Capital without the proletariat?

Submitted by martin on 3 February, 2014 - 2:08
Isaac Julien

"Playtime", a video installation by Isaac Julien. Victoria Miro Gallery, 16 Wharf Rd, London N1 7RW (to 1 March).


Of the six segments of film comprising Isaac Julien's "Playtime" video installation, the most ostentatiously playful and fictional is also the most literal and documentary.

It is a parody of the adulatory celebrity interview, with the actress Maggie Cheung portraying an extravagantly gushing interviewer. The interviewee, Simon de Pury, one of the world's most famous art auctioneers, is however playing himself.

When a wealthy person commissions him to sell an artwork, says de Pury, it is like entrusting her or his children. The anxiety is immense. The preparation of the auction is like walking a tightrope without a net.

But then, when the sale is cashed in, the elation!

All the tension, the love of and the doubts and fears about one's own creation, and the catharsis, of art, here transform into tension and catharsis in the cash nexus.

Another segment, "The Art Dealer", pursues the same theme. What is the exciting question? Whether it will be this artwork, or that, which realises huge financial gains for its owner.

Julien has named the installation "Playtime", and describes it as about capital. The segment "The Hedge Fund Manager" also portrays the circuits of capital as a game of gambling and exulting in gain. Those who lose as the "players" in the market win are portrayed in two segments.

In "Dubai", an immigrant worker, employed as a maid, weeps about her servile status, her loneliness, her separation from her children. In "Reykjavik", more enigmatically, an artist stomps around grim-faced because the credit crunch has stopped him completing his "dream" of refurbishing a large industrial space to be his home.

The installation is shown on seven screens, but in straightforward sequence. It is set up so it's impossible to see all seven screens from any point in the room, but not, as far as I could make out, in a way that symbolises and conveys unseen processes running alongside the surface show of capitalist playtime.

The unseen processes of capital are, instead, symbolised rather naively by repeated shots of big computer server warehouses, as if the mysteries of capital were to do with the complexities of information technology rather than the inversions of commodity fetishism.

The seven-screen installation is bright, snappy, beautiful. The accompanying two-screen installation, entitled "Kapital" and billed as "creating an intellectual framework for Playtime", is a solemn, dispirited counterpoint.

"Kapital" is made from film of a seminar on "Choreographing Capital" which Julien organised with the Marxist political economist David Harvey at the Hayward Gallery in 2012. Having the film, rather than, say, a transcript of the seminar, as counterpoint, focuses us on the visual qualities.

This is class time, not play time. The audience sits in genteel, respectful "ah yes, very interesting" mode. Almost no-one takes notes. No-one protests, interjects, laughs, or winces.

In front of the audience, Julien and Harvey sit in deep armchairs. (All the figures in "Playtime" are striding around, or perched as for concentration and work). Julien solemnly reads a list of questions to Harvey from prior notes, nodding sagely as Harvey replies.

Then high-ranking professors opine from the audience. Colin McCabe - once a fiery young academic, ousted from the Cambridge University English faculty in 1981 for his "structuralism", but now snug in an "eminent scholar" persona - shrugs that socialism is "less of an option now than ever". Stuart Hall, the patriarch for the Communist Party's journal Marxism Today in the 1980s, wearily asserts that the proletariat has gone, shoved aside by new identities of race and gender.

Harvey's responses are reasonable but mild-mannered. The film's showing of them allows them slight drama or passion, not enough to make us look in what Marx called the "hidden abode" of capital where we can "force the secret of profit-making".

Both in "Kapital" and in "Playtime", we remain in what Marx called the "sphere of exchange of commodities", where "alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham". Or, now, not the sober Bentham, but a more exuberant, self-elated "player".

Or, as Hegel put it, "The creation of bourgeois society is the achievement of the modern world which has for the first time given all determinations of the Idea their due... The whole sphere of bourgeois society is the territory of mediation where there is free play for every idiosyncrasy, every talent, every accident of birth and fortune, and where waves of every passion gush forth, regulated only by reason glinting through them..."

Again, a difference: for Hegel, the "reason glinting through" was supplied by the state; here, it is the market.

The one worker in the story, the maid in Dubai, is not a proletarian, employed by capital to produce for the market, but a domestic servant. This capitalist playground is one with the workers who build the attractions faded out.

Julien, it seems, has drifted to fading out his own background. He is from Caribbean-origin working-class East London. At school (so he recounts) he came across a teacher "who, during life drawing, started explaining dialectical materialism... All my teachers were middle-class and they were also of the left. So we were having these conversations about Marx, about Trotsky, about socialism".

At the age of 15, in 1975, he came across the small revolutionary left group Big Flame, whose politics were half-Maoist, half-anarchist. He met activists like Alan Hayling, who after a high-flying degree at Cambridge was then a line worker at the same Ford factory as Julien's dad. Like other groups of such politics across Europe, Big Flame faded in the late 70s and early 80s. Hayling became the driving force in the failed "News on Sunday" attempt in 1987 to create a mass-circulation socialist newspaper as a commercial operation, without any activist organisation behind it; and, later, Head of Documentaries at the BBC.

Julien also had the "Healyites" delivering their daily paper Newsline to his home every day. The "Healyites", ex-Trotskyist and still calling themselves Trotskyist, had spiralled into a screeching, blustering sect, sustaining their paper on lucrative links with governments like Gaddafi's.

"I myself", writes Julien, "preferred the more anarchistic groups, and the East End saw a lot of circling around the Trotskyists. But I flirted with any organisation that seemed interested in me".

By 1985 Big Flame had disappeared, and the "Healyites" had imploded: maybe Julien took that to be the end of revolutionary socialist activism. Yet the proletariat did not cease to exist when the fantasies about it of the soft-Maoists and the "Healyites" collapsed.

Capital is not just about winners and losers in the market. It is about the confiscation by capital of the tension and catharsis of human creativity, a confiscation which Julien sets out to criticise but ends up partly complicit in.

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