openEDsource

Andrew Hewitt: Choreography is a way of thinking about the relationship of aesthetics to politics

ana.vujanovic — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 00:26:42 -0700

Frakcija: The key concept and the title of your book is “social choreography” and you use it in relation to both dance and the aesthetic of everyday movement. How do you frame that concept and how is it related to choreography as artistic practice?

Andrew Hewitt: My methodology of “social choreography” is rooted in an attempt to think the aesthetic as it operates at the very base of social experience. I use the term social choreography to denote a tradition of thinking about social order that derives its ideal from the aesthetic realm and seeks to instill that order directly at the level of the body. In its most explicit form, this tradition has observed the dynamic choreographic configurations produced in dance and sought to apply those forms to the broader social and political sphere. Accordingly, such social choreographies ascribe a fundamental role to the aesthetic in its formulation of the political. Attempting to reconnect to a more radical sense of the aesthetic as something rooted in bodily experience, I further use the category of social choreography as a way of examining how the aesthetic is not purely superstructural, purely ideological. I do not claim that aesthetic forms do not reflect ideological positions: clearly they can and do. But they do not only reflect. My claim, instead, is that choreography designates a sliding or gray zone where discourse meets practice – a zone in which it was possible for an emerging bourgeois public sphere to work on and redefine the boundaries of aesthetics and politics.

This argument for the centrality of the aesthetic to the elaboration of social configurations places the critical project of social choreography in opposition to two alternative approaches to the consideration of dance. If the most obvious polemic is against that critical tradition that takes dance as a physical experience of metaphysical transcendence – i.e. against a vocabulary developed in Symbolist and aestheticist writings of the late nineteenth century – this study no less resolutely resists any reduction to the specific social “determinants” of dance, such as race, gender, or class. My argument will not be that these categories do not hold with respect to social choreography, but that in both the practice of choreography and in the critical discourses it generated, such categories were themselves being rehearsed and refined. The aesthetic thus functions in this study neither as a quasi-metaphysical realm separate from the socio-historical, nor as a practice that can be fully explained in terms of socio-historical analysis.

I began the book – as a literary critic – with the desire to challenge the traditional literary tropes of transcendence that have dogged scholarly studies of dance by literary critics. Obviously, dance has a privileged place in the pantheon of modernism. The prevailing modernist paradigm for thinking dance – inaugurated by the Romantics and carried through by the late nineteenth-century aestheticists – has consistently privileged the philosophical, aesthetic, and even religious question of individual “grace” over the politics of social choreography. By looking at choreography as the disposition of bodies in space, I wished to examine a more “lateral” transcendence. Indeed, as I point out in the book, early Enlightenment political theory often – as in Hobbes – took the freedom of bodies to move through space as the very basis of political freedom. To choreograph that movement is always to invoke such notions.

What I am calling “choreography” is not just a way of thinking about social order; it has also been a way of thinking about the relationship of aesthetics to politics. Aesthetic dance – and here we encounter the importance of the performative within our notion of social choreography – functions as a space in which social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. Consequently, choreography as an intrinsically performative aesthetic form cannot simply be identified with “the aesthetic” and set in opposition to the category of “the political” that it either tropes or pre-determines. In the bourgeois era, I argue that choreography has provided a discursive realm for articulating and working out the shifting, moving relation of aesthetics to politics.

Abstraction in choreography is always related to a “concreteness” of the movement – the more concrete (less gestural) the movement is, the more abstract it becomes. In your book you put an emphasis on abstraction as a distillation of social formations. If we are thinking about choreography between two poles of understanding: mimetic and performative, it seems that we are still missing one aspect and this is productive or poietic...

On the question of the “concrete” in dance, I think your question raises some important issues. I think it is most helpful to understand the concrete in its curious Hegelian formation. “A true concrete,” Hegel argues, “involves Being and Essence, and the total wealth of these two spheres with them.” Logic § 160 Note. In other words, the concrete is not something we should simply oppose to the abstract, but rather the instance in which something “essential” is revealed as dependent on its accidental occurrence. In my book, I work with the semiotics of Peirce to get at this problem by insisting upon the materiality of the signifier. Dance, as an aesthetic form, strikes me as the best example of this materiality – which is dynamic and dialectical rather than merely material and static. Thus, to think between “two poles of understanding: mimetic and performative” is to think undialectically. What dance allows us to perceive is that even the most mimetic forms of signification are, if you like, dependent upon their being performed. My favorite example from the book is Nijinsky’s final dance at the Suvretta House, where he claims to perform and expiate the guilt of Europe at the First World War. It is only when he falls and injures himself – that is, only when he performs an aesthetic lapse – that his aesthetic itself is actualized. Peirce talks of the materiality of the signifier as “knocking against” something – i.e. against the realities and contingencies of existence. That is what happens here – when Nijinsky “knocks against” the hard floor and injures himself, he does not break the semiotic code, he enables it. I see this moment – the “fall” into the realms of physical existence, if you like – as a concrete moment in the Hegelian sense. It is a moment in which the reliance of abstract signifiers at the moment of their physical performance is revealed. The “accident” of Nijinsky’s fall reveals itself as essential to the work his dance is to perform.

In terms of its engagement with current critical trends, the concept of social choreography marks my response to certain equivocations in the recent critical emphasis placed on the question of performativity. I felt that much that was interesting in this concept in the work of Judith Butler had subsequently been lost as a result of the term’s popularization in two diametrically opposed directions. On the one hand, there was what I would call the “ludic” tendency, according to which all identity is performance, all so-called “essentialism” is reactionary, etc. This tendency struck me as a banal and rather naïve celebration of some form of postmodern freedom. On the other hand, there was a tendency to stress the scripted nature of a performance and stress the unfreedom inherent in so many of our actions and interactions. Performativity became, here, a sort of anthropological concept focused on everyday rituals. This tendency lent itself to a form of critique of ideology no less banal than its counterpart: “you think you are just acting spontaneously, but look, let me show you the script.”

To some extent, your questions hint at this dichotomy when you speak of “two poles of understanding: mimetic and performative.” The “mimetic” polarity would be that discourse that claimed to uncover a hidden social script. What you term the performative would be that which stressed the moment of performance itself. It was the inevitability of this polarity that I wished to question. One questions this distinction, however, not by denying it. In other words, faced with two camps effectively arguing that the truth of performativity – or anything else, for that matter – lies on their side of the divide, one does not get any closer to the truth by denying the validity of the divide. Quite the opposite, the split is the truth.

To question this dichotomy also, to some extent, required questioning the distinction of aesthetic and non-aesthetic or, as you put it, the “aesthetic of everyday movement” and “choreography as artistic practice.” In stressing the notion of the performativity of the aesthetic I was led to think about performance in the more limited sense. My argument in the book is that dance has served as the aesthetic medium that most consistently sought to understand art as something immanently political: that is, as something that derives its political significance from its own status as praxis rather than from its adherence to a logically prior political ideology located elsewhere, outside art. Again, the aim is not to respond to an historically ossified distinction between life and art by insisting upon a continuum that renders them inseparable, but to examine the logic of the distinction. I think that recent work in cultural studies has gone a long way to demonstrate the historically and socially grounded nature of discursive distinctions between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic. My concern, however, is that such accounts afford a classic petitio principii by privileging one side of the debate. The aesthetic always appears as something determined within the parameters of a framing social discourse. I reject this.

It struck me that no aesthetic form better demonstrated this fact than choreography – where the formal medium cannot be abstracted from the medium through which subjects experience themselves. All formalism in dance is compromised by the fact that subjectivity is itself embodied – the body that enacts formal principles in dance is the same body through which the subject – so often under attack in formalist experimentation – presents itself. Similarly, even in the most mimetic of dance forms, the body that leaps leaps. Form and content are entangled not by virtue of some Yeatsian transcendence, but by virtue of the fact that without the body, they cannot exist.

Though coming from literature myself, I felt that there was a danger in the current mania for “reading” the body. I wished to trouble the regime of reading to ask whether there were not other modes of signification that were oriented toward production rather than reference. Rather than extending the realm of an episteme of reading, I wished to challenge it by turning to performance. Rather than taking text as a model for reading performance, I propose taking performance instead as a challenge to our model of “reading texts.” To question the status of a dance-interpretation on the grounds that it is, after all, a trope, a certain approximation of interpretive reading strategies, is to naturalize the act of reading itself as non-metaphoric, as the hegemonic medium for the production of meaning. Instead of asking what the performance analogues of literary techniques would be – e.g. What is a bodily metaphor? When is a gesture performative rather than denotative? What is a choreographic sentence? etc. – I wished to ask what literary studies might learn from performance itself. A study of social choreography entails opening us up to the many different ways in which meaning is produced in both aesthetic and social arenas. Dance, then, is not simply another object onto which text-based “reading” strategies can be projected; it is a motif, a challenge internal to the operation of textuality.

Pretty soon, however, I found it equally important to reject a tendency that pulled in the opposite direction – an aesthetic that stressed materiality, the brute somatic nature of the body. I believe that a romanticism of non-transcendence – a romanticism of the body, if you will, and one that is most troubling politically and ideologically – has emerged ever more insistently in recent years. One certainly encounters it in discussions of modern dance again and again. Perhaps in response to transcendental tendencies in classical dance – the tendency to efface the materiality of the body, the old Yeatsian impossibility of telling the dancer from the dance – modern choreography has tended toward what you call “concreteness.” As an antidote or reaction, this tendency is quite understandable, but nevertheless troubling for the ways it traduces the dialectical nature of the concrete. Not since the days of Feuerbach has it been intellectually respectable to think of materiality in such brute terms. The “concrete” cannot be reduced to the material, nor the “real” to the merely somatic experiences of a body.

Let us re-examine one of the examples I just gave; What is a bodily metaphor? Given the materiality of the semiotic process in performance – in short, its embodiedness – this question becomes almost nonsensical. A metaphorical leap and an actual leap are one and the same. A choreographic metaphor would always be of the nature of a catachresis. To reflect on catachresis – on what it means to speak of the “leg” of a table, to take the most common example – is to reflect on the ways in which rhetoric serves not only secondary, or metaphoric functions. If there is, after all, no “proper” term for what we “improperly” refer to as a table’s “leg,” the very referentiality of language itself comes into question. Whereas metaphor makes sense out of what it finds, this catachresis actually brings into being what we might ordinarily presume to have preceded it – its referent. This is the sense in which I want to insist upon the status of social choreography as catachresis – it really is the thing it wishes to signify. I believe that the tendency to identify abstraction with “concreteness” in choreography is dangerous. On the one hand, this tendency might lead us to think of the concrete in rather undialectical and crudely materialist terms. I believe that there is a romanticism of the somatic at the heart of some of the most rigorously “abstract” modern choreographies. Whereas it is easy to identify the ideological underpinnings of a balletic tradition that sought to transcend and, effectively, efface the human body, the pathos of “honesty” that so often accompanies the choreographic foregrounding of the body’s limits, lapses and sheer hard work in dance strikes me as even more disingenuous. Choreography is not just another of the things we “do” to bodies, but a reflection on – and enactment of – how bodies “do” things, and on the work that the work of art performs. Social choreography exists not parallel to the operation of social norms and strictures, nor is it entirely subject to those strictures. It serves – “catacritically,” we might say – to bring them into being.

This brings us to your concern about the productive or poietic function of dance. I am glad you pose this question, because it is precisely this function that I wish to privilege in my study. It is entirely lost within any consideration that accepts the binaries of mimetic and performative as you set them out. On the one hand, the function of the aesthetic sphere has always been to articulate the possibility of another way of life. The mere existence of “art” testifies to the insufficiency of life. The fictive function of art is its determinant. Yet on the other hand, as Adorno insists, “Erlebnisse sind kein Als Ob.” The experience of the aesthetic is – for all that it is fictive – no less an experience. In aesthetic performance, a fundamental dissatisfaction with what is is played out within what is. A performance indicates to the audience “what if things were this way...” – and for a moment they are.

This really brings me to the question of the implications of my work for choreography as artistic practice. The question for a choreographer, it seems to me, is how to work with this reality/irreality of the bodies s/he choreographs. By this I mean that choreography obliges us to dialectical thinking in ways that the unhelpful dichotomies you rightly outline do not. When teaching students about the nature of “the real” in performance, I often use the example of sitting in the audience of a play in which one’s lover is playing the romantic lead. We do not jump up in outrage when our beloved locks lips with his or her romantic counterpart in the play. We know that they are not “really” kissing. But, of course, they are. Lips touch lips as they do when I embrace my beloved. What we mean when we say that they are not “really” kissing is that we have codes for understanding the real that transcend mere materiality. They are kissing and they are not: performance always performs yet erases its own boundaries.

It is not my place to prescribe in any way at all, of course, but it seems to me that choreography becomes essentially conservative in one of many ways. It might accept the division of art and life, become mere divertissement. In this sense it becomes what Marcuse would call “affirmative.” On the other hand, it might reject that division and protest. In both cases, however, there is an unquestioned operative understanding of what is “real” at work. It is the function of choreography, I believe, to question that understanding – not in the name of a more fundamental notion of the real (a notion we might identify with hypostatized notions of truth, or with the materialist romance of the body), nor through some relativizing gesture that would reject truth outright. In dance productions, truth – and perhaps it seems old-fashioned to insist upon the truth content of art, as Adorno does, but without it, there is no need to talk of art – is of the nature of an event. Perhaps this is what choreography performs and re-performs – the belief that the truth is written in the future tense.

But then we could think about choreography as being an “affirmative” practice, or “affirmative” performance more in Badiouian terms, as prescriptive political action, as the forcing of an issue, the production of truth, at least for this moment that you mention above. Do you think that dance is capable of this political action today and what would be its political agenda?

For those such as I schooled in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the term “affirmative” has always been highly ambiguous with regard to aesthetic practice. Marcuse uses the term in a negative sense when speaking of art as a palliative, as something that “says yes” to the status quo. For Adorno, though, the affirmative value of art is, perhaps, less negative. “Erlebnisse,” he writes, “sind kein Als Ob.” In other words, even the experience of an illusory consolation nevertheless bears within itself a premonition of true experience.

When this experience is, as it were, an “embodied” experience, however, the situation becomes more complex. How can we conceptualize a physical “premonition” or differentiate such an experience from an experience of the actual. The deferral implicit in a disinterested physical experience would seem to be impossible (at least, for the dancer). You will recall that “disinterest”, in the Kantian sense, relies upon the superfluity of the physical existence of the object from which we derive pleasure. He uses the example of a painting of a piece of fruit and argues that the pleasure we derive does not rely upon the existence of the fruit itself as something a hungry viewer could eat. Kant argues here from within a representational paradigm, but the question becomes more complex once one moves into the realm of a non-representational aesthetic. If aesthetic pleasure is derived from the signification itself rather than from its signified (from the painting of the fruit rather than from an imagining of the fruit itself), the object that does not “need” to exist for our experience of aesthetic pleasure could then be construed as the aesthetic object itself. In other words, there is something self-destructive in the nature of aesthetic pleasure. Moving one step further into the realm of a performative aesthetic, the medium that makes possible the play of signification – the body – and the medium of “reception” through which pleasure can be experienced – likewise, the body – would seem to be one. An aesthetic lack of “interest” in the existence of the body that dances seems to entail a concomitant dissolution of the body that experiences. Clearly, then, it seems that our concept of body needs some differentiation. I attempt such a differentiation elsewhere in an essay on “Body and Soma in Adorno” and it seems to be something that is central to Badiou’s presentation of the event.

Badiou seems attuned to the problem when he discusses the affirmative in terms of the bringing into being of a subject that is not reducible to the body. The body is not simply the trace of the subject – and the tendency to portray it as such is precisely that which I have been opposing in my criticism of a trend toward the romanticization of the body and the reinstating of a kind of organicism that I find politically very troubling. Now whether or not one thinks this “affirmative” aspect of the event in terms of a prescription is a vexing question. Without wanting to either critique or support Badiou – whose thoughts on the matter I have not examined well enough – I would tend by instinct to resist any prescriptive function for aesthetic production. Having worked extensively in the past on the question of fascist aesthetics, I am wary of any attempt to mix aesthetics and politics in anything but the most mediated of fashions. At best I might think in terms of rehearsal – that is, the rehearsal of alternative social possibilities and formations. That rehearsal, moreover, might itself be thought in terms of the French répétition as something that is not merely future-oriented, but in fact repeats and re-runs experiences. Such a rehearsal would be both the freeing up of possibilities and the mastering of them. Returning to Adorno’s formulation – “Erlebnisse sind kein Als Ob” – I might begin to answer your question by seeing in performance a sort of inversion of the structure of the sublime. Instead of a spiritual faculty rescuing the subject from a fear of physical annihilation – we have the body forestalling the annihilation of the spirit.

I like to think of this in terms of Lyotard’s discussion of the sublime in the avant-garde, where he claims that the sublime experience is a question of sorts, the question “Is it happening?” Can we still ask this question with respect to an embodied experience? Surely we know in choreography, don’t we, whether or not “it is happening”, since “it” is happening in and through our own body? Well no, we do not – for what we do not know is who – or what – the subject of that experience would be. The body? The “spirit”? This is what I see as so exciting about a shift to performative notions of the aesthetic – the way in which the persistence of the body resists traditional notions of aesthetic transcendence, but nevertheless repeats and rehearses the trajectory of sublime experience. In other words, it is no longer a question in aesthetic experience of operating from the position of “spirit”, but nor can it be a question of ditching the transcendent in the name of an immanent – and resolutely ideological – body.

Of course, questioning the status of the subject necessarily questions the possibility of political action since it brings into doubt the status of the political agent. But the body serves at the same time as the reminder of the need for political action. In Social Choreography I draw a distinction between Isadora Duncan’s claim that the pain inflicted on the dancer’s feet in ballet is a sure marker of its aesthetic and political “wrongness” and her subsequent assumption that a painless dance must, therefore, be culturally and socially right, somehow. In the move from the critical function of pain to the affirmative function of painlessness, I see the slip into ideology. A painful aesthetic is, indeed, wrong – but it also articulates that wrong. To move beyond this critical function to a painless aesthetic is to move into the realm of the affirmative and of ideology, by embracing too prescriptive a role for aesthetic performance itself. To take up again the example of Nijinsky’s final dance, in which he falls and bloodies his foot. His pain, I argue, is the prerequisite of significance – the price the body pays for its cultural passage beyond the realm of mere soma. To this extent – and I am sorry if it seems rather etiolated as a form of politics – I would envisage an aesthetic that concerns itself less with a political action to be projected elsewhere, beyond itself, but that seeks instead to articulate fully the preconditions of its own existence. Aesthetic practice would, therefore, entail not the utopian imagination of a condition in which pain would be absent, but a confrontation with pain’s inevitability as the very ground of all existence – the subject’s confrontation with the object, the clash of the body in motion and the ground across which it moves.

One of the most interesting facts about your book is that it does not come from a performance studies context which dominates in the research of cultural performance. How do you see your work in relation to performance studies? I like your proposal of “taking performance as a challenge to our model of ‘reading texts’” very much, but I'm still not completely sure of its real methodological consequences or its reality. How would the results of this challenge, for example, look in the reading of your own book? Would it bring us to more artistic practice or political action or...?

As to the questions regarding alternative modes of interpretation that would undercut models of “reading” the body and touching upon my own status as a literary scholar, I think the two can be treated together. You are clearly right when you indicate that it is conceptually easier to think of the possibility to an alternative to the paradigm of writing and reading that governs our regime of interpretation than it is to enact one. Perhaps, as a literary scholar, I intended a provocation more than a positive indication. However, my sense is that recent shifts toward cultural studies have tended to install a form of positivism in interpretation – a positivism in which some kind of hypostatized History serves as the key to all interpretation. I very much wish to resist this. While it is clearly important to resist the glib tropes of transcendence so central to literary modernism’s understanding of dance, it is equally important, I think, to resist the invocation of categories such as race, gender, class etc. as the key determinants of our interpretation. We should resist not because such categories are not important, but because they are categories that do not simply exist externally to the cultural artifacts they are called to explain. For me, a “revolutionary” aesthetic – if I may invoke a rather overused notion – is not one that can be somehow translated back into a revolutionary discourse of the political, or into a program of political practice. This is not, for me, the status of the aesthetic. A revolutionary aesthetic would be one that scrambles the possibility of any such one-to-one translation. How often does one encounter the absurdity of performances that have as their aim the representation of the death of the subject – as if that death had not already taken with it the possibility of any such simplistic “representation.”

In a sense, my training in literary studies puts me at something of a disadvantage in talking about my “relation to performance studies” because that relation, I think, might be better explicated from the other side of the dialogue, from the perspective of performance itself. It is certainly not my aim to offer prescriptions to performers, but to raise possibilities – perhaps in the realm of theory only – that they themselves might then articulate. In writing the book, I felt very strongly that Nijinsky served as the cultural “hero” of my text, not for his conscious response to the theories I invoke to talk of dance, but for his ability to shed light on those theories. In particular, I think of the ways in which Nijinsky helped me understand the logic of the semiotic of Peirce for example. At several points in the book, I sought to take up key organizing categories of cultural studies – Nijinsky as a cultural “icon” of modernity, for example – and to subject the categories themselves to scrutiny from that perspective. What is an icon? Is there something in the structure of the icon that can be elucidated with specific reference to dance? If an icon is a motivated sign, what does the art of motion have to say about it? As a literary scholar, one might be alert to tropes and motifs – to the motivum – but are we doing violence to the motivum – that is, to our own critical categories – if we cannot think of its relation to motion? These are the kinds of question I sought to pose.

It might seem at first sight that my resistance to a direct politicization of the performative reflects a failure to conceive of agency with regard to action. I do not think this is the case, however. Certainly, my work foregrounds the collective nature of choreography, but I do not believe either that the problem of the subject – the problem of modernism, par excellence – can be solved by opposing the bourgeois individual to a collective that simply replicates the logic of the subject on a grand scale. When I try to think of instances of the performative production of subjectivity within the political realm, unfortunately, I arrive again and again at examples from the far right. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe talk of this when they discuss the “mythic” quality of fascism – by which they mean not the belief in a specific set of (for example, Germanic) myths, but a belief in the power of belief itself to produce a subject of history. By foregrounding the body, however, I wish to stress that I have no faith in such belief – no mythic belief in belief itself. The ability of the mythic subject to conjure itself – ex nihilo – from the abyss, is frustrated by the reliance of that subject upon an objective and embodied existence. To this extent, the objective – one might even say “abject” – status of the body within such thinking is transvalued. Whereas fascism relies eventually on a body that transcends itself into pure raciality, for me the body that “knocks up against” reality – to use Peirce’s term for explaining the work of the semiotic – becomes “objective” in both a somatic and historical sense. The political agent, for me, is neither the transcendental subject, or even just the bourgeois subject of ego psychology, nor is it a purely somatic body that acts from some form of urge or untrammeled pre-social drive. It is the one operating through the other – the subject aware of its historical objectivity through the medium of its body. I write, perhaps, not of history’s subjects, but of its objects.

THE EMANCIPATED SPECTATOR

ana.vujanovic — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:51:42 -0700

TEXT:

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I gave to this talk the title: «the emancipated spectator». As I understand it, a title is always a challenge. It sets forth the presupposition that an expression makes sense, that there is a link between separate terms, which also means between concepts, problems and theories which seem at first sight to bear no direct relation on each other. In a sense, this title expresses the perplexity that was mine when Marten Spangberg invited me to deliver what is supposed to be the “keynote” lecture of this academy. He told me that he wanted me to introduce this collective reflection on “spectatorship”, because he had been impressed by my book The Ignorant Schoolmaster. I first wondered what kind of relationship there could be between the cause and the effect? This an academy bringing together artists and people involved in the world of art, theatre and performance on the issue of spectatorship to-day. The Ignorant Schoolmaster was a meditation on the eccentric theory and the strange destiny of Joseph Jacotot, a French professor, who, at the beginning of the 19th century, made a mess in the academic world by asserting that an ignorant could teach another ignorant what he did not know himself, proclaiming the equality of intelligences and calling for intellectual emancipation against the standard idea of the instruction of the people. His theory sank in oblivion in the middle of the 19th century. I thought it necessary to revive it in the 1980’s in order to put a new kind of mess in the debate about Education and its political stakes. But what use can be made, in the contemporary artistic debate, of a man whose artistic universe could be epitomized by names such as Demosthenes, Racine and Poussin?

On second thoughts, I thought that the very distance, the lack of any obvious relationship between Jacotot’s theory and the issue of spectatorship to-day could be a chance. It could provide the opportunity of taking a radical distance from the theoretical and political presuppositions which still shore up, even in postmodern disguise, most of the debate on theatre, performance and spectatorship. I got the impression that it was possible to make sense of the relationship, on condition that we try to piece together the network of presuppositions that put the issue of spectatorship at a strategic cross point in the discussion of the relationship between art and politics and draw the global pattern of rationality on the background of which we have been addressing for a long time the political issues of theatre and spectacle. I am using here those terms in a very general sense, including dance, performance and all the kinds of spectacle performed by acting bodies in front of a collective audience.

The numerous debates and polemics that had called the theatre into question all along our history can be traced back to a very simple contradiction. Let us call it the paradox of the spectator, a paradox which may prove more crucial than the well-known paradox of the actor. This paradox can be summed up in very simple terms. There is no theatre without spectators (were it only a single and hidden one, as in Diderot’s fictional representation of Le Fils naturel) . But spectatorship is a bad thing. Being a spectator means looking at a spectacle. And looking is a bad thing, for two reasons. Firstly looking is put as the opposite of knowing. It means being in front of an appearance without knowing the conditions of production of that appearance or the reality which is behind it. Secondly, looking is put as the opposite of acting. He or she who looks at the spectacle remains motionless on his or her seat, without any power of intervention. Being a spectator means being passive. The spectator is separated from the capacity of knowing in the same way as he is separated from the possibility of acting.
From that diagnosis it is possible to draw two opposing conclusions. The first one is that theatre in general is a bad thing, that is the stage of illusion and passivity which has to be dismissed in favour of what it forbids: knowledge and action: the action of knowing and the action led by knowledge. This conclusion has been drawn long ago by Plato: the theatre is the place where ignorant people are invited to see suffering people. What takes place on the stage is a pathos, the manifestation of a disease, the disease of desire and pain, which is nothing but the self-division of the subject caused by the lack of knowledge. The “action “of theatre is nothing but the transmission of that disease through another disease, the disease of the empirical vision which looks at shadows. Theatre is the transmission of the ignorance which makes people ill through the medium of ignorance which is optical illusion. Therefore a good community is a community which does not allow the mediation of the theatre, a community whose collective virtues are directly incorporated in the living attitudes of his participants.
This seems to be the more logical conclusion of the problem. We know however that it is not the conclusion that was most often drawn. The most usual conclusion runs as follows: theatre involves spectatorship and spectatorship is a bad thing. Therefore we need a new theatre, a theatre without spectatorship. We need a theatre where the optical relation- implied in the word theatron - is subjected to another relation, implied in the word drama. Drama means action. The theatre is a place where an action is actually performed by living bodies in front of living bodies. The latter may have resigned their power. But this power is resumed in the performance of the former, in the intelligence that builds it, in the energy that it conveys. The true sense of the theatre must be predicated on that acting power. Theatre has to be brought back to its true essence which is the contrary of what is usually known as theatre. What has to be pursued is a theatre without spectators, a theatre where spectators will no longer be spectators, where they will learn things instead of being captured by images and become active participants in a collective performance instead of being passive viewers.

This turn has been understood in two ways which are antagonistic in their principle though they have often been mixed in theatrical performance and in its legitimization. On the one hand, the spectator must be released from the passivity of the viewer, who is fascinated by the appearance standing in front of him, and identifies with the characters on the stage. He must be proposed the spectacle of something strange, unusual, which stands as an enigma and demands that he investigate the reason for that strangeness. He must be pressed to switch from the status of the passive viewer to the status of the scientist who observes phenomena and looks for their cause. On the other hand the spectator has to leave the status of a mere observer who remains still and untouched in front of a distant spectacle. He must be dragged away from his delusive mastery, drawn into the magic power of theatrical action where he will exchange the privilege of the rational viewer for the possession of its true vital energies.
We acknowledge those two paradigmatic attitudes epitomized by Brecht’s epic theatre and Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. On the one hand, the spectator has to become more distant, on the other hand he has to loose any distance. On the one hand he has to change his look for a better look, on the other hand he has to leave the very position of the viewer. The project of reforming the theatre ceaselessly wavered between these two poles of distant inquiry and vital embodiment. This means that the presuppositions which underpin the search for a new theatre are the same which underpinned the dismissal of theatre. The reformers of the theatre in fact resumed the terms of Plato’s polemics. They only rearranged them by borrowing from the platonician dispositif another idea of the theatre. Plato opposed to the poetic and democratic community of the theatre a “true” community: a choreographic community where nobody remains a motionless spectator, where everybody is moving according to the communitarian rhythm which is determined by the mathematical proportion.

The reformers of the theatre restaged the platonic opposition between choreia and theatre as an opposition between the true living essence of the theatre and the simulacrum of the “spectacle”. The theatre then became the place where passive spectatorship had to be turned into its contrary: the living body of a community enacting its own principle. In the text introducing the topic of our academy we can read that “ theatre remains the only place of direct confrontation of the audience with itself as a collective”. We can give to the sentence a restrictive meaning that would merely contrast the collective audience of the theatre with the individual visitors of an exhibition or the sheer collection of individuals looking at a movie. But obviously the sentence means much more. It means that “theatre” remains the name for an idea of the community as a living body. It conveys an idea of the community as self-presence opposed to the distance of the representation.

Since German romanticism, the concept of theatre has been associated with that idea of the living community. Theatre appeared as a form of the aesthetic constitution – meaning the sensory constitution - of the community: the community as a way of occupying time and space, as a set of living gestures and attitudes which stands before any kind of political form and institution : community as a performing body instead of an apparatus of forms and rules . In that way theatre was associated with the romantic idea of the aesthetic revolution: the idea of a revolution which would not only change laws and institutions but transform the sensory forms of human experience. The reform of theatre thus meant the restoration of its authenticity as an assembly or a ceremony of the community. Theatre is an assembly where the people become aware of their situation and discuss their own interests, Brecht will say after Piscator. Theatre is the ceremony where the community is given the possession of its own energies, Artaud will state. If theatre is put as an equivalent of the true community, the living body of the community opposed to the illusion of the mimesis, it comes as no surprise that the attempt at restoring Theatre in its true essence take place on the very background of the critique of the spectacle .
What is the essence of the spectacle in Guy Debord’s theory? It is externality. The spectacle is the reign of vision. Vision means externality. Now externality means the dispossession of one’s own being. “The more man contemplates, the less he is”, Debord says. This may sound anti-platonician. Obviously the main source for the critique of the spectacle is Feuerbach’s critique of religion. It is what sustains that critique, namely the romantic idea of truth as unseparateness. But that idea itself still keeps in line with the platonician disparagement of the mimetic image. The contemplation that Debord denounces is the theatrical or mimetic contemplation, the contemplation of the suffering which is provoked by division. “Separation is the alpha and the omega of the theatre”. What man contemplates in this scheme is the activity that has been stolen to him, it is his own essence, torn away from him, turned foreign to him, hostile to him, making for a collective world whose reality is nothing but man’s own dispossession.

In such a way there is no contradiction between the search for a theatre achieving its own essence and the critique of the spectacle. The “good” theatre is posited as a theatre that uses its separate reality in order to suppress it, to turn the theatrical form into a form of life of the community. The paradox of the spectator is part of this intellectual dispositif which keeps in line, even in the name of the theatre , with the platonician dismissal of the theatre. This dispositif still sets to work some ground ideas which have to be brought back into question. More precisely what has to be questioned is the very footing on which those ideas are based. It is a whole set of relations, resting on some key equivalences and some key oppositions: equivalence of theatre and community, of seeing and passivity, of externality and separation, mediation and simulacrum; oppositions between collective and individual, image and living reality, activity and passivity, self-possession and alienation.

This set of equivalences and oppositions makes for a rather tricky dramaturgy of guilt and redemption. Theatre is charged with making spectators passive while its very essence is supposed to consist in the self-activity of the community. As a consequence it sets itself the task of reversing its effect and compensating for its own guilt by giving back to the spectators their self-consciousness or self-activity. The theatrical stage and the theatrical performance thus become the vanishing mediation between the evil of the spectacle and the virtue of the true theatre. They propose to the collective audience performances intended to teach the spectators how they can stop to be spectators and become performers of a collective activity. Either, according to the Brechtian paradigm, the theatrical mediation makes them aware of the social situation on which it rests itself and prompts them to act in consequence. Or, according to the Artaudian scheme it makes them leave the position of spectators: instead of being in front of a spectacle, they are surrounded by the performance, dragged into the circle of the action which gives them back their collective energy. In both cases the theatre is a self-suppressing mediation.
This is the point where the descriptions and propositions of intellectual emancipation can get into the picture and help us reframe it. Obviously this idea of a self-suppressing mediation is well-known to us. It is exactly the process which is supposed to take place in the pedagogical relation. In the pedagogical process the role of the schoolmaster is posited as the act of suppressing the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignorant. His lessons and exercises are aimed at continuously reducing the gap between knowledge and ignorance. Unfortunately, in order to reduce the gap, he has to reinstate it ceaselessly. In order to replace ignorance by the adequate knowledge, he must always run one step ahead of the ignorant who looses his ignorance. The reason for this is simple: in the pedagogical scheme, the ignorant is not only the one who does not know what he does not know. He is the one who ignores that he does not know what he does not know and ignores how to know it. The master is not only he who exactly knows what remains unknown to the ignorant. He also knows how to make it knowable, at what time and what place, according to what protocol. On the one hand, pedagogy is set up as a process of objective transmission: one part of knowledge after another part: a word after another word, a rule or a theorem after another. This part of knowledge is supposed to be exactly conveyed from the master’s mind or the page of the book into the mind of the pupil. But this equal transmission is predicated on a relation of inequality. The master alone knows the right way, time and place for that “equal” transmission, because he knows something that the ignorant will never know, short of becoming a master himself, something which is more important that the knowledge conveyed. He knows the exact distance between ignorance and knowledge. That pedagogical distance between a determined ignorance and a determined knowledge is in fact a metaphor. It is the metaphor of a radical break between the way of the ignorant and the way of the master, the metaphor of a radical break between two intelligences.
The master cannot ignore than the so-called “ignorant” who is in front of him knows in fact a lot of things, that he has learnt on its own, by looking and listening around him, by figuring out the meaning of what he has seen and heard, repeating what he has heard and known by chance, comparing what he discovers with what he already knew and so on. He cannot ignore that the ignorant has made by this way the apprenticeship which is the condition of any other: the apprenticeship of his mother tongue. But for him this is only the knowledge of the ignorant: the knowledge of the little child who sees and hears at random, compares and guesses by chance and repeats by routine , without understanding the reason for the effects that he observes and reproduces. The role of the master is to break with that process of groping by hit-and-miss . It is to teach the pupil the knowledge of the knowledgeable, in its own way: the way of the progressive method which dismisses all groping and all chance, by explaining items in order, from the simplest to the most complex, according to what the pupil is able of understanding, with respect to its age or its social background and social destination.

The first knowledge that the master owns is the “knowledge of ignorance”. It is the presupposition of a radical break between two forms of intelligence. This is also the first knowledge that he transmits to the student: the knowledge that he has to be explained to in order to understand, the knowledge that he cannot understand on his own. It is the knowledge of his incapacity. In that way, progressive instruction is the endless verification of its starting point: inequality. That endless verification of inequality is what Jacotot calls the process of stultification. The opposite of stultification is emancipation. Emancipation is the process of verification of the equality of intelligence. The equality of intelligence is not the equality of all manifestations of intelligence. It is the equality of intelligence in all its manifestations. It means that there is no gap between two forms of intelligence. The human animal learns everything as he has learnt his mother tongue , as he has learnt to venture through the forest of things and signs which surrounds him in order to take his place among his fellow humans: by observing, comparing one thing with another thing, one sign with one fact , one sign with another sign, and repeating the experiences he has first made by chance . If the “ignorant” who does not know how to read , knows only one thing by heart, be it a simple prayer, he can compare this knowledge with something that he still ignores: the words of the same prayer written on a paper. He can learn, sign after sign, the resemblance of what he ignores with what he knows. He can do it if , at each step, he observes what is in front of him, tells what he has seen and verifies what he has told. From this ignorant up to the scientist which builds hypotheses, it is always the same intelligence which is at work: an intelligence which makes figures and comparisons in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and to understand what another intelligence tries to communicate to it in turn.
This poetic work of translation is the first condition of any apprenticeship. Intellectual emancipation, as Jacotot conceived of it, means the awareness and the enactment of that equal power of translation and counter-translation. Emancipation entails an idea of distance opposed to the stultifying one. Speaking animals are distant animals who try to communicate through the forest of signs. It is that other sense of distance that the “ignorant master” – the master who ignores inequality- is teaching. Distance is not an evil that should be abolished. It is the normal condition of any communication. It is not a gap which calls for an expert in the art of suppressing it. The distance that the “ ignorant” has to cover is not the gap between his ignorance and the knowledge of the master. It is the way between what he already knows and what he still does not know but can learn by the same process. To help him to cover it, the “ignorant master” needs not be ignorant. He only has to dissociate his knowledge from his mastery. He does not teach his knowledge to the students. He commands them to venture forth in the forest, to tell what they see, what they think of what they have seen, to check it and so on. What he ignores is the gap between two intelligences. It is the linkage between the knowledge of the knowledgeable and the ignorance of the ignorant. Any distance is a casual one. Each intellectual act weaves a casual thread between an ignorance and a knowledge .No kind of social hierarchy can be predicated on that sense of distance.

What is the relevance of this story with respect to the question of the spectator? We are no more in the times when the dramaturges wanted to explain to their audience the truth about social relations and the good way to do away with domination. But it is not enough to loose his own illusions . On the contrary it often happens that the loss of their illusions lead the dramaturges or the performers to increase the pressure on the spectator: maybe he will know what has to be done, if the performance changes him , if it sets him apart from his passive attitude and makes him an active participant in the common world. This is the first point that the reformers of the theatre share with the stultifying pedagogues : the idea of the gap between two positions. Even when the dramaturge or the performer does not know what he wants the spectator to do, he knows at least that he has to do something: switching from passivity to activity.

But why not turn things around? Why not think, in this case too, that it is precisely the attempt at suppressing the distance which constitutes the distance itself ? Why identify the fact of being seated motionless with inactivity, if not by the presupposition of a radical gap between activity and inactivity? Why identify “looking” with “passivity” if not by the presupposition that looking means looking at the image or the appearance , that it means being separated from the reality which always is behind the image? Why identify hearing with being passive, if not by the presupposition that acting is the opposite of speaking , etc, etc.? All those oppositions – looking/knowing, looking/acting, appearance/reality , activity/passivity are much more than logical oppositions. They are what I can call a partition of the sensible, a distribution of the places and of the capacities or the incapacities attached to those places. Put in other terms, they are allegories of inequality. This is why you can change the values given to each position without changing the meaning of the oppositions themselves. For instance, you can exchange the positions of the superior and the inferior. The spectator is usually disparaged because he does nothing , while the performers on the stage – or the workers outside – do something with their body. But it is easy to turn matters around by stating that they who act, they who work with their body are obviously inferior to those who are able to look: those who can contemplate ideas, foresee the future or take a global view of our world . The positions can be switched but the structure remains the same. What counts in fact is only the statement of the opposition between two categories : there is one population that cannot do what the other population does. There is capacity on one side and incapacity on the other.
Emancipation starts from the opposite principle, the principle of equality. It begins when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting and understand that the distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection. It starts when we realize that looking also is an action which confirms or modifies that distribution , and that “interpreting the world” is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it . The spectator is active, as the student or the scientist : he observes, he selects , compares, interprets. He ties up what he observes with many other things that he has observed on other stages , in other kind of spaces .He makes his poem with the poem that is performed in front of him . She participates in the performance if she is able to tell her own story about the story which is in front of her. This also means if she is able to undo the performance , for instance to deny the corporeal energy that it is supposed to convey here in the present and transform it into a mere image , if she can link it with something that she has read in a book or dreamt about a story , that she has lived or fancied. They are distant viewers and interpreters of what is performed in front of them. They pay attention to the performance to the extent that they are distant.

This is the second key point: the spectators see, feel and understand something to the extent that they make their poem as the poet has done, as the actors, dancers or performers have done. The dramaturge would like them to see this thing, feel that feeling, understand this lesson of what they see, and get into that action in consequence of what they have seen, felt and understood. He sets in the same presupposition as the stultifying master: the presupposition of an equal, undistorted transmission. The master presupposes that what the student learns is the same thing as what he teaches to him. It is what is involved in the idea of transmission: there is something - a knowledge, a capacity, an energy – which is on one side, in one mind or one body- and that must be transferred onto the other side, into the other’s mind or body. The presupposition is that the process of learning is not only the effect of its cause –teaching - but that it is the transmission of the cause : what the student learns is the knowledge of the master. That identity of the cause and the effect is the principle of stultification . On the contrary ,the principle of emancipation is the dissociation of the cause and the effect. The paradox of the ignorant master lies there. The student of the ignorant master learns what his master does not know, since his master commands it to look for and to tell everything that he finds out on the way and verifies that he is actually looking for it. The student learns something as an effect of his master’s mastery . But he does not learn his master’s knowledge.

The dramaturge or the performer does not want to “teach” something, indeed. There is some distrust today regarding the idea of using the stage as a way of teaching . They only want to bring about a form of awareness or a force of feeling or action. But they still make the supposition that what will be felt or understood will be what they have put in their own dramaturgy or performance. They presuppose the equality – meaning the homogeneity - of the cause and the effect. As we know, this equality rests on an inequality. It rests on the presupposition that there is a good knowledge and good practice of the “distance” and of the means of suppressing it. Now the distance takes on two forms. There is the distance between the performers and the spectators. But there is also the distance inherent in the performance itself, as it stands as a “spectacle” between the idea of the artist and the feeling and interpretation of the spectator. This spectacle is a third thing , to which both parts can refer but which prevents any kind of “equal” or “undistorted” transmission. It is a mediation between them. That mediation of a third term is crucial in the process of intellectual emancipation. To prevent stultification there must be something between the master and the student. The same thing which links them must separate them. Jacotot posited the book as that in-between thing. The book is that material thing, foreign to both the master and the student, where they can verify what the student has seen, what he has told about it, what he thinks of what he has told.
This means that the paradigm of intellectual emancipation is clearly opposed to another idea of emancipation on which the reform of theatre has often been predicated : the idea of emancipation as the re-appropriation of a self which had been lost in a process of separation. The debordian critique of the spectacle still rests on the feuerbachian thinking of representation as an alienation of the self : the human being puts its human essence out of him by framing a celestial world to which the real human world is submitted . In the same way the essence of human activity is distanced, alienated from men in the exteriority of the spectacle. The mediation of the “third term” thus appears as the instance of separation, dispossession and treachery. An idea of the theatre predicated on that idea of the spectacle conceives the externality of the stage as a kind of transitory state which has to be superseded . The suppression of that exteriority thus becomes the telos of the performance . That program demands that the spectators be on the stage and the performers in the auditorium. It demands that the very difference between the two spaces be abolished, that the performance take place anywhere else than in a theatre . For sure many improvements of the theatrical performance resulted from that breaking of the traditional distribution of the places. But the “redistribution” of the places is one thing, the demand that the theatre achieve, as its essence, the gathering of an unseparate community, is another thing . The first one means the invention of new forms of intellectual adventure, the second means a new form of platonic assignment of the bodies to their good place, their “communal” place.

This presupposition against mediation is connected with a third one: the presupposition that the essence of the theatre is the essence of the community. The spectator is supposed to be redeemed when he is no more an individual , when he is restored to the status of a member of a community, when he is carried in the flood of the collective energy or led to the position of the citizen who acts as a member of the collective . The less the dramaturge knows what the spectators must do as a collective, the more he knows that they must become a collective, turn their addition into the community that they virtually are. It is high time, I think, to bring back into question the idea of the theatre as a specifically communitarian place. It is supposed to be such a place because , on the stage, real living bodies give the performance for people who are physically present together in the same place. In that way it is supposed to provide some unique sense of community, radically different from the situation of the individuals watching on the TV or the spectators of a movie who are in front of mere projected images. Strange as it may seem, the generalization of the use of the images and of all kinds of media in theatrical performances didn’t change the presupposition. Images may take the place of living bodies. But, as long as the spectators are gathered here, the living and communitarian essence of the theatre appears to be saved so that it seems possible to escape the question: what does specifically happen between the spectators of a theatre which would not happen elsewhere? Is there something more interactive, more common to them than to the individuals who look at the same time the same show on their TV?

I think that this “something” is just the presupposition that the theatre is communitarian by itself. That presupposition of what “theatre” means always runs ahead of the performance and predates its actual effects. But in a theatre, or in front of a performance, just as in a museum, a school or a street, there are only individuals, weaving their own way in the forest of words, acts and things that stand in front of them or around them. The collective power which is common to the spectators is not the status of members of a collective body. Nor is it a peculiar kind of interactivity. It is the power of translating in their own way what they are looking at. It is the power to connect it with the intellectual adventure which makes any of them similar to any other in so far as his or her way does not look like any other. The common power is the power of the equality of intelligence. This power binds individuals together to the very extent that it keeps them apart from each over, able to weave with the same power their own way. What has to be put to test by our performances – whether it be teaching or performing, speaking , writing, doing art , etc, is not the capacity of aggregation of a collective . It is the capacity of the anonyms, the capacity which makes anybody equal to everybody. This capacity works through unpredictable and irreducible distances. It works through an unpredictable and irreducible play of associations and dissociations.

Associating and dissociating instead of being the privileged medium which conveys the knowledge or the energy that makes people active: this could be the principle of an “emancipation of the spectator” which means the emancipation of any of us as a spectator. Spectatorship is not the passivity has to be turned into activity. It is our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know as spectators who link what they see with what they have seen and told, done and dreamt. There is no privileged medium as there is no privileged starting point. There are everywhere starting points and knot points from which we learn something new, if we dismiss firstly the presupposition of the distance, secondly the distribution of the roles, thirdly the borders between the territories. We have not to turn spectators into actors. We have to acknowledge that any spectator already is an actor of his own story and that the actor also is the spectator of the same kind of story. We have not to turn the ignorant into learned persons, or, according to a mere scheme of overturn, make the student or the ignorant the master of his masters.

Let me make a little detour through my own political and academic experience. I belong to a generation which was poised between two competing statements: according to the first , those who had the intelligence of the social system had to teach it to those who suffered from it and would act in order to overthrow that system ; according to the second , the supposed learned persons in fact were ignorant : as they knew nothing of what exploitation and rebellion were , they had to become the students of the so-called ignorant workers. Therefore I tried to re-elaborate Marxist theory in order to give its theoretical weapons to a new revolutionary movement , then to learn from those who worked in the fabrics what exploitation and rebellion meant. For me, as for many other people in my generation , none of those attempts proved really successful . That’s why I decided to look in the history of the worker’s movement for the reason of all the mismatches between the workers and the intellectuals who had come and visited them , in order either to instruct them or to be instructed by them . I was lucky enough to find out that it was not a matter of relationship between knowledge and ignorance, no more than between knowing and acting or individuality and community. One day in May, during the 70’s, as I was looking at a worker’s letters from the 1830’s in order to find what the condition and the consciousness of workers was at the time , I found out something quite different : the adventures of two visitors ,on another day in another time of May, one hundred and forty years before . One of the two correspondents had just been introduced into the utopian community of the saint-simonians and he told his friend the schedule of his days in utopia: works, exercises, games, choirs and stories . His friend in turn told him the story of a country party that he had just done with two other workers in order to enjoy his last Sunday leisure . But it was not the usual Sunday leisure of the worker restoring his physical and mental forces for the following week of work. It was in fact a breakthrough into another kind leisure: the leisure of the aesthetes who enjoy the forms , lights and shades of Nature , of the philosophers who spend their time exchanging metaphysical hypotheses in a country inn and of the apostles who set out to communicate their faith to the chance companions they meet in any inn.
Those workers who should have provided me information about the conditions of labour and the forms of class-consciousness in the 1830’s provided in fact something quite different: a sense of likeness or equality : they too were spectators and visitors amidst their own class . Their activity as propagandists could not be torn apart from their “passivity” as mere strollers and contemplators. The chronic of their leisure meant a reframing of the very relationship between doing, seeing and saying . As they became “spectators” , they overthrew the distribution of the sensible which had it that those who work have no time left to stroll and look at random , that the members of a collective body have no time to be “individuals” . This is what emancipation means: the blurring of the opposition between they who look and they who act, they who are individuals and they who are members of a collective body. What those “days” brought them was not the knowledge and energy for a future action. It was the reconfiguration hic et nunc of the distribution of Time and Space . Workers’ emancipation was not about acquiring the knowledge of their condition . It was about configuring a time and a space that invalidated the old distribution of the sensible, dooming the workers to do nothing of their night but restoring their forces to work the next day .

Understanding the sense of that break in the heart of Time also meant setting to work another kind of knowledge, predicated not on the presupposition of the gap but on the presupposition of likeness. They too were intellectuals, as anybody is. They were visitors and spectators, just as the researcher who, one hundred and forty years after was reading their letters in a library, just as the visitors in Marxist theory or at the gates of the fabrics. There was no gap to bridge between intellectuals and workers, actors and spectators , no gap between two populations, two situations or two ages. On the contrary, there was a likeness that had to be acknowledged and put at play in the very production of knowledge. Putting it at play meant two things. Firstly, it meant refusing the borders between the disciplines. Telling the (hi)story of those days and those nights forced me to blur the boundary between the field of “empirical” history and the field of “pure” Philosophy. The story that those workers told was about Time, about the loss and reappropriation of Time . In order to show what it meant, I had to put it in direct relation with the theoretical discourse of the philosopher , namely Plato, who had told , very long ago , in his Republic , the same story by explaining that in a well-ordered community everybody had to do only one thing , his own business, and that workers anyway had no time to stand in another place that their workplace and do anything but the job fitting the (in)capacity that Nature had given them. Philosophy then could no more appear as the sphere of pure thought separated from the sphere of empirical facts. Nor was it the theoretical interpretation of those facts. There were neither facts nor interpretations. There were two ways of telling stories.

Blurring the border between academic disciplines also meant blurring the hierarchy between the levels of discourse, between the narration of a story and the philosophical or scientific explanation of the reason of the story or the truth lying behind or beneath the story. There was no metadiscourse telling the truth about a lower level of discourse. What had to be done was a work of translation, showing how empirical stories and philosophical discourses translate each other. Producing a new knowledge meant inventing the idiomatic form that would make the translation possible. I had to use that idiom to tell my own intellectual adventure, at the risk that the idiom remain “unreadable”for all those who wanted to know the cause of the story, its true meaning or the lesson for action that could be drawn out of it . I had to produce a discourse that would be readable only for they who would make their own translation from the point of view of their own adventure.
That personal detour may lead us back to the core of our problem. Those issues of crossing the borders and blurring the distribution of the roles come up with the actuality of the theatre and the actuality of contemporary art, where all artistic competences step out of their own field and exchange their places and powers with all others. We have theatre plays without words and dance with words; installations and performances instead of “plastic” works ; videoprojections turned into cycles of frescoes; photographs turned into living pictures or history paintings; sculpture which becomes hypermediatic show, etc., etc. Now there are three ways of understanding and practising that confusion of the genres. There is the revival of the Gesamtkunstwerk which is supposed to be the apotheosis of art as a form of life but actually proves to be the apotheosis of some strong artistic egos or the apotheosis of a kind of hyperactivist consumerism, if not both at the same time. There is the idea of a “hybridisation” of the means of art , which would fit in with a new age of mass individualism viewed of as an age of relentless exchange between roles and identities, between reality and virtuality , life and mechanical prostheses, etc. In my view, this second interpretation ultimately leads to the same as the first one. It leads to another kind of hyperactivist consumerism, another kind of stultification , using the crossing of the borders or the confusion of the roles only as a means of increasing the power of the performance without questioning its grounds.
The third way – the good way in my view – does not aim for the amplification of the effect but for the transformation of the cause/effect scheme itself, the dismissal of the set of oppositions which grounds the process of stultification. It invalidates the opposition between activity and passivity as well as the scheme of “equal transmission” and the communitarian idea of the theatre that makes it in fact an allegory of inequality . The crossing of the borders and the confusion of the roles should not lead to some sort of “hypertheatre” turning spectatorship into activity by turning representation to presence. On the contrary, it should question the theatrical privilege of living presence and bring the stage back to a level of equality with the telling of a story or the writing and the reading of a book. It should be the institution of a new stage of equality, where the different kinds of performances would be translated into one another. In all those performances in fact , it is a matter of linking what one knows with what one does not know, of being at the same time performers who display their competences and visitors or spectators who are looking for what those competences may produce in a new context , among unknown people. Artists, just as researchers, build the stage where the manifestation and the effect of their competences become dubious as they frame the story of a new adventure in a new idiom. The effect of the idiom cannot be anticipated . It calls for spectators who are active as interpreters, who try to invent their own translation in order to appropriate the story for themselves and make their own story out of it. An emancipated community is in fact a community of storytellers and translators.

I am aware that all this may sound as : words, mere words. But I would not hear this as an insult . We have heard so many speakers passing off their words as more than words, as passwords enabling us to enter a new life . We have seen so many spectacles boasting on being no more spectacles but ceremonials of community. Even now, in spite of the so-called postmodern scepticism about changing life, we can see so many shows turned to religious mysteries that it might not seem outrageous to hear that words are only words . Breaking away with the phantasms of the Word made flesh and the spectator turned active , knowing that words are only words and spectacles only spectacles may help us better understand how words, stories and performances can help us change something in the world where we are living.

Jacques Rancière
Frankfurt, August 2004

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1/6: http://www.youtube.com/v/OLlZ-l8FZh0&amp

2/6: http://www.youtube.com/v/-eqPxabhnHM&amp

3/6: http://www.youtube.com/v/jMI-tc0Xjng&amp

4/6: http://www.youtube.com/v/6k2nXNZ93a0&amp

5/6: http://www.youtube.com/v/CutYuYA16E4&amp

6/6: http://www.youtube.com/v/bMux7OuTpnE&amp

Jacques Ranciere blog:

See more and download video (torrent, ed2k, magnet) at: http://ranciere.blogspot.com/

NB: Jacques Rancière’s new book The Emancipated Spectator will be published by Verso, London in August 2009.

FROM BIOPOLITICS TO NECROPOLITICS

marta.popivoda — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 06:18:11 -0800

What is the intention of this lecture?

to situate from which point I am talking and to bring into the story new positions of theory, knowledge and analysis
to differentiate in- between biopolitics and necropolitics
to take into an analysis an art performative project produced in Slovenia in order to see if contemporary art services necropolitics
to see the linking of necropolitics and neoliberal capitalism and the relation toward institutions of art and culture

1. To situate from which point I am talking and to bring into the story new positions of theory, knowledge and analysis

New theoreticians are present and active in the neoliberal capitalist world, in its center Walter Mignolo (Argentina/USA) and as well outside the center, on its periphery, Achille Mbembe (South Africa), Madina Tlostanova (Russia)[1]and I found important to refer to them when writing on the “production conditions” and intervention logic of theory, transformation of capitalism and globalization. Why is important to enlarge, expand and open a different referential theoretical framework for our references and conditions of analysis? Theory is not just an abstract practice of interpreting and rearticulating the “World.” Theory is contextualized; it has its history and its byways and bypasses. Often, it is theory that provides a rational basis for the cruelest forms of exploitation, the legitimization of capitalist expropriation and for various racial, chauvinist, and anti-Semitic positions. Even when theory does not deal with these questions, but is directing us “elsewhere,” demanding so to say for a withdrawal from the World – this is also a positioning of theory; this is theory’s politics. The same holds true of art. Art without theory is dead; lacking critical discourse an artwork is only a salon decoration and an easy prey for the art market.

In order to understand a place from where I am speaking that is not outside theory and not less neutral, I would suggest three theses with which to frame the contemporary art – technology – politics relation.

The first thesis of the contemporary art – technology – politics relation states that contemporary art is the most accomplished form of capitalist commodity. Art and culture are constitutive to the functioning of late capitalism; through its form of aestheticizing excess, art is the most developed form of capitalist commodity. The institution of art is an ideological accessory to the incessant capitalist reproduction and is at the center of the formation of an aestheticized “re-commodification.” For this reason it is important to ask how it might be possible to form a different platform of contemporary art and culture production and interpretation that wrests itself away from the global neoliberal capitalist system through the process a) of de-coloniality ( Walter Mignolo’s term) and b) de-linking (again Walter Mignolo’s term) of art and culture from capital, and to think about a new possible radical break within the social and political, a break that will produce a liberation from the capital’ grip of continuous exploitation and expropriation.

Immediately I would like to as well think on the difference in between coloniality and colonialism. Coloniality that is different from the historical colonialism is the hidden logic of contemporary capital and makes possible here and now the imperial transformation and colonial management of the World in the name of fake but for capital constitutive parameters: progress, civilization, development, and democracy. This process of coloniality is grounded in the Western rhetoric of modernization and salvation, through which global capitalism attempts to disgustingly snobbish and when is not possible with pure violence and death of millions to reorganize what it calls “human” capital. In the capitalist apocalyptic scenario, technology gets out of control; it seeks only progress and development, and in this fake progress the only scientists, or artists, who can be involved are those from the First capitalist World. You will be hard pressed to find any trace of a position that originates anywhere outside of the Western (First World) neoliberal capitalism.

This differentiation as well makes a cut within postcolonial theory. I quote Achille Mbembe, listen carefully: “There is no doubt that postcolonial theory, under its many guises, has importantly contributed to the unmasking of Western hegemony in the field of the humanities and in other disciplines. But at the same time the postcolonial theory has revealed the violence of Western epistemologies and their dehumanizing impulses. This process is far from over. It has intensified in the situation when the imperial sovereignty dictates who may live and who must die.

When sovereign power has taken control over mortality and has defined life as the very site of the manifestation of absolute power, we need to start asking different questions. One such question is who has the right to kill? What does the implementation of such a right tell us? How can we account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? The other challenge to postcolonial theory is what is referred to as ‘globalization.’ What is clear is that it opens awareness beyond the postcolonial theory of the 80s and the 90s.”

With regard to the relationship between globalization, capitalism and aesthetics, we should establish a critique of the formation of a so-called “universal culture and art” that takes place at three co-dependent and decisive levels (the economical, political and institutional) and that establishes culture as a hegemonic and ideological apparatus. Today’s frenetic global economy demands the production of more and more new commodities at increasingly larger profit rates and ascribes the essential role (position and function) to innovations and experimentation to the field of art.

On the other side while demanding for de-linking of art and capital, we have to ask for linking of contemporary theory and practices of intervention in the social and political. For it is precisely within this horizon (theory and political intervention) that a different type of “de-linking” is nowadays being promoted. This de-linking claims that it is sufficient to think about the critique of the world, to contemplate it within one’s mind and support it within oneself by reading and writing what is termed “real” theory, while what happens to the World “out there” is not important. Such a de-linking is very much desired and promoted in the name of active passivity, because activity is seen as an exercise in thought.

The second thesis of the contemporary art – technology – politics relation states that there is a process of subjectivization at work today in the field of contemporary artistic and cultural production, which does not take place through work, but through artistic creativity; the latter redefines precisely, or, if you want colonizes what work is. The production and instrumentalization of life (what is known as biopolitics) become in such a context (of a redefinition of labor) of a fundamental importance for capital.

However, even here we need to make a further step and point to the fact that today it is necessary to politicize biopolitics with – necropolitics. What does it mean? The concept of necropolitics was proposed by Achille Mbembe and it is connected to necrocapitalism and necroeconomy; all three working hand in hand within and with global neoliberal capitalism today.

With necropolitics we can precisely define the transformation of regulation of life within extreme conditions produced by capital. Necropolitics is a coinage in-between necro (DEATH) and politics. Necropolitics regulates life through the perspective of death, therefore transforming life in a mere existence bellow every life minimum. Necropolitics presents as well, I will state, a historicization of biopolitics! Necropolitics was primarily envisioned by Achille Mbembe in Africa or was taking place in the Third World, but today is more and more taking place in the First (capitalist) World.

With this proposed “transformation” of biopolitics into necropolitics, I am NOT asking to de-link biopolitics from necropolitics but to understand that the maximization of exploitation and expropriation of life, labor, and “humanity” that is put forward here and now by capital asks for the reformulation, or, better to say re-politicization of biopolitics!

The third thesis of the contemporary art – technology – politics relation states that new media technology makes a condition for contemporary art to be an important part of the functioning of capitalist society. Three strategies are at work here; the production of shock through the help of cloning, the strategy of creating simulacra that work outside the human perspective (say “paraspace”), and the strategy of mutation (theories of the “post-human”). These three strategies are a form of concealing, abstracting, and evacuating from the economical, social, political and artistic of the social antagonism, of the class war.

I suggest a stubborn insistence on a process of rearticulation of these three theses with a way of acting that I would like to define in relation to Alain Badiou as “FORCING,” implying a force that is a result of a constant and insisting approach that asks for a continued analysis of knowledge / colonialism /modernity. This forcing is based especially on the demand to de-link contemporary art and theory from contemporary forms of epistemological colonialism (as defined by Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova). Contemporary epistemological colonialism presents only the Western enlightenment matrix and does not take into consideration the epistemological breaks and shifts taking place in the so-called “exterior,” or rather at the “edges” of Western European scientific thought. Or as stated by Madina Tlostanova: “Only through alter-modern in the sense of other-than-modern perspectives, standing on the border of Western modernity and non-Western reasons, can we hope to work out a solution. Capitalism the way it exists now seems to be increasingly incapable of dealing with its own consequences. While alter-modern perspectives need to be redeemed from the discourse of modernity, which habitually has treated them as sentimentalist, romantic, archaic, and retarded in order to easier discard them and present the dominant scientific-technocratic ideal of the future as the only possible and reasonable one.”

Modern, non-modern, postmodern and finally alter-modern are the possible stages (where alter-modern is proposed as a radical break) not only in historization but re-politicization of the genealogy of modernism.

2. To differentiate in- between biopolitics and necropolitics

In principle it is possible to state that all the events in the World today are brought back to a single event. This event I will name in reference to Santiago López Petit as the impossibility of capital to restrain from exploitation and expropriation. This unrestrainment of capital is the accomplishment of co-property between capital and power. This was clearly seen in the way how the financial crisis that involved banks and their deficit was solved in September 2008, with a bill issued with one single move in order to save the capitalists and their banks’ savings. It presented the unification of power (political representatives) and capital (and note that nothing similar was proposed regarding for example New Orleans and the poorest working class that lost everything in the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina).

French philosopher Michel Foucault characterizes biopolitics as biopower, as a power that aims for the production and reproduction of life itself. Biopolitics thus practices sovereignty that can, today, also be connected to the processes of subjectivization, which does not mean only a production and reproduction of subjects, but – above all – the regulation and understanding what the process of subjectivization means in itself. Biopower is based on strategies of control that transcend those institutional frameworks which were important for societies at a time when domination was founded on punishment and discipline; biopolitics /biopower is based on control. Biopower is a matter of a direct instrumentalization of life enabled through contemporary new media technologies. Control is, thus, composed of surveillance systems (surveillance cameras following us everywhere); increasingly more detailed digitalized databases of personal information available to the state; as well as, it is composed of public opinion (market) researches and other forms of acquiring more and more precise personal data.

In the genealogy of the connections between institutions, money, and power that Foucault defines as one of the more important procedural processes of biopolitics, economy plays a very significant role. The politics of economy shows how finances are distributed in such a way that the government supports only those organizations, administrations, discourses, theories, and populisms that are vital only to that particular government and its commands, practices and governance of the social body.

Achille Mbembe in his book On the Postcolony: On Private Indirect Government (2001) stated, regarding the proposed accomplishment of co-property between capital and power in the time of globalization, and taking into account specific conditions of environmental exploitation and warfare in Africa, that while war tactics in Africa are quite rudimentary, they still result in human catastrophes. This is because, via Mbembe, “military pressure sometimes targets the straightforward destruction, if not of the civilian population, at least of the very means of its survival, such as food reserves, cattle, and agricultural implements. In some cases, these wars have enabled ‘gang’ leaders to exercise more or less continuous control over territory. Such control gives them access not only to those living in the territories but also to the natural resources and the goods produced there – for instance, to extraction of precious stones, exploitation of natural resources. The financing of these wars is very complex. In addition to the financial contribution provided by Diasporas and assignment of men and women to forced labor, there is resort to loans, appeal to private financiers, and special forms of taxation.”

He argued that these new forms of more or less total control not only blur the supposed relationship between citizenship and democracy, or, I will add biopolitical forms of life, but rather and more deadly incapacitate whole sections of the population politically, economically and structurally. Therefore it is possible to state that what is becoming evident with reference to Mbembe (and in relation to Africa where we see the intensification of many exploitation processes established and empowered through colonialism) is the emergence of a new form of relation in-between capital and power named “private indirect government.” It presents new configurations of power, the privatization of violence (myriad of militias and private armies) that works hand in hand with economy that is as well put through the process of privatization and therefore is completely informalized. In an interview given by Mbembe, on the occasion of the publication of his book On Post-Colony, he stated firmly that democracy as a form of government and as a culture of public life does not have a future in Africa – or for that matter, elsewhere in the world – if it is not rethought precisely from the crucible of “necropower.” By “necropower” Mbembe refers to a sovereign power that is set up for maximum destruction of persons and the creation of deathscapes that are unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.

Today these deathscapes – if we only think about what has been going on in Gaza from December 2008 to January 2009 – are not, as is pointed out by Mbembe, “a peculiar African reality,” but something that is becoming more and more of a normal “landscape” in all the territories outside of the First capitalist world (just think about Palestine, Chechnya etc.). Even though such deathscapes were once reserved only for the third and second worlds (Balkan’s Srebrenica was such a clear deathscape) with the present recession deathscapes they are now becoming slowly normalized within the First capitalist world as well (thousands of jobs will be lost, low middle class will be transformed in a new class of “poorscape” and therefore a deathscape reality, etc).

3. To take into an analysis an art performative project produced in Slovenia in order to see if contemporary art services necropolitics

In February 2008 the Journal for Critique of Science, Imagination and New Anthropology (Časopis za kritiko znanosti) published in Ljubljana, Slovenia, released its special issue entitled The Story of an Erasure.I called this issue a bright moment on “the dark side of the Alps” as it is possible to describe the situation in Slovenia.

However, to put clear why this special issue The Story of an Erasure, published in 2008, is the bright moment of a radical intervention within the Slovenian social and political right wing dark landscape, I must question the establishment of an art project/art performative “body” that was constituted in the 2007/2008 in Slovenia as well. It is important that the establishment, or if you want “the event” of this body happened within the Slovenian reality of a clear link of turbo-capitalism with its clerical fascistic liaisons. Nota bene: that the turbo fascism with which Žarana Papić described the reality of Milošević’s Serbia is in the case of Slovenia “upgraded, ” it is neoliberally urbanized and intensified.

The body I want to refer to is what I termed ventriloquist three-headed “Janez Janša” monster figure founded in 2007/2008. In 2007/2008 three visual-performative and media artists from Ljubljana, Slovenia (Davide Grassi, Emil Hrvatin and Žiga Kariž) changed their names into “Janez Janša” – not only symbolically, but as well materially and administratively (changing all identity documents from identity cards to passports into Janez Janša). I propose a thesis that these two art/cultural and performative projects, one is The Story of an Erasure and the other is the Janšas performative body, though both are to be seen as critical discourses, present a diametrically opposite performative-theoretical and politico aesthetical intervention within the art and cultural space of Slovenia. One, the Story of an Erasure intervenespolitically directly, the other, the ventriloquist three-headed “Janez Janša” simulates not only the proper position, but as well obfuscates through cloning the right wing politics in Slovenia and aestheticises the present ideological and administrative State apparatus. To understand my thesis it is necessary to answer to two points, who is Janez Janša and who are the “Erased people.” Both projects refer to them in/directly.

Who is Janez Janša?

Janez Janša is a right wing Slovenian politician that was running the Slovenian government from 2004 to 2008; he and his party lost the new elections in September 2008! The genealogy of his formation is double and not historically fully evaluated. In the 1980s he was the political figure that provoked through a discovery of secret military documents the declaration of independency of Slovenia in 1991, today he is the most clear representative of a new turbo fascistic and clerical entity in Slovenia that synthesizes precisely the genealogy of the Slovenian reality from socialist into neoliberal capitalist. Janez Janša – nomen est omen[2]– the prime Minister of Slovenia in the period from 2004 to 2008, was as well one of the most ferocious political force to prevent the possible process of putting an end to the necro reality of the Erased people. In essence Janez Janša’s political methods can be described as necrocapitalist and dysfunctional. On one side, he is implementing totalitarian Communist methods of absolute power (total party discipline and control of mass media) and on the other he is exposing the clerical-fascistic connection with the present turbo-capitalist Slovenian reality. For example, he pushes forward a European policy of privatization of education, and demands for equalization of Partisans and the Slovenian Nazi collaborators’ (the Domobrans) and so forth.

Therefore, if we make a relation between the “ventriloquist three-headed “Janez Janša” monster figure” and the real Janez Janša, it is necessary to emphasize that what is at prima vista seen as two different contexts of these two “projects,” one is art and the other is politics, must be seen together. We should not de-link the ventriloquist three-headed “ Janez Janša” and the real Janša, as they did not stay on opposite sides, the theater Janša is not only symbolical, while the other is simply “real.” Both of them are real, having their documents fully registered by the State.

Further it is necessary before providing the answer to the question who is the erased people to expose on what possible historical reference is based the constitution of the “ventriloquist three-headed “Janez Janša” monster figure”? Or to formulate this differently, on what relies this total identification with the right wing populist political leader by the three-headed “Janez Janša” body?

The idea of the three-headed “Janša” can be conceptually defined as a re-enactment of what was strategically invented by the music group Laibach in the 1980s; Laibach a music group from Ljubljana (still active) re-appropriated the German name of Ljubljana (the name became especially controversial at the time of German occupation of Slovenia in the WWII when the Nazis exercised aggressive Germanization of Slovenes) and performed in a style that was a mixture between a party rally and a Mussolini speech; they performed in the 1980s without offering any further explanation of their action. Laibach’s gesture, which is also known as “over-identification” in psychoanalytical terms, or a total, complete identification with a body (Mussolini), name (Ljubljana) etc. succeeded as well to subvert at that time the exhausted strategies of parody and irony performed by the Western contemporary field of art in the 1980s. Therefore over identification (as a total simulation strategy) on which Laibach insisted presented a complete destitution of their individual positions. Laibach “real” member’s names were totally disclosed in the 1980s; their public appearances, be it in music concerts or interviews, did not produce a relief or catharsis in terms that we know that in the end it is a mockery or a parody that is at stake of the political body, or of a certain social ritual and etc.

Almost three decades later, in 2007/2008 the three-headed “Janša” started though refereeing to Laibach to exploit them but on the “reverse.” The three-headed “Janša” inaugurated in a spectacular way their name changing; they sent several and several mails. The act was announced spectacularly by each “new born baby Janša,” through mails and in other formats of communicating with the general public. Every time they proudly announced their act, I will state not as subversion, but as a spectacular power demonstration that they have the pleasure, time and money to change the names. Therefore I will name this act as pure parody exhibitionism. They sent mails just in case that we, the public, won’t miss who have actually changed the name in the last instance. I will call this a gesture of securing the terrain for future branding and money. In fact the three-headed “Janša” artifact was abundantly supported by the government on power! The Ministry of Culture abundantly supported almost all projects in which at least one, if not all the three “Janez Janša” took part, while many other artists applying for co-financing from the Ministry of Culture in 2007/2008 were rejected and pushed into the grip of the fatal process of neoliberal pauperization.

Now let’s answer briefly who are the erased people and how is it possible to state that the “truth” of the three-headed “Janša” and their relation to the real Janez Janša can be understood only through the Erased people.

The Erased people are the only possible context in which to read the act of performing of the three-headed “Janša,” as the Erased people, as it will be presented, are an outcome of necropolitics that was implemented by the Slovenian state through taking/re-issuing and nullifying their residency papers and documents. Through this act of re/naming and re/taking their identities, the Erased people were deprived of the social and economic status that is granted to individuals through such papers and documents; in the last instance they were deprived of life.

Therefore as the three-headed “Janša” developed their project precisely on the same “act,” it is possible to state that the truth (in a Badiou’term) of their performance, of their act of changing all their documents and taking, spectacularly – as was described – the new identity can by definition be conceptualized and politicized only in relation to the Erased people.

Who are the Erased people?

In February 1992, at the time when Slovenia was still in its infancy, the Slovenian government which was headed by then-Prime Minister Lojze Peterle and the Ministry for Internal Affairs, Igor Bavčar, (and with the support of the State Secretary the Ministry for Internal Affairs, Slavko Debelak), adopted a macabre necropolitical measure of erasure, transforming 30,000 people into people without residency permits and deprived of any rights. This 30,000 people were mostly workers and internal migrants that were working and living in Slovenia being of non Slovenian ethnical roots, Bosnian, Croats, Serbs, Roma people, Kosovars, Macedonians and etc… What happened on February 27, 1992 was the total confiscation of their status of permanent residence, and this confiscation was triggered by a simple bureaucratic telegram sent by Slavko Debelak on 27 February 1992. The number of the telegram is 0016/4-14968. Slavko Debelak was at the time subordinate to Igor Bavčar. Janez Drnovšek was elected president of the Slovenian government in April 1992. Matevž Krivic is referring to the recorded transcription of the first meeting of Drnovšek’s cabinet on June 1992, when Bavčar, being the Minister of Internal Affairs in Drnovšek's government as well, informed him about the “problem regarding the violation of human rights in Slovenia”.

Today, Bavčar, due to his political connections, is one of the most influential capitalist in Slovenia and in charge of the multinational corporation Istrabenz, but recently he “succeeded” through privatization processes to ruin totally Istrabenz (one of the prosperity corporation of Slovenia). Though Bavčar transformed in a “deathspace” the corporation and will left its workers without jobs and futures, he is not facing any legal charges at the moment.

To put an even more clear light on the 1992 event in the darkness of the present reality, lets read carefully how the 1992 case is explained by the Erased themselves: “It is important to state that the status of permanent residence, at least in a state of law, that respects human rights, can be obtained or confiscated only on the basis of law, administrative acts, or court decisions. The status of permanent residence is provided by birth or through other legal means. This status provides duties and rights. Slovenia was in 1992 the legal successor of the former common federative state of Yugoslavia, together with permanent residents appurtenant to it, regardless of the nationality, sex, race, or religion of respective individuals. The basic existential status of the Erased has been taken from them without any law, legal act, or notification, only by a simple telegram!”

Therefore the truth of the three “Janšas” is to be found in their over-cynical gesture par excellence through an “esthetical-artistic” level of “fun” that allowed them to change all the documents, while not taking into consideration what this means within the present Slovenian reality that has “still” 18.000 people from the Erased contingent, without papers and their status is not solved at all, not even after 17 years! (The others 12 000 witnessed different macabre consequences, some described in the mentioned special issue.)

“Janšas,” in turn, when they were asked in 2008 to write some kind of circular letters to each other, which were then published in the weekly supplement of the daily Ljubljana newspaper Dnevnik, used this very important public space for weeks to amuse the readers. The “Janšas” did not give any criticism of the cultural politics of the right wing government their just wrote speculations on their traveling and the reminiscent sentimentalism about their different places of birth and origins. This is interesting enough as they said they use the name as a “criticism” of Janša politics.

I called the act of Janšas “three headed body” as parody exhibitionism that did not provide a critique but additionally reinforced the blurring of the political/artistic situation. The right-wing political space on the other side needed and needs such multiplication, such a spectacular cloning and branding of nothing, of the same nothing produced by the government and parties on power. “Nothing” as an act of total nullifying of 30 000 people. However, this nothing had and has social and political effects, for it reproduces something. This is, first) it aestheticises a necro social and political space of misery and control, and second) transforms administrative State procedures into a playful game. On the other part now after Janša lost the elections in September 2008 the whole project of Janšas “three headed body” started even by itself to expose that all was actually taking part only and solely as a playful act of renaming, saying that does not matter which is the name, as is just about to change it! At the present they are already sending some mails with their old real name, at least one of them is using the real name: Žiga Kariž!

Therefore instead of developing a criticism, the “Janšas” even more obfuscated the real Janša, duplicating him ad nauseam and providing an artistic flavor to necropolitics. I can further insist that it is not so much about testing our capacity of producing all sorts of supplementary meanings; rather, we have to rearticulate the relation of meanings to hegemony! We have to surpass the fascination with new meanings (the fun, indeed, for example, produced through the triplication of the name, etc., used by mass media abundantly) and analyze the hegemonization that is produced in such a situation and as well to see the role of such a renaming within the biopolitical, and “necropolitical”[3]logics of the contemporary (Slovenian) neoliberal capitalist space.

In order now to connect the two projects the special issue entitled The Story of an Erasure and the “Janšas” it is as well necessary to make a direct and precise relation to the past, as these both cultural events are relating to the past. The special issue entitled The Story of an Erasure relatesto a 17 years old necropolitical event of the erasure of 30.000 people, the “Janšas” are relating to Laibach and its almost 30 years’ old art strategy.

In a talk with Alexander Skidan and Dmitry Vilensky in the newspaper What is to be Done? published in St. Petersburg, Artiom Magun presents a very simple but crucially important difference in understanding the past in relation to two remarkable theoretical cases. One case is Walter Benjamin and the other is Alain Badiou. Following Magun, I can present this difference in the following way, “Badiou proposes that we find our support in something necessary and important that happened in the past and move on from there. Benjamin, on the contrary, searches for something that was suppressed in the past, something that did not happen, that perished and is reawakening only now. The event that, for Badiou, happens in the past, is taking place right now for Benjamin. That is, they both look back to the past, but from opposite points of view. This is important as we try to understand potentiality: either potential is the impulse generated by a positive past or present event, or it is something that has not happened yet, that was interrupted in mid-sentence.”http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=327&I... (28.3.2008)" href="#footnote4_crgd5dw">[4]

“Janšas” obfuscate and foreclosure the cultural and political space in Slovenia also because of the impossibility of making a connection to past events; notably to Laibach to which they conceptually refer, not to mention the reference to the Erased people! If this will be a case indeed, they will be capable of opening the present space of art and culture as a space of potentiality. If the “Janšas” based their concept on fidelity to Laibach, or to the Erased people, then they could connect and re-perform differently the art, social and political space, while opening the space of criticism and emancipation today. They could have transformed “the three-head monster Janša” into a real political subject able to subvert the real Janša and the right wing necropolitics. They could make a reference as well to the 1980s and 1990s events; to a) the underground (subcultural movement) of the 1980s, and b) the powerful awakening of the independent cultural and social structures situated in a squatted and empty military barrack complex in 1992 in the centre of Ljubljana known as Metelkova city. If they made a connection in terms of understanding what were the political implications of these events, they could produce a political subject capable of emancipating the social and political space of Slovenia today; by contrast, contemporary art today is perceived as a branding, as a luxury subjectivity field feeding the neoliberal turbo capitalist machine!

Going back to the initial point of this analysis, I stated there is also a bright moment of cultural production on the dark side of Slovenia: the thematic issue of the Journal for Critique of Science, Imagination and New Anthropology entitled The Story of an Erasure. This issue offers an in-depth presentation and analyses of the 17-year agony of the Erased people. This is a clear Badiou’s position, as it maintains a political fidelity to the cause of the Erased people that is not yet solved even 17 years after the case started. On the contrary, today, different stories try to depict the history of the Erased as a simple mythology.

I can state that the thematic issue of the Journal for Critique of Science, Imagination and New Anthropology: The Story of An Erasure is a bright light at the end of a dark tunnel, as it presents a gesture of a radical fidelity to a historical event that put a deep shadow on the new born Slovenian state – only when it will be fully terminated will it allow for a clear potentiality to Slovenian social, political, and art spaces.

4. To see the consequences of necropolitics in relation to neoliberal capitalism and the relation to institutions

The most important point is to understand that neoliberal necrocapitalism lives from the intensification of its two primal conditions of reproduction: deregulation and privatization. In what follows in talking about and explaining the logic of these two conditions and other characteristics to be put forward as being internal to neoliberalism, I will make a reference to two texts and a small vocabulary published recently in Chicago, in the magazine area # 6. I will refer to Daniel Tucker and his editorial text “Inheriting the Grid” and to Nik Theodore, Jamie Peck and Neil Brebber’s text “The City as Policy Lab,” both published in Area Chicago (ART/RESEARCH/EDUCATION/ACTIVISM), no. 6, August 2008.

To refer to these two conditions means to refer to a situation of psychosis or to a situation of exceptionality at first, that is soon to be seen as completely normalized and accepted. Privatization means that the state withdraws from social, cultural and public life step by step, and leaves these public sectors to struggle for private money. But privatization also implies a format of private property or of a private instrumentalization of the public institution by those who run it. To precisely understand these processes and neoliberalism, let me refer to the short, but extremely precise vocabulary of terms published in Area Chicago, no. 6. I quote: “Neoliberalism is a project of radical institutional transformation. This term refers to a unique period in Capitalism in which some economic elite of some countries has encouraged a free-market fundamentalism that is unprecedented since before the Great Depression. This fundamentalist ideology has promoted a reversal of much of the regulation that has protected local and national economies from foreign competition, in addition to much of the social and political gains of social movements (including organized labor). Much of this transformation occurs through the privatization of industries and services previously monopolized by the State, and many of the social programs associated with Welfare. This period is also marked by the opening up of new markets in sectors of life previously untapped for profit-making potential – including those basic services provided by the state, as well as the growing importance of industries like culture, health, environmentalism, and education (to name a few). Neoliberalism is considered to have grown out of the University of Chicago Economics Department, promoted by its ideologues such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. The concepts grow out of a ‘liberal’ tradition, dating back to the theorists of early capitalism in the late 1800s, who were compelled by pure concepts of freedom. For the liberal, ‘freedom’ was the ideal. For the neoliberal, the ‘free market’ undisturbed by any State intervention is ideal. What must be constantly kept in mind is that the ideal is far from the truth, and current so-called neoliberal policies require massive State intervention – only this time around it is exclusively on behalf of economic elite with no attempt to promote policies of economic redistribution, equal opportunity or civic participation.”

Therefore, neoliberal necrocapitalism has an impact on every sector of life, production and labor. In neoliberal necrocapitalism, the whole of society has been transformed into only one BIG INVESTMENT sector that provides for a capitalization of capital. I want to emphasize that the time of the particularization of levels of society (let’s think about culture and art, being “outside” the processes that are going on in the wider economical, social and political contexts, so to speak) are over. There was always a firm relationship of interdependency between the superstructure (art, culture, the social field, etc.) and the economical base. The difference was that in the past this logic was hidden, but in neoliberalism these connections are clearly visible. What we see is that these artistic, cultural, social, health, public, etc. sectors that were before primarily used for ideological reproduction of the mode of production and its labor force, are vital for the direct capitalization of capital today. Therefore, when we speak about the neoliberal necrocapitalist radical deregulation of each and every institution in society, be it the institution of art, culture, politics, health, social security, public, law, religion, etc., it means it affects not only its (dis-)investment policy, but its histories, strategies of interventions, ideologies, rituals and forms of organization.

In neoliberalism, as the Area Chicago team formulates, four processes apply: financialization of capital, speculative movements of financial capital, interspatial competition and place-marketing. My proposal is not only to term the processes that are going on in the field of art and culture as overtly restructured and deregulated, but also to envision a radical process of not only the financialization of capital, but of the financialization of (cultural) institutions as such, with speculative, interspatial competitive and place-marketing as highly visible characteristics as well. In neoliberal necrocapitalism, a process of overdetermination that is definitely financialization, affects not only every level of society, but it is also highly operative in contemporary art and culture.

Financialization of capital means that the surplus value as the only drive of capital is produced with a bubble mechanism of “virtual” money movements, investments, etc. This is not rooted in “production” any more so to speak, as was the case of the direct expropriation of people, regions and territories in the not so distant, clear capitalist colonial past. Even though such a process is still active, if we think about oil, financialization makes money from money (virtually) without the so-called background of production. It does not come as a surprise that in the last week of September 2008, in the week of Wall Street’s darkest scenario of collapse (after the 1929 Great Depression), billions of euros simply disappeared overnight, so to speak. We witness a performative aspect of the speculative power of capitalization of money that has no base in anything but itself. The outcome of such a situation is at once an auto-cannibalization and super-vampiric blood thirsty condition. What do I want to say? If the financialization of capital means the domination of financial markets (foreign exchange trading, futures, debt trading, US government securities trading and other forms of speculative investment) over industrial economies in contemporary capitalism, as stated by the Area Chicago team, I therefore put forward the financialization of institutions as a paradigm, to be parallel to the financialization of capital, meaning the over-empowerment of institutions, but only and solely through performative speculative processes that have no base in anything other than the institutions themselves. These speculative processes are becoming more important than any art and cultural production, more important that any art work, more important that any artist or artistic group position, etc.

As it was formulated by the Area Chicago group, speculation “could be understood as buying, holding and selling something (anything from real estate to fine art) in order to profit from the fluctuations in the market (something like ‘buy low, sell high’).” What is bought and sold here is information itself, devoid of any content, so to speak. Additionally, a process of “a cleansing of the terrain” is to be added, as was learned from the Balkan Wars. Practices and theories that disturb the flow of incessant production of information should be erased, and have to vanish. Very similar processes were and still are –not only in relation to the brutality in the Balkan Wars in the 1990s and in Chechnya, etc. – implemented in relation to the erased people in Slovenia. Therefore, to summarize what is taking place is a twofold process; on the one hand, speculations are the outcome of a hyper activity, not of (art or cultural) productions, but of a hyper production of information itself, and on the other, institutions are activated as incubators of constant production of information – about themselves. The outcome is, to say it simply, a daily bombardment of information of an unbelievable quantity about projects and activities that nobody can follow anymore. A boom is made with the infinite speculative sending and distributing of whatever. On the other hand, we see a completely psychotic process of total evacuation.

In short, financialization means not only capitalizing off of “nothing,” through pure speculative strategies of information. In the case of talking about the financialization of the institution, it means transforming the whole art production as such into NOTHING. Please make a reference of this nothing to the nothing I developed in part 3; they are both something of nothing.

A case to understand what is going on, is possible to be illustrated by the official institution of modern art in Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija. In the last period from 2008 early on Moderna Galerija is without the main exhibition space due to renovation. Moderna Galerija found itself in an extremely disturbing situation, not only for itself, but also for all of us who are without a major institution of contemporary art in Slovenia. Moderna Galerija “temporarily” lost the space due to its (needed) renovation, but was not granted a temporarily substituting exhibition space (which is a normal practice in the contemporary world when a national institution of art and culture is at stake). The refusal to provide the substituting space to Moderna Galerija by the state and the respective Ministry was a process of disciplining the institution by the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia that was elected from the right-wing party in power (Janez Janša political party) and other lobbies. Though under pressure, the Moderna Galerija failed to initiate an international action of pressure on the Ministry through activating an international petition force of support.

This “incapability” from 2008 on of the Moderna Galerija, by not “provoking” or initiating a call for an international solidarity action that could force the right-wing party in power to offer a substitutive space (and I can claim that such a call would receive important solidarity support from the national space), can also be seen as a process of withdrawing from a proper responsibility to what is necessary to be done in a situation when it is important to “fight” for the institution of art as such. Instead, a process of mimicry was put forward; Moderna Galerija was invited to present its different exhibition projects (through logic of “squatting”) in different cultural spaces in the city of Ljubljana. It seems cozy to act as a homeless person, but the problem is that the national institution in such a way normalizes wrong state decisions and procedures; it will be necessary to act completely differently (instead of behaving as an impoverished NGO); the national institution should use its power (and international recognition) to ask for the change of the situation publicly and internationally, to almost provoke a war that will force the state and its ministry to at least try to save face internationally and do something about the state of things. On the contrary, Moderna Galerija behaved completely speculative; withdrawing, abstracting, and evacuating itself from the situation precisely when it was necessary to draw a line or when it was necessary to act in order to re-articulate a proper position in a broader sense; the way of functioning is similar to the banks on Wall Street in the last week of September 2008. All these institutions, and especially those who run them, are displaying their unbelievable capacity to survive at the expense of the whole artistic and cultural sector.

It is important to state in this respect that Moderna Galerija is working hand in hand with parallel institutions, that it is possible to call “shadow public structures.” They are, so to speak “non-institutions,” as they are not really public institutions, but private funds that function as NGOs and are getting public money. These non-institutions live in shadow of the institutions and are more or less left-overs from the 1990s, post Soros institutions. What do they primarily do? Such institutions are seen as over rapid “incubators” that over rapidly produce generations of different structures that are operative within art and culture: curators, organizers, even artists, etc. Along with this process of over rapid production of new (human) structures, these non-institutions produce over rapid genealogies of art. It is important to understand that this over rapid process is taking part contrary to genealogies of the First Capitalist World (that is patiently and constantly being (re)constructed). The over rapid production of genealogies present a process of “enterprised-up genealogies” – it is a form of deregulating, and it is the way to (over rapidly) construct and conceptualize history. These traits are not psychological descriptions, but are constitutive to the way neoliberal capitalism functions structurally today, and show that sped up time processes are part of finanzialization and speculation.

As a result of these processes, the categories of public space, public money and the public as such have been totally instrumentalized and privatized.

At the point of a conclusion, I can state, that as institutions and non-institutions are functioning through a process of financialization with fully speculative scenarios similar to banks and non-banks, they have to be aware of their possible total collapse. This is precisely what is going on in Wall Street. Elements of the collapse are already possible to be seen in the way the art institution functions publicly, going beyond every border of good taste.

In short, neoliberal necrocapitalism is continually being produced and reproduced, not only economically and politically, but obviously institutionally. All these processes have an effect that is totally and straightforwardly completely socially “dysfunctional.” It generates consequences that are very difficult to be fully understood. Nowadays it is necessary to de-link ourselves from a war of everybody against everybody, ex/changing everything with everything, everybody with everybody; it is necessary to be capable of drawing a line of differentiation in the space, while building local and international alliances. These are the only possible ways for changing the deregulated and privatized present economic, social, and institutional spheres of our life and work.

And now, at the end, it is time to ask if with the present recession neoliberal global capitalism ended? I will say that the financial crises actually created conditions for a new global and if you want internal restructuring, for en even deeper dysfunctional deregulation. Therefore what we can expect is the intensification of deathscapes with processes of creation of massive pauperization and poverty. On the global scale in order to curb mass hunger (but actually to provide the terrain for new technologies) biotechnologically developed and genetically modified foods will be introduced, not only in the World as general, but in Europe as well. This will be done “tout court,” without objection and will be going side by side with realities of environmental crisis. These realities are and will be the result of the lack of energy supply that will give in turn free hands to all sorts of murderous usage of uncontrollable ways of energy (from the most dirty to the most “clean” atomic one!)

It is important to add that the present situation will give free hands to capital’s most urgent task and this is the intensification of collapse and /or of a complete de/re/structuring of the working class within the described line of regulation of life from the biopolitical into the necropolitical. This will be conducted through an intensification that is already taking place and can be named, according to Ignacio Ramonet, as four great rationalization principles:

Reducing the number of employees

2) Reducing wages

Introducing more and more work obligations

Restructuring companies and the redistribution of good and resources.

These processes will be performed in many different situations by capital: in executing control over life, pushing war on terrorism or civilizing those that are not yet civilized enough!

REFERENCES:

Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur (text) and Belinda Kazeem (visuals), In: Reartikulacija/Re-articulation, no.1, Ljubljana 2007. http://www.reartikulacija.org/pozicioniranje.html

Časopis za kritiko znanosti, domišljijo in novo antropologijo: Zgoda Nekega Izbrisa (The Journal for Critique of Science Imagination and New Anthropology:The Story of an Erasure), February 2008.

Matevž Krivic, "Izbrisani, Bavčar: Odmisliti človekove pravice!" ("The Erased, Bavčar: Ignoring Human Rights!"), Mladina, no. 9, 2004.

Sebastjan Leban, “Procesi pavperizacije” ("Process of pauperization"), in M. Gržinić, S. Kleindienst, S. Leban, “Sodobna umetnost in kultura na Slovenskem: procesi getoizacije, pavperizacije in apolitičnosti” (Contemporary art and culture in Slovenia: processes of ghettoization, pauperization and apolitical stance), 2008, published at www.reartikulacija.org

Maria¸Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System”, in Hypatia, 22.1, 2007, pp. 186–209.

Santiago López Petit, El Estado-Guerra (War-State), Editorial Hiru, Hondarribia, Spain 2003.

Artiom Magun, Alexander Skidan and Dmitry Vilensky, “Potentialities”, What is to be Done?, no. 16, March 2007

http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=327&Itemid=167 (28.3.2008)

Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, University of California Press, Berkeley 2001.

Walter Mignolo, “The geopolitics of knowledge and the coloniality of power. An interview with Mignolo.” Catherine Walsh, in: Zehar, no. 60-61, San Sebastian 2007.

http://magazines.documenta.de/attachment/000000345.pdf

“On Private Indirect Government,” interview with Achille Mbembe by Christian Hoeller,

http://www.springerin.at

Reartikulacija, Artistic-Political-Theoretical-Discursive-Platform and Journal, no. 3, March 2008, www.reartikulacija.org

Madina Tlostanova, “Re(dis)articulating the Myth of Modernity through the Decolonial Perspective” text for Transmediale, Berlin, 2009.

[1] Cf. Reartikulacija, Ljubljana http://www.reartikulacija.org/. Gržinić as well invited these theoreticians to Ljubljana. They will lecture in the beginning of February 2009 in Ljubljana as part of the course on art and culture within the postgraduate school established by ZRC SAZU and The University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia.
[2] In latin nomen est omen means the name is a sign.
[3] J.-A. Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture, vol. 15. no. 1, Winter 2003, pp. 11–40.
[4] Artiom Magun, Alexander Skidan and Dmitry Vilensky, “Potentialities”, What is to be Done?, no. 16, March 2007; http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=327&Itemid=167 (28.3.2008)

A LECTURE [about improvisation as performance]

marta.popivoda — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 04:36:51 -0800

This will be about the conditioning and the conditions for improvisation as performance.
I won’t talk about improvisation as a technique to create new movement, or as a technique to free the body from habitual movement patterns, or as a technique in contact improvisation to explore movement by physical contact.

I will mainly talk about some almost philosophical notions which should pre-condition improvisation. Don’t worry: the level of abstractness in the course of this lecture will change. It is some elliptic lecture. I mean to say ‘don’t worry when you do not grasp notions from the first time they are mentioned, they will pop-up again from a slightly other perspective or in another context.

On June 29 I wrote Joao, after having hesitated for some weeks if I should accept his invitation of giving this lecture for this selected audience of specialists, I dance, but as some sidekick, I am not a real dancer, I am a tourist in your fields, I teach at Parts since the beginning in 95, but nonetheless, I am not a specialist, and preparing a lecture is time consuming, but on that date, I saw some possibilities and I wrote:
I am going next week to Paris, to ’teach’, in Boris Charmatz’ school "Bokal", this means his students make a performance and I have to react instantly on individual interventions of them in front of an audience, an improvisation. The whole evening a continuing of a one to one confrontation of 5 minutes, with 18 different students, during four public presentations. I will try to reflect on this, as I have thoughts about improvising, so to speak about meta-systematic improvisation. (Meta-systems preclude both completeness and consistency. By definition a system is complete when it consists of several contradictory properties, but this excludes consistency. Nonetheless a meta-system precludes both. A system is a gestalt, a wholeness that is greater than the sum of the parts. A meta-system has a lack, rather then a surplus, it is a defective that is less than the sum of its parts.) What do I mean with meta-systematic improvisations: Most improvisations follow schemes, structures, patterns of action-reaction, which are in most cases all driven by some essentialist need to express oneself, to express the human being, and by stereotypes of aesthetics and affects.

I would like to reflect on the possibility to improvise without the need to mainly express yourself, better to say: the need to save yourself, the situation or the performance, in front of an audience. I call this to try ’not to be under the roof’ and to try ’ not to fill in the empty space, the tabula rasa, the white screen, with yourself’.
It is about the availability of the body and mind, not driven by impulses to produce, but to reach a state of non-productiveness, of not-needing each other, of reaching a state of potentiality.
In the performance Weak Dance Strong Questions, Jonathan Burrows and I made, we tried to improvise on the principles not to negotiate with time nor with space, to stay together, and to dance in a state of questions. It was clear to us that we definitely not wanted to have the dancemachine driven by impulses of action and reaction. In this performance the body was prepared to think. We danced in a condition of questions.

Two weeks ago, I wrote to the partner, with whom I am preparing a new dance performance with, a real dancer:
We should not make a performance about something, but the thing itself needs to be interpellated by itself.
We have to find a language in which we stammer ourselves, in which we are foreigners ourselves.
This means that we have to see if the relation with the elements of the piece is productive, is generating something different than its juxtaposition, that it becomes some assemblage.
We must try to be bilingual in our own language, we must create a minor language in our own language.
Finding, encountering, stealing instead of regulating, recognizing and judging. Recognizing is the opposite of the encounter.
As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze called it: ‘To create lines, which do not amount to the path of point, which break free from structure - lines of flight, becomings, without future and past, without memory, which resist the binary machine: man-woman/good-bad/beautiful-ugly.
Non-parallel evolutions, which do not proceed by differentiation (can it be done in another way, JR), but which leap from one line to another, between completely heterogeneous beings; cracks, imperceptible ruptures, which break the lines even if they resume elsewhere, leaping over significant breaks... Thinking in things, among things. This is producing population in a desert and not species and genres. Populating without ever specifying.’
This means you do something. And I do something. At first sight this seems very little to do with each other. But we keep them. We interrupt (and this is no deal). Nothing is a deal, let alone a big deal. You do. I do. I listen, you speak. All the products are strange results of our conversations, as vague or as clear as they are. We do not try to understand each other. The misunderstandings, the misconnections are at stake here. And there will be many. And these will find their way and possibly become the stammering, the foreigner in our own language; the interpellations of the thing itself. These will be our blind spot. Means the part we don’t understand ourselves, but nonetheless the object for the observers. A thing they can see/perceive and of which they know we can’t do it ourselves. Invisible for us, visible for the audience. Nonetheless drive of the performance, we are driven by it, without knowing exactly how and why and what for, and the audience is driven by it.

‘It is not the elements or the sets which define the multiplicity. What defines the multiplicity is the AND, as something which has its place, BETWEEN the elements or BETWEEN the sets. And, and, and -stammering. Even if there are only two terms, there is an AND between the two, which is neither the one nor the other, nor the one becomes the other, but which constitutes the multiplicity.
It is always about taking up the interrupted line, to join a segment to the broken line, to make it pass between two rocks in a narrow gorge, or over the top of a void where it had stopped. It is never the beginning or the end which are interesting; the beginning and end are points. What is interesting is the middle. The English zero is always in the middle. Bottlenecks are always in the middle. Being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable position. Do not think in trees, the tree of knowledges, the alpha and omega, the roots and the pinnacle. Trees are the opposite of grass. Not only does grass grow in the middle of things, but it grows itself through the middle. Grass has its line of flight, and does not take root. We have grass in the head, not a tree: what thinking signifies is what the brain is, a particular nervous system of grass.
We should try to be a flux, a flux which combines other fluxes. A flux is something intensive, instantaneous, mutant, something between a creation and destruction. It is only when a flux is deterritorialised that it succeeds in making its conjunction with other fluxes.’ (Deleuze)

Here I would like to read to you an excerpt from an interview of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. These lines are a belated discovery of resemblance between what Deleuze writes and what my poetics are. On the body and affection. Each individual, body and soul, possess an infinity of parts which belong to him in a more or less complex relationship. Each individual is also himself composed of individuals of a lower order and enters into the composition of individuals of a higher order. All individuals are in Nature as though on a plane of consistence whose whole figure they form, a plane which is variable at each moment. They affect each other in so far as the relationship, which constitutes each one forms a degree of power, a capacity to be affected.

Whence the force of Spinoza’s question: ’What can a body do?’, of what affects is it capable? Affects are becomings: sometimes they weaken us as they diminish our power to act and decompose our relationships (sadness), sometimes they make us stronger in so far as they increase our power and make us enter into a more vast or superior individual (joy). Spinoza never ceases to be amazed by the body. He is not amazed at having a body, but by what the body can do. Bodies are not defined by their genus or species, by their organs or functions, but by what they can do, by the affects of which they are capable - in PASSION as well as in ACTION.
When Spinoza says" The surprising thing is the body... We do not yet know where the body is capable of..." he does not want to make the body a model, and the soul simply dependent on the body. He has a subtler task. He wants to demolish the pseudo-superiority of the soul over the body. There is the soul and the body and both express one and the same thing: an attribute of the body is also an expressed of the soul (for example, speed). Just as you do not know many things where the body is capable of, so there are in the soul many things which go beyond your consciousness.
This is the question: what is the body capable of? What affects are you capable of? Experiment!, but you need a lot of prudence to experiment. We live in a world which is generally disagreeable, where not only people but the general powers have a stake in transmitting sad affects to us. Sadness, sad affects, are all those which reduce our power to act. The established powers need our sadness to make us slaves. The tyrant, the priests, the captors of souls need to persuade us that life is hard and a burden. The powers, that be need to repress us no less than to make us anxious or, as Virillo says, to administer and organize our little fears. The long, universal moan about life: the-lack-to-be which life is... In vain someone says, ‘let’s dance’; but we are not really very happy. Those who are sick, in soul as in body, will not let us go, the vampires, until they have transmitted to us their neurosis and their anxiety, their beloved castration, the resentment against life, filthy contagion. It is all a matter of blood. It is not easy to be a free man, to flee the plaque, organize encounters, increase the power to act, to be moved by joy, to multiply the affects which express or encompass a maximum of affirmation. To make the body a power which is not reducible to the organism, to make thought a power which is not reducible to consciousness. So far Deleuze.

In 2000 working on an improvisation performance called Verwantschappen I wrote some kind of instruction for the actors.
I called it The Lesson.

don’t take it in
share it
don’t take it for yourself
just present it
fully unconscious about the how
be, are with the things around you
do not make yourself the most important,
the only one in the space
don’t isolate yourself from the rest
there is not such a thing as a hierarchy between you,
it is, And the chair, And the table, And the wall
try to be one of them
present you as an animal, just there
almost by chance
tout et rien d’autre (everything and nothing else)
pas une image juste
juste une image
juxtapose yourself with the other objects
do not fill your presence in with yourself
do not hide yourself behind your presence
don’t try to be under the roof of some smaller or bigger task, or of
some understanding of what you are doing
the roof is everywhere and everything: the wall,
that candle, the floor, me, them
do not mask yourself by the denial of the things around you
mask yourself by everything
be rich, not poor, many, not little things are at your disposal
go for all of us, all of this
we live in a complex society
go for all this complexity
for all the probable possibilities
don’t control space, nor time
do not negociate with it
don’t fill in your nor our time,
(we know how to do it ourselves)
nothing is more important than anything else,
you neither
only the difference
just different
no hierarchy
no focus by isolation
by denial,
by exclusion
you can say:
‘take this poem for instance’
and you say it, you just say it
in the presence of all the other things
try it, say it
move it, just move it, you, the space, us, the things

For the performances TODAYulysses and PIPELINES, a construction, which I wrote and performed together with Bojana Cvejic I wrote some reflexions for the programbooks, of which the following are excerpts.

We are talking about a performance between the active AND the passive, between the actor AND the spectator.
We are talking about border zones.
The ideal spectator does not come to the theatre in order to assess the theatrical content but rather to arrive at unexpected thoughts, to call into doubt her own stereotypical views and ways of thinking: not to be confirmed, not to have his or her views about theatre, life and the world substantiated, but precisely to question them.
Now that the theatre is the only remaining place where we gather ‘live’, like the church of old, it should not be the place where one is treated. One does not come to be cured but expects to be challenged: challenged with propositions, questions and hypotheses. One does not expect to be given answers, confirmation or opinions, but rather to be confronted with a border zone, still undefined, whimsical and full of opacity. Not to be provided with conclusions or directions, but shown a field, a table of sometimes-contradictory propositions that are the results of the thought processes of its makers.
In other words, the stage is a surface upon which to inscribe and to erase, to add and to take away, to place and to replace. The stage is a “propo-site,” a notebook in which to jot down propositions, a worktable full of unfinished attempts and leftovers.

What is this AND? The AND is neither the one nor the other. It is always between the two, it is the border zone. There is always a border zone, a vanishing trace or flow, only we do not see it because it is barely visible. Yet, it is along this vanishing trace that things happen, events come into being and revolutions are sketched out.
What is this between? Strength does not lie in occupying one camp or the other. Power resides in the border zone, and the border zone is never a massive wall or an impregnable fortress but is always an area filled with holes. We are interested not in the position on either side of the border zone but in the potentiality of the holes it contains.

The border zone is a no-man’s-land of potentialities. There, things and opinions are not yet set in stone, things and opinions are able to become, to become many things.

How do we think we can achieve this?
By establishing this in-between situation, this borderline situation, at all conceivable levels of the performance

We create a performance that itself is a border zone in the possible and conceivable range of imaginable performances. We see the performance itself as a border zone, the unknown place, a place of anonymity, a place adrift and incapable of being situated. The displaced place where things can be thought anew. To this end, we must blur the known properties of a performance as much as possible. We destabilize them as it were, by thinking differently about how they are used. We mean here the use of dancing techniques, illustration, representation, presentation and decoration, the use of new media and light, the use of the dispositive as such (the separation of stage and spectators), the use of the illusory, the use of beauty, the poignant, the disarming, the provocative and the hilarious. We mean the use of the spectacular and the sentimental, the production methods that one used, the way things are financed and sold, and above all, the choice of subject matter and the addictive need to impress.
By destabilizing the means, we also deprive them of a hierarchy. It no longer concerns how beautiful or how ugly, how virtuosic, moving or human the set, the dance, the dancer, or the story was, but how effective their use was in creating the border zone that the performance intends to be.

There is neither place for formalization. The form is the lack or scarcity of form. After all, the form must also be a border zone of form, must remain accessible to all possible forms. It may not overwhelm or astound. It must remain imaginable, manageable, as a mouldable element among all other mouldable elements.

Thus, it more or less boils down to the following code words: destabilization, displacement and decentralization.

You should not imagine such a border zone too concretely. Border zones are everywhere: between you and yourself, you and your computer, you and your child ... infinitely many. What I would like is to be aware of this zone, this enormous non-space, so that I do not lurch from thing to thing, or from thing to subject and from thing to task to still another task. To put it differently: that I do not jump from one task that I give myself to the other, until the final command of the day, ‘now go to sleep’. Similar to how I travel: from A to B and nothing in between. However, let the transitions be present, similar to me writing this lecture. There is an ocean of other texts and an ocean of thoughts between this lecture and me, which means that this lecture does not stand on its own but has to do with my personal circumstances, with my history, with the performances that I make and would like to make, with the influence that I have and would like to have and with all the performances that I have seen. But it also includes that fact that I could write something very different, or would like to write something that has much more impact, something people would call disgraceful, but that I do not do this, and then, why not. It includes what I might be able to write or would like to write.
This is what it is about for me, about the awareness that I am writing this and why precisely I am writing this, but also about the awareness that I could write something completely different about the same field and notions.
In the border zone, things spring into action. There it happens, almost of its own accord. The border zone is an opportunity, but usually a lost opportunity.
The agglomerate of border zones that the performance intends to be, is such an opportunity. You can use it or not use it. It does not need you and likewise you could do without it.
It is precisely this position that makes it possible for you to think something but also something else, or to do something but also something else. The border zone cheats you out of your means of navigation and your compass, and so questioning the possibility to determine the way for yourself.

No hierarchy in the use of the (performative) means, the objects and subjects. Everything, words and things, are equally important. No secrets. Nothing to be revealed. Everything is what it is, means in all its possibilities. Objective, abstract, that everything can become an object for thought. And at the same time everything is related to all that; the thing, the ‘ici’ is related to the ‘there’ the ‘ailleurs’; to avoid to look at things mainly from the position what they mean to you, the ‘I’, the ‘ici’, because there is the thing too, or the subject, the ‘ailleurs’. What has the ‘I’ that watches to do with the thing that shows or is shown. And what has the thing ‘the ailleurs’ to do with the ‘I’, the ‘ici’ that watches.

Nothing has to be understood nor judged, it is the mere enjoyment of combining/relating/ juxtaposing you, your thoughts with the ones offered on stage. Both stage and audience are active and passive at the same time. And what is important is what happens between the active and the passive, the ici and the ailleurs.
That is the non-conclusive area, the area where it moves, the area that goes beyond truths, fixed positions, but unlike the position of the absorbing screen, that most performances are, where there is movement too, but the movement here is not a one-way one (audience sucked in into the stage, the screen) but some whimsical vice versa, to and fro.

For the art magazine Performance Research Jonathan Burrows (with whom I made the dance-performance Weak Dance Strong Questions were asked to fill the so called artists pages of a special on contemporary dance called bodiescapes (vol.8 no 2, June 2003). We made it in 2002:

Bodiescapes.
WEAK DANCE STRONG QUESTIONS
from the notebooks of Jonathan Burrows and Jan Ritsema

In the beginning were Celan, Eliot and Thomas: poetry.

THERE WILL be something, later
that fills itself with you
and rises
to a mouth
Out of the broken bits
of my illusion
I stand up
and look at my hand,
how it draws the only
possible
circle (Celan)

He says that I should not want to prove anything with the movement, that I just ask questions, but how can one ask a question by moving? This is impossible. Every movement is a statement, this is what I learned when I started dancing. And unlike speech, movements are never something else than what they are, they do not pretend. So how can I doubt about a movement which can only be clear to me?

Don’t make gestures, let the skeleton make the movement, and don’t lead your moving with your eyes from one point to another; then you try to rescue your body, and there is no rescue. Sink into the body, go from one moment to the next and ask question after question; question continuously.

He is talking about his dancing and he wants to say ‘my body’ and he says ‘my money’, and then he says ‘when I dance my body seems younger’, and I think, this is worrying, I wanted to dance with an older man.

He says he has to forget more of his trained body. He has nothing to forget, only to try. It’s not possible for the body to forget, because the muscles can’t forget.

I can only say, there we have been; but I cannot say at the same moment where.

I should not think that life can take things away from me, things that I have an obligation to try and keep hold of, I should only think about the possibilities life offers. I should know that there are only chances and nothing to lose.

I could be bounded in a nutshell and call myself
a king of infinite space were it not that I have
bad dreams. (Hamlet)

He says that it is not about being fearless but about accepting fear, so don’t practice the principles, don’t exercise, just go for it, you will fail anyway, let your body remember it, endure your body, you can’t escape from it.

He wants to dance but he gets stuck in an image of what he thinks dancing is.

He goes round in his house closing doors after himself and then he expects to open them when he dances.

Images give us consolation for the suffering of life
And life gives us consolation for the fact that the images
Do not mean anything (Godard)

Usually I am not interested in what happens between departure and arrival, reaching the goal seems to be the only importance. I have to change this. I have to split big distances into tiny ones. Going to Moscow starts with locking my apartment door, taking the elevator, opening the outside door, walking to the railway station, and so on. This takes the fear out of the big trip. This is how I have to dance, from movement to movement and all the time face every change. At first only the bigger ones, and then slowly on, going more into details.

When he thinks about dancing he shifts around in his chair, and he starts to curl up again, starts to get small, as though he wants to disappear.

He says it’s his shameless dance, but at the same time he feels a lot of shame, he says he wants to dance and at the same time he wants to disappear.

He is the most afraid person in the world, fear is his general state of being, he says, and a moment later he says he’s afraid of nothing.

He says he has no fear, but if he really had no fear he would not mention it.

He says when the fear is in him he fights back and so his feet are never on the ground. He is always on the run.

Everything belonged to him, but the important thing was to know where he belonged to.

I lift him, I put him on my shoulder here, I throw him in the air, he even stays there maybe, I will always catch him, again and again.

I ask myself, how much of the tree I see in front of me is in me?
Do I have roots, am I grounded, do I give shadow, do I get new leaves every year, do my leaves die too?
And how much of me is in the tree?
Can it dance, can it be happy, can it ask for social security, can a tree fuck, get cancer?
He says that by asking himself this, he feels he lives a bit less trapped in himself than he normally does.

When we walk in, and also during the performance, we should not negotiate the space, nor the time. To walk in and wanting to possess the space is a negotiation.
It is so difficult not wanting to be interesting.

He says he wants to make his brain physical, in some way, he says this quite often.
But his spirit is still afraid, and he starts to recite Dylan Thomas:
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not.

You are an Orangutan, he says, when he observes me.
There is a sense of anthropology about what we do.

When he dances his mouth takes a certain expression and he suddenly looks like a priest. Why is he doing that?
Yes, I did it again. Because I think dance is something serious. But when my mouth is not a priest my arm is completely different. When I am a priest I show a problem and I am not offering anything.

We started by reading and reciting parts of poems to each other. Some stayed, like the T. S. Eliot (Four Quartets, Burnt Norton). Although we try to move ‘neither from nor towards’ we never stop in the performance:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Is it that we try to dance in a way in which every movement contains the possibility of all directions?

Is it the pleasure of recognizing individuality as a product of all possible possibilities?

Is it then the celebration of individuality as Spinoza described it: ‘the recognition of being composed by an ensemble of an infinity of infinite ensembles of extensive parts, inside or outside, which belong to me under characteristic rapports, these characteristic rapports express only a certain level of power which forms my essence, my essence according to me, so to say the essence specific to me’?
Is it the feeling that we are composed by our life in which we perceive and experiment and are perceived and experimented on by other internal and external parts?
And this in a chain of transformations, transpositions and mutations?

Is it the fascination for the shameless emptiness then? What some people called the ‘courage’ of being on stage without being covered by a context or meaning?
Without what we call being under the roof of a task?

Is it the fascination for a thing that is so common that you tend to oversee it at the same time? A thing that is there and at the same time not? A thing you can think away easily, a thing you can forget because it will always be there, a thing you can erase safely without the fear for overseen consequences, a fearless thing because you know it so well, so well how to handle it that you as an audience can never fail?

Is it the seeming contradiction in this factory-of-movements- not-to-produce-specific-products which connects it more to nature, more to a landscape that creates the enjoyment of a profound purposelessness in which, again, it is fearless to travel?

Is it the relief about the absence of the spectacular and the excitement, not only for the sake of an exception but for some intrinsic reason not to be confronted with the stereotypes of impressiveness?

Is it the absence of music or any sound in the performance, only the daily noise from outside the theatre, which questions the source for the concentrated execution of the ongoing movements, and by this the drive behind all this moving?

Is it the absence of any physical touch between us which triggers a longing of the audience to bring us together in their imagination?

And he says that these days we live and play in each others movies all the time. And that he wants to make a performance in which it is easy to take part. He wants to be touchable and the performance to be touchable, which is something else than touching.

He says: I don’t want to control myself on stage, but I want that everyone can control me. (I mean their understanding of what is happening)

I interviewed a monk once, a very old man, called Brother Harold. And it was quite a long time ago so I can tell this story without embarrassment. No, this is a lie, I am still embarrassed, but I will tell it anyway. And so of course at the end of the interview I said, well Let me ask you the really obvious question: what does God mean to you, and he said, straight away without any hesitation, he said: ‘The more in the middle of’. He said it straight like that, without any hesitation and looking into my eyes. There was no need to pause for thought, there was a lifetime of thought behind his answer, and what I understood was that the more was now, here, the present, the isness which is surrounded by what came before, what I wanted to do, what I thought I should do, and the future, what I want to do next.

When I told him the story he thought I said ‘the move in the middle of’, and somehow that remains useful to him.

In the train this morning I read an interview to be published with Merce Cunnigham; he said: there are no fixed points in space (as Einstein taught me), and I thought, that is marvelous for the stage! Rather than thinking there is a fixed point on the stage, the most important place, allow for any point to be used, so that you can not only face it but use it for directions.

Many thanks to Gilles Deleuze (Dialoques II), Baruch DeSpinoza (Ethics), Jean-Luc Godard, Kenneth Palmer (autopoietic systems theory) and Jacques Rancière (Politics of Aesthetics, Ignorant Schoolmaster).

The lecture was given on 6 October 2004 at DanceUnlimited, postdoctoral dance education in Holland, Arnhem.

TOWARDS THE TECHNO-HUMANITIES: A Manifesto

marta.popivoda — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 06:39:32 -0800

THE CREATIVE ASPECT OF THE HUMANITIES has not yet found its recognition in the established classification and methodology of scientific disciplines. Are the humanities a purely scholarly field, or should there be some active, constructive supplement to them? We know that technology serves as the practical extension ("application") of natural sciences and politics as the extension of social sciences.

Both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study objectively. Is there any activity in the humanities that would correspond to this transformative status of technology and politics? In the following schema, the third line demonstrates a blank space, indicating the questionable status of the practical applications of the humanities.

Nature - natural sciences - technology - transformation of nature
Society - social sciences - politics - transformation of society
Culture – human sciences - ______ - transformation of culture

There is a coherent connection between theoretical and practical disciplines regarding the exploration and transformation of nature and society. But the third line suggests that we need a practical branch of the humanities which functions like technology and politics, but is specific to the cultural domain.

What are we to call it? Naming is sometimes the best way to define or even to solve the problem; a name contains the embryo of a concept and the beginning of future theory. I will suggest several terms that could operate in that blank space (the current embryonic stage of theorizing leaves the future open to multiple possibilities).

“Culturonics” will refer to the discipline that deals with culture practically, in the mold of "electronics," "bionics," "avionics," "tectonics," "mnemonics" and other "applied," constructive disciplines. “Pragmo-humanities” suggests that the humanities have a pragmatic side that regulates the relationship between their practitioners and users, their authors and addressees. "Trans-humanities" indicates that this group of practical disciplines - translinguistics, transaesthetics, transpoetics, etc. – aim to trans-form those areas of culture which are studied by the corresponding scholarly disciplines of linguistics, aesthetics, and poetics.

Among these trans-disciplines, one of the broadest applications can be assigned to translinguistics, which creates artificial languages or introduces new directions for the development of natural languages. Obviously, Dr. Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof’s project, the international language Esperanto, does not belong to the field of linguistics properly, though it expands from intensive linguistic scholarship. The comparative analysis of existing languages allowed Zamenhof to synthesize a new language, combining in its grammar and vocabulary Roman, German, and Slavic elements.

In the first half of the twentieth century, before English became the predominant language of international communication, Esperanto laid very serious claims to becoming the lingua franca for modern civilization; even now it still claims about several millions users. Translinguistics covers the area of the so-called constructed international languages (Volapuk, Ido, Occidental), fictional languages (Klingon in Star Trek series, Quenya and Sindarin in Tolkien’s books), and specialized languages of various disciplines (math, logic, linguistics), as well as languages of computer programming, and man-machine communication.

Finally, the term “techno-humanities” would refer to the art of the humanities. It includes the art of building new intellectual communities, new paradigms of thinking and modes of communication rather than simply studying or criticizing the products of culture. We should bear in mind that the humanities constitute the level of meta-art, different from the primary arts of painting, poetry, or music, all of which comprise the object of humanistic inquiry. The fact that the humanities belong to this meta-discursive level does not preclude their practical, productive orientation. The humanities do not produce works of art but rather new cultural positions, movements, perspectives, and modes of reflexivity.

The concept of "technohumanities" does not imply that the humanities should adopt the idea of "techno" from scientific technology; on the contrary, it was technology that stole "techno" (Greek techne - "art, skill, craft") from the humanities. Now it is time for its re-appropriation. By utilizing this term "techno," we do not intend to "scientize" the humanities, but, on the contrary, to draw them closer to art, to creativity in the sphere of ideas and communications. When offering a certain theory, we need to ask ourselves if it is able to inaugurate a new cultural practice, an artistic movement, a disciplinary field, a new institution, life style, or intellectual community?

By reintegrating "techno," the technohumanities complement the project of human sciences with the concept of humanistic arts. While the primary arts, such as poetry, painting, theater, etc. are studied by the human sciences, the secondary, humanistic arts are not the object of human sciences, but their constructive extensions, the transformative practices built on the foundation of scholarly findings and theories.

Primary arts are transformative practices directed onto material objects or natural languages (as Yury Lotman put it, "primary signifying systems"). For example, sculpture transforms marble, dancing and theater—the human body, poetry—-natural language. The humanities, or human sciences, are designed to study these primary arts and build certain theories and generalizations on their basis. The technohumanities constitute the third, post-theoretical level of cultural activity, that is, the variety of practices that aim to reconfigure the elements of the preceding two levels.

For example, Russian Symbolism integrated cultural activity on all three levels: first, poetry and fiction, second, theory of symbols in general and its application to symbolist writing, and third, the transformative practices that emerged from symbolist theory. These included the production of manifestos, critical and journalistic writings, polemics, the organization of public events (concerts, readings, discussions) and of new journals and presses, the creation of the Symbolist milieu, and the expansion of Symbolism into different arts and intellectual circles. All these practices could be identified as constitutive of the technohumanities, or humanistic arts.

The existing division of culture into primary practices and scholarly theories is incomplete and does not allow the proper definition of the creative contributions made by many cultural figures. For example, the major representatives of Russia’s Silver Age—Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely—were both writers and theoreticians. But there is a third factor in their work not to be found in pure writers (such as Chekhov or Leskov) or pure scholars (such as Veselovsky or Potebnia). They did not simply produce literature or investigate it, but broadened the frontiers of literature proceeding from the theoretical vision of its possibilities. They wrote Symbolist poems and treatises and manifestos. They created the program of symbolism as a comprehensive cultural movement, incorporating artistic, aesthetic, mystical and social components.

In distinction from the humanities, which study existing cultures, the technohumanities explore that which does not yet exist. They project and produce possible cultural objects and forms of activity including new artistic and intellectual movements, new disciplines, research methodologies and philosophical systems, new styles of behavior, social rituals, semiotic codes, and intellectual trends.

That the technohumanities are not just a construct of our time has been demonstrated by cultural communities such as the Italian Humanists, German Romantics, American Transcendentalists, Italian and Russian Futurists, French Surrealists… It is the inherent property of such cultural groups to generate their creative practices on the basis of certain theories. In the late 20th century, the technohumanities in Russia are exemplified by the work of Dmitry Likhachev in "ecological" preservation of cultural memory; Yury Lotman in the development of semiotic consciousness and systematic exploration and transformation of the semiosphere; and Georgy Shchedrovitsky in the implementation of the reflective methodology ("thought-action," "mysledeiatelnost") in education, architecture, design, and economics.

I will give one more detailed example of what I understand by technohumanities. The main insights of literary theory, as we study its innovative ideas and peak achievements, are found not in scholarly monographs or articles, but in literary manifestos. The latter are products of theoretical imagination rather than empirical study and scholarly scrutiny. Manifestos of Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Naturalism, Futurism, Surrealism, etc. are not based on the discipline of research, the "careful, systematic, patient study and investigation in some field of knowledge," as defined by the Webster Dictionary. Manifestos are neither factual nor fictional—they are formative.

They aim to produce new literary facts rather than register and analyze the facts, past and present. Under which existing academic categories can this constructive activity of theory be placed? Does it belong to the realm of scholarship or literary fiction? Obviously, none of them. Its proper place is precisely in the yet unmarked domain of theoretical inventions, techno- or trans-humanities? The humanities should embrace both modes of conceptual activity recognized by the sciences: discovery of some existing principles and facts and invention of those tools and ideas that can transform a given area of study. "Inventorship," as a mode of creativity, should become as indispensable a companion to scholarship in the humanities as technology is to science. Thus, technohumanities, or transhumanities can be defined in Bakhtin’s words as "the co-creativity of those who understand [culture],” as the constructive and transformative potential of cultural theories.[1]

Our academic institutions, however, have no place for such peculiar avenues of conceptual creativity. There are departments for literary theory and scholarship, for fiction and creative writing, but not for constructive writing in “practical theory,” not for technohumanities. Is there any institution in contemporary academia in which such creative thinkers, literature inventors and builders, like Friedrich Schlegel, Vissarion Belinsky or André Breton could flourish as professionals? Paradoxically, their views, works, and biographies are deemed worthy of extensive and scrupulous academic study; yet the very constructive impetus of their writing, its "inventive" genre, lacking proper documentation and scholarly "apparatus," would keep them outside of academia.

This paradox can be compared to an impossible scenario in which a university would exclude an engineering school or department on the grounds that, unlike departments of physics or chemistry, it deals with inventions and not discoveries. Engineering in the humanities is no less important.

This failure to recognize the cognitive status of technohumanities raises the question whether various intellectual capacities are adequately represented and integrated at our universities? According to Alfred North Whitehead, "The task of a University is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue."[2] Literary inventorship, even more directly than literary scholarship, shapes our cultural future. Though held in such high esteem retrospectively, why is theoretical inventorship dismissed in the contemporary academy?

To recognize the constructive potential of the humanities is not enough. Bakhtin’s methodological insights help us to specify the character of cognitive activity in the humanities as different from the sciences. Up to this point, the tendency in the "applied humanities," inasmuch as they were called to prove their practical value, has been to technologize or politicize these disciplines, that is, to subject them to the practical modalities of natural or social sciences. The humanities, however, have their own constructive potential that corresponds to their unique object. Bakhtin characterizes this object as "the expressive and speaking being [vyrazitel’noe i govoriashchee bytie]. This being never coincides with itself and therefore is inexhaustible in its meaning and significance."[3] Bakhtin further indicates:

[There are] various ways of being active in cognitive activity. The activity of the one who acknowledges a voiceless thing [like in natural sciences] and the activity of one who acknowledges another subject [like in human sciences], that is, the dialogic activity of the acknowledger.[4]

Following Bakhtin’s emphasis on the dialogical activity of cognition, we can single out a specific set of utterances, which I call transformative, that are crucial for the logic and ethics of humanistic discourse. Transformative utterances communicate something that changes the very process of communication and the roles of its participants. "I love you" is an example of a transformative utterance, as it refers to the relationship between communicators and radically changes this relationship in the moment of its annunciation.

Humanistic discourse, like any discourse in natural or social sciences, is addressed to human individuals. But only humanistic discourse has human individuals and their creativity as its subject matter. Thus humanistic discourse is not purely informative. It is potentially as transformative as a declaration of love (or of hatred); it addresses the same subject about which it speaks. The activity in the humanities is different from technological or political activity in that the former is directed not to material objects or social masses, but to creative and responsive individuals, engaging them in the events of creative communication. To technologize or to politicize the humanities means to ignore their specifics.

Mikhail N. Epstein Samuel is Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University. Epstein founded the Laboratory of Contemporary Culture in Moscow. He is the author of inteLnet and some fifteen books.

[1] Mikhail Bakhtin. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992, p. 142.
[2] A. N. Whitehead. Modes of Thought. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1938, p. 233.
[3] "K filosofskim osnovam gumanitarnyx nauk,” in M. M. Bakhtin. Sobranie sochinenii, Moscow, Russkie slovari, 1997, vol. 5, p. 8.
[4] Bakhtin, Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, p. 161.

THE PASSION OF PROCEDURALISM

marta.popivoda — Thu, 29 May 2008 02:24:19 -0700

One of the first comments I could call out after the performance of The Theatre of Repetitions was: finally! Finally an event where music and theatre engage on an autonomous third plane of philosophy, saved from the obsessive search for a suitable Musik+Theater relationship whereby the capacity for representation in music traditionally is weighed against theatrical staging. Yet it would be inappropriate to claim that the philosophical concepts of Deleuze, according to the reference to Deleuze in the title of the work, [1] take the vantage-point of a masterdiscourse beyond (and in regulation of) Lang’s music and Le Roy’s choreography. The happy confluence of their distinctive mediums or what makes the collaboration between these two artists congenial rests on the fact that they both are investigating and bringing out ways of performing discursivity in music and dance proper. Every compositional or stage procedure in The Theatre of Repetitions could be considered on a second-degree basis of treating dispositifs of music and theatre in Western traditions. Perhaps, easier to be recognised in the staging thanks to the recent conceptualist tendencies in dance, Lang’s intentions have to labour against more stubborn resistances, the romantic phantom habits and expectations of audiences to enjoy original expressions of beautiful souls in opera. Their discursive mutuality is conceived in an intertwining relationship. What could only unfold in the materiality of music – the interiority of the concept of repetition in musical work and its multiple perceptual, historical and political ramifications – is overtly exposed, stated and extenuated in the Inszenierung. Briefly describing the performance we could say we are watching a hyphenated concert of live music performed in theatre, where music is presented with the small gestures of musical execution choreographed. But to trace the path of how the strategies and procedures of music exposed their institutional protocols, let’s restart with the music.

Musical Work Deconstructed

Answering the simple question “what is it? what is it about?” is subverted almost methodologically in Lang’s music, and my answers would rather bear with some implications of its proceedings. It is, namely, the very concept of musical work and its metaphysical and ideological foundations, deconstructed by the procedures of differentiated repetition. Lang unfolds a compositional writing whose textuality efficiently dismantles the binary logic of the sign and the communicational intent of signification – in favor of a texturality, perhaps. By texturality I would suggest the haptic touch-for-sound illusions of sound surfaces or planes of intense musical matter, built by conjunctive and disjunctive sequences of utterances. It is a matter of manipulations of musical syntax which render played or sung/spoken musical units into utterances in the condition of making musical language possible but never becoming language. A phenomenon of bordering, of signifying undecidability or of the force of something close to the infinitive verb of activity without subject/object formations is driven by a machinic (and not rationalistically mechanical) sense of flow and interruption. Utterances appear like gestures whose protention in time is perceived untimely – in the sequences of repetition seeming delayed in departure and interrupted in destination which will become another immediate discontinuous redeparture. To describe the sensation of the complex textures resulting from multiple layerings, also affected by the changing dispositions of solo singers, chorus, orchestra, live performed or played back music, is necessarily to distinguish it from the principles of classicist architectonic/evolutive and minimalist processes of repetition. In view of the dialectical functions of musical unity established through recapitulation in Western classical music tradition Lang’s treatment of repetition shatters any support for receiving the composition in an organic whole, as it frustrates the repetitive sequences to take the direction of development. In difference to the modernist urge of minimalism to produce the objecthood of musical process in itself, repetition in The Theatre of Repetitions deals not with the craft of arbitrarily anatomising and reinventing musical material, but with a disfiguration of gestures. Every gesture is thoroughly asemanticised by way of repetition which stresses an innerly inverted citationality, iterability and reiteration, in the Derridean double sense of “once again” and “other”. [2] To the extent in which every utterance suggests to have been animated by intention which will never be completely present in it, we are testing our tendency to reassemble the totality of its context, expression/representation of meaning and singularity of occurrence, although music provides no referential stimulations. It captures us in the mutative effects of repeating a fragment as small and underdetermined as a particle, for instance, a SCH from Schwartze, which will gesticulate from the mouths of the musicians into the onomatopeic sound of bowing, thus, from a possibly tragic connotation associated with the broken syntagm Schwarze Wand (referring to the Nazi executions in the text) to a circular denotation (string-bowing) of the concert. The undoing of our listening habits goes so far that we sometimes even have to revoke our dreary inclination to decipher and try to anchor our perception with what we would like to interpret as the ending and starting signals in a post-Webernian musical narrative. This is to counter the hard core of the dispositif, the regulative of the habit or the impossibility of the listener to dissociate from the economimetic telos: what is the purposeful whole of a piece and how does it stand for the listening subject substituted for in representation?
The answer to how The Theatre of Repetitions unroots the logocentric frames of reception is furthered in the operations with verbal texts, especially in disregard to the ideal of the over-arching thematic or dramatic unity in opera or music theatre. The same effect is already managed by doubling the solist voices, untying them from any character-based expression in the presentation of text. Going for extreme registered voices (soprano, countertenor, bass disposition) and at moments replacing them with instruments (one distinguished Oboe solo) reveals a tendency to instrumentalism in thinking music, perhaps, remotely traceable reference to Baroque (Cartesian) visions of machines. In assembling excerpts from texts by Marquis de Sade, J.K.Huysmans, W. Burroughs, as well as Nuremberg trials and concentration camp testimonies is more striking a paragrammatic logic of poetic language or a disjunctive conjunction of “...and...and...and” words as objects in narration than their signified “content” in metaphors. Kristeva’s concept of paragrams which literally displays itself in the poetic potential of meaning in splitted, fissured, stuttered words, also involves the notions of the double writing-reading / composing-listening (bringing together, watching for, uncovering the trace etc.) as a violent participation in the field of possible topics. [3] I wouldn’t venture to interpret it in the grand narrative of the European concepts of political utopia, sovereignty and transgression, although the political intent emerges in the projection of a three-part history vaguely pivoting around the times of French Revolution, WWII and ’68. Instead of looking into the metaphorical reflections of the images of violent excesses of XVIII century aristocracy, explosive mental and carnal phantasms of gunning and sodomy or documents about the Nazi executions..., I would argue for another logic of sense construed not in symbolical images and notions, but in the fragmentary and yet pungent accounts of procedures of (passionate) cruelty. De Sade’s tortures, Burrough’s sexual magick or gangster shootings and the liquidation in concentration camps are talked about or made mention of as ritualized normative practices, where the law is reasserted by its transgression (e.g. homosexuality or suspension of law in the camp). They don’t offer narratives to be staged or represented in music, but metonymically configure the historical, social and political frames of repetition through the reiterative procedures which shed manuals sometimes even with details to how the act of violence was done. This political stance certainly has something to do with the Sloterdijk’s unhappy consciousness of cynical reasoning - L’éloge de la raison cynique, scenes 2 and 6 in Act 1. Perhaps, out of the inherent impossibility of ideological critique today comes the tactic not to represent but to repeat, not to attempt to grope for the Real in ideology but to examine and unfold ideology in its way of functioning, and for The Theatre of Repetitions in the dispositifs of music and theatre specifically.

Exhausting the Theatre Dispositif

The music of The Theatre of Repetitions exteriorises all its far-reaching discursive operations with what would be contained in and proceeded by the concept of musical work in the stage presentation. Departing from Lang’s score where some gestures of musical execution are already composed, that is, are included in the composition, Le Roy conceived of staging the concert performance. Movements “found” or sourced from the working situation of producing music in concert, usually presented and perceived in the aura of expressing the here&now one-time event of performing the musical work, are choreographed. They are shown retrievable, as the score of the musical work is. Appearances on stage, musicians, singers, chorus taking or leaving positions, the moving or breathing gestures of the impulse to begin, turning of score pages and other by-products of music-making function (to quote from the text: happiness is the by-product of function), even some moments in the orchestration or changing course of the music (especially the retrograde operations) are made visible through the exactness of repetition, duplication, manipulations in speeds and space of the movement. By completing the mise-en-scène of concert, Le Roy not only underlines the arbitrary, yet naturalized conventionality of procedures by which the status of musical work is declared, but he helps one of the most radical strategies, proceduralism, to slide the sublime object of musical work into the surface of its protocol. [4] Similarly to the duplication of voices (two sopranos, two countertenors, two basses), dancers are commingling with instrumentalists and singers in costumes and actions, like in coupling the piano-player with the assistance which at some moments creates ambiguity about who is coming/leaving the stage and who is playing/turning pages. The most striking upshot from such a consistently carried out duplication as simulation appears when the conductor – figuring the head in charge of the concert performance – receives a replica in another conductor look-alike diverted from the orchestra to conduct against the audience. The homogeneous set-up, everyone dressed in the same concert attire, supports the image of the machine at work, but as every machine is a machine of a machine, a machine connected to another machine, Deleuze and Guattari write, [5] it produces continuity conditioned by breaks and interruptions. These breaks and interruptions are the result of the musicians’ gestures cut, copied, multiplied by musicians or dancers conjoining musicians’ doings in the sameness that can thus only point out to difference.
In the second act, The Place of Dead Roads, where Burrough’s texts come through with a more explosive language, Le Roy draws a detour line in the game he set. When dancers (probably together with some chorus singers) come from sides around the central body of the orchestra on stage to perform gangster scenes, at first we would suspect that repetition gave way to representation, and our imagination is unleashed for evoking film images like Reservoir Dogs etc. However, at a closer look we drift away from the attraction to any resemblances that would have to do with illustrating the texts. We are caught again by the protocol in repetition and not by the object in representation, we are exposed to the machinic functioning of actions, in stuttering reiterations, ruptures and redepartures of the movements of gunning, fighting, beating, which invert in to their intense material qualities. This decision to fake a regime of representation through repetition, in fact, complements the full range of possibilities Le Roy exhausts out of his conception of staged concert. As if a recursive process is set here - the theatre dispositif repeatedly returns to its own properties so as to generate an infinite sequence of possibilities - in functions of lighting on the stage, onto the audience, on/off fading in/out, in the conductor-look-alike performing together with the orchestra conductor or alone conducting for the audience, performers appearing in the orchestra, next to the orchestra players, around the orchestra body, in the audience, rails with technical equipment lowering down onto the stage and many others I probably didn’t mention here, seeming that all the possibilities of the mise-en-scène of the concert are realized when in the third act descends a frame for the performance within the frame of a proscenium stage-frame. But it is important that this set of variables of the situation of live concert is exhausted with no goal or signification rather than the passion of displaying itself. I am deliberately here speaking of passion in producing choreography of a concert, because it is only by excluding the possibilities of interpreting and representing the content in the text, which would anyhow collide with its paragrammatic organisation, that the possibilities of different meanings and receptions are included and stimulated.

***

Each art has its interrelated techniques or repetitions, the critical and revolutionary potential of which may attain the highest degree and lead us from the sad repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory... (Deleuze [6])
As we might exercise the memory of historical past in relation to the political present when we claim “we are political” today, The Theatre of Repetition, in its distinctive yet complementary operations with music and the theatre in music, interpellates us into another discipline within the politicity that Western musical audiences are compelled to face in the first place: listening and observing nowhere else but first into the real of our perceptual habits and receptive values, disclosing them as our dominant fictions. Experiencing the disentaglement from the telos of representation in order to listen to one’s own listening, watch one’s own watching.

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton, The Athlone Press, London and New York, 1994.

[2] Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context”, A communication to the Congrès international des Sociétés de philosophie de langue francaise, Montreal, August 1971. Published in Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass, 307-330.

[3] Julia Kristeva, “Towards a semiology of paragrams”, in: The Tel Quel Reader (tr. & ed. Patrick ffrench, Roland-François Lack), Routledge, London, 1998, 25-49.

[4] Cf. Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1991.

[5] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983.

[6] Gilles Deleuze, ibidem, 293.

THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL REPRODUCTION

marta.popivoda — Tue, 06 May 2008 03:03:10 -0700

The Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture, presided by Jan Philipp Reemtsma, has recently advanced science and culture to a whole new level: they obtained a warrant of arrest against Sebastian Luetgert, the founder of textz.com, who faces jail time if he refuses to pay around 2,300 euros in damages for the alleged copying of two essays by Theodor W. Adorno that the foundation claims as their "intellectual property". Jan Philipp Reemtsma was kindly asked to settle, but he refused. An "intellectual proprietor" of Adorno and Benjamin who claims to advance science and culture by sending people to jail for taking Adorno and Benjamin serious is seriously wrong on a whole number of points. In the end, he may even be wrong in thinking that he will ever get his property back. There is a universal right to reappropriation that will never cease to apply, and there is copyright legislation that will. Sooner or later, it will dawn upon Reemtsma that he should think of his "intellectual property" as a genie, and of his foundation is just another failing bottling company.
Robert Luxemburg

»Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.«
(Steve Jobs, Keynote, MacWorld San Francisco 2004)

Preface

When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself. The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than one and a half centuries to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. However, theses about the art of the new proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, shareholder value and copyright — concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Digital reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Steve Jobs pointed up in this sentence: »Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with cultural commodities, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.« Around 2000, technical reproduction has reached a standard that not only permits it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also has captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations — the reproduction of works of art and the art of reproduction — have had on art in its traditional form.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. One might subsume the eliminated element in the term »aura« and go on to say: that which withers in the age of digital reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the reader or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the Internet. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of »intellectual property«. This phenomenon is most palpable in the great file sharing networks. It extends to ever new positions. In 1999 Shawn Fanning exclaimed enthusiastically: »Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will be on Napster... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate.« Presumably without intending it, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation.

III

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things »closer« spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose »sense of the universal equality of things« has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the »authentic« work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of »intellectual property«. An analysis of art in the age of digital reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: For the first time in world history, digital reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a digital text, for example, one can make any number of copies; to ask for the »authentic« copy makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice — politics.

Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the distribution of the work. With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for distribution increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its distribution the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today file sharing and the Internet are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.

The twentieth-century dispute as to the economic value of Television versus the Internet today seems devious and confused. This does not diminish its importance, however; if anything, it underlines it. The dispute was in fact the symptom of a historical transformation the universal impact of which was not realized by either of the rivals. When the age of digital reproduction separated business from its basis in copyright, the semblance of its authority disappeared forever. The resulting change in the function of the Internet transcended the perspective of the century; for a long time it will even escape that of the twenty-first century, which experienced the development of file sharing. Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether the Internet is an economy. The primary question — whether the very invention of the Internet had not transformed the entire economy — was not raised. Soon the Internet theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to file sharing. But the difficulties which the Internet caused traditional economies were mere child’s play as compared to those raised by file sharing.

VII

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the nineteenth century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers - at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for »letters to the editor.« In the twentieth century, there was hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public was about to lose its basic character. The difference became merely functional; it began to vary from case to case. At any moment the reader was ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gained access to authorship. Literary license was now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus became common property. All this can easily be applied to the Internet, where transitions that in literature took centuries have come about in a decade. In digital practice, particularly in Asia, this change-over has partially become established reality. In North America and Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the Internet denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced. Under these circumstances the culture industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations.

Epilogue

The growing proletarianization of postmodern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. All efforts to render »rights management« effective culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.

p.s.

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THE IMPOSSIBLE IMPOSSIBLE PERFORMANCE

marta.popivoda — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:31:33 -0700

He staged a building, some kind of historical site.
he invited his colleagues and friends to stage the site
and to direct themselves
and to direct it themselves
so they did
a coming and going of friends and colleagues and friends and colleagues of friends
discussing their work
discussing proposals of work
working
working together
a platform
of exchange
of merging
of the smoothiest way to produce and gain knowledge
of experiencing and training
of invention
a performance
a strange performance
a permanence

He desperately wanted this
this reconfiguration
We need it he screamed
We have to rethink the positions

the undoing of a performance
he used to call it
this unsplit of audience and stage

but this is no performance, they screamed,
(when he started to ask subsidy for it as a performance)
this is a new initiative, very interesting, but not a performance

but i am a director he said
i am staging this
it is my work
this undoing of the stage
this undoing of the audience space

the unification, he said
and he started to shout: el pueblo unido.......

this, he said is a political performance
a change of perspective
a historical split undone

but still they didn’t want to pay for it
the subsidy distributors
they were convinced that this wasn’t a performance
they knew this wasn’t even art either (although they could know that art always should be the exception and not the rule)
they only subsided the rule
the what they could recognize as a performance

his building they said was a project
an initiative, yes,
but no performance
praiseworthy yes
but not subsidiable
not as some kind of art in general,
let alone as a performance
never mind how many actors were involved
how accessible for anybody it was
how this dispositive called theatre had been revisited
how this rusty institute called theatre had been displaced
reconfigured
a serious proposition to revive it
emancipatorise it
dehierarchyse it
but nothing helped

a performance they said needs the split between audience and stage
a split between those who know (their text) and those who don’t know
a split between the haves and the havenots
a performance, they knew needed the clear distinction
between the included and the excluded
the prepared and the not prepared
the bored and the curious
the teachers and the pupils
a performance they knew needed
hierarchy
distinction
inequality

they excluded him
his performance died
for him it died
for them it never existed

this performance
the impossible impossible performance
the absence of a performance
(for them)
not for the theatre director and performer himself
for him it was a performance
a more than live performance
a bigger than live performance
this area of exchange and merging
compressed
condensed
a forum for producing knowledge and ongoing discursive practice
a tool equal to all participants of the event
a tool machine even,
a tool producing tools
a place for temporary autonomy
a theatre at work

but not for them
they left him out
missing again and again
this chance of making a difference that really could make a difference
this chance to change
addicted as they are to what they could recognize
to what they think they belong too
and to what belongs to them
to what is known to them
their past
rejecting what eventually might have been possible
what is unknown to them
a possible future
that of the probable
of the impossible possible

The text is written for the work Re-delegating - Archiving Performances on the Egde of the Void , by Bojana Cvejić, Marta Popivoda, and Ana Vujanović. Within the work it was presented as a sound performance(-proposal).
The work was exhibited at the exhibition no space is innocent!, Steirischer Herbst, Graz, 2006