Potlatch:
“It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other
words, that each thing seen is the parody of another,
or is the same thing in a deceptive form.”
There are only two things in my life that continuously give to me without any invitation: The Sun and my home television screen. The difference between the two, however, is that my TV always carries with it an ‘expectation of return’. This notion fuels much of my cultural farming practice: video appropriation and (C)ritical remix. I must return in kind what I have collected in kind. And the more I share the better my universe, for I cannot benefit from what cannot be used, expended or returned.
According to Georges Bataille’s theory of consumption, the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy -- the surpluses we hoard -- which must be destined for expenditure. Expenditures of abundance happens two ways. Excesses must be spent luxuriously as gifts, knowingly without return or gain; for instance, in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, or in sumptuous events, monuments and spectacles. If not formally expended, however, the excess is then obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring of crises. All excesses thus must be laid waste either way: give-away or destroy...as a form of social regeneration.
Bataille, himself an excommunicated surrealist, links the idea of an ever-giving Sun to the anthropological phenomenon of the potlatch-festival of the Kwakiutl indians of the Northern Pacific coast of North America. Marcel Mauss, too, refers to this phenomenon in his influential essay The Gift (1923), in which potlatch is translated as ‘a gift,’ typically signified through festivals of communal gatherings, where the host can show his generosity by freely dispersing his excesses, even up to the point of total bankruptcy, in a public performance displayed for gaining acceptance and establishing social standing. (1 2 3 4 5)
If left unexpended, however, excesses lead to war, crisis and catastrophe much more by force and without control. Our current Western model of overproduction bears this kind of danger. And so does my TV; it just gives and gives and gives to me. Television’s streaming excesses of graven-content fill my consciousness to capacity. I must never greedily or unthinkingly accept television’s gifts without also refunctioning and returning its excess. I must release whatever of it I can back into its media-ether, at the very least. This is the sacrifice of abundance... a true symbolic exchange.
Every project found throughout Cultural Farming elicits this strategy of repayment. I collect as much as I want, therefore I must also give back for free as much as I can, with interest. I re-use this unending material to tell my version of events to the ‘tribe’. And then I give it all away for free. This expenditure repayment establishes my social standing. My honest collection and re-dispersals, regardless how meager, merit an open hearing within the community.
“Georges Bataille argues that humans can reciprocate the
original gift of solar energy if they enter into a potlatch with the
sun from which they can emerge only as losers. He insists that
the sun provides a surplus of energy that no human civilization
can accept, absorb, or utilize in its entirety. Bataille interprets
unchecked economic expansion as an attempt to absorb and
thus to diminish the pressure of this energy surplus.”
Audio & Visual -- I must return in kind what I have collected in kind. Excess, Body, Media, Death, Trump, Expenditure, Waste. Television to television, dust to dust. This video project is no TV mash-up comedy. This is surreal ‘science for the people’. For I am sovereign, as is this research.
An American
resident of Canada, experimenting with new forms of critical media ethnography in Cultural Farming.
Click to view main project & 400 videos
Preface Premise Project Potlatch Pornography Politics Postscript Peroration