Economically
speaking, what is important is to make money; the more the better. The everyday
social engagement may be affective, creative, even productive but it only adds
up economically when it is valorized through the sacrament of money (wage,
price etc.). The dominance of economic logic imposes commodification, the
insertion of objects, subjects and relations in the market as the necessary
precondition of valorization. Even practices that claim their autonomy vis a
vis the market, like art or science, economism seems to find pathways to impose
itself as an objective, exactly because its independent, measure of value.
In our conversation we will try to highlight the mechanism of economization via
the process of commodification. We will stress the consequences of this process
for artistic creativity, as well as for
the construction of subjectivity. We will focus on cases where individual
participation in the market is not achieved, by pointing to examples of
individual economic failure, a failure that does not necessary entail social,
or even more artistic or scientific failure. Economic failure is rather
something to be sought for, something that is necessary for success in other
domains. In some cases, economic failure is the outcome of a recalcitrant attitude,
a refusal or an inability to change, to adapt in the new maxims of the trade
and market.
We aim to celebrate economic failure as a way of resisting the dominance of the
market, the rationality of capitalism. Failure remains one of the forms of art not
yet incorporated in the process of valorization; at least not quite yet!