From Complot to Potlatch by Bruno Bosteels

The fact is that a critique capable of surpassing the spectacle must know how to bide its time. - Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

It would be insufficient to conclude that in the notion of the potlatch we can find a form of sociability that is totally foreign to self-interest, an economy of pleasure and waste incompatible with the cold cash nexus of money, or a radical break away from exchange and calculation in capitalist society. Yet this interpretation continues to be quite common among readers of Marcel Mauss's Essay on the Gift, or its even more ambitious speculative continuation in Georges Bataille's The Accursed Share. The idea is that only a return to a more noble and generous principle of exchange as gift, encapsulated in the potlatch, could save us from the homogeneous avarice of utilitarianism. For example, when in 2007 the Chilean theater director Alfredo Castro prepared an adaptation of Eltit's Mano de obra for the stage, Raquel Olea in her presentation of the play quoted the Bataillean notions of expenditure, sovereignty and inner experience, only to conclude with a reaffirmation of the useless utility of artistic creation. "Creation, from the point of view of power, is dilapidation, uselessness, something absolutely unproductive. But therein resides precisely its subversive power," she writes. And even more concisely: "Art's usefulness consists in this impossibility of serving any purpose whatsoever. "41