Harun Farocki Deep Play, 2007

Harun Farocki: Raising the Stakes of the Game

Brianne Cohen

In Harun Farocki’s two-screen video installation, I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (2000), the deaths of prisoners barely register on camera. What is most shocking is that the relentless banality of the black-and-white surveillance footage renders their deaths scarcely visible. In one instance, on April 7, 1989 at the Corcoran State Prison in California, it takes guards a full nine minutes to retrieve the body of a man, William Martinez, who is fatally wounded. He is shot in the prison yard by a guard up above for fighting with another inmate. Farocki provides intertitles throughout, but a human voiceover layers the video only when focused on these precise deaths, as if to lend them a certain corporeality and humanity again. I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts also reveals the fact that prison guards would arrange to have inmates with divisive cultural affiliations placed in the yard together, and then bet on the outcome of the expected fights:

The prisoners belong to prison gangs with names like “Aryan Brotherhood” or “Mexican Mafia.” They have received long sentences and are locked up far away from the world in a maximum-security prison. They have hardly anything but their bodies, whose muscles they train constantly, and their affiliation to an organization. Their honour is more important to them than their life; they fight although they know they will be fired on.”[1]

Betting in such an arena offers only a gruesome payoff, with casualties sustained in the yard by both gun and surveillance camera. Though far removed in one sense, it is not difficult to draw a connection between the austere gray box of the prison yard and the minimalist gray room where the installation viewer stands, also captured by surveillance cameras.

Farocki has long been interested in Jeremy Bentham’s ideal panoptic prison and Foucauldian disciplinarian structures.[2] I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts foreshadows a more recent, elaborate twelve-screen video production by the artist, Deep Play (2007), debuted at Documenta 12. The twelve screens displayed different angles on the 2006 World Cup final game between Italy and France. The hybrid black box/white cube space, moreover, was semi-circular. It was originally intended as a fully circular, 24-screen installation without interruption by curtains.[3] The specialized configuration evokes a panoptic-like space, and the soccer players, like the “gladiator” convicts in the disciplinary prison yard of I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, fight for their honor with only their bodies and cultural affiliations.

In his Theory of Legislation, Jeremy Bentham coined the phrase deep play. Basically it means that within gambling, a point is reached at which the stakes become so high that it is irrational for the bettors to continue their wager. In other words, the marginal utility of what one stands to win is less than the marginal disutility of what one stands to lose. In deep play, this is the case for both participants, and despite entering the bet in search of pleasure, the net pain will inevitably exceed the net pleasure.

Clearly, the guards’ gambling in I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts may result in a type of profound dehumanization and debasement – to bare life and banal death – but in the deep play of a soccer game, could the stakes be as dire? In his 550-page treatise, Theory of Legislation, Bentham only once mentions this phrase in a footnote, referring to it as the “evils of deep play.”[4] It is anthropologist Clifford Geertz, rather, who appropriated and fully developed the concept in perhaps his best-known essay, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.”[5] Geertz borrowed the phrase in order to understand gambling in the Balinese cockfight less as a matter of economic utility, and more one of social significance. In his analysis, the stakes are much more than material: they are bound up in esteem, honor, dignity, respect, and status. He asserts, “It is in large part because the marginal disutility of loss is so great at the higher levels of betting that to engage in such betting is to lay one’s public self, allusively and metaphorically, through the medium of one’s cock, on the line.”[6] So what was at stake in Farocki’s unveiling of Deep Play at Documenta 12, beyond the outcome of a World Cup soccer match that millions had already viewed?

In the broadest sense, Deep Play stages a Brechtian “epic” play to present a realistic picture of the world and to teach the greatest number of people about it. As a filmmaker based in Berlin since the late 1960s, Farocki has explored the Weimar intellectual legacies of Walter Benjamin and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Specifically, Farocki has established himself within the tradition of an “author as producer” – as Benjamin once described Brecht’s practice – constantly stressing his own role in the transformation of a class-based, exploitative process of production. Much of his film and video work utilizes the tools of Brecht’s epic theater and in particular, the alienation effect, in order to showcase the inequities of a capitalist economic order and the often deleterious effects it has had on resources and peoples worldwide.

Yet Deep Play offers a critical point of departure in Farocki’s recent work as well, not only for its staged, expanded spatial design, but also for its shift towards a greater emphasis on the critical role of the audience. The first part of this essay will investigate Farocki’s long-running adaptation of Brechtian theoretical, pedagogical models in his artistic career, particularly the enacted Gestus (socially-based attitude), which scholars have not examined in any detail. The following section will delve into his transition from filmwork to video installation in the last fifteen years, providing a close analysis of his film, In Comparison, contrasted with its installation equivalent, Comparison Via a Third. Each features basically the same material vis-à-vis an anthropological gaze: examples of brick production techniques from around the world. Their differing formats, however, offer an avenue to explore the implications of Farocki’s broader shift from black box cinema to white cube mediascapes since 1995, in terms of audience viewership. Lastly, the essay will examine Deep Play as it uniquely models a 21^st century, global epic theater, problematized as it is within a panoptic design. Farocki’s career-long strategies of “artist as producer” and “artist as ethnographer” take backstage to the newly featured emphasis on spectators, as collective participant-observers.

When there are no longer actors on the epic stage – in the sense that those actors are dehumanized to an unprecedented degree by a controlling, automated apparatus, like in I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts or Deep Play – then spectators must learn to engage a new site of struggle, not one of class per se, but more fundamentally, of cultural production and representation. Deep Play signals this struggle vis-à-vis the under-whelming footage of French soccer player Zinedine Zidane’s historically-specific, impassioned head-butt of an Italian player for a xenophobic slur. Spectators in many cultural arenas today, like sports viewers, are placed frequently at the center of elaborate, technological dis-plays and bombarded at all angles by a nonstop flow of mundane data. In his most recent installations, such as Comparison Via a Third or Deep Play, Farocki stresses the participative, ethnographic fieldwork necessary on the part of exhibition visitors to filter and interpret this information. Above all, Farocki is concerned with discovering a theater of his own time, as was Brecht. In a search for cultural significance and the status of the human in the twenty-first century, Deep Play offers the ultimate betting ring – and ultimate stage – for a “sporting” public.[7]

The Artist as Producer

“We pin our hopes to the sporting public.”

-Bertolt Brecht, “Emphasis on Sport” (1926)

“At the center of [Bertolt Brecht’s] experiment stands the human being. […] He is subjected to tests, examinations. What emerges is this: events are alterable not at their climaxes, not by virtue and resolution, but only in their strictly habitual course, by reason and practice. To construct from the smallest elements of behavior [Gesten] what in Aristotelian dramaturgy is called ‘action’ [handeln] is the purpose of the epic theater.”

–Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” (1934)

Farocki’s work is profoundly indebted to the theories and praxis of Brecht, and many scholars have analyzed the manner in which his oeuvre has redeployed and adapted Brecht’s methods for a later, specific historical moment. Thomas Elsaesser, above all, in his essay “Political Filmmaking After Brecht: Harun Farocki, For Example,” provides one of the most nuanced analyses of Farocki’s interest in the playwright’s work, contextualizing it within a 1970s European filmmaking discourse. The question then was the continued applicability of Brecht’s ideas. Elsaesser claims that most of the New German Cinema filmmakers during that post-’68 era borrowed primarily from Brecht’s practical, interventionist strategies, engaging in institutional battles and tactical strategies, for example, introducing their films to live audiences or taking up social issues as their subject matter.[8] In contrast to Brecht’s institutional, public sphere interventionism, however, practical necessities – such as lack of funds – marginalized filmmakers who would have continued to engage exclusively with Brecht’s theories of disjunctive formal experimentation. Moreover, for those who were preoccupied with a theoretical discourse at the time (namely feminists, according to Elsaesser), Brecht’s radical concepts of “distanciation” were coming to be displaced by a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective that promoted a more deconstructive approach to tackling the illusionism of spectacle culture. The notable exception to this trend was work by Farocki, who continued to interrogate the continued applicability of Brecht’s ideas within such a conceptually-evolving topography. As evidence, Elsaesser provides a close reading of Farocki’s Before Your Eyes – Vietnam (Etwas Wird Sichtbar, 1980), as it spoke to this shifting discursive terrain and still engaged a Brechtian notion of function versus appearance. Before Your Eyes highlights the problem of uncovering political realities behind certain images, in this case iconic photographs from Vietnam. In his essay, Elsaesser establishes concretely Farocki’s early dialogue with a Brechtian tradition as one that could still productively inform a changing filmic discourse.

In terms of his later work, Christa Blümlinger provides a thoughtful analysis of Farocki’s first video installation, Schnittstelle (Interface, 1995),[9] as a distinct and complex foregrounding of the “author as producer.” According to Walter Benjamin in his eponymous essay, the “place of the intellectual in the class struggle can be identified – or, better, chosen – only on the basis of his position in the process of production.”[10] Critically, Schnittstelle’s two-screen video display disrupts the illusion of the filmic apparatus by highlighting Farocki’s own role in the social production of images, fragmenting and recombining his past works. It recursively portrays screens within screens, implicates the artist as he reiterates voiceovers from past films, and emphasizes his hand as it materially frames or interacts with the film strip or the video button. One scene illustrates Farocki handling money, describing how in this gesture, it is easy to understand how little appearance and essence actually coincide. Clearly, even with his shift to video installation, Farocki has continued to apply Brecht’s dictum to engage a means of production and not just the products, in the hopes of altering an apparatus of mass consumption.

There is, however, another quite specific, Brechtian concept that is not identified by scholars in their analyses of Farocki’s “instructional” films from the 1980s and 90s, up until the present. That is Brecht’s notion of the Gestus – the combined bodily gestures and posture, tone of voice, facial expression, language, and habits that together reflect specific social, historical processes and relationships.[11] “Gestus” does not translate as mere gesture, but rather as an adoption of particular behaviors and bodily attitudes that reveal broader social laws governing a collective.[12] These behaviors and language are alterable. Thus, while it may seem that the human species, at times, progresses according to an underlying, inexorable fate, the actual state of affairs – political and economic – is contrived, constructed by humans, and is, therefore, alterable by human behavior in its smallest acts. Brecht’s epic theater worked to break this illusion of a “natural” human course and to point to the historical specificity, and the class struggle, of his own time. Among other methods, his actors were charged with demonstrating particular social Gesten through episodic interruption, or to show the showing of these Gesten. This encouraged a spectator to become an informed observer, rather than a hypnotized subject, by pedagogically displaying to him/her how to recognize, imitate, and change human behavior and ultimately, historical circumstances, in a quite material way.

A significant number of Farocki’s films, such as Indoctrination (Die Schulung, 1987), How to Live in the FRG (Leben – BRD, 1990), What’s Up? (Was ist Los?, 1991), Re-Education (Die Umschulung, 1994), The Expression of Hands (Der Ausdruck der Hände, 1997), and The Interview (Die Bewerbung, 1997), investigate microcosms of human gesture/language/mood in social situations. This mostly involves occupational training and performance testing in workplace settings, but also includes “how-to” instruction for the management and administration of activities in all spheres of quotidian life. In How to Live in the FRG, for instance, police practice how to arrest suspects who resist, midwives are shown how to deliver babies safely, children are taught how to cross the street, and much more. Art historian Hal Foster notes how these “lessons in proper behavior shade into forced socialization,”[13] and Elsaesser identifies how the training often commodifies and objectifies the very people that it aims to empower.[14] Blümlinger, in turn, elaborates on how these films offer a “reflection on disciplinary institutions as precursors of control societies,”[15] which clearly ties them to the artist’s later video installations focused on prisons, shopping malls, grocery stores, and sports arenas. There is no doubt that these films project a dark image of human order and “progress” in different public and private spheres.

They also, however, reflect a certain Brechtian hope for social change. To be sure, they betray moments of rupture in the overall Grundgestus [basic Gestus] of human training and mechanization. Farocki states:

I am stylistically indebted to the early Brecht: his idea of ‘man is man.’ It has to do with the fact that Man himself is not that great, he is the raw material to be constructed. Both Brecht, in his play on British colonialism [Mann ist Mann], and I, in my film on Vietnam, abhor the abuses that took place, but we also find that there are possibilities hiding in those situations.[16]

Blümlinger observes a moment in How to Live in the FRG, for example, when a workplace trainer plays his role badly with a “young and rather attractive” woman, revealing a crack in his professional façade when he suggests that she use her (girlish) charm. Role-playing and reality, through Farocki’s careful editing, are shown to misalign in this instance, thus betraying and unhinging the social laws that govern such behavior. Rather than an individual human attitude, a social Gestus is revealed. While this documented workplace is no epic theater in the literal sense, with no professional actors such as Peter Lorre in Mann Ist Mann to exhibit the showing of Gesten, Farocki is able to edit footage in order to punctuate episodically gestic language and behaviors in another social arena.[17]

In What’s Up?, likewise, Farocki focuses on the socially-based, gestic language of chance and order. The film provides intertitles with word pairs such as “fortune/destiny” to chart different human attempts to create controlled, rationalistic environments/processes against the backdrop of unpredictable forces. Bank managers weigh investment risks, companies balance the replacement of laborers by Japanese-imported robots, and business researchers calculate consumer reactions to television advertisements. Like How Live in the FRG, the camera anthropologically targets and hones in on the body language, mannerisms, speech intonation and word choice that are employed in these different economic exchange rituals. At one point there is even “how-to” instruction for holding chips properly at a gambling table. The implication is that with proper handling, there can be more adept gambling, or better management of monetary risk. What’s Up? depicts the Grundgestus of attempting to manage and control every aspect of one’s life through the “equalizing,” “universalizing” medium of capital.

Fiscal security and control in the film, however, are stripped of their illusory character through the capturing of anomalies in social habit and speech. Farocki updates the class struggle of Brecht’s era in terms of the broad financial deregulation and “casino capitalism” of the 1980s, which reflected the increasing significance of financial speculation over industry.[18] In one scene, an investment broker, sitting at an office desk in front of diagnostic line graphs on his computer, contacts a potential buyer with a “sure bet.” His software analysis indicates that investment today is guaranteed to bring dividends tomorrow. The phone line is symbolically weak, however, and the conversation begins poorly. Once the buyer finally hears what the broker has to say, he challenges the caller’s confidence, citing his own life experience with an always unpredictable market. What was originally a routine sales call turns into a subtly antagonistic debate concerning the risk of the stock market. The broker, above all, seems offended that the potential buyer would view it as a “game.” With clearly Brechtian methods in What’s Up?, Farocki exposes a historically-specific moment, and points to the transformative potential of experience-trained, cognizant human behavior.

The Artist as Ethnographer

In the last few years, particularly since the exhibition of Deep Play at Documenta 12, critical interest in Farocki’s oeuvre has accelerated. Since the late 1960s his work has played a key role in German aesthetic circles, but as of the mid-1990s, with his incorporation of multiple-screen, moving-image works into the museum-gallery nexus, his work has attracted more international attention.  In 2004, for instance, Hal Foster introduced the “old ’68er” to an Artforum public, highlighting the artist’s complexly intertwining thematic concerns, such as forms of “everyday” socialization and training, the instrumentalization of modes of representation, and the military-industrial-complex.[19]

Schnittstelle (1995) began this transition, as Farocki’s first video installation. Since then, the artist has continued to expand his practice spatially and temporally, including more screens and more innovative layouts in museum and gallery settings. Of about a hundred works, approximately twenty of these have stretched beyond a single-screen cinematic environment, and among these twenty, most juxtapose two screens. Recently, however, with Deep Play, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik in elf Jahrzehnten, 2006), and Feasting or Flying (Fressen oder Fliegen, 2008), the artist’s displays have expanded to six or twelve screens.

A number of scholars have posited various reasons for this critical move. Film historian and artist Chris Pavsek worries that Farocki’s later works register and mimic an increasing process of dehumanization in the larger visual field – that it suggests there are no longer collective subjects to catalyze amidst the bombardment of a spectacular media culture.[20] With his initial foray into filmmaking in the late 1960s, Farocki produced overt agit-prop material, and his now classic essay films from the 1980s and 90s have been characterized as didactic.[21] Pavsek suggests that the artist’s new installation pieces betray a certain cynicism concerning 21^st century visual culture, one which fails completely to edify.[22] Beyond literally mobilizing viewers in a controlled museum environment, how can these installations still hope to incite spectators to political resistance and action?

Invariably, there will be many factors that play into Farocki’s evolving practice, mostly involving funding opportunities, the desire for creative and intellectual experimentation, and an awareness of a radically changing social-visual field. Yet his installations do offer a new kind of hope for subjective agency and collective mobilization, one that implicates viewers in a new and transformative manner. Referring to Farocki’s “direct cinema” of the 1960s and ‘70s, Elsaesser posits that “… he has probably remained too much of an agitator-activist to create the openness that usually gives the viewer the illusion of entering into the ongoing events as a participant or co-conspirator…”[23] With his shift to installation, Farocki’s practice has moved precisely in this direction, in that it often now designates much more trust – or rather responsibility – to the embodied spectator.[24]

In this regard, his aesthetic transition resonates with a growing trend in the art world since the 1990s to engage spectators collectively and inter-relationally. The most critical difference between his work, however, and much artistic production that falls under the rubric of relational aesthetics, for example, is his continued political commitment to contesting exploitative systems of production and to fostering thoughtful, politically-charged dialogue within a public sphere. His work attempts to initiate discussion – like many interactive installation pieces today – but not necessarily for convivial, “playful” exchange. Rather his challenging projects call for contestatory voices and a frank debate over current, macroscopic social and economic problems.

A provocative example of the contrast between Farocki’s film work and video installation would be his recent one-channel, cinematic In Comparison (Zum Vergleich, 2009) versus its two-screen counterpart, an installed Comparison via a Third (Vergleich über ein Drittes, 2007). Both utilize the same material, but the different formats subtly alter the effect of the larger message. The footage in both depicts a spectrum of brick production methods: from highly industrialized, automated machine-work in Germany to purely communal handwork in Burkina Faso, and a mixture of both in Indian cities. The film In Comparison unfolds as an episodic “narrative,” interspersed throughout with authorial intertitles and diagrammatic inter-images. The artist once again reveals his thumbprint with montage and commentary, and carefully identifies specific temporalities and locations (cities and towns in Burkina Faso, India, France, Germany, and Switzerland). The film charts a historically-situated conversion from manual to machinic labor across these different sites – presenting it “one brick at a time” – beginning with the mixing of raw material in Burkina Faso to the final shot of a digitally-designed, elaborately-constructed building in Switzerland.

Whereas the first half of the film appears to proceed in an uncomfortably linear fashion, the second half shuffles around between different production sites, problematizing an association of temporal or historical progress with cultural “development.” Indeed, the first half chronologically situates a sequence of production plants: from one in India that has had the same routine since 1930, to a French plant operated by Moroccan workers since 1945, and lastly to a fully machine-operated plant constructed in Germany in 2003. The second half of the film, however, fragments this progression by jumping more dramatically among production techniques and sites and by offering authoritative judgments (as for a building being constructed in Gando, Burkina Faso): “Nothing is imported for this building and only human energy is expended;” or for a firing kiln in Toutipakkam, India: “The socially minded idea: the building is fired and the heat is used to fire bricks as well.” The film also displays European architectural students in India, sketching and laying bricks, and learning by both ethnographic observation and participation.

The double-screen, moving-image projection Comparison via a Third, on the other hand, eschews text or voiceover, instead presenting a soft montage of the same images of brick workers in Germany, India, and Burkina Faso.[25] Art critic and historian Helmut Draxler correctly raises the question of a “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous” in Comparison via a Third. In other words, the installation challenges a conflation of notions of temporal and historical “development”(from categories of the primitive to developing to highly developed) that are often employed to assign value to different methods of cultural organization and production. Farocki does not juxtapose an image of communal hand labor with that of automated machine work in order to either value the former as ideal or “natural,” or to devalue it as rudimentary or “primitive.” Rather, the images are placed temporally and spatially contiguous, not hierarchically, via the two screens.

In discussing his 12-screen installation, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006), which utilizes basically the same material as his earlier one-channel essay film, Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), Farocki explains that in the case of the 12-screen version:

Film clips from the past 110 years are shown simultaneously. The succession of montage allows one shot to replace the next and the message is: this image, not the one before. Simultaneity, on the contrary, expresses: this shot and at the same time this other one.[26]

Draxler suggests that the “third” element referred to in the title marks a different mode of comprehending social production altogether, but understood more simply, the third element in this composition, beyond the two contiguous screens, may refer instead to the viewer.

Rather than depict anonymous architecture students (footage that is removed in this version), Comparison Via a Third challenges gallery visitors not only to register conceptually both screens simultaneously, but also to embody both distinct ethnographic roles of observer and participant. The film In Comparison attempts to present an anthropological, pedagogical description of global brick production methods, but the installation places much more responsibility on the viewer. In Comparison offers precise dates and locations, whereas Comparison via a Third does not. Instead, the installation situates the viewer phenomenologically, as a de facto, necessarily implicated participant, in a state of contemporaneity with the filmed subjects, focusing on the simultaneity of present modes of being and working in an increasingly proximate international context.

The Stakes of Deep Play

Deep Play implicates spectators to an even further degree than Comparison via a Third. Rather than a third actor between two channels, the viewer is placed at the center of a massive, twelve-screen mediascape, a configuration that mimics a semicircular panoptic viewing space. Visitors become the guards/observers of an extensive, horizontal tableau of the 2006 World Cup final game. Time is integral to the video presentation (set at a specific two hour fifteen minute interval in history), but it is looped, endlessly repeated, and immutable. It is an object fixed in time, lending itself more to a synchronic “reading,” such as in anthropology, rather than a historical, diachronic one. Spectators are integral to the “fieldwork” of the soccer game. In the Balinese cockfight, as Geertz concludes, the audience gambles in deep play despite inevitable economic loss because the enterprise involves much more than monetary value: it garners social status, honor, respect, and dignity. The event also allows the Balinese audience an opportunity to tell a story about itself to itself, to better understand moments of profound social meaning within its own culture. Likewise, visitors to Deep Play are challenged to realize an event of deep social significance within their own ritualistic game, and it is this ability, just as much as any wager, that is at stake.

Insofar as Deep Play de-emphasizes Farocki’s own authorial hand in its construction, it marks a divergence from his past single-channel films. While Farocki has been quite attentive to crafting sound in his films, in Deep Play, however, sound is entirely diegetic, with no voiceover and nothing altered from the noise of cheering fans to the television director’s quick camera instructions. Nor does the installation include inscriptions that are essential to his essay films. No text supplements the installation except for the piece’s title, which is, strikingly, given in English with no German translation. The one exception to Farocki’s diminished authorial presence is the very first, split-screen channel on the left, which recursively displays screens. On this channel, we see a game analyst watching a television screen with the soccer match on, and on the second, we see the analysts’ hand marking down information from what he views. This evokes the self-referential editor in Farocki’s Schnittstelle, providing a close-up of the analyst’s hand in juxtaposition with his watching a screen. It is the only channel among the twelve that implicates via an obvious substitution the “artist as producer” through the use of montage.

In the first channel, one gathers that the game analyst will interpret players’ movements (“twitches”) into strategically-significant actions (“winks”). According to Clifford Geertz, to note a mere twitch of the eye would be “thin” description, only transmitted data, but understanding a socially-significant, polysemous wink would necessitate “thick” description on the part of a cultural analyst or ethnographer. For Geertz, the idea of culture is fundamentally semiotic. Ethnography works to discern the difference between twitches and winks, movements and gestures (or Gesten as the case may be). This is the “interpretive turn” in anthropology that Geertz introduced and advanced. His essay “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” perhaps best exemplifies this commitment to an interpretative method of “thick description.”[27] With enough thick description – derived from long-term, quantitative and qualitative, highly participative, and microscopic observation – an ethnographer can essentially “read” another culture’s webs of social signification as texts.

Ostensibly, Deep Play presents more than enough information to develop a “thick description” of the World Cup final, but the quality of that information remains inferior to the statistical quantity. According to the anthropologist, one gains access to the signs of another imaginative universe by inspecting events, not by “abstract[ing] entities into unified patterns.”[28] Deep Play, however, presents approximately twenty-seven total hours of game coverage as exactly that: abstracted, aestheticized patterns. A constant theme in Farocki’s work is the critical necessity to distinguish between mere data-gathering, and understanding or interpreting that data. In Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989), for example, he explores the multivalent character of Aufklärung, as either “reconnaissance” or “enlightenment,” data-gathering or human intellectual illumination.[29] He also notes multiple translations of the German word erkennen: to “perceive,” or on the other hand, to “recognize” in the sense of “understand.” Deep Play also offers surveillance but not human cognizance.

Indeed, the eighth and twelfth screens stream only surveillance footage: a view of the Berlin Olympic Stadium from up above as the sun sets, as well as fans throughout the stadium. The final channel in the installation monitors not only the spectators of the game, but also ironically, the guards around the perimeter of the field that also survey the crowds. Just as in the maximum security prison of I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, every corner of the stadium, and every player of the game, is supervised and controlled through visual access. Bodies are rationalized as abstract material. Deep Play attempts to present the centrally-located viewer with every possible, panoptic line of sight into the game.

Dehumanization occurs on multiple levels. The tenth screen, with edited live footage, reduces players to statistical numbers with real-time miniature speed charts on the bottom of the screen. The seventh screen focuses on the French and Italian coaches, capturing them behind digital, “chalk” game boards as if containing and caging them; and the third and ninth screens evoke individual players’ vital signs, with line graphs (for rates of speed) that mimic medical heart monitors.

Additionally, a number of other screens schematize the whole match as if it were a video game. In his discussion of I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, Farocki writes, “The fights in the yard look like something from a cheap computer game. It is hard to imagine a less dramatic representation of death.”[30] Like the convicts who are represented as track-able, computerized dots on screen for their guards, made possible by electronic ankle bracelets, the soccer players of the Deep Play Ascencio software analysis also materialize on screen as mere dots, connected to other players by outward radiating lines. Interpretative text is created by the computer software itself. The screens appear diagnostic and predictive, rather than spontaneous: any idea of a “gamble” vanishes in this game.

To be sure, analysis becomes purely machinic, completely disembodied from humans and “safe” from human error or chance. It recalls the camera-equipped, heat-seeking missiles depicted in Farocki’s earlier installation piece, Eye/Machine I, II, and III (Auge/Maschine I, II, and III, 2001-03) that were developed as intelligent killing machines. Of course this is the extreme example, but Farocki’s incorporation of this type of machine vision software points to a threatening scenario of dehumanization. There is a certain violence in the representation of those players through such stark visual abstraction.

Rather than this mundane statistical data, what most fans will remember from the game was French player Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt of the Italian player Marco Materazzi. Immediately afterwards, there was widespread speculation about what provoked the act, and it was only much later that Materazzi revealed his exact words, a racially-based insult aimed at Zidane’s sister’s honor. In fact, the full-game fifth screen replays this moment several times. It schematizes the two men’s bodies into lines and dots and isolates them in different replays, highlighting both the movement of the abstracted figures and the fact that it can offer no substantive interpretation of the act itself. Furthermore, after Zidane receives the red card for misconduct, his representative bar in the lower graph of players’ speeds transforms into a stationary red block. Because he no longer functions in the game, his involvement is neatly struck out, even though despite the offense, Zidane went on to win the Golden Ball award for best player of the tournament. His ejection from the game also marked the end of a tremendously popular and successful soccer career.

More than Italy’s victory, this is the moment that arguably defined the 2006 World Cup final. Zidane’s head-butt, otherwise a routine soccer movement like a Geertzian “twitch” rather than “wink,” was not only a shocking gesture. It was a social Gestus in the sense that it signified, and continues to signify, increasingly profound tensions in Europe concerning immigration, community, and cultural difference. Algerian-born Zidane’s raw and instantaneous backlash against Italian player Materazzi’s xenophobic slur, disrespecting his sister, cut to the core of deep-seated divisions on the continent. Brecht provides a compelling example in the theater that resonates with Zidane’s unbridled act:

“Woman in a play has not gotten compensation for a hurt leg in a traffic accident: Working without the A-effect, the theatre was unable to make use of this exceptional scene to show the horror of a bloody epoch. Few people in the audience noticed it; hardly anyone who reads this will remember that cry. The actress spoke the cry as if it were something perfectly natural. But it is exactly this – the fact that this poor creature finds such a complaint natural – that she should have reported to the public like a horrified messenger returning from the lowest of all hells. To that end she would of course have needed a special technique which would have allowed her to underline the historical aspect of a specific social condition. Only the A-effect makes this possible.”[31] [my emphasis]

In Zidane’s case, spectators were jolted by the soccer player’s extraordinary action; footage spread like wildfire across internet and television outlets. It was more of a street-fighting move within the carefully regulated scenario of soccer. Yet the endlessly replayed footage, as well as the act’s abstract schematization in Deep Play, only aid in making the head-butt appear natural, like any other normal soccer movement or “twitch.” No actor in this panoptic theater, not even the superstar Zidane, could intentionally perform it as a signifier of a “bloody epoch,” could alienate it as a sign of growing cultural hostilities and discrimination in all European nations and the European Union against “foreigners.” The World Cup final game, a symbolic international arena for the peaceful mediation of different cultural affiliations, and played between two major European nations in 2006, set the perfect stage for the thick significance of this violent Gestus to be revealed. Yet televisions cameras could only register Zidane’s head movement as thin description.

The Spectator as Observer-Participant

In his Return of the Real (1996), art historian Hal Foster suggests that there has occurred a paradigm shift in much avant-garde artistic production from the left: that of the “author/artist as producer” to the “artist as ethnographer.”[32] He posits that the subject of association has changed: the new site of struggle will be located not in terms of economic relation, but rather, cultural identity. The artist will locate his/her practice not through solidarity with the worker, but through the other. Astutely, Foster warns of the pitfalls of this “ethnographic turn” and elaborates on practices within anthropology that have worked to reformulate culture as text, thereby reducing it and “decoding” its society (Geertz would fit within this model). He also cautions against old primitivist fantasies and advocates “parallactic work that attempts to frame the framer as he or she frames the other.”[33]

Farocki’s artistic career clearly challenges such a dichotomy. He has long worked within both paradigms, of both “artist as producer” and “artist as ethnographer.”  Though many scholars, for instance, point to How to Live in the FRG as a classic leftist film – by which it identifies instances of worker training and mechanized socialization in every sphere of life – the film also clearly places an ethnographic lens on the artist’s own culture. Indeed, rather than exoticize or superficially ally himself with an “other” culture, one for which he lacks thick description, Farocki interrogates the “natural” processes of his own. In the last decade in Germany and the European Union, the most pressing site of struggle – both economic and cultural – happens to be the formation of a heterogeneous “European” community, threatened by entrenched xenophobia and material insecurity throughout the continent.

How can one begin to address this problem, however, when pieces like Deep Play reveal only alarmingly dehumanized and abstracted “actors” on the world stage? Farocki recalls his experience producing Indoctrination (1987), a film that documents business managers training role-playing during training to improve their performance:

When I saw the manager training, how the managers played workers, I thought: man, this is finally Brecht! That’s how you’d have to stage the Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis [The Baden Cantata of Consent, 1929]. In his most extreme period, Brecht demanded that the learning play was only for the actors who played it. With these role plays it’s the same thing: the role play is not so much intended for a viewing public but as an instruction for the actors.[34]

Ideally, in Brecht’s time, actors would not only edify themselves, but also teach an audience through their Gesten, to show the significance of moments in their narrative by alienating critical episodes for spectators to observe with care. The spectators, in turn, were expected not to empathize with illusory characters, but to comprehend the significance of such human behavior within the space of their own historically-specific lives.[35] Deep Play is a filmic update on the epic theater as Brecht would have intended it: the playwright stressed the need to reach and instruct as many people possible. The World Cup soccer game, in this sense, was a model arena, viewed by millions of fans around the world. Yet in Deep Play, a different apparatus of our own time – of panoptic surveillance and machinic observation – strips actors/players of their agency to an unprecedented degree. In 2004, Foster noted this in relation to Farocki’s Eye/Machine triptych. He asks how a Brechtian alienation effect may contend with a “world of hyperalienation,” as depicted in Eye/Machine: “In short, [Farocki] traces such a grim telos that it threatens to nail us all…”[36]

In Deep Play, with no epic actors to manifest the presenting of collective, historically-specific human behavior, all that remains are spectators, taking center stage in the elaborate twelve-screen panoptic mediascape.[37] In other words, when players in a prison fight, soccer game, or any other socially-loaded ritual are abstracted and stripped of the unique cultural differences that mark them as humans, then spectators must recognize a different type of “A-effect.” In Brecht’s time, the informed observer was needed to recognize class conflict and to incite the working class into appropriating and transforming an unjust means of production. The stakes of this present-day, increasingly globalized theater is the ability not only to recognize an inequitable capitalist order, but also to interpret human culture and contestation itself, above and beyond an omnipresent, machinic eye.

The museum or gallery space, itself a controlled and surveyed environment, but one also geared towards thoughtful reflection, is a reasonable location to expect such a shift in engaged perception. The spectator’s cognizant observation is still crucial, but added to the toolbox, s/he must also adopt an ethnographic gaze – one of participative, embodied simultaneity – to combat such an entrenched, panoptic design in the broader social field. Moreover, as in Geertz’s analysis of the Balinese cockfight, this must be a collective shift in awareness.

What distinguishes much of Farocki’s new multi-channel installation work, as I have attempted to suggest with close analyses of Comparison via a Third or Deep Play, is its attempt to superimpose more responsibility on spectators, or as Benjamin would attest, “…this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers – that is readers or spectators into collaborators.”[38] Throughout his practice, Farocki has self-reflexively acted as an “artist as producer” and attempted to catalyze intelligent viewing by an audience – with the aim of producing more informed collectives. Here that collective spectatorship is challenged once more: to transform an increasingly consuming, passive, spectating, panoptic, and objectifying eye – into an ethnographic gaze. Not only as expert observers, but also as observer-participants, through thick description, viewers will be able to interpret the objectifying yet discriminatory social forces that govern a contemporary world and to recognize critical Grundgesten such as Zidane’s head-butt. Farocki has raised the stakes of the game: in a theater of increasing alienation, we must learn to tell a story about ourselves to ourselves through deep play.

Short Circuits: Finance, Feedback and Culture

Benedict Seymour

‘There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.’ So said John Cage in his 1958 lecture, ‘Experimental Music’. This article argues that the aesthetic or cultural transformation of absence into presence, the revelation, by subtraction, of new raw materials or free inputs, bears a relation to the logic of accumulation in an era of financialised capitalist self-cannibalisation. What Cage valorised in the aesthetic sphere, developing concepts of feedback and self-regulation formulated in cybernetics, anticipated the innovations of modern finance and the production – by subtraction – of empty/full spaces of accumulation.
The term ‘feedback’ originates from the inter-disciplinary science of cybernetics. Cybernetics is concerned with regulation within closed systems. It looks for and exploits circular causal relationships, ‘feedback’, within these systems. Negative feedback is a process in which action and its effects are fed back to the actor in order to better coordinate aim and result. The loop proceeds from action (e.g. firing a machine gun at an enemy plane in order to shoot it down), to sensing (how is the target affected?), to comparison with the desired goal (has the plane been shot down?), to action (shoot again, a degree to the right), and so on. The circle of action, monitoring, correction and further action, integrates error in order to regulate and improve performance. Incorporating indeterminacy and recursive logic enables an automation and expansion of control. On the other hand, as we will see, this virtuous circle of negative feedback can also invert into its opposite. ‘Positive feedback’, from the perspective of control, is not positive at all, but represents a spiralling disorder or perturbation of the system. A vicious circle.

It is no accident that the circular causality of the feedback loop resembles the cycle of capital accumulation described by Marx (Money – Commodity – more Money). Information feedback has played an increasingly important role in the larger loop of capital accumulation for decades, if not centuries. The cybernetic revolution simply radicalises solutions to capitalist crisis proposed by Ford, Taylor and Keynes, expanding the ambit of control by flattening the world into a single dimension of information. Tiqqun claim in their essay ‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis’, that the internet has become a global cybernetic system, enabling capital to manipulate and monitor consumer preferences. Consumer behaviour, for example, is subject to the management of financial markets: ‘Each actor in capitalist valorization is a real-time back-up of quasi-permanent feedback loops.’

We may disagree that the information society has brought about a new form of value creation in which information is wealth. Nevertheless the rise of the information society certainly coincides with the installation everywhere of feedback loops which monitor and regulate consumption, production and distribution. Capital strains to reduce its overheads by outsourcing labour to consumers – witness the rise of social networking – and subjects all social processes to measurement and quantification. Through privatisation, marketisation and the destruction of earlier modes of welfare, society is subsumed under the commodity form. Like good students of cybernetics, New Labour set about installing forms of performance measurement and modification across the public sector, primarily in health and education, imposing value as a dominant metaphor on all areas of social reproduction. This indexed a need to generate growth, no doubt, to find substitutes for industrial production and to increase the pressure on workers of all kinds. The deepening penetration of informational feedback loops contributes to an extension of the working day and a breakdown of limits to exploitation. The ‘efficiency’ of this process was predicated on another order of feedback, however: the continued rise of the UK as a global centre for the creation and retail of fictitious capital. The production of a specific form of ‘information’, credit and debt, is crucial. The UK’s health and education sectors, not to mention the UK’s other ‘unproductive’ services, could only deliver a facsimile of ‘growth’ in relation to the City’s siphoning off of the global value product.

To understand the larger feedback loop in which the circuits of ‘information society’ function, then, we need to look at the feedback loops of finance capital. An increasingly large proportion of this information represents claims on non-existent value, i.e. credit and debt, as well as the plethora of financial instruments – derivatives, Collateralised Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps, etc. – that dominate the global finance market. In this process information does indeed become hegemonic – not as value, but as fictitious capital. This does not amount to an actual process of valorisation, merely the ever-increasing generation of claims on future, as yet non-existent (or no longer existent) value. In order for these claims on value to be made good, supported and sustained, an anterior process of valorisation and expropriation remains necessary. As in Marx’s day, there remains no substitute for the expenditure of human labour in the creation of value.

Fictitious capital comes to function as a kind of effective, but precarious, surrogate for value which both depends on and is undone by the financial feedback loops that constitute it. In David McNally’s excellent 2008 essay, ‘From Financial Crisis to World Slump’, he describes how the becoming-pervasive of value as the form of measurement of all social activity coincides precisely with its becoming tenuous and volatile as a measure of… value. Its absolute triumph is predicated on its increasing shakiness as a claim. McNally writes, ‘With the end of dollar-gold convertibility in 1971 and the move to floating exchange rates (rates that literally fluctuate all day each and every day according to values determined on world markets), currency values, especially for the dollar, became much more volatile. As a result, the formation of values at the world level became much more uncertain and less predictable.’

The growth of finance is predicated on an actual decommodification of (world) money. To put it another way, the commodification of everything else stems from the decommodification of the dollar as global reserve currency: ‘The measure of value property of money – the capacity of money to express the socially necessary (abstract) labor times inherent in commodities – was rendered highly unstable.’

The suspension of value as measure is, paradoxically but logically, expressed in a new over-accumulation of forms of measurement, beginning with those most influential forms of measure – the financial instruments called derivatives.

In essence, derivatives set out to measure and price risk. As McNally says, the increased uncertainty of value relations put an increased emphasis on risk assessment and monitoring for all capitalists, but especially those who, in a globalised market, have to deploy multiple currencies. These currencies themselves became more volatile because of the suspension of dollar-gold convertability. The basic loop of financialisation is thus the movement from the suspension of dollar-gold convertability to the increase in volatility of currencies to the proliferation of mechanisms (derivative contracts) for monitoring and insuring against these fluctuations. But a further cybernetic spiral immediately arises from the growth of derivatives as risk measure and hedge. Derivatives become themselves a source of risk. Because one can buy insurance against risks to assets one doesn’t actually own they can function instead as forms of financial speculation. For instance, a Credit Default Swap [CDS] against the risk of GM defaulting can be purchased even if one owns none of GM’s stocks or bonds. Speculators can win by shorting the circuits of value they feed on.

Whether gambling on currency movements or exploiting value gaps between markets (arbitrage), the same logic applies. Tools originally conceived as a way to measure and so more precisely price risk, and so master volatility, become themselves a source of fluctuations in prices as their use en masse gives rise to new forms of financial feedback. As well as impacting on the material world immediately through the devaluation of currencies and drastic price changes, the diffusion and networking of risk enabled by derivatives displaces risk from the local to the systemic level. The virtuous circle (‘negative feedback’) of debt creation, becomes ever more likely to invert into a vicious circle (‘positive feedback’) of depreciation. Guaranteed returns based on risk-managed revenue streams prove to be fictitious.

There isn’t space here to properly go into the workings of Value at Risk (VaR) and other measures and models of risk. It should be noted, though, that such forms represent the repetition at a higher power of the basic reifications of capital. Homogenising and objectifying particular socially and politically determined risks as ‘abstract risk’, they are the financial sphere’s cognate of ‘abstract labour’ in the sphere of production. Markowitz’s ‘Portfolio theory’ of risk management and the VaR measure depend on this abstraction of risk to automate and autonomise the assessment of specific investments. Once achieved this becomes an industrial process. Human oversight and investigation of particulars is displaced by ‘black boxes’ computing homogenised variables.

These phenomena are not alone sufficient to explain the systemic crisis of capital, however. The growth of speculative finance is inseparable from the larger process of social reproduction and the productivity of capital as a whole. To put it crudely, a crisis of over-production and under-consumption arising from massively increasing technical productivity dictates the expanding destruction of both exchange and use values in order to reproduce the conditions for capital accumulation.

If information does not produce as much value as is claimed, then not only fictitious claims but also productive assets must be cancelled for accumulation to continue. As fictitious values, previously treated as if they were real assets, went into freefall during the credit crunch, real capital began to be wiped out, too. McNally: ‘factories are mothballed, corporations go bust and sell off their buildings, machines, land, customers lists and so on at bargain basement prices.’ This process of destruction is still in its early stages, with many more forms of financial feedback yet to begin unwinding.

Here we see the real signature of cybernetic capitalism: not infinite growth through deregulated feedback but rather an intensified and expanding destruction of value. The zero growth ideology was first enunciated in a report, ‘The Limits to Growth’, by a group of MIT cyberneticians commissioned by the capitalist think-tank the Club of Rome in 1972. From this set of scenarios for capitalist ‘sustainability’, published at the very moment the dollar was being decoupled from gold, to Thatcher-era deindustrialisation and privatisation, the feedback loops of finance have been intimately linked to the driving down of social reproduction (the sustenance of humans, infrastructure and environment) at a global level. As McNally notes, the imposition of the value form – ‘value logics’ – across every sphere of social existence simultaneously reflects unprecedented financial volatility and impels an epochal attack on proletarian reproduction through dismantling of subsidies to subsistence goods, removal of wage protections, welfare and privatisation of public services, etc. All this contributed to the further rise of financialisation, and such accelerated value destruction is visibly the telos of ‘cybernetic’ capital again now that the financial feedback loops have begun to unwind, in our current phase of aggressive and open austerity.

Before and After Feedback: Culture, Politics and Finance

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
- John Cage

What then of culture, not to mention politics, in this by no means completed era of financialisation and cybernetic self-regulation? Long before the rise of derivatives, feedback was being explored as key to new artistic forms and practices. If, as Tiqqun claim, network society is a kind of massive global cybernetic system, and the social/cultural structures of feedback (internet, social networks, workplace monitoring of performance, logistics, meta-finance, etc.) possess distinctive political and economic characteristics, how does culture anticipate, reflect or resist these?

We can begin by considering how the cultural and social structures of feedback, like the financial ones, today mesh with capital’s major feedback loop. Capital is now compelled by its own logic to destroy an increasing amount of the means of production it commands. It needs to devalue labour-power and avoids paying for reproduction of other forms of capital. So today we see expanding forms of ‘non-reproduction’, including: the annexation of labour-power outside the advanced capitalist countries through globalisation; the bolstering of profits by paying workers less than the cost of their reproduction; the non-maintenance of infrastructure; the non-replacement of natural resources, etc.

Considered from this perspective, feedback – both financial and cultural – is not just about abstraction. Rather the growth of the network form, and the measuring and monitoring of all areas of social existence, extends the scope of non-reproduction exponentially. The annexation of ‘free inputs’ – environmental, infrastructural, and re/productive – is enabled by the network. At the theoretical level cybernetics’ collapse of the distinction between man and nature, between states (and between States) subsumed under a universal set of feedback loops, anticipates the unified field of (self-)regulation and ‘self-reproduction’ to use editorial collective Midnight Notes’ term, imposed in neoliberal capitalism.

Cybernetics’ higher order of abstraction implies an expanded field of increasingly ‘extractive’ accumulation, in which both waged and unwaged labour are available. Readers will no doubt be familiar with the idea of ‘free labour’ as precondition of the social network. Both fictitious claims (finance) and social networks (culture) require ‘free inputs’ – unpaid labour and unpaid for assets – to perform. Derivatives’ performativity as claims on value assumes and commands unpaid and non-reproductive labour – for example, through their effect on the price of commodities and labour in ‘low GDP’ countries. Networked cultural production solicits ‘plabour’ and ‘prosumer’ activity and individual capitals are able to reduce their overheads, if not increase their rate of exploitation, by the outsourcing of content production to the end-user. ‘Paying attention’ may not create value directly but clearly the formerly ‘passive’ consumer has been activated. Both terms – culture and finance – are increasingly interchangeable; finance is aestheticised as it claims become absurdly fictitious, culture is reduced to finance as its fictions become absurdly monetised.

I would like to suggest here that the rise of such a culture of ‘free inputs’ and financial feedback is anticipated and prepared – if not foreseen or desired – in the neo-avant-garde of the ’50s and after. Seeing feedback as a route to a more autonomous and egalitarian cultural and social existence, a way of dissolving the hierarchical structures of a bureaucratised mass society, the pioneers of cybernetic and network culture generally failed to target the Ur-form of feedback, that is, the value form per se.[1] Both counter- and corporate culture converged on a more ‘liberated’, technocratically enlightened, form of circulation (and re/production), which, ironically, presupposed the deregulation of money and the looting of those subject to the diktats of decommodified wealth.

John Cage’s ethos of impersonality in artistic production shares, by no means accidentally, something of cybernetics’ flattening of the man/nature (organism/environment) distinction.[2]  Conceived as an aesthetics of Buddhist self-abdication, the shift from subjective intention to aleatory process has structural similarities to the outsourcing of evaluation and decision later seen in black box trading and other forms of financial feedback. Rather than creating finished works, the (post-)cybernetic artist or composer becomes a programmer of cultural software, setting up self-regulating, ideally self-executing systems or processes. From La Monte Young to Phillip Glass, Sol LeWitt to Hans Haacke, the implications of processual feedback as form are manifold but an overall shift in orientation is apparent. The Duchampian readymade, the ultimate, or rather foundational ‘license to loot’ already implicit in Fordist artistic production (and productivism), becomes ‘for-itself’ with the post-Cageian phenomenologists of feedback.[3]  Cage makes the audience into producers with 4’33″, his own production being confined to a minimal instructional score. La Monte Young seeks ways to let the untreated raw sonic material resonate without intervention – ‘we must let the sounds be what they are’. Rather than working on the world in instrumental fashion to shape it, we must find ways to give it back its independence and listen to it better. This may be a higher-level ‘reskilling’ of the deskilled listener set free from their traditional interpretive duties, but it could also be read as a miniature manifesto of non-reproduction.

The composer’s (non-)work shifts from the creation of teleological musical narrative to the precipitation and harvesting of psycho-acoustic ‘free inputs’. These are catalysed by the creation within interacting streams of sound-data, of virtual or ‘gestalt’ musical lines (Young’s ‘combination tones’, Steve Reich’s ‘resulting patterns’, etc.). Phillip Glass, whose additive compositional process eschews a goal-directed temporality or offers ‘recombinant teleologies’ (in Robert Fink’s phrase) discovered a similar unplanned qualitative ‘plus’ while listening to a performance of one of his works in a concert hall, deciding to consciously incorporate such psycho-acoustic effects in future works. Unplanned outputs become new inputs within an infinite, responsive, musical feedback process. Notoriously, musical Minimalism synced opposing temporalities to a single pulse, in the process becoming ‘crossover music’. As in financial derivatives, which align existing revenue streams to produce more than the sum of their parts, it is enough to bring two repeating musical patterns into coordination to produce a virtual third. The temporality of the derivative is also anticipated in the split or schizoid time of minimalist composition, in which ceaseless activity at the molecular level produces stasis and stability on the macro scale, simultaneous acceleration and deceleration.

Both financialisation and Minimalism can be described as ‘machines for the suppression of (historical) time’, and with some justice have been criticised as exhibiting the positivist/mystic drive to master and suspend temporal succession, to preempt and overcome history by application of self-correcting models. (Stockhausen is overtly anti-historical in his pronouncements, while Glass and Reich seem to want to tap into a secular eternity that mirrors the reticulated flow of advertising and TV). Musical feedback can signify as a dream of perpetual motion, as growth without excess, as a regained cosmic balance. Whatever the ideological orientation or intentions of the individual composers, many aspects of systems-influenced music seem to dream capital’s subsequent involutions as a utopian exit from it. The creation of musical feedback loops yields a form of sonic (sometimes spiritual) ‘added value’ that is attributable to neither composer nor performers, but depends on their environment (the concert hall or studio) and the reverberations released, or captured, by the unfolding musical material. In this magical aesthetic gift economy there is nevertheless an echo of the larger restructuring of production, and contraction of social reproduction, in which such cultural forms were discovered and developed. Call it ‘unmediated adjacency’, but Downtown New York Minimalism was certainly born somewhere between Madison Avenue and Wall Street. The suspension of dollar-gold convertibility and of linear musical development in Minimalism certainly occur at the same point on the historical score. As does the bankruptcy, and then gentrification, of New York…

Whatever one makes of this brief exercise in cultural-economic isomorphism, it does seem worth urgently asserting the currency (or rather, bankruptcy) of certain post-cybernetic conceptions of culture. An ethos of self-limited and self-sustaining activity, freed from the hubris of modernist telologies of growth, linked to a notion of ‘generosity’, ‘gift economy’ and ‘DIY’ emancipation may (still) seem appealing. Yet, however militant the refusal of instrumental reason, linear time, progression, etc., this ethos predominantly operates by bracketing out the dull compulsion of the value form. This leaves it hostage to the kind of reappropriation now being conducted by the capitalism of the Big Society. In many counter-cultural products and processes the commitment to dissolution of the work into the flow of negative feedback and free-floating (non-consumerist) desire coexisted with a project for the creation and replication of enclaves or islands outside the sphere of consumerism or ‘capitalism’ conceived as a bureaucratic regime of unfettered development. Today we see the reductio ad immiseration of this larger trajectory into an ethics of ‘doing more with less’ (famously dissected in season 5 of The Wire‘s extended montage of the restructured institutions of news and policing). Architects and theorists such as Rem Koolhaas and artists such as Marjetica Portc encourage us to embrace the self-organising, self-regulating ‘creativity’ and ‘improvisation’ of the ‘entrepreneurial’ slum dweller, hymning the efficiencies of outsourcing former state services to the absolutely destitute. Policy wonks such as Charles Leadbeater eulogise the mendicant refuse collectors of Recife Brazil, with their supermarket trolleys and contract-free labour. Networked creativity can be read as a euphemism for the harvesting of ‘free inputs’, which the eulogists assume will add up to sufficient savings and value creation to keep the financialised system in motion.

All this is the consummation of the cybernetic capitalist tendency to ‘activate’ potential by removing means of support and subsistence, letting the raw (human) materials resonate to the newly opened up environment of non-reproduction. The dead hand of the state or over-arching structure of welfare and services is withdrawn to facilitate the free play of the system’s molecular constituents. Capitalism as open system is increasingly dependent on the annexation of the ‘outside’ in all its forms, and where this outside is definitively assimilated it must be recreated endogenously by the subtraction of existing social reproduction.

Rather than recycling forms of cultural feedback developed more or less consciously as a subversion of the (Fordist, statist and bureaucratic, etc.) social order – a project that was always, at best, ambivalent in its implications for the majority of the population – perhaps we should shift our focus, both culturally and politically, to the ways financial feedback has laid the ground for today’s era of struggles around subsistence in a society subsumed under an ever more volatile value form. As an expanding global proletariat confronts contracting social reproduction, the question for cultural producers is whether one (solely) serves an extended programme of value destruction or (at least) contests it.

Revolts catalysed by Twitter and Facebook, alongside the offline networking of all those put into contact with, and forced ever closer to slavery by, financialised systems are the positive feedback loops beginning to resonate after years of controlled deregulations and informatisation. The accelerating repetition of ineffective financial moves generates an ever greater financial contradiction which is transposed across the social scale from banks to states to populations. As subsidies are withdrawn and barriers to capital dismantled, this contradiction is translated into food and fuel price inflation, in turn triggering riots and a proletarian music of revolt ripping through once stable states. With the socialist – and now fundamentalist – control circuitry torn out or severely compromised by financialised capital itself, perhaps an unregulatable feedback will ensue.

An unprecedented coordination of class decomposition and social non-reproduction has made systemic risk, in every sense, far greater than it has been for decades, greater than in the entire history of capitalism, perhaps. If the spiral of feedback leading from financial bubble to insurrectionary wave that now seems possible is fulfilled, then we may yet have to revise our opinion of the long era of financialisation. It will have been more than just a fiction of wealth – the imposition of the value form as a volatile but empty claim to value creation. In a final spiral of cyber-capitalist feedback, finance may prove to have been the amplifier par excellence of the noise that abolishes the capitalist signal, that is of the signal which is value – the one, supremely abstract, supremely material thing it always must communicate, send and receive. An exponential positive feedback in class struggle should not be assumed, however, any more than the teleological projections of cybernetics (e.g. inevitable planetary death by overpopulation, etc.). But one would have to be more myopic than a risk analyst, or middle-eastern CIA operative, to miss the current potential for the destructive cycle of financial feedback to invert into an unprecedented global cycle of struggles against capital per se.

Give me the time (For an aesthetic of desistance)

Federica Bueti

In Neoliberal Western Democracies, participation has transformed into the daydream of politicians and the nightmare of precarious cultural workers. The latter is consistently prompted to invent and collaborate with others to survive the current economic system, the lack of resources, and the acceleration of time. In this context, participation is ripe for experiments with alternative strategies for collective action that can concurrently reiterate forms of neoliberal democratic consensus. Participatory practices have the potential to oppose the logic of a neoliberal society while donating novel forms of regeneration and development to society.

For a long time now, modes of participation have been shaped on the terms of the rhizomatic, anti- hierarchical, anti-dialectical, anti-representative, libertarian, non-anarchistic, and ideologically open since the 1960′s and 70′s. They were loosely organized by small groups of people in order to avoid structures and to work more effectively as an open network. The desire to permeate a totally open reality had manifested in artistic production that refuted the limitations of both traditional media and the institutional setting. For instance, Umberto Eco’s essay “Opera Aperta“1 -Open Work- (1962) presented a rubric for the structural analysis of the artwork that challenges its single trajectory and favors the concord and “openness” of contemporary art.

The new paradigm of contemporary art has been extensively explained by art historian Miwon Kwon’s assessment of site-specific practices. Kwon found the best reasons for experimenting with new formats to be “the epistemological challenge to relocate meaning from within the art object to the contingencies of its context; the radical restructuring of the subject from an old Cartesian model to a phenomenological one of lived bodily experience; and the self conscious desire to resist the forces of the capitalist market economy.”2

These new expectations demanded opposition and critical dissociation from a system based on rigid structures and roles. Artists came to terms with social inequality and distance from more agreeable living conditions. Artistic production was influenced by this detachment from both the motherland and the art system. Dematerialization, institutional critique, and aggressive anti-visuality registered as procedural responses to the multifaceted disassociation.

Assorted discourses penetrated art transversally. Analytical practices often used language and direct experience as counter-performative elements. The opposition of this definitive language and the counterattack of critics against the intrusiveness of power encouraged a self-reflective, distanced practice. Language was the site for the analysis, de-construction, and re-definition of sensible space.

The institutionalization of critical practices, i.e. practices that confront the role of art and art institutions, trapped these artists within an exhausting loop of self-reflection and the eager expectation of idiosyncratic output. Tethered to the advancement of the global liberal capitalism, their aesthetic of resistance was inhibited. Rather than discover a new space of experience, these processes have perpetuated the sense of free floating like a hot air balloon with a direction yet no definitive landing ground and a necessary postponement of expanding horizons.

The obstruction of practice evokes disorientation accompanied by an outwardly constrained representation of the world. Critical practices are plagued by the rapid integration into institutions they are supposed to problematize. Since the advent of the second generation of Institutional Critique, there has been a continuous attempt to exceed consensus by supplementing it with presence, meanings and a massive dose of self-reflectivity.

The rhizomatous, anti-hierarchical operative model of social and cultural dissensus has been transformed into a fragmented and dispersed political machine. This mutation ensures the sustenance of biased conditions of production and neoliberal logic. It accommodates a distorted notion of time and motion, and prompts the creation of an immanent state of exceptions that restrains resistance. Existential meditation serves capitalism’s exploits, obscuring the laboring bottom-feeders and blinding the lucid eyes of the cognitivat.

The breaking point has been on hand for over a decade, which could ostensibly subvert the purportedly shallow existence. We are trapped in the here and now of an artificial existence, where satisfaction of temporary desires falsify experience. There is a constant push to affirmatively respond to incessant requests for participation or some other notion of intervening and performing in the world. The performativity of “I can” can fester amid frustration and exhaustion. “I can” sustains a distorted notion of what may be physically possible in the real world.

The sense of exhaustion produced by “performing” is certainly linked to the overlap of leisure and work. The late 1960′s called for coincidence and the integration of life and art while the modern interpretation is fixated on pathology. Private and leisure time is a unique type of labor, dictated by consumption, enjoyment, status-building, and maintenance. Culture is thus adapted to the web of capitalism’s economic and social relations.

It is possible to individuate in the idea of “inclusiveness” the ambiguous terrain where critical art is operating today. Integration and overlap between different spheres like work and leisure or public and private fabricates a space of social and political ambiguity. This uncertainty is reflected in critical practices, which endanger opposition to systems in society through neutralization. The claim that art must enter the space of social and political reality should not be embraced without reservations. As Jacques Rancière put it: “Although we no longer share early twentieth-century dreams of collective rhythmics or of Futurist and Constructivist symphonies of the new mechanical world, we continue to believe that art has to leave the art world to be effective in “real life”: we continue to try to overturn the logic of the theatre by making the spectator active, by turning the art exhibition into a place of political activism or by sending artists into streets of derelict suburbs to invent new modes of social relations.”3

Should art become one with the social and political reality, how could ulterior regimes of representation exceed existing ones? One must preserve the imaginative power of art. When it enters into the hierarchy of reality, the risk lies in assuming art can dictate what can and cannot be. Art, like capitalism, straddles the line between reality and virtuality, abandoning the material reality for the nebulous space of immateriality. The paradoxical situation created by the current opposition to the autonomy of art and the claim for art to inevitably enter the social and political space of action has bounded the very possibility for art to be effective and to establish an alternative space for thinking about reality. The economic and social evolution of society has facilitated the optimistic embrace and drive for the “new” and “potential.” By entering the space of socio-political reality art has also been victim of a natural postponement of changes. If we are constantly leaning forward such potential and new future, then we are pushed to perform and convulsively act in order to make this future possible. But then, it is endlessly postponed. The only thing such feeling makes possible is that you have to perform at all cost, in order for the neoliberal machine to be perpetuated and for any turning point to be endlessly postponed. If critical practices disclose a particular space of consciousness within the incessant flux of reality, we should welcome such insights into a warm home.

We took on the idea of deconstructing and re-thinking reality with enthusiasm. The socio-political system, clearly totally dependent on the economic system, injected us with speed. Every aspect of our life is accelerated, like a mouse running around in a maze without finding the ‘Exit’ gate. The whirl of modern reality is bound to imminent presages and potential motions, encapsulating citizens within the socio-cultural system despite its predictability. Participation in neoliberal scenarios is performance. You have to act seemly within the space where, as Jacque Rancière put it, “everyone’s speech is determined in terms of his or her proper place.”4

The persistent need to perform and the high level of competitiveness preoccupies the notions of social-relations and participation. In art the idea of critical participation or the use of other forms of critical practices have been integrated into the very same system they are vividly trying to escape. Participation, for example, has been consistently linked to the consensual model of contemporaneous democracy. Each opposition is a new opportunity for the neoliberal system to propose a novel solution. Democratization can thus nullify the attempt to escape the present reality by re-appropriation into the larger society. Today artists are asked to perform for an audience at infinite panel discussions, symposia, lectures, book launches, and other opportunities to “share” with the globe. You do not have an exhibition without having a lecture. What kind of participation is based upon a forty-minute reading of a statement and ten minutes for questions from the audience? In the end it is always too late. The moderator comes up and says: “Sorry, time is up, we have to leave. Thank you for coming and thanks to the speakers for their time and interesting insight.” Where is this “sharing of knowledge?” Is it meant to be a multitudinous and unilateral process? Why should I enable the production and reproduction of such models? Here the problem we are facing is of methodological nature.

Maintaining the performative sway of participation, we constrain collaboration to a mantra that serves the purpose of the already existing apparatuses. Substantial changes, and an altered concept of participation, can only be brought about by a deliberate fracture. Participation revolving around disinterested participation would revitalize the degree of intensity and investment to transform the performative experience of the collective. Unbiased dialogue can produce shared creative time and a space of social interaction. It facilitates a prismatic social environment of surplus relations, encouraging a break from the calculated logic of current artistic production.

Art participation should be considered not as a political choice or strategy, but more as a methodology that aims to preserve the autonomy of the artistic and cultural production from the attack of the neoliberal all-encompassing logic. For participatory practices preserve the autonomy of art mean to use the potential of collaborations to create a more sustainable economy for artists and cultural producers. Modes of Participation can create the conditions for an economy that is not totally dependent on the needs and wills of the current market. They can generate practical interventions that preserve and sustain the autonomy of cultural productions and by doing so, creating the conditions for art to envision different possibilities of existence.

But in order to establish a different meaning for participation, we should perhaps reconsider current cultural attitudes and social behaviors. Time, for example, needs to be re-introduced into current artistic, critical and curatorial production. Not as an oscillation of time, but as a “spatialization of the subject”. Against the backdrop of contemporary virtual and physical progress, one could oppose the necessity of durational experience and the sense of prolonged time that resists rapid consumption. Experience is comprised of time spent as well as a space of experience and shared intensities. Time is an essential element in participatory practices. Diverse knowledge and exchanges, and fruitful long-term relations require not just physical time but steadfast consistency. Endured duration is particularly vital in the context of virtual-communications. The reason is quite simple: people don’t share the same level of understanding or sensitivity, and a model of learning, exchanging and developing relationships varies extensively. Speed of pace is different for everyone. We cannot wish for the contrary without surrendering to the trap of authoritarian vision.

Adopting a creative model based on collaboration does not only mean maximizing outcomes or saving economic resources. People should revel in the space and allow for participation, discussion, and confrontating beliefs and modes of thinking. Only then can operative possibilities for transforming the acquired knowledge into operative models of actions unfold. A space of conflict where dissimilarities can play out and subsequently be used rather than liquidated at the first mention of a discrepancy is essential.

We should not forget that collaborations have become a necessity for the growth and implementation of profits in the capital industry. Today managerial agendas abide by more complex yet malleable democratic models. Groups can be identified through their representative members, for example, which spurs homogenization and the dissolution of the individuals ultimately relied upon for the decision. Participation, under the guise of performance, is constantly compromised. It accepts the conditions for the benefit of others, further perpetuating the current illusory, consensual democratic trend. Any partnership in this context becomes a tool for pursuing individual interests at the expense of potentially collective achievements.

Participation should be regarded as an opportunity to escape quantitative time and the correlation between its passing and imminent “results” and successes. Participation can create a genuine place for growth and education by first of all embracing a different sense of time. Genuine in the sense that a collaborative project channels energies, feelings and emotions into an event of intensities. It is an experience of proximity and materialized distance. Participation is like the paradox of Zeno’s tortoise in Plato: the tortoise’s movements are slow and often imperceptible, but they are firm and have a precise direction. Although Achilles is faster, he reaches where the tortoise has been and still has farther to go.

The potential of participatory practices indeed lies within the distribution of time and of duties. Pressure, competitiveness, and the anxiety over the ‘right’ performance must dissolve. Subjectivities, both individual and collective, should be fostered while those involved remain responsible for honesty to themselves and the Other. Participation is more than a funny way of doing and making things; it is a painful process of human and professional investment. It is an exercise in adjustments, in detachment from a system that obliges us to become a mechanism in a broken machine.

New labor conditions have entangled the current society, leaving millions of young people unemployed, self-employed or simply precarious. The trap is thus set for those who cannot envision their future, be it unrealized projects or the fulfillment of ambitions. A job is not only a way to earn money but a means of independence. The current situation is frustrating because we are unable to overcome the limits of the implemented system to envision different ones. In this sense participatory practice functions as a mode of resisting social annihilation by exceeding the limitations of the space and overcoming the logic of economic value.

Participation can resist the acceleration and optimization of performance. It can resist both consensual models and homogenization. Its polyphonic conflicts and manifold nature are reasons for both inclusion in and optimistic exclusion from the neoliberal system. It could be a motif for changing the way we understand what is possible.

Modes of Participation in this context have the capacity to explore new forms and new meanings. Rather than romanticize a concept of community or the bodily personification of the abstract concept of ‘multitude,’ participation is best served as an operative to produce an innovative, breathing place and an emancipated space of production.

Art Under the New World Order

Irmgard Emmelhainz

Art Under the New World Order

It would seem that art must now either abolish itself entirely – the audacious strategy of the avant-garde – or hover indecisively between life and death, subsuming its own impossibility into itself.[1]

If we understand deregulation as the absolute rule of the market, what are the conditions of aesthetic production under deregulation? How have art and its production been influenced by the predominance of neoliberalism and by the shift toward cognitive production as a source of surplus value? Is contemporary art, now subsumed to the rule of the market interests, caught in the Adornian impasse between life and death?

As we all know, a massive process of capitalist accumulation is taking place by way of financial capitalism, dispossession of vital resources and land, annihilation of forms of life, mass privatization of the commons, the redistribution of power in favor of the elites, and the repression of dissent from Toronto to Deraa, Syria, passing through Rome, Beil’in and Athens.[2] We are seeing the ruins of the worker’s movement from the 19^th Century bourgeois industrial order; witnessing the 20^th century welfare state collapse at the feet of neoliberal measures like outsourcing, deregulation, de-unionizing, exploitation of factory labor, downsizing, the precarization of labor, cut-throat competition at the work place (social Darwinism), the inextricability of the legal economy and the rogue or illegal economy, speculation with food prices, etc. Moreover, the shift that began to take place in the 1970s from the industrial production of merchandise to an economy based on knowledge and information has prompted an international division of labor. That is to say, transnational capital has created new forms of mobilizing and exploiting the working force at a global scale, uprooting and displacing hundreds of millions of peasants from the third world, transforming them into national and transnational migrants working under enslaving conditions.[3] Production in the first world has come to be based on semiotic content centering on cognitive production like marketing and branding, placing creativity at the core of the actual economic system–what Franco Berardi (Bifo) has called SemioKapitalism.[4] In this scenario, art has joined the economy of knowledge and become subject to what Theodor Adorno called the culture industry. “Culture industry” denotes a tendency toward uniformity within apparently varied and free production that mirrors the dominant logic of the global social process of the production of the same.[5]

As part of the economy of knowledge, art carries the burden of becoming a form of knowledge all the while it derives its value from a context, second hand removed. Furthermore, academia, by way of critical theory and art history, insures the further validation of art as a form of knowledge within the market. The reason for this is twofold: in the current economic order, on the one hand, the sector of the arts and culture is seen as a potential financial boom where it has become necessary to invest. As Rosalind Krauss noted in 1990, art had become an asset, and what gives art its value is not that it is thought of as cultural patrimony but that it is considered to be specific and irreplaceable embodiments of cultural knowledge whose value is one of pure exchange.[6] On the other hand, following Jean Baudrillard, art has fulfilled its avant-garde potential, having morphed everywhere to become embedded into everyday life. Art can now use everything for its own purposes, “from recycling garbage, to forming communities, to investigating political issues and perfumes, to playing with television, anthropology, biology and technology.”[7] The trouble in distinguishing art from other kinds of processes is not only related to art having reached its vanguardist ideal, but also ties in to Adorno’s thesis of the Culture Industry as the production of sameness. In any case, in order to be able to distinguish itself from other fields, contemporary art needs validation as some form of knowledge. In this regard, Sylvere Lotringer located a paradigm change in art production grounded on the reception of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations in the New York Artworld as a tool to imbue art with theoretical weight. Lotringer wrote:

The year 1987 happened to be a real turning point for the New York Artworld, throngs of young artists were flooding the art market desperately seeking Cesar, a “master thinker”, a guru, anything really to peg their career on; they took Jean Baudrillard’s book, Simulations for an aesthetic statement (while it was an anthropological diagnostic) and rushed to make it a template for their art.”[8]

In this regard, academia has served the purpose of affirming the separation of art from socio-economic relationships, as it needs to prove its status as a space for critical thinking outside from the capitalist system; at the same time, the Artworld has sought (or not) to distinguish itself from transnational corporate ventures that claim the creativity that used to belong to the domain of art. For example, Chris Kraus argued recently that the company American Apparel fills “the void left by avant-garde process-art of the last century, which are no longer practical for artists who must maintain their career.”[9] For Kraus, American Apparel is a “gigantic work of conceptual art,” with its stores that look like galleries in to-be-gentrified neighborhoods, with its Warhol-esque operational mode, with its anti-brand attitude and its ads that look like MFA art and which quote conceptual artworks.[10]

One of the consequences of the expansion of art into economical processes and its migration to discourses of creativity has been the emergence of the “creative class”:[11] an economic class not because its members have certain professions, but because they “adopt a common lifestyle: an outlook on life that cuts across and ties together the different registers of work, leisure, self-actualization and social goods.”[12] Another consequence is, as Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman noted recently, art has ceased to matter as art, and thus its politics are gone:[13] evidently the global Artworld, the market and political engagement are not at odds with each other but rather, they coexist for mutual benefit. In this schema, much politicized artwork sits within the confines established by liberal ideology that on the one hand, reduces the political to culture by institutionalizing dissent and staging antagonism. On the other hand, the model of aesthetic practice that predominates mirrors corporate ideology. For example: the cultural producer is a nomadic entrepreneur against a centralized art world; political commitment–long gone are the politics of visibility of the 1980s and 90s–means dialogue, cooperation and the creation of communities; betterment is sought as opposed to change; culture and knowledge serve as tools against poverty; spontaneous relational interaction and autopoiesis are means to undo fixed representational strategies.[14] The Modern vanguardist role of the artist as mediator is gone as the exploited class appears as a “social issue” and as subject of direct intervention and of denunciation, for example: the oppression of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence, the exploitation of immigrants, humanitarian crises, conditions of life in the slums, etc. As politicized work, aesthetic interventions and politicized gestures are shadow-theater battles that fail to address the new realities of capitalism. Furthermore, contemporary art thrives on what Mark Fisher calls the aesthetics of demise, taking up the ethico-political task of showing the horrors of capitalism in the most realistic manner, turning spectators into stupefied, passive contemplators.[15] The aesthetics of demise encompasses works that abstract current forms of violence exercised on the social and urban tissues and reifies them into images, objects or gestures. It is characterized by being direct, real and immediate. By eliminating mediation, it renders transparent the mechanisms of transmission, similar to mediatic “objectivity.” It is not by chance that aesthetic practices coincide with the mass media, as both regimes fall short in their attempts to transmit pain, fear, the ruin of cities, the sequels on the collective psyche left behind by murders, torture, rape, war. Not coincidentally, much of contemporary art shares with journalism the method of empirical investigation as its basis of production: like journalists, artists are “citizens of the world” and witnesses to the consequences of globalization on the planet. Moreover, aesthetic practices seek to compensate for the blind spots of the information industry, and have taken up the task of highlighting what is suppressed in current global political and cultural processes, intending to put at work the criticality that the media lack.[16] Such a view of the “world picture”[17] believes that the picture presented by journalism can be transcended by aesthetics, insofar as it allows for formal experimentations and is able to go beyond “technology” – positing the cognitive mapping of the world as a matter of technique. The problem is that art, like the media, draws up a horizon of legibility in common, outlining a frame of what can be done and said, what positions may be legitimately taken and in which actions one can become engaged in or not: journalistic and cultural tourism; cultural intervention, in debates carried out by ‘experts.’ This horizon of legibility is a matter of power relations and it has to do with the articulation of political frontiers in a discourse and thus, social divisions become a matter of limits creating an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside.’ This is how social divisions are established between concerned citizens of the world and victims, cultural producers and informers and sufferers, cultural products and subjects of the work, victims and spectators. Such a division was cynically (self-reflexively?) drawn by Santiago Sierra in his intervention for the 2001 Venice Biennale: 133 People Paid to Have their Hair Dyed Blonde. Sierra’s action highlighted (literally) a division between the poor illegal immigrants in Venice (mostly Subsaharian) and the Artworld crowd mingling on the streets of Venice that summer.

When facing the contradictions of politicized aesthetic practice within the current World Order, it is often argued that capitalism recuperates the criticality of art. The recuperation of criticality by capital is a myth, however, when we consider Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski’s distinction between “social critique” and “artistic critique” alongside the “creative” turn in capitalism since the 1970s. The two forms of critique that Chiapello and Boltanski conceptualize, posit demands for liberation. On the one hand, social critique denounces poverty and exploitation and demands liberation from oppression suffered by a people lacking political self-determination due to historical conditions. On the other hand, artistic critique demands authenticity and self-fulfillment. In terms of self-fulfillment, artistic critique is against generic alienations prompted by religion, authority, community, having a given body, etc. With regards to authenticity, artistic critique is against standardization and massification by capitalism. According to Chiapello and Boltanski, while artistic critique has been partially fulfilled and subordinated to profit making since the 1970s, social critique and anti-imperialism were attenuated by being transformed into ethics and human rights, reduced to denunciation, disagreement, making visible what the mass media do not show, confusing social work with engaged art, etc., dispossessed of their ideological base and consigned to the trash-can of history.[18] Artistic critique, in turn, has been put at the center of life becoming ideology and a source of capitalist profit. The subsumption of artistic critique to profit-making means that the politicized demands of autonomy from fixed hierarchies and determinations that stem from gender, society, ethnicity, etc. have migrated to the market of counter culture become mainstream. This has given leeway to the trend to create autonomously one’s own subjectivity and lifestyle by way of commodity ownership, that is, a matter of the consumption of semiotic products. Lifestyle has become a value and the site for the creative invention of a “free self” as well as the grounds for the pursuit of hedonistic practices in the name of personal freedom; also, self-fulfillment has come to mean to give one’s own life a purpose and social responsibility. Moreover, artistic critique has been placed at the center of human life activity, and become part of the current ideological trend to live for the sake of self-fulfillment and to make life meaningful. As Slavoj Zizek stated:

We have this ideology that addresses you as a private individual and accepts you; and you are not destined to care for higher causes but to dedicate your life to self-fulfillment. In this situation, our ideological identity is that of individuals whose task is to realize their true potential and to make their life meaningful.[19]

Thus, the current ideology of self-fulfillment implies de-alienation and autonomy, which get satisfied by semiotic consumption. Even social responsibility is a matter of semiotic consumption, and lifestyle provides a framework to our lives and sense to it, becoming the site for the creative invention of a socially aware “free self.” To conclude, if lifestyle is in old-fashioned terms the predominant form of “ideology,” then contemporary art could be charged as guilty of its inability to create an alternate or critical model that would oppose it. The writer, critic and filmmaker Chris Krauss, in her dialogue with Baudrillard’s and Lotringer’s assessment that art has completely merged with life, wrote that “the art world remains last frontier for the desire to live differently.” In her view, artists are searching for a new kind of living, documenting their approaches and placing them in relation to each other, reclaiming public space and time. Artistic critique integrated into a capitalist vision, as we have seen, emphasizes creativity and self-fulfillment, and as lifestyle, it is the predominant form of ideology. One of the devastating consequences of this is the effect it has had on our perceptive critical capacity to truly understand the underlying forces behind our current personal drives and desires in the context of the ongoing wars and the geopolitical-economic landscape. According to Gene Ray, the issue at stake in the Culture Industry’s production and consumption of commodified culture is the production conformist consciousness, “the restriction, impoverishment, and seduction of consciousness.”[20] The Culture Industry, however, never absorbs entirely the autonomy of art, which can be actualized as a force of resistance. For example, Miguel Ventura’s 2008 humongous installation, Cantos Cívicos at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) at the Autonomous National University in Mexico (UNAM). The motif of a swastika linked to the dollar sign appeared throughout an overwhelming collage made up of intervened images of Iraqi soldiers, male pornography, Nazi paraphernalia, a parody of the Artworld, hints of the colonial atavisms remaining in contemporary Mexico, etc.

The work was unpalatable for many, especially for the institution that hosted it.[21] This installation and the debates that it spawned, demonstrates that the critical potential that art has, goes well beyond artistic critique in Boltansky and Chiapello’s sense, as there exists the possibility of expressing and then presenting the unclassifiable, unsellable, unshowable, the abject: a disturbing image of the world that may distantiate us from the present. This takes place beyond the well-known, ready-made liberal margins that have been set up by the culture industry precisely for politicized artwork and art writing.

Robin Rhode Classic Bike performance, 2008

Trickster Tactics in the Artwork of Robin Rhode

Bhavisha Panchia

The trickster is a boundary crosser and a speaker of profanities. He is the “mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox”. (Hyde 2008: 7) The trickster can “bring to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight”. (Ibid) He disrupts and reshapes the world around him. Contemporary South African artists have appropriated the art of the trickster in visual ways that not only amuse, but also mock, reveal and recast their chosen objects of attack. The trickster, much like the artist offers resistance to dominant ideologies. Contemporary artist Robin Rhode embodies trickster characteristics in his art production to create works that are not only engaging and critical, but witty and playful too.

It has long been argued that humor and mockery are forms of resistance or protest.  Mikhail Bakhtin emphasizes the critical and subversive functions of humor, pointing to the powerful impact of humor in popular culture in the late medieval and early modern period. During carnivals and festivities, hierarchies disappeared and allowance was given to the “articulation of the idiomatic ‘world turned upside down’,” a funny and subversive way to play with established rules, chain of commands and traditions. (Hart 2007:4) The occurrence of carnivals and festivities saw the disappearance of former ranks and hierarchies and participants were regarded as equal and free.

The rhetoric of ‘resistance’ forms a significant part of South Africa’s art histories, which numerous publications and exhibitions (Williamson, S., 1989; Williamson, S. & Jamal, A., 1996; Wylie, D. 2008; Peffer, J. 2009) attest to. South Africa and Africa at large have been subjected to degradation, exploitation and dehumanization by systematic rules of colonialism. Arguably, artistic responses to the aforementioned abuses have contributed to a saturation of violent, didactic and instructive imagery, and in effect, resulted in scant visibility of fantastical, humorous and playful artworks. Humorous and playful strategies displace and recast the known and the accepted, and instead, offer us numerous contradictions and paradoxes.  It is through such artistic approaches that make visible the moral ambiguity and human absurdity prevalent in a context fraught with contradictions of postcoloniality.

A continued concern with the politics of colonial and apartheid past, led to art making that was, in the main, preoccupied with the grotesque and the spectacular. The artist became the ‘cultural worker’ and produced work that advocated for social change, which in turn resulted in an oppositional culture that was confrontational, direct and unambiguous.  In his essay, Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa Njabulo Ndebele reflects on spectacle and the failed attention to detail in relation to black South African literature. Even though Ndebele focuses on black South African literature, he notes in his essay that the representation of the spectacular is not confined to literary fiction but it is also present in visual arts such as painting and sculpture, creative sites wherein we are most likely to see “grotesque figures in all kinds of contortions indicative of agony” (Ndebele 2006:38). Ndebele’s essay is important as it brings our attention to those human practices and experiences that tends to be neglected and repressed under hostile regimes. Humor is one of these unattended human tendencies in politically charged South Africa, a humor that is inherent in the everyday social practice of ordinary South Africans. The spectacle that Ndebele articulates can be seen in Alfred Thoba’s Riots (1977), Billy Mandini’s Necklace of Death (1986) and Jane Alexander’s, The Butcher Boys (1985-6). (Richards 2008: 232)

Former South African Constitutional Court Judge Albie Sachs forwarded a similar argument in his essay Preparing Ourselves for Freedom (1991:187) when he writes,  “[o]ur artists are not pushed to improve the quality of their work; it is enough that it be politically correct. The more fists and spears and guns, the better.” Speaking directly to the premise of my argument, Sachs went as far as to say “[t]he range of themes is narrowed down so much that all that is funny or curious or genuinely tragic in the world is extruded.” (Ibid.)

Taking account of the foregoing discussion, it is evident that seriousness and a strong emphasis on righteousness during resistance and protest generally inhibit laughter and joy. In this light, social protest is fuelled by anger and fear, notwithstanding its consequences to leaving little room for jokes, laughter, and frivolous thoughts. The resistance period in South Africa marked a time that pushed aside the joy of laughter in favour of the fight. Steven Sack, writing in The Neglected Tradition, succinctly articulates the premise of art production by black artists during this time of resistance as:

an attempt to reflect social reality, and the repression of the 1960s. This art was often introspective and “tortured”; at its best and indictment of the social conditions caused by apartheid, at its worst, a “self pitying” and sentimental art. (Sack 1988:17)

Contemporary South African artists have diverted from such methods to employ alternate approaches to resistance and critique over the last twenty years. With the onset of the new political dispensation artists are less concerned with creating work that espouse specific didactic messages, and have favoured more playful, light and amusing ways to engage their audiences. These artists’ works are not filled with grotesque imagery, nor is its primary concern to incite political and social change. Instead, they employ humorous strategies that simultaneously mock, question and reveal.

The project FRESH is one of many initiatives indicative of this move away from political rhetoric to refreshing methodologies and approaches.  Headed by curator Emma Bedford together with the South African National Gallery, FRESH comprised of residencies, exhibitions and publications that celebrated the contribution of young South African artists. As the title of the project suggests, the South African art world was invested in furthering and expanding the creative output by emerging South African artists who were working in creative and innovative ways. One of the artists to participate was Robin Rhode, whose witty conceptual approach to art making saw his rise to local and international success.

Rhode is a dynamic visual artist who works in various media ranging from photographic prints, performance, video and installation. His quick, witty and often humorous artworks, together with his utilization of a globalizing urban youth culture, has established him in the global art market. Using humor to subvert the notion of the centre and the periphery, he explores the marginal figure in democratic South Africa.

Rhode manipulates the ‘colored’[i] figure in an ambiguous and playful manner to challenge the character of the stereotypical ‘colored’ that has often been rendered an object of ridicule and an anomaly in South Africa. Like other humorist figures such as the minstrel and the jester, Rhode would perform for his audience, challenging notions of truth and permanence. Rhode invites a humorous response and asks us to remain open to ambiguity and play-he approaches resistance in a playful manner, fantastical rather than purely “oppositional.” (Gule 2005: 25) Being inspired completely by his own “cultural identity being a colored person” in South Africa, he believed that a sub-cultural language impregnated by politics and marginalization could give birth to a broader artistic vernacular. (Bellini 2005:91)

Rhode draws on his experiences in South Africa as positive and motivating, rendering the negative aspects as “ironic, absurd and humorous.”(Hobbs, 2001:11) When speaking of his personal experiences of marginality, Rhode self-consciously uses and asserts this position as an advantage, using his culturally coded landscape to invade the status quo of the South African art world. This historical, political and geographical marginalization has afforded Rhode a dual position in which to create artistically.

Humour may be one of the conditions for taking up a critical position with respect to what passes for everyday life, producing a change in our situation, which is both liberating and elevating. (Critchley 2002: 41) This is true to Rhode’s approach where he takes personal experiences from everyday life and objects, liberates them from the constraints of reality whilst defying the physical laws of the world. Rhode however does not deny the reality of the space, the figure in space nor the performance, but rather conflates the three to push the limits of reality itself. His initial inspiration for his visual approach is told to several interviewers when he states,

I became inspired by a specific experience or ritual in high school- a type of initiation rite whereby young pupils were forcefully taken into the boys’ toilets by senior pupils. Chalk was stolen from the classroom and the senior boys would draw elementary objects such as candles and bicycles, directly onto the walls of the toilets. The younger pupil was then forced to interact with the drawn object, either trying to blow out the candle or to ride the bicycle. It was a form of initiation into high school subculture. (Rhode quoted in Bellini, 2005:91)

This experience became the model for his most of his artistic practice. This form of initiation used by senior students would ridicule the younger to elevate their status among the rest of the school. Using this playful form of aggression the senior students would attain pleasure as they ridicule the juniors. Here humor is used to enforce power and hierarchy. In one of his first performances Classic Bike (1998), Rhode draws a bicycle on the wall and attempts to ride it, unsuccessfully however. Here the drawing of the bicycle depicts an object of desire; the desire to ride and own the bicycle. The figure raises one leg in the hope to get onto the bicycle; he leans forward, takes hold of the front wheel, crouches down and checks the chain, bends his knees and tries to push the bicycle away.

As a site whereby the paradoxes of real-unreal oscillate, humor and play could be thought as an assemblage of intermeshed and conflated moments of reality and fantasy. (Auboiun quoted in Raskin,V. 1985:41) Artworks that engage with such sites, challenge us to open up to, and remain open to ambiguity. In so doing, we momentarily suspend our preconceptions to produce a change that is both liberating and elevating.  Rhode’s interaction with the representation of an art object as if it was the actual physical object blurs two and three dimension to suggest the confusion between the real and the illusion is unavoidable.  Here humor arises out of the unexpected, from the ironic difference that is incongruous to that which is expected, and can be used to help explain how the subversive quality of humor operates.

French philosopher Blaise Pascal, first proposed the theory of incongruity in the 1600s. He said “Nothing produces laughter than a disproportion between that which one expects, and that which one sees.” (Pascal quoted in Klein, 2007:10) Rhode suspends our disbelief so that our minds are taken to fantastical possibilities. Incongruity is taken to mean arrangement of subjects or objects in ways that bring forth absurdity, and inviting a sense of strangeness in the relationship between them. When that which we expect is overturned, reversed or subverted, they are incongruous to each other, resulting in the shock destruction of expectations, a key ingredient to the comic effect.

As a boundary crosser, the trickster is a dualistic manipulator and a marginal figure with a “disruptive presence” to expose deceit and disrupt the status quo, much like Rhode. (Gaylard 2005:162). Rhode in many ways appropriates such mechanisms to subvert, challenge and amuse his audiences. His artworks are playful and humourous but they also reflect on social and political issues. As such, Rhode employs creative approaches that engage with sensitive cultural and political subjects in a playful and fantastical sense.

References:

BELLINI, A., (2005) Robin Rhode. The Dimension of Desire. Flash Art. October 2005. pp. 90- 92.

CRITCHLEY, S., (2002) On Humour. London: Routledge.

GAYLARD, G.,(2005) After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical Realism. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

GULE, K., (2005) At the Centre’s Edge. Art South Africa V4.1 .Cape Town: Brendon Bell Roberts.

HART, M., (2007) Humour and Social Protest: An Introduction. International Review of Social History [online], 52 (15), 1-20.

Available from: home.medewerker.uva.nl/…thart/…/Introduction%20humor%20and%20social%20protest.pdf [Accessed 26 July 2009].

HOBBS, S., (2001) Using my Youth to the Truth, IN E. Bedford (ed.) Fresh: Robin Rhode. Cape Town.

HYDE, L.,  (2008) Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture. Edinburgh: Canongate.

KLEIN, S., (2007) Art and Laughter. London:I B Taurus.

NDEBELE, N., (2006) Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Kwazulu- Natal: University Of Kwazulu-Natal Press.

PEFFER, J., (2009) Art and the end of apartheid. Minneapolis University Press: Minneapolis.

RASKIN, V., (1985) Semantic Mechanisms of Humour. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.

SACHS, A.,(1991) Preparing Ourselves for Freedom:  Culture and the ANC Constitutional Guidelines. TDR (1988) [online], 35 (1), 187-193.

Available from:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1146119 [Accessed 19 January 2010].

RICHARDS, C. (2008) Aftermath: Value and Violence in Contemporary South African Art. IN T. Smith, O. Enwezor & N. Condee (eds.) Antinomies of Art and Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press. pp 250-289.

SACK, S., (ed.) (1988) The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art (1930-1988). Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery.

WILLIAMSON, S. and Jamal, A., (1996) Art in South Africa: the Future Present. Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Phillip.
WILLIAMSON, S., (1989) Resistance Art in South Africa. Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Phillip.

We Are Parasites: On the Politics of Imposition

Anna Watkins Fisher

The tactics of appropriation have been co-opted. Illegal action has become advertisement. Protest has become cliché. Revolt has become passé…Having accepted these failures to some degree, we can now attempt to define a parasitic tactical response. We need a practice that allows invisible subversion. We need to feed and grow inside existing communication systems while contributing nothing to their survival; we need to become parasites.

-Nathan M. Martin for the Carbon Defense League (2003)

There is, however, an advantage that woman can gain from her very inferiority.  Since she is from the start less favored by fortune than man, she does not feel that she is to blame a priori for what befalls him; it is not her duty to make amends for social injustice, and she is not asked to do so.

-Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949:695)

IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME

The British artist Roisin Byrne, a breakout star of the BBC4 reality series Goldsmiths: But Is It Art?, has recently begun to make a name for herself in the art world by sabotaging work by more-established male artists.  In June 2009, while still an art student, she began a correspondence with the Turner prize-winning, environmentally engaged artist Simon Starling, claiming admiration for his work, only to use the information she gained against him when she posed as a horticulturist, stole, and smuggled a rhododendron from his earnestly titled 2000 installation Rescuing Rhododendrons at the Parque Los Alcornocales in Spain back with her to the U.K. on a budget airline flight.  Byrne exhibited their email correspondence in full, along with the plant, for her final student show at Goldsmiths in a piece she entitled You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore.  This is one of a number of works for which Byrne has engaged powerful male artists through correspondence, using flattery to get what she wants from them.  For another piece, Look What You Made Me Do from 2008, she enticed the artist Jochem Hendricks into an extended correspondence that resulted in her putting her own bank details on his financial form so that she could later receive his payment and use it to create a replica of one of his works.

In January 2011, I started to write about Byrne’s artistic practice, fascinated by what I began to theorize as the parasitism of her provocative and ingenious artistic reversals of power and its potential for reinvigorating feminism. In his widely known, if still not fully contended with 1982 book The Parasite (Le parasite), Michel Serres offers a study that describes the world as a system of parasitic relations wherein production gets exploited by a maintained order of interloping consumption, organized by one-way relations that are not reversed.  He writes: “I call this semiconduction, this valve, this single arrow, this relation without a reversal of direction, ‘parasitic’” (Serres 1982:5).  “Precisely what is a parasite?” writes David Bell of Serres’ book. “It is an operator that interrupts a system of exchange.  The abusive guest partakes of the host’s meal, consumes food, and gives only words, conversation in return.  He does not pay in any material sense for what he takes” (Bell 1981:886).  Byrne’s art conceptualizes the creative reversal at the heart of the performance of parasitism, I argued in my dissertation proposal; it challenges artistic and feminist economies with its compelling manipulation of normative approaches to the production of value and representational political etiquette.  In my analysis, I read Byrne’s practice through the conceptual lens of parasitism, a term I argued was compelling for rethinking the increasingly vexed states of both contemporary feminism and contemporary feminist art, sites that have become bogged down by accusations of cultural cliché and creative stagnation.[1] What might be possible for a notion of feminism unbounded by vague and idealistic objectives such as autonomy, dignity, and independence?, I asked.

While the curatorial and journalistic discourse surrounding Roisin Byrne’s artistic practice has focused almost solely on questions about the ethics of stealing and forgery, I asked: what would it mean to consider her work as, rather than the sociopathic betrayals of one individual woman artist, performative actions that literalize and hyperbolize, in ways compelling and problematic, long-held notions of femininity as a bad copy of or vampiristic threat to masculinity?  Byrne has said of her work: “I’m not interested in placing it in some kind of art discourse: I’m interested in a relationship to information and to ownership.  The separation between you and that thing you desire is changing…” (Jones 2010).  I argued that a symbolic reading of Byrne’s conceptual practice demands that one question the ethics of stealing and forgery as feminist tactics, as it became evident that what Byrne calls “that thing you desire,” that coveted object taken without permission, is not so much the fetishized commodity in a society based upon private property but more so, the very cultural and commercial capital possessed by the male artists that she targets.  By exploiting conceptual art’s institutional absorption as a recognized practice in the twenty-first century, I suggested that Byrne is an artist that has “latched on” to the deregulatory zeitgeist of the present contemporary art market, securing it as the “host”-guarantor to her “feminist” claim to that which would otherwise lie beyond her reach.  Reading Byrne’s practice as parasitic, as a self-conscious feminist performance of parasitism—I argued in my proposal—opens up a number of important questions: on what moralistic, taste-based, or otherwise normative valuative terms has women’s drive to acquire cultural and commercial capital—awards, renown, influence, financial success—been characterized historically as a parasitic imposition deemed unacceptable?  How might we understand the discursive registers of “conceptual art” and “performance,” in particular, as even further authorizing certain appropriative deregulation—and in so doing, of freeing up a set of experimental feminist tactics—that might be used to infest spaces that have been maintained by otherwise hollow or dogmatic impulses within feminist theory regarding ethics and etiquette?  On the other hand, I wondered: what are the dangers of advocating a tactical parasitism for feminism?  What are the threats of laying bear feminism’s darker or more ambivalent drives (its complicity with forms of oppression, its death drive), and what might constitute the collateral damage of such a maneuver?

I shared my early writing about Roisin Byrne with a small group of fellow graduate students as a part of our biweekly research group.  An early draft was uploaded onto our university-sponsored “wiki”—a collaborative online space for sharing files—to be shared with the group, workshopped, and revised for a dissertation chapter.  When the group met, my readers were also intrigued and excited by Byrne’s work.  A few weeks later, I was surprised to find myself on the receiving end of a correspondence from Roisin Byrne.  First a Facebook friend request and then a message.  Our website had not been password protected, and the artist had gained access to my unpublished writing about her work by “Googling” herself.  In our exchange, she praised my reading of her work and subsequently emailed me just a few weeks later to ask if she could have permission to “take some terms” of mine for her artist’s statement for an upcoming show in Madrid:

Subject: Hello

April 17 at 6:17am

Hello Anna
I thought i would drop you a line to run something by you..i hope you don’t mind.
I have a solo show coming up at the end of May at my gallery in Madrid and i would really like for the works to be positioned properly ..it’s time!…

Anyhows, i was wondering if i could ask you whether it might be possible to take some terms you use like sexually harassing patriarchy for example , exploit exploitation, capitalise on capitalism, skillful manipulation of authoritarian codes (im not sure if they are yours or someone else’s?) for my blurb for my upcoming show???[2]

Faced with having my own ideas rendered unoriginal with no publication to cite, I found myself in an uncomfortable position at receiving her request to parasite me, being neither male, nor affluent, nor well established.  Byrne had called the bluff on my own (at the time, predominantly enthusiastic) critical relationship to the parasite—as well as my own critical parasiting of her art practice—by asking if she could make me her host.  How could I regard the notion of the parasite as generative in foreign, art context, if when faced with it in my own, material context, I turned away?  What was it that made Byrne’s former projects seem so compelling, so just and so funny, and this request seem rather unfair and serious?  After careful deliberation, I responded:

Subject: Re: Hello

April 19 at 5:29pm

Hi Roisin,
I am honored that you are interested in my work. Would this be for a catalog essay? If so, I would be thrilled if you quoted me (I could provide you with a quote if so) and perhaps even better, I could write something about your work for it.

As a young female graduate student who is working to establish myself as a critic–just as you are as a young artist–it means a lot for my ideas to be acknowledged (and yes those are my phrasings).[3] Perhaps we could collaborate on something here.

Byrne replied:

Subject: Re: Hello

April 20 at 2:53am

Hi Anna

I am delighted I found your ideas! and i think it would be a good thing to do something together. You articulated things in my work in a way that no one else has which i am i have to say really happy about. A collaboration sounds like something i would be more than happy to do.

At this stage the gallery in Madrid won’t be doing a catalogue, it would just be a press blurb positioning the work, do you think you would be interested in being credited on something like this? It’s small fry but…

“Small fry or not…” I wrote back to her on April 26th, assuring her that I would indeed like to acknowledged and providing her the relevant information to do so.  I did not hear back again.

On May 26th, I received a group email invitation from Byrne to her exhibition “It’s Not You, It’s Me” at The Goma in Madrid, Spain. In the body of the invitation—and, as I would later discover, in the press release for the exhibition—her artist’s statement read (in part) as follows:

Roisin Byrne (Dublin, 1981) is concerned with how representation can end up taking the place of reality in such a heavily mediated world and engages with the way appropriationist… tactics have been co-opted by advertising and how rebelliousness, protest and illegal action are now accepted as yet another part of the fabric of our society. She posits an invisible subversion: to feed off and grow within the communication system without contributing to its survival, to become a parasite…

Not only does Byrne appropriate my reading of her work as parasitical without attribution, but she also lifts from Nathan M. Martin’s 2003 article for the Carbon Defense League that appears as my epigraph above.  Byrne had, of course, encountered this epigraph before, when she first read it in my draft.  Either the conditions under which Byrne would parasite had changed between her earlier projects and 2011, her professional and economic situation becoming more precarious and therefore, necessitating an ethical slippage from seeking out powerful, well-known, male artists to a young, unestablished, female peer to play her host or Byrne’s parasitism never, in fact, had a stable ethical dimension in the first place.  Or perhaps we might recognize the parasite here as a far more shifting position than a stable one, as the linguistic shifters “you” and “me” in her exhibition title and, now, my essay heading, “It’s Not You, It’s Me,” evidence as the artist and the critic take turns playing exploiter and exploited.

The figure of the parasite, as Byrne’s oeuvre models it, indexes, above and beyond the ethics of stealing and forgery, questions of what forms of productivity are valued and what forms are deemed not of value within capitalism and how the giving and withholding of credit represents its own economy of power (as the parasitic drag of Simon Starling’s proper name into her project was essential to its conceptual interest, while inclusion of my name offered the artist little reward). Ironically, in another turn of the screw of parasitism, had my name been acknowledged by Roisin Byrne, this essay would be without its introduction.  The intriguing system of rewards for playing the role of weakened host, even momentarily, certainly complicates the picture of the economy of parasitism in ways that will require further attention in future work.  The parasite’s relationship to concepts of (de-)regulation and productivity betrays an internal paradox at work in the parasite’s popular figuration: its use in common parlance to index the metaphorical social leech who exploits the law and lives off of the work of others (very often the woman who lives off the wealth and access of a man) and yet, in my reading, its use as a performative figure of manic or hyper-productivity.  The parasitic, as I propose it here, seeks—as Byrne does—to pervert the mechanics of productivity, to bend and re-direct its normative meaning and value to its own benefit.  Indeed, the concept of a parasitical feminism that I have proposed (and will elaborate further) renders explicit a process of perversion that I read as already apparent in Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection.  Writes Kristeva: “The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them…[like] an artist who practices [her] art as a ‘business.’” (Kristeva 1982:15-16, my emphasis).

My entanglement with Roisin Byrne illustrates that the parasite is a dangerous subject—a dangerous subject of study and a dangerous subject on which to base a feminist politics—and perhaps, for this very reason, an intriguing one.  The parasite is both dangerous and generative precisely because it does away with the subject/object dichotomy and because there are no guarantees against its mechanisms.  Byrne’s particular modeling of a parasitic performance does not necessarily work toward something: a focused goal, an ethical logic.  It just works—like an artist who practices her art as a business.  The parasite threatens the integrity of the boundaries between the self and other but also in this case, between criticism and art, between a private draft and public persona, between my reading of Roisin Byrne and Roisin Byrne’s performance of herself.  The parasite is an unruly agent provocateur not simply because it often refuses to abide by the rules but rather because, by appropriating, indeed performing, the mechanisms of capitalism, it exposes that there are few rules, if any, in the economy of intellectual and artistic relations under capitalism.  With this lesson in mind, this essay will further elucidate a model of parasitism for feminism not merely to promote it but to query the limitations of it as well.

ART OF THE WEAK

“What might a parasitical performativity actually achieve?” asks Rebecca Schneider in a passing remark in her recent book Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Schneider 2011:125).  In a moment when parasitism has become a way of life under the economy of relations conditioned by late capitalism, what would it mean to render such relations explicit and tactical?  What would it mean to take seriously feminist tactics based on performative reversals that exploit exploitation or capitalize on capitalism? How might parasitism articulate itself not only as a contemporary feminist performance but also as a performative model for contemporary feminist politics?  Named after the Greek (parasitos), parasites were once a standard character in ancient Greek comedy, complete with their own mask (Zimmer 2000:2). Byrne’s work is but one example in a larger critical project that seeks to delimit an arsenal of artistic procedures by which a new generation of “feminist artists” have engaged the figure of the parasite to produce moments of ideological dissonance or majoritarian frustration: tactics that skillfully manipulate symbolization, that perform a sincere relation to, hyperbolize, and put on display authoritarian codes, that appear at first to adopt certain political poses only to attack them through rabid and exaggerated adoptions and reappropriations of such codes (Shukaitis 2010).  Parasitism can be understood here as a corrosive queering move that challenges recent work in queer theory and performance studies that has privileged, under the opaque appellation “negativity,” moves of cynical distancing, pure refusal, exit, and escape to argue instead for maneuvers of overintimacy, exaggerated mimicry, and excessive appropriation for feminist theory.

The turn to parasitism demands the question: Could the very logics of imposition provide the means for transforming increasing perceptions of Western feminism as a cultural imposition and lost cause and for figuring new and inventive models of feminism?  Steve Pile has argued, “There is never one geography of authority and there is never one geography of resistance.  Further, the map of resistance is not simply the underside of the map of domination—if only because each is a lie to the other, and each gives the lie to the other” (Pile 1997:23, my emphasis).  What might it mean to pause on the intriguing ambiguity of this “simply” to ask if indeed a map of resistance can be drawn from reversing, flipping over, and dragging structures of domination, if only to dwarf or exaggerate the original image in scale and significance.  What could it mean to sexually harass patriarchy, as the writer Chris Kraus does in her 1997 book I Love Dick, containing two-hundred letters stalking “Dick,” the symbolic object of her desire?  To juvenilize adolescence as artists such as Ann Liv Young, Amber Hawk Swanson, and Kate Gilmore appear to in the self-conscious performances of adolescent cliché that characterize their work.[4] To exhaust “women’s work,” as obsessive and proliferating task-based projects such Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More (2002-09) and Barbara Campbell’s 1001 Nights (2005-08), projects that re-appropriate the daily ritual of feminized work, appear to do?  Can performed, hyperbolic responses to or maniacal engagements with problematic figures be used to undermine their ideological effect?

How have long-held anxieties within feminist theory over the notion of the parasite[5]—a historically feminized metaphor for an intruder that is overly dependent, ungracious, and unwelcome—emerged as a tactical model for reinvesting contemporary feminism?  In what ways and to what extent have certain strands of feminist theory “pre-scripted,” and thus circumscribed feminists in, a set of compulsory performances oriented around a political subject represented as dignified, mature, and autonomous?  Moreover, might performed reversals or inversions of these terms—tactical performances of indignity, immaturity, and dependence—be found to aid or further damage the feminist project?  Parasitic performance “calls the bluff” on the derided figure of feminism, as well as derided figures within feminist theory, to query whether tactically and preemptively assuming the (im)position of such figures might take advantage of a cultural logic akin to double jeopardy whereby one cannot be charged with the same crime twice.  Rather than evading, by overidentifying with, “dragging” the impositions, parodies, and caricatures said to represent it, by performing “itself” back to itself, a younger generation of feminist artists have already begun to re-image feminism—assimilating not only patriarchy’s but also feminism’s internalized ironies, awkwardness, and equivocality for its tactical gain, while at the same modeling an “impure” performance of inheritance and generational transmission.  Taking seriously an influx of controversial, scholarly polemics on the crisis of contemporary feminism in recent years, from Angela McRobbie’s The Aftermath of Feminism (2009), Janet Halley’s Split Decisions: How and Why To Take a Break from Feminism (2006), Elisabeth Badinter’s Dead End Feminism (2006), among others, I will argue that these books problematically posit closure (aftermath, breaks, ends) as the answer to what ails feminism, failing to see the “open wounds” and maniacal, recursive force of what Avital Ronell has characterized as contemporary feminism’s “parasitical” ressentiment as instead, conditions of possibility.[6]

I, however, propose the parasite to be more than a figure of recursivity.  To be sure, the vigor and insistence represented by parasitism offers a model of iterability that does not simply repeat a given form but that also modifies it, taking the parasite as an exemplary figure for this generative iterability.  To be sure, iteration (called citation, called performative utterance) has been named parasitical by not only J. Hillis Miller and J. L. Austin[7] but also by Derrida who “para-cites” Austin,[8] all of whom link the accumulative nature of language, and ultimately performativity, to a kind of parasitic chain.  Contemporary performance art has found a way to exploit a certain impurity and supplementarity trafficked in performativity to feminist ends.[9] Articulations of impure modes of iterability (what I oppose to modes of pure refusal) yoke together questions of parasitism with those of feminist inheritance, as young artists and feminists have increasingly claimed, as Byrne does, to be uninterested in how their practices relate to those who have become before them, at the same time that they engage in hypercitational practices.  Artists like Roisin Byrne and Ann Liv Young parasitically perform historical ignorance or forgetting, as a tactical disidentification with images of feminism they would seek to rework.  Young, a New York City-based artist who has become infamous in the downtown art scene for her performances of art historical disregard,[10] told me in an interview that “to be perfectly honest” she has never heard of pioneering performance artist Marina Abramović until “the other day” and has “never seen anything by” the now legendary Karen Finley despite having poured chocolate all over herself in her aptly titled piece Solo (2006). The feminist parasite engages performance as a way of derailing and rerouting patriarchal investments in reciprocity, generational gratitude, and the gift economy that have structured discourses of morality, as realized by way of compulsory constructions of femininity as congenial, gracious, and obliging, not to mention the project of feminism as one that would seek gender equality, rather than to posit an opposition that would seek to hyperbolize, and thus outperform, patriarchy.  The parasite challenges the gift economy’s complicity with gender oppression, recalling Gayle Rubin’s brilliant elaboration of the historical exchange of women as historically constituting them as objects of exchange makes clear.  A performance of parasitism demands to know: what does it mean to take, over and over, and not give anything in return?  How might we read parasitical performance as a reflexive embodiment of the same fervor and voracity that Marx and Engels, and many since, have attributed to capitalism, as an unleashing of the same maniacal logic of shameless re-appropriation back on the structures found to host it most obligingly?[11]

Parasitical performance iterates female stereotypes at a level of mania, while simultaneously claiming—or rather insisting (“to be perfectly honest”)—that their performances bear some relationship to real life beyond the stage, effecting in this juxtaposition, a sense of disquietude or instability in the system.[12] Despite the often very apparent artificiality or hyperbole of their contrived spectacles, the artists’ refuse to break character, to let their “real meaning” be finally pinned down.  Theirs is an insisted-upon theatricalization of sincerity that enables the artists to stage their critique, or as Silvija Jestrovic as described it, “[to play] out the ambiguity between the performativity of the staged and the theatricality of the authentic” (Jestrovic 2008:160).  Rather than ignore, deny, or contradict female stereotypes, these artists hyperperform them, pervert them, make them work, exhaust them.  In this sense, they perform the parasite that feeds on and yet is seen as supplementary to a system that cannot fully come to terms with it.  By performing parasites, the artists exploit the iterative and accumulative force of performativity for their own creative practices.  In the force of accumulation, these artists insist on making something from the excesses of the system’s supplementary parts—whether it be kitsch, affect, contamination—that according to the logics of dominance, cannot be measured or incorporated because they have been deemed inadmissible.  In this sense, the parasite previously feared by feminism as a presence threatening to create and sustain “fresh wounds” and newly dependent attachments gets reimagined as the condition of possibility by which these fresh wounds, posed by the strategic supplementarity of the parasite to its host, might perform a tactical feminist remapping of the structural dynamics of gendered territoriality as the parasite comes to overwhelm the terrain of its host.

A FIELD OF PARASITES

These contemporary articulations of feminism by a younger generation of performance artists (not only women) respond to the “anxiety of influence” of 1960s and ‘70s feminist performance art, and second-wave feminism broadly, by modeling performances of parasitism that infest the more ambivalent strands of feminism.  These performances tease out feminist anxieties registered by representations of liminality, relationality, and simulation, sites that have been historically denigrated by versions of feminism conditioned by logics of affirmation and positivism.  The parasitic indexes sites that have proven challenging for feminisms grounded in a certain philosophical idealism: sustained by classical political and aesthetic values and based on the paradigm of sovereignty that privileges a conception of the liberal autonomous individual, all challenged by notions of the minor, the derivative, the relational.

Parasitical performance is offered here as one possible response to debates about what exactly feminism’s objective is at a juncture when concepts such as liberation and revolution appear increasingly inadequate for accounting for the fractured, intersectional, and relational experience of gender in postmodernity, as one’s ability to visualize, conceptualize, and escape the field of social violence in global late capitalism has become unthinkable.  Whether it be Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation, Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, or Michel Foucault’s theory of discipline, theorists concerned with questions of dominance have consistently articulated the impossibility of isolating the mechanisms of power within the constantly shifting ideological grid of postmodern space and time, an impossibility that has altered the very terms for politics historically compelled by goals such as exit or revolution.

Rather than flee, the parasite is a figure that “lives on” what it finds before it, for better or worse.  As such, the parasite represents important questions for feminist theory about complicity.  Parasitic performance, such as that of Roisin Byrne, makes explicit a certain double bind in contemporary feminist theory.  That is: feminism’s dependence on the very structures of domination that it finds its raison d’etre in critiquing.  J. Hillis Miller writes, “The host feeds the parasite and makes its life possible, but at the same time is killed by it…Or can host and parasite live happily together…feeding each other or sharing the food?” (Hillis Miller 1977:439).  I argue that feminism’s double bind, rather than being resolved, is even more deeply inscribed in its tactical recourse to parasiticism, taken up as a model of perverse appropriation that seeks to undermine the very thing that it depends on using in order to do so.  As the parasite has been given by Michel Serres to be the figure of relationality par excellence (Serres 1982:79), a question that troubles my project, and I would argue troubles critical theories of resistance more broadly, is the question of precisely what forms of relation are tantamount to consent?  Michel de Certeau, who characterizes the tactic as a kind of parasitical maneuver, gestures to the problem of complicity in the parasite’s willingness to “live with” that which might be understood to be oppositional to it.  De Certeau writes, “A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance” (De Certeau 2002:xix).

To be sure, a number of sticky philosophical and ideological questions emerge around the politics of the parasite:  If the parasite has gained traction in ideological fields where radical critique has been suppressed by the stronghold of capitalism, as may be argued of the U.S. and Western European contexts where these artists emerge, what does it mean to regard a figure of complicity as politically generative?  Does this turn to parasitism represent an inventive form of subversion or conversely, an elite retreat and “avant-garde” consensual agreement with forms of domination?  If the move to a parasitical politics on the part of feminism can be read as a bargain made to move beyond the impasses of revolutionary or radical politics, does this bargain amount to consent to an economic, political, and ethical system without rules?

POSTSCRIPT
As the online text of this article was just beginning to be formatted by Art & Education, the editorial manager received an unexpected email.  It was Roisin Byrne, who had somehow already discovered it and was inquiring how soon it would be published.

WORKS CITED

Austin, J. L. 1975.  How To Do Things With Words. Harvard University Press.

Bell, David. 1981. [untitled review: Le Parasite by Michel Serres] MLN Vol. 96, No. 4, French Issue (May).

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter. Routledge.

Cotter, Holland. 2002. “ART REVIEW; Two Nods to Feminism, Long Snubbed by Curators.” The New York Times, 11 October: Arts. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/11/arts/art-review-two-nods-to-feminism-long-snubbed-by-curators.html (1 May 2006).

De Beauvoir, Simone. 1993. The Second Sex. Edited and Translated by H. M. Parshley. Alfred A. Knopf Press.

De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1991. “Signature, Event, Context” A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Edited by Peggy Kamuf. Columbia University Press.

DiGiacomo, Frank. 2011. “Hipster Warfare Breaks out During Performance Artist Ann Liv Young’s Show at Delancey Lounge,” New York Daily News. 12 January. Accessed on January 13, 2011. http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2011/01/12/2011-01-12_hipster_warfare_breaks_out_during_performance_artist_ann_liv_youngs_show_at_ps_1.html.

Jestrovic, Silvija. 2008. “Performing Like an Asylum Seeker: Paradoxes of Hyper-authenticity,” Research in Drama Education, Vol.13. No. 2. 159-170.

Jones, Jonathan. 2010. “The Artist Who Steals For a Living.” The Guardian, April 14. Accessed on November 1, 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/apr/14/roisin-byrne.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press.

Martin, Nathan M. for the Carbon Defense League. 2003. “Parasitic Media: Creating Invisible Slicing Parasites and Other Forms of Tactical Augmentation,” accessed on December 15, 2010. http://www.why-war.com/news/2003/06/12/parasiti.html.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. 2001. The Communist Manifesto. International Printers Co., Inc.

Miller, J. Hillis. 1977. “The Critic As Host,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 3, (Spring) The University of Chicago Press.

Pile, Steve. 1997. “Opposition, Political Identities and Spaces of Resistance,” Edited by S. Pile and M. Keith Geographies of Resistance. Routledge.

Ronell, Avital. 1991. Interview. Angry Women. Eds. Andrea Juno and V. Vale. Re/Search Publications.

Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Schneider, Rebecca. 2010. Performing Remains: Theatricality, Civil War, Performance Art, Reenactment. Routledge.

Serres, Michel. 2007. The Parasite. University of Minnesota Press.

Shukaitis, Stevphen. 2010. “Overidentification and/or Bust?” Variant, Issue 37.

Zimmer, Carl. 2001. Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures. Free Press.

Existential Embarrassment

Eva Kenny

In May 2009 the painter, musician and performance artist Jutta Koether gave a performance at Reena Spaulings gallery in Chinatown, New York, as part of her exhibition, Lux Interior.[1] Some of the performance can be seen on YouTube in a clip called “The Staging of Restricted Means in the Landscape Redefines the Terms of Pleasure of Painting.” For Koether’s performance, the screen was precariously positioned with one foot on and one foot off the raised platform that is the main floor of the gallery, as David Joselit has described it in his recent essay, “Painting-beside-itself.”[2] Styled as a pedagogical prop like a whiteboard or flip-chart and pushed away from the wall at one end so that it turned towards the audience, on the screen hung one large painting of Koether’s, Hot Rod (After Poussin).  Dressed all in red with her long hair down, red gloves and multicolored glittering shoes, the artist’s outfit was half Dorothy, half dominatrix, half teacher.

In the manner of a lecturer giving a presentation, she held a sheaf of notes, but had no podium to stand behind to hide her from the audience or vice versa.  Koether introduced her painting, saying that she wanted to have it there in order to have a conversation about painting.  Hot Rod (After Poussin) is mostly red and black and is an interpellation or interpretation of Nicolas Poussin’s 1651 painting Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe, which is described by Joselit as “representing a Roman myth centered on the extinction of love—and life—caused by the misreading of visual cues.”[3] Normally in Frankfurt, Poussin’s painting is rarely loaned but was in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition in 2005.  Koether’s painting takes one motif from Poussin’s landscape, the bolt of lightning in the background, and makes it the central mark on her canvas.  With T.J. Clark’s book The Sight of Death in hand and in a strong German accent Koether reads from her notes and quotes from the book.  She tosses papers off the pile and onto the floor where already pages are lying, then lies down on the floor continuing her monologue on the subject red.

Koether stamps around the stage in her heavy-sounding shoes and goes to a flickering light machine, which she switches on.  Then she stamps over to the main light switch, off the platform, and turns off the overhead lights.  When she comes back to the stage she walks around and around the painting, gesturing at it vaguely while still reading from her sheaf of papers. She crouches on the platform to tidy some of her notes, stands up, and starts shouting the lyrics of a song by The Cramps, a punk band active from the 1970s until the lead singer, Lux Interior, died early in 2009.  Garbage Man, the song Koether uses, has lyrics that go something like “You ain’t no punk, you punk, you want to talk about the real junk?…You gotta live until you’re dead, you’ve got to rock until you see red.”  The audience at the gallery, of which only the front row can be seen in the YouTube video, are already looking a little awkward up to this point.  Although many of them may have heard or already know what type of thing to expect from one of Koether’s performances, presumably most don’t know what form it will take in this one.  They look from side to side to smile at their friends. When the performer starts shouting the words the atmosphere gets even less comfortable, as this fifty year old German woman is not only unpredictable and confrontational but somehow, by sing-shouting this song, embarrassing.

This embarrassment is not just based on the logic whereby any remainder or reminder or proximity to the most recently discharged is embarrassing, like Walter Benjamin’s description of yesterday’s fashion as “the most radical anti-aphrodisiac imaginable,” although that certainly has something to do with it.[4] It could also be argued that embarrassment is an element of much performance art, but this does not quite identify specifically enough the type of embarrassment at work here.  Koether’s performances have been described by audience members as “excruciating,” “so horrible;” and by Isabelle Graw in an overview of the artist’s oeuvre in Artforum magazine thus: “Anyone who has witnessed one will know what I mean when I say that the cringe factor is generally high.”[5] Graw asks, “To what end does Koether create such a sense of embarrassment?” and contends that even as Koether complicates the exchanging of roles, from artist as subject and artwork as object, to artist as object and artwork as subject, “her staging of the persona “Jutta Koether” is very different from currently prevailing modes of artistic self-presentation, insofar as it embraces the eccentricity that artists, luckily, are still permitted.”[6] But rather than enjoying a type of behavior that could only be tolerated these days in such a wacko figure as the artist, does Koether play in her performances with exactly these notions of the archetypal artist as an “eccentric?” Furthermore, if there is something political in this particular mode and cause of embarrassment?

We get the word in English, according to the OED, from the French verb embarrasser, to block, hamper, or impede, which has etymological associations to the Portuguese baraço: halter, like a harness.  It would be impossible really in this essay to diagnose or dictate a means by which embarrassment is, or could be, harnessed or mobilized towards political ends or what this would mean, but it would certainly be possible to look at what hints could be taken from these etymological roots, and, further, look at what that might indicate in terms of a political imperative in some art making or discourse in New York at the moment. Embarrassment, in the wider context of social anxiety, is described as “a disease of resistance” on www.socialanxiety.com.[7] Could this mean anything in the political sense of the word resistance?  If embarrassment can be given a political reading, does it fall down more on the side of resistance in an active sense, of resistance to something at work in the political sphere, or does it mean more to hamper, impede or block activity?

Koether repeats lyrics of the Cramps’ song with a raging chant-like quality, not particularly with rhythm, and with emphasis on the lines “til you see red.”  Poussin’s painting uses very little red by contrast with hers: no more than the bright red garments that often appear in the midst of his landscapes, and even Pyramus’ blood looks a darker brownish hue. David Joselit describes the red of Hot Rod (After Poussin) as a reference to “blood and anger (and by extension AIDS)”[8] and her brush strokes as “something like the caress before a slap.”[9] Red is also the color of a blush, and this visible dimension of embarrassment, the idea of which is prompted by Koether’s painting and performance, leads to the questions “What is the visual element of embarrassment?” or, “is there something specifically visual about embarrassment?” Or “what effect does embarrassment have on the visual register or how does it register visually?”  What would the red of Koether’s painting and the use of the color in her performance have to do with blushing? What is displaced from Koether’s painting into her performance?  What could be political about this experience? Another way of approaching this question might be to ask how ‘creaturely’ embarrassment or blushing is, to use Eric Santner’s term. His description, in his book On Creaturely Life, of the term ‘creaturely’ and its uses, articulates something about blushing that will be explored in greater length in the paper:

This notion (creaturely life)…opens a new way of understanding how human bodies and psyches register the ‘states of exception’ that punctuate the ‘normal’ run of social and political life. ‘Creatureliness’ will thus signify less a dimension that traverses the boundaries of human and nonhuman forms of life than a specifically human way of finding oneself caught in the midst of antagonisms in and of the political field. [10]

Although Santner’s text refers frequently to the ‘cringe’ experienced by the body under certain conditions of political sovereignty, it refers less to a ‘cringe factor’ in embarrassment than to a wretchedly stooped or shamed posture characterized by Kafka’s figures before or under the law. Nonetheless, for my purposes this articulation of how a body might physically and visibly register a state of embarrassment, specifically human as it is and political as it may be, is extremely useful.

The first part of this paper turns to the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century to try to write an incomplete history of blushing and embarrassment.  Charles Darwin’s chapter on blushing, from his 1872 text The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, seems to edge somewhat towards the insights of psychoanalysis. Initially I read his text for descriptions of blushing as the body’s performance of embarrassment, but in the end he does not so much refer to blushing as a way for the human to draw attention to itself as become, it seems, involved with the embarrassing aspects of blushing itself. What struck me as particularly interesting and seeming to move in Freud’s direction was the claim that one could blush for somebody else. This not only seems like a precursor to a psychoanalytic concept of projection or something similar, but draws attention to the changing concepts of shame and embarrassment over the past century.

The description of blushing in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals starts with a question: “Why should the thought that others are thinking about us affect our capillary circulation?”[11] In other words, how does emotion, affect, anxiety, state or feeling of embarrassment become physical or visual? Blushing is not synonymous with embarrassment but is often a symptom or a manifestation of it, and in keeping with Jutta Koether’s red theme, this paper has an interest in blushing as the body’s visible display of embarrassment. The text, which Darwin based on the compiled responses to a questionnaire along with earlier writing on the subject, does not concern itself with physiognomy but with expression.  “All the authors who have written on Expression,” he writes, “with the exception of Mr. Spencer – the great expounder of the principle of Evolution – appear to have been firmly convinced that species, man of course included, came into existence in their present condition.”[12] As such, these writers are of the belief that the facial muscles, for example, are purely instrumental in showing the emotions, because that’s what they were created to do. Darwin on the other hand, believing that apes have largely the same muscles as humans but for different purposes, says “He who admits on general grounds that the structure and habits of all animals have been gradually evolved, will look at the whole subject of Expression in a new and interesting light.”[13] (He hopes to learn a lot about expression from the great painters and sculptors but is largely disappointed in this, claiming that as a subject beauty prevails; “and strongly contracted facial muscles destroy beauty.  The story of the composition is generally told with wonderful force and truth by skillfully given accessories.”[14]) Darwin’s questionnaire, circulated in 1867 to missionaries, explorers and other “protectors of the aborigines,” asks that recipients base their answers on observation and not on memory.[15]

The book offers a description of “three principles to account for the expression of emotions,” which are summarized as follows: habitual or inherited ticks that were of use to our remote ancestors, next, habits that are based on the opposite of these inherited movements, so that “when a directly opposite state of mind is induced, there is a strong and involuntary tendency to the performance of movements of directly opposite nature;” and thirdly, “reflexive autonomic actions, including perspiration, piloerection, trembling and so on.” These are caused by “the direct action of the nervous system” and blushing is of this last category.[16]

Darwin describes blushing as “ the most peculiar and most human of all expressions”[17] and looks at it under the subheadings self-attention, shyness, shame, modesty and “breaches of etiquette”. It is described as the “relaxation of the muscular coats of small arteries, by which the capillaries become filled with blood,” and, importantly, as automatic:

We can cause laughing by tickling the skin, weeping or frowning with a blow, trembling from fear of pain, and so forth; but we cannot cause a blush, as Dr. Burgess remarks, by any physical means, – that is, by any action on the body. It is the mind which must be affected. Blushing is not only involuntary; but the wish to restrain it, by leading to self attention, actually increases the tendency.[18]

Even though it is a physically automatic occurrence, self-awareness or self-attention is key to this physical manifestation, and Darwin lists the degrees of self-consciousness presented in a glorious array of nineteenth century subjects. “Women blush much more than men,” he writes, it is generally not noted in infants, and “Dr. Burgess doubts whether idiots ever blush.”[19] According to Dr. Blair, principal of the Worcester College, blind people blush:

The blind are not at first conscious that they are observed, and it is a most important part of their education, as Mr. Blair informs me, to impress this knowledge on their minds; and the impression thus gained would greatly strengthen the tendency to blush, by increasing the habit of self-attention.[20]

In some cases, however, Darwin notes that blushing is replaced by sudden paleness instead of redness:

For instance, a young lady told me that in a large and crowded party she caught her hair so firmly on the button of a passing servant, that it took some time before she could be extricated; from her sensations she imagined that she had blushed crimson; but was assured by a friend that she had turned extremely pale.[21]

One of the questions on Darwin’s list asks responders to observe in particular the “downward extension” of the blush on the body.  According to the reports sent to him, blushing is a phenomenon that occurs not only on the face, but varies according to geographic location, sex and mental ability. For example, Sir J. Paget “has never himself seen a single instance in which it extended below the upper part of the chest,” however, with the insane, blushing can extend as far as the breasts. As a general rule, English women do not blush beneath their “upper chest.”[22]

Darwin gathers reports on the phenomenon in other countries to support a proposal that blushing occurs at the site of attention, or, in other words, where the attention of the mind is directed. In England, only the face, neck and ears will redden because these habitually exposed parts, used to attention from others, operate by a mechanism wherein the arteries, used to expanding and contracting, flush the capillaries of the face. In other races, Darwin writes, the same is true. Attributed to “shame, or it may be in part fear,” according to Mr. Scott, the Lepchas of Sikhim manifest “a faint blush on the cheeks, base of the ears and sides of the neck, accompanied by sunken eyes and lowered head. This has occurred when he has detected in them a falsehood, or has accused them of ingratitude.”[23] Mr. Geach reports that “some of these people go nearly naked, and he particularly attended to the downward extension of the blush… with another Chinese, when asked why he had not done his work in better style, the whole body was similarly affected.”[24] Like the blind (and presumably children), natives of other countries can be taught the habit of blushing, so that “Von Spix and Martius, in speaking of the aborigines of Brazil, assert that they cannot properly be said to blush; ‘it was only after long intercourse with the whites, and after receiving some education, that we perceived in the Indians a change of colour expressive of the emotions of their minds.”[25]

Darwin never uses the word embarrassment to describe the motivation for a blush. He identifies some of the other movements or gestures that accompany blushing, writing that “persons in this condition lose their presence of mind, and utter singularly inappropriate remarks. They are often much distressed, stammer and make awkward movements or strange grimaces.”[26] One of the most remarkable examples Darwin gives to depict the effects of this condition on language tells the story of a very shy man who had to make a speech at a party thrown for him. He stands up and starts into this much-rehearsed speech and goes through it with great gestures and emphasis, but without making a single sound. “His friends, perceiving how the case stood, loudly applauded the imaginary bursts of eloquence, whenever his gestures indicated a pause.” Darwin says that not only did the man not realize he hadn’t spoken but he actually thought he did “uncommonly well.”[27]

Examining the ticks and characteristics that often accompany blushing, Darwin posits an “intimate sympathy between the capillary circulation in that part of the brain on which our mental powers depend, and in the skin of the face.”[28] When a person’s face reddens, he claims, the temperature within the cranium rises and at first the mental powers are stimulated by this heat.  But when the blushing is “excessive,” however, the mind gets overheated, confused, and “muddled” as one woman describes the experience.[29] This happens even when the redness is induced not by “moral causes” but artificially triggered by heat for the purposes of medical experimentation. When the “brain is primarily affected” by moral causes, and the secondary result is blushing, this mental disturbance is in evidence too.

At this point Darwin starts to investigate the mental states that can induce blushing. Shyness, shame, modesty; all are “self attention in relation to moral conduct.”[30] The production of a blush, he writes, comes not from thinking about ourselves exclusively but from thinking about what others think of us. One’s appearance before others seems to be at stake here – even primeval man, says Darwin, “before he had acquired much moral sensitiveness would have been highly sensitive about his personal appearance, at least in reference to the other sex, and he would consequently have felt distress at any depreciatory remarks about his appearance; and this is one form of shame.”[31] Blushing is motivated by sensitivity to the opinion of others, particularly negative, in relation to our personal appearance.  It may also be caused by the idea of not having done something promised for someone, provoking the question “what will he think of me?”[32] Not only looking, therefore, but the thought or imagination involved in self-attention can excite a blush, and Darwin explores some of the reasons for this habit, listing a regard for the opinion of others; moral causes; breaches of etiquette.

What could a blush reveal about the context in which it occurs? Darwin points to the cultural specificity involved in the phenomenon and sees that the blush-provoking opinions and rules of etiquette are not necessarily the same as ‘moral causes.’ He even goes so far as to call these social rules and opinions meaningless except inasmuch as they indicate the customs and opinions of our peers, which we hold in high regard. We are even so impacted by the rules of etiquette that, apparently, one can blush for somebody else’s mistakes:

Consequently the breach of the laws of etiquette, that is, any impoliteness or gaucherie, any impropriety, or an inappropriate remark, though quite accidental, will cause the most intense blushing of which a man is capable. Even the recollection of such an act, after an interval of many years, will make the whole body to tingle. So strong, also, is the power of sympathy that a sensitive person, as a lady has assured me, will sometimes blush at a flagrant breach of etiquette by a perfect stranger, though the act may in no way concern her.[33]

In his passage on modesty, Darwin points to the roots of the word modesty as modus, a way of doing, a measure or standard of behavior. Blushing at the thought, even, of somebody else acting in a way that contravenes these standards speaks not only of a highly sensitive lady or the entrenchment of social codes, or the biopolitical implications of this automatism, but also of a certain externalization of wrongdoing or faux pas. What does it mean to blush for somebody else or their actions? Why would a person feel embarrassed because of something someone else has done? Why would it show, on the outside of the body and in the most observed places?

Since “blushing originally arose from thinking about what others think of us” and not simply the immediate stare of a hostile observer, it also seems to be possible, for Darwin, that one can blush all alone. This passage, amongst others, reminds us that blushing and embarrassment are not the same thing, as we will see when we turn to the psychoanalytic literature on embarrassment.  Provoked by the thought of what others think about us, “several ladies, who are great blushers, are unanimous in regard to solitude; and some of them believe that they have blushed in the dark.”[34] The face, Darwin concludes, shows our relationship to other peoples’ opinion on our conduct.  Can a person then really blush for somebody else? If I can blush for another person it would seem to show my opinion of their conduct, inasmuch as I feel it to be in a kind of relationship to myself, since this is registered on my face. Can we say that one can be embarrassed for somebody else whilst speculating that they may not necessarily blush for somebody else?

Darwin’s question “Why should the thought that others are thinking about us affect our capillary circulation?” is not really answered definitively. He gives some conflicting contemporary theories: that it is a provision for expression, or that it was “designed by the Creator ‘in order that the soul might have sovereign power displaying in the cheeks the various internal emotions of the moral feelings.” Somehow Darwin does not find either argument convincing and suggests that such accounts don’t take into consideration the displeasure that blushing brings to its actor, in the case of the soul’s sovereign power, nor would it apply to those people whose skin color does not show blushing.[35] There are several passages in which Darwin specifically draws attention to the idea that blushing is not a universal phenomenon and this is the most strikingly obvious one. His assertion is that those parts of the body which are accustomed to attention, over many generations, are sensitive and

assuming for the moment that the capillary vessels can be acted on by close attention, those of the face will have become eminently susceptible. Through the force of association, the same effects will tend to follow whenever we think that others are considering or censuring our actions or character.[36]

The most powerful of all the causes is shyness; for shyness relates to the presence and opinion of others.  “With respect to real shame from moral delinquencies, we can perceive why it is not guilt, but the thought that others think us guilty, which raises a blush.”[37] When you blush, it is because you feel that others are looking at you disapprovingly and thus register their perceived disapproval. But, again, do I blush because I disapprove of someone else’s behavior, or does embarrassment for someone else’s behavior take another form? According to Darwin, in the externalization involved in embarrassment, you do not reflect on ‘real’ feelings of guilt but instead feelings that someone else is judging you, looking at you or thinking badly of you, causing you to blush. The suggestion that the parts of the body that are constantly exposed are the most sensitive is strange, considering that the skin on parts of the body that are constantly exposed must really be much tougher than skin that is never exposed.  What does he mean by ‘sensitive’ then?

It is noticeable that in Darwin’s essay he does not say what might now seem the most predictably anthropological observation: that going red could be read as human’s way of drawing attention to something. For Darwin, blushing is performative but not performance – perhaps that is an argument that seemed too closely linked to the creationist theory for him. The essay is preoccupied with concealment and the embarrassing nature of blushing itself in Darwin’s society, but every monkey or bird with a bright red feather or part, as far as I’m aware, is supposed to be showing off that part or attracting attention to themselves. Red is not a camouflage color. However, even though he does not explicitly make this claim, his essay gives a lot that could build towards an argument for blushing as information or sign that hasn’t been civilized or formalized into language. For example, where the caveman might blush when derogatory remarks are made about his appearance, he is effectively saying something. Darwin remarks too on the attractive quality of seeing a lady blush. In the passage on the natives of Brazil, where he quotes Humbolt asking, “How can those be trusted, who know not how to blush?” the implication is that blushing would give away a lie that the subject might not consciously admit to – and in Hamlet, the mother is accused not only of deceit but of not even blushing, when Hamlet asks her “O Shame, where is thy blush?”[38] A reddening of the face is seen as a show of honesty that the devious mind can’t conceal, and an honesty that in certain societies, it seems, can be learned, even if involuntary. If creationism might have seen blushing as an expression of the soul’s sovereignty, Darwin’s rejection of the soul and the universal aspect of blushing might lead the way to an idea of a more contingent type of experience and a different type of sovereignty, like that implied in Eric Santner’s notion of the creaturely, namely political, or the status of the body under authority.

But it is Freud, not Darwin, who suggests that embarrassment has an exhibitionist dimension. In his Interpretation of Dreams, in 1900, he describes the conflict between inhibition and exhibition in dreams about embarrassment, like being naked in front of people.  “He noted that the dreamer’s embarrassment usually occurs in the presence of strangers who take little or no notice of his/her state of bodily exposure. The dreamer generally feels too inhibited to cover or correct his/her state of undress.”[39] The conflict is not only between feelings of inhibition and the desire to exhibit, but the conventional meanings of these terms: inhibition as feeling prevented from covering one’s nakedness, and exhibition as displaying oneself, but only in dreams. In an essay called A Case Study of Embarrassment, Oliver T. Dann describes that conflict. He writes “that the need to satisfy socially unacceptable sexual impulses or exhibitionistic tendencies is met by covert processes such as dreams – the content of which the client finds embarrassing and distressing.”[40]

The insights of the psychoanalytic literature, as we will see, are that embarrassment is related to the perceived infringement in front of others of the social codes and the rules of etiquette we live by that concerned Darwin. This gets more complicated though when we try to keep in mind that, as Darwin has reminded us with various inconsistencies, blushing and embarrassment are not the same thing. Darwin never even used the word “embarrassing” or “embarrassment,” and neither does Freud for that matter. Freud uses a combination word, die Schamverlegenheit, in The Interpretation of Dreams, a word which really means something more like shame-embarrassment, but was translated by Strachey as embarrassment.[41] Embarrassment is distinguished from shame as an affect in Robert J. Edelmann’s The Psychology of Embarrassment.[42] It is categorized as a form of social anxiety (its “umbrella term”), with emphasis on the social aspect, and according to Edelmann, blushing “has been referred to as the hallmark of embarrassment.”[43] This text, written in 1987, describes embarrassment in the recent psychological literature as being “generally regarded as a form of social anxiety closely related to shyness, audience anxiety and shame.”[44]

Identifying a lack of work on embarrassment as affect (as does Dann in his 1977 text), Edelmann tries to distinguish between the four strands of social anxiety: shame, embarrassment, shyness and social anxiety.[45] These four encompass a larger group of symptoms, like stage fright, audience anxiety and communication apprehension. The four subgroups then divide into two groups, where shyness and audience-anxiety share more characteristics than with either of the other two terms, and shame and embarrassment are similarly linked to one another.[46] Embarrassment, like all social difficulties, Edelmann writes, is “related to self-presentational problems. In social situations we attempt to control images of self, or identity relevant information, before real or imagined audiences. Social anxiety occurs either because we doubt that we will be able to convey the image we would wish, or because an event occurs which prevents us from so doing.”[47] Now that we have moved into the language of psychoanalysis, we are still discussing embarrassment in terms of a disturbance of the visual or on a visual register. Although Darwin’s approach is to examine the exterior in embarrassment and psychoanalysis examines the interior there is in common a reference to appearance, and in embarrassment, appearance before others.

Shyness and audience anxiety, the first group, are affects based on anticipation: I have an idea before a social interaction that I will not be able to live up to my own standards of self-presentation. A gap is perceived between what one wants to present and what one thinks they will actually present to others in situations that may or may not be under their control. The second group, embarrassment and shame, share a different temporality. Embarrassment and shame are described (as opposed to shyness and audience anxiety) as “social emotions which result from unintentional and undesired predicaments or transgressions.”[48] In other words, whereas shyness and audience anxiety come from the anticipation or worry that things will go horribly wrong in a social situation, embarrassment and shame come from the perception or feeling that things actually are going horribly wrong, or have just gone horribly wrong, in a social situation. Lack of control over one’s self-presentation, as with shyness and audience anxiety, is still the issue but this time in the present or immediate past rather than projected into the future. “Thus, when an undesirable event, such as a faux pas, impropriety, accident or transgression occurs it is likely to cause a perceived discrepancy between one’s current unintended self-presentation and one’s desired self-presentation.”[49] The natures of these transgressions can be surprising. For example, in a short poll I conducted of what people found embarrassing, one person said that when it is pointed out to him that he has used “he” as universal or gender neutral pronoun, he is embarrassed because it conflicts with his desired self-presentation both to himself and to other people. Making a particular sort of mistake, not knowing something, asking some silly question that reveals a lack of knowledge or shows something unintentionally: these are linked by the presence of a witness or interlocutor. Therefore Darwin’s comments on blushing in solitude would seem to mark a need to distinguish shame and embarrassment, even if a full epistemological study can’t be achieved in this essay. (Even to consider properly why embarrassment is a more recent occurrence in the literature than shame, or why this distinction is not noted earlier, would have to be a separate enterprise altogether.) Edelmann writes that, “The literature distinguishing shame from embarrassment is rather more confusing than that distinguishing shyness from audience anxiety. In fact the terms embarrassment and shame are often used interchangeably.”[50] Sometimes embarrassment is used as a euphemism for shame, Edelmann says, and going through the literature, he collects some differences of opinion:

Lynd (1958)…suggests that: “Embarrassment is often an initial feeling of shame before shame is covered up or explored as a means of further understanding oneself and of the situation that gives rise to it.”

A similar suggestion is made by Modigliani (1966), who makes the point that: “In common usage one is primarily ashamed of oneself, while one is primarily embarrassed about one’s presented self. This may mean that shame is the more personal extension of embarrassment, or it may mean that it is a quite distinct psychological state.”

This suggestion of overlapping but differing concepts is also raised by Vallelonga (1976), who collected 40 written descriptions each of being ashamed and being embarrassed. He thus defines shame as:

“to perceive suddenly, in and through one’s behaviour, an extremely unpleasant discrepancy between who one is and who, according to one’s live self-projects, one ‘must’ be.”[51]

Edelmann suggests that embarrassment, as opposed to shame, always entails at least three constituents. These are, first of all, interpersonal exposure, with the presence of “a thematic other, whether that presence be ‘actual, presumed or fantasized,” secondly, either a concern for one’s face or concern about the experience of ‘losing face,’ that is to say, diminishing in the other’s esteem or regard; and thirdly, a desire to escape, hide or disappear.[52] Embarrassment entails, then, not only “the discrepant self-image present in shame” according to this study, but also involves “the exposure of this discrepancy to the scrutiny of others.”[53] Shame indicates a private, solitary dimension to the feelings experienced in embarrassment. In A Case Study of Embarrassment too, Dann reports that “The patient said that she did not experience embarrassment when she was by herself. The importance of an observing external object was demonstrated by her relief from embarrassment as soon as she left the analytic session.”[54] Dann’s account of his patient describes how important an external object is to provoke feelings of embarrassment. Although he claims that many of her defenses could not quite be called projection, they were “manifested particularly in the presence of an external object, which of course had internal representations.”[55] We might try to apply this information to Darwin’s description of the women who blush in the dark and deduce from it that, according to Edelmann’s and Dann’s reading, what they are experiencing is shame rather than embarrassment. Shame, it is suggested, could be restricted to describing those instances which refer to personal feelings, whereas embarrassment has to do with the public display or exhibition of these feelings.[56] We might also think back to Darwin’s woman who assures him that sensitive people blush for the ‘flagrant breaches’ of etiquette committed by others. What is the relationship between the externalization of embarrassment onto the face and onto another person in Darwin’s thought, and projecting embarrassment onto an external object in Dann’s example?

Edelmann quotes a strange formulation from a text by Erving Goffman, Embarrassment and Social Interaction, from 1956: “Embarrassment has to do with the figure the individual cuts before others felt to be there at the time.”[57] According to the logic of this claim, the individual definitely does something or makes a certain impression, or ‘cuts a figure,’ but it’s the existence of an audience at all that might be imagined or projected: this is the thematic other which may not be real but can be actual, presumed or fantasized. I take this also to mean that the nature or type of audience or their attitude, not just their existence, is fantasized by the individual.

There are, it seems, a number of marked similarities between shame and embarrassment. “Common to both is gaze aversion, covering of the eyes or face and parasympathetic reactivity.”[58] The psychoanalytic literature seems to agree that what sparks embarrassment or shame is behavior by the self, and imagined or real disapproval or ridicule in the other. Blushing represents not only embarrassment on the face but starts to be associated too with exhibitionism and scopophilia, in which one derives pleasure from watching others engaged in sexual activity. Edelmann examines the development through the texts of Dann, Benedek (1925), and Hitschmann (1943) who “also stressed the significance of exhibitionism and scopophilia, which he suggests develops from maternal condemnation for genital exhibitionism. Blushing then represents the displacement upwards of the repressed wish to exhibit the genitals.” [59] According to this last, blushing not only shows something but shows something unknown to or repressed by the subject; concepts unavailable to Darwin.

According to Edelmann, his brief summary of a psychoanalytic perspective on embarrassment and blushing suggests that this school of thought had many adherents in the 1930s and 1940s with decreasing number in recent years. “The idea that embarrassment and blushing are always linked with exhibitionist or sexual tendencies is of course fanciful, to say the least.”[60]

We can imagine, for instance, that, like in Dann, where the patient needs an external object for her embarrassment, (“She tended both to blame her embarrassment on the analyst and to regard the analyst as embarrassed”), we could think of Koether’s performance as a similar encounter for the audience.[61]

It is important to consider how instrumental Jutta Koether is in producing embarrassment in the Reena Spaulings performance. Again, like Dann’s embarrassed patient projecting her discomfort onto her shrink: “She often blamed her embarrassment on me. At times she thought the ideas and feelings about which she was so embarrassed either were ‘suggested’ by the analyst or originated with the analyst”[62] it could be said that Koether only operates as an external object onto which the audience project their anxieties. Yve-Alain Bois remarks in Formless, A User’s Guide, that real kitsch cannot be manufactured or inauthentic; only genuine fakes can be recognized as such.[63] Can embarrassment be manufactured, in other words and to reiterate one of the questions troubling this essay, can it really come from the outside? If you wanted to produce an embarrassing situation, how would you know what to do?

Attempting to create an embarrassing scene might be difficult, but some of the predicable sources of embarrassment come from, as Walter Benjamin suggests, the outmoded, whether this is the recently discharged, like yesterday’s music, or an idiom that may once have belonged to a radical or other political social movement, but that has been identified as expressive of a certain demographic by trendspotters and marketing experts and which filtered down from the highest echelons of social avant-gardism to beer ads and fake stencil prints on tee shirts.  But what does this have to do with any kind of political dilemma or the cringe of bio-political, the status of the body under authority and state of discourse – how are these performed? What we need to look at in Koether’s performance is the political and aesthetic choice implied in her confrontational incantation of “You ain’t no punk, punk… You gotta rock until you see red.” Her red performance, surely not without references to communism, can be imagined as the literal performance of a blush, with her red painting, red dress and tights. How critical is this, in combination with the song she chose for her performance?

Jacques Rancière writes in the foreword to his short text The Politics of Aesthetics something that could serve as an introduction to the premise of this paper. Describing how his book came about in response to questions posed by “two young philosophers,” Rancière explains that

“a battle fought yesterday over the promises of emancipation and the illusions and disillusions of history continues today on aesthetic terrain. The trajectory of Situationist discourse – stemming from an avant-garde artistic movement in the post-war period, developing into a radical critique of politics in the 1960s, and absorbed today into the routine of the disenchanted discourse that acts as the ‘critical’ stand-in for the existing order – is undoubtedly symptomatic of the contemporary ebb and flow of aesthetics and politics, and of the transformations of avant-garde thinking into nostalgia.”^[64]

It might not be strictly accurate to declare embarrassment (or shame) a kind of anti-nostalgia, nor punk an offshoot of avant-garde thinking. I am unsure of the relationship between nostalgia and embarrassment in critical or philosophical discourse. But what would be the role of embarrassment (or punk) in a political context? To return to Darwin for a moment: “Breaches of conventional rules of conduct, if they are rigidly insisted on by our equals or superiors, often cause more intense blushes even than a detected crime; and an act which is really criminal, if not blamed by our equals, hardly raises a tinge of colour on our cheeks.”[65] When public or civic culture is almost characterized by the degree of shamelessness or lack of embarrassment with which political leaders lie about huge wars, bankers defend huge bonuses, the prime minister of Italy boasts that he is not impotent and will prove it in court if necessary, what does it mean when a group of people is confronted with something vaguely political-sounding and find it embarrassing? How is finding an art performance embarrassing useful, or does it mark any resistance whatsoever? What does Koether’s performance draw attention to or diagnose in this group of people? Should we see it as a radical gesture and protest against state, capital, commodity?

First of all, Koether’s performance would seem to say Punks not dead – or, to be more precise, not dead enough. The marketing and remarketing of its zombified incarnation continues. What would be embarrassing about punk? What punk reminds of, I would argue, is a whole spectrum of what is thought of as genuine popular social revolt, disgust at and resistance to the establishment, the reigning political order, the way things are. As Chris Kraus says in Video Green, her book about the 1990s Los Angeles contemporary art scene and particularly the efflorescence of MFA programs, “’It’s so—theatrical,’ is about the worst thing you can say about anybody’s work in the contemporary art world. Theatricality implies an embarrassing excess of presence, i.e., of sentiment.”[66] Whether the emotion is actually genuine or not, there is something about being seen to have a fixed, unstrategic position that is embarrassing. Kraus is referring to what she sees as the hegemonic theoretical discourse of impersonality and detachment in art schools in LA during the 1990s, but this logic could also be applied to the expression of the politics we are put in mind of by a reference to punk. Anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, anti-bourgeois, radical, resistant stances, used in this setting, provoke extreme embarrassment. But Koether is not only shouting punk songs but is directly challenging the authenticity of these songs and questioning the merit of their statement now, challenging the punk credentials of the audience.

To shout the lyrics to a punk song would be seen as about as embarrassing as shouting “Fuck the System!” when everyone involved is also part of the system. But the words themselves, “you ain’t no punk, punk” are not embarrassing because everyone in the audience wishes they were more punk. These words would be authentically embarrassing not only because they are words or ideas that are perhaps more appropriate to a generation for whom there was hope that they might effect something, or at least a generation who might have seen some effects of such slogans. They ring embarrassing not only because they are the stark reminders of the co-option of resistance movements by advertising companies and by marketing executives who use photographs of Paris in 1968 or New York in 1978 to sell clothing or apartments. There is still, on top of all this, the aspect by which bourgeois expectations of art or the role of art are confounded in the figure of this eccentric, leading to the realization that what is presented to us as radical or mad or wild, our experience of radical, transgressive culture is being served up in a gallery, or through a publishing company, or another instrument of capital culture. The slogans or challenges in Koether’s performances fall deliberately wide of the mark. Isabelle Graw’s comment on Koether can be read in another way. The staging of the eccentric role of an artist is also likely to chime slightly off key with the audience. Even if the culture is permeated with the idea that an artist is a free agent, loose cannon, vehicle of expression and embodiment of a Bohemian radical lifestyle outside the system, do the people who attend Koether’s performance consider this to be a piece of outdated nostalgia? Being confronted by this angry artist perhaps offends by implying naïveté on the part of the audience, that they are unsophisticated enough to still think this to be the case, even, maybe especially, if they did until recently. Like punk, this idea persists and continues to influence.  At the same time, it is unlikely to imagine the same group saying that they have no interest or involvement with the political culture whatsoever. Between two logics, one expressed, for example, by Hans Haacke in October thus: “In this culture, conventional wisdom has it that getting involved

in politics does not help one’s career. It’s just not “cool.”[67] And another by David Joselit in the same edition thus: “Artists… are laboring under the idea that “serious art must articulate a critique of consumption”[68] Koether seems to perform both in an apposite and observant, possibly therapeutic, way.

Hurt Now, Feel Later: Noise, Body and Capital in the Japanese Bubble

Matthew Mullane

“The short-lived bubble economy at the end of the 1980s was a period of collective hysteria, a crazy time of frothy fortunes, pie-in-the-sky projects, and lavish living that suddenly evaporated. The impact of the crash of the stock market and land prices has had profound consequences, hammering banks, businesses, investors, borrowers, customers, and employees.”^[1]

-Jeff Kingston on Japan’s “lost decade.”

“I cut my leg with a circular saw (…) I knew I had cut myself, but I didn’t feel any pain (…) It was some kind of extreme emotional state.”^[2]

-Yamatsuka Eye describing Hanatarash’s second live performance in Osaka, 1984.

Echoing the “boom” of the Japanese economy in the 1980s was an explosive feedback caterwaul shot from underneath the country’s ballooning stock markets. A potent mixture of ecstatic improvisation, raw performance and psychedelic sound mangling, “noizu” (noise music) manifested as a violent and transgressive practice juxtaposed against Japan’s sleek hypermodern expansion. Acts such as Hanatarash and Hijokaidan emerged from the underground eager to destroy not only their ears but their bodies in each performance. Enticed by rumors of blood and auto-destruction, audiences grew in number and in determination to be assaulted by sound. They entered concert venues as war-zones: chainsaws, backhoes, shattered glass and industrial tools were accompaniment to blown-out guitar fuzz and distorted human shrieks. Artist profiles and mythologized tales of performances were disseminated in zines while cassette tapes documenting live recordings and bedroom studio experiments were bartered across oceans. These artifacts were quickly consumed by like-minded listeners in America, Europe and elsewhere, prompting the moniker “Japanoise.”

Despite the geographical identifier, much of the discourse on noise practice, and here specifically Japanese noise practice, has posited it as a creative expression unbound to its location and specific context. Furthermore, recent theoretically tinged discourse on noise has consistently posited it as a globalized modality transcendentally oppositional to the capitalist mission, elevating it beyond its own immediate radius. Within this conceptualization, the formal elements of noise music (extremes of volume and duration, disruptive dynamics, abrasive timbres, etc.) are shaped as metaphors for struggle against commodification, social subjectification and capitalist homogenization. Similarly, the formal tropes of noise performance, its détourned use of fascist imagery, threats of violence and ecstatic atmosphere are situated as a discreet zone of anti-capitalism.^[3] This representational casting of noise practice, although apt, too readily extracts it from its specific locations of origin and effect. Considering sound’s fundamentally relational and spatial being, noise performance deserves to be reconsidered as an analogy distinctly within its specific context.^[4] I use the word “analogy” not purporting noise as cooperative with the larger political structure or as testifying to its efficacy, but rather as a creative activity whose formal elements are analogous to portions of the contemporaneous socio-political schema.

Situating Japanese noise performance within the expansion and collapse of the 1980s economic “bubble,” connective analogies of disfunction and auto-destruction vividly appear. Fashioning such a formal perspective is a distinctly historical activity, as many of these clues and analogous indicators only appear when looking backward. Jacques Rancière’s methodological elaboration on the historical analogy informs this approach. As he outlines in The Politics of Aesthetics, “the arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them.”^[5] Following this, it should be clear that this paper is not an assertion of noise’s power over social subjugation, but rather an exercise in highlighting “the manner in which artistic forms reflect social structures or movements.”^[6]

Isolated is what I consider to be the primary aesthetic element of noise performance: volume. In cooperation with themes of amplification and distortion, volume  is an apt analogy to the “bubble” phenomenon, linking the microcosmic space of the performance hall with the larger socio-political space of Japan in the 1980s. Volume will be contextualized as a formal hinge point between these two bodies. Regarding the latter, attention will be narrowed to the particular acts that perpetuated the country’s bubble economy and its unsustainable growth, leading to its eventual bursting. Inflated real estate prices, rampant construction projects, rising cost of living, and the plethora of labor imbalances that follow quick economic growth will be treated as symptoms of a self-abusive set of policy decisions–policy decisions that, in the words of Sabu Kohso, signaled a “shift from a society of discipline to one of control” promoting a rigid “bifurcation of class and a transformation of the urban space and culture in general.”^[7] Unregulated loaning, careless speculation and huge consumer debt are representative of state and individual economic practices that favored the pleasurable “now,” against the reality of its future pain.

Concerning Japanese noise music, concocting anything that resembles a “history” is difficult as there exists no definitive (or even attempted) encapsulation of its unwieldy output. Nonetheless, amongst the few writers who have dedicated themselves to the subject, the artists I focus on are largely regarded as key acts in the early emergence of noise practice. And though copious source material can be found in contemporaneous fanzines and interviews with artists, very little theoretical work has been written in relation to these performances. However, in recent years, several authors have made concerted efforts to navigating the wider channels between sound, politics and philosophy. I will be referring to these efforts directly and indirectly, including the work of Paul Hegarty, Douglas Kahn, and Seth Kim-Cohen. Furthermore, the theoretical work of Jacques Rancière, though not explicitly concerned with sound, has provided a methodology for associating art and politics through analogy and expanded formal analysis.

Noise, Amplification and the Body

Commandeering the standard tools of rock music (guitars, microphones, drums, amplifiers and effects), noise music exploits these objects for sheer volume. Hijokaidan, an amorphous group entity often called the collective “king of noise,” has at its core an almost traditional “band” lineup with Yoshiyuki Hiroshige (AKA JoJo Hiroshige) on guitar, Junko on vocals and Futoshi Okano on drums. Fumio Kasaki and Toshiji Mikawa of Incapacitants too make appearances, looming over tables of innocuous looking effect boxes and electronics. Hanatarash, although more known for their use of industrial objects, too find themselves behind guitars, drums and vocals. The extreme amplification of noise practice transforms the simple signals of a guitar or the human voice, exploding them into body-shaking waves. In the small performance venues that became home to Japanese noise, “volume is integral–the sound continually overdriven, to the point where the rock element thwarts and, better still, exhausts itself.”^[8] At such high levels, the ear is sublimated with the body, forcefully nullifying the “mind-body dualism” of traditional musical forms, rendering the “body as listening device.”^[9]

In his history of noise music, Paul Hegarty describes this process of bodily activation: “Noise brings you to your body, your body without organs, perhaps, but also a body made ear. When noise occurs, listening gives way to hearing, giving way in turn to the loss of hearing–not literally, but in the sense of losing the ability to distinguish sounds, to keep sound as merely an auditory input.”^[10] Douglas Kahn, discussing not noise but the amplification used by minimal composers of the 1960s, similarly notes that “loudness is ultimately governed by injury, and in this way, the body refuses to indiscriminately allow all sound.”^[12] The bodies packing the performance venues in Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo have a threshold for not only volume, but for information. Noise amplifies and saturates signal to the point of incomprehensibility, erasing the logical connection between physical cause and the heard effect. With chains of effects, stacked amplifiers, and hot microphones, even the most minute movement of the performer’s body is capable of deafening an entire audience. However, listeners are physically unable to perceive every facet of what is being amplified–the bodies-turned-ears are overloaded, and data is lost amidst the field of noise and pain. Over time, “listening is replaced by hearing” and the body submits to the noise scenario, accustomed to a state of constant loss and unknowing.^[13]

In an interview, Mikawa, member of Incapacitants and Hijokaidan, refutes a question concerning noise music’s “extra-aesthetic purpose,” saying “I don’t have a special message in my noise, but being loud.”^[14] The aesthetic deployed by both of his projects is indeed one of loudness, but it is also one of walls, massive unwavering walls of noise. Within these dense sound environments, loudness does not necessarily carry meaning, or this “extra-aesthetic purpose,” but rather distorts the meaning of things around it. Sound, being fundamentally relational, reaching all of the ears in the room at once, connects individuals. Yet, these walls do what walls do: they separate and isolate. Describing the walls of sound being used by musicians in the New York City loft scene of the 1960s, John Gruen notes how “sound, used to envelop the listener physically, becomes a manufactured environment (…) The self must now be defined in physical action, but it is no longer the embrace of a dancing partner that defines the physical self. Since amplified sound touches all, equally, partners need not embrace while dancing; sound becomes the real partner.”^[15] With noise as the new partner, one need not, or rather cannot, communicate with the others in the room. The wall has multiplied and built itself around each listener in the room, connecting through sound, but dividing through its distorted amplification.

Amplifying the Bubble

When the word “bubble” is used, we are speaking generally of the unrealistic inflation of the Japanese stock market via speculative trading beginning in 1983, followed by a sharp and unrealistic cost increase in major urban area real estate. As walls of noise were being stacked block by block in cramped music halls, walls of commercial and residential real estate were being sold for exorbitant prices in the speculative real estate market. Between 1983 and 1991, Japan’s GDP rose by 170 percent; however, the average price of commercial and residential land in the country’s six largest urban centers rose respectively by 500 and 290 percent.^[16] Capital amassed though exports, multiplied by an undervalued yen, was thrown into the land and stock markets, encouraging a “now or never” investment philosophy characteristic of the “bubble” phenomenon.

Although there was indeed real money flooding the markets, the reality of its foundation was tenuous. Several accounts of the decade use the word “distortion” to describe the ways in which capital gains were used unrealistically to bolster the market.^[17] Firstly, the yen was distorted in its own undervaluing, even after attempts to reverse this discrepancy in the Plaza Accords of 1985. Secondly, the land market was distorted by government support of overvalued construction and development projects. And finally, the safety of these investments was distorted by the security companies responsible for loaning. Distortion is the direct result of signal amplification, or rather, over-amplification. Amplification is capable of moving the real and logical world aside, creating a new zone of its own distorted laws and truths. Just as a simple guitar strum can be amplified into a room-filling cacophonous swell, unrecognizable from its original source, so too can capital gain be amplified and distorted beyond its own reality. Within the bubble of distortion, “reason is suspended in the face of dazzling price appreciation as everyone piles in simultaneously, more worried about missing out on the quick gains than the consequences of the inevitable downward spiral.”^[18]

With reason suspended, the refracted world of the bubble determines reality.  Through the amplified noise of capital, details are lost as the hearing body, now the living body, is unable to take in the sudden rush of information. Precisely what was lost in the noise is unfortunately impossible to completely grasp. Sabu Kohso asserts that the most tragic loss was the silencing of the worker’s voice by corporate collusion when “the ‘real’ subsumption of the entire social milieu occurred under the influence of the integration of enterprises into groups (keiretsu) that absorbed affiliated subcontractors into a kind a cartel. The advent of these monsters accelerated the decomposition of critical labor movements.”^[19] Further muting this voice was a housing shortage caused by high prices, making homes unavailable or inconvenient to those looking to buy. Kohso adds that this labor decomposition was characteristic of a larger shift in philosophy where “all the political and social problems were addressed on the level of the market economy.”^[20]

One could certainly extend this critique to position the loss of the individual as a symptom of neoliberalism, and indeed many commentators have posited Japan’s 20-year economic stagnation as a global caveat of the system’s ills. However, beyond this critique, most obscured in the cloud of noise was a conception of the individual living in a safe and secure future. Extreme amplification forever bounds one to the moment. The sensorial overload of distortion erases any conception of the past or future, instead asserting a streaming succession of painful present instances.

In 1991, a year after the bubble officially burst, James Walsh, the president of America’s Prudential Securities in Japan, spoke of the distortions perpetrated by stockbrokers who reversed losses to important investors, thus providing no incentive to invest responsibly. At a meeting with the Liberal Democratic Party he said, “it is crucial to understand that the practice of reimbursing certain investors for their losses in the Japanese securities market was in fact the equivalent of a steroid treatment that has debilitated the market process in Japan.”^[21] The eager athlete, caught in the hysteria of competition, injects steroids to ensure victory in the moment, in the now. The future threats of its use are ignored, forgotten, or simply lost in the frenzied pursuit of winning. Similar to Yamatsuka Eye’s “extreme emotional state” after cutting his leg with a circular saw during a Hanatarash performance, a “hurt now, feel later” sentiment is enacted by the present-affirming noise. For Japan, national feeling returned in the 1990s, a period often referred to as the “lost decade.”

In August 1990, the Bank of Japan incrementally raised interest rates to six percent, almost three times higher than its lowest point in 1987. A chain reaction of devaluation followed, stock prices tumbled and approximately $16 trillion of capital was lost in the first years of the decade.^[22] Although these numbers help illustrate the scale of the capital loss, it is difficult to enumerate the felt individual effects. If we are to return to Kohso’s assessment of the bubble as foremost a labor calamity, the various fissures of the 1990s become slightly more realistic and what was lost more human.

As a response to global competition and the immense losses sustained with the bubble bursting, Japanese companies shifted away from the life-time employment schematic, instead hiring non-regular staff members at both a lower cost for the company and lower salaries for the workers. From 1991 to 2008, the percentage of non-regular staff increased from 19.8 to 34.1 percent. According to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), non-regular and part-time employees “are paid only 40% as much per hour as full-time employees,” spurring “serious equality issues, which are exacerbated by the limited mobility between the regular and irregular segments of the labour market.”^[23]

Jeff Kingston describes non-regular staff as “marginalized workers” who are “mostly young and their prospects are bleak. Very few will make the transition to regular employment and many face a tough time eking it out. Their lack of status, stable income, and confidence about the future means many will not marry and have children. These children of the Lost Decade are the unfortunate generation, one without much of a stake in the existing system.”^[25] As people are swept away and hidden amongst inequality, lost in the noise are not only jobs and wages, but a foundational trust in the governing system. Reports of corruption and flagrant misuse of tax money by corporations and the LDP flooded news outlets in the 1990s, prompting a national inquest and a challenge to the popular trust invested in governmental practice.^[26] This period of introspection has been dubbed a decade of anxiety or “fuan” “associated with unbearable fragmentation, opacity, and paralysis.”^[27] Tomiko Yoda historicizes this turn inwards as a realization of the present pressed against a simultaneous inability to move beyond it, “arrested in the seemingly paradoxical state of an unending and entrenched present coexisting with momentous instability.”^[28] Looking back, it was realized that trust was violated, but in its place formed a jaded auto-defense mechanism. Eric Cazdyn claims that the string of scandals and the reactionary announcement of reform in the years following the bubble were largely “shrugged off by most of the populace as just so many expedient defenses of a thoroughly flawed system.”^[29] Fuan has been dually associated with social and economic stagnation, highlighting the connective tissue between the two and representing more than an existential malaise. It has become representative of lost trust and a lost future for the “lost decade.”

Trusting Noise, Trusting Japan

In 1985, Hanatarash, a duo then consisting of founder Yamatsuka Eye and percussionist Ikuo Taketani, thundered into a Nerima, Tokyo performance hall atop a backhoe. With Taketani’s position as a day laborer, the group had access to industrial construction materials and audiences had come to expect the group to be armed with these tools for both noise-making and physical intimidation. Photographs of the event show Taketani pounding a drum kit amongst a wall of guitar amplifiers as Yamatsuka alternatively screams into a microphone, throws metal detritus towards the audience and destroys a raised stage with a backhoe (Figs. 3, 4, 5).^[30] The audience slowly irks backward as the possibility of injury increases. Yamatsuka describes this now legendary performance:

“We got on this thing and rode it, bang! Through the doors of the hall. It’ll spin a full 360 degrees,   so we were spinning and driving through the audience, chasing them around, when suddenly                 there was this wall we spun into and opened a rather large hole in. The wind came blowing in.                    The shovel part got stuck in the hole and, trying to get it out, we pushed a switch that started the            tractor tipping up, like it was about to go over backwards. I was worried that Taketani would get              would get crushed and die. So I stopped it, arched up like that and we got off. Strapped to our          backs were two saws—kind of life a weed-eater shape, but with a real circular saw blade at the   end. We whipped ‘em out, fired ‘em up and worked at the walls and stage a bit. Most of the      audience took off but one woman sat calmly and watched. We pretty much trashed the place.              Backstage we’d left a couple Molotov cocktails to use for the finish, but unfortunately when the                   tractor had wrecked, it spilled a bunch of gasoline. It smelled pretty strong, a lot of vapors in the        air, so we were looking at a pretty big explosion if we even lit a match. Then about 10 people            grabbed me and held me down because I was too excited and out of control. That was the end of      the show.”^[31]

I quote this recount in full for two reasons: firstly, it describes without hyperbole the specific acts that occur within the noise contract, but more importantly, it also describes a situation where the contract is perceived by the audience to be broken. The intense loudness of the performance combined with the constant threat of physical harm creates a distinct power relationship, subjecting the audience members to a set of rules unique to the space. Hegarty claims that this power relationship enacts a “masochistic contract,” suggesting a sort of pleasure derived from the pain, either real or threatened. But such a contract also insinuates the possibility for it to be broken, for bounds to be overstepped.

In his analysis of sexual subjectivities and sadomasochism, Michel Foucault identifies a “game” of power relations wherein roles of domination are subject to change. He concedes, “of course, there are roles, but everybody knows very well that the roles can be reversed. Sometimes the scene begins with a master and slave, and at the end the slave has become the master. Or, even when the roles are stabilized, you know very well that it is always a game.”^[32]

In the noise game, the fundamental nature of performance immediately creates a role distinction between performer and audience. In order to draw attention to the artificiality of this separation, Yamatsuka co-opted fascist rhetoric, wore uniforms, and branded the group’s industrial objects used in their performances with the Hanatarash logo. Both the performers and the objects they used were thus transformed into instruments and weapons. In an interview, he explains:

We don’t wear uniforms for anarchy. I want to go in a completely unfree direction. Freedom and      anarchy are for the ‘60s. Those are clothes you put on to take off. Uniforms are cool. Throughout          history, uniforms have been the most erotic clothing (…) When I’m dressed for Hanatarashi,     anything can happen. You see an “N” in the Hanatarashi mark. I later saw it as breaking a circle                   into diamonds. Some patterns must be broken, even if only superficially.^[33]

Clad in symbols of total domination, roles are enforced almost ironically, tempting the audience to violate them or submit and take pleasure in the game. The eroticization of power through hyperbolized role playing is typical of sadomasochistic activities. The roles, based upon trust and contract, activate the entire body, akin to the bodily activation of noise. If music can be pleasurable to the ear, then noise, via amplification, enlivens the entire body into a receptor of pleasure. Foucault acknowledges sadomasochism for its ability “to make use of every part of the body as a sexual instrument.”^[34] In noise, all objects are sexualized instruments via amplification. Vibrating the performance space and the bodies of audience members with high volume noise while charging the air with the possibility of violence, injury and death is a game of “pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations.”^[35]

Contemporaneous with Hanatarash, the performances of Hijokaidan took a more purposefully grotesque turn, covering the stage in mixtures of dead fish and garlic while antagonizing audiences with buckets of slime. Mikawa recounts his own stunned reaction to an early performance in 1981: “During the performance, they started throwing these buckets around the stage. As it happened, I had not been forewarned about their plans and I was thus struck dumb with amazement. I remember being rooted to the spot, unable to move.”^[36] Here Mikawa, both a performer and audience member in this instant, is not being constrained by physical force, but rather constrained by his own amazement and shock. The vulnerability of constraint, either physical of mental, requisites a momentary stabilization of power roles. Nonetheless, it is still a component to the game as a sort of soft autocracy and ultimately subject to be reversed at any time. Bob Plant, writing on the game of sadomasochism, asks hypothetically: “What then would Foucault say about such a scenario? Presumably that this sort of stabilization would be necessarily temporary; it would only operate within the confines of a specific game.”^[37] Yet, what happens when the game spills out into reality? What happens when the thin gauze of performance is punctured and the unspoken contract is violated? The line straddled between performative shock and real danger is thin. Grazing that line provokes pleasure; however, a momentary lapse can result in real injury.

Plant criticizes Foucault for not minding the fact that “abstract appeals to consent and ‘contract’ often obscure the contingencies and distorting features of specific concrete situations.”^[38] He goes on to clarify that “[the problem] is that if there are only games, then it is not clear what the term ‘game’ is supposed to pick out. ‘Game’ is not only a ‘blurred’ and (more or less) open concept, it is also a relative concept; ‘game-playing’ makes sense only insofar as it can be distinguished from non-game-playing activities.”^[39]

Within the game of noise, a vital transfer of trust exists between roles, ensuring that the volume and threat of violence will be extreme, but not exceed certain levels. Plant stresses that within such activities, “the requisite levels of trust involved are treacherously high.”^[40] At that Tokyo loft, audience members were aware of the high risk of Hantarash performances, learning of their exploits in local newspapers and magazines. However, there was a sudden fissure between the fiction of performance and the reality of violence, or as Plant positions it, a fissure between “simulation and reality; between what one is and what one is capable (and/or willing) of doing or pretending to be.” ^[41] With the smell of gasoline hanging in the air, Yamatsuka reached for a match and the fictionalized space of the performance was shattered. The level of danger had exceeded what was silently agreed upon by the audience and they acted, physically subduing him and putting an end to both the contract and the performance.

Satoru Higashiseto, writing a history of Hanatarash for Bananafish magazine, is attracted to the tenuous line of reality and the impetus to push beyond it. He hypothetically asks, “‘Why did they [Hanatarash] have to go so far?’ But I’m mostly interested in why they couldn’t stop pushing, even when it was sure someone would get hurt. Sure it was dangerous, but it was more a question of who was going to get it and how badly.”^[42] With the volume increasing, intentions become blurred. Yamatsuka repeatedly references a frenzied emotional state when performing, seemingly erasing reason but not totally absolving him of culpability. And in the bubble scenario, one could say that the greed and irresponsibility of investors and regulators was consequence of a similarly frenzied state. Higashiseto’s question is apt in this case as well, “why did they have to go so far?” Lost was a conception of how dangerous it was and “who was going to get it and how badly.”

After the Noise

In the same string of photographs that documented Hanatarash’s 1985 “backhoe” concert, we see people streaming out of the hall to share what they just experienced (Figs 6, 7, 8, 9). With their ears still ringing, they collected, commiserated and discussed how they managed to survive. They mull about, almost expecting a doubly destructive encore. Perhaps they are jaded like the national body described by Cazdyn. Or perhaps their boundaries of trust have been widened and they want to be tested further. Regardless, once the noise has stopped and the walls of volume have fallen, they are back, made aware of being together.

Twenty years after the bursting of the bubble, Japan has likewise survived. With self-realization, the rules of the game have shifted alongside new boundaries of trust. We can imagine the 1980s as a decade of amplification and crescendo, a noise growing in loudness and pervasiveness that eventually deafened. Just as noise forcefully renders the body into an ear, so too did the noise of the bubble turn the citizenry into a collective body, shaking against the power of its own amplification. In both scenarios there is a distinct threshold of pain, a point where pain gives way and hearing is lost, either partially or totally. Commentators write often about a fracturing of the national body following the bubble bursting, giving way to the blossoming of subcultures and distinct strains of what could be called postmodernism.^[43] Here, loss of the whole is recovered and transmuted into a prizing of its new parts. Retrieved from the breakdown of labor and the widening of the generational gap is a reappraisal of multiplicity and Japan’s place not only in the face of itself but in the face of the world. The 1990s are then years of coming into being, a time insinuating “the prospect that the Japanese cultural and social terrain, without ever overcoming the parochialism, may appear before us in its utter globailty.”^[44]

Leaving the concert hall, the sounds of the street are muffled and gauzy as one’s ears regulate to the normal volume of the world. Japan’s reaction to its own noise, its fuan, is akin to tinnitus, a condition of perpetual ringing in the ears following prolonged exposure to high volume. The ringing is persistent, imprinting its own high-pitched touch on all new and incoming sensation. Similarly, all that Japan does now is tinged with the memory of the bubble bursting, a perpetual reminder of its own fallibility. And just like the body regulating itself to noise, so too will Japan regulate itself to this new sound. The postmodern expansion of subcultures can be seen as such a regulation, and the creation of a new sense of what the whole body is. Kohso explains, “It is said that Japan is still surviving thanks to the money earned during the 1980s bubble economy. Most of the Japanese are, directly or indirectly, more or less, affected by the status of the collective account. But sooner or later, the savings (or the history of the bubble) will disappear, and the situation will be different again. That will be the day when we have nothing but our mass corporeality.”^[45] So again, with the volume reduced, distortion and noise acquiesce to regulated relationality, encouraging consciousness of  specific groupings. Be it the “mass corporeality” of the post-concert audience in 1985 or the national body in the 1990s, we find a zone of deregulated noise transformed into a state of collective regulated awareness.

Wout Vercammen, poster for a happening, 1965, 29 x 18.5 cm.

In search of Belgium’s first happening

Stefan Wouters

Validity in art historical terms

The first self-proclaimed Belgian happening is interesting for various reasons. First of all this is the earliest Belgian example which officially adopts the art historical term ‘happening’. Secondly it gives a broader insight into the beginning of the artistic career of Panamarenko (°1940), one of the country’s leading contemporary artists. But Panamarenko was not alone to organize or to participate in this event. Key players included Yoshio Nakajima (°1940), Wout Vercammen (°1938), Hugo Heyrman (°1942) and Tony Rombouts (°1941). Here we enter a field of collaboration between international artists and strong international connections. For all these reasons it is rather surprising that little research has been conducted so far about this happening, especially in a country that can claim a rich history of art.

In this paper we will try to reconstruct what happened exactly during this piece and we will attempt to provide an analytical framework by means of contextualization within other local and international events. The lack of film footage for reconstruction underlines even more the ephemeral character of this form of art. Therefore our interpretation will be based on written texts, interviews, a few photos and a poster made for the event.

In search of a title

A valuable starting point for textual interpretation lies within the title. Neither scholar nor artist seems to agree on the exact title of the event though. For instance the scholar Niek Pas usesEen bezette stad II (An  occupied city II) [1], whereas the artist Hugo Heyrman, uses the title Happening Bezette Stad II (Happening Occupied City II).[2] Both titles are very likely to be derived from the seminal work by Paul Hefting, who opted for Happening van een bezette stad II, dancing-music-photography-movies-pantomime and other action (Happening of a occupied city II, …).[3] It seems obvious that Hefting based himself on a poster for this event. Until now it was commonly accepted that it was Panamarenko who made this poster.[4] But from a recent interview we now know that the poster was made by another participant, Wout Vercammen.[5] He wrote: NU HAPPENING! van een bezette stad III dancing-music-photography-movies-pantomime and other action (NOW HAPPENING! of an occupied city III…). Apart from leaving out the word NOW and the leveling out of its typography by later authors, an even bigger surprise lies in the change of the number. One could see this as a typo, but as we will see, it has got more to do with the blurred context in which the event took place. The scholar Joannes Késenne plays it safe and opts for a combination: Nu Happening! Bezette Stad II en III (Now Happening! Occupied City II and III).[6] In fact each given title reflects more or less the author’s contextual preconception.

Occupied City

The common key words in all these slightly different titles are: Occupied City. This might seem as a direct reference to a famous typographical expressionistic work from the poet Paul vanOstaijen (1896-1928).[7] This reference finds also a formal confirmation in Vercammen’s poster, since he uses expressionistic typography. It might be quite clear that there is a link for the choice of title with van Ostaijen, but it is not a direct one on the level of content, as most authors and artists involved suggest. To understand this indirect link, we have to contextualize the first proclaimed Belgium happening within the local literary scene. This indirect reference will also clarify the confusion that surrounds the exact title.

Time for literary action

The first artists to use public Antwerp space as a medium were four prominent figures that created the literary magazine Gard Sivik (1954-1960). As early as 1956 Gust Gils (1924-2002), René Gysen (1927-1969), Hugues C. Pernath (1931-1975) en Paul Snoek (1933-1981) wrote a critique on publicity upside down in chalk, mentioning their own magazine as a statement of irony. They worked the piece together as a collage of words and sentences. This event took place on the outside walls of the house of Gust Gils. The act of doing so must have been as important as the words themselves, because some pictures were taken during the process itself.[8]

There is a formal similarity between this small scale event and what happened in the summer of 1965. Back then a group of Antwerp poets wrote poems on the ground, in streets, on squares, on walls, fences, publicity boards, roofs and on window-shops. They used markers and chalk sticks. Participating poets were Rudy Witse, Frans Neels, Adriaan Peel (1927-2009), Jan Diels, Lucienne Stassaert (°1936) and Tony Rombouts. It was the poets’ artistic way to literally occupy the city, hence the title name Occupied City II. Here we are confronted with a direct reference to van Ostaijen. According to Tony Rombouts, it was Wout Vercammen and Hugo Heyrman who came up with the idea. Vercammen en Heyrman also took pictures of this event.[9] Although these pictures haven’t surfaced yet, we might assume that their purpose was more out of a documentary interest than for an artistic point of view. It is quite surprising that Rombouts mentions explicitly these two artists in the event, since Vercammen en Heyrman were generally more into visual arts. This means that an interdisciplinary co-operation between visual artists and writers took place. They were not the first ones though to develop this interdisciplinary concept in Antwerp. A blueprint for such co-operation can already be traced to the beginning of the sixties. A relatively well-known form of co-operation was a big exhibition called Ondergronds (Subterranean) organized by Serge Largot (°1929) in 1962. This exhibition can be situated within a beatnik ideology. Also its title, Ondergronds, is a clear reference to one of the most influential spokesman’s of this ideology, Jack Kerouac (1922-1969). It was the painter and writer Lucienne Stassaert who borrowed this title from his famous novel, the Subterraneans (1958).[10]

Another important co-operation in the light of this research is the early collaboration between Vercammen and Rombouts. Vercammen often used to illustrate Baal&Stuip, a local literary magazine in which Tony Rombouts also regularly published.[11] The closest collaboration between these two artists must have been the illustrations that Vercammen provided for a volume of verse by Rombouts in 1963.[12]

Apart from their public 1965 literary city occupation collaboration, there was also an indoor event scheduled at the AMVC.[13] The title for this part of the event was Beeldprojectie van eenbezette stad II (image projection of an occupied city II).[14] Here we enter the domain of meta-meaning and it is in this event where the nucleus of the title confusion resides. The image projection itself is a part of the first happening, called third occupied city happening. The pictures taken by Vercammen and Heyrman were an important part of these images. This explains already a significant part of the poster made by Vercammen. It also proves that Vercammen knew exactly what it was all about at the time and by this analysis we can exclude any form of typo.

Vercammen’s poster

This poster needs some further closer reading. The first word, NU (NOW) often gets omitted in referencing the event. The reason must probably be sought in its inherent annunciating character. However, this seemingly innocent word has a deeper connotation in this context. Here we enter the field of Hugo Heyrman’s literary background and ideology. Heyrman was a big fan of the work of Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) and in particular of the utopian novel Island (1962).[15] In later happenings he will even give himself the nickname The Happy- Space-Maker and the idealistic utopian idea will become a huge factor in these happenings. Therefore it seems quite logical that NOW refers to here and now, a catchphrase that stems from Island.[16]

Each participating artist indicated on the poster has a nickname. Nakajima’s one is unbeat. Unbeat appears to refer to a group of Japanese monks whose goal was to travel around the world in minimalist circumstances to enrich themselves with new experiences. So far it has not been quite clear who came up with this name nor who the other monks were. Vercammen wrote his name right underneath Nakajima’s and nicknamed himself nihilist. Though he did not have the intention to change society as a whole, he was opposed towards certain values produced by society. Heyrman, the third artist on the poster, is presented as the prefix eye. This probably refers to the concept of inner wisdom and, as in the case of Huxley, to eastern philosophy. The last artist on the poster is Panamarenko. His prefix poval is directly linked to his material artistic output and therefore he stands out from the other three artists. It is important to note that two years before the happening, Panamarenko and Heyrman were making sculptures in kurashiki poval, a Japanese variation of polyester.

Furthermore the poster lists a whole range of disciplines, such as dance, music, photography, film, pantomime and other action.  These art forms will now be looked at within their spatial context.

Where did it happen?

Before the pictures of bezette stad II, taken by Vercammen and Heyrman, were projected at the AMVC, another part of the happening took place outside.  According to Tony Rombouts the first part happened completely spontaneously and only half an hour before the performance acquaintances were informed.[17] However, complete spontaneity seems unlikely since Vercammen’s poster indicates the date and place for part I.

The place for the first proclaimed happening was the Groenplaats, a square right in middle of the historical centre of Antwerp. This is a highly symbolic place, both on the ground as under the ground. First of all it hosts a statue of one of the city’s greatest 17^th century painters, Peter Paul Rubens and secondly it used to be the cemetery ground for the famous Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe cathedral. Although Niek Pas sees an interesting similarity with the happenings conducted in Amsterdam, on the Spui, by Robert Jasper Grootveld[18], there is no reason so far to believe that the Groenplaats was chosen for a possible comparative symbolism. Anny de Decker, who was a journalist at the time and who shortly, afterwards co-founded the famous White Wide Space Gallery in Antwerp, declares that the choice of location was practical, in the sense that there were always many people gathering around, especially when the weather was good.[19] This potential for public must have been the main reason for the choice of location. But there is also another practical reason. At the time the city centre was heavily invaded by cars, a situation which was hardly questioned. Therefore a congregation of people could disturb traffic and this would mean the police force would undoubtedly intervene. At this specific event police intervention was not part of the plan. So to avoid a clash, a car free location was recommended. Apart from the symbolic coincidences, mainly steered by these practical reasons, there is also a second level to be taken into account: the influence of space on the artistic form, as we will investigate later.

What happened during part I?

Around 7.30 p.m. Vercammen led Yoshio Nakajima from his studio in the Blindestraat towards the Groenplaats. A group of insiders surrounded them, which draw even more attention to the passer bys. Nakajima masked his face and shouted unrecognizable sounds. At the same time he wrapped himself in threads, paper festoons and colorful ribbons. He jumped, squatted down, lied down, stood up, imitated the wings of a mill, danced, and walked and put himself in thousands of swirls. During this active performance, Hugo Heyrman, dressed with a military jacket, probably a Belgian one, appeared and wrote ATOM on the ground.[20] From a picture we can also decipher the word LEGER (ARMY).[21] These words are related to the spatial context, namely the fact that at the time a nuclear air-raid shelter was housed under the Groenplaats.

This is a fine example of the passive influence of space on the dynamics of this happening. Not completely spontaneous, as the army jacket indicates, but on the other hand, as stated above, it seems unlikely that the space has been chosen for political reasons. No artists involved or people who were close to them have openly acknowledged any political intentions. This act seems rather to be an outing of the signs of the time, fuelled by Heyrman’s own ideological framework. By bringing art to the streets, they confronted a public that maybe generally did not visit art galleries or museums. In this sense we can speak of the happening as a tool for social reformation.

Nakajima reacted to Heyrman’s performance by bonding him in return with rope around his chest. He also turned some long, lightweight and slightly transparent tissue around his head, covering his face. Heyrman then lay on the ground.[22] Shortly afterwards Heyrman sat up and took some binoculars out.  He looked through the bondage material into the binoculars. What or who he was looking at stays unknown.[23] Shortly afterwards Nakajima had his army jacket pulled off. It is very likely that Panamarenko also got involved at this stage and that the three artists ended up pulling at each other’s jackets. Vercammen denies this though and states that Panamarenko only showed up during part II.[24] Whereas Panamarenko seems to remember that Vercammen retired himself in a nearby pub, probably out of fear of the police.[25] [26] What we do know is that eventually the situation calmed down and that Nakajima lit some incense and candles. He placed those on the ground and distributed some to a few spectators.[27]

Multi-sense or non-sense?

Because of the seemingly spontaneous and unrehearsed character of Antwerp’s first happenings, one might have the impression that there was no underlying meaning involved. Further and deeper analyses show us though that these happenings were much more conceptual and calculated than one might think. Since there were more artists involved one cannot speak of a sole meaning or sense in the happening nor about a layer of meanings. Each artist had their own meaning or cluster of meanings enriched, together with other connotations, by way of interaction. By doing so we may argue that a conceptual blur blinded the spectator in a seemingly ‘non-sense’. The following sections will show that the first happening was not only appealing to audiovisual senses, but was also a web of interwoven meanings.

Nakajima’s act can be analyzed on two levels. The first one is the dramatic level. There is clearly an unspoken narrative going on, which brings us close to a conventional form of theater. Nakajima is captured but manages to liberate himself physically and even goes to counter attack. Although this could symbolize war in general, a specific reference to the Vietnam War seems not to be so farfetched. The fact that Nakajima, born in Japan, has Asian roots and that Heyrman, who had American connections, is wearing an army jacket, seems to confirm this.Panamarenko denies though this specific, or any reference in general. Nakajima on the other hand explains that his aim was to get his art noticed and at the same time he wanted to point out certain intolerable situations in the world.[28] Vercammen is even more direct by stressing out the fact that he and his contemporaries felt that the Vietnam War seemed to happen just around the corner.[29] This is a clear example of conceptual confusion.

Nakajima’s second level is rather personal and philosophical, influenced by Zen. By shouting undecodable sounds and making unpredictable movements Nakajima seems to want to completely liberate himself to reach a point of inner emptiness where the essence of being might be attained. This inner state of mind ends up in symbolic materialism, closely linked to religion. In this second level one might detect a critique on the lack of personal spirituality and also on the lack of un-institutionalized religion.

Heyrman’s role is less layered, but is more schizophrenic. With writing ATOM on the ground he indirectly also refers to the open-air protest marches against nuclear weapons, such as the famous Aldermaston Marches. These types of action are undeniably linked to the nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This indirect reference for their first communal happening, instigated by the influence of location, confronts the spectator directly with Nakajima’s national background.

In a way the spectator has been misled. It seems unlikely though that this was planned in consent. On the one hand the reason for this can be found in the above mentioned conceptual confusion. On the other hand this was also a period in time where an interesting ideological landslide took place. As from 1965 onwards demonstrations against nuclear weapons often started to transform into protests against something that was more concretely happening at the time being: the Vietnam War for example. It is exactly this evolution that can be read in an almost juxtaposed way during this first happening. The juxtaposition of different acts, in this case also highly symbolic, can be seen as an essential part of many happenings. It disturbs a possible story, whereby the spectator gets drawn more to the form and the visual than towards the content, hence the seemingly ‘non-sense’.

Behind the lens

So far it seems that it was mainly Nakajima and Heyrman who performed the first acclaimed happening. Although Vercammen was responsible for the bigger picture, his visible role was limited. This has mainly to do with the fact that he does not like to be in the spotlight himself. What is even more surprising is the fact that Panamaranko does not seem to have participated much in part one of the first happening. This is a fine example of the effect that his fame generated over the years on contemporary art historical perception. It is likely that he came into action only near the end of the event. Fact has it that he was there, because he took some pictures.  It must be said though that Panamarenko stayed and still stays modest about his actions at the time. His minor role is also visible in Vercammen’s poster, where his name can be found on the bottom of the list of happening makers.

The spectator as an outsider

It has already been shown that the public was quite diverse, including friends, artists and the occasional passer bys. The few known pictures of this happening also show the difference in age and gender. Remarkable is a group of people in uniform, hailing from the political right wing party the Volksunie.[30] Since its start in 1961 this party grew rapidly and the elections of 1965 proved to be quite successful for them. It would not be the last time in the artistic history of Antwerp when a group of fairly right wing believers mixed with a considerable part of left winged orientated people. This curious mix probably culminated in the exhibition Matrakkensabbat[31], where leading Antwerp Provos joined forces with members of the Volksunie. The motivation for this rather surprising coalition must be sought in both their strong urge and belief to change society and their mutual awareness of not being able to do it all by themselves.

In the case of this first happening though, there is no indication of any memorable form of co-operation. Neither from the Volksunie, nor from any other spectator. This is a bit problematic seen from an academic viewpoint. If we consider a happening a form of art whereby an active role is demanded from at least a few spectators, where or how does this act fit in then? It is also interesting to notice that in most happenings since Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) there is always one artist who leads or conducts the happening. Where in this case we have at least two protagonists: Nakajima and Heyrman.  Since form and content also have strong similarities with a textbook happening and because of the fact that the artists involved called it a happening themselves, we might consider this action as a local variation or mutation of the “conventional” happening. If we take into account the bigger picture and include part II and its literary references we might even be tempted to call the event a ‘bastard happening’.

Part II of occupied city III

One might say that part II was less spectacular in the broad meaning of the word. Therefore it has less of a happening appeal than part I. Because of this formal gap it is easy to see why this part has often been separated from part I, with the title confusion as a result. Its conceptual point of departure was also completely different, as we will see later on.

The original concept takes an unsuspected turn though when Nakajima continues an indoor solo performance. Unsuspected since it was not planned by the organizers. A picture shows us Nakajima wearing an outfit completely composed of tinfoil paper, held together with strings. This indicates that the artist himself was prepared for the act. We also witness by picture how he pours water from one glass into another.[32] Tony Rombouts recalls Nakajima pouring water into tinfoil paper and considers this act symbolic for poetry. For him poetry is as fluid as water. It is very possible, taking into account Nakajima’s earlier happening repertoire, that he tore pieces of his uniform to use these as a recipient. Surprisingly the housekeeper of the AMVCdid not intervene or call the police. This shows the meditative and serene character of this act. According to Tony Rombouts, the public was even pleasantly surprised. [33] Once more the passive influence of space plays a crucial role. The formal setting and space limitation of a museum weighs undoubtedly upon the different acts. Also the influence of the public and its possible shift towards a more literary and educated public is very likely, but hard to pinpoint.

However, the main act of this indoor happening was the reading of poetry. Poets included were Rudi Witse, Tony Rombouts, Lucienne Stassaert en Frans Neels.  At the same time color slides were projected. These were the pictures taken by Vercammen and Heyrman of occupied city II.

Panamarenko also returns to the picture.  He took Polaroid pictures of the event and of the public that were immediately projected.[34] Even more interesting is the fact that Panamarenkostates that during that same summer he took pictures of nametags of plants and flowers in the Kruidtuin, a famous public Antwerp Botanical garden. According to Panamarenko these were also projected.[35] These nametags can also be seen as a symbol for mans conquest and occupation on nature. Therefore, these pictures of nametags can be interpreted as Panamarenko’spop-art version of occupied city II. By choosing this subject, he also makes a link, and maybe even a statement, by confronting poetry with a scientific classificatory text. The combination of science with a poetic touch will gain him, later on in his career, a strong reputation within contemporary art.

What about the other scheduled events during part II?

If we go back to Vercammen’s poster of the ‘bastard happening’, there are two main disciplines, i.e. music and film, which have not been mentioned yet. It could have been that Antwerp born folksinger Wannes van de Velde (1937-2008) played some music inside the AMVC[36], although Panamarenko denies this. No movies have been detected either. Panamarenko explains that they wrote whatever they wanted on the poster, as a form of free artistic expression.[37] The addition of movies and music to the poster makes the event appear undeniably even bigger than it already was.

Conclusion

Belgian’s first self-acclaimed happening consisted of two parts. Although the second part was less of a conventional happening, it was still an integral part of the concept. This explains for the first time Vercammen’s choice of title for the poster of this happening. Nakajima’s ‘unexpected’ performance during part II can be seen as a transition between the more spectacular, in its broadest meaning of the word, outdoor event and its more refined, literary indoor counterpart. Because of the co-operation between visual artists and writers and the specific development of this happening, with its conceptual confusion, we may even be drawn to call this event a ‘bastard happening’. Also, this investigation has created a hermeneutic circle for Panamarenko’sartistic solo output.

The idea of an individualistic fractured Gesamtkunstwerk including relatively new technologies with the “latest” means of expression was quite cutting edge. It may not have changed society as a whole, but it definitely helped to trigger a local offshoot for Provo and to establish some names in the world of modern art.