KATYA SANDER

Introduction for Printed Project #12 

In the light of the recent crash in the global financial system, this issue of Printed Project is framed by the notion of ‘circulation’ – but not only in the sense of the circulation of goods, bodies, knowledge, ideas, images and money, i.e. the movement of certain forms; but also and maybe more so, the idea of circulation as form in itself.

A central figure in the western idea of modernity is the notion of movement – questions of transportation, flow, directions, velocity, and circulation. And from modernist urban planning and its visual analysis of spaces, functions and ways of optimizing the movements between them; we are familiar with particular kinds of iconic diagrams, charts, blueprints and maps, which have come to both represent and embody modernist ideals.

Similarly, critics have pointed out that the charts, graphs and statistics, which constitute the visual language of the market, rather than merely depicting or describing, they constitute it: they are that which generates certain readings, interpretations and reactions, which in turn can be seen mapped in these images themselves. But unlike the graphic abstractions of modernist urban planning, which essentially related to actual physical spaces, real objects and bodies; the graphics we look at when we want to understand the market are abstractions to a different degree. They refer less to real objects, bodies, ideas and spaces, but rather to the circulation of these factors – supposedly depicting ‘movements’ in the market and their consequences for investments, speculations, risks, and possible accumulation of value. 

By understanding the notion of ‘circulation’ as central to the idea of the market, I am taking the cue from a number of contemporary sociologists and anthropologists, who have sought to understand and describe the market as a form of circulation central to the western imaginary of modernity. Along with the market, the notions of the public sphere and the idea of the nation state are also understood as seminal forms of circulation for western modernity, and the ways in which it is understood and imagined.

Considering the notions of the market, the public sphere and the nation in the light of circulation, forces us to arrive at a new understanding of circulation itself. As Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, two anthropologists dealing especially with global financial systems, suggest “It is no longer viable to think of circulation simply as movement (…) from one place to another” (1) Instead, Lee and LiPuma, call circulation a “cultural process (…) with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and their interpretive communities built around them”.

Interpretive communities are the social groups and practices that set the codes, customs, contracts –and thereby also institutions and boundaries – for understanding and using certain forms of circulation. They are groups implementing and performing the practices of recognition, interpretation and use that are necessary for the different forms of circulation to exist. As such, forms of circulation can be understood as self-referential or performative: The acts of buying and selling can be understood as performative practices, that constitute the idea of the market – parallel to the way in which for example reading and public discussion are constitutive to the ideas of a public sphere.

As such, performativity is central to any system of circulation and exchange, in that “performatives go beyond reference and description (…), and seem to create the very speech act they refer to.” (2) They allow for language to objectify it’s own praxis just like forms of circulation give shape and meaning to the forms they circulate; producing a framework for visibility, interpretation and evaluation of the objects, texts or ideas they not only transport, but also make recognizable as such.

“Although a culture of circulation can be identified by the objects circulating through it, it is not reducible to them. More is at stake, or, in circulation”. (3) I am interested in how we can describe, make visible and discuss this more – these different forms and ways of circulation – and not only that which is circulating in them. What are the conditions imposed on different forms in order for them to travel and circulate across social space?

To try to look at circulation itself as form – not just the objects it moves – implies that rather than attempt to condense meaning from forms in flow, [it is exactly about giving up the idea of “meaning” as something final] to try to follow these forms in all their transformations, mutations and transfigurations. In other words, trying to grasp their journey, observing the ways different forms in circulation behave or change as they move, and / or discussing the conditions and behaviours of the interpretive communities.

The artists, thinkers and researchers I have invited for this issue of Printed Project have been asked to contribute with notes, images, collages, stories or anecdotes or other kinds of material they felt could reflect upon these various questions of circulation. As such, this issue of Printed Project is imagined as a kind of sourcebook or collage of material of very different formats and characters.

Katya Sander

Notes

1. Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the globalization of Risk, Duke University Press, 2004.

2. Ibid.

3. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elisabeth A. Povinelli: Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition. Public Culture 15(3): 385-397. Duke University Press, 2003.