Open Philosophy 2024; 7: 20240039
Research Article
Yoav Ronel*
Zaniness, Idleness and the Fall of Late
Neoliberalism’s Art
https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2024-0039
received April 7, 2024; accepted September 9, 2024
Abstract: The article conceptualizes Agamben’s inoperativity from a historicized perspective, discussing how
inoperative or “falling” works of art can reveal the limits of neoliberal capitalism. It discusses contemporary
works by Guy Ben-Ner and Ragnar Kjartansson as paradigmatic examples of the ways art reveals the limits
and exhaustion or falling of late neoliberalism, particularly in relation to its fusion of work, affective labour,
and performance. Relying on Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic categories of the zany and the interesting and Alenka
Zupančič’s notions of the comic, the article examines how said categories, as they function in a comic manner
in the artists’ works, suspend (rather than negate) the neoliberal order. The essay has two purposes: first, they
illustrate the waning ideological influence of neoliberalism, signalling its “passing away,” and discuss how art
can “tell time” and engage with historicity. Second, this essay demonstrates how art can encapsulate a frozendialectical process of “falling down” or Giorgio Agamben’s Inoperativity – representing its own arrival at its
formal limit, its exhaustion albeit without its negation. However, unlike Agamben’s accepted use of the
concept, here Inoperativity and the potential it opens is historicized – and appears as a response to late
neoliberalism, suspending its forms without negating them.
Keywords: neoliberalism, Ragnar Kjartansson, Guy Ben-Ner, Agamben, Alenka Zupančič, Sianne Ngai, zany,
idleness, contemporary art, inoperativity
How do we know when something has ended? And what are we to do if the things we used to lean on – to use
and live – don’t seem to function the way they should? These questions can mostly describe the general
sentiment throughout the West today – when we think of our political establishments, our media, forms of
labour, prospects of economic prosperity, or our mere ability to talk to each other – it almost seems as if the
entire governing order, what we might as well refer to as the neoliberal order, is not working. Things are not
looking great – and yet, it’s as if we don’t have the tools (forms, acts, rituals, practices) to use and do something
else. Focusing on the realm of art, this essay attempts to conceive of a theoretical prism which might allow us
to grasp this (extremely vivid) exhaustion of the ideological and social order we inhabit.
This essay aims to explore works of art that express the exhaustion of neoliberal ideology and form. I refer
to this form as “art that falls,” a concept that encapsulates the way these artworks reveal the limits and passing
away of the current neoliberal order. In doing so, I propose that contemporary art can function as a means to,
in line with Mathias Nilges’ discussion on contemporary literature, “tell time.”1 While we are all immersed in
what seems like an endless yet failing neoliberal order, autonomous artistic endeavours can reveal the limits –
the passing away, to use a Hegelian metaphor – of the way things are as they are exhausted and reach their
limit, in what I refer to as art forms that fall.
1 Nilges, How to Read a Moment, 10.
* Corresponding author: Yoav Ronel, The Ben Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben Gurion University of
the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel, e-mail: yoavronel1@gmail.com
Open Access. © 2024 the author(s), published by De Gruyter.
International License.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
2 Yoav Ronel
To exemplify this argument, I will analyse two contemporary artworks that embody the concept of falling
and exhaustion within the neoliberal context. The first is Ragnar Kjartansson’s performance “(A lot of)
Sorrow” (2013). In this piece, Kjartansson collaborates with the indie rock band The National to perform their
song “Sorrow” repeatedly for six hours. This endurance performance pushes the boundaries of repetition and
exhaustion, serving as a metaphor for the relentless demands of neoliberal productivity and the emotional
labour inherent in creative work and also in almost all forms of labour under neoliberalism The second work I
will examine is Guy Ben-Ner’s video “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” (2022). Ben-Ner’s piece explores
the blurred lines between work and personal life, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the
rise of the remote work. As a work of video-art mostly made of a screening of a(nother) zoom meeting, Ben-Ner
captures the absurdity and fatigue of trying to maintain productivity and normalcy in a world where traditional work structures have collapsed.
Over the past few decades, the West appears to be entrenched in what historians refer to as “presentism”
or “the long presence,” or simply “neoliberalism.”2 In this essay, I draw upon the thesis that posits the
exhaustion of neoliberalism as we currently understand it. This exhaustion manifests in various, “general”
crises of “hegemony”:3 from the rapid shifts in global economies to the outbreaks of conflict in regions like
Israel/Palestine and Ukraine, the ascent of populist right-wing movements, the reshaping of global power
dynamics, and the evolving nature of labour structures. However, as Nancy Fraser observes, while neoliberalism may be on its last legs, it is still all we have: “the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” as the
Gramscian adage Fraser quotes suggests.
Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, in their discussion of contemporary art, argue for the
emergence of metamodernism as a new cultural dominant. They contend that what re-appears as “metamodernism” – what I prefer to call late-neoliberalism – holds a utopian sentiment and libidinal energy that was
absent during the decades of postmodernism.4 For our purposes here, this ״utopian ״sentiment expresses, as
an experience, a general (universal) “structure of feeling” which derives from material and ideological conditions but can only be fully grasped as a “whole experience.”5 In this renewed sense of historicity, what is
experienced is the exhaustion of neoliberalism as a governing ideology (and base structure). I will demonstrate
how art expresses this exhaustion, using the “techniques and tropes associated with the postmodern precisely
in order to surpass”6 it.
As I will show, the works explored here exemplify the concept what Sianne Ngai refers to as zaniness – the
affective and performative expression of over-work which is endemic of neoliberal forms of labour – reaching
its exhaustion. They present various and explicit forms of labour, performance, and productivity pushed to
their limits, embodying the exhaustion of neoliberal ideals and practices.
This essay will begin with a theoretical introduction. In it, I will show how neoliberalism is expressed
formally, leaning on Ngai’s aesthetic categories. Following, I argue that Giorgio Agamben’s notions of inoperativity – a state in which an apparatus is suspended without negation – can help in capturing the expressions
of the limits of neoliberalism and its forms. Afterwards, I will discuss how Ben-Ner and Kjartansson’s works
express how inoperativity can function as an artistic mechanism for the expression of the ideological and
material exhaustion, thus both “telling time” and revealing its limits. To provide a theoretical background for
my analysis, I will primarily lean on the thought of Agamben, Ngai, Alenka Zupančič, and her notions of the
comic, as a mode (a how) in which things are released from their telos. Their concepts will serve as the
framework through which I examine the artworks. I will start off with an explanation of Ngai’s post-Fordist
aesthetic categories which will serve as the central theoretical prism for my discussion here. The introductory
part of the article will present the concept of an historicized work of art that falls; and the second and third
parts will show how an art that falls works.
2 For a comprehensive discussion of the various iterations of this “long presence,” see Nilges, Ibid., 29–79.
3 Fraser, The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born, 9–10.
4 Vermeulen and van den Akker, “Utopia, Sort of: A Case Study in Metamodernism,” 55.
5 Ibid., 56.
6 Ibid., 62.
Zaniness, Idleness and the Fall of Late Neoliberalism’s Art
3
1 Theoretical Introduction: Art that Falls
When discussing post-Fordist neoliberalism, Ngai elucidates how art has relinquished some of its claim to
“autonomous creativity” beyond the market, instead immersing itself within a conflictual relationship with the
markets that sustain it and the consumer aesthetics.7 Ngai’s discussion on “weak art”8 of this kind revolves
around the aesthetic categories of the zany, the interesting, and the cute, as ambiguous and ineffectual
aesthetic categories radically different from the classic notions of beauty and the sublime. These aesthetic
categories, for Ngai, signify the ways in which neoliberal capitalism is expressed and mediated in cultural
works, constructing the form of neoliberal culture.
I will return to the interesting in what follows, starting off with stating that Ngai’s zany is of particular
interest here. The zany – “highlighting the affect, libido, and physicality of an unusually beset agent” – is a
dominant form of aesthetic judgement, form, and style under neoliberalism.9 As Ngai argues, zaniness represents precarious forms of labour, over-productiveness, and affective labour, and is therefore also linked to
forms of performance.10
Contemporary zaniness is an aesthetic more explicitly about the politically ambiguous convergence of cultural and occupational performing under what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the new “connexionist” spirit of capitalism: the dominant
ideology of a capitalism that has absorbed and adjusted to the “artistic critique” of the 1960s but also, as Nancy Fraser stresses,
the second-wave feminist critique of the gendered division of labor-by now encouraging workers, through a rhetoric of
“networking,” to bring their abilities to communicate, socialize, and even play to work.11
Zaniness, serving as a formal mediation of labour and production, embodies the cultural representation and
aesthetic manifestation of the precariat – individuals continually juggling multiple precarious jobs while
incessantly striving to promote themselves – a social class emblematic of neoliberalism. It functions as a
representation of both the materialistic aspects of production and the subjective pursuit of meaning and selffulfilment, transforming individuals into entrepreneurs under what Boltanski and Chiapello refer to as “the
new spirit of capitalism.”12
Zaniness finds further theoretical grounding in the work of Byung-Chul Han. Han emphasizes the psychopolitical dimension of contemporary labour, where the exploitation of freedom itself becomes the primary
mode of production. In Han’s view, neoliberalism turns subjects into “entrepreneur[s] of the self,” constantly
engaging in self-optimization promotion and exploitation. This “achievement subject,” as Han terms it, is
flexible, perpetually busy, always connected, and relentlessly productive – a state that closely aligns with
the zany aesthetic.
Under neoliberalism, we see a convergence of work and life, where the boundaries between professional
and personal spheres become increasingly blurred. This collapse of distinctions is central to the zany aesthetic,
where labour becomes a form of performance and every aspect of life is potentially productive. In the cases of
creative fields of production under neoliberalism, creative desire is what is exploited:13 this is expressed in
zaniness (what Han refers to as “whizzing”).14 The fatigue and precarity inherent in these modes of labour find
their aesthetic expression in the works of art I will examine, where the zany reaches its limits and begins to fall
apart, revealing the underlying structures of neoliberal capitalism in crisis.
7 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 20–1.
8 Ibid., 21.
9 Ibid., 14–5.
10 Ibid., 3.
11 Ibid., 7–8.
12 Chiapello and Boltanski, The New Spirit of Capitalism.
13 “Everything that belongs to practices and expressive forms of liberty – emotion, play and communication – comes to be
exploited. It is inefficient to exploit people against their will. Allo-exploitation yields scant returns. Only when freedom is exploited
are returns maximized” (Han, Psychopolitics, 12).
14 Han, The Scent of Time, 34–45.
4 Yoav Ronel
To expand on Ngai’s concept of the zany, I connect it to Adam Kotsko’s notion of creepiness and to Alenka
Zupančič’s theory of comedy. Kotsko argues that neoliberal culture is fascinated with what he refers to as
creeps, which he connects to the decline of white masculinity.15 A creep, according to him, is someone who
brings too much (libidinal energy) into the symbolic order: “he does not enter the social world fully – [but]
enters some particular aspect of it much too fully, charging it with the excessive desire that he refuses to give
up.”16 Creepiness sounds a lot like zaniness; like the zany, the creep is simply too much – albeit mostly in white
male versions.17 Thus, with creepiness we are at the formal manner in which identity is formulated as a
response to changes in modes of affective labour in post-Fordism.
I will extensively explore Zupančič’s theory of comedy in the second part of the essay. For now, I will say
that it offers a perspective on how the zany can function as a form suspension within the neoliberal order:
while the zany is always comic to a certain degree, when it becomes “truly” comic, it can help “suspend” the
symbolic order (neoliberal ideology) it derives from, and specifically notions of self-identity; or the identity
between the neoliberal subject and his “identity” and project. The comic shift, as I will show, is not one of the
content but of form.
2 History and Form, Inoperativity, and Criticism
My interpretation here aligns with the Marxist principle that argues that form – and not content – enables us
to comprehend historicity. As Roberto Schwartz asserts, drawing from Adorno, “dialectical understanding
hinges on formal analysis,” emphasizing the significance of examining form rather than solely focusing on the
ideological and thematic level of content. This approach involves a dialectical process of theorization, reading
a text: “against its real background and study reality against the background of the [text] … reading one
through the other … until the mediating terms are found.”18
Focusing on the formal depiction of the zany, this essay delves into the aforementioned performance art
pieces particularly in relation to zaniness: the fusion of labour, affective labour, and performance. It seeks to
demonstrate how art can encapsulate a dialectical process of “falling down” – representing its own arrival at
its formal limit. This exhaustion will be elucidated in dialogue with Agamben’s concept of Inoperativity, which
originally refers to the suspension and naturalization of an apparatus, a state of suspension that occurs
without negation. It is, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, a “dialectics” in which “time stands still and has come
to a stop.”19 What I aim to consider is the confrontation of Ngai’s over-productive zany (and interesting) formal
categories with Agamben’s notions of inoperativity as form of rest. The axis that connects both concepts is
neoliberalism itself.
For Agamben, inoperativity primarily pertains as inherent to apparatuses and human practices, and the
means of its deployment or “activation” remain somewhat ambiguous. Inoperativity signifies the condition in
which things exist or linger when they are potentialized and made available for new uses in a form of
inactivity:
The inoperative work, which results from this suspension of potential, exposes in the act the potential that has brought it into
being: if it is a poem, it will expose in the poem the potential of language; if it is a painting, it will expose on the canvas the
potential of painting (of looking); if it is an action, it will expose in the act the potential of acting. Only in this sense can one say
15 Kotsko, Creepiness, 85.
16 Ibid., 38–9.
17 As Ngai argues, zaniness in post-Fordist capitalism is mostly feminine, and are related to the neoliberal demands of women to
participate both in production (work) and in reproduction (transparent labour) (Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 203).
18 Schwartz, “Objective Form,” 191.
19 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 396. Benjamin further discusses his notions of the messianic stoppage of history in the
appendix to his theses: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps
revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train-namely, the human race-to activate the emergency brake (Ibid., 402).”
Zaniness, Idleness and the Fall of Late Neoliberalism’s Art
5
that inoperativity is a poem of poetry, a painting of painting, a praxis of praxis. Rendering inoperative the works of language,
the arts, politics, and economy, it shows what a human body can do, opens it to a new possible use.20
Inoperativity is, in a sense, potential as such – beyond the Aristotelian dichotomic articulation of potential/
action. It is potential actualized as potential or action suspended and thus potentialized. This potential lingers
at the core of the mechanism of anthropogenesis (and consequently human history).21 Thus, human potential
can be released with a suspension.
To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new—more
effective or more authentic—articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that—within man—separates
man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man.22
Inoperativity for Agamben thus isn’t a revolutionary act which brings forth the new, but rather the potentialized-suspension of what is, rendering the concepts of action and in-action almost mute. It is not avantgarde
(negativity and critique) nor conservatism and tradition (positivity and affirmation) but the idle state of both
poles. Agamben is primarily interested – here and elsewhere – with human history itself. However, in his late
works, this process becomes endemic to neoliberalism. The mechanism governing our conception of man can
be seen not as a historical point of view but from a materialist and exigent point of view. The metaphor of
idleness – a Shabbat of both animal and man – can be used to understand the limits of the specific ideological
and materialist machine of neoliberal capitalism, the demand that it enacts.
Importantly for our discussion, Agamben’s work has sometimes been thought of alongside concepts such
as strike, ban, and other concepts, which call for the inclusion of political efficacy within “weak” works of art.
As Gilad Reich shows, post-Fordist traditions tend to follow the imperatives Agamben prescribes: using tactics
of ban and strike, they infuse art with political activism. Here, art becomes almost “merely” political activism,
“culture jamming,”23 and other forms of resistance and protest. In other forms, art inhabits a critical, reflective
disposition. Art and political “grassroots” actions become inseparable, and in this sense, art sheds its original
“work.”24 These works become what Ngai refers to as “interesting,” in a sense that they are disseminated in
accordance to their serial participation in the discourse beyond the work. Forms of artistic critical selfreflection or political activism – as Ngai has shown – are part of the same negative origin (arche) which
Raymond Geuss posits that modern art has found itself on.25
What is negative about self-reflection is the ways in which the awareness of the work’s participation in the
field of art creates an intellectual or political negation of the work itself, as it appears both as itself and its
negation. While I do not argue that we need to escape self-reflection (such escape is not possible today
anyway), I do posit, following Ngai, that it locates the meaning of art (too) close to the pole of knowledge
(of the interesting). As such, it succumbs to a prominent left-wing fantasy upon which: “by shaking people out
of their ideological fantasies, the project of emancipation hopes to enable them to see where their own
interests lie so that they might act on these interests.”26 Todd McGowan claims that not only will knowledge
not save us but the recourse to knowledge is also in itself a form of fantasy we enjoy. In other words, selfreflection charges the work of art with the fantasy of awakening from coercive forms of production and
ideologies. In Ngai’s terms, self-reflection – the interesting – is an of art which its dissemination depends on a
reflective theorization which grounds it in (usually critical) meaning and discourse.
The act of theorization I aim to do here is quite different: I want to show how forms of labour and work as
such become inoperative as they continue to function “normally.” The artistic procedure here isn’t dedicated
to resistance, subversion, political efficacy, or consciousness-raising. Nor is it interested in finding new uses for
20 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 94.
21 Agamben, The Open, 68.
22 Ibid., 92.
23 Klorman-Eraqi, “Hijacking IKEA,” 9.
24 Reich, “From ‘Art Strike’ to ‘Boycott Artists’,” 58.
25 Geuss, A World Without Why, 109–10.
26 McGowan, “Mainstreaming Fantasy,” 177.
6 Yoav Ronel
existing apparatuses. That is not to say that the view of art suggested here will be a “post-critical,” in the vein of
some recent theoretical movements. Nor will it claim that art should release itself from the clutches of “theory”
(whatever that means) and return to the realm of “simple” consumption and perception; or that it should be
freed from “the political.”
The works of art I explore here are paradigmatic in the sense that they are not activist or even critical, but
rather simply the repeated and/or presented end of work and labour (and perhaps of art itself as well). As such,
they express an ideological form – that of the zany and the interesting – reaching its limits as its forms of
production are suspended – in a constellation in which there is no negative other to work: no strike, no ban,
and no alternative use. Inoperativity here will be the limit of a materialist and ideological order, of the zany
and the interesting. A limit in which there is no difference between work and non-work – no dialectical
negation, just a thing falling while continuing to work.
This perspective isn’t foreign to Agamben’s work – inoperativity and idleness can serve as expressions of
materialist history (a concept which mostly escapes Agamben’s thought):
It is certainly true that, as Marx has suggested, the forms of production of an epoch contribute in a decisive way to determine
its social relationships and culture; but in relation to every form of production, it is possible to individuate a “form of
inoperativity” that, while being held in close relationship with it, is not determined by it but on the contrary renders its
works inoperative and permits a new use of them. One-sidedly focused on the analysis of forms of production, Marx neglected
the analysis of the forms of inoperativity, and this lack is certainly at the bottom of some of the aporias of his thought, in
particular as concerns the definition of human activity in the classless society. From this perspective, a phenomenology of
forms of life and of inoperativity that proceeded in step with an analysis of the corresponding forms of production would be
essential. In inoperativity, the classless society is already present in capitalist society, just as, according to Benjamin, shards of
messianic time are present in history in possibly infamous and risible forms.27
Inoperativity thus reveals in history its possible passing away in the form of an image. In developing
Agamben’s concept, I argue for a theory in which art does not create the crisis that critical force emanates
but rather idly dwells in what is left and fallen – in loss, so to speak. However, meaning and beauty positively
appear in such forms of art. Or, put differently, I wish to show how idle and inoperative works of art hold
potential beyond the negativity or resistance, critique or avat-garde. In doing so – in becoming inoperative –
art necessarily (and this necessity is precisely the point) inhabits the now intelligible limits and contradictions
of a historical moment (epoch), vivifies them. Put simply, in the works of idle art, I will present here, history
appears negatively, as beauty and creativity emerge as what we have and remains unthreatened.
For Hegel, a concept loses its “richness” and becomes grey and abstract as it both passes away and
becomes appropriable (intelligible): concepts passing away create a “grey on grey” world.28 What I argue
here is a little bit different: I aim to show how formal expressions of neoliberalism appear in their exhausted
state, as in them, to use another Agambenian metaphor, form, and content coincide, “which is to say, fall
together.”29
Falling here isn’t just a metaphor. In the works I explore here form and content express exhaustion. The
works I explore here – Kjartansson’s performance “(A lot of) Sorrow” (2013) and Guy Ben-Ner’s video-art
“Whatever Gets You Through the Night” (2022) – present various and explicit forms of zaniness and of the
interesting reaching its exhaustion. The zany is the formal category representing late capitalist forms of
production and performance, while the interesting is connected to its dissemination. As such, its style and
form offer incessant movement, and its performative aspects are those of a person/thing trying too hard,
27 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 94.
28 “When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a form of life grown old, and with grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but
only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in.” See also Žižek: “The same mortification occurs in
historical memory and monuments of the past where what survive are objects deprived of their living souls. Here is Hegel’s
comment apropos Ancient Greece: ‘The statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are
words from which belief has gone.” As with the passage from substantial God to the Holy Spirit, the properly dialectical reanimation is to be sought in this very medium of grey’ notional determination (Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 9–10).
29 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 165. As Ido Govrin clarifies, following Agamben, the medieval Latin “coincidere “literally means ‘to
fall upon together’” (Govrin, Philosophical Archeology with and Beyond Agamben, 151).
Zaniness, Idleness and the Fall of Late Neoliberalism’s Art
7
working too much, and being too much. Moreover, many times its thematic content mostly refers to forms of
precariat labour.30 In the concept I am developing here, this form is sublated without negation. (neoliberal)
Desire, play, labour, work, and performance are at the core of the works I explore, as they become idle and
inoperative (suspended from its ostensible vocation or end) without being negated, but maintained at their
limit, in a “immobile dialectic.”31
3 Ragnar Kjartansson/(A Lot of) Sorrow
The Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson has many works depicting various states of idleness as the tension
between work, labour, and their image haunts his work. In perhaps his most important work, “The End”
(2009), he locks himself inside a Venetian mansion with a friend for six months; in between drinking beer and
smoking cigarettes, Kjartansson paints a new portrait of his Speedo-wearing friend each day. Another work
depicts him playing his guitar while taking a bath. Unsurprisingly, this idle and indulgent image coincided with
the identity of the artist as a middle-aged white man. What art critic Valerie Mindin refers to as “his pathetic
cliché of the Heroic White Male,” Mindin refers to “The End,” which “saturates [a] wall with 144 painted portraits
of a skinny young man lounging dejectedly around a spare and unfurnished, stone-clad interior of a booze-bottlestrewn Venetian apartment.”32 A white man doing nothing. Or, even, too many white men doing nothing.
This imagery evokes conceptualizations of privilege and resentment which characterize identity politics
discourses. The moralistic response here usually goes something along the lines of here is (another) white man
showing his ironic dismay and privilege (of art, of capitalism, of himself) at the same instance. What is
important here is the abundant and formal aspect of Kjartansson’s works: the white man appears (as) a lot.
Kjartansson uses the image of an idle and creepy white man – in one of his famous works, he records his
mother spitting at him in videos taken every five years. But, I argue, his works use this image – of the white
creep – to reconsider the question of self-identity itself. In other words: if identity politics demand that we
think of a person as identical to its identity, Kjartansson suspends this entire process by using its most
excessive (and maligned) figure: the creepy and zany idle white man.
It is probably easiest to tackle the question of idleness through one of the artist’s works in which idleness is
the content – and “The End” would be an intuitive point of departure. However, I will discuss Kjartansson’s
comically named installation “(A Lot of) Sorrow,” which deals with the limits of the concepts of work and
inoperativity formally. In the work, the band The National plays the same song, “Sorrow,” for six straight hours
live – the show took place at MoMA PS1 in front of a live audience. It was also filmed and recorded. There is a
lot to unpack in this seemingly simple artistic gesture. First, we will return to the image of the white man.
Much like Kjartansson himself, The National are derided for being a representation of privileged white men.
“The Ohio-born five-piece are the best-dressed straw men in the business, making people bristle at the idea of
identifying with the ascendant, middle-class Brooklynite angst of their records,”33 to use the words of Laura
Snapes in her review of the show.
Again, this image needs to be historicized: straw men or not, the privileged white man is the antagonist of
progressive identity politics, which is the political form of neoliberal politics (left and right). Their image and
the impasses they create are at the heart of this work. The song’s lyrics play the same tune. The image of a
melancholic person enjoying his sorrow is the main theme:
Sorrow found me when I was young
Sorrow waited, sorrow won
30 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Catagories, 30.
31 Agamben uses the phrase “immobile dialectic” (Agamben, The Time That Remains, 23).
32 Mindin, “Ragnar Kjartansson.”
33 Snapes, “A Lot of Sorrow.”
8 Yoav Ronel
Sorrow, they put me on the pill
It’s in my honey, it’s in my milk.
Sorrow, alongside burnout, depression, and other neoliberal maladies, is historicized through the use of
“the pill,” the antidepressant, which, according to “Bifo” Berardi, marks an important characteristic of the age
of the neoliberal “Prozac economy.”34 In it what is “at work” is the soul itself:35 Berardi argues that in order to
facilitate neoliberal “semiocapitalism” and affective labour, antidepressants fuel the lifeline of production.36
The tension it holds is also the crux of desire in the song’s lyrics:
Don’t leave my hyper heart alone on the water
Cover me in rag and bone sympathy
‘Cause I don’t wanna get over you
I don’t wanna get over you
For the singer, the melancholic lost object is the option of melancholy itself, embodied in stoppage. “I don’t
wanna get over you” speaks to both a lost girl (“sorrow’s a girl inside my cake”) and to melancholy itself, with its
metaphors of devouring and incorporating the lost object – the song suggests that melancholy isn’t merely a
response to loss but a poetic mechanism of suspension and recline.37 It is, to use Agamben’s phrase, “a loss
without a lost object,”38 which allows for sorrow (melancholy) to manifest as a form of authentic living, not just a
reaction to loss. The problem the song addresses is that of a zany, hyperactive heart constantly at work, yearning
for and romanticizing sorrow. Thus, sorrow is not “simply” an emotional phenomenon; it is a form of weakened
and privileged resistance and “political protest” – “a way of fighting back,” to use the words of Audrey Wollen.39
In “Sorrow’s imagery,” the pill stands for the means by which neoliberalism unleashes the hyper-heart of
the subject, now yearning for rest and depression as a phantasmatic solution. If for Wollen women’s sadness is
thus evoked as a form of weak and passive political and artistic resistance, The National offers a malegendered version of the same resistance (which makes it creepy and excessive).
As Alenka Zupančič shows, early neoliberalism was marked by the sign of positivity. It “[promoted] the following
fundamental axiom: a person who feels good (and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person.”
It is this short circuit between the immediate feelings/sensations and the moral value that gives its specific colour to
the contemporary ideological rhetoric of happiness.40 The “pill” represents this imperative for happiness.
Late neoliberalism, however, is quite different. In it, the culture of self-care, wellness, and “work–life
balance” invigorates expressions of depression, anxiety, and failure as ideological tentpoles. The adoption of
“ugly feelings”41 into cultural production and ideological discourse creates a loop: if we choose to stay positive,
we enforce its ideological imperative of productiveness. If we express our burnout, we now express our-selves
– thus, again, adhering to its imperative and the neoliberal focus on “personal feelings”42 and the expression of
the self. Such expressions of burnout, anxiety, and depression now serve as the basis of the production of art
and culture, not to mention the thriving care and self-help industries.43 “Sorrow” is thus both the product of
34 Berardi, The Soul at Work, 96. Assembly line workers, while forced to repeat the same movements, still had brains that thought
freely, at least until their energies were available and fatigue and sadness did not prevail. Despite the machine’s clanking, it was
possible to discuss and initiate processes of autonomy and revolt. In semiocapitalism, the soul itself is put to work.
35 Ibid., 116.
36 Ibid., 76.
37 This is how Agamben thinks of melancholy in his early work Stanzas. It is “an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates
the loss of the object” (Agamben, Stanzas, 20).
38 Ibid.
39 Tunnicliffe, “Interview with Artist Audrey Wollen.”
40 Zupančič, The Odd One In, 5.
41 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories.
42 Greenwald-Smith, Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, 2.
43 Popular examples can be found in the music of Billie Eilish, in the latest Barbie movie or in the description of feelings in the
forthcoming Pixar movie Inside Out 2. Depression and burnout are now acknowledged as forms of expression which coincide with
neoliberal ideology.
Zaniness, Idleness and the Fall of Late Neoliberalism’s Art
9
neoliberal culture, its lost object, and another one of its ideological manifestations and conduits. The fantasy of
doing nothing becomes prominent in contemporary culture as it presents itself as lost and unattainable.
To return to “Sorrow,” the main tension driving the song lies in the automatization of the subject – as he
wishes to “authentically” remain in sorrow but is forced to keep on hyper-working. The pill is the artificial
mechanism that unleashes and diminishes the freedom of the zany subject, who is coerced to remain at work.
The pill symbolizes ideological nourishment: it is in the honey and the milk. Thus, the pill makes the subject
become too much – it is the superfluous element that is attached to an authentic subject and creates hyperactivity and zaniness.
As Ngai shows, zaniness is a form of compulsory and hysterical self-expression, becoming easily “too
much” – or a state in which self-expression, a form of affective labour, becomes identical to automatization
and inertia. Thus, it involves an “incessant performance in one’s self-presentation to others.”44 It is not simply
a style and form of incessant expression but a way in which the subject hyper-performs itself. This process of
work, according to Zupančič, is where we potentially (comically) discover that the Self “is not reducible to
itself.”45 The basis of comedy lies in this non-identity – as the mechanization of what is ideologically conceived
as organic, natural, flowing, and authentic.46 In zaniness, the subject loses its authenticity as it expresses it
tirelessly. This is how, when seen from the right perspective, zaniness and, with it, neoliberal ideology and its
fixation on the self are comic.
What Kjartansson does in “(A lot of) Sorrow” is to stretch this formal and comic problem to its limit – thus
fully expressing it. In playing “Sorrow” live for six hours straight, its zany form is expressed in repetition (not
represented):47 the song “Sorrow” has an end – much like the structure of melancholy itself, which always
desires an enclosed room or crypt to hide in.48 In “(A lot of) Sorrow,” the closed form of a song is turned into
the incessant movement of the zany – it adopts the structure of repetition. It becomes zanier. What is revealed
here is not only the traversing of the private melancholy of sorrow but also the (very zany) appearance of
labour as such – The National works extremely hard and for a very long time. The work is tedious, repetitive,
and tiring. It would have become monotonous and mantra-like, if not for the fact that the live bodies have to
work very hard, all the time – while staying inspired and even inspiring, emotional, busy doing neoliberal
“affective labour.”49 Their song is supposed to express and manifest an authentic desire for sorrow and
stoppage – but authenticity is hampered by the form of repetition.
However, labour here also turns into solidarity and humour. Thus, the show is full of gaps and refuelling
stops for food, sandwiches, beers, or other beverages. As Snapes says, for lead singer Matt Berninger, the show
is “a voluntary slow-death sentence, which he bears stoically throughout the six hours: joking, singing with a
mouth full of sandwich halfway through Side A (Kjartansson brought them food and drinks throughout), and
saying they’ll have to start over after he coughs during a chorus.”50 At the end of the show, a bottle of
champagne is opened. During the show, some band members stop playing for several parts. At certain points,
the singing becomes quiet, almost inaudible. And, near the end, the lead singer almost collapses and begins
crying.
This breaking point is thought of as an emotive expression, as what the repetition meant to achieve: “His
live performances are frequently marked by a frightening volatility, and he often openly declares that he
needs someone in song, but he’s rarely vulnerable like this,” says Snapes.51 The ending is ostensibly cathartic.
44 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 208.
45 Zupančič, The Odd One In, 118.
46 Ibid.
47 Zupančič follows Lacan and Deleuze in showing that representation and repetition are of a different order, and that repetition,
and not representation, is what allows for forms of emancipation, contingency and chance. In this sense, repetition is what allows
for potentiality (Ibid., 150).
48 As Abraham and Torok have shown, and melancholy opens up an imaginary space which resembles a crypt (Abraham and
Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 130).
49 Chiapello and Boltanski, The New Spirit of Capitalism.
50 Snapes, “A Lot of Sorrow.”
51 Ibid.
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Yoav Ronel
But catharsis is hardly the sole meaning – and also not the mantra and spiritual process Kjartansson is aiming
for, nor the argument about turning the song into sculpture which Kjartansson and Patrick Nickleson offer.52
What happens in repetition also involves the relation between sorrow, work, and authenticity: what is
suspended and becomes inoperative in the tireless repetition is authentic expression itself. It falls down.
Here is where the dialectical and comic element of the work comes into play. As Zupančič argues, in
comedy, what comes to life is the fact that our authenticity is revealed as also inherently automatic. Not that it
relies on automation but that authenticity and automation cannot be separated – yet also cannot be thought of
together.53 When discussing the concept of imitation, she argues that what is funny in imitation is that it
reveals the automated, potentially repeated, and thus mechanical nature of the things that turn people into
their most subjective: “Comic imitation reproduces all there is, yet by doing so – that is, by relating a habit to
itself, by introducing something like a relationship in which this habit (when imitated) refers to itself – it
produces pure life at its most obvious, as an object to be seen, as a thing.”54 Comedy thus involves showing how
subjectivity is in fact also mechanical, and thus not reducible to itself (as authentic). Meaning, in comic
repetition, the self is always aware (too aware) of its doubling but can never simply assume either position
(man or machine, life or automaton).
“Sorrow” is a song about a desire to rediscover authentic melancholy against the artificial nature of “the
pill.” It is also a song about the desire to escape neoliberal ideology and release an authentic self. It is an
ideological representation of neoliberal sorrow culture as well. Its formal application is that of the affective
rock band. However, “(A Lot of) Sorrow” intensifies this tension – “Sorrow” changes because it is repeated,
tediously, again and again. It changes through formal work as its content is not changed but repeated.
For Zupančič, repetition never signifies the return of the same authentic “one” thing. On the contrary,
repetition is a comic mechanism of difference that obstructs the symbolic ideological order and introduces
Tyche, chance, and contingency, into the machine. A “tiny gap between one occurrence and the next one” as
Zupančič quotes Mladen Dolar.55
Zupančič shows that in representation, we are never able to fully overcome the grip of ideology. This truth
is present in the problems that the ethos of authenticity presents: the fantasy of sorrow, melancholy, and nonwork are also forms of affective labour, authentic expression, and emotional growth, the core of neoliberal
ideology. But, in repetition, gaps and holes in the symbolic order are discovered: “for a moment, the subject
sees herself on the outside”56; and the structure itself – zaniness and neoliberal ideology – is suspended. “What
this repetition repeats – is not a reduction of ourselves (and all that we are) to non-being, not the destruction of
our being, but its emergence – its emergence outside meaning, yet inextricably linked to it.”57
Put differently, if The National (and Kjartansson) ostensibly embody the identity of the self-loathing and
privileged white man, repetition allows for a comic departure from the “laws” of self-identity. Identity politics
require that we construct identities that are reducible to their subject. A white man equals a white man. 1 = 1.
What the comic repetition does is suspend the structure of identity itself. It is not simply that the artists are not
“white men” anymore, but rather that this logic of self-expression and self-identity – of representation of
identity and sorrow – is undermined and suspended. In repetition, it is exhausted, figuratively and
symbolically.
52 Kjartansson in Spice, “Reaching for the Spiritual;” Nickleson, “On Repetition in Ragnar Kjartansson and The National’s A Lot of
Sorrow,” 139.
53 Zupančič, The Odd One In, 117–8.
54 Ibid.
55 “To put it simply, tyche is the gap of the automaton. In the tiny gap between one occurrence and the next one, a bit of real is
produced. In every repetition there is already, in a minimal way, the emergence of that which escapes symbolization, the
haphazard contingent object appears which spoils the mere repeating of the same, so the same which returns is never the
same although we couldn’t tell it apart from its previous occurrence by any of the positive features or distinguishing marks.
There is a contingent bit which dwells in the gap, which is produced by the very gap, and this imperceptible bit is the stuff that
comedy puts to maximum use.” Dolar in Zupančič, Ibid., 164.
56 Ibid., 172.
57 Ibid., 182.
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11
The circle manifests not in returning to the same place but in the expression of zany labour as such: it is, in
fact, the Soul that is working here. Or, the Universal figure of the reflective and narcissistic white male artist is
presented “in work.” For Zupančič, comedy is a process in which a universal ideal is concretized as such:
“Comedy is not the undermining of the universal but its own reversal into the concrete; it is not an objection to
the universal but the concrete labour of the universal itself. Or, to put it in a single slogan: comedy is the
universal at work.”58 Here, the universal is precisely identity turned zany – or, the inability to separate
authenticity from automation. But zaniness is also stretched to its inner limits: the work itself is a process
of exhaustion, without culmination but with a growing sense of impoverishment.
If zaniness mediates the representation of neoliberal ideology and forms of production, it still houses an
ideological structure: it still allows for ideology to thrive, through fantasies of melancholy as self-expression.59
However, here neoliberal affective labour isn’t just represented but repeated – and this comic procedure, with
its perpetual and “staccato” temporality, not only reveals it as such but also allows for its exhaustion. It has
nothing more to say – because it has been sung (represented) in repetition.
In the end, nothing is left: the content of the song is suspended, as the dichotomy of authentic sorrow and
mechanistic activity is rendered inoperative. It is not clear if the band is playing or going through the motions.
Formally, the hyperactive heart is played to its point of exhaustion, not because of interference by market
forces but because the aesthetic zaniness of art itself becomes too much for itself. This can refer to the inherent
ambiguity of zaniness as an aesthetic category. Not only is zaniness “always already a kind of hysteria,”60 but it
also demonstrates that “the cute, the zany, and the interesting are aesthetic experiences that seem to undermine conviction in them as such”;61 thus, they act as “turnstiles” on the brink of turning into their opposites,
rather than as solid experiences. This ambiguity is present in the affective process that occurs in “(A Lot of)
Sorrow.” Nothing is negated – not the hyper heart, not affective labour, nor the influence of the pill or the
fantasy of sadness – and everything is brought to its limit, turned over, even beyond the ambiguous affinity of
zany/hysterical. Zaniness transforms into exhaustion, hysteria into a cry. The work could have gone on
indefinitely, and yet, at the same time, the only limits that enclose the work are those of the body and soul
(the universal) at work.
As Nickleson argues, “Kjartansson has done much in his work to reframe the discourse around repetition
in performance art and music.” Importantly, he shows how “unencumbered by the austerity, solemnity, and
precision typical of long-duration or repetitive performance art,” his works are. “It’s clear that other features
were primary: the food, the laid-back style of the repetitions, the rejection of durational austerity, and the
audience clapping and singing along into the final repetitions of ‘Sorrow.’”62 The point here is of repetition
done together – as is the case with Kjartansson’s The End. Nickleson – as well as Vermeulen and Van den Akker
– returns to the point about the work rejecting nihilism. While works of (postmodern) repetition tend to
emphasize “degeneracy, or at least signal the cultural regression, infantilism, and trauma of late capitalism”63
and latch onto a nihilistic death drive, “Kjartansson’s use of repetition to produce a convivial space raises the
necessity of differentiating among forms of repetition – and thus of a potential escape from the twentieth
century’s monolithic, cynical, and inescapable repetition.”64 This diversion from nihilism is done via the
notion of the comic as a form of repetition.
Looking closer at the structure of the work clarifies that. The closure of the work brings applause and
some form of catharsis. But, as Zupančič argues, when we think of things as comic, we should consider the end
as nothing but the end of satisfaction. A comic procedure is one in which satisfaction – getting what you want –
58 Ibid., 27.
59 Fantasy, as McGowan shows, is how an ideological structure fills its gaps and amends its contradictions. This, however, depends
on fantasies inherent ability to transcend the social order’s limits. Here lies the emancipatory (and reactionary) potential of fantasy,
as it excessively “fills” the leaks of ideology (McGowan, “Mainstreaming Fantasy,” 183).
60 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 27.
61 Ibid.
62 Nickleson, “On Repetition in Ragnar Kjartansson and The National’s A Lot of Sorrow,” 136.
63 Ibid., 140.
64 Ibid.
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comes before desire. “As she argues, Satisfaction does not conclude the game (as it does in the case of jokes), it
launches it.”65
In other words, if we think of a rock concert as a process in which you wait for your favourite song, which
then passes by, it thus holds the structure of anticipation. In comedy, the thing is that you get more than what
you want. As shown in the perplexing concert song list which essentially sees the word “sorrow” repeated on
the white page, what you are about to get is “(A Lot of) Sorrow.” What we also get is bears, cigarettes, and a
jointly experienced friendship. Again, the difference here is of form and structure – not of content.
To put things in the perspective of desire, the comic structure allows the subject to enjoy beyond demand:
“The discrepancy that constitutes the motor of comedy lies not in the fact that satisfaction can never really
meet demand, but rather that demand can never really meet (some unexpectedly produced, surplus) satisfaction.”66 In comedy, everyone is satisfied precisely through the gags and miscommunications that thrive within
it – much like satisfaction in “(a lot of) sorrow” is gained in the pauses between songs for drinks. In other
words: in “(a lot of) Sorrow,” we get more than enough of what we asked for. Inoperativity here isn’t the fact
that art reveals its hidden potential to do “other things,” but the simple fact that a thing – art, song, ideology –
still labours without working, without doing its job. This applies to both the formal and thematic elements of
the installation. If the form here is that of live music, and the content is a song about a longing for authentic
sorrow, both form and content lose their efficacy as they continue working – and through repetition, the
precarious connection that ties affective labour and fantasies of respite is thwarted and filled with gaps. Form
and content can neither unite nor separate but only exhaust themselves and “coincide,” to use Agamben’s
term. They become inoperative.
Kjartansson and The National’s installation reveals neoliberal ideology in its idleness, potentizing it as it
collapses, filling it with meaning as it is impoverished, making it work as it stumbles and stumble as it works.
Thus, the work intensifies both work and non-work, authenticity and automation, rendering each pair of
concepts inoperative as they are literally and figuratively exhausted.
A question still remains though: is Kjartansson’s “(a lot of) sorrow” nihilistic or comic? Does it create gaps
in the symbolic order and emancipate the acting and viewing subject, or does it rob us of our (false) belief in
the haven of authentic sorrow? What are we dealing with here? I argue, following Vermeulen and Van den
Akker as well as Nickleson, that while on the surface level the work simply repeats a “tragic” song, it does not
succumb to nihilism.67 This is the transition from postmodernism to metamodernism, or at least to a utopian
imagination that emerges as neoliberalism is exhausted. Or, as Vermeulen and Van den Akker suggest, for
Kjartansson, repetition is utopian because it allows for transcendence.68
How is that done? First and foremost, because it lacks any form of cynicism towards the work itself: The
National are dead serious, the artist their fervent admirer, and the audience is visibly there for them. As
Snapes said when reviewing the album of the show, fans of the band would love this work. These affective
qualities form the style of the show, not giving in to nihilism and the absurd but rather to playful
experimentation.
Moreover, what can be glimpsed – what happens in repetition – is camaraderie, empathy, and joy. The
coincidence of affective labour and physical labour, of constraint and freedom, makes the Sisyphean performance become a common goal for both band members, audience, and Kjartansson himself. Thus, the celebration at the end of the work attests to a shared enjoyment of a job well done – the (inoperative) work is done
together. And its telos – albeit comical and idle – is aimed at doing the show as well as possible.
The presence of friendship amidst inoperativity isn’t coincidental but essential. As in “The End,” a work
Kjartansson conducts alongside his friend, repetition and idleness become potent and inoperative when
shared in friendship – this is why Nickleson can say that the main thing in “(A Lot of) Sorrow” is what happens
65 Zupančič, The Odd One In, 136–7.
66 Ibid., 131.
67 Zupančič argues that comedy isn’t simply the repetition of tragedy. Tragedy repeated manifests in tragicomedy – or tragedy
without transcendence (perhaps the genre of late capitalism).
68 Vermeulen and van den Akker, “Utopia, Sort of,” 61.
Zaniness, Idleness and the Fall of Late Neoliberalism’s Art
13
in between, while Snapes points to the interactions between band members. Lucy Alford pointed out the
relations between friendship, idleness, and attainable forms of freedom beyond its privatized neoliberal form.
Alford even goes on to argue that this specific form of idleness attains a certain formal rhythm of banter and
repetition – relying on structural banter: “Flights of pure sonic joy suggest lines spun for pleasure, evoking a
quality of being more than semantic content … a kind of dance of talk, which is the essence of banter.”69 In this
repetition, the friends’ rhythms create a kind of momentum of interplay which could go on forever.70
In this sense, what maintains its universal character in Kjartansson’s work is art itself, as a procedure that
derives enjoyment and meaning in the conjunction of material and concepts which are now concretized and
put to work. In other words: revealing “Sorrow” as comical means, it becomes non-identical to itself. However,
it does not negate it: in repeating neoliberal labour, the work does not negate the desire that generated the
show. In fact, it simply allows for other forms of enjoyment to thrive. The work is rendered inoperative, but
this only means that the social order from which it sprouts is now available for other contingent forms of
enjoyment, not that it becomes empty or new. The show is both a “real” show of the band The National and its
comic repetition. Thus, it does not represent a world emptied out but one that now has too many enjoyments.
What is revealed in repetition isn’t an emptiness of the symbolic but the emergence of the Real in the gaps,
gasps, gags, and stoppages that both obstruct the work and are the work. If the work represents neoliberal
zaniness, we can see it both pushed to its limit, signifying the exhaustion of neoliberal ideology and the
continuation of its processes of production. In idleness, in the fall, we are allowed other, inoperative forms
of beauty and friendship to rise.
4 Guy Ben-Ner/Whatever Gets You Through the Night
The Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner’s work “Whatever gets you through the night” is also interested in the forms of
beauty and meaning that come to life when something falls. Ben-Ner’s work has, explicitly and implicitly,
always dealt with the contradictions of Capitalism. In a video-art work named “Stealing Beauty” (2007), he is
filmed engaging in Marxist-oriented discussions about the nature of capitalism with his siblings and his
partner, as they mimic family gatherings while actually inhabiting the “rooms” in different IKEA superstores.
IKEA is the home for these familial scenes, as the actors are Ben-Ner and his actual family members. As Na’ama
Klorman-Eraqi argues, Ben-Ner’s work, and specifically “Stealing Beauty,” involves a conjunction of art and
political critique, even activism of some sort. She suggests that “it harbours anarchistic qualities that resonate
with [Guy] Debord’s and Hakim Bey’s ideas,” while “actualizing unique strategies for subverting global consumer culture … Stealing Beauty is a self-reflexive, critical work of art; it circulates in fine art venues and
promotes itself as an art commodity yet at the same time corresponds with anti-consumerist culture-jamming
practices that predominantly operate in the media and in public arenas.”71
From this follows that Ben Ner’s work, a paradigmatic case of “weak” art, constantly engages with the
aesthetic category of the interesting that Ngai defines – its defining feature is to emphasize its ambivalent
nature.72 For Ngai, the interesting accounts for the way in which post-Fordist art is disseminated. This is done
because, quoting Schlegel, Ngai offers that the interesting “[marks] a convergence of art with conceptual
discourse about art, or an internalization by art – which consequently becomes philosophical or ‘reflective’
– of the ‘relation between theory and praxis.’”73 Thus, to say that something is interesting means to locate the
work of art in a sphere beyond it, as it is completely manifest only when it becomes the subject of critical
discussion. The tendency towards conceptual, reflective, and/or activist art goes hand in hand with the rise of
69 Alford, Forms of Poetic Attention, 221. See also Han, The Scent of Time, 39.
70 Ibid., 220.
71 Klorman-Eraqi, “Hijacking IKEA,” 9.
72 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 130.
73 Ibid., 124.
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Yoav Ronel
“art for artists.” And with art that involves an attempt “to attenuate the already thin line that separates art
from commercial merchandise in a market society.”74 And what the work is supposed to elicit is a theoretical
response that mostly comes from things that lie beyond it or linger beneath it.
In “Stealing Beauty,” the “interesting” lies in the main aspects of the work. Its content and form emerge
from discourse: the family portrayed in the work are reading Engels’ text on private property as they are
“activating” IKEA for their own use. Thus, the praxis of dis-concealing the alienation of consumer society
converges with its discourse. “The evocation of this consumerist desire is presented in the video as corresponding to Marxist ideas regarding capitalism’s distortion of the nature of human needs and the way its
permeation into the fabric of human relationships induces alienation.”75 Both actions are clearly almost
impotent: neither Marx nor Ben-Ner manage to dethrone capitalism. But that is precisely the point: this
anarchist intervention is based upon its self-reflective inefficacy. Thus, when Klorman-Eraqi discusses the
disruptive qualities of Ben-Ner’s work, she does so in full awareness that disruptiveness and resistance are
possible only in their weakened form. And the same goes for theorization.
These self-reflective qualities are an integral part of the work itself. As Klorman-Eraqi argues, “While
Stealing Beauty challenges global consumer culture, it playfully references itself as an art commodity object.
This can be witnessed in a scene where Max [the father of the family played by Ben-Ner] lectures his daughter
that ‘sound adds value and that without it all is worthless; one then finds oneself in a slapstick comedy… By
adding sound, the comedy is turned into a tragedy of wild consumption and waste.”76 Thus, the interesting
facet of the work involves its own critical self-awareness of the way it is involved with the system it attempts to
subvert. This is a formal element, in the sense that what Klorman-Eraqi refers to as “subversion of consumer
culture” and “culture jamming” are also what infuses the work with energy and locates it within the art
market – and of which the work is completely aware.
In this sense, it is important to note how concepts like subversion, resistance, and critique are at once
autonomous and reified. In this sense, Ben-Ner’s work functions as a synecdoche for neoliberal art in general:77 the rise of “the interesting” and the embrace of art and theory has also followed the submergence of art
in the neoliberal market. To quote Ngai: “the routinization of novelty, the tension between individualization
and standardization, and the new intimacy between art and criticism. Invested in both cases in checking
experiences of ‘reality’ against one’s ‘notes on reality,’ the style of the interesting speaks directly to the making
and disseminating of art.”78
Another DIY video-art work by Ben-Ner, “Drop the Monkey” (2009) is completely immersed within the
logic of the market and “the fetters of donor-based art-world funding.”79 In the work, Ben-Ner uses the funding
he receives to make art, in order to live out his relationship with a romantic partner who lives in Berlin, while
the artist lives in Tel Aviv. The money he receives pays for plane tickets. Ben-Ner documents his travels – he
holds the camera throughout all the scenes in the work – and, as Thom Donovan remarks, “The piece was
made shot-by-shot (that is, without editing) during plane trips between Israel and Berlin, where Ben-Ner’s
girlfriend lived at the time. A PERFORMA 09 commission, the video piece openly questions the ethics of
artmaking, and where the divide should be drawn between art and personal relations.”80
Ben-Ner’s choice to use the money he receives for his personal use, and, following, to use his personal life
for the purpose of art – and bring all these components to the foreground of the work – maintains a work in
which art, bios, and the market become inseparable. As Ben-Ner attests:
74 Ibid., 80.
75 Klorman-Eraqi, “Hijacking IKEA,” 24.
76 Ibid., 27.
77 Ibid., 26.
78 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 37.
79 Bradley, “Guy Ben Ner’s Low Budget Tales of Longing and Transgression.”
80 Donovan, “An Interview with Guy Ben-Ner.”
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15
It is a self-reflective film in the sense that its production and subject matter are one and the same. In the last couple of years
my work was being commissioned and I didn’t know what to do with the production money, since I was used to working very
cheaply. I didn’t feel comfortable, so I had to deal with that issue as subject matter.81
In this sense, Ben-Ner’s work follows Ngai’s description of weak art: it is art in which submersion within the
logic of the market becomes the concept driving the work. As such, it blurs the difference between critique of
the logic of capitalism and its use for artistic purposes and for living (and specifically private living itself). As is
the case in “Stealing Beauty,” Ben-Ner’s work explicitly engages with neoliberal and capitalist ideological
notions of privacy and identity.
However, while usually thought of as a meditation about art, personal relations, and the market (the
interesting), it is important to note that the video’s DIY method, the lack of editing and rehearsing, and the fact
that Ben-Ner both acts and is the photographer, makes the work incredibly zany. Thus, it’s not simply a
“declaration of independence,” to quote Doron Rabina, the curator of one of Ben-Ner’s exhibitions;82 nor is
it simply an (interesting) way to subvert, jam, or resist the art market. The efforts of labour of the artist are
always present, almost abundant, and in a comical and “hyperactive” way which both expresses the precariat’s overwork and ironizes it. Ben-Ner is constantly too much. For example, he accidentally slams into another
person on the street and spills his coffee on his shirt – a characteristic zany gag.
Moreover, in the work, Ben-Ner uses a form in which the artist on the Israeli side is moving towards
meeting the artist coming from Berlin. Their incessant movement – alongside the incessant labour present in
the work – is presented right at the beginning, and the work culminates after Ben-Ner and his partner are
separated; Ben-Ner returns to Tel Aviv, but it is not clear if the two Ben-Ners actually meet. Formally, the work
is constructed using the split between the two Ben-Ners and their movement. Stylistically, the show is completely zany: the artist is in incessant movement, while reciting a text (he wrote) and films himself.
The splitting of the artist himself into two does something to the concept of anticipation. In Marina
Abramović’s famous “The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk” (1990), the artist is depicted walking on the
Chinese wall towards her ex-lover, who walks towards her from the other direction. Their meeting is the
culmination of an anticipatory process, which ends in separation. In Ben-Ner’s “Drop the Monkey,” anticipation is thwarted as the only thing that happens when Ben-Ner meets himself (or not?) is the end of the work.
And while the romantic relationship between Ben-Ner and his partner is the raison d'être of the work, it does
not end with the end of love but with the end of incessant, superfluous, and zany movement of the artist. It also
(probably) ends when the funding runs out. The work is formally and stylistically zany, as it embraces its own
production as an aesthetic and formal affinity. And this zaniness is attached to critical, subversive “interesting”
affinities. The two feed each other, in a circle of self-aware overwork.
The problem that Ben-Ner’s work raises is clear and refers us back to the discussion about the negative
nature of modern art which we touched upon earlier. One cannot simply call the work “resistance” or “critical”
as it explicitly uses the “system” and is disseminated within it. And this use – of funding – produces a work of
art to be discussed, displayed, and disseminated. On the other hand, the relations and limits the art market
forces and enacts are what formally limit the show and thus are expressed rather than repressed. What is
important for my discussion is how Ben-Ner’s work does not allow for the basic dichotomy of critique (ban,
strike) and complicity but finds potential within the confines of a system. And, again, everything is extremely
zany in the performative aspect of the work, and interesting in its material basis.
The political horizon of such actions is probably quite vague, but it does offer an expression and mapping
of the contradiction of the neoliberal art market, and perhaps even those challenging the neoliberal subject at
large. However, one must confess that adjectives such as “subversion,” “resistance,” and “cultural jamming” –
so readily used by critical thinkers and art critics today – become inherently ironic and even lose their
meaning. In this sense, another limit of Ben-Ner’s work is the critical imaginary of resistance itself, which
always oscillates between the radical and the meaningless (as academic discourses tend to do).
81 Ibid.
82 In Bradley, “Guy Ben Ner’s Low Budget Tales of Longing and Transgression.”
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Even as Ben-Ner’s work plays with these notions, it is perhaps more useful for critics to rethink the role of
art and theory again, specifically the notions of resistance and subversion, and to relocate art’s vocation in
other, more promising, and less ironic and reified horizons. In other words: the attempt to decree whether a
work is critical and radical or obedient and ideological – the attempt to decree the degree of subversion a work
possesses or enacts – is inherently problematic when historicized. In this sense, Ben-Ner’s works can help us
see the exhaustion of certain discourses and “political” categories – which leads me back to inoperativity and
the fall of the zany and the interesting.
While “Stealing Beauty” and “Drop the Monkey” bask in the glimmering light of the market, “Whatever
Gets You Through the Night” (2022) deals with the end of the world. It does not show us how to use the art
market but can be viewed as a “recipe” for art after the fall. As such, it inverts the zany character displayed in
Ben-Ner’s other works. Only now, instead of incessant movement, chatter, gestures, and overproduction,
“Whatever Gets You Through the Night” presents a world where nothing really happens. The video art
work introduces two separate processes that unite in the end. In the first, we see Ben-Ner sitting in an
intolerable Zoom meeting in the Beit Berel Midrasha (School) of Art. The content of the meeting is a discussion
of pay cuts, cancellation of courses, and re-aligning the telos (end) of the art school to make it more productive
and efficient (“we already have too many art schools” a participant in the meeting quotes a government
representative). As such, the content of the work is explicitly neoliberal ideology. In the second, we see him
dismantling public property and stealing neon letters from cafes and shops. Formally, both processes maintain
an affinity. If the zoom app is made of squares which function as frames, Ben-Ner dismantling of two wooden
public benches uses form of a square as well, and building a (useless) wooden house from them (the frame is
turned into a place to sit on and hide in).
However, these two narratives share the same singular aimlessness – until the work’s end. Ben-Ner
dismantles tiles to create the saying “Go back to where u came from,” only to do just that: take the tiles
(another almost square) to where they came from. And, obviously, the Zoom meeting is experienced as long,
tedious, boring, and going nowhere. This non-happening isn’t something other than zaniness; it is its inoperative mode. It is not a negation of the interesting (nor its transformation into the boring), but again, its
suspension. “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” offers a suspension without the negation of neoliberal
forms and styles – mainly the zany and the interesting – which still idly work within it.
The work engages with “the interesting,” though it is neither boring nor interesting but simply uses
its ineffectual nature to produce something that lingers beyond intellectual discussion. It is not deemed
interesting because, unlike the formal structure of the interesting, the work engages with finality (and is
engaging to watch). Formally, it does so by presenting two endings. The first occurs when Ben-Ner, while
sitting in an intolerable Zoom meeting as part of his work as the dean of the Beit Berel Midrasha (School) of
Art, pulls a lever, a button, and a wooden DIY structure surrounding his background – a frame, which
resembles the wooden house built from the dismantled benches – collapses behind him. This “ending” elicits
no response, thus lacerating and piercing the form of the interesting without altering it. In fact, what is
revealed “behind” the frame is another smaller wooden piece shaped from squares. If an interesting work
is understood only as part of a series, the concept of the endless series of Zoom meetings and their critique via
art and discourse is pierced by a singular event – which, nonetheless, is noticed by no one. Form collapses and
still remains.
The second ending that envelops the work happens moments later, as the camera zooms out of Ben-Ner’s
window (another frame) and we see writing – compiled of stolen colourful neon letters glued to the back end
of Ben-Ner’s grey Tel-Avivian apartment building – saying “We’ve Lost” as the frame of the shot is widened.
The message is clear: while everything is over, something continues. And this something is both neoliberal
capitalism and its forms of production, symbolized by the Zoom meeting now operating while having effectively ended – and a beauty that appears in its aftermath. The end of something (of art? of neoliberal ideology?
of hope?) does not signify its passing away but rather its inoperativity.
First, this historical process is presented through an inversion of the zany, as the work prompts us to
rethink its limits: above all, nothing is done in the work. This “nothing” is composed of three stages. First, the
theme of the work (the symbolic or ideological background) is that of the Zoom meeting: the place where
zaniness goes to die, only to return reanimated in an undead form. While Zoom meetings epitomize capitalist
Zaniness, Idleness and the Fall of Late Neoliberalism’s Art
17
flexibility – allowing for meetings “on the go” and enabling work anywhere (thereby rendering space zany),
they are also, almost inherently and always, useless and involve a degree of immobility.
I must emphasize the ambivalent affective nature of Zoom meetings. On the one hand, their excessive
proliferation and the ways in which they stretch work time and space make them the perfect vehicle for
round-the-clock labour. They also permit participants to multitask. During Zoom meetings, we often browse,
answer emails, or engage with social media. While multitasking, we also strive to appear engaged – and due to
the design of the Zoom app, we constantly see ourselves at work. As such, Zoom meetings are incredibly zany:
the subject is divided, labouring, hyperactive, and performing affective labour (smiling and nodding at the
appropriate moments). We are also compelled to present ourselves favourably, choosing the right filter, the
appropriate lighting, and perhaps even amusing effects – transforming ourselves into cats or clowns.83
Moreover, Zoom meetings eviscerate the boundary between the private and the work sphere. This evisceration creates an abundance of zany instances: for example, my dog barks every time I start a Zoom meeting
at home. And my toddler son, if at home, always wants to join the meeting – and is audibly disappointed when
he is not allowed. I also need to tidy up the room, make sure not too many of my son’s toys are in the camera’s
view – not to mention dirty dishes or thrown clothes. The issue here isn’t simply the amount of overwork Zoom
meetings call for, but the countless instances in which this overwork is revealed in cringeworthy and awkward
comic moments.
Having said all this, the incredible thing about Zoom meetings is that they are also almost totally idle.
Formally, it’s just a bunch of faces staring at a screen. And, more importantly, most Zoom meetings amount to
what David Graeber refers to as “bullshit jobs.” According to Graeber, a bullshit job is “a job that is primarily or
entirely made up of tasks that the person doing that job considers to be pointless, unnecessary, or even
pernicious.”84 It is a form of idle and yet somehow active action, in which work loses its meaning while
remaining in action. Zoom meetings are zany and idle at the same time. They encapsulate both the “new spirit”
of flexible, whizzing, connectionist, and potential capitalism (Zoom is a synecdoche for platform capitalism), as
Han and Boltanski and Chiapello define it, and are mostly redundant and useless. This content of the Zoom
meeting is, again, the attempt to improve efficiency in the art institution. And all of this is expressed in a formal
tension between the face stuck in the cubic frame, and the incessant and useless psychic and ideological
movement it contains and allows for. The soul idles in work. In this time-space, immobility isn’t the opposite of
zaniness but one of its expressions. Ben-Ner accentuates this tension: when his DIY frame collapses behind
him, the participants in the meeting continue to discuss the incoming cuts as they attempt to improve teaching
efficiency at the Midrasha.
This aesthetic formation also points towards the political phenomena that accompany the emergence of
Zoom meetings: mainly, rapid and radical movements of refusal of work, alongside reactionary and political
shifts in late capitalist forms of work. The Zoom meeting represents the standardization of the work-fromhome movement that happened during COVID-19, but also the reaction to it: both the success and the failure of
avant-garde capitalism (i.e., creative destruction).
Back to Ben-Ner’s work: Formally, the aesthetics of Zoom meetings immediately became tedious and
unbearable. As if capitalist aesthetics somehow hastened within it, they were incepted as a limit or cage
surrounding our world (and not what enables us to move beyond our productive or aesthetic limits). As such,
their image remains incredibly outdated: just a black square with other squares in it. Ben Ner doesn’t add
anything to this image but rather plays with its intangible quality. The “thing” that happens in the work
remains indiscernible. This is weak art: it is muted, immobile, and follows one, fading motion.
The important thing is that as the room collapses behind the artist, the Zoom meeting and its content
prevail. The meeting continues, the ideological chatter is unhindered. The destruction means nothing but
displays the limits of artistic and consumerist aesthetic categories. The frame remains the same, as the Zoom
83 A famous example would be a lawyer that during a live trial on zoom couldn’t remove the filter making him look like a cat.
“Lawyer uses Zoom meeting by mistake – ‘I’m not a cat’,” BBC News, YouTube video, February 10, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=qcnnI6HD6DU.
84 Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, 36.
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cubes mirror the fallen frame behind Ben-Ner. Art has lost – it means nothing to the movement of work and
cannot influence anything politically – that is quite obvious from the opening sentences of the work (“we are in
the process of re-organizing the Midrasha”). Yet it gains meaning in said losing. The non-event of art points to
an art form that begins with the loss of critical and political art. It is also an art that takes place inside work, as
if benefiting from the fact that work itself has become useless.
This non-work is quite different from the hustling and bustling that Ben-Ner’s work usually engages in.
While some of the work is dedicated to his usual DIY shananigans of wooden houses and writing with tiles,
these are undermined by the monotony of the fixed frame. In stretching productivity to its limit, Ben-Ner
doesn’t create new aesthetic categories for neoliberal capitalism – that would miss the point and is also
probably impossible (from a Hegelian perspective at least). Thus, what reaches its limit is also Ben-Ner’s
own actions. The artist also does not allow art to follow the footpaths of technology and immerse itself in
its visions. Basically, it opens no new horizon – and Ben-Ner’s mechanism for destruction is incredibly crude,
on purpose – he builds a DIY wooden construction and then collapses it using a lever. And the letters he steals,
displayed on his grey wall in colourful (zany) fashion, are taken from consumer society.
There is something incredibly symbolic in the colour palette which appears as the closing image of the
work, zany letters on a grey wall. If we return to Hegel’s “grey on grey” world, it is indeed a moment in which
something is expressed and becomes appropriate as it passes away: here, what is “passed” is the efficacy of
neoliberal ideology, aesthetics, and meaning. They are presented as futile both formally and symbolically.
After all, we have lost – as Ben-Ner tells us. Art has no place anymore in this world. However, the colour
scheme allows for play and beauty to arise within the passing away of a world. Much like Kjartansson’s
repetition, the work is thus climactic, sincere, and affective, attaching art (itself, perhaps) to an idle gesture.
The aesthetic experience that the work explores formally is interest (alongside zaniness). Fixed in the
closed room, with the camera focusing on the tedious and meaningless Zoom meeting, we confront “being
interesting” in almost its bare state. Boring Zoom meetings are the content, and the frozen frame is the work’s
form. As Rob Horning has shown – and Ngai reinforces – “boring” art may well be a reaction to the incessant
neoliberal demands for being occupied or desiring: “In a consumer society, it’s a rare delight to experience
things without having to want to possess them.”85 On the other hand, the interesting suggests precisely that
what is interesting lies beyond the work, in discourse, political activism, or theory.
Ben-Ner uses boredom as his object: he directs his camera towards it. Thus, he registers the conflating and
contradicting nature of work (at large) in a fallen world, as today, work itself is the harbinger of boredom and
idleness. The crucial point here is that the relation of boring to interesting is severed, as the poetic act – which
is supposed to “make things interesting” – remains inconsequential, as if it didn’t happen. The formal affinity
of the work, comprised frames, is both shattered and maintained, in ruins. The Zoom meeting continues, still
“wasted time,” as art cannot pierce or interfere with it – the Zoom meeting is precisely not the “ordinary
boredom” Horning longs for.
“Whatever Gets You Through the Night” depends on the relation between the boring non-happening and
the elaborate theoretical discussion that follows it: this is why it is “interesting.” Yet, it somehow escapes this
non-dialectical tension. Ben-Ner juxtaposes content – a critique of late capitalism’s bullshit jobs, ideology of
“efficiency” and its incessant demands of work and their failure – with the formal zany and interesting basis of
the work. However, this tension also fails: nothing happens and almost nothing can be said. The artist remains
mute. The interesting and the zany rest on the hammock of the boring non-work. If the formal structure of the
interesting demands a tension between theory (discourse) and practice (work), here things aren’t negated but
simply released. I propose that to understand and potentialize the work, we need to free it from its negative
interpretative horizon (of subversion, cultural jamming, and resistance). It isn’t that nothing can be said about
the work – but that theorization and art both mean nothing to the work (and to work) itself, which continues.
Loss here is also the release of content from form, a release of art.
Thus, the tension that ostensibly invigorates the work – the problem with late capitalist forms of labour,
both artistic and “simple” work – culminates in a climactic act at the endings of the work, in falling and loss.
85 Horing, “Ordinary Boredom.”
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19
There, art “betrays” its dubious vocation as negation: it does not negate but falls. Or, to quote Agamben when
he writes about poetry:
If poetry lives in the unsatisfied tension between the semiotic and the semantic [form and content, YR] series alone, what
happens at the moment of the end, when the opposition of the two series is no longer possible?…. The double intensity
animating [the work] does not die away in a final comprehension; instead, it collapses into silence, so to speak, in an endless
falling.86
Ido Govrin elucidates this concept, stating that for Agamben, at the end of a poem, “what appears is no longer
what it [the work] says nor the alternation of representations.”87 What appears is silence itself, a “threshold”
where the mechanism of art can be considered suspended in an erotic embrace, as content and form “fall
hugging each other in silence.”88
In “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” this convergence – the revelation of things as they fall together
– leads nowhere. The work, remarkably, fails to achieve any purpose. And importantly, the falling adds
nothing to the discourse. It is idle, not because it is not critical, but because it is simply happy or comic. To
use Zupančič’s words, it suspends the symbolic order – freeing the work from it – because the other does not
recognize it; capitalism and neoliberal ideology continue to operate in the Zoom meeting. The ways in which
art and work are co-opted by neoliberal ideologies are sidestepped (or diverted from) precisely because these
ideologies (and the zany and interesting composition of the work) persist in (idly) working. Art forges a haven
where its critical and negative role is exhausted, but its liveliness endures. It is powerless, yet hopeful and
vibrant. A utopia, of sorts, returning to Vermeulen and van den Akker’s notions. Or, to put it more aptly, a
utopian sentiment born from the suspension of what is, devoid of any positive content (which, at least for
Marxists, is a definition of Utopia).
Ben-Ner misuses the remnants of neoliberal ideologies, forms, and content, allowing their motion to wane
yet gain significance in this fading gesture. The meaning here embodies both the traditional role late capitalist
art has assumed – weak, conceptual, and critical – and also the task of delineating the boundaries of that role –
and of post-war, late capitalism itself as it shifts from neoliberalism into something else. It demonstrates both
how we can no longer continue – we have lost – and presents the potential inherent in this inability or
inoperativity, now historicized. In their collective descent, the movements of art, discourse, and labour, as
ideological expressions of historical conditions, reveal themselves and become inoperative: art and work
continue as before yet also expose the possibilities latent in their limits. The form of the world passes away
even as it persists.
5 Conclusion
This essay formalizes a theoretical perception of art forms that fall. This comes in an attempt to do two things:
first, the essay shows how Agamben’s notions of inoperativity can be thought of when historicized, and how
they can be used to rethink neoliberalism and its culture. This was done not in an attempt to understand
Agamben better, but rather to contribute to our understanding of the pregnant with potential role of non-work
and idleness in our ideologies, forms of production, and artistic and cultural endeavours. In this sense, the
essay shows how art can “tell the time,” periodize art (as metamodernist or as late-neoliberal), and express the
inner limits of neoliberal capitalism and the movement of history in manners beyond our conceptualization. I
am not arguing that the development of Ben-Ner’s work is linear (although the latest crises of neoliberalism
may well point in that direction). Nor that neoliberalism is over with. What I do argue is that the works
86 Agamben, The End of the Poem, 114–5.
87 Govrin, Philosophical Archeology with and Beyond Agamben, 171. See the entire discussion on pages 170–8.
88 Agamben in Govrin, Ibid., 170.
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explored here mark a historicized limit within neoliberalism, which may remain potential – or allow us to
understand the birth of “something” new: allowing us to grasp historicity.
Second, it locates a form of creative discourse that traverses our notions of art as negative and critical. Art
as strike, ban, or usership is supposed to escape capitalism or stop it, find an alternative to it. It is critical and
radical. Kjartansson and Ben-Ner’s very different methods of producing inoperative work allow us to enjoy it
comically, while foregoing the imperative of critique. It also allows for beauty, enjoyment, and meaning,
encapsulated in a space in which the comic suspends the symbolic order: be it identity politics, neoliberal
self-expression (in the case of Kjartansson); or the zany and interesting entanglement of art in theory and
critique, and the contradictions of neoliberal labour (in the case of Ben-Ner). In both cases, art as inoperativity
rethinks both political categories and the potential falling (as a form of aimless suspension) holds.
Author contribution: The author confirms the sole responsibility for the conception of the study, presented
results and manuscript preparation.
Conflict of interest: Author states no conflict of interest.
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