Producta 50

PRODUCTA50
www.ypsite.net
CASMDOC2
PRODUCTA50
YPRODUCTIONS EDS.
Barcelona 2007
Centre d’Art Generalitat de Catalunya
CASMdoc2 Santa Mònica Ministery of Culture
and Media
Ferran Barenblit Joan Manuel Tresserras

Antonio Ortega Director Minister
Director of the collection
Montse Badia Lluís Noguera
YProductions Jacob Fabricius General Secretary
Editors Frederic Montornés
Curators Berta Sureda
Ester Martínez Entitat Autònoma
Production Antonio Ortega de Difusió Cultural
Activities
Alexandra Caporale
P 206 David Armengol
John Clegg Education
P. 046, 098
Mara Goldwyn Ester Martínez
P. 090, 126, 196 Production
Michael B Reynolds and
Alex Reynolds Cristina Güell
P 036, 158, 176, 256, 268 Economic management
Rosa Nogués
P 008, 020, 238, 242 Neus Purtí
Translations Comunication
Printing Súria, S.L Cristina Suau

Printing Coordination
Xxxxx
March 2007 Xavi Roca

First edition Assembly and
technical maintenance
B-14.283-2007
Legal diposit Jovita Ferrer
XXXXX-2006
Carles Ferry
ISBN 978-84-393-7419-0 Francesc Garcia
Xxxxx
Assistants and reception
David Garcia
Pere Jobal
Ricardo Lozano
Toni Ramon
Assemblers
Index
008 Introduction
YProductions
016 Producta50 GPS

YProductions
020 The Brand and the Past: Strategies of the Struggle for
Social Space in Postindustrial Barcelona
Mari Paz Balibrea
036 From Urban Planning to the Practice of Metropolitan

Production: Political Dilemmas Regarding the Production
of Urban Public Space
Jordi Bonet
046 The Makers of Culture in Discontinuous Employment

Antonella Corsani
062 Basic Instinct. Trauma and Retrenchment 2000-4

Anthony Davies
076 Markets, Antimarkets and the Economics of the Net

Manuel DeLanda
090 Creation, Intelligence, Collective, zemos98

Pedro Jiménez
098 The Function of Signs and Semiotics in Contemporary

Capitalism
Maurizio Lazzarato
112 The Doing and the Living of the Business of Barcelona:

Brandspace, Brandvalue and Brandpower
Celia Lury
126 Barcelona and the Paradox of the Baroque

Jorge Luis Marzo
136 Hotel Barcelona

Donald McNeill
148 The New Cultural Peasant? Ruskin’s ‘Political Economy

of Art’ Revisited
Mao Mollona
158 The Hidden Side of Consumption
Susana Narotzky
176 Wealth and the City

Emmanuel Rodríguez
196 In the Mood for Work

Can Representation Alter the Valorization of Work?
María Ruido+Jaron Rowan
206 Art and Economy: Value Creation in Cognitive Capitalism

Enzo Rullani
228 Lucha Libre and Mexican National Identity

Adela Santana
238 Creative Strategies for the Patrimonialisation of Identity /

The Nation Brand
Tristes Tópicos
242 Nation Brand/ México

Unique, diverse and beyond hospitality
Joaquin Barriendos
256 Nation Brand / Chile

All ways surprising
Cristián Gómez Moya
268 Sustaining Contact. Communicative Action in Home

Attention Services
Cristina Vega Solís
284 It Was the Market That Did It: (dilatory account - decisive
action - dissipative tendency)
Marina Vishmidt
294 Reality Check: Are We Living in an Immaterial World?

Steve Wright
008
YP’s Crisis
YProductions1
(we were never very

economical men)
Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of
individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with
the use of the material requisites of wellbeing.
Alfred Marshall (1920)
Welcome to Barcelona. Here nobody has to pay.

Alex Brahim (2006)
We cannot begin this introduction without previ-

ously warning the reader that all of it is going to
be tarnished by the somewhat somber mood
afflicting us as we write this. YP is going through
its first period of economic crisis. This depres-
sion, this feeling of vulnerability in the face of
the abstract laws that rule the economy, the feel-
ing of bitterness for not having done one’s home-
work correctly, all of this can be terribly weaken-
ing, especially for a group of gullible individuals,
who once thought it was a good idea to start a
cultural production company.
1. http://ypsite.net
YPRODUCTIONS 009
This situation can however be read in somewhat positive terms, as when

falling off the bicycle for the first time, or when being the victim of a well
known scam. It has made us stop temporarily, leave productivity aside and
reflect a bit on our situation. One of the first conclusions that we have
arrived at, and this without having had to think long or hard, is that we
were asking for it. The second conclusion, which has been a bit more dif-
ficult to get to, has to do with something which we hope will structure the
following volume: how does one position oneself within an economic con-
text when the accumulation of wealth is not one’s immediate objective? Is
it possible to claim a position in an economic game when one is conscious
that many of the decisions that one makes are not very rational and nei-
ther do they seem to be the wisest?
It is quite anecdotical that it is precisely us who, while still in the process of

licking our wounds after a few months of financial troubles, compile a vol-
ume that deals with the economics of culture. At a point in time when we
are still finding out how to calculate profit margins (surprisingly enough,
the little that we have been able to learn and calculate tells us that our prof-
its, when actually given, are very narrow), we have set out to analyse and
to try to further research an entity so abstract and so difficult to demarcate
such as are culture’s different economic devices. Because of all of the men-
tioned, right from the start, the reader must be warned that those in search
of a practical guide to cultural economics will not find it in this book. The
same goes for those looking for tricks to pay less taxes, or for help as to
becoming a millionaire with cultural projects. Anyone with similar worries
to the ones described will be disappointed. With this introduction we hope
to open up a field of speculation capable of incorporating a range of
themes considered ‘less economic’ if one strictly adheres to the neoclassi-
cal notion of economics. Themes, which to our opinion, are nevertheless
indispensable when one is interested in understanding the strange and
complex relationships between the cultural and the economic spheres.
What we aim to do with this volume, far from confining the study of the
economy to the departments of economics or statistics, is to point out that
if one hopes to start to understand part of that which is happening in the
contemporary cultural milieu and its relations with the economy, one needs
to approach the subject from different viewpoints and perspectives. To the
latter is due the variety of the profiles of this volume’s collaborators, com-
ing from philosophy, anthropology and sociology and also from social
movements and cultural studies. On these premises, the reader of these
010
pages will be able to note that in the whole book not one strict definition
of either culture or economy is given.
Those readers of this introduction who work daily within the cultural sphere
will not have been able to conceal their smiles when noticing the ease with
which the economic is associated with culture. Due to the high levels of pre-
cariousness that prevail in the cultural milieu, which in the following pages
will be analysed by a number of authors, we have to contend with a defini-
tion of the economic that is not necessarily associated with ‘money’.2 It is
sometimes difficult to understand the process whereby a sphere such as that
of cultural production, and more extensively, the cultural industries,
acclaimed by many as ‘the future of the economy’3, can operate and ground
its functioning on such irregular working conditions (which could be charac-
terised in much less diplomatic terms) and with such obvious lack of
resources. Given this situation, the question is: what are the reasons that impel
cultural producers to continue working when they are in fact conscious of
their real ceiling of economic growth (which can be reached with the stretch
of an arm)? Is the desire to work in cultural production a strong enough
impulse to keep cultural producers at work in spite of knowing that they
won’t be adequately remunerated for their work? Is Pierre Bourdieu right
when he states that cultural producers work with the expectation of accumu-
lating a symbolic capital, an investment which they hope to profit from in the
long run once the latter takes economic shape?4 Both possibilities deeply
question certain precepts of neoclassical economy. Among these, the idea
that every decision that is made within the economy pursues selfish objectives,
or that all decisions are made with the expectation of an economic reward.5
With the above, we don’t mean to say that the laws of the economy do not
apply to the sphere of cultural production, just that in many cases, these
2. Let us make clear that this is not due to the cultural agents being especially interested in living with no money. We are
interested in putting across a notion of economy closer to the one described by Schumpeter when he states that: ‘the
economic interpretation of history does not imply that we all act, conscious or unconsciously, totally or partially
following economic aims. I believe that a key element to this theory (…) has to do with the influence that all those non-
economics motives and how social reality causes an impact on the human psyche’. Schumpeter, 1983:35.
3. Amongst others see Florida 2002.
4. Pierre Bourdieu develops this idea in different essays within his bibliography. It is worth pointing out the one titled The
Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods, Pierre Bourdieu, 1993.
5. ‘The economic man is forced to choose. When confronted with a range of available goods and services, each with its
affixed price, he dispassionately considers the possibilities and carefully estimates the costs and respective levels of
satisfaction that he can obtain’ in Diana Strassman’s Not a Free Market: The Rhetoric of Disciplinary Authority in Economics,
in Ferber and Nelson, 1993.
YPRODUCTIONS 011
are superseded by the specific reality of the field, a reality much more com-
plex and with highly diffuse interests. With this book we want to help struc-
ture a notion of the economy for which the ultimate objective is not the
accumulation of money; an economy comprising different levels of inter-
action and impulsed by multiple interests and forms of value.6 It is not our
intention to make the case for a certain neo-hippyism, nor to praise a col-
lective of workers for daring to live with few resources. What we hope to
do is to put on record the paradox in the fact that, precisely the sphere
which for many represents the future of the economy, is so strongly impreg-
nated with informal working modes, high levels of precariousness and co-
dependence quotas that, to diversify the channels of reward, instance the
emergence of less ‘economic’ economies.
Some of the reasons that have shaped our position are grounded in our
having been able to empirically confirm that many of the individuals who
we work with or who we know, managing small cultural companies or in
the field of cultural production, do not hold as an ultimate objective to get
rich with their activity (!!!). The reasons that lead to this particular form of
understanding one’s work are various and it would probably be quite risky
to point out some of them without a previous more in-depth research.7
This impression, which we have been able to ascertain in conversations,
interviews and other forms of informal communication, seems to be a real-
ity that is forging the context, such as is described in the British cultural
newspaper Creative Week (June 2006):
Researchers have been surprised to find that those creative businesses with fewer
than 50 employees don’t put financial goals high on their list of priorities. Only
35 per cent of businesses have established financial goals for the future.
We are not surprised by this percentage. We are accustomed to speaking to

people who would think that to produce a cultural project without financial
losses is in itself already a real success. Making money with such a project
does not even enter one’s mind. If our state of mind was slightly more opti-
mistic, and our ideas slightly more utopic, we would dare to suggest that the
sphere of cultural production conforms a space which presents a challenge (if
involuntary) to the precepts of neoclassical economics, but this is not exactly
so. What is in fact revealed when financial accumulation is left out of the
6. For a deeper inquiry into the different dimensions of value one can find in the cultural sphere see Rowan, 2006.
7. At YP we plan to embark on such a project in short.
012
immediate objectives and suspended in the limbo of a future-to-come, when

completely different value systems are introduced in the economic sphere
(social recognition, visibility, the necessity of communication, vocation, etc.),
is that not all decisions that are made are of a rational nature, that they have
not all been fully meditated.8 If the economic man is a free subject who aims
at making the most correct decisions, which will yield the largest profits9, any
individual who, like us, starts a cultural production company, is making a mis-
take and contradicting the mentioned maxim, for profits are actually scant
and, as of today, we still sometimes wake up covered in sweat, unable to shake
off the thought that we should have studied engineering or journalism.10
On the other hand, we have been able to note that this attitude, this know-
ing that one’s work is not going to be sufficiently remunerated, has been cyn-
ically embraced by a number of companies operating in the field. These
have learnt to use a certain jargon, whereby words such as visibility, contacts,
curriculum, investment or opportunity, are treated as precious goods, which
the worker can one day have access to. The result of this is that what once
seemed like a circumstantial or momentaneous evil, has now become a
structural problem. The value chain that cultural producers have developed
to make up for the scarcity of money has been seized and used against them.
All of the above mentioned leads us to conjecture that within the cultural
field, a brain drain may be taking place, that is, that a large part of the
value of the work generated by cultural producers is materialised in spaces
foreign to the workers themselves. On the other hand, as will be discussed
in the following pages, we realise that the abstract and complex nature of
quantifying cultural work makes it extremely difficult to calculate precisely
the extent of this lost value. Along the coming pages, we will therefore hear
about ways to capture this process, such as, among others, the use of pos-
itive externalities or a reconceptualisation of cultural work.
All of these models should be at the same time confronted with the alterna-
tive valorisation chains that, as we mentioned before, have taken shape in
8. From a neoclassical perspective, it is obviously not rational.

9. This is one of the characteristics that defines not only neoclassical economics, but also marxist economics, as we can
note in the following quote by Folbre and Hartmann, ‘Within the neoclassical tradition, as well as within the marxist
one, economists (...) have taken for granted that personal interest is that which motivates the decisions of individuals
in the capitalist market’, in Carrasco (1999: 93).
10. In short, this nightmare will stop making sense when precariousness at work is extended to all fields of production
and labour.
YPRODUCTIONS 013
this context to make up for the lack of financial resources and to guarantee
the operative continuity of cultural production systems. The sudden multi-
plication of the value systems that will come to compete in the cultural
sphere is going to be one of the factors to indicate that the economy of cul-
ture exceeds and surpasses certain restrictive definitions of what can or
should be considered an economy. At the same time, whilst exceeding an
unitary logic and introducing so many different necessities in each choice, we
can notice what Parry and Bloch (1989) called different ‘exchange spheres’
taking shape, that is, parallel economic realities that operate with different
scales, currency or cycles within the same temporal space. This is the reason
why we speak of an involuntary challenge to the precepts of neoclassical
economy, since neither an intentionality nor a basic design exist aiming to
challenge the model. What we have is a space of exchange, which, due to
certain conditions (that at this point are very far from being contingent), has
been fragmented and laminated, and has at the same time generated impor-
tant inequalities in relation to the access to resources. These differences will
themselves be crossed by new axes which will increase certain modes of dis-
crimination, such as those based on gender, place or social origin.
The inequality of resources which one finds within the whole sector will lead
to a variation in the objectives of the different agents which populate the
field. It is not the same thing to have certain artistic aspirations and be the
son of a bourgeois family than to have a modest background and aspire to
make a living producing cultural works. Although demagogical and simplis-
tic, this example still reflects a reality of the field, which is that a large part of
the actors that inhabit it come from well-to-do families.11 In other words, in
many cases one can only afford to hold a precarious job during a long enough
lapse of time as to eventually ‘make it’ and enter culture’s professional league,
if one can count on a strong financial background. With this assertion we do
not mean to question the work that these individuals will eventually produce,
we just purport to point out that the fact that there is no support network of
a structural nature in the sector, will be to the detriment of those individuals
with the least resources or the least capacity to access them.
With this overview in mind and with our aspirations almost touching
ground, we set out to put together a cultural production company. The
decision was neither due to a wish to play ‘real’ business, nor to a will to
11. We hereby extend the invitation to start a rigorous investigation that can help us measure the real percentage of indi-
viduals working in the field who come from well-off families.
014
take control of our economic and employment future with such an ‘entre-
preneurial’ attitude. We had a much more simple intention in mind: in an
economic and social milieu so fragmented and destructured, we were try-
ing to generate an architecture of our own that could guarantee a certain
work continuity. It is in this sense that we were able to attest to the proxim-
ity of two ways of understanding the economy, which in paper seem worlds
apart: discourses around precariousness and those arguments that applaud
an ‘entrepreneurial’ attitude. It is only in the understanding of this prox-
imity that we can begin to reply to one of the questions that were formu-
lated at the start of this introduction, namely, how to position oneself with-
in an economic context when one is not especially interested in the
accumulation of wealth? It is our belief that this lack of interest in accu-
mulation is not due to a new form of generosity that has taken hold of cul-
tural producers, nor does it have anything to do with an unusual altruism
that affects all their decisions. This lack of interest is related to the adequa-
tion of the individuals’ objectives to the reality of the field.
We can now argue, only after understanding this complex state of affairs,
that the individual choice is a myth, since, as we have seen, in a sphere
where such high levels of precariousness prevail and which is crossed by
such different needs, to disengage from emotions, needs, cares and interests
to make economically efficient decisions, is anything but feasible. We
should also add to this the forms of governmentality inscribed in the poli-
tics that promote ‘entrepreneurship’ and that some wish to normalise as if
we were dealing with a sort of historical determinism.12 All of the above
combined offers us a much more complex and rich state of affairs to
analyse, with no room for pre-established judgements and in which identi-
ties are the symptoms of the efforts of a sector trying to appropriate a
space of political agency and economic development.
With this said, all we can do is invite you to read the following volume, hop-
ing that its reading will prove fruitful, and that with it we can start to think
about the different relations between economy and culture. At YP we
believe that to rethink the economy of culture is a good way of under-
standing cultural processes and of noticing the way in which hotels,
brands, faxes, sculptures, biennials, skaters, museums, cities, artists, air-
ports, cutlers and moneys come in contact and function in this field, about
12. See Barbrook, 2006.

YPRODUCTIONS 015
which a lot is still left to be said. On our part, we will continue researching
and trying to learn more things about numbers, sums and subtractions, to
figure out if this month we don’t have to deduct from our salaries, and we
can finally get paid.
YP, September 2006.
Bibliography
Barbrook, R. (2006). The Class of the New. OpenMute, London.

Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production. Polity Press, Cambrdige.
Carrasco, C. Ed. (1999). Mujeres y Economía. Icaria Editorial, Barcelona.
Ferber, M. y Nelson, J. Eds. (1993). Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and
Economics. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Florida, R. (2004). The Rise of the Creative Class. Basic Books, New York.
Parry, J & Bloch, M. (1989). Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge.
Rowan, J. (2006). From Scarcity to Excess, in http://ypsite.net/pdfs/scarcity-
toexcess.pdf
Schumpeter, J.A. (1983). Capitalismo, Socialismo y Democracia. Obris,
Barcelona.
Stiglitz, J. E. (2003). The Roaring Nineties. A New History of the World’s Most
Prosperous Decade. WW Norton & Company, New York.
016
Producta50 GPS
When editing and attempting to organize the following compilation we have

discovered that in certain cases the different core subjects we indicated in
our requests for the contributions that make up this book intersect, are
repeated, differ and are transformed, giving rise to prolific but complex
analysis and conceptions. These different thematic lines which, in our opin-
ion, are key elements in shaping a critical analysis of the economy of culture
are not however closed concepts, nor do they constitute univocal definitions.
In fact, throughout the book it becomes obvious that they are transformed
and recontextualized as they are addressed by the book’s authors.
We have divided these possible interpretive fields into eighteen concepts or

axis’s, which we have indicated at the beginning of each chapter. These are
ATTENTION, BARCELONA, BRANDING, CARE, CITIES, CON-
SUMPTION, CULTURAL POLICY, CULTURAL WORK, EXTER-
NALITIES, GENTRIFICATION, IDENTITY AND BRAND, INTAN-
GIBLES, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, KNOWLEDGE, MARKETS,
PRECARIOUSNESS, SEMIOTICS, and VALUE. We feel it would be
counterproductive to provide an a priori definition of what each of these
concepts conceals, as their subsequent development in the following chap-
ters will contribute towards generating a more rewarding, in depth reading.
On the one hand, we are aware that texts may appear in the compilation
that are contradictory or that challenge ideas expounded in others. This
reinforces our idea that one sole reading of what constitutes the economy
of culture must not and cannot exist and, as we indicate in the introduc-
tion to this book, any reductive notion of the economy achieves nothing
more than to throw its viability as an interpretive tool of this model into
crisis. We would likewise highlight the fact that any cultural analysis that
sets out to be somewhat more than a mere formal description of a series of
cultural elements or objects must take the economic reality that shapes and
defines these elements and objects into account. As will become obvious in
the book, the links between culture and the economy are numerous and
direct, in many cases both realities are in fact simply one.
017
Having said that, at YP we feel it is important to point out how these differ-
ent lines materialise in the book’s chapters, and we have outlined the cate-
gories we consider are worked in the list that preceeds each text. This edito-
rial decision is not intended to reduce the agency of the contributions, nor
to infer that they are the only aspects addressed in them, but we could not
let the opportunity pass to intervene and partially condition the book’s inter-
pretation. So now is the best moment, just before you begin reading, to tear
out the indexes that precede each chapter if you would rather not be obliged
to face our analysis of the texts (if you are a less impulsive person and The
Dead Poets’ Society left no mark on you, you could simply ignore them).
Concluding this brief guide to navigation, we leave you to do what you will
with the book, providing you do it with love and respect.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
The Brand and the Past:
Mari Paz Balibrea1
Strategies of the
Struggle for Social
Space in Postindustrial
Barcelona
Barcelona: the path to the brand

This article hopes to be a contribution to the cri-
tical debate around the social, cultural and politi-
cal implications of the processes that, in reference
to the progressive commodification regulating the
identification mechanisms of the city of Barce-
lona, have prompted it to be referred to as a regis-
tered trademark.2 I will focus specifically on how,
in those urban spaces that are to be transformed,
the dynamics in the social relations with the past
intervene both in the branding processes and in
the resistance to these.
1. Mari Paz Balibrea, author, researcher and currently director of the degree course in Spanish and Latin-American
cultural studies, Birkbeck College, University of London.
2. The most critical documents in this vein are two collective books, the title of the first is indeed Barcelona marca registrada
[Barcelona registered trademark] and that of the second La otra cara del <Forum de les Cultures, S.A.>[The other side of the
<Forum de les Cultures, S.A.>]. Both refer to the concept of trademark to synthesize the strategies for incorporating
the city into neoliberal globalization processes.
MARI PAZ BALIBREA 021
As it is well known, the brand is the identity with which a company presents
itself and participates in the market. This term, and the reality of our every-
day life which it represents, have a perhaps unexpected capacity to define our
historical moment. If we think about this in regard to what in anthropology,
psychology or sociology defines the complex processes that lead to the artic-
ulation of individual or collective identities, we will notice that these dynam-
ic processes are analogous to what in business jargon is related to the manu-
facture and maintenance of the logo. These processes identify one, and only
that one, commercial company, and defend its legal right to the difference
and the exclusivity that it purports to personify, the logo thus functioning as
a brand.3 In the context of postmodernity, one of whose defining character-
istics is the radical colonization by the market of all the social and individual
spaces, as Jameson explained years ago (1991: 36), branding defines a man-
ifestation of this colonization. That is, the process through which any reality
is made specific in the form of a fetishistic identity (a logo, in short) in order
to become a consumer object. In other words, the process through which this
reality enters a capitalist market in which it exists, occupies a place and pros-
pers as long as it abides by the rules of competition, supply and demand, etc.
And so we get to our subject. When we connect the term branding to a city,
in this case to Barcelona, we mean by it the processes through which a spe-
cific urban context, in all of its complexity, becomes liable to being under-
stood as part of a market, in which it has to compete and to sell in order
to survive, and in which its main goal is thus to become the object of desire
of the potential consumer. One immediate result of this is that all the ele-
ments that comprise the city (citizens, politics, economy, spaces) start them-
selves to be understood in functional and pragmatic terms, in relation to
the extent to which they serve these goals. Every city brand, or brand city,
needs a comparative advantage that will ensure a share of the market, as
David Harvey explains (1989). It must present unique attributes that no
other competitor can offer. In the case of a medium sized city with the
characteristics of Barcelona the market where today competition is most
3. See Celia Lury’s article in this volume. Her book Brands: The logos of the global economy, which embarks on a sociological
and media theory analysis to decipher the functioning of brands, is very useful for understanding the complexity and
dynamism of this ‘mode of capital accumulation’ (15). As Lury explains (16), the brand comprises multiple, sometimes
divergent, levels of activity, which make up a system or network of conditions in constant flux. The versatility and effica
cy of this ‘artifact’ within the global economy is such that the brand has surpassed its original field of action in the
administration of the relations between services and products, to penetrate the management of people, sites, nonprofit
organisations, universities or political parties (16), which are in this way transformed into -reduced to- products. The
case of Barcelona is an example of these processes, as I will explain hereafter.
022
successful is that of tourism. The competitive elements here derive from

the city’s capacity to present and construct as the best ones those charac-
teristics of the city that are geared towards the production of pleasure and
entertainment for the leisure of the consumer (the tourist). But tourism is
not the only market. There is also one of geopolitics and an economic mar-
ket in which the social actors of Barcelona have sought to intervene. These
are markets in whereich the competition revolves around who has the best
attributes to hold the headquarters of international agencies or of multi-
national firms with a global vocation. Furthermore, the three mentioned
markets are not exclusive of each other, they feed back on each other and
out of the success of one of them, impulse for the others arises.4
How have we arrived at this situation? On what grounds has the current
Barcelona brand been built? What about its ‘comparative advantage’, the
distinct and desirable identity that the product Barcelona offers compared
to other cities? I would say that the origin of all this lies in the creation of
the ‘Barcelona Model’5, which defines what could be called an urban
regeneration strategy in reference to the profound changes, of a socioeco-
nomic as well as a urbanistic nature, that have taken place in the city from
the mid-70s onwards. This is a strategy that has been vastly endorsed in
both national and international circles by urbanists, architects, geogra-
phers, sociologists, local politicians and experts in cultural politics. To be
more specific, it is the urbanistic decisions made in regard to design and
architecture, considered of high formal and aesthetic quality, as well as the
political decisions that endorse these and the impact that all of it has in the
citizens and the city’s economy, that is considered a model worthy of praise
and imitation. According to some, all of this has made of Barcelona a
model city, or more specifically, a model for the regeneration of a specific
urban space, which, being historically defined by the logic of an exhaust-
ed industrial structure, has been able to reinvent itself more beautiful,
more economically successful and more socially just.
The relation between both concepts, the model and the brand Barcelona,
is a result of the notion embraced by different social agents that significant
4. I have discussed this subject in my article Descubrir mediterráneos: La resignificación del mar en la Barcelona postindustrial, in
which I use the sea, and the mediterraneity of Barcelona as the axis of analysis of this branding processes, and very
specifically, for the analysis of its historicity, that is, of how the signification processes of the city change historically.
5. The bibliography that defines and reflects on the Barcelona Model is at present very large indeed. See my articles
Barcelona: del modelo a la marca and Urbanism, culture and the post-industrial city: Challenging the ‘Barcelona Model’, where I
take a closer look at the critical implications of the concept, and cite the relevant bibliography
qualitative changes have taken place in the nature of the processes of

urban redevelopment regeneration which I have referred to previously, as
well as in the political and economic reasons that explain these. If the con-
cept of model is laudatory, that of brand is critical. The latter signifies the
commercialization, ossification and neutralization of the most productive
and positive aspects of the urban design changes that have taken place in
the city since the seventies. The most radically sceptic critics go as far as
denying the existence of a degenerative process altogether, declaring that
the model is nothing more than the kind front of the brand, that a model
was never genuinely conceived. They affirm that there was only a cynical
process whose only goal was always the brandization of the city. It is
argued that the configuration of the ‘model city’ and the socio-economic
tertiarization of the city, something which has turned tourism into one of
the main industries of Barcelona, have contributed to the conversion of the
city into a theme park, whereby it has been embellished at the price of
becoming aseptic and of expelling all of its contradictions and undesirable
vistas for the new citizen/consumer/tourist. During the last ten years an
increasing number of social movements6, historians, geographers, archi-
tects, urbanists7 and cultural centres8 have called attention, through writ-
ings of cultural critique and with social actions, to the growing transforma-
tion of the city into a showcase, within which the whole city poses, a
consumer and a tourist of itself, before the eyes of co-citizens and strangers
alike. The main target of critique is the culture of consensus and the liqui-
dation of dissent, and within this context, the spatial eradication of a his-
tory, and a present, of urban conflicts. From a more prosaic perspective,
the institutions are accused of having built a model city for those who can
afford to enjoy it. Massive speculation with land and housing has been gen-
erated, in a first instance by the industrial land reassessment processes since
the seventies, and in a second instance, by the international revalorization
of Barcelona as a model city. This has made the processes of gentrification
and privatization of public spaces into two of the most urgent political
problems of the city, issues which tarnish the dominant image of the idyl-
lic city. The current new Barcelona has been built on the ruins of the mas-
sive devastation of the social space of production and reproduction of
industrial Barcelona, this is mostly factories and working class housing. The
bulldozers are now having a go at some of the once insalubrious and unde-
6. Such as the Forum Ribera del Besós or the FAVB –Federació de Associacions de Veins–.
7. Such as Jordi Borja, Joan Roca, Josep Lluis Montaner, Manuel Delgado or Eduard Bru.
8. Such as MACBA, Fundació Tapies or CCCB
024
sirable working class and marginal neighbourhoods (Poble Nou,

Barceloneta, Raval, Santa Caterina, Besós). They demolish the old and
build the new at prices unpayable for most of the residents of the neigh-
bourhoods and their descendants.
If we take into account that the grand urban redesigns of the city from
which the Barcelona model and brand emerge, have brought on a very sig-
nificant physical demolition in terms of the quantity of constructed space,
as well as the revaluation, restoration and refunctionalization of spaces
hitherto considered obsolete, we will understand that the interpretation of
the past of a building –its history– and of its viability in the present can
offer an explanation as well as a strategic critique of the branding of
Barcelona and also, of the emergence of critical movements against its
hegemony. One of the recurring critiques against the demands of the
brand as the developing structure for Barcelona is precisely that it destroys
the plurality and richness of memories that the city was capable of gener-
ating before the grand postindustrial urban redevelopments and before its
meanings were hegemonically resignified. On the other hand, this hege-
monic resignification privileges a reading of Barcelona’s history, in which
modernism reigns over all other memories of the city, including other ver-
sions of modernity.
Obsolescence or memory? Discussion of two paradigms
The preferred paradigm to study the subject of the relationship between

the present and the past in general, and in reference to the transformations
of the urban space more specifically, is always that of memory, with its
symmetrical antagonist, oblivion. I call it a paradigm because its invocation
imposes a very specific model of conceptualization. The biggest political
potential of the memory paradigm, especially when we try to articulate
and give meaning to a concept as slippery as that of collective memory, is
the relationship that it establishes between the past and the present, the
acknowledgment that memory is always a projection backwards from the
conditions of possibility of the present, a now. From here stem the
demands to unearth silenced memories, the claims for the right to preserve
and retrieve symbolic spaces that are considered memory sites. But the
political demands for rights based on memory find their limit at the source
of their potential. Those critical of these demands like to accuse the ones
who claim them of holding on too tightly to the past, and they are not too
far from calling them reactionary conservationists for wanting to preserve
too much and for leaving no space for an urban transformation that looks
on to the present and the future. On the other hand, critics remind their
counterparts of the hermeneutic limitations of their paradigm: insofar as
memory is a human capacity, the memory paradigm is subject to subjec-
tivity and to the limits of biology. In as much as access to the past is only
possible through interpretation, memory statements are never completely
free of relativism. But, if according to the latter, all memories are worth the
same, there is no other choice than to accept that it is impossible to pre-
serve all the sites that invoke all the memories. And to accept this is to
accept that the necessity to obviate and to eradicate sites, even if it is
admitted that they are sites of memory, is justified. However, in this way,
the paradigm within which the original demand is structured, is neu-
tralised. Therefore, the political vulnerability of the memory paradigm as
regards the social space depends on how much its particular (insofar as ini-
tially defined from a psychological perspective) hold on the past weighs it
down. On the other hand, a concept that preserves and respects within its
definition the axis of the past –that is, that incorporates the recognition of
the time accumulated in the social space–, but emphasising the present
time –and with this, giving priority in the analysis to the way in which the
past is actualised, the way it makes itself present–, would represent a dif-
ferent axis for political analysis, an axis that I find to be more productive,
especially in terms of studying the different forms of resistance to the
transformations of the urban space. What I want to propose is that it is
precisely this that the concept of obsolescence contributes. As will be
shown, obsolescence implies and invokes memory, sometimes explicitly
and others implicitly, but, as opposed to the memory paradigm, its politi-
cal emphasis is always anchored in the present.
Given the historicity of every city, the whole of urban space is past and his-
tory, the whole of it is its memory, even if its character, inherited from a
complex past, is not constantly manifested in the everyday uses, as this
026
would be unendurable and unsustainable. It is in this sense that the urban

space is the zero level of memory, since the whole of the space that makes
up the city is susceptible of having and constituting memory: the popular
neighbourhood, as well as the monument to a national hero or the most
valued architectural jewel of the national heritage catalogues. Nevertheless,
the conditions of survival of all and every one of the historical urban ele-
ments depend on these being considered productive and useful for the
urban present. And here is where obsolescence comes in. The already men-
tioned gentrification and resignification processes of the constructed space
–understood in all of its political, social, economic, urbanistic and symbol-
ic complexity– always stem from the dominant, or at least an influential
enough definition and categorization of a constructed site as obsolete. It is
around this category of obsolescence that, –to refute it, accept it or qualify
it– change is initiated and where some of the most complex and frequent
struggles for the urban space are generated, when there is no social consen-
sus for its transformation to take place.
But let us define our concepts a bit more precisely. Obsolescence, as it is

understood here, implies a relation of rejection, from the present towards
an element coming from the past and which is thereby reduced to some-
thing antiquated and useless, that is to say, something without any possible
relation to the present, without a possible or recommendable use in the
present. Its elimination is therefore desirable, together with its substitution
by some other new thing that is considered useful. Applied to the con-
structed social space, obsolescence is the worst antagonist of memory,
worst even than oblivion. The latter is after all not as harmful for memory
in the constructed space if we keep in mind that, being the city, all of it,
history, in as much as its residents do not know or do not remember its
manifestations, its historical meanings will fall prey to oblivion. But this is
a dynamic oblivion, at least insofar as its spatial and physical supports sub-
sist, since these can at any moment help reinstate memory.9
9. Let me choose a random example to illustrate my point: the sculpture of La República (1934) by Josep Viladomat i
Massanas, which is in Barcelona’s Plaza LLucmajor since the times of the Transition. Having in mind the historical oblivion
which has characterised Spain, the country’s relationship to its Segunda República (Second Republic) since the arrival of
democracy, it is not exactly risky to suggest that most of the people walking on the plaza (which is better defined as the
crossroads of two big traffic arteries) don’t pay much attention to the sculpture of the naked woman. Among those who
do look at it, most probably only some know that it is an allegory of the republic, and even less of them are able to make
the memoristic connection to the last republican period of the Spanish state. And finally, a very small amount, if there
are indeed any left, will find the sculpture as a site of this memory symbolically important. Even if this is the case,
nothing prevents that within another historical configuration, helped by the presence of the sculpture, the plaza comes
to be an important site for the defense of memory.
Given that obsolescence eliminates almost for sure the possibility of the
survival of the capacity for memory of a specific constructed site once the
site disappears, it is paradoxical that it is at the same time compatible with
the knowledge of the past and with memory, even needing these to exist,
just like in any binary relationship one pole needs its opposite in order to
be. The fact is that the past of a constructed site should be identified prior
to deciding that it is no longer useful. When something old is substituted
for something new, a process that begins with the functional abandonment
of a building or space, continuing with the announcement of its demoli-
tion, or later, with its complete wipe-out or with the confirmation that a
specific built site has been resignified, the memoristic nature of the endan-
gered space is, precisely at the moment of denying it, emphasised. Insofar
as obsolescence denies the past constructed object any present value (and
therefore any value at all), at the same time the capacity of memory of the
constructed space is negated, as a productive agent in the present. Giving
in to obsolescence takes away the rights to memory, it breaks that fine line
that connects the past of a site to its present, casting its history to the outer
darkness of an exhausted past. This explains why some of the struggles for
these sites are formulated around a vindicated collective memory which, so
runs the argument, is being discriminated against. In Barcelona for exam-
ple, the discourse that campaigns for the survival of the memory of the
urban spaces in danger of disappearing (especially the modernist ones) was
a strategy of resistance during the 1960s against the openly speculative
land politics of the prosperous years of late Francoist desarrollismo (econom-
ic ‘developmentalism’). These were politics that destroyed constructed
urban space with no other criteria than the financial gain of the develop-
er, something that on the other hand was done in an undisguised manner.
Nowadays, the discourse that champions endangered memories functions
as resistance to a transformation of the city that is interpreted to be obedi-
ent to the interests that seek a commodification of the city. And here is pre-
cisely where memory, obsolescence and the branding of the city converge.
In a wider sense, every struggle for social space that is generated against the
cataloguing of an urban space as obsolete is, whether it is explicitly so or
not, a specific form of struggle for a citizen memory, in as much as it advo-
cates the validity of a space that has come to be considered meaningful only
in relation to its outdated past and which, because of this, is not worthy of
survival. But to think of this struggle as one against obsolescence demands
that in order to win the game, we demonstrate that the constructed space is
beneficial and relevant in the present, right now, and it is only by preserv-
028
ing it that its capacity for memory, whether it is explicitly claimed or not,
will be preserved. This is its first political value. The second is that its criti-
cal position depends necessarily on a questioning of the framework that
permits the consideration of a space as erasable, that is to question who has
decided, how, and in whose interests. In Barcelona today these struggles
revolve around a more or less radical critique of the brand Barcelona.
Nowhere is it shown as clearly as in the field of social space exactly what is
at stake in the struggles around collective memory. It is not only the symbol-
ic hegemony over the meaning and value of the past, it is also the right to
decide the conditions of possibility of the present. In other words, to con-
demn the devastation of certain spaces, or to defend the preservation of
what is left, of the existing space in the city’s palimpsest, can always be
spelled out in terms of a social demand for a fair justice or for the rights of
the citizens. This is the case for example with the urban squatters’ move-
ments, whose political intervention and radicality lies precisely in defying a
process of obsolescence already in place, by inhabiting a space that has been
abandoned, and so infringing on numerous occasions the sacrosanct laws of
private property. These actions question the idea that the squatted space is
a space without use in the present. The possibility of the constructed space’s
own memory connection is thereby restored. Nevertheless, what this form
of activism especially conveys is a condemnation of the privileges that those
in power grant to real-estate interests as a tool of the ‘glocal’ economy in
detriment of the citizens’ needs and rights to decent housing.
We should add that a good number of the squatted spaces end up in dem-
olition, not only to continue with whatever real-estate interests that are
being pursued, but also to do away with the possibility of the future organ-
isation of a similar resistance to these goals. Once the building disappears,
so does also the problematic of obsolescence. However, the demolition can
also act as catalyst for the emergence of new forms of struggle and social
activism that plead for the urban social memory. For example, neighbours’
associations in places like La Barceloneta or Santa Caterina, in Ciutat Vella,
where working and lower class neighbourhoods, as well as commercial and
fishing districts were always to be found alongside the monumental
medieval town, have gotten together after the demolition has already taken
place. This is the case of the Forat de la Vergonya, whose goal is to avoid the
prevalence of real-estate interests over the social needs of the neighbour-

hood. These collectives have occupied an empty space, a hole, and have
aimed at resignifying it and preventing its stipulated reconstruction. In these
social movements, in which no memory is explicitly called upon to articu-
late their political demands, specific ideas about the right to space and to the
city are nevertheless actualised, together with the struggle for those rights, a
struggle with clear precedents in the local industrial past. In the booming
and revolutionary Barcelona of the first third of the 20th Century, as Oyón
(2005) and Ealham (2005) have shown, a significant part of the radical poli-
tization of its working class was directly related to the precariousness of the
living conditions within the space. This included the place of work, the liv-
ing space and the consumer space. Just to give an example, the CNT
(Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, National Workers’ Union, an anarchist
organization) organised in 1922 and again in 1930 tenants’ strikes which
consisted in refusing to pay the sky-high prices of the rents at the time. We
could call these the forebears of the struggles for the right to the space as a
right to the city. They describe an urban history of Barcelona quite differ-
ent from the hegemonic version. This other history is activated and contin-
ues in the present thanks to the aforementioned actions.
Another fundamental difference between memory and obsolescence is that

while the former is not always formulated as confronted to the branding of
the city, the second is indeed so articulated. For a city that is being designed
for an external market (tourism and beyond), it is indispensable to create
or manipulate local popular myths, to frame its history in order for it to be
cast in a more appealing light. To create ‘the experience’ of all of this, it is
necessary to signify the constructed space strategically and selectively. The
tertiarization of the city in Barcelona, together with the protagonism of
the urbanism and architecture that have materialised it, have strongly cap-
italised the patrimonialization of specific constructed sites. This has taken
the commodification of the city’s history to unprecedented limits.
In general terms, the built sites of the medieval past (authentically or falsely
gothic) as well as those of the modernist one, have been favoured. The most
notorious examples are well known. The democratic governments and pri-
vate capital have taken great pains to favour the restoration of the great
030
modernist monumental heritage, with Gaudí on the front line. This has been
justified by turning this patrimony into the central pillar of the comparative
advantage of Barcelona’s cultural offer. The contemporary emphasis on and
protagonism of the modernist heritage help reconstruct and privilege today
the material culture and a history of the city which belong and give voice to
a great industrial and modernising bourgeoisie that had the good taste to
finance the most avant-garde manifestations of the architecture of its time.
The modern and avant-garde character of the Catalan modernist architec-
ture is nowadays very intelligently woven at a discursive and architectonic
level into a line of continuity with the contemporary urban transformations
of the Barcelona model. The result is integrated into a Barcelona brand that
offers an image of quality in the constructed space, an image of coherence,
uniqueness and difference, as should be the case with any brand that aims to
be competitive. At the same time, other aspects of the history of Barcelona
have languished due to the scarcity of spaces of urban memory. It is worth
mentioning here its industrial past from the working class perspective, whose
patrimony has not received nearly the same institutional or private support,
except for when, by sheer coincidence, it was of modernist style.
From the perspective of the memory paradigm, the problematic here would
consist in denouncing a selective politics that gives voice to the memory of
some while silencing that of others. And the solution? To give voice to all,
covering in this way the blind spots and mitigating the harmful elements of
the processes of urban transformation and resignification? The demands of
collective groups such as Salvem Can Ricart, that for some time have been
politically active in calling for the preservation of the urban area of the
same name, can be interpreted in this reformist vein. Can Ricart is under
threat of demolition, if not total, at least a partial one, and, as a clear sam-
ple of the industrial heritage of Barcelona, Salvem Can Ricart hopes to pre-
vent its destruction. For this they argue for reasons of historic justice in the
retrieval of the constructed trail of the productive classes, which have not
been justly valued in the Barcelona model. Other reasons have to do with
the artistic quality and preservation of a model of productivity in Poblenou
in accordance with the most progressive policies of 22@.10
I am calling this line of critical social intervention and organisation repre-

sented by Salvem Can Ricart reformist because I am thinking about it in
10. See www.salvemcanricart.org. Latest access, 08/06/06.

terms of a qualitative change in the hegemonic relationship with the built

patrimony. As an example, let’s just mention that during the sixties, which
I referred to previously, in discussions of urban planning it was a radical
position to consider the architectonic value of a modernist building, as it
was the total opposite of the voracious speculative aims of the constructors
of a growing Barcelona, that did not yet consider the possibility of selling
itself as a brand in the market of cities with a cultural patrimony. However,
nowadays, within the context of having to sell the Barcelona Brand as a
cultural tourism destination for both nationals and foreigners, and as the
perfect site for the headquarters of clean/tertiary industries, or to say it less
cynically, in the context of a growing awareness of the positive value of
preserving the architectural heritage, it is possible to fight for the preserva-
tion of a space endangered by obsolescence by appealing to the same logic
of the dominant discourse. Those spaces that could be argued are useful
for the historic construction needed, have good expectations (although no
guarantees) of being saved from obsolescence. There are already a good
number of cases in Barcelona where the industrial patrimony has been
preserved, factories have been reconverted for public use, or preserved for
private capital.
In order to accept that the defense of the working class memory is perfect-
ly assimilable, together with the non-obsolescence of its spaces, one just has
to consider that the industrial patrimony, recently institutionalised in indus-
trial archaeology and heritage studies, is part of the pack that comprises the
comparative advantage and the differentiated identity that European city-
brands are using to compete amongst themselves. On an ideological level,
all the memory accumulated in the industrial patrimony is easily neutralised
when considered part of a history of the celebration of modernity, which is,
after all, the dominant interpretation of the history of Barcelona. After all,
the bourgeoisie, the great heroine of the narrative told by the modernist
heritage, only makes sense if thought of as the antagonist of the working
class. Both shared certain spaces, and in this regard, buildings such as
Fundació Tàpies’ or CaixaForum’s for example, which were designed as work
spaces –a print shop and a factory respectively–, could be legitimately
appropriated for a working class history and memory. Barcelona being gov-
erned by a social democrat town hall, which takes pride in its progressive
disposition and which counts its social and economic successes at both local
and international levels in terms of a quality reconstructruction of its
spaces, it could be argued that the demands above described have something
to offer the city, beyond a resistance to its model. It offers a new territory of
032
acquisition of that qualitative difference of which the city-brand is so much

in need in order to remain profitable. In discussions around the city’s patri-
mony, the proposals to refunctionalize and monumentalize fit quite well in
a city that from the Transition onwards has been characterised by its aes-
thetisation, and which has very intelligently capitalised on a cultural indus-
try, well packed into the Barcelona Model that is exported on an urbanistic,
touristic, architectural and political level. The more buildings that are pre-
served, the more quality architecture there is and the more quality of life
there is to find in the city. It also affects the particularity of the citizen’s expe-
rience, where everything is up for sale in the production of a spectacular city
for the tourist or the possible investor, and also for the citizen.
And nevertheless, Can Ricart, the emblem of the invention of modernity in

Barcelona according to the collective that defends it, and the only 19th
Century industrial site that can be preserved in its totality, continues without
a clear guarantee of a consistent preservation.11 From the point of view of
the politics of memory, the indecision of the Town Hall to secure its preser-
vation is a contradiction. Real estate pressure offers us the most coherent and
powerful argument from the point of view of obsolescence: in an area of
such new centrality as Poble Nou or 22@, an office building is much more
profitable. Insofar as that which is already built does not offer the same pos-
sibilities of profitability it does not serve any purpose, it is obsolete. In the
case of Can Ricart, the strength of the arguments being put forward lets us
pose some of the fundamental questions around the Barcelona Brand, from
the point of view of a reflection about the obsolescence of constructed space.
With these I would like to finish this article. As I have said before, the politi-
cal significance of the social struggles against obsolescence lies in the fact that
their critical position necessarily depends on a questioning of the parameters
that allow one space to be considered erasable, of who has decided this so,
how, and following what interests. If Can Ricart ends up being demolished,
even in part, the discursive and ideological framework that sustains the
Barcelona Model as well as the most well-intentioned versions of the Brand,
will have been refuted, and so they will be looked upon with more scepticism.
What will be shown in the process is not that the city functions under the late
capitalist economic logic, that was already taken into account and assumed
in the Barcelona Model. The fact that the capacity to generate social justice
11. At the time of writing this article in June, 2006, preservation of Can Ricart is not guaranteed. Quite to the contrary,
the precariousness of its status was made more evident than ever when it fell pray to a fire, apparently provoked,
on the 4th of April, 2006.
and welfare is at odds with this logic of late capitalist economy is what will
surface as new evidence from this situation, plus the failure in this particular
although hardly insignificant case, of the social democrat dream of joining
and conciliating both poles, capitalist development in a global economy
without so acting to the detriment of social development and rights.
Therefore, is the Barcelona Brand a deformation of the praised and prized
Barcelona Model, which can be corrected and made better (and here lies the
function of critique) but which is fundamentally viable and positive? Or, on
the contrary, is it a formulation which, stemming from a set of capitalist
premises which turn the city into a space of perpetually unjust relations, is
fundamentally harmful and in need of being reformulated at its root?
Bibliograpy
Balibrea, Mari Paz. (2005). ‘Barcelona: Del Modelo a la Marca.’

Carrillo, Jesús and Ignacio Estella Noriega (eds) Desacuerdos 3. Sobre Arte,
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Universidad Internacional de Andalucia. pp. 263-267. Available on line
at http://www.desacuerdos.org/
(2004). ‘Descubrir Mediterráneos: La resignificación del mar en la
Barcelona post-Industrial.’ Enguita, Nuria (ed). Tour-ismos. La derrota de la
disensión. Barcelona: Fundació Tàpies. pp. 35-48.
(2001) ‘Urbanism, culture and the post-industrial city: Challenging the
‘Barcelona Model’’. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 2:2: 187-210.
Delgado, Manuel, et.al. , (2004) .La otra cara del <Fòrum de les Cultures
S.A.>. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra
Ealham, Chris. (2005). Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona 1898-1937.
London: Routledge/Cañada Blanch Studies on Contemporary Spain
Harvey, David. (1989). The Urban Experience. Oxford: Blackwell.
Jameson, Fredric. (1991). Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Lury, Celia. (2004).Brands: The logos of the global economy. London:
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Oyón, José Luis. (2005) ‘The Structures of the Everyday City. Space
and Urban Practices in Popular Barcelona, 1914-1936.’ Lecture given at
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Unió Temporal d’ Escribes [UTE]. (2005). Barcelona Marca Registrada.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
From Urban Planning
Jordi Bonet i Martí1
to the Practice
of Metropolitan
Production: Political
Dilemmas Regarding
the Production of
Urban Public Space
During the past two decades, Barcelona has gone from being a city marked by its indus-
trial past and lacerated by Franco’s intensive development policies to becoming a post-
Fordist metropolis struggling to connect with the flow of global networks which the new
information economy consists of (Castells, 1996).
In order to provide itself with the necessary infras-

tructure for the development of this transforma-
tion, the municipal administration, in alliance with
local capital, has used the celebration of two large
scale international events: the Olympic Games of
1. Jordi Bonet is a writer and researcher for the UAB, he is also an assistant teacher of the History of Psychology at the
UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya).
JORDI BONET I MARTÍ 037
1992 and the Forum of Cultures in 2004, under whose aegis the road system
was completely remodelled from the routes of the ring roads; the design of
a new sea front (from the Olympic Village to the Forum) as a new centre for
development; the urban transformation of the ‘Ciutat Vella’2 as well as pro-
jecting the city internationally, with the objective of turning it into an attrac-
tion for touristic and financial capital flows. Nevertheless, it is important to
note that while the exploitation of large-scale events as generators of consen-
sus and social legitimacy worked during the Olympics (1986-1992), this
failed in the case of the Forum of Cultures (Bonet, 2004). The hypothesis
behind this article is that this failure should not be blamed on flawed social
engineering but on the widening gap between the creative flows that pervade
the metropolis and the logic behind urban planning that aims to striate them.
While the municipal administration is still licking the wounds of its failure,
Barcelona remains adrift. The model of agreement between public and
private which years before had appeared to represent the city’s collective
intelligence still fails to establish a consistent sense of direction. This inca-
pacity to lead and project the city’s model has been attributed to exogenous
factors, more specifically to the Popular Party’s3 second legislature, during
which it chose to prioritize investment in its electoral feuds of Valencia and
Madrid, as well as its lack of agreement with the Generalitat4, whose essen-
tialist concept of what a nation is collided with the metropolitan model.
Nevertheless, once the three administrations coincided in their political
inclinations, and in fact belonged to the same party, it seemed that the insti-
tutional obstacles to the re-launching of the city should disappear. Yet we
are assisting to an intensification of the city’s identity crisis with no view to
a solution. This situation leads us to look for the root of the problem else-
where: Where are metropolitan dynamics generated?... In the consultan-
cies and agencies of the municipality? Or do they result from the tension
present between models for urban planning and the synergies (both posi-
tive and negative) which make up the urban fabric?
Despite its apparent simplicity, this is not a trivial matter, as it makes us

question what constitutes a ‘real’ metropolitan model. Plenty has been
written, both congratulatory and critical, and a lot more has been debat-
ed, about the so-called Barcelona model. The majority of approaches,
2. Old town center

3. National conservative party. Editor´s note.
4. Catalan Government, Editor’s note.
038
however, tend to reduce it to institutional rhetoric, either public or private,

without tackling a materialist analysis of what we could call ‘the real
model’5, compared with ideal models. Proposing the existence of a ‘real
model’ is not exempt from methodological and epistemological difficulties.
It is not a matter of drawing the line between infrastructure and super-
structure, which would deny the discourse’s performative effects, but of
taking into account the complex character of any metropolitan transfor-
mation this needs to take into consideration the continuous and complex
interaction between multiple social, political, economic and linguistic fac-
tors, whose dynamic and processual formation which both the urban plan-
ning boards and the assemblies where the conflict is debated, tend to hide,
and the objectifying pretension of any socio-rationalizing view.
The ‘city put into practice’ (Delgado, 2005) exists beyond the logic of urban
planning. It is a smooth space of fluxes made up of collisions of fragments
whose complexity escapes any attempt to turn it into a ‘model’ of any sort
precisely because it constructs itself by undoing the model. Urban territories
function as machines of transubjective production, semiotic-material dispo-
sitions for the singularization of desire which in turn are segmented, com-
muted, and cut off by capitalist semiotization devices (Guattari, 2006).
This intrinsic complexity of what makes up ‘the urban’, accelerated by the

interconnection of migratory flows and the changes endured by urban
lifestyles, was perceived as a threat to be regulated through the implemen-
tation of sanctions6 in the recently approved ‘Ordinance of measures to
promote and guarantee co-existence amongst citizens’7, better known as
the ‘civic ordinance’. Yet it is precisely the heterogeneity and hybridizing
capacity of the urban territory which constitutes one of Barcelona’s main
immaterial assets.
While current strategic plans aim towards a positioning of the city as a capi-
tal of fairs and congresses (Alimentaria, Barcelona Meeting Point, 3GSM...),
5. The ‘real’, in this case refers to the underlying register which undoes all pretension of modelling the space, and to
destabilising the complacent and self-satisfied metropolitan identity in its speculative reflection. To speak of
‘real/model’ constitutes an oxymoron, and we use it only as far as it allows as to reinsert the dynamic of conflict
against the systems of urban planning.
6. For more information on the civic ordinance consult the blog: http://elcarreresdetothom.blogspot.com created by the
‘Associació de Victimes del Civisme’ one of the platforms of opposition to the new ordinance. In addition, the infor-
mation can be compared with the civic section of Barcelona city council’s website. http://www.bcn.es/civisme
7. The text can be accesed at the following address: http://w3.bcn.es/fixters/ajuntament/ordenansacivismecast.189.pdf
a logistic hub (with the Delta Plan and the extension of the port and the air-
port) or a quality tourist centre (UTE, 2004), they ignore, or even worse,
crush, the mixture of creative flows which have made Barcelona a pole of
attraction for the global creative class, and which constitute, in this sense, one
of the main activators for globalization within the city. The threat doesn’t
reside in the heterogeneity of the urban ways of life, but in short-sighted
urban planning subject to the short-term interests of real estate capital and
tourist operators which divide the creative flows and run the risk of turning
public space into a great theme park, inverting in this way the capacity for
attraction which the territory could still exercise.
We are facing the alternative possibility of turning the city into a subsidiary
metropolis for the ‘new global managerial class’, which would lead to pre-
carious employment due to the necessary increase in auxiliary and tempo-
rary work (hotel and restaurant business, maintenance...) which is neces-
sary for the transformation of the territory into an attraction for
companies in the advanced tertiary sector (Sassen, 1999) and the destruc-
tion of the urban territory due to the proliferation of urban banalization
(Sorkin,2004); or to facilitate and study in greater depth an alternative way
of globalization taking the revitalisation of the creative flows present in the
territory as a starting point.
An example of this tension between different models is found in the puni-

tive action against graffitis. While Barcelona has become one of the world’s
capitals for graffities, recognized thanks also to the publication of books
sponsored by the municipal council, the new civic ordinance illegalizes de
facto the practice of urban graffiti with the excuse that it makes public space
ugly. Similar examples could be found in the prohibition of skateboarding
or of the creative occupation of the streets carried out by critically engaged
citizens, praised by the mayor in international Forums but banned de facto
by the new ordinance.
The Can Ricart case deserves to be mentioned as a special case.8 It is an

industrial quarter located in the Poble Nou neighbourhood, now empty
due to the implementation of the Plan22@, the aim of which is to gener-
ate a district of high-tech activities in the area (UTE, 2004). If there has
been a centre in Barcelona that deserves to be called an incubator of cre-
8. For more information consult http://www.salvemcanricart.org and http://www.forumriberabesos.net or the article

by Mari Paz Balibrea in this same volume.
040
ativity, it is Can Ricart, a place which activates/hosts the synergies gener-

ated from the mixture of uses of the space (art workshops, cultural centres
for videoart, industry and craft) combined with a well-kept industrial her-
itage (Martí, 2006). However, once again the municipal council has proved
to be short-sighted, getting rid of one of the city’s creative hubs, and ignor-
ing the plan of activities developed collectively by members of the commu-
nity (neighbourhood assemblies, groups of affected citizens, urban plan-
ners, architects...) and presented for discussion.
The alternative offered by the council is the confinement of these creative

practices, turning them into an attraction for big commercial surfaces or
mummifying them in certain cultural centres, leading to their de-activa-
tion, as well as devaluing their capacity to act as metropolitan/global
attractions and hybridizers. Only three months after the approval of the
new ordinance, the Urban Cult Festival (16th March-15th April 2006) in
the La Maquinista mall was celebrated, including a graffiti contest and
skateboard exhibitions. The singular potential of graffiti and the so called
urban sports (skating, skateboarding...) which act through their molecular
proliferation as reappropriation and generation processes of the existential,
expressive and affective territories, are captured in this way, serialized, cut
from their micro political value and redirected towards the dominant
modes of semiotization (Guattari, 2004). We can find a similar operation,
in terms of mummification, in the Desacuerdos exhibition presented in the
MACBA9 between March and May 200510 where social movements’ visu-
al and theoretical production was separated from its potential for critique
and transgression, and turned into cultural consumer goods.
The cultural collective centres in Barcelona work as black holes of metro-

politan creativity; flow controls that block and capture processes of collec-
tive singularization. Would it be possible to propose a different use for met-
ropolitan cultural centres, new articulations of compositions between the
molecular and the molar that allow the proliferation and interconnection
of subjective singularization processes? Possibly yes, but for this we would
need to rethink the concept of participation from a ‘radical’ perspective, in
the sense of going to the root of it, a subject we will tackle later on.
9. Barcelona’s contemporary art museum.

10. For a critique of the MACBA’s activities consult the blog of ctrl+y, a group that deals with precarious employment in
cultural spaces: http://blog.sinominio.net/blog/ctrl-iando/
We have resorted to the civic ordinance for its capacity to exemplify the
inherent tensions between the different city models. The civic ordinance
constitutes the opposite of the plural and educational city evoked in the
naïve discourse promoted at the Forum of Cultures, and is a direct conse-
quence of its failure. Its effects in the context of Barcelona’s potential for
creative innovation go much further than the simple desire for the regula-
tion of public space. Its design and implementation respond clearly to the
coalition of interests between real estate, touristic and commercial capital,
which manage the new design of the city; the so-called business urbanism.
These need to privatize public space in order to stop it operating as a meet-
ing place and to turn it into a space for circulation between acts of con-
sumption.
This operation not only constitutes a criminalizing and stigmatizing device

of vulnerable collectives; it also affects the artistic and political creation of
processes that develop in the metropolitan space directly. Despite the grow-
ing preponderance of cyberspace as a territory for the generation of a new
public sphere, threatened, however, by the proprietary monopolies and the
defenders of intellectual property, the creative flows still need physical
interaction within public space; a public sphere which is not only a receiv-
er but is also a driver of the flows which shelter metropolitan creativity.
The compact, dense and heterogeneous city still constitutes one of the main
catalysts for the development of collective intelligence and the singulariza-
tion of creative processes. In the post-Fordist city, the territory doesn’t act
only as a container, but becomes itself a productive factor, joining physical,
infrastructural-communicational and symbolic elements. The active devel-
opment of the metropolitan immaterial production reserves (Rodriguez,
2004) needs the hybridization between the physical and virtual space in a
way that these may allow transversal communication in the face of the
multiplication of points of enunciation.
This need for a greater interconnection clashes, however, with the interests
of speculative capital whose parasitic function requires the channelling and
closing down of communication flows. This tension was made apparent
during the CMT’s (Telecommunication Market Commission) closing down
of the project ‘Barcelona sense fils’ (Barcelona without wires), sponsored by
the Barcelona city council, and whose aim was to offer free WiFi connec-
tions (restricted, however, to a limited number of institutional websites).
The reasons given by the Commission for the closure were that the project
042
entailed unfair competition against the private operators and urged the
town council to become a self-financed operator without using public
money.11 What could have been a good practice on part of the town coun-
cil, with the aim of developing an effective opportunity to overcome the
digital gap, came to nothing after the CMT’s verdict. The timid reopening
of the project in December 2005 and the indifference shown by the coun-
cil has left the implementation of the project at a standstill.
On the other hand, when on the 7th of April of 2006 professionals from
the culture field together with critically engaged citizens decided to occu-
py the Arnau Theatre12, an abandoned theatre in the town centre, the
town council didn’t hesitate to send the municipal riot police to evict them,
without previous judicial notification. Once again, the threat made itself
known, without taking into account the opportunity represented by a self-
managed temporary use of this facility by artists, acrobats, hackers and
media activists. As an alternative, municipal representatives informed the
occupants that the neighbouring ex-club Scenic would be transferred by
public tender to the SGAE13 to carry out cultural activities. Once again the
tactic of confinement, with the added mockery that the administrative
body would be one of the staunchest enemies of free culture, against the
demonstrations of the city’s radical creativity.
In order to rethink cultural public policies it is necessary to recognize the

social protagonism of these creative practices and assume its dimension of
conflict and dissent. The participation in the design and implementation of
public policies has been granted only to the formal actors who are full right
citizens, and from an acquiescent position regarding all the strategic proj-
ects. Only a ‘participation by invitation’ model destined to problem solving
following an aim-based approach, while participation by irruption, like the
one that took place in the Arnau theatre, is denied and repressed; oppor-
tunities to intensify communication flows are lost, like the Barcelona Without
Wires project, or how the growing heterogeneity given by the migratory
flows is transmuted in the shop-window culture of the Forum area, while
the lives of the people who have decided to disobey and break the bound-
aries is subject to police harassment.
11. Consult the notification of the closure at: http://www.puntbarra.com/node/2280 , and regarding the present area
of the network at www.bcn.es/sensfils/
12. For more information regarding the Espais Alliberats de la Cultura see: http://culturalliure.blogspot.com
13. Society for Authors and Editors, a controversial organ wich manages I.P. for record labels an musicians, Eds. note
We need a change in our approach to the concept of participation, since it

cannot be reduced to legitimation and collaboration within the existent
alignment. Currently, Barcelona, like the rest of the informational metrop-
olis, is composed by a network of flows generated and fed by the different
capture areas of immaterial production, which creatively exploit the com-
munication infrastructures (transport and communication networks) to
connect and reconnect the territory to the global informational networks
(Blondeau, 2004). The partner-based dynamics of public-private participa-
tion in the design and planning of public policies in the metropolitan area
of Barcelona have tended to undermine the presence of these creative
areas, not valuing their growing strategic interest.
To incorporate this metropolitan creative intelligence in the design of pos-

sible future Barcelonas, we need to rethink participation in a radical way,
avoiding the Habermasian temptation of a magic wand with which we can
reconcile different conflicting interests. There is no global prescription for
the tensions generated in the heart of the process of globalization and
problems must be approached in their diversity without forgetting their
interdependence on the different intervening scales (local, metropolitan
and global). The creation of culture must not be classified as a tourist
attraction if we want the city to be more than a theme park.
In order to develop this change in the design and implementation of urban

public policies, participative processes cannot be used as an alibi to legitimate
the operations developed to satisfy the interests of certain social-economic
players, but to commit to a model of real governance which recognises the
social protagonism of all the different players, made invisible by the politics
and the formal economy which constitute the city’s productive social fabric:
a model that doesn’t avoid conflict for the sake of consensual solutions, but
which favours the social creativity that arises from the power of dissent and
which generates an inclusive, dynamic, and creative public space.
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colectiva. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños.
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Traficantes de sueños.
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of Can Ricart in Barcelona’ manifesto made public during the 16th
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Rodríguez, E. (2003) El gobierno imposible. Trabajo y fronteras en las metrópolis de
la abundancia. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
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University Press.
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Editorial
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
The Makers of Culture
Antonella Corsani1
in Discontinuous
Employment
The labour of the artist seems to be losing its spe-

cificity. The communication, invention and pro-
duction of new cultural goods is at the heart of
the contemporary capitalist process of valorisa-
tion. The new nature of work within the process
of production requires a capacity of invention
and autonomous cooperation, and demands a
flexible labour market. According to the sociolo-
gist Philippe Zarifian the concept of flexibility is
insufficient to understand contemporary transfor-
mations, he proposes instead taking up the term
‘modulation’ from Gilles Deleuze2: modulation of
time, space, activity, remuneration, but above all,
and most fundamentally, modulation of subjec-
tive engagement itself, both object of control and
source of liberty. Faced with the crisis of discipli-
1. Antonella Corsani is Profesor of Economics at the Université de Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, member of the editorial
committee of the journal Multitudes.
2. ‘Enclosures are moulds, distinct mouldings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming moulding which con-
tinually changes, from one instant to another, or like a sieve of which the mesh changes from one point to another’
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Post-Scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle’ Pourparlers 1972-1990, Les Editions de Minuit,1990 p. 242
ANTONELLA CORSANI 047
nary societies and their institutions, we are heading, according to Zarifian,

towards a society of control by modulation.
In the society of control by modulation it is necessary to ‘periodically bal-

ance the accounts’ of results attained and not just labour employed, which
implies an effort of self-discipline in the society’s subjective engagement.
This also implies a modification of the notion of labour time, because this
is defined according to two modalities: the allotted time or deadline, that is
the date at which the result must be attained (like the date of a theatrical
representation), and the time or duration of the project’s realisation, which
is a discontinuous time of experimentation, research and creation (as in the
time for the realisation of a theatrical piece). If these transformations are
analysed as the source of new oppressions, Zarifian insists on one point:
It would be false to reduce the principle of modulation to a simple form of con-

trol. Because at the same time it represents a concretisation of an aspiration to
liberty, to the breaking of physical, affective and intellectual enclosures. Today
it is through modulation that individualities aspire to take power over the con-
duct of their own lives, over the diversification of their experience and of their
commitments.3
If ‘allotted time’ is still a ‘spatialised’ time, a ‘displayed’ time which is basi-

cally the same as the time of the taylorist factory, the time of ‘duration’
which Zarafian defines, following Deleuze, as time of ‘becoming’ is a time
which ‘exercises a permanent push towards the future […]. Characteristic
of becoming-time is the mobilisation of memory (of experience), the con-
frontation with the event, the disjunctive synthesis which concretises in the
micro-choices and micro-initiatives which the worker takes at every instant
to guide his action; finally the orientation towards the future under the
form of reflected anticipation of the emergence made possible by the ini-
tiative […] The conduct of action is not only a matter of reasoning, it is
woven with affects. In becoming-time affect and reason merge.’4
The passage from disciplinary societies to control societies, from spatialised

time to becoming time, is certainly a source of new suffering in the work-
place, of new existential risks and forms of subjection, but it also opens
new possibilities of emancipation and liberty.
3. Ph. Zarifian A quoi sert le travail? La Dispute, 2003

4. ibid.
048
If in industrial capitalism subjectivity was supposed to be left behind in the

locker room of the (taylorist) factory, in contemporary capitalism it must
come in, it must be put to work.
The passage from spatialised to becoming time is implied in the passage

from an economy where invention/innovation was the exception, to an
economy where it is the rule. Invention is not only incapable of being
brought into the time/space norms of the factory, it introduces at the same
time a discontinuity and a radical uncertainty which is no longer the uncer-
tainty of the market, but the uncertainty of creative activity itself.
The discontinuity of employment does not only express the strategy of

flexible labour in response the uncertainty of the market, it is more about
the irreducibility of the heterogeneity of time to a single measure.
The metamorphosis of the wage relation, of which flexibility appears as

the key term, does not simply express the need for a better management of
costs by a new organisation of work, it is the necessary means to stimulate,
capture and control the mobility and inventiveness of workers.
This stimulation of subjectivity is the most characteristic aspect of what Luc

Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call ‘the new spirit of capitalism’ which has par-
tially incorporated the ‘artistic critique’. The artistic critique, which was
largely developed in the 1960’s, ‘subordinates the need for authenticity to the
need for liberation –the manifestation of beings in their authenticity is taken
as difficult to realise if they have not broken out of constraints, limitations,
even the mutilations which are imposed on them by, most notably, capitalist
accumulation.’5 If in the aftermath of May ‘68 whole expanses of the pop-
ulation were able to withdraw from ‘discipline’, if the values of creativity, lib-
erty and authenticity were democratised to the point of no longer constitut-
ing the figure of exception represented by the artist, the question which
poses itself today is, in Boltanski and Chiapello’s words: ‘won’t it be neces-
sary to start over again on another basis, that is, to ask if the forms of capi-
talism which have developed over the last thirty years by incorporating whole
expanses of the artistic critique, and by subordinating it to the creation of
profit, have not emptied the need for liberation and authenticity of that
which gives it flesh and anchored it in the ordinary experience of people?’6
5. L. Boltanski, E. Chiapello Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Gallimard, 1999

6. ibid.
In the French experience, reflection about the relation between art and
capitalism, between work and culture, has been nourished since 2003 by
the debates around the social question of the ‘intermittents du spectacle’.7
It is this question which is addressed in this article. The relation between

artistic/cultural production and work will be assessed from the point of
view of an enquiry co-led by the intermittents and a team of researchers, and
focussing on employment and working practices of artists and technicians
in the sector of the performing arts and recorded media.8
Employees like any other
A discontinuity is not an interruption, even less a stoppage, it is a continuation,

the pursuit of an unforeseeable mode […] In breaking continuity, a discontinu-
ity introduces liberty into the unfolding of a phenomena Denis Guedj.
In France artists and technicians working in the media represent a figure of

exception, as much from the point of view of their labour rights as their social
rights. As opposed to those in the majority of European countries, and to
those working in the ‘plastic’ arts, they do not have the statutes of independ-
ent, freelance workers, but of ‘employees of discontinuous employment’.
In article L.954 of the Labour Code we find reference to the abnormal fig-
ure known as l’intermittent du spectacle: an employee who ‘depends upon the
sector of activity of the media [spectacle], of audiovisual and cinemato-
graphic production, for whom it is useful to not have to resort to a perma-
nent contract by reason of the nature of the activity exercised and of the
temporary character of these employments’. It is thus a matter of ‘an
employee engaged in a temporary manner and who depends upon the pro-
fession of cinematic, audio visual or media production’ (article L.351-12 of
the Labour Code). The recognition by labour law of the discontinuous
nature of the activity undertaken and of the temporary nature of employ-
ment is the foundation of ‘l’intermittence’. The intermittent is an employee ‘not
7. TN : as it constitutes a specific, and specifically French, social and legal category I have left this phrase, and its abbre-
viation intermittent, un-translated. A literal translation would be ‘temporary media/cultural professionals’, but it is the
special status in French law described below which defines the category, and this makes it virtually impossible to translate
into other contexts.
8. The results of the enquiry can be found on the site of the Coordination des Intermittents et Précaires: http://www.cip-idf.org/
050
like any other’, the discontinuity of employment often combines with a

multiplicity of employers, but also by a notable variation in pay, depending
on the employer and the project.
Since the 1960’s this ‘exception’ of the labour code was associated with
another exception in the area of civil rights: ‘intermittent’ employees ben-
efited from a specific system of unemployment insurance. It can be found
in annexes 8 and 10 of the general system of unemployment insurance,
concerning the sectors of recorded media and performing arts.9 Until the
reform of 2003 these specific criteria allowed for a relatively easy access to
unemployment benefits (the condition being 507 hours worked per year
without need for continuity) and to assure, throughout each year, the con-
tinuity of social benefits and income in the event of an unexpected break
in employment.
At the crossing point of labour law and of the French system of social pro-
tection there thus existed a zone of exception where the ‘hyper-flexibility’
of employment combined with a certain ‘security’ for the employee, pro-
viding some wider fringes of liberty and a certain voluntary mobility. This
was the specific system of unemployment indemnification for the intermit-
tents du spectacle until the reform of 2003.
Annexes 8 and 10 of the unemployment-insurance were born of the neces-

sity to secure a social protection against the risk of unemployment in the
project based organisation of work which appeared in the cinema industry
in the 1930’s, and was then extended to the audiovisual and performing
arts sectors in the 1960’s.
Intermittent employment is based on the possibility of mobilising a work
force uniquely for the period of the realisation of a project, a work force
capable of using its abilities in a cooperative process which differs every
time. This work force must have the capacity to adapt to variation in the
composition of teams, employers, conditions of work, remuneration, and
period of realisation.
Conceived at the start as a specific social protection for the workers of the
cinema, whose employment was determined by the organisation of work
by project (relatively exceptional at the time), the regime of l’intermittence
9. The reform of 2003 modified the criteria of affiliation to annexes 8 and 10, separating the artists (annex 10) from the
technicians (annex 8).
extended its field to cover what one would today call ‘project-carriers’. In
other terms, if the first and essential function of annexes 8 and 10 was to
protect those employees for whom employment was structured by a discon-
tinuity imposed by their employers –the model at work in e.g. the culture
industry– they equally integrate, notably since the exponential develop-
ment of performing arts companies, all employees who need to assure the
durability of their artistic projects, across the hazards and discontinuities of
their employment.
In the 1980’s new practices emerged, new methods of production and self-
production. This is the period which saw a strong rise in the number of
intermittents, and the emergence of an interstitial space of production and
diffusion, between the commercial logic of the culture industry and insti-
tutional public policy.
A new economy arose on the basis of the multiplication of small and medi-
um sized productions and companies, whose viability depended on the
possibility for employees to produce and work in shifting between hetero-
geneous domains (culture industry, self-production, local politics, and pub-
lic cultural policy).
A territorial and urban economy of culture was born alongside the culture
industry and the public sector, at the point of convergence of two phenom-
ena: the politics of the city and the massive inflow of young generations
into the cultural professions.
As regional metropoles invest in the cultural field, using it to reinforce the

image of the city, construct and consolidate their appeal, a new force of
artistic and technical work extends itself to new proportions. This work-
force has been mobilised foremost in the organisation of local festivals and
other socio-cultural events. It has contributed to the territorial weaving of
a multiplicity of activities in core urban spaces (occupation of abandoned
areas, development of street arts and urban interventions). This diffuse cre-
ativity has given birth to micro-basins of artistic work, rooted in the city
and the territory, and from which the cities can draw resources for their
cultural policy.
The system of unemployment benefits has played a very important role in

the constitution of this workforce, in the implantation of basins of local
artistic work, and the provision of the (indirect) financing of cultural policy.
052
It was thus in a heterogeneous context that intermittence developed, a con-

text very far from that of the cinematic and audiovisual industry and the
big cultural institutions of the 60’s and 70’s
Certain ‘emerging’ sectors in the 70’s an 80’s such as street theatre or the
new circus, have only been able to develop, in the absence of public fund-
ing, on the basis of the kind of self-financing that unemployment benefits
gave to the intermittents engaged in the research and development of new
artistic practices. It is only at a later point that these will be recognised at
the institutional level and, to this degree, financed by public money. We are
here confronted with a very significant example of productive investment
not being supplied by traditional public actors (the state and regional
authorities) but by a system of social right.
We’re not playing anymore
As a result of the discontinuity of employment and the continuity of social

rights, notably the right to an income, the accounts of UNEDIC –the pri-
vate organisation which manages the public unemployment insurance
funds– show a structural imbalance: the surplus of pay-outs over the con-
tributions of intermittents has reached 900% because the mass of employees
from which the contributions are drawn is necessarily frail, notwithstand-
ing the important number of non-compensated contributors and the rising
employer contributions.
In the 1960’s the number of these ‘exceptional’ employees had little effect
on French employment as a whole, and thus on the coffers of UNEDIC.
Since the 80’s their number has rapidly increased, a growth which has
been sustained ever since. Between 1991 and 2001 the number of intermit-
tents doubled, from 75,000 to 150,000.10 During the same period the num-
ber of intermittents receiving compensation per year went from 40,000 to
110,000.11
This growth is mainly due to the qualitative and quantitative development

of cultural and artistic activity sketched out above, and it is in line with the
more general social and economic transformations which cut across west-
10. Figures from the Caisse des Congés Spectacle

11. UNEDIC figures
ern economies. The relative space taken up by service activities (training,

study and research, health, leisure) has not ceased to augment as access to
them has been increasingly democratised, and cultural and artistic activi-
ties have not been an exception to this process. Today, cultural activities,
removed from the logic of ‘exception’, do not constitute a ‘beyond’ of the
economy, but rather a sector at the heart of new dynamics of capitalist
accumulation. In terms of employment (permanent and intermittent)
these activities now make up as much as the automobile industry.
The deficit of the UNEDIC, determined by the growth in the number of

claimants, was the argument which justified the reform brought in 2003.
The cry ‘we’re not playing anymore’ rang out from Avignon and resound-
ed across France, even across its frontiers. During strikes we read, we dis-
cuss, we analyse, we listen, we confront each other. The detailed wording
of the reform was analysed by those who it ‘concerns’ and its aberrations
were denounced. The Coordination Nationale des Intermittents et Précaires
(CNIP), a political organisation which emerged from the movement, has
not ceased to criticize the inequality of treatment and injustice induced by
the reform, as well as the costs it creates at the price of the exclusion and
precarisation of many; just as it has denounced the inadequacy of the
reform to the practices of employment and work with which the intermit-
tents have experimented.
The practices of employment and work are at the heart of the enquiry
project carried out with and for the intermittents, and it allowed us to grasp
the mutation of activity which had initially been seen as a problem of ‘too
many’ intermittents and companies.
The socio-economic enquiry revealed a number of situations, paths, forms

of production and modes of existence in l’intermittence.
One statement by an interviewee managed to express very succinctly a

conclusion we drew from the enquiry as whole: ‘In a general sense, there
are only particular cases: there are loads of different jobs, even under the
same name; there are many different ways of working from one milieu to
another, there is no common rule’.
A diminishing number pursue a single job, work in a single sector, or in a

unique economic model. Many depend on different statutes (employer and
054
employee), work both in fragile under-funded sectors and for the big media
industry, play simultaneously the part of artist and technician.
A multiplicity and porosity which preclude any reduction to the singular

figure of the intermittent of cultural production.
Even more, the enquiry revealed to us to what extent all binary representa-
tion becomes inconsistent and ineffective. In particular: employment/unem-
ployment, employee/employer.
Displacement of the binary oppositions: employment/unem-

ployment, employee/employer.
For intermittents, the question currently stamped on their claimant card:

‘have you worked in the last month?’ should be replaced by ‘did you have any
employment?’ or ‘did you have a contract?’ Because I work all the time, and
every now and then I am employed.
There is no time to be unemployed. When I’m at home I have my hands on an

instrument, my eyes fixed on a computer and my ears hooked to the phone.
It is very difficult to quantify the proportion of unemployment because when one

is not on a particular project one remains effectively available for future projects,
or simply present, to sustain contacts, meet other project teams, cultivate oneself,
maintain materials, research new materials, etc… Also the part of unemploy-
ment always remains fragmented as long as my estimation is of a month, it is
a matter of days spread out across the year between different projects which
serve also as time for recuperation and the development of future projects (its
worth pointing out that in periods of creation time is always lacking and that
the time of work is thus very dense).
To all that which is visible, the tip of the iceberg, that which we give as a rep-
resentation, is added all the invisible, submerged part, which is often more
important than the former. It is within this that there is the time of conception,
preparation and documentation… and they are for the most part unpaid or par-
tially paid. How can we judge the work of an artist to determine that which is
relative to his own needs and that which is really necessary for the realisation
of his work? It seems to me that the one and the other are indivisible, in the
same way that a researcher in medicine, physics or literature is not paid per dis-
covery, but for the duration of the research.
It could be said that I work also outside of situations of production. The idea
of work can equally apply to all sorts of occupations which, without being
directly productive, contribute nonetheless to the process of production.
At the point when I began to work as an actress the system of intermittence had
been going for 20 years. It was indivisibly linked, right from the start, to the
way I view the theatre as a profession, as an entirely distinct practice - with-
out any need to go find a job in other sectors – in constant movement, nourished
from so many moments of production, and moments of experimentation not
subordinated to any given product (which will go one to enrich moments of pro-
duction). In sum, ‘free’ and ‘invisible’ work go without saying. I have been able
to pursue personal research, develop contacts, whether that be in the form of
courses, apprenticeships, notably on the side of ‘bodily’ practice, or in pursuing
university studies linked to my practice. All these activities seem to me not only
necessary, but inherent to the profession.
Statements collected during the enquiry
The organisation of work into projects implies discontinuity, flexibility,

subjective engagement, the capacity to take decisions and initiative,
autonomy and versatility. This specific organisation of work gives rise to
another phenomena: the free appropriation, by the culture industry, of
both work time and of the abilities, knowledge, experimental activities
and training of the intermittents. This appropriation manifests itself in two
ways: the appropriation of unremunerated work hours spent on a project
and which exceed the time of declared employment; the capitalisation of
the necessary time taken to create abilities and knowledge which the inter-
mittents cultivate and maintain themselves, prior to their engagement in a
project.
A portion of the enquiry realised for and with the intermittents was con-
cerned with what one could call ‘budget time’. It began to analyse the time
of ‘unemployment’ between one job and another: the time spent around a
project or employment but not remunerated, the time consecrated to free
or voluntary projects.
056
On average the hours worked outside of employment are estimated as 923

hours per year per intermittent. For the entire population of intermittents this
unemployed work-time represents 130 percent of the number of declared
hours.
But there is more time to be added: the time of looking for a job, the time
spent elaborating new projects, the time of writing, the time putting
together proposals, the time spent looking for financing, the time given to
associative activities, the time for training and self-development, etc.; all
activities hard to quantify and integrate in a contract with a single and
unique employer.
Thus the time of work finds no other measure than the limits defined by
the time of rest. It is for this reason that so many responded to the ques-
tion ‘how much time do you consider you have worked in the year?’ by cal-
culating negatively on the basis of leisure time. More than 80 percent of
intermittents said they have worked at least ten months. For one intermittent in
five, a month of rest is a rare luxury.
The value of a cultural product is not the exclusive result of the time
employed, namely the activity exercised under contract. It involves a plu-
rality of temporalities: time spent in training and being trained; time con-
secrated to the reproduction of the conditions of social, biological, intel-
lectual and artistic life; to research; to voluntary projects; necessary time
given to rest. A plurality of time irreducible to the time of employment.
Employment, conceptually and in real practice, does not cover the full
nature of work. Activity exceeds employment to a large extent.
These practices of work engage multiple activities and temporalities which

make up a major mutation of the sector, a mutation marked by the devel-
opment of microstructures working in the interstices between the media
industry and big cultural institutions, between the commodity logic of the
culture industry and institutional public policy. But they also constitute a
mutation both of professions (the qualitative development of versatility)
and of artistic forms of production.
At the heart of these mutations a hybrid figure is formed: that of the

employee-employer. Here the employee is employed by his own structure,
the intermittent incorporates at the same time the function of employee and
employer, all the while maintaining formally the juridical statute of a

salaried-worker. More often than not the figure combines classical forms of
salaried employment with that of freelanced self-employment.
One intermittent in three sees themselves as an employee/employer. But it is

a figure which is mostly present in the artistic professions. The emergence
of this hybrid figure partly results from the techniques of work but also
from an institutional void which allows them to blossom. There is an insti-
tutional void as much in the statutes of business as in the social protection
of persons engaged in activities whose possibilities of existence depend on
the regularity of financial aid and grants. It is no longer the case, as it was
in the traditional media sector, of an organisation of work by project; these
hybrid figures are ‘project-carriers’. At the fluid frontiers between employ-
ment and independence, these intermittents situate themselves in the ‘grey
zones’ of Alain Supiot: between ‘informal’ juridical autonomy and
dependence vis-à-vis program co-ordinators and financers.
Intermittence can thus be thought of as a ‘frontier zone’ between employ-
ment and unemployment, as a hybrid form of salaried employment and
freelancing. It displaces the binary oppositions which opposed employed
time, as productive time, to unemployed time as inactive time; which
equally oppose autonomy and subordination, employee and employer. We
need to take up the challenge which intermittence constitutes: to rethink
social rights and revenue beyond employment (and unemployment).
To guarantee the continuity of income
What are the necessary conditions for the creation of a work of art? […] it is
necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you
are to write fiction or poetry. […] I think that you may object that in all this
I have made too much of the importance of material things. […] ‘The poor
poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance
… a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an
Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great
writings are born.’ That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material
things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom Virginia Woolf.
Annexes 8 and 10 to the general system of unemployment insurance have

clearly played a role which exceeds the function of the UNEDIC.
Unemployment benefits have allowed for the flexibility of the labour mar-
058
ket, but they have also allowed for a reduction of those inequalities which,
far from being justified by variations of talent and professional standing,
depend much more on the ‘envelope’ of a project, on the size of the sec-
tor of activity in which it is situated (audiovisual, cinema or performing
arts) and the juridical statute of the employer (private and public). The
deficit is a rough measure of the collective investment which would be nec-
essary to allow the diffusion of cultural and artistic practices.
We must therefore reverse the terms of the assertion that the number of
intermittents would have progressed more than the available resources: it is
not the amount of intermittents which rises faster than the resources, it’s the
resources which are not augmented enough. They are inadequate, gener-
ally insufficient to accompany and support the expansion of artistic and
cultural activities, to allow for the development of activities outside the
commercial law of the media industry. To increase the resources implies
above all a redefinition of the measuring criteria for wealth. The econo-
mist Patrick Viveret and Jean Gadrey have contributed to showing the lim-
its of measures based on the industrial and commercial economy in the
context of an expansion of the service sector.
But the financing of structures can never substitute itself for or cheapen
the ‘financing’ of individuals, because the discontinuity of projects cannot
be allowed to imply the precarisation of people’s conditions of life. The
sustainability of structures is indissociably linked to the sustainability of
social rights and incomes of individuals, with the security and mobility that
the continuity of income permits.
It would be necessary to reform annexes 8 and 10, but differently. The New
Model of unemployment benefits elaborated by the Coordination des
Intermittents et Précaires indicates a way beyond unemployment benefit, it is
intended to be a model in which the continuity of income is guaranteed in
a situation of discontinuity of employment. It responds to a double objec-
tive: to be adapted to the practices of employment and work of intermittents,
and to permit the greatest number to benefit from a guaranteed continu-
ity of an income of which the lower limit should be equivalent to the min-
imum wage. Based on the principle of mutualisation, it implies a redistrib-
ution in favour of those who receive the lowest salaries and who experience
the greatest discontinuity of employment. In this sense, the idea of a
monthly ceiling calculated on the basis of all the income received in the
month and considered as a criteria of regulation, constitutes a first con-
crete response from the New Model to questions of financing following a

mutualist logic. The level of the ceiling can be an object of ‘local’ negoti-
ation, in accordance with the social and economic context.
The New Model is intended to be a radical alternative to the Reform.

Rather than transforming every detail (e.g. the calculation of daily com-
pensation), the difference is based on the philosophy by which it is inspired.
It is really a question of two models of society, and the choice does not just
concern the intermittents, far from it.
It is intended to form a basis which is open to being adapted to other situ-

ations, according to the practices of employment and work specific to
other fields of activity. For ‘intermittence’ or discontinuity of employment
is far from being the exclusive property of the media sector, yet it can take
different forms in each and every case.
Access to this right of guaranteed continuity of income is not ‘without con-

ditions’. Nevertheless, in the New Model, these conditions are to be found in
a context in which value is an object of social negotiation. As such, we can
imagine that the parameters of value will vary, but also might well function
according to the criteria of time banks12. This can include the time spent in
training, but also, can be determined according to ‘local’ definitions of social
utility. The field is open for a collective redefinition of what counts beyond
mere commercial value, the value of the content of that which we produce.
In effect, even more than as an overlapping of the time of life and time of
work, intermittence can be thought of as a ‘frontier zone’ between employ-
ment and unemployment. A space beyond the two from where it is possi-
ble to interrogate as much the meaning as the content of work. A frontier
zone as a space of experimentation with forms of life which contribute to
the hybridisation of space-time within and without employment13. The
‘supernumerary’ is thus the expression of the flight of ‘normal’ work, of
which the contents and meaning appear less and less evident, towards
‘frontier zones’. Because it is not just a matter of the flight of waged
employment, but also of engaging in the search for ‘meaning’, engaging in
a becoming-other of ourselves and our fabrications.
12. TN : time banks are mutual volunteering systems which function on the basis of ‘time credits’ exchanged locally.
13. In issue 17 of the journal Multitudes we put together a series of reports focussing on ‘intermittence in every sense’.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
Basic Instinct.
Anthony Davies1
Trauma and
Retrenchment 2000-4
2
A new synthesis?
In the late 1990s, as the narrative of convergence
hit its peak, two members of Dutch anti-fascist
organisation De Fabel van de Illegaal highlighted
some of the risks associated with networked forms
of organisation in a series of texts directed at the
fledgling protest movement.3 Developing debates
already underway in Germany, where left-right
cooperation and anti-semitism were being dis-
cussed by anti-nationalist and ‘Anti-German’ com-
mentators, activists Eric Krebbers and Merijn
Schoenmaker argued that the terms in which anti-
globalisation struggles had –at least initially– been
framed may have dovetailed with agendas associa-
ted with the right. The weak spots, they contend-
ed, lay in the fixation on the most visible edifice of
1. Anthony Davies is an independent researcher and occasional contributor to a number of magazines including Mute,
Texte zur Kunst and Art Monthly.
2. Text commissioned and first published by Mute magazine (Issue No.29, Winter/Spring 2005). This is a revised version
of that article.
3. Eric Krebbers, ‘Together with the New Right against globalisation?’, October 1998,
http://www.savanne.ch/right-left-materials/with-new-right.html
ANTHONY DAVIES 063
global capitalism (agencies such as the International Monetary Fund,

World Trade Organisation and World Bank plus, of course, the
Transnational Corporations), and its instruments (trade agreements like
the Multilateral Agreement on Investment), at the expense of constitutive
issues like racism, sexism, and homophobia which had been constructed as
secondary. The absence of clear declarations had, according to this emer-
gent critique, inadvertently created the conditions for left/right coalitions
and opened up pathways for the right at the very heart of the campaigns
against corporate led globalisation. As early as 1998, this had led De Fabel
to amend their terminology and positioning, taking on a pro-globalisation
position.
Later in 2000, an author writing under the name of ‘Mark S’ further high-
lighted some of the risks associated with alliances and networked forms of
organisation. In ‘The Progressive Left’s Dirty Little Secret: Public Citizen,
IFG and the Far Right’, he raises a series of question marks over the
alliances, funding and strategic planning behind the now mythical Seattle
protests of November 1999. By drawing attention to the manner in which
singularly focused opposition to transnational corporations helped forge an
alliance between left and right which sidelined the latter’s racism, sexism
and nationalism in favour of the ultimately vague target of globalisation,
he argues organisations like Public Citizen and the International Forum on
Globalisation (IFG) stretched ‘the movement’s’ mood of alliance-oriented
pragmatism to breaking point, and created dangerous precedents for far
right influence over ‘progressive’ discourse and activism.4
Far right infiltration of ‘progressive’ movements is neither a novel phenom-

enon nor one restricted to the US: the international anti-Gulf War and
Ecology movements have long provided a foil for anti-immigrant, anti-
semitic and even fascist sentiment. After this particular scare however some
4. Public Citizen is a US based consumer advocacy NGO ‘Protecting Health, Safety and Democracy’. It was founded
by consumer rights activist Ralph Nader in 1971, although the organisation no longer has an operational relationship
with him. See http://www.citizen.org. The IFG is an alliance of 60 leading activists, scholars, economists, researchers
and writers representing over 60 organisations in 25 countries, and was formed in response to economic globalisation.
See http://www.ifg.org. Mark S’s criticism of these organisations rests either on their negotiating tactics (Nader, for
example, was prepared to share platforms with Buchanan to oppose ‘institutions of world government’ and promote
comparable positions on trade; discussions were also had with far right ‘union buster’ and Buchanan campaign financier,
Roger Milliken), or on issues of funding (several campaigning efforts of the IFG have, for example, been sponsored by
The Ecologist editor Teddy Goldsmith, whose name became associated with the European Far Right after attending
meetings of GRECE)
064
organisations made clear moves to address the problem. The PGA for
example amended its manifesto to explicitly reject alliances with the right.
Not so other leading lights of the anti-globalisation movement: the IFG’s
Susan George instead reasserted the ultimate effectivity and hence value of
the alliance model by stating, ‘the anti-NAFTA and anti-WTO forces
defeated fast track authority... only with the help of the far right. It was still
a good thing to defeat fast-track’.5
In December 2001, and back in a European context, representatives from

the anti-fascist Never Again Association, editors of the national trade
union weekly Nowy Tygodnik Popularny and ‘left-wing intellectual’ review
Lewa Noga raised concerns regarding an alleged right wing infiltration of
the Polish branch of the anti-globalisation group ATTAC. In a text pub-
lished in the UK anti-fascist magazine Searchlight in July 2002, Rafal
Pankowski built a compelling case –not only against Polish ATTAC but
also the manner in which sections of the left had generally been wrong-
footed by a quiet reconfiguration of the right. In this case, by moving into
some of the blurred ‘professional’ and social interstices of Polish political
culture of the 1990’s to expose one of the organisation’s founders as a
reformed fascist.6
Significantly, there is a difference between the pragmatic and publicly

acknowledged ‘we are neither left nor right, we are in front’7 alliances man-
ifest on the streets of Seattle, and the crypto convergence of left/right
agendas at Poland’s ATTAC. Whereas the former demonstrate the strate-
gic opportunities and dilemmas forged by new networked forms of organ-
isation, the latter can be linked to the reformulation of the European New
Right and its hibernation in the left’s ‘laboratories of thought’ over the last
5. Susan George, in an email to De Fabel, cited in Krebbers, ibid

6. Rafal Pankowski, ‘Far Right hijacks anti-capitalist group’, Searchlight 2002. Pankowski’s claims were met head on by
Remigiusz Okraska, a co-founder of ATTAC Poland, who made a series of counter accusations in ‘At the service of
Neo-liberals’. See http://www.de.indymedia.org/2002/07/26175.shtml
7. Nicholas Hildyard, former editor of The Ecologist, states in his essay ‘Blood and Culture: Ethnic Conflict and the
Authoritarian Right’, that ‘the slogan ‘Neither Left nor Right but In Front’ was first used by anarchist groups in the
1970s to signal an opposition both to the overtly statist policies of the then Left and to the elitist policies of the Right.
In its modern variant, it is a slogan that calls not for opposition but for an alliance – an alliance that is possible only
by setting aside key political differences.’ Mark S for his part cites researcher Janet Biehl’s work ‘’Ecology’ and the
Modernization of Fascism in the German Ultra-right’, not only to track the transformation of fascist discourses into
ecological and anarchist ones during the 1970s and 80s, but also to name the provenance of the same phrase, which
she claims was coined by Herbert Gruel, a participant in the formation of the German Greens and later founder of
the fascist-ecology group the Ecological Democratic Party (ODP)
ANTHONY DAVIES 065
thirty years or so. Pankowski’s alarmist calls, valuable though they are, fall
somewhat wide of the mark: Polish ATTAC wasn’t necessarily hijacked or
infiltrated by the right –in a significant sense it was a product of the right.
Between 2000 and 2002 the European political landscape was rocked by a
series of victories and gains made by the mainstream populist right in local
and national elections: Jàrg Haider’s Freedom party (FP) in Austria; Jean
Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France; Pim Fortuyn’s List Fortuyn in
Holland; the People’s Party in Denmark; the Progress Party in Norway;
Vlaams Blok in Belgium and the Northern League in Italy. Where many
attributed the electoral success of this populist movement to the resurgence
of nationalism triggered by globalisation, migration and economic insecu-
rity, others looked to an ‘intellectual’ current which had been quietly hiber-
nating in mainstream political culture since the late 1960s. According to
two of its most prominent exponents, Alain de Benoist and Charles
Champetier, the European New Right (ENR) is not a political movement,
but ‘a think-tank and school of thought’ which, since its formation in 1968,
has attempted to formulate a metapolitical perspective:
In a world where closed entities have given way to interconnected networks

with increasingly fuzzy reference points, metapolitical action attempts,
beyond political divisions and through a new synthesis, to renew a trans-
versal mode of thought and, ultimately, to study all areas of knowledge in
order to propose a coherent worldview.8
Its critics have claimed that the ENR’s force lies in having transformed the
discourse and focus of 1960s fascism by re-branding it as a critique of the
‘system’ that was attractive to anti-fascists, whilst simultaneously transmit-
ting a fascist message to the initiated.9
As the narrative of globalisation intensified during the 1990s, anxieties

associated with networked forms of organisation were identified and acted
upon in activist communities. Clearer political positioning and a definition
of basic ideological orientations emerged as a response to the left-right
coalitions and ‘transversals’ being constructed to serve right-wing interests.
8. Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, ‘The French New Right in the Year 2000’, The Alain de Benoist Collection,
http://www.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain9.html
9. Roger Griffin, ‘Between metapolitics and apoliteia: the New Right’s strategy for conserving the fascist vision in the
interregnum’, Modern and Contemporary France, vol. 8, no. 2, Feb. 2000
066
It would take the combined impact of the dotcom collapse, September 11

and Enron to trigger a similar crisis of limits in the world of business.
Back to Basics
In late 2001, as some sections of the US business community were busy

preparing for bankruptcy filings and state investigations into corporate
misconduct, others were looking for the hope of survival in the global
downturn. For the first time in a decade, terms like ‘interdependence risk’,
‘network discontinuities’ and ‘back-to-basics’ started to temper the chorus
of innovation, risk, expectation and hope –the irrational exuberance which
had accompanied the boom economy of the 1990s.
In an article published in Strategy and Business magazine in January 2002,

Ralph W. Schrader and Mike McConnell (respectively CEO and Vice
President of management and technology consultants Booz Allen
Hamilton) issued a set of warnings linked to the many perceived threats to
corporate America post September 11. Schrader and McConnell argued
that most companies bound to the globalisation of communications,
finance, trade, and corporate activity –as well as their supporting infra-
structures– had made themselves susceptible to ‘interdependence risk’.
This is ‘the potential for ostensibly small events –a trader improperly cov-
ering derivatives trades, a rogue computer hacker, a fire in a suppliers’ fac-
tory– to spiral rapidly into a company-threatening crisis.’10
Ironically, those very same risks and discontinuities, those unanticipated

events that can suddenly transform an industry, did indeed prove to be
catastrophic for many companies. The threat however was not exposure
to remote risks intensified by global connectedness; rather, it was the
potential for alliances, partnerships and networks to distort growth, and
CEOs’ enthusiastic abuse of this situation in exaggerated profit projec-
tions, insider deals and massaged accounts. In late 2001 the labyrinthine
networks and illegal partnerships orbiting Enron and WorldCom were just
coming to light: for a moment, interdependence risk threatened to engulf
the system.
10. Ralph W Schrader and Mike McConnell, ‘Post-9/11 CEO Agenda’, Strategy and Business (Security and Strategy
Special Report), issue 26, first quarter, 2002
ANTHONY DAVIES 067
In the case of Arthur Anderson, its interdependence with Enron triggered the
rapid disintegration of the entire brand –not just the company in the US but
the mutli-disciplinary partnerships (‘MDPs’) that had underpinned its global
operations. Up until this point, Anderson had challenged traditional business
models by offering tax, legal and a host of professional services under one
roof and was by far the largest proponent of MDPs among the ‘Big Five’
accountancy firms (now the Big Four). Exposure to Enron was catastrophic
for the company and a major setback for MDPs in general. Seen within this
context, those debates which focused on the many perceived holes and vul-
nerabilities in the system as well as their ‘remedy’– securing the networks, pro-
tecting data and what Strategy and Business editor Randall Rothenberg
called ‘boundarylessness within borders’ –must seem prescient. But, as part-
nerships and alliances became increasingly associated with risk and the econ-
omy continued on its downward course throughout 2002/3, some CEOs
started to question the viability of such a model of growth altogether.
When Bill Ford took over the ailing Ford Motors from Jacques Nasser in
late 2001, he immediately reversed what had become a disastrous pro-
gramme of diversification (into areas like e-commerce, parts recycling etc.),
shed ancillary businesses, and implemented a general turnaround plan that
he termed ‘Back to Basics’. From that point on, the company would con-
centrate on what it knew best –its core business, the production of cars.
This was not simply a case of redefining the core business in times of tur-
bulence, but an attempt to roll back the company to a pre-Jacques Nasser
golden age– a fundamental rejection of the dotcom inspired ‘consumer
products company’ in favour of what can best be described as a company
practicing ‘total manufacturing’ (i.e. a shift back into design, engineer and
build). This was broadly welcomed by industry analysts fed up with what
automotive industry expert Brett C Smith dubbed, ‘the blatant hoax [dot
com] played on the country by a bunch of twenty year olds!’11
From its reinstatement on 30th October 2001, Back to Basics continued to

gather pace and was lauded as a major corporate trend, with a number of
companies –including Gap, Procter and Gamble, Levis, Nike and Reebok,
with their ‘Fashion Backwards’ trends– following suit. Newsweek’s grand
proclamation in August 2003 that ‘common sense is back in vogue’12 found
11. Brett C Smith (Senior research Associate at The Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation),
http://www.autofieldguide.com/columns/smith/1201ob.html
12. Brad Stone, ‘Back to Basics’, Newsweek, August 4, 2003
068
a highpoint of articulation in the ‘Eyes on the Fries’ strategy of the now

deceased CEO of McDonalds, James Cantalupo.13
After taking control of the company in early 2003, Cantalupo immediately

reversed the headlong rush to build new outlets, arguing that diversification
was the fundamental reason that McDonalds had gone off the rails. They
had taken their eyes off the fries and neglected core competencies and qual-
ity in favour of unrealistic growth targets and diversification. After shedding
partnerships, adding customers to existing stores rather than adding stores,
and revising the growth forecast from 10-15 to a more modest 3-5 percent,
McDonalds’ share price leapt back from its eight year low in March 2003.
As sections of the business community became increasingly disentangled

–in some cases willingly, in others forcibly– from the complex networked
landscape of the late 1990s, for many the project of convergence came to
an abrupt halt. By 2001, Silicon Valley was suffering 4,000 job losses per
month, and 85 bankruptcies per day. For the business community, this trau-
ma was further compounded by September 11 and the violently paranoid
geopolitics of the US led ‘War On Terror’, whose security clampdown led
some analysts to the extraordinary conclusion that this ‘new crisis presents
issues never before faced: a halt to the headlong, liberating globalisation of
the last two decades.’14
The Back to Basics, Fashion Backwards, New Common Sense and Eyes on
the Fries strategies clearly indicate a tendency towards retrenchment in the
face of economic and political uncertainty, but the broader contours of a
climate where, as The Economist had it, ‘revolutions are distinctly out of
favour’ has been much less clear.15
A Real Paradigm Shift
In late 2001, as the Securities and Exchange Commission started to unrav-

el the bogus networks at energy giant Enron, arts research agency AEA
13. Neil Buckley, ‘Eyes on the Fries: will new products, restaurant refits and a marketing overhaul sustain the Golden
Arches’, Financial Times, August 29, 2003
14. Jeffrey E Garten (Dean of the Yale School of Management), From New Economy to Siege Economy’, Strategy and
Business, ibid.
15. The Economist, July 12 2003
ANTHONY DAVIES 069
Consulting questioned the viability of unregulated corporate sponsorship

of the arts. Using the Venice Biennale with its ‘anachronistic but much
revered national paradigm’ as an example, its researcher Joe Hill noted
that members of the Biennale’s global village weren’t guaranteed equal
representation if some were able to outspend others thanks to strategic
partnership deals with business. ‘[L]ike America’s political action commit-
tees’, he suggested, ‘corporate sponsorship may require regulation if
increasing numbers of smaller countries are to remain visible.’16
For many companies however, market realities were already beginning to

overshadow the finer points of Hill’s verdict.
In the UK, the dot com implosion and subsequent readjustment of 2000/01
continued to rip through Europe’s leading Venture Capital Market.17
By 2002 it had fallen to only 20 percent of its 2000 high (from Euro 7.2bn
in 2000 to Euro 1.5bn in 2002) with obvious repercussions for the fledgling
Creative Industries whose entrepreneurial habitats had been spurred on by
the ideology and loose capital associated with the new economy, as well as
being actively supported by a devoted New Labour government.18
The desire to create ‘a society in the UK where the arts are more effective-
ly integrated with business than almost anywhere else in the world’19
meant, of course, that the arts had become subject not only to business val-
ues but, critically, even more closely ‘integrated’ into the vagaries of busi-
ness trends and economic cycles. The 2001 Venice Biennale had narrowly
missed a cull. But shortly after Bloomberg, the British Council and their
guests partied to the tune of £250,000 at Venice’s art bash of the year, the
traumas of a deepening recession and September 11 led to Bloomberg
16. Joe Hill, Reflections on the Venice Biennale, The Platform, Volume 2 Number 2, AEA Consulting, http://aeacon-
sulting.com/site/platformv2i2d.html
17. Ernst and Young report, ‘UK Venture Capital halves in 2002’, London 13th February 2003: http://www.ey.com/
global/Content.nsf/UK/Media_-_03_02_13_DC_-_UK_Venture_Capital_halves_in_2002
and: ‘UK Venture Capital investment drops again in 2003’, London 12 February 2004: http://www.ey.com/global/
Content.nsf/UK/Media_-_04_02_12_DC_-_VC_investment_drops
18. According to the employment statistics provided by the Department for Culture Media and Sport, jobs in advertising
and design & designer fashion actually went up 7 percent during the same period!
19. Colin Tweedy, ‘Putting art into business’, Oct 2004, ePolitix.com at: http://www.epolitix.com/EN/TopicalComment/
200410/3f5ab58b-4e6d-4dc7-a1dd-51aa96f24853.htm. Colin Tweedy is chief executive of Arts & Business and
chairman of CEREC, the European Committee for Business, Arts and Culture
070
canceling their annual Christmas party in London; elsewhere, Scotland’s

Sunday Herald reported that Andersen Consulting’s exposure to Enron
had resulted in their withdrawal from the 2002 Glasgow Art Fair, leaving
the organisers with no time to find a replacement sponsor.20
It was only a matter of time before those organisations and individuals who
had looked outwards to private capital during a boom economy would
need to find escape routes during a downturn –looking inwards at core
competencies and micro-economies was a safe option.
Against this backdrop of contraction, a latent crisis surfaced in the art press
on the role of criticism and the ‘withering away’ of various categories, gold
standards and specialist discourses in contemporary art in the 1990s. On
the occasion of its 100th edition October magazine published a special
edition devoted to obsolescence, which included a since much cited round-
table on ‘The Present Conditions of Art Criticism’.21
The original discussion took place in New York City on December 14,
2001 and brought together the magazines’ editors and a carefully selected
band of US academics, museum curators, art critics, and artists.22
The October landscape is one in which the serious art critic is charac-
terised as an independent actor –a ‘third voice’– outmaneuvered by the
neoliberal-pop-libertarian-aesthetics of writers like Dave Hickey on the
one hand and curators’ organisational access to the instruments of the cul-
ture industry on the other. Here, art criticism’s crisis partly finds its cause
in the ascendancy of ‘belletristic’ art writing; the role of the popular press
is described as defining artists’ careers and creating new markets/con-
stituencies during the 1990’s –notably in the UK.
In the UK meanwhile, after a decade of false starts, an assault on the inter-

disciplinary and intersectoral proliferations of the 1990’s started to gain
currency in reactionary registers such as the New Gentleness and New
Formalism. Common to the presentation of all these ‘post-yBa’ and ‘post-
20. Juliette Garside, ‘Scottish arts suffer as big business pulls plug on cash’, Sunday Herald, 21 April 2002
21. October 100, ‘Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism, Spring MIT, 2002, pp200-228
22. October 100, ibid. The Round Table included October founding editor Rosalind E. Krauss, fellow editors Benjamin
H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster and George Baker, art historians David Joselit, James Meyer and Helen Molesworth, artists
John Miller and Andrea Fraser, and critic and MOMA curator Robert Storr
ANTHONY DAVIES 071
Sensation’ idioms was a clear sense of periodisation and place which, con-
trary to claims made for the art being ‘uncluttered by the relics of history’,23
in fact anchored it to history –through a doggedly narrow account of the
1990s British (or rather London/Glasgow) cultural scene.24
Together with the implicit affirmation of the primacy of the art object,
gallery and market, many of these narratives were well matched to institu-
tional and media agendas in desperate need of new, stable and conserva-
tive ciphers of cultural value. Although careful not to lump together the
diverse artistic positions in one ‘movement’, most interpretations followed
a similar pattern of describing the new art’s turn inwards –to a set of psy-
chosocial, material or art-historical default values. In most cases, the pri-
mary explanatory architecture welded together a supposed backlash
against the ‘aggressive’ identity politics and theoretical cul-de-sacs of the
late 1980s and early 1990s with a sense of disdain for the celebrity-fixated,
populist venality of the yBa to argue for a move into –for example– more
intimate, sincere, and authentic forms of production. The cumulative
investment in formalism prompted Iwona Blazwick (the then recently
appointed director if the Whitechapel Gallery in London) to announce on
the occasion of the Early One Morning exhibition that a ‘a real paradigm
shift in contemporary art’ had occurred.25
With its concomitant returns to painting, sculpture and objecthood, the ‘par-
adigm shift’ hit mainstream visibility and institutional accord with a host of
‘back to basics’ exhibitions throughout 2002-2003. At a glance, these includ-
ed the survey of contemporary British sculptors who ‘were re-engaging with
the formal and conceptual business of making things’ in Early One Morning
(Whitechapel Gallery, August 2002); the ‘art [that] seems to be rematerialis-
ing’ in Object Sculpture (Henry Moore Institute, June-September 2002); the
lifting of ‘90s amnesia and ‘forgetfulness about earlier forms of modern art’
in Beck’s Futures (ICA, March – May 2002) and the ‘honest colorful experi-
ence’ of Days Like These (Tate Britain, February – May 2003).
23. JJ Charlesworth, ‘Not Neo But New’, Art Monthly, no. 259, September 2002
24. Martin Maloney, the artist/curator who can be credited with developing the vocabulary associated with the New
Gentleness, emphasised the ‘romantic’ and ‘softer’ nature of new art. See also Alex Farquharson’s catalogue essay for
‘Real Hearts Protest/Neurotic Souls Survive’, Beck’s Futures, 2002. Recent usage of New Gentleness can be found
in Fiachra Gibbons, ‘After the shocks and the hype, the gentle art of painting is ready to make a comeback’, The
Guardian, January 2, 2003. For New Formalism, see JJ Charlesworth, ‘Not Neo But New’, ibid.
25. Iwona Blazwick, Catalogue introduction to ‘Early One Morning – New British Sculpture in the 21st Century’,
Whitechapel Gallery, 2002
072
As these tendencies crystallised throughout 2002/03, a radically reformed

and newly appointed Arts Council England (ACE) entered the equation. In
addition to its remit to improve social cohesion, cultural diversity and gen-
erally utilise what the state perceives as the ‘transformative’ power of the
arts, the new organisation put the individual artist at the centre of its pol-
icy making with an implicit remit to develop markets for sales and commis-
sions of contemporary art. Between the lines, the first ACE manifesto
‘Ambitions for the Arts’ (February 2003) offers a glimpse into a fundamen-
tal funding realignment towards, and ‘productive intervention’ in, the exist-
ing market for contemporary art. As this market has remained relatively
opaque to policy makers, a research brief went into circulation in early
2002 to tackle the deficit of understanding. Two of the most significant
expected outputs of the report, authored by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre
and published under the title ‘Taste Buds’, were to suggest ways in which
artists may be encouraged to become more entrepreneurial, without com-
promising their practice’ and to ‘recommend strategic initiatives to devel-
op the marketplace and enhance the purchase and commissioning of, and
engagement in, the innovative end of contemporary art practice.26
This clearly indicates a turn inwards –in this case to intra-sectoral core
strengths– and offers up what might be called the ‘New Art Consumer’
(NAC) as the paramount engine of art’s sustainability. NACs’ relevance to the
last three years of contraction lies in their capacity to shift the operational
logic from corporatisation to marketisation, from ‘immaterial’ knowledge
and services to a re-materialisation of the art object and consumer base.
Where corporatisation –as part and parcel of a model of convergence–
implied increased integration with the business community and compliance
with its administrative and managerial infrastructures, marketisation relies on
models of divergence and individuation. Under the jurisdiction of the State,
the burden of provision, valorisation and autonomy is moved onto a careful-
ly modeled, differentiated social system in which the relationship between
individual artists and educated consumers moves to the centre ground.
Ever ahead of the game, by late 2003 retail company Habitat was already
leading by example –enrolling in its ‘Crash course in Contemporary Art’,
26. ‘Developing the Markets for Sales and Commissions of Contemporary Art’, Research brief, Arts Council England,
2002. Taste Buds itself can be found at ‘Taste Buds: How to Cultivate the Art Market’ 14, October 2004. The exec-
utive summary and Art Eco System Model can be found at: http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/information/publication_
detail. php?browse=recent&id=416
ANTHONY DAVIES 073
soon to be followed by the Whitechapel Gallery’s ‘Critics Classes’ and

Bloomberg’s ‘Art School’.27 To celebrate Habitat’s support of the first Frieze
Art Fair, the company brought together a range of experts to provide ‘insid-
er tips [that] will inspire Londoners who love their homes to adorn them with
exciting and unique works of art to complement their home and lifestyle.’28
As with Bloomberg’s later ‘Art School’ in January 2004, the event took
place in-house and had a clear performative function: companies were cast
in the role of educational service providers, offering a kind of ‘relational
consumption’ (Habitat customers could observe, pass by and listen in to
NAC sessions at their Kings Road store; registered ‘students’ enjoyed port-
folio sessions and private tutoring at Bloomberg’s London headquarters).
In addition to being an alternative to capital and real estate, NACs are
enticed into the art market on the pretext that they are buying into a piece
of contemporary culture. As Ben Lewis further qualifies in the ‘The Price
of Art’, this can be accompanied by any one or all of the following: a ‘new
sense of writing history’, ‘becoming purified by the act of collecting art’,
and becoming part of the process of validation.29
Buzzing Beijing?
Whilst the unprecedented financial coverage and speculation on the

growth of the Chinese economy may well indicate that the 21st century
belongs to China, it also helped take some of the strain off faltering
Western economies and facilitated the transferal and reanimation of dubi-
ous economic models like the Third Way.30
27. The Habitat ‘Crash Course in Contemporary Art’, October 2003 can be found online at: http://www.artshole.co.
uk/exhibitions/7thOctober/crash%20course%20in%20cont%20art.htm
‘Art School’ at the Bloomberg Space, 26 January – 6 March 2004
‘Crash Course – Unraveling Collecting Contemporary Art’ with Louise Hayward, Director, Store Gallery, and Alicia
Miller, Head of Education at the Whitechapel Gallery, July 2004
28. The Habitat Crash Course was serviced by Jennifer Higgie (Frieze Reviews Editor), Matthew Collings (art critic),
Anthony Spira (curator), Edmund Hubbard (art consultant) and Mark Darbyshire (framing expert)
29. Ben Lewis, ‘The Price of Art’, Prospect, October 2004, see also: Francis Sheenan, ‘The secret art of buying’, The
Herald, Glasgow, Scotland, October 22 2004. Elaine Cronin, ‘Selling art for the solution’, Circa Art Magazine, Friday
15 October 2004, and Sophie Leris, ‘The fine art of buying’, The Evening Standard’s ES supplement, March 2004
30. Exemplified by, for example, Philip Dodd in conversation with Jonathan Freedland: ‘The Long View’, BBC Radio 4,
Tuesday 28th September 2004. Having traveled the world promoting Swinging London as the living, breathing
embodiment of the Third Way, Dodd is now the favored talking head on its heir apparent, Buzzing Beijing, a place
that he claims is currently ‘navigating a way that’s neither State socialism nor American capitalism... a Third Way
that makes Blair’s Third Way look like a joke’
074
But is global capital’s favorite new theatre of operations any more than the
physical and symbolic instantiation of ‘boundarylessness within borders’,
the latest space of deferral for problems unleashed by global interdepen-
dencies?
Some of the key ‘dangers’ associated with globalisation’s porous bound-

aries were noted in sections of the anti-capitalist community as early as the
1997, though it required the multiple trauma of 2000-1 to bring home
interdependence risk to the business community. As De Fabel and Enron
have shown (albeit in distinctly contrasting ways), networked forms of
organisation, alliances and partnerships are particularly prone to abuse,
infiltration and corruption. But what happens when they go into remis-
sion? What happens when contemporary art, for example, de-links itself
from the broader Creative Industries and retreats into core competencies?
Recent structural changes in corporate capitalism –its turn inwards,
reassessment and temporary withdrawal from the ‘networked society’–
have revealed the extent to which myriad reactionary, conservative and far
right tendencies remain latent in the laboratories of thought –ready to re-
emerge, hybridise and claim the cultural agenda.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
Markets, Antimarkets
Manuel DeLanda1
and the Economics

of the Net
The explosive growth of computer networks in

the last ten years, coupled with the recent devel-
opment of electronic cash and of cryptographic
techniques for the secure transmission of credit
card numbers and commercial documents, has
begun to open new possibilities for the flow of
material and informational resources and for the
conduct of financial and commercial transac-
tions. Although these developments are indeed
symptoms that the Internet is beginning to form
a radically new economic space, the differences
with other economic spaces and the degree to
which the Internet represents a radical break with
the past should not be exaggerated. For example,
some economic characteristics of the Net are
shared by many different types of networks, rail-
road and telephone networks, for instance. One
such shared property is what economists call ‘net-
work externalities’. An externality is defined as a
1. Manuel DeLanda is a philosopher, writer and lecturer and currently teaches at Penn (University of Pennsylvania).
MANUEL DeLANDA 077
side effect of production or consumption, in which people other than the

direct producers or consumers are positively or negatively affected. An
example of a network externality is, for instance, the so called ‘fax effect’.
As the number of people using faxes increases, the use value of each indi-
vidual fax machine increases too. In other words, when there are only a few
users, a fax machine is at most an expensive gadget, but as the number of
possible people one can reach via a fax increases, the machine becomes
more useful and begins to change the routines and practices of the users
themselves, until it becomes a necessity. As an economic space, the Internet
is clearly subject to such network externalities, but so are non-computer
networks.
Thus, it is important not to overemphasize the novel aspects of the infor-

mation revolution, for this gives us a false sense of its historical connections
with other economic spaces. For example, many contemporary observers
of the computer world think that we have entered a new age, the ‘informa-
tion age’, characterized by the importance of knowledge, instead of mat-
ter or energy, as a factor of production. The problem with this view is that
it forgets that a hundred years ago, the interaction of several technologies
(electricity, the internal combustion engine, oil, steel and plastics) had
already made knowledge a key input to production processes. And it was
the creation of the first industrial research laboratories early in this centu-
ry (such as the General Electric laboratory) that propelled knowledge to
this key position. What the dramatic growth of computer networks has
done is to intensify the flow of knowledge even more. And although this
intensification will undoubtedly transform the nature of the economy in
the next century, one should not forget that it is a development more or less
continuous with the past.
Similar remarks can be made regarding the negative aspects of computer

networks. For example, several software products readily available in the
market allow the transformation of the computers connected to a local
area network into surveillance devices, through which the management of
a firm can monitor and discipline its workers: peek at an employee’s screen
in real time, scan data files and e-mail, tabulate keystroke speed and accu-
racy, override passwords or seize control of a workstation. Clearly, network
managing software poses distinct dangers to privacy and to individual con-
trol of work activity, but it would be wrong to blame computer technology
for it. Computers are merely intensifying a process which is at least two
hundred years old, a process in which factory workers were progressively
078
deskilled, as their daily activities were transformed into fixed routines and
their skills were transferred to machines. Military institutions played a key
role in the development of the disciplinary techniques and monitoring
practices through which this routinization of the production process was
achieved. I believe that an awareness of the historical origins of this
process is a precondition to a successful understanding of the negative
effects of routinization and surveillance, and of the dangers its computer
intensification poses for the future.
It follows that a discussion of the possible economic impact of the Internet

needs to address many other issues besides those closely connected with the
distribution and dissemination of information. In this essay I would like to
address a few of these issues, some of which are concerned with the effects
that networked computing may have on our knowledge of economic dyna-
mics, some regarding the effects of networks on the production of material
and energetic products, and finally the more specific effects that the Internet
may have on the production and distribution of information-based products
and services. Let’s begin with a quick sketch of the potential use of comput-
er networks in the production of knowledge about economic phenomena.
This is, indeed, a crucial point since our evaluation of the effects of networks
of real economies clearly depends on our conception of what economies are,
but as I will argue in a moment, our dominant theories (whether neoclassi-
cal or Marxist economics) are very close to conceptual bankruptcy and rad-
ically new theories will need to be developed to replace them.
One direction which a new economic theory will have to follow may be illus-
trated with examples from nonlinear science and theories of self-organiza-
tion. Basically, these theories may be used to explain the emergence of
wholes that are more than the sum of their parts. Real markets are, in a
sense, such synergistic wholes since they emerge as a result of the unintend-
ed consequences of many independent decision makers. In this sense, mar-
kets are quite similar to ecosystems in many respects, that is, spontaneously
assembled wholes of very heterogeneous components. The Internet itself is
also one such self-organized entity, despite its origins in the hands of military
planners. In other words, markets, ecosystems and decentralized networks
all have in common that their synergistic properties emerge spontaneously
MANUEL DeLANDA 079
out of the interactions among a variety of elements, plants and animals in

the case of ecosystems, sellers and buyers in the case of markets, or com-
puter servers and clients in the case of the Internet.
To understand the processes that lead to such emergent, synergistic wholes,

we need to create new ways of modeling reality. In particular, instead of
beginning at the top, at the level of the whole, and moving down by dis-
secting it into its constituent parts, we need to create models that proceed
from the bottom up. For example, instead of creating a computer model of
a market, ecosystem or computer network, by using a small set of mathe-
matical functions (that capture the behavior of an idealized whole), we
need to create virtual environments in which we can unleash a population
of virtual animals and plants, buyers and sellers, or clients and servers, and
then to let these creatures interact and allow the self-organized whole to
emerge spontaneously. In this way the bottom-up modeling strategy com-
pensates for a weakness of the top-down strategy. Emergent properties are
properties of the complex interactions between heterogeneous elements,
but top-down analysis dissects and separates elements, that is, eliminates
their original interactions, and then adds them back together. But this
operation necessarily misses any property that is more than the sum of the
parts. Hence analysis needs to be complemented with synthesis, as is done
today, for example, in the discipline of Artificial Life and in the branches
of Artificial Intelligence known as connectionism and animats.
This switch in modeling strategy would have a significant impact on the

shape which a new paradigm of economics would take. Instead of postu-
lating a whole, a capitalist system, for instance, and then attempting to cap-
ture in some mathematical formulas its basic dynamics, we would unleash
within a virtual environment a population of institutions, including virtual
markets, corporations and bureaucratic agencies. Only if we can generate
from the interactions of these virtual institutions, something like a capital-
ist system, would we feel justified in postulating an entity like that. My
guess is that there is no such overall, homogeneous system, and that socie-
ty is a much more heterogeneous collection of processes. Fernand Braudel,
for example, who was perhaps the most important economic historian in
this century, called attention to the striking differences between markets,
080
where decentralized decision-making is the rule, and large corporations, in

which centralization dominates and in which commands replace prices as
the main mechanism of coordination of human activity. Of course, many
economists had already noticed this essential difference, but they had mis-
takenly attributed it to a late stage of capitalism. What Braudel has shown,
on the other hand, is that the difference goes all the way back to the thir-
teenth or fourteenth centuries. That is, that economic history has for a long
time involved the coexistence of heterogeneous institutions, some governed
by demand and supply, and hence properly called markets, others involv-
ing manipulation of market forces, which he calls antimarkets.2
Recognizing this heterogeneity may be crucial not only when thinking

about network economics but, more generally, when analyzing the oppres-
sive aspects of today’s economic system, that is, those aspects that we would
want to change to make economic institutions more fair and less exploita-
tive. We need to think of economic institutions as part of a larger institu-
tional ecology, an ecology that must include, for example, military institu-
tions. Only this way will we be able to locate the specific sources of certain
forms of economic power, sources which would remain invisible if we sim-
ply thought of every aspect of our current situation as coming from free
enterprise or from exploitative capitalism. In particular, many of the most
oppressive aspects of industrial discipline and of the use of machines to
control human workers in assembly line factories, were not originated by
capitalists but by military engineers in eighteenth century French and nine-
teenth century American arsenals and armories. Without exaggeration,
these and other military institutions created many of the techniques used to
withdraw control of the production process from workers and then export-
ed these techniques to civilian enterprises, typically antimarket organiza-
tions.3 Hence, not to include in our economic models processes occurring
within this wider institutional ecology can make invisible the source of the
very structures we must change to create a better society, and hence dimin-
ish our chances of ever dismantling those oppressive structures.
Virtual environments, and the bottom-up models they allow us to build,

may be the right tools to study these institutional ecologies without reduc-
2. Fernand Braudel. The Perspective of the World. (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), pages 630-631
3. Merritt Roe Smith. Army Ordnance and the ‘American System of Manufacturing’, 1815-1861. And: Charles F. O’Connell, Jr.
The Corps of Engineers and the Rise of Modern Management, 1827-1856. Both in: Military Enterprise. Perspectives on the American
Experience. Merritt Roe Smith, ed. (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1987).
MANUEL DeLANDA 081
ing their heterogeneity. The most obvious obstacle to the routine use by
philosophers and intellectuals of these synthetic models, is perhaps the
very high cost of the massively parallel computers needed to implement
them. However, cheaper alternatives may exist. In particular, although the
Internet is composed primarily of old-fashioned serial computers, as a
whole it may be seen as a huge parallel computer spanning the entire plan-
et. With the right software running on some of its servers, the unused
memory and computer processing time of its millions of client computers
may be made available to model makers at a fraction of the cost of a par-
allel supercomputer. In other words, given the right arrangements so that
individual users can rent time in their machines to others, and the right
software to permit the simultaneous use of all these rented machines, the
Internet may be used to simulate a gigantic parallel computer allowing
researchers to run elaborate virtual environments, and therefore, to deep-
en our understanding of the complex institutional dynamics underlying
economic systems.
There may be, of course, many other ways to use computer networks to
increase our understanding of economic science. But now I would like to
move on and consider some possible effects that networks may have on the
performance of real economies. And, not to drift away from the main sub-
ject, let’s consider examples from the industries that create the infrastruc-
ture of the Net itself. The question of the manufacture of computer hard-
ware and software has many different interesting angles, not to mention a
very close association with military institutions which have been involved
in the development of computers from their inception. I have written
about this military involvement in the past but today I would like to discuss
a different issue, one related to our bottom-up modeling of heterogeneous
institutional ecologies. In particular, I would like to discuss two such ecolo-
gies with different mixtures of market and antimarket components: Silicon
Valley and Route 128 in Boston. Both are industrial hinterlands involved
in the production of hardware and software, and both are animated by
intense flows of knowledge and information, partly due to their association
with large technical universities, Stanford and MIT respectively. The two
ecologies are very different, however, and this has made a difference in
their performance.
Silicon Valley has a decentralized industrial system that is organized around

regional networks. Like firms in Japan, and parts of Germany and Italy,
Silicon Valley companies tend to draw on local knowledge and relationships to
082
create new markets, products, and applications. These specialist firms compete
intensely while at the same time learning from one another about changing mar-
kets and technologies. The region’s dense social networks and open labor mar-
kets encourage experimentation and entrepreneurship. The boundaries within
firms are porous, as are those between firms themselves and between firms and
local institutions such as trade associations and universities.4
The growth of this region owed very little to large financial flows from gov-
ernmental and military institutions. Silicon Valley did not develop so much
by the economies of scale typical of antimarkets, as by the benefits derived
from an agglomeration of visionary engineers, specialist consultants and
financial entrepreneurs. Engineers moved often from one firm to another,
developing loyalties to the craft and region’s networks, not to the corpora-
tions. This constant migration, plus an unusual practice of information-
sharing among the local producers, ensured that new formal and informal
knowledge diffused rapidly through the entire region. Business associations
fostered collaboration between small and medium-sized companies. Risk-
taking and innovation were preferred to stability and routinization. This, of
course, does not mean that there were not large, routinized firms in Silicon
Valley, only that they did not dominate the mix. Route 128, on the other
hand, houses a completely different mixture of markets and anti-markets:
While Silicon Valley producers of the 1970’s were embedded in, and insepa-
rable from, intricate social and technical networks, the Route 128 region came
to be dominated by a small number of highly self-sufficient corporations.
Consonant with New England’s two century old manufacturing tradition,
Route 128 firms sought to preserve their independence by internalizing a wide
range of activities. As a result, secrecy and corporate loyalty govern relations
between firms and their customers, suppliers, and competitors, reinforcing a
regional culture of stability and self-reliance. Corporate hierarchies ensured that
authority remains centralized and information flows vertically. The boundaries
between and within firms and between firms and local institutions thus remain
far more distinct.5
The different dynamics of these two institutional ecologies illustrate one of

the potential benefits which computer networks could bring to a new econ-
omy. Although the dynamics of Silicon Valley involved networks of differ-
4. Annalee Saxenian. Lessons from Silicon Valley. In Technology Review, Vol. 97, no. 5. page. 44
5. ibid. p. 47
MANUEL DeLANDA 083
ent kinds (social, institutional, educational networks) which formed more

or less spontaneously, networks like the Internet could help energize other
industrial hinterlands around the world (including the third world) by mak-
ing possible the interconnection of many small businesses, allowing them
to compete with large national and international corporations which enjoy
economies of scale. The industrial regions in question would not, of
course, have to produce computer equipment: any product that is today
manufactured in large, militarized assembly lines could be competitively
created in a less oppressive environment by an networked agglomeration of
small firms, as has happened, for instance, in the production of textiles in
certain regions of Italy. In other words, networks may allow markets to
benefit from economies of agglomeration in order to offset the benefits
which economies of scale grant to antimarket organizations.
Finally, I would like to say a few things about the economic potential of the
Internet itself, that is, its capacity to create a space on which to carry brand
new commercial and industrial transactions. As I said at the beginning, the
Internet is today rapidly evolving into such an economic space, and the
development of electronic cash and crypto-technology to perform secure
and anonymous transactions will accelerate this trend. Much as a tradi-
tional economic system may be seen as a means of allocating or distribut-
ing resources which are scarce, so scarcity is one of the factors that deter-
mines the nature of Net economics. The scarcity in question, however, is
not of computer power or memory, both of which are becoming cheaper
and more plentiful every day, but a scarcity of bandwidth, that is, of the
capacity to transport information through the conduits or channels that
link computers together.
A change from a world of scarce to one of plentiful bandwidth would have

very important consequences for the Internet. Of the writers who have
analyzed the possible of impact of such a change, no one has received
more attention than George Gilder. Gilder’s technical analyses are indeed
quite interesting but their merits must be assessed against the background
of my introductory remarks. Gilder has a strong ideological commitment
to nineteenth century economic ideas, and incorrectly identifies the
dynamics of markets with those of antimarkets. In particular, Gilder is an
extreme ‘invisible-hander’, that is, a believer that the economy is guided to
optimal performance by an invisible hand, which mysteriously optimizes
the match between demand and supply. However, Gilder’s right wing ide-
ology is so transparent that it is quite easy to separate it out from his con-
084
crete analyses of the technologies that could one day end the bandwidth
scarcity.
To begin with, the current channels used by the Internet are owned by tele-
phone companies, and the technology that runs those channels was
designed to deal with bandwidth scarcity. When bandwidth is expensive,
much of the infrastructural investment is on the switches that control the
movement of analog or digital information through the conduits. Today, as
Gilder argues, the telephone companies have replaced much of the old
copper wire with optical fiber, vastly increasing the amounts of data that
can flow through these channels. However, to take advantage of the huge
bandwidth increase that optical fiber makes possible we need to get rid of
hardware switches (replacing them with control devices simulated by soft-
ware) but this move is resisted by the telephone companies, since they are
in the business of selling services based on switches. A similar point applies
to other potential channels for data, such as wireless transmission through
the electromagnetic spectrum. Just like a switch-based technology evolved
in a world of bandwidth scarcity, so our current broadcast technology grew
to take advantage of the limited space in the radio portion of the spec-
trum. Today the technology exists to use higher-frequency portions of the
spectrum, increasing bandwidth enormously, but the cellular telephone
companies that should be rushing to take advantage of this are still caught
in their scarcity-based paradigm. A system of optical fiber liberated from
switches, a fibersphere as Gilder calls it, together with the use of the atmos-
phere at high-frequencies, could result in a world where bandwidth is so
plentiful as to be virtually free.6
We may agree with these assessments because Gilder picked up from engi-
neers, or from reading engineering books, the relevant knowledge of the
potential of the new technologies . But when he switches to an analysis of
the economic consequences of these developments, and even more, to his
advice to policy-makers, Gilder’s ideological baggage completely overrides
his technological insights. There are two biases which an invisible-hander
will bring to an analysis. First, the most obvious one, any intervention by
the government is by definition evil, since it interferes with the invisible
hand. Therefore one has to attack government regulations, even if they
serve to break up monopolies thereby contributing to technological devel-
6. George Gilder. The Fibersphere. And: The New Rule of Wireless. Both in Forbes ASAP (#1 and #2)
MANUEL DeLANDA 085
opment, as was the case of the break-up of AT&T in 1984. The second
bias is more dangerous because it is less obvious: one divides society into
public and a private sectors and then one applies the term ‘market’ to pri-
vate organizations regardless of their size, structure, and economic power.
This ideological maneuver is performed through several operations. First

one uses the word ‘competition’ as if it applied both to the anonymous
competition between hundreds of small buyers and sellers in a real market
(the only situation to which Adam Smith applied his invisible hand theory)
as well as to the competition between oligopolies, say, General Motors,
Ford and Chrysler. The problem is that, these two forms of competition
are completely different, with the competition between oligopolies involv-
ing rivalry between opponents which must take each other’s responses into
account when planning a strategy. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith
has shown, oligopolies are structures as hierarchical as any government
bureaucracy, with as much centralized planning, and as little dependency
on market dynamics.7 Unlike the small buyers and sellers in a real market,
who are price-takers (that is, they buy and sell at prices that set themselves),
oligopolies are price-makers, that is, they create prices by adding a mark-
up to the costs of production. In short, when one confuses these two types
of competition one fails to distinguish between markets and antimarkets.
The consequences of these two biases are very obvious. Oligopolies, and
their power to absorb smaller competitors through vertical and horizontal
integration, are eliminated from the picture, and the landscape now con-
tains only markets and the government, with monopolies being now the
only antimarket force left, but one that can be easily dismissed. Thus
Gilder agrees that there are such thing as monopolies, like those of the
Robber Barons of the nineteenth century, but the enormous profits that
these monopolists generate are seen as transitory, and therefore the men-
ace they represent is dismissed as largely imaginary. Although Microsoft is
today playing a similar role as the Robber Barons, according to Gilder its
potential menace (and any government action against it) should be dis-
missed. So what if Bill Gates has acquired a virtual monopoly on operat-
ing systems, a position of power that allows him to control the evolution of
much of the software that runs on top of those operating systems?. No
problem, says Gilder, in a world of bandwidth plenty, the paradigm of
7. John Kenneth Galbraith. The New Industrial State. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1978).
086
operating systems will change to one of distributed software in the

Internet, and this by itself will end Microsoft’s domination. This, of course,
assumes that Microsoft using its enormous leverage cannot simply buy and
internalize any company it needs in order to ensure its powerful presence
in a networked economy.8
In short, the core of Gilder’s ideological maneuver is to lump together small

producers and oligopolies in one category, and to call that ‘the market’, and
to focus exclusively on government regulation as the only real enemy, dis-
missing monopolies as chimerical. Applied to his theory of the Internet, this
maneuver works like this. A world of bandwidth scarcity, like today’s cable
television, favors the creation of large companies that acquire control of
both the channel and the contents flowing through those channels, and
therefore gain monopoly rents. For example, TCI, a cable giant, also owns
content-producing companies such as the Discovery Channel, Home
Shopping Channel, TNT and so on. With bandwidth scarcity gone, argues
Gilder, the rationale for owning both conduit and data is gone and this will
benefit small producers of content. So here he seems to be siding with real,
decentralized markets. But what are his policy recommendations to get to
this decentralized world created by cheap bandwidth?. Well, the fastest way
to get there is to allow the optical fiber infrastructure of the telephone com-
panies to be combined with the final connections to homes owned by cable
companies, even if this creates huge monopoly profits. (Remember that,
after all, according to Gilder, this would be transitory.) So the government,
who of course, opposes this merger between the telcos and the cable giants,
is the enemy of the people, because its anti-trust regulations are preventing
us from enjoying the benefits of a world with cheap bandwidth.
I could go on adding detail to this criticism, one that Gilder himself makes
easy by offering such an obvious target. But we would be wrong to think
that the only ones to be ideologically biased in this debate are right-wing
invisible handers. Left-wing commodifiers, that is, intellectuals for whom
the very entry of an object into a market involves a ‘commodification’
(which is, of course, seen as a bad thing,) are equally simplistic in their
assessments. I strongly believe that neither side of the political spectrum
can be trusted anymore in their economic analyses, and that a new eco-
nomic theory, one that respects the lessons of economic history and that
8. George Gilder. Washington’s Bogeymen. In Forbes ASAP. #3

MANUEL DeLANDA 087
assimilates the insights from nonlinear dynamics and complexity theory,

should be created. The elements for this new theory are already here, not
only from institutionalist economists and materialist historians, but from
philosophers of economics that are now more than ever participating in
dispelling the myths that have obscured our thought for so many centuries.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
Creation, Intelligence,
Pedro Jiménez Álvarez1
Collective, zemos98
...And it’s a lie

Tote King – Mentiras
When we talk about collective intelligence and cre-

ation, about intellectual property, about copyleft,
about free culture, about licenses, about move-
ments, we have the serious problem of being too
inside of it all to clearly shed any light on these con-
cepts. Sometimes we confuse the claim for access to
culture for a majority of people, with a desire to
obtain the product that the structure itself –the one
against which we are struggling– produces.
This is how the media have always framed prob-

lems concerning ‘collective management soci-
eties’2, such as the negotiation of collective rights,
of artists in peer-to-peer systems, or the issue of top
manta.3 Normal procedure is to ignore and manip-
ulate information and statistical data in order to
convert opinions into reliable data. In that sense
1. Pedro Jiménez Álvarez is a visual artist and member of the coordination committee of the zemos98.org collective
2. Sociedades de gestión colectiva, public entities that were established in Spain to protect the intellectual property
rights in the name of authors, editors, etc. Trans. Note.
3. The selling of pirated material on the street. Trans. note.
PEDRO JIMÉNEZ ÁLVAREZ 091
what is important here is understanding what’s at stake, and clarifying what

are, what have been and what should be our real claims.
Zemos98 is a collective for cultural creation and production that was

founded in the Sevilian town of El Viso de Alcor, around 1995, crystalliz-
ing in 1999 with the celebration of the first zemos98 audiovisual festival.
Up until 2003 the festival was always celebrated there, but the gradual
move to the Andalusian capital began with zemos98.5. The last two edi-
tions have taken place entirely in the capital, Seville.
In all of these years the collective also has produced very diverse types of
audiovisual and multimedia work –from fiction to video creation– using
documentaries and audiovisual essays. The collective has always had an
interest in video production without ever forgetting aspects like training or
theoretical production. We have generated digital narrative workshops, live
video art (vj) workshops, digital culture meetings and online productions;
the publication of experimental music on CD, the editing of literary mag-
azines and >>forward, our communication and audiovisual culture project
on the Internet, which includes television online: forwardtv.net.
The first question that we should answer is: When, and –more interestingly–
Why does zemos98 insert itself in the logic of answering to the current
model of Intellectual Property? The When lies within the genesis of the
project itself. The first edition of the zemos98 festival was first and fore-
most an innocent response to a persistent problem: Public entities’ lack of
interest for culture and emergent proposals. Zemos98 arose, as we said at
the time, to cultivate something of contemporary culture (and difference)
in the small town cultural morass of a Sevillian province.
Our principle objective was to get into the area of cultural diffusion, at first
thinking about the diffusion of our own work, and little by little, zemos98
has become a space receiving proposals from audiovisual creators from
more than 30 countries –in the last edition over 650 works were received.
Out of this innocent and, to a certain extent unconscious, act emerged an
autonomous space for the expression of content, format and genres that
have only entered with difficulty into many other fields.
This is how we can explain some of the concepts that govern our current
practice: internet as life space, video as banner and free everything
as strategy. The viewing of video works produced at the end of the nineties
092
was restricted to certain specific areas, to television –with its ‘professional’

component far from minor producers– and the proto-galleristic ambit of
‘contemporary art’, restricted to artists with ‘prestige, pose, and a budget’.
This assessment is highly personal, but when zemos98 started working with
video, we needed to do so with amateur or low budget video due to the eco-
nomic logic of the field. And well, let’s say that there were very few spaces
for the diffusion of amateur video, as it is film –short films– that keep
monopolizing the majority of audiovisual festivals in the country. Normally
these film festivals or short movie festivals tend to see video as a last holdout
of ‘low quality’ in contrast to more ‘noble’ formats like the 35 millimeters.4
By 1998 we already had a presence on the web, and that has allowed us, to
a certain extent from the very beginning, to get to know how the informa-
tion superhighway has evolved. But more than anything –and most impor-
tantly for us– it has helped us to understand the web as an engine for our
own work: Internet as another life space, from a complementary rather
than a substitutive perspective –whether it be for internal work, through
forums, listservs, or chats for communication with the outside world. It has
only been through the web that we have constructed an image for
zemos98, and only thanks to that image have we been able to transform
ourselves into an important node for Spanish speaking audiovisual culture.
And - bit by bit, without it being our principle objective– we have become
an international referent in terms of contemporary art and reflection on
cultural politics.
And so we were talking about economy and culture
The economic aspect, the financing of projects, their economic adminis-

tration and the resources that we have counted on have been, for quite a
while, based on the innocent and utopian idea of ‘free’. Let’s untangle a
few related matters.
We all know that free culture is not the same as gratis culture, the word
‘Free’5 in English has many faces. But we also must make it clear that
4. Indeed there were important video festivals, like the former Muestra de Cadiz, restructured into a very interesting
video library, as well as the Cinema Jove in Valencia. What is clear that we will be well into the twenty-first century
before Spain participates in the production of festivals, fairs, and meetings related with video.
5. In the original Spanish, ‘free’ has a few translations, libre and gratis or gratuito. The latter refers more to ‘free’ as in
free of cost. In this instance it refers to gratuito. Trans. note.
money has never played a central role in our initial objectives; we have
never done zemos98 for money, ever. Maybe this is because –starting out
from a associative culture based on the absence of profit– the budget has
been the last thing on our cultural agenda. A qualitative step forward in
programming that corresponded with an economically-quantitative one
was only possible in the very last (eighth) edition, an edition for which we
finally can say that the budget was sufficient.
We have slowly learned that culture moves a lot of money. And also, bit by
bit, we have learned that we progressively need even more resources than
what we normally were not able to obtain when we wanted. So the ‘non-
profit’ aspect gets reconfigured into ‘spending without resources’ and
deficits are covered by individual donations or by loans from friends and
relatives without any possibility of restitution.
In the difficult path of self-administration, the zemos98 collective has

always had it clear that public money –the kind managed by institutions–
belongs to us. If there is a budget for culture it should be distributed and
used for emergent projects, and this is what we have demanded from city
hall, councils and ministries. It hasn’t gone so badly, but the ‘spending with-
out resources’ persists. And it persists because the public subsidy system is
as perverse as it is unavoidable.
With time, we have realized that the next step is to capitalize on risk, and
to see expenditures as an investment, in that way increasing institutional
demands and looking for our own resources in diverse ways: contracts,
sponsors, contests, prizes... What is clear is that our economic culture has
evolved quite a bit since 1995. And we’re still learning today.
With all of this in mind we could conclude that zemos98 has created, and
has grounds for, a model of free culture that works; that is capable of, for
example, the selling of copyleft6 licensed documentaries to Andalusian
public television. Little by little we have understood that culture is much
more important than the voluntary work that public institutions foment
and –in short– that cultural production and immaterial workers should be
remunerated.
6. Since November 2005 the zemos98 collective has produced diverse reports on contemporary culture, among them
one about the Copilandia festival, that have been purchased and broadcast by Canal Sur television. These reports
all have Creative Commons of Noncommercial-Recognition-Spain.
094
Up to here the reader will think that this text is nothing more than an accu-
mulation of platitudes that ‘more advanced societies’ have already gotten
past. Maybe. But in cultural models like the Sevilian or the Andalusian, even
today the majority of cultural proposals lack aspects as basic as remuneration.
All we need is to design a t-shirt
In terms of what brought us here, some of the steps and actions we have
taken crystallize in various cultural products. By way of a self-interested
and disorganized list, I will speak about some of these projects.
Appropriation forms part of our most immediate artistic expression, and I

believe it to be passionate and creative impulse.7 But beyond the impetus
that feeds every one of these actions, as a collective, we have produced
–and continue to produce– some audiovisual pieces based on appropria-
tion, in this case, in a digital format.
For example there are projects like voluble.net (a collective of ‘sonic-visual

cre-action’) that was born out of zemos98, in the year 1996; or DJ Spooky’s
show ‘Rebirth of a Nation’ which he presented in the seventh edition of
zemos98 along with the postmodern stream of Eclectic Method’s live
audiovisual show.
Voluble.net is our particular way of understanding the creation, management

and production of shows, normally unreleased in Spain, and tackling the
problems of appropriation in different ways. It is interesting to point out that
in Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky)’s case, appropriation is loaded with politi-
cal-philosophical meaning in terms of the ‘remix’ of his own identity, individ-
ual and collective8; and in the case of Eclectic Method, one would only have
to look to his licensed works with the copyright ‘copy as you please’.
Remuneration for the producer is one of the recent, principal things

zemos98 has incorporated into the call for audiovisual submissions. Since
7. The passion component of appropriation is yet to be seriously studied. In this first approach we realize that it can
have two faces: appropriation out of hatred and appropriation out of love, respect, or fetishism towards the appro-
priated object.
8. Birth of a Nation (1915) by G.W. Griffith is considered one of the masterpieces of cinematic language, but it is also
aracist and classist. DJ Spooky reutilizes the material, that already is public domain, to signal these codes.
our last edition we included in our budget the need to pay audiovisual pro-
ducers, as they form part of zemos98’s most important activities. In terms
of exhibition rights, we pay 150 euros for a public projection in the Official
Section of the festival. We must remember that the cornerstone of the fes-
tival, the international call for submissions for video shorts, have never had,
nor will they ever have, a cash prize, but over the years we have been
authorizing a series of distribution prizes, with the understanding that our
responsibility as cultural producers lies in the expansion of video as a trans-
formative and public form of cultural expression.
David Casacuberta, as with many other things, has been ‘ahead’ in his
approach to culture in general and cyberculture in particular. In ‘Can you
eat from cyberculture?’9 Casacuberta, directly and by way of a letter,
explains the dangerous face of free culture, which works for us as a ‘true’
definition of intellectual property:
The argument is simple: Without intellectual property there wouldn’t be any

incentive for cultural production, as ordinary people wouldn’t be able to enjoy
music, film, books and all of those things that make life really interesting. That
is why intellectual property is necessary, because it establishes the base of a right
that indeed is basic: The right to free access to culture.
That is, intellectual property is not the problem. The problem lies with
those extremists obsessed about authorship; in the intermediaries that tax
real prices; in those who –in short– don’t respect creation but would rather
turn it into an infinitely profitable business.
For that reason we –without thinking twice– pay the right of public com-
munication directly to the creator10, in the same way that any theatrical
show has its fee. We think that if this concept spreads on to the audiovisu-
al festivals, then we will help develop an audiovisual creation that is freer,
more creative and above all, far from the meritocracy that imposes itself in
the logic of the audiovisual and, more over, the film business.
9. This text belongs to the Hambre/Comida (Hunger/Food) project produced by zemos98. It has been published in the
zemos98.5 catalogue and can be found in >>Forward in the following web address:
http://www.zemos98.org/spip/article.php3?id_article=27
10. This right that the Law clarifies that only the Collective Management Societies (Entidades de Gestión Collectiva)
like SGAE or VEGAP can administrate, we have decided to work with it, to a certain degree, as if we were paying for
a rental copy.
096
Because zemos98 does indeed wager for creations that reinvent the culture
that feeds them in which content is subordinated by experimentation in
form, and in which normally a video clip cannot be differentiated from a
documentary, or a fiction piece from video creation.
We always want to differentiate ourselves by including education in our

cultural practice. It is clear to us that the educational process should be col-
lective, critical and participatory. If we understand education as a process
and not as an end in itself, we realize that it must be transformational.11 In
this sense, the zemos98 collective creates practical applications for the pub-
lication of material with copyleft licenses12, and for that same reason, we
also initiate processes of edu-communi-cation in workshops for reading
images, introduction to audiovisual language workshops, or interactive film
workshops for teenagers.
But it will surely be our book Creation and Collective Intelligence that puts the
final accent on the necessity to explain about licensing, what remuneration
is all about, what the remix is, or what intellectual property is. The book
Creation and Collective Intelligence sums up the proposals we developed in 2005
as the inspirational theme for the seventh edition of zemos98.
It is a book co-edited by zemos98, the International University of Andalusia

and the Andalusion Institute for Youth; licensed by Creative Commons and
in a bilingual edition (Spanish/English). The content centers on collective
intelligence and zemos98’s interest in the creative aspect. The book includes
national theorists who are interested in themes that deal with the legal and
administrative context, materializing in aspects such as education, journal-
ism, the web or activism, and concentrating on collective creation and the
effects on video, art, music...
There the content stated in this brief essay will be amplified and expand-
ed, summing up our current particular vision of creation, intelligence, col-
lectivity and the cultural.
11. ‘Education is praxis, reflection, action of man over the world to transform it’. Paulo Freire cited by Mario Kaplún
in ‘Una pedagogía de la Comunicación’ Ediciones de la Torre, Madrid, 1998
12. With the help of the lawyer Javier de la Cueva we realized a small template for the editing of a DVD with Creative
Commons material. It was published in our book Creation and Collective Intelligence and can be downloaded at
http://www.zemos98.org/festivales/zemos987/pack/pdf/z987-licencia.pdf (in Spanish)
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
The Function
Mauricio Lazzarato1
of Signs and Semiotics

in Contemporary
Capitalism
With post-fordism a new distribution of semiotics

emerges, a new division of the sensible in that
which concerns knowledge and signs. In spite of
the fact that linguistics was the paradigm of the
social sciences in the 60’s and 70’s, few have
analysed this configuration. In order to attend to
the different functions in this conflict of signs, dis-
course, and knowledge, we borrow from Deleuze
and Guattari the distinction between a-signifying
and signifying semiotics.
Signs and semiotics always function on a double

register in contemporary societies. The first is that
of the ‘representation’ and ‘signification’ organised
by signifying semiotics (language) with a view to
the production of the ‘subject’, the ‘individual’, and
1. Maurizio Lazzarato is a philosopher, writer and regular contributor to the Futur Antérieur magazine. He is also a member
of the Multitudes/editorial board.
MAURICIO LAZZARATO 099
the ‘I’. The second is the machinic register organised by a-signifying semi-
otics (such as monetary and stock-market signs; computer languages which
activate machines or codes producing images, sounds and data; the equa-
tions, functions and diagrams of science, music, etc.) which ‘are able to
introduce signs with a symbolic or signifying effect, but of which the prop-
er function is not symbolism or signification’.
This second register is not directed towards the constitution of a subject,

but the capture and activation of pre-subjective, pre-individual and trans-
individual elements (affects, emotions, perceptions), in order to make them
function as cogs in the semiotic machine of capital.
1. The function of social subjection and subjective alienation

within signifying semiotics.
Through representation and signification, the capitalist system produces and

distributes roles and functions, it equips us with a subjectivity and it assigns
us an individuation (identity, gender, profession, nationality etc.) in such a
way that everyone is caught in a signifying and representative semiotic trap.
This operation of ‘social subjection’ to established identities and roles is
achieved through the subordination of the multiplicity and heterogeneity
of pre-symbolic or pre-signifying semiotics to language, and to its functions
of representation and signification.
Corporeal symbolic semiotics (every pre-verbal, bodily, iconic means of

expression: dance, mime, music, a somatisation, a nervous fit, a fit of tears,
of intensities, of movements, rhythms etc.) depend neither on signifying lan-
guage nor on consciousness. They do not entail a clear distinction between
speaker and hearer, as in the communicational and linguistic model, and
speech does not take the central place that it does in the latter. These semi-
otics are animated by affects and give rise to relations which can be
assigned to a subject, an I, an individual, only with difficulty. They exceed
the subjective individualising limits (persons, identities, social roles and func-
tions) in which language would like to enclose and reduce them. The ‘mes-
sage’ does not pass through linguistic channels, but via the body, through
posture, noise, imagery, mimicry, intensity, movement, rhythm etc.
The use of signifying semiotics has, according to Guattari, the following

consequences: ‘Pathic [affective] subjectivity, which is at the root of all
100
modes of subjection, is obscured (…) and tends to be systematically evac-

uated of relations of discursivity, although the operators of discursivity are
essentially founded on it’.2
The reduction of these modalities of expression to signifying semiotics is a

political operation, since, on the one hand, the ‘the taking of signification
is always inseparable from the taking of power’3, and on the other, there is
no significance and representation independent of the dominant significa-
tions and representations.
The power to manipulate linguistic and non-linguistic signs is bent to the

logic of representation and signification, a logic which neutralises and
represses all other functions of language and signs.
There is a pretension common to the capitalist logic of disciplinary soci-

eties and that of socialism and communism: the relation to the real must
necessarily pass by a mediation. Without signification and representation
there is no access to the real. In the tradition of the workers movement, no
politics is possible without ‘gaining consciousness’ (signification), and with-
out ‘representation’ of the people or the class by the ‘party’.
Semiotics and politics, government of signs and government of political

space, are tightly interwoven.
2. The functions of the machinic enslavement of a-signifying

semiotics.
Guattari’s concept of subjection accords in several places with the concept

of ‘government by individuation’ which for Foucault characterises discipli-
nary societies. The functions of ‘machinic enslavement’ by contrast find no
correspondence in any political or linguistic theory, and this concept is one
of Deleuze and Guattari’s fundamental contributions to the comprehen-
sion of contemporary societies.
The machinic register of the semiotic production of Capital functions on

the basis of a-signifying semiotics, of signs which, instead of producing sig-
2. Félix Guattari, Chaosmose Galilée, Paris, 1992

3. Félix Guattari, La Revolution Moléculaire, 10-18, 1980, p. 232
nification, trigger an action, a reaction, a comportment, an attitude or a

posture. Such semiotics do not signify but put into movement, they activate.
We will use a description by Brian Massumi in order to explain the func-

tion of machinic enslavement. He explains, in a very beautiful article, that
after September 11th 2001 the television became the ‘the privileged chan-
nel for collective affect modulation, in real time, at socially critical turning
points’.4 That is, it became the privileged channel of machinic slavery.
The US Office of Homeland Security put in place a system of alerts coded

by colour (from green to red) to calibrate the anxiety of the public in the
face of the ‘terrorist’ threat. This system was not addressed to the cogni-
tion and consciousness of subjects, but rather ‘to the irritability of bodies’,
that is, to the pre-verbal and pre-individual elements of subjectivity.
Perceptive/perceptual symbols were used to directly activate the sensibili-
ty rather than ‘to reproduce a form’ or ‘to transmit definite content’. The
alerts were ‘signals without signification’ carrying no ideological sense in
themselves, nor any discourse, but activating a ‘reflex-response’ in which
‘each body’s individuality performed itself, reflexively (that is to say, non-
reflectively) in an immediate nervous response’.5
This trained response to the ‘perceptual cues’ of the system ‘wirelessly

jacked central government functioning directly into each individual’s nerv-
ous system’. The object of government is always, as Foucault says, the pop-
ulation, but here ‘the whole population became a networked jumpiness’ an
immense ‘neural network’ which reacts in a reflexive manner to the stimuli
it is given.6 According to Massumi, this is not about transmitting a message,
an exchange of information with ideological content, but an intervention
which acts where experience emerges. This system works upon the condi-
tions of emergence of emotion, speech and action. It affects subjectivity in
its very process of constitution, within the modalities of its own production.
‘It was less a communication than an assisted germination of potentials for

action whose outcome could not be accurately determined in advance –but
whose variable determination could be determined to occur, on hue’.7
4. Brian Massumi, ‘Fear (The Spectrum Said)’ positions. 2005; 13: 31-48
5. ibid.
6. ibid.
7. ibid.
102
This system sees a decline in the capacity for determination, since it cannot
control the effects and reactions of individuals, but what it loses in control
it gains in the possibility of formatting the development of subjectivity.
Monetary signs and stock indexes, television, science, music, etc., can func-
tion as machines producing signs which write both the real and the body,
without passing through any signification or representation.
The circulation of fear, anguish and panic which constitute the atmosphere
and tonality that infuses our ‘security’ societies is propelled by sign
machines which are not directed towards consciousness, but to the nervous
system, to affects, to emotions. Instead of being centred on language, the
symbolic semiotics of bodies are activated directly by the industrial,
machinic, and non-human production of images, sounds, intensities,
movements, rhythms, etc.
If signifying semiotics have the function of subjective alienation, of ‘social

subjection’, a-signifying semiotics have the function of ‘machinic enslave-
ment’. A-signifying semiotics operate a synchronisation and modulation of
pre-individual and pre-verbal elements of subjectivity; in utilising affects,
perceptions, emotions etc. as pieces, components and elements of a
machine. We are all able to function as input/output components of semi-
otic machines, like the relays of the television or the internet which allow
access or block the passage of information, communication and affects.
In opposition to signifying semiotics, a-signifying semiotics know neither

persons, roles or subjects. Whilst subjection enlists global persons, molar
subjective representations which are easy to manipulate, machinic enslave-
ment puts together infra-personal, infra-social elements, on the basis of a
molecular economy of desire.
The power of these semiotics reside in the fact that they pass though sys-
tems of representation and signification in which ‘individuated subjects
recognise and alienate themselves’.8
Machinic enslavement is thus not the same thing as social enslavement. If

the latter addresses itself to the individuated molar dimension of subjectiv-
ity, the former activates its molecular, pre- or trans-individual dimension.
8. Félix Guattari, La Revolution Moléculaire, 10-18, 1980, p. 237

In the first case the system speaks and makes speak. It indexes and flushes
out the multiplicity of pre-signifying and symbolic semiotics in language
and linguistic chains, privileging their representative functions. But in the
second case it creates no discourse, it does not speak, it functions, it puts
into movement. It does this through connecting directly to the nervous sys-
tem, to the brain, to the memory etc.; through activating affective, transi-
tive, trans-individual relations; relations which may only with difficulty be
attributed to a subject, an individual, an I.
These two semiotic registers work together in the production and control
of subjectivity, in both its molar and molecular dimension.
As we shall see, the same semiotic assemblages can be at the same time
assemblages of machinic enslavement and social subjection (television, for
example, can constitute us as subjects, as users, or then again, it can use us
as simple relays to transmit information, communication or signs, setting
off a simple action-reaction loop). We have the privilege of being subject
to the effects of both.
The sense and role of a-signifying semiotics (money, assemblages of

machinic production of images, sounds, speech, signs, equations, scientific
formulas, music etc.) must be stressed, since for the most part they are
ignored by linguistic and political theories, although they constitute the
pivot of new forms of capitalist government. They put in place a new dis-
tribution between the discursive and non-discursive.
Linguistic theory and analytic philosophy misrecognises their existence and

function because they suppose that the production and circulation of signs
and words is essentially a human affair, a matter of semiotic ‘exchange’
between men. They construct a territorialized and logo-centric conception
of enunciation, despite the fact that a growing part of the enunciation and
circulation of signs is produced and maintained by machinic assemblages
(television, cinema, radio, internet, etc.). In opposition to their conception,
capitalism characterises itself by a de-territorialised and machino-centric
enunciation. Media and telecommunications double the old ‘oral and scrip-
tural’ relations, configuring new (individual and collective) arrangements of
enunciation.
The theories which consider speech and language to be the most impor-
tant or exclusive form of political expression (Arendt, Rancière, Virno)
104
seem to also misunderstand a-signifying semiotics, since the process of sub-

jectivation (Rancière) or individuation (Virno) is performed in a public
space conceived as a theatrical scene, where political subjects constitute
themselves in their molar and representative dimension, miming the per-
formance of the artist or the orator before the public.
The theatrical metaphor seems to me particularly ill fit for the apprehen-
sion of contemporary political space.
The process of subjectivation or individuation is mutilated because the

semiotics of a-signifying machines completely redraw and reconfigure pub-
lic space and its modes of expression, directly affecting ‘political speech’.
This latter can no longer be described by the function of the power of lan-
guage, as it is was exercised in the Greek ‘polis’, as it has been by all those
theories, from Hannah Arendt on. In contemporary public space the pro-
duction of speech is organised ‘industrially’ rather than ‘theatrically’. The
process of subjectivation or individuation cannot be reduced to ‘social sub-
jection’, completely ignoring ‘machinic enslavement’.
These contemporary political and linguistic theories, insofar as they main-

tain direct or indirect reference to the polis or the theatre, remain paradox-
ically on the terrain of pre-capitalism.
3. The techniques of the mind
The subjectivity of the control society depends on a multitude of machinic

systems for its content. To describe this ‘entering into machine’ of subjec-
tivity9, it is necessary to recall the gestures and actions which we, the devel-
oped westerners, carry out each day, in our most mundane routines.
I get up in the morning and turn on the light, activating in this way a tech-
nological assemblage which corresponds to the generalised decoding of
flows particular to capitalism. Nondescript flows, indifferent to all product,
all actualisation, but which, composed of sign-points with no signification,
will penetrate and drive all the other technological assemblages that I will
activate in the rest of the day.
9. TN: The text employs the phrase ‘entrer en machine’ as a play on the phrase ‘entrer en religion’ –to enter or join the
church.
While I eat my breakfast I listen to the radio. The habitual spatial and tem-
poral dimensions of my aural world are suspended. The habitual sensori-
al-motor schemas on which aural perception is based are neutralised.
Voice, speech and sound are de-territorialised, since they have lost all rela-
tion with a body, a space, a situation, a territory. Radiophonic diffusion
does not convey ‘the orientation, limits and structure of the space’ of enun-
ciation, but simply the ‘relations between the aural intensities’.10
The ‘radio is less a matter of sound fragments comprehended as sensible

qualities relating to an object, than an unlimited series of modes/meth-
ods/manners, of passive and active forces of affection…’11
‘Sound comprises elemental forces (intensities, tone, interval, rhythm and

tempo) which have a more direct impact than the meaning of words: it is
fundamentally the foundation of radiophonic art’, according to Arnheim.12
But here too is the foundation of the government of control societies.
Before leaving I make a call to say that I will be half an hour late. Where
does the communication happen? At my place? At my interlocutor’s? In the
telecommunication assemblage? What is the context of this enunciation?
In the street I try to get some money from a cash machine, an electronic,
informatic and telemetric assemblage which emits only sign-points without
signification, satisfying my request in placing at my disposition monetary
signs that I put in my pocket. These signs are flows of purchasing power
which, as we know, have in reality no power, other than that of exchang-
ing with other commodity signs. Signs which are ostensibly displayed on
the walls of the subway where I go to catch my train.
The ticket vending machine is a system of regulation and control without

signification, but it can produce significations since it ceaselessly reminds
me of the balance of my signs without power, a balance which continually
modulates the necessity of working.
10. Serge Cardinal, ‘La radio, modulateur de l’audible’, Chimères, n° 53, Paris, 2004 p. 46
11. ibid.
12. cited in ibid. p. 53
106
Before entering the subway train I buy a newspaper. My daily reading con-
fronts me with the capitalist specificity of writing, another machine of signs
and information.
Here we can defer to Gabriel Tarde who at the end of the 19th century
had already underlined the difference between this ‘mute’ mode of enun-
ciation in relation to the model of the Greek polis.
The Greek political orator composed a discourse destined to be pro-

nounced in ‘a very short time, in a space which never exceeded the reach
of the human voice’ in front of a restrained number of men ‘momentari-
ly subtracted from all other ambient influences’, composed by the orator in
the ‘same state of mind.’13
The task of the newspaper seems entirely different: ‘The newspaper is

addressed to a much wider public, but dispersed, composed of individuals
who remain subject to distractions of all types whilst they read, hearing the
drone of conversations around them in the neighbourhood or café, ideas
contrary to those of the writer’.14
The readers, like the radio listeners, never see the writer, neither his ges-
tures and postures, nor his facial features, and, with this difference to the
radio, they also never hear his voice or intonation. Whereas the orator
marks the mind of his listeners with a single discourse, it takes several arti-
cles to achieve the same result, since ‘the article is only a link in a chain of
articles, generally coming from multiple writers who make up the editorial
voice of the newspaper’.
It is from the French Revolution onwards that the very long and complex
‘mute discourse called newspaper’ comes to drive our democracies.
The big difficulty for a newspaper is to form its public and keep them. One
does not constitute a public with a body of coherent ideas, or a harmo-
nious deployment of arguments, as with the rhetoric of the orator.
‘The content of the newspaper is composed of innumerable –and incoher-

ent– subjects which are formed every morning by the events of the day
13. Gabriel Tarde, ‘Les transformations du pouvoir’, Les empécheurs de penser en rond, Paris, 2003.
14. ibid.
before. It’s as if in the course one of Demosthenes’ diatribes against Philip

he is approached at every minute by messengers bringing him fresh news,
and as if the narration or interpretation of this information constituted his
discourse’.15
In returning home I watch a television news program, along with some

eight million other French men and women. Together we constitute a huge
neural network, a network of bodies and souls, of simultaneously synchro-
nized affects, emotions and passions. We are an immense nervous system
exposed to the order-words of power.
Who speaks in the television and to whom is the speech addressed?
The talking head is only the termination of an ‘industrial’ production of

enunciation, of which editors, the journalists, the technicians and the
interns are only a part (and not necessarily the most important in the pro-
duction chain). The voice of the presenter is a ‘polyphony’, it is not pleas-
ant. In her voice resonate the voices of the powers that be, the advertising
announcers, the other written and electronic media, and those of the direc-
tors of ‘cultural’ enterprises whose function is to expose brains to the
process of marketing.
In every house, every one of the eight million television viewers finds him
or herself also in the centre of an agency, at the crossing of a series of
flows. The different modes of mobilising attention, organizing programs or
of presenting a subject demarcate the different experiential spaces of read-
ing a newspaper or listening to the radio. But new elements appear, linked
to the technological specificity of the assemblage. Therefore, in front of my
television I am at the point of convergence of:
1. A perceptive fascination provoked by the luminescent stream of the appara-

tus and which borders on hypnotism; 2. A relation of capture with narrative
content of the emission associated with the a lateral vigilance in relation to the
environmental events (the water which boils on the stove, the cry of a child, the
telephone); 3. A world of fantasy inhabiting my daydreaming… My sentiment
of personal identity is in this way pulled in all directions.16
15. ibid. p. 259

16. Félix Guattari, (1995) Chaosmosis. Indiana University Press.
108
Before going to the cinema I respond to the emails that I have received
during the day and I enter into a completely different assemblage of writ-
ing and communication, one in which, in Bakhtin terms, the ‘understand-
ing and active responsivity’ neutralized by television can be exercised. I
enter into another public space.
I arrive at the cinema just before the last showing, where I have another
experience of the ‘ordinary’ suspension of the world. This time the suspen-
sion concerns the perception of space and time and its habitual coordi-
nates. My sensorial-motor system is cut short, since the images and move-
ments no longer depend either on an object or my brain, but are automat-
ically produced by a machinic assemblage. The editing disturbs the rela-
tion between situation, image and movement, making me enter into anoth-
er bloc of space time.
In pre-signifying or symbolic semiology the matter and form of expressions

are parallel and not articulated in a linear fashion as in language. In a film
there are different lines of expression: the audio and visual lines, the lines
of light and colour etc. There is no question of a syntax or key which
would render the relation between these different lines homogenous.
Faced with the processes of subjection and enslavement which we have

described, a political question arises: how do we extract ourselves from
these relations of domination and develop from these same technologies
practices of freedom, processes of individual and collective subjectivation?
Conclusions
Signifying and a-signifying semiotics play a fundamental role in the process

of subjectivation. The latter is the result of the action of a multiplicity of
elements, discursive and non-discursive, linguistic and ethical, social and
political. Instead of presupposing their general translatability into the unity
of signifying semiotics, we must rather recognise their disjuncture, their
digression, their fundamental difference. Only in working through the dis-
junction, autonomy and independence of these components can we map
their effects, functions and modalities of action; their capacity for existen-
tial production, transformation and self-affirmation.
In this way, the polyvocal quality of the components of enunciation (linguis-

tic and non-linguistic), implies a process of subjectivation which cannot be
reduced to the simple result of a logico-linguistic or signifying operation.
On the contrary, the point is to map the components of subjectivation and

enunciation in their fundamental heterogeneity, to be able to determine
their functions, effects and ultimate potential for action.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
The Doing and the
Celia Lury1
Living of the Business

of Barcelona: Brand-
space, Brandvalue
and Brandpower
Introduction
This chapter puts forward a view of the brand as
a new kind of object, of interest for the ways in
which it demonstrates the making of new kinds of
space, value and power in contemporary society.
It begins with an analysis of branding as it has
developed within the economy and concludes by
outlining briefly the implications of this argu-
ment for Barcelona as a brand.
The brand as a new media object

In previous work on brands (Lury, 2004), I have
outlined a view of the brand as a new media
object. I suggest that the brand may be seen as a
1. Celia Lury is a researcher and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

CELIA LURY 113
new media object (Manovich, 2001) because of the multi-layered charac-

ter of its existence. Rather then being merely a logo or sign, brands typi-
cally comprise a physical operating system (a distributed production and
distribution process), a technical or material support (a physical infrastruc-
ture such as a hotel or a petrol service station or simply products), and a set
of conventions that articulate or work on that support (the activities of
service providers and/or the activities of consumers) as well as a logo and
advertising campaigns. As such the brand is a dynamic platform or support for
practice. This practice or activity is usually, but not always, some kind of
market exchange.
In economic theory it is conventional to think of the co-ordination of mar-

ket exchange in terms of price as a framing of economic action. How does
the brand frame economic action differently? In media theory, the frame
and its correlates –window, mirror and screen– are used in discussions of
architecture, painting and cinema (see Sobchack, 1992; Deleuze and
Guattari, 1994, pp. 186-199; and Manovich, 2001, pp. 95-103 for useful
discussions). The most basic definition of the frame in media theory is ‘a
window that opens onto a larger space that is assumed to extend beyond
the frame’ (Manovich, 2001: 80); alternatively, the frame is said to separate
‘two absolutely different spaces that somehow coexist’ (Manovich, 2001:
95). One of the key developments in the work on cinema and computing
is to consider the frame –or more precisely, the screen or interface– as
dynamic. The point here is that ‘Frames or sections are not co-ordinates;
they belong to compounds of sensations whose faces, interfaces, they con-
stitute’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 187). The second way in which the
brand is a new media object then is that brands organise (market and
other) activities by acting as a dynamic frame, and more specifically as an
interface.
As a frame, the interface –like the window or mirror– is a surface or

boundary that connects and separates two spaces, an inner and outer envi-
ronment. So, for example, as a commercial interface, the brand is a frame
that organises the two-way exchange of business communication between
the inner and outer environments of the market in time and space, inform-
ing how consumers relate to producers and how producers relate to con-
sumers. However, insofar as the brand is an interface while these relations
are affective, dynamic and two-way, they are not direct, symmetrical or
reversible. The interface of the brand connects the producer and con-
sumer and removes or separates them from each other; it ‘is revealing of
114
some relationships, but it keeps others very well hidden’ (Pavitt, 2000: 175).
And in this regard the interface of the brand is rather like that of the inter-
face of the computer as described by Sherry Turkle in her ethnographic
study Life on the Screen. In this book she describes the interactivity afford-
ed by the computer interface in terms of a changed understanding of
transparency. This changed understanding is initially associated with the
use of Macintosh’s iconic computer interface, but it is also, so Turkle
argues, ‘part of a larger cultural shift’ (1996:42). It is a transparency in
which a system, rather than encouraging its users to ‘look beyond the
magic to the mechanism’ as was true of the early IBM PCs, tells its users
‘to stay on the surface’. She writes,
In a culture of simulation, when people say that something is transparent, they

mean that they can easily see how to make it work. They don’t necessarily
mean that they know why it is working in terms of any underlying process.
(1996:42; my emphasis).
The iconic style of the Macintosh does ‘nothing to suggest how [its] under-
lying structure could be known’; instead it is ‘visible only through its effects’
(1996: 23). In place of the assumption that ‘an object is transparent if it lets
the way it works be seen through its physical structure’ (1996: 79), this
transparency is ‘somewhat paradoxically... enabled by complexity and
opacity’ (1996: 42).
A further way in which the brand may be seen as a new media object is in
relation to the use of looping, a central control structure of many new
media objects. So, for example, computer programmes make use of loops,
which may involve altering the flow of data through control structures in
terms of operations such as ‘if this/then that’. Indeed, a computer pro-
gramme progresses from start to end by executing a series of loops. The
suggestion here is that the marketing practices developed in the second half
of the twentieth century act as loops; they incorporate the activities of con-
sumers in the processes and products of production and distribution (‘if
this/then that’). This incorporation typically involves the marketer and
other cultural intermediaries adopting the position of the consumer, that is,
of imagining the consumer (Lury and Warde, 1996). The (historically
changing) marketing knowledge or information produced in this way is used
selectively to loop back, to inform processes of product and process differ-
entiation. Then, in turn, the resulting products and processes themselves
become marketing tools, generating further information. The brand thus
CELIA LURY 115
progresses or emerges in a series of loops, an ongoing process of (product)

differentiation and (brand) integration.2
In the case of brands as in computer programming, this looping is not usu-

ally a one-off (it does not usually have as its aim a single, or discrete sale)
but is part of a sequential progression (and is intended to develop an ongo-
ing relationship). From this point of view, the brand comprises a sequence
or series of loops that implicate or entangle the consumer or user. The
temporality that defines the communication of the brand is not defined by
one-offness, but by managing ‘the temporal delay between receiving a
request and responding to it’ (Rodowick, 1994; Butler, 1991), by organis-
ing a sequence or series of products, services, promotion and events.
Moreover, this sequence of products, services, promotions and events is not
to be found in a single place, but is distributed in space. The role of the
brand in organising this movement or flow –in terms of a series of rela-
tions between products, services and events– is fundamental.
Putting together these elements of the analysis of the brand as a new

media object it becomes possible to see how the brand integrates, organis-
es and co-ordinates (market) exchange through its qualitative possibilities
or qualities –as transitions of phase or state, as the organisation of qualita-
tive effects– not merely through price or quantitative calculation (Kwinter,
2001: 42). In short, brands may be deployed as instruments or tools of
qualculation (Cochoy; Callon and Law, 2003). In the operation of the
brand then, the calculations of economic capital are not solely quantita-
tive, that is, they are not entirely a matter of the quantitative calculation of
equivalence, but also of qualculation and the co-ordination of qualitative
differences. Indeed, the emergence of the brand is one of the reasons that
the contemporary economy is described in terms of a vital intensity
(Thrift, 2005) or as an economy of qualities (Callon, 2002).
Brandspace, brandvalue and brandpower
Let me now go on to say a bit more about how the brand organizes or
makes space, the nature of brand value and brand power. To do this let me
2. Important here is the way in which this looping process has contributed to the possibility of value being added at
different points in the processes of production and distribution. It is not simply price, but also product, place and
packaging that become variables in the organisation of market exchange.
116
first employ two brand product examples: Swatch and Nike. A key compo-
nent of the logo of the brand Swatch is its consistent self-identification in
relation to Switzerland. Swatch watches display not only the name Swatch
(itself a contraction of Swiss and watch) and the Swiss flag, but also the
description ‘Swiss’ on their faces. In addition, much of the promotional lit-
erature accompanying products makes reference to the Swiss-ness of the
Swatch ethos. Such references are widely held to have the effect of
strengthening consumer perceptions of trust in the quality of Swatch prod-
ucts in what is perceived to be a risky global commercial environment.
Thus Nicolas Hayek, one-time Swatch CEO, has gone so far as to claim
that the buyers of Swatch are ‘sympathetic’ to the Swiss: ‘We’re nice peo-
ple from a small country. We have nice mountains and clear water,’ he says.
He attributes the company’s success to the fact that:
We are not just offering people a style. We are offering them a message.
…Emotional products are about message –a strong, exciting, distinct, authen-
tic message that tells people who you are and why you do what you do. There
are many elements that make up the Swatch message. High quality. Low cost.
Provocative. Joy of life. But the most important element of the Swatch message
is the hardest for others to copy. Ultimately, we are not just offering watches. We
are offering our personal culture. (Quoted in Taylor, 1993)
Here Hayek describes the way in which a place-of-origin may be deliber-

ately designed into the interface of a brand. This design activity enables
Swatch products to sell by securing the trust of (certain) consumers, pro-
viding a guarantee of quality, by tying the brand to an origin (a ‘personal
culture’). This guarantee is indirectly linked to the use of Swiss labour in
the manufacture of Swatch products. This is one way of saying that
Swatch may be seen as a territorial, national brand, but it might be more
accurate to say that Swatch was part of a reterritorialisation of global flows
in the context of a competitive global media economy.
In contrast, the origin-ality of the Nike interface is less clearly tied to a terri-
torialised place of origin, or indeed, to an origin at all. To some extent, the
physical location of the company itself (in Portland, Oregon, USA), dedicat-
ed retail outlets such as Niketowns and sports events sponsored by the com-
pany may serve as such an origin. Certainly the perception of the flag-ship
retail outlets, Niketowns, as origins is encouraged not only by the highly-
charged design of the stores, but also by the greater range of stock available,
typically including all the most recent models of shoes, clothes and acces-
CELIA LURY 117
sories. Alongside such intense and exclusive sites, however, Nike presents itself
as original in relation to the almost endless multiplicity of the sites of its prod-
ucts’ uses through the brand’s elevation (and ownership) of an ethos of com-
petition, determination and individuality. Just Do It is the brand injunction,
and in this ‘doing’ multiple origins for the brand are brought into being.
Of course, it is possible to argue that a culture of competition, determina-

tion and individuality is the national culture of the USA and in this sense
there is a parallel between the effects of the interfaces of the Nike and
Swatch brands. But what makes the interface of the Nike brand so distinc-
tive is that it appears as if there is no need to locate this ethos within terri-
torial boundaries in order to secure its ownership or claim its effects. The
interface is not tied to any specific inner environment in this regard; it is
deterritorialising (but nonetheless imperial). The examples of Swatch and
Nike thus suggest that brands may contribute to both re- and de-territori-
alisation. In both cases, it is the brand’s organisation of products, services,
promotions and events as a flow that produces what I am calling brandspace.
Here I want to return again to media theory for what it has to offer in terms
of understanding flows as more than simply mobility or liquidity: in particu-
lar to the account provided by Raymond Williams in his study of television
(1974). For Williams, flow is a sequence or serial assembly of units characterised by
speed, variability and the miscellaneous. In developing this definition, he notes the
historical decline of the use of intervals between programmes in broadcast-
ing, or rather, he draws attention to a fundamental re-evaluation of the inter-
val. In the early days of broadcasting on radio, for example, there would be
intervals of complete silence between programmes. But now, no longer divid-
ing discrete programmes, no longer an interruption or silence, the interval
plays a vital role in the management of the response gap of interactivity (if
this/then that): it marks and makes a sequence (or sequential progression) of
programmes (or products) into a series or flow. Think here of the role of
‘idents’, that is the logos of broadcasting companies, which fill the previous
gaps or silences between programmes (and sometimes now persist through
programmes in the corner of the screen), making possible multiple associa-
tions within and across programmes, branding the channel. The true
sequence in broadcasting in these cases, Williams argues, is not the published
sequence of programme items, but a series of differently associated units,
some larger and some smaller than the individual programme. The argument
proposed here is that in marketing practices, the logo is similarly able to secure
the recognition of the brand as a constantly shifting series of products, services,
118
events, experiences. It is the mediation of things (Lash and Lury, in press).

Brands mark relations between products in such a way that the consumer is
caught up in a more or less open-ended relationship. More generally, what I
have suggested is that brands open up the possibility of organising a complex
space by co-ordinating a continuous process of interactivity, of flows.
What, if any, is the value produced in the movements of flow? Arjun

Appadurai (1986) argues that historically the mass production of goods saw
a shift in the regime of value associated with many kinds of exchange. This
was a shift from a regime structured in terms of exclusivity, where the value
of goods was indirectly regulated by the costs of acquisition, to one struc-
tured by authenticity. In this latter regime, value is typically established in rela-
tion to an origin, that is, to an individual, an event, organisation or place
that is established as pre-existing the object or commodity. The value of the
good in this regime is tied to its function as a trace or an index of that indi-
vidual, event, organisation or place. The argument being put forward here
is that this regime is being supplemented, though not surpassed, by a regime
of value organised in terms of distinctiveness. Let me elaborate on this.
Branding has been described so far as the multiplication of points of access

to an open-ended system of products, events and experiences distributed
in discontinuous time and space, marked by a logo or logos, and sometimes
protected by trade mark. In relation to this open system the value or mean-
ing of any particular item may be understood in terms of ‘a difference that
makes a difference’. This is, of course, Gregory Bateson’s ‘deceptively sim-
ple’ definition of information (Malik, 2005; Bateson, 2000 [1972]). While
information has been widely understood as inimical to meaning or value
(Lyotard, 1984), it is not necessarily so. So, for example Suhail Malik
argues that the information conveyed in a system as regards its transmis-
sion depends on the system as a whole at the time in which the transmission is
taking place. This is a radically relational determination of information.
This invites questions: a difference in what (What are you paying attention
to?), about what (What matters?), for whom (Who is asking, who is affect-
ed?). Asking these questions leads us to focus on the knower, a knower who
always has a particular history, social location and point of view. (Oyama,
2000: 147, quoted in Malik, 2005: 33)
In relation to the open systems of branding described here, the informa-

tion provided by price as to exclusivity retains its meaning (it is important
CELIA LURY 119
because it contributes to availability and the stratification of consumption),

but it is not the difference that makes a difference. Similarly, the meaning
or value of authenticity fails to register, because it is intrinsic to the system
(it is an index of something that pre-exists, such as an author or a place of
origin), and does not require any alteration in the established structure,
organisation or memory of the system. Instead, the value of the brand is
produced in –and produces– a system that is temporalized. The difference
that makes a difference is an event3: it is as such that it is recognised as hav-
ing a distinctive value. An event is what produces a time pressure, or, as
Malik puts it, a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, either for the system itself –as (a
brand) experience– or for an observer, that is, the consumer, as communi-
cation, as an emotional message, as ‘brand experience’. In this sense, dis-
tinctiveness is not opposed to meaning, but is rather ‘a vector of meaning’s
transmutations’ (Malik, 2005). It is what makes some-thing –a branded
product, a branded place or a brand experience– ‘more than just what it
is’, and this is the source of brandvalue.
Finally then, I turn to the question of power and the proposal here is that
brandpower is part of what has been called a condition of transitivity
(Massumi, 2002). As a social fact, the brand is not total and complete but
totalising and incomplete, and it is this incompleteness –its openness, its
ongoingness, its doingness– that defines the modality of brandpower. A
transitive verb is one that requires an object. So, for example, ‘to buy’ is a
transitive verb; we don’t just buy, we buy something, we buy brands. We
don’t just do, we do ‘it’. The openness4 of the brand invites our participa-
3. The brand understood here as an open system is based on pattern and randomness (that is, of organised but open-ended
relations between products, advertising, events and so on), rather than presence and absence (that is, either some specific
product –or person– being in a particular time or place or not) (Hayles, 1996; Lury, 2004). It is what organises the
movement of the products of the global (culture) industry –mediated things and thingified media– as flows of dis-
juncture and difference (Appadurai, 1996; Lash and Lury, in press). Fundamental to this kind of system is the recog-
nition that ‘an infusion of noise into a system can cause it to reorganize at a higher level of complexity’:
Within such a system, pattern and randomness are bound together in a complex dialectic that makes them not so much opposites as comple-
ments or supplements to one another. Each helps to define the other; each contributes to the flow of information through the system. (Hayles,
1996: 260)
Sometimes randomness is introduced deliberately (as appears to be the case for Nike), but what is significant is that in
any case it is inevitable as the introduction of a strategy at one level is radically transformed in unpredictable ways at
others. Indeed, brands such as Nike and Swatch rely –to some extent at least– upon this transformation as they monitor
and respond to the unintended effects of their products in use. Elements of an (un)controlled event will be used –via a
process of intuition, interpretation or scientific analysis– into a new direction of product planning and development as
the brand mutates as it evolves.
4. While brands are described here as open this should not be taken to imply that this openness is either total or unregu-
lated or that it in contributes to freedom in any sense. On the one hand, brands may be distinguished from each other
120
tion and organizes that participation in terms of interactivity. However,

while it operates in terms of an injunction not that you should, but that you
may (Barry, 2001), the invitation to participate is one which is increasingly
difficult to refuse. Brands –amongst other objects– are what we have come
to require in order to do many, if not most, things in everyday life. On the
one hand it is important to recognise that this requirement is organised in
terms of possibility not constraint; on the other, it should not be forgotten
that innovation or possibility may have anti-inventive as well as inventive
implications (Barry, 200). In this respect, brands are not only so ubiquitous
as to be obscene (Baudrillard, 1994) they are also obsequious (Bourdieu,
1977). As Bourdieu notes, the term obsequium was used by Spinoza to
denote the ‘constant will’ produced by the conditioning through which ‘the
State fashions us for its own use and which enables it to survive’. Bourdieu
adopts the term to designate the public testimonies of recognition that are
set up in every group between individuals and the group. Here the term
may be seen to apply to the ‘constant will’ called into being by the taken-
for-granted ubiquity and never-ending possibilities provided by brands in
consumer societies.
Barcelona: the brand
What are the implications of this argument for brands that are not direct-
ly or only commercial, are places not products, and which do not have pro-
prietors in any simple sense, such as the city Barcelona? In many respects,
I would suggest, the points made above apply directly. The branding of
Barcelona may be seen to have produced it as a platform or dynamic sup-
as more or less open; in the case of the two examples discussed here Nike may be seen as slightly more open than Swatch
in the sense that it is organised so as to be more responsive to shifts in consumer use that are to do with lifestyle (although
it has been notoriously unresponsive to consumer criticism in relation to production practices). Indeed this might be seen
as precisely one source of its success and power as a brand: this responsiveness is one of the factors that has aided its dom-
ination of the sports apparel market. On the other hand, the openness described here is more apparent than real in rela-
tion to many brands, including Nike. While brands have the potential to bring ‘an understanding of the outside, of society,
economy and customer, to the inside of the organization and to make it the foundation for strategy and policy’ (Drucker,
quoted in Mitchell, 2001: 77), this potential is not often realised. In practice, brands are more often closed than open. The
situation remains much as it did when marketing expert Theodor Levitt called for a marketing revolution in 1960:
When it comes to the marketing concept today, a solid stone wall often seems to separate word and deed. In spite of the best intentions and ener-
getic efforts of many highly able people, the effective implementation of the marketing concept has generally eluded them. (Quoted in Mitchell,
2001: 77)
In other words, many brands do not operate as interfaces, instead they function like a wall or shield, insulating the pro-
duction process from its environment. In this regard that the managers of brands may be described as having their eyes
wide shut.
CELIA LURY 121
port for activity, for the organisation of (commercial and other) exchange
and communication as interactivity (not as interaction). It is a multi-layered
object, comprising the physical and natural infrastructure of the city (and
other outlets of Barcelona-ness elsewhere), the activities of the local popu-
lation and relations with visitors, consumers and tourists of Barcelona-ness
wherever and whenever that occurs. The exchange or communication
framed by the production of Barcelona as a brand is two-way and dynamic,
but it is neither direct nor symmetrical. While all possible exchange that
takes place in or is concerned with Barcelona may not be intended to con-
tribute to the brand it may be recognized as such, and consequently can-
not be said to be without a brand significance. In these ways, the branding
of Barcelona may be seen to have made everyday living in the city both
more open-ended, more full of possibilities (both inventive and anti-inven-
tive) and more of a business.
The other points made here –about brandspace, brandvalue and brand-
power– also apply to the brand, Barcelona. Thus, while the exchange that
the brand Barcelona organises may be largely localised in a specific place,
it is not exclusively so; that is, access to Barcelona-ness occurs in a complex
space of flows, which include the movements (and prices) of low cost air-
lines, the fortunes of a football club, as well includes promotional and other
media information and the activities of other places which participate in
the same markets. Consequently, the value the brand Barcelona produces
is widely and unevenly distributed and not easily managed. Indeed, its
value as a brand (rather than as a city) is that of distinctiveness, that is its
brand value is realised in competition with other brands (only some of
which are other place brands); it is not that of authenticity or status.5
In short: the brand Barcelona, like other brands, participates in and con-
tributes to a condition of transitivity. It is both obscene and obsequious,
that is, it produces and requires constant will. What follows from this is that
the questions: whether and how interactivity is managed, whether, how
and who can inhabit the possibilities of a brand, become crucial. These
questions are especially important in relation to a place brand, and in rela-
tion to a brand that is not privately owned (as our most product brands) but
is nonetheless managed by some for others. In this respect, I want to con-
clude by considering the impact of brand culture on the general schemes
5. Or only at one remove, that is only insofar as the authenticity of Barcelona is distinctive and differentiates it from other
brands.
122
of conduct and knowledge that Agnes Heller identifies as everyday think-

ing (1984 [1970]).
According to Heller, everyday thinking includes pragmatism, probability,

imitation, analogy, over-generalization, and ‘the rough treatment of the
singular case’ (1984: 165-182). Such everyday schemes of knowledge may
be contrasted with the schemes of knowledge involved in the doing of the
possibilities of the brand. So, for example, Heller suggests that ‘everything
we do on the level of everyday life is based on probability’. This everyday
notion of probability is to be distinguished from the ‘possible’. On the one
hand, the ‘objective basis of action based on probability is provided by
habit and repetition’ (1984: 168); it can ‘extend from action based on noth-
ing more than impulse, to action based on moral reflection or on calcula-
tion’, or indeed, to action based on ‘belief ’ (1984: 170). On the other,
‘Action undertaken for no better reason than it is possible is not a reliable
guide in the business of everyday living: it lands us in too many catastro-
phes of everyday life’ (1984: 168). This analysis outlined briefly here
–which suggests that the constrained heterogeneity of the probable may be
being supplanted in everyday life by the unlimited homogeneity of the pos-
sible– suggests that branding might not be a reliable guide to the business
of everyday living.
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Fontana/Collins.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
Barcelona and the
Jorge Luis Marzo1
Paradox of the Baroque
Catalan historiography constructed, even from its

very beginnings, the idea that Catalunya was not
Baroque; that is, Baroque is something not very
‘proper’ to Catalunya. The 17th and 18th cen-
turies represent the dark Baroque age, in contrast
with a magnificent Medieval and Renaissance
era, during which the kingdom of Catalunya and
Aragón played an important international role in
a large part of the Mediterranean. The interpre-
tation suggests that Catalunya was Baroque
despite itself; a reading that, from the 19th century
on –when it is decided that all negative content
about Baroque should be struck from the record
in order to transform it into a consciously com-
mercial and urban logo– makes implicit that any
reflection on such content or Baroque itself will
be schizophrenic and paradoxical. Right up to
this day.
Though the (always Late-) Baroque style was pre-

sent in buildings, embellishments and paintings, it
1. Jorge Luis Marzo is an independent curator and private researcher.

JORGE LUIS MARZO 127
however did not have an official environment in which to expand and legit-
imate itself, nor urban spaces in which to extend its setup (although in
Tortosa, Girona, and other cities there were important Baroque features).
The Baroque style was especially evident in rural churches, but as a result
of the occupation of principle Catalan plazas –particularly by the Bourbon
crown of Castile– principal architectonic realizations were castles and mili-
tary forts, like the castle of Montjuic or the military Citadel in Barcelona.
Public Baroque buildings hardly existed: The Gothic ones were already
present and there was little necessity for new ones. At the same time, there
was more money in the private sphere than in the public for building, so
Baroque programs were more subject to family representation than to the
strictly political. Also, there was not an excess of capital circulating that
could be put towards undertaking the creation of new buildings, so scarce
resources were put towards the creation of tableaus rather than the build-
ing of buildings. What’s more, Barcelona rather quickly adopted the
Neoclassical style to define political and commercial buildings in the city.
The restrained tradition of Catalan Gothic and Renaissance (see, for exam-
ple, Santa María del Mar or the Palau de la Generalitat) was no longer very
inclined toward ornamental flourishes, considered cliché amidst the pro-
gressive awareness of what Catalunya’s ‘national art’ should be.
Barcelona entered into the 19th century with the same dimensions that it
had in the 14th. The disappearance of the walls –which had turned against
the city ever since the Castilian military occupation of 1714– became a
pressing priority for an impatient and internationalist bourgeoisie hoping
to develop the enormous financial capital it had created. The Catalan cap-
ital had not been able to realize itself as the great European city that it had
aspired to be during five centuries. First, resigned to its notion of ‘Plaza
fuerte’ (fortified enclosure), well laid out within its limits; later, from 1714 on,
subject to Madrid’s political, military and administrative control.
What happens to the mid-19th century Barcelona is similar to what occurs in

Protestant countries after the religious wars at the end of the 17th: Liberated
from military constrictions and free of social tensions, the new bourgeois
classes were able to let loose a kind of representation –Baroque– despised for
its association with the occupier. In the northern countries, the Neoclassical
style was rapidly associated with political and mercantile buildings, while
Rococó, with its accent on Baroque ornamentation, was given free rein so as
to usher in feelings of liberation and pleasure after all the privations that had
128
been suffered. After the confusion of the 17th and 18th centuries, and once
Cerdà’s rationalist ensanche2 had taken form, Barcelona would adopt this same
philosophy, curiously reaping from a long tradition of Baroque urban design
by using a grid layout, which had garnered such success in the large
American colonial cities. The ‘brand new’ reticule offered the possibility to
create determined points of view that accented the monumentality of the
city. At the same time, Cerdà’s rational organization (let us not forget,
imposed by Madrid over other more Baroque projects that the bourgeois
Catalan nobility was driving) was an obligatory modern justification of the
country’s traditional ‘spiritual sobriety’, upon which, now more openly, the
naturalist and decorative frenzy of Noucentisme and Modernisme spread.
In the imaginary of the most ennobled bourgeoisie, Barcelona’s ensanche

was the opportunity to set loose the Baroque city that Barcelona longed for
and had been denied. All of the city’s great architects, in an implicit and
explicit way, participated in this perception: Domenec i Muntaner, Puig i
Cadafalch, Gaudí. Barcelona hurried to buy Baroque paintings to fill its
collections, which remain today, as can be seen in the Museu Nacional
d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC). Leading this wave were personages such as
Francesc Cambó, a prominent figure of Catalan politics at the time (from
his vantage point in City Hall, his position as stock holder in nascent energy
companies, and from his fluid relations with Madrid elites during the dic-
tatorship of Primo de Rivera), who would boost the Universal Exposition
of 1929, with the urbanization of Montjuic Mountain, instead of the pro-
posal to construct it in what is now the zone of the Fòrum.
Montjuic turned into, on the one hand, the very astute representation of a
city that wanted to internationalize itself, while on the other it configured
a new axis with the industrialized neighborhood of Sants and the outlet to
the south. But, on top of that: If the Exposition of 1888 had eradicated the
old army Citadel and had returned control of urban symbols to the peo-
ple of Barcelona, the newly configured mountain erased the ominous pres-
ence of the military castle from the urban imaginary and legitimized the
efforts of the city’s bourgeoisie in maintaining the political and nationalist
pulse of the affair, even though this was the commercialization of Spanish-
ness, which was indeed what it ended up being.
2. The Ensanche –or Eixample in Catalán– designed by the Catalán architect Ildefons Cerdà and constructed in the 19th
and early 20th centuries, literally means ‘extension’, and is the district in Barcelona between the old city (Ciutat
Vella) and what were once surrounding towns. (Trans. Note)
The urbanization of Montjuic gave the highest profile to the western face
of the mountain, emphasizing the character of the only facade open to the
city. The Baroque intention was clear in every element. Finally, a ‘national’
palace presided over the city, which unfurled at its feet.
The dome, almost theatrically connected to the facade, like Francesco

Borromini’s Santa Agnese church, was crowned by a beam of nine light
projections into the sky that could be seen from any point in the city.
It cannot be but a bit strange that, in this scenario, it was military features
(light beams into the sky) that were applied to make people forget the
mountain’s military past. On the other hand, new applications in hydraulic
technology carried out by Carlos Buigas configured a spectacular central
fountain –in an intermezzo in the path– in which the plays of water, light,
color and music achieved a scenic paroxysm that would have delighted
Roman architects of the 17th and 18th centuries.
For it’s not by chance that Baroque Rome was so present in the whole
ensemble. The fountain that presides over Plaza Espanya, by the architect
Jujol, is dedicated to the ‘national’ rivers, in the same way the sculptural
ensembles in the Piazza Navona are. The short open, oval colonnade that
opens the scene to the viewer –next to the two enormous Venetian towers–
are intended to recall Saint Peter’s in the Vatican, like two arms that
embrace the visitor-citizen and accompany him into the interior.
The ensemble of fountains and small pools, then, gradually spread

throughout the Exposition paths in the form of organic waterfalls, which
in their day were surrounded by rows of obelisk of light. Parallel to that,
the external walls of the Exposition palaces were all decorated with sgraf-
fito Solomonic columns. But, most importantly, Barcelona constructed
Montjuic and Plaza Espanya with the same spirit in which 17th century
Rome defined its physiognomy: As a way to captivate the pilgrim. If, in
Rome, the spirit of Trent defined the urban scenario, in 1929 Barcelona
attempted to embrace the commercial and touristic pilgrim.
However, it is interesting to observe that while Barcelona was bit by bit

acquiring a clear profile of Baroque influences in the way it orchestrated
its modern identity and layout, the Catalan Baroque patrimony was disap-
pearing. Around 75% of the country’s Baroque constructions succumbed
in a period of time highlighted by three key dates: In 1835, with the aban-
130
donments and subsequent looting provoked by the liberal Desamortización3;

in 1909, during the Anarchist anti-clerical fury of the Setmana Tragica4; and
in the Civil War, between 1936-1939. If enlightened Barcelona recognized
in Baroque a great boost for nationalist reconstruction, at the same time
working class and iconoclastic Barcelona and Catalunya almost always
identified the Baroque legacy with an intolerable weight that should have
disappeared in the fire.
The desire to grant itself symbols codified by the Romantic and pre-
Vanguard imaginary evident in the great cities of the moment (Paris,
London, Berlin, Vienna), made Barcelona employ the Baroque mentality
to resolve problems and questions that had not been well-digested with
time. For example, the aforementioned theme of monumentality.
Barcelona, crammed into its walls, had not been able to generate great
monumental symbols to represent Catalan political and economical
impulses. What’s more, Catalunya itself didn’t even have a real capital.
Over time cities like Madrid and Seville had acquired the label of land-
marks in the Spanish imaginary, while up into the 20th century Barcelona
has suffered a prolonged financial and political inferiority with respect to
the the majority of 19th century governments. The aforementioned 1929
Expo was in part boycotted by powerful economic and political circles in
Madrid when they pushed for the celebration of a parallel Spanish-
American Exposition at the very same time. Barcelona needed to become
a city with monuments, plazas and enclosures that were unique but at the
same time mirrored global currents dictated by the principal European
cities of the moment.
Monumentality is always defined by immensity and magnificence.

Barcelona, in the middle of the 19th century, was by no means magnifi-
cent. It was certainly a dynamic city, with a grand cathedral but without a
facade, and with some great official Neoclassical buildings that could only
be seen from the sea. The Baroque monumental solution, timidly initiated
in the 1880 Expo but consolidated in 1929, had an end in itself: To make
Barcelona something ‘grand’, and as much as possible, ‘the grandest’. This
is how the ensanche projects, many of Gaudí’s works, the international
3. Desentailment: the governmental seizure of ecclesiastical properties and lands (Trans. note)
4. Bloody Week: violent confrontations throughout Catalunya between working classes and the army in response to the
calling-up of reserve troops by Prime Minister Antonio Maura to be sent to Morocco for renewed colonial activity
there. (Trans. note)
Exposition, the planning of the Montjuic facade and many other actions
must be understood. One of the characters in Eduardo Mendoza’s novel
City of Marvels said: ‘Every two hours the spout and the fountains lining
each side of the central path of the Exposition use as much water as was
consumed in all of Barcelona in a full day, the Marques said. When and
where have you ever seen something so grand? he asked’.
Puig i Cadafalch was the great inventor of the public works program at
Montjuic and of the conception of the city itself as monument. The figure
of this great architect represents especially well Barcelona bourgeois soci-
ety’s impulse towards the Baroque transformation of a city that desired to
be modern and ‘global’. Puig i Cadalfalch’s ideal city was a monumental
one, where opulence is manifest in splendid representative elements that
speak pompously of economic triumph. Puig conceived the city as an
immense festival that therefore required ‘grand stanzas’. Towards 1905, he
began to leave aside medievalism to begin to compose with Baroque
resources –such as plataresque and manueline ornamentation– in order to
achieve preciosity and wealth. During his Baroque stage, the so-called ‘yel-
low age’ –which as Cirici pointed out had much to do with a great ‘impe-
rialist’ vigor5– Verdaguer’s mentality no longer dominated, but rather that
of the great ideologue of the new Barcelona, Cambó: Baroque monumen-
talism, courtly, sumptuary, bombastic and arbitrary.
That desire for monumentality nevertheless remained permanently fixed

in the imaginary of those who were successively responsible for the city
urbanistically: It certainly did not end in 1929. The 1992 Olympics called
for an updating of Barcelona’s urban elite classes’ dormant will: the ‘no va
más’ (the cutting edge) after the long impasse of Francoism. The enormous
urbanization of the coastal zone in order to construct the Olympic Village;
the construction of sensational cultural infrastructure such as grand muse-
ums, auditoriums and theaters; and most recently the colossal space of the
Fòrum de les Cultures 2004; respond to a continued exercise of providing
the city with monumental references situating it among the ‘Baroque’ cities
of the world. Official promotional material created for the Fòrum building
imitates, with surprising analogies, the bombastic language that was used
in the great baroque cities of the 17th and 18th century (Rome, Mexico
City or Madrid, to give three well known examples): ‘the grandest plaza’,
5. Alexandre Cirici, ‘La arquitectura de Puig i Caldafach’, Cuadernos de Arquitectura, no. 63, Colegio Oficial de
Architectos de Catalunya, 1966, pp.49-52
132
‘the largest urbanistic operation in Europe’, ‘the biggest photovoltaic

plaque’ or the ‘greatest spectacle in the world’.
The architecture of the Fòrum, in a space separated from the convention-

al city, liberated from the cumbersome social and historic ties of both the
medieval and ensanche parts of the city, and far from the ‘peripheral’ subur-
ban realities of Poble Nou and el Besós, is absolute evidence of the urban
image exactly as the imaginary of Barcelona power conceives it. We could
point out a wide variety of examples within the Fòrum, but we will settle
for ones whose obviousness and magnitude make them emblematic; we are
talking about the steps that connect the new commercial port and the
Fòrum esplanade.
On entering, the massive dimensions make one wonder: What are the true
reasons for this? What is its utility of such a scenario? Because it seems just
that: a scenario, constructed to magnify the will of power. The steps of the
Fòrum, organized in clearly scenographic and perspectivist segments, take
us back to the Steps in Piazza di Spagna of Rome, or the Cathedral of
Girona, but with one enormous difference. While these were responses to
urban organizational and accessibility problems, the stairway at the Fòrum
is a space unto itself, without any relation to its surroundings: it is a mon-
ument per se, a (pathetic) refection of urbanism blind to real problems and
surrendered completely to the business of the logotype.
Barcelona has made the anti-Baroque a national banner, favoring a struc-

tural sobriety and rationality to which all decoration must submit. But, in
the meanwhile, it has found in many Baroque premises a fitting resource
for making itself into one more ‘step’ in the complicated and competitive
procession of postmodern cities.
Barcelona suffers, along with 17th century Rome, from an open-space

complex. The popes of 17th century Rome adopted a series of legal stip-
ulations that made the creation of false facades to cover plots or to unite
buildings separated by open spaces obligatory. The idea that even one
space is not consistent with the Baroque city’s uni-vocality, that anything
could possibly become insignificant, or that anything could represent
something different from that which is conceived for the use of power, does
not fit in the urban institutional universe. In the language of Barcelona’s
City Hall, open spaces are defined as spaces that must be eradicated, and
all of it is justified with the necessary coherence of an ostensibly more inte-
grative model, but which rather obscures the chimera of a culture of

facades that guides the citizen-tourist through the principle obelisk-
emblems of the city.
Checa and Moran (1982) defined Roman Baroque space in the following
way:
More than anything else, [Baroque space] tries to create a transitable space
in which pilgrims who are unfamiliar with the city can orient themselves. The
solution was to create grand, straight streets, that required costly leveling work,
but that would permit an easy passage, and would let a group of pilgrims con-
template themselves as a spectacle in movement while simultaneously favoring
the alienation of the individual in the crowds of the great collective ceremonies;
and which would, finally, permit one to contemplate the next station of that
urban pilgrimage from afar with vertical landmarks in a fundamentally hori-
zontal street system.6
Baroque urbanism stood out because it was the first kind to design the city
as a whole. It is interesting to read Josep Aragay, an influential artist, writer
and editor in Moderniste and Noucentiste Catalunya, when in 1920 he
spoke of the urban ideal: ‘Artists should be the ideal builders of the city, and
they must feel enthusiasm in the depths of their souls for this duty. Because
the city is a primary work of art that begins with the very layout of the
streets and plazas ending in the decoration of the facades of every one of
its buildings, and continues embellishing within them all their rooms and
halls. The city is a primary work of art in which all mediums, from archi-
tecture to the last trade, collaborate to make it into a monument to the
Race.’7 The Baroque city: A well-oiled scheme for structural programs and
dramatic scripts, happily legitimized in the individual subjectivity of the vis-
itor, with its ultimate end being the commercial expression of propaganda.
Barcelona became Baroque because it was in its interest. It was first able to
invent an alternative model, like the ensanche, which would put an end to the
inconveniences of seeing (a then overly discredited) Baroque. Afterwards, in
the first third of the 20th century, it discovered that Baroque ‘sells’.
But Barcelona couldn’t sell Baroque since it didn’t have it (and didn’t real-
ly want it). The idea was to create its own modernism: one that would
6. Fernando Checa and José Miguel Morán, El Barroco, Istmo, Madrid, 1982, p.266
7. Josep Aragay, ‘El nacionalisme de l’art’, 1920; in Abel Figueres, Joan Cusidó (eds.) El nacionalisme de l’art (De
Domènech i Montaner a Aragay), Llibres de l’Index-Neopàtria, Barcelona 2004, p. 91
134
make allusions both to urbanism and to the Baroque ‘amalgam’, but which
would depict them in a contemporary way. The epitome of this would be
Mies’ 1929 German Pavilion. Mies would realize brilliantly –with glass,
travertine and marble– all of Baroque’s contradictions. But he would do so
while using all the tools of a militant –and also institutionalized– avant-
garde. Barcelona’s German Pavilion is a monument to politics’ new
Baroque order: publicity. Mies knew it. Barcelona knew it too, and it wait-
ed 57 years to remake the disappeared pavilion in 1986. Mies’ work repre-
sented an excellent referent for a ‘monumental’ city that presented itself as
modern, but with the appeal of offering what is ‘proper’ to cities whose
principle selling point is their own image.
Baroque demands big cities, with lots of people and lots of money.
Barcelona is not a big city, but it over-compensates with the premise of
grand urban scenarios –parades, concerts, stadiums, parks, museums and
stores that respond to well-tailored commercial and urbanistic legislation.
All size extra-large. Barcelona doesn’t have a lot of people, which is why
importing people is its primordial objective. It doesn’t have much space,
either. But it does have money. This is the paradox of the city and the back-
drop in which it evolves: With a population of a little less that two million,
and with an always eroding economy, it has the formidable ability to pro-
mote its own dreams, chimera, panacea. Certainly Barcelona is one of the
few European cities that that has been able to invent itself as a transitable
space, finding in Baroque, more often than it might think, solutions to ques-
tions of a historical, political and cultural order. And the whole world still
loves it. As if Baroque were just that, a logo, to camouflage from us the
truth that the entire cover-up is still Baroque.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
Hotel Barcelona
Donald McNeill1
Hotels are powerful machines in city life, both as

sluices for investment capital, as venues for those
mysterious tasks that necessitate face-to-face con-
tact, as temporary abodes of the travelling bour-
geoisie, and as destinations in their own right for
their restaurants and bars. From the 19th century
onwards, developers and financiers began to
respond to the growing demand for large, luxu-
rious spaces to house a mobile upper class. These
‘grand hotels’ –the Savoy in London, the Plaza
in New York, the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris (Denby
1998)– fulfilled a symbolic function. In Weimar
Berlin:
Construction was… tied to local boosterism: grand hotels
were often conceived as civic showcases meant to put the city
on the larger map as economically and culturally viable. This
was as true for the Adlon in Berlin, which was partly
financed by prewar government tax breaks, as it would later
‘show window’ to the world… (Katz, 1999: 137-8).

be for the Palace Hotel in East Berlin, which served as a
1. Donald McNeill is a writer and Associate Professor at the Urban Research Centre, University of Western Sydney.
DONALD McNEILL 137
And so in Barcelona. Since the nervous pre-Olympic days when it was

clear that the city was almost entirely lacking in sufficient luxury hotels to
keep the International Olympic Committee in the style to which it was
accustomed, the hotel landscape of Barcelona has been totally trans-
formed. The original ‘Pla d’Hotels’ of that period has long been surpassed
by an explosion in refurbished and newly built hotels, underpinned partly
by a remarkable rise in the city’s visitor numbers, and a strong availability
of investment capital. The Diagonal Mar developments associated with
22@ and the Fórum 2004 are but one part of the story. Bellvitge in
l’Hospitalet now, almost unbelievably, possesses a five-star hotel designed
by a world-famous architectural firm, Richard Rogers Partnership, and has
just sanctioned another with the imprimatur of Jean Nouvel, author of the
city’s newest icon, the Torre Agbar. The old town and its surrounds have
seen a range of boutique hotels open, high-design concepts aimed at the
sophisticated tastes of the city’s cultural visitors. The likes of Hotel Jazz,
Hotel Banys Orientals, Casa Camper, and such-like have –along with the
nightclubs, fashion boutiques, bars and cafes– transformed the narrow
streets of the Raval and Gòtic. Hotel Claris (and Omm) and Hotel Axel
have brought this ethos to the Eixample and Gayxample respectively.
I think it can be argued that hotel developments, their politics, design and
financing, can tell us a lot about the nature of urbanism in a city, and this
is the purpose of this chapter. Here, I briefly discuss how the city’s many
new high-rise hotels, such as the Hotel Arts, the Skidmore Owings Merrill
–designed skyscraper with its Mediterranean and art luxury fusion, the two
manifestations of the Hilton chain, and a cluster of new developments at
Diagonal Mar and in l’Hospitalet, entail the production of new, specula-
tively profitable, urban spaces. By contrast, I explore the ethos of the Casa
Camper, the brand extension of the shoe chain, and what it tells us about
the direction of the contemporary Raval. Taken together, hotels –whether
high-rise new-build envelopes or discreetly refurbished old buildings– are
fundamental shapers of any city’s urban economy and identity.
Skyscraping: Hotels and the Urban Geography of Cities
[Pasqual Maragall] called me about participating in this project for the

Olympics…He used the Olympics as a vehicle that would raise the spirits of
the people there and which he used as an excuse to do major replanning of that
city. He hired Oriol Bohigas, a well-known Spanish architect, to lead that
138
master planning effort…The first thing I did, of course, was to meet Bohigas
and go over the plan. Then they both asked me if I would comment on it. I
did and then we made some different schemes. One thing that Bohigas didn’t
give in on was that there had to be two towers…I think he was in love with
the idea of the twin towers in New York –maybe the mayor not so much as
Bohigas…Then the mayor asked me to find a developer to do the towers,
because he didn’t know anything about that. I asked a number of developers
about it and they were not interested, including Jerry Hines and Tishman
Speyer. Now they’re sorry, but nevertheless…So I asked Ware
Travelstead…The mayor was a wonderful man to work with– he was unbe-
lievable, in fact…He was so in love with the arts that Ware decided to call the
hotel the Hotel d’Arts (Bruce Graham).2
If Barcelona of the early 1990s was indeed a ‘city of architects’ (Moix 1994),
many of the most famed projects were small-scale interventions in the city’s
streets and public spaces. At 47 floors and 152 metres in height, the Hotel
Arts represented a striking shift in scale in Barcelona’s post-Francoist rede-
velopment. It sits on the beach frontage of the Olympic Village, an expres-
sion of the confidence of the city council to build high in a hitherto relative-
ly low-rise city. As well as being the first venture into Europe by the luxury
Ritz Carlton management group, in hindsight it can also be seen as a
bridgehead for the arrival of major American property developers to the
city, from Ware Travelstead to Jerry Hines. The hotel was designed by the
renowned Chicago architect Bruce Graham of Skidmore Owings Merrill,
whose close stylistic link to Mies van der Rohe cemented the city in the
minds of architectural commentators as a champion of international style
modernism, particularly since Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion had been recon-
structed in the 1980s.3 Furthermore, given that the front space of the hotel
is embellished with Frank Gehry’s huge Fish sculpture, we can see this design
intervention in the city as heralding the ‘arrival’ of the Californian architect
in Europe several years before the advent of the Bilbao Guggenheim.
2. Oral History of Bruce Graham, interviewed by Betty J.Blum. © 1998 The Art Institute of Chicago, used with permission.
May 25-28 1997. Quotation from transcript pp. 302-306, held at:
http://www.artic.edu/aic/libraries/caohp/graham.html, accessed 15 May 2006. Pasqual Maragall was mayor of
Barcelona from 1982 to 1997.
3. Graham himself regards the hotel as one of his best pieces of work, in a career that has seen him design such modernist
icons as the Sears Tower and John Hancock Center in Chicago: ‘The steel structure is out there, all painted white and
without any coverings of aluminium, and when you’re in an apartment you see through these diagonals out to the sea
and that’s what I’ve always dreamt of doing in a tall building. There’s no other statement I need to make in architecture.’
Ibid., p.305.
DONALD McNEILL 139
Graham’s recollection of how Maragall asked him to ‘find a developer’ is

also intriguing, as it gives a hint of the close integration between signature
architects and speculative property development that continues –in an
intensified way– to this day . Graham was central to building SOM into one
of the world’s largest practices, and SOM’s Chicago office was central to
urban redevelopment politics in that city. Graham worked as both designer
and promoter of real estate projects in Chicago (Miller, 1996: 99), which
introduced him to many major American developers. Among them would
be Gerald D. Hines, whose firm was a central player in the redevelopment
of Diagonal Mar, and so we might see the Hotel Arts as being symbolic of
the arrival of global development capital into the city, a bridgehead for, as
urban critics such as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1992) had predicted, an
eastward shift in the city’s development and class landscape.
If the Olympic Village and its high-rises represented something of a new

frontier in the east of the city, it is well-known that the Diagonal has over the
course of the 20th century represented the dividing line between two
Barcelonas: the zona alta of the city’s well-to-do, and the zona baja, the narrow
streets, tight alleys, and small properties of the old city. If we take this imag-
inary social frontier seriously, then we might see the construction of the city’s
two Hilton Hotels (the first at 589-591 Diagonal, not far from the Camp Nou,
which opened in 1990 in time for the Olympics, the second in Diagonal Mar,
in time for the Fórum 2004), as part of a rather symbolic frontier mythology.
This might be far-fetched, were it not true that Hiltons are, of course,
emblematic of a particular kind of urbanism, which Annabel Wharton cap-
tures in her book Building the Cold War (2001). In this study of the early post-
war roll-out of bespoke Hiltons in Istanbul, Cairo, Athens, Tel Aviv, and so
on, we see the Hilton as a ‘space of aestheticized efficiency… twenty years
before McDonald’s thought about franchising fast food abroad’ (Wharton,
2001: 6). At the same time, the buildings –often the first major high-rise in
historic neighbourhoods– were designed with a broader cultural message.
The Berlin Senate, the state government for the city, financed the construc-
tion of that city’s first Hilton as one of its first acts in the post-war period,
and was an explicit capitalist commitment to West Berlin (p.79), yet was ‘a
piece of American experience that yielded ideological and political effects’
(p.87); the Hilton tower on London’s Park Lane evoked shrieks of protest:
‘The queen was to be looked down upon by American tourists’ (p.100); the
Athens Hilton was the scene of a bomb attack in 1969 by left-wing extrem-
ists protesting American support for the military regime (p.66); the view
140
from the Hilton in Cairo ‘offers the sweep of the Nile, the new suburbs on
the opposite bank, and, the desert beyond, the pyramids. The gaze of its
highest-paying guests was directed to the most modern and the most
ancient parts of Egypt’s historical topography’ (pp.48-49), rather than on
the tightly-packed working class neighbourhoods that comprise much of the
city. In short, we might see the location of the early Hiltons as saying some-
thing interesting about the cultural geography of the city.
The designation of planning permission for hotels had been one of the most
sensitive issues in the neighbourhood politics that emerged from the
Francoist period. The Pla d’Hotels, established by the city council after pres-
sure from the International Olympic Committee, saw a zoning of eight sites
in the city for hotel building, some of which were later rezoned for office use.
One of these would be the Hilton site. The initial model for the hotel, pre-
sented by Joan Gaspart of HUSA and Aniceto Císcar of Hesperia, was met
with disgust by Maragall, according to his biographers: ‘Vosotros sabéis per-
fectamente que el alcalde no puede denegar una licencia de construcción
simplemente porque el proyecto no le gusta o no se adapta a sus criterios
estéticos – les digo. Pero si hacéis esto cometeréis un crimen contra
Barcelona’ (in Mauri and Uría, 1998: 220).4 Gaspart responded by appoint-
ing the well-regarded local architects Viaplana and Piñón, yet – despite its
public spaces adjacent to the hotel - it remains set back and aloof in the
upper reaches of the city. Again, architectural panache and development
consent go hand in hand. Subsequent strategies have seen a similar prioriti-
sation of hotel building in line with growing tourism figures, and the city’s
burgeoning convention business, which was always conscious of models of
US urban redevelopment.5 There, convention centres are engaged in fierce
rivalry, yet are seen as possessing a very positive multiplier effect in other sec-
tors of the local economy, such as retail and hospitality. They bring in sales
and hotel tax revenues, and provide a considerable amount of low-skilled
jobs which may be suitable for areas of high unemployment (in the absence
of enlightened social and training policies) (Frieden and Sagalyn, 1989: 270).
This was, presumably, part of the logic behind the redevelopment zones
associated with Diagonal Mar. There, the Hilton Diagonal Mar sits next to
other high-rise hotels –AC Barcelona, Princess– and adjacent to the new
4. ‘You know perfectly well that the mayor can not refuse giving a building license just because he doesen’t like the project
or it doesn’t fit in his aesthetic criteria. I told them. But if you do it you will be committing a crime against Barcelona.
5. La Veu del Carrer, November-December 1992, p.20.
DONALD McNEILL 141
convention buildings that were created for the Fórum.6 The optimism of
this mode of urbanism has its parallels with the plaza Europa area of
L’Hospitalet, projected to have 28 skyscrapers by the end of 2006, where
Jean Nouvel and Catalan architects Ribas & Ribas project a similarly lux-
urious and eye-catching ‘garden’ tower, scheduled to open in early 2008
(Montilla, 2005a, b). Nearby is the Hesperia Tower, designed by Richard
Rogers Partnership, with its prestige restaurant Evo located in a cupula that
sits high above Bellvitge. These plans are closely related to the expansion
of Barcelona airport, and resemble a form of tourism that is derived as
much by aeromobility as any other factor. In a similar way, the projected
viability of Diagonal Mar is expressly derived from the potential location
of the high-speed rail station at Sagrera.
What many of these high-rise hotels have in common is their ability to

exploit verticality. On the one hand, this can involve the commodification
of the view from high floors, giving the guest ‘visual control’ of the city
(Wharton, 2001: 139). The Hotel Arts is an exemplar of this, with –as in
Miami’s South Beach– unobstructed views and a beachfront location. On
the other hand, the hotels are agents of a form of gentrification which, fol-
lowing Neil Smith (1987), reflects the rent-gap theory of inner-city rein-
vestment, where the expanded opportunities for room rental (where iden-
tical rooms and floor plans can be replicated multiple times, with executive
floors on the upper-most levels) far exceed the existing rental value of the
ex-industrial sites on which they were built. And so the Hiltons, and their
high-rise cousins, are a pure expression of the boom in business tourism to
Barcelona, and reveal a form of megastructural urbanism that the city
council distanced itself from for much of the earlier years of the Barcelona
model. As a ‘supermanzana hotelera’, the area of Diagonal Mar sits incon-
gruously close to the working class apartments of the Besòs, where –at
1550 Euros a night– the presidential suite of the Hilton costs the same as
two months’ rent in the nearby apartments (Peirón, 2005: p.1).
Brandscaping: Casa Camper
Casa Camper is something else entirely. Tucked tightly into in the Raval in
Carrer Elisabets, just around the corner from the MACBA, this is the
6. The glut of hotel rooms that this brought onto the market was reflected in the cancellation of the 28 floor Plaça Fórum
in 2005.
142
Mallorcan-origin global shoe chain brand extension. Its façade similarly

tantalises, with glimpses of design minimalism from interior designer
Fernando Amat and architect Jordi Tió. Its interior oozes charm, with bric-
a-brac ‘found in the building’ –a typewriter, some figurines, a vacuum
cleaner, a bicycle, some toys– on display behind the façade, extolling the
virtues of palimpsest and urban memory, while shunning entirely the idea
of the public lobby (access is firmly restricted by a receptionist-controlled
sliding door).
The idea of using a hotel to extend the power and reach of the brand is
an idea that has grown in popularity in recent years. Armani, Bulgari, and
Missoni are the principal exponents of the idea, a means by which the fab-
rics, design and ethos of these brands can percolate into lifestyle (Gross
2004). They can be lived. What differentiates Camper from these luxury
brands is, of course, its appeal to a different kind of consumer, one who is
at home in public space, a classless or cross-class space, rather than the
higher end luxury spaces of the Italian brands. Critics have argued that
such ‘boutique’ hotels have become devalued, evidence of which can be
found in the speed that some of the major hotel corporations have devel-
oped their own ‘boutique’ brands. Yet this can deceive:
The hotels lure the customer, promising a fitting setting for their individualism,
but on inspection many boutiques are merely using devices, such as a piece of
shocking contemporary art, to hide the absence of real design innovation. When
you try to look at the real substance, you realise that in many cases the relation-
ship between hotel and guest has become plagued with kidology. A hotel with a
thoroughly mundane design, with the exception of a single oversized and unusu-
al floor lamp in the middle of the foyer, now markets itself as ‘boutique’
(Watson 2005: 13).
Casa Camper seems to avoid this, but we might consider that the firm uses
the hotel as a means of both enhancing its brand presence, with the hotel
as a visual, lived, advertisement, but also something more, an anchor in the
Raval’s regeneration.
In many ways, Camper –which despite its Mallorcan roots opened its first
store in Barcelona in 1981– is representative of the city’s self-confidence in
world street fashion. Its other attempt at brand extension, foodBALL,
which sits adjacent to Casa Camper, is based around rice balls, and is
branded as ‘Camper culture in food. A new fast food restaurant concept
DONALD McNEILL 143
with real food, for mind and spirit’.7 This may, then, be a playful take on
the McDonaldisation concept, yet taken together, Casa Camper, the
foodBALL, and the nearby shop provide a powerful physical brand pres-
ence in one of the city’s most emblematic neighbourhoods, and –located
only yards from the MACBA– is illustrative of the company’s attempt to
provide a lifestyle brand. By contrast with the large high-rise hotels dis-
cussed above, Casa Camper is thus based around a pedestrian ethos, rather
than one of automobility, a point reinforced by its website, which features
the stone and glass façade, with a pair of feet wiggling suggestively, and
presenting the choice of ‘relaxing’ in Camper slippers, or ‘blending in’ in
Camper outdoor shoes.8
Casa Camper is but one example of Barcelona’s status as ‘style city’, efful-
gently captured and distributed worldwide in the Barce-porn of design
magazines and books (see StyleCity, 2003). Its presence in the Raval is
largely benign, especially when compared with plans for the rather more
aggressive 10 storey Barceló Rambla del Raval, due to open in 2007. This
latter, which is seen to be a ‘lighthouse’ in one of the less salubrious areas
of the old city, seems likely to be as subtle as the bulldozers that tore down
the old blocks of the Illa Robador. Taken together, however, we can see
each hotel as, in their own way, contributing to the Raval’s total gentrifica-
tion, Casa Camper with a nod and a wink, Barceló with a light-sabre. In
2016, we might revisit this question.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have sought to briefly explore how the development con-
text and design concept of Barcelona’s hotels are expressive of broader
forces at play in the city –and beyond. It should be clear that the whole
concept of a branded hotel –be it Ritz-Carlton, Hilton, Camper, or even
the independent boutiques grouped under the Design Hotels marketing
umbrella– is based on an idea of external recognition. The hotel thus
speaks to the world outside, whether promising familiarity (as in the reas-
surance provided by Hilton’s global brand) or difference (as in the prom-
ised fusion of Mediterranean lifestyle, Miesian modernity and cultural
identity in the Hotel Arts, or the creased and stressed urbanity of Camper).
7. http://www.camper.com/web/en/faqs.asp?idFaq=21&orden=1&textobusqueda= (accessed 11 May, 2006).

8. http://www.camper.com/web/en/casacamper.asp, accessed 11 May, 2006.
144
Hotels are also expressive of a range of elements within urban economies,

from the performance of service work to the accumulation of capital on
the part of property speculators, from the commodified consumption of
fine bedspreads, Catalan cuisine and views to the use of hotels as urban
place-marketing icons. They effectively mask a myriad of power-saturated
relationships, from urban development finance and contested zoning deci-
sions, to a complex social geography of service work and service consump-
tion. Their relationship to the immediate urban neighbourhoods is also
rarely neutral: Casa Camper, for all its liberatory discourse, is paradigmat-
ic of the brand bohemianism that is often an early stage of gentrification.
The Hilton Diagonal and the Hotel Arts are both possessive of carefully
designed entrances well pushed back from the street, and their public
spaces are barely used.
Hotels have, however, always been part of a vibrant public culture within
the modern city, their lobbies and bars being what Carole Berens describes
as ‘an important civilizing element in the urban landscape’:
They greet and provide comfort for their own guests as well as welcome all
(usually for a price). Their roles are as numerous and diverse as their clientele:
a place to meet strangers or lovers, a comfortable setting to pass the awkward
time between appointments, a clean restroom or just an air-conditioned stopover
in a busy day (Berens, 1997: p.xv).
Thus for Barcelona, the ‘hotel revolution’ which has inarguably swept over
the city over the last 15 years plays a very significant role in the articulation
and staging of the city’s business, both corporate and casual. But we might
consider how the city’s much-celebrated culture of public space design and
management extends to its hotels.
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ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
The New Cultural
Mao Mollona1
Peasant? Ruskin’s
‘Political Economy
of Art’ Revisited
We are always in these days endeavouring to separate the two; we want one man to be
always thinking and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman and the
other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking and the thinker ought
to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense.
John Ruskin
‘The Mystery of Life and its Arts’ Dublin, May 13, 1868.
The gallery opens in ten minutes. Steve’s paintings are on

the walls. He is edgy and tired. He has just returned from
the West-end where he had been building a big shed for a
posh guy, ‘someone working in telly. I made him a good
price, you never know’, he says with entrepreneurial look. A
reporter of the Sheffield Telegraph and a guy from Sheffield
Hallam (‘an art critic’) show up. Steve is nervous. No lass
to entertain the two middle age men. ‘You know this busi-
ness’ he winks at smiles and me. He pours wine to people
1. Mao Mollona is lecturer at the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London; he is also an editor
of the journal Critique of Anthropology and hon. Review editor of JRAI (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute).
MAO MOLLONA 149
coming in. Nobody is buying. How will he pay the gallery space? I ask, tact-
lessly. ‘Bank overdraft’ he answers’ and the odd jobs’. Tomorrow at 6 in the
morning he will be shovelling mud for a re-landscaping contractor of the city
council. Then he will sign up at the dole office. Next week he will work as
cleaning contractor for a big steel company, removing the scale from the panel
underneath the rolling mill. ‘Underground. Wicked’. Steve’s dad is here. An old
fashion sort of guy, a retired steel worker. ‘Nice stuff boy. Have you got some
beer?’ ‘No dad only wine’. I look at Steve’s hands. They are big and knotted.
Definitively not the hands of an artist. Rather of a workingman. The night
goes on behind close doors. The party is finished. It’s 4 in the morning. None
of the paintings is sold. But Steve is happy. He received several enquiries and
made many important contacts. As the sun rises behind the Yorkshire moors, I
am ready to go to bed. Steve has only one hour to get changed, have breakfast
and restart working. {Fieldwork notes, May 2000}
The cultural industry of Sheffield was a Phoenix that rose from the ashes
of the declining steel industry and from the imagination of successive neo-
conservative governments. In spite of its initial promises, work in the cul-
tural industry resulted more precarious, exploitative and physically wear-
ing then the dirty jobs in the steel factories. The cultural workers of
Sheffield show no sign of resemblance to the flexible personality of the
immaterial workers described by Brian Holmes2 –fragmented in a variety
of prosthetic working aids and dispersed in invisible mediatic economic
flows. Rather, they resemble the peasants described by Eric Wolf3, with a
foot in subsistence economy and a foot in the global economy. Wolf chal-
lenges the traditional view of the peasants as farmers rooted in subsistence
and non-monetary economy and describes them instead as precarious
workers who survive through a variety of sources of income. With half of
the income than their unskilled fellow proletarians working in the steel fac-
tories and without entitlements to welfare benefits, the new ‘cultural peas-
ants’ struggle to reconcile different strategies of survival –wage work, infor-
mal labour, self employment and the dole. The emergence of the ‘cultur-
al peasant’ can be read as a return the golden age of the re-composition of
Arts and Crafts, as for Ruskin and his contemporary admirers. From this
optimistic perspective the cultural peasant can be seen as a mutant of mod-
2. http://www.geocities.com/CognitiveCapitalism/holmes1.html
3. Eric Wolf, (2001). ‘Is the peasantry a class?’ In Pathways of Power: building an anthropology of the modern world. Berkeley:
University of California Press
150
ern anthropological types –authoritarian characters, flexible personalities–

that reconcile ‘docility’ and ‘creativity’ and bridge flexible and corporate
capitalism. Less optimistic cultural critics will read the emergence of cul-
tural peasants as a worrying return to the age of merchant capitalism and
neo-colonial politics instead.
War and Peace. A View from Yorkshire
On March 1857 John Ruskin delivered his famous talk on the Political
Economy of Art to an audience of workingmen in Manchester. In his pas-
sionate speech, full of Chartist and protestant fervour, he accuses the mod-
ern factory system to have separated Arts and Industry by deskilling craft-
ed artisans and incorporating their immaterial knowledge and design skills
into the standardised movements of factory machines. Ruskin also chal-
lenges the Principle of political economy of his contemporary Mill –a mechan-
ical scientific construction revolving on the economic value of labour– and
presented an alternative vision of political economy centred on the conver-
gence of Work and Art and on a notion of Value as encompassing ‘the
entire life’, rather than being limited to its material components. A few
years later, Ruskin opens the Mapping art gallery in Sheffield to train the
local tool makers in the appreciation of fine art and industrial design.
Ruskin had a peculiar fascination for the cutlers and tool-makers of
Sheffield whose skilled knowledge, craft consciousness, and flexible organ-
isational structures incarnated his ideal of workers/artists and the utopia
of the economy integrated into the sphere of human life.
Indeed Ruskin’s fascination for the cutlers of Sheffield was linked to their
uncertain social and economical status which reflected the paradoxes of
Hanoverian society split between cosmopolitan imperialism and domestic
agrarian capitalism. On the one hand, the tool makers of Sheffield were
peasants embedded in the agrarian economy controlled by the local Duke
of Norfolk –from whom they rented the river power and agricultural
land– and by the Cutlers’ company. The ‘Cutlers Company’ was founded
in 1624 to regulate the prices, quality and brands of the tool produced
and assure that the trades between masters and workers followed fair rules
of conduct. Tool makers worked in cottages along the river Don, follow-
ing the rhythm of the seasons and combining agriculture and industrial
production. These small capitalist/artisans controlled the labour process
through their control over the simple technology of the grinding wheel
MAO MOLLONA 151
and their location in dense social productive networks of forgers, grinders,

and blacksmiths. Ruskin’s fascination for the tool makers of Sheffield was
partly linked to his romantic view of these peasants as ‘original’ folks,
embedded in the beautiful landscape of the Yorkshire moors and engaged
in pre-industrial self-sufficient economy, and to his distaste for the primi-
tive crowd of steel proletarians whose prosthetic bodies had been corrupt-
ed by market ideology and urban decay. His fascination for these rural
artisans was shared by philanthropist Edward Carpenter and by the anar-
chist prince Kropotkin, who believed that Sheffield’s cooperative capital-
ism –with its combination of farming and industry, patriarchal and
domestic labour, urban and rural cultures– challenged the inhuman sys-
tem of factory production. Yet, the tool makers of Sheffield were also part
of a cosmopolitan elite of urban artists with outstanding skills in design
and fine manufacture for the bourgeoning market of middle class con-
sumption. Their artistic objects –pocket knives, razors, cutlery, candle-
sticks, pistols, hunting knives, and steel framed umbrellas– mesmerised the
international audiences of the Great Industrial Exhibitions, where the
political and cultural reputation of the emerging European nation-states
were at stake. The Arts Journal and Illustrated Catalogues of these Industrial
Exhibitions rounded the world enhancing their international fame and
increasing the values of their trademarks and commercial brands, that
were also traded independently by speculative merchant capitalists.
Artisans were also active in public debates on political economy and often
vociferously opposed both to trade combinations and to free competition.
Their craft consciousness and Protestantism also fit in Ruskin’s elitist and
individualistic political views. The fascination for the immaterial knowl-
edge, design skills and diffuse ownership of the artisans/artist of Sheffield
spread outside the romantic circle of Ruskin and the Arts and Craft move-
ment. Oxford economist Alfred Marshall describes the mixture of physi-
cal strength and immaterial labour, craft knowledge and manual skills,
hard labour and shared ‘culture’ of the tool makers of Sheffield as an
instance of perfect balance between Arts and Industry to be incorporated
into his modern principles of industrial economics. Unlike him, Karl
Marx considered them as pre-modern social formations soon to be
eclipsed by the teleological trajectories of industrial capitalism. Ruskin’s
involvement in cultural politics reflected a wider middle class awareness
–shared by both Tory and socialist MPs– of the importance of art for the
social emancipation of the labouring classes. The Parliament legislated
almost contemporaneously on the Poor Law and on the opening of the
British Museum and of the National Gallery in London, where, accord-
152
ing to Charles Kinsley ‘the rich merchant and the poor sailor met like
equals’. Ruskin openly criticised the French system, where the art sector
was subsidised by the state, and shared the Tory’s trust in philanthropic
institutions and in private public partnerships. As for the Society of Arts,
a public body chaired by Prince Albert that promoted the practical appli-
cation of arts in industry and funded industrial and arts exhibitions in
partnership with private businesses. But his dream of aligning Arts,
Politics and Economics through political and philanthropic institutions for
the education of cosmopolitan artists, crashed under the weight of British
imperial decline and the intensification of factory production that fol-
lowed the two wars.
If the 19th century was the era of peace achieved through financial hege-
mony and trade liberalism, the 20th century was a time of war, mass-pro-
duction, state-controlled industry, nationalism and trade protectionism.
Under the impulse of arm races, technological innovations and the adop-
tion of the American principles of scientific management, the tool indus-
try metamorphosed into a gigantic industrial machine for the production
of steel. In the new integrated plants for the mass production of steel the
‘mechanics’ –a new category of working class– replaced artisans and
grinders in the production of modern tools and weapons, their tools were
expanded to accommodate the customer specifications of the Admiralty,
their tasks mechanised through cranes, cars and ladles and their wages
standardized following the negotiations between the government, the
emerging trade unions and the capitalists.
The split between Arts and Industry, and between conception and execu-
tion, materialised in the expansion and solidification of capital on the
shopfloor –in the form of furnaces, anthropomorphic hammers and gigan-
tic milling machines– and in the institutionalisation of immaterial labour
in the different fields of economics, science and culture, outside it.
Industrial design became a managerial function reproduced through gov-
ernmental institutions for the promotion of science and higher education.
Mill’s abstract and mechanical principles of political economy defeated
Ruskin’s ‘practical economy’ and fostered a new Keynesian statistical imag-
ination and techniques of population management through wages,
employment and culture. The standardisation of cultural tastes followed
the mechanisation of manual labour; the rise of a national culture paral-
leled industrial nationalisations, and cultural protectionism against
Hollywood movies or expressionist arts, mirrored the trade wars against
MAO MOLLONA 153
American and German industrial imports. With the establishment of

CEMA4 during the Second World War, culture reached the shopfloors of
Britain. Sheffield steelworkers were intimated to the mysteries of The
Sleeping Beauty and of Bach sonatas to release the tensions of German air
strikes. But the nationalisation of the cultural industry –through the British
Broadcasting Corporation, the British Film Institute, the National Theatre
and British National Opera Company– and ‘mass ornamentalism’ did not
reach the industrial bourgeoisie and the proletariat of northern Britain. In
spite of their mergers, alliances and concentrations, these industrial bour-
geois remained family businessmen operating in national markets and with
local concerns, unlike the London-based financiers who has joined the cos-
mopolitan capitalist elite of American and German industrial magnates. If
industrial bourgeoisie of Sheffield shared the workers’ passion for pan-
tomimes, soccer matches and company brass bands, this cosmopolitan elite
controlled the Arts Council through the office of Queen’s Lord of
Chamberlain. With the economic boom of the 1960s working class salaries
and cultural standards rose exponentially. Just as proletarians started to
gain access to prestigious cultural institutions, the economic recession and
the return of the Conservatives to power hit them back.
Ruskin returns to Sheffield.
Under the Thatcher government de-industrialisation and the fragmenta-

tion of the welfare state was reflected in the fragmentation of industrial
workforces, the decomposition of the heavy machines of mass production,
and the reappearance of artisan tools and machines of early capitalism in
the Sheffield workshops. Curiously, in these small workshops, the ancient
craft skills of forging, file cutting, grinding, have become handy again to
contemporary cutlers who work as subcontractors for steel corporations.
Of course, the decline of the manufacturing industry was not a conse-
quence of abstract economic forces –market saturation, global competi-
tion, increased productivity– but the result of the political determination
of reducing job security through subcontracting, flexible production and
the externalisation of knowledge-based and high-value immaterial labour.
If the conservative leader of the Art Council Rees-Mogg declared that
‘arts is to Britain what sun is to Spain’ the conservative government priva-
4. Council for the Encouragement of Music and Arts

154
tised and streamlined the cultural industry as it had done with the manu-
facturing sector. Chris Smith, Tony Blair’s fist Culture, Media and Sport
secretary, also embraced the liberalisation of the arts market, but as tool of
social regeneration and a weapon against social exclusion instead. In 2000
the appointment of businessmen Gerry Robinson to the Art Council was
followed by the publication of a consultation document5 that lays the foun-
dation of collaborations between museums and galleries and the voluntary
sector. In New Labour’s political imagination the cultural industry reduces
the externalities of capitalist society through diffuse social capital and cre-
ativity, whereas the ‘old’ industrial regimes fosters unequal concentrations
of economic capital and wearing manual labour. The Tory’s localisation of
social and economic policies and its link between arts and urban regener-
ation was continued by the New Labour government that used Lottery
funds and European money to promote culture in areas of industrial dep-
rivation. For instance, the Sheffield City Council fought the detrimental
social and economic effects of the decline of the steel industry through the
development of the Cultural Industry Quarter, including the Northern
Media School, the Showroom Cinema, the Music Production centre and
the National Centre for Popular Music, designed by architect Nigel Coates
and costing £15m of Lottery money. The stainless steel drum-shaped con-
structions of the centre were a symbolical tribute to Sheffield past industri-
al heritage and to its new cultural identity perpetuated by its the brand
names of Joe Cocker, Jarvis Cocker and the Human League. Most of the
‘brains’ behind Sheffield’s Cultural Industry wanted to get rid of their
industrial family background. Some of them had developed environmen-
talist sensitivity and perceived the re-landscaping of industrial land and the
conversion of old factories into sanitised cultural venues as a form of per-
sonal emancipation. Some believed that the manufacturing industry was
too exposed to the influence of foreign competition and saw the cultural
industry as a safe space of national identity. Others had inherited the
utopian spirit of early socialist and saw the cultural industry as the reincar-
nation of the cooperative capitalism and horizontal productive networks of
the early cutlers. According to these contemporary utopian philanthropist,
the (post)modern putting-out system in the cultural sector revolves around
technological incubators and creative hubs which power dense networks of
individual artists/artisans in control over their technology of production
and connected along the same creative value chain. If in the past the Duke
5. Centre for social Change: Policy Guidance on Social Inclusion for DCMS funded and local authority museum and
galleries. May 2000.
MAO MOLLONA 155
of Norfolk controlled the power of the grinding wheels, the new feudal
lord is the Sheffield city council that controls the flow of money and pro-
vides personal connections. As the pre-capitalist merchant capitalists, the
modern cultural workers exchanges cultural logos in global economic net-
works and are wired in decentred spaces of political resistance. Like the
ancient cutlers they are hybrids cultural subjects –Cultrepreneurs, culture
clubs and industrial brokers– who move in the hybrid economic spaces of
quasi-firms, flexiworks and rural workplaces. This (new) romantic view of
immaterial labour as a form of working class emancipation from wearing
manual work is misleading. The unemployed proletarians turned post-
industrial cultural workers, found themselves stuck in pre-modern subsis-
tence economy instead. Like the peasants described by Eric Wolf the cul-
tural workers of Sheffield face the dilemma of reconciling subsistence
economy and global capitalism. With an average earning of £7,000 and
without entitlement to unemployment benefits6 they are forced to combine
variety of economic strategies –self-employment, wage work in local metal
companies, illegal software trade, farming, building or vegetable produc-
tion in allotments. Unlike them, an average manual worker in Sheffield has
a salary of £20,000 and secure welfare entitlements.
Towards a New Cultural Empire?
In their article on Culture Clubs7 Anthony Davies and Simon Ford unveil the
hidden relations between Arts, Politics and Business and the homology
between networked forms of cultural and political organisation and post-
Fordism. In contemporary Britain the alliance between Industry and Arts
have fostered privatisation of the cultural industry and the materialisation
of industrial labour. London is one of the global cities where alliances
between financial markets, local governments and corporate capitalism are
forged and resources distributed towards the world-periphery. Sheffield’s
third industrial revolution –the spread of the leisure industry; extensive
subcontracting and putting-out in the steel industry; and the rescaling of
the welfare state at the local level– represents an ironical return to mercan-
tilist economy, decentralised state, financial cosmopolitanism and global
imperialism of Hanoverian England. In Sheffield, cultural workers, like the
ancient tool makers, are a mixture of petty capitalist and farmers, subjects
6. Due to the new ‘Welfare to work’ programme

7. http://www.metamute.org/en/Culture-clubs
156
to the capricious will of the city council and of cultural philanthropists,

liable of financial speculations, and atomised by conflicting loyalties and
patronages. Like modern wage workers, they maximise the economic cap-
ital through manual labour and part-time work. Like the Kabyle peasants
described by Bourdieu8, they are embedded in webs of patronages, pres-
tige and unequal symbolic capital. The emergence of artists/peasants
shows the paradoxical trajectories of industrial capitalism and the political
nature of the boundaries between material and immaterial labour. If
industrial capitalism celebrated the manual strength of proletarian work-
ers and downplayed intellectual labour, cultural capitalists downplay the
physical drudgeries of immaterial labour and emphasise the creative side
of cultural production. It was during agrarian capitalism that the interplay
between Arts and Industry and between material and immaterial labour
became a political topic and, as John Ruskin demonstrates, the ideology of
liberation through creative work was propagated. From a trans-historical
and global perspective9, the dialectics between Arts and Industry, and their
perceived overlapping and separations, can be read as a dialectics between
Culture and Political Economy. In Britain the celebration of ‘Arts’ and
immaterial labour followed colonial expansion and global financial domi-
nation, whereas ‘Industry’ and cultural homogenisation emerged in time of
economic protectionism, nationalism, war, and social revolutions. Today,
the ghost of John Ruskin stretches between Sheffield, London and other
colonies of Empire. His romantic pictorial tastes and folk primitivism have
returned into fashion10 and his political vision of philanthropic capitalism
and state paternalism are inspiring neo-conservative cultural and econom-
ic policies whose global reach ridicules the parochial conservative rhetoric
of free-market and national heritage. But today as in the past, British
immaterial colonial domination is subordinated to American industrial
potency and to the new geopolitics of the War on terror. As Anthony
Davies recently suggested11, from the dotcom crash, September 11 and the
collapse of Enron a new cultural and industrial revolution might be on its
way. Again.
8. Pierre Bourdieu, (1977). Outline of the Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9. For a similar perspective, see Jonathan Friedman, (2002) Transnationalisation, Socio-political disorder and
Ethnification as Expression of Declining Global hegemony. Reprinted in The Anthropology of Politics Joan Vincent
(Ed). Blackwell.
10. For a critique of the ‘re-rooting’ and neo-primitivism of new formalism, see Nick Evans in Variant 16 Winter 2002.
11. See Anthony Davies, Basic Instinct: Trauma and Retrenchment 2000-4. In this same volume.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
The Hidden Side
Susana Narotzky1
of Consumption
The hidden side of consumption is made up of

all those things we don’t usually pay attention to
when we consume and which are nevertheless an
important part of, and indeed form the basis of a
complex process hidden behind discrete actions
which appear to stand for our individual auto-
nomy. Different material and cultural values,
which will later be absorbed by the objects them-
selves and will help to define their capacity to sig-
nify, will be obtained depending on the develop-
ment of social relations amongst those in charge
of production and distribution.
I would like to stress that the provisioning of

resources (of all sorts, but mainly of goods, ser-
vices and information) is a complex process where
relations of production, distribution, appropria-
tion and consumption are to be taken into consi-
deration as a whole, and where historical develop-
ment will define individual ways of provisioning
goods and services which are available in specific
1. Susana Narotzky is a writer and Professor of social Anthropology at the UB (University of Barcelona).
SUSANA NAROTZKY 159
societies, for specific groups and specific players within those societies.
Starting from a perspective that observes diverse ‘methods for provision-
ing’, we can begin to understand non-commercial ways of obtaining and
transferring resources, as opposed to merely looking at consumption with-
in the framework of market dynamics.
In the past 20 years, a number of studies and theoretical views have con-
tributed to create a favourable environment for the development of an
approach focused on provisioning in the broadest possible sense, beyond
the market’s standard boundaries. I will deal with some of these in greater
detail further on, but first I would like to mention some of the most signif-
icant contributions to the creation of such an intellectual environment,
which touch several different social disciplines, from sociology and geogra-
phy to economics, without forgetting, of course, anthropology.
From the field of anthropology, Wolf (1982) and Mintz (1985) have con-
tributed to this approach from a perspective of ‘political economy’.
Appadurai (1986) and Kopytoff (1986), on the other hand, have made
important contributions from a cultural and transactionalist perspective.
Others, like Bourdieu (1988), have shown interest in the social recreation
of economic and political elites through individualised consumption,
which, at the same time, is based on individual relations of production.
Others like Davis (1972) have insisted on different ‘fields of exchange’
which had been described for non-western societies (Bohannan 1959,
Bloch and Parry 1989), but which also operated within full-fledged capital-
ist societies.
From the field of sociology, Pahl (1984), Mingione (1985) and Gershuny
(1988) have emphasised the fact that the provisioning of goods and serv-
ices could be carried out through both formal processes (State, markets)
or informal processes (communities, domestic groups), and that these
were often options that were simultaneously available in a community or
a society. In a now classic monograph on the island of Sheppey, Pahl
(1984) discovered the existence of an apparently paradoxical relationship
linking the participation of men as employees in the ‘formal’ field of pro-
duction and their participation in local and ‘informal’ self-provisioning
networks. On the contrary, those who most needed to participate in the
informal provisioning networks because they had no alternatives, that is
to say, the unemployed, were those who found it most difficult to access
these networks.
160
In the past 10 years the approach to provisioning has been developed as

a methodological tool, especially useful within political economy’s theo-
retical framework. This present development also tries to tackle ques-
tions about consumption, incorporating them in the complex framework
of differentiation processes that converge in the relations of production,
distribution, appropriation and consumption. Two key contributions
define the provisioning perspective: Warde’s (1992) defines itself as a
‘horizontal’ theory of ‘modes of provisioning’, and Fine and Leopold’s
(1993) (see also Fine, 2002) defines itself as a ‘vertical’ theory of ‘modes
of provisioning’.
From Warde’s point of view, it is important to think about articulated

cycles of stages of production/consumption which ‘are not necessarily
identical and which may involve different specific types of social relations’
(1992:19). Therefore, for a consumer to enjoy a specific good or service, a
number of articulated stages of production/consumption must take place
which will probably encompass different spatial-temporal frameworks as
well as different social and cultural contexts where these stages will
arrange themselves around specific social relations of production, distri-
bution and consumption. This perspective encompasses that classic dis-
tinction between productive consumption and personal consumption in a
chain of different though articulated moments which will be driven by
one or more values which direct consumption: exchange value, use value,
identity value (Warde, 1992:17-8). We can backtrack every good to the
particular cycle of stages of production/consumption and the social rela-
tions involved in making it widely available to a society, still it will be dif-
ferentially, accessible to those living within it. Warde defines ‘modes of
provisioning as processes where:
Production/ consumption episodes are characterized or distinguished by the spe-

cific social relations involved in providing the final value. In contemporary soci-
ety, empirically, these social relations fall predominantly into four categories. I
shall call these modes of provision. Modes of provision are characterized by
distinctive ways of producing the good that embodies the value to be obtained
in the end of any episode and by the social relations governing access to the
fruits of labour. We need to consider market, state, domestic and communal
provision, the main contemporary modes…. Typically these four kinds of
processes of provisioning are governed, respectively, by relations of market
exchange, familial obligation, citizenship right and reciprocity (Warde, 1992,
p.19-20).
SUSANA NAROTZKY 161
This outlook on ‘modes of provisioning’ provides us with a ‘horizontal’

theory provisioning which can be applied across all goods and services.2 In
terms of theory, it tries to capture the social and political meaning of the
changes and substitutions between modes of provisioning.
It is because services [and goods] are produced under distinctive conditions and
access to them is regulated accordingly, and because this subsequently has con-
sequences for their enjoyment, that the substitution of services between modes is
so important socially and politically…. For the extent that social relations of
production are formative of social cohesion and conflict, then substitution
between modes is of enormous importance (Warde 1992:20).
Fine is also interested in the complexity of the processes articulated by pro-

duction and consumption, but in his case, emphasis is given to the differ-
ence between diverse commodity (pointing out the substantial differences,
for example, amongst the processes of the food industry and those of the
clothes industry). He turns this into the backbone of his theory of provi-
sioning (Fine & Leopold 1993, Fine 2002). On the other hand, Fine is care-
ful when determining the field of the ‘commodity’ where his theory is to
be applied, that is to say, strictly to products produced for market exchange,
and only marginally to those not produced for market exchange but which
can introduce themselves into a mercantile process without actually being
a ‘commodity’ as such. The latter would include, among others, second
hand objects, antiques or even bribes which follow a market dynamics.
Fine has a ‘vertical’ perspective on provisioning:
The distinct set of imperatives governing different sets of commodities is

implicit in the use of terms that describe them –namely, the food system, the
energy system, the housing system, the fashion system, the transport system, etc.
The use of the term ‘system’ signifies the idea that certain structures and
dynamics have been set in place for each separate group of commodities. Whilst
these are not cast in stone, nor without affinities at least in part across commod-
ity groups (sharing technical, marketing or other features), the presumption must
be that there is a stronger vertical link in the process from production to con-
sumption within each of the SOPs [systems of provision] than there is between
them (Fine, 2002:175).
2. J.Davis (1972) also distinguishes four forms of exchange that essentially correspond to the same distinctions.
162
There are a number of relevant points in Fine’s theory of ‘provisioning sys-

tems’. Firstly, the analysis of the articulations between production and con-
sumption where each articulation ‘plays a potentially significant role in the
social construction of the commodity both in its material and cultural
aspects’ (Fine 2002:98). Secondly, the emphasis on the tension between the
physical nature of the products (and services), that is, their potential ‘use
value’, and the meaning attributed to them. In this way, changes in the pro-
duction end of the provisioning chain will affect the content of the com-
modity, whilst changes in the consumption end of the chain will affect their
interpretation or meaning. Nevertheless, there isn’t an automatic transitivi-
ty running through the links of the chain where the changes on one end
would produce isomorphic and predictable changes on the other. Rather,
there is a permanent dialectic where social relations on one end –that is,
those that produce the commodity’s use value– interact with the social rela-
tions that are created on the other end; those of the final consumption.3
Thirdly, although not in the same ‘horizontal’ and systematic sense that
Ward proposes in his theory of ‘modes of provisioning’, Fine recognises the
importance of taking into consideration ‘the shifting relationship between
commercial and non-commercial forms of provision and shifts within and
transformation of, these broad categories’ (Fine, 2002:114):
It is necessary to determine how different forms of production for consumption

are reproduced and transformed despite their possible lack of a commercial logic
and their interaction with it. Both the nature and viability of such non-com-
mercial production and consumption are liable to be heavily influenced, if not
eliminated, by the predominance of commercial alternatives (2005:115).
Both of the approaches described above (Warde’s and Fine’s) construct, in

an explicit way, a theory of provisioning, highlighting the need to integrate
production and consumption. This has important consequences for the
social sciences implicated in the study of questions regarding the material
sustenance of life in our societies.
3. An example of this tension is that presented by Bourdieu (1988) when dealing with practices of ‘distinction’ through
consumption, which are useful for the economic and political reproduction of the elite that organises capitalism in
France. These practices he describes as both ‘enclassed’ and ‘enclassing’.
SUSANA NAROTZKY 163
PROVISIONING: SOME INITIAL EXAMPLES
The two examples chosen to illustrate ‘modes of provisioning’ and ‘systems

of provisioning’ are those of care and of nourishment/food. The first
refers to ‘modes of provisioning’, the second, to ‘systems of provisioning’.
Care
Let’s imagine that we need a babysitter or a nanny to take care of our chil-
dren for a number of hours every day, several days a week, whilst we are at
work. How are we going to provide ourselves with that service? Several pos-
sibilities come immediately to mind: a) the State can provide a nursery system
to supply this service; b) the Market has a large number of agencies of pri-
vate employment and freelance workers (generally women) available which
can supply this service at a variety of prices; c) the Relatives network may
have people willing to provide this service informally, and d) the Community,
the neighbourhood or a network of friends may have organised a system of
exchange of services, more or less formalised within a cooperative system,
which may provide us with the service we need (Brandon, 2000, Stack 1974).
From the 4 possibilities I have described, only b) is completely positioned

within a network of market exchange, but even in this case, the mode of
access to private nannies is often conditioned by their position within the
labour market as well as by their position within a particular social net-
work. Our social network and our income, as well as our social construc-
tion of trust regarding people we don’t know will also play a part in this.
On the other hand, many of the non-mercantile possibilities can be par-
tially inserted within market exchange. This is the case when we pay a rel-
ative to do the job, even if at a different price to that of the market, (some-
times lower, others higher); it is also the case when the neighbours
association who have organised a system of exchange organises an internal
accounting system in terms of time-credit, and therefore the exchange
value of (abstract) labour is measured via a time unit.4
On the other hand, not everyone has the same options of provisioning
available to them for both material and cultural reasons: some people live
4. This is very close to a concept of value from the classical theory of the value of labour.
164
far away from their relatives, others are new in the neighbourhood or city
and cannot access the local social network, others don’t have money to
enter the market provisioning system, others live in places which the State
or municipality doesn’t provide with nurseries (or not enough of them to
alleviate the possible demand for them), or are not eligible to access this
public service (for their ‘excessively’ high income, or their place of resi-
dence), in other cases the nurseries are in inconvenient locations (far from
the workplace or home, badly connected to public transport networks,
etc), others, finally, will not trust a stranger enough to leave their child in
his/her hands.
Most people will use different options at different points of their lives. This
is often conditioned by social and economic factors such as the domestic
cycles of homes which accommodate several generations of a single family,
the changing individual or domestic capacity to articulate social networks,
each subject’s position within the labour market, which will determine
availability of money and time, the State’s welfare policies, etc.
Food
Let’s say we are used to having coffee for breakfast, and that we normally
obtain it through the market. We have a number of options. We can go to
the supermarket and choose among the different brands (Marcilla, Bonka,
Soley, etc. all of which belong to food multinationals such as Nestlé),
usually mixtures of coffee vaguely defined by their place of origin (Co-
lombia, Brazil) or their type (Robusta, Arabic). This product is aimed at
mass consumers. But behind each of these labels is a series of social rela-
tions of production and distribution that are difficult to track down, that
is to say, that monitoring of them is scarce as far as quality goes, but also
where questions of ‘ethics’ are concerned when dealing with the exploita-
tion of the workforce, for example. Yet specific relations of production
(including, according to the historical period, slavery, indentured labour,
wage-earning workers, and independent sharecropping and peasantry)
and of distribution (including transformations of transport and storage
technology as well as retail outlets), which make a form of provisioning
possible, are founded on a history of connections between economic,
social, cultural and political forms of organisation of different groups of
people in different geographical locations (Stolcke 1984, 1988: Jimenez
1995, Roseberry 1996).
SUSANA NAROTZKY 165
Another option would be to go to a specialised shop; an independent

roaster (such as Cafés El Magnífico or La Puertorriqueña in Barcelona), where
we can be sure to find specific coffee produced in concrete places which
result in different tastes and quality levels. Our trust is based on the belief
that the connection between production and distribution/retail is hypo-
thetically more direct, and that the knowledge and quality control in the
place of origin is possible in this case. That is to say, that both in terms of
production and distribution, the ‘alienation’ of the agents involved from
the product itself, is considerably less than that present within the agro-
/agriculture industry and food distribution giants (Carrier 1995, Winson
1992). This type of shop, on the other hand, caters to a public that is sup-
posedly more experienced and sophisticated. We mustn’t forget, however,
that this form of provisioning is linked to technological innovations such
as ‘containerisation’, and to new forms of marketing that segment
consumer practices and address themselves to predefined consumers by
way of identity and quality discourses (Roseberry 1996, Roseberry, et al.
1995).
More and more, we find that there are other options for the provisioning
of coffee for the western urban consumer. Through our coffee consump-
tion habits, we can try to benefit specific forms of production in the place
of origin, which are generally systems connected to smaller peasant forms
of production which commercialise their product through cooperatives
linked to the ‘fair trade’ system (Whatmore & Thorne, 1997). Fair trade is
based on the promotion of the ‘connectivity’ between the decisions of the
agents at both ends of the chain of consumption and production respec-
tively, as well as on the ‘selling’ of that ‘connectivity’ as ‘fair’ and ‘sustain-
able’. Although the connection between the two ends of the chain of pro-
visioning often appears to be linear and evident in these cases, this rarely
corresponds with the reality. The decisions that affect the production and
commercialisation of the products depend on institutions such as the
futures markets specialising in coffee, and New York’s Stock Exchange
(Cocoa, Sugar, Coffee Exchange, CSCE), which make the prices fluctuate
and provides the standards for the ‘fair trade’ agreements.
The key difference between fair trade buyers and commercial dealers is that the
former pay a guaranteed minimum price (which protects the farmers should the
market go into free-fall), and a standard number of points above the CSCE
price when the market price exceeds the minimum (in effect, a 10 per cent pre-
mium) (Whatmore & Thorne, 1997, p.297).
166
The aim of this premium is to contribute to investments related to the

implementation of infrastructures linked to public welfare in the country
of origin (health, education, etc.).
Nevertheless, the pressure exerted by the ‘fair trade’ consumers on prod-

uct ‘quality’ (which at the same time will justify the higher prices paid by
the final consumer), exerts strong pressure on the farmers to change
their methods towards more ecological agricultural systems (which gen-
erally implies more intensive work), and to follow the certification stan-
dards regulated by the European Union among others. Even so, the
‘quality’ factor is a delicate matter because it often pushes the producers
outside of the ‘fair trade’ networks and back into the clutches of the
commercial intermediaries (the ‘merchants’) and the futures market’s
brutal fluctuations:
In order to provide consumers of Cafédirect [a fair trade commercial network]

with ‘excellent coffee’, the cooperatives [of producers] must submit only the
highest quality beans. If the coffee is of low quality (reasons may include rain-
fall, ‘pests’, fermentation) it will not be suitable for the fair trade contracts
negotiated by the cooperative export manager and the Cafédirect buyer, and
farmers will sell to the traders. If the price in the stock market is high traders
will pay well even for this low quality, and they will pay in cash (Whatmore
& Thorne, 1997, p.299).
As consumers, our capacity for selecting one way or another for getting
our coffee will depend on factors such as income, the most convenient
point of sale, information on the different available options, our ideology,
but also, and this seems to be the least evident, on the relations of produc-
tion in the country of origin, the distribution and commercialisation sys-
tems, the money market, technological innovations (such as containerisa-
tion for long distance transportation of perishable goods), all of which
affects the quality, price and circulation of the product but also its signifi-
cance in our society…
These two examples bring to light a series of matters centred around the
inevitable connection that exists between the processes of production and
the processes of consumption, particularly between the ‘material’ produc-
tion of goods and services, the ‘social’ production of differentiation and the
‘cultural’ production of meaning and identity. We will attempt to expound
on these matters hereafter.
SUSANA NAROTZKY 167
Consumption as a problem
There is a growing interest for consumption in the field of anthropology.

Some anthropologists seem to think that consumer patterns can tell us more
about contemporary social relations (social differentiation, the construction
of identity, agency, power) than production patterns. They point out that
now empowerment can only be gained from consumer practices within a
context of a precarious and segmented labour market, and where flexible
and informal productive processes have wrecked traditional empowerment
practices based on the homogeneity and solidarity achieved in the work-
place by the workers and expressed by trade unions (Miller, 1987, 1995,
1997). Consumption seems to address both material necessities and symbol-
ic production: the production of meaning and its relation to power.
Nevertheless, what I would like to emphasise here is that if we don’t

address the complexity of provisioning systems in their totality, we won’t be
able to comprehend the patterns of consumption, the social relations that
are produced within consumption, nor the construction of social meaning
or the forms of social distinction and differentiation that arise around con-
sumption. Hence the interest in a perspective that will underline a series of
points. In the first place, it raises the question of the need to track the ways
of provisioning. Secondly, the need to study these ways of provisioning’s
relation to processes of power, particularly the forms of institutionalisation
and social differentiation.
FOLLOWING THE PATHS OF PROVISIONING
In relation to the task of analyzing the ways of provisioning we must take

into account two important contributions from the field of anthropology,
which come from 2 different theoretical perspectives: that of ‘political
economy’ in anthropology (Roseberry, 1988), and that of cultural anthro-
pology of globalisation with a transaccionalist tendency (Inda & Rosaldo,
2002; Hannerz 1992, Appadurai, 1998).
The first can be framed within the perspective of ‘political economy’,

which developed during the 70’s and 80’s in anthropology, based on
dependency and world-system theories. From this viewpoint, Sidney
Mintz’s study Sweetness and Power (1985) shows how a particular system of
production (the plantation system) transformed the availability of sugar as
168
well as its meaning, going from being a scarce high value luxury good to
becoming something ‘common, and a necessity’. It also shows how the
expansion of a particular consumer good, sugar, is related to England’s
industrialisation and the need to reduce the costs of reproduction of the
workforce through the provision of cheap and energetic nutrients that
could be produced cheaply by the colonies due to the type of production
and power relations that ruled those regions.
The aim of Mintz´s analysis is to emphasise the relationship between food

production and consumption, a relationship that as he points out was clearly
present in ‘the traditional preoccupations of food anthropologists’ when they
studied ‘primitive’ societies, but which appears to have lost interest today.
…Complex modern societies appear to have divorced food production from food
consumption; but why what quantities of food were made available when they
were, and how such availabilities shaped choices, are questions deserving
answers all the same (1985:179-80).
The proclaimed freedom to choose meant freedom only within a range of possi-
bilities laid down by forces over which those who were, supposedly, freely choos-
ing exercised no control at all (1985:183).
In his introduction to The Social Life of Things (1986), Arjun Appadurai,

from a transactionalist point of view, shows how objects can follow path-
ways that make them enter or leave the status of commodity, and shows
how some ‘things’ will be consumed several times and in different ways, in
different cultural contexts and by different sorts of people while others ‘will
follow one single route from production to consumption’ (Appadurai
1986:23, see also Kopytoff ’s ‘singularization’ concept 1986:73-77), having
their access to ‘commodity candidacy’ status restricted by social and polit-
ical forces Appadurai 1986:13-14).
What’s more, Appadurai underlines how the value of goods is produced

during the transaction as a result of temporary factors, both cultural and
social. The meaning of a particular ‘thing’ depends as much on a ‘cultur-
al biography’, which outlines the object’s movement and ‘life history’, as it
does on a ‘social history’, which can be outlined for ‘types of objects’ in a
society and which creates large scale dynamics that restrict the ‘intimate
trajectory’ of things (1986:34-36). An important contribution from
Appadurai’s perspective is that of the relation that is established between
SUSANA NAROTZKY 169
knowledge and the commodity throughout their routes, and how this con-
tributes to the value of the commodity in individual exchanges:
Culturally constructed ideas about commodity flows are commonplace in all soci-
eties. But such stories acquire especially intense, new, and striking qualities when
the spatial, cognitive or institutional distances between production, distribution,
and consumption are great. Such distancing either can be institutionalized with-
in a single complex economy or can be a function of new kinds of links between
hitherto separated societies and economies. The institutionalized divorce (in
knowledge, interest, and role) between persons involved in various aspects of the
flow of commodities generated specialized mythologies (1986:48).
WAYS OF PROVISIONING AND PROCESSES OF POWER
This point insists on the connection between provisioning systems and sys-
tems of domination. This implies asking ourselves how State institutions,
for example, delimit the availability of resources, as well as the possibility
to choose of formally or informally defined groups of people in an effec-
tive way. But it also implies asking ourselves how the distribution processes
affect in a differential way social players’ possibilities for consumption.
The Power of Distribution
The concept of distribution describes the process through which produced

things reach the hands of consumers. It is one of the main aspects of the
approach to ways of provisioning. Distribution implies allocation and move-
ment at the same time. Although within the market system, the allocation is
theoretically obtained through supply and demand mechanisms, abstracted
away from political and social constraints, in practice this does not usually
happen in such a way. If we take into consideration all the possible different
modes of provision in each stage of a specific provisioning route, we may
observe how the allocation is both conditioned politically and socially embed-
ded in multiple and complex social relations (Carrier, 1995; Miller, 1997).
The social value of goods, its significance, will also depend on the particu-
lar form of distribution that a particular person or group may use to access
them, as well as the real capacity of choice he/she may have to choose
between the different available possibilities. The capacity of a social actor
170
to choose amongst available forms of distribution is always conditioned by

his/her position within general the economic and social structure. This
comes across in factors like the following:
1. The consumer’s level of domestic and public resources.5 This allows or

inhibits certain consumer modalities: electricity, fridge, freezer, car, storage
space, lift, phone, etc.
2. His/her available time and lines of credit. It is easy to see how this affects
people in different spatial and social places (for example, degraded neigh-
bourhoods, isolated rural populations, illegal immigrants, the elderly, etc.),
and as a result also affects his/her capacity for making decisions and his/her
ability to produce particular identities through consumer practices.
3. The consumer’s capacity for information regarding the products, alter-

native forms of provisioning, special sales, etc. These capabilities to inform
oneself depend on factors such as education and levels of literacy, not only
traditional literacy (reading, writing, counting), but also, and increasingly,
electronic literacy.
4. His/her physical condition and health condition. This directly affects

the consumer’s possibilities regarding his/her choice of final distribution
points. Particular groups of people are affected by these conditions: the
elderly, the chronically ill, etc.
5. The sources and forms of income. This is without a doubt the most cru-
cial factor in the determination of the capacity of choice in consumer
practices, and depends on the structure of capitalism in every place and
every moment, the welfare system available in each case, and the particu-
lar position of the social actors in each context. Without forgetting the fact
that income is not exclusively monetary and the participation of the play-
ers in social relations that provide income in kind implies in fact a move-
ment towards non-mercantile modes of provisioning.
Therefore, different channels for the circulation of goods and services will
affect their differential allocation between different groups of people and
will produce once again a differentiation process.
5. These ‘assets’ could also be understood as goods/domestic capital, that is, related to productive consumption in self-
provisioning processes (in the same way that Pahl 1984 does, see also Pahl & Wallace), and not to the final consumption.
SUSANA NAROTZKY 171
CONCLUSION: THE PERSPECTIVE OF PROVISIONING
Just as we have been proposing, the provisioning perspective follows chan-

nels of production, distribution, circulation, appropriation, consumption
and discarding of goods and services. In each of these stages of the path
of provisioning, social relations produce a material differentiation, which is
incorporated within the actual goods and services, for example, in terms of
quality, adjustment to necessity, availability of time, accessibility, etc. for
goods and services such as food, clothes, housing, sanitation, water, elec-
tricity, domestic care, etc.
One important aspect of this perspective is that it takes into consideration

the simultaneous provisioning of specific goods through different ways –mar-
ket, State, community, domestic groups– and the articulation of commercial
and non-commercial stages along the provisioning trajectory. In fact, goods
often move between different phases throughout their trajectory and the
majority of goods and services can be provisioned through both commercial
and non-commercial modes. The interaction between these factors will affect
both the economic value and the symbolic value of goods and services.
The methodological framework of provisioning emphasises the importance

of the State and its policies and regulations regarding social welfare, and spe-
cific social aid programmes in particular. It underlines in this sense, that the
decisions of the social actors to direct themselves towards provisioning
through modes more or less connected to the market, depend in a very direct
way on State provisioning policies. It is therefore important to keep in mind
the historicity of the provisioning systems and the political economy of the
movements and articulations that exist between different modes of provision.
The provisioning perspective emphasises the political nature of the pro-

duction of meaning throughout these journeys. In this way it insists on the
complexity and ambivalence of the meanings produced and found avail-
able for social actors to use as a primary resource for the construction of
their identities during the consumption processes. The focus on provision-
ing therefore expresses the unavoidable relationship between the produc-
tion of meaning and the systems of exploitation and domination.
If we think of the effective provisioning practices, it is often useful to think

of social actors as entangled in provisioning networks. On the other hand,
if we pay attention to the chain of provisioning in its totality, we will find
172
a complex network of social relations that split up at particular points

where certain options become impossible or improbable for some social
actors, and where generally speaking, tension and power will concentrate
and a social differentiation and possibly conflict will be produced.
The idea of a provisioning system should, on the one hand, articulate the dis-
tribution processes to the production processes, that is to say, which suppliers
of which goods use which distribution channels and vice-versa (for example;
in the food provisioning chains you can compare the routes of ‘organic’ or
biological products to genetically modified products). On the other hand, it
should articulate distribution processes with the forms of and capacity for
consumption, that is to say, with questions such as the availability of income,
the form of exchange (with money, credit, in kind, bartering, charity, etc.),
and the modality of the transference (personal/ impersonal).
The provisioning perspective should also take note of displacement

between modes of provision, and pay attention to how the different ways
of provisioning interact to produce differentiated options that help recre-
ate specific social structures. In particular, this perspective should articulate
the availability of different opportunities of production and distribution for
different agents, with the political and economic context which has devel-
oped historically at both a local level and a global level. Only starting from
these premises will we be able to understand the complex processes of pro-
duction of meaning around consumption, and their unavoidable relation-
ship with the processes of social differentiation and reproduction.
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ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
Wealth and the City
Emmanuel Rodríguez1
The government of externalities and com-

mons in the global metropolis
Maybe few eras have shown such an asymmetry
between wealth of means and opportunities and
shortage of political imagination regarding their
usage as the present one. In addition, maybe
nowhere else is this asymmetry presented in such
an acute way as in big cities; in the metropolis
crossed by global fluxes of power and wealth. The
present article deals with how this wealth is pro-
duced and how next to the great macroeconomic
magnitudes there exists a proliferating sphere of
symbiotic relations which can and should be
understood as the social underground of wealth
tout court.
A starting premise: metropolitan economies are

complex economies. Economic theory’s difficulties
in tracing an explanatory model to give an account
of this phenomenon, reside precisely in the large
amount of dependence and interaction ocurring
which makes the typical neo-classic and Keynesian
economic explanations unviable. In fact, economic
1. Emmanuel Rodríguez is the autor of the book ‘El Gobierno Imposible. Trabajo y Fronteras en la Metrópolis de la
Abundacia’, and also editor of Traficantes de Sueños.
EMMANUEL RODRÍGUEZ 177
theory faces a problem which characterises in a decisive way the reality

of a city: the multiplicity of heterogeneous agents, the diversity of sur-
prisingly productive actions which can be considered work, the paradox
of the multiplication of relations of interdependence which are difficult
to measure or to reduce to models of equivalence (unless by means of an
arbitrary and almost always coercive system), the articulation notion of
a wealth that does not encompass traditional theories of value, and
which at moments seems to get rid off old economic paradigms.
Here, we are offering a few glimpses of intelligibility about the city that
go beyond statistical empiricism. This approach takes the complexity
and multiplicity of subjects and relations that make up the urban frame-
work as a raw material of its sources of wealth. In the light of this per-
spective, we should accept that the wealth of the metropolis overflows
the economy’s analytical framework. Furthermore, that this real wealth,
which has to do precisely with the consistency and proliferation of het-
erogeneous relations and subjects, is expressed in an imperfect form in
the great macroeconomic magnitudes or in the structure of opportuni-
ties of a city, even when it constitutes its elemental underground infra-
structure. Evidently, this could be the beginning of a program of with-
drawal of these forms of wealth of the accumulation model.
Therefore, this approach must be differentiated from that (also valid of

course) which explains the global city from its capacity for the capture
and use of global flows of capital and power (according to which the
natural features of a powerful mechanism of capture of wealth and
global sustainability are drawn). The perspective is necessarily another
one. In the place of great the financial flows, appear the endogenous
phenomena of production, which, also containing a global genetic
code, constitute in some way the molecular structure of every single cell
in the urban body. As a last analysis, this approach should give an
account of the ways of exploitation and economic use that have their
base and power in the multiplicity of agents and in urban interactions.
Let us therefore start by introducing a hybrid concept: externalities.
Theory of externalities
The complexity of the relations between a multiplicity of singular agents

requires a different economic tool. This can be provided by the theory
178
of so-called externalities.2 Externalities refer to the positive or negative

effects that relations of interdependence have amongst economic agents
which are not directly included in a commercial relation. A definition
extracted from an economics guidebook defines it as follows:
An externality exists when the production or consumption of a good direct-

ly affects consumers or companies who do not participate in its purchase or
sale, and when those effects are not totally reflected in market prices.3
The abundance of news regarding the prices not included in the mar-
ket, in terms of pollution and the over-exploitation of natural resources,
has allowed environmentalism to define an important field of negative
externalities. Less understood (scornfully modulated and demeaned by
economic and institutional agents), positive externalities could be, how-
ever, the origin of a new reflection on the way how metropolitan
economies operate.
Alfred Marshall, British, master of a virtuoso school of economists

amongst which we can find Pigou and Keynes, was maybe the first to
enunciate a possible theory of positive externalities. In fact, in his works
he recognizes, for the first time, that companies often generate benefits
in their environment, which go much further than their mercantile or
fiscal contributions.4 For example, the existence of a cluster of compa-
nies specialized in the same type of activity generates virtuous circuits
of training and qualification, of distribution and of market organiza-
tions which can be used by any agent without having necessarily partic-
ipated in the production of that same circuit. Subsequently, the theory
of external economics has been applied to public intervention, which,
by providing a wide collection of goods, generates a group of tangible
benefits in the entire economic circuit.
2. Due to its interest and pedagogic character, we reproduce Yann Moulier Boutang’s passage on the theory of externali-
ties: when an economic operation between agents A and B has effects on a third party, C, without any monetary trans-
action or exchange agreement between A and C, or B and C this is then called an externality. If the externality cre-
ated is used in detriment of C, that is, if its present well being is lessened, or if it prevents it from enjoying certain goods
or potential services, then we call this a negative externality, or an external spilloover. If due to the trans action between A
and B, agent C finds its well being and wealth, its possibilities of action, knowledge, of improving its surroundings,
increased, then we say that a positive externality has been created. Capitalismo cognitivo, propiedad intelectual y creación colectiva,
Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2004, pp. 147-148.
3. Francisco Mochón, Economía. Teoría y política, Madrid, Mc.graw Hill, 1993, p.236
4. Alfred Marshall, Principios de economía, Madrid, ICO-Síntesis, 2005.
In addition, feminist theory has stressed on innumerable occasions that

women’s work generates an assortment of benefits which are systemat-
ically concealed by the market, but which make up most of social
reproduction. Feminists point out that the work of ‘reproduction’ could
be considered to be an enormous positive externality for all productive
work, without which the latter could never take place.5 In this way, they
also pointed out the enormous depth of economic circuits, and the high
density of dependent and interdependent relations that are basic to any
economic relation.
The example normally used by economists to explain external

economies is that of the beekeeper, who gives his bees full liberty for
them to feed in neighbouring fields, providing in this way the precious
service of pollination to a good number of farmers. Naturally, the
farmers pay the beekeeper nothing for this service, who considers him-
self remunerated enough by the gathering of honey.
Couldn’t we think of the city as an innumerable collection of bee-keep-

ing species? From the public investment in infrastructures and education
which are the support for all economic activity, to care work, tradition-
ally organized by women, passing through a group of undetermined
activities and processes amongst which we include technological appli-
cations, the actual cultural and relational density in urban environments,
in short, a wide group of social connections which determine, parting
from this sort of empirical underground, the results we can read in the eco-
nomic newspapers.
In this way, the theory of externalities, even at the risk of becoming an

immense jumble from which we can imagine every unthinkable eco-
nomic expression of social relations, allows us to understand the eco-
nomic implications of social fabrics and discover a whole new concep-
tual field in which the old notions of accumulation, exploitation and
labour must find a new meaning.
For sure, from the company lab, which served as a testing ground for
economic theory and where an assortment of players and factors (capi-
tal/work) are described, to the enormous social metropolitan lab where
5. Interesting, in this sense, are the political implications of the claim for a salary for care work, which, although
unrecognised (or only slightly recognised), is nevertheless not only the basis of economic activity but of life in general.
180
economic interdependence is weaved in with the universe of social net-

works, there is a conceptual abyss. In fact, metropolitan economies
would be an unattainable object without resorting to cartographic
devices capable of recognizing their complexity.
Anyway, we are moving on to a level that is still too abstract. What do

externalities tell us about the cities’ new grandeur or decadence? Can a
virtuous regime of creation and exploitation of externalities that deter-
mine successful growth models exist? And on another level, aren’t the
positive externalities, in terms of benefits produced and not acknowl-
edged, neither by business nor by the market (which should ultimately
be recognized as an unpaid job), both the root of prosperity and the
raw material of all new forms of exploitation? In other words, could we
say that a displacement is being made, from the exploitation within the
frame of salary relationships, to another more generic one that has to
do with business’ appropriability of goods (often common goods) from
external economies?
The paradigm of the global city or of the new informational city seems
to resolve the question in a concise way. The attractiveness of a city as
a global decision centre seems to depend on its capacity to generate or
attract innovations, have a strong enough market for the latter and a
highly qualified human resources. From here, research follows the clas-
sic course of study of R&D indicators, patents registered per year, new
information and communication technology companies, levels of qual-
ification in the population, etc. In this way the emergence of a new pro-
duction based on knowledge and new high-tech production districts,
the so-called technopolis, is described.6 Undoubtedly, all of these fac-
tors serve as a record of powerful external economies, in that most of
the financing falls on public institutions and homes, and the main ben-
eficiaries are the companies (who make a certainly minor contribution
to the maintenance of these external economies).
However, this approach is still too superficial. In fact, consultancies’

studies on the preferences of entrepreneurs at the time of locating their
companies in one town or another (always oriented by a pragmatism
which rarely gets lost in conceptual discussions) has to do with the so-
6. A pioneer in this type of work was the piece by Castells, The Informational City: Economic Restructuring and Urban
Development, Blackwell, 1990.
called urban environments. It is a generic concept, but one which refers

to the environmental values of a town as well as its quality of life, the
presence of personal services and diversified entertainment, and also to
factors which are difficult to value economically, such as so-called cre-
ativity (in fact, there is a whole field of elaboration of the so-called ‘cre-
ativity indexes’), the social and cultural dynamism of the city, the often
relative existence of ethnic diversity, etc. All of these factors are consid-
ered of interest to companies. Indeed, they are considered to be pro-
ductive elements.
This may be better understood from an approach that crosses economy’s

frontiers once and for all to consider the actual social constitution of the
territory as its raw material for its development. In a recent and quite
controversial work, Richard Florida essayed a generic sociological expla-
nation to describe models of urban success. Basically, the main argu-
ment he puts forward considers that prosperity in a metropolitan region
had to do with its capacity to activate and multiply its creative forces
(what arguably could be seen in the emergence of the so-called creative
class).7 Undoubtedly, these creative forces are found in high-tech indus-
trial areas and in research centres, but also in the proliferation of an
entire group of professions based on culture, the arts, design, and even
in the growth of the so-called liberal occupations (teachers, lawyers, con-
sultants, etc.). The merit of his approach is that the proliferation of these
creative environments (what other writers have called millieus innovateurs)
does not only refer to the education of human capital (for example,
through an active university policy and its connection with the business
world), but to an assortment of much more immaterial factors which
have to do with social diversity, tolerance towards irregular ways of life
and ethnic diversity. In fact, Florida essays a series of indexes which have
to do with the number of gay couples that live in a town (he calls this the
gay index), the number of workers linked to show business, the arts and
design (bohemian index and coolness), and racial and ethnic diversity (melting
pot). Observe that all of them have a positive relation with traditional
technological indexes and economic growth. Paradoxically, the cities
with greater social and cultural diversity and with a higher number of
jobs in the creative sector, are also those best equipped to face techno-
logical production. The virtuous circle of emerging spaces would be
7. Richard Florida, Cities and The Creative Class, Routledge, New York, 2005.
182
composed of what Florida calls the three ‘Ts’: talent, tolerance, and
technology. Human capital, liberal ethics and technological investment.
Florida’s study is apparently inspired by theorists of the Chicago School,

and by Jane Jacobs who once again recognizes the value of cities as clus-
ters of diversity, difference, creativity and innovation, as well as the value
of these as the main external economy of the city. However, the creative
class’ perspective limits itself to pointing out a correlation between index-
es, which tells us too little about how this social and cultural diversity
works. To a certain extent, it limits itself to recognizing in these charac-
teristics an enormous group of externalities.
All these elements seem to refer to the city as a primary subject of new
forms of production. In this sense, Jacobs’ work takes on a renewed rele-
vance. For Jacobs, cities were genuine points of economic condensa-
tion. The high density of symbiotic relations, capacities and profes-
sions, their reserves of imagination and innovation, made the cities
unique and inseparable from the economic process. When these com-
plex relations (always social before economic) put themselves to work
for an economic purpose, a genuine industrial explosion was produced
(especially in the sectors of greater added value) which converted the
city into a more self-sufficient (in what Jacobs calls a substitution of
exports) and diversified economic place. Urban economies distin-
guished themselves precisely from supplier economies (always special-
ized in the production of one or two goods) due to their diversity and
dynamism in the creation of new industries and markets.
The merit of Jacobs’ work lies in having expressed this relation without
having simplified it. That is, only from the complexity of cities is it pos-
sible to articulate complex and emerging economic processes starting
from the creation of new industries and from types of social and eco-
nomic symbiosis, ever more sophisticated.8 This view does not avoid the
unequal exchange that is produced between metropolises and supplier
regions. It simply points out the coordination, control and capture of
resources tasks, which today are to be found in big cities, and are only
possible from this horizon of high sophistication and of a relative diver-
sity of social relations.
8. Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life. Random House, 1985.
To a certain extent, what all these approaches reveal is perhaps obvious:

the economic dimension of the generic features of urban experience. The
city as a dense spatial reality where time compresses and expands at a
speed unknown in any other social media, where the progression of
changes and innovations seem to succeed each other without interruption,
where a strong component of arbitrariness of encounters and connections
is present. Above all, the city or the urban framework appears as a space
of diversity and of confluence of heterogeneous subjects par excellence.
Overall, the externalities that nowadays determine the new forms of

centralization of space have their origin and root in generic urban fea-
tures, which are exacerbated to the point of exasperation in metropol-
itan areas. However, what forms, modes, and modulations do these
generic characteristics of the urban framework acquire today to cause
this strong economic impact?
Cooperation and territory
It is important to point out that these externalities, which, as we have

already noted, derive from the actual materialization of generic fea-
tures of the city, have forms of organization and of implementation in
precise territorial expressions. That is, external economies are pro-
duced in a specific niche of social relations, which overrides the frame-
work of a collection of individual agents. The production of care,
knowledge, technology, and forms of learning and expression, are pro-
duced through complex social interactions. For these to be effective,
these interactions have to have a certain field of consistency. Just like
any other form of life, they demand mechanisms of reproduction and
multiplication for the action to be effective.
Therefore, it is necessary to make a drastic new conceptual change and

make use of a plan that points towards the actual ecological consisten-
cy of the metropolis. The conception of the metropolis as a conglomer-
ation of heterogeneous subjects, which potentially deduces a greater
power for innovation and creation, requires a molecular view to describe
social relations in terms of cooperation, and, therefore, of work.
In the language of political economics, the reversal of the factory-terri-

tory relation or how the spread of factories over the land has been
184
deduced on many occasions, suggests a view which approaches metro-

politan economies, parting not so much from entrepreneurial networks
as from anthropological profiles, social networks, and the forms of coo-
peration which make the former possible. In this sense, perhaps the
more interesting approach, the one that has tried to synthesize the field
as generator of these urban externalities, is the proposal of cooperation
basins of immaterial work by Antonella Corsani, A. Negri and Lazzarato
among others.9
In a small series of researches they conducted on the forms of pro-

duction in fashion, design, advertising and communication compa-
nies they arrived at surprising conclusions. A good part of the work
cycle, which in fact made up the effective production of these com-
panies, was not carried out in the company itself nor in the compa-
nies they subcontracted, but depended on the vague space in which
educational circuits (both public-formal and informal ones) over-
lapped with trends and cultural networks as well as ways of life.
These spaces were denominated basins of immaterial work. This
reflected that the production of semiotic and informational contents
of goods was carried out in the territory as a result of a vast plurali-
ty of agents, qualifications and knowledge, which completely over-
flowed the perimeters of business. In fact, business limited itself to
organizing the final sections of that complex cycle of production (the
design of a product, for example) in what can be recognized as a sim-
ple capture of wealth and of external labour.
Evidently, it could be said that these basins of cooperation are not only
found in the sectors of design and advertising, that is, in what we call
cognitive production. The basins of cooperation are innate to metro-
politan life; they constitute the raw material of urban experience. In
any case, the basins of cooperation concept allows us a first concrete social
approach of the enormous externality production machine that the city
is nowadays.
First of all, the basins come from the actual historical density of the
social fabric. They include languages, codes and flows of information
9. Antonella Corsani, Maurizio Lazzarato y Antonio Negri, Le bassin de travail inmaterial dans la métropole parisienne, Paris,
LíHarmattan, 1996. Also M. Lazzarato, Y. Moulier-Boutang, A.Negri y G. Santilli, Des enterprises pas comme les autres.
Benetton in Italy, Le Sentier a Paris, Paris, Publisud, 1995.
that are materialized in ways of doing and living and in specific work-
ing capacities. They also include niches of sustainability where forms of
collective learning and educational circuits (not only institutional and
formal ones) are essential. They also comprise, as could not be other-
wise, forms of solidarity and reproducibility of both bodies, and wis-
dom and knowledge. Above all, they implicate a collection of potential
synergies derived from new encounters and forms of cooperation
between subjects (which constitutes their horizon of proliferation).
However, all in all, what economic concretion does this theory of exter-
nalities and of basins of cooperation have? Or, in other words, how do
these cooperation basins work for the entrepreneurial fabric? At this
point, the Gordian knot of exploitation of positive externalities
becomes undone and a true political field is discovered, which translates
(often by force) cooperation’s formless production into the accumula-
tion’s equivalents of change. The exploitation of externalities, as well as
the capitalist capture of cooperation is revealed.
We have chosen a focus that takes three great regions of positive urban
externalities, which in turn allow us to make different approaches to the
question of wealth and its appropriation in metropolitan economies:
-The ways of life, as far as cooperation basins are primarily modes

of relation, forms of sociality, codes and languages, which
become productive under determined regimes of economic
mobilization.
-Wisdom and knowledge. Naturally, metropolitan economies (guid-

ing centres of the complex system of global accumulation) are
above all else management and exploitation systems of knowl-
edge and of information.
-Mobility and Circulation: essential components of the production

of wealth, whether dealing with goods, capital, people or infor-
mation. However, the appropriability of wealth that mobility
produces is also turned into an ambiguous fighting field
between strategies of control and regulation and its uncon-
trolled proliferation. This contradiction is shown clearly in the
migratory flows that go through the city and constitute its main
economic engine.
186
Ways of life and wealth
Plural ways of life. Beyond regulatory models, rites and myths of deeply
striated societies of every historical era, the city has been the humus of
ways of inhabiting and living (hated and desired at the same time)
unknown to those contemporaries who contemplated it from afar.
Fascinating spaces, due to the luxury and wealth that they accumulated
and probably also to the most extreme forms of pauperism of the mass-
es, cities have been the meeting place of different social and cultural
marginalities.
In this way, the air of the city made people free, but in an unforeseen
way, unsuspected, too ambiguous and unbearable in the eyes of the
princes who historically governed them. Maybe it would be reiterative
to resort to medical or urban archaeology to find in all of them, under
the philanthropy and explicit rationalisation of their discourse, a strong
moral aspiration: to bring order to that indistinct filth consisting of tav-
erns, bad rooms, immoral cohabitation of the sexes and subversive pro-
visions for all possible urban communes.
Certainly, if something remains of the Chicago School’s work it is pre-

cisely to have attracted attention to these spaces of marginality, to have
fascinated their readers with the study of the same material that gave
birth to jazz in black ghettos or the radical nomadism that gave birth to
both counterculture and the wobbly movement of the temporary work-
ers in the Mid West.
Nevertheless, studies such as that of Richard Florida show us a produc-

tive image of the planet of the marginalised that has its privileged resi-
dence in big cities. As if the margins had taken over the city centre,
materialising in this way a paradoxical real subsumption where just the
most outlandish ways of life turn into the most appreciated resources for
a capitalism hunger for novelties and imagination. The financial centre
of San Francisco (the third volume in the United States) coexists with the
biggest gay community in history. The most liberal cities in terms of
behaviour are also the richest. Diversity and heterogeneity mean wealth.
It is true that the cruelty of anonymity and the destruction of tradition-

al bonds could be giving rise to the creation of communities (perhaps
weaker than the word would bring to mind) around interests, affections
and above all ways of observing and of inhabiting, which are hardly
comparable to the great social categories of nation, race, or class.
These communities, whose existence is sometimes as fleeting as adoles-

cence, have been turned into rich fields of cultural and social experi-
mentation. Whole industries are based on them such as the industry of
culture (that would rapidly drown without the infinite resource of these
urban trends), but also an informal field of qualification (in communi-
cation, information management, cultural production), the appearance
of new markets, often self-organised and fed by those communities
which make them up (and not only ethnic economics but also the gay
economy, the distinct markets ecological or new age), and a whole new
productive universe of elements that the effective production of value
continuously shuffles and exploits.
Evidently, not anything goes, not everything is a resource for consump-

tion. If, for example, the strongly urban psychedelic culture renewed
(and continues to renew) perception and with that publicity, the visual
industries and ways of consumption, the challenge of a new and vast
wave of radical experimentation in the field of perception (and that of
all aesthetic and ethical ecology) must be as banned and isolated as the
slums, seedy bars, and rough neighbourhoods of the cities.
The limit of the productive value of this proliferation is perhaps in its

capacity to autonomously self-organise the circuits of value. Hence,
these ways of life, these metropolitan experiences, become a little more
suspect (although perhaps more promising, as if they were a sort of risk
capital waiting to be discovered) as they descend the scales of income
and power.
For this reason, at this point the policing of criminal spaces and the cul-
ture of violence usually replaces the liberal language of respect and toler-
ance. Pushed to the limit and without resources for a politisation that
would give them consistency and a new field of alliances, some ways of life
slide into the terrain of subculture (in the best case) or forms of survival
that lead to a sort of collective self-organisation on the edge which borders
in many cases on the formation of gangs and marginal markets. That this
is the result of social exclusion and harassment and a lack of resources
appears to be verified by the enormous wealth in the forms of cultural
expression that many of these same ways of life are capable of producing.
188
The expropriation of commons: the economic discovery of

the knowledge commons
Few commentators (many of them on the left that defend the «today
like yesterday») can deny that the arrival of new technology has lead to
an economic revolution as profound as that of industrial capitalism.
Nevertheless, almost nobody would agree on what so-called ‘new infor-
mation and communication technology companies’ mean, as well as
the cultural revolutions that accompany them. However they imply a
destruction of old economic theory, that is now seen under the strong-
ly contrasted light of the positive externalities of new technology
(Solow’s old paradox)10 and the increase in performance that they
appear to provide, in the unrecognised announcement of the possible
end to scarcity.
In this intersection of new technology, the communicative revolution

and social cooperation, the big cities were the centre point of the cross-
roads. Indeed in them, and especially in the big cities of the United
States and Europe, a chain of cultural revolutions and technological
inventions took place that led to perceptive and cultural experiments
(on which the whole cultural industry continues to feed) that resulted in
Internet, personal computing and possibly the declaration of a future
field of emancipation.11
Of course, economic theory had to wise up in order to understand this

enormous field of externalities. So, in the models of competition
between cities, it is considered that space as a place for innovation (the
so-called millieus innovateurs) is an essential factor. Evidently, most
comparative studies take into consideration only the quantitative
indices available for the OCDE countries and which normally include
the expense for Research and Development (R&D) in relation to GNP,
the number of investigators per thousand inhabitants, the importance
of technological companies in the economy as a whole, etc.
10. Stated in the decade of the 70s, Solow, Nobel Prize winner for Economy, appeared to recognise that computers were
everywhere except in productivity statistics. He was referring to the big disparity between the cooperative potential
that started this cultural and informative emergency and the actual economic institutions, in that moment of the
process of serious reconversion, as a capitalist solution to the actual ungovernability of the 60s decade.
11. That the association between the technological revolution from the sixties to the eighties and the cultural revolution
of those same years was so close that many times the same people were involved in them is still hardly recognised.
The hacker culture was born and developed in the same cultural and political environment as the counterculture.
However, the production of knowledge and innovation is captured in

formal accounting methods in an imperfect way. The production of
knowledge and innovation in a broad sense, that is to say, cultural
wealth, go beyond the scope of public and private R&D institutions.
This multiplication of cognitive production (to state the problem in a
synthetic way) is formed by a complex space, which pervades formal
institutions and companies, but has its impulse in social tendencies and
ways of co-operation which are often in their interstices, when they are
not completely independent of any institutional form.
In other words, there is a wide area of innovation and circulation of

knowledge which is intangible in institutional terms, but which has
spaces, social networks and forms of sociality (to pick up on the argu-
ment of the previous section), which serve as specific support of this pro-
ductive cooperation. Undoubtedly, this innovative media is often mixed
and intertwined with academic and educational institutions, with centres
of innovation and with companies, and above all with those involved in
technological innovation or which place themselves within highly spe-
cialised disciplines such as that of biomedicine. In addition, evidently,
this institutional contribution in human capital, or in what is now known
as wetware, reflects the enormous socialization of education in the last
decades, and the enormous transfer of public funds to education.
Nevertheless, what this approach needs is the continuity of these innova-

tive environments (their whole development as basins of cooperation and
innovation) where it is not possible to determine a unique motive or cause
for the innovation or production of knowledge, but a conglomeration or
clusters that include institutions, companies, but also communities of
interest, cultural currents and, why not, ways of life. It is here where an
almost infinite collection of positive economic virtualities is projected.
On the other hand, cognitive production is always a production of vir-

tualities. The production of knowledge and innovation is a complex
process where each new step opens up a multiplicity of small future
possibles. To a certain extent, it should be understood that this produc-
tion of innovation has much more to do with the logic of the event than
with the old assembly lines of Fordism.12
12. It is precisely on this cognitive production, or this production that is equivalent to the multiplication of the event, that
determines the extreme dynamism of cognitive capital. For a more thorough explanation read Lazzarato, Por una
politica menor, Acontecimiento y política en las sociedades de control, Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2006.
190
By understanding innovation as a creation of possibles (which at the

same time are shown as new fields of virtualities) a completely new light
is shed on economic science. Certainly, companies have a primordial
interest in innovation since this determines the future of the markets;
intellectual and industrial property legislation plays a crucial, perhaps
irreplaceable, role, in that it allows business to appropriate complex and
continuous processes. Rather, processes that are projected over time.
The ownership of some product or innovative development, is similar
to holding shares over a whole field of possibles, that is, a sort of
monopoly over a fragment of the future, over which not only will they
have an important control, but also a complete monopoly in terms of
economic profitability.
On the other hand, the (mainly legal) devices for appropriability are
only exercised on the final stages of the production of products of inno-
vation (new technology, software, cultural assets etc.), precisely the
phase of most added value in a complex work cycle that is ignored or
treated with disdain. That is to say, the millieus innovateurs that we iden-
tified as the authentic original source of cognitive production suddenly
disappear before the rights of medical laboratories, big software com-
panies, and recording studios.
The business depredation of these externalities is nothing if not para-

doxical. The devices for capture are like little points to capture light, lit-
tle mirrors in a room that must stay in semidarkness, illuminating per-
haps only the most interesting parts for the production of value.
The room is, of course, this complex process of circulation and produc-
tion of knowledge. However, for this cognitive production to be effective,
the room must have sufficient light, (in terms of income and wealth for
the basins of cooperation, of circulation of knowledge and information,
of liberty to share that knowledge the way it happens with the free soft-
ware...). The depredation of the externalities is threatening to reduce the
light in the room and therefore the feed back conditions of the process.
The Mobility and control of wealth
Territory has been the great enemy of the economy: distance, the sin-
gularity of geographic accidents, regional discontinuity, the always-
capricious climatic system... You could almost say that territory, and
above all, distance, has been a permanent source of negative externa-
lities 13; an implicit resistance, which economic theory took as the neu-
tral remainder of the inexorability of the human ecosystems.
Nevertheless, the revolution of new technology and transport appears

to have eliminated the spatial barrier, at least on a planetary scale, at
least within the territorial limits where human life is possible. The ten-
dency for physical barriers to disappear has signalled the time for
instant communication and the circulation of capital in real time.
Maybe some days are still needed, maybe some hours, for the trans-
portation of big physical merchandise, but these are now marginal
costs, or the pretext for new industries such as logistics. The important
thing is that in the circulation of capital, and above all, in this new
immaterial production, distance is now taking on the uncertain outlines
of its dissolution.
All of this appears to announce the end of great human agglomera-

tions, open to a new phase of general decentralization, of dispersed
production spread over huge geographic areas. Nevertheless, it is but
the beginning of a new era of concentration and prosperity for the big
metropolises, for the global cities, which will turn into guiding centres,
authentic predators of the global economy. The speed and the growth
in the rates of circulation of goods, people and capital will make them
the new epicentres of the global economies, savage attractions of mer-
chandise, people and capital.
However, even though mobility is a prerequisite of access to wealth

(something we can summarise in an aphorism as simple and perhaps
imprecise as: as a space dominated by the speed of the flows, only those
who can keep up can appropriate at least a part of them14, not all mobil-
ity follows a controlled direction.
A clear but ambiguous case: immigration. This represents a virtually

infinite source of positive externalities for the cities that take immi-
13. Andrea Fumagalli, Lo spazio come esternalitá in via di estinzione: terziarizzazione e lavoro cognitivo, available
HTTP:// seminaire.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=77
14. This is what Boltansky and Chiapello have called the new success and government of the mobiles over the immobiles.
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London, 2006.
192
grants in. It is frequently an adult population with levels of education

for which the society taking them in has paid nothing. This also ties in
with their life stories that are usually examples of determination and
initiative: of overcoming countless difficulties. Furthermore, these qual-
ities are not only expressed in displacement (which can always be inter-
preted in a relatively passive way) but in the creation of their own eco-
nomic circuits (the so-called ethnic economies) where business and
community are almost indistinguishable.
Of course, it is a population, which in the light of all the sources of sta-

tistics, is occupied in the economic sectors with the hardest working
conditions and the lowest salary levels. However, migrant mobility does
not stay in the employment and residence niches that the welcoming
societies want them to. Their desire and their production coincide with
wealth. That is to say, mobility tends to organise itself autonomously to
become free of the capitalist mechanisms of coercion.
Here the capitalist capture of migrant labour coincides with the impo-
sition of floodgates and internal frontiers to contain the tide that threat-
ens to upset the precarious equilibrium of the exploitation of the circu-
lation of people.
Once again, it would seem that in the positive externalities we can see
the possibility of a drastic change, of a reversal of the capitalist depre-
dation of this wealth. A drastic change that will happen through the
autonomous organisation of mobility and cooperation.
By way of conclusion: a model for the capture of wealth on

the territory
From all that has been said two small deductions can be made:
1. Effective forms of cooperation between subjects translate into posi-

tive externalities, which are potentially useful for business, institutions,
and financial flows. On numerous occasions, these externalities
take the form of goods and services (often with atypical forms of
property), but the majority mix with their own sociality implicit
in cooperation (with their own ways of life, language, and modes of
relation).
2. The positive externalities do not have an economic effect per se ; it is

necessary for it to be carried out from an ensemble of control and cap-
ture devices. We could argue that subsumption within the accumulation
mode is not guaranteed by the reproducibility of cooperation. That is
to say, cooperation is not necessarily a function of accumulation. The
integration of the cooperation basins as accumulation devices uses
resources and instruments that are more commonly found in the figure
of capture or even in brutal and arbitrary impositions, than in the clas-
sic forms of salarisation of work. Remember that the object of sub-
sumption is almost the whole city, its social and cooperative relations,
and that this is a complex process.
To a certain extent, a new model of exploitation (without excluding

others) could be drawn which takes its raw material from the depreda-
tion of positive externalities, but must also manage and control their
possible revolutions: the self organisation phenomena.
In the first place, basins of cooperation constitute the infrastructures of

the economic life of the metropolis, which is the initial framework,
always complex, where economic players can acquire competitive
advantages before their competitors, but is above all the framework
where a territory can be competitive against others. It is a totality of
interdependence between heterogeneous agents where the dynamics of
economic exploitation are externally imposed on the actual concrete
organisation of cooperation.
The exploitation of these positive externalities has a limit for the eco-
nomic agents. Without monopolistic mechanisms, or mechanisms that
impose rules of exclusive exploitation, that is, if it weren’t for the impo-
sition of conditions, in principle not inscribed in the cooperation basins,
we would be contemplating external economies as generous and unde-
termined as a mountain stream. That is to say, external economies are
the virtual raw material for the very concrete business economy: with-
out forms of fencing, of exclusive exploitation or transformation, actu-
al cooperation does not become a source of value and accumulation. In
other words, the exploitation of these externalities depends upon their
appropriability. In this way, the flow of cooperation must make cuts,
dams, production areas and products that can be appropriated, even
when this production cycle is impossible without its insertion in a more
complex framework of multiple interactions.
194
These forms of imposition of arbitrary fences in the channels of flow

of cooperation, which are always found in the sections of greater added
value, are contradictory and quite ambiguous. While it is necessary for
institutional powers to guarantee instruments of appropriability for
business, they also have to guarantee that the actual humus of cooper-
ation is not radically extinguished by these practices (always predatory),
at the same time as they limit (by giving social support) or repress (by
means of security measures) the effects of implosion of the social body
or of its autonomous organisation, which go against the instruments of
appropriability.
This operation is essentially carried out on the actual material of coop-

eration formed as a way of life. Power thus becomes bio power, which
has to guarantee the reproducibility and multiplication of educational
systems; the disposition of secure fields for business through legal guar-
antees of the appropriability of common resources: the control and
management of negative externalities; the distillation of indigestible
effects by the economic metabolism (methods of self organisation and
resistance of social sectors, etc.). Only in this way, by means of a polit-
ical intervention external to cooperation, the weak economic and social
equilibrium of the exploitation of the metropolitan externalities is
maintained.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
In the Mood for Work.
María Ruido and Jaron Rowan1
Can Representation Alter

the Valorization of Work?
‘Or come to find that loving is labor, Labor’s life and life’s forever’.
Biomusicology by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Defining a (kind of) Field of Production

At this point, it’s no longer necessary to insist that
cultural production is one of those spaces most
affected by the transformations of labor taking
place on a global level, processes such as the grow-
ing flexibilization of work, the precarization of
labor conditions, and the demands upon workers
that they assume their own risks and costs. We see,
in the same vein, that David Harvey’s system of
flexible accumulation (Harvey 1990), widely deba-
ted in academic spheres (for example, Narotzky,
1997), has met with little resistance when intro-
duced into the sphere of cultural production. We
1. María Ruido is an artist, researcher and lecturer at the University of Barcelona.

Jaron Rowan is a cultural producer, researcher and member of YP.
MARÍA RUIDO & JARON ROWAN 197
think that cultural production’s ‘bohemian tradition’ has been a feeble

buffer against these labor transformations which have been taking place at
a global scale since the late seventies, or that it could even have encouraged
them. Some of the problems we would like to reflect upon in this brief
essay have to do with how these transformations have affected cultural pro-
duction by modifying its practice, its economic models and how it is under-
stood. Throughout this text, we will try to talk about why a good part of
such production is not perceived (or is perceived distortedly) as work, and
also how the erosion of the traditional boundaries defining work has had a
negative effect on how value is attributed to cultural production. Finally, we
would like to speak about some examples of representations of this
not-quite-work in the media, and discuss if these images contribute, or not,
to the perception of cultural production as labor. It is an ambitious under-
taking for such little space, let’s see how far we get.
That jobs have mutated is a verifiable fact; this mutation has occurred in
almost all fields (Federici, 1999, Boltanski and Chiapello, 2006, Rodriguez,
2003). However, very little has been said about how these changes have
affected the sphere of cultural production, which must still struggle to
understand the heterodox grouping of practices that configure it2, (scant
delimitations in time and space, irregular remuneration or none at all, social
under-recognition, etc…). In these past years we have observed how, in
response to a past in which such forms of production tried to distance or
even dissociate themselves from the dominant system and the economic
game in general, collectives of cultural producers are beginning a series of
small scale revolts in an attempt to normalize certain rights that up until
now had only been claimed by salaried workers. Without a doubt, one of
the movements that has been the most capable of articulating these
demands with the most insistency has been that of workers in the perform-
ing arts in France, known as the ‘intermittents du spectacle’.3
On a less visible scale, we can see how certain processes of professionaliza-

tion taking shape within the sphere of cultural production have permitted
it, sometimes, to begin to consider itself as labor; but without a doubt these
2. In order to not get into a discussion about what is and what isn’t culture, or about who are the cultural producers, we
propose to understand as cultural producers all those people that work within one of the thirteen categories defined
by the organisation Creative London: ‘publicists, architects, art and antique dealers; crafts, design, fashion design, film
and video, interactive media, software, music, theater, the editorial world, television and radio,’ in ‘Creative London’s core
Business’ see: http://www.creativelondon.org.uk/server.php?show=nav.009004001
3. See Antonella Corsani’s contribution in this same volume.
198
advances have been, if anything, timid. Previously, one of us (Rowan,

2005) has described how, while artists were trying to leave behind notions
of genius, vocation, etc., the processes of dislocation, and of ‘putting out’
that affected high volume factories simultaneously forced traditional
salaried workers to assume forms of work similar to those which had char-
acterized artisans, (Blim, 1992). It would be precisely among cultural pro-
ducers’ ‘disorganized’ (Lash & Urry, 1987), precarious, flexible and barely
unionized forms of labor where capitalism would find a perfect nest from
which to grow. As Marina Vishmidt states in her text Precarious Straits, ‘cre-
ativity’ and ‘flexibility’, once deemed endemic to the artist as a constitutive
exception to the law of value [are] now valorised as universally desirable
attributes’(Vishmidt, 2005). So within Post-Fordism, the cultural producer
becomes the ideal model of the worker.
But if indeed it is true that, with increasing velocity, cultural workers’

attributes (extreme flexibility, the idea of the product as project, involve-
ment and responsibility in the entire production process, etc.) are socially
valued in recent decades, is it possible on the other hand that the value of
the work-process itself has diminished just as quickly? In other words, is the
socially positive perception enjoyed by these forms of cultural production
proportional to the remuneration that the majority of its producers
receive? We think not. We believe that if indeed the utilization of the con-
cept of the artisan (or in some cases the imposition of the ‘exceptionalities’
of the artist) has rescued or revalorized the figure of the independent,
autonomous producer, the valorization of the work-process itself (the
unpaid time invested, the naturalized risks, the working conditions that do
not improve) has not been recognized nor has it acquired proportionally
adequate pay.
Forms of not working
All societies legitimize some forms of work and not others

Standing, G. Beyond the New Paternalism (2002)
If, as we have said, the defining boundaries between what is and what isn’t
work have succumbed, pressed by the implementation of Post-Fordist
forms of production, something similar has occurred in the world of cul-
tural production in an exponential way –and this is one of the reasons why
it is so difficult to talk about labor practices within this terrain.
In her magnificent text ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital
Economy’ Tiziana Terranova (Terranova, 2004), demonstrates the cur-
rent situation’s complexity. She argues that the development of new tech-
nologies of computerized production has generated an enormous market
for what she calls ‘free labor’, that is, large cadres of workers willing to
offer their work for free to corporations that control such technologies. For
such a thing to be possible this cultural production activity mustn’t be con-
sidered work. Only that way can corporations like AOL take advantage of
the time of all of the people who –through using their chat rooms, mod-
erating their discussion groups, or participating in their games– generate
benefits for a company capable of capitalizing upon them. Accordingly,
Terranova defines ‘free labor’ as ‘the moment where this knowledgeable
consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are
pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited’
(2004). The author argues that these new forms of cultural production are
characterized by an expansion of ‘forms of labor we do not immediately
recognize as such: chat, real-life stories, mailing lists, amateur newsletters,
and so on’ (2004). Along the same lines, in his text Sim Capital, Nick Dyer-
Whiteford (2003) explains how a greater part of the videogames distrib-
uted by large companies have in fact been, over time, elaborated by kids
who have modified them, improved them, redesigned them by consuming
them. A good deal of the tools and software that we use are the fruit of
collaboration between ‘prosumers’ who have improved and developed
them through everyday use, making the barriers between consumption
and work increasingly imperceptible. Such lack of definition threatens to
invade any and all activities which might be considered cultural produc-
tion, pushing practices within this area further and further away from
what actually can be considered work. It’s not surprising that it is becom-
ing ever more difficult to understand, to adequately evaluate –and conse-
quently to remunerate and to recognize– all of this dedication. Cultural
producers’ activities are so subjugated by the system of flexibilization that
it becomes increasingly difficult to discern if one is chatting with friends
or networking, if one is reading or researching, if one is fucking or relax-
ing oneself to get back to work. With all this said, if we can’t even untan-
gle what is and isn’t work in our own lives, how can we hope to design
arguments that help us revalorize this whole process? And would it help
anyway?
200
Invisible Jobs
I am not suggesting that continued invisibility is the ‘proper’ political agenda,

but rather that the binary between the power of visibility and the impotency of
invisibility is falsifying.
Phelan, P. Unmarked, the Politics of Performance (1993)
In the situation we are sketching out, could cultural production’s lack of

representation as such have to do with it being so under-valorized?
We cannot forget, as we have argued elsewhere, that the system of repre-
sentation is a form of control associated with diverse manifestations of
power, and that lack of visibility can be used, on occasion, as strategy in a
given juncture (Phelan, 1993; Ruido, 2001).
And we can hardly ignore in moments such as the one we live in –one of a
crisis of representation– that it is almost a necessity to doubt the capacity of
representation to provide political agency. These days, when workers accuse
unions of being institutions of pacts and consensuses (we have in mind, for
example, the images of the conflictive first of May, 2003 when former Sintel
workers rebuked the CC.OO4 leader in Madrid), the demand for recogni-
tion of cultural workers’ value cannot rely, evidently, upon traditional chan-
nels of visibility. But we should remember that, as occurs in the economy of
desire, the lack of images translates into the lack of power (and accordingly,
value): Linda Williams already said this in her text ‘Fetishism and Hardcore’
when she associated the legitimization of pleasure with economic control,
making the ‘money shot’ tantamount to the ‘come shot’ (Williams, 1989).
As the artist Hito Steyerl explains in a recent text that re-updates Walter
Benjamin’s 1934 classic ‘The Author as Producer’, the image-building sys-
tem is closely linked to the productive and economic systems into which the
images are inserted (Steyerl, 2005). Following this logic, capitalism has pro-
gressively transformed its imaginary of work from the apparently simple
binary between productive (factory, office, school) and reproductive (home,
street, free time) spaces, into a complex representational logic like today’s,
where the nuances are extensive and our position within the cogs of the
productive system changes within a single workday.
4. CC.OO stands for Comisiones Obreras, one of Spain’s major national unions. Translator’s note.
In the new imaginary of production, some forms of work continue to be

difficult to recognize or to openly declare as part of the system. We could
say that there are forms of work that resist recognition by ‘lack’ (domestic
work, reproduction in a wide sense, sex work…) sometimes to the point of
social stigmatization and punitive invisibility, while others resist by ‘excess’
(cultural work, for example), as they lack limits and fixed competencies,
and are generally too mystified or even too strategically overvalued to be
considered ‘just’ work.
Without attempting to force a symmetry between these two categories, as

it is very clear that capacity to mobilize that symbolic capital has from one
or the other extreme is quite different, it seems evident that the movement
of the scene towards these ‘other forms of work’ could mean a reversion
to a social and economic redefinition necessary for both, understanding of
course that they should go through very distinct processes of redefinition.
If indeed domestic work and reproduction –in all of its aspects– have
appeared frequently in movies and in traditional media as a ‘women’s voca-
tion’, it is only in the past thirty or forty years that they have suffered a dena-
turalization that places them within the system of production and introduces
suspicion about their hierarchies. And more recently, they have also experien-
ced the profitable inertia of an informality which relies upon reproduction as
a model of extreme implication, emotional involvement, responsibility…
But without a doubt, among all the other kinds of production, it has been
the cultural that has experienced the most substantial surge in its represen-
tation, since, like we mentioned above, its supposed ‘attributes’ have been
signaled as models for the new forms of production. Thereby, its exception-
alities (Lazzarato, 2004) and its lacks, (lack of articulation, precariousness,
hyper-flexibility, the lack of competency limits, etc.) are transformed –with-
in the media– into emblems of a model of success that once again obscures
the process of production and the cost of the cultural product.
And we’re not talking about the melancholy and tortured artist, no. Now
our public image is associated with characters like Carrie Bradshaw, the
lead role in Sex and the City, a woman whose life takes place somewhere in
between fashionable clubs and trendy magazines, a woman who has made
work material out of her experiences and her relationship with her friends
by raiding her fascinating life to produce (or reproduce?) on her laptop a
newspaper column that is excellently paid (judging from her lifestyle.)
202
It seems clear that visibility doesn’t always translate into valorization (or at
least into a collective and effective valorization), and even less so if this vis-
ibility does not evidence a process but rather re-mystifies and revitalizes its
clichés, twisting the product into something the execution of which was
apparently fun and exciting, though perversely utilitarian in that its costs are
never explained, (it is not unlikely that one day Carrie’s friends will leave her
high and dry, sick of seeing their private lives ransacked on the page…).
We don’t find around us, in the movies or on television, representations

that embody with any sort of realism the daily activities of cultural work-
ers. Almost all of them are permanently young, they live in a precarious
way that they somehow feel is just temporary, and they have a complex
labour horizon that promises some different future. Though there are some
characters that are more nuanced than others: (remember, for example, Ed
Chigliak, the dubious apprentice filmmaker in Northern Exposure, a badly
paid and aloof multitasker/Guy Friday, a peripheral character that did his
thing to the scanty interest of most of the Cicely, Alaska community).
If in a traditional capitalist scheme cultural workers made demands by, as

Benjamin explained, positioning themselves within the relations of produc-
tion (for example, like Bertolt Brecht, indicating the representation pact),
the new system of production requires a permanent negotiation with con-
ditions of production that are in continuous transit, a constant turning to
the representational ‘offstage’, since when we specifically note this process,
we are acting vicariously and making way for a ‘new cultural object’.
If we agree that the system of image generation is directly related to the

system of production and to its power relations, it seems clear that cultur-
al workers are ‘invisibilized by overexposure’: an overexposure that has not
contributed to a valorization of their work, but rather to a devaluation and
an inverted profit from of their precarious conditions which they have not
only not questioned, but extended (except, maybe, in very concrete cases
and moments, more individual than collective, such as those of the ‘Young
British Artists’).
Let us return to the initial question in this text: can representation alter the
valorization of cultural work? The answer seems to be no. As we have been
highlighting throughout this essay, it is only possible to change the images
if we change the general conditions of production itself. Maybe it is the
moment to ask ourselves if it is really possible to represent each and every
step and process that occurs throughout the production of a cultural

object. We think to do so would end up being quite complicated, as it
would mean shedding light on a layout of relations that are complex to the
extreme (tensions, negotiations, repressions, self-censorings, dislocations,
etc.) in addition to requiring the re-definition and de-mystification of the
competencies, times and places of cultural workers. But at the same time,
we think that we should be capable of identifying and making visible all the
‘positive externalities’ that cultural production generates, which are diffuse
indicators of the real contribution of culture to the bulk of society, and that
they should contribute to the living conditions of its producers. Through
this approach, in addition to social recognition, economic valorization can
be addressed, which is an aspect that we believe to still be inactive. Only by
understanding the value of these ‘positive externalities’5 can we leave
behind old debates about how to remunerate and consider cultural prac-
tices, which not only hamper the growth of this area, but make it more dif-
ficult to understand its real working processes.
Bibliography
Benjamin, W. (1984, first ed. 1934). ‘The Author as Producer’, in Wallis, B.

(ed.), 1984. Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation. New York: New
Museum of Contemporary Art.
Blim, M. (1992). ‘Small Scale Industrialization in a Rapidly Changing
World Market’, in Blim, M. and F. Rothstein, 1992. Anthropology and the
Global Factory: Studies of the New Industrialization in the Late 20th Century. New
York: Bergin and Garvey.
Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2006). The New Spirit of Capitalism.
London: Verso.
Corsani, A. (2005). ‘Intermitencia: Reapropiación de la movilidad, pro-
ducción de lo común’ in http://www.sindominio.net/contrapoder/arti-
cle.php3?id_article=57
Dyer-Whiteford, N. (2003). ‘Sim Capital: General Intellect, World Market,
Species Being and the Video Game’ in http://www.electronicbookreview.
com/thread/technocapitalism/marxinalia
5. A term introduced by the economist Alfred Marshall at the beginning of the twentieth century that could be defined
as the collateral benefits (not necessarily monetary) generated by a productive activity that go towards a third party
204
Federici, S. (1999). ‘Reproduction and the Feminist Struggle in the New

International Division of Labor’, in 1999 in Dalla Costa, M.R. and Dalla
Costa, G. (eds.). 1999 Women, Development and the Labor of Reproduction,
Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press.
Harvey, D. (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers.
Lash S., & Urry, J. (1987). The End of Organized Capitalism. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Lazzarato, M. (2004). ‘Tradición Cultural Europea y Nuevas Formas de
Producción y Transmisión de Saber¨, in VV.AA., 2004. Capitalismo
Cognitivo. Propiedad intelectual y creación colectiva. Madrid: Traficantes de
Sueños.
Narotzky, S. (1997). New Directions in Economic Anthropology. London,
Chicago: Pluto Press.
Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge.
Rodriguez, E. (2003). El Gobierno Imposible. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
Rowan, J. (2005). ‘Value, Work, and Flexibility: Identifying Cultural
Producers.’ (unpublished essay)
Ruido, M. (2001). ‘Els limits de la visibilidat’. Barcelona Art Report, No.
3. Barcelona.
Standing, G. (2002). Beyond the New Paternalism. London: Verso.
Stereyl, H. (2005). ‘La articulación de la protesta¨. Brumaria, No. 5.
Madrid.
Terranova, T. (2004). Network Culture: Politics in the Information Age. London:
Pluto Press.
Vishmidt, M. (2005). ‘Precarious Straits’. Mute II- The Precarious Reader,
London, 2005.
Williams, L. (1989). ‘Fetishism and Hardcore: Marx, Freud and the Money
Shot.’ in Gubar,S., and Hoff, J., (eds.) 1989. For Adult Users Only: The
Dilemma of Violent Pornography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
Art and Economy:
Enzo Rullani1
Value Creation in
Cognitive Capitalism
1. Postfordism: Seeking Differences and

Meanings
Fordism has filled the world –as well as our life
experiences– with mass goods, serial goods, banal,
and all dramatically the same. We welcomed them
for being cheap, very cheap: up to two, even three
times less than the respective handicraft products
obtained with pre-industrial techniques. General
mechanization has allowed fordist society –estab-
lished between the Twenties and the Seventies– to
continuously increase labour productivity and
GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita in all
developed countries. Despite the aesthetic and
semantic discredit from which mass-production
now suffers, its propagation in all interstices of
social experience continues, thanks to the amplifi-
cation caused by mass media, organized according
to the serialising logic of big, very big, numbers
(the advertisement audience).
1. Enzo Rullani is an economist and professor at the Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice.
ENZO RULLANI 207
Machine production may not be aesthetically or semantically appreciated,

attached as it is to the functionalities of performance and cost, resulting in
a poverty of other meanings: it does not relate to the identity of the sub-
jects involved (workers, consumers), does not differentiate its function and
meaning according to the context of use, does not distinguish between one
person and another according to different sensibilities, limiting itself to
providing an ‘average’ performance made for an ‘average’ audience. But
its (economic) strength lies exactly in being like this: lacking in differences
that distinguish one piece from another, or one production or consumption
process from another.
For a long time Fordism has been supported in practice and, on the other
hand, strongly criticized on ideological grounds with regard to the subjec-
tive and aesthetic characteristics of mass-produced products and the repet-
itive processes associated with them.
From the Seventies onwards Postfordism arrived2, due not to the critics of pre-
vious paradigms but to other and (more) fundamental reasons. Fordism has
lost its appeal on its own ground: that of performance and cost. Performances
have been decreasing while there have been increases in the complexity of the
economic environment and of the needs to be satisfied. Costs have grown,
sometimes considerably, due to the rigidity that prevents rapid intervention to
adapt choices and processes to given or awaited changes.3
In Postfordism, the offer must become flexible, or at least more flexible

than before. In fact, this is the condition of adaptation, with limited costs
and in a short time, to a demand which is becoming increasingly varied,
variable, and indeterminate, bound as it is to the behaviour of the subjects
of production (workers, suppliers, distributors, etc.) and of consumption
(consumers). These tend to escape the centralized control of plans and pro-
grammes on which mass production used to be based.
The variables to be kept under control have become too many, varied and
contradictory, whereas the subjects who constitute the market are by now
so heterogeneous and mutable that they favour, in all their choices, contin-
gent and autonomous criteria, free from the preventative control of a supe-
rior and farsighted power.
2. Rullani E., Romano L., eds. (1998), Il postfordismo. Idee per il capitalismo prossimo venturo, Etaslibri, Milano.
3. Di Bernardo B., Rullani E. (1990), Il management e le macchine. Teoria evolutiva dell’impresa, Il Mulino, Bologna.
208
Once the offer no longer follows a predetermined, self-referential model

and becomes potentially able to provide a variety of things, changing them
with time according to the wishes and notions of the demand, it turns out
that:4
1. The demand does not know what it really wants, therefore does not
want to pay for the cost of the variety, variability and flexibility
that the offer provides;
2. The producer does not know how to interpret the needs, wishes and poten-
tials of the demand which remain latent, because with time the
Fordism proposals became worn-out, banal, and because commu-
nication channels with the demand became unilateral and unreli-
able.
Once the products/services provided stop being serialized, and begin a

transition towards small-scale series, niches, several forms of personaliza-
tion and interactivity, one discovers that there is a lack of languages and mean-
ings, which would be necessary to give value to the small numbers and turn
uniqueness into a marketable resource.5
Through this transition, modern production rediscovers the fascination of

uniqueness and difference –between people, contexts and different stories-
something that mass production had tried to suppress, reducing them to
indistinguishable and ‘average’ standards.
All factors related to uniqueness and differentiation come back into the
picture: handicraft, services, people, dialogue networks, cultures, and world
visions.
Art, generating aesthetic meanings that can be associated to these factors

and made socially recognizable, becomes a useful intellectual resource to con-
struct the uniqueness of the product/service provided (offered) to a demand that
requests personalized attention, respect of personal identities and acknowl-
edgment of the territorial (local, geographical) contexts.6
4. Rullani E. (2006), La nuova economia dell’immateriale’, Economia dei servizi. Mercati, Istituzioni, Management, n. 1, settembre-
dicembre, pp. 41-60
5. Bonaccorsi A., Granelli A. (2005), L’intelligenza s’industria. Creatività e innovazione per un nuovo modello di sviluppo, Il Mulino,
Bologna
6. Cianciullo A., Realacci E. (2005), Soft Economy, Rcs Libri, Milano
ENZO RULLANI 209
Therefore art is no longer something different from industrial production

but becomes a function of the cognitive chain that produces furniture, electrical
appliances, motorcycles, perfumes, etc: a function that defines and diffuses
recognizable aesthetic languages through design, fashion, experimentation
of new lifestyles and cultural innovation.7
Is it still art that we find in the products of daily life? Is it still art once it
renounces the uniqueness of its brand, in order to enter into the reproduc-
tive circuit of postfordist goods and services (which hold meanings that
express difference but not uniqueness)?
Perhaps the evolution from fordism to postfordism does not involve only a
recuperation of art, from the ghetto where it fell during the age of serial
and mass production, but also a transformation of its notion and its function.
The traditional demarcation between art and industry is changing. And

probably the productive function that the aesthetic models and meanings
can have today does not only mean that art is worth more and that its eco-
nomic applications grow, but also that art becomes, at least in part, another
thing. What thing?
We begin to see starting from a fundamental difference: the (modern)

opposition between industrial serialization and artistic uniqueness.
2. Behind our backs: the path of modernization from uniqueness

to serialization.
Modernity is the age in which, beginning with the industrial revolution, the
economy systematically begins to use, in the production of economic value
(profit), a particular type of knowledge: reproducible knowledge.
Knowledge of science, technology and machines is reproducible. This
knowledge teaches us how to transform an abstract concept (input) into an
equally abstract useful product (output), not only activating productive
processes that are alien to the uniqueness of the people and of the contexts
involved but also rendering the copy indistinguishable from the original.
7. The chain’s internal and external organization follows a logic of meaning rather than a logic of eficiency. For more
on this point see: Strati A. (1999), Organization and Aesthetics, Sage, London; e Rullani E. (2004), Economia della conoscenza.
Creatività e valore nel capitalismo delle reti, Carocci, Roma
210
Once the prototype is made, using abstract laws of causation, thousands of

products equal to the first can be made. Every time a new product is made,
using previous knowledge, the value grows (because new uses and new
functions are added) while the costs grow much less because the previous
knowledge is used, with some small adaptations. In other words, the serial
production, of many equal objects (and correspondents to an abstract
model) has the advantage of the value multiplier (n): increasing the num-
ber of reuses and imagining for each one a unitary value (v), the resulting
total value becomes V = nv.
A value that becomes very high when n increases.8
The industrial production of the first modernity therefore puts into play the
serial production and its multiplicative power. In this way it overshadows
the previous handicraft production, that instead worked on the unique piece,
which was different in each case and personalized according to the client’s
needs. As much as the artisan product may have a v superior to the stan-
dard, typical of the industry, it is easy to understand that the differential of
v can hardly compensate for the disadvantage that the handicraft produc-
er has on the grounds of n, that is of the economies of large-scale production
obtainable with the replication n times of the same model of technical
solution, machine and product.
In the pre-modern world, when production was still attached to the arti-
san paradigm, there were no particular barriers that separated the world
of production of useful things from that of artistic and aesthetic invention
in general. In the (unique) products of handicraft production there could
simply be a more or less committed aesthetic exploration, more or less
original and convincing. The production of the élite was rich, evidently, in
aesthetic meanings, low cost production, for daily use, diminished instead
the burden of the aesthetic search and the differentiation from the stan-
dard. Not for nothing the artists of the age had ‘work-shops’ and were
substantially craftsmen of quality, more original and good than others, but
pertaining to the same world: that of the artisan profession, called, pre-
cisely, ‘art’.
The artistic-artisan labours were exercised in one of the many masters

guilds, that is in the ‘art’ of the weavers, or of the tailors, of the decorators,
8. Rullani E. (2004), La fabbrica dell’immateriale. Produrre valore con la conoscenza, Carocci, Roma
ENZO RULLANI 211
of the painters, of the architects, of the sculptors, of the blacksmiths etc.

each with their own places, rules, accesses and barriers, and their own
management and representation committees. Art was, in other words, a
way to produce. Because production corresponded to the ways in which art
worked.
The art-work is born, in fact, similar to craftwork, as a unique work:

unique because it was bound to the author (that particular author), to the
context in which it is produced and it is read (in any other context its mean-
ing changes), to the quality of the original (which is different to the copy).
When modernity arrives, with machine production, things change radical-

ly: the production of things for daily use (banal) is industrialized, being del-
egated to abstract technologies, reproducible, that is delegated to
machines. The result is that, for the majority of goods, the characteristic of
the uniqueness is lost. Processes and products become serialized, that is
part of a sequence of acts and objects in which each unity is equal to its
precedent and the following ones. In such a context art, understood as an
activity which cultivates the uniqueness of the processes and that assumes
the costs, remains an exception. A practice separated from social labour in
general, which as such is confined to an aesthetic limbo. Aesthetics becomes,
in this way, a differentiating characteristic that defines art in negative
terms: as something which does not reflect the norm of serialisation, of
technique, of low-cost production.
Therefore art is seen as something which has to do with luxury (the high
fashion dressmaking, the famous singer’s artistic performance, the great chef
who transforms gastronomy into an artwork) or that is, on the contrary,
immersed in ‘poor’ everyday life that is not worth organizing in a modern
form (the carpenter, the shoe repairer, the seller in the corner shop).
At the two extremes, above and below, art characterises the productive
processes that, for various reasons, escape from industrial modernization,
becoming an exception: the place where extravagant consumption grows,
it is not necessary (for the rich), or where pre-modern tradition is preserved
(for the poor).
The industrial product belongs to another world: that of serialisation. A

world where, with knowledge being reproducible, the original does not dif-
fer from the copy, and where, therefore, the value does not depend as much
212
on the quality of the (individual) piece, as on the number of the times it is

replicated. With each replication the values extracted by the knowledge
increase, while the costs stay the same or grow very little.
Instead, art remains anchored to its irreparable uniqueness, each expression

being a unique work to be enjoyed without altering the distinctive character-
istics of each (specific) musical execution, of each (specific) painting, of each
(specific) artistic ballet, of each service provision ‘poor’ enough to discourage
the use of machines. In this way, the cost of the performance associated with
the artistic uniqueness grows exponentially with respect to the ‘useful’ social
products, obtained by modern machines. In the relationship between serial
production and unique production a ‘costs illness’ is recognized, diagnosed
at the time by Baumol for services, and called for this reason Baumol Disease.
The producers of unique goods and services cease, with the passing of the
time, to be handicraft enterprises able to compete, in their field, with indus-
trial production. Not being able to sustain themselves with sales, they tend
to withdraw into the private sphere (the isolated and ‘inspired’ artist, who,
in absence of a market, consumes more than produces) or into the public
and semi-public sphere of grants and sponsorships.
Part of artistic production recuperates a market through advertising and

mass media: but it is, by necessity, an art form squeezed by the big –very
big– numbers of the audience which are required to balance the budgets.
In such a context, established during the last century, art has changed skin
and meaning, becoming an ‘ephemeral’ complement to what was ‘hard
and pure’ in the mode of mass production. And it is this complementation
between opposites which today begins once more to be questioned.
3. The way we were: mechanic modernity
Industrial modernity was born in the factory: its emblem was the machine,
and with it the engineer, who designs the project, manages it, and connects
it to the rest of the world. The machine has enabled our way of producing
to make a substantial productivity jump, because of two different, but con-
vergent, reasons:
-mechanical technology uses artificial energy (derived from natural

resources such as petroleum or coal) to realize the necessary mate-
ENZO RULLANI 213
rial transformations in order to obtain useful products from raw

materials, which were previously useless or less useful than the final
product. Artificial energy costs much less than the biological ener-
gy obtained by human muscles; but above all, it is available in
greater quantities than those obtainable from the work of men and
animals, (in pre-industrial agriculture, in traditional handicrafts or
in manually managed transport).
-the machine uses a particular form of knowledge (codified, repro-

ducible knowledge), which allows re-use of the same knowledge
base many times, in this way multiplying the useful value. The
labour employed to design a machine allows the production not
only of one item, but a hundred, a thousand models of the same
machine. And with that machine, there will be produced, serially,
not one, but a hundred, a thousand standard units of the same
article.
The sum of these two characteristics (artificial energy and reproducible

knowledge) has enabled mechanical modernization to knock down production
costs and prime a secular cycle of productivity and production growth, which has
been happening for the last two and a half centuries (from the industrial re-
volution to today). In this period the factory –the concentration of machine
and the place of reproducibility– has been the pulsating heart of economic
development, the tangible sign, even if burdensome, of modernization. But
today –and for some time– the propulsive strength of the machine has
been decreasing, until entering a state of exhaustion. There are many signs
of this global change of scenario.
4. The new enterprise, which bridles complexity
The first sign is the net increase in complexity (variety, variability and inde-
terminability) of the economic and social world in which we live.
Mechanical modernity started with a very low level of variety, variability
and indeterminability: in order to have cheap products people would accept
standard products, in a society far poorer than ours and in a state of inno-
vation far slower than the current one, accepting life in a predictable and
controllable environment that no longer exists. Economic development has
primed a real explosion of complexity that has vastly exceeded the progress
of the tools aimed to control it. Every day thousands of new varieties of
214
products, processes, works, meanings and desires, cover the economic circuit
of the global economy. Every day one has to deal with variants which did
not exist the day before and that perhaps will no longer be important a day
later. The world in which we live has become, therefore, completely unpre-
dictable: from the dollar’s performance to the moods of fashion, no one real-
ly knows what will happen in fifteen days or a month. It is no longer possi-
ble to plan with significant anticipation ours or anyone else’s behaviour; it is
a question of responding quickly to change, interpreting its weak signals and
imagining creative answers, with which to convince our interlocutors.
The growth of complexity contrasts, therefore, with the logic of the

machine and the factory, conceptual and physical construction bound to a
world of low complexity, the only one in which knowledge can be codified
and reproduced successfully on a large scale. As ‘free complexity’ grows out
of control, men become more important than machines. In fact only peo-
ple are able to govern uncertain and indeterminate situations, through
imagination, experimentation, and communication. Only people, in doing
this, can put into play tacit knowledge and contextual requirements that
machines do not understand and are not able to use.9
5. Workers, entrepreneurs and consumers off the rail
In today’s business practice, in effect, it gets harder and harder to control (in
the sense of reducing to pre-constituted and ex ante programmed standards)
the behaviour of workers, entrepreneurs, consumers and of the social sys-
tems that make them interact, with often surprising results. Labour, banal-
ized by the logic of mechanical serialization, does not repay nor tolerate the
consequent loss of sense, creating significant problems of motivation, gov-
ernability, and loyalties in the relationship between the enterprise and its
own employees. The entrepreneurs themselves follow models of behaviour
little inline with the abstract prescriptions of optimizing rationality, using
business as a place to manifest their passions, and their ambitions for lead-
ership, their instinct to fight, and also their senility.
The consumers, who are no longer prisoners of their physiological needs

of survival, to which they were bound in the past because of poverty, today
9. Rullani E. (2002), ‘The Industrial Cluster as a Complex Adaptive System’, in Quadrio Curzio A., Fortis M. (Eds.),
Complexity and Industrial Clusters. Dynamics and Models in Theory and Practice, Physica-Verlag, Heidelberg, pag.. 35-64
ENZO RULLANI 215
follow the fluctuating –and unpredictable– wave of desires, fashions, and

moods conveyed by the mass media. This wave pushes businesses to con-
tinuously pursue the new, by the creation of a great variety of meanings,
goals, and identities. From here –from this new logical behaviour of the
economic actors– comes the outbreak of services and immaterial functions
of the production chain. Service means, in fact, to adhere to the needs
–personalized, unpredictable, unique– of the client. Immaterial involves
symbols, languages, capacity for relating and sharing that can hold together
the production chain, making it creatively interact from the top (the inves-
tigation) to the bottom (the consumption) of the process.
Art, understood as an aesthetic canon, returns, therefore, to actuality. It

offers, in fact, a repertoire of symbols, of languages, of a web of relation-
ships and of shared methods that allow the exercise of the creative profes-
sions; like those of the designer, the planner, the advertiser, the scriptwriter,
the cultural mediator, the tastes interpreter, the contexts and the fashion
designer. But the entrepreneurialship of the craftsman, of the small busi-
nessman, of the service provider, today demands to be exercised with pas-
sion, like we do when the sense of our own actions exceeds the merely
instrumental objectives (the profit) to become craft, profession, art.10
6. The value of the immaterial and of the service
Today, in the various production chains, the material (energetic) transfor-

mation generates only a small fraction of the value that the final customer
obtains (and pays for) from the productive system. In the clothing industry,
the manufacturer will be perhaps responsible for a fifth –or even less– of
the value paid by someone who buys a dress or a swimsuit. In the case of
glasses, this fraction reduces to a tenth. And we could continue with min-
eral water, hair-dyes, drugs, sports equipment, etc.
To what do all the other costs that the customer pays correspond, in addi-
tion to the costs of the material transformation? Substantially, apart from
some personal revenue, the customer pays for the value of the service
(personalization, guarantee, spare parts, access facilities, logistics, etc.) and
10. Bettiol M., Micelli S. (2005) (Eds.), Design e creatività nel made in Italy. Proposte per i distretti industriali, Bruno Mondadori,
Milano; Rullani E. et al. (2006), Innovare che passione. Quaranta modi di essere creativi nel business dei servizi, Angeli, Milano
(con Paiola M., Sebastiani R., Cantù C., Montanini F.)
216
the value of meaning (the design, publicity, fashion, brand, creativity,

etc...).11
But the same numbers are read also in the employment statistics. In the
United States, manufacturing has been diminishing for a long time, to
below 20% of total employment. In Italy (as in Germany and Japan), the
quota of manufacturing is still higher, but even in our country [Italy] there
is a diminishing historical trend which cannot be avoided, that constantly
reduces the importance of manufacturing in comparison to that of service
provision, above all, that of business services which contribute to the
immaterial part of the production chain.
We are noticing, in the end, that the factory –from which the industrial rev-
olution started– is no longer the centre of the modern world, but it has
been reduced to being only one stage of the production chain, a stage that
often turns out to be less determining than other stages and activities.
Indeed, the banal manufacture (that in which knowledge is totally codified
or incorporated into machines or transferable devices) is rapidly displacing
to countries with low-cost labour. While in developed countries such as
Germany, United States, Italy, and Spain there only remains that fraction
of manufacturing that we can call ‘intelligent industry’, in the sense that it
makes wide use of contextual knowledge tied to competences and systems
that are not easily incorporated into machines, and that for this reason can-
not be exported in the short term to where labour is cheap.
Most innovative businesses have interiorized for a long time, in their strate-
gic logic and in their inner organization, the sense of this global transfor-
mation of modernity which today becomes an imperative for all: we are
going in nearly all sectors from the big integrated factory, where intelligence
and power are concentrated at the top of solitary and self-referential organ-
izations, to the economy of a chain that, instead, is comprised of many
enterprises, equipped with autonomous intelligence and decision making
ability. In the chain, the production is distributed between many factories
specialized in various tasks and is enriched by the ‘immaterial’ activities of
investigation, conception, connection, communication and service.
11. Schmitt B. H., Experiential Marketing. How to get customers to sense, feel, think, act, relate to your comparny and brands, The Free
Press, New York; Schmitt B. H., Simonson A. (1997), Marketing Aesthetics. The Strategic Management of Brands, Identity, and
Image, The Free Press, New York
ENZO RULLANI 217
7. The new - postfordist - factory
Nothing gives us an idea of the time gone by since the golden age of the
first modernization more than this movement, from the big factory to the
chain of distributed production.
The fordist factory was the immovable, and reassuring, centre of gravity of
an enterprise constructed around the necessities of machines and of the pro-
ductive program: all of this had to happen within the circuit of the owner,
who guaranteed the control of the process, by the logic of the vertical inte-
gration of all production chains. The postfordist factory, instead, is a network
of labours that are distributed along the chain: some are assigned as internal
business units, that nevertheless work as independent units; others are out-
sourced, to suppliers, distributors, and external service providers. Often the
head-enterprise retains for itself, beside some plant-laboratory where it culti-
vates its own technological excellence, the function of connecting the network of
services and works that are entrusted to external specialists. The enterprise
becomes in this way a network of services, which finds its core in the control
of the final market’s interaction with consumers and retailers, in brands, in
advertising and publicity, in the conception of products and processes, in
logistics, in the management of procurement, in the control of information
(ERP), in quality control, and in management of customer service.12
Its competitive advantage depends, in this condition, not so much on what

it does directly, but on what it makes others do: the management of the inter-
active relationship with others (operators of the chain, final consumers)
that becomes the source of distinctive competence.
8. Economy of chain, economy of service
From a survey that Unioncamere and Mediobanca13 made on medium sized

Italian enterprises, for example, it turns out that in this ‘excellent’ segment of
our production system the head-enterprises acquire from outside 81% of
what they invoice. Note, not the 30 or 50%: but over 80%. And every year
12. Micelli S. (2000). Imprese, reti, comunità, Etas, Milano

13. Unioncamere: Italian union of commerce, industry, handcraft and agriculture chambers. Mediobanca: financial
credit bank and centre of analysis and investigation, specialized in economic and financial studies. [Trans. note]
218
that passes this percentage grows by one percentage point. Therefore only
19% of the value sold to the customer is self-produced within the ownership
circuit of the enterprise, directly controlled. The rest –raw materials, energy,
components, labour, services– is outsourced, to partially or totally independ-
ent suppliers. The business profit depends significantly on the chain manage-
ment of this 81% of activities, which are carried out outside of the direct
control of the company. This is the material base from which the postfordist
model of the enterprise-network emerges, one of an enterprise that becomes a
network of services distributed between the many operators in the chain.
To become a network of services means, for the enterprise, not so much to free
itself from manufacturing (something that can happen, but that is not crucial
in itself). But –positively– means something more difficult and demanding: it
is necessary that the enterprise changes its own identity and sensibility, until
feeling part of a chain that is not totally under its own control, but with which
it is necessary, however, to share standards, solutions, projects, and risks.
To make a network means, in fact, to depend on others, but not to accept this
dependency passively, but to try to convert the dependency into sharing, rendering
it therefore less dangerous from the point of view of unpredictability, but
from the point of view of the management it is also more complex and
slippery. The entrepreneur who has succeeded, in this case, is not the one
who tames the technology, incorporating it into machinery or more effi-
cient lines of production than others, but he who organizes with patience
and determination his own system of relation and interaction with others,
from which he accepts the dependency betting on his ability to convert it
into a type of sharing. The bet is not entrusted to the situation or the good
disposition of others, but to specific abilities of vision, communication and
initiative, at the moment in which the enterprise is introduced to others as
a conscious part of a chain that wants to grow and to develop as a whole.
There is a need for an intelligent and credible mediation between the indi-
vidual business interests and the interests of the other partners who must
share a plan, an investment, and a risk.
9. From dependency to sharing: an uphill road
As is easily understood, it is a case of a complex mediation, elusive and

always varying from case to case. Something that cannot be pre-planned,
ENZO RULLANI 219
as the machine designer would do, but can only be conceived with creative
imagination, experimentally testing new –and original– forms of commu-
nicative action. In doing this the point of view of others must be consid-
ered, and adopted, at least partially, in order to construct a habitable world
for those who meet in the chain and can neither unite nor separate them-
selves completely.
It is often said, rhetorically, that men are an economic resource, and, in this
rhetoric, the first to popularise this idea have been the engineers, who have
always imagined themselves to be able, in the end, to reduce men to
machines and the social system to a factory. Today, complicit with the
incoercible complexity we have to deal with, this rhetorical affirmation
becomes also a credible representation of reality. The men can indeed
become the primary source of productivity and of value in companies,
because they are the only ones to possess the intelligence necessary to bri-
dle the complexity, that paralyzes machines and factories, and that margi-
nalises the machine-man and the factory-society inherited from the past.
On the other hand modernity can indeed move its centre of gravity from
machine to man, reproducible knowledge to communicable knowledge,
only if the network-companies manage to mobilise free men by providing
spaces for invention and experimentation14. The latent resources of cre-
ativity and cooperation, that can emerge in these areas, considered up to
now to be off limits, constitute for sure a large chance for the economy, but
also a great risk for authority and business continuity. A risk that not all
intend to run, but that must be assumed in order to draw from the network
all the value that this can offer.15
10. How value is generated in cognitive capitalism
In the first place it must be asked: what indeed has value, in an age in
which income –for the greater part of the population of the developed
countries– has exceeded the threshold of necessity? Once necessities, dictat-
ed by biological need and those suggested by the cultural tradition, are satisfied
why and for what is it worth continuing to make an effort?
14. Florida R., (2002), The rise of the creative class, Basic Books, New York; Florida R. (2005), The Flight of the Creative
Class. The New Global Competition for Talent, HarperCollins, New York
15. Sicca L. (2000), Organizzare l’arte, Etas Libri, Milano
220
The answer that is emerging in these years is: that what has more value for
us, beyond the threshold of necessity, is the construction of a shared symbol-
ic world in which it is possible to define our identity, rendering it recognizable
and reliable to others.
Beyond the threshold of necessity, therefore, there is not the Marxian free-
dom ‘to go hunting and fishing’, without restrictions or any planned rigor:
there is, instead, the desire to explore, to colonize and to render habitable
the immense space of possibilities that can be discovered beyond the horizon
of needs and tradition. The freedom from the necessary gets transformed
therefore into the stimulus to construct an artificial world, defined symboli-
cally, in which the plan is not given, but must be imagined and set up.
To plan a world of possibilities, to construct desires, the dialogues and the

rules of its potential inhabitants become the motivation that give values to the
labour and that set again human action in service of a cause, of a desire
which –in other to be realized– demands discipline, coordination and ratio-
nality. The freedom conquered from necessity does not translate into an
absence of ties and simple leisure or entertainment realized in the given con-
text of desires, social relationships and pre-existing identities. Rather, it is free-
dom to explore, planning itineraries and tracing maps, which nobody forces
on us but to which we are willing to dedicate time, money and attention.
Once the ship has sailed, and the exploration has begun, the context stops
being given and labour becomes important in order to construct the new
context. It will be a matter of working with creative imagination, artistic
expression, dialogic communication, practical care, and identitary consid-
eration. But it will still be a job: a disciplined exercise of ones own intelligence
and time in service of a objective that society self-produces and continu-
ously modifies, but that individuals somehow receive as already defined,
only partially modifiable by the individual.
It is in this work of exploration, of the new and symbolic construction of

the world, that knowledge becomes a productive force of contemporary cap-
italism. Indeed, the primary productive force of contemporary capitalism.
Exploration would not be possible without the cognitive processes that con-
ceive it, live it, codify it and make it possible for others to access.
Knowledge is the lever that we employ in order to trace exploratory itiner-
aries, to interpret events, to trace maps, to communicate these and to give
value to all of this, transforming the promises and the products of the
ENZO RULLANI 221
exploratory process into goods that can be appreciated and exchanged –in
and outside the market– by a plurality of persons.
11. The production of meanings is an aesthetic production
Knowledge generates value giving shared, and social, shape to what is possible and
desirable. The aesthetic language is one of the most appropriate means to cre-
ate shared shapes and propagate recognizable meanings. Art is no longer
aimed at producing a single piece, but to the definition and dissemination
of the aesthetic language that allows producing the new, to make it recog-
nizable and to give it a meaning.16 The consumer is prepared to pay five or
ten times the value of the material object produced by the factory for a
fashionable dress because it gives shape to the life-style that he intends to
communicate to others, making this meaning shared within its social group
of reference. This is also true in the case of the exclusive concert, the
unique tourist experience, the exceptional sports enterprise, the finally
reached wellbeing of body and spirit. This is true for all other activities in
which immaterial values come into play, which exceed those of the factory
works in a strict sense.
Today, artistic and creative work is employed especially to produce the

knowledge that can be useful for the exploration of what is possible and
desirable, giving meaning and value to the efforts and the risks assumed in
the construction of a world not predefined. Next to the labour that codi-
fies and serializes (and demands elements of creativity) there is an impor-
tant part of labour that instead generates and disseminates meanings in the
form of shared aesthetic models, which at the same time are fed by the pro-
ducers and the consumers, in a repetitive series of throws. The effects of
this labour transformation and the value of labour in the exploratory
process of what is new and possible are many and of great importance.
Two above all:
a. The rapport between labour and consumption changes;

b. The distribution of power in the social system changes.
16. Cometti J.-P., Morizot J., Pouivet R. (2000), Questions d’Esthétique, Presses Universitares de France, Paris
222
12. Cognitive Capitalism: New Meanings of Labour, Consumption

and Power
Labour and consumption are no longer two separate activities as before.

On the one hand, labour –once a cognitive work– is not just the instru-
ment put in service of other people’s interests (and for this reason
exchanged for money), but itself becomes consumption, as it generates, at least
potentially, intrinsic gains that exceed those exchanged with the employer or
the client. This happens in all those cases, by now prevailing, in which the
worker does not limit himself to produce material transformations, but
–through cognitive work– experiences the world and therefore changes his own
identity, giving value to this experience. The football player who plays both
for entertainment and professional reasons, the musician or the painter,
who hopes to earn enough from being able to dedicate entirely to his art,
the amateur writer who aspires to become a professional, the pilot who is
passionate about flying, are all cases of reflexive labour in our social
organization.
On the other hand, the consumption of knowledge and experiences does

not have a dissipate character (the destruction of the consumed objects and
of their usefulness) but becomes, partially, a work of symbolic construction of
the world and of ones identity in this17. A job to do seriously, learning the
technique that serves the objective, investing ones own time, money and
attention in the predisposition of a context adapted to the experiences to
make. To be touched by the vision of an art work, to make ‘intelligent’
tourism, to practice sport, to follow a television serial, to be ‘fashionable’,
to be fond of a life style, to follow a diet or to respect a fitness regime, one
must be equipped, read, practice, be convincing, and dedicate energies to
these models of life. In other words, (cognitive) labour contains within itself
aspects of consumption that generate value for those who work, besides
that for others. (Cognitive) consumption becomes, in some ways a job, with
its necessities and its investments.
Workers and consumers develop these new attitudes in a social system that,
as we said, changes the distribution of power. In cognitive capitalism, individ-
uals are not easily reduced to the role of passive executors of technical
necessity and ‘economic laws’ (calculation, market) that represent it. Their
17. Pine B.J.II, Gilmore J.H. (1999), The Experience Economy. Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage, Harvard Business
School Press, Boston; Addis M. (2005), L’esperienza di consumo. Analisi e prospettive di marketing, Pearson, Milano
ENZO RULLANI 223
cognitive function implies a kind of active intelligence and, therefore,

autonomy of judgment, without which they are not in a position to pro-
duce useful knowledge (true or anyhow credible, reliable). In this sense, the
subjects that are not assigned to mere executive tasks acquire a sphere of
freedom –which can be bigger or smaller, and of which they are not always
entirely self-conscious– within the work and within consumption.
Social production of value requires that they (workers) exercise their own
imagination and their own ability of realization in this sphere, since eco-
nomic growth can only continue if society stops considering work and con-
sumption as something motivated by necessity, setting in motion work and
consumption according to desire, to the creation of a non-necessary but
equally demanding world.
Surely this requirement does not refer to all, but it is not referred solely to
an elite either. Postfordist labour and postfordist consumption are actually
attached to cognitive functions that imply a sort of mastery of languages
and a sort of creativity in their use. It cannot, in fact, push workers and
consumers to passively desire new things simply by means of advertisement
and life styles publicized by the mass media.
In order for the new cognitive constructions to be solid, properly rooted in

people’s heads and social relationships, it must leave some space for the
self-generation of meanings, and therefore, for the world to construct its
own identity. Therefore the coercive power that characterized work and
the necessary consumption must change skin, turning into a dialogic power
of conviction and involvement. Control is no longer (mainly) exercised
over single individuals, but rather over the nets of relation and communi-
cation that augment the capacities to involve and convince. The factory
‘owners’ turn into ‘owners of networks’: owners of the nets of communi-
cation, the media of relation and languages that allow the transfer
of knowledge, more or less codified, through them. Nets of communica-
tion, media of relation and languages are, in fact, the real insufficient
resources in value production that is realized through the exploration of
the world of possibility. Whoever owns these resources succeeds in orient-
ing social exploration towards this or that direction and in becoming irre-
placeable in the constructive process, therefore being able to have a greater
contractual power in the distribution of the results of the started produc-
tion process.
224
13. The Return of the Aesthetic Sense in Work and Consumption
In this way, value is pouring out from the sphere of the pure and simple
instrumentality, in which the economy of classic capitalism had confined it.
More and more things have value, means to satisfy desires, to create worlds,
to generate relationships and meanings, not to answer in technically effec-
tive ways a given aim, but to elaborate such an aim, to modify it, to take it
on ‘a more advanced’ terrain of hopes and aspirations.
All this implies a type of labour and consumption aesthetically based: in order
to work and consume, being part of a process aimed at exploring new mean-
ings, shared aesthetic languages have to be mastered and be able to contribute
to their regeneration, in contact with the various contexts of experience. We
are going back to the past, in a way: value production needs to go beyond the
cultural horizon of the serial machine and perfectly codified knowledge.
To do this it must compromise with people, intelligence and the autonomy

that must accompany it in this new way, rediscovering the importance of
their uniqueness and their differential, original, point of view18.
People must also compromise with modern capitalism, learning to make

reproducible, communicable and transmittable, on a wide scale their own
ideas, inspirations and emotions.
The mediation between these two requirements is that of languages and

aesthetic models, which are the mediators through which unique meanings
can be shared, extended to great numbers.
They still do not know it, but –to the dawn of second modernity– art and
production are going to meet again, recovering, in some aspects, the rela-
tionship they had in the pre-modern age19. Two centuries and a half of
modernity, as we said, have divided the development of economy from that
of art, pushing them in different and conflicting directions. Today we must
allow them, by meeting again, to acknowledge each other, learning to walk
together.
18. Bonomi A., Rullani E. (2005), Il capitalismo personale. Vite al lavoro, Einaudi, Torino
19. Rullani E. (2006), ‘La nuova economia dell’immateriale’, Economia dei servizi. Mercati, Istituzioni, Management, n. 1, set-
tembre-dicembre, pp. 41-60; Rullani E. (2001), ‘Immaterial production in Venice: towards a post-Fordist economy’
(con S. Micelli), in: Musu I. (ed.), Sustainable Venice: Suggestions for the Future
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
Lucha Libre and
Adela Santana1
Mexican National
Identity
A specter is hunting Mexico City –the specter of

Lucha Libre.2 All the coolest players of trendy
Mexican culture have entered into a holy alliance
to merchandize this specter: images of masked
luchadores appear in T-shirts and bags sold by the
chic designer stores of La Condesa neighborhood
and bootlegged along populous Eje Lázaro
Cárdenas; hip magazines publish stylized wrestlers
in their covers, who instead of their usual wrestling
garb are dressed in Armani, the unfaltering mask
still protecting their identity as a way to privilege
the hero that they represent over the man of flesh
and bone with photo ID; rock bands are using
paraphernalia of Lucha Libre to revitalize their
concerts vis-à-vis the menace of electronic music;
Djs, refusing to lag behind the times, publicize
their gigs in posters that imitate the traditional art
of wrestling advertising; bean bags are being re-
1. Adela Santana has studied Anthropology at Columbia University, New York. She now works as a writer and
researcher. She is currently working on an ethnography on women and lucha libre in Mexico City.
2. Mexican wrestling. Eds Note.
ADELA SANTANA 229
fashioned to resemble the masked head of a luchador; antenna balls, also in

the shape of masked lucha libre faces, bounce happily on top of cars in
Mexico City and even young designers who have just arrived from New
York’s Parsons School of Design are doing shows in which wrestling costumes
are the inspiration for their latest spring collection.
Nowadays, the usual toys sold outside the wrestling coliseums of Mexico City
are as desired by kids (undecided on whether to buy a luchador mask or an
action figure) as they are by curators always hopeful to encompass Mexican
national identity in what they consider to be post-modern handicrafts.
Up-and-coming artists know well enough that the success that Gabriel
Orozco has enjoyed, creating a brand of conceptual art that avoids nation-
al distinctiveness is almost unthinkable for a Latin American artist in the
years to come. The only way to make it into P.S.1 or the Tate Modern is
through a colorful and distinctive national urban character. Lucha Libre is a
perfect catch: metropolitan, folkloric and involuntarily humorous. Artists as
diverse as painter Luis Hampshire and mixed media creator Puto are using
wrestling as their leitmotif. The pathos-driven photos of Lourdes Grobet,
the best graphic testimony that exists today about the past 30 years of
Mexican Lucha Libre, have finally found themselves published in a massive
edition for a public avid of Mexican curious (Trilce, 2005), the most successful
of Mexican immaterial exports. Chicano artist, Xavier Garza just published
a children’s book called Lucha Libre, the man in the silver mask (Cinco Puntos
Press, 2005) as a means to help Mexican and Mexican-American kids to
finally have a book of their own. No more stories set on Norway or for that
matter New Hampshire: the characters breath and dream in Mexican.
Mexican cinema is making slow progress on its way to DVD. Nevertheless,

it is quite easy to find the complete filmography of Santo, el enmascarado de
plata, the all-time legend of Lucha Libre who was also the hero of a whole
generation’s worth of local superhero films (Monsiváis, 1995: Fernández
Reyes, 2004; Posa y Franchini, 2006), in almost any video store in both
Mexico and the United States. The heirs of his archenemy, Blue Demon,
recently announced that after Santo’s triumph on the medium, all of his
flicks will be republished on DVD. I prophesize that soon LA’S American
Cinematheque, New York’s Film Forum or Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse will
substitute their Kung Fu nights (which will become too mainstream after the
critical acclaim of the films of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou) for the Luchadores
genre, another outrageously amusing product from the global south. Cartoon
230
Network Latin America has revived the character of El Santo to make a

production in which the hero faces the usual evil forces in an approach
towards Mexico City that follows certain aesthetic and social conventions
about the urban space alongside animated movies like Akira and Ghost in
the Shell.
Even more interesting is the incredibly fragmented (post-modern?) notion

of Mexico that has been created in the United States through the imagery
of Lucha Libre. It is worth noting that these American-created representa-
tions of mexicaness share the obsession with exoticism proclaimed by
Mexican artists. A great example can be found in the American cartoon
Mucha Lucha. With the exception of a (masked) dog that behaves in the
ways of English Royalty, the rest of the characters are all wrestlers who
conduct themselves in such a hyperkinetic manner as to delight children
and annoy parents. According to the world of cartoons, Attention Deficit
Disorder is Mexico’s most important contribution, represented at first by
Speedy Gonzalez and now by plump-yet-incredibly fast little wrestlers.
Lili Chin and Eddie Mort, creators of Mucha Lucha, produce an LA-
based burlesque show, Lucha Va Voom, that has become a gold mine in
American cabaret culture. Each function is a bricolage of popular culture
intersected by the spirit of Bob Fosse and Todd Browning: it is hard to
determine where the actual wrestling ends and the dancing freak show
begins. Cabaret-style strip-teases and comedy acts give needed variety for
an audience that has very little familiarity with Lucha Libre and might
become tired of one lucha after another. I have recently seen the movie
Nacho Libre (2006), an even more popular instance of new Mexican exoti-
cism, where Jack Black portrays, in his characteristic comic style, a charac-
ter that is priest-by-day, luchador-by-night, in a story that is clearly inspired
by a real life priest-luchador, Fray Tormenta.
What I describe in the paragraphs above is merely the second wave of a

cultural resurgence of Lucha Libre. Mexican intellectuals have been working
on the subject on-and-off for the past 50 years, that is, from the documen-
tary photographs and texts of Lourdes Grobet, David Siller and Emiliano
Perez Cruz to Emmanuel Carballo’s Los Dueños del Tiempo (1966; 2003)
and Carlos Monsiváis’ Los rituales del caos (1995). Nonetheless, there are
two peculiarities about this recent artistic trend: First, the figure of the
Mexican intellectual has become associated, by the newest generation of
artists, with the past. This does not imply a polemical or contemptuous
ADELA SANTANA 231
attitude towards their elders; they just take for granted different convictions
and march on a separate path. The latest generation of Mexican artists
can be more properly described as cultural producers instead of intellectuals.
This fact is visible in the slow shift of gears that has taken place within the
context of high culture in Mexico, from literature (traditionally associated
with social compromise, political stance and a constructive position
towards the long process of nation-building in Latin America) to a much
more socially-detached notion of an artist whereby visuals and music have
become more fashionable than words. Second, young artists, unlike the
past generation, are less inclined to explain popular phenomena as if they
were outside observers, that is, they practice an intuitive, passionate and
very personal version of what anthropologists call participant observation.
While a common trend in Mexican political and cultural thought throughout

the 20th century involves proclaiming the existence of an ‘original Mexican
identity’, there is an increasing perception that cultural influences from out-
side have irrevocably changed the country. This notion explains, in part, why
there is a frenetic search, amid the cultural milieu, for evidence that points
towards the particulars of national culture. Consequently, young cultural pro-
ducers gladly assume the peculiarity of Lucha Libre and aim, when possible,
to mingle with the established fans of the sporting spectacle. They do not
scrutinize from the back of the arena or in front of the TV screen as their sen-
iors did, they act out in the front seats just like any other ñero enjoying the spec-
tacle: ‘Aluche, pícale el culo’, Kinkin, a promising artist from La Condesa,
screams with a frenetic voice in a Lucha Libre match at Arena Naucalpan
featuring Tinieblas Jr. and his loyal short and furry companion Aluche. To
paraphrase the terminology that has been cherished by interpreters of
wrestling ever since Roland Barthes: the new generations of artists submerge
into the ritual of Lucha Libre looking for some sort of local legitimacy.
But also, as Raúl Bejar and Héctor Rosales argue: ‘Globalization provokes
a certain displacement among the economic and cultural segments of soci-
ety, integrating them into a neutralizing totality that distances them from
both marginal social groups and the work and consumer markets’. (1999).
As a result, cultural producers from the South live in a globalization limbo:
they are neither part of ‘the global hierarchy of mobility’ nor are they con-
demned to the spatial confinement of locality (Bauman, 1998). To play the
global game they need to articulate a unified strategy that conciliates, in a
creative and profitable way, the contradictions that exist between globaliza-
tion and locality. Therefore, it is common to see these days in Mexico City
232
actions taken by artists in their work, in order to preserve what is ‘authen-

tic’ about their own society and be able to export when the circumstances
are appropriate, pop culture landmarks.
While it would be easy for a remote observer to look upon the authenticat-
ing strategies of popular culture as a revival of nationalistic tendencies, it
seems more appropriate to argue that, at the level of cultural producers, the
enthusiasm that exists about ‘the local’ cuts across the framework sustained
by the classical discussion about what is explicitly Mexican (Molina
Enríquez, Gómez Morin and even Octavio Paz), namely, what remains
‘completely peculiar’ and thus unalterable. At the same time, this proposi-
tion can lead to a kind of preventive archaeology, that is to say, the conclusion
that a revival of popular culture only indicates that it is on the verge of
extinction. In other words, that these manifestations are vanishing from the
streets and soon will be placed in the new Museum of Popular Art near
Mexico City’s Chinatown, or in an auditorium intended for foreign visitors
looking for the ultimate bizarre experience, similar to the same fate suf-
fered by the bullfighting plazas of Cancun and Tijuana, disdained by pres-
tigious bullfighters because they attract BoBo gringos looking for Mexican
curious instead of a respectful and knowledgeable audience.
All of these authenticating strategies are based on a sequence of keywords:

urban, folk, retro and cool. These days, any successful artistic discourse has
to include in its corpus all of these words, as prerequisites for the global
cultural milieu to accept market-oriented claims of local difference. I will
try to explain how I understand these key terms:
1) Urban has to do with the mental environment in which we move about,

where we share all kinds of elements. The notion of globalization is not
keen on emphasizing differences based on physical geography, yet favors
the slight, localized cultural variations that can be appreciated from one
city to another. That which is URBAN unites us in many ways and makes
us different from one another in some ways. It is, for instance, the relation-
ship between Boston and New York taken to a global scale, specifically, how
we rabidly defend the precise local characteristics that slightly differentiate
us from other people in other cities.
2) I regard folk as a generic definition, that is, non-argumentative and non-

political, of ‘people’ and their beliefs. Globalization is assumed as a dem-
ocratic process and favors products aimed at the majority of a population
ADELA SANTANA 233
regardless of class, race and creed. It favors cultural production made by

and for the people.
3) Retro is a category that seeks to identify cultural differences by recover-

ing the more or less recent past without the need to historicize or politicize
reality. History has a solemn quality, retro, on the contrary, is light-hearted.
History is the source of all civic gravity, retro is always looking for laughs.
We laugh at ourselves when we see how we acted 10, 15 or 20 years ago.
It is one of the more visible social expressions of what the academic milieu
calls postmodern irony.
4) The notion of cool sustains the other 3 terms. It is proof that the authen-
ticating strategy has been successful. If it is popularly regarded as cool it
works, if not then the strategy needs to be changed. Cool is a concept that
is difficult to define properly, yet it is based in a collective intuition and feel-
ing. In order to be cool one must count with certain enthusiasm and loyal-
ty from the public, one must conquer a certain public, even if it is not the
majority of the cultural scene. We might never be able to precisely define
the nature of cool; we can’t pin it down with words or concepts. It is a slip-
pery notion, always reluctant to subordinate itself to other notions. We can
just describe some of its traits.
If it has proven tricky to sample mariachi music or boleros in a formula

adhoc for the most up-to-date musical taste as it is done in Argentina, Brazil
and Nigeria, with Tango, Bossa and Afro-beat, Mexican cultural producers are
confident about their urban imagery as a way to conciliate globalization
and locality. Amongst other Latin American countries, Mexico is the most
conspicuous representative of that which is Latino in the art world. This is
testified, for example, by the 2005 ARCO fair in Madrid, dedicated to
Mexico and placing special attention on Tijuana and Mexico City. Recent
editions of the Armory Show in New York City, feature an important num-
ber of Mexican galleries. Even world renowned artists such as Belgian
Francis Alÿs and Spaniard Santiago Sierra now live and work in Mexico
City. Sierra claims that he is inspired by a ‘city that resembles a tumor, a hal-
lucinating place where you can live both as if you were in Europe and in
Mogadishu. All of this generates a violence that is very apparent in the
streets and a source of distressful work’. ( Jiménez, 2005). For Alÿs, ‘Mexico
City will not leave you be. It coerces you into adopting an identity to be able
to survive its chaos. My strategy was to turn into an artist. I am able to find
in here the cruel and poetic pretext for my work’. ( Jiménez, 2005).
234
Ever since Jules Dassin´s film Night and the City (1950), wrestling has been
used as a metaphor of society. Dassin expounds through the nobleness of
his Turkish wrestlers, the conflict faced by the oppressed vis-à-vis the cor-
ruptive manners of the bosses of the underworld. By way of the wrestlers
we understand Dassin’s conviction about the inherent decency of the
working class. It is not surprising, then, that Lucha Libre has been used as
a metaphor to comprehend the depth of Mexican culture; a space to
reflect on the singularities of Mexican national identity. Lucha Libre is usu-
ally understood as a crystallization of Mexican complexities, a conglomer-
ate of symbols that, like manna, are available to anyone who wants them.
Cultural producers, for example, contemplate Lucha Libre as privileged ter-
rain where it is possible to take on their artistic struggle in an effort to
achieve self-authentication through the visual richness of the event; this,
however, does not imply any kind of theorization.
If we want to discover how Lucha Libre has been contemplated in Mexico,

it is necessary to look back in time. I will limit myself to those themes that
are constant and refrain from singling out the disagreements that may exist
between intellectuals that have worked the subject of Lucha Libre. An idea
prevails that in many ways reached Mexico by way of Octavio Paz and the
early Spanish translations of Roger Callois: the notion that in order to
comprehend Mexico it is necessary to have a good understanding of the
religious mentality of its people. Every massive event is a ritual. For
Emmanuel Carballo, for instance, the meaning of Lucha Libre ‘is closely
knit to the ancient symbolism of ritual, to the dramatization of some of the
fundamental problems of human existence. Lucha Libre recreates the
most important of these problems: the struggle of man against man. In a
symbolic way, victory and defeat are well-known. A new type of ‘Odysseus’
is celebrated, one that is rich in both licit and illicit resources’ (1966).
Carlos Monsiváis is more interested in the way the spectators of Lucha
Libre administer the rules of the sport/spectacle themselves therefore cre-
ating their own ritual of disorder (1995).
In 1983, Felipe Ehrenberg wrote in El Gallo Ilustrado, the cultural magazine

of newspaper El Día: ‘Today, rational people (the white petit-bourgeoisie) are
scandalized at the notion of Lucha Libre, even if they can only conjecture
about it. When they refuse to understand it, enjoy it, to participate in the rit-
ual, they accentuate the infinite cultural solitude that they suffer’. Ehrenberg,
a visual artist himself, builds a perfect bridge between intellectuals and the
cultural producers of today in their common interest for Mexican wrestling.
ADELA SANTANA 235
All of these authors privilege the notion of ritual and, at the same time, seek
to give more depth to their interpretation of signs. This tradition still lives
in many discussions about Mexican identity. For instance, Mexican novelist
Leonardo Da Jandra in his recent essay La Hispanidad: Fiesta y Rito (2005) dis-
putes the infamous Huntington thesis about Latinos living in the United
States and points to the sacredness of the fiestas and rituals as the essential
components of Mexican identity. This tradition, Da Jandra explains, situ-
ates Spain in its immediate past, Mexico in its continuous present and
Hispanic communities in the United States in its promising future.
Most scholarly approaches to the subject of professional wrestling world-

wide place great weight on Bakhtin’s reading of Rebelaisian carnival cul-
ture and on the interpretive account of the sporting spectacle that Roland
Barthes first published in 1957. These arguments mostly center around
two concerns, social meaning and political consequence as we can see, for
example, in the approach to Lucha Libre carried on by Heather Levi
(1999), who immersed herself in the everyday life of the sport and argued
that the social meaning of the spectacle is not to be found in the script or
in the experience of the wrestlers in the ring, but in the melodrama pres-
ent in the event as a whole, a kind of melodrama that can be traced to
many other popular events in Mexico.
Not many scholarly texts that examine Lucha Libre have been published in
Mexico. The literature that exists, similar to the Anglophone texts, addresses
Lucha Libre in terms of ritual and symbolism, creating arguments that could
only be appreciated within the sphere of Mexican national identity such as
Tiziana Bertaccini’s analysis of Mexican popular heroes (2001), Karina
Pizarro-Hernández’s work on Pachuca’s prestigious wrestling tradition
(2003), and the in-depth study of El Santo written by Álvaro Fernández Reyes
(2004). These authors put forth similar arguments that, in the end, are not
very distant from Octavio Paz´s foremost idea in The Labyrinth of Solitude
(1947): ‘Discovering our myths in order to discover ourselves. Tackling the
problem of national identity in a serious manner’. The point of departure for
most of the works that analyze Lucha Libre is language or various types of
languages of the body and what people think and mythologize about them.
These authors share a certain vision about Lucha Libre. I am referring to a

paradigm of communication that they employ to understand how luchadores,
through their corporal expression, represent a ritual that takes place week
after week, always saturated with the same dramas and mythology.
236
Academics and intellectuals have approached the topic of Lucha Libre in

the same way that they have studied art: they detect symbols that must be
interpreted at first and later classified. The result of such a process is in
plain confrontation to the way protagonists of a concrete discipline think
about themselves. Furthermore, theorization about Lucha Libre supposes
that each lucha event is a scientific lab with more than enough guinea pigs,
where the mysteries about how Mexican people live, think and feel are hid-
den and ready to be discovered. Theorization never takes into consideration
that Lucha Libre attracts a specific public, not necessarily a sector of the
population that should scientifically represent ‘the Mexican people’, that
fanhood may be constantly fluctuating. It also does not consider that Lucha
Libre, first and foremost is a business through which millions of pesos run
each year and where an extreme disparity exists between the earnings of
promoters and that of the luchadores, between the earnings of the stars and
that of the luchadores that entertain the public at the beginning of a lucha
event. The logic and the reality of this sport/spectacle is at times much sim-
pler and at other times much more complex than suggested by those inter-
pretations that seek to emphasize the feast of symbols. I have shown the
importance that Lucha Libre has for cultural producers, but if we are look-
ing for an in-depth study of the topic, we only find studies of an analytical
nature that obscure the phenomenon within the intricacies of ideas. It is a
manner of exposition that feels superior to the rest, one that finds in exoti-
cism the aesthetic representation of ritual. The same way that early anthro-
pology associated the ‘backwardness’ of a community with its instinctive
proclivity to ritual and symbolism. In order to make a real contribution to
the deep understanding of Lucha Libre we have to engage into the thick
description of its reality, allowing the protagonists to speak for themselves.
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Creative Strategies for
Tristestópicos1
the Patrimonialisation
of Identity / The Nation
Brand
2
Based on the prospect of innovation, develop-

ment, creativity and technology, today’s global
economy has determined the need to capitalise
new resources with the purpose of opening new
spaces for the circulation of goods. One of these
resources is Symbolic Capital, which due to its
immateriality, has had to be promoted through
the development of new heritage policies in
order for us to feel and think about the value of its
products and services in terms of goods.
1. TRISTESTOPICOS collective develops diverse practices in cultural critiques of the collective imagination of Latin
America. www.tristestopicos.org
2. This introductory text explains the working context of the research project THE NATION BRAND. Visual Architecture
and Strategic Management of Latin American Identities, which the TRISTESTOPICOS collective is presently developing.
This project consists of the analysis of the different processes of the construction of nation brands within the region,
with the aim of comparing and establishing common motifs in the discourse of the representation of identity. From
here onwards, TRISTESTOPICOS is researching both the mechanisms underlying the call for simbolic capital as a
political and cultural resource, and the implementation of models for the creative production of subjectivity to activate
Latin American economic development.
TRISTESTÓPICOS 239
Design and branding methodologies for corporate identity are associated

with nation brands’ position within the global market. They have been pre-
senting methods for resolving political needs, using the logic of the com-
mon good to create brands of patrimonial identity within the framework
of market expansion. Standing out among their characteristics is their high
capacity for developing cultural representation systems which are sustained
and driven by the new ‘creative class’3, who have a tendency to appropri-
ate cultural differences and cognitive capital as a strategy for the profes-
sionalisation of cultural economy.
Nation states, commercial regions and economic blocks are currently some
of branding agencies’ potential clients on a global scale. Latin America’s
‘emerging economies’ have been no different. Adding on to corporate
brands (local, hybrid or country of origin labels), the new Nation Brands
now appear as an item of the global economy’s portfolio.4
As a challenge to cultural and entrepreneurial creativity, these brands

introduce themselves as re-activators of the country’s social scheme taking
the challenge of directing and channelling nationality through a con-
densed set of globally recognisable features specific to that country: the
3. This way of thinking about creativity as something valuable and empowering for its social class has taken a strong
political and economic dimension in countries like the USA, from which it has been usually imported as a way of reac-
tivating the economy in other places. ‘Creative class’ ideology is the result of the appropiation of ethnic and sexual
minorities’ revindications on the one hand, and of nomadism’s and cognitive capitalism’s political practices on the
other. Richard Florida, its main exponent, promotes a way of thinking about a city, region or state’s success and cog-
nitive capitalism through its creative class, based on talent, technology and tolerance. He points out: ‘You can’t create a
technologically innovative place unless it is open to difference, eccentricity and peculiarity’. Florida, The Rise of the
Creative Class. And How is Transforming Work, Leisure, Community & Everyday Life, New York, Basic Books, 2002. Source:
http://www.creativeclass.org. This idea is also written about by Tom Peters, ‘guru of gurus’, according to The
Economist, who advocates for the advantages of innovation, marketing and Richard Florida’s Book through his techno-
cratic and almost religious zeal . Source: http://www.tompeters.com
4. Creative business agencies and lobbies believe that the Nation Brand should be strengthened and redirected through
communicational branding strategies. Nevertheless, it is important to understand that the concept of the Nation
Brand comes out of an evaluative outlook over a nation’s overall representation. The Anholt-GMI Nation Brand Index
reports, for example, are the result of the evaluation of six specific fields within each country: tourism, national pro-
duce, exports, government, investment and immigration. The result of these surveys provides a global ranking of the
best Nation Brands. Anholt Nation Brands Index thus develops its statistic analysis based on the evaluation and percep-
tion of ‘brand images’. This is a subsidiary agency of the Global Market Insite (GMI) company, which offers compre-
hensive solutions based on the market’s intelligence. The Brands Index provides their reports on Nation Brands’ global
positioning and stability every four months. Their surveys are conducted on 29,500 consumers from 35 different coun-
tries. Complete information can be found on http://www.nationbrandindex.com/ As for cities, these are also subject
to investigation and competitive statistics in the international market, as they are prone to be evaluated in the same
way as brands. Anholt Nation Brands Index has also published its statistics in this field. See
http://www.citybrandsindex.com
240
perception and circulation of identities. Nation Brands thus establish a cul-

tural dependency on their place of origin, which doesn’t only imply a form
of cultural essentialism, it also translates as a cultural asset, which is why
nations choose to develop their nation asset through brands that make a
profitable imagery and identity-based universe. As a consequence, some
Latin American countries, in their yearning to reach a point where they
can manoeuvre the access global culture, have activated their economic
dependency through explosive treaties of free trade, direct deals with for-
eign investors and branding’s new transfers and cultural exchanges.
The strategies comprised in the idea of a Nation Brand constitute a prob-

lematic aspect regarding the visibility of what is Latin American, as well as
of the recreation of certain models for the commercial negotiation of cul-
tural heritage. These aspects have turned out to be relevant when exercis-
ing a critique of the construction of cultural imagery and the representa-
tion of identity in economic globalisation’s processes.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
242
Nation Brand/ México

Joaquín Barriendos1
Unique, diverse and beyond

hospitality
Pantone Solid uncoated2
PMS 1795 U/PMS Process Magenta U/

PMS 130 U/PMS 248 U/PMS 376 U/
PMS 7467 U/PMS 201 U/PMS 676 U/
PMS 158 U/PMS 512 U/PMS 377 U/
PMS 322 U
Myriad Pro Black3
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789
1. Joaquín Barriendos is an art critic, editor and independent curator.

2. Pantone colour range (Pantone Matching System) of the new MéXICO brand. This colour palette has been chosen in
order to promote the signaling structure of application and communication of the corporate identity used to single
out the products and services that Mexico offers within the global market. According to the Consejo de Promoción Turística
de México (CPTM) [Mexico Tourism Board], the body responsible for the creation and promotion of the new MéXICO
brand, and to the branding agency Emblem, this range of chromatic values was selected for the ‘combination of tem-
peratures (warm, strident and lively) that project the visual richness of our country’. Taken from the Guía Breve de Uso
[Short User Guide] of the MéXICO brand.
3. The typographic family ‘Myriad Pro’ (Adobe Systems) was chosen by the CPTM to communicate the MéXICO
brand, because of its ‘warm personality, [which gives the brand] a fresh and contemporary identity’. Taken from the
Guía Breve de Uso of the MéXICO brand.
JOAQUÍN BARRIENDOS 243
The new image illustrates the immense natural and cultural richness of
Mexico. In addition, the chosen typography creates a strong entity, proud of its
love of life, and self-confident. The gesture of using the lower case accentuat-
ed ‘e’ reveals its inherent modernity and personality.
Francisco Ortiz4
Patrimony design and political economy of Mexico’s corporative

identity
After the last turn of the century, Mexico –like many other countries in
Latin America– joined the regional urge to develop or renew a distinct
Country Brand. As in most of the cases, the creation of the MéXICO
brand was the result of a speedy adjustment of the necessities of the
Mexican tourism, production and business sectors to the state’s model of
outsourcing and rendering invisible the public management structure
(through companies with shared capital). The objective was to increase the
efficiency, refine the administration and render the management of public
resources transparent. Thus in the creation of the brand three different
entities were mainly involved: the Mexico Tourism Board (a mixed body
with majority state presence with representatives both from the govern-
ment and from the private sector), the Fundación México Puente de Encuentros
(which is run with private capital and assembles a committee with repre-
sentatives from the most powerful business groups in Mexico, such as
Grupo Posadas, Femsa, Cemex or Grupo Carso) and the Emblem agency
(which is a merger of brand management and corporate design companies
with a number of branches in Latin America).5
In order to be able to understand the scale and the strategic character of

the concept of the design and management of a national identity as a
means to activate the Mexican economy, as well as to be able to value accu-
rately the potential and repercussions of a better positioning of the
MéXICO brand within the global economy, it is a good idea to contextu-
4. Francisco Ortiz Ortiz was the promoter of the new MéXICO brand, which he championed from his post as director of
the CPTM, itself acting as the trade name for the brand. Ortiz’s words were extracted from a press conference offered
on occasion of the official presentation and launch of the MéXICO brand at the Tianguis Turístico de México (a travel
industry event [TN]), in the city of Acapulco on April 22nd, 2005.
5. Emblem considers itself the most important consulting and design agency in the region committed to the promotion of
design of emblematic brands in Latin America. See http://www.mblm.com/
244
alize on the one hand the set of budgetary relations of the Mexican state
and the system of capitalization of its intangible assets (such as identity or
the cultural links between subjectivities), and on the other hand, to sound
out the processes of construction of a Mexican visual culture in terms of
the production and perception of its graphic identities.
With high expectations in regard to its performance within the global mar-
ket, the MéXICO brand was conceived as a tool to compete as well as a
means to interact in the transnational cultural economy, where the flux and
market price of intangible assets has become increasingly important. In
this respect the web page of the Instituto de Análisis de Intangibles (Institute for
the Analysis of Intangible Assets) states: ‘beyond doubt, significant
advances have been made in recent years in the management of intangi-
ble assets (trademark, corporate reputation, corporate ethics, corporate
social responsibility, good governance, human capital, organizational cap-
ital or technological capital...) as vital and strategic elements to ensure the
success of business organizations.’6
The identification of a country’s image as an economic asset is usually

understood as ‘a set of strengths and weaknesses linked to the country of
origin, that incorporate or subtract the value provided by a brand or serv-
ice to the manufacturer and/or her client’.7 It is in this sense that Country
Brands are a perfected by-product of the asset that is the ‘country of ori-
gin’, and are thus a variable in the positioning of goods or services, brands
and markets.
The quotation of a Country Brand can either surpass the valuation of the
country’s Gross Domestic Product or stay below that level. In 2004, for
example, whilst Denmark’s brand valuation reached 320% above its GDP,
Mexico’s Country Brand was valued at only 41% of its GDP.8
Paradoxically, there are significant variations in the assignation of
resources and in the political mechanisms for the allocation of budget
items, between strong economies with strong Country Brands, and other
6. http:///www.institutointangibles.com/index.html
7. Ramón Casilda Béjar, Internacionalización e inversiones directas de las españolas en América Latina 200-2004. Situación y pers-
pectivas, Barcelona, CIDOB, 2004. (col. Documentos CIDOB América Latina No 5), p. 58. [Internationalization and
direct investment by Spanish firms in Latin America 200-2004. Situation and perspectives]
8. See Anholt Nation Brands Index’s fourth quarter’s report of 2005.
http://www.nationbrandindex.com/docs/NBI_Q4_2005.pdf
‘emergent’ economies with unstable Country Brand assets. The differences

lie mostly, on the one hand, in the structure of implication and operative
congruence between the expectations of the public and cultural policies of
the country and the agencies and institutions that implement these, and on
the other, in the procedures of public expenditure as an investment (direct-
ly or indirectly) in the strengthening of the state.
In Mexico, the process of institutionalization of the idea to condense cul-

tural, commercial and productive values into a single brand, started in
2003, within the already mentioned Mexico Tourism Board (CPTM). This
body, under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Tourism and the
Presidency of the Republic, was founded in 1999 to get the public sector
involved with the private sector in searching for initiatives for the evalua-
tion and promotion of Mexican tourism.9 According to María Elena
Mancha, a former director of the CPTM, in 2003 the goal of the agency
was to ‘sell Mexico’ as a registered trademark, making the most of the fact
that the pronunciation of the word ‘Mexico’ does not change substantially
from one language to another, in contrast to other words that designate
countries (such as ‘Germany’). This has the advantage of generating asso-
ciative memory and stability in the brand identity.
Nevertheless, the consolidation of Mexico’s first Country Brand project as a

well planned strategy of commercial positioning did not take place until 2004,
after Francisco Ortiz took charge of the CPTM. In a certain way, Ortiz was
the true ‘creator’ and prime mover of Mexico’s current Country Brand.10
When he arrived at the CPTM Ortiz inherited a Country Brand prototype

that reflected in its slogan a tendency to favour ‘sun and beach’ tourism:
9. www.cptm.com.mx / The online access to the CPTM’s web page was suspended during several months.
10. The reader must keep in mind that Ortiz arrived at the CPTM after a long career in Mexico as manager and creator
of political and cultural images. He had worked as Director of Public Opinion and Image of the Presidency of the
Republic. This ‘entrepreneur’ (the strategist of the image of Vicente Fox’s election campaign) is credited with having
provided the elected president with a formal and presidential character which he previously lacked, whilst preserving his
colloquial and ‘people friendly’ language. (See Ortiz’s own article titled El poder del lenguaje venció al lenguaje del poder. El habla
de Vicente Fox (vid infra) [The power of language defeated the language of power. Vicente Fox’s speech]. Ortiz’s suspension
as director of CPTM this past 31st of December 2005, was due to his joining the presidential campaign of Felipe
Calderón Hinojosa, the new candidate of the Partido Acción Nacional [National Action Party]. Nevertheless, just two
months before the presidential elections, in April 2006, Calderón dismissed Ortiz on suspicion of illicit enrichment.
Ortiz seems to have come against the slogan of transparency in government which he himself came up with.
http://cvc.cervantes.es/obref/congresos/valladolid/ponencias/activo_del_espanol/4_la_publicidad_en_espanol/
ortiz_o_f.htm
246
Mexico: unique, diverse and hospitable. The justification of the slogan by that
particular Country Brand project went as follows:
It is unique because of its geographical location, its culture, its customs and
traditions, its architecture, the ethnic mix, the gastronomy and its people. It is
diverse because of the climate, the landscapes, the destinations, the tourist
attractions, its ethnic groups, the ecosystems, its modernity, its regional cuisine,
the music and because it has something to offer to every need. It is hospitable
because of the cordiality of its people, their friendliness, affability, their obse-
quious disposition and the infrastructure and quality of the transport services.11
It is evident that the previous Country Brand privileged an obsequious

reception of tourists as the key characteristic in the promotion of Mexican
identity, something which, based on a certain idea of ‘hospitality’ turned
the country into a container of temporary travelers. The image of Mexico
projected by this brand, of a container without content, an empty country
that needed to be filled with the tourists’ promenades, was accurately
detected by Francisco Ortiz’s team. It revealed an element of ‘animosity’,
that is to say, it proved counterproductive for the expansion of the Mexican
tourism sector into strategic sectors of growth. At the time Ortiz stated in
this respect that the previous logo ‘did not reflect the diversity and richness
of today’s Mexico, a country proud of its roots and, at the same time, of
its aspirations to modernity. [The logo] referred to folklore stereotypes and
communicated mostly elements of sun and archeological sites’.12
The immediate objective of the CPTM’s director was thus to go beyond the
hospitable to connect with the presidential aim of turning the tourism sector
into a ‘strategic ally’ for development. Together with a (politically support-
ed) revision of the ‘isotypes’13 of the old Country Brand, Ortiz backed the
CPTM’s Marketing Plan of 2004, which pressed above all for the increase
of the financial resources for expenditure in advertising, promotion and
the ‘creation’ of a Mexican commercial identity.
11. Taken from Aportes para la implementación de la Estrategia Marca País Argentina. Planos interno y externo, Tandil, Universidad
Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, 2004.
12. Ortiz’s words were extracted from a press conference offered on occasion of the official presentation and launch of
the MéXICO brand at the Tianguis Turístico de México in the city of Acapulco on April 22nd, 2005.
13. An isotype is a brand in which an image functions without any text. Lowering the protagonism of the ‘sun’ was one
of the central concerns of México’s new corporate identity.
It would have been impossible to carry out the objectives advanced by Ortiz
–objectives which represented the aspirations of hotel corporations, the avi-
ation industry and other strong sectors of the tourism industry– if the peri-
od during which Ortiz was the director of the CPTM had not been preced-
ed by one of the most important budgetary transformations in the field to
occur in Mexico. This change, which brought about a radical turn in the
expectations of creative economics applied to the tourism sector and in the
management of the Mexican cultural heritage, comprised a constitutional
regulation on the ‘non immigrant tax’, which tourists are charged when
entering the country. Fifty percent of this tax revenue was redirected to
finance CPTM’s programs, at the expense of a decrease in the budget of the
Instituto Nacional de Migración [National Institute of Migration]. In this way
the CPTM became the second highest spending body in Mexico, in terms
of expenditure in advertising and social promotion of image, reaching an
annual figure of almost 45 million dollars, of an average available annual
budget of 70 million. On the other hand, due to the increase in oil prices,
the CPTM received an extra increase on top of the amount originally grant-
ed by the Parliament for that year’s budgetary period. This was an increase
of 288.6%, 40 times the amount of the increase destined to the Ministry of
Social Development, due to the mentioned oil revenue surplus.14
The amount spent on the substitution, implementation and typographic

and signal application of the MéXICO brand was almost 9 million dollars.
The expenses from contracting specialized agencies (consulting, evaluation,
procurement of indicators, market analysis, etc.) reached 8 million dollars.
For example, regarding the cost of the introduction and communication of
the new brand, the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu was
awarded a budget of one million dollars to make five promotional clips.
The MéXICO brand, which was officially introduced in April 2005, rep-
resented a whole new strategy of branding, the redesign of the Mexican
corporate lobby and the reformulation of the application manual. The
economic/cultural support of these strategies was the narrativization of
the Mexican identity, forming an ‘isologotype’15 out of various hypercon-
densated graphic symbols. At the presentation of the new MéXICO
brand, it was stated that the brand ‘clearly narrates our millenary history,
14. Data obtained from the Informe sobre la situación económica, las finanzas y la deuda pública of 2005’s fiscal year, a report [on
the economic situation, finances and public debt] of México’s Treasury [Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público (SHCP)].
15. An isologotype is a brand in which the isotype and the logotype interact in such a way as to be joined together.
248
starting in the pre-Hispanic past, continuing with the viceregal period and
arriving at the Mexico of today’. Thus, the representations in the ‘isologo-
type’ of the Mexican identity function symbolically within the new coun-
try brand. To put it in Peircean terms, these representations are a ‘repre-
sentamen’ based on conventions. These stereotypes are therefore cultural
conventionalisms legitimated through various narratives which have been
previously established by the state’s political mechanisms.16
In terms of intellectual property, the institutional graphic identity MéXICO

has all the elements to be a mixed brand, since it comprises a set of letters
which contain images. Colours function in this isologotype diagrammatical-
ly (they refer to a set of qualities and subjective attributions of that which
they purport to represent). Letters operate iconically (they are the formal
starting point for the construction of images within the body of the letters
that resemble a number of graphic conventions about the Mexican identity).
The new MéXICO brand assembles thus a diachronic reading of the official
and compartimentalized history of Mexico. The director of the CPTM
referred to the MéXICO brand as ‘an image that clearly narrates our mil-
lenary history, starting in the pre-Hispanic past, continuing with the vicere-
gal period and arriving at the Mexico of today’. Ortiz has also asserted that
‘a brand is much more than a logo, a brand is above all an essence, a spirit
that permeates everything carrying its stamp’. The renewal of the Country
Brand corroborates thus the aim for Mexico to have ‘a brand identity that
expresses our strategic positioning: unique, diverse and beyond hospitality’.17
Claude Salzberger, the director of the Emblem agency (which is the result
of the merger of the two agencies of corporative branding, brand strategy
and maintenance, FutureBrand and Brandspin) thinks that the corporate
lineaments of the agency are based on ‘winning over the emotional as well
as the rational side of the consumer, on getting to her heart; in this way, the
brand can become a cultural icon of society’.18 The director of the
16. For a theoretical framework around these practices we recommend Bhabha’s chapter ‘The Other question: the stereoty-
pe and colonial discourse’ in: Literature, Politics and Theory, London, Methuen, 1986. On the subject of cultural stere-
otypes and representational politics, see Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation, London, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2001.
17. Vid. supra. note 11
18. Claude Salzberger in his address at the seminar titled El poder de la marca. Deseos, ideas y acción para trascender [The power
of the brand. Desires, ideas and action to transcend], organized by the Asociación Nacional de Anunciantes (Anda)
[National Association of Advertisers] together with the consulting firm Emblem, on the 20th of July 2005, in Caracas.
See http://www.elpoderdelamarca.com/
Mexican sub-office of Emblem, Design Associates, Eduardo Calderón, jus-

tified the visual architecture and the typographic emotivity of the logo of
the MéXICO brand along the following concepts:
M) A millenary civilization, with strong roots and pride in its origin.

é) A nation that is born out of the coming together of two different
worlds. A viceroyalty during which its distinct character takes shape.
X) The symbol of an encounter, of fusion, of the crossroads, of a
racial and cultural mix in which the duality of day and night are
to be found.
I) Verticality, modern aspirations, plastic and architectural brush-
strokes that highlight the sophistication of our roots and that look
forward.
C) Vitality, natural resources, megabiodiversity.
O) Seas and skies, natural beauty, fluid thinking and lofty dreams
to conquer.
Having in mind the internal rhetoric of the graphic images of this

‘Corporate Identity’ of Mexico, as well as the behavior of the iconic-typo-
graphical attributes that makes of the Mexican cultural identity a
‘Corporate Image’ of Mexico, it is interesting to stop and highlight some
of its most problematic aspects.19
The ‘M’ used in the MéXICO brand is a pyramid (cut in half, with the top
part inverted and superimposed on the bottom one), an explicit reference
to the pre-Hispanic architecture of the Meso American groups (something
which is also explicitly expressed by the ornamental bands around the let-
ter). This initial clearly eludes the double arcade (typical of the lower case
‘m’) which immediately refers to the colonial arches, and through these to
a whole series of historic-typographic implications about the Mexican
identity. Paradoxically, the following two letters (the ‘é’ and the ‘x’) encour-
age the solidification of a Mexican identity in relation to a culturally mixed
past, viceregal, the result of crossroads and fusion, in which hybridization
19. The fact that both concepts ‘Corporate Identity’ and ‘Nation Brand’ are immediately associated with one another,
reminds us that the idea of a (political and aesthetic) representation of the social or national body, as well as the idea
of a ‘brand’ or a delimitation of the identity and territorial borders and margins of this body, are two elements cons-
titutive of the emergence of the national states and of the concept of a national culture. The ‘corporation’ is the form
that provides unity to the body; the term’s provenance are the latin words corporatus and corporare, from which the word
Corporative emerged.
250
is presented as explicitly colonial. This is established by the baroque ges-

ture of the interior brushstrokes of the ‘é’ and with the history of appro-
priation and vindication of the letter ‘x’, which appeals to the specifically
Mexican Spanish as opposed to that of the peninsula (the ‘j’ in ‘Méjico’).
It suffices to quote Manuel Revilla on this, who says that to alter the name,
already stereotyped, of the motherland, of the nation that we accept as our
own, seems like a profanation. Our feelings protest against this. To take the
x off México is like taking the indigo nopal or the wavy snake off the eagle
in our shield, or like changing one of the emblematic colours of the nation-
al flag. Wouldn’t our feelings together with our tradition protest against
this? What are philological reasons worth in comparison to sentimentality
and passion?
It can be quickly appreciated that in the MéXICO brand the problem of

the colonial identity of the Mexican (the ontological doubt about her ori-
gins) is rhetorically resolved. A kind of homage to the ‘melancholization’
of the Mexican identity takes place, something which Octavio Paz already
did when he introduced it in his labyrinth. Like Paz’s ‘loneliness’, the cor-
porate narrativization of the Country Brand is grounded on a reading with
an institutional viewpoint (in this case more corporate than intellectual),
which resembles quite closely what was once defined as the construction of
the Mexican identity by a method of subtraction. That is, the Mexican
identity starts to be at the point where all other identities (Aztecs, Spanish,
Chicanos, etc.) cease themselves to be.
The Emblem agency determined the slogan strategy in reference to this

series of onto-typological attributes associated with the ‘Mexican identity’.
The phrase Unique, diverse and hospitable was substituted with Unique, diverse
and beyond hospitality.20 The latter, while still forcefully emphasizing that
which belongs to the Mexican identity in terms of a double reading (from
the local and native position, as well as a tourist attraction from that of the
foreigner), avoids the obsequiousness that is implicit in the hospitality of a
country highly exoticized by tourism.
20. This phrase was recently changed for Beyond your expectations (Más allá de tu imaginación).
Strategic management of the ‘Mexican public limited company’

as an intangible asset
If we look closely at the flux of identity values, the strategies used for the
patrimonialization of the Mexican identity and the expenses that allow the
MéXICO brand to function, we will be able to get an idea of the real mar-
keting dimension of the creative management of the commercial/nation-
al identity of a country, as well as of the political and economic aspects that
it implies. At the same time, the corporate landscape, the visual architec-
ture and the branding strategies that claim ‘to represent’ Mexican com-
mercial and cultural activities come to light. Because of all of this, because
of the amount of public resources invested by the state in the project, and
due to the problematic character of the idea itself of giving a brand the
legitimacy of national patrimony by granting resources to specialists in the
field of the creative construction of national/corporate identities, some
important questions arise. These are related for instance with the surplus
value in intangibles stemming from the process whereby identities are
turned into stereotypes for market related purposes, and also with the lim-
its of alienation that a type of brand such as this one should imply. Within
another sphere of analysis of the production of intangible cultural assets,
which is nevertheless itself immersed in the economy’s culturalization
process, the question about the privileges to manage the gain in assets
derived from the creation, exploitation and protection of a Country Brand
arises. Needless to say, if the state ceased to be perceived as the generator
of nationality itself, it would prove more difficult to legitimize not only the
national heritage as resource, but also the design and management of the
patrimonialization of identities as market activating assets. Within these
mixed capital operations we therefore seem to find, hidden from broad
daylight, strategies to renationalize ‘innovative’ public politics and the cor-
porate creativity, whose aim is the economic strengthening of the country
and the protection of the identity culture.
These forms of corporatization of national economies prove that, far from

living in a postnational age (as many would like), we rather live in an age,
in which national identities are re-enforced through various strategies,
including the patrimonialization and renationalization of values, products
and services through the sub-contracting of private lobbies to manage and
render national resources more efficient. In other words, it is a double
movement with the economization of the cultural on the one side, and the
culturalization of the economy on the other.
252
A few questions need to be addressed if we take into account that not only
the production of identity but also identity itself are intangible assets, sub-
ject to being turned into patrimony by the state and alienated through sub-
contracts with specialized agencies in charge of positioning a nation’s iden-
tity brand within a market. How can we go about evaluating the kind of
social corporate responsibility that should go hand in hand with the cre-
ation of a Country Brand? Who are the real clients of a country brand?
Who should be the beneficiaries? What role should the state play when
sub-contracting an agency to produce an isologotype whose objective is to
substitute the identity values of a culture with the corporate symbols of a
national company? Why is the responsibility of the creation of identity
related products delegated to the corporate interests of strategic sectors in
advertising, without having this ‘national’ project looked after and regulat-
ed by ‘specialized’ agents, who have been ‘legitimized’ by the state itself to
generate identity narratives? What interests are served when the ‘creative’
of the national identity is indisputably required to be a specialist in the
international market, a manager of the architecture of the advertising
image or a strategist for the positioning of the cultural economy, and not a
specialist in identity anthropology, a semiologist of the social subject or a
critic of the aesthetic representations of the collective subjectivity?
Perhaps Carlos Carpintero’s words should be considered when he states that:
A brand can condense multiple behaviors, depending on the relation that the sign
establishes with its object. It is in this manner that our brand will come into
contact with multiple layers of sense, rather than with multiple meanings. It is
therefore important to study the structure of these layers prior to embarking on
a project of institutional graphic identity. [...] Our work will truly benefit if
we are able to track down the common spaces, the imaginary, the symbology, the
way in which the discourses are structured. Since we, as graphic designers, can
work within such diverse fields as a chemical plant or a university, we have to
know the way in which reality is constructed in each activity, in order to arrive
at good results. If we don’t, our view will be that of a tourist, and our identi-
ty system will not be much more than a set of souvenirs.21
21. Carlos Carpintero, ‘Identidad Gráfica Institucional’ [Institutional Graphic Identity], online bulletin of the Unión de
Diseñadores Gráficos de Buenos Aires, 13 November 2005, n. 13 http://www.udgba.com.ar/institucional/newsletter/
0511newsletter13.htm
It is very probable that the humanities –insofar as they are disciplines that
pretend to build values that are both integral and integrated in the social
reality– have a major responsibility in this situation. It is obvious that they
do not have the ‘creative capacity’ nor are they up to meeting the most
urgent and immediate necessities, which both the cultural economy and
the culturalization of the economy generate. We can therefore define and
describe the (graphic) and strategic container of the MéXICO brand, what
we cannot do is decipher what its content is, what is it that comprises it and
how should the financial benefits that are generated by this symbolic capi-
tal of the state be shared.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
Nation Brand / Chile
Cristián Gómez Moya1
All ways surprising

‘It’s the happy version of the garden of Eden’
5th verse of the Chilean national anthem
In the market of identities, Latin American coun-

tries are emerging as new clients who ‘need’ to
construct and resignify their identity through the
image of a fictitious and deterritorialised2 agency
such as the Nation Brand.
From the perspective of a critique of the instru-

mentalisation of aesthetics, it seems relevant to
think of this perceptual and abstract universe
which provides moments of reflection on the
appropriation of cognitive capital and the creation
of symbolic goods: on the one hand, the public
administration’s need to represent this ‘added
value’, and the way it has been commissioning its
own projects of national interest to new creative
1. Cristián Gómez Moya is a visual artist, visual culture researcher and lecturer at the Chile University.
2. Deterritorialisation, in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari proposed, operates here as a movement that is particularly
relevant within sign systems. Passing through circularity and leading towards the infinite, the sign will only refer to the
sign itself and not to the the state of the things it designates. As the authors point out: ‘the signifying regime undoub-
tedly reaches a high level of deterritorialisation; but since it carries out at the same time an entire system of reterrito-
rialisations in the signification, within the signifier, it blocks the line of flight and only allows a negative deterritorialisa-
tion to subsist’. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia,Continuum, 2004.
[ Mil mesetas. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia, Pre-textos, Valencia, 1997. p. 517]
CRISTIÁN GÓMEZ MOYA 257
lobbies3 through collusive public tenders between the state, the government
and private companies, and on the other hand, the promise of ‘otherness’
in an aesthetic experience conceived through the lure of local innovation
which aspires to become universal desire.
Rhetorical Administration of Added Value
The pro-Latin American geopolitical scenario of these past years has pro-
moted a relationship of convenience where symbolic goods are concerned,
with the cliché of identity as one of its producers of global otherness, and
branding methodologies as one of its ideological bridges. In Chile’s case (a
Latin American country with the social economy of an emerging market,
constructed thanks to a neo-liberal inheritance strengthened by the priva-
tizing arrogance of the ‘Chicago- boys’ in the early eighties), its image and
its politics of communication have reproduced a daring branding model
which however copies the standard norm of global dynamics, with the
intention of presenting the image of a trustworthy country with renewed
stability and a commercial perspective which looks to fulfil the internation-
al market’s expectations. This event, of a political-normative nature4, has
been consolidating itself through an agile and intense history regarding the
start-up of spectacular communicational mechanisms based on experience
as ‘added value’.
In 1992, hardly three years after the end of the military dictatorship, Chile
responded enthusiastically to the Universal Exhibition of Seville by build-
3. The geopolitical stage of developed countries has favoured the appearance of these new hybridisations of globalised
creative products of innovation, art, design and marketing, linked to the so called creative class, characterised by its affinity
with the artistic, the different and the sensitive. It is also what has been forming against the drift of professional careers,
as a movement towards new entrpeneurial and talented subjects connected to new wired lifestyles. See Fernando Flores
and John Gray, El espíritu emprendedor y la vida wired: el trabajo en el ocaso de las carreras. This document is available digitally
on www.fernandoflores.cl/blog
4. In this case normativity is used directly in relation to the idea of performativity provided by John Austin’s theory of speech acts,
as far as language and action are concerned, but these are reconsidered from the political meaning of a language that
has the power to produce norms, according to Judith Butler. Around this detour, some other recent and no less sugges-
tive perspectives also present themselves. For example, the idea of performative force developed by George Yúdice, who
argues that ‘the subject and society are connected by performative forces that operate, on the one hand, to restrain or
make the various differences or interpellations that make up and singularise the subject, converge, and on the other hand,
to rearticulate the order of what is social, in a broader sense.’ See George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture
in the Global Era, Duke University Press, 2004 [El recurso de la cultura. Usos de la cultura en la era global, Gedisa, Barcelona, 2002,
p. 47]. On the other hand, we should also think about the political aspect of the statement as a performative visuality beyond
words, as Paolo Virno insinuates: ‘To those who observe that the material sign guarantees the visibility of the invisible
semantic content forever, one should ask: ¿what authorises you to believe that this ‘invisible’ exists, before its actual visibili-
ty?’. See Paolo Virno, Cuando el verbo se hace carne. Lenguaje y naturaleza humana. Traficantes de sueños, Madrid, 2005, p. 140.
258
ing a fabulous pavilion out of national material –radiata pine wood–, to

host the usual display of identitary export products of design. Not satisfied
with this they also planned and carried out the transportation of an aston-
ishing and unexpected object: an iceberg.
The mere idea was ‘surprising’. This ice floe, directly extracted from the
Antarctic, turned out to be Chile’s best image before the international gaze
which met at the great showcase fair, and which, furthermore, commemo-
rated the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Spaniards on the
American continent. Clearly, the package caused a series of logistical diffi-
culties, and provoked a passionate controversy within political, cultural and
economic power circles. The social field was not particularly influential in
this project of national character, since, as always, it turned out to be a
demonstration more typical of a popular din than of a real understanding
of the actual demands that governability and its negotiation mechanisms
for State transcendence should face. Regardless of the controversies that
arose, everyone was able to climb onto the carriage of triumph: the tri-
umph of being looked at.5
This budding but at the same time monumental gesture of the exploitation
of geographical and cultural patrimony, was beginning to pave the way for
the development of a real nation image. The question would turn out to
be particularly stimulating leading up to the ‘concertacionista’6 project
–triumphant political paradigm of the past 17 years of social-democratic
government–, aware of the real dimension of the cultural change that was
starting to appear in Chile.7 With the memory of that challenge still fresh,
5. Beyond expecting to unravel the meanings attributed to the construction-nation project from an anachronistic historicist
zeal, the event in question is only useful in order to tackle the question of how the field of aesthetic and creative visuality
has been weaving into political strategies, thus designing a flexible and systemic fabric. Because of this, I will only hint at
the framework of the visual as a political strategy in a specific transitional situation, and its model of visibility within cul
tural capital’s fairground spectacle; at how the museistic aspect is replaced by the heroic path to reach the global scene,
decontextualised by the stands; at the exercise of intervention applied to a site context that has been previously ideologised;
and he recuperation of nature resignified in apolitical symbols with mystical connotations for the encounter with users of
high culture. This should be understood within the context of a post-dictatorship Chile where cultural criticism has also
nourished its own productive necessities to the rhythm of a political transition which rapidly institutionalised the artworks
and counter-discourses of alternative culture through new progressive scenes, renewed by the university, the museum and
by cutural activity. For a critical study of the Chilean political and cultural transition see Nelly Richard, Residuos y metá
foras, Ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la Transición, Santiago de Chile, Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1998 and Tomás
Moulian, Chile actual: Anatomía de un mito, Ediciones LOM, Santiago de Chile, 1998.
6. Coalition of a number of political parties that originally was formed in order to confront Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship,
now it still remains operative. [Eds Note].
7. The Concertación government’s cultural politics have generated confusion due to their thinking of an economy of culture
thirteen years later, a new opportunity to consolidate Chile’s image before

the international markets sprung forth, although under a stamp of com-
mercial identity applicable to export products, but under the protection of
branding strategies that, with their battery of perceptual and persuasive
procedures, manage to make an identity compete in a market of flows of
distinction.
In 2004, by way of public tender, the international company Interbrand

(founded in 1974, with more than 40 offices throughout 25 different coun-
tries) was initially awarded 150,000 US dollars (the overall project was
assigned 25,000,000 US dollars) for the design of the communication strat-
egy for the Chile Nation Brand. 60% of the first stage of the project was
financed by the public sector (divided equally amongst the governmental
agency ProChile, the Foreign Investment Committee-CIE, and the
Corporation for the Promotion of Production-CORFO), and the remain-
ing 40% was provided by the private sector. This agreement was achieved
through a rigorous Nation Brand Extended Committee, which was made
up of the same organisations from the private and public sectors (ProChile,
CIE, CORFO, Sernatur, Asosex, Sofofa, the National Chamber of Commerce, Asexma,
the Corporation for the Promotion of Tourism, the Chamber of Commerce of Santiago,
Wines of Chile, SalmonChile, Fedefruta, ChileAlimentos, Sonapesca, the Poultry
Producers Association and the Pork Producers’ Association), all of which decided to
have, as a main aim, the creation of a Nation Brand, which arose, accord-
ing to ProChile’s director Hugo Lavados8 from ‘the need to strengthen the
different promotional activities which are being carried out abroad
through a single, consistent image that is coherent with our identity’,
although he also rushed to cover his back by warning, with his experience
gained from administrating public resources, that ‘the image of a nation
cannot only be constructed through purchased communication, attractive
as a process that doesn’t go any further than the mere opening up of access to cultural goods. José Joaquín Brunner,
ex minister in Eduardo Frei’s government of 1994 and director of the Education program of Fundación Chile, has generated
market alignments on education and on the management of symbolic capital in Latin America, warning: ‘In fact,
what is taking place is a complex process of differential appropriation and use of the different forms of access to culture
and to cultural goods, of ways of producing symbolic classifications, limits and hierarchies –a new cultural order– in
a phase of rapid extension of the capitals that make participating in culture possible.’ José Joaquín Brunner, Chile:
ecología social del cambio cultural, Santiago de Chile, 2005. This document is available in:
http://mt.educarchile.cl/mt/jjbrunner/archives/2005
8. Extracts from ProChile’s presentation on its strategies, presented by its director, Hugo Lavados, and included in the do-
cument Diseño de estrategia Imagen de Marca Chile, 2005. The complete document is available in:
http://www.prochile.cl/noticias/noticia.php?sec=5915
260
logos and ingenious phrases. A nation image is not an isotype or a slogan.

A nation image is not invented; it is extracted from one’s own identity’.
In order to do that, it was necessary to apply the rules of insight, that is to

say, to understand how the nation-state was perceived at an internal level,
as well as by the external audiences that it intended to influence. At the
same time, it was necessary to study other cases, and the advantages of
competing countries; in short, a classic market study for branding adverti-
sing, but let’s say that under a fundamental condition, inherent in its
methodology : that it should add value.
Of course, they already knew of the complexity of the matter. In the words
of Interbrand Chile’s Executive Director: ‘The nation brand is not a logo, an
advertising campaign or a touristic flyer and video. It is the set of percep-
tions, positive associations and emotional bonds that external and internal
audiences develop about the country through a chain of experiences gath-
ered through time. Every country has an image, but the important thing is
to evolve towards something more powerful, something that will add value
to public, institutional and economic efforts, and, in general, to all politi-
cal, economic and cultural activities where Chile’s identity is involved.’9 In
congruence with this, Interbrand developed a matrix of key messages to sus-
tain these concepts, from which the lines directed at different users would
be designed: tourists, buyers and distributors of Chilean products, and
investors. According to ProChile’s reports, this would be carried out through
a coexistence model during a time in which the different institutions of the
country could develop their promotional activities following three strong
ideas that would be common to all:10
1. Overwhelming, varied and transparent landscape: Exuberant and var-

ied flora and fauna, which goes from the driest of deserts to the southern
glaciers, through green valleys and millennial forests; across the width of
the country, it goes from the majestic Andes mountain range to the abrupt
beaches of the Pacific.
2. Warm, efficient, and entrepreneurial people: Kind, welcoming, friendly
and warm people, who are at the same time efficient, responsible, hard
9. Contents from the presentation of the report Interbrand Imagen País: Chile Sorprende,that Luis Hernán Bustos, Interbrand
Chile’s executive director, carried out during the presentation of the Chile Nation Brand. The complete information
is available in: http://www.prochile.cl/noticias/noticia.php?sec=5915
10. Op. cit. Hugo Lavados, ProChile.
working and entrepreneurial; good professionals, qualified technicians and

capable workers who value their family and aspire to a good standard of
living; tradition and modernity, warmth and efficiency.
3. A stable country, open to the world, with institutions that work well and
keep their promises: A consolidated democratic system, a solid and dynamic
economy, a sophisticated and competitive financial system; clear rules of
the game and a far reaching tradition of respect for the law, where institu-
tions work well. A small, close, country, integrated with the world, with top
communications, technology and infrastructures. Its modernity, connec-
tion to all markets and its free trade treaties make it an active agent within
the world scene.
At present, the ‘sensible perception’ has turned out to be very useful to jus-
tify the common sense of a social group that has to think about its own
production of value, its differentiating plus. It is often argued that there is a
floating perception of the country abroad, which urgently needs to be con-
trolled in order to protect symbolic goods, which will only be made produc-
tive once this perception is controlled and systematised. In this way the co-
rresponding benefits can be obtained, in terms of a real identity, based on
reality as something unique, distinctive and differentiating which ‘adds
value’ but which, deep down, gives sense to the promotion of exports,
tourism and foreign investment.
In more precise terms, the concept of ‘added value’ has been typical of the
economy, as it is applied to obtain the final price of production, which is
why added value is generally calculated as tax. On the other hand, Marxist
theory of added value considered that the time factor constituted a key
variable for the reproduction of labour.11 Contrary to this, some lighter, or
simply more opportunistic versions of the capitalist and neo-liberal econo-
my have appropriated this attribute of economic functionality, turning
‘added value’ into a deformed but very convenient cliché for the encou-
11. In terms of technical specificity, we must understand added value as the difference between the total value of the
goods produced by a company, and the value of the sum total of what it uses in order to produce them. In the Marxist
version of the matter, added value was conceived through a theory of value which consisted in the quantity of labour
needed socially to produce the good, the time of work taken for the production and reproduction of the good being
of extreme importance, in this case the good being the workforce. From this it was understood that from an excess
of time destined to the reproduction of labour, a difference was brought about, which was understood as surplus
value, finally translated into a superstructure capable of capitalising value and of representing conscience through
diverse cultural activities. See Karl Marx, ‘Part V: the production of absolute and relative surplus-value’, The
Capital, Volume 1, Ofxford University Press, 1999.
262
ragement of the consumption of a product or service that supposedly pos-

sesses an additional attribute, but that can actually be bought for the same
price as the competition, and which therefore has something more. In this way,
from a marketing point of view, the value comes from the difference
between the benefits obtained by the client from the product, and the price
that he/she pays for it. In this way, the more difference he/she obtains, the
greater value the products possess, even if the price of sale remains unal-
terable. In this abstract background, specialised knowledge and creativity
play a key role when giving merchandise ‘added value’, in that their main
function is the construction of a sense of value.
International agencies such as Interbrand ‘s horizon of value is coherent with

the latter: ‘Chile is a part of Latin America, but Chile is different. There is
a tendency to situate Chile within the Latin-American context, associating
it by default with the negative aspects of the continent. Yet lately, some
notion that Chile is different to ‘the rest’ has permeated’.12 When put in
this way, with the simplicity of the word and the traces of a gallant com-
pliment from the most flattering of suitors, the country in question man-
ages to get rid of all that underdeveloped and populist residue belonging
to a negative imagery of what is Latin American, but on the other hand,
dives into the charming denseness of the patrimonial myth to emerge as
another country, positively different to the rest, only comparable to its own
exuberant natural landscape.
12. Luis Hernán Bustos, Interbrand Chile. The discourses that incite the new entrepreneurial lobbies to practice a hyperbolic
identitary paradox based on the trans-economic challenge go along these lines. In this way, for example, in a recent inter-
national meeting which took place in Santiago de Chile, Juan Capello, spokesman and businessman and the meeting’s
main speaker, posed the following question: ‘Chile has not transmitted a defined identity of its values to the United States,
and has not detached itself from Latin America... Chile has practically everything it needs to establish itself firmly in the
eyes of the informed US consumer, but if it wants to reach him/her, it must do so with a direct, innovative message that
is to be repeated thousands of times.’ Branding Chile: ¿can we?, meeting organised by the Friends of the Catholic University in
Chile, Inc. Corporation and the Dirección de Desarrollo de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. The friends make up a non pro-
fit organisation whose aim is to contribute to the placement of the Catholic University as a centre of international pres-
tige, a cornerstone of Chilean development, and at the head of progress in Latin America. With its headquarters in New
York and Boston, its board of directors is made up by Sava Thomas, associate of a New York law firm; Arnoldo Hax,
professor at Massachussets Institute of Technology, Juan Capello, president and partner of Hill and Knowlton Latin America, among
other academic and business personalities. Source: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
The patrimonialisation of the surprising
Indeed, to think of a nation brand is not only to think of the design of a

logo, it is also to think of a superstructure that is constructed from the par-
adigm of the myth but which also uses logos as a reasonable justification. In
the anteroom of anthropological structuralism, myths were defined as
explanations for incomprehensible rites. These rites, which worked as a
social representation, were then explained through myths that allowed for
the justification of historical circumstances for what is social. Nowadays
the myth continues to supply a general representation of reality and of cir-
cumstances. In this way, individual subjectivity is directed towards the inte-
rior of a collective system.
Cultural branding is based on myth13 and is a part of the ‘rites of social

appearance’ which, in the context of occidental modernity, work as signi-
fiers in themselves. They have a historical condition, which is what regu-
lates mythical language. In this process, the mechanisms developed to con-
struct the Chile Nation Brand have been made up from a contingent
urgency to obtain a global openness, belonging, by the way, to the histori-
cal field of the myth especially strengthened by the phenomena of aesthet-
ic experience. On the understanding that global brands aim to create new
spaces parting from flows of distinction, which means creating differences
that make the difference, Chile presents its own phenomenological, intan-
gible and immanent slogan: Chile, always surprising.
This mythical statement, which obviously doesn’t explain the reasons for
the promotion of an emerging economy’s symbolic capital, is the signifier
that ‘informs and imposes’, it is the result of natural circumstances hidden
behind a false apolitical entity –articulated through ‘de-politicised speech’,
in Roland Barthes’ words- which only resolves, in the lowest and most con-
venient way, the now classic moral principle of consensus. In Interbrand’s
words: ‘There was a consensus in that what best represents Chile is its
capacity to surprise foreigners, to surpass every expectation, in all sorts of
ways, always’. In this way, the geopolitics of knowledge in a jaguarised
13. To be more precise, myth is used here in terms of its structure of signifiers, going back to the semioclast model proposed
by Roland Barthes. The language of myths consists of a usually overcodified metalanguage applied to communication and
to the persuasion of the masses. According to the author, it ‘carries out a double function: it designates and it notifies,
it informs and it imposes’. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Vintage 1993 [Mitologías, Siglo XXI, España, 2005, p.208
(primera edición en francés, Mythologies, Éditions du Seuil, 1957)].
264
nation (comparative denomination with emerging South Asian economies

in the 90s) such as Chile aren’t separated from a ‘mythical language’ to
carry out their commercial project, but rather confirm it by repeating the
norm and recurring to the post-colonial practice of cultural branding.
Consequently, it is understandable that its strategies should operate with a
sense of prescriptive innovation enlisted strongly in the codes of the global-
local, and prey to one of its dogmas par excellence: to take part in internation-
al markets by camouflaging themselves with their communication strate-
gies, but with the demand, at the same time, of reaching an identitary
essentialism; ‘the imperative of evolving towards something unique, dis-
tinctive and differentiating’, in ProChile’s words.
The prescriptive value of this statement works with performative force, as it

functions via the reproductive approximation of normative models, doesn’t
take notice of the ‘self-management’ of historical conditions, and isn’t
reflexive before the mechanisms of coercion imposed by a hegemonic
society. In its most aesthetic aspect, the communicational agencies of local
reproduction construct an aesthetic expectation to exalt the abstract and
symbolic universe of an event which has patrimonialised surprise as long as
they can be seen; ‘This capacity to surprise has to do with the sensations,
emotions and perceptions that, according to the studies we carried out, are
provoked in tourists, buyers and consumers of Chilean products and people
from the business world by the nation’s attributes.’14 Emotional and intangi-
ble aspects are represented, in this case, by a word that is half way between
aesthetic practices and free market economics: surprise. This, defined as an
unexpected or strange event, also works in its other, different but implicit
sense: the act of discovering what the other conceals.
What is thus presented is the participation of an identitary impostor who

dresses up as one who belongs to the global scene15, but who manages, in
this game of impostures and conveniences, to turn surprise into a patrimo-
nial experience of what is local (we already know that patrimony is cons-
14. Hugo lavados, director of ProChile. Interview and press release form the communications department Direcon-ProChile,
2005, in http://www.prochile.cl/noticias/noticia.php?sec=561
15. In fact, Chilean politics’ recent historical heritage has also been imbued with the military logic of surprise. A long
transition period has been needed to slowly rediscover its immoral mechanisms of political and cultural repression.
In this sense, that is, in the sense of historical interpretation, the nation-state endorses a model of reproducibility which
repeats the norms inherited from former regimes, and in this way, by homogenising the social body, negotiates at the
table where free trade treaties are decided upon. with the guarantee of neoliberalism’s economic tradition. See Tomás
Moulian, Chile actual: Anatomía de un mito, Ediciones LOM, Santiago de Chile, 1998.
tructed from an assumption inherited through historic value, the protection

and the handling of knowledge, which is why it is urgent to think critically,
on the one hand, about what is inherited, and on the other, about the value
of cultural products that emerge from social interaction, in the touch with
social and collective recognition, but always within a market in which the
cultural product comes from its social construction). In this aesthetic expe-
rience, the only patrimony of consensus is recovered: its exuberant nature,
which is however instantly depatrimonialised when it offers itself up for the
opinion of the external market, which measures the viability of a nation-
state with the weight of its symbolic merchandise dressed up as patrimoni-
al difference.
‘Chile sorprende, siempre’ (in its local version), functions in relation to extreme
otherness in that it promises to surprise the other, but not itself. The coun-
try insists on surprising another entity that is represented as an exquisite
client with whom something more is to be negotiated, and in this signify-
ing becoming ‘expands’ its own area of power before the legitimating mar-
kets of an identitary patrimony. In this way, a curious ontology of brand-
ing is imposed, which forces the nation to essentialise itself, and to think of
itself as a spectacular brand, always. The metalanguage of myth operates
in this way. The signifying form does not suppress historical sense; it sim-
ply ‘impoverishes’ it.
Under these social conditions –unfailingly associated with the creation,

production, distribution and consumption of cultural capital– surprise no
longer comes out of the invocation of an act of visual spectacle which
makes up an aesthetic experience far from reality, but rather ‘appears’ as a
‘sensitive absence’ concealed by the harmonious relation of a new cultu-
ral order: that of the economic management of the creative lobbies and
symbolic capital of the nation-state.
ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
Sustaining Contact.
Cristina Vega Solís1
Communicative Action
in Home Attention
Services
2
In the tertiarised society network, social relations

are at the centre of productive processes. The
object produced is no longer an object; it is social
life itself. The services for people that are provided by
nurses, call centre operators, shop assistants, social
workers3, in short, all those who attend the public,
share this distinctive characteristic: they generate a
communicative flow. This exchange, no matter
how brief, attempts to improve or to satisfy a neces-
sity. It can also help to create one. In some cases,
interaction later leads to a service or purchase –the
repair of a breakdown, the purchase of a dress, the
treatment of a wound, the acceptance into a reha-
1. Cristina Vega Solís is a researcher, lecturer, feminist activist and member of the Precarias a la Deriva and Eskalera
Karakola projects.
2. I would like to thank Paulina Jiménez and Maggie Schmitt for their comments and contributions to this text. The testi-
monies that I present here are from the native and immigrant carers in the Services of Home Attention in the province
of Barcelona, presented in ‘Subjetividades en tránsito en los servicios de atención y cuidado. Aproximaciones desde el feminismo’(Subjectivities
in transit in the care and attention services, from a feminist point of view), Financed by the Council of Barcelona and completed in
2006.
3. Translator’s note: Here, and in the rest of the text, the gender of the workers mentioned is feminine in the original text.
CRISTINA VEGA SOLÍS 269
bilitation centre–, in others, none of this happens. Simply to speak for the
sake of speaking –to listen attentively, to show empathy, to understand, to
advise, to direct, to analyse experience, to dramatise it, to interrogate it, to
curse it, etc.– is the aim of the service. In any case, as happens with the
golden telephone4, words establish a bond, a community even, although
not everyone agrees on how to define its nature.
This phenomenon of the growth of services of attention to people has

many sides to it. One is its capacity to act as a substitute for relations that
have dissolved or weakened, generating at the same time others that are
more fragile and without a local base, in an environment of sustained co-
presence5. Many of these listening services aimed at resolving everyday
problems were carried out, and still are, by women in families. Though
intermittently or at a distance, others formed, and form part of, the state
welfare network and the private companies and NGO’s which function,
thanks to subsidies, as outsourced companies for the state itself (Torns,
1997; Lallement, 2000; Comas d’Argemir, 2000; Daly, 2003). Attention, at
this point, turns into a useful tool to channel «personalised» assistance.6
There are those who have always purchased these and other more spe-
cialised services as part of a luxury pack; corporal therapies and relaxing
holidays, which are nowadays popularised by creating different classes of
users of personal services. Other services are even carried out by the mass
media. Finally, some are in the hands of people from the formal or infor-
mal economy –sexual services and/or care– who fulfil this role of listening,
attending, advising, etc. without their activity being fully recognised
(Monteros and Vega, 2004 and Agustín, 2005)7. Relatives cannot always
4. Translator’s note: The golden telephone is a free phone line that attends people who are lonely and simply need some
one to talk to.
5. It is also important to emphasize the progressive psychologization of individuals, a displacement of external social codes of
liberal nineteenth-century ethics –fundamentally independence and self control–, reformulated as internal or psycholo-
gical. Freud’s theories played a determining role in this. As Zaretsky explains (2001), in pre-modern societies the interior
world was equivalent to the dominating cultural symbolic world. Freud’s idea, on the contrary, was that symbols, for which
modern men and women lived, were personal and idiosyncratic. Mass culture, (in whose background psichotherapy
appeared) praises the new possibilities of subjectivity, plurality and personal freedom before the family. Paradoxically, the
recovery of this liberating potential has come via the overproduction of subjectivity through consumption.
6. To attend is not to assist, but it is an important component of this activity, which furthermore, is related with other
meanings such as to support, accompany (follow-up) or help. If we look at the definition in the Seco, Andrés y Ramos,
Spanish dictionary we find the following meanings: «prepare oneself to receive (something) physically and mentally»,
take care of [someone; a person or thing that is under their responsibility], to take care of that which [someone needs
to satisfy them], to accept [petitions, advice or arguments of someone], replying favourably to them»
7. Sassen (2003) speaks, in this sense, of «homes without wives» and of the labour niches that this phenomenon generates
in global cities; niches that are being filled by immigrant women in unprotected situations.
270
have the capacity, want to, or know how to help us, and our friends are
busy and their availability depends on what is left over, their free time. We
almost always turn to a combination of things to find consolation.
The importance of the front-office, associated with this phenomenon of

attention, affects other areas that are different from personal services. The
increase of these sectors within companies due to three main elements of
flexible specialization: (1) the adjustment between production and consumption
(the famous just in time) and the communicative control of work that this
requires, (2) the proliferation of intangible products (finance and insurance,
but also culture, art and entertainment) that require intense connectivity
and (3) the importance of «greasing» and of loyalty to companies, to work-
ers, and consumers in a context of strong competition. Information technol-
ogy and new forms of work management –networked enterprises– has
made this process in which interactivity becomes a fundamental piece
viable. Today, the communicative production mode (Marazzi, 2003) runs
through many fields, amongst which the immaterial activity of the produc-
ers of signs within different levels of the cultural industries stand out. In this
essay we would like to present an introduction to a different field, which is
less clear but equally involved in the construction of imagery and bonds:
communication in terms of personal attention in care services. In the words
of Teresa Torn (1997), those «other services» linked to the care of people.
It must be noted that this field brings diverse services together which are not
equivalent either in their importance to social life nor in the resources need-
ed (communicative or of any other type) for their satisfaction, nor in what is
referred to as their symbolic value. It is not the same to take care of a health
or emotional problem that will end in treatment, as to attend to other mat-
ters such as an error in an order or a breakdown on a road, which can be
resolved with a single telephone call. Neither is it the same to pay attention
to someone in order to sell, even if the sale implies the construction of a
shared world, of imagery of desire and of the identity created from this rela-
tion, as to pay attention to calm; to advise. It is probable, nevertheless, that
all these modalities need continuity through time. Even incidents, to use tele-
phone operators’ jargon, conceal more important necessities. Maintaining
contact is important, although this can be modulated and measured out in
different ways. It is also possible that they may share cultural codes, anticipa-
tions of what can be expected from the relations. In personal services, these
are asymmetric. A salary pays for kindness, appearance, information and
support. But the activity leaves marks which give continuity to the bond, as
in the economy of love (Lewandowska and Cummings, 2004). Money, as

opposed to gift, does not totally cancel out the social aspects of the exchange.
For those who don’t want to waste time and who have the money, person-
alised attention is a sign of distinction that when needed can turn into
accomplished well-being, because there are times when well-being is
obtained through talking –talking a lot and for a long time–, but on the
majority of occasions, well-being is related to processes which normally
involve more people and actions, either professional or amateur, that can-
not be achieved at a distance, that need one on one contact that is commit-
ted, that takes responsibility, that keeps its word... This clearly involves
bringing to the front line the materiality of attention.
Another side of this phenomenon has to do with the latter; with the con-
tent and the context in which attention is produced. It is obvious that atten-
tion is highly coded. It has its keywords, its familiar gestures, its learned
scripts. Today, nobody can deceive themselves in this respect. The reifica-
tion of attention, as Guattari (1994) warned, has become commonplace.
The mass media has behaved as a socialising agent, teaching on the basis
of repetition, but also of innovation and participation, the conditions of
validity of these acts of courteous speech which hardly communicate any-
thing, but which capture and hold our attention.
But, if this is so, and attention is no more than talk for its own sake, if it does
not create bonds, but rather postpones them indefinitely, if it doesn’t pro-
duce lasting well-being but merely fleeting satisfaction, if it is hyper coded
and does not express the singularity of contact, then what is the sequence
that makes a communicative continuity possible; a full communicative
action or simply a communicative action that is, in itself, instrumental but
that places us before others in a complete way and not as a replacement?
There are two problems implicit in this question: one, to determine the ‘raw
material’ of attention (taking into account the specific context of services)
and two, to identify the tension between attention and codification.
These questions are enormous, so I will try to examine them from the spe-
cific experience of salaried carers, and therefore «experts» in attention.8 We
8. I am aware of the fact that a complete elaboration of this inter-subjective dynamic would have to incorporate those
who are attended: those who pay attention and those who receive it, positions that in the interaction of service are put
into play with different contents.
272
are dealing with a type of communication that is not generally mediated by

technology, although home attention is turning more and more towards that
of phone assistance. It is necessary to speak, nevertheless, of institutional
and market mediation, given that the administration (social or medical serv-
ices) and the companies are the ones involved in the conception of services
and, to a great degree, of their management. I am not going to deal with
questions related to the asymmetry of services derived from the fragility of
rights, working conditions, or salary; with the limitations that women must
face if they want to become «entrepreneurs» in care services. These ques-
tions appear, whether we want them to or not, when we speak of quality. I
prefer to talk of the characteristics of attention, but allow me for the
moment to leave these in the background of the matter9. My intention here
is to arrive at an approximation to family work –professionals of domiciliary
attention are denominated in this way– in its expressive aspects: the creation
of languages and affective bonds in a framework that is not the family itself
but is permeated by references that belong to it.
These personal services are defined by three terms. The first is attention, a
concept that evokes meanings that are different from those of care10. The
second is domicile, a neutral term different from others of common use
that are marked by the experience of inhabited places such as home or
even domestic space. Finally, we find the family, present through the envi-
ronment and the object of the production of work, in the professional cat-
egory of those who lend these services.
We will focus this chapter on the subject of attention, which is always linked
to the home and the feminine connotations of family. From the psychology
9. In Spanish, the word «quality» has two meanings: quality as good, bad, poor standards and quality as the properties
or attributes, in this case of a relationship that do not only stand in a good/bad opposition.
10. Precarias a la deriva (2005) introduces here a distinction between three categories: attention, which alludes to the com-
municative aspects of the relation, task, that refers to the «material» aspects, physical contact and care, which is the result
of the articulation of the previous dimensions. Developing this formulation a little further you could separate attention
and tasks to find instances of attention without tasks and tasks without attention. In a historic dimension you could say
that Fordism placed emphasis on the task, that is, assistance at work, without elaborating too much on attention (where
normalization and standarization takes place), while nowadays what is relegated is the task. In any case, tasks and atten-
tion appear almost always connected. An attention without tasks can exist, however it is difficult to imagine a physical
action –hygiene, a mediation, etc.– without the use of language. Perhaps where this distinction is most operative is in the
exchanges in the mass media and in call centres, although cyberfeminist literature would add interesting nuances to this
debate about the supposed bodylessness of these contacts. When co-presence exists, when the task implicates and affects
the body, attention in its expressive dimensions, affections, etc. is always present, although, evidently, not always in the
same way. In this sense, perhaps the most relevant questions refer not so much to the delimitation of one from the other
but to the diverse «cultures of attention», connected to the different «qualities» they involved.
of perception and attention, the latter is looked upon as the capacity to con-
centrate psychic activity, that is to say, thought, on a particular object. It is an
aspect of perception where the subject is placed in the most adequate situa-
tion to best perceive a particular stimulus11. Attention would then be a cen-
tral mechanism of limited capacity whose main function would be to control
and orientate the conscious activity of the body with a specific aim. There are
three modes of attention: The posterior attention network, where attention consti-
tutes a mechanism of selection of relevant information coming from the
immediate environment. The anterior attention network, where attention is a
mechanism of cognitive control, that is to say, a voluntary act. And the vigi-
lance network, which works as an alarm mechanism, producing a strong ten-
dency towards external perception and inhibiting conscious attention.
Interest for the first mode, although also for the latter mode, underlies the
principles of the denominated attention economy, which place this disposi-
tion in contemporary socioeconomic relations. Attention, that is, the intensi-
fication of awareness in relation to an object, is, from this point of view,
scarce good. The economy, as we are repeatedly told, is founded on goods
that are scarce, or, we should say, on the unequal distribution of goods, based
on scarcity. According to Goldhaber, forerunner of the economy of atten-
tion, the genuinely valuable good is not information, but attention12. In a
society in which information circulates in abundance –through the paradigm
of the internet and the presence of advertising in all sorts of media and
channels- attention turns into something to be conquered and consolidated
as far as possible. Browsers and human beings in general socialise in this envi-
ronment of information excess coming from television, billboards, e-mail,
chats, weblogs, hyperlinks, etc. The excess of information is saturating and
makes choice impossible. Human beings also need the attention of others in
every phase of their lives. These are two views that Michael Goldhaber bases
on this need: scarcity, and consequently, the desire to capture attention. For
him, these are the principles of an economy that is radically different from
the market economy, with its classes, its forms of property and its power rela-
tions. At the present time, we are, according to him, in a transitional phase.
11. Although mid 50s psychology focused on behaviour, from then on interest for cognitive processes increased, and in
terms of attention, in the study of multiple and fragmented attention.
12. We remind you here that the informational paradigm, as G. Abril (1997) indicated, is now at its height thanks to the
implantation of electronic technology, the digital treatment of signals and the computer manipulation of signs. In it,
instrumental technical mediations sharpen the tendency towards a quantitative-statistical definition of knowledge
and communication.
274
There is no doubt that competition around attention is a fundamental part

of the capitalist economy. Attention, as Goldhaber explains, is not a unidi-
rectional process; a radio station that attracts a listener who in his/her turn
pays attention. Whoever attracts attention does so in order to implicate the
other parties, to make them accomplices and even co-participants, the way it
happens in any conversation where there is mutual respect between the
speakers. Attention is paid, received, even transferred. It is certainly created,
and is fundamental in the generation of customer and audience loyalty. The
activation of the receiver is essential in today’s work processes because any-
body can put into play his/her communicative capacity and can, instead of
taking the role of a passive audience, implicate themselves by looking for new
speakers that will attend to the strategic ends of those who promote this
movement. All of this is fairly well known. For Goldhaber, however, attention
as an alternative exchange mechanism appears because of the actual success,
indeed the excess of success, of the industrial-monetary economy: the abun-
dance of material goods gives way to a new movement of exchange and
competition around this new scarce good. Furthermore, when genuine atten-
tion is scarce, one has to conform oneself with illusory attention, based on a
false reciprocity, which often runs through the media. On the other hand, for
Goldhaber, he or she who has attention also has more possibilities for resolv-
ing the rest of his/her necessities, even for accumulating capital. In this
sense, the relation between the accumulation of attention and capital resem-
bles the process which started in the transition from the accumulation of
property and status in the lineage system of the Old Regime, to the capital-
ist bourgeoisie. Today, he who has attention can have access to goods and
money, but the contrary doesn’t occur so easily, according to Goldhaber.
Someone who aspires to obtain your attention cannot simply pay you money to
get it, he has to do something more, he has to be interesting, that is to say, he
has to offer you illusory attention in a similar proportion to that he would obtain
if you had been prepared to pay to listen to him. Money flows towards atten-
tion, however, you cannot say the same of the opposite.
For Godhaber, Bill Gates, for example, has obtained his fortune because he
has managed to maintain attention thanks to his personal fame and the
interest he arouses; ‘Although he has made his fortune in the business arena,
his fortune and that of others like him doesn’t reside so much in money and
shares in the stock exchange as much as in the attention he receives’.
Notwithstanding that Goldhaber insists on speaking of an alternative econ-
omy, it is evident that the economy of attention falls completely within capi-
talist valuation processes. In spite of what he maintains about the growing

equality between individuals and organisations on the internet, we are not
on the same level when it comes to giving or receiving attention. Attention
is raised by introducing semiotic processes, and these depend on commer-
cial exchanges. The cultural and entertainment industries put communica-
tive and cognitive instruments of attention at the service of business, rely-
ing on a human yearning: attention and reciprocity of attention13. Certainly
not everyone deals with this yearning in the same way or under the same
conditions. Goldhaber’s proposal reveals, in this sense, its neoclassic charac-
ter: the polarity scarcity vs abundance; its individualistic base, according to
which people hold and attract more or less attention in an autonomous way
depending on their personal charisma, and not on other reasons such as
social position and identity, –which isn’t always put into play in voluntary
exchanges–, independent of necessity, coercion, commercial or simply
power relations.
Neither are the needs for attention comparable: that which children need
from adults, that which is needed by old people who cannot move without
help, those who give or attend a conference or choose one or another
hyperlink. Attention, as we have already said, is a perceptive attitude that
operates through repetitive, new, or intense information flows, but it is also
an ethical attitude where affection intervenes. The other person is not a
mere object or stimulus, but, as carers explain, is an embodied subjectivity
that speaks from his/her condition as a vulnerable body.
We need to note that there are many old people that perhaps need and don’t have
attention. I see old people with their shopping bags and they can’t carry them,
if their daily load could be alleviated... It is necessary to pay attention.
To pay attention is to direct oneself towards the other and this implies a
communicative activity through which we construct a position from which
13. We have discussed this model of sexual work, where the customer buys the attention of the worker although in practice
gets a performance, the illusion of attention, of a reciprocal bond in a context of deficiency but also curiously of power.
The professional will attend the petitions of her customer by producing stimuli based on, as in publicity, the mani-
pulation of novelty, repetition and intensity. She will feel, also, involved, a fact that explains the limits that each worker
in the services of attention will have to place between their professional identity and the subject that goes home once
the job is done. Those that revindicate this salaried professional identity, frequently excessively leave aside the subjective
aspects that are constructed at the work. The particles, the details of communicative activity, expressive, that form a
body which transcends the activity. On the contrary, from the abolitionist positions, these subjective transfers and move-
ments happen in excess ‘to the subjects’, to the women, that ‘receive’ and ‘suffer’ passively. These details, it is neces-
sary to insist on this, can contribute to empowerment processes.
276
we can speak and affect. To notice, to come closer, to understand, to

empathise, to anticipate, to put into context, to support... these are the
ingredients of the relational work of personal attention. The majority of
these are common in some fields of attention such as nursing, which intro-
duces technical and emotional components or social and educational work,
combining learning, the communication of values and of emotional stim-
ulation. Nevertheless, in home care, where institutional intervention is not
fully consolidated, the culture of attention and its actual practice acquire a
more individual and generalist character: anyone can attend, which repre-
sents a problem in itself for the (professional) recognition of the carers. If
we also take into account the work done in the home we have a combina-
tion of high personal value.
Attention can be acquired with money thanks to the purchase and sale of
services. But this does not in any way mean to say that the service can be
reduced to an exchange strictly dependent on economic benefit. As Teresa
Torns (1997) points out, personal attention services are different from cul-
tural and entertainment ones; they require a lot of workforce and of a lot
of time to carry out, which makes the labour costs of these jobs in expan-
sion expensive. Also, these services compete with volunteers from religious
organisations and/or charity-assistance orgainsations. They are scarcely
visible or valued, since women have traditionally done this work as part of
their domestic family obligations. All this, together with the abilities and
experience required for this sort of work, Torns concludes, make it femi-
nised, and end up reinforcing social stratifications of gender and ethnicity.
Precariousness and feminisation are at the base of its relative profitability.
But the production of sources of value of personal services don’t only

depend on economic profit. They are not produced, as Antonio Negri
(1997) would say, only ‘from above’. Value, whether it is translated or not
into money, is also produced from other places, although these end up
depending on the understanding and performance frameworks of compa-
nies and public administration: cutting labour costs, increasing productivi-
ty in detriment of quality, introducing (‘quality’) controls in order to read-
just the service, etc. All those that do this work in the home coincide in
pointing out the value of the attention they give to old people. ‘I would like
–points out one employee– it to be valued more (she refers, in particular, to
salary and recognition) and that more attention be paid to old people from a social
and educational point of view’. And they evaluate attention above all through
the user’s replies, when asked about the changes produced by it.
What is it that you like the most about this job?
Well, when you see them laugh, when you see that they are well, when objec-
tives are met, when you see that people go out… I don’t know, and when they
open the door, see you and say ‘oh, you look nice!’ and they hold you and they
embrace you. It is a tremendous satisfaction. Their faces when they look at you
sometimes, that’s amazing, to leave and to say, ‘well, I feel great, I’ve helped
someone’ [laughter]
As Standing (2003) reminds us, we cannot forget that part of our identity
as human beings is to look after those around us, to contribute to their
development.
On the whole, the activity of attending others in their home is not limited
to simple tasks, it involves social competences whose improvement is only
obtained, like in other specialised jobs, through experience14. This idea can
be clearly seen in the testimonies of informal carers when they talk about
the breach that opens up between what they actually do and what their
employers see, value, and account for, which are the simple tasks (Monteros
and Vega, 2004). This breach reveals by default the most immaterial
aspects of their work: those concerning affection15. These women, the
majority of which are immigrants, are not explicitly hired for their emo-
tional work, which is already hardly recognised in professionals –‘this profile
no one knows about’, they frequently say when speaking of the social and
affective aspects their job is made up of–, and, in the case of those who
carry out informal care work, is not recognised at all. The act of picking
up the kids from school, cooking them dinner, feeding it to them, bathing
them, putting them to bed... actually becomes an intense exercise where
habits, styles, expressive tones, the act of listening, knowledge, and the
14. The universality of assistance, as Standing (2003) points out, the fact that to a certain extent everyone considers themselves
capable of helping another person, leaving aside illness, handicaps, or special situations of vulnerability, has contributed
to associative skills not being valued. For Standing, assistance work is a mixture of the following elements: time (real and
stock), effort, technique, social ability, emotional contribution, stress (fear of letting the assisted person down fear of fail-
ing in front of the supervisors and regulators.
15. And here we find a paradox, one recognized by professional carers, that between nurturing the relationship with the other
person without establishing limitations or to enact the procedures, even calculating the impact of the relationship, to
protect themselves or as a strategy to valorise their work when lacking this input. A social nurse expressed it the following
terms: ‘to work for the people or to work for the system’ (Precarias a la Deriva, 2004), while an informal worker explained
how while fighting for her rights she had to learn to ‘quantify’, measure the affective flow that emerges from the bound
as an extension from the love she feels for her kids, this is to say, as an ‘affective chain’ in the context of migration
(Monteros & Vega, 2003).
278
transmission of social and educational values, etc., intervene, in short:

socialisation and ethics within a context that is transformed through inter-
vention. Everything that makes up a mother or a father, especially the for-
mer, is outsourced or pseudo outsourced here in an employee. These intan-
gible elements, which in contrast with what is usually assumed, appear in
domestic work, where the needs, tastes and which are associated with the
idea of a ‘home’ are attended to, even through supporting its members,
turn the job as such into an abstraction. The job, in practice, is always
brimming, overflowing with the production of subjectivity.
It is therefore necessary to bring attention to two paradoxical questions.

The first is that attention is firmly embedded within capitalist valuation
processes. It represents an important bonus over information, but it is not
like the flat process –to lend, receive, give attention depending on the inter-
est that is awakened– Goldhaber describes, but rather something that oper-
ates on irregular ground, inhabited by social positions, that is, ‘objects’ sus-
ceptible of giving and receiving attention in an asymmetric manner and at
different prices, as well as varied attention formulae influenced by values
and moral sentiments. The second question is the fact that attention brings
in the aspect of affects, which enriches the work and brings to the table
questions related to the qualities and styles of attention which are nowa-
days favoured by personal services, after having subjected to scrutiny those
that arose and still arise within the heart of the family.
Family workers, however, do not describe themselves as care staff; ‘taking

care of people is just another, more maternal task included in the work done
in the home’. Not mixing work and emotion is part of the professional code,
although it often brings about dilemmas that the temporal limitations of the
service, of one or two hours of duration, ends up resolving. The obstruc-
tions on attention are not only caused by time limitations, but also by the
knowledge that the workers have, and are capable of putting to practice at
work; knowledge of old people’s biography, of their family and friends, of
the context in which their job is carried out. Work within the family is a job
that involves socio-affective knowledge; to know in order to affect.
Nevertheless, familiarity, as in the closeness to the other’s private life, has to
be elaborated in order to attend better, leading at times to distancing
processes and even to objectification. To keep a distance in order to come
close again. The management of emotions is complex. Leaving aside the ill-
nesses that are typical of old age –to take care of the dying–, given our per-
ception of old age and our culture of care, end up discouraging, in an
almost mechanical way, the assertive capacity of affective work, which is an

interweaving of technical, cognitive and affective aspects aimed at change.
The attention that family workers lend during home visits consists of the
communication of a disposition towards the other, almost always linked to
concrete tasks related to hygiene, medication, or outings and mobility in
general, the result of which is a subjective change which despite its limita-
tions –such as not working from a biographical revision–, alters life condi-
tions by creating moods, habits, and ways of being. Nevertheless, even if
continuous, attention in services is limited by time and intensity. Because of
this, workers use different strategies to transmit in the little time that they
dedicate daily or weekly to each person, the expressivity that has to go with
the specific tasks. The balance between disposition and tasks in proximity
services needs specific communicative and embodied strategies in order to
survive its own conditions, and not to die as a communicative action, a
potentiality directed towards the other’s well being (although not necessar-
ily with the other). But this brief approximation to the subject shows
glimpses of other enormous questions around embodied attention: what is
attention made of, as far as it is communicative work about/with the other,
when it is satisfactory for those that come close? And what is the nature of
the bonds that are originated during care services? Or how are the tensions
between codified and singularised attention resolved?
The singularity of aging, with, but especially without, illness, is permeated

by fear and loneliness. The crisis in care, and in particular in everything that
concerns family value systems, places us before a new scenario full of uncer-
tainties, where those who are employed in these services work, often with-
out specifying the perspectives from which these are dealt with, insofar as
public discussion forums about the culture of care don’t seem to worry any-
one beyond the amount of people who attend or the number of those
employed by care work. Nevertheless, workers’ dilemmas, especially of
those who find that work is measured by internal or external factors, nowa-
days reveal important aspects for future lives and deaths. They speak of the
professional and of the profane; of what is subject to conventions and of
what is personal; of autonomy and support; attention and care; family and
service. Family work is frequently used to contain these dilemmas that we
experience as fears and anxieties, despite of which, the impulse towards
action, towards the production of subjectivity inherent in the work, makes
facing the affective aspects of it inevitable. ‘It is the role of the carer to con-
nect, to understand, to know...’. If personal involvement produces stress,
280
‘pro-professionalism’ in terms of a strict and narrow translation of commu-

nication into code, entails a limitation, which ends up inhibiting personal
implication in the job the way it happens with call centre operators who
have to defend themselves with sales arguments, or social and health work-
ers who create an institutional barrier against those who turn to a service.
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política europea, Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva.
Marazzi, C. (2003), El sitio de los calcetines. El giro lingüístico de la economía y sus
efectos sobre la política, Madrid, Akal.
Monteros, S. y Vega, C. (2004), Servicio doméstico y de cuidados. La conciliación de
la vida familiar y laboral y la participación de las mujeres inmigrantes, informe inédito.
Negri, A. (1997) ‘Valor y afecto’ in http://www.nodo50.org/cdc/
valoryafecto.htm
Parella, S. (2003), Mujer, inmigrantes y trabajadora: la triple discriminación,
Barcelona, Anthropos.
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los cuidados, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, tesis doctoral.
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ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
It Was the Market
Marina Vishmidt1
That Did It: (dilatory

account - decisive
action - dissipative
tendency)
In short, the question is not that of taking state power but to dissolve it, by revealing its like-
ness to a criminal gang: ferocious but marginal.
Paolo Virno, ‘Reading Gilbert Simondon: Transindividuality, technical activ-
ity and reification’ (interview with Jun Fujita Hirose), Radical Philosophy, 136,
March/April 2006: 34-42
For this instance of Producta50, I was asked to

develop some of the positions, and the many fla-
grant aporias, of my article on the vicissitudes of
‘precarity’2 as a mode of solidarity and/or identi-
fication exhibited by cultural producers, primarily
engaged in reproducing critical discourse in the
European institutional sphere, and what modes of
exposure and social power the somewhat disin-
genuous use of the term can occlude, as well as
1. Marina Vishmidt is a researcher and, haphazardly, other things.

2. See ‘Precarious Straits’, http://www.metamute.org/en/Precarious-Straits
MARINA VISHMIDT 285
the types of labour precarious employment practices are actually drawing

on –all the variants of unpaid and compulsory labour that have been con-
stitutive, rather than marginal, to the expansion of capital; and whether it
is efficacious to situate ‘creativity’ at the root of such conditions. However,
‘creativity’ cannot be discounted in the subjective and social constitution of
the subjects of these living labour constraints, whether it be the creativity
of resistance or the everyday creativity of survival– but it is embodied in
forms, and demands an analysis, different from one which presupposes the
creativity of the modular, artistic and ‘engaged’ contemporary (or stalwart
Romantic-era) individual as paradigmatic.
Two years down the line, the currency of ‘precarity’ has been downgraded
from its ephemeral vogue at the centre of the value-added pluralism that
describes much of contemporary art display, circulation and discourse,
returning to the activist and local European milieux from which it first
emerged, and where it continues to prompt discussions of insecurity as piv-
otal to contemporary work –a discussion which however rarely goes beyond
a tactical short-term focus on restoring the bargaining power of labour
through stronger unions and pressure on local, regional and national gov-
ernments to turn back the clock on re-structuring policies and espouse a
new ‘social compact’. ‘Precarity’ as the shorthand for a movement and a set
of dynamic articulations premised on regularising exploitative workplace
relations, with a view to challenging much wider social circumstances, was
always marked by this potential and actual conservatism –not pernicious of
itself, but in its ability to block or neutralise the thinking and doing of more
innovative and autonomous (and difficult) modes of organising that do not
take the nation state as their horizon of possibility. Recently, this has been
illustrated further by the gaining prominence of the ‘basic income’ or the
‘guaranteed social wage’ in activist and progressive economics circles, not to
mention mainstream left political parties such as the Greens in many coun-
tries, including the UK. The basic income, advanced as a new constituent
relationship to the distribution of social wealth by some and an uncon-
tentious extension of existing social benefits like unemployment dole and
the 8-hour working day by others, evinces an interesting paradox: it pro-
motes an evacuation of the punitive tie between work and survival by guar-
anteeing a moderate living income to everyone regardless of when or how
they are contributing to the productive economy –on the Negrian thesis that
the law of value in capital has been eroded to the point where productivity
is happening ceaselessly and indeterminately– within the existing mecha-
nisms of national social benefit allocation and administration that have
286
never served as anything but the palliative wing of capital’s rule. Neither
have the theorists of the basic income been able to account for how such a
measure would be inserted into the prevailing international division of
labour without intensifying its contradictions or succumbing to the global
conflicts that even now sever so many populations from essential resources.
It is not enough to posit that real subsumption has decoupled value from
production and ignore the tremendous role of money as an instrument of
global discipline over labour, of abstract exchange as very immanent biopo-
litical control3. So, in short, the basic income is a transitional demand that
is predicated on a revolutionary situation. As such, it seems to this writer
‘basically’ incoherent... but enough on this for now.
If possible, I’d like to turn to an account of practical criticism, to a moment

when materialist critique became material intervention, in a very concrete
and local register. It also, at times obliquely but sometimes also very direct-
ly, illustrates the just-cited amalgam of radical and conservative proposals,
which cannot always be cleanly held in tension or in separation. The juxta-
position of a campaign of direct action that fixed its horizon on demands
made to elected officials seems emblematic of this conjunction of invention
and compromise; although if basic income proposals make a spurious elision
between the utopian and the pragmatic, here we rather face the cancellation
of the possible by the practical. But it is not solely a failure of imagination
or a dogmatic adherence to outdated political models; it is an admission that
specificity and focus on circumstances on the ground may sometimes be at
odds with recent tendencies to anti-statism in ‘multitudes’ era political dis-
course, and that different and adaptable tactics may be needed to win local
battles. It is also interesting, however, to consider such approaches as turn-
ing back in on themselves to become reactionary and/or ineffectual when
specificity becomes valorised up to the point where other models can no
longer inspire or diversify, when the known becomes its own end.
The discussion is in the context of a swell of local mobilisation against the

unchecked incursions of profit-led development in a part of East London
3. It may be a churlish objection that contra Antonio Negri’s invocation of a ‘non-place’ neither inside or outside capital
that is the site where the labour force which produces value ‘beyond measure’ must locate their attempts to form a
constituent power out of the relentless excess of affect and sociality that is contemporary production, no recent social
movement that has made any impact on a local or international level has shown any tendency or ability to mobilise
people on the grounds of their belonging to a non-place. A non-place may be a parameter of a systemic analysis, [the
part of no part?] but it’s hardly a place to start.
MARINA VISHMIDT 287
that has for over a decade now been a crucible for tried and failing regener-
ation strategies. Small businesses, lower-income residents and public housing
are being swept away or made invisible/politically unfeasible in the usual
mode of regeneration processes implemented by the collusion between busi-
ness interests, local government and national policy, oiled by corruption which
is scarcely discernible from business as usual. The ‘market’ is ordained as the
only social actor with any real power, and ‘community’ becomes a rhetoric of
blackmail for which social groupings can best help it achieve its ends.
The campaign featured a three-month occupation of a local Italian cafe

where the proprietor had been evicted after 30 years, large public meetings
with residents and officials and court battles to forestall the eviction of yet
another small business and home, a Caribbean grocery. There was even
some spectacular amateur construction the day after Christmas, when the
illegally half-demolished cafe was built back up again virtually overnight
–if dialectic can break bricks, magical thinking has a lot to do with the lay-
ing of them.
As an observer and participant in many of these events and the day-to-day

organisation of activities such as publicity and fundraising, several things
were immediately apparent: this was not a traditional campaign, whether
in the sense of being dominated by a party-political agenda or the vague
prescriptions of a professional activist caste. Its motor seemed at all times
to be the desires and experiences of local people with very disparate back-
grounds and occupations, most of whom had not been involved in commu-
nity activism before or had any identifiable political affiliation. Yet the very
speed, spontaneity and decisiveness that this ad-hoc combination generat-
ed would also eventually get thwarted, diverted or dissipate. The personal,
physical and psychic toll of the maintenance of a round-the-clock occupa-
tion in tandem with fundraising, organising, publicity and legal efforts
kicked in, especially after two evictions massively attended by police and
demolition personnel. The impending council elections also served to dis-
sipate the energy, with members of the campaign who did have a party-
political affiliation believing the most effective means of achieving change
in the short term was to contest local elections. The praxis that would have
sustained the momentum of the campaign, such as organising ever more
broadly in the neighbourhood and articulating the resistance to property
speculation and the impoverishment and displacement of people across the
very differences and contradictions that animated this resistance, fell by the
wayside as decisions were taken to represent this resistance instead, in ever
288
more narrow terms. So the role of exhaustion, apathy and inertia as de-
stabilising influences can hardly be overestimated, as could varying levels
of personal commitment and inclination to intervene in the flux of events
or their eventual over-determination as described above. The misreading
of a heady local mobilisation as having any direct correlation in represen-
tational politics was also a crucial, if in retrospect predictable, mistake.
The varied social composition of the campaign was a perennial source of

fascination to media and onlookers from established activist circles alike.
Although mixed constituencies are hardly mythical beasts in the context of
local campaigning groups, they seldom occur in groups responsible for
direct action, which are by and large viewed as the preserve of ‘activists’, at
least in the UK and in the recent past and present. The campaign seemed
paradoxical in that it appeared to combine a pragmatic and populist rhet-
oric with a decisive approach that made its radical intentions unequivocal.
It was also intriguing as an instance of solidarity between people from
divergent backgrounds – artists, builders, local advocates, media profession-
als, a geriatric former Mayor, the unemployed, the disabled, journalists, stu-
dents and community activists, with most of these labels being neither
exhaustive nor exclusive for a number of those involved. Although the issue
of class differences has figured in some commentaries as the ‘coming to
consciousness’ of a ‘creative class’ structurally implicated in the gentrifica-
tion proceeding in the area4, it would be a reductive analysis that was satis-
fied with that. It would also be a substantively distorting one: the campaign
signally failed to attract anything but token support from the broad swathe
of middle-class creative professionals in the neighbourhood. The members
of the campaign who could be referred to in that light were already politi-
cised through other experiences and alliances, and would conceivably
describe their participation as motivated less by the emergence of a self-
conscious identification with the less fortunate than the direct implementa-
tion of an impossible solidarity in an arena with fewer and fewer possibilities
for everyone. It was also an experiment in mobilising differences in collec-
tive action within and against a capitalist habituation that mobilises differ-
ences for the cultivation of consumption and the propagation of fear. In an
area like the one in question, an area which symbolically trades on a past
and on a texture of urban life to developers and higher-income groups that
it is busy eradicating or criminalising in practice, not everyone is going to
4. See Richard Barbrook, The Class of the New, 2006.

MARINA VISHMIDT 289
be equally affected by the changes. However, the comparative degree of

flexibility in averting or mediating the social consequences of these policies
need not circumscribe the possibilities of resistance or the development of
other forms of life that can elaborate resistance in time. An immanently
critical or a reflexive awareness of class position and its impact on the actu-
al possibilities for life and for politics is virtually ground zero for any effec-
tive campaign in an area as polarised as this one, or as any locality in the
throes of gentrification would be. Yet such reflexivity may ultimately be less
key a priori than in organisational modes and decision-making; it is here
that distribution of power and resources becomes critical, where uttered or
unuttered political agendas override social gulfs –although the mutual rein-
forcement of these cannot be discounted. ‘Political agendas’ can here a bit
tendentiously be extended to scepticism about or enmity towards politics
per se. This need not be formulated in stridently apolitical terms; it can just
as tellingly emerge in a disabling contradiction between the politics of
direct action and the evacuation of politics that seeking redress through
administrative channels reflects. Politics always becomes individualised
when there are no collective decision-making, or indeed any mutually
agreed-upon and binding, structures in place to mobilise differences.
Thus, rather than assess the composition of the campaign as a staging of an

expiation of middle-class guilt, it might be more instructive to look for the
fractal and divided loyalties, the social, personal and political experience that
moulded the participation of unequally situated protagonists. There were
many and consistent elements of a collective articulation in action, but sparse
common ground politically. Relative access to resources, be that financial,
educational or media, pooled with local knowledge and community ties to
distribute responsibility and initiative as needed, which assuaged, if tem-
porarily and pragmatically, the contradictions of class and political perspec-
tive. The course of action, however, was rarely determined collectively (con-
sensus was seen as formalist and repudiated) and group reflexivity was nei-
ther practised nor solicited, with many refusing to endorse the existence of a
group as such. This wariness of what was perceived as the formalism and
esotericism of an ‘activist’ subculture, however, did not manage to restrain its
own lapses into formalism, adopting a mode of address in public communi-
cations that was frequently succinct, but often times ready to sacrifice analy-
sis to moralism in the idealised projection of a ‘working-class’ reader. It is
debatable whether this in fact constituted a romanticisation of the excluded
interlocutor of contemporary politics (the ‘working class’) by an already cited
‘middle-class guilt’, with nostalgia for an antagonism that no longer seems to
290
find a political outlet. Again, class may be less actual here than pragmatism.
The willingness to abide by existing terms of political activity and populist
rhetorical tropes signals the belief that it is the only way to ensure accessibil-
ity –cloaking subversion in common-sense. To invent a new language, as well
as new ways of doing politics and of organising, was perhaps too ambitious
for a campaign of such specific and sustained intensity; moreover, one that
for many reasons declined much in the way of self-scrutiny.
Although it may be premature, or simply wilful, to frame the events as the

first stirrings of class consciousness among the middle-class media types
who’ve inadvertently brought gentrification to the shores of the area, culture
did end up playing a prominent role. Shaped by the twin poles of a justified
and longstanding recognition of the role of culture in hastening gentrifica-
tion, as well as suspicion of ‘artivist’ spectacle, the campaign as a whole
attempted to steer clear of any cultural activity, with the exception of the
reggae nights organised to raise the fighting fund for the Caribbean grocer.
This reluctance also had some relationship to a certain disavowal of culture
as instrumental (rather than instrumentalised as above) to the campaign in
any way but that of affording some technical facilities, e.g. for the editing of
videos, the production of documentary photographs, or auctioning off of
donated Gilbert and George books. The analysis could be extended beyond
this facticity into a preliminary diagnosis of, if anything, not the self-con-
sciousness of the ‘creative class’ but the abjuration of the creative class of
their own creativity, deemed thoroughly tainted by its cynical deployment in
government policy and economic restructuring. Creativity and politics can
not and should not mix, if creativity has been appropriated as the alibi for
the ascendancy of brute economic rationality in all spheres of life. The
repudiation of culture could also have been a means for some of the cam-
paign’s members to negotiate their own passive responsibility, as resident cul-
tural producers, in the transformation of the area. But it could also be con-
tended, on strong anecdotal and empirical grounds, that the question of cul-
ture, just like the question of organisation, would have been handled differ-
ently had a long-term outlook been formulated for the existence of the
group and if we hadn’t all reverted to our roles as ‘artists’, ‘activists’ and
‘local people’ once the frantic bout of activity expired.
Counter to such diffidence, it would be interesting to speculate on the types

of practice groups like Park Fiction in Hamburg, which transit between
community involvement against gentrification in their neighbourhood and
reading rooms at Documenta, bring to bear on this aporia of culture.
MARINA VISHMIDT 291
‘Culture’ as a byword (in the same register as ‘community’) for de-politicis-

ing and idealising antagonisms predicated on the economic and the mate-
rial, and for eliding differences within so as to better dominate migrant and
domestic minorities is one thing. ‘Culture’ as the spearhead for the eco-
nomic cleansing of a suddenly desirable inner-city area is another. Yet,
‘culture’ as an immanent means specially geared towards the production of
the new in political praxis also needs to be considered, a lot more rigorous-
ly than it has been to date. By this I mean culture as utterly imbricated with
but utterly distinct from the reproduction of the same dictated by necessi-
ty or, a way of imaginatively conveying the stakes of a social situation such
that it isn’t circumscribed by its particulars but is universal enough to
engender action in every particular case. This route to universality can, in
fact ought to, proceed through opacity, obliqueness, semiotic violence and
torsion of the conceivable with the actual; the malleability of reality is fore-
grounded in culture; we have enough information.
As time goes on, it becomes more and more difficult to be sanguine about
the campaign and what it achieved, aside from its ephemeral capacity to
focus local discontent, and to make a material difference, in the short term,
to the prospects of the Caribbean grocer under threat of eviction.
Otherwise, it was evident, that in this conjuncture, there was no quicker
route to marginality than our brand of pragmatism. How is it possible to do
politics? Is the only possibility to do what you would be doing anyway, but
politically, e.g. have the correct inbuilt critiques in everything you do? Is the
ideological fantasy of the post-political –a well-administrated haven for pri-
vate enterprise– really having that overdetermining an effect on material
conditions and social relations that seem to relentlessly generate an excess
of politics? To return to the ‘precarity’ discussion, the initial spark of the
‘precarity’ discourse was that it would bring the (ironicized, appropriated)
imprimatur of politics to conditions that had been almost definitively neu-
tralised by their displacement from the structural to the individual: the set
of conditions that constitute life. But even here the dialectic was beavering
away: the more intimate the encroachment of de-regulated and all-perva-
sive work on life, the stricter the psychic barriers between them, in line with
a state of affairs that doesn’t seem to provide much of an opening for col-
lective social action and promotes de facto individual solutions. Hence: the
unorganisability of ‘chainworkers’, who would decline to identify with their
jobs to the minimal extent needed to organise for better working conditions,
and freelancers, who, in common with most of the indentured and illusori-
ly free working population, are sceptical about taking time out of procuring
292
and completing short-term contracts to partake of a political engagement

they may perceive as vain. While the referent circulates ever more broadly
if not incisively through the cultural sphere, while the geopolitical situation
reaches unimaginable nadirs, and the arrangements of capital are as reas-
suringly ordinary as they are unarguably lethal. Political agency in the
everyday life of Western populations seems more and more remote. The
vacuity of institutional politics and the frantic activity of activist subcultures
seem to be wired in the same dispiriting lockstep, as Virno’s ‘ambiguity of
disenchantment’ carries all before it.
Such a lugubrious snapshot may reflect the situation in the UK more faith-
fully than elsewhere – the recent U.S. mobilisations around illegal immigra-
tion, for one, seemed to evince a sharp understanding of the link between
the structural and the personal. But huge, transient mobilisations and the
‘strategy of moles’ are different propositions, though not mutually exclusive.
The building of resilient and adaptable structures, not just within the art-
world, where self-institution has been provoking debate and implementa-
tion for some time now, but for the maintenance and development of non-
market relations in every aspect of physical and political life is the urgent
proposition now. Such institutions would be in a position to evacuate dom-
inant economic relationships and the subjective investments in them, as well
as to engage with this heteronomy when suitable. They would not be com-
munes, but they would embody a first tentative practical criticism of the
governing wisdom that the solutions to social/structural problems are indi-
vidual and that there can only be refuge from the inevitable in institutions
that are themselves only able to survive according to how well they can align
themselves with market imperatives. Such social formations would illustrate
a strategy of non-compliance and invention, but they would not eschew
antagonism (either in conflict or in the conditions of their own existence),
only reactivity. In distinction from current declarations from some activists
associated with Euromayday, still the most visible exponents of movements
around ‘precarity’, forging a new social compact with the neoliberal state
would not be a priority, although a principled aversion to representational
politics needs to be tactical rather than absolute, lest it degenerate into an
emblem of purity. However, the emergence of such groups on a mass basis
seems virtually (indeed, perhaps they can only be sustained virtually) mytho-
logical, when they can barely be sustained as socially marginal congeries of
activists, artists or software programmers.
As it is, I guess we just have to keep writing.

ATTENTION
BARCELONA
BRANDING
CARE
CITIES
CONSUMPTION
CULTURAL POLICIES
CULTURAL WORK
EXTERNALITIES
GENTRIFICATION
IDENTITY AND BRAND
INTANGIBLES
KNOWLEDGE
MARKETS
PRECARIOUSNESS
SEMIOTICS
VALUE
Reality Check:
Steve Wright1
are We Living in an
Immaterial World?
A priest once came across a Zen master and, seeking to embarrass him, challenged him
as follows: ‘Using neither sound nor silence, can you show me what is reality?’
The Zen master punched him in the face. 2
Continued assertions that, today, we live in a know-

ledge economy or society raise many questions for
reflection. In the next few pages, I want to discuss
some aspects of these assertions, especially as they
relate to the notion of immaterial labour. This
term has developed within the camp of thought
that is commonly labelled ‘postworkerist’, of which
the best-known exponent is undoubtedly Antonio
Negri. While its roots lie in that branch of postwar
Italian marxism known as operaismo (workerism),
this milieu has reworked many of the precepts
developed during the Italian New Left’s heyday of
1968-78. If anything, it was the very defeat of the
1. Steve Wright is a writer and lecturer at the Monash University, Australia.

2. Thanks to Hobo for telling me this story. Thanks too to Angela Mitropoulos and Nate Holdren for their helpful sug
gestions with this piece. All mistakes my own etc. An earlier version of this paper appeared in J. Berry-Slater (ed.)
(2005) Underneath the Knowledge Commons. London: Mute Publishing.
STEVE WRIGHT 295
social subjects with which operaismo had identified –first and foremost, the
so-called ‘mass worker’ engaged in the production of consumer durables
through repetitive, ‘semi-skilled’ labour– that led Negri and others to insist
that we are embarked upon a new age beyond modernity (see the
Generation Online website for the best English-language introduction to
postworkerism).
According to this view of the world, a quite different kind of labour is cur-
rently either hegemonic amongst those with nothing to sell but their ability to
work or, at the very least, is well on the way towards acquiring such hegemo-
ny. Secondly, capital’s growing dependence upon this different –immaterial–
labour has serious implications for the process of self-expanding abstract
labour (value) that defines capital as a social relation. Marx held that the
‘socially-necessary labour-time’ associated with their production provided
the means by which capital could measure the value of commodities (and so
the mass of surplus value that it hoped to realise with their sale). Negri, on
the other hand, is of the opinion that in a time of increasingly complex and
skilled labour, and of a ‘working day’ that more and more blurs the bound-
aries with (and ultimately colonises) the rest of our waking hours, value can
no longer be calculated. As he put it a decade ago, in such circumstances the
exploitation of labour still continues, but ‘outside any economic measure: its
economic reality is fixed exclusively in political terms’ (Negri, 1994: 28).
This is pretty esoteric stuff, particularly the arguments over the measura-
bility (or otherwise) of value. Should we care one way or the other? What
I hope to show below is that, for all their apparent obscurity, these debates
matter. That is because they raise questions as to how we understand our
immediate context, including how we interpret the possibilities latent with-
in contemporary class composition. Is one sector of class composition like-
ly to set the pace and tone in struggles against capital, or should we look
instead towards the emergence of ‘strange loops… odd circuits and strange
connections between and among various class sectors’ (as Midnight Notes
once suggested) as a necessary condition for moving beyond ‘the present
state of things’?
Unpacking immaterial labour
Maurizio Lazzarato’s discussion of ‘Immaterial Labor’ –perhaps the first

extended treatment of the topic to appear in English– defined this term as
296
‘labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the com-
modity’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 133). If the ‘classic’ forms of this labour were
represented in the fields of ‘audiovisual production, advertising, fashion,
the production of software, photography, cultural activities, and so forth’
(Lazzarato, 1996: 137), those who performed such work commonly found
themselves in highly casualised and exploited circumstances. This is part of
what has, more recently and in certain Western European radical circles,
come to be called the ‘precariat’.
The Taylorist approach to production that confronted the mass worker

decreed that ‘you are not paid to think’. With immaterial labour, Lazzarato
(1996: 136) argued, management’s project was
even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and man-
ual labor (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve even the
worker’s personality within the production of value.
At the same time, Lazzarato believed, this managerial approach carried

real risks for capital, since capital’s very existence was placed in the hands
of a labour force called upon to exercise its creativity through collective
endeavours. And unlike a century ago, when a layer of skilled workers like-
wise stood at the centre of key industries, even if largely cut off from the
unorganised ‘masses’, today ‘immaterial labour’ could not be understood
as the distinctive attribute of one stratum within the workforce. Instead,
immaterial labour was present (even if only in latent form) amongst broad
sectors of the labour market, starting with the young.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire –a book that has come to stand
(rightly or wrongly) as the centrepiece of postworkerist thought– built upon
and modified Lazzarato’s work. Accepting the premise that immaterial
labour was now central to capital’s survival (and by extension, to projects
that aimed at its extinction), Hardt and Negri (2000: 30) identified three
segments of immaterial labour: the reshaped instances of industrial pro-
duction which had embraced communication as their lifeblood; the ‘sym-
bolic analysis and problem solving’ undertaken by knowledge workers; the
affective labour found, above all, within the service sector.
These experiences, it was conceded, could be quite disparate: knowledge

workers, for example, were divided between high-end practitioners with
considerable control over their working conditions, others engaged in ‘low-
STEVE WRIGHT 297
value and low-skill jobs of routine symbol manipulation’ (Hardt and Negri
2000: 292). Nonetheless, a common thread did exist between the three ele-
ments. As instances of service work, none of them produced a ‘material or
durable good’. Moreover, since the output was physically intangible as a
discrete object, the labour that produced it could be designated as ‘imma-
terial’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 290).
How can we make sense of such arguments? Doug Henwood (2003: 184-
5), who praised Empire for the verve and optimism of its vision, was
nonetheless moved to add:
Hardt and Negri are often uncritical and credulous in the face of orthodox prop-
aganda about globalization and immateriality… They assert that immaterial
labor –service work, basically– now prevails over the old-fashioned material
kind, but they don’t cite any statistics: you’d never expect that far more Americans
are truck drivers than are computer professionals. Nor would you have much of
an inkling that three billion of us, half the earth’s population, live in the rural
Third World, where the major occupation remains tilling the soil.
Nick Dyer-Witheford (2005: 151-55) likewise registered a number of con-

cerns with Hardt and Negri’s account of class composition. To his mind,
Empire glosses over the tensions between the three class fragments it identi-
fies, while ultimately reading immaterial labour only through the lenses of
its high-end manifestations. And was all of this really as new as Hardt and
Negri intimated? It’s not as if ‘affective labour’, for instance, was anything
but fundamental to social reproduction in the past, even if it did go unno-
ticed –because of its largely gendered composition perhaps– in many social
analyses.
Another issue concerns Empire’s insistence that ‘the cooperative aspect of

immaterial labor is not imposed or organized from the outside’ (Hardt and
Negri, 2000: 294). Again, perhaps this is true for some work at the high-
end. But does the obligation to ask ‘Do you want fries with that?’ really rep-
resent a break with Fordist work regimes? Or might many of the McJobs
that are prevalent in the lower depths of so-called immaterial production
be better characterised as ‘the Taylorized, deskilled descendants of earlier
forms of office’ and other service work? (Huws, 2003: 138)
More recently, Hardt and Negri have attempted to address some of their
critics in Multitude, the 2004 sequel to Empire. The first thing to note here is
298
that while immaterial labour remains a central pivot within the book’s
arguments, it is presented in a rather more cautious and qualified form
than before. Indeed, Hardt and Negri (2004: 109) are at pains to state that:
When we claim that immaterial labor is tending towards the hegemonic posi-
tion we are not saying that most of the workers in the world today are produc-
ing primarily immaterial goods;
The labor involved in all immaterial production, we should emphasize, remains

material –it involves our bodies and brains as all labor does. What is imma-
terial is its product.
Therefore, much like the ascendance of the multitude itself, here the hege-
mony of immaterial labour as the reference point (vanguard?) for ‘most of
the workers in the world today’ is flagged as a tendency, albeit one that is
inexorable. Towards the end of Multitude’s discussion of immaterial labour,
Hardt and Negri (2004: 114) insist upon what they call a ‘reality check’,
asking ‘what evidence do we have to substantiate our claim of a hegemo-
ny of immaterial labor?’ It’s the question we’ve all been waiting to be
answered. Unfortunately the half page of discussion they proffer is some-
thing of a damp squib: an allusion to US Bureau of Statistics figures which
indicate that service work is on the rise; the relocation of industrial produc-
tion ‘to subordinate parts of the world’, said to signal the privileging of
immaterial production at the heart of the Empire; the rising importance of
‘immaterial forms of property’; and, finally, the spread of network forms
of organisation particular to immaterial labour (Hardt and Negri, 2004:
115). Call me old-fashioned, but something more than this is needed in a
book of 400 plus pages intended to explicate the latest manifestation of the
proletariat as a revolutionary subject...
Hardt and Negri’s reference to the growth in service sector activity is inter-
esting for a number of reasons. Ursula Huws (2003: 130) argues that the
unrelenting rise in service work within the West might be cast in a different
light if the domestic employment so common 100 years ago was factored
into the equation. Writing a decade earlier, Sergio Bologna (1992: 20-1) sug-
gested that certain forms of work only came to be designated as ‘services’
within national statistics after they had been outsourced; previously, when
they had been performed ‘in house’, they had counted as ‘manufacturing’.
Neither Huws nor Bologna is seeking to deny that important shifts have
occurred within the global economy, starting with the OECD countries. Yet
STEVE WRIGHT 299
they urge caution in interpreting the changes, and care in the categories
used to explain them. Bologna (1992: 22-4) –a one-time collaborator with
Negri in a variety of political projects in the 1960’s and -70’s– is particular-
ly caustic about the notion of immaterial labour, which he labels it a ‘myth’
that, more than anything else, obscures the lengthening of the working day.
Goodbye to value as measure?
As stated earlier, one of the distinguishing features of most postworkerists is

the rejection of Marx’s so-called ‘law of value’ as a device for understand-
ing contemporary capitalist social relations. George Caffentzis (2005)
reminds us that Marx himself rarely spoke of such a law, but there is also
no doubting the Old Moor’s opinion that under the rule of capital, the
amount of labour time socially necessary to produce commodities ultimate-
ly determined their value. In breaking with Marx in this regard, postwork-
erists draw some of their inspiration from a passage of the Grundrisse known
as the ‘Fragment on Machines’. This envisages a situation, in line with cap-
ital’s perennial attempt to free itself from dependence upon labour, where
knowledge has become the lifeblood of fixed capital, and the direct input of
labour to production is merely incidental. In these circumstances, Marx
argues (1973: 705), capital effectively cuts the ground from under its own
feet: ‘As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-
spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and
hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value’.
Negri, among others, has insisted for many years and in a variety of ways
that capital has now reached this stage. Therefore, nothing but sheer domi-
nation keeps capital’s rule in place: ‘the logic of capital is no longer function-
al to development, but is simply command for its own reproduction’ (Negri
1994: 28). In fact, a range of social commentators have evoked the ‘Fragment
on Machines’ in recent times. Apart from anything else, it has held a certain
popularity among those, like Jeremy Rifkin, who tell us that we live in an
increasingly work-free society. It’s a pity, then, as Romano Alquati (1997: 174)
has pointed out, that the likes of Negri don’t follow the logic of Marx’s argu-
ment to its conclusions. For while he indicates that capital does indeed seek
‘to reduce labour time to a minimum’, Marx (1973: 706) also reminds us that
capital is itself nothing other than accumulated labour time. As a conse-
quence, capital is obliged by its very nature, and for as long as we are stuck
with it, to pose ‘labour time... as sole measure and source of wealth’.
300
In its efforts to escape from labour, capital attempts a number of things

that fuel arguments that see labour time as irrelevant in the measure of
capital’s development. Looked at more carefully, however, each of these
can be seen in a somewhat different light. To begin with, capital tries as
much as possible to externalise its labour costs. To take a banal example
(although not so banal if you are a former bank employee), it can do this
by encouraging online and teller machine banking and discouraging over-
the-counter customer service. Or many of us find ourselves bringing more
and more work home (or on the train, or in the car). More and more of us
also seem to be on perpetual stand-by, accessible through the net or by
phone, wherever we may be. Added together, such strategies (which may
well intersect with our own individual aspirations for greater flexibility) go
a long way to help explain that blurring of the line between the ‘work’ and
‘non work’ components of our day that Negri decries. On the other hand,
they also cast that boundary in another light than that of the collapse of
labour time as the measure of value, one in which –and precisely because
the quantity of labour time is crucial to capital’s existence– as much labour
as possible comes to be performed in its unpaid form.
Secondly, in seeking to decrease labour costs within individual organisa-

tions, capital also reshapes the process through which profits are distributed
on a sectoral and global scale. In a number of essays over the past fifteen
years, George Caffentzis (1997) has outlined the idea, first elaborated at
some length in the third volume of Marx’s Capital, that average rates of
profit suck surplus value from labour-intensive sectors towards those with
much greater investment in fixed capital:
In order for there to be an average rate of profit throughout the capitalist system,
branches of industry that employ very little labor but a lot of machinery must be
able to have the right to call on the pool of value that high-labor, low-tech branch-
es create. If there were no such branches or no such right, then the average rate of
profit would be so low in the high-tech, low-labor industries that all investment
would stop and the system would terminate. Consequently, ‘new enclosures’ in the
countryside must accompany the rise of ‘automatic processes’ in industry, the com-
puter requires the sweat shop, and the cyborg’s existence is premised on the slave.
In this instance, if there appears to be no immediate correlation between the

value of an individual commodity and the profit that it returns in the mar-
ket, the answer may well be that there is none. The puzzle of value can
only be solved by examining the sector as a whole, in a sweep that reaches
STEVE WRIGHT 301
far beyond the horizons of immaterial labour. Here too, it’s a matter of
which parameters we choose in order to frame our enquiry.
Thirdly, and following on from the above, the division of labour in many
organisations, industries and firms has reached the point where it is diffi-
cult –and probably pointless– to determine the contribution of an indivi-
dual employee to the mass of commodities that they help to produce
(Harvie, 2005). Again, this can foster the sense that the labour time
involved in producing such commodities (whether ‘immaterial’ or not) is
irrelevant to the value they contain. Marx (1976: 1040, quoted in Cleaver,
2001: 119), for his part, argued that the central question in making sense
of all this was one of perspective:
If we consider the aggregate worker, i.e. if we take all the members compris-
ing the workshop together, then we see that their combined activity results
materially in an aggregate product which is at the same time a quantity of
goods. And here it is quite immaterial whether the job of a particular worker,
who is merely a limb of this aggregate worker, is at a greater or smaller dis-
tance from the actual manual labour.
In this regard, Huws’ critique of notions of ‘the weightless economy’

deserves careful attention. Like Henwood (2003) in his fierce deconstruc-
tion of the ‘new economy’, Huws (2003: 142-3) draws our attention not
only to the massive infrastructure that underpins ‘the knowledge econo-
my’, but also to ‘the fact that real people with real bodies have contributed
real time to the development of these ‘weightless’ commodities. As for
determining the contribution of human labour within the production of
immaterial products, Huws argues that while this might ‘be difficult to
model’, that ‘does not render the task impossible’. Or, in David Harvie’s
words (2005: 151, 154), ‘every day the personifications of capital –whether
private or state– make judgements regarding value and its measure’ in their
efforts ‘to reinforce the connection between value and work’. He adds:
Hardt and Negri may believe in the ‘impossibility of power’s calculating and
ordering production at a global level’ (2000: 357), but ‘power’ hasn’t stopped
trying and the ‘impossibility’ of its project derives directly from our own strug-
gles against the reduction of life to measure.
More recently, Harvie and Massimo De Angelis (2006) have sought to

‘uncover capital’s attempt to measure immaterial labour and thus
302
(re)impose value and the law the value’, with specific reference to the
British higher education sector, where so-called ‘key performance indica-
tors’ presently run rampant. As they put it,
while thinkers such as Hardt and Negri are claiming the impossibility of linking
immaterial production and measure, the heirs of Taylor and Dickens’ Gradgrind
are attempting just that. An army of economists, statisticians, management scien-
tists and practitioners, information specialists, consultants, accountants, bureau-
crats, political strategists and others is engaged in a struggle to connect heteroge-
neous concrete human activities on the basis of equal quantities of human labour
in the abstract, that is to link work and value.
Interviewed at the beginning of the millenium, Paolo Virno (2001: 11)

spoke of ‘the crisis (and the ambivalence of such a crisis) of the law of
value’, a law that he portrayed as possessed of ‘a dual character, in force
but no longer true’. Taking a tack quite different to that of Hardt and
Negri, Virno went on to assert that:
the labour time of the individual (abstract, empty [vuoto], deskilled etc) is no
longer the principal source of the production of wealth, but remains the meas-
ure in force.
This line of reasoning, while still undeveloped, finds some further elabora-
tion in The Grammar of the Multitude (Virno 2004). If nothing else, Virno’s
views caution us not to lump all postworkerists together on this score, and
to watch instead to see whether some at least within that tendency might
yet be able to offer a more qualified approach to the question of value and
measure than that found in Empire. In the meantime, what happens when
we cast our gaze elsewhere?
Other leads?
Not long ago, Dr Woo pointed me to a presentation by Brian Holmes

(2005) entitled ‘Continental Drift Or, The Other Side of Neoliberal
Globalization’. In large part, his talk is a reflection upon the arguments in
Hardt and Negri’s Empire, taking advantage of the hindsight provided by
five years of events since the book’s publication. For Holmes, many of the
arguments advanced in Empire were important for challenging common-
place assumptions about how to make sense of the ‘big picture’ of global
STEVE WRIGHT 303
power relations, forcing a reconsideration of terms such as globalisation

and imperialism. But if the book helped in clearing away certain miscon-
ceptions, it has not been nearly so successful in supplanting them with
more adequate ways of seeing.
‘Continental Drift’ addresses a host of issues, but the three points most rel-
evant to the current discussion are these: a privileged focus upon ‘immate-
rial labour’ is increasingly unsatisfactory for efforts to understand what is
happening within contemporary class composition; global events since the
publication of Empire cast doubt upon the usefulness of seeing capital’s
domination as a smooth space that lacks centre(s); more attention has to be
paid to the reasons why the world of finance has become such a crucial
aspect of capital’s rule in our time.
Regarding the first point, Holmes offers similar criticisms to those made by
Dyer-Witheford. If the concept of immaterial labour is important for
analysing certain kinds of work ‘in the so-called tertiary or service sectors
of the developed economies’, talk of its hegemony can obscure not only
‘the global division of labour’ and thus ‘the precise conditions under which
people work and reproduce themselves’, but also how ‘they conceive their
subordination and their possible agency, or their desire for change’. As for
the second point, Holmes argues that global capitalism is better under-
stood through the analysis of ‘regional blocs’, such as the European Union
or the increasing engagement between China, Japan, and Southeast Asia.
Finally, he believes that a far better understanding is needed of the role of
money –and, above all, of finance– in capital’s efforts to maintain control
at both the international and individual level (on this score, see also
Goldner, 2005a & 2005b).
The richest explorations of regional blocs that I have encountered are

those developed by ‘world systems’ analysts such as Immanuel Wallerstein,
Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver. Interestingly enough, their efforts to
explain the emergence of a new cycle of global accumulation with its epi-
centre in Asia is intimately bound up with their attempt to understand why
the expansion of money as capital has become so pronounced over the past
thirty years or so. For them, the predominance of financial expansion is
symptomatic of a necessary phase in the cycle of accumulation when, as
doubts mount concerning the profitability to be found within production,
industries are relocated, unemployed capital and labour pile up, and ‘a
sharp acceleration of economic polarization [occurs] both globally and
304
within states’ (Wallerstein, 2003: 275). In recent times, Arrighi (who also
penned one of the more considered reviews of Empire) has devoted much
of his efforts to understanding the waning fortunes of the US state and
capital within this process (Arrighi, 2005a, 2005b), while Silver (2003) has
concentrated upon the prospects facing contemporary labour in an age of
capital flight. The work of these authors (much of which is on the net) is
well worth a look: in part for the challenges they offer to a number of rad-
ical orthodoxies, but also for the depth of analysis that they bring to their
account of the conflicts between and within the forces of labour and cap-
ital today.
There is still a great deal to unravel in the issues touched upon here. For
example, the current centrality of money as capital, with all the peculiari-
ties that this entails, may offer another reason why it might appear that
socially necessary labour time no longer has any bearing upon capital’s
existence as value in search of greater value. Speculative ventures –of
which the past decade has been rife– seem to make money out of thin air.
But in actuality, they do nothing to increase the total pool of value. At best,
they redistribute what already exists. More uncertainly, they seek to side-
step the sphere of production and, instead, make money ‘from betting on
the future exploitation of labour’ (Bonefeld & Holloway, 1995: 213-4). In
the meantime, debt continues to balloon, from the micro scale of individ-
ual and family credit cards, to the macro level of public sector budgets and
current account deficits. Whatever the ingenious ways through which the
burden of such debt is redistributed, the terms of the wager cannot be
forestalled forever. When it is finally called in, things will become very
interesting indeed. If nothing else, we may then find out at last whether, as
Madonna sang:
the boy with the cold hard cash/

Is always Mister Right, ‘cause we are/
Living in a material world
STEVE WRIGHT 305
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PRODUCTA50

Ferran Barenblit Joan Manuel Tresserras

Printing Súria, S.L Cristina Suau

March 2007 Xavi Roca

Assistants and reception

016 Producta50 GPS

036 From Urban Planning to the Practice of Metropolitan

046 The Makers of Culture in Discontinuous Employment

062 Basic Instinct. Trauma and Retrenchment 2000-4

076 Markets, Antimarkets and the Economics of the Net

090 Creation, Intelligence, Collective, zemos98

098 The Function of Signs and Semiotics in Contemporary

112 The Doing and the Living of the Business of Barcelona:

126 Barcelona and the Paradox of the Baroque

136 Hotel Barcelona

148 The New Cultural Peasant? Ruskin’s ‘Political Economy

176 Wealth and the City

196 In the Mood for Work

206 Art and Economy: Value Creation in Cognitive Capitalism

228 Lucha Libre and Mexican National Identity

238 Creative Strategies for the Patrimonialisation of Identity /

242 Nation Brand/ México

256 Nation Brand / Chile

268 Sustaining Contact. Communicative Action in Home

294 Reality Check: Are We Living in an Immaterial World?

(we were never very

Welcome to Barcelona. Here nobody has to pay.

We cannot begin this introduction without previ-

This situation can however be read in somewhat positive terms, as when

It is quite anecdotical that it is precisely us who, while still in the process of

We are not surprised by this percentage. We are accustomed to speaking to

immediate objectives and suspended in the limbo of a future-to-come, when

8. From a neoclassical perspective, it is obviously not rational.

12. See Barbrook, 2006.

YP, September 2006.

Barbrook, R. (2006). The Class of the New. OpenMute, London.

When editing and attempting to organize the following compilation we have

We have divided these possible interpretive fields into eighteen concepts or

Barcelona: the path to the brand

successful is that of tourism. The competitive elements here derive from

qualitative changes have taken place in the nature of the processes of

sirable working class and marginal neighbourhoods (Poble Nou,

Obsolescence or memory? Discussion of two paradigms

The preferred paradigm to study the subject of the relationship between

would be unendurable and unsustainable. It is in this sense that the urban

But let us define our concepts a bit more precisely. Obsolescence, as it is

prevalence of real-estate interests over the social needs of the neighbour-

Another fundamental difference between memory and obsolescence is that

I am calling this line of critical social intervention and organisation repre-

10. See www.salvemcanricart.org. Latest access, 08/06/06.

terms of a qualitative change in the hegemonic relationship with the built

acquisition of that qualitative difference of which the city-brand is so much

And nevertheless, Can Ricart, the emblem of the invention of modernity in

Balibrea, Mari Paz. (2005). ‘Barcelona: Del Modelo a la Marca.’

In order to provide itself with the necessary infras-

Despite its apparent simplicity, this is not a trivial matter, as it makes us

2. Old town center

however, tend to reduce it to institutional rhetoric, either public or private,

This intrinsic complexity of what makes up ‘the urban’, accelerated by the

An example of this tension between different models is found in the puni-

The Can Ricart case deserves to be mentioned as a special case.8 It is an

8. For more information consult http://www.salvemcanricart.org and http://www.forumriberabesos.net or the article

ativity, it is Can Ricart, a place which activates/hosts the synergies gener-

The alternative offered by the council is the confinement of these creative