Anarchistory of Action (a heresy in action)

Anarchistory of Action1, (a heresy in action) by Luis Guerra 2014 Abstract There are performances that have no fixed abode in the Arts. Invisible to the norm, unnamed, these actions of art dwell a nomadic and unsettled condition, disappearing as surplus holes of the situation. Through a subtractive strategy, I argue, these performances render a subversive accumulation of routine and ordinary gestures against Capital nomenclature. The present work aims to present the possible philosophical conceptualization that emerges from a non- spectacular performativity working through subtractive procedures of loss, friction and disappearance. I propose to address these issues through a double conceptual plane, by American anthropologist James C. Scott and French philosopher Alain Badiou. The aim of the paper is to show that this homeless Performativity proposes to Philosophy a liminal, radical and unstable script willing to create new territories of speculation by its apparent inexistence. Keywords Performance, Action, anarchist history, James C. Scott, Alain Badiou, subtraction, anomie. The present text was originally written for the International Conference “Theatre, Performance, Philosophy” at La Sorbonne, Paris, France, June 27th 2014. I have decided to change the title after confirming an intuition on the difference between the notion of Performance and Action within the realm of contemporary art. This confirmation came by my reading of Pavlína Morganová’s book Czech Action Art, Happenings, actions, events, land art, body art and performance art behind the iron curtain, Karolinum Press, 2014. In this text she argues: “It is worth mentioning that the term 'action' has slightly different meaning that the commonly used term 'performance'. The primary meaning of 'action' is the process of doing, while 'performance' means a kind of representation. An action can be carried out without witnesses, but also before an audience. (…) Performance art is usually perceived as a specific stream of Western conceptual art as RoseLee Goldberg, in particular, formulated in her books.” In the same sense, in Latin America, the term “action” was used in the field of art, before the more internationally accepted word “performance” came to take over. Due this fact, I have decided to re-title my text returning to the word “action”, which I think opens the text to a more undefined force-form of art. 1 Anarchistory of Action (a heresy in action) “(..) and performance, rather, tries to be a pure reality, an indiscernible, tendentiously, of a whatever becoming.” Alain Badiou2 In November 1976, at Wenceslas Square, Prague, the Czech artist Jiri Kovanda performed the piece “Theater, I follow a previously written script to the letter. Gestures and movements have been selected so that passers-by will not suspect that they are watching a “performance”.” Kovanda has said that his “actions” were “doing something invisible, something completely unnecessary. Something that can be done normally, something that happens all the time, in a way that is abnormal.” Kovanda has said that the activity of art can change society but only indirectly3. His statement could be reframed as a change produced through invisible forms, inexistent to the frames of intelligibility conducted by those in power. Kovanda’s work is one among other examples of art procedures with no fixed abode4. I could also name the works of Gordon Matta-Clark, Adrian Piper, Bas Jan Ader, Helio Oiticica, Mladen Stilinovic, Carlos Altamirano, Elías Adasme, among others. These forms of action are invisible to the norm, unnamed, dwelling a nomadic and unsettled condition, disappearing as surplus holes of Badiou, Alain (2009) “A Theater of Operations: A Discussion between Alain Badiou and Elie During”, in A Theater Without Theater, ed. Manuel J. Borja-Villel et al. Barcelona: Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 26. 2 Guerra, Luis (2010) “Jiri Kovanda Hacer Arte con Nada”, SCRIPT #10, Buenos Aires-Madrid, http://clubscript.blogspot.com.es/ 3 By no fixed abode I refer to the phrase that Kafka’s Odradek answers to the Father in The Cares of a Family Man. In that short story Odradek, before being questioned about where it leaves, answers: “no fixed abode”. This homelessness exposed by Odradek’s answer, its permanent vanishing, composes a possibility of naming without name a series of activities which, I argue, exist in an inexistent condition within the realm of art. I have argued a similar idea in the paper “Window Blow Out (1976), Acontecimiento, Corte, Sustracción y Profanación” Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo, Vol. 1, # 1, 2012, 121-139. 4 the situation. Through subtractive strategies, I argue, these procedures render a subversive accumulation of ordinary gestures against Capital nomenclature. Anarchistory But first, what is an anarchistory? Here I will refer to a double source: the concept of Anarchitecture coined by artist and architect Gordon Matta- Clark and the notion of anarchist history by American anthropologist James C. Scott. “Anarchitecture was about making space without building it”5, Gordon Matta-Clark wrote. Anarchitecture was first the name of a collective project, a New York based artist group6 that mixed the concepts of anarchy and architecture as a way of grasping an interstitial territory of critical exploration. The concept itself was born from a series of informal conversations developed by the group throughout 1973. In a letter to Robert Lendenfrost7, Gordon Matta-Clark wrote: “The group that I represent, as I mentioned by telephone, are (sic) well-known young artists coming from a wide range of disciplines who have been meeting together for over a year to discuss an attitude which we loosely call ‘Anarchitecture’. This term does not imply antiarchitecture, but rather is an attempt at clarifying ideas about space which are personal insights and reactions than formal socio-political statements.” In March 1974, they produced an exhibition named also as Anarchitecture at the 112 Greene Street Workshop in New York. Generally, the notion of Anarchitecture has been used to define the Attlee, James (2007) “Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark And Le Corbusier”, Tate Papers, Tate’s Online Research Journal, Spring 3, http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7297 5 6 The Group was then formed by Laurie Anderson, Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Bernard Kirschenbaun, Richard Landry, Richard Nonas, and Gordon Matta-Clark. 7 Letter from Gordon Matta-Clark to Robert Lendenfrost, World Trade Center, New York, January 21, 1975, in Moure, Gloria (2006) Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Polígrafa, Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain, 369. practice of Gordon Matta-Clark, specifically in reference to its work dealing with the “betrayal” of Architecture to society. It is in this sense that I use anarchitecture, referencing these works where Matta-Clark confronts directly a conceptual and political critique of the practice of architecture. The American anthropologist James C. Scott states that “the huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart of it. This is also what makes this an anarchist history.”8 An anarchist history involves then the history of those that by different actions or strategies have constituted procedures of State-repelling9. An anarchist history is the history of those solely being archived by the State but never subjects of it10. It is also the history of procedures and choices made by a group or individual to maintain itself away from the State, even if that awayness has to be developed within the frontiers of the State. This is what Scott names the Art of not being governed: the summation of techniques, procedures and strategies of living through which an individual or a group can stay away or to maintain the State far from themselves, understanding here that state means “what enumerates, names and controls the parts of a situation”.11 Anarchistory then would be conceptualized as the history of the 8 Scott, James C. (2009) The Art of not being governed, Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia,Yale University Press. James C. Scott resumes these strategies into four features: 1. “A society that is physically mobile, widely dispersed, and likely to fission into new and smaller units”; 2. Subsistence routines, meaning the choice for autonomous and versatile forms of subsistence that permit state-repelling condition; 3. “highly egalitarian social structure”; and 4. Distance from state centers, or as Scott has pointed out: “friction-of-terrain remoteness”. 9 “At other times, which is to say most of the time, the peasantry appeared in the historical record not so much as historical actors but as more or less anonymous contributors to statistics on conscription, taxes, labor migration, land holding, and crop production.” Scott, James C. (1985) “Normal Exploitation, Normal Resistance”, The Weapons of the Weak, Yale University Press. 10 11 Badiou, Alain (2003) Saint Paul, The Foundation of the Universal, trans. Ray Brassier, Stanford University Press, 76-77. inexistents. A history of those making space without building it. An anarchistory of Action would be in itself a procedure, a strategy that, on the contrary of naming or enumerating, composes spaces, trajectories, infinite sets, to avoid state management. An anarchistory will frame what has no frame. It will form a set of procedures that happen without any given name, unsettled and invisible to the structures of intelligibility. The level of the everyday James C. Scott has pointed out that infrapolitics12 are those practices happening at the level of the everyday: a form of politics that does not refer to the representational forms or any kind of political discourse but, on the contrary, to those activities that undermine the system by its, I will say, “subtractive” action. As an example of this, Scott proposes the activity of poaching, the illegal hunting within lands owned by those in power, state or elites. Scott argues that this action is an ordinary weapon, a weapon of the weak, which is active in an effective infrapolitical level. What is stated here is that these kind of actions are in fact forms of struggle against private property, which is to say, many forms of everyday actions that undermine the status quo. It is at this level that I claim that some of the performative practices, those without fixed abode, are also working at this ordinary level, not as a representational or mimetic condition of the everyday, but directly as weapons of the weak. For example, within the political situation at the moment, Kovanda’s actions were not directly confronting the regime13, but indirectly, his actions were effective space-forms, Scott, James C. (1990) “The Infrapolitics of Subordinate Groups”, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, 183-201. 12 13 The action refered in this text, Theater (1976), was produced during the “Normalization” period in Czechoslovakia, after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies and during the Gustav Husák regime. This period was characterized by the repression and restoration of the country to the socialist bloc. Pavlina Morganova states that “Kovanda’s gesture is closely linked to the normalization situation.” Commenting on another action, Untitled, 1976, she asserts: “His position 'of being kind of crucified' expresses that which many of his generation (not only artists) were deprived of by the totalitarian regime, though there is also something in him determined to preserve his identity despite the warped conditions. This performance was not merely an affront on those simply walking past, an attempt to bridge the anonymity of the city and break down the anarchitectural performances, undermining not only the visible symbolical capital of the Regime but also its core. Without being seen his actions avoided direct confrontation. In other words, his actions occurred at the level of the invisible, of the inexistent 14 to the norm, to the State. By refusing to develop any kind of spectacular statement of the action, which would immediately recompose, and reaffirm, the dialectical landscape of master-slave, negation-destruction between power and the powerless, these actions remain unsettled, unnamed, in a vanishing point, within a permanent disappearing. The subversive exercise appears without presence, and by the presentation of the act of absolute withdrawn. I am not arguing here that the infrapolitical actions are the effective way to undermine the State. Any kind of effective change in the political field needs an evident, defiant action which breaks the norms. But it is important to expose that the political struggle happens not only within the open air of a public manifestation, but also through the infinite capacity of infrapolitical actions, concerted or not. It has been the case, for example, in the refusal of participation, or the invisible, noisy gathering known as “cacerolazo”, which is produced by banging pots, pans, and other utensils of the kitchen, or by the private sharing of political jokes. These infrapolitical actions work as an accumulative force which exposes a critical space, allowing for an opportunity of defiance upon the skin of the State. The Subtractive It is this ordinary appearance which composes the subtractive operation. This ordinary appearance, which is not different from what is considered by the State as ordinary, composes the terrain for a barrier that each carries.” Morganová, Pavlína (2014) Czech Action Art, Happenings, actions, events, land art, body art and performance art behind the iron curtain, Karolinum Press. “Generally speaking, given a world, we will call ‘proper inexistent of an object’ an element of the underlying multiple whose value of existence is minimal. Or again, an element of an apparent which, relative to the transcendental indexing of this apparent, inexists in the world.” Badiou, Alain (2009) Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano, Continuum, 322. 14 subtraction from the conditions of the situation. This unnoticed condition, or rather, its apparent sameness to the conditions within the regime of the situation, composes its own invisibility, its inexistance. Without the clues to name its difference, being invisible to the regimes of intelligibility in place, these procedures go away from the situation composing infrapolitically the features of a state-repelling performativity. These elements, appearing as something similar to the status quo, belong to themselves. They are radically new, an excess or deficiency from the state point of view, operating within the knowledgeable situation, becoming sedimentary or accumulative forceform. The presentation of this accumulative force-form is the work of an anarchistory. But what is a subtractive procedure? Alain Badiou has said at a conference on Pier Paolo Passolini’s poetry: “I name subtraction the affirmative part of negation. When a new artistic axioms are in no way deducible from the destruction of a given system. They are the affirmative laws of a new framework for the artistic activity.” For Badiou the main difference composed by this affirmative part of a negation is the fact that its coherence does not depend upon the disintegration of the system. On the contrary, the new becomes “indifferent to the system’s law”. A subtraction procedure keeps the new coherence apart from the destruction or the purely negative part of a negation. To emphasize this argument, Badiou exposes Marx’s notion of a communist state: “It is the same thing for Marx in the political context. Marx insists on saying that the destruction of the bourgeois State is not in itself an achievement. The goal is communism, that is the end of the State as such, and the end of social classes, in favour of a purely egalitarian organization of the civil society. But to come to this, we must first substitute to the bourgeois State a new State, which is not the immediate result of the destruction of the first. In fact, it is a State as different of the bourgeois State as a contemporary performance can be of an academic representation of Olympic Gods. For the new State - that Marx names "dictatorship of the proletariat" - is a State which organizes its own vanishing, a State which is in its very essence the process of the non-State. So we can say that in the original thought of Marx, "dictatorship of the proletariat" was a name for a State which is subtracted from all classical laws of a "normal" State. For a classical State is a form of power; but the State named "dictatorship of proletariat" is the power of un-power, the power of the disappearance of the question of power. In any case we name subtraction this part of negation which is oriented by the possibility of something which exists absolutely apart from what exists under the laws of what negation negates”.15 A subtractive procedure is one through which an inexistent to the situation declares its existence. Indifferent to the norms of the state, and independent of the destruction of that same system, the inexistent declares its presence. It is in this sense that I name subtractive these procedures. These actions happen without the necessary recognition of existence from the regime in place. These actions happen besides the laws at work. These actions occur infrapolitically, within the conditions of the system, remaining subtracted, separated, “even at the price of the impotence of naming”16. These actions exclude themselves from the situation. They operate as surplus holes within the situation. These actions create a space of resistance without building it. I will bring forward a last example of this subtractive procedure through the work of American artist Adrian Piper named Catalysts. Catalysts was a series of actions performed by Piper between 19721973. She states that “Ideally the work has no meaning or independent existence outside of its function as a medium of change. It exists only as a catalytic agent between myself and the viewer. (...) Here the art-making process and end product has the immediacy of being in the same time 15 Badiou, Alain (2007) “On Pier Paolo Passolini”, Graduate Seminar - Art Center College of Design in Pasadena - February 6 2007, published at Lacanian Ink. 16 Badiou, Alain (2006) Briefings on Existence, A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, trans. and edited by Norman Madarasz, State University of New York, 2006. and space continuum as the viewer.”17 Within the continuum space of the everyday, the action of the artist occurs as a subtraction, as an excess of the same situation without altering the general view of the ordinary: “For example, Catalysis IV, in which I dressed very conservatively but stuffed a large white bath towel into the sides of my mouth until my cheeks bulged to about twice their normal size, letting the rest of it hang down my front and riding the bus, subway, and Empire State Building elevator; Preserving the impact and uncategorized nature of the confrontation. Not overly defining myself to viewers as artwork by performing any unusual or theatrical actions of any kind. These actions tend to define the situation in terms of the pre-established categories of "guerrilla theater," "event," "happening," "street work," etc., making disorientation and catalysis more difficult. (...) For the same reason I don’t announce most of these works, as this immediately produces an audience- versusperformer separation and has the same effect psychologically as a stage surrounded by rows of chairs has physically.”18 On Weapons of the Weak, Scott asks of resistance: “Can individual acts such as theft or the murder of livestock be considered resistance even though they involve no collective action and do not openly challenge the basic structure of property and domination? Can largely symbolic acts such as boycotting feasts or defaming reputations be called resistance, although they appear to make little or no dent in the distribution of resources?”19 In the same sense, here, we can ask if it would be possible to affirm that acts like the kind of performances that I am defining as having no fixed abode can be considered as procedures of resistance, even though they do not involve direct collective action. These actions should be considered as procedures through which the entire epistemopolitical structure is not only criticized but abandoned. By Piper, Adrian “Talking to Myself, Autobiography of an Art Object”, January 1971, in Bowles, John P. (2011) Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, Embodiment, Duke University Press. 17 18 19 Ibid. Scott, James C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak, Everyday forms of peasant resistance, Yale University Press, 290. the subtractive procedures of loss, friction and disappearance, what these actions compose is a territory of abandonment, withdrawal and instability. They compose a non-state space, a space of anomie. Through these procedures, we have a state-repelling methodology. I argue that these kind of performances, without fixed abode, these acts of art, these force-forms, develop infrapolitical activities, which means that these practices compose an effective terrain of resistance to a given situation. They compose an anarchive of procedures, open to be used. Bibliography Books Badiou, Alain (2003) Saint Paul, The Foundation of the Universal, trans. Ray Brassier, Stanford University Press. Badiou, Alain (2009) Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano, Continuum. Badiou, Alain (2006) Briefings on Existence, A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, trans. and edited by Norman Madarasz, State University of New York. Scott, James C. (1985) The Weapons of the Weak, Everyday forms of peasant resistance, Yale University Press. Scott, James C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press. Scott, James C. (2009) The Art of not being governed, Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia,Yale University Press. Morganová, Pavlína (2014) Czech Action Art, Happenings, actions, events, land art, body art and performance art behind the iron curtain, Karolinum Press. Bowles, John P. (2011) Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, Embodiment, Duke University Press. Catalogues Borja-Villel, Manuel et al. (2009) A Theater Without Theater, Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain. Moure, Gloria (2006) Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Polígrafa, Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain. Papers Guerra, Luis (2012) “Window Blow Out (1976), Acontecimiento, Sustracción, Corte, Profanación”, Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo, Vol. 1, # 1, Barcelona, Spain. Guerra, Luis (2011) “The Bomb Case”, in Journal for Aesthetics and Protest, # 8, Los Angeles, USA. Guerra, Luis (2010) “Jiri Kovanda Hacer Arte con Nada”, SCRIPT #10, Buenos Aires-Madrid, http://clubscript.blogspot.com.es/