NO LONGER NORMAL

CRITICAL EXCHANGES IN THE LANDSCAPE OF ART

Ted Purves and Shane Aslan Selzer

Dinner

On any given day, we navigate constantly through shifting landscapes of

exchange. Sometimes we are aware of our passage, but more often than not our
navigation occurs without a great deal of thought. For many of us, this daily
navigation of complex territories of exchange is simply normal and unremark-
able—something we are socialized to understand almost intuitively.
We pay our rent from our checking account. We pay for clothes online
using funds we borrow through a credit card. We borrow a book from the library
for a few weeks and return it when we have finished reading it. We read an
article on the Internet and send it to a friend by pressing a button that says
“share.” We sit and share an orange on a bench in a city park. While it is
somewhat obvious to say that these exchanges are all quite different from one
another, it is perhaps less obvious to say that the differences between them
are best understood not by looking at what in particular was exchanged, but
by considering the systems of exchange that governed each of them.
Try to imagine it this way.
You have a child, and one afternoon you discover that you are in need
of groceries to prepare the dinner that you had planned for the two of you to
eat that night. Time is short, so you ask your neighbor to drop you off at the
grocery store on her way to work. At the grocery store, you select the food
you need for the evening and pay the cashier. When you leave the store, you
notice that it has started raining, so you decide to wait for the city bus to
take you home, spending a dollar for the fare, rather than walk in the rain.
When you get home, you and your child prepare dinner. You sit at the table.
The meal is eaten together.
In this simple story, the main character has made a series of exchanges, but
what is significant about them is that the specifics of each of those exchanges
were governed by a rotating array of economic systems. What compels your

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neighbor to say yes when you ask for a ride to the grocery store? Why would
you spend time and effort to prepare a meal and then give half of it away to a
child, who did nothing to help produce it? Such questions reveal the workings
of what is arguably the first, and oldest, economic system that we participate
in, which is termed a traditional (or social) economy. This is a system governed,
first and foremost, by participants who live in ongoing association with one
another, originally in a village or a tribe, now, more commonly, in a family,
or circle of friends, or a neighborhood. Such institutions as barter, favors, and
filial obligations govern the primary mechanisms of exchange in a traditional
economy. In our story above, this system of exchange is what sanctioned (and
structured) the request of a ride from the neighbor, and it is the framework
upon which the protagonist, as a parent, takes the responsibility to provide
food for his or her child.
Why would a city or community have a bus, which drives along the street
whether anyone is riding it or not? Why can someone ride it for miles and
others for a few blocks, while both pay the same fare? These questions reveal
a second system, which is termed a redistributive (or command) economy. In
this system, resources, goods, and services are taken or levied from those who
produce them by a state or governing entity, which then redistributes them
to various areas of the society in accordance with goals and policies. In our
story, it this redistributive economy that provided a city bus service (likely built
with the proceeds from taxes) and set the price level for the one-dollar fare.
Why is a grocery store (which, for example, neither raises vegetables
nor produces its own milk) able to concentrate so many varied foods into a
single location? What determines the price that is paid for these varied goods,
and why might these prices shift as products go on or off sale. A shop, or a
market, exemplifies the system of the capital economy, where resources, goods,
and services are exchanged in relation to abstract systems of exchange, such
as money or currency. In capital economies both the resources and the cur-
rency can shift in value in relation to each other, due to either speculation
and/or supply and demand. This “fluidity” of capital economies is what creates
the possibility for investment, loaning, and wagering, as the shifting prices of
the market allow for profits to be made simply by guessing which way values
might shift. Again, we can refer to our story above, where the lone capital
transaction was the purchase of food at the grocery store. Its price was set in
relation to both the cost of the food for the market as well as the “overhead”
costs associated with running the store (employee salaries, utility costs, etc.),
and it also contained a certain level of profit added in, which is taken by the
owner of the market.
It is generally agreed that the above systems are the three primary eco-
nomic systems (or systems of exchange) that have evolved over the course of
human history. As seen in our examples, an economic system is a method for
producing, distributing, and consuming goods and services. No country (or

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city, or state) is governed by just one; most are controlled by a mixture of the
three. It is important to note that economic systems not only encompass the
mechanisms of exchange (e.g., currency or barter goods), but also incorporate
the social institutions that govern and manage the production, distribution, and
consumption of goods and services. This can mean tangible institutions such
as a market, a bank, or the Federal Reserve, as well as intangible institutions
such as marriages, community services, or a birthday party.
While the story details a series of fairly straightforward exchanges, it is
worth noting that the shifts between economic systems means that even this
simple set of encounters contains complexities of great interest as we move
forward. The food, which is bought with currency, is later shared with another
without any subsequent repayment. The trip from the store is the same distance
either way, but it is “paid for” quite differently. Each of these systems contains
its own rules, and the terms of exchange in one do not really transfer to any of
the others. You would not usually consider charging your child money for the
meal you prepared, any more than you would tell the bus driver that instead
of paying the fare that you will give her a ride tomorrow.

Basketfill

These systems of exchange are the ground upon which the artists’ projects
assembled and investigated in this book are constructed. It is the landscape
that they occur within, as well as what they are attempting to make meaning
of and from.
One such landscape can be found in the town of Nsukka, in southeast
Nigeria. Once a small town, Nsukka has grown to become a cultural zone of
over a million people, and the pressures of a rapidly shifting economy have
resulted in a massive influx of internal migration as the population has moved
from rural villages to urban areas in search of work and opportunity. It is there
in this bustling town, the home to the University of Nigeria, that Amuche
Ngwu-Nnabueze initiated the Sculpted Basket Project (SBP). In the most
straightforward sense, SBP is an ongoing project that takes the form of work-
shops and community organizing while producing woven objects for exhibition,
use, and exchange. Ngwu-Nnabueze wanted to address the potential overlap
between the disappearance of traditional basket weaving and a major issue facing
her community: waste removal. The growth of population in this area has far
outpaced the local government’s ability to provide basic infrastructure, which
has resulted in a proliferation of open waste dumps full of unsorted throwaway
materials, some degradable and some not.
Following an intensive series of meetings, first with the local commu-
nity and subsequently with such institutional forces as the university and the
municipal administrators, Ngwu-Nnabueze started holding workshops to teach
traditional methods of basket weaving using reclaimed waste material, which

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would simultaneously raise awareness about environmental waste problems. The

result is an ongoing social project that fuses waste separation, composting, and
basket weaving, one that presents baskets as traditional, sustainable, functional
replacements for plastic bags, plastic seats, and other items generally made from
imported or unsustainable materials. It also proposes the revival of a somewhat
dormant tradition of producing locally woven baskets as transporting vehicles,
made from repurposed fabrics, plastics, wood, and metal found in the local dumps.
Ngwu-Nnabueze conceptualized the project to interpenetrate a variety
of social groups as well as various local institutions. She first considered who
the project might impact, and how those impacted might become personally
involved in the project. This was largely determined by the population attend-
ing the initial workshops, and extended to the many roundtable meetings SBP
held to pull in schools, churches, civil authorities, and public service agents.
She then considered the various public institutions that the project would
both intersect with and draw upon: sanitation systems, traditional methods of
basket weaving, workshops, radio stations, and church bulletins. These forms
were deliberately chosen to reflect and respond to the needs of those who
were becoming personally involved in the project through regular attendance
at the workshops. Out of these gatherings a campaign was launched to begin
the sorting, recycling, and composting of waste.
SBP can broken down into a number of separate parts: a civic organiza-
tion, a lobbying group of concerned citizens, as well as a craft project producing
woven baskets using traditional techniques. But separating these elements of
the project undermines its conceptual premise and devalues the leveraging of
the various local systems of exchange that the project navigated between as
it went from inception to action. By fusing the removal (or nonremoval) of
waste, generally considered to be a part of a functioning redistributive economy,
with a community-based workshop (part of a traditional/social economy), in
the service of producing baskets (which are both reusable and saleable, and
thus have an impact on the local market economy), the project attempts to
harness together a series of disparate interests to create a tangible physical and
social result. The fact that the project is also created as an art project adds an
extra dimension, as the Sculpted Basket Project also has the potential to be
considered by a nonlocal audience, through critical institutions of the art world
such as exhibitions and publications (including this one). In this framework,
the project also has the potential to be seen in a larger, critical discourse, one
where its varied exchanges and the objects it produced also function symbolically.

#criticalexchanges

This pulls into focus one of the key lenses of this book: critical exchanges. What
are critical exchanges and what criteria might we put forward for understand-
ing how they operate? Critical exchanges occur within works in which the

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participants (audience/collaborators/institutions) are made consciously aware

of the transfers that occur within the work. They make visible the conditions
and stakes that are required for the production of the work, and, at times, the
participants may have a voice within the process and that voice could affect
the ultimate outcome of the project. This awareness of the transfer(s) of power,
of material, of resources, or knowledge, forms a core aspect of both the work
itself and its attendant meanings. Rather than emphasizing process or produc-
tion as the outcome, the exchange itself becomes the most important outcome
identified through the project.
In 2002, Santiago Sierra initiated a new work entitled Person Saying A
Phrase, in Birmingham, England. For this work, he hired a person begging for
money on a busy shopping street to be filmed stating the following phrase:
“My participation in this project could generate $72,000 profit. I am paid £5”
One point of this project is possibly to expose the myth that most participatory
artworks are inherently generous, by showing ways that they are potentially
self-serving and often profoundly unequal in terms of who benefits from their
production. But there is a more pressing issue that is poetically brought to the
surface by this work, namely, the terms or social contract engaged to produce
works that are dependent on social interaction. When Sierra makes these terms
transparent, he also puts them at the center of the work itself, asking questions
about how value is determined during an exchange.
By asking his hired participant to recite the script about payment, Sierra
ensures that the participant is also fully aware of the discrepancy in how his
“work” is compensated, versus how Sierra’s “work” may be later rewarded. Sierra
does nothing to rectify this problem, and no solution is proposed. But the issue
is made public, and that becomes the core of the work. The video produces
an uncomfortable scenario for its viewers about privilege and access. It points
back to Sierra himself as a conscious party to this inequality and the hired
participant as a disempowered subject, one who is participating in the exchange
for small monetary gain rather than refusing the terms of the exchange based
on the inequities of the agreement.
Critical exchanges look at the power dynamics in relationships (those
within the art world and those beyond), but they aren’t necessarily focused on
representation; they are less interested in interpreting or constructing meaning
and more concerned with demystifying power relationships through an active
encounter. In this respect, critical exchange is a way of practicing what Cor-
nel West terms “demystification,” for it attempts to understand not only why
something is the way it is, but also all the historical and social forces that
have made something act the way it does today.1 During a critical exchange,
the conditions of the exchange itself are highlighted in such a way that they
provide an expanded view of the cultural, historical, and sociopolitical forces
at play. In this respect, we are using the word critical not simply within its
most common definition, where it is understood to mean careful (or even

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d­isapproving) judgment or evaluation, but in its alternate definition, where

the word critical describes a crucial juncture or turning point, a place where
a situation or fact may suddenly change or transform.

You’ve Got Form

Part of understanding how criticality operates within these projects comes from
an understanding of the forms that these projects occupy. While it might sound
somewhat traditionalist, when it comes to artworks, there is an integral rela-
tionship between form and content, and any assessment of a work’s efficacy is
incomplete if there is no acknowledgement of the form by which it manifested.
That said, it’s certainly the case that most, if not all, of the projects considered
in this book do not manifest in forms that we would readily identify as artworks
(e.g., there are few paintings and sculptures detailed in these pages). However,
this does not mean that these works do not have form; rather, it means that
we have to turn to other frameworks to understand the forms that they do
have. This leads us to bring forward the concept of social form.
In his essay “The Problem of Sociology,” the German-born philospher and
sociologist Georg Simmel defined social form as the mode of interaction among
individuals through (or in) the shape of which specific content achieves social
reality. Simmel positioned these social forms as being distinct from social content,
which is considered to be the interest, purpose, or motive of an interaction.2
As such, a social form could be something like a street vendor’s cart, a protest
march, a meeting at work, a trade union, or a wedding. For the purposes of
this book, the concept of social form has far-reaching implications, not simply
because it extends a familiar art-historical concept of form to a large group of
artists’ projects that, at first glance, might not have an obvious form, but more
importantly because the consideration of social forms gives us an added ability
to talk about the mechanics of criticality that operates within these projects.
An example might serve at this point. Consider the work Untitled (Beauty)
(1994), by the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. For this project, the artist, and others,
cooked Thai curries in the Jack Hanley Gallery of San Francisco for a month,
and served them for free to anyone who came into the gallery. This work was
one of a long series of such projects that Tiravanija performed in galleries dur-
ing the early 1990s. Considered in terms of its basic content and its structure
as a participatory artwork, Untitled (Beauty) and similar works by Tiravanija
have been widely discussed within the field of art criticism as a utopian gesture.
They are generally credited with carving out a convivial space in the gallery
wherein participants were drawn together, lured by a free meal, and (together
with the artist) generated an ongoing social space where their relations were
both open to experience and also (due to the work’s location in a gallery)
“framed” as a social sculpture. However, when the work is considered in terms
of social form, it is possible to read somewhat different meanings in the work.

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Commercial art galleries, as social forms, can be thought of as a particular

form of “shop.” However, unlike most shops (where members of the public
become customers or shoppers upon entering the shop, whether they actually
purchase something or not), in most commercial art galleries, members of the
public are not generally considered to be potential buyers of the wares that
the gallery/shop is offering. If you work in a gallery, you quickly learn to call
these people “visitors,” such as you would have at a museum or a zoo. What
happens within this space when there is no artwork on display, and the gallery
is required, through the “rules” of the artwork that they have commissioned,
to serve free food to those who come into the space? Of course many things
can (and do) happen, but on a structural, or formal, level, the gallery is no
longer able to treat these people simply as “visitors.” You do not feed free
meals to visitors, after all; such people are usually called guests. Through this
sequence of modifications to the social form of the gallery, it is possible to see
how critical relations arise: What changes for the worker in the gallery (who
is now a host), and for the visitors (who are now guests)?
Centering the consideration of social projects from the vantage point of
form shifts the central questions from ones centered on ideas of a project’s mean-
ing to a consideration of a project’s capacity: How does it operate within the
social world, and for whom? How does it interact with the surrounding social
forms that form its immediate social context? What is the work’s agency? After
all, we do not encounter social forms in a vacuum—they are adjacent to (and
interpenetrate) other social forms, as much as they are discrete unto themselves.
In a landscape of social forms, the recognition of the forms we are within
are of ongoing importance. We enter someone’s home for a dinner party as
a guest. In the Tiravanija example Untitled (Beauty), we enter a gallery as a
visitor who then is asked to become a guest by sitting down and being served
a free meal. Both of these points of entry are something that we know almost
sub-intellectually; they are parts of the world of social forms that we have been
raised within, things that we have an almost inherent grasp of. This learned
familiarity with social forms is, obviously, similar to the familiarity that we have
with systems of economic exchange, as discussed in the first section of this essay.
While this brief discussion of social form has focused on the form of the
gallery/shop, critical exchanges can occupy any number of social forms—from
dinner parties to potlucks, from community meetings to online encounters,
quite literally any social form wherein we would normally expect to find one
or another system of exchange in play. When such social forms are taken up
by artists and subsequently altered to achieve more idiosyncratic or subjective
ends, it is possible to become disoriented, to have a moment of adjustment
that requires a shift in thinking and reaction. It is in this moment of realign-
ment that a possibility of critical exchange arises—where the form is seen not
just for the moment when it is strange, but for all of the prior times we have
entered it when it was “normal.”

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+1 Add Friend

At this point it is useful to look outward to the landscapes of exchange within

which we, as a people, as societies, are living. As has been discussed, there
is, in each of us, almost an inbuilt sense of order to the shifts in systems of
exchange that we encounter as we go through our daily lives. But if we look
back at the last twenty five years (which is roughly the timeframe for the
projects that this volume considers) or even the last ten years (which is the
amount of time that elapsed between the bulk of the writing in the first edi-
tion of this book and the present edition), it is clear that that the exchanges
we live within on a daily basis aren’t quite as ordered as they once were. They
are no longer normal, and the ground under us has changed.
While exchange systems morph and evolve over time,3 it is difficult not
to look back over the periods of time covered by this book and imagine that
the rate of evolution for economic systems has somehow had a finger pressed
firmly on the fast-forward button, so fast that they seem to collapse into each
other as each permutation is explored by global enterprise. It is this period that
John Berger summarized (beautifully, as always) in his essay “Where Are We”:

Might it not be better to see and declare that we are living through
the most tyrannical—because the most pervasive—chaos that has
ever existed? It’s not easy to grasp the nature of the tyranny, for its
power structure (ranging from the 200 largest multinational corpo-
rations to the Pentagon) is interlocking yet diffuse, dictatorial yet
anonymous, ubiquitous yet placeless. It tyrannizes from offshore, not
only in terms of Fiscal Law but in terms of any political control
beyond its own. Its aim is to delocalize the entire world. Its ideo-
logical strategy . . . is to undermine the existent so that everything
collapses into its special version of the virtual, from the realm
of which—and this is the tyranny’s credo—there will be a never-
ending source of profit.4

While details of this drastic shift are beyond the scope of this essay, a
single example might serve as instructive. Ten years ago, at the time when we
were writing the last edition, the world (or at least the digitally linked or “wired”
world) was just beginning to glimpse what would come to be collectively called
“Web 2.0,” a nest of innovations that included social networking, free webmail,
blogs, and photo-sharing. The first rush of the arrival of Web 2.0 could be seen
in the emergence of user-driven websites such as YouTube, MySpace, Napster,
and FlickrWeb, among other offerings. The basic idea of Web 2.0 represented
not just a new mode of internet technology, it also represented a totally dif-
ferent outlook on how to harness creative energy to create meaningful (and
meaningless) content. Unlike earlier websites, which created their content

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“in-house” and then “uploaded” it to the web for people to see, these websites
created a platform that grew somewhat organically, primarily using the creative
energy of their users, who uploaded their own content at the same time they
were seeing and reading content generated by others.5
This shift represented not just a break from a traditional model of
producer and consumer; it also demonstrated an entirely different economic
model for production, wherein content is produced entirely off of the creative
surplus of the “wired” populace. Of course, the users of sites like Flickr and
YouTube are (by and large) not paid for their creative efforts, and one of the
initial notions around these sites is that they actually represented something
of a high-tech version of a traditional economy, specifically a barter economy
with a user-community at its heart. In this economy, users got free email, free
access to a larger public, free opportunities to exchange thoughts and informa-
tion, in exchange for which they supplied their creative energy (and watched
a small amount of advertising that was placed on the sites) to generate both
content and “traffic” (which was a tracking of how many visits a site had over
the course of a day).
This system of production came to be called “crowdsourcing,”6 and it
represented a significant innovation in terms of both exchange and creative
production. This innovation was viewed with great optimism by the “wired”
public, who invested these various platforms for user-interaction and exchange
with a belief that they might create an almost global system of “free” per-
sonalized communication and information exchanges. However, within a few
years, as one after another of the companies supporting this technology “went
public” with multi-billion-dollar IPOs, many users realized the truth in what
was quickly becoming a new maxim: When you get something for free, you
are not the customer, you are the product.
Consider the example of Facebook. Launched in 2004, Facebook, ini-
tially offered a nominally free platform for college students to create an online
representation of their social “self,” where they could post pictures, com-
municate with friends, build networks, chat with each other, and share their
lives, as well as their “likes.” The site was gradually opened up to the general
population and exploded in popularity. Over this same period, Facebook was
collecting staggering amounts of data from all of its users, not just in terms
of the content they uploaded, but also information on what other websites
they visited, what they might buy or look at after they left. In May of 2012,
Facebook went public, trading about 490 million shares in its first day, and
raising sixteen billion dollars for the company. What is particularly instructive
about this for the purposes of this essay is not simply the staggering amount
of capital that was raised, primarily through monetizing the digital produc-
tion of billions of social exchanges (which were by and large not created for
any form of monetary payment); the thing to note is that this public offering
completed a transfer of the product of one economic system (information and

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content arising from the social economy of Internet users) into another (the
monetized information capital). All of those discrete and personal likes, all of
the friendings and unfriendings, all of the shared photos and games of Scrabble
spawned countless shares of Facebook stock.7
There remain, however, signs that this collapse between systems (and
cultures) of exchange does not simply collapse in one direction. For example,
one of the more interesting aspects of this new economy that converts crowd-
sourced content into data for advertising and marketing is that, despite the
disparity between the gift economy of its producers and the monetizing power
of its owners, it must still (somewhat) rely on open access to continue to make
profits. New veins of information must be continually laid down, like sediment,
into the oceanic server farms that underlie the information economy, from
where it can be productively mined for yet more data. This has created a situ-
ation where continuous need for content is turned to surprising (and startling)
ends. One can spend an hour on YouTube and see, literally, almost anything.
Homemade videos of cats sleeping are only a single click away from a political
rant filmed in a bedroom in Holland or an illegal upload of a Bollywood drama.
A more dramatic and visible example of the forces at play in this situ-
ation was seen in early 2010, when the “Arab Spring” protests, fueled in part
by tactical use of Facebook and Twitter, spread across a dozen countries in the
Middle East and North Africa. In many cases, these new social media platforms
were used to facilitate, very quickly and on a mass scale, a “low-tech” strategy
that has served the masses for centuries: gather in great numbers in a public
place and refuse to leave until someone in power responds. In the fall of 2011,
Occupy Wall Street, a viral, populist array of long-term protests that emerged in
many cities across the United States in the midst of an ongoing recession, took
many organizing cues from the disparate revolutions of the Arab Spring, using
a similar formula of combining sophisticated communications with persistent,
physical intransigence. In the Greater New York area, the network of protes-
tors and the communication strategies that linked them were reorganized as
Occupy Sandy in order to put to use the organization and distribution tactics
employed during the Occupy Wall Street protests in the wake of a natural
disaster, Hurricane Sandy, which struck the area in the fall of 2012. Again, a
mix of high-tech and age-old strategies was found to be effective. Occupy Sandy
was able to network with local churches to help them function as distribution
hubs,8 and was able to harness the ingenuity of texting, cellphone cameras,
and Twitter to act as contemporary versions of SOS signals.

Horizon

While it is important to look at the forces at play in this collapsing realm of

exchanges and economies, it is naive to imagine that artists’ tactical uses of

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critical exchanges will “solve” the problems that have arisen, or redress the
mendacity that lies behind them. Nonetheless, they remain full of possibil-
ity. Learning how to speak about the times we are living through is vital. In
his essay “The Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault wrote: “Maybe the most
certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time and
of what we are in this very moment.” This sentence builds upon his read-
ing of a question raised by Kant almost two hundred years prior, “Was Heist
Auflklarung?” which Foucault elaborated to mean, “What is going on just now?
What is happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment
in which we are living?”9
One of most pressing tasks is for us to understand how we are (and who
we are) within these hyperglobalized realms of exchange. If the projects in this
book can be seen as critical exchanges, and we can see this process of critical
exchange being furthered by tactical uses of existing social forms, there is then
a substantial framework in place to understand how their criticality has an
integral relationship to the social and economic world that forms their context.
There is the possibility that they can slow down a moment of exchange long
enough for us not just to see it fully, but to ask why. Why am I giving this
away, what is the encounter that forms this moment? It is more than possible
that this slowing, this consideration, can form a benchmark from which we
navigate our way . . . somewhere. To home. To market. To dinner.

Notes

1. West considered the practice of demystification to be a more forceful (and,

in his view, prophetic) mode of critical practice, one that not simply deconstructs but
builds a framework for future action. See “The New Politics of Cultural Difference” in
The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999).
2. For a thorough introduction to Georg Simmel, readers are directed to Georg
Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1971).
3. This morphing over time is one of the central questions addressed by Marcel
Mauss in his landmark book The Gift. For more on the historical evolution of exchange
systems, readers are directed to chapter three of this volume.
4. John Berger, “Where Are We,” from David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes:
Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture Books, 2003).
5. By most accounts, the term Web 2.0 appeared in Darcy DiNucci’s article
“Fragmented Future,” Print 53.4 (January 1999), 32.
6. Interestingly, the term crowdsourcing was coined largely as a play on a much
more negative word, outsourcing, which was a term used by corporations to describe
the process by which they got rid of their workers as employees and formed one of the
primary modes of globalized capitalism.
7. As we write this, at market close today, January 30, 2013, each share is worth
$31.64.

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8. It is worth noting that this tactic, which rests on the inbuilt community
connections of churches, echoes those used by 1960s civil rights organizations, such as
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
9. “The Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault, Critical Inquiry 8.4 (Summer 1982),
785. Foucault goes on to say that an even more pressing problem for philosophy might
be to “refuse who we are.” In the context of the following projects this might be an
even more meaningful goal.

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