What is a list? The question is apparently simple and comes with an immediate visual predicate: a list is a set of words organized in a column, sometimes in an order (numerical, alphabetical, temporal, related to value, etc.) and sometimes at random. Lists are general, appearing across strata of organizations from the personal to the institutional: lists of domestic jobs, lists of professional tasks, lists of offers, lists of currency, lists of global statistics, lists of code. As I write, I have a list next to me (as do you as you read, no doubt): finish the article, do the ironing, cancel the meeting, vacuum the house, book the ticket, pay the bill, plan the workshop, write the abstract, collect the children, cook the supper . . . Speaking at once of the technicity of my/your life and the endlessness of our labour, my/your list both absorbs and refracts the stressful intensities of our openings and closings, gaps and double bookings, opportunities and frustrations. They are, of course, blank to us, no help and yet of absolute help. We list at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day, when we are confused, when we need to defer things, when we cannot defer things any longer. In the paradoxically self-annulling character of contem- porary immateriality, we no longer need others to impose the list upon us. We do it to ourselves, as Boltanski and Chiapello observe, we do it artistically, as the open spaces of creative freedom demanded by a previous generation of cultural critics are recuperated through forms of advanced capitalism by and in which we utilize our own artistic capacities and skills of autonomous organization to produce more effectively (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005).
Primarily, lists have a function that can be described as economic in both a cultural and fiscal sense; they provide – or promise to provide – rationalizations of scale, time and space within our lives and those of others, and they do so through contemporary preferences for modes of organization and milieus of practice. Lists are supposed to save time (and money). Lists are distillations of the maps of activity, accumulation, sociability, enterprise, aspiration that motivate action in the widest sense, but they also precede mapping, stand in for mapping, defer the mapping of the organization of the self to some other time and place (the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of the year, the beginning of the future, etc.). While a list might have physical or virtual depth – it might be a series of tiles or links on a web page, for example, or a
pile of filing cards – it is usually a spatial device, and one, of course, that has inbuilt (often frustrating) revolution. Closed lists exist on a nominal basis – a list of contents, a list of titles, a list of war dead, an index or codex – but here the function of the list is to always remain partially open in the apprehension of discovery or change (a man is discovered to have survived, an unknown manuscript is revealed, new reference is discovered, etc.). A rolling ‘to-do’ list haunts contemporary life – from the mundanity of organizing daily practice to the precarious politics of means without ends, offering us opportunities for networked and heterogeneous action (and here the transmogrification of the list into a set of friend-contacts via social networking sites is emblematic). At the same time, ‘to-do lists’ keep us busy from those ‘old fashioned’ concerns whereby their contents might reveal a register of power and powerlessness, inclusion and exclusion, access and its lack.
This dynamic capacity of lists to be both open and closed, to suggest both action and the ordering of action, to mark the now ingrained enmeshing of work, play, time on, time off, personal and official orders of behaviour and labour, makes them attractive devices. The attraction is conceptual, affective and aesthetic. But the same attraction to devices that are malleable, that would suggest the enablement of types of paradoxical activity, functions as a sign of the erosive imaginary of contemporary power, and its consistent reinvention of the tools through which it produces its capital.
In advanced capitalist states of labour relations, Weberian definitions of the bureaucratic organization of a clear work/life divide in which official activity takes place within the regime of an office that is segregated from the private sphere have become indistinguished. The dispositif of this indistinction is the list. Whereas in Weber’s office (factory, bureau, etc.) work was regu- lated through abstracted structures of achievement that guaranteed, at least in theory and for Weber with ambivalent results, a distantiated hierarchy of bureau cratic order and authority unsullied by autarchic systems of favour, the shift towards what Richard Sennett identifies as the ‘willingness to destabilize one’s own institution’ through forms of liberal, distributive planning results in a set of contradictions encapsulated by the list (Sennett, 2006: 41). If at one time the list of things to do was imposed, and the worker might well be punished for failing to complete the list, at another (nominally our) time the authority for completion is ours, and failure turns inwards in forms of self- governmentalization that promise to value our resourcefulness and at the same time, as Sennett rightly observes, divorces our displaced and disguised authority from power (ibid.: 62).
In their study of the relation between new forms of immaterial labour organization and developments of neo-liberal capitalism through shifting structures in the organization of work, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello describe a newly emergent subject, ‘who is mobile, streamlined, possessed of the art of establishing and maintaining numerous diverse, enriching con - nections, and of the ability to extend networks’. (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 355). This subject emerges through the absorption of critical attitudes List 97
towards the advancement of capitalism (that in order to produce capital, workers and their institutions must be homogenized, hierarchized, subordinated and unequal) into the system of capitalist production itself. In particular, Boltanski and Chiapello label the critique that is absorbed as artistic, point- ing to the values championed by artists at the end of the 1960s (and in this they use the term ‘artistic’ in a very general sense) that prioritized liberation, egalitarianism and freedom of autonomous, creative action. The consump- tion of this in the ‘neo-management mechanisms’ and ‘especially the self- management movement’ of the 1980s and 1990s produces institutional subjects that practice:
the qualities that are guarantees of success in this new spirit [of capi talism] – autonomy, spontaneity, rhizomorphous capacity, multitasking (in con - trast to the narrow specialization of the old division of labour), conviviality, openness to others and novelty, availability, creativity, vision ary intuition, sensitivity to differences, listening to lived experience and receptiveness to a whole range of experiences, being attracted to informal ity and the search for interpersonal contacts.
(ibid.: 97) For Boltanski and Chiapello, the exemplars, the experts, of this way of working are artists. If they take as their model those radical creative individuals who emerged from May 1968 to develop into the liberal capitalists of the 1980s and 1990s and to invent such novel formations of artistic-capital management for themselves and their employees (the authors cite management gurus such as Peter Drucker and Rosabeth Moss Kanter as examples; the effect of Mitterand’s rebranded socialism is also an important example for the authors, locating their argument at times too intractably within a Francophone context), it is easy to see how the ensuing internalization of the conceptualization of capital has emerged not simply through artistic methodologies, but also as art across a similar time period. Much contemporary art, in which relationality and participation are dominant tropes, serves as both an embodiment and illustration of the recuperation of hegemonic organizational structures in the form of ambivalently designed environments and structures (the work of artists such as Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe, Elmgreen and Dragset or Iza Genzken are primary examples of this). As Suhail Malik has pointed out, ‘[contemporary artists’] non-alienated work and informal sociality and exhibi- tion structures are emblematic of the heightened invention of destructured professionalization. Artists are the heroes of the new spirit of capitalism’ (Malik, 2006: 41).
Listing, too, is artistic; self-regulated, inventive, adaptable, etc. – it is an activity that joins the stages of this transformation together – from the oppressive and imposed list of Weberian capital analysis to the informal and immaterial processes of labour available to workers in globally advanced capital economies in which it stands as an opportunity (a list of contacts that 98 Andrea Phillips
make a network, a list of potential clients, a list of friends that also constitute a set of economic relations, etc.). The subject of and worker in these environ - mental conditions (the lister) mimics the shape and form of financial/or all markets in his or her flexibility and mobility. He or she, just as his or her fiscal corollary the market, is able to profit by the manipulation and movement of lists. Movement is essential to continued success. The same open and tolerant socius that produces the potential for heterogeneity also produces the supra- inegalitarianism of new capital. Both proceed via lists.
This double action of the list is mirrored at a structural and linguistic level in Foucault’s conception of the dispositif (usually translated as apparatus or device), wherein the paradoxical formats of power involved in its utilization are consistently made manifest:
With the notion of the apparatus, I find myself in a difficulty which I haven’t yet been properly able to get out of. I said that the apparatus is essentially of a strategic nature, which means assuming that it is a matter of a certain manipulation of relations of forces, either developing them in a particular direction, blocking them, stabilizing them, utilizing them, etc. The apparatus is thus always inscribed in a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain coordinates of knowledge which issue from it but, to an equal degree, condition it. This is what the apparatus consists in: strategies of relations of forces supporting, and supported by, types of knowledge.
(Foucault, 1980: 196) If a dispositif is a mechanism of precarity, it is also one that acts within the power relations of that precarity (this is its ‘difficulty’). It is, for Foucault, ‘the system of relations that can be established between [. . .] elements’ (ibid.:194). As a dispositif, a device, a list is thus a system of relations between elements, those elements being both the contents of any list – the task of ironing, the ordering of the stock market, the alphabetic of the dead – and the structures to which they are linked – the social tensions of private and public labour, the organization of transnational fiscal accumulation and profit, the memorializa- tion of participants in wars of ‘national security’, etc. Any list performs across registers, its seductive format offering solutions through ordering and naming.1
If a list is a dispositif that performs explicitly under the artistic conditions of new capitalism, and if art is generally recognized as a method through which the devices of general cultural and/or social production are held up for (often ambivalently staged) scrutiny, then it is not surprising that artists have produced lists as art. Equally unremarkable is the fact that this experimentation has occurred over the decades that approximate the shift from material to immaterial labour, from the hierarchical divisions of labour to the situated indistinctions performed through informality, flexibility and adaptability that now reconstitute those hierarchies of power. The conceptual turn of art and capital mimic each other, as do the devices with which they invent and List 99
maintain themselves. In an attempt to illustrate this compatibility, I propose the figure of Richard Serra, an artist, and here a dispositif, for the performance of the list as art and as the figure of artistic capital. Serra is emblematic not simply because he made a famous work from a written list, but because his career spans the decades through which practices of immaterial labour, arguments over the status of objects and commodities within fiscalized economies and revisions of the value of cultural self-making have developed. 100 Andrea Phillips
Figure 7.1 Richard Serra, Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself
(1967–68). (© Richard Serra. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.)
Serra’s Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself (1967–68) consists of a column of verbs in prepositional form handwritten on a sheet of paper, reminiscent of the repetitive rote-learning activity that once dominated grammatical education in the classroom. The work was originally presented in published form in a book, but has since been exhibited widely as both a stand-alone artwork and a document that describes the shifting terms of materiality in Serra’s – and other artist’s – work then and now. The handwritten original is often presented alongside a more legible version in typescript. The actions described are directly related to activities Serra was engaged in his List 101
studio at the time but they also exemplify an engagement with ‘everyday’ manual labour indicative of the way in which many artists in the 1950s and 1960s sought to destabilize – and distance themselves from – notions of beaux- arts training.
Verb List appears as both a conceptual artwork, wherein the lack of elite value of its materials underscores its speculative potential, and as a theoretical and descriptive text, published in collections of the artist’s writing and catalogues and historical surveys of conceptual art.2Its transitive status – part
art writing, part instruction manual, part aesthetic object – runs parallel to a set of experiments that Serra was carrying out in his studio at the time.3
Peter Osborne describes the tense of Verb List as ‘the perpetual participal present’, a work that is dependent upon its title to establish ‘relations to acts of . . . production within the frozen objecthood of . . . results’ (Osborne, 2002: 22). Comparing Verb List with other works made with lists of instructions as their material by Yoko Ono and Robert Morris, Osborne describes Verb List in relation to theatricality:
Freed from musical or dramatic conventions of performance, and open to interpretation in performance by anyone, instruction pieces are unbounded, in principle, by any particular context. This both draws attention to the indeterminacy or infinity inherent in their linguistic expression and confers a participatory dimension to the work, requiring its audience to ‘complete’ it, albeit only in this instance and often only imaginatively.
(ibid.: 22–3) In interviews, Serra has talked of his interest in the ‘logic of materials’, developing a commitment to the relationship between materiality and the body (his and the viewers’) at a time when other critics were involved in the conceptual production and ideologically driven dematerialization of art. The list here stands as a device that allows the artist to move precisely between materialization and dematerialization: if, on the one hand, the work is prag - matically and perceptively insubstantial, proposing a presentness of action over stasis of object, it is also a proposition to get hold of material and make things substantially, in concrete form.
Now best known for Titled Arc (1981–89), the monumental rusted steel sculpture sited in, then removed from, Federal Plaza in New York, Serra worked from the age of 16 in steelworks in the Bay Area in order to fund his way through art school. He has consistently described his methodology in direct relation to this experience of large-scale industrial production. He continues to work with steel, and those verbs with which he could be said to have started – roll, fold, bend, twist, etc. – are still clearly present in his work, albeit in highly literal form.
When I first started, what was very, very important to me was dealing with the nature of process. So what I had done is I’d written a verb list: to roll, 102 Andrea Phillips
to fold, to cut, to dangle, to twist . . . and I really just worked out pieces in relation to the verb list physically in a space. Now, what happens when you do that is you don’t become involved with the psychology of what you’re making, nor do you become involved with the after image of what it’s going to look like. So, basically it gives you a way of proceeding with material in relation to body movement, in relation to making, that divorces from any notion of metaphor, any notion of easy imagery.
(Serra, n.d.) Serra’s claim has always been that of a relation to unalienated labour, to processes of work of a certain order in which crafting is recognized as the primary tool of artistic endeavour (this fantasy of hard physical labour as both unalienated and true to materiality is a myth that pervaded Northern American minimalism, documented acerbically in Anna Chave’s 1990 essay ‘Minimalism and the rhetoric of power’4). Verb List now appears as an
anomaly in a career spent building edifices to a bygone industrial age, unless one reads it in purely pragmatic terms: a to-do list of actions to perform upon, say, a large slab of steel. But Verb List is never simply a to-do list, however pragmatically the artist might claim his singular relation to the body, to material (and no matter how effectively it apes the form). Rather, its ability to be a to-do list is limited by its ontological status as an art object: a simple but important founding condition.
List 103
Figure 7.2 Richard Serra, The Matter of Time, Guggenheim Bilbao, 2005.
(© FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, Erika Ede, 2011. All rights reserved. Total or partial reproduction is prohibited.)
Verb List, in many ways the most contemporary work Serra has ever produced (far more in sync with contemporary artists’ production, say, than the artist’s monuments), expresses that which Jacques Rancière describes as ‘the absolute singularity of art’, which ‘at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity’, by which he recognizes contemporary art’s ability to appear as both an absolutely irregular artefact within the world at the same time as being constituted by and through regular artefacts and images. Art in what Rancière calls the ‘aesthetic regime’ (a distinction made on the basis of the need to disassociate the political structure of art’s instantiation that interests Rancière from the more didactic or representational work of artists who attempt to illustrate political concerns through their work, as well as in order to describe the performative relationship between art and its discourses) ‘destroy[s] the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated with art from other ways of doing and making, a barrier that separated its rules from the order of social occupations’ (Rancière, 2004: 23). Serra exemplifies the performance of this indistinction, whereby the acts of writing, working, rolling, folding, spilling, etc. are proposed by the artist and his interpreters as modes of shared knowledge.
The enduring commitment to a relation between materiality and immanence that Serra shares with many artists of a younger generation can here be seen as paradigmatic. Rather than being a device that enables someone to do something, the Verb List is, then, a device that performs itself; performs