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nothing happening here at transmediale 2021 for refusal: How do we refuse the institutions we work within and depend on? Our ongoing project “Nothing Is Possible” began when lab members refused to build new sensory technologies and instead embraced the promise of nothing. Seeking collaborators outside Duke, we paid freelancers at Research Triangle Park, a nearby special economic zone, to do nothing. “Nothing” emerged as a material, bureaucratic dispositive which carves out spaces of refusal within the ceaselessly productive structures of the university and technocapitalism (Tuck & Yang). Refusing “steals” from the institution, expends its social and economic capital with no return on investment, making capital flow from enclosure to the surround. We propose refusal as a way of studying together. Understanding the impossibility of studying without generating debt, we investigate how refusal transforms the vertical accumulation of the university into what Harney and Moten call "bad," indissoluble debt that can hold community together.
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notes to transmediale refusers
November 30th, 2020
Subject line: Credit, Poisonous Gifts, and Bad Debt
We borrow an anecdote from Debt: The First 5,000 Years that David Graeber borrowed from Margaret
Atwood, who also wrote a book about debt. (Borrowings all the way down). There was a nature writer
named Ernest Thompson Seton. On his twenty-first birthday, his father presented him with a bill. It
was for every expense incurred in his rearing all the way back to what the doctor charged for
delivering him. Odd behavior, but even odder, Ernest paid it. Graeber comments:
"Such behavior seems monstrous, inhuman. Certainly [it did to] Seton: he paid the bill, but never
spoke to his father again afterward. And in a way, this is precisely why the presentation of such a
bill seems so outrageous. Squaring accounts means that the two parties have the ability to walk away
from each other. By presenting it, his father suggested he'd just as soon have nothing further to do
with him." (92)
Debt, as Graeber points out, is a basis for ongoing sociality. He borrows an account from a fellow
anthropologist, Laura Bohannan, who observed a Tiv community in rural Nigeria. When she arrived,
neighbors started turning up with all sorts of little gifts—peanuts, tomatoes, eggs, etc.—so she
wrote down what had been given her, unsure what she might owe. Eventually two women explained to her
she had to bring back something of approximately the same value. Even money would do, as long as
"one did not bring the exact cost of the eggs. It had to be either a bit more or a bit less. To
bring back nothing at all would be to cast oneself as an exploiter or a parasite. To bring back an
exact equivalent would be to suggest that one no longer wishes to have anything to do with a
neighbor." (105)
Just as with Seton and his father, settling the debt exactly would be a way of dissolving the
relationship. Account closed. Rather, the ongoing debts turn out to be a basis for ongoing
sociality, even a reason to visit. Graeber writes:
"Tiv women, [Bohannan] learned, might spend a good part of the day walking for miles to distant
homesteads to return a handful of okra or a tiny bit of change—'in an endless circle of gifts to
which no one ever handed over the precise value of the object last received'—and in doing so, they
were continually creating their society. There was certainly a trace of communism here—neighbors on
good terms could also be trusted to help each other out in emergencies—but unlike communistic
relations, which are assumed to be permanent, this sort of neighborliness had to be constantly
created and maintained, because any link can be broken off at any time" (105).
The exchange relationship is an impersonal one in the sense that the identity of the other person
ought not matter and that by concluding the exchange—squaring accounts, settling the debt—the
parties license each other to walk away. So, if you find yourself in exchange relationships you want
to maintain, you must never precisely settle your debts. But not all relationships are exchange
relationships.
To return to the story about Seton, Graeber further wonders:
"In other words, while most of us can imagine what we owe to our parents as a kind of debt, few of
us can imagine being able to actually pay it—or even that such a debt ever should be paid. Yet if it
can't be paid, in what sense is it a 'debt' at all? And if it is not a debt, what is it?” (92).
Maybe it's a gift. The word exists in English as well as in German and has the same etymology: the
given, die Gabe. Except that in German, “gift” turned to mean “poison.” We should be wary of the
obedience induced by believing we have been given a gift, by the act of generosity that declares
itself not to incur any debt. The gift is never the end of the story, as the Tiv women well know. We
may not be able to refuse gifts, but we certainly can see them for what they are: always slightly
poisonous.
If transactions incur debts—even in the apparent generosity of gifts freely given—must we always be
keeping track, putting the ledgers in orders, squaring accounts? Should we pay the bill our father
presents us?
There's a useful term of art from accounting, "bad debt." Bad debt is not only debt unlikely to be
paid, it is debt the creditor is unwilling to expend further effort trying to recover. It is not
forgiven, but it will never be paid.
In "Debt and Study"—the key text we're suggesting to the groups in accordance with our agreement
with transmediale (it's short, we don't want to debit too much of your time)—Fred Moten and Stefano
Harney extol bad debt. They agree with Graeber's point, that debt underpins sociality, and contrast
debt with credit. Credit, they say, "is a means of privatization and debt a means of socialization.”
Bad debt, they say, "is senseless, which is to say it cannot be perceived by the senses of capital.”
Yet Moten and Harney do not imagine bad debt as a structure that exists purely outside or against
capital. Their position is more ambiguous, both inside and out. It is a position, we feel, that
resembles (all) our own vis-a-vis transmediale (which we have begun referring to, internally, as ™).
They write:
“Think of autonomia, its debt at a distance to the black radical tradition. In autonomia, in the
militancy of post-workerism, there is no outside, refusal takes place inside and makes its break,
its flight, its exodus from the inside.”
When we first met on November 21, we asked all of you “How do we refuse the institutions we work
within and depend on?” This is the question we repeat to frame our sharing of Moten and Harney’s
essay. We want to enact a refusal which both “takes place inside” and makes its break “from the
inside.” We are all in this together. Or we should say, we are each in this together. Because we
also want to acknowledge our differentiated positions: first within our group, and then across all
nine groups, and finally amongst the organizers. We want to problematize the too-easy use of the
word “we.” We ask you to be suspicious of those who say “we”—including us!
This contradiction between togetherness and individuality is something we will explore further in
subsequent provocations, but for now, let us make our own position clear: we are doing this work
first for each other, the group Nothing Is Happening Here. Second, for the other eight research
groups. And last, in a way we are still determining, for ™. As we also said on that first day,
quoting Moten and Harney, “We’re telling all of you, but we’re not telling anyone else.”
Ever in your debt,
Nothing Happening Here