, it is almost impossible to spot unattributed ideas, though every concept originates in primarily cooperative circumstances. To illustrate how fundamental and unavoidable this mechanism is, I refer again to the example of F/SUW’s publication. In response to attributive demands and customs, we coauthored our book. This, in my opinion, was done for good reasons: if we named ourselves as a collective entity and remained individually anonymous, none of us would receive any credit.

But, even more importantly, if, as a collective of editors and conveners we remained anonymous, the credits would have been distributed anyway. We simply would lose any remaining control over the process of attribution. The symbolic capital would be spread through informal channels, and would go to either a charismatic leader, to a “face” of the collective, or to those from our group who travel most extensively and cherish access to a larger network.

Cruel Economy of Attention

“Being seen on the scene” is perpetuated by the cruel economy of attention. It is a winner-takes-all economy, founded on an unequal distribution of links and visibility. ¹⁸ In the same moment as a tiny minority of globalized “joyful riders” flourish due their reputational gains, the vast majority of artists and cultural producers remain not only poor, but also invisible. According to Abbing, the level of poverty in the arts is astonishing—as much as 40 to 60 percent of artists live below the poverty line. ¹⁹ The projective city reinforces the causal link between poverty and a lack of recognition, which has traditionally haunted artistic careers. Currently, the projective apparatus utilizes the labor of “unsuccessful” (or simply unrecognized) cultural producers for the benefit of a few and for the sake of its own social reproduction.

Due to this cruel economy of attention, a majority of cultural producers find themselves below the radar, trapped in what Gregory Sholette calls “the dark matter of the art world,” which “includes […] all work made and circulated in the shadows of the formal art world, some of which might be said to emulate cultural dark matter by rejecting art world demands of visibility, and much of which has no choice but to be invisible.” ²⁰ Moreover, it is based on a “structural invisibility of most professionally trained artists whose very underdevelopment is essential to normal art. Without this obscure mass of ‘failed’ artists the small cadre of successful artists would find it difficult, if not impossible, to sustain the global art world as it appears today.” ²¹ Furthermore, as Sholette points out, “while astrophysicists are eager to know what dark matter is, the denizens of the art world largely ignore the unseen accretion of creativity they nevertheless remain dependent upon.” ²²
In my opinion, dark matter is a repository of dispersed labor of pollination, indispensable for the reproduction of a project-based art world. It holds the art world together by maintaining its social gravity, symbolic economy, and creative ecology. Still, it hovers below the threshold of authorial attribution and remuneration. Dark matter perpetuates the same economy that robs it of the fruits of its own creative toil.

Labor of Pollination and Labor of Love

Generally speaking, multifaceted, frenetic, and informal exchanges constitute the core of cultural activities or intellectual research. At F/SUW we team up, pool our knowledge, and create collective surplus value—for our existential satisfaction, research interests, and professional progress. What is essential is that we do not do it in the closed team, but in the more diffused networks. This labor of pollination exceeds what can be formalized and attributed to the group of identifiable individuals. The flow of inspirations that allows us to define the field of research and pose sensible questions never happen on the lonely island—be it in the mind of genius or in the collective of supremely talented creatives.

We need a variety of situated exchanges, links, contacts, relations, flows, chats, readings, seminars, summer camps— formal and informal, authored and anonymous. And yet when it comes to the moment of publishing, as I have already hinted in the introduction, the obvious challenge is to decide who is named and who is not. A text (and, much more rarely, an artwork) can have two, three, even five authors. There are always limits to the amount of individuals to whom any work can be attributed. Attribution loses its main social function when it ceases to distinguish between authors and others. Loose networks of cooperators and their labor of pollination are simply not accounted for. Those contributions are possibly individually less significant. But taken together, they constitute an enormous body of creative input, indispensable for the formulation of any sensible project or idea.

The situation is even more nuanced, as the majority of those exchanges are not stereotypically accounted for as “creative.” George Yúdice provides the following account of the role played by support personnel of large-scale art event: “staff members also make an enormous personal investments into the projects and the artists, including ferrying them to sites and suppliers, having long discussions with them into the wee hours, and investing the unmeasurable labor of love (of art) and the labor of producing process. This investment includes critical work that does not always surface in the exhibition materials like the catalogue and guide.” ²³

More often than not, as the reputational economy grows, enthusiastic engagement and under- or unpaid labor (especially the one of interns or assistants) is shamelessly exploited. In any case, no authorial credits are attributed to the support personnel. The complete disregard of the input of all the non-authorial contributions to creative processes has a long tradition in the art world, as convincingly presented by Howard S. Becker. ²⁴ But in the project-based production, like site-specific commissions, public art projects or any new artistic endeavors, support personnel do not only organize and support, but also participate in the creative exchange. They engage into all those “long discussions […] into the wee hours,” crucially impacting the artistic success of any project, which is rarely accounted for.

Moreover, the labor of love is not limited to the inside of any particular project. It is an anonymous work of “significant others” (often female) that keeps projects intact. They labor on the margins of a project, maintaining its context. They emotionally stabilize otherwise disruptive working patterns, and are the first ones with whom “good ideas” are exchanged, edited, and formulated.
To reiterate and summarize: the artistic economy recognizes neither the socially diffused and distributed labor of pollination, nor the labor of love. Resources flow only to those who are successful in their reputational attributions. The collective toil remains both invisible and unpaid.

What Is To Be Done?

The questions remains: how to recognize, evaluate, and reimburse the dispersed laborers of pollination and love?

My argument up to this this moment might seem rather pessimistic, continuing the general feeling of entrapment, compromised agency, and lack of possibilities. Yet I have not referenced Benjamin in vain. According to his argument from “The Author as Producer,” one needs to first position the author in relation to the products of his period in order to overcome them in later stages. For Benjamin, the author needs to abandon his own privileges and turn from “reproducer of the apparatus of production into an engineer who sees his task as the effort of adapting that apparatus to the aims of the proletarian revolution.” ²⁵ Such a revolutionary task would consist of the “socialization of the intellectual means of production,” the “organization of production process” by the “intellectual worker himself,” and of “transforming the function” of literature. ²⁶ The process of sublation, encompassing all those revolutionary transformations, needs to start with the thorough dissection of the apparatus and its position in relations of production, which, here, means an understanding of the apparatus of project making and a “new spirit of capitalism.”

It is important to position our current urgency in a historical perspective. Zygmunt Bauman compares our confused period with the beginnings of modernity. Following Reinhart Koselleck, Bauman calls our period a “threshold time” or a “saddle time.” ²⁷ That is, it is the epochal moment when humanity, after a long climb, begins to reach a mountain pass—here, it is already too late for us to turn back, but we still are not able to glimpse beyond the narrow line of the horizon. The threshold is the time of rapid change and profound confusion, or, to use Immanuel Wallerstein’s notion, of “systemic bifurcation.” ²⁸ It is the moment when old solutions are not able to contain new dynamics; institutions of the past are faced with problems of the future. We reiterate already tested solutions while facing different challenges. But we spot the glimpses of what might be in what already is, inventing responses on the move and testing them in action, without relying on existing manuals.

Taking this into consideration, my main question would be: could the labor of pollination and the labor of love be better accommodated in other apparatuses? Or, rather, how do we reinvent and revolutionize the current one?

I believe that the process of sublation is already deep in historical (re)shaping, consisting of a multiplicity of struggles. They constitute a “chain of equivalence” ²⁹ informed by the acceptance of basic principles, such as the promotion of expanded models of authorization, the appreciation of the structural role of invisible labor in the arts-based economies, and the equalization of gains for a multiplicity of cooperators. They all repose the postulates of justice, sustainability, and equality in relation to the specificities of coopetative economy.

This is not only a theoretical endeavor, as there are plenty individuals and collectives (F/SUW among them) that identify these problems, develop solutions, and test them in practice. ³⁰ They exercise forms of expanded authorship, balance the division of socially necessary labor, struggle for the recognition of invisible work—either of love or of pollination—and institute mechanisms of self-defense against exploitation. All of them utilize the structural inconsistencies of projective apparatuses, reframing coopetition for the benefit of the multitudes and not only for the gain of the few.

 

The article was first published in: Undoing property (ed. Marysia Lewandowska and Laurel Ptak), Berlin and Stockholm: Sternberg Press and Tensta Konsthalle 2013