Emergency Ectoplasmic Exodus, Rejected Material (Take 3),
aka the New York Factory Plays Itself
J.K. Bergstrand-Doley
An interesting scene played out in front of me a few months ago when I was on my way into Manhattan. Seated on the subway, my dog was in a bag on the floor, per the transport rules. A person on my right had a large food-delivery bag, similarly placed on the floor. He was probably on his way to deliver early lunches to an office. One person by the doors was rehearsing a dance to a song, marking movements in the air without completing them, and a third person who had turned himself into a vending machine was hustling snacks to the commuters on their way to work.
As I left the train at the Canal Street station, I noticed a power socket on the platform that had not been closed off to the public. It often catches my eye as people use it to charge their phones. Today, the socket had been turned into a temporary barber’s shop. Two people, probably homeless, were using it to carefully shave each other’s hair.
The scene laid bare for me what seem to be essentials about life in New York. As I rushed out of the subway—the Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving the Factory (1895) on my mind—I was struck by how a twenty-minute-long subway ride could display so many forms of work, all as part of the same “factory,” the factory that is New York City. Low-paid delivery workers rushing between finance offices, the mechanization of the proletarian body in DIY vending machines, and the hacking of the city’s power. This transformation of the subway into a food-delivery vehicle, rehearsal room, store, and hair salon not only blurred the boundary between public and private, it also displayed a repurposing of the city, through an organizational error and an anomalous plug socket, into a site for care work.
It also chimed with a long-running interest in the idea of the social factory and the Potere Operaio and Autonomia Operaia movements, active in Italy from the 1950s to the 1970s, who conceived it. For them, the social factory describes “the shift from a society where production takes place predominantly in the closed site of the factory to one where it is the whole of society that is turned into a factory—a productive site.”
The social factory was also key to the international Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s, which showed that the factory was a society-wide construct and that the work of students in universities and the unpaid labor of women in the home is integral to the broader production of capital. Without the work of having babies and raising children; feeding, caring for, and reproducing the labor power of working adults; and maintaining households, families, and communities, there would be no worker, the most fundamental capitalist commodity. The analysis provided by Wages for Housework activists led to demands such as wages for housework and schoolwork as well as for a broader definition of labor struggle and the working class.
In order to explore hidden forms of work in relation to the art world, its institutions, and its mechanisms of exclusion, as well the figures of the emerging and submerging artist, this text will offer a Marxist reading of the Ghostbusters movie trilogy (1984, 1989, and 2016) against the backdrop of the 1975 fiscal crisis in New York City and the 2008 global financial crisis. This reading will rely on notions of haunting and the material called “ectoplasm,” both in the form in which it appears in Ghostbusters as well as the spiritual substance much discussed during the spiritualism fad of the early 1900s.
Ectoplasmic Waste
Viewing the Ghostbusters films from the perspective of the social factory means reading the ghosts in the film as ghosts of the working class or as part of the specter of communism. Important to the factory are the waste materials left behind by the production process, as emphasized in Dominique Laporte’s 1978 book The History of Shit. A striking image from the films is the river of slime that runs through a sewer under First Avenue in Ghostbusters II (1989). It is described as a conglomeration of New York’s negative emotions that have materialized and amassed beneath the city:
Egon: Negative human emotions are materializing in the form of a viscous, psycho-reactive plasm with explosive supernormal potential.
Winston: All the bad feelings, all the hate, the anger and vibes of this city are turning into this sludge!
While “ectoplasm” is a term originally coined in 1894 by Charles Richet to describe a substance purportedly exteriorized by spiritual mediums, in the film it is an emotionally-reactive slime that can be charged with different emotions and enables ghosts to materialize. The scene showing the river of slime merges a literal waste-disposal system with a metaphysical one: all the negativity in peoples’ heads, the waste products of everyday life, including the reality of work, becomes manifest in the form of a seemingly malevolent river of psychological slime. The site’s significance to the city as a whole is underlined at the end of the scene as Ray, being winched back up out of the sewer, knocks against an old pipe, causing a citywide blackout. The city shuts down and the factory grinds to a halt after its shit has been exposed.
In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey claims the 1975 crisis in New York was central to the development of neoliberal capitalism. Banking and government elites, unwilling to supplement city spending on things such as health care and education, pushed the city toward bankruptcy and then refused to bail it out, transforming the city from a vibrant, working-class “island of social democracy” to a highly stratified and business-friendly enterprise. This “shock” strategy, perhaps one of the first examples of a structural adjustment program, entails bailing out a defaulting city or nation while also demanding cuts to welfare, public health care, education, and transport spending, as well as imposing user fees and creating laws that are unfavourable to unions and other forms of organized labor. This process has been replicated many times over globally.
In 1975 President Ford described spending in New York as an “insidious disease” and resisted pleas to help avert bankruptcy, resulting in the headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” His negotiating tactics forced the imposition of austerity. The democratically elected government was replaced by an unelected board of businessmen. The declines already witnessed in quality of life and city services were only exacerbated. Police officers and firemen were laid off, library hours reduced, tuition fees were introduced into the city university system, already-strained city services deteriorated and the city’s population declined by more than 10 per cent throughout the decade. Harvey describes this episode as the demolition of working-class New York, “corporate welfare substituted for people welfare.”
Working-class and ethnic-immigrant New York was thrust back into the shadows, to be ravaged by racism and a crack cocaine epidemic of epic proportions in the 1980s that left many young people either dead, incarcerated, or homeless, only to be bludgeoned again by the AIDS epidemic that carried over into the 1990s.
If it’s possible to say that working-class New York died a death in the 1970s, then we can posit the 1984 release of Ghostbusters as a conservative vision of that working-class specter, and the river of negatively charged slime the waste product of the financial restructuring, and destruction of life, in the preceding decade.
The Emerging Artist and the Curator
In Ghostbusters II, the protagonists later discover that the mass of New York’s negative emotion flows to a single site: the Manhattan Museum of Art and more specifically to a single painting depicting a megalomaniac called Vigo, who it turns out is trying to take over the world by possessing first a curator at the museum and later a small child. As the power of the river and New York’s negativity increase, Vigo slowly becomes more lifelike until he is able to emerge from the painting. In one sense he is the classic art commodity, a painting. But once fuelled by the river of psychological waste, he is able to escape the canvas and gain full agency. We would tentatively like to propose Vigo as a vision of the emerging artist, as both a commodity and as a potentially political agent, one who has now risen from the river of unseen social-factory labor.
From what kind of detritus and waste then does the artist emerge? Does this period of emergence refer to the artist before they are fully formed, still a ghostly figure on the edge of some vast market? Or is this partial invisibility also connected to still being within the realm of hidden labor, so that behind that shimmering figure one might also catch a glimpse of all those others destined never to emerge. Is it possible to reimagine the artist as everyone and posit the figure of the mass emerging artist, where emergence is in fact a nonending process? The artist would then be subsumed by and connected to a broader mass of workers to whom their labor is inherently connected.
And what of the painting’s curator, Janosz Poha? What kind of curatorial practice does he represent? Poha is caring and nurturing the painting of Vigo, a traditional approach to curating indicated by the root cura or care.
The artworld has seen an immense influx of curators of late and the field is competitive. Art schools offer curating courses teach the dos and don’ts of managerial labor, spatial organization, semi-academic writing and organizational administrative creativity. There is a surplus of curators in museums ranging from chief, senior, and assistant curators to paid and unpaid intern curators. Not to mention the collection, education, and public-relations curators, among others, all working at the same museum.
Curators are sometimes described as gatekeepers of the artworld, perhaps alluded to in Janosz’s name, with its root Janus, the god of beginnings and portals. The villain in Ghostbusters (2016), Rowan, is a hotel janitor, another etymological relative. Classically, the role of the curator, at least within a museum or gallery setting, has been to manage and control appearance and disappearance, in terms of who exhibits and who does not. This decision-making process is mostly played out behind closed doors. The rejected artists, the art school dropouts, those who quit, the ones who couldn’t exhibit, and so on, become parts of the value of those who get to show. The surplus value of the artwork is based on a mountain of invisible rejected labor power. For example, most art institutions have entrance procedures whereby, from a large number of applicants, only a select few are accepted. From a labor perspective there are a large number of free workers whose labor provides the basis of the value of every artist or curator who goes on to “make it” on the global art market. The losers are component parts of the value of those who succeed. They are revenants who haunt success through their failure.
What then to make of Vigo and Poha as manifestations of New York’s negative emotions? They represent a break from the failure/success dynamic; now the entirety of the social factory waste product has come forth in the figure of a museum curator and a collective specter of the submerged artist. Is Vigo then a mass fantasy of what the art world could be, or of what art even means?
One way that we have approached this topic, in various workshops and projects, was to reimagine the importance of the place from which the artist emerges through a rejection of the curriculum vitae as a device through which one sells oneself as human capital. Human capital, in a contemporary sense, does not really exist. To paraphrase Marx, human capital would only be possible to attribute to a slave, since their labor power is not theirs to sell for a wage; it belongs to the owner and is therefore a form of capital that is also human. To confront the absurdity of the human capital CV, we have engaged in processes of writing “labor power CVs,” in which all the terrible jobs, free work, unpaid internships, work-related fights with loved ones, debts in all their forms, and so on, are clearly listed. Such CVs are dirty lists of lost labor power, politically emotional outpourings, manifestations of one’s dead labor in the social factory, lists of what has been lost in the work process, and therefore also what one is owed.
Mercado. It’s Spanish for “Table”
ABBY: Okay . . . he's gonna be able to rip a hole right through that barrier.
HOLTZMANN: Letting whatever's on this plane [gesturing in the air] come crashing down on this plane . . .
ERIN: Okay . . . that intersection right there . . . What is there now? The Mercado. Mercado. It's Spanish for “table.”
PATTY: The Mercado? That actually makes sense . . .
—Ghostbusters (2016)
The recent Ghostbusters remake takes place in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis that was triggered by the subprime mortgage market. In Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason, David Harvey emphasizes that capital is a process, and that crises are created when the process is slowed down or blocked. “Any failure to maintain a certain velocity of circulation of capital through the various phases of production, realisation and distribution will produce difficulties and disruptions.”
The “credit crunch” that emerged in 2007 when housing prices started plummeting quickly spread to Wall Street through mortgage-finance companies and financial institutions that held what became known as “toxic” securitized mortgage debts. Workers, whose wages had stagnated since the 1980s, had been forced into a dependency on easy credit, cheered on by a neoliberal capitalist agenda. An economy based on debt necessitates a foreclosing of the future, and on future working hours. This is especially central when it comes to housing and real estate, because everyone needs a place to live. As we are all painfully aware, in order to avoid a depression akin to the 1930s, the U.S. government, along with a plethora of others, formed a “rescue package” to bail out the banking and insurance sector at the cost of the larger public. For the majority of the population it was a return to the days of austerity politics; for capital, it was business as usual.
When the team in the recent Ghostbusters are looking for new premises—replicating the scene in the first movie where the out-of-work Ghostbusters are able to rent an abandoned fire station, presumably a victim of the previous round of austerity—a real-estate agent explains to Erin that the rent is $21,000 a month, upon which Erin blurts out: “burn in hell.” The team later settle for the top floor of a Chinese restaurant, a surprising choice since Chinatown has undergone major gentrification and has rents that are as unaffordable as other neighborhoods in Manhattan. With this backdrop it is perhaps not surprising that the film’s crescendo takes place at the Hotel Mercado, meaning “market” or “stock market” in Spanish. When the evil janitor Rowan later releases a mass of ghosts from the basement of the hotel, the floor is broken up into what looks like a black hole and the ghosts fly out.
The scene, which resembles a political riot, brings the city to a complete standstill. The military and the police who have been called in to fight the specters are frozen outside the hotel in positions resembling the choreography of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video. Is this ghostly uprising that brings everything to a halt an image of the working class rising up against the all-encompassing power of the market? And why does everything, the destroyed hotel, roads and vehicles, and so on, all get restored to its original form after the Ghostbusters have created a vortex that sucks all the ghosts back into the ground? Is it a return to business as usual?
Emergency Exit
I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order).
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969”
After arriving in New York, I was struck by the professionalization of art practices. Surrounded by artists and makers, when I asked people what they did, they often answered that they were artists but later I learned that most people were balancing two to four part-time positions to make ends meet. They were almost always compartmentalizing different professions, not to mention their unpaid labor performed at home. Art practices most times seem to have very little to do with one’s part-time position. The divisions between “work” and “work” were firmly drawn, breaking apart one side of their life from the other—perhaps a necessary escape. This professionalization was highlighted again when visiting the websites of U.S. artists, where the CV was almost always displayed on the front page.
Basically we want an art practice, conceived as broadly as possible, that does not exclude or hide the capital-labor relations that are involved within it. Instead we strive for a practice that recognizes and tries to include all sides of production. It means a refusal of the elite art-system ladder. Instead of sucking up to museum curators, or chasing biennials, we need to recognize that the majority of artists today live in poverty, excellently elucidated, for example, in Hans Abbing’s Why Are Artists Poor? The aim of this refusal is to be part of something like a workers’ movement again, one that begins from the myriad forms of invisible labor that produce production. In that sense, we believe in an antiproductive production, in an art practice that doesn’t strive to make another exhibition, but rather sees the opportunity to unionize as a collective form of a labor power séance. Maybe it is something like the workers trapped in the ubiquitous social factory as it burns down, looking for an emergency exit, or more systematically for an emergency ectoplasmic exodus.
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J.K. Bergstrand-Doley is a fictive ghostwriter-collective whose name is an homage to the partially-late writing duo J.K. Gibson-Graham.