openEDsource

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

ana.vujanovic — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 00:25:45 -0700

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miško Šuvaković, EPISTEMOLOGY OF ART

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THE EMANCIPATED SPECTATOR

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

TEXT:

(scroll down for video)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacques Rancière
Frankfurt, August 2004

VIDEO:

YouTube:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacques Ranciere blog:

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

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

Aldo Milohnić, TEORIJE SAVREMENOG TEATRA I PERFORMANSA

ana.vujanovic — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:36:32 -0700

Aldo Milohnić, Teorije savremenog teatra i performansa

originalni naslov:

Teorije sodobnega gledališča in performansa

broj stranica: 240

ilustracije: 60 crno-belih fotografija

povez: meki, broširano

godina izdanja: 2009.

izdavač: Maska, Ljubljana

edicija: TRANSformacije (knjiga 25)

Više informacija vid. ovde

Beleške na marginama interdisciplinarnih teorija savremenog teatra i performansa (POGOVOR)

Pozicija pisca pogovora faktički je vrlo slična poziciji čitaoca, koji je upravo zatvorio poslednju stranicu knjige. I ja sam, kao i vi, pre neki minut završila čitanje knjige Alda Milohnića Teorije savremenog teatra i performansa (Teorije sodobnega gledališča in performansa) i počinjem da razmišljam o pročitanom. To me spasava one neugodne, nužno pomalo invazivne uloge „uvođenja“ čitalaca u materiju, koja uvek implicira hijerarhiju između onoga koji zna (koji je već pročitao i „svario“ štivo) i onoga koji ne zna i kome treba „postupno objasniti“ o čemu se tu radi. Pošto odbijam svaki oblik – pedagoškog, teorijskog i drugih – zaglupljivanja onih kojima se obraćam, iskoristiću ovu poziciju doslovno, da budem vaš sparing partner u otvorenim razmišljanjima o onome što smo upravo pročitali...

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Sama Milohnićeva knjiga u velikoj meri i sama poziva na ovu vrstu razgovora među jednakima. Iako veoma precizno i čvrsto strukturirana kroz tri problemska dela, ona ne počinje uvodom niti se završava zaključkom. Naprotiv, počinje in medias res temeljnim teorijskim „izoštravanjima“ graničnih pojmova savremenog sveta performansa, teatra i izvođačkih umetnosti, kojima se autor i njegovo pisanje pozicioniraju u određeni konceptualni i političko-ideološki ovir. Ti pojmovi nisu oni koji su „uvodni“, „osnovni“ i time nas, poput prve lekcije uvode u kasniju, težu problematiku, već oni sami jesu jedna od ključnih i najtežih problematika koja zaokuplja autora i koja od nas odmah zahteva budnost, razmišljanje, stav, komentar i dalju problematizaciju.

U prvom delu knjige, naslovljenom IZOSTROVANJE MEJNIH POJMOV: RITUAL, ENERGIJA, PERFORMATIV IN GESTUS, Milohnić sa kritičke, materijalističke pozicije pokušava da raščisti disperzivni, turbulentni i kompleksni teren savremenog performansa i studija performansa. U tome, on nam kroz četiri tematska poglavlja daje i veoma preglednu analizu epistemološke mape savremenih studija performansa, pozorišne antropologije, angažovanog/političkog teatra i teorije izvođačkih umetnosti. Uvođenje pojma »ritual« u svet teatra, za Milohnića je temeljni korak zasnivanja savremenih studija teatra i performansa, kojima se izvodi prelaz sa centralnog razmatranja dramskog teksta u okviru teorije i istorije književnosti ka fokusiranjima problema izvedbe. Taj pomak od drame ka izvedbi analogan je pomaku od mita ka ritualu, i po Erici Fisher Lichte, predstavlja prvi izvođački obrt u 20. veku. Ova, veoma rasprostanjena veza teatra i rituala postala je okosnica mnogih teatarskih praksi i diskursa okom 20. veka, ali joj Milohnić stavlja dvostruku zamerku, koja nas vraća na promišljanje početnih pretpostavki. S jedne strane, diskurzivni poredak pozorišne institucije u modernom zapadnom društvu iziskuje da je jedini mogući modus vivendi rituala u teatru »teatralizovani« odnosno reprezentovani ritual. S druge strane, transformacija teatra u ritual nije izvodljiva uopšte jer današnja društva su sekularna (i teatar jeste sekularna institucija) dok je ritual praksa religioznog društva. Sledeća poglavlja, o energiji, performativu i gestusu već su temeljno obrađena u ranijim Milohnićevim tekstovima, s tim da poglavlje o performativu – jednom od zaista fundamentalnih pojmova u teorijskom opusu Alda Milohnića, koji se i ovde proteže kroz celu knjigu – ima i dodatak napisan za ovu priliku. U dodatku, nazvanom Post scriptum de[r]riderum autor se vraća svojim ranijim spisima i otvara još jedno poglavlje za razmatranje performativa u teatru i performansu povezujući performativ sa brechtovskim »gestusom«. Iz Derridinih kritika Austinove teorije i pojmova iterabilnosti i citatnosti performativa, a zatim razrada Judith Butler (odakle bira ubedljiv primer gorućeg KKK krsta kao »govora mržnje« čiji je ilokucijski učinak realna pretnja crnačkoj porodici) i Bourdieuovog pojma habitusa (naročito njegove »korporealne« dimenzije koja omogućava teorijsko promišljanje »neverbalnih oblika performativnosti«), Milohnić uvodi zahtev za razlikovanjem specifičnih formi iteracije odnosno performativa. Tom specifikacijom, stvara obrise svog (shvatanja) pojma »gestični performativ«,[1] koji i više nego Austinova originalna filozofsko-lingvistička teorija može poslužiti kao operativni teorijski instrumentarij za razmatranje (govora i ilokucijske moći) savremenog teatra koji se zbiva usred društvenog konteksta.

Ipak, iako je glavni Milohnićev pristup pojmovima rituala, energije, performativa i gestusa »izoštravanje«, iz ovih poglavlja ne izlazimo sa »konačno definisanim« pojmovima koje ćemo od sad moći koristiti bez prethodnih neoštrina. Pre izlazimo sa novim, usložnjenim pitanjima o njima, koja osim što rasvetljavaju konceptualno-političke pozicije autora i od nas traže isto: da razmislimo, prepoznamo i artikulišemo kako, pod kojim uslovima i pretpostavkama koristimo određene pojmove s kojima svakodnevno (u svom radu u ovom polju) operišemo. Radi se o wittgensteinovskom postupku, preuzetom kasnije u okviru analitičke estetike, kojim je izvršen bitan pomeraj od esencijalističkog i esencijalizirajućeg pitanja tipa: Šta je umetnost? ka funkcionalnom pitanju: Koje je vrste pojam »umetnost«?,[2] odnosno: U kom smislu, kako, kada i pod kojim uslovima koristimo taj pojam?

Ono što mi je u izvesnoj meri nedostajalo u ovom delu knjige je izoštravanje samog pojma »performans«, koji je ovde dat posredno, kroz polemike i preciziranja pojmova koji ga – istina, u velikoj meri – određuju od 1970ih godina do danas. Performansu nije posvećeno posebno poglavlje, a glavne razrade date su u poglavlju o odnosima teatra i rituala, gde nema pozitivnog obrta koji bi performans, nakon što je razvezan od nekada čvrste veze sa ritualom povezao sa nekim drugim, aktuelnim paradigmama koje bi ga mogle precizirati ne samo kritički nego i konstitutivno.[3] No, ovako ostaje nam još otvoreniji prostor za sopstvena dalja razmatranja, u kojima performans možemo upisati u centralni (relativno prazni) prostor ove mape, čije su granične oblasti temeljno postavljene, ili po međuprostorima, između graničnih pojmova koje Milohnić razmatra a koje zatim, po principima teorije skupova, možemo povezivati kao unije ili kao preseke sa pojmom performansa i između sebe.

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Sa ovako uzburkanog polemičkog terena Milohnić nas uvodi u problematiku odnosa savremenog performansa/teatra i politike, u delu knjige naslovljenom APORIJE A/POLITIČNEGA: OD EPSKEGA DO POSTDRAMSKEGA GLEDALIŠČA. Pored brojnih teorijskih i teatroloških referenci (od Brechta do Lehmanna, preko Althussera i Močnika) i prikaza primera sa lokalne izvođačke scene (Horvat, Janša, Berger, Repnik, Živadinov idr), najupečatljivije što nudi ovaj deo knjige je lucidna pregledna analiza dvadesetovekovnih shvatanja »političkog« u oblasti teatra i performansa. Analiza se zasniva ne na sistematizaciji i razvrstavanju određenih postupaka, diskursa, tehnika i praksi teatra i performansa kao »političkih ILI apolitičkih«, već na razlikovanju različitih aspekata »političnosti« koja karakteriše svako teatarsko delo, kao javni čin izveden u konkretnoj socijalnoj situaciji.

Ovaj deo knjige počinje razmatranjem Brechtovih drama odnosno likova – Puntile, Šen Tei/Šui Taja iz Dobrog čoveka iz Sečuana i Peachuma i prosjaka u Operi za tri groša. Ovi primeri ne toliko putem priče i psiholoških katakterizacija likova kao »uzoraka iz života«, koliko putem očuđavajućeg prikaza njihovih društvenih pozicija i odnosa sa drugim likovima iznose bespoštednu kritiku kapitalističkog društva čije socijalne odnose među subjektima i mehanizme interpelacije individua u subjekte karakterišu strukturna šizofrenija, internalizovana represija i komodifikacija. Prema Milohniću: »Brechtova posebnost je v tem, da je lastno politično pozicijo zavestno privlekel na površje, da je temeljna politična vprašanja svojega časa 'postavil na dnevni red' umetniškega ustvarjanja, jih potujil, prikazal kot nenavadna in tako spodkopal temelje njihove samoumevnosti, 'normalnosti'.«[4] Na taj način temeljni/društveni gestus brechtovskom taktikom očuđenja materijalizuje (otelovljuje i opredmećuje) spontanu ideologiju svakodnevnog života u gestualno delovanje pojedinca u društvu i time je čini vidljivom i nesamorazumljivom, te poziva na njenu kritičku recepciju. Podstaknut time, Milohnić iznosi stav u althusserovskom ključu a nasuprot uverenju teorije odraza: »...umetnostna praksa ne 'obdeluje' realnosti, njena metoda izhaja iz metapreloma, iz 'drugotne obdelave' gradiva, ki je že bilo ideološko obdelano, 'prelomljeno', ki torej nima več neposredne povezave z realnostjo«.[5] Drugim rečima, nije političko u umetnosti prikazivanje npr. shopping and fucking sindroma kao prvostepene društvene datosti, već njegova drugostepena obrada koja vrši ideološki rez sa prethodnom ideološkom obradom, a koji se pre svega sprovodi na razini materijalističkih aspekata teatra: bavljenjem umetničkim medijem, konvencijama, institucijom, sistemom. Ova drugostepenost političkog gesta teatra koji se bavi društvenom stvarnošću ima korene još dalje od Althussera, u Frankfurtskoj školi 1930ih. Podsetiću samo na Horkhajmerovo zapažanje da su činjenice koje okružuju individuu i izgledaju joj kao po sebi postojeće zapravo (već) proizvod određene društvene obrade. Tako on dolazi do teze o dvostruko posredovanom opažanju, koja istovremeno uzdrmava stabilnost i objekta i subjekta umetnosti: »Činjenice do kojih nas dovode čula društveno su dvostruko preinačene: istorijskim karakterom opaženog predmeta i istorijskim karakterom organa koji opaža«[6]. Uvedena opozicija između idealističkog i materijalističkog pristupa teatru, Milohniću omogućava da u poglavlju »Politično« in gledališče, ki ni njegov dvojnik izvede veoma konzistentnu analizu, čak i svojevrsnu »odbranu«, političnosti teatra i reditelja »treće generacije« na slovenačkoj sceni, čiji se rad obično karakteriše kao apolitični (esteticizam). Iako radovi autora kao što su Vlado Repnik, Dragan Živadinov, Emil Hrvatin, Matjaž Berger, Tomaž Štrucl, Marko Peljhan ili skupina Betontanc i Plesni teatar Ljubljana nisu politični u smislu ex-jugoslovenskog političkog teatra 80ih godina, koji se bavio »velikim pričama« kasnosocijalističkog društva, oni jesu politični zbog svojih istraživanja i problematizacija umetničkog medija, institucije umetnosti, referencijalnog polja, prostora izvođenja i, generalno, teatarskog dispozitiva u Sloveniji ranih 90ih. Ukratko, pozivajući se na Lehmanna, Milohnić ukazuje da se političnost u ovim primerima uspostavlja ne u vezi sa aktuelnim društveno-političkim temama već u vezi sa načinom predstavljanja i politikom recepcije.[7]

Podstaknuta pročitanim, u nastavku razmišljanja o aporijama a/političkog izvešću skiciranje jednog rastera političnosti performansa i teatra kroz 20. vek, koji može biti korisna dopuna Milohnićevih teza. Iako ne hronološki, već pre kontekstualno i problemski, taj raster obuhvata nekoliko različitih makroaspekata političkog na koje se fokusiraju autori različitih perioda. Početkom veka i u periodu istorijskih avangardi, politički angažman je pre svega podrazumevao uvođenje »ne-umetničkih« (nesublimnih, neuniverzalnih, partikularnih), brutalno realnih tema u umetničko delo, koje se time postavljalo kao relativno izuzet(n)i prostor kritičkog govora o aktuelnom društvenom kontekstu. Ovakav pristup je prenet iz prethodnih istorijskih perioda, koji su u izvođačkim umetnostima izveli svojevrsnu kanonizaciju »mimezisa« koji je poslužio i kao osnova svim 20vekovnim razradama »teorije odraza« (od autonomije umetnosti do angažovane umetnosti). Veliki prevrat u ovakvom shvatanju političnosti umetnosti donela je teorijska eksplozija 1960ih i 70ih godina, koja je označila prelaz sa strukturalizma na poststrukturalizam, a u okviru njega i razvoj savremene teorije teksta i savremene marksističke teorije. U kratkom spoju te dve teorijske platforme, desilo se radikalno preusmerenje na označiteljsku razinu društva, te priznavanje materijalnog, interventnog statusa označitelja u idealistički mišljeno polje označitelja. Za umetnost, to je značilo prefokusiranje na medij, tekstualnost, materijalnost umetničkog dela koje nastaje u intertekstualnom odnosu s okružujućim tekstovima društva, politike, ideologije, kulture i sl. Time je afirmisan i novi aspekt političnosti umetnosti, koja se više ne mora baviti određenim temama, nego se mora na određene načine baviti bilo kojom temom. Po tom shvatanju, i rane Wilsonove režije nosile su politički pečat svojom označiteljskom hiperprodukcijom koja je ostavljala otvorenu recepciju i ujedno ukazivala na pražnjenje velikih označitelja tadašnjeg poznokapitalističkog društva spektakla. Treći bitan aspekt političnosti umetnosti dolazi iz aktuelnog razvoja digitalnih tehnologija, pre svega interneta. U tom području pojavljuju se brojne novolevičarske i cybermarksističke prakse i taktike, od free softwarea i open sourcea, preko hackerskog aktivizma, piraterije, copy lefta i creative commonsa, do social networkinga i weba 2.0, koje snažno uzdrmavaju i polje umetnosti. Pod uticajem njih, u teatru i performansu danas poltičnost je moguće preusmeriti na aspekte kao što su: tehnologije autorstva, principi deljenja i razmene, načini organizacije i donošenja odluka, pristupi znanju, načini licenciranja dela, otvorenost koda itd, koji spadaju u ideološko-ekonomske kategorije koje konstitutivno sačinjavaju i savremenu politiku i političku ekonomiju na makrodruštvenom planu.

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Skicirani raster političnosti performansa se može shvatiti kao moj zapis na margini, kojim spajam drugi sa trećim delom knjige Alda Milohnića, koji nosi naziv STRATEŠKI DISPOZITIVI: UMETNOST IN VLADAVINA PRAVA. Deo se sastoji od poglavlja u kojima se ispituju taktike savremenog aRtivizma i problematika autonomije umetnosti u neoliberalnoj državi, da bi se završilo case studyjem »umetničkog projekta Janez Janša«. Ovo je možda i najupečatljivi deo knjige, koji nas prvo smešta u najaktuelniji kontekst slovenačkog društva, a zatim u tom okviru zahteva da temeljno preispitamo statuse umetnosti u savremenoj neoliberalnoj kapitalističkoj državi uopšte. Raspravljajući taj ne mnogo raspravljeni odnos umetnosti i prava autor ne referira toliko na istorijske primere teatra niti se čvrsto drži teorijskih referenci, već se na tom relativno praznom mestu postavlja u ulogu »građanina-diletanta« koji je ozbiljno zapitan o društvu u kojem živi(mo) i u kojem stvaramo umetnost. Ta ozbiljnost pitanja diletanta, koji ne prihvata (a/jer, prethodno, ni ne poznaje) samorazumljivost pretpostavki o umetničkom stvaranju i delovanju, otvara jedan nov pristup i novi ugao posmatranja umetnosti kao društvene prakse, spuštajući relativno apstraktna i uvek nedovoljno precizna pitanja umetničke slobode, autonomije, pa i političnosti na realnu i veoma materijalističku društvenu razinu. Na toj razini, mnoge teoretizacije padaju, mnogi opšteprihvaćeni primeri se osporavaju, a neke teze i stavovi koje smo prihvatili kao svoju »prirodnu sredinu« mišljenja i bavljenja umetnošću se moraju ispočetka preispitati. U tom smislu, od izvanrednog su značaja naročito poglavlje O umetniški imuniteti, avtonomiji in podrejanju i pojedinačni odeljci Moralna panika, Varnostna panika in umetniška imuniteta, »Definicijski monopol«, Stvarjenje, ustvarjanje in samokreacija i Avtonomija in podrejanje. Ono što je u njima, po mom mišljenju, značajno jeste suočavanje savremene umetnosti i teorije umetnosti, s jedne strane, sa preciznim pravnim osnovama umetnosti kao društvene prakse, s druge strane, sa teskobom paradoksa da je neoliberalnoj državi autonomija umetnosti potrebna kao dokaz sopstvene liberalnosti, a sa treće sa tako čestim i lakim oduzimanjem autonomije umetnosti u svakoj kriznoj i vanrednoj situaciji.

U ovom delu knjige Milohnić razmatra brojne primere artivističkih, kritičkih i subverzivnih umetničkih projekata i radova sa savremene slovenačke scene, koji su ne potencijalno provokativni nego koji su zaista isprovocirali reakcije medija, javnog mnjenja, pa i pravosuđa. Recimo, to su akcije koje skreću pažnju na »izbrisane« građane Slovenije Izbris i Združeno listje grupe Dost je!, »mekoterorističke« akcije Marka Breclja, slučaj sudskog procesa protiv grupe Strelnikoff (koja je sliku Marije Pomagaj, Leopolda Layera reprodukovala na omotu CDa, s tim da je malog Isusa zamenila štakorom). Zatim, tu su i internacionalni primeri procesa protiv članova grupe VolksTheater Karawane koja je učestvovala na protestima u Genovi i čuvenog suđenja članu Critical Arts Ensamblea Steveu Kurtzu za bioterorizam;[8] kao i posebno analiziran primer »projekta Janez Janša« Žige Kariža, Emila Hrvatina i Davidea Grassija. Kroz ove primere, Milohnić nas vodi kroz gustu mrežu »nevolja s umetnošću« koje se pojavljuju kada je postavimo u okvire pravnih sistema današnjih država. S jedne strane, on ukazuje na rastegljivost »hanibalističkog« neoliberalnog sistema, koji proždire svaku svoju kritiku, koristeći cinizam kao glavnu samoodbranu, a s druge strane ukazuje na značajno smanjenje tolerancije tog društva u situacijama kada je ugrožena njegova sigurnost.

Što se tiče pravnih osnova, u Sloveniji, kao i mnogim evropskim državama, umetnosti su zagarantovani izvesni (funkcionalni) imunitet i autonomija – kao dokaze toga Milohnić navodi članove 59 i 39 slovenačkog Ustava, kao i član 169 Kaznenog zakona. Međutim, tu se nalazi i prvi paradoks: ključni ograničavajući faktor artivističkih odnosno direktnih akcija je sposobnost samog neoliberalnog sistema da asimiluje prodore realno postojećeg političkog mišljenja, čime ih pacificira i, ja bih dodala, komodificira. Tolerantnost tog sistema je podložna temeljnoj političkoj kritici, jer, kako Milohnić napominje: »tolerantnost je privilegij tistega, ki ima moč, da tolerira«.[9] Ipak, Milohnić ovde ne napušta teren ostavljajući nas ušuškane u iluziji kako je jedini problem sa slobodom umetnosti to što je njena sloboda već-uračunata u sam sistem. U nastavku razmatranja, on uvodi drugi paradoks sa autonomijom umetnosti i ukazuje na krizne momente (npr. 11. septembar) – koji poprimaju oblik sve kontinualnijeg stanja – kad savremene države u odbrani svoje ugrožene sigurnosti, znatno smanjuju tolerantnost i počinju da ugrožavaju slobodu umetničkog izražavanja. U tim procesima dolazi do histerične reakcije vlasti, koja počinje da brka i tako udaljene pojmove kao što su umetnost i terorizam. U prikazu tog procesa »histerisanja«, Milohnić veoma jasno i šire primenljivo parafrazira Ecoovu upotrebu Wittgensteinove teorije igre, čime dolazi do sheme tranzitivnosti među pojmovima: umetniške akcije → protestne akcije → državna nepokorščina → terorizem, u kojoj se u krajnjem rezultatu gubi granica između umetnosti i terorizma. Tako se opet, mada drugim putem, vraćamo pitanju mogućnosti i važnosti autonomije umetnosti i umetničkog imuniteta. Opor zaključak koji iz Milohnićevih razmatranja sledi bi mogao biti da umetnost, pa i ona veoma kritička i subverzivna, po pravilu stvara mnogo manje problema nego što bi htela, te da je autonomija umetnosti koju garantuju ustavi i druge zakonske regulative upravo dokaz njene benignosti i čak služenja neoliberalnoj državi. Međutim, čak i tako benignoj, autonomija joj je direktno i isključivo zavisna od spoljašnjeg faktora – državne administracije, političara, zakonskih regulativa – koji joj je može dati i oduzeti, po potrebi. Ipak, i pored sumnjičavosti i pritužbi na hanibalističku asimilativnost neoliberalnog sistema, (relativna) autonomija umetnosti nema i ne sme imati alternativu. Pri tom, dodaću, to ne znači transcendentan status umetnosti koja lebdi nad društvenom stvarnošću a umetniku ostavlja »čiste ruke«, već znači relativno autohtono i autonomno mesto koje je u velikoj meri zasnovano na sopstvenim procedurama i definicijama i u kojem se može kritički delovati dosezanjem krajnjih tački onoga što nazivamo »slobodom mišljenja i govora« uopšte. Da li će to biti iskorišćeno kao zalog progresa samog tog društva – što sugeriše Paolo Virno u Gramatici mnoštva kada ukazuje na asimilaciju oblika ponašanja iz alternativne kulture 60ih u postfordističku kompaniju danas[10] – ili kao oružje radikalne promene tog društva, suviše je neizvesno da bismo zbog te bojazni relativnu autonomiju umetnosti zamenili sa bilo kojim drugim njenim statusom.

***

...Ovo bi, ukratko, bilo moje brzo prolaženje kroz beleške i zapažanja o knjizi Teorije savremenog teatra i performansa, neposredno nakon što sam je pročitala. A pročitala sam je u jednom dahu, jer me je odmah na početku ščepala za vrat »tražeći da se izjasnim«, i do kraja me je držala u neizvesnosti hoćemo li u mišljenju o performansu i teatru danas preći na stranu radikalnog makrsizma ili na stranu oportunog neoliberalizma. Ili, nema tog »ili«. Na kraju, ostavila me je sa tom nelagodom, u tesnacu, sa sopstvenim preispitivanjima, negde između entuzijazma i ogorčenosti, sa pojačanom verom u kritičku i subverzivnu ilokucijsku moć umetnosti, ali i svešću da joj tu moć upravo daje neoliberalna država kojoj se ona – u svom, za mene, najboljem izdanju – svesrdno opire. Ništa više u pogovoru, sem ovih utisaka ne želim da iznesem, čuvajući se toga da ovo uzbukano otvoreno polje zatvorim za čitaoce, kad ga je sam autor ostavio otvorenim.

Nažalost, sudbina knjige napisane na slovenačkom jeziku je da, iako smelo zahvata fundamentalne problematike globalnog sveta umetnosti danas, ostaje čitljiva samo malom broju teoretičara, aktera i publike savremenih izvođačkih umetnosti. Ipak, makar samo za nas – a možda u tome i jeste njena najveća vrednost – jedno pitanje je čini mi se razrešila, otelovljujući odgovor sopstvenom »teksturom«: ako do sada nismo znali šta je to post-socijalistički kritički diskurs o umetnosti, sada svakako znamo.

u Beogradu, januar 2009.

Ana Vujanović

[1] Ovo povezivanje je poslužilo i kao putokaz u raspravi Brectovog pojma gestus, i njegove upotrebe preko Brechta, jer Milohnić izvodi direktnu vezu: „Brechtov gestus bi definirali kot telesno z-govornost, ki združuje gesto in izjavo v gestični performativ.", Aldo Milohnić, Teorije sodobnega gledališča in performansa, Maska, Ljubljana, 2009, str. 82.

[2] Vid. kod Weitza: »The problem with which we must begin is not: What is art? but What sort of concept is ‘art’?«, Weitz, Morris, »The Role of Theory in Aesthetics«, u Philosophy Looks At the Arts; Contemporary Readings In Aesthetics, Margolis, Joseph (ed), Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1987, str. 147.

[3] Intrigantno je da Milonić gotovo zaobilazi McKenzijeve aktuelne postavke pojma performansa, koji nakon niza istorijskih i interpretativnih pristupa pojmu kakav je uspostavio Schechner, nudi njegovu novu teoretizaciju. McKenzijeve teze bi Milohnićevim razradama mogle biti korisna dopuna (recimo, s obzirom na McKenzijevu skepsu ili čak osporavanje liminalnosti performansa koja dolazi upravo iz veze teatar i ritual i istovremeno ukazivanje na njegovu normativnu dimenziju), a ponekad i izazov (s obzirom na McKenzijeve veze performansa i menadžmenta i performansa i visokih tehnologija u savremenom postfordističkom neoliberalnom društvu). Milohnić McKenzija, međutim, pominje samo u nekoliko fusnota, pa koristim priliku da skrenem pažnju čitalaca na knjigu: McKenzie, Jon, Perform or Else: from discipline to performance, Routledge, London-New York, 2001.

[4] Milohnić, str. 96.

[5] Milohnić, str. 119.

[6] Horkhajmer, Maks, »Tradicionalna i kritička teorija (1937)«, u isti, Tradicionalna i kritička teorija, BIGZ, Beograd, 1976, str. 48.

[7] »Političnost je v teh primerih … vzpostavljena v povezavi z načini predstavljanja in politiko percepcije.« Milohnić, str. 130.

[8] Uzgred budi rečeno, Kurtz je nedavno oslobođen te optužbe, ali mu sada preti između 5 i 20 godina zatvora za »internet uznemiravanje«, što ga iz Milohnićevog okvira »sigurnosne panike« ponovo prebacuje u okvir pitanja slobode (umetničkog) izražavanja, autonomije umetnosti i naročito umetničkog imuniteta.

[9] Milohnić, str. 152.

[10] Vid. Virno, Paolo, Grammar of the Multitude; For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, Semiotext(e), New York, 2004.

FROM BIOPOLITICS TO NECROPOLITICS

marta.popivoda — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 06:11:50 -0800

What is the intention of this lecture?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. To differentiate in- between biopolitics and necropolitics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is Janez Janša?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who are the Erased people?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a talk with Alexander Skidan and Dmitry Vilensky in the newspaper What is to be Done? published in St. Petersburg, Artiom Magun presents a very simple but crucially important difference in understanding the past in relation to two remarkable theoretical cases. One case is Walter Benjamin and the other is Alain Badiou. Following Magun, I can present this difference in the following way, “Badiou proposes that we find our support in something necessary and important that happened in the past and move on from there. Benjamin, on the contrary, searches for something that was suppressed in the past, something that did not happen, that perished and is reawakening only now. The event that, for Badiou, happens in the past, is taking place right now for Benjamin. That is, they both look back to the past, but from opposite points of view. This is important as we try to understand potentiality: either potential is the impulse generated by a positive past or present event, or it is something that has not happened yet, that was interrupted in mid-sentence.”http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=327&I... (28.3.2008)" href="#footnote4_ir2mh2u">[4]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reducing the number of employees

2) Reducing wages

Introducing more and more work obligations

Restructuring companies and the redistribution of good and resources.

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

REFERENCES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.springerin.at

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

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

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

SCENA KAO EKRAN: Slučaj Operrrra...

marta.popivoda — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 02:18:09 -0800

THE STATE OF THINGS

Tema „video u teatru“ spada u legitimne i važne teme savremenih izvođačkih umetnosti, ako ih – svesni realnosti koja nas okružuje – posmatramo kao umetnost u doba kulture, koja je nezamisliva bez masmedija i digitalnih tehnologija. Ipak, o temi „upotreba videa na lokalnoj tetarskoj sceni“ se teško može napisati ma kakva analiza, a da nije oštra kritika. Za takvu analizu nedostaje sam predmet. The present state of things o tom pitanju se može objasniti primedbom da kako je svet za lokalni kontekst, pa i scenu, još 1990ih prestao da bude relevantna referenca, to je i upotreba videa u lokalnom teatru samo neznatna a logična „kolateralna šteta“ takvog društvenog samo-konstituisanja.

S jedne strane, u prilici sam da vidim mnoga izvođačka dela na internacionalnoj sceni, a sa druge sam – pre svega zbog koselekcioniranja BITEF 40 Show casea – prilično upoznata sa lokalnom i alternativnom i mainstreamom scenom.
KONCEPT KONCEPTA: Na internacionalnoj sceni, video poslednjih godina dobija najrazličitije, često konstitutivne a nekad i veoma problematizujuće, funkcije, povezane sa suočenjem živog tela/izvođenja i medijske figure/ekrana, čvorom koji u velikoj meri određuje i privatne i javne aspekte sveta koji pravi današnji čovek. Video tako nekada postaje integralni deo žive predstave, ponekad njen medijski komentar odnosno inverzija, ili proteza koja može ono što živ izvođač/ica, baš kao ni gledaoci, ne može. Ponekad se celo izvođenje posreduje video projekcijama i publika mora sama da odluči o realnosti i realističnosti; nekada se kombinuje video snimak pripremljen ranije s aktuelnim dešavanjem, iskušavajući mogućnosti i navike naše, ljudske, percepcije. U nekim radovima, radi se o uvođenju greške ili pomeraja koji zbunjuje ili kojem se veruje, i više od realnosti koju prikazuje. Ponekad video otkriva izvođača, skrivenog među publikom, ili menja fokuse i kadrira ono što je na sceni dato u širokom planu. Video nekada, direktnim prenosom ili živim streamingom omogućava prisustvo izvođača koji nisu fizički prisutni u određenoj prostoriji, ili postaje i medij putem kojeg se u real timeu izvode internacionalni radovi na samo jednom mestu. Itd.
SUPER NIGHT SHOT: Upotreba videa na lokalnoj sceni obično ne ide tako daleko, niti „duboko“. Video je najčešće živahniji i reduntantni deo scenografije, koja već i sama obično ilustruje događanje na sceni, umesto da stvara okvr za njega; ili se, ne retko, koristi dekorativno, odnosno deklarativno – u smislu: Pošto ima video na sceni, to mora da je savremeni teatar. Neću se vraćati tako daleko do istorijskih avangardi i Piskatorovih filmskih scenografija ili kasnijih Nam Džun Pajkovih TV instalacija, da bih ukazala na činjenicu da video ekran, počev od filma na traci, pa televizijskog programa, preko lakodostupne super osmice, a zatim kućnog videa u VHS formatu i, konačno, čudno demokratičnog digitalnog videa, već odavno nije „tehničko čudo“, koje samo treba uvesti u predstavu da bi joj se lupio pečat savremenosti. Istina je da je u lokalnom kontekstu, čini mi se naročito teatra koji neobično tvrdoglavo odbija novine, još uvek važno neke prakse, paradigme, pojave za početak samo uvesti, ali ostaje nezaobilazno i isto tako urgentno pitanje načina, namera i ciljeva tih uvođenja.
U tom smislu, izdvojiću rad Operrrra (je ženskog roda) kao primer upotrebe videa na lokalnoj sceni koji smatram retko značajnim i uzbudljivim. Razmatranje koje sledi nije tu toliko da pokaže da je sve što sam gore napisala arbitrarno (a jeste), koliko da ukaže na eksces koji je lokalnim pozorišnim akterima blizak a može biti inspirativan za uključivanje videa u neke buduće predstave/radove.

OPERRRRA (je ženskog roda)

BIOKHRAPHIA: Operrra...[1]je, pre nego opera, teatarski rad koji tematizira operu i koji se realizuje operskom formom. Pre svega, on ispituje oblike i funkcije ženskog glasa u operi, kroz tri različita pristupa zastupljena u kompozicijama Sažeti prikaz neumitnog i tragičnog toka sudbine koji krhko biće Male Sirene odvodi u potpunu propast Gorana Kapetanovića, Classifieds Anje Đorđević i Untitled Dženifer Valš. Već inicijalno, sve tri kompozicije – koje se u Operrrri... izvode kao činovi – fokusiraju problematiku ženskog glasa, tradicionalnog stožera opere kao muzičkog i scenskog žanra, pre svega bavljenjem muzičkom problematikom glasa (načinom pevanja, otporom ili destrukcijom belkanta, fetišizacijom glasa itd.), a delimično i na planu libretta.
Drugi važan aspekt Operrrre... je ispitivanje statusa opere između visoke i popularne umetnosti, u masmedijsko digitalno doba. Rediteljska koncepcija ima jasne reference na koncepte kao što su „opera posle smrti opere“, „postopera“ i „opera u doba medija“[2], i autore kao što su Vilson/Glas, Grinavej/Andrisen, Rajš/Koro idr. Problemi operske postistorije korespondiraju s aktuelnim kontekstom informatičke hiperprodukcije i hiperestetizacije kulture, u kojem se mesto teatra mora temeljno promisliti, jer više ne može računati na ranije pozicije, niti funkcije.[3]Po Biringeru, a s tim se slaže i Leman, promoter postdramskog teatra, to je kontekst jačanja evroameričkih integracija, putem globalnog tržišta i transnacionalnih medijskih industrija, u kojem se teatar kao umetnička forma pojavljuje ne kao savremena aktuelnost, već kao anahronizam.[4]Dorđev objašnjava: „inscenacijom odnosno nedostatkom iste u tradicionalnom smislu te reči, ova opera ili komad muzičkog teatra temeljno preispituje ideju Gesamtkunstwerka u doba medija, pre svega praveći analogiju između Wagnerovog koncepta i muzičkog klipa s MTVa kojem danas potpuno pripada to mesto.“[5]

AMPLIFIED BODY #2: Za oba ova aspekta, ključno je rediteljsko koncipiranje scenskog prostora. Prostor u kojem se izvodila Operrrra... je nevodršena betonska zgrada Biološkog instituta u botaničkoj bašti Jevremovac. Publika se kreće kroz prostor za vreme Prologa, da bi se smestila u amfiteatar, iz kojeg prisustvuje izvođenju centralnog dela (tri čina) i Epiloga.[6]Ipak, ne radi se o site-specific radu. Betonska zgrada je uzeta kao prazni, neutralni urbani prostor, koji je u potpunosti prilagođen scenskom izvođenju. A, izvođenja, kakvo i teatarska, pa i publika alternativnijih izvođačkih praksi očekuje, zapravo nema. Sve što se dešava, za publiku se dešava na ekranu. Nijedan živi izvođač niti tehničar se ne mogu videti; publika je okružena samo platnima ogromnih dimenzija između betonskih zidova. Na platnima se, od Prologa do Epiloga, videom posreduje izvođenje, koje se tu, iza ekrana, mada u to niko ne može biti siguran, uživo dešava. Inscenacija je realizovana kao live-video-mix u TV reportažnim kolima. Njegovi ulazi su živa, ručno kolažirana animacija i direktan prenos bodi arta i slikanja po telu (Siniša Ilić), video snimci pripreme prostora (Marta Popivoda), direktan prenos instrumentalnog i vokalnog izvođenja, kao i svetlosni efekti i varijacije pozorišta senki (Prolog i delimično 3. čin), dok su izlazi tri simultane video projekcije. Na taj način, kompletno izvođenje Operrrre... se premešta na ekran, koji ga skriva ili otkriva (?).
POSVEĆENJE PROLEĆA: Pitanje je čemu cela ta mašinerija za izvođenje koje se uživo na licu mesta dešava, a s kojom je projekat od skupe predstava kakva je svaka opera postao pravi visokobudžetni spektakl, u sred tranzicijskog Beograda? Ovako realizovan, scenski prostor Operrrre... je zasnovan na potpunoj zameni tradicionalne scene kutije video ekranom. Taj pristup – jedinstven u razmeri i razlozima upotrebe videa na lokalnoj sceni – pokazuje ključni psiho-sociološki dispositif scenske situacije. A to je da scena, svaka scena i jeste ekran, na koji se projektuju želje i fantazije publike, postajući društveni fantazmi. Razmatrajući tu činjenicu, scena Operrrre... postaje hladno tehnološka i odlaže prisustvo. Jer, scena kao ideološki aparat je i posrednički mehanizam koji nas odvaja od same stvarnosti i jedini način našeg bivanja u toj stvarnosti. To je konstitutivna, a radi očuvanja svojih ideoloških efekata ne tako rado pokazana funkcija scene – kao agore društvenih fantazama. U Operrrri... ta funkcija javnog-prostora-scene je, otkrivajući svoju nepodnošljivo materijalnu ’radnu mašineriju’, ogoljeno suočena sa publikom i njihovim pojedinačnim očekivanjima.

LETTERS FROM THE PRESENT: Live-video-mix Operrrre... se u estetskom i poetičkom smislu nalazi između Bila Vajole i Aernouta Mika. U teorijskom smislu, on se – kao i u slučaju oba umetnika – zasniva na principima relativističko-konstruktivnog prikazivanja.[7]koja se upostavlja na kritici ontološko-mimetičkog principa sličnosti, ukazujući da se ni sličnost ni viđenje ne odvijaju neutralnim perceptivnim mehanizmom koji prethodi diskursu, već kroz društveni sistem zastupanja, određen ’pravilima simbolizacije’[8].Bazično pitanje kojim se problematizuje zamisao mimetičkog prikazivanja je: Ako je stvarnost predstavljena umetnošću uvek-već posredovana brojnim društvenim sistemima zastupanja, zar i svako umetničko predstavljanje nije praksa ponovnog posredovanja, što znači redistribucije društvene stvarnosti? Stoga je osnovni problem mimezisa društvena determinacija mehanizama i protokola proizvođenja stvarnosti koja se kroz umetnost nudi identifikaciji. Razlog za nepoverenje prema ontološko-mimetičkom prikazivanju se nalazi već u Aristotelovom pojmu mimezisa. Jer, ako mimezis nije samo imitiranje sadržaja otkrivenih u stvarnosti, već uključuje i stvaralački čin oblikovanja, onda on nužno proizvodi i nove, drugačije sadržaje od postojećih. Tj. kako je pojezis pored eurezisa programski uveden u mimezis, mimetičko prikazivanje ni ne može predstaviti neki sadržaj, već u tom pokušaju uvek proizvodi novi sadržaj, specifično zastupajući onaj na koji referira.
BLUE PROVISOIRE: Mešajući direktne prenose i pripremljene snimke, fikcionalne i dokumentarne video materijale, Operrrra... iznosi kritički stav da umetničko prikazivanje nikada nije samo re-prezentacija postojećih sadržaja, već ideološka proizvodnja slika koje se pojavljuju na mestu stvarnosti. Naglašavanjem nužnosti da se u prepoznavanje uključi odazivanje na društvene mehanizme i pravila prepoznavanja – kao na primer to da se komentari živog izvođenja koji se emituju u 2. činu i pišu uživo – eksplicira se da je stvarnost na koju prikazivačka slika referira ona koju samo prikazivanje proizvodi u specifičnim društvenim uslovima. Zapravo, radilo se o komentarima i pripremljenim i snimljenim unapred, koji su prosto emitovani sa trake. Tačka za identifikaciju u prikazivanju se tako otkriva, u svoj svojoj kontingentnosti.

THE SPECTATORS: Operrrra... sa svojim ekranima jeste mašina za otkrivanje fantazija koja ih sprečava da pređu na razinu fantazama. Tu ću pomeniti 3. čin, gde se usta pevačice Dženifer Valš snimaju makroobjektivom, te se umesto telesnog otelotvorenja ženskog glasa projektuje samo meso ljudskog tela, njegova ranjivost, fragilnost, nesavršenost, izmičući mogućnost konstituisanja ženskog tela kao (seksualnog) objekta Gestalt-slikom. Teorijska psihoanaliza ukazuje da je odnos koji subjekt gradi u rizičnom polju sa drugim imaginarni scenario koji pretpostavlja ostvarivanje želje, ali funkcioniše kao posrednik koji će sprečiti da subjekt dođe do same želje, i tako se spasava u fatalnom odnosu s drugim. Taj scenario se realizuje kao fantazam. Frojd je fantazije tumačio kao prepuštanje maštanju koje postavlja zaslon između subjekta i drugog, tj. kao oblik fikcionalizacije koji skriva doslovno posrednim predstavama. A, prema lakanovskoj psihoanalizi, fantazam je mesto spajanja želje i njenog imaginarnog objekta, mesto gde se uspostavlja odnos subjekta i njegovog manjka. To znači da subjekt na mestu onoga što mu nedostaje stvara sliku koja će spasonosno ponuditi ono što je nepribavivo.[9]
ORFEJ I EURIDIKA: Identifikacija koja je pokrenuta tim, konstruktivno-prikazivačkim video mehanizmom, koji slično kao što radi sa slikom, radi i sa (ženskim) glasom, polazi od Lakanove razrade odnosa subjekt-Drugi na 11. seminaru. Razmatrana tako, problematika identifikacije prevazilazi ograničenost na logocentrični dramski realizam i ogledalne narcističke procedure, i uvodi se i u neteleološke, fizičke, konceptualne, medijske i digitalne reprezentacije. Tako bi se opis 3. čina, kojem dodajem da je paralelno sa snimkom usne duplje pevačice, na drugom ekranu bila njena bestelesna senka, mogao umetnuti u zaključak Ivane Stamatović da objasni procedure zastupanja u Operrrri...: „U prvoj autentičnoj operi Monteverdijev Orfej se okrenuo i, zbog jednog nestrpljivog i preuranjenog pogleda, zauvek izgubio obožavanu ženu. U tom trenutku on je i nesmotreno i, činilo se, podjednako nepovratno ispraznio mesto želje operskog poklonika. Na takav način započeta je nemoguća istorija žene u operi: bestelesna duša nevidljive i neuhvatljive Euridike lutala je vrtlozima operskih metafizika i, upisujući i prepisujući u njih tragove želje Drugog, izmicala otelotvorenju slušaočevog/ gledaočevog uživanja. […] Opera Operrrra (je ženskog roda) upravo predstavlja jedno teorijsko i iskustveno povampirenje ženskog/operskog tela.“[10]

LOOKING FOR A MISSING EMPLOYEE: Za takav efekat, nije dovoljno ukinuti živo izvođenje i namesto njega pred gledateljstvom emitovati video, već treba postaviti ekran između izvođenja/scene i gledateljstva, tako da ekran ne samo da otkriva ideološke mehanizme identifikacije, već postaje materijalno otelotvorenje mesta društvenih fantazama koji se nalaze između subjekta i realnosti. Đorđev ukazuje da se u Operrrri...: „stavljaju u pogon sve mašinerije kao i u bilo kom operskom/teatarskom delu, ali sada su one izložene publici (backstage, pripreme prostora, gotovo pornografski detalji izvođačkog tela koje ’radi’), dok je ono što je tradicionalno izloženo (stage) u ovom slučaju medijski posredovano...“. U tom smislu, Vajoline i Mikove video procedure postaju važne reference između kojih se proizvodi video Operrrre... Pa, dok Vajola pretežno radi sa dokumentarističkim potencijalnostima fikcionalizovanih (npr. hrišćanskih) scena, a Mik, obrnuto, fikcionalizuje dokumentarizam (npr. brokerski rad na berzi), Operrrra... nerazmrsivo zapetljava granice fikcionalnog i dokumentarnog, u ekranskom približavanju (pokazivanjem backstagea) i odlaganju (spektralnošću ženskog tela) sopstvenog izvođenja. U tom smislu, video unosi neprekidne šumove u proizvodnju fantazama, koju scena omogućava. „Fantazam ne potvrđuje svoju materijalnost verodostojnošću ’narativa’ koji zastupa, već njegovom interventnošću u materijalnom svetu ljudskih odnosa. Fantazija postaje fantazam kada je materijalna intervencija u nekom odnosu, poretku, zapravo, kada je praksa. Mnoga umetnička dela su predstave ’fantazija’ (maštanja), ali ona postaju fantazmatska tek kada deluju u društvenom prostoru. Jevanđelje po Jovanu ili pesma Lili Marlen, odnosno nago našminkano telo Nikol Kidman na filmskom ekranu prestaju da budu fantazija i postaju fantazam kada su intervencija u društvu. Jovanovo jevanđelje je tekst koji je barijera/zaslon između hrišćanske ljubavi koju obećavaju druga Jevanđelja i straha od apokalipse koji postavlja na mestu nemoguće ljubavi realna politika hrišćanstva. Sentimentalna ljubavna pesmica Lili Marlen postaje fantazam o ’muškoj snazi’ i ’muškom jedinstvu ili bliskosti’ onda kada postaje vojnička pesma...“[11]

THREE TALES: Fantazmi su u Operrrri... raspršeni jer se video slika ne nudi kao označitelj koji sigurno stoji za nešto drugo i daje se konzumaciji (poistovećivanju, uživanju itd.). Njen semantizam nije fiksan niti pouzdano i jednoznačno usmeren na spoljašnje referente. Video je tu pokrenuta mreža označitelja koji su pre određeni time što stoje za nekog (subjekt) nego za nešto (referenta). Time oni ostavljaju pojedincu više prolaza za smeštanje kojim će konstituisati subjektivitet i time potencijalno intervenisati u označiteljsku mrežu. Petrifikacija subjekta ni tu, kao ni u bilo kom odnosu sa drugim, nije izbegnuta, ali jeste razlabavljena jer je slika nesigurna, kolebljiva. Radi se i dalje o jednom označiteljskom stroju koji gradi scensku situaciju; ali masteroznačitelji ne računaju na podrazumevajuću teleologiju niti prediskurzivne principe sličnosti, nego su u stalnom potencijalitetu, računajući na kontingentnost društvene situacije.
U ovakvom video prikazivanju bih, na kraju, izdvojila dve novije identifikacijske tendencije u izvođačkim umetnostima, koje odbacuju mimetičke reprezentacije. Za video Operrrre... važne su obe, jer, dok je njena „scena“ hladno tehnološka i povremeno spektakularno MTVjevska, divergentna video slika ogoljava nesprektakularnu materijalnost operske mašinerije: pore na leđima modela, brčići iznad usne pevačice, znoj radnika na objektu, posečeni makazama i umazani bojom prsti slikara, zavarivanje skele, žabokrečina u barici pre drenaže amfiteatra... Jedna tendencija je hiperprodukcija klizajućih označitelja koji anticipiraju bilo-šta ili pre mnogo-šta. Njene reference su ranije režije Vilsona i Foremana, opere Majkla Najmana, koreografije An Terez de Kersmaker, kasni radovi Triše Braun... Druga tendencija je pokušaj prodora manjka (Drugog) u označiteljsku strukturu koju izvedba otelovljuje za subjekt gledaoca/teljke. Za nju ću prizvati radove Stelarka, Katažine Kozire, Rona Etija, Franka B, Orlan... Identifikacija koju pokreće video Operrrre... je u tom svetlu radikalno drugačija od poistovećivanja sa prikrivene tačke pogleda i jednoznačno petrifikatorskog scenskog realizma. Prva tendencija omogućava promenjivu i privremenu identifikaciju subjekta kroz klizajuće označitelje. Iz pozicije subjekta, značajno je da on/a ne samo da dobija više manevarskog prostora, već se ni u jednoj tački ne može fiksirati jer stalno klizi potpadajući čas pod ovaj čas pod onaj označitelj iz rizomske mreže. Standardni primeri su Vilsonovo Pismo za kraljicu Viktoriju i Ajnštajn na plaži ili Tri priče Rajša i Koro. Druga tendencija intencionalno priziva manjak u diskursu i pokreće mehanizam identifikacijske separacije. Operrrra... se tu nadovezuje na one radove koji, od neoavangarde do poznog postmodernizma, rade sa baznim telesnim materijalima (kožom, mesom, krvlju, spermom, sekretima), kao operacioni teatar Orlan, Stelarkove telesne ekstenzije ili L Ruaovo plesačko telo bez organa.
HOW LONG DOES THE SUBJECT LINGER ON THE EDGE OF THE VOLUME:[12]Na samom kraju, napomenuću o videu Operrrre... i to da potpuno oslobađanje subjekta od označitelja, s aspekta psihoanalize, nije moguće; jer – subjekt postoji samo u društvenoj situaciji. A opera, pa i kad je njena scena ekran, je par excellence prostor te situacije. Po Lakanovom ultimatumu »Pare ili život!«, oslobođenje se može jedino postaviti kao zahtev: Subjekt ili sloboda!, tako da birajući da bude subjekt on/a gubi slobodu, a birajući slobodu gubi oboje. Ipak, i Operrrra... i sve druge izvedbe čije je prikazivanje ovako orijentisano su u tom smislu potencijalno oslobađajuće. One na različite načine hakiraju potencijalnosti neznakovne telesnosti i specifičnosti čoveka kao društvenog individuuma. Radi se o prekojezičkim aspektima subjekta, koji ukazuju na ne-celo subjektivacije, i ponavljanju pokušaja nadomeštanja stvarnog manjka u separaciji i oslobođenju od označiteljske razmene. Dakle, nije stvar u tome kako gledaoca/teljku ispetljati iz društvene mreže kroz video sliku, već kako ga u toj mreži pozicionirati i koliko mu prostora ostaviti da izmeni tu poziciju. U jednom trenutku, na centralnom platnu Operrrre... gledaoci gledaju same sebe u direktnom prenosu. Na tom mestu, reditelj uvodi pukotinu od koje kreće neumitni raspad savršenog Gestalta petrifikatorskog Gesamtkunstwerka, u ljudskoj i međuljudskoj kontingenciji – i to je ona procedura videa Operrrre... koju smatram najznačjanijom i u poetičkom i u političkom smislu.

[1] Predstava je, u produkciji BELEFa, izvedena 16, 17. i 18. avgusta 2005. u botaničkoj bašti Jevremovac. Autor i reditelj je Bojan Đorđev, a saradnički tim broji preko 50 autora, izvođača, tehničara idr.
[2] Vid. Jelena Novak, Opera u doba medija, IKZS, Sremski Karlovci-Novi Sad, 2006.
[3] Vid. i Yves Michaud, Umjetnost u plinovitu stanju; esej o trijumfu estetike, Ljevak, Zagreb, 2004.
[4] Vid. Johannes Birringer,Media & Performance; Along The Border, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1998; Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramsko kazalište, CDU, Zagreb : TkH-centar, Beograd, 2004.
[5] “Razgovor o/na marginama Operrrre“ (sa Bojanom Đorđevim razgovarala Ana Vujanović), programska knjižica, BELEF 05, Beograd, 2005, bez paginacije
[6] Uzgred, projekat je za otkrivanje novih scenskih prostora nagrađen na Bijenalu scenskog dizajna 2006.
[7] Radi se o novijoj prikazivačkog orijentaciji,[[Vid. npr. Braco Rotar, »Pitanje slikarstva«, Delo, god. XIX, br. 11, Beograd, 1973, str. 1297-1315; Flint Schier, Deeper into pictures; An essay on pictorial representation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989; i Peggy Phelan, Unmarked; The Politics of Performance
[8] Vid. Miško Šuvaković, Pojmovnik moderne i postmoderne likovne umetnosti od 1950, SANU, Beograd; Prometej, Novi Sad, 1999, 484. Prikazivanje, str. 271
[9] Objašnjenje prema Miško Šuvaković, Diskurzivna analiza; Prestupi i/ili pristupi ’diskurzivne analize’ filozofiji, poetici, estetici, teoriji i studijama umetnosti i kulture, Univerzitet umetnosti, Beograd, (u pripremi) 2006.
[10] Ivana Stamatović, „Autopsija opere“, programska knjižica, BELEF 05, Beograd, 2005, bez paginacije
[11] Miško Šuvaković, „Uvod: diskurs, fantazam i događaj“, u Diskurzivna analiza
[12] Svi podnaslovi ovog teksta su nazivi izvođačkih dela u kojima video ima na, po mom mišljenju, izazito zanimljive funkcije; te preporučujem čitaocima da ih dalje prouče.

A LECTURE [about improvisation as performance]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHTO DELAT? - ZAŠTO BRECHT? / WHY BRECHT?

marta.popivoda — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 08:58:43 -0800

Broj 11 ruskog umetničko-teorijsko-aktivističkog časopisa Что делатъ? (Chto delat?) / What Is to Be Done? posvećen je savremenom preiščitavanju teorije i prakse Bertolda Brechta. Broj je objavljen u januaru 2006, dvojezično (na ruskom i engleskom jeziku).

Celokupan broj možete preuzeti u PDF formatu na dnu stranice.

Časopis Chto delat? je učesnik projekta Documenta 12 magazines.
Izdaje se pod Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution-Share Alike licencom.

Chto delat je kolektivna platforma, osnovana 2003. godine, sa sedištem u Petrogradu i Moskvi. Platforma se bavi otvaranjem prostora između teorije, umetnosti i aktivizma, sa ciljem njihove politizacije, kroz akcije, performanse i časopis. Od 2003. izlazi i istoimeni časopis/novine fokusirane na odnose između repolitizacije ruske intelektualne kulture i njenog šireg internacionalnog konteksta.

See online : www.chtodelat.org

U nastavku sledi sadržaj broja na engleskom jeziku:

Bertold Brecht: Opera — with Innovations!

Dmitry Vilensky: Why Brecht?

Aleksandr Skidan: The Anachronism of Brecht

Janna Holmstedt: Are You Willing to Get Stupid?

Alice Creischer: Yearning for Brecht or for Undisguised Alienation

Ilya Kalinin: The Scenography of Capital

Esa Kirkkopelto / Artiom Magun: Brecht. Earth. Helsinki. December. Coffee. Cigarettes. Kirkkopelto. Magun.

David Riff: An Apology of the Obvious?

Bertold Brecht: In Praise of Dialectics

IZVOĐENJE PEDAGOŠKIH FIGURA/TELA

marta.popivoda — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 07:53:01 -0800

Polazna teoretizacija izvođenja pedagoških figura/tela

U zapadnoj tradiciji, od starih Grka pa do avangardi početkom 20. veka, uobičajeno su za umetnost vezivana dva ‘pedagoška’ očekivanja:
(1) očekivanje da umetničko delo ima nekakve funkcije u vaspitanju i obrazovanju građana, i
(2) očekivanje da postoji ‘poetički diskurs’ o stvaranju, postojanju i recepciji umetničkog dela kojim se podučavaju oni od kojih se očekuje da ‘stvaraju’ (autorski koncipiraju i izvode) delo.
Ovo su dve bitne, ali sekundarne funkcije umetničkog dela. Jer, tradicionalno zapadno umetničko delo (od Grka do avangardi) je bilo postavljeno u odnosu na neki, za njega određujući javni i opštevažeći metatekst kulture. Kod starih Grka, to su bili metatekstovi tradicijskih mitova, u hrišćanstvu je to bio biblijski metatekst, a u buržoaskom društvu 18. i 19. veka to je bio tekst filozofije ili politički tekstovi građanskog strukturiranja buržoaske javni i privatne sfere egzistencije. Sa uspostavljanjem buržoaskog horizonta društva, dolazi do velike deobe diskursa, ali i do njihovog istovremenog umnožavanja. Na primer, Max Weber je okarakterisao buržoasku modernost kao razdvajanje suštinskog razuma izraženog u religiji i metafizici na tri nezavisne oblasti: nauku, moral i umetnost. One su se izdvojile sa raspadom sjedinjenih pogleda-na-svet religije i metafizike. Time je došlo do umnožavanja tekstova u odnosu na koje je moglo da se odredi umetničko delo. Umnožavanje buržoaskih metatekstova i njihova institucionalna diferencijacija su uslovile da se umetnik našao pred mogućnošću izbora i konstruisanja različitih identiteta i sopstvenih kontekstualizacija ili dekontekstualizacija. Sa avangardama dolazi do atomizacije konteksta umetničkog rada, i umetnik nalazi sebe na praznom i brisanom prostoru istorije ili, uže, građenja istorijskog smisla. To se desilo u onom smislu u kome je Theodor W. Adorno konstatovao na samom početku svoje Estetičke teorije da se sada podrazumeva da ništa što se tiče umetnosti ne može više da se podrazumeva, ni sama umetnost u odnosu na celinu, pa čak ni pravo umetnosti da postoji. Umetnik je za taj prazni i više ne-referirajući-prostor moro da stvori stvarne ili hipotetičke ‘indekse’ prepoznavanja (imenovanja, verbalizacije, teoretizacije i poduke) koji će omogućiti ‘drugom’ (izolovanom, stranom, asimetričnom i modernom drugom) da kontekstualizuje i razumeva umetnički rad (izvođenje teatarskog dela). Nastala je situacija u kojoj je umetnik (dramski pisac, reditelj, koreograf, plesač, kompozitor ili muzičar-izvođač) bio prisiljen da stvara neizvesne ‘kognitivne mape’ (od manifesta preko autopetičkih i teorijskih iskaza do pedagoških praksi i teorija) okružja sopstvenog dela i sopstvenog javnog ili privatnog ponašanja i delovanja. Time je umetnik svoj rad (stvaranje, delovanje) postavio kao umetničko ili, čak, egzistencijalno ‘istraživanje’ koje je rezultiralo teorijsko-pedagoškim kontekstualizovanjem ili dekontekstualizovanjem sopstvenog rada ili ‘sveta umetnosti’. Bitna razlika između istraživačke ili neistraživačke umetnosti, prema Giuliu Carlu Arganu, počiva na činjenici da neistraživačka umetnost polazi od ustaljenih vrednosti, dok istraživačka umetnost teži utvrđivanju vrednosti i same sebe kao vrednosti. I, zato, često se dešavalo da se vrednost nije mogla pronaći ni u polaznom predlošku ni u rezultatu, već u metodologiji ili proceduralnosti ili procesu istraživanja i iz istraživanja uspostavljene poduke: “Rezultat ne mora biti postignut, ili možda nije vredan spomena, ili je možda prevaziđen u samom času kada se smatra da je postignut, ali proces istraživanja kvalificira se sam po sebi kao proces mišljenja, rada, ili, jednom riječi, ponašanja.” Uspostavljanjem teatarskog ili muzičkog umetničkog rada kao istraživanja postiže se da se pažnja pomeri sa dela (efekata dela, događaja koje izvođenje dela izaziva ili provocira) na praćenje procesa stvaranja (koncipiranja, pravljenja, konstruisanja, proizvođenja, izvođenja) dela. Drugim rečima, delo je otvoreno refleksiji. S druge strane, u teorijskoj psihoanalizi Jacquesa Lacana se iznosi eksplicitna tvrdnja: “Mi, pak, tvrdimo da se tehnika ne može shvatiti, pa prema tome ni ispravno primeniti, ako se ne poznaju pojmovi na kojima je zasnovana. Naš zadatak će biti da pokažemo da ovi pojmovi dobijaju svoj puni smisao samo kada se orijentišu na polje jezika, samo kada se uređuju prema funkciji govora.” Ako se ove reči primene na tradicionalnu ili modernu teatarsku i muzičku pedagogiju, dobija se avangardistički zahtev da se ‘tehnika poduke’ – uobičajeno postavljena kao objektivni i univerzalni formalni sistem izučavanja veštine ‘izvođenja’ – dovede preko ‘jezika’ kroz funkcije govora do forme razumevanja, kritike i, što je najvažnije, prepoznavanja poetičkih, umetničkih, teatarskih ili muzičkih gledišta (stavova, ubeđenja, verovanja, vrednosti ili, čak, ideologija). U dvadesetovekovnoj umetnosti tehnička poduka izvođača postaje uvođenje u diskurs, a to znači u područje konceptualnih, ideoloških, poetičkih i egzistencijalnih strukturacija činjenja i smisla.
Zadržimo se na tri karakteristična primera. Na primerima avangardne, neoavangardne i postpedagoške teatarske ili, šire, izvođačke pedagogije.

Avangardna laboratorijska pedagogija (Bauhaus, Rusi)

U avangardnom teatru se desio prelom i decentriranje koje je dovelo do narušavanja kriterijuma značenjske ‘transparentnosti’ teatarskog dela. Teatar je izgubio očigledne (ili normalne) kriterijume samorazumljivosti, a to znači direktne čitljivosti, time što su subvertirani, poremećeni ili odstranjeni metaokviri teatarskog dela unutar tradicije zapadnog teatra, a to su:
mimezis, kao kriterijum teatarskog pristupanja ili odstupanja od jasnog (uobičajenog, normalnog i normiranog) značenja, i
narativni ‘glatki’ kontinuitet ili samorazumevajući prelaz između dramskog i scenskog ‘teksta’[1].
Sa istupanjem iz metajezika mimezisa i prekidanjem kontinuuma dramskog i scenskog teksta dolazi do gubljenja: (a) teatarskog dela kao ciljne tačke i (b) teatarskog dela kao posrednika u receptivnom procesu doživljavanja i razumevanja dela. Sam rad na ‘teatarskom događaju’ zato postaje autoreferencijalni eksperiment u kome umetnik istražuje i pokazuje svoj proces rada i moguće puteve otkrivanja novog i nepoznatog u teatru ili odnosu teatra i društva. Ta situacija omogućava da se rad na ‘teatarskom događaju’ preobrazi od pripreme teatarske predstave u istraživanje puteva koji vode ka zamišljenoj, idealnoj ili novoj-i-neočekivanoj predstavi. Sam teatarski ‘radnik’ prestaje da bude stvaralac koji izražava ili prikazuje ‘nešto’ stvarno ili fikcionalno kao ono bitno, već postaje istraživač mogućnosti konstruisanja (postavljanja, izvođenja) teatarskih događaja (event) u odnosu na svet. U tom smislu, na primer, Meyerhold se usredsređuje na proučavanje mehanike tela, Schlemmer na matematičke (ili kao matematičke) modele figure u prostoru, Hirschfeld-Mack na mašine za komponovanje i izvođenje svetlosnih događaja itd… U ovom okviru se ukazuje da:
(1) teatarski rad biva povezan sa zamislima naučnog (ili, preciznije, kao naučnog) istraživanja, čime se ukazuje na veliku avangardističku zamisao o sintezi nauke i umetnosti koja se odigrava kroz preobražaja ‘teatarskog estetskog izvođenja’ u ‘naučni eksperiment’;
(2) mesto teatarskog eksperimenta, zato više nije javni promotivni prostor teatra, već izuzetni prostor laboratorije (najčešće školske laboratorije), gde se ‘predstava’ izvodi kao ‘naučno artikulisani proces’ za stručnjake ili saučesnike; i
(3) rezultat nije ‘umetničko teatarsko delo’ sa svojim estetskim efektima, već stvaranje novih i izuzetnih uzoraka koji se postavljaju kao paradigmatski primerci ili, čak, prototipovi razumevanja, teoretisanja ili doživljavanja budućeg teatra, budućeg teatarskog rada ili budućeg teatarskog dela.
Na primer, u Bauhausu se teatarski laboratorijski eksperiment kretao od izučavanja novog plesa do teatra (ili muzike) svetlosti. Pri tome, istraživani su sasvim različiti aspekti teatra u rasponu od formalnog konstruisanja scenskog figurativnog prizora preko istraživanja javnih funkcija teatra (cirkus, varijete, teatar) do arhitektonskih pitanja o sceni i zgradi teatra. Izučavanje je uspostavljano kao specifična vrsta praktičnog rada na, sa i u teatru koja je bila reflektovana do pozitivnog znanja. Laboratorijski teatarski rad se ukazao kao proces:
(a) izdvajanja ‘teatarskog istraživanja’ iz masovne popularne kulture koja je za avangardne strategije bila važna (uloga cirkusa i kabarea u ekspresionizmu, futurizmu, dadi) i uvođenje u kontekst akademskog-obrazovnog-rada, i
(b) akademizacije avangardnih eksperimenata i ekscesa uvođenjem ‘novog dela’ u sistem visokog umetničkog obrazovanja, što ima za posledicu preobražaj ‘ne-normativne’ prakse avangardi kao izuzetnih marginalnih elitnih grupa u ‘normativnu’ masovnu modernističku kulturu.

Neoavangardne teatarske i anti-pedagoške taktike

Neoavangardni teatar se uobičajeno tumači kao razvoj ili remake ili obnova ‘tendencija’ istorijskih avangardi nakon Drugog svetskog rata[2]. Drugim rečima, istraživanja i akcije unutar teatra i performans arta 50ih i 60ih godina se posmatraju kao obnove ili produžeci (repovi) autentičnih eksperimenata ekspresionista, futurista, dadaista, konstruktivista ili Artaudovih i Brechtovih inovacija. Naprotiv, moja teza o neoavangardnom teatru glasi: neoavangardni teatar nije remake teatarskih ili parateatarskih (performerskih) inovacija i utopija istorijskih avangardi, već politički (ili češće para-politički) odgovor na dominatne (mainstream) koncepcije velikog dramskog modernističkog teatra i, uopšteno govoreći, visoke umetnosti poznog modernizma i njihovih kanonizacija i fetišizacija zatvorenog, celovitog i autonomnog ekspresivnog/egzistencijalnog scenskog i vanscenskog dela. Dok je istorijska avangarda bila predvodnica nastajuće buržoaske moderne na prelazu 19. u 20. vek i početkom 20. veka, neoavangarda je sredinom 20. veka postala reakcija na kanone i ontološki fundamentalizam i esencijalizam velikog pobedničkog i vladajućeg (hegemonog) modernizma. Karakteristično je za neoavangarde da bitni prevratnički impuls neoavangardi nastaje u okviru umetničkih škola; na primer, američki happening, neodada, i fluxus nastaju na Black Mountain Collegu suočenjem evropskih avangardnih umetnika u egzilu (Joseph Albers, Anni Albers i Xanti Schawinsky) i američkih eksperimentalnih umetnika nastajuće neoavangarde (arhitekta Buckminster Fuller, kompozitor John Cage, koreograf i plesač Merce Cunningham, slikari Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns ili Allan Kaprow). Prenos evropskih zamisli ‘avangardne bauhausovske inovacije’ na nivou novih tehničkih medija u američkim uslovima biva povezana – a to je Cageova zasluga – sa uticajima Duchampovih ‘taktika i strategija antiumetnosti’ i filozofsko-religioznim prenosima zen budizma u zapadne umetničke ‘taktike’ ponašanja kroz ukazivanja na levičarske zamisli provokacije, kritike i emancipacije svakodnevnog života. Cageova predavanja, držana sredinom 50ih u New School for Social Research omogućila su uspostavljanje ‘nove američke avangarde’ ili preciznije ‘nove eksperimentalne umetnosti’. Ta nova umetnost (neodada, fluksus, hepening, eksperimentalna muzika, eksperimentalni teatar, mixed theatre) je nastajala na preobražaju:
(a) pozitivne (utopijske, popularizatorske) pedagogije umetničkih modernističkih škola (učenje zasnovano na stvaralačko-tehničkim principima obrazovanja talentovanog stvaraoca) u anarhičnu antipedagogiju preobrazbe ‘procesa poduke’ u konceptualno-bihevioralnu ‘igru’ revolucionarnog oslobađanja i emancipacije,
(b) modernističke pedagogije usmerene na ‘završeno delo’ u situaciju omogućavanja i artikulacije ili deartikulacije stvaranja kao ‘životne aktivnosti’ koja se uspostavlja kroz otvorena činjenja (happening), događaje (event) ili akcije (action).
I, zaista, u toj novoj anarhičnoj situaciji dolazi do gubljenja granica između umetničkih disciplina, kao i gubljenja granica između pedagoške poduke, samog svakodnevnog življenja i izuzetnih anarhičnih provokativnih načina ponašanja. Nastajali su različiti eksperimenti: demonstrativno izvedene taktike seksualne emancipacije (masturbacija, heteroseksualni, homoseksualni, biseksualni odnosi) kod Carolee Schneemann ili učenja za život po Gestalt psihoterapiji u hepeninzima (sa svlačenjem, oblačenjem, uzimanjem hrane, haptičkim odnosima) koje je priređivala Ann Halprin. Skulptor, pripadnik evropskog Fluxusa i jedan od pionira performance arta Joseph Beuys je tokom 1960ih i 70ih godina zasnovao složen sistem spiritualnog, političkog i umetničkog školovanja na Akademiji u Dizeldorfu. Beuys je na lucidan način povezao antiumetničke inovativne post-duchampovske strategije antiumetnosti sa antropozofskim učenjima Rudolfa Steinera i levičarskim akcionizmom i pro-terorističkim anti-institucionalizmom nemačke omladine kasnih 60ih godina. Njegov sistem obrazovanja se zasnivao na uspostavljanju ‘socijalne skulpture’ u kojoj umetnik-šaman (tj. on: Joseph Beuys) obećava i pokušava da izvede preobražaj modernog otuđenog individuuma u revolucionarnog stvaralačkog subjekta.

Jedna posebna priča o pedagogiji se može ispričati o transformacijama ‘belog’ baleta u ‘bosi’ ili ‘avangardni’ balet (Isidora Duncan, Marry Wigman, Rudolf von Laban) u prvoj polovini 20. veka i transformacijama modernog baleta (Martha Graham) u neoavangardni ples (Merce Cunningham) i neoavangardnog plesa u minimalistički ples (koreografi, igrači i igračice oko Judson Dance Theatera) u drugoj polovini 20. veka. U ‘belom’ baletu je uloga koreografa i igrača određena statusom učesnika u realizaciji estetskog događaja koji je uokviren horizontom estetskog efekta. U ‘belom’ baletu obuka koreografa i igrača, zato jeste, uvek i dominantno tehnička obuka za ‘stvaranje’ estetske (čitaj: lepe) situacije i događaja. U ‘bosonogom’ plesu ‘izvođač/izvođačica’ (koreograf, koreografkinja, igrač, igračica) emancipuje se od ‘radnika na tehnici’ u autora/autorku (radnika/radnicu na konceptima plesa). Time dolazi do obrta u kome nosilac plesnog rada postaje subjekt koji koncipira ne samo tehnička očekivanja, već i uspostavlja diskurs koji tehnička očekivanja smešta i dovodi u odnos sa religioznim, političkim, erotskim ili svakodnevnim delovanjem. U tom smislu ‘učitelj’ (na primer, Isidora Duncan ili Rudlof von Laban) jeste ‘praktičar’ koji uči posebnoj vrsti plesa ili igre; zatim osoba koja teoretizuje taj rad i dovodi ga do poetičkog diskursa; i, zatim, koja taj poetički diskurs povezuje sa sistemom života i delovanja u svakodnevici. Avangardni učitelji plesa jesu neka vrsta ‘mesije’. Naprotiv, američka modernistička plesačica i koreografkinja Martha Graham ili eksperimentalni neoavangardni plesač i koreograf Merce Cunnigham jesu veliki majstori umetnosti koji ukazuju na auto-emancipaciju svog rada i na moguće konceptualizacije plesa u odnosu na druge umetnosti (muziku, teatar, književnost, slikarstvo, skulpturu itd). Sa nastankom neformalne i otvorene igračke institucije Judson Dance Theater (1962-64) dolazi do bitnog obrta, pri čemu se gubi uloga učitelja, stvaralački i pedagoški rad se stapaju u kolektivno (saradničko) istraživanje, a institucija učenja se pretvara u instituciju vežbe ili radionice u kojoj sarađuju koreografi i plesači (Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Alex Hay, Debora Hay, Steve Paxton) i umetnici drugih umetnosti (skulptor Robert Morris, slikar Robert Rauschenberg). U krugu minimalista se pedagoški proces ukazuje kao proces rada i kao proces kolektivnog i saradničkog istraživanja i učenja kroz istraživanje.

U transformacijama teatarske poduke vezane za neoavangardna teatarska istraživanja Jerzy Grotowskog, Living Theatera, Richarda Schechnera i Eugenija Barbe se uspostavljaju sistemi ‘inicijacija individualnog izvođača’ kroz istraživanja tela, ponašanja, prirode i ljudske mikrozajednice u svetu. Kod ovih autora se težište rada pomera sa ‘javnog izvođenja’ na proces laboratorijskog (Grotowski) ili radioničkog (Schechner) ili kao-komunarskog (Living Theater) rada. Karakterističan je prelazak sa duhovne i psihološke ekspresije kao temelja modernističkog izražavanja (artaudovski ‘psihološki izraz’ kroz telo izvođača) na poznomodernističke taktike ‘izražajnosti tela u bihevioralnom procesu’ (telesni teatar: od siromašnog teatra Grotowskog preko telesno-političkog rada livingovaca do antropološkog ‘paranaučnog’ istraživanja Schechnera ili Barbe). ‘Pedagoški proces’ izveden u formi laboratorijskog istraživanja ili vežbanja u radionicama jednako je važan i paralelan završenim i izvedenim predstavama. Na primer, kod Grotowskog se vremenom gubi potreba za javnim izvođenjem predstava, jer sam ‘rad’ je ostvaren i realizovan već tokom istraživanja. Zato se ova vrsta preobražaja teatarskog rada u kao-pedagoški istraživački rad može razumeti kao odbacivanje svega onoga što može izazvati ‘predstavu’ da bi se kroz proces dospelo do osmoze između vitalnog i mentalnog. Rad u teatru se, primarno, shvata kao podstrek za neprekidnim verifikovanjem umetnikovog mentalnog i fizičkog postojanja, kako bi se odstranila mreža predstava koje teatar vode od ‘događaja’ do ‘predstave’. Odatle se proces učenja i proces izvođenja poistovećuju kao postupci suočenja sa mogućnostima fiziciranja i bihevioralizacijama teatarske ili vanteatarske (političke, mitsko-ritualne, etnološke) zamisli. Autor-akter-učenik-učitelj se stavlja u središte između zamisli i događaja – on postaje protagonista koji na svom telu pokazuje (svojim ponašanjem) ono što uči i otkriva u prirodi i kulturi. Karakteristični paradoks ovih novih ‘antropoloških istraživanja’ je moćna (šamanistička i gotovo diktatorska) uloga učitelja (Grotowski, Schechner, Barba) i, istovremeni, zahtev za emancipacijom, oslobođenjem i individualnošću aktera (glumca, igrača, izvođača ili gledaoca).

Postpedagogija

Pojam ‘postpedagogija’ je izveo američki deridijanac Gregory L. Umler u vezi sa koncepcijama ‘scene pisanja’ Jacquesa Derride, a primenio ga je na sasvim različite ‘autore’, kao što se u psihoanalitičar Jacques Lacan, skulptor i performans umetnik Joseph Beuys, filmski reditelj Sergei Eisenstein i pozorišni reditelj Antonin Artaud. Za Ulmera pojam postpedagogije (post/e/-pedagogy) ukazuje na kretanje preko konvencionalne pedagogije do uspostavljanja pedagogije u eri elektronskih medija.
Ja ću u ovom tekstu postpedagogijom označiti nekoliko različitih mogućnosti:
(1) otvaranje tradicionalnog pedagoškog procesa (procesa prenosa ‘ideja’ /znanja/ od učitelja na učenike) ka istraživačkom ili bihevioralnom radu ravnopravnih saradnika koji uče jedni od drugih[3],
(2) anarhističko destruisanje kanona, pravila, kriterijuma i zakona pedagogije, na način izvođenja pedagoške situacije kao ludističkog i emancipatorskog čina stvaranja[4],
(3) poništavanje (destrukcija, dekonstrukcija, relativizacija, decentraliziranje, relativizacija odnosa margine i centra) sopstvenog statusa ‘učitelja kao posednika znanja’[5],
(4) postavljanje teorijskog ili pedagoškog predavanja kao otvorenog, nomadskog i interaktivnog umetničkog dela[6],
(5) izvođenje teorijskog, autopoetičkog ili pedagoškog predavanja kao ‘događaja’ koji se ne može precizno identifikovati kao predavanje u teorijskom smislu, kao umetničko delo (meta-predstava) ili kao neka vrsta promotivne radionice[7],
(6) postavljanje čina teorijskog izlaganja kao scenskog događaja ili na način scenskog događaja sa razradom posebnih retoričko-verbalnih, bihevioralnih (telesno-gestualnih) i medijskih (upotreba reproduktivnih medija oprimerenja stavova) primera ili artikulacija-i-atrakcija na sceni izlaganja (predavanja i poduke)[8],
(7) postavljanje čina teorijskog izlaganja u sistem medijskih reproduktivnih komunikacija (radio, televizija, LP ploče ili CDi)[9],
(8) izvođenje teorijskog čina izlaganja u sistem interaktivnih elektronskih medija (kompjuterske mreže ili tehnike multimedije i VR /virtuelne realnosti/)[10], drugim rečima, ovde postoji mogućnost očekivanja odziva slušaoca i njegovog intervenisanja u okviru predloženih predavačevih tema i eksplikacija,
(9) uspostavljanje bilo koje umetničke prakse kao osnovnog modela (tela) kojim se izvodi prikazivanje, zastupanje, demonstriranje ili označiteljsko izvođenje (testiranje) teorijskih pretpostavki i mogućnosti, to znači da se pokazuje sredstvima umetnosti kako se uspostavlja teorijski metagovor (pedagoški nivo) i kako se u metagovor uvode označitelji (lanci, mreže) koji pokazuju kako metagovor biva nemoguć, ali postoji i inverzni put koji pokazuje kako se teorija uvodi u umetnost posredstvom performerskih i teatarskih taktika, odnosno, kako se za teoriju konstruišu stvarna ili prividna tela ‘od’ tragova umetnosti.[11]

Verovatno su mogući i drugi različiti primeri. Ali, ono što je bitno za razumevanje postpedagogije jeste da se ‘pojam’ pedagogije redefiniše (transformiše, transfiguriše) kao ‘produktivna praksa izvođenja’ na stvarnoj ili fikcionalnoj ‘sceni’ (ekranu). Pri tome, pedagoški čin nije prenošenje jednog ‘kristalisanog znanja’ od jednog subjekta (subjekta-gospodara znanja) ka drugom subjektu (subjektu-bez-znanja), već jeste uspostavljanje mogućnosti da različiti individuumi na konceptualno demonstrativan način konstruišu sebe i drugog kao subjekta znanja posredstvom teorijskih, umetničkih ili kulturno-medijskih materijalnih aparatusa. Reč je, zapravo, o dinamičnim interaktivnim epistemologijama ili teoriji na delu.

Literatura

Terry Atkinson, Michel Baldwin, “The Index”, iz The New Art, Hayward Gallery, 1972, str.16-19.
Rose Lee Goldberg, Performance. Live Art 1909 to the Present, Thames and Hudson, London, 1979.
Cvetan Todorov, “Poslednji Bart”, Delo br. 7, Beograd, 1982, str. 110-116.
Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology. Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1985.
Fluxus - Izbor tekstova, MSU, Beograd, 1986.
Selma Jeanne Cohen (ed), Ples kao kazališna umjetnost. Čitanka za povjest plesa od 1581. do danas, Cekade, Zagreb, 1988.
Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body, Judson Dance Theter 1962-1964, Duke University Press, Durnham, 1993.
Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre 1892-1992, Routledge, London and New York, 1993.
Michael Huxley, Noel Witts (ed), The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, Routledge, London, 1996.
Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Farkas Molnar, The Theater of the Bauhaus, The John Hokins University Press, Baltimore, 1996.
Euđenio Barba, Nikola Savareze, Tajna umetnost glumca. Rečnik pozorišne antropologije, Institut FDU, Beograd, 1996.
RoseLee Goldberg, Performance.Live Art Since the 60s, Thames and Hudson, London, 1998.
Johannes Birringer, Media & Performance. Along the Border, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1998.

NB: slovenačka i engleska verzija teksta: Maska, št. 72/3, Ljubljana, 2002.

[1] Ukazuje se na razliku i moguće odvajanje verbalnog (pisanog, govorenog, odnosno, razlučujućeg) i fenomenološkog (pojavnog, sada-i-ovde) teksta u teatarskoj praksi 1910ih i 20ih godina. Drugim rečima, kao da su rane avangarde razdvojile svetove dramskog (lingvističkog, verbalnog) i svetove telesnog (fizičkog, bihevioralnog) teatra.
[2] To je teorijska koncepcija koju je postavio Peter Bűrger u svojoj teoriji avangarde.
[3] Taj proces učenja kroz istraživanje je razrađen u grupi Art&Language početkom 70ih godina. Na primer, Therry Atkinson i Michel Baldwin ga definišu sledećom shemom: “Searched by the index of = y) x learns a from y and x$def. A-L(x)(if x is a member of A-L then (( y))”.
[4] Na primer, različite strategije Johna Cagea tokom njegovih univerzitetskih predavanja. Jedan takav postpedagoski gest je davanje najviše ocene ‘A’ na početku držanja kursa bez provere znanja koja se obično vrši na kraju kursa.
[5] Na primer, Cvetan Todorov o kasnom Rolandu Barthesu govori kao o ‘misliocu’ i ‘piscu’ koji obara diskurs učitelja. On kaže da Barthesove knjige nisu izlaganje ideja, nego verbalni gestovi (action writing). On kaže da se Barthes razvija od teroriste (onog koji konstruiše, menja i nudi epistemologiju) u egositu (onoga ko uživa u epistemologiji).
[6] Na primer, predavanja Josepha Beuysa koja su izvođena kao umetnički događaj (performance, happening, akcija).
[7] Na primer, predavanja Roberta Wilsona koja on drži kao neku vrstu pedagoškog ili teorijskog performansa tematizujući i tumečeći svoju teatarsku poetiku.
[8] Ovom vrstom predavačkog rada su se bavili mnogi. Mogu se, u modernoj, navesti predavanja Martina Heideggera ili Ludwiga Witgensteina, o čemu postoje brojne anegdote. Na primer, o Heideggerovom pevanju ili Wittgensteinovom ležanju na podu učionice dok predaje. Ali, zamisao konceptualno namerene teatralizacije predavačko-pedagoškog čina se može otkriti u Lacanovima predavanjima o matemima ili njegovom televizijskom nastupu i predavanju koje je držao za mediji televizije o samoj televiziji. Tu se mogu navesti i predavanja filozofa Jacquesa Derride, filozofa Petera Sloterdijka, teoretičara kultrure Borisa Groysa…
[9] Mnogobrojni primeri se mogu navesti od Johna Cagea do Jacuesa Lacana, Jacquesa Derride ili Salvoja Žižeka.
[10] Primeri su različiti i mogu se naći mnogobrojni net-artisti ili teoretičari čiji se rad posredstvom mreže komunicira. kroz pedagoške moduse (na primer, critical art ensemble).
[11] Primer su teorijsko-teatarski ili teorijsko performerski radovi TkH: Teorije koja Hoda. TkH je radila sa teorijskim konstrukcijama koje je realizovala kroz javno (performersko) izvođenje da bi pokazala telo teorije.

PREMA TEHNO-HUMANISTICI: manifest

marta.popivoda — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 06:25:22 -0800

STVARALAČKA STRANA HUMANISTIKE još uvek nije naišla na prihvatanje u zvaničnoj klasifikaciji i metodologiji naučnih disciplina. Da li je humanistika oblast koja se bavi isključivo izučavanjem, ili bi u njoj trebalo da bude i aktivnog, konstruktivnog dopunjavanja? Znamo da tehnologija služi kao praktično proširivanje ("primenjivanje") prirodnih nauka, kao što je politika proširivanje društvenih nauka.

I tehnologija i politika su osmišljene da bi transformisale ono što njihove zasebne discipline objektivno proučavaju. Postoji li neka aktivnost u humanistici koja bi mogla da bude saobrazna ovoj transformativnoj funkciji tehnologije i politike? U navedenoj shemi, treća linija ukazuje na prazno mesto, nagoveštavajući sporan položaj praktičnih primena humanistike.

priroda - prirodne nauke - tehnologija - transformacija prirode
društvo - društvene nauke - politika - transformacija društva
kultura - humanističke nauke - ______ - transformacija kulture

Između teorijskih i praktičnih disciplina postoji logična veza u odnosu prema istraživanju i transformisanju prirode i društva. Međutim, treća linija sugeriše da nam je potrebna praktična oblast humanistike koja funkcioniše kao tehnologija i politika, a svojstvena je kulturalnom domenu.

Kako bismo je nazvali? Ponekad je imenovanje najbolji put da bi se odredio ili, čak, rešio problem; sam naziv sadrži embrion koncepta i početak buduće teorije. Predložiću nekoliko termina koji bi mogli biti delotvorni u tom praznom prostoru (trenutna embrionska faza teoretizacije čini budućnost otvorenom za višestruke mogućnosti).

"Kulturonika" bi se odnosila na disciplinu koja se kulturom bavi praktično, po matrici "elektronike", "bionike", "avionike", "tektonike", "mnemonike" i ostalih "primenjenih", konstruktivnih disciplina. "Pragmo-humanistika" sugeriše da humanistika poseduje pragmatičnu stranu koja reguliše odnose između njenih aktera i korisnika, njenih autora i primalaca. "Trans-humanistika" ukazuje da ova grupa praktičnih disciplina - translingvistika, transestetika, transpoetika, itd. – teži da trans-formiše ona područja kulture koja su proučavana putem odgovarajućih naučnih/filozofskih disciplina kao što su lingvistika, estetika i poetika.

Među ovim trans-disciplinama, jedna od najširih primena može biti pripisana translingvistici, jer ona stvara veštačke jezike ili uvodi nova usmerenja u razvoj prirodnih jezika. Očigledno, projekat dr Ludwika Lejzera Zamenhofa, internacionalni jezik esperanto, ne pripada polju lingvistike u pravom smislu te discipline, iako potiče iz intenzivnog bavljenja lingvistikom. Komparativna analiza postojećih jezika omogućila je Zamenhofu da sintetizuje novi jezik, kombinujući u njegovoj gramatici i rečniku elemente romanskih, germanskih i slovenskih jezika.

U prvoj polovini 20. veka, pre nego što je engleski postao preovlađujući jezik u internacionalnoj komunikaciji, esperanto je imao veliku šansu da postane lingua franca moderne civilizacije; čak i sada se njime služi više miliona korisnika. Translingvistika pokriva oblast kojoj pripadaju tzv. konstruisani internacionalni jezici (volapik, ido, Okcidentalni), fikcionalni jezici (klingon iz serije Zvezdane staze; quenya i sindarin u Tolkienovim knjigama), i specijalizovani jezici različitih disciplina (matematika, logika, lingvistika), kao i jezici za kompjutersko programiranje i komunikaciju čovek-mašina.

Najzad, termin "tehno-humanistika" bi referirao na umetnost humanistike. Ona uključuje umetnost građenja novih intelektualnih zajednica, novih paradigmi mišljenja i načina komunikacije pre nego jednostavno proučavanje ili kritikovanje proizvoda kulture. Trebali bismo imati na umu da humanistika konstituiše nivo meta-umetnosti, različite od primarnih umetnosti: slikarstva, poezije ili muzike, koje čine predmet humanističkog istraživanja. Činjenica da humanistika pripada ovom meta-diskurzivnom nivou ne isključuje njenu praktičnu, proizvodnu orjentaciju. Humanistika ne proizvodi umetnička dela već nove kulturalne pozicije, pokrete, perspektive i moduse refleksivnosti.

Koncept "tehno-humanistike" ne nagoveštava da humanistika treba da se prilagodi zamisli "tehne" iz naučne tehnologije; upravo suprotno, tehnologija je ta koja je ukrala "tehnu" (gr. techne - "zanat, veština, umeće") od humanistike. Sada je došlo vreme za njenu reaproprijaciju. Koristeći ovaj termin "tehne", ne nameravamo da "sajentizujemo" humanistiku, već, naprotiv, da je približimo umetnosti i kreativnosti u sferi ideja i komunikacija. Kada nudimo određenu teoriju, potrebno je da se zapitamo da li je ona sposobna da inauguriše novu kulturalnu praksu, umetnički pokret, disciplinarno polje, novu instituciju, životni stil, ili intelektualnu zajednicu?

Reintegracijom "tehne", tehno-humanistika upotpunjava projekat nauka o čoveku konceptom humanističkih umetnosti. Dok se primarne umetnosti, kao što su poezija, slikarstvo, teatar, itd. proučavaju u okviru nauka o čoveku, sekundarne, humanističke umetnosti nisu predmeti nauka o čoveku, već njihova konstruktivna proširenja, transformativne prakse izgrađene na temeljima naučnih otkrića i teorija.

Primarne umetnosti su transformativne prakse usmerene prema materijalnim objektima ili prirodnim jezicima (tj. kao što ih je Yury Lotman nazvao, "primarnim označavajućim sistemima"). Na primer, skulptura transformiše kamen, ples i teatar – ljudsko telo, poezija – prirodni jezik. Humanističke ili nauke o čoveku su uspostavljene da bi proučavale ove primarne umetnosti i gradile određene teorije i generalizacije na njihovim osnovama. Tehno-humanistika konstituiše treći, post-teorijski nivo kulturalne aktivnosti, odnosno, raznovrsne prakse koje teže da rekonfigurišu elemente prethodna dva nivoa.

Na primer, ruski simbolizam je integrisao kulturalnu aktivnost na sva tri nivoa: prvo, kroz poeziju i prozu; drugo, putem opšte teorija simbola i njenom primenom na pisanje simbolista; i treće, transformativnim praksama koje su proizašle iz simbolističke teorije. To uključuje produkciju manifesta, kritičkih i novinarskih spisa, polemika, organizaciju javnih događanja (koncerata, čitanja, diskusija) i novih časopisa i publikacija, stvaranje simbolističkog miljea, kao i širenje simbolizma u različite umetničke i intelektualne krugove. Sve ove prakse mogu biti identifikovane kao konstitutivne za tehno-humanistiku, odnosno humanističku umetnost.

Postojeća podela kulture na primarne prakse i naučne teorije je nepotpuna i ne dopušta odgovarajuću definiciju stvaralačkih doprinosa od strane mnogih aktera kulture. Na primer, glavni predstavnici ruskog srebrnog doba – Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely – bili su i pisci i teoretičari. Ali, tu je i treći faktor u njihovom radu koji se ne nalazi kod samih pisaca (kao što su Chekhov ili Leskov) ili naučnika (kao što su Veselovsky ili Potebnia). Oni nisu jednostavno proizvodili ili samo istraživali književnost, već su i proširivali granice književnog pristupa prema teoretskoj zamisli njegovih mogućnosti. Pisali su simbolističke pesme, rasprave i manifeste. Stvorili su program simbolizma kao širokog kulturalnog pokreta, uključujući u njega umetničke, estetičke, mističke i društvene komponente.

Za razliku od humanistike, koja proučava postojeće kulture, tehno-humanistika istražuje ono što još uvek ne postoji. Ona projektuje i proizvodi moguće kulturalne objekte i forme aktivnosti, uključujući nove umetničke i intelektualne pokrete, nove discipline, istražuje metodologije i filozofske sisteme, nove stilove ponašanja, društvene rituale, semiotičke kodove i intelektualne tendencije.

Da tehno-humanistika nije konstrukt samo našeg vremena pokazano je kroz kulturalne zajednice italijanskih humanista, nemačkih romantičara, američkih transcendentalista, italijanskih i ruskih futurista, francuskih nadrealista... Bitno svojstvo ovakvih kulturalnih grupa jeste generisanje njihovih stvaralačkih praksa na osnovama određenih teorija. U poznom 20. veku, na tehno-humanizam u Rusiji je ukazao Dmitry Likhachev u svom radu na "ekološkom" očuvanju kulturalne memorije; Yury Lotman kroz razvoj semiotičke svesti i sistematsko istraživanje i transformisanje semiosfere; Georgy Shchedrovitsky putem uključivanja refleksivne metodologije ("misao-akcija", "mysledeiatelnost") u obrazovanje, arhitekturu, dizajn i ekonomiju.

Navešću jedan podrobniji primer onoga što podrazumevam pod tehno-humanistikom. Glavna saznanja književne teorije, ako proučavamo njene inovativne ideje i vrhunska dostignuća, ne nalaze se u naučnim monografijama ili člancima, već u književnim manifestima. Oni su proizvodi teorijske imaginacije, pre nego empirijske studije i naučna ispitivanja. Manifesti neoklasicizma, romantizma, naturalizma, futurizma, nadrealizma, itd. nemaju uporište u istraživačkoj disciplini, u "pažljivoj, sistematičnoj, strpljivoj studiji i potrazi u nekoj od oblasti znanja", kao što je to definisano u Websterovom rečniku. Manifesti nisu ni faktualni ni fikcionalni – oni su formativni.

Oni teže da proizvedu nove naučne činjenice, pre nego da uoče i analiziraju stanja, prošla i sadašnja. U okviru kojih postojećih akademskih kategorija se ova konstruktivna aktivnost teorije može smestiti? Da li ona pripada oblasti naučne ili književne fikcije? Očigledno, ni jednoj od njih. Odgovarajuće mesto za nju je upravo u još uvek neoznačenom području teorijskih izuma, tehno- ili trans-humanistike.

Humanistika treba da usvoji oba modusa konceptualne aktivnosti prepoznate u naukama: otkriće nekog od postojećih principa i činjenica, i invenciju onih oruđa i ideja koje mogu transformisati dato područje proučavanja. "Izumevanje", kao modus kreativnosti, treba da postane nerazdvojivi pratilac istraživanja u humanistici, kao što je to tehnologija za nauku. Tako, tehno-humanistika ili trans-humanistika se, Bakhtinovim rečima, može odrediti kao "ko-kreativnost onih koji razumeju [kulturu]", kao konstruktivni i transformativni potencijal kulturalnih teorija.[1]

Naše akademske institucije, ipak, nemaju razumevanja za ovako neobične trase konceptualne kreativnosti. Postoje odseci za naučnu i književnu teoriju, za fikcionalno i kreativno pisanje, ali ne i za konstruktivno pisanje "praktične teorije", ne za tehno-humanistiku. Da li postoji institucija u savremenoj akademiji u kojoj bi se takvi kreativni mislioci, književni izumitelji i graditelji, kao što su Friedrich Schlegel, Vissarion Belinsky ili André Breton, mogli razvijati kao profesionalci? Paradoksalno, njihovi stavovi, dela i biografije se smatraju vrednim opširnog i pažljivog akademskog studiranja; dok će veoma konstruktivne podsticaje njihovih spisa, koji pripadaju "inventivnom" žanru, nedostatak odgovarajućih dokumentarnih dokaza i primena naučnog "aparata" držati izvan akademije.

Ovaj paradoks može se porediti sa nemogućim scenarijom u kome bi univerzitet isključio inženjersku školu ili odsek zbog toga što, za razliku od odseka za fiziku ili hemiju, radi sa izumima umesto sa otkrićima. A inženjering u humanistici nije manje značajan.

Neuspeh u prepoznavanju kognitivnog statusa tehno-humanistike otvara pitanje da li su različiti intelektualni kapaciteti adekvatno reprezentovani i integrisani na našim univerzitetima? Prema Alfred North Whiteheadu, "zadatak Univerziteta je stvaranje budućnosti, kao i racionalne misli, civilizovanog načina uvažavanja, što može uticati na potomstvo."[2] Naučna inventivnost, čak mnogo direktnije nego naučno proučavanje, uobličava našu kulturalnu budućnost. Iako mu se retrospektivno pridaje tako visok značaj, zbog čega je teorijsko izumevanje odbačeno i na savremenoj akademiji?

Prepoznavanje konstruktivnog potencijala humanistike nije dovoljno. Bakhtinova metodološka sagledavanja pomažu nam da specificiramo karakter kognitivne aktivnosti u humanistici kao drugačiju od one u naukama. Sve do ove tačke, tendencija u "primenjenoj humanistici", ukoliko je bila pozvana da dokaže svoju praktičnu vrednost, bila je tehnologizacija ili politizacija ovih disciplina, odnosno, njihovo svođenje na praktične modalitete prirodnih ili društvenih nauka. Humanistika, ipak, ima svoj sopstveni konstruktivni potencijal koji odgovara njenom jedinstvenom objektu. Bakhtin je okarakterisao ovaj objekt kao "ekspresivno i govoreće biće [vyrazitel’noe i govoriashchee bytie]. Ovo biće se nikada ne podudara sa sobom, i zato je neiscrpno u otkrivanju svog značenja i značajnosti."[3]
Bakhtin zatim ukazuje da:

"[Postoje] različiti načini bivanja aktivnim u kognitivnoj aktivnosti: aktivnost onoga ko prihvata nemu stvar [kao u prirodnim naukama] i aktivnost onoga ko prihvata drugi subjekt [kao u naukama o čoveku], to jest, dijaloška aktivnost primaoca."[4]

Sledeći Bakhtinovo zapažanje o dijaloškoj aktivnosti saznanja, možemo izdvojiti specifičnu grupu iskaza, koje nazivam transformativnim, a koji su ključni za logiku i etiku humanističkog diskursa. Transformativni iskazi saopštavaju nešto što menja sam proces komunikacije i uloge njegovih učesnika. "Volim te" je primer transformativnog iskaza, jer referira na odnos između sagovornika i radikalno menja ovaj odnos u trenutku svog iskazivanja.

Humanistički diskurs, kao i bilo koji diskurs prirodnih ili društvenih nauka, obraća se ljudskim individuama. Ali, jedino humanistički diskurs uzima ljudske individue i njihovu kreativnost kao svoju glavnu sadržinu. Zbog toga humanistički diskurs nije samo informativan. On je potencijalno transformativan, kao što je to i izjavljivanje ljubavi (ili mržnje); upućen je subjektu o kome govori. Aktivnost u humanistici se razlikuje od tehnološke ili političke aktivnosti po tome što ona nije usmerena ka materijalnim objektima ili društvenim masama, već ka kreativnim i odazivajućim pojedincima, angažujući ih u događajima stvaralačke komunikacije. Tehnologizovati ili politizovati humanistiku znači ignorisati njene specifičnosti.

Mikhail N. Epštajn je Samuel Candler Dobbs profesor Teorije kulture i Ruske književnosti na Emory Univerzitetu. Epštajn je osnivač Laboratorije za savremenu kulturu u Moskvi. Autor je inteLneta i petnaestak knjiga.

[1] Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, prev. Vern McGee, University of Texas Press, Ostin, 1992, str. 142.
[2] A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, The Macmillan Co, Njujork, 1938, str. 233.
[3] "K filosofskim osnovam gumanitarnyx nauk,” u M. M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, Russkie slovari, Moskva, 1997, sv. 5, str. 8.
[4] M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, str. 161.