Brian Holmes: Profanity and the Financial Markets. A User's Guide to Closing the Casino.

Published in conjunction with the dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition in Kassel, Germany, 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series ranges from archival ephemera to conversations and commissioned essays. These notebooks express director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s curatorial vision for the exhibition.

Is the middle class our new revolutionary class? In his notebook, no. 064, Brian Holmes attempts to connect Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the Spanish “Indignados,” and the uprisings in North Africa. For Holmes, the link lies in the financial system—connecting the places where capital is jeopardized and the regions from which it is extracted. The transnational movement of demonstrators, and the dictates of financial capital, are analyzed from a cultural-critical perspective. Using the image of a casino, Holmes describes how after 1968 a generation of “middle-class heroes” emerged who approved the suppression of revolution. Today, the members of this “new class” are themselves subjected to speculating capital—and now a fear of the future, and loans and mortgage payments, force them, too, out onto the streets.

Brian Holmes is a cultural critic and autonomous researcher, based in Chicago.

Bilingual in English and German.

Published by Hatje Cantz, 2012, staple-bound softcover, 36 pages, 8.25 x 5.75 inches.