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 1

IN-
ED
1
 Oliver Vodeb: To my daughter Mina who
shows me everyday the power
of love- it is more powerful than
any debt.

Nikola Janović Kolenc: This book is dedicated to my

newborn son Lev, and my wife
and best friend Irena, with
much love and thanks.
 6

10 Intro
TXT Oliver Vodeb, Nikola Janović Kolenc

TXTS
14 Debt as a Mode of Governance
TXT Nikola Janović Kolenc
26 Indebted Interaction: The Wages of the Digital Economy
TXT Mark Andrejevic
40 From the Fetish Character of Commodity
to the Fetish of Interest-Bearing Capital
TXT Sašo Furlan

57 Cyber-Debt, Barter, and Gift Economies

TXT George Petelin
65 Overcoming the Fear of Exercising Our True Desires
TXT Nenad Jelesijević

80 Debt in the American Economy:

Busted Bubbles and Booming Inequality
TXT Daniel Marcus
86 Debt and Public Communication:
Towards an Interspatial Counterpractice
TXT Oliver Vodeb
Type Illustrations – Ben Mangan
PAGES: 20, 34—35, 52—53, 60, 77, 82, 106—107

114 DEBT Friendly Competition 2012

CURATED BY Oliver Vodeb

VISUAL
COMMUNICA-
120 Party’s Over, Starts Over
AUTHOR Lydia Dambassina
Greece

TION
COUNTRY

122 On the Other Side of the Mirror

PRACTICE
AUTHOR Katarzyna Pagowska
COUNTRY Poland
124 First World Problems + Consumed
AUTHOR Ashlea Gleeson
COUNTRY Australia
 7

128 Change Your Mind. Change Our World.

AUTHOR Darcy Mangan
COUNTRY Australia
130 The New World Order
AUTHOR Mariyah Arif
COUNTRY United Arab Emirates

132 Debt Machine

AUTHOR Belinda Li
COUNTRY Australia

134 Rich Uncle Pennybags's Game of Debt

AUTHOR Andrew Cox
COUNTRY Australia

136 00.05.00: Debt Doom

AUTHOR Aaron Croft
COUNTRY Australia

138 Savers' Credit Card: The Card that Pays You

AUTHOR Charles Mayfield
COUNTRY Australia

140 ATM Sale

AUTHOR Lucy-Ann Moore
COUNTRY Australia

142 Wonderland Series

AUTHORS Vladimír Turner, Sergi Palau
COUNTRY Czech Republic
146 Tunnel Vision: Campbell Newman’s Tunnel vision:
A Cost-Benefit Analysis.
AUTHORS: Luke Robertson, Gem Copeland, Aaron Gillett
COUNTRY Australia

148 Loquitur Muros

AUTHOR Bleeps and Dimitris Petalas
COUNTRY Greece

150 The Third Deadly Sin

AUTHORS Majida AlSafadi, Sarah Zohair, Omnia ElAfifi
COUNTRY United Arab Emirates
152 Value Quest Bourse:
An Electronic Allegory of Casino Capitalism
AUTHORS Eduard Balaz, Ivan Blagojevic/Urtica Art Group
COUNTRY Serbia
 8

CRITICAL
WRITING
156 Surplus Debt
AUTHOR Søren Rosenbak
COUNTRY Denmark

164 Debt, How to Get out of it

AUTHOR Antonio Rollo
COUNTRY Italy

172 What Is Your Occupation?:

Meditations on and Mediating the Corporeal Self
and Corporate Society
AUTHOR Johnny Merryman
COUNTRY USA

174 Escape from the Tyranny of Things

AUTHOR Aaris Sherin
COUNTRY USA

175 Instincts on debt

AUTHOR Brendan Ross
COUNTRY Australia

178 Reconsum
AUTHOR Lukas Lehmann
COUNTRY Germany
BEYOND...
180 Let's Play Tag: Culture jamming Harvey Norman
AUTHORS Paul Kimbell, Nicola Paris
COUNTRY Australia
182 Call Centre Experience! Contact Centre Emulator
AUTHOR Ivan Kozenitzky
COUNTRY Argentina

184 Speculative Numismatics

AUTHOR Anja Groten
COUNTRY Germany
 9

186 Safety First

AUTHORS Vladimír Turner, Ondřej Mladý
COUNTRY Czech Republic
188 Plakatopolis
AUTHORS Kaja Kisilak, Janez Plešnar, Goran Ivašić
COUNTRY Slovenia
190 Finitude
AUTHOR Keith Armstrong
COUNTRY Australia

194 In Search of Extradisciplinary

Dialogue and Intervention: Debt and Brisbane
TXT Oliver Vodeb

218 IN MEMORIAM: Zravko Papič

Shoaib Nabi Ahmad
 10

You cannot evict an idea

whose time has come!
These words express the nature
of the global movement against the rule
of money over life. They belong to the
people, the 99 percent, who are bring-
ing fundamental, urgent issues to the
street, into the media and the realm of
public consciousness, into schools, uni-
versities, jobs, homes, and into intimate
discussions and relationships.
These words also express some-
thing else. They articulate a state of mind,
a focus, and a concise articulation of the
problem. The idea whose time has come
is mainly about three things: inciting in-
terventions that create a rupture in the
order of things with the goal to redefine
our fields of experience and the relation-
ship between being, doing, and saying;
encouraging dialogue; and creating new,
emancipatory social institutions.

INTRO
 11
If communication and art are to
play a relevant role in shaping a future
worth having, we need to further redi-
rect, reinvent, and reimagine our own
understanding and the way we think,
theorise, and practice them both. The
burden of debt not only offers an op-
portunity to do so, but also an urgent
responsibility.
During the global protests against
the austerity measures and financialisa-
tion, one thing became clear. Debt is no
threat to the capitalist economy. In fact,
it lies at the very core of the neoliberal
project.
The imperative financial logic is
simple: to generate more debt. While
punishing indebted people and states
for unpaid debts, financial capital simul-
taneously offers them new loans that
they will not be able to repay in future.
Drawing these nations deeper into the
cycle of debt, (mostly) Western democ-
racies and financial institutions have
loaded debt onto future generations.
Today, public debt is an obliga-
tion handed down from the present
generation to future ones. Millions are
enslaved through debt, and indebted
life has become naturalised. Debt has
become the primary mechanism that
takes power from the people and gives it
to the hands of the 1 percent. But debt is
rarely questioned. Its moral obligation is
culturally embedded. It is shaming and
therefore unspeakable. Its power lies in
its violent normalcy.
What is to be done? Clearly, after
years of the welfare state, we are now
in the cycle of debt—the capitalist age
of economical, financial, and political
emergency, which could last forever. It
could turn into a constant way of life;
life under debt. Surely we do not want
to become the “capitalist entrepreneurs”
of our lives, or self-governed “human
capital”.
Yes, we are witnessing the un-
certainty of the current times, which
generates mass anti-capitalistic cri-
tique through interventions in the
public sphere. But public critique is not
enough. Our struggle should use all that
public reason and power offer to sup-
port the many aspects of the current
common anti-capitalist effort. Our aim
should be one: to abolish capitalism
with all reasonable means.
Taking a step back and looking at
the global movements from a distance,
it is clear that we need to learn more.
We need to create strategies for under-
standing and ways of learning that go
beyond the institutional, cultural, and
pragmatic boundaries of professions
and fields of knowledge. This process is
already happening with great intensity
around the world, and we at Memefest
have been contributing to it for many

years. From our perspective, a better
understanding of communication and
art for social and environmental change,
together with developed relevant prac-
tices, is crucial.
InDEBTed to Intervene is a book of
critical lessons in debt, communication
design, art, and theoretical practice. It
is inspired by the intensive process we
have undertook during the Memefest
2012 Festival of Socially Responsive
Communication and Art, themed ‘Debt’.
It shows some of the results of this pro-
cess but also presents additional work
on the theme.
The book starts with texts written
on the subject for this publication by
scholars, educators, and activists from
Slovenia, Australia, and the US. Debt
is discussed through the lens of public
communication, art, design, technol-
ogy, political economy, social struggle,
surveillance, protest, education, en-
forced subjectivities, and urban as well
12
as virtual space. This is followed by an
international selection of works from
the 2012 festival process: visual com-
munication, critical writing and par-
ticipatory radical art. Works include
written contextual articulations by par-
ticipants and commentaries by some
of Memefest’s curators. This extradisci-
plinary contextual, public, and dialogic
approach to analyse and evaluate com-
munication design and art is unique to
Memefest. It shifts the focus beyond
the image and towards communication.
Finally, an essay about the extradiscipli-
nary seminar/workshop/intervention
held in Brisbane at the Queensland Col-
lege of Art in November 2012 follows.
This collection of response-able
essays, theoretical discussions, art, and
communication design works presents
findings about debt through the lens of
communication and art for social and
environmental change; in this sense, it
is the first of its kind. It offers analyti-
cal insights, conceptual apparatuses,
practical tools, and radical inspiration.
Debt defines our lives and lies at the
core of human relations; this book is an
intervention that aims to contribute to
the process of real change. The time for
change is now.
Oliver Vodeb,
Nikola Janović Kolenc,
Brisbane and Ljubljana,
December 2013
 13

TXTS
 14

DEBT AS A
MODE OF TXT Nikola Janovic Kolenc

GOVERNANCE

C ontemporary social relations, as we know them, are changing. The

category of capital is still essential for social relations, but today even
more essential is the production of debt and the indebted man. In oth-
er words, the creditor–debtor relationship, which operates as a specific
mechanism of biopolitical control, exploitation, and domination over in-
dividuals and society as a whole, is a fundamental one.
The production of the (post)modern subject, as defined by biopoli-
tics (Foucault (1978/79) 2008; Negri 2000; Virno 2004; Esposito 2008),
has had at least two purposes: First, to provide conditions for the repro-
duction of homo economicus, and second, to meet the needs of capitalist
economy and human flexible morals, for the purposes of creating a (post)
modern consumer self. But with economic and political neoliberalism
has come the era of “financialization”.1 During this period, predatory and
speculative (financial) capitalism and the production of “the end of work”
(Rifkin 1996) are increasingly coming to the fore, as is the socioeconomic
function of debt, which significantly changes the form of daily life and the
constitution of subjectivity in capitalism. Constitution of subjectivity is
no longer bound to the relationship of work/capital but, through the crea-
tion of debt relationship, subjects—the “entrepreneurs of the self”—are
constituted as debtors. Since creditors, i.e., Capital – ensure the effect of
society through debt relations and not through social cohesion or ideolo-
gy, it is necessary to observe the fundamental transformation this has on
social relations. One can see that the morality of subject is also changing.
This new morality—the morality of the indebted man—stems from the
underlying social relationship of creditor–debtor that has become domi-
nant in most societies.

1 Financialisation or time of violent financial capitalism (Marazzi et al. 2011) is the processes of
global profit production (financial products, investments, stocks and bonds, currency exchange, lend-
ing money at interest etc.) prior to the accumulation of money and in a today’s world financial system.
 15

Debt cannot be articulated only as a socio-economic disposition.

Debt also has biopolitical power.2 It should therefore be seen as a tech-
nique of governing individual and collective subjectivities. State appa-
ratus–serving Capital subordinate subjects—through political decisions
and through subordinating national laws to the requirements of the neo-
liberal market by increasing taxes, making cuts to welfare and pension
funds, reducing health, education and culture funds, and increasing the
precariousness of work—to adapt their own lives to new conditions of the
market (in the name of capital) and become entrepreneurs of their own
lives. Adapting state apparatuses to suit the requirements of the neolib-
eral market (Sassen 1996) has led to the introduction of subtle control
and surveillance, which is just a new form of neo-liberal-slavery.

WHAT IS HAPPENING?
Deleuze wrote that man is no longer a man confined, but a man in debt
(1995). Over seventeen years later, Maurizio Lazzarato writes that this has
produced an indebted man (2012). We could say that the subject of debt—
homo debtor—is a new figure of biopolitics and economics. Together, bio-
political and economic production are pursuing "a new social relationship",
which is characteristic of the current stage of the neoliberal project.
What produces the (over)indebted man can be explained in a few
steps. Debt is just another form of capital, and it lies at the heart of neo-
liberal project. Is it therefore possible to say that debt crosses all social and
class relations? The products of debt are the workers, the unemployed,
pensioners, students, consumers, etc. In the eyes of capital, these people
are reduced to the common denominator of debtor, while the capitalist is
the lender/creditor.
From a sociological perspective, debt is a social relationship be-
tween creditors and debtors. From a biopolitical perspective, debt is not
just an ordinary creditor–debtor relationship; its formalised relationship
is governed and protected by legal power and control mechanisms. And
this is of great importance for capitalism, mainly because it forms a new
historical form of human capital relations. In the current capitalism para-
digm, the fundamental relationship is based between capital and labour.
However, this relationship—at the end of work and with the destruction
of the social contract with capital—can no longer be taken as given. The
relationship between capital and labour is now replaced by the forced re-

2 Biopower is term coined by Michel Foucault in his lecture courses at the Collège de France (1975-
79). Foucault relates biopower to the governmental practices and techniques of modern state.
 16

lationship between creditor and debtor. The resulting creditor–debtor re-

lationship due to the financialisation of social and class relations.

DEBT ECONOMICS
The financialisation is a product of the accelerated and expansive
spread of financial institutions and markets that have taken over the or-
ganisation of the capitalist economy in the post-Ford era (Boltanski and
Chiapello 2005). The consequences are not only visible at the macro level
but also at the micro levels of everyday life. From here, there is a need
to understand financialisation of fundamental social and class relations
through the economic apparatus. Not because social relations can be in-
terpreted as a form of social economy, but because financial order colonis-
es social and class relations, and structurally redesigns them in creditor–
debtor relations. The fundamental economics of social and class relations
have been (re)articulated in our debt economy.
Change has its referent in the inverted logical operation. Let's look
at some symptomatic cases that show how debt is imposed on society.
Instead of raising the wages in real sector (the part of the economy that is
concerned with actually producing goods and services) to encourage con-
sumption, capitalism insists on placing long-term and short-term bor-
rowings (debt) for consumption. It could be said that the state is no better
when it comes to the nonprofit housing and social care. The state as an
instrument of capital continues to build housing designed to service its
citizens by providing them with access to housing loans (debt), while so-
cial instruments and other forms of housing co-operatives are neglected.
When it comes to education, there is also no understanding. For graduate
students and students who travel to universities abroad, most affordable
credits (debt) are designed to pay their tuition fees. These fees are not the
students’ only expense, however; buying a computer, going on vacation,
buying school supplies are all subject to the consumption of loans (debt).
Debt is ubiquitous. It means that debt might appear once as an in-
nocent loan, another time as the only solution in distress. In both cas-
es it is important to realise that the imposition of such loans is purely
a economic mechanism that allows the appropriation of surplus value.
Therefore, the economics of debt is symptomatic of a deeper domestic
economic and social disequilibrium. These symptoms are seen through a
new social division. On the one hand are homo debtors; on the other, the
institutions of capital—creditors—of which there are not a large number.
This means that capital is very concentrated.
 17

BIOPOLITICAL MODE
When it comes to debt problems, the term 'financialisation' can be
somewhat unclear. Many people think that financialisation is only about
stock exchanges, financial institutions, and financial instruments. No.
Indebtedness should be seen also as biopolitical control over lives. There-
fore, it is necessary to talk about the state as an extension of capital and
biopolitical production (which is the domain of the state), as it was first
described by Michel Foucault ([1978/79] 2008).

State
The ideology of the ruling class in the early 1990s modulated to
gouvermentalité—model of expert governance—at a time of political
and economic neoliberal capitalism (Foucault 1991). With the help of
the ideo-political apparatus, which Althusser mentioned as a supplement
to the legal system (1971, 142–48), a special political caste was created
whose political ideology of governance was subordinate to the interests
of Capital as the national interest of state (people). Today, allows political
caste to remain in power and adapt to the new neoliberal conditions.
The new role of government is to serve the global interests of capi-
tal. Therefore, the main role of the state is to subsidise the necessities of
capital (Močnik 2006, 58–59). In other words, the task of such a state is to
eliminate all (local) social and other inadequacies that are contrary to the
universal ideology of capital, and make them acceptable. This means that
the state should constantly manage and monitor world economic process-
es in its territory, ensuring that this takes place smoothly. In particular,
this means that the state must comply with the obligations and duties
imposed (in the name of capital) by institutional representatives of the
global economy, global processes, and universal legal order.

Subject
The production of the indebted and subordinated subject fits per-
fectly into the context of the above-described conditions, ensuring for
the smooth functioning of capital. At the micro level, the state itself,
through internal institutions, provides conditions under which manage-
ment practices of the ruling caste seem unproblematic and acceptable.
The ruling caste's task is to convince the public that the production of the
indebted man is the only option. It could be said that their communica-
tive approach is a special technique of domination, which is possible due
 18

to the specific political monopoly of the ruling caste.3 The ruling caste
governs society through and with the apparatuses of control and surveil-
lance (media, pedagogy, internal security, economic policy, etc.), which
places financialisation at the centre of everyday life. It is impossible to
overlook the fact that debt or the production of the indebted man is not a
biopolitical strategy—the work of power that at the same time constructs
and subordinates subjects and their lives. It creates the subjectivity of
the debtor that corresponds to the expectations of Capital. Hence, debt
is continuous and limitless; capitalism, in relation to biopolitics, is taking
total control over life.
Creating debt without limits should therefore be recognised as a
new biopolitical relationship between the government and the subject.
The microphysics of power connecting external subjectivity, which is
subordination with objectification, runs through the building applianc-
es of individualisation techniques. This means that debt as an external
constraint subordination (made by the debtor) has its own internal psy-
chological dimension. From that perspective, to get into debt means to
internalise the obligation to return debt. In contrast to the external rela-
tionship, in which the state imposes a tax, internal debt-to-indebtedness
is less visible. That relationship is pushed in man’s cognitive apparatus,
which implies the creation of an individual's control over himself at least.
The main aim of this process is the internalisation of norms of capitalist
behaviour and becoming (the capitalist ideal) the “self-regulating man”.
Dual external-internal force produces the subjectivity of the debt-
or, which is controlled by the relation to the creditor, which is self-reg-
ulated. Of course, the creditor—to whom debt should be returned with
interest—is a capitalist. This means that capitalism, with the help of debt,
is transforms subjects into infinitive debtors. It marks every individual,
making them a vessel through control and dependence (debt), and con-
fines them to their own identity (the conscience of debt). Both approach-
es allude to a form of government, which, through debt, now controls
subjects (subjectivity) and produces subjects (subjectification). Therefore,
it is necessary to recognise the birth of a new form of life under debt.

3 The communicative approach of the ruling caste is based on the specter of manipulative com-
municative practices that are misleading. These practices are not established through democratic
dialogue and in the direction of a more equal distribution of power. Contrary, they are based on media
manipulation is to divert public attention away from important issues and changes decided by the
political and economic elites, and to keep the public busy with trivial politics and trivial mass culture.
In other words, manipulative communicative approaches are used by the ruling caste to create prob-
lems and then to offer solutions which are common with the interests of dominant, elite groups in
the society. Noam Chomsky described this kind of manipulative communicative practices in his book
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988).
 19

FINANCIALISATION BEYOND DEMOCRACY

Since debt is not only a universal economic category but it is also
a universal political construct, it is necessary to speak of its transversal-
ity. What does this mean? It means that debt hit everybody: we woke up
one morning as debtors. And today, as debtors, we are all obliged to repay
debt, regardless of our social status—student, unemployed, scientist or
millionaire). creditor–debtor relationships are now new forms of finan-
cialisation—forms of the neoliberal capitalist exploitation and domina-
tion over society and individuals. Therefore, debt and debt relations in
Foucault's language could be articulated as financial dispositive of control
and surveillance. Seen from a social perspective, it is a capitalist biopoli-
tics, the policy of life, the purpose of which is to produce social life of
homo sacer in relation to a debt (as an economic and financial category).
Enforcing debt as a form of financialisation should be thought of as
a form of structural violence that ignores what little democracy still exists
in the world (Balibar 1994). Twenty-four EU Member States are over-in-
debted. Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Italy are in a very difficult eco-
nomic and political situation, while unemployment is the biggest problem
in the EU. The scenario is no different in the US. Barack Obama and José
Manuel Durão Barroso, in their public appearances, cannot offer concrete
solutions. In 2012 Greeks experienced the power of financial disciplining.
The financial elite didn’t allow Greeks to have a referendum on the methods
of debt payment. Their rescue programs are scheduled by their creditors, i.e.
global institutions and representatives of capital. Spain, Italy, Portugal, and
Slovenia also appear to be non-sovereign states when it comes to deciding
on financial policies and use of fiscal instruments.
Democracy is suspended in this case. It was also suspended when
politicians decided to socialise/reward private debts produced in the "glob-
al financial crisis" by spending public contributions on citizens. Today, we
pay these debts in such a way that government regularly reduces wages
in the public sector, funds for schools and health services, pensions, etc.,
so as to recover these costs. Capital is extending the working time, intro-
ducing precarious work, optimising working processes,, reducing salaries,
and reducing the number of workers And politicians repeat the capitalist
mantra: the crisis is a challenge. The problem with this capitalist man-
tra is its solipsism, which remains trapped in an endless cycle of one and
the same thought: how to help capital, and not the people. Therefore it is
not necessary to repeat Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) sentiments in order to
realise that contemporary neoliberal capitalism is a space without a mini-
20
 21

mum of the holiness, in which everything alive is democratised with the

intention to be profitable, (ab)used, and, in the end, left to the controlled
vegetation (bare life in debt).

HETEROTOPIAS OF RESISTANCE
Why do we obey the authorities that enforce our debt? There is no
single answer to this question. Maybe this answer could be articulated
with another question: why can we not resist such a power?
Rebellion against debt was a central part of the global Occupy Wall
Street movement. Although the protest movement did not achieve all its
goals, it was successful in its manifestation and temporary insistence. The
movement proved to be insufficient in terms of articulating a stronger
and more permanent/common interest. It has been shown that debt has
its individualistic power, which is still more powerful than the collec-
tive power of the multitude. This movement has not coped as a collec-
tive, which does not mean that it did not establish itself as a multitude,
in the sense of Antonio Negri’s conception. 4 The fact is that the Occupy
Wall Street movement started a new alternative politics. In this move-
ment, the common interest prevailed, which was geared toward finding
new common alternatives. At this symbolic level and with tactical com-
munication skills, the multitude began a conflict with the authorities. In
Jacques Rancière’s language, their speech was articulated around an in-
justice (1999, 1–21). Through protest, movement was manifested as an
alternative request that was critical to the socialisation of private debts.
Expressing this particular truth was a political manifesto from the outset.
Notwithstanding the partial success of the movement, which reached the
stage of doxa (the appearance of people who manifest and protest), the
mobilised multitude showed, at least, that debt is disputed property.
Resistance, whatever it was, showed that a critical force builds new
world politics. It became clear that a politics exists precisely through con-
frontation. Through symbolic, non-violent confrontation with the police
(a representative force of ruling order), debt became political issue.

FINANCIAL OR PASTORAL TECHNIQUES

The Occupy Wall Street movement failed in its manifestation and
in its rebellion. Further, no other movement has succeeded in protest-

4 The political concept of multitude was first used by Machiavelli and then by Spinoza. In its (post)
modern use, the term 'multitude' (which refers to the distinct category of people who share their
common fact of existence/resistance) is used by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book Empire
(2000) and defined in their book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004) as 1) the
name of an immanence, 2) class concept, and 3) concept of power
 22

ing financial capitalism. Even Herodotus wrote in The Histories about the
rebellion of slaves—"the poor against the rich"— which alludes to every
fight today. Deleuze and Guattari’s ([1993] 2000) explained concept of
debt through the interpretation of the despotic society refers to Friedrich
Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral where Nietzsche emphasised the dif-
ference between finite and infinite debt. If the finality of a debt is charac-
teristic of archaic societies (debt can be repaid), in capitalist societies, we
are faced with infinite debt that cannot be repaid. Lazzarato also points
the infinity of debt (Lazzarato 2012). Through the works of Nietzsche and
Deleuze,, and Foucault's concept of Christian pastoral techniques, Laz-
zarato has introduced an analogy between an infinite debt in capitalism
and an infinite debt to God.
For Christian pastoral power—a biopolitical thesis is developed by
Foucault ([1977/78] 2007)—is characteristically that only God can take
debt and pays it off. The Son of God took all the sins of mankind to repay
debt. With this gesture, all humanity is committed (or bound) to believe
in God . Today, the crisis is not the saviour who would repay debts. Debt
is infinite; it cannot be repaid, and the ruling class does not want to erase
debt. The reason for this is not hard to find. The capitalist insistence on
debt is to be understood as its ruling technique. This technique provides
conditions for the reproduction of inequality and helps to govern divided
people/a divided world. Of course, this technique shows divided com-
munities and ways of dictatorship through capital. Techniques of domi-
nation, are tied in our Western society to Christian eschatology and the
Christian genealogy of morals (Nietzsche [1887] 1990, 53–94). Christian
pastoral techniques emphasise responsibility (moral bond), obedience
(subordination), knowledge and humility (which individualises through
the practice of self-awareness), and death (the sacrifice for god/sovereign),
thereby creating a psychological matrix in which every individual/subject
is formatted. These elements help capitalism to produce and maintain (in-
dividuation of) the indebted man, his servility, humility, isolation, guilt,
memory pressure and obligation promises (commitments, contracts) to
return the money. In this way, techniques of debt governs a borrower’s fu-
ture live. They isolate and subordinate him. Therefore, the establishment
of a debt ratio in the next period is nothing more than a specific form of
bonds; a way of internally and externally controlling every indebted indi-
vidual; a way of avoiding collective resistance.
 23

CLASS STRUGGLE
Biopolitical production has the power to shape individuals into sub-
jects who establish control over themselves, to produce subjective feelings
of guilt, to force subjects to isolate themselves, to become publicly invis-
ible and socially alienated. This biopolitical power is now more powerful
than the collective form of resistance or multitude of singular subjects.
Obviously, the multitude is not yet able to establish strong social (collec-
tive) relations. It is therefore necessary to look for new forms of socialisa-
tion and solidarity, and to organise masses in the direction of resistance.
Resistance should not be directed solely against debt. So far, rebellions
against debt and financial instruments have not been very successful, as
evidenced by the recenthistory of neoliberalism. In this context, the re-
bellious multitude should be understood through the concept of class; as
a rebellion against capital.
Today’s resistance of multitude against capital must be conceived
through the frontal class struggle (Negri 2005, 113–14). The multitude
should be seen as a productive class of singularities. In other words, as
a class that is no longer one class, but is a creative set of economic reali-
ties, which is subject to the authorities. In this context, a multitude is of-
fered as a subject of class struggle and revitalises the politically defeated
working class. The numerical labour force—as opposed to the problematic
term 'working class'—must once again become a productive class and go
to the fight against capital as a united front (and not as a trade union or-
ganisation). It must become the ontological force that will embody com-
mon desire to change the world.

REFERENCES

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.

Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”

In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 142–48. New York and London:
Monthly Review Press.

Balibar, Etiene. 1994. Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and

Philosophy Before and After Marx. New York & London: Routledge.

Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London
and New York: Verso.
 24

Herman, Edward S., and Chomsky, Noam. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The
Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1983) 2000. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press.

Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bìos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: The

Minnesota University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in

Govermentality, edited by G. Burchell, C. Gordonand, and P. Miller, 87–104.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

———. (1977/78) 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the

Collège de France 1977–78. New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

———. (1978/79) 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De

France 1978–79. Basingstoke: Palgrave, MacMillan.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. The Making of the Indebted Man. Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e).

Marazzi, Christian. 2011. The Violence of Financial Capitalism. Los Angeles:

Semiotext(e)

Močnik, Rastko. 2006. Svetovno gospodarstvo in revolucionarna politika

(World Economy and Revolutionary Politics). Ljubljana: Založba *cf.

Negri, Antonio. 2005. Negri on Negri: In Conversation with Anne

Dufourmentelle. New York, London: Routledge.

———. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Negri, Antonio, and Michael Hardt. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire. London: Penguin Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1887) 1990. Genalogija morala (On the Genealogy of

Morality). Beograd: Grafos.

Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis:

The University of Minnesota Press.

Rifkin, Jeremy. 1996. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force
and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: A Tracher/Putnam book.

Saskia, Sassen. Losing Control?: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New

York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of

Contemporary Forms of Life. New York: Semiotext(e).
 25

BIO
Dr. Nikola Janović Kolenc is a sociologist and cultural theorist, independent re-
searcher, Memefest collaborator, and a member of The Initiative for Democratic
Socialism. His theoretical and practical research mostly focuses on contempo-
rary studies of culture and society, and issues regarding ideology theory and
biopolitics. He has been a research associate at the Department of Sociology,
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. His previous research has
focused on new forms of communication and mobility, the crisis of social cohe-
sion, cultural flows, cultural experiences, and multiculturalism across European
city spaces. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology,
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. He has published several articles
and co-edited the book Demonstrating Relevance: Response-Ability, Theory, Practice
and Imagination of Socially Responsive Communication (published by Memefest
and Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, 2010). He still wants to
become le chef cuistôt-un philosophe when he grows up.
 26

INDEBTED
INTERACTION:
THE WAGES OF
THE DIGITAL TXTMark Andrejevic

ECONOMY

I n his manifesto-like pronouncement on the demise of disciplinary

society, Gilles Deleuze observes that, “Man is no longer man enclosed,
but man in debt” (1992, 5). This telling and timely formulation asks us
to consider the ways in which debt stands in relation to enclosure. In
what respect might it be opposed to enclosure? After all, when we incur
a debt, we colloquially ‘enter into’ an agreement of some kind that, along
the way, we hope eventually to ‘get out of’. Isn’t a debt simply another
kind of enclosure—something that, in a sense, traps or captures us? It is
clear that Deleuze is not here interested in mobilising the full spectrum
of oppositions: if enclosures serve as a form of confinement, the state of
indebtedness is surely not a contrasting form of liberation, but rather a
different (but related) modality of containment and control; we might de-
scribe it as ‘de-confined’ control. The spatial metaphors are not incidental
to the argument, since Deleuze is specifically (and presciently) identifying
the ways in which spaces of control are reconfigured in the era of always-
on, information-age technologies and practices. If disciplinary strategies
are associated with the grand enclosures of the nineteenth century—the
schools, factories, penitentiaries, and other institutions—strategies of
control emerge alongside the reconfiguration of these enclosures and, in
particular, the ‘de-differentiation’ of the spatial distinctions that defined
them. In the disciplinary society, one leaves one space to enter another:
distinct realms of leisure, labour, domesticity, punishment, treatment,
training, and so on, become the hallmark of specific disciplines exercised
within their relevant spaces: factories, prisons, schools, etc.
In the digital era, one can list the ways in which these distinctions
continue to be reconfigured by what might be described as post-enclosure
 27

strategies: distance learning, telecommuting, house arrest, and various

forms of technology-dependent ‘de-institutionalisation’. The promise of
spatial de-differentiation as a form of alleged empowerment for those
once confined to institutional enclosures takes shape against the back-
ground of disciplinary strategy. How else would one construe the promise
of being able to work from anywhere as ‘liberating’? Deleuze reminds us
that the very rationale for de-institutionalisation is the advent of tech-
nologies of flexible control that render the institutional boundaries in-
creasingly unnecessary. Always-on, ubiquitous forms of monitoring reach
beyond institutional boundaries, allowing these to explode outward.
The story of de-differentiation is by now a familiar one—but the
explicit connection to debt bears further examination. In what way is
the spatial reconfiguration associated with emerging strategies of con-
trol subsumed under the logic of debt? Why figure the ‘control society’ in
terms of this particular economic relationship? To begin, foreground the
relational character of debt, which is to be opposed to the discrete charac-
ter of simple exchange. Deleuze notes that, “In the disciplinary societies
one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the bar-
racks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished
with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed ser-
vices...” (1992, 3).
Something similar might be said of the relationship between sim-
ple exchange and the creditor–debtor relationship: in the case of the for-
mer, people are always starting again (a new transaction, a new product),
whereas in the latter, people are ‘never’ finished—the debt relation is an
ongoing, indefinite, perhaps infinite one (another subscription, another
membership on another platform). This opposition is echoed in the ju-
ridical distinction invoked by Deleuze between, “The apparent acquittal of
the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless
postponements of the societies of control” (1992, 3)). Relations of con-
trol, obligation, and exchange become ongoing relationships rather than
discrete, self-contained transactions as they adjust to the de-differenti-
ation of the enclosures. Debt is the economic relation of the always-on,
always-connected informational infrastructure. To take just one example,
consider how subscription services have displaced direct-purchase rela-
tions. Once, we bought our music in discrete, material packets: vinyl 45s
or LPs, cassettes, CDs. Now the tendency is towards subscription services:
we pay for a streaming service that follows us wherever we go—through
spaces of domesticity, labour, leisure, etc. Or, perhaps, we subscribe to a
 28

commercially supported service that allows us always-on access wherever

we go. The ‘cloud’ is a relational infrastructure: when we entrust our data
to it, we enter into an ongoing relationship—indeed, were we to ‘finish’
the transaction, we would lose access to our documents, our music, our
photographs, our data.
Our relationship to these spatially and temporally de-differentiated
services is continuous and ongoing as is our obligation to them for the
services they provide. In exchange for the convenience, flexibility, and ac-
cess they allow, these services seek ongoing access to the informational
resources (including our data and how it is used) they need to generate
revenues. The online economy is increasingly reliant upon this debt rela-
tion: the proliferation of services it provides come with an obligation that
is indefinite and potentially infinite, at least insofar as there is no limit
to the data that is sought in exchange for ongoing access to an array of
services: search, social networking, photo- and video-storage and access,
and so on.
The remainder of this essay considers how the relational charac-
ter of networked digital media—the reliance on models premised upon
always-on access and availability—has developed around the logic of debt
as a strategy for control. The proliferation of services that come with an
ongoing obligation—typically of submission to increasingly comprehen-
sive forms of data collection and monitoring—invokes Lazzarato’s de-
scription of capitalism’s production of “the indebted man, who will never
finish paying his debts” (2012, 77).
This logic is neither new nor distinct to digital media: it is caught
up in the system of advertising more generally. This is evidenced by the
fact that when, in the 1990s, the television industry was first absorbing
the challenge posed by digital video recorders (DVRs) that threatened to
allow viewers to skip advertisements with a flick of a button, its repre-
sentatives made explicit the terms of their implicit ‘pact’ with audiences:
viewers get ‘free’ programming in exchange for doing the ‘work’ of watch-
ing the advertisements. That is, the commercial pact entailed an implicit
obligation or responsibility on the part of viewers; in return for not hav-
ing to pay directly for free-to-air programming, viewers owed something
to producers—an obligation variously described in terms of viewers’
time, their attention, or their ‘eyeballs’. Thus, as the technology changed
and it became easier to skip advertisements, people such as the CEO of
Turner Broadcasting began to describe the use of DVRs as a form of theft:
“Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to
 29

watch the spots ... Any time you skip a commercial ... you’re actually steal-
ing the programming” (Kramer 2002, 32, emphasis added). Of course, no
actual contract was signed by viewers; this term is meant to characterise
the implied logic of free-to-air commercial TV. The very act of watching
incurs an obligation: the responsibility to provide something in return
for the freely available content. It was only against the background of the
threat that viewers might withhold their value-generating activity—via
a technologically facilitated ‘general strike’—that the need to find new
ways of enforcing the pact, and thus of making it explicit, emerged. This
task has become an increasingly urgent and productive one in the digital
era with its plethora of ‘free’ online content and services that impose a
similar obligation on users; the implicit message is ‘if you want this ser-
vice or this content, you owe us something, and we will extract it from
you’. Moreover, the relational, always-on character of networked, digital
services renders the extraction an ongoing process: the more services we
use, the more content we access, the greater the backlog of debt we cre-
ate. We provide the growing collateral of our personal data, but it is never
enough to buy our way out of the obligation: more services require more
data, and as long as we use them, we can never quite catch up.
The collection of this data, oddly enough, is framed for us as a form
of personal attention and care: the promise that if we are being counted
then we must really count. But of course, this promise is as misguided as
the conflation of creditworthiness with care for the creditor critiqued by
Marx. Indeed, Marx’s characterisation of the logic of debt as relying upon
the false promise of dis-estrangement resonates with the false promise of
personalisation in the digital era:
this abolition of estrangement, this return of man to himself and there-
fore to other men is only an appearance; the self-estrangement, the de-
humanisation is all the more infamous and extreme because its element
is no longer commodity, metal, paper, but man’s moral existence, man’s
social existence, the inmost depths of his heart... (cited in Lazzarato
2012, 56)

In a sense, this is the currency of the infinite debt imposed by the

interactive digital ‘enclosure’—the various platforms that allow us to
seamlessly move through physical spaces without leaving or arriving.
Facebook trades in the currency of our ‘social existence’ while various ap-
plications probe data about our desires and fantasies, hope and dreams,
as well as the more mundane details of our movements throughout the
 30

day, our purchases, our web searches, and so on. The capture of such data
highlights the integral relation between surveillance and debt—a defin-
ing feature of the digital landscape. As Richard Dienst puts it, “The two
great abstract machines that define our era—the market and the media—
are two faces of this inscriptive-projective process, the organisation of
lived temporality around the interminable working-up and working-off of
an imperishable indebtedness” (2011, 125). Simply put, a regime of debt
is simultaneously and necessarily one of surveillance even if different re-
gimes are associated with different modalities of monitoring. Lazzarato
associates this equation with the rise of finance capital and its reliance
on various techniques for leveraging debt: “financial power is essential-
ly a power of public evaluation whose claim is to make all organisations
transparent, to make visible and thus assessable (measurable) the rela-
tion and behaviour of the actors in each institution” (2012, 138). From
the perspective of the commercial digital media economy, the frantic
consumption and circulation of information is paired with the injunction
to become hyper-productive, generating increasingly detailed data about
oneself with every mouse-click, every page visit, every text and email, and
phone call. Following Lazzarato (2012), Mark Coté emphasises the way
in which debt enables market-based strategies of control in the digital
era because of the way it “breaks down the binaries producer–consumer
and working–nonworking ... Debt is a strategy of control, a command of
encumbrance: ‘become productive’” (forthcoming, 32). 1
In this regard, the sporadic moral panics surrounding high levels of
personal and household debt in the US (and elsewhere) can be deceptive:
economists see the willingness of consumers to incur new debt as a posi-
tive sign for the economy. After the staggering recession triggered by the
2008 collapse of the sub-prime lending market in the US, for example,
financial analysts welcomed Americans’ increased willingness to take on
debt as a healthy sign of recovery. As one press account put it, “For the
first time since the Great Recession hit, American households are taking
on more debt than they are shedding, an epochal shift that might augur a
more resilient recovery” (Lowrey 2012). One of the key indicators of eco-
nomic growth in the US is new housing starts—an indicator that, in the
majority of cases, refers to the incurrence of debt in the form of long-term
mortgage obligations. From 1997 to 2007, the US experienced significant
economic growth, during which time “household debt ballooned from
66% of economic output to 98%” and “was knocked back down to 89%

1 Cited with permission from the author.

 31

by the recession” (Hilsenrath and Simon 2011). The figures are striking:
economists and pundits describe a shift toward debt levels that equal the
nation’s entire domestic output as a step in the right direction. Alterna-
tively, foregoing consumption in order to pay off existing bills rather than
continuing to carry high-debt levels is seen as a drag on the economy:
“Paying off bills slows consumer spending on appliances, travel and a slew
of other products and services...” (Hilsenrath and Simon 2011). Thrift
has fallen a long way since the days of Benjamin Franklin: “During the
Great Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes warned of a so-called
paradox of thrift: When everyone turns frugal, everyone suffers. Synchro-
nised thrift slows the economy … Some experts worry that is happen-
ing now” (Hilsenrath and Simon 2011). The relationship of monitoring
to debt takes place in several registers: as a precursor to the imposition
of an obligation (background checking and census data collection); as a
means of monitoring and accounting for outstanding obligations; and as
a population-level indicator of economic growth. Given the close relation-
ship between monitoring and surveillance, it is no coincidence that cred-
it-card companies and credit-rating agencies helped pioneer the forms of
economic surveillance that are becoming an increasingly important part
of the commercial online economy. Along with loyalty cards, they are a
key player in the attempt to bridge the realms of online and offline data
collection by linking an online consumer with past patterns of purchase
behaviour and preferences.

BIG DATA DEBT

Viewed as a data-generating activity, the lending process contrib-
utes to what William Bogard (1996, 1) describes as the “simulation of
surveillance”—forms of data-driven analysis that seek to displace the
uncertainty of the future by modelling it. Simulation stands in for a
kind of knowledge about the future that exerts control in the present.
The fantasy of simulation is that total information capture in the pre-
sent might saturate the possibilities of the future. As Lazzarato puts it,
“What matters is finance’s goal of reducing what will be to what is, that
is, reducing the future and its possibilities to current power relations”
(2012, 46). Colonising the future requires the accumulation of as much
data as possible about the present. The bottomless appetite for informa-
tion is one way of approaching the infinite or limitless data-debt obliga-
tion that has come to characterise the digital economy: the fact that the
increasing range of available services and applications with which we are
 32

provided is the obverse of the process of monitoring without limits. The

exchange on offer is one in which the development of new information
services and products is intertwined with the widening and deepening of
the scope of data collection.
While once, services such as Google, Gmail, and Facebook might
have been thought of as ‘free’ services provided by commercial entities
whose motives remained obscure, we are arriving at a less romanticised
and mysticised understanding of the exchange that supports them: we
‘pay’ for access to these services not simply with our attention (as in the
case, for example, of commercial free-to-air broadcasting), but with our
data. This data is not a ‘found’ asset, something that marketers simply
stumble across because it is lying around cluttering the information land-
scape. Rather, it is a resource generated by user activity and deliberately
captured by an infrastructure developed for the express purpose of creat-
ing useful databases.
Thus, the same sorts of criticisms are voiced about ad-blocking soft-
ware as were about TiVo. One executive of an online company likened
ad-blocking to “a shoplifter coming in and stealing your money” (cited
in Flynn 1999). By the same token, attempts to limit online tracking and
targeting of consumers, such as ‘do-not-track’ legislation, are described
as grave threats to the future viability of the online economy. As one ad-
vertising executive put it, “this may sound like a good idea to online pri-
vacy absolutists, but the practical implications of such regulations would
be devastating—not just for advertisers and the online publishers who
depend on their money, but for the technology industry and economy
as a whole” (cited in Wheeler 2012). There is a somewhat circular aspect
to such arguments: once you build a commercial economy predicated on
the comprehensive monitoring of consumers, then the economy itself
becomes an argument in favour of comprehensive monitoring. However,
such arguments also reiterate the value proposition on offer: consumers
owe something in return for the services they receive. As these multiply
indefinitely, that consumer debt correspondingly increases. At the limit,
we are offered total convenience and complete automation in exchange
for willing submission to comprehensive monitoring.
The emerging commercial architecture of the Internet, then, can be
construed in terms of a certain type of indebtedness, not simply in its
technological configuration, such as the development of new and more
sophisticated capabilities for data capture built into the hardware and the
software, but also in the implicit message: ‘we built this for you and in
 33

return you owe us your submission to the forms of tracking that sustain
it’. Such architecture is neither unprecedented nor limited to the ‘virtual’
realm. The wholesale privatisation of public space that has come to char-
acterise suburban and small-town US might be described in related terms.
The private sector has, in a sense, taken on the duties of the provision of
publicly available facilities for sociality, conviviality, and popular forms of
diversion. The commercial shopping mall is a ‘free’ space, in the sense that
we do not need to pay to enter into a costly enclosure or to benefit from its
amenities: spacious promenades, lounge areas, and even landscaping and
play facilities for children. Although they are open to the public, commer-
cial spaces such as malls are not public spaces in the civic sense. Rather,
they are private spaces governed by the commercial imperatives of their
owners and operators who have the discretion to limit speech, commerce,
social intercourse, and access as they see fit. In his discussion of shop-
ping malls, Dienst suggests that insofar as such spaces impose a certain
sense of obligation upon their users, they embody, “the global sprawl of
an indebted world within the terms of a single building” (2011, 129). The
huge investment in commercial infrastructure carries with it a certain im-
perative—perhaps even an implied obligation—towards those who have
supplied the ‘public’ space: “the sheer proliferation of shopping spaces
should be seen as the physical extension of the regime of indebtedness
where individual subjects are empowered to enact their own fidelity to
the reigning powers of money” (Dienst 2011, 129). Once such a physical
infrastructure is created, it carries with it its own set of imperatives built
into both the spaces themselves and the social and economic logics that
sustain them. Empty or underused malls become yet another economic
indicator: the sign of an ailing economy, an admission of weakness, a pub-
lic concern.
Echoing the transformation of physical space, the Internet rapidly
transformed from a publicly supported infrastructure to a commercial
one—a digital mega-mall of sorts—and continues to construct an infor-
mation-intensive system of commerce that carries with it not simply the
injunction to consume, to interact, and pay attention, but also to submit
to its monitoring logics.
In an environment in which data miners are continually finding
new uses for the data collected by commercial sites and applications, con-
sumers cannot be expected to anticipate any and all uses to which their
information might be put. Thus, the implicit claim that users have a clear,
informed understanding of what they are signing up for when they agree
34
35
 36

to have their data collected and mined is absurd. Typically, the claim that
users are happy with the terms on offer is inferred from user behaviour,
because when they are asked, people tend to express concern over the col-
lection and use of their personal information for customisation and tar-
geting. For example, a 2012 Pew study revealed that the majority (65%)
of people who use search engines do not approve of the use of behavioural
data to customise search results. More than two-thirds of all Internet us-
ers (68%) in the study did not approve of targeted advertising based on
behavioural tracking (Purcell et al. 2012). Another nation-wide survey
in the US found that 66% of respondents opposed advertising targeting
based on tracking users’ activities (Turow et al. 2009). And a US study of
public reaction to proposed ‘do-not-track’ legislation found that 60% of
respondents said they would opt out of online tracking if given the choice.
The overall picture, then, is very different from one in which us-
ers happily agree to the capture and use of their personal information.
There is a split between what people say and what they do—that is, they
may not like the available model, but they submit to it regardless. That
is a far cry, however, from claiming that users embrace this commercial
model, that they are happy with the available choices, or that they find
the balance between ‘privacy’ and ‘convenience’ to be a healthy one. On
the contrary, what emerges from the research is a world in which people
submit to the available model because they do not see any alternative way
of accessing the services and conveniences on offer. For the commercial
service providers, the mere fact of acceptance is certainly enough, but the
need to push the further claim that people like and embrace the terms on
offer is a telling one.
One of the central tenets of data mining large databases is that the
mining process is an ‘emergent’ one, in the sense that patterns cannot be
discerned, predicted, or modelled in advance. That is to say, the explicit
goal is to discover indiscernible and perhaps even inexplicable correla-
tions in the data. If, for example, a person’s political preference can be
reliably predicted based on the model of car he or she drives or the brand
of toothpaste he or she uses (or vice versa), this is actionable information
in the sense that it can facilitate targeted forms of political campaign-
ing or marketing, but it is not necessarily comprehensible information. In
other words, there may be no clear underlying explanation for why people
who drive Mercurys vote Republican. To put it somewhat differently, we
do not know what type of predictive power particular types of data might
bestow upon those who can access it. Do habits that seem completely un-
 37

related place us within groups who are stigmatised (or privileged) in one
way or another? In the ‘small data’ era it was relatively simple to reverse-
engineer the forms of sorting that resulted in various types of discrimi-
nation. In the ‘big data’ era, this might be much more difficult: are we
turned down for a professional post because other people who share some
similar, seemingly random, trait have not had success in the past? As the
algorithms get increasingly complex, we may not even know what com-
bination of traits conspired to include or exclude us, or to turn us into a
target of one kind or another. The question becomes not so much whether
we want to hide some aspect of our private lives, but rather how data,
once it is sorted and mined, might be used to influence decisions that
impact our lives but remain profoundly opaque to us.

BEYOND PRIVACY
The paradox of the fate of personal information in the digital
era is that it often involves mundane information that, in general, peo-
ple are not particularly concerned about revealing. The notion of debt
gets us to the related question of how this personal data is extracted.
In order to access what is good and useful about the Internet, we need
to rely upon a commercial infrastructure that sets the terms of access.
We do not need to pay—in fact, we cannot pay directly for services such
as Facebook or Gmail—but we are told we owe something to them in
return for access and use. In this regard, the notion of debt (and vari-
ous forms of resistance to the obligations it imposes) refers directly to
the political economy of the commercial Internet—the fact of its com-
mercialisation and the ways in which privatisation begets privatisation
or, as Marx suggested, in which separation begets separation (De An-
gelis 2002). When you separate people from (control over) the means
of sociability, communication, and information storage and access, you
can then separate them from their own data—and extract further data
about them in exchange for allowing them to access what they have cre-
ated (their email, Facebook account, Tweets, and so on). The notion of
debt also speaks to the familiar attitude of resignation in the face of the
seemingly incontestable obligation imposed by the digital economy—
an understanding that, as in the case of broadcasting before it, the huge
private infrastructure must be financed somehow. Once we accept this
commercial model, we find ourselves beholden to the logics that sup-
port it. Finally, the notion of debt invokes the character of the current
commercial arrangement as an ongoing relationship. This is a defining
 38

element of debt as a form of social control: it designates an ongoing

relationship between debtor and creditor—one that can be extended in-
definitely given the right combination of interest and payment rates. As
new commercial conveniences and capabilities continue to develop, the
appetite for data is as infinite as the ongoing obligation to supply it.

REFERENCES

Bogard, William. 1996. The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in

Telematic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Coté, Mark. “Data Motility: The Materiality of Big Social Data.” Cited with
permission.

De Angelis, Massimo. 2002. “Marx and Primitive Accumulation: The Continuous

Character of Capital’s ‘Enclosures’.” The Commoner, 2 September. Accessed 10
July 2009. http://www.commoner.org.uk/02deangelis.pdf.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59

(Winter): 3–7.

Dienst, Richard. 2011. The Bonds of Debt. London: Verso.

Flynn, Laurie. 1999. “Battle Begun on Internet Ad Blocking.” The New York
Times, 7 June, 1.

Hilsenrath, J. and R. Simon. 2011. “Spenders Become Savers, Hurting Recovery.”

The Wall Street Journal, 22 October. Accessed 12 December 2012. http://online.
wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204294504576614942937855646.html.

Hoofnagle Chris, Jennifer Urban, and Su Li. 2012. “Privacy and Modern
Advertising: Most US Internet Users Want ‘Do Not Track’ to Stop Collection
of Data about their Online Activities.” Paper presented at Amsterdam Privacy
Conference, 8 October. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2152135.

Kramer, Staci. 2002. “Content’s King.” Cable World, 29 April, 32.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. The Making of the Indebted Man, translated by

Joshua David Jordan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lowrey, Anne. 2012. “Rise in Household Debt Might Be Sign of a Strengthening

Recovery.” The New York Times, 26 October. Accessed 12 December. http://
www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/business/rise-in-household-debt-might-be-
sign-of-a-strengthening-recovery.html?_r=0.
 39

Purcell, Kristen, Joanna Brenner, and Lee Rainie. 2012. “Search Engine Use,
2012.” Pew Internet and American Life Project, 9 March. Accessed 12 December.
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Search-Engine-Use-2012.aspx.

Turow, Joseph, Jennifer King, Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Amy Bleakley, and Michael
Hennessy. 2009. “Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities
that Enable It.” Social Science Research Network, 29 September. http://ssrn.com/
abstract=1478214.

Weinberger, David. 2011. "Too Big to Know." New York: Basic Books.

Wheeler, Eric. 2012. “How Do Not Track Is Poised to Kill Online Growth.” C/Net,
20 September. Accessed 12 December. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-
57516422-93/how-do-not-track-is-poised-to-kill-online-growth/.

BIO
Mark Andrejevic is an ARC QE II Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Director of
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. He is the
author of Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in
the Interactive Era, and Infoglut, as well as numerous articles and book chapters
on surveillance, digital media, and popular culture.
 40

FROM THE FETISH

CHARACTER OF
COMMODITY TXT Saso Furlan

TO THE FETISH
OF INTEREST-
BEARING CAPITAL

I NTRODUCTION
Ever since Karl Marx’s Capital was first published, his theory of fet-
ishism has been highly debated. Some Marxist theorists, such as Louis
Althusser, have disregarded it, denoting it as a bourgeois-idealist theory
in which a fabric of Hegelian idealism persists. Other Marxists, such as
Georg Lukacs, have praised it, declaring it as one of his most daring and
brilliant deliberations, and have used it as a key tool to the critique the
modern society and its ‘reified’ social relations. Diametrically opposed,
these approaches nonetheless agree when it comes to evaluating the theo-
retical significance and implications of Marx’s theory of fetishism. They
usually treat it as a digression that accompanies his economic theory that
is presented in the three volumes of Capital. They see it as either an ob-
scure or an ingenious socio-philosophical supplement to Marx’s theory
of value; something that can be considered independently from his eco-
nomic theory. Contrary to this common perception, I will try to show that
the theory of fetishism is not a supplement to Marx’s theory of value, but
rather a central and constitutive element. In the words of Isaak Ilich Ru-
bin: “[T]heory of fetishism is, per se, the basis of Marx’s entire economic
system, and in particular of his theory of value” (1990, 5).
Another notion about Marx’s theory of fetishism frequently held
by both its proponents and opponents is that Marx’s theoretical delibera-
tions on the subject are exhausted in the section on the fetish character of
 41

the commodity in the first chapter of Capital Volume 1. Most of the discus-
sions of Marx’s theory of fetishism are therefore reduced to comments on
this section and are usually complemented by considerations of the im-
plications of what Marx said in this section. In contrast to this approach,
I will claim that Marx’s theory of fetishism spreads throughout all three
volumes of Capital. I will show that the theory of fetishism initiated in the
first chapter is enhanced by his consideration of the capitalist process of
production at appear in subsequent chapters in Volume 1 (particularly in
his discussion of the capital fetish). This is further developed in his anal-
ysis of the unity of the capitalist process of production and circulation
in Volume 3 (most notably, in his consideration of the redistribution of
surplus value and the formation of categories of the price of production,
profit, and the rate of profit). Finally and most importantly, I will examine
Marx’s treatment of the externalisation of the relations of capital in the
form of interest-bearing capital, which coincides with the completion of
the capital fetish. I will demonstrate how interest-bearing capital, which
designates the specific capitalist form of debt relation, constitutes what
Marx calls the “most superficial and fetishised form” (2010 [1894], 255)
of relations of capital.

THE FETISH CHARACTER OF THE COMMODITY AND MONEY

Marx’s theory of the commodity fetish as presented in section 4 of
the first chapter of Capital Volume 1 has often been interpreted as a specif-
ic version of a theory of false consciousness. According to the most widely
accepted view, it designates a state of affairs in which people are subjected
to an illusion of assigning the characteristics that have their origins in so-
cial relations among people to things. When people are engaged in the act
of exchange, they supposedly ascribe false properties to the products of
their labour, i.e., commodities, and fail to recognise that, in reality, these
properties are but properties of the relations between people. In the con-
text of commodity fetishism, that which is in fact a relationship among
people supposedly appears as a relation among things. According to this
view, the relations among things are considered as a false appearance that
camouflages the essence—the relations among people. Even though this
interpretation is almost generally accepted in Marxist literature, it is,
strictly speaking, wrong.
Marx is clear that the commodity fetish cannot be reduced to a
mere subjective illusion, to false consciousness as it were. He starts the
section, entitled “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”
 42

with the observation that, to everyday consciousness, a commodity ap-

pears as an obvious, trivial thing. A specific thing is perceived by sponta-
neous consciousness, above all as a particular use value, which is not in
any way mysterious. Insofar as this thing is a commodity, i.e. a unity of
use value and value, it is also perceived as something that, in addition to
a particular use value, has a particular value. Note that either from the
point of view of satisfying certain human needs (use value), or from the
point of view of being a product of human labour (value), the commodity
is, in both aspects, far from being enigmatic to everyday consciousness.
Michael Heinrich correctly points out that the so-called secret of the com-
modity fetish that Marx seeks to decipher does not initially emerge in the
consciousness of the people engaged in exchange, but is rather a result of
an undertaken analysis (2012, 72). Marx makes this very clear in the first
two sentences of the section: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very
trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality,
a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological
niceties” (2010 [1867], 46). Analysis of the commodity shows that the
triviality of a thing as use value vanishes into dust and becomes an enig-
matic “sensory extrasensory thing” as soon as it is considered as value, as
a product of (abstract) human labour.
By pointing out the “sensory extrasensory” character of the com-
modity, which is first made clear by the analysis, Marx is referring to the
analysis of the value form of the commodity elaborated in the preceding
section of Capital Volume 1 (i.e., section 3). This section shows that the
value of a commodity cannot be expressed as a substance of a single com-
modity; it cannot be expressed within the commodity itself as something
intrinsic to it. In order for the value of a commodity to be expressed, at
least one other commodity is required. A commodity positioned in the
relative form of value can only express its value in relation to the com-
modity positioned in the equivalent form of value whose use value serves
as an embodiment of the value of the commodity in the relative form of
value. The analysis of the value form further shows that, in the last in-
stance, a socially valid and objective expression of value of the commodity
necessitates a general equivalent, i.e., money (Marx 2010 [1867], 32–46).
When Marx explicitly asks himself from whence “arises the enig-
matic character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of
commodities?”, he formulates the following answer:
Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour
is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the
 43

measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that ex-

penditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of
labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which
the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social
relation between the products.
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the
social character of men‘s labour appears to them as an objective char-
acter stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of
the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them
as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the
products of their labour. (Marx 2010 [1867], 46)

It is thus the specific character of the commodity production in

which the produced goods assume a specific commodity form that makes
the social relationships among people appear as the relationships among
things. Marx continues by claiming that under the conditions of commod-
ity production, things take on “a life of their own”, and uses the analogy of
the “misty realm of religion”. In the same way that deities—the products
of human minds—“take on the life of their own” (2010 [1867], 47), the
products, which are produced in the capitalist mode of production, appear
as having an independent life. He writes, “This I call the Fetishism which
attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as
commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of
commodities” (2010 [1867], 47). Significantly, immediately after engag-
ing in an eccentric rhetoric full of metaphors from the religious world,
Marx asserts that the fetish he is talking about is inseparable from the pro-
duction of commodities. This again indicates that the fetish character of the
commodity does not originate in people’s consciousness, and is thus not
a subjective phenomenon in the form of a mere deception, but a phenom-
enon that has an objective basis in the sphere of production.
But what exactly is this objective basis? The distinctive character-
istic of the capitalist mode of production is that individual capitalist en-
terprises are autonomous entities—as private firms, they organise their
production separately and independently from each other. However, they
do not produce commodities for their own use, but for the sake of selling
them in the market. In the context of commodity production, commodity
producers thus do not relate to each other in a direct social manner. In-
teractions between producers are brought about not by direct cooperation
and communication, but by exchanging their commodities in the market
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 The Beggar.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.
The more he become master of his brush, the more the rustic
work haunted him. He was still a thorough countryman. Although he
had now at intervals the refinements of elegance and little bursts of
worldliness; although he had exchanged the modest atelier in the
Impasse du Maine for a house in the Quartier Monceau, the world
soon wearied him, and he was glad to go back to his village.
This six weeks’ absence, of which he speaks in his letter to his
friend Baude, was spent in an excursion to Venice, and in
Switzerland. He came back only half delighted, and brought back
only a few unimportant sketches.
 Italy and the splendours of Venetian art had left him cold. In this
world of history and mythology he was not at home. He sickened for
his meadows and his Meusian forests.
During his rapid visits to Paris in 1881 and 1882, the painting of
various portraits, notably that of Madame Juliette Drouet, and the
compulsory tax of visits and soirées occupied him almost entirely.
We saw but little of him. But these successes, and the adulation
lavished upon him in Parisian drawing-rooms, did not change him.
He was still the loyal, joyous comrade, faithful to old ties; very
good, very simple; happy as a child when he found himself in a circle
of intimate friends.
We were both members and even founders of an Alsace-Lorraine
dinner, the Dîner de l’Est, which was always given in summer in the
country. One of the last meetings at which he was present, took
place at the end of May, 1881.
A boat had been engaged, which was to take the diners to the
bridge at Suresnes, and to bring them back at night. When we
arrived at the landing-stage, a blind man was standing by the
footbridge, attended by a young girl, who held out her sebilla to the
passers-by.
“Come, gentlemen! all of you, put your hands in your pockets!”
gaily commanded Bastien, and he passed over first, preaching by
example. And the eighty, or a hundred guests of the Dîner de l’Est,
passed one after another over the footbridge, each one leaving in
the child’s sebilla a coin, large or small.
When we were on the deck, Bastien turned round to look at the
blind man and his girl, who were amazed at this unexpected windfall,
and were slowly counting their money.
“What a lovely group?” he said to me. “How I should like to paint
that child!”
While waiting for dinner we walked in the Bois de Boulogne. The
acacias and hawthorns were in flower. The lawns, newly shorn, gave
out a perfume of mown grass. Jules, joyfully drawing in this air
impregnated with country odours, laughed like a happy child.
 At that moment all was going well with him. His Mendiant had had
a great success at the Salon; his last visit to England had been very
prosperous; his head was full of fine projects for pictures. “It is good
to be alive!” he exclaimed, as he played with a flower he had plucked
from the bushes…. On the way back he gave himself up to all sorts
of roguish fun. Mounted on the prow of the boat he sang, with his full
voice, the Chant du Départ.
The vibrating tones resounded powerfully between the two
sleeping river banks; the sky was splendid, twinkling with
innumerable stars. From time to time Bastien lighted a rocket and
sent it up overhead, shouting a loud hurrah!
The fusée mounted slowly into the night, showering down many-
coloured sparks, then fell suddenly and sank in the dark water. Alas!
it was the image of the short and brilliant years that remained for him
to live.
 IV.

On the death of Gambetta, January 1, 1883, Bastien was

commissioned to make a design for the funeral car in which the great
orator was to be conveyed to Père Lachaise; he spent a week in the
little room at Ville d’Avray, painting the picture representing the
statesman on his deathbed. The cold was extreme at this time, and,
his work scarcely finished, he went away, feeling ill, to Damvillers,
where he hoped to finish the great picture he had began of L’Amour
au Village.
His native air, the simple life, and his mother’s loving care
restored him, and he began to work again with his usual eagerness.
Muffled in a warm jacket and a travelling cloak that covered him
down to the feet, he made his models pose for him in the piercing
days of February, in the little garden where he had already painted
the portrait of his grandfather. In March the work was well advanced,
and he invited me to go and see it at Damvillers before it was sent to
the Salon. I left Verdun on a freezing afternoon, accompanied by the
old friend who had walked with us through the Argonne, and we
were set down at Damvillers at night-fall. Our hosts were awaiting us
on the doorstep; the grandfather, always the same, with his Greek
cap and white beard, and his Socratic face; the painter and the little
mother, with smiles and outstretched hands.
Around them Basse the spaniel, and Golo and Barbeau were
bounding and barking joyfully to give us a welcome.
The next morning, early, we went up to the studio to see L’Amour
au Village, which was to go to Paris that day.
The subject of this picture is well known; it is one of the most real
and the most original that the artist has painted: the daylight is
waning; at the gate of a village garden, a lad of twenty, who has
been binding sheaves, and still wears his leggings of leather, is
talking, leaning against a fence, with a young girl, who turns her back
to the spectator; what he is saying to her may be guessed from his
awkward manner of twisting his stiff fingers, and also from the
attentive but embarrassed air of the young girl. One feels that they
are not saying much, but that love exhales from every word, so
difficult to speak. Around them summer spreads the robust verdure
of the country. The fruit trees stand lightly silhouetted against a
background of kitchen herbs, gently sloping up to the houses of the
village, whose brown roofs and pointed spire come against the soft
and misty twilight sky. All this, bathed in a subdued light, is
marvellously painted. The young girl, her short plaits falling over her
shoulders, her neck bent, the form of her back, so young, so
delicate, is an exquisite figure; the face of the young harvester, so
energetic, so ingenuously in love, is charming in expression; the
treatment of the hands, the bust, the dress, is masterly. There is in
this picture a true and manly poetry, which is strengthening and
refreshing, like the odour of ripe corn.
Bastien was glad to have completed this difficult work, and his
satisfaction enabled him to bear with cheerfulness the pains in his
loins, and the digestive troubles which were becoming more and
more frequent.
It was long since I had seen him so gay and unreserved. This
happy holiday-week spent at Damvillers was the pendant to the walk
through the Argonne. The sullen sky, continually blotted out by
chilling showers, allowed us few walks in the open air; but every
morning we went up to the studio. Jules dismissed the little sweep,
who was sitting for a picture that he had on hand, and, taking a sheet
of copper, he made us pose for an etching. I have this plate before
me now; it did not bite well. It represents the whole family, including
the grandfather, making a circle round our friend F., who, standing up
and very grave, is reciting one of La Fontaine’s fables. While I look at
it, I seem to hear again the merry laughter which filled the studio,
alternating with the rattling of the hail against the windows.
In the evening, after supper, we placed ourselves at the round
table, and played at Diable or Nain rouge. Jules, throwing away his
best cards, always managed to let the grandfather win; and when the
octogenarian, quite proud of his success, took up the stakes, he
would pat him on the shoulder, and cry out, with a merry twinkle of
the eye, “Ha! what a lucky man! he will ruin us all!” and the laughter
began again.
We did not go to bed till well on into the night, after having roused
the little domestic, Felix, who had dozed off in the kitchen while
copying a portrait of Victor Hugo.

Father Jacques, the Woodman.

By Jules Bastien-Lepage.
In the intervals of sunshine, Bastien-Lepage took us to visit “his
fields.” He had a peasant’s love for the land, and he employed his
gains in adding to the paternal domains. He had just bought an
orchard situated in the old moat of the town, which had belonged to
an unfrocked priest. He intended to build a châlet there, where his
friends, painters or poets, might come and live in their holidays and
dream at their ease. He explained to us with the delight of a child, his
plans for the future. When, with his portraits, he should have gained
an independent fortune, he would execute at his ease and in
freedom, the grand rustic pictures that he dreamed of, and among
others, that burial of a young village girl, for which he had already
made many notes and sketched the principal details. We only took
one long walk, and it was in those woods of Réville which form the
background of his landscape, Ripe Corn. The weather had remained
cold, and there were still patches of snow on the backs of the grey
hills, though the sun shone sometimes. Except a few downy buds on
the willows, the woods were without verdure; but the ploughed fields
had a beautiful brown colour; the larks sang; the tops of the beeches
began to have that reddish hue, which indicates the rising of the sap,
the swelling buds. “Look,” said Bastien to me, when we were in the
forest, “my Wood-cutter in the last Salon was reproached with want
of air…. Well, here we are in a wood, and the trees are still without
leaves, yet look how little the figure stands out from the undergrowth
of trees and bushes. There is a great deal of routine and prejudice in
that criticism of the perspective of my pictures done in the open air. It
is the criticism of people who have never looked at a landscape,
except crouching down or sitting. When you sit down to paint, you
naturally see things quite differently from the way you see them
standing. Sitting, you see more sky and you have more objects—
trees, houses, or living beings standing out sharply in silhouette
against the sky, which gives the illusion of a greater distance and a
wider atmosphere. But it is not in this way that we generally see a
landscape. We look at it standing, and then the objects, animate or
inanimate, that are nearest to us, instead of being seen in profile
against the sky, are silhouetted upon the trees, or upon the fields,
grey or green. They stand out with less clearness, and sometimes
mix with the background, which then, instead of going away, seems
to come forward. We need to renew the education of our eye, by
looking with sincerity upon things as they are in nature, instead of
holding as absolute truths the theories and conventions of the school
and the studio.”
All the afternoon passed thus happily away in friendly talking and
slow smoking along the wooded paths. The blackbirds were
whistling; from time to time we discovered a flower in the open
spaces, which showed that spring was surely coming; a wood
anemone, with its milk-white petals, or a branch of mezereon, with its
pink flowers opening before the leaves, and its Japanese
appearance.
Jules stopped and gathered a stem of black helebore. “Ah, how
beautiful!” he said. “How one would like to make a careful study of
these leaves—so decorative, so finely cut—of dark green, almost
brown, out of which comes this pale green stem, with its clusters of
greenish flowers edged with pale rose-colour. What lovely forms, and
what a variety of tender shades! This is what they ought to give as a
copy to the children in the schools of design, instead of the eternal
and wearisome Diana de Gabies!”

Sketch for Father Jacques

We did not return till evening, when there was a magnificent
sunset, which crimsoned the smoky roofs of Réville, and made the
light clouds scattered over the sky look like a strew of rose-leaves.
The next day was the last of my visit. We took leave after long
embraces, making fine plans for returning to Damvillers for the
September holiday, while the grandfather, shaking his hoary head,
murmured sadly, “Who knows if you will find me here?” And
Barbeau, and Golo, and Basse bounded and barked round the
omnibus that took us away with tremendous noise.
I did not see Jules again till a month later, at the opening of the
Salon, in front of L’Amour au Village, which had a full success. He
was ill, and complained of pains in the loins more acute than
formerly; then he suddenly disappeared mysteriously. The door of
the atelier in Rue Legendre was closed, and visitors were told that
the painter was gone into the country. We did not know till later that
he had hidden himself, to undergo a sharp and painful treatment,
and that, scarcely convalescent, he had gone to breathe the sea air
in Brittany, at Concarneau. He spent his days there, in a boat,
painting the sea, and forgetting his pains by the help of work.
When he came to see us again in October, he appeared to be
recovered; but digestion was still a difficulty, and his habitual gaiety
was, as it were, clouded over. His character was changed. There
were no more of those trenchant affirmations of which his comrades
sometimes complained; he was indulgent, and even affectionate,
much more than was usual with him. He did not stay long in Paris,
but hastened back to Damvillers, to get seriously to work again. He
arrived in time to be present during his grandfather’s last moments.
The old man departed loaded with years; but, though surely
expected, his death was a painful blow to the survivors. “The house,”
he wrote, “is empty more than one could believe. Only a few days
ago, at any moment, a door would open and the grandfather
appeared, without motive, without object, without speaking or being
spoken to; but the sight of his kindly face was enough. One kissed
him, and he went away, as before, without object, sitting down, going
into the garden, coming back, and always with the same kind face. I
remember now that he has been growing paler for some days…. No,
you can have no idea how empty the house is. I cannot get
accustomed to it. We often talk of him with my mother—with what
pleasure! It is not that we weep for him with tears; we reason about
it, and we appear resigned and courageous; but behind all that there
is a sad feeling of want, of absolute loss. It is the touch one wants….
I have been ill with it, and am so still. I have not been able to work;
to-day, for the first time, I went out to shoot larks; the weather was
fine, the sun was shining, and the country beautiful. This did me
good.”
Indeed, the health of the artist, far from improving, was becoming
daily more uncertain. “It is the digestive tube,” said he, “that is out of
order.” Nevertheless, he worked with his usual courage, overlooking
his Concarneau studies, planning a new picture, and only stopping to
go out shooting or to saunter through the woods.
“Our evening walks are the best part of the day”—(letter to Ch.
Baude, Nov. 27, 1883)—“that is, from the setting of the sun till it is
dark. Every night the spectacle is new. The programme changes with
the weather. Sometimes the subject of the piece is dramatic; the next
day it is soft and charming; and, with the constant rain, our inundated
meadows reflect the brilliant scenery. Can you imagine all our
pleasure, in your dingy Paris? The next morning is too slow in
coming; one wants so much to put down last night’s impression; so
that I am making a heap of sketches, and find much pleasure in it.
Then—here is a surprise!—I have a new picture on the way….
Guess!… The subject is a wounded deer taken by the dogs. The
scene is, naturally, the wood, and the wood at this time of year: only
a few leaves of brilliant yellow against the marvellous rosy-grey of
the branches of the trees; then the violet tone of the dead leaves
flattened on the soil, and a few green briars round a pool under a
willow. The place was not chosen by me. The deer chose it himself
to die there; for I killed him the other day, and he went there to be
taken, a hundred yards from where he was shot—just opposite the
spot where Minet killed a hare. It was then that this picture struck
me. Afterwards I sketched in and reconstructed the scene; and, as I
wanted a model, I killed a second deer….”
Here is a characteristic symptom: he who formerly only wrote the
shortest of notes, scribbled in haste at the corner of a table, now
sent long, expansive letters to his friends, showing signs of
redoubled love of life, of art, of the beauties of nature:—
“My dear friends” (Jan. 3, 1884), “if you could see your poor
Bastien, with this heap of letters to write, you would certainly say:
‘How he is changed!’… If my wishes had the extraordinary virtue of
fulfilling themselves, I should like that you, whom I love, should profit
by it, and that 1884 should bring health and happiness and success
to all. My mother’s wishes are the same as mine, and she rejoices
that we are to see you soon. Ah, my dear friend, what pleasure you
would have in living upon the woods, as I feed upon them now
almost every day, along with Golo and Barbeau! What marvellously
delicate tones! and the fading out of daylight, and when the evening
comes on! The woods are exquisitely fine, with their tall, dry, ivory-
coloured grasses; they are so tall in some of the open spaces that
they caress your face as you pass, and the cool touch upon your
face and hands, hot with walking, is a delicious sensation. I rarely
leave the woods before night, for I must send up a few salutes to the
wild ducks with my gun before going in. One hears them coming
from a great distance, but it is difficult to judge if they are far away or
near, from the peculiarity of their cry; so they have often passed, and
are already a good way off, before one finds out that one has missed
them.
“This is to let you know that I am not a stay-at-home, as you might
think. I find it important to walk a good deal, for in this way I regain a
little health. My stomach was beginning to get wrong, but it is
better!…”
A few days after this I met a mutual friend of ours. “Well,” he said
to me, “our poor Bastien is very ill…. They think it is hopeless.”
 V.

Indeed he was very ill. The treatment he had undergone in the

summer of 1883 had not been successful. The pains in the loins and
bowels had returned with greater violence at the end of January.
By the advice of his friend Dr. Watelet he again went to Paris in
March to consult Dr. Potain. Without any illusions as to the fatal
nature of the disease, the doctors thought that a change of air and of
climate might, morally and physically, produce good results. They
advised that he should go to Algiers for two months.
Bastien himself, seized with that longing desire for movement
which often torments invalids who are seriously ill, had experienced
a wish to go to the south. It was decided that he should start as soon
as possible for Algiers, accompanied by his servant Felix, and by his
mother.
On the morning of the day fixed for starting I went to the Rue
Legendre to say good-bye to him. He had gone to complete some
arrangements with his picture-agent. I found only Mme. Bastien, who
was occupied in filling the trunks which were scattered about the
studio. The brave little mother, who had never left her home at
Damvillers for more than a few days together, was preparing for this
long journey to an unknown country quite simply, with an apparent
tranquillity, as if she were going as far as Saint Cloud.
The hope that the change might be good for Jules was enough to
give her courage to face this upsetting of all her old ways of living.
Sometimes only, when she was carefully arranging the linen in the
trunk, the tears would rise to her eyes and a quiver of pain pass over
her lips.
Upon the chairs and against the walls were placed the recent
studies brought from Damvillers, and one felt one’s heart tighten at
the sight of these last works, where nature had been observed and
rendered with incomparable skill, penetration, and charm. They were
The Frog-fisher, The Little Sweep, The Washerwoman, The Pond at
Damvillers, The Edge of the Wood, The Church at Concarneau, and
that study of A Midnight Sky so original, with the clouds scattered
over an azure that was almost black.
At this moment Bastien-Lepage came in, and on seeing him walk
with difficulty into the studio, I was distressed at the change that had
come over him. His thin face had become quite bloodless; the skin of
his neck was peeling off; his hair seemed to have no life in it. His
questioning blue eyes expressed an anguish and weariness that was
heartrending. “Well,” said he, after having embraced me, “are you
looking at my studies? When people see them at George Petit’s,
they will say that the little Bastien could paint the landscape too,
when he gave himself the trouble!…” When I said to him that his long
absence that morning had made his mother anxious, he added quite
low, and taking me into one corner of the studio: “When one is going
to take a journey so far, one must prepare for it…. I wanted to put my
affairs in order. Poor little mother!” he went on; “she has been very
brave! Down at home she used to spend whole nights in rubbing me
for my rheumatism, and I let her think that it did me good…. Now,
perhaps the Algiers sun will cure me.” Hope alternated with
discouragement. During breakfast he recovered a little. I was to go to
Spain at the end of March; he urged me to change my plans, and to
join him in Algiers. We ended with a half-promise. We tried hard to
appear gay; we clinked our glasses as we drank to the hope of soon
meeting again, but each one felt his throat tighten, and turned away
to hide from the other his moist eyes. I left the house in the Rue
Legendre with my heart full of the saddest forebodings.
Jules left the same night for Marseilles. They had a good
crossing, and his first letter, dated March 17th, was reassuring:—
“My dear friends, there is no getting out of it; you must come, for a
thousand reasons. Here it is just like May in Paris. Everything is in
flower; and such flowers!—heaps of them, everywhere. The verdure
is delicate and grey, and, like patches, always well placed; the
outlines picturesque and new, the trees very dark green. And in the
midst of all this, upon the roads, the Arabs, of astonishing calmness
and splendid carriage, under their earth-coloured and ash-coloured
draperies—ragamuffins as proud as kings, and better dressed than
Talma. They all wear a shirt and burnous; not one is like another. It
seems as if each one, at every moment, gave expression to his
thought by his manner of draping his garment. It is once more the
triumph of blank truth over arrangement and conventionalism. The
sorrowful man, whether he wishes it or not, in spite of himself is not
draped like the gay. Beauty, I am convinced, is exact truth: neither to
the right nor to the left, but in the middle.
“All this without telling you we have hired a house at Mustapha
Superior. It is half Arab, half French, quite white, with an interior
court opening into a garden twice as big as that at Damvillers. The
garden is full of orange-trees, and lemon, almond, fig, and a quantity
of other trees, the names of which I do not know and probably never
shall. All this, not trim like a park, but left a little à la diable, like our
garden at home. Then we have the right of walking in a magnificent
garden which joins ours. We have at least eight rooms; in counting
them I thought of you. In all directions round this house there are
delightful walks within reach for invalid limbs; in short, it is a
Mahomet’s Paradise, … ‘moins les femmes.’ I have said nothing
about Kasbah, the old Arab town—my legs have only let me see it
from a distance as yet; but, my good friend, imagine that against a
morning sky you have, sometimes in the palest rose, sometimes in
silvery grey, sometimes in faint blue, and so on—everywhere against
the pearly sky—more or less elongated rectangles, placed
irregularly, but always horizontally, in the manner of a line of low hills,
and you will have the delicate colouring of the old town. One would
not suppose it was a town with habitations, so delicate is the tone of
it, but for some little holes of rare windows placed here and there.
One could not have a sensation more unexpected, and never a
sweeter and finer joy. So you must come! My mother is counting
upon it, and what, then, am I? What new things you could say about
all this! The sea was very fine at the beginning and end of our
crossing. Midway some of the passengers suffered: my mother and
Felix among them, but they got some sleep. We were twenty hours
in crossing, and we were not tired on arriving. Come, set off; start!…
A good embrace from my mother and from me.”
His first letter, as may be seen, was full of ardour. The climate of
Algeria did him good at first, and his sufferings seemed to be
relieved.
“I am preparing myself bravely for the ordeal by fire” (April letter to
Ch. Baude); “may my rheumatism take flight and depart with the
coming attack of the sun! When it is hot here, it is still quite bearable.
Apart from these calculations about the heat and these health
experiences, I am happy, even excited, by all that I have seen; and
yet I have only seen what any bagman might see who is busy about
the selling of his goods; but it has been enough to give me great
delight. What remains of the old Arab town is marvellous; one holds
one’s breath when, at a sudden turn, the vision reappears. For those
unhappy eyes that only see the colours on the palette, it is white; but
picture to yourself a long hill, rather high, with a depression in the
middle, and sloping as if to the sea, and this hill all covered with
elongated or elevated cubes of which one cannot distinguish the
thickness; all this remaining unnoticed by the eye that is ravished by
the delicate tone, rosy, greenish, pale blue, making altogether white
tinted with salmon.
“If one did not know it beforehand, one would never dream that
amongst these cubes of plaster thousands of men are walking,
talking, sleeping—men of noble manner, proud and calm, and with
something very like indifference or contempt for us. And they are
right. They are beautiful, we are ugly. What matter is it to me that
they are knaves! They are beautiful!…
“Yesterday I went to take a bath. I had to go three or four hundred
steps through streets full of merchants. In a passage a Jew was
selling silks, pearls and corals; in front of his shop, not two yards
wide, were three Arabs—an old man, another of middle age, the
third about seventeen. There they were, seated, attentive, calm,
wishing to buy, consulting together, making scarcely a gesture with
their hands, always kept at full length, but sitting quietly, never
hurrying, reflecting enormously, and keeping all the while under their
burnouses the softest, gentlest attitudes. The youngest was superb
—so handsome that mama was struck with it. ‘They are like beautiful
statues,’ said she. I could not understand the scene and the relations
that united these three Arabs. It was clear they were come to buy;
they had come down from the higher part of the town. They were
poor, for the youngest was in rags, and the burnouses of the others,
though not in rags, were very much worn; but they took such pains in
counting the little pieces of false coral that it was clear the Jew was
selling dear to these big children a thing of no value. The one of
middle age was counting on the table, with his flat hand by groups of
five, the little pieces of coral which he chose as he counted them;
thus adding each time five pieces to the heap that he drew towards
him.
“What strikes one is this simple colouring, these magnificent folds,
and then this serious childishness.
“I was not able to wait till the end of the scene. It was cold and
draughty in this passage, which brought me back to the fact of my
poor crazy legs. I long for the time when I shall be a man again; what
lovely things I shall see, and perhaps I shall do!”
April 23rd (to the same): “Now I take myself by the ear and drag
myself to the letter-paper, and all the needful things. Nothing is
wanting, neither the thousand things I have to say, nor above all the
tender affection that I keep in store for you.
“Emile says that you are coming, and soon: don’t be alarmed, you
will not melt in the hot sun. There are cool places in the garden,
where one can stretch oneself, with a magnificent landscape at one’s
feet. We have only had the heat since yesterday; you will see how
good you will find it, your muscles will relax, and you will go back
quite young. We will make some excursions together if I am up to it.
Any way there are plenty all round us to tempt you to make some.
“You have heard from Emile that I went to Blidah. I bore the little
journey very well at first, but I was tired afterwards. I am going to
begin to rest, and go slowly, in order that I may go farther. I have
scarcely done anything till now, for I don’t feel myself up to remaining
long in the same position, as a painter must, who thinks only of his
work.”
The health that he hoped for, and so anxiously waited for, did not
come. On the contrary, as the heat increased, Jules felt more unwell
and more fatigued. The last letter that he wrote to me reached me at
Granada, in that hotel, the “Siete Suelos,” where Fortuny and Henri
Regnault had lived. There was all through it a sentiment of touching
melancholy and discouragement.
“My good friends, this is delightful. It is too good to get your
photographs at the same time as your kind and affectionate letter. I
am glad you are going to Spain. Lucky fellows! Go along! while I,
who should so like to see a bull fight!… You had not time to come,
and indeed it was selfish to ask you. You could not have stayed more
than a few days. But that is to be done some day when I am no
longer a cripple, and when we can have two months before us. We
are comfortably settled here. At this moment I am writing to you
under the tent set up in the terraced court of our villa, with a
wonderful view before me. Placed a little to the left of a semicircle,
formed by the hills of Mustapha, 170 yards above the sea which
flows at their base, we have at every hour of the day, a different
landscape; for the sides of the hills are full of ravines, and the sun,
according to the time of day, throws their slopes into light, or makes
a network of shade, in a way quite peculiar to this corner of Africa.
Little villas gleaming in the sunshine or grey in the shade give effect
to the groups of verdure, the whole looking from the distance like a
rich embroidery, with bosses of green harmoniously arranged. All
this runs down toward the Gulf of Algiers, and trending away from
here forms Cape Matifou. Above are the crests of the Little Atlas, far
away, and lost in heaven’s blue; near by, sloping gardens spread out
their golden or silvery verdure, according as one looks upon olive or
eucalyptus. Add to this the perfume of the orange and lemon trees,
the pleasure of telling you that I embrace you all three, Tristan
included, that I am a little better, and you will have the state of my
heart.
“Enjoy yourselves,—and you, my dear forester, with your Toledo
eyes, what are you going to give to the world after all this delight of
sunshine and kindly fellowship and the loving union of the charming
trio that you make? It seems to me I have the heart and voice to
make a fourth—what say you? Ah! that shall be after the
rheumatism! Kindest regards from mama and from me. A last
embrace to all three of you.”
The improvement he had experienced on arriving in Algiers
ceased about the end of April. His strength and appetite gradually
failed; and at the end of May it was decided to take the invalid back
to France. He settled again in the Rue Legendre with the poor little
mother, who never left him afterwards. When I saw him again I was
shocked at the progress the disease had made. His thinness was
such that my unhappy friend was nowhere in the garments that were
made for his journey. His legs refused their service; he could no
longer work; and yet he kept a little hope. He had just begun a new
treatment, and talked of going into Brittany “as soon as he was
strong enough.” He drove every day in the Bois when the weather
was fine, and spent the rest of his day on cushions in the corner of
the studio, occupied in contemplating, with a heartrending look, his
studies hanging on the walls. This inaction was most distressing to
him.
“Ah!” cried he, “if I was told: They are going to cut off your two
legs, but after that you will be able to paint again, I would willingly
make the sacrifice….”
He could only sleep now with the help of injected morphine, and
he waited with impatience for the hour when a new supply should
give him some relief, and a factitious drowsiness should make him
forget his suffering.
In proportion as digestion became more difficult his appetite
became more capricious. He wanted to have dishes made which
reminded him of the cooking of his village; then, when they were
brought to him, he turned away disgusted, without tasting them.
“No,” said he, pushing aside the plate, “that’s not it; to have it good it
must be made down there, prepared by the Damvillers people, with
home-grown vegetables.” And while he was speaking one saw by his
moist eyes a sudden and painful calling up of the impressions of
former days; he saw all at once the old home, the gardens and
orchards of Damvillers at the fall of evening, the peaceful village
interiors at the time when the fires were lighted for the evening meal.
As the season advanced his strength decreased. In September
his brother was obliged to take him on his back to carry him to the
carriage, and he drove about slowly for an hour in the avenues of the
Bois. He could not read, and was easily wearied by conversation.
His nerves were become very irritable, and the slightest odours were
disagreeable to his sense of smell. His courage seemed to forsake
him; at the same time he was always wanting to know what others
thought of his illness. His blue eyes with their penetrating look
anxiously searched the eyes of his friends, and of his mother, who
never left his side. The heroic little woman did her best to
dissimulate, and was always smiling and affecting a cheerfulness
and a confidence which were painful to see; then, when she could
escape for a moment, she hastened into the neighbouring room and
melted into tears.
For months this cruel agony was thus prolonged. Bastien was
only a shadow of himself. On the 9th of December, during great part
of the night, he talked of Damvillers with his mother and his brother.
Then at about four in the morning he said to them, with a kiss,
“Come, it is time for children to sleep.” All three slept. Two hours later
Mme. B. was awakened by Jules, who asked for something to drink;
she rose, and brought him a cup of tea, and was alarmed on finding
that the invalid groped for the cup to guide it to his lips; he could no
longer see; but he still spoke and even joked about the difficulty he
had in moving his limbs.
Shortly afterwards he dozed, and sliding gently from sleep into
death, he expired at six in the evening, December 10, 1884.
I saw him next day lying on his mortuary bed, in the midst of a
thick covering of flowers. His poor emaciated face, with its sightless
and deeply sunk orbits, made him look like one of those Spanish
figures of Christ, fiercely cut in wood by Montanez.
On the 12th of December a long train of friends and admirers
accompanied his remains to the Eastern Railway Station, whence it
was conveyed to the Meuse. The next day, Sunday, the whole
population of Damvillers waited at the entrance of the town for the
funeral carriage, which brought back Bastien-Lepage to his native
place.
The sad procession advanced slowly on that road from Verdun
where the painter had loved to walk at twilight, talking with his
friends. A pale mist blotted out those hills and woods whose familiar
outlines he had so often reproduced. The cortège stopped before the
little church where he had intended painting his Burial of a Young
Girl. The morning was showery; the wreaths and festoons of flowers,
placed the night before on his coffin, were revived and refreshed by
the moisture; when they were heaped up upon the grave they
seemed to come to life again, and to send out with their renewed
perfume a last adieu from Paris to the painter of the peasants of the
Meuse.