Le Merle

Pecunia, si uti scis, ancilla est; si nescis, domina ¹

The debtor-creditor or stakeholder-shareholder opposition is the predominant social, political and economic relation within financialized capitalism, specifically in the way it structures everyday life through the production of consumer debt. The debtor-creditor basis inherent in financialized capitalism’s modus operandi is made quite explicit in the relation that one agrees to enter into in being granted the “privilege” of becoming a cardholder with all its advantages and responsibilities. The credit card figures as a major instrument to propel not only consumption, but, perhaps more importantly, to stimulate consumer indebtedness in order to extract value from the credit mechanisms that govern its functioning; i.e. a contractual agreement to accept high interest rates on overdue balances, rigid monthly minimum payments, credit rating surveillance etc., all this in return for easy access to a form of borrowed liquidity (i.e. leverage).

The slightest deviance from the contractual rules, such as failing to pay the monthly minimum or going beyond the card limit, invariably leads to a cascade of harassment and punitive measures: downgraded credit rating, aggressive collection agent phone calls, continuing accruing interest on the unpaid amount, etc. For those who abide by the contractual rules and who have secured a sufficient monthly income to regularly pay down the borrowed amounts, the credit card can certainly serve as a convenient way to access liquidity. Heeding the call of the endless and omnipresent advertisement barrage that hegemonically shapes contemporary modes of subjectivation, the money-wise consumer can thus derive some benefit from the borrowing leverage afforded by this peculiar transaction medium.

However, one does not need to be an economist or financial analyst to realize that consumer debt, which is to a large extent measured by unpaid credit card balance accounts, is soaring in Canada and the US. It is also not far-fetched to surmise that the credit-card issuers and the financial credit mechanisms of which they are but a cog, derive far more value from the“irresponsible,” debt-generating behaviours of a good part of the consumer population. It can therefore be argued that the profits generated from the credit mechanisms, such as gleaned from super high interests and credit card based debt swapping derivatives, probably represent a very significant source of liquidity earnings for credit card issuing corporations. The particular contractual agreement governing the terms one enters into in accepting a credit card of course also speak to the wider contours of our current political-economic sphere. With its fast-forward, expansion driven impetus the machine of the post-fordist economy appears to know no brakes, regardless of its evident short-mid-long-term contribution to the anthropocenic disaster that is looming on the planetary horizon. As it stands, finanicialized capitalism is not only unsustainable as such, it is itself an engine that threatens to destroy the very conditions of planetary sustainability on which the myriad life forms and life-feeding inorganic systems depend. These two aspects, the micro everyday debtor-creditor or shareholder-stakeholder social relation and the macro contours of the juggernaut post-fordist economy machine are in fact two sides of the same coin. Two sides that are respectively focused on by the two art projects under scrutiny here, Michel Eddy’s Infinite Cruelty, for nothing, which considers the debtor-creditor credit card relation from a satirical, carnivalesque inversion perspective, and Speed Glue, which examines the broader delineations of the macro economic system’s rules by altering a game of ping pong into an analogy for a more life-affirming relation than what is afforded under the current socio-politico-economic conditions.

Infinite Cruelty, for nothing, a video piece in five acts and an epilogue in which a series of credit cards are subjected to various forms of traditional torture, literally inverts the debtor-creditor position by turning the credit card object (a metonym of the creditor) into the position of the debtor by subjecting it to various hilarious acts of cruelty aimed at divulging its inner workings and dark secrets. Filmed in a seedy snuff movie aesthetic, as evidenced by a handheld camera that roams through a darkened basement space, Infinite Cruelty, for nothing consists of an unfolding of various absurdly cruel episodes. In the first act, a newly received Tim Horton’s Double Double CIBC credit card — issued in the artist’s name — is dipped into a jar of hot tar various times before being carefully feathered in multi-coloured plumages. Afterwards it is doused with cold water to clean off the shame-inducing sticky accoutrements. While this is going on, a character wearing a bizarre rubber mask — reminiscent of a henchman, or a BDSM Dom — proceeds to call the CIBC customer representative to inquire into her current altered credit card status. The conversation centres on the notion that the card contains liquid that “allows transactions” to occur. After having unsuccessfully tried to extract liquid from the card, the cardholder asks the representative if the card’s liquid can run out and if the card has a memory, i.e. “if it remembers what is done to it.” The flummoxed representative gives as straightforward an answer as possible given the unusual, torturous questions. In another torment incident, when the cardholder-torturer asks: “what are the rules when, when, when pain is pleasure?” the sales representative responds in default mode with a perplexed “What are the rules when payment is not made?…” The credit card custodians are thus unwittingly drawn into this cruel and quite comical inversion of the business-as-usual polite harassment protocols. In this regard, Michael Eddy’s work is not only sadist in its content and actions, but also in its narrative strategy, which can be likened to Marquis de Sade’s novels in which acts of cruelty are the prelude for a reflective inquiry into fundamental questions.

Indeed, each act of cruelty is followed by a real- life phone call inquiry-interrogation with a customer representative of the respective card-issuing institutions. The narrative progression thus leads to another episode in which a leather-clad Dom-like figure flogs a BMO MasterCard — tied to a stake — with a cat o’ nine tails until it cracks into pieces. This is followed by a particularly abject affair in which an Amazon card is buried in a pile of teeming worms. A penultimate act of cruelty features an American Express card fastened to a contraption and slowly stretched into a painfully elongated shape. This humorous nod to the medieval rack & stretch torture practice leads to a final conversation with a service representative centred on the notion of stretching the card’s limits and an anxious inquiry into the card’s identity and potential claims to immortality; hence the titular Infinite Cruelty. In the epilogue, the card is placed into a metal box decorated with a cultish figure engraved on its lid. The card is then put within this occult box, which is equipped with protruding nails on its lid’s inner side and bottom. As the henchmen closes the lid the card is punctured recto and verso and enshrouded into this coffin of sorts.
End of video.

These sidesplitting acts of torturing a hapless piece of plastic followed by spontaneous real-life conversations with its corporate custodians, transfers the financial violence normally exerted upon credit card using (abusing) human subjects to the transaction object itself as well as its corporate foot soldiers, who are employed to ensure that the attendant terms and regulations are properly adhered to and understood ². In thus comically turning the card object into a personified subject with a memory, who/which feels pain, who/which is self-interested (“it wants something from you”) and who/which has an uncertain identity and “life story,” Michael Eddy uses strategies of the absurd to reveal the cruel ordeals ordinary human subjects are put through when dealing with the Kafkaesque apparatus of the credit card corporations and their usurious lending practices ³. As in any incisive satire, the use of ridicule and humour here serves to reveal and critique serious issues. Furthermore, Eddy’s proposition follows the logic of torture not only by way of the cruel acts performed but also through the efforts to get the cards and their corporate intermediaries to speak and reveal some of their precious secrets; secrets that maybe useful to better grasp the enemy’s position and intentions. Infinite Cruelty, for nothing thereby lays bare the underlying violence operative when we engage in everyday transactions made all too easily affordable through the little rectangular piece of plastic and its contractual terms. In the performance work, Speed Glue, Grenier-Poirier and Nuskind-Oder also explore finance-related notions of exchange and sustainability, but in a different perspective, driven not so much by exposing the cruel absurdity of the rules in place, but rather by imagining the possibility of an alternative set of rules that would do away with the notion of competition and a winner-takes-all ethos.

The central concept behind Speed Glue ⁴ is to remove the competitive rule structure from a game of ping pong by instructing two professional ping pong players to play not for points, but to sustain the game cooperatively as long as possible. The finite, zero-sum game basis
of competitive table tennis is thus replaced with a potentially infinite game in which the pleasure of the exchange and beauty of play are the only surplus value worth striving for. The piece presents two professional players exchanging a ball for as long as they possibly can, with no other goal in mind but to return the shot over the net (hedge), either high or low (shorting or going long) and into the partner’s side of the court.

This apparently simple proposition is however rife with meaning, especially when it is viewed in relation to finance and value, as it offers an utopian re-evaluation of the rules whereby we play our games, one in which cooperation and the surplus value of life derived from play and mutual enjoyment trump strive and winner-take-all profit seeking. In removing the win-motive or profit-motive from the equation, Grenier-Poirier and Nuskind-Oder introduce something akin to a Fourier-like utopian vision in which struggle and harsh labour are replaced by cooperation and mutual support in view of a common and shared well-being. In eliminating the competitive edge, the work transforms what is normally a finite battle — albeit quite pleasurable within the confines of the game’s leisure structure — into a potentially infinite game that is closer to dance and artful style than a struggle to maintain the upper hand until victory is assured. There is a plethora of finance analogies to be derived from the highly mobile and fluid game of ping pong, but as this may be slightly hors propos here and risks overstretching my allotted space, I will leave such considerations for another time and space. For now, I will limit such parallels to the evocation of the notion of arbitrage. “Arbitrage is the means through which a volatile field of trading in assets is kept liquid.” ⁵ When transposed to the game of ping pong, arbitrage can be viewed as the incessant trading back-and-forth of a symbolic means of exchange or token (ball) for a symbolic return (points, sets, matches) on investment (placement of ball on the volatile tradingfield, such as a ping pong table or market, according to a set of pre-established rules, i.e. market place regulations or rules of ping pong) in view of winning and taking home the whole kit and caboodle (match, tournament or profit). In simply subtracting the stakes from the back-and-forth exchange, the arbitrage dynamic is transformed into an exchange of mutual benefit and enrichment, in lieu of the predominant struggle to win at the expense of one’s opponent or competitor. Speed Glue thereby mobilizes the analogy of a potentially infinite ping pong game to envision a situation in which outcomes and living conditions are greatly improved simply by changing the rules of the game from an antagonistic platform to a cooperative one.

Infinite Cruelty, for nothing and Speed Glue, each in their way, abstract certain elements of the hegemonic finance relation we all find ourselves, to lesser or greater degrees, entrapped by. However, this abstraction, this simplifying or isolating of certain elements of a complex phenomenon so as to better illuminate it, casts a revealing eye on the deliberately byzantine abstractions of the post-fordist economic leviathan. Clearly these works will not have much of an effect on the operating logic of the ever-churning and steamrolling apparatus of financialized capitalism, but they do allow us to conceive of alternatives to the cruel and relentless charge of the debtor-creditor, shareholder-stakeholder equation, which is clearly based on a form of asymmetric warfare in which the former engage in a zero-sum game that leaves all too many of the latter systemically short-changed. Viewed in juxtaposition, the two art projects, one based on satire and derision exposing the inherent cruelty of the debtor-creditor calculation, and the other on an utopian imagining of an other, more cooperative framework of exchange, offer the possibility of introducing another affordance, another means to structure the relations between ourselves and the world we live in and by.

1. Latin proverb. Translation: “If you know how to use money, money is your slave; if you don’t, money is your master.”→
2. For instance, when one has overdrafted a credit card account, the (automated) response from the institution reads as follows: “your account has been struck with a limitation and access is now restricted.” The violent undertone of the verb “struck” is indeed telling here, not to say striking.→
3. On a little side note, after repeatedly witnessing the series of torture incidents, I was almost expecting an inquisitorial outing in which the credit card would be burned at the stake in a sort of auto-da-finance. Such an ultimate treatment would in fact turn the plastic into an oozing liquid that could then re-solidify into something of no value whatsoever. Just a thought.→
4. At first I thought the title was some clever contraction of an accelerationist desire for speed and a substance (glue) that would somehow thwart its movement. This appears to be an erroneous reading, as “speed glue” is in fact a technical term for a special glue table tennis players use to re-fix the rubber surfaces to the racket or paddle. This has an apparently advantageous accelerationist effects on the speed of play, but no effect on capitalism’s ever faster, rudderless advance.→
5. Randy Martin, “From the Critique of Political Economy to the Critique of Finance,” in Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies, Benjamin Lee and Martin Randy eds.,The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2016, p. 174→