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DEMATERIALIZATION
KAREN PINKUS

FROM ARTE POVERA TO CYBERMONEY THROUGH ITALIAN THOUGHT

This essay is a rather broad, free-floating consideration of the term dematerialization. It is inspired by two poles in Italian theory and praxis: the first is the movement known as arte povera of the late 1960s and early 1970s, years that correspond to the period of the dematerialization of the art object as defined by the American critic Lucy Lippard, the Italian critic and father (Pope?) of arte povera, Germano Celant, and others.1 For our purposes, we might think of arte povera as conceptual sculpture in a pre-digital age. The second pole is constituted by various reflections on narrative, paper, and digital commerce in contemporary Italy. Of course, dematerialization is by no means an exclusively Italian concept; in fact it should be considered as intimately tied to globalization. It does imply a somewhat specific temporality: it is a movement or force that follows upon a period of materialization. On the surface, dematerialization may seem like a gesture of liberation, a strategy to overthrow the stockpiles of materials left by the previous generation, a break in a trajectory toward a planetary junk pile. Dematerialization is different from an antimaterialist attitude, strictly speaking. To dematerialize is to acknowledge a prior period of materialization (particularly acute, in the case of Italy, during the ultra-fast economic boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s). It emerges as a retro-movement, then, possibly retrograde, possibly progressive; certainly worth distinguishing from both the immaterial and the sustainable.2 The key question that this essay addresses, through Italian thought, is how can dematerialization help think the paradoxical overabundance of useless materials, and simultaneously the tendency toward immaterial production?3 1 We could begin by turning to that first authentically Italian modern art movement, Futurism.4 Futurism was by no means a movement against capitalism or the commerFor this epithet, see Prvost. See my essay, The Risks of Sustainability. 3 This question is, obviously, very complex. When critics of current global trade practices ask about the original ideas of free trade, they also argue that Adam Smith and David Ricardo could never have foreseen the sped-up forms of production and communication that characterize the present. Likewise, in Multitude, Hardt and Negri argue that Marx himself called for a new theoretical apparatus adequate to our own present situation [141] dominated by immaterial labor. As they go on to explain, immaterial labor can be said to describe the present, even if it is not yet quantitatively dominant. Remember that, as Marx himself notes in the opening pages of Capital, when he studied industrial labor and capitalist production they occupied only a portion of the English economy. . . . In quantitative terms agriculture was certainly still dominant, but Marx recognized in capital and industrial labor a tendency that would act as the motor of future transformations [141]. Can Marx be read as prophetically anticipating ever-greater economies of scale? 4 I mention Futurism, not because I wish to make some essentialist argument about an Italian national artistic spirit, but because, as Bonami will insist, it is important to engage with the question
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cial potential of the art marketquite the contrary, in certain senses. Yet at points the practitioners affiliated with the movement did make use of the notion of impermanence. Giacomo Balla (a signer, along with Fortunato Depero of the 1915 Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, the manifesto which most explicitly suggests the potential to commercialize the Futurist brand identity) worked in cardboard, tissue paper, wire, mirrors, and other materials later recycled by arte povera. He did so not in order to trump potential buyers but to increase the potential for movement in the work of art. The poor materials were a means of distancing himself from the static and flat surface of the canvas that had failed to reproduce the dynamic volume of speed. It was their capacity for transparency (tissue paper), to be lit from inside with light bulbs, to be transformable, and possibly even noisy, that made these materials attractive to Balla, rather than, say, their potential to break up or disintegrate. After sculpting Force-Lines of Boccionis Fist in cardboard, the same year as the manifesto just mentioned, Balla later cast the identical form in bronze. Perhaps he felt he could do so, having established the dynamism of the piece in its earlier incarnation. The Futurist Reconstruction is revolutionary for its rhetorical insistence on sound, perhaps the most dematerialized of all art forms, as a key element of sculpture and architecture. Of course, the manifesto was a (dematerialized?) form sui generis, not a retrospective or truthful account of actual works produced. We should, then, be cautious when we use such writings or proclamations in a discussion of questions of materials and materiality. When Lucy Lippard used the term dematerialization in what is by now an historical context, it had various valences. To dematerialize the art object itself was to deconstruct, play with, or dtourne the possibility of a consumable art object. To achieve the goal of dematerialization, some artists positioned themselves as conceptualists who had their work fabricated by others. Some worked through the theme of energy as matter; they strove to negate the work as opus of a single creative hand, in concert with prevailing theories of the death of author; or they sought to negate the work as institutionalized product, engaging in a critique of museums or in a search for alternative spaces and markets.5 Arte poverainasmuch as it is possible to generalize about a heterogeneous set of practicessought to keep work continuously present, non-historical. There were various ways to achieve this: avoid documentation of work, such as photographs or catalogues, and focus instead on transmission and presence (happenings); make work that is inaccessible to almost all potential consumers (Giuseppe Penones painted trees in a private woods), and so on. Michelangelo Pistoletto exhibited his oggetti in meno
of tradition-as-burden in modern Italian art. Various critics have placed arte povera, a movement of the 1960s, in contrast with the Transavanguardia, a more material movement of the more material 1980s. This movement also had a central promoter/critic, Achille Bonito Oliva. In 1979 he organized a show with Mimmo Paladino, Nicola de Maria, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Sandro Chia, extolling the healthy opportunism of these painters on traditional canvas supports that would soon gain international recognition as art stars. As Vetrocq writes of the movements: The two appear to occupy wholly discrete and irreconcilable territories with respect to form, materials, marketing, the pertinence of art history, the assertion of artistic psychology, and the very way in which a work of art functions or means. . . . [Arte povera] was an art of austerity and subtraction, [Transavanguardia] an art of indulgence and excess. Following an art of poor, unorthodox, and often impermanent materials that expressed contempt for consumerism and the collectors appetites, the Transavanguardia restored big figural and symbolic painting and ushered in a lucrative and comfortable meshing of the interests of the artist, the dealer, and the critic [49]. 5 In Italy this tradition has led to potentially important consequences with the use of occupied spaces or centri sociali as alternative art galleries. By invoking these debates, I mean to draw attention to the creative ways that underground culture in Italy has spread in a realm that is quite distinct from that of international stars of the high-end art market.

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(usually translated as minus objects, but fewer objects or diminishing objects are also suggested by the Italian) in 1965 and 1966. They include a heavy milestone, a solid man-sized house and a wooden sculpture, all of which are eminently ready for museum display. Indeed, a number of the oggetti in meno were recently shown as a discrete and historical selection, in one space among others at MAXXI, Romes new museum for contemporary art. What makes Pistolettos objects minus or less has little to do with materiality and more to do with the artists concept of them as liberating him and his body from traditional constraints. In arte povera, then, the body of the artist enters into the work, at times making institutionalization highly problematic. Arte povera struggles against the commodity. Marx wrote that the process disappears in the product and if product is use-value, Natures material adapted by a change of form to the wants of man [201], then arte povera often tries to negate the use-value by emphasizing process at all costs. In Italy of the late 60s and early 70s, dematerialization was specifically linked to the Autonomist movement and the counterculture. Arte povera participantswith varying degrees of explicit political engagementfelt that no object, no matter how well intentioned, nontraditional, or idiosyncratic, could escape becoming a commodity or transcend the conditions of the market.6 They saw the capitalist (art) market as a monstrous machine that incorporates everything into itself, even opposition to it. The arte povera movement has thus been associated with the use of found or raw materials of naturesticks, stones, live animals, produce, spongesbut in reality the artists made use of heterogeneous materials, including garish plastics, metals, neon tubing, and so on. It would be more proper to say that what was elevated was a notion of contingency, the use of available materials on a rather spontaneous basis.7 Indeed, as Francesco Bonami argues, arte povera had to negotiate with a dominant tradition of humanistic materiality that has conditioned all Italian art practices since the fifteenth century. He writes: In their own subversive fashion the Arte Povera artists continued this tradition. They expanded the range of materials used for art, but basically the relationship they established with a handful of coal or a head of lettuce was not much different from the way earlier artists approached a piece of marble. [109]8 A determined materialist approach to art opposes itself to a metaphysical or ideal approach exemplified by traditional oil perspective painting on canvas, an aesthetic legacy that has been felt as particularly burdensome to modern Italian artists. When Giulio Paolini displays a photograph of a Renaissance portrait and titles his work Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto, or when he exhibits the backsides of traditional canvases, he is attempting to acknowledge such a burden. As a materialist, then, Celant writes: Ideas, events, facts, and actions visualized and materialized are, in fact, the focal points of the simultaneity of idea and image. . . . A visualized and materialized idea does not contain
6 Arte povera has been notoriously difficult to define and many of its so-called participants even denied adherence to the movement. Celant coined the term in 1967. It is obviously not my intention to debate the complex questions that surround affiliation with an art movement. So for now I will consider arte povera as a fairly coherent group that did, however, undergo certain shifts of emphasis. 7 In 1967 Celant did not specifically refer to dematerialization or moving away from objects. Instead, he wrote, The insignificant has begun to existindeed, it has imposed itself. Physical presence and behavior have become art. . . . Cinema, theater and the visual arts assert their authority as anti-pretence. . . . They eliminate from their inquiry all that which may seem mimetic reflection and representation or linguistic custom in order to attain a new kind of art, which, to borrow a term from the theater of Grotowsky, one may call poor [Arte Povera/Art Povera 31]. 8 The essay continues with a rant against the lack of funding by the Italian state for the arts since the postwar period.

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a program [Arte Povera/Art Povera 51]. In this context, materialitya movement toward creating a perfect identity of the thing and idea, unambiguous, stripped of excessive reificationserves to authenticate the so-called poverty of art. Celant promoted Boetti, Zorio, Fabro, Anselmo, Piacentino, Gilardi, Prini, Merz, Kounellis, Paolini, and Pascali as revolutionaries concerned with the recovery of free self-planning [Arte Povera/Art Povera 37]. Precariousness is exalted; objects live in the moment of their creation. Nevertheless, by 1969 Celant had produced an attractive catalogue, Arte Povera, published by Mazzotta, with text and glossy photographs.9 Here Celant described the arte povera artist as the artist-alchemist who is a producer of magical, wonderful things [Arte Povera/ Art Povera 119]; the artist is interested in the discovery, the presentation, the insurrection of the magical and astonishing value of natural elements [119]. Dematerialization in arte povera might best be thought of as a process of ridding oneself of excess objects of the economic boom, of trying to climb out from behind commodities and strip ones work down to a bare distillation. In this sense it is clear how alchemy became a key term for the movement.10 Alchemy is a long-standing tradition within which the ambivalent relation of process and product is played out. Although, in the broadest sense, in the West alchemy refers to the production of gold from baser substances, the discourses of alchemyin treatises, narratives, and visual representations rarely represent the final object, but, rather, focus in an obsessive manner on spiritual renewal or rejuvenation. Alchemy, a distillation, negation, and subsequent purification or redemption of materials, depends on the successful production of gold in order to legitimate itself, but it depends equally on the process (enlightenment) to serve as an alibi against base greed. Although there is a tendency in modern art to abuse alchemy simply to mean a magical transformation of materials, the arte povera participantsGilberto Zorio, in particularexpressed a more developed sensitivity to the tradition, including its political and economic implications. Zorio filled Pyrexes with chemicals and reagents, not merely to evoke a general ethos of the alchemical, but to incorporate temporality, change, and the problematic relation of process to finished product into the work that he exhibited. Various artists of the period came to believe that in spite of any sense of creativity, they are as alienated from their products as any factory worker. The artist is supposed to draw from the well of his labor power, but the alchemy that turns it into gold for the dealer leaves him nothing but slag (coagulated labor-time, Marx would say) [de Duve 60].11 Alchemy serves here as a metaphor for the transformation of the artists labor power

Along with some documentation of the Amalfi actions, this was the first presentation of arte povera in the traditional catalogue form. See Celant, Identit italienne 310. 10 Some of the arte povera participants studied with or knew Eugenio Battisti, a scholar of early modern alchemy who was also very influential within the movement. Battisti founded the influential journal Marcatr in 1963 and included Celant and Maurizio Calvesi in the first issue. The alchemical work of artists like Zorio deserves much greater attention than can be given at this point. Calvesi also wrote extensively on alchemy in early modern and modernist contexts. He writes about a felicitous coincidence in 1967 when, as he was working on an essay on the four elements in alchemy, he was also writing about the exhibit Fuoco Immagine Acqua Terra at the Attico Gallery in Rome [Calvesi, Albrecht Drer xxii]. Alighiero Boetti exhibited a large geometric form; Jannis Kounellis a flame emitting from an iron flower; Pino Pascali pieces of earth; and Luciano Fabro natural rugs, actually made of synthetic material that looked like the floor of a forest. I treat the intellectual connections of alchemy and arte povera in some detail in Alchemical Mercury. 11 In an attempt to dupe an art dealer, Joseph Beuys once carved a price90,000DMinto the side of a clay bathtub, knowing that as the clay hardened, it would crack. And, as it happened, one of the fissures sliced through the price, separating the 9 from the 0s. Arte povera artists made similar, ingenious temporal interventions in their work.
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(the base material: lead) into the noble product, the capital realized by the art market. Alchemy, then, is not a mere metaphor for the present considerations, it is a deeply structuring element imbricated in capital itself, just as gold, the product of alchemy, is not a mere figure for just anything of value. In time, Celants position moves from linguistic or sign based, to a more overtly political, or better, an Autonomist one: the artist can only escape the burdens of production by embracing nomadism, refusing dogmas, and cultivating a slippery relation to the market.12 Referring to Giovanni Anselmos works, Celant states they are not autonomous products, but unstable ones, alive as a function of our life [Arte Povera/Art Povera 57]. This kind of work is not a synthesis or material representation of thought, but rather, to quote Celant, a possible socio-cultural strategy in which revolutionary and gnosiological processes shatter the system of industrial dictatorship [Arte Povera/Art Povera 89]. Indeed, the 1968 arte povera show spilled out beyond the physical boundaries of the cavernous armory in Amalfi to include actions in the streets (handshaking of passersby and a soccer match, for instance). Instead of materializing energy into objects, a potential goal of arte povera was to evacuate objects of all energy, reaching a degree-zero of purity. To help put this idea in context, we could cite Hardt and Negri: Every form of labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a relationship or an affect, solving problems or providing information, from sales work to financial services, is fundamentally a performance [like the performance of gender, in Judith Butlers terms]: the product is the act itself [200]. The idea of performance in this context clearly echoes an older, more traditional leftist concept of play, even if Hardt and Negri want to move beyond this in their idea of the multitudes affective production. As a secondary effect, such actions might help overcome sectorial and classist distinctions that stand in the way of revolutionary change. For arte povera this secondary effect is an important shift in emphasis, perhaps a corrective to the earlier stress on play and nomadism. By 1968 there was a growing skepticism in Italian circles about the metaphor of theater or the radical effectiveness of play, along with a sense that to call workers actors might be simply nave. Arte povera emerged in a period before a defined environmental movement, and indeed, Italian activists put class politics, and to a lesser degree, feminist politics ahead of broader issues of global labor or ecological devastation. Students, workers, and intellectuals were engaged in a battle, at times admittedly unfocused, against the state, the padroni, the political parties, corporate culture, an antiquated educational system, the Americanization of Italy, and so on. At the same time that dematerialization was deployed to refer to the subtraction or self-removal of the artist from the system in sympathy with students and workers, many of the artists also used terms such as matter, materials, and materiality in ways that were both positive and necessary. Their engagement with massive objects (enormous tents, gardens, rock piles, fully stocked horse stables) served as a powerful affective gesture. Indeed, in response to an early essay on dematerialization by Lippard and Chandler, the Art & Language group noted that the objects that the critics highlighted were mostly art-objects, perhaps not traditional, but still matter in one of its forms: solid, gas or liquid.13 Even something like the groups Map to Not Indicate, while potentially subversive
The contemporary Italian artist who most directly embodied the mischievous spirit of dtournement was certainly Maurizio Cattelan. In a sense, he expressed qualities of both arte povera and the Transavanguardia, and he did so with a great degree of consciousness and humor. I use the past tense since Cattelan has claimed he is retired (after his 2012 retrospective All at the Guggenheim in New York City). 13 Cited in Lippard 4344; the unpublished essay is dated 23 Mar. 1968. The Art & Language group was composed of British artists Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, and Harold Hurrell.
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and playful, is ultimately a piece of paper. It is matter, even if it occupies a minimal space. Not only, but it is a work of art on a rather traditional support, even if works on paper have sometimes been considered as preparatory to painting, or perhaps relegated to the minor genres. The Art & Language group wrote: The map is just as much a solid-state object (i.e. paper with ink lines upon it) as is any Rubens (stretcher-canvas with paint upon it) and as such comes up for the count of being just as physically-visually perusable as the Rubens . . . [Lippard 43]. And they continue: Matter is a specialized form of energy; radiant energy is the only form in which energy can exist in the absence of matter. Thus when dematerialization takes place, it means, in terms of physical phenomena, the conversion (I use this word guardedly) of a state of matter into that of radiant energy; this follows that energy can never be created or destroyed. But further, if one were to speak of an artform that used radiant energy, then one would be committed to the contradiction of speaking of a formless form, and one can imagine the verbal acrobatics that might take place when the romantic metaphor was put to work on questions concerning formless-forms (non-material) and material forms. [4344] The knotty language of this passage speaks to a vogue in the period for discussions of materiality that tend toward aporia. 2 Some of the paradoxes (and perhaps, the pleasures) of the language of dematerialization reappear if we move from the plastic arts to narrative, which also has to contend in some fashion or other with the material form of the book, printed on paper. A number of contemporary Italian writers thematize the question of dematerialization through writing itself. For instance, Bolognas activist-writers who currently publish under the pseudonym Wu Ming, are known for the material bulk of their prose.14 When they first began in 1994 under the collective name Luther Blissett (a rather mediocre English soccer player whose name was available to all for collective mediatic actions, textual productions, and so on), the group attempted to maintain anonymity. Although they have since been outed, in their writings and activities (recounted in their online newsletters available in various languages) they attempt to think through issues related to dematerialization, environmental activism, the market, and the function of the author. The name Wu Ming evokes an indefinite space, and means without a name or noname in Chinese. The choice of a Chinese name is significant for the group, precisely in ecological terms: It seems to us that the ecological and social future of the planet depends in large part on what will happen in China, overpopulated, extremely polluted, afflicted with a distasteful mix of economic liberalism and political Stalinism [Lipperini n.p.]. Wu Ming have published (and promoted) a substantial number of fictional works on traditional supports (e.g., as novels on paper). In particular, Q was an international success. Associated with the New Italian Epic, the group maintains the importance of the novel as a means of confronting recent Italian history, particularly in the wake of the
14 The collective maintains a website, <http://www.wumingfoundation.com>, with text in Italian, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Friulian dialect. Wu Ming also writes an electronic newsletter, Giap. The members are Roberto Bui (Wu Ming 1); Giovanni Cattabriga (Wu Ming 2); Luca Di Meo (Wu Ming 3he left the collective in May 2008); Federico Guglielmi (Wu Ming 4); and Riccardo Pedrini (Wu Ming 5).

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collapse of the Berlin Wall.15 In contrast to Luther Blissett, Wu Ming is not a name for general use, but a literary phenomenon with a precise set of directives for how they deal with the press, publicity, and public appearances. In this they are much more organized and regimented than the arte povera artists, if a comparison is indeed warranted. The group has recently maintained that they plan to continue to publish books. Their work on paper, magnetic-optical, and any other formatswill be free of copyright, from time to time with certain specifications and limitations that Wu Ming finds necessary [Wu Ming 207]. Nevertheless, they clarify: The free reproduction of a text should not be confused with a renunciation of advances or royalties. We refuse them only the case of editions of our work published in Cuba, our (modest) contribution to rebirth of editorial and cultural activities on that Island which has suffered from the prolonged embargo imposed by the U.S. [Wu Ming 207]. Wu Ming are among the signers of the Greenpeace declaration against the use of paper produced from old forests.16 They are dedicated to pressuring their publishers (including Einaudi) to insure that their works will be printed on 100% recycled (FSC) paper, bleached without the use of chloride. Certainly this is a valid gesture that is already having an effect, however minimal, on the Italian publishing industry. While it might seem that recycling poses a solution to deforestation, it only goes so far, or to evoke the terms used by the Art & Language group, recycling is not a complete conversion of matter into radiant energy.17 Moreover, as the Bologna collective notes, the paper industry isnt only about trees, but also the consumption of vast amounts of water and the release of toxic substances into the water supply. Recycling uses much less water and fewer toxic chemicals than traditional paper production, and there have been recent advances. In its traditional forms, however, the production of paper is entirely parallel to alchemy; better, it is alchemy. That is, between the living tree and the gold of literary production is a long and difficult process of separation, death, purification, and renewal, carried out in noxious chemical baths.18 E-writing, for all that it opens to an intellectual common(s) or to new forms of social life, does not clearly constitute an adequate replacement for paper because the production of computersalready headed for obsolescence the moment they are launchedis ecologically insidious. If cyberspace offers the potential for deterritorialization or is used

See the Italian website Carmilla <http://www.carmillaonline.com/archives/cat_new_italian_ epic.html> for an overview of critical writings on New Italian Epic. 16 The Forest Stewardship Council, the forest certifier backed by Greenpeace, promotes the use of paper made from post-consumer recycled fibers and/or virgin fiber (that is, not derived from primary forests). See Ovan for a discussion of Wu Mings policies and politics in relation to immaterial labor, in particular. 17 In a 1973 interview with Alison Sky, Robert Smithson eloquently addresses the question of entropy and dematerialization: On the whole I would say entropy contradicts the usual notion of a mechanistic world view. In other words its a condition thats irreversible, its a condition thats moving towards a gradual equilibrium [Smithson 301]. The earth is a closed system with a limited amount of energy, as Smithson argues. The attempt to reverse entropy by recycling garbage is ultimately pointless because its effect is so miniscule. Geology is entropy: everything is slowly wearing down. See Stoekl for a brilliant overview of such issues. 18 In particular, the production of the paper used by the U.S. Mint (and others) is subject to a grueling process of purification that parallels the secret stages of the alchemical Great Work. An episode of the program NOVA, Secrets of Making Money, that first aired 22 Oct. 1996, demonstrates (as much as allowed by law) these processes in an extremely vivid manner.
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for activism, nevertheless, it is impossible to fight for the environment without having an impact on the environment [Wu Ming 5, Responsabilit universale par. 9].19 Wu Ming 5 writes: The products offered by current technologies (and let us recall that technology is the offspring of the powerful and precipitous energy fluxes of fossil fuels) are only transformed materials of the world, objects whose origin has absolutely nothing to do with the humanthat is, telluric, metallic objects that derive their essence from the earths womb and are the fruits of a veritable material consumption of the planet; objects that are ephemeral, virtual, that tend toward dematerialization and toward a parody of spirituality. The products of current technology are actually symbolic tools that help to perpetuate myths of money and economics, and to situate the world within the self-affirming ideological horizon that the production of the existingcapitalismrequires for its own survival. [Responsabilit universale par. 10] And Wu Ming 5 elsewhere affirms, The production and consumption of goods are like water and wind that erode the rocks of a mountain until they flatten it [Il buon borghese par. 1]. Again, the analogy leads us toward transformation, but in geological transformation, the materiality of rock does not disappear, it moves to another location, building up. In the natural world, there is no complete dematerialization, only a shifting of materials, erosion, accretion.20 3 As in the natural world, so in the world of money and commodities, it is not possible to dematerialize fully. Reading Sartre reading a short story by Valry Larbaud, Jean-Joseph Goux discusses the paradoxical situation of the protagonist, an American millionaire who claims that he is dematerializing his wealth in order to achieve a kind of spiritual purity. In truth, Barnabooth, Larbauds millionaire, does not get rid of all wealth, he merely rids himself of property, but a London bank periodically wires him funds as he travels the world with a small suitcase. Sartre comments: The gesture is inspired by that of Mnalque or of Michel in [Gides] LImmoraliste. Gidian. That word dematerialize made me dream. For when you come down to it, its really a question of detaching oneself from goods, as the concrete aspect of wealth, and of keeping only its abstract aspect: money. Here, moreover, in the guise of bundles of shares and cheques. In short, thats the advice given by Gide
For a pointed discussion of some paradoxes of cyberspace, see the essays in Berardi (Bifo). See Biolchini for a fascinating connection between the issues I am addressing here and alchemy. Computers contain small amounts of gold (about 16 grams per ton) and silver, and a research group in Sardinia has found a way to extract the gold without using carcinogens. So the recycling effort may lead directly to the production of gold (to be exchanged for other commodities): alchemy stripped of its usual (abusive) analogies. I am grateful to Paolo Matteucci for bringing this article to my attention. 20 The artist who is most interesting in this regard is Robert Smithson, a contemporary of arte povera. In his writing and interviews he tends to take the position that decay and waste, as inevitable as they are, also elicit a kind of pleasure. He rejects the position of those ecologists who despise waste as simplistic and unrealistic. Instead he embraces a model of geologic entropy that he worked through in his Land Art projects intended to reclaim former strip mines. His early death (a plane crash while surveying sites in Texas) curtailed what might have been his most interesting work.
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and followed by Barnabooth: to swap real possession for symbolic possession, to swap property-wealth for sign-wealth. Its no accident that Gide preaches disponibilit. Basically, the Gidian homme disponible is the one whose capital isnt tied up. And what I saw clearly was that Gides moral code is one of those myths that marks the transition from big bourgeois propertyconcrete ownership of the house, fields, and the land; private luxuryto the abstract property of capitalism. [War Diaries 141] Sartre here is commenting on the economic reality that lies behind a moralistic facade, that is, the facade of the man who travels the world in search of God (but with a steady flow of cash available to satisfy his needs). As Goux points out, Sartre had to realize that disponibilit [availability] refers not only to a certain openness to experiences, but is also a banking term for the liquidity of funds. His reading of Gide, then, opens itself up to a critique of the ethics of travel, the exotic, and even the novel itself as a literary form. Goux focuses on the particular circumstances of the nineteenth century, when wealth was considered res, and so value was thus not distinguishable from a given particular tangible, heavy, and objective substance in which it was embodied to the point of perfectly coinciding with the substance itself [16]. But in the modern era, value is abstracted, in the most ideal sense, as equities, pure signs, infinite transferability, that is, writing itself [17]. And for Sartre, Gide serves primarily as a great transitional figure between the propertied bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century and the capitalism of the twentieth [141]. In the modern period we have moved from metallic (or bi-metallic) forms of money to a dematerialized formlessness of money. Goux explains: And we all know that after the decline of gold-money and its replacement by bank notes, the next step will be the loss of all convertibility into gold of these signs of value, a step which will be a categorical qualitative rupture inscribed directly in this historic hegemony of banking capital. Thus what Sartre determines to be a process of dematerialization of value and a transition from fortunepossession to fortune-sign would have its decisive monetary realization in the move, after the First World War, to suspend in Europe all convertibility of bank notes into gold [1718]. For Sartre, what emerges from his reading of Larbaud and Gide is the transition from a system of realistic signs, oriented toward the thing (the object, the referent) to an abstract system, based on the growingly autonomous link among signifiers [Goux 19].21 Considering the above, can we legitimately call stripped-down or minimalist prose dematerialized with respect to traditional or grand narratives? Like various musicians (Radiohead, most notably) who allow for free MP3 downloads, Italian writer Vanni Santoni made his Personaggi precari [Precarious Characters] available as both a free download of a PDF file and as a published book. Of course precariousness, a term widely used in Italy and elsewhere to refer to contemporary conditions of laboris obviously linked to dematerialization in a number of ways. The characters of Personaggi precari may work in temporary jobs like call centers or suffer from anxiety about a loss of social entitlements enjoyed by previous generations, but we would have to construct such scenarios for ourselves since they are not given in the novel. Like Luther Blissett, Santonis characters are available to anyone as freelancers or temporary workers, to be used for comedies, short stories, short films, long films, role playing, TV series, traditional and experimental theatrical productions, cartoons, novels, comic strips, radio
From this linguistic rupture, we also move to a break in literary forms or genres that has interesting implications for postmodern novelists like Wu Ming. Realist literature is linked with the circulation of gold, notes Goux. He has written extensively on the significance of gold as standard, as a way of centering the world, to a unique point of view. Instead, with Sartre, we find a new exoticism, de-centered, without any base. The traveler lacks fixed coordinates (and this has a profound impact on language or rcit), as Goux elaborates in this dense and fascinating essay.
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broadcasts and made for television movies [Santoni 1]. The work is structured as a series of first names followed by negligible information, at most about a paragraph, usually in prose but occasionally in the form of dialogue. The entries appear random and cannot be said to build to any conclusion in any traditional sense. For instance, the first entry does not announce a beginning: Marina Marina is seventeen. Her eyes are limpid like the sea of Elba where she grew up. She has never taken on any responsibility and she is unaware of how much her indolence bothers her parents. Or of how much her vagueness torments those unfortunate enough to fall in love with her and her salty sea scent. [2] Similarly, the last entry, Magda So, mama? What do you think of Vilmaro? I think hes strange and horrible. [111] certainly does not amount to closure. Yet the continued prestige of the book form will undoubtedly influence readers to proceed in a linear fashion and to impose some degree of narrative. To the degree that the work resists a progressive reading, it could also be said to undo or dematerialize narrative per se. Not dissimilarly, Sono stata io: Diario 19001999 [It Was Me: Diary 19001999], by Italian artist Daniela Comani, achieves an absoluteness that one might associate with the historical epic. The work includes 365 entriesfrom different years during the twentieth century (with no indication of the exact year). Each entry follows the same format, that is, it includes a personal pronoun involved in an event in one sentence. Yet in contrast with the epic materiality of Wu Ming, the entries consist of prose stripped down to its bare bones. For example: January 1. Today in Berlin I founded the German Communist Party or July 21. I am the first person to set foot on the moon; December 31. During a New Years Eve celebration I flee Cuba. So ends my regime. And so on. Sono stata io positions itself in relation to historical epic without consideration for any sort of plentitude of identity (the author is a women who acts in the work as a flexible subject). Both history and writing gesture toward dematerialization and at the same time toward its absolute impossibility. The work risks disappearing in its very smallness. 4 Today the word dematerialization has come to achieve a potentially powerful place in the environmental sciences and in the global monetary system.22 As a first impression, the term might seem to designate anti-consumerism or anti-globalism (inasmuch as the refusal to consume might constitute a personal political stance against global labor practices, for instance). Yet dematerialization is just as likely to be heard in corporate boardrooms, or even in the arena of the stock market to mean the replacement of a material object with electronic signals: electronic money (e-money or cybercash) is a prime example. Telecommuting, or more radically, the creation of global service centers
I am grateful to Cameron Tonkinwise who let me know about the European sustainability site SusProNet <http://www.suspronet.org>. Also see, for instance, <http://www.valcucine.it>, the site of the ecologically friendly Italian kitchen manufacturer, Valcucine, that contributes directly to reforestation efforts. Both of these sites can be studied as examples of what we might call hybrid dematerialization.
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in places like India, is another. Dematerialization means flexibility, a streamlining of the decision-making process . . . information and communication technologies are pervasive; the product becomes iconic; productive processes become destructured [Morelli 11]. Generally, the impetus for dematerialization does not lie in regulatory enforcement, but in market-driven competition. Viewed in this sense, dematerialization does not figure as part of a contrarian retreat from hyper-production or a return to nature, but rather, it stands as an entirely predictable part of the capitalist process itself, a flexible strategy of sustainability some say contributes to an exploitative geopolitics and a breakdown in old-fashioned forms of human interactivity, identity, and community.23 Moreover, the danger is that dematerialization in this sense might reduce waste (and produce a sense of collective self-satisfaction) but not nearly enough to have any counter-effect to increased materialization (not to mention increased greenhouse gas emissions): dematerialization as a partial or temporary salve leading to complacency. Hybrid cars, for instance, may end up leaving a greater environmental footprint than the more traditional alternatives. In a sense, then, the movement toward dematerialization represents a form of false consciousness that ultimately threatens to derail or slow the very process that it sets in motion. The (no-longer-so-) new economy, based on immaterial production, would seem to call for a radical rethinking of value and wealth. In Multitude, Hardt and Negri argue for a novel form of accounting, something akin to the way Einsteins theory of relativity transformed our understanding of the regular, metrical spaces of Euclidean geometry [149]. As they note, Marx may be said to have presciently understood such a rethinking when he wrote that wealth is not reducible to money or property. However, this does not mean to obtain real wealth one must get rid of objects. (The arte povera participants and others on the left who enjoyed the new consumer items made available during the economic boom in Italy may be heard to breathe a collective, retroactive sigh of relief.) The real wealth, which is an end in itself, resides in the common; it is the sum of the pleasures, desires, capacities, and needs we all share. The common wealth is the real and proper object of production [149]. Hardt and Negris optimism implies that such production will necessarily have to take place alongside of and intertwined with the irrepressible developments of the new money-form-to-be: e-money or cybercash.24 Yet e-money also expresses a great optimism about its socially transformative potential: Circulating on computer networks that span the planet, cybercash transcends physical space and national boundaries. As such it will inevitably become a major force in fostering globalization, allowing individuals to engage in exchange, production and credit relations with actors across the globe. Flowing with the speed of light by means of the latest communication technologies (for example fiber optics or broadband), cybercash also compresses real time to an instance of seconds and thus greatly accelerates the pace at which things get done in the pursuit of economic activity. [Guttmann 15] A return to alchemy underscores the aporia of dematerialization. Alchemy remains a stubbornly common metaphor to describe the transformations of our monetary interregnum. In a book on the coming e-money we learn: A modern alchemy succeeds where the old failed. The ancients of the Middle Ages [sic] were never able to change lead into gold, but the medium of electronics turns magnetized particles (bits) into money-like value. Money seems for a time to be conjured out of nothingness, to be returned to nothingness
See Brognara, for instance. The two terms are often used interchangeably, but whereas e-money refers, more broadly, to all electronic forms of exchange, cybercash specifically makes use of the internet as a trading vehicle, hence it can be considered the more radical or futuristic form of the two.
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either quickly or at an indeterminate moment [Solomon 85]. Let me attempt to gloss this rather complex statement. The new money form will finally achieve the Great Work of alchemical transformation by turning (base) bits of digital code into (noble) gold.25 Without the messy and morbid processes that characterize ancient Medieval alchemy, e-money will someday succeed in a perfect dematerialization. It is difficult to imagine a statement that is in greater need of demystification. The new economists would have us believe that the coming money form will free us from the heavy burden of the materiality of older money forms. In order to counteract the mystifying language of the new money, we are compelled to dematerialize, not in any vulgar sense of doing away with things, inhabiting zero-carbon utopias, or posing as nomads, but in expropriating the terms of dematerialization from the market-driven strategists, and making it part of the production of a common wealth. So dematerialization is a movement taking place within a horizon of potentiality rather than an arrival at some endpoint. Faremo la nostra parte, say brainworkers, freeware supporters, autonomists, Wu Ming.26 Well do our part. Its a start. Better than nothing. Just as e-money is still a fantasy that cannot yet escape its foundation or referent in paper, so narrative, as productive activity, even if carried out collectively and presented in cyberspace, cannot yet do without its referent in the book (the novel). We face an infinite deferral. Indeed, one might perform dematerialization without actually engaging with matter at all. As a gesture, dematerialization may turn out to be potential, in the sense that Giorgio Agamben develops this term: potential dematerialization is precisely not actual: It is a potentiality that is not simply the potential to do this or that thing but potential to not-do, potential not to pass into actuality [17980]. Agambens extremely compelling epigraphic statement leaves us speechless, as it were, standing in our tracks, or better, our footprints, in the environment. WORKS CITED Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print. Berardi, Franco, ed. Cibernauti: Tecnologia, communicazione, democrazia. Rome: Castelvecchi, 1994. Print. Biolchini, Vito. Chi smonta un computer trova un tesoro. La Repubblica.it. La Repubblica, 7 Apr. 2005. Web. 31 Jan. 2012. Bonami, Francesco. Now We Begin. Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 19621972. Ed. Richard Flood and Francis Morris. London and Minneapolis: Tate Modern and Walker Art Center, 2000. 10927. Print. Brognara, Roberto. Il commercio elettronico: Il consumo immateriale. Sociologia del lavoro 99.3 (2005): 16776. Print. Calvesi, Maurizio. La melanconia di Albrecht Drer. Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Print. Celant, Germano. Art Povera. New York: Praeger, 1969. Print. Trans. of Arte Povera. Milan: Mazzotta, 1969.
Gold is in quotation marks, since, just as the alchemical writings of the past rarely lingered on actual gold as a material substance as the end product of the Great Work, so in the projected alchemy of the future, gold stands in for something of great value, whereas real gold has been relegated to the vaults, a conservative hedge or stalwart, albeit a very voluble one. 26 Wu Ming reproduce excerpts of an open letter to Italian publishers, written by a group of subscribers to the groups newsletter and signed by the collective iQuindici. The letter clarifies the nature of copyleft and the rights of readers. The letter affirms that copyleft will not mean the end of printed books nor of financial gain for publishers. In particular, copyleft would allow a greater diffusion of Italian texts outside of the major cities of Italy, and in the world, stimulating an interest that might lead to more opportunities for the industry as a whole.
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. Arte Povera/Art Povera. Trans. Paul Blanchard. Milan: Electa, 1985. Print. Celant, Germano, et al., eds. Identit italienne: Lart en Italie depuis 1959. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1981. Print. Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. Arte Povera. London: Phaidon, 1999. Print. Comani, Daniela. Sono stata io: Diario 19001999. Mantova: Corraini, 2007. Print. Trans. of Ich Wars: Tagebuch 19001999. Frankfurt am Mein: Revolver, 2005. de Duve, Thierry. Joseph Beuys, or The Last of the Proletarians. October 45 (1988): 4762. Print. Goux, Jean-Joseph. Banking on Signs. Trans. Thomas DiPiero. Diacritics 18.2 (1988): 1525. Print. Guttmann, Robert. Cybercash: The Coming Era of Electronic Money. London: Palgrave, 2003. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print. iQuindici. Lettera aperta a tutti gli editori italiani. iQuindici.org. Web. 15 Feb. 2012. Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. 1973. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Print. Lippard, Lucy, and John Chandler. The Dematerialization of Art. Art International 12.2 (1968). 3136. Print. Lipperini, Loredana. Il suicidio di Luther Blissett. la Repubblica.it. La Repubblica, 7 Mar. 2000. Web. 19 Mar. 2012. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. Ed. Frederick Engels. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: Dover, 2011. Print. Morelli, Ugo. Consistenze immateriali: Dematerializzazione del lavoro: Il caso Banca BSI Italia SpA. Milan: Guerini, 2002. Print. Ovan, Sabrina. Qs General Intellect. Cultural Studies Review 11.2 (2005): 6976. Print. Pinkus, Karen. Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Print. . The Risks of Sustainability. Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative: Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk. Ed. Paul Crosthwaite. London: Routledge, 2011. 6278. Print. Prvost, Jean-Marc. Celant, pape de lArte povera. Beaux Arts Magazine 129 (1994): 10. Print. Santoni, Vanni. Personaggi precari. N.p.: Unwired Media RGB, 2007. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War 193940. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London: Verso, 1984. Print. Secrets of Making Money. NOVA. PBS. WGBH, Boston, 22 Oct. 1996. Television. Smithson, Robert. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Print. Solomon, Elinor Harris. Virtual Money: Understanding the Power and Risk of Moneys High-Speed Journey into Electronic Space. New York: Oxford, 1997. Print. Stoekl, Allan. Batailles Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Print. Vetrocq, Marcia. E. Utopias, Nomads, Critics. From Arte Povera to the Transavanguardia. Arts Magazine 63.8 (1989): 4954. Print. Wu Ming. Giap! Tre anni di narrazioni e movimenti. Ed. Tommaso De Lorenzis. Turin: Einaudi, 2003. Print. Wu Ming 5. Il buon borghese USA e deteriora. Giap 13.4a (13 Nov. 2003). Web. 9 Feb. 2012. . Responsabilit universale. Giap 8.4a (15 July 2003). Web. 9 Feb. 2012.

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