In the name of the strongest ideology of the modern era, that of "development," claimed to guarantee equality and justice, our contemporary economies strive to produce wealth and desire, powerful, "magical" machines for the production of goods and services, promising wealth distribution, an increase in living standards, and well-being.
The shining yet tragic hero of this story, the neoliberal homo oeconomicus, has transformed from a collaborator and participant in a process of circulation and exchange, albeit with different types of stakes, into a deft and highly specialized productive machine, into "human capital." The modern economic man is the producer and consumer of his own satisfaction, an entrepreneur of his own self, as Michel Foucault first astutely observed, excavating the birth of biopolitics.
If such a new condition may seem emancipatory, its undeniable consequence is a new form of angst: today we live at the edge of an existential anxiety regarding the possibility of losing both our ability to produce and the capacity of our economy to produce abundance, surplus, the infamous accursed stock that Georges Bataille speaks of in his eponymous book.
This anxiety, this fear, and the desperate search for a solution are, in themselves, conditions of unfreedom, confusing the very demand for freedom with obligations related to anything other than the pursuit of freedom.
In the schizoid and paradoxical reality we experience here today, the homo oeconomicus, whose culture and very existence was and is driven by the consumption of his accursed stock, has come to refuse both to sacrifice this stock at the altar of a development that excludes him and to waste it.
The accursed stock of a society in anxiety lies within its bowels, buried and unseen like an exquisite corpse. A corpse among corpses.
– Vanessa Theodoropoulou
This publication was released on the occasion of Dimitris Halatsis's solo exhibition Accursed Stock, curated by Vanessa Theodoropoulou, from September 30 to October 18, 2015, at the arcade of Praxitelous Street 33, in Athens.
Text by: Nikos Daskalothanasis, Vanessa Theodoropoulou, Katerina Nasioka, Christos Moutouris, Evgenia Tzirtzilaki, Dimitris Halatsis.
