Donna Haraway, talking about the production of modern culture in her readings of National Geographic on primates in the late eighties, pointed out that cultural critics are faced by a world very much like tangled balls of yarn, whose meanings must be untangled by pulling on and tracing through the different threads. The first example she uses leads her to the question, “what gets to count as nature; for whom and when?” But, most of all, “how much does it cost to produce nature at a particular moment in history, for a particular group of people?” Haraway tells a number of stories using objects, texts and images, that lead from Silicon Valley to Tanzania or sidereal space, and concludes that the dualism of modern opposites – which includes the nature/culture coupling, among others – is non-functional, being destined to perpetual resignification. She proposes to replace the coupling with naturecultures.

The multi-form research programme Estimulantes: circulación y euforia (Stimulants: Circulation and Euphoria), organised by Oier Etxeberria, Max Jorge Hinderer and Pablo Lafuente, would seem to embrace the idea of a tangled world; and to want to untangle it, with the infinite complications this entails. Through a series of events (encounters, workshops, concerts and an exhibition), and modern stimulants (coffee, sugar, cocoa and tobacco) it seeks to consider the meaning of nature, who it is for, and what the cost is of wanting to ingest and possess it for a group of people at different historical moments. As in Haraway’s narrative, we are led from America to Africa through outer space. Let us not forget, too, that Tabakalera (San Sebastián), where the project was conceived, was a cigar factory in the early twentieth century, recently converted into an international contemporary culture centre; to dig into its foundations would seem to be an exercise in critical responsibility.

The programme was introduced in December 2015 by “La gran conversación” (The Great Conversation) ^[1], which took the idea of discourse as its subject for debate. Discourse understood as a stimulant for speculation; as a change of gears or driving force that could carry us through the different rhythms of contemporary society and its constantly circulating forms of representation. It is no coincidence that “coffee” should mean the after-dinner conversation that comes with digestion and is a source of discussion and debate, leading us into the diachronic rhythm of the tangled ball of yarn. The coffee ritual is a space where ideas are exchanged, but also a space for ideas on exchange. Historians claim that coffee houses in eighteenth century Europe played a fundamental role in defining the language of the moment and in shaping the idea of the present, which relates not only to gossip, but also to the aimless dialogue that is useless for capital production. “Talking for the sake of it” is counterproductive to the search for methodologies which will structure and digest thinking, channelling it towards the economy of knowledge that humanistic institutions so strongly depend on in the midst of their crises.

Estimulantes: circulación y euforia attempts to reconsider the history of active substances as a narrative of globalisation; an occurrence that takes place alongside the expansion of capital and transoceanic exploration since the discovery of America in the fifteenth century. The exhibition, curated by Oier Etxeberria ^[2], should not be seen as a culmination, but as one part among many in a wide-reaching programme. The programme is set up as a sort of rhizomatic nervous system, a network of relations between participants in different phases and the artist and materials in the room. The exhibition develops from three types of stimuli (biological, economic and cosmic) which catalyse the way through it. The stimuli generate a series of itineraries, visible in the exhibition space as a colour code (red, yellow and green). These set up a series of correspondences between matter, capital and reason, versus illusion, desire and inebriation. From my own understanding of the exhibition as a stimulus for speculation, I propose a fourth itinerary in this text, which does not follow the linear path of the exhibition space and which I call “From the Tangle to the Spider’s Web”.

1.
Visitors enter the exhibition space to be received by two screens showing advertisements starring Salvador Dalí. In the first of these, the artist is amazed by Lanvin chocolate. In the second, he sells an effervescent anti-acid for healing – as if it was a piece of art. Next to the adverts is a store dummy by Ines Doujak and John Barker wearing a colourful patterned dress made of “skins”. Their work, The Devil Opens a Night School to Teach about the Secrets of Success and Failure also suggests ways to use drugs as a shortcut for ridding yourself of pain. Salvador Dalí in the late sixties – a born performer who was perfectly at home in the new media – provides the first clues to the itinerary, and reminds us how it was precisely at that time that lethargy set in to (or renewed itself in) the collective consciousness. The world economy had been experiencing the highest growth in history since World War II, and the so-called welfare state had been established. Soon after, in the early seventies, the gold exchange vanished as the standard economic measure, with the Nixon dollar and the neoliberal doctrine – finally unbound from material correspondence – which began its domino effect and entered Europe in the figure of the Iron Lady, the woman who slept less than four hours a night, fuelled by whisky rather than coffee.

This gradual self-absorption coincided with a complex political moment which was to pave the way for the individual consciousness of the self, which was to stand as the basic political, financial and moral measure. Simultaneously, new forms of communication and leisure were gaining firm ground. The consciousness of the self – which, for Walter Benjamin, was the beginning of a deeper and deeper sleep – is illustrated in this path through the exhibition by the studies of scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, whose studies of human anatomy we find in the main room of Tabakalera; meticulous combinations of science and art.

Next to Ramón y Cajal is a film of the female workers at the Tabakalera factory leaving their workplace ^[3], taking us back to the late nineteenth century and the Lumière Brothers’ Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, first screened, interestingly, at a Café. The history of the Spanish female cigar makers is especially relevant and has attracted a great deal of interest; since the early sixteenth century, female workers were present in the sector, and were a highly organised collective who made successful demands for their rights, and are said to have held on to their autonomy and combined work with caring in both social and family spheres. But as was to occur in many other fields of labour, industrialisation meant the end of their skilled labour, with machines taking over the work previously done by their hands.

Fragmented arms with coloured prostheses in the form of hammers, knives, chisels or pistols. Dismembered bodies as instruments for production: handmachines. This is what runs through my mind as I contemplate the delicate work of Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga, whose work reflects on the circulating histories of the body, African identity and colonial exploitation. Of paramount importance in her work are the interconnections between all of these, as well as the different scales of land and matter that have gone into the construction of neocolonial narratives. Her tangled image at the top of these lines is probably the best illustration of the task of my own itinerary.

Opposite Nkanga’s are other images of machines evocative of hands, too; in Ibon Aranberri’s mosaic based on the damascene craft which was closely linked to arms production in the Basque town of Eibar. Damascene consists in inlaying gold or silver threads in grooves cut into other metals. Aranberri’s work is a large glass panel filled with recycled documents from another time (flowered calendars) on the back of which are ornamental damascene patterns. The panel, lit by the large windows of the exhibition space, reminds us of how the inlays on weapons are no longer bound to the time and context that distinguished them, and how the ornament is carried over onto sewing machines and other domestic utensils. Alfred Gell’s ideas surely resonate here: beyond its decorativeness, damascene on arms and utensils possesses agency and its objects enact their effect.

2.
The early twentieth century’s banishment of the ornament, seen as a sign of aesthetic and moral degeneration, has given way to a contemporary demand for its return as a way to counter the world’s increasing alienation.

The modern pursuit of formal purity in art leads me to the search for purity in stimulants. Users and chemists alike seek to reduce matter to its most perfect essence, the purer the better. Euphoria is proportionate. The lesser the purity, the cheaper the product and the poorer the desire. I am not speaking of any particular stimulant here; the idea of cleanliness can be carried over to almost any modern active substance – the female cigar makers even protested in the late nineteenth century against the impurity of the tobacco they were working with, which was full of residues. Stimulants also effectively materialize the contradictions of the history surrounding them: was coffee not the equivalent to the bourgeoisie of sugar to the English working classes; that is, was it not the driving force behind the establishment of the bourgeoisie?

Whether or not this is so, how does the idea of alienation and purification relate to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dream-sleep? In “The three circulations” seminar ^[4], Max Jorge Hinderer takes up Félix Guattari’s idea of “integrated world capitalism” and considers the all-devouring function of this, whereby the colonisation of the horizontal surface of the world transfers into verticality, into our pharmacological and semiotic bodies (chocolate-consuming, tobacco-smoking bodies). A radio programme by Antonin Artuad broadcast in the exhibition space invokes the idea:

[…] one must by all possible means of activity replace nature wherever it can be replaced, one must find a major field of action for human inertia, the worker must have something to keep him busy, new fields of activity must be created, in which we shall see at last the reign of all the fake manufactured products, of all the vile synthetic substitutes, in which beautiful real nature has no part, and must give way finally and shamefully before all the victorious substitute products […] ^[5]

The word integration implies a search for something missing: assimilation, taking up or in to form a whole. And if “integrated world capitalism” has understood anything seventy years after Artaud’s programme was broadcast at the end of World War II, it is that bodies in most of the world have been assimilated. Those that are already in circulation can work for it and generate value. The “bodies without organs” in Artaud’s radio programme become handmachines more than skins. They are some of the nods of the tangle. Google’s reCAPTCHA ^[6] could serve as an example for many of us; almost unawares, we are teaching computers to read. The permeability of our bodies facilitates networks and other forms of subalternity. It is precisely such human, non-human and more-than-human entities that are voraciously engulfed by the capitalist vacuum that continues to numb the world to sleep while providing it with a counterfeit process of emancipation in which the freedom of each one of us no longer depends on ourselves. Yet is it possible to circulate outside the predatory activity which turns everything it touches into a residue or resource?

When capital becomes religion, as Benjamin also foresaw in 1921, the capacity to reinvent power, and resistance with it, is fraught with increasing complication. “To have done with God’s judgement”, declares Artaud on the radio, the men armed with steel and blood must advance towards the invisible christ, the “crab-louse” who consented to live without a body. Money, too, was separated from its material correspondence with gold: more fiduciary (meaning, depending on the faith of the community) notes were printed for the payment of war. We seem to swing from one form of idolatry to another, where debt and guilt are one and the same word, as in the German schuld. Images play a fundamental role in this, and with that in mind, I move down the passage from one room of the exhibition to the next, where a voice from above whispers “Money means nothing to us,” but that though it may not be fun to play God, “someone has to do it.” This is Lorea Alfaro’s sound piece Throat, made with a trap ^[7] singer who yearns for an Oscar to celebrate his fame.

Erick Beltrán’s Las cuentas del collar (The Beads in the Necklace) seeks to reflect on the idea of idolatry that displaces the cult of the vera icona towards discourse and the magical arts whose gaze searches the heavens in a different way. One of Beltrán’s aims is to analyse how power is constructed in other communities who still manage to remain outside “integrated world capitalism,” the system in which discourse also works as a drug, “allowing men to be turned into animals or slaves, the language of the dead to be spoken, or even the figure of the state to be embodied.” This is perhaps the reason behind the presence of Fang masks from Equatorial Guinea which were used in dance by the community before they came into contact with the white man; a large mural by Fernando Palma as a codex recording the cacao rituals and their gods in relation to Mesoamerican cultures; or Maruja Mallo’s cosmological paintings and her Viajeros del Éter (Travellers through the Ether).

3.
The intertwining of nature, territory and capital we see in this exhibition is interesting to perceive in relation to the anthropocentric discourse of the past few years, which places man in the centre of the geological paradigm ^[8], and in my opinion, in line with that expressed by Jason W. Moore, is too reduced in its outlook. In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism, Moore proposes we take a step back in history for a different focus on the problem. As we know, scientists who favour the notion of the “Anthropocene” place man at the crux of the debate, with the Industrial Revolution as a factual turning point. Moore goes back to the sixteenth century, the long period of colonial expansion, and proposes a shift from the focus on the anthropos to highlight capital ^[9]. But perhaps Donna Haraway’s position might be more stimulating and inclusive. No centre is possible there, but it does manage to include the previous proposals. Her Cthulucene proposes a tentacular form of thinking through the figure of the pimoa cthulhu (Goshute for “long legs”), which takes us back to the diachronic tangle of the ball of yarn at the beginning of this text, with its multiple temporalities and responsibilities. For Haraway, human, non-human and more-than-human worlds are made up of complex beings, with whom we can imagine alliances for thinking and resisting together, but also to disagree with.

And from the tangle to the spider’s web, we come to the arachnid thinking of architect Miguel de Prada Poole for a happening in Guadalajara in 1971, the same year as the so-called Nixon shock. In this encounter, a group of people build a perfect collective spiderweb together. In a parallel experiment to the encounter, the architect discovered that a spider swallowing caffeine will make webs whose function as traps is damaged. Perhaps coffee time is also a useless moment for a spider, where its web loses its reason for being. Though perhaps Fernand Deligny was right, and the spider wasn’t interested in the web’s utility in the first place: “What the spider teaches us is that for the spider, it’s not about wanting the web it spins to trap the fly; what matters is to spin.” ^[10]

This exhibition, then, does not represent stimulants as matter – there is no trace of any substances in the room. It tries to think, to resist and to disagree through them, to understand them as possible refugia ^[11] from which to build new images with which to overcome the difficulties faced by current emancipatory political thinking. This means acknowledging that the definition of nature cannot be reduced to either capital or the singular man; but should be understood as something implicitly bound to culture, where technoscience and images play a fundamental role. But to imagine “the end of endless capitalism,” ^[12] together with new ethical forms of commitment to the tangle of the world without falling into the trap of evangelising, we must first decolonise thought and its institutions. To take a look at the contradictions of current new forms of idolatry is perhaps the next step we need to make. Estimulantes: circulación y euforia is a clear example of this.

Notes:

^[1] It would be impossible to detail the vast programme of Estimulantes: circulación y euforia from 2015 to 2017. For more information see: https://www.tabakalera.eu/es/estimulantes-circulacion-y-euforia. [Accessed 1 March 2017].

^[2] With Pablo Lafuente and Max Jorge Hinderer as consultants.

^[3] The film is part of Mañana Goodbye, a project which examines the changing model of production within which a cigar factory could be converted into the current International Contemporary Culture. Online at: https://www.tabakalera.eu/es/manana-goodbye-0. [Accessed 1 March 2017].

^[4] This talk took place 29 September 2016. Online at: https://www.tabakalera.eu/es/una-dos-tres-circulaciones-max-jorge-hinderer-cruz [Accessed 1 March 2017].

^[5] ARTAUD, ANTONIN: “To Have Done with the Judgement of God”, online at: http://surrealism-plays.com/Artaud.html [Accessed 30 March 2017].

^[6] reCAPTCHA is a Google project based on the fact that a human may find it easy to detect text within an image, but a machine will often find it too difficult. Our online entries are “helping” Google to digitize all editions of the New York Times.

^[7] The trap movement came out of Atlanta in the nineties, closely linked to rap and the drug trade. The term comes from the Spanish trapichear, to deal or scheme, but also from the English trap, as in a spiderweb.

^[8] In 2000, Paul Crutzen, winner of the Nobel Chemistry Prize, used the term “Anthropocene” for the first time to baptise the new historical and geological age characterised by the human influence on the Earth. With the entrance of the term, the Holocene age and the relative stability of its ecosystems are considered to end. The International Commission on Stratigraphy (of which Alejandro Cearreta, from the Basque Country, is a member) is currently debating whether the term should be approved. While a considerable part of environmental change is a direct result of the Industrial Revolution, some scientists also argue that the appearance of agriculture 8,000 years ago is also a crucial factor.

^[9] It is interesting to note here that the 2010 exhibition Principio Potosí in Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, could also be framed within this discourse. Many of the participants in the exhibition play different roles in Estimulantes: circulación y euforia. Alice Creisher, Andreas Siekmann, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Max Jorger Hinderer curated Principio Potosí, an exhibition which, extraordinarily, distanced European modernity from its love story with the Enlightenment and carried it over to the “New World” to remind it that other ways of constructing history are not only possible, but also necessary. Ines Doujak and John Barker were two of the artists in the show, and are with Alice Creisher in both exhibitions. See online at: http://www.museoreinasofia.es/exposiciones/principio-potosi-como-podemos-cantar-canto-senor-tierra-ajena [Accessed 1 March 2017].

^[10] Quoted in the artist book MAD MARGINAL Cahier #2, The Inadequate de Dora García published by Stenberg Press for the 54º Bienal de Venecia. For more information see: DELIGNY, FERNAND: Lo arácnido y otros textos, Editorial Cactus, Buenos Aires, 2015.

^[11] En TSING, ANNA: Anthropological Visions of Sustainable Futures, University. College London, February 2015. I refer here to Anna Tsing’s idea of the refugia in “Feral Biologies”, where she suggests that the turning point between the Holocene and the so-called Anthropocene came at the moment when the possibility of rebuilding most of the shelters of any species (human and non-human) no longer exists as an option, for instance after events such as desertification. TSING, ANNA: Anthropological Visions of Sustainable Futures, University College London, February 2015.

^[12] SOUSA SANTOS: Descolonizar el saber, reinventar el poder, Ediciones Trilce, Montevideo, 2010.