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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Collaborative Aesthetics and the Politics of Trans-Subjectivity Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/19c75445 Author Durham, April Louise Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Collaborative Aesthetics and the Politics of Trans-Subjectivity A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by April Louise Durham August 2013 Dissertation Committee: Dr. James S. Tobias, Co-Chairperson Dr. Marguerite Waller, Co-Chairperson Dr. Sabine Doran Dr. Jeffrey Sacks Copyright by April Louise Durham 2013 The Dissertation of April Louise Durham is approved: Committee Co-Chairperson Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments In a project on collaboration, there are necessarily many, many people who inspire, contribute, and commingle and whose contributions are felt on every page of this long consideration. I list a few of them here: Damien Airault, Patrick Bernier, Juliet Conlon, Dessislava Dimova, Nico Dockx, Christie Frields, Christine Laquet, Olive Martin, Michelle Naismith, Douglas Park, Merryn Singer, Sharon Suhovy. These artists and curators and writers and organizers have all interrupted a confined sense of myself that I held dear at some point or other. The disruptions have been beautiful, terrifying, and ultimately transformational. I have had so many lovely, engaging, and rigorous conversations with my academic colleagues at UCR including Tanya Rawal with her conviction that she needs to change the world, and Kimberly Hall whose graciousness and unflagging energy have inspired me again and again. Others include Michael Podolny, Edward Troy, Richard Hunt, and Regina Yung-Lee. In addition to long-term and short-term commitments to shared creative and scholarly practice, some others have willingly stepped into the void, repeatedly, with me. Linda Parnell has shared her strange and persistent curiosity and wandered in the desert with me for these many years, even when our paths were slightly different. Pam Strugar has been my constant ally, thinking and feeling through the intricacies of alchemical reactions and shadowy processes, steadfastly fighting through the thorniest of places without fear. Her fine mind, her assiduous commitment to asking more questions, and her wondrous sense of humor made this project richer and more complex. The faculty at UC Riverside are more than wonderful. I appreciate the care and consideration I received from Margherita Long, Thomas Scanlon, Heidi Brevik-Zender, and Theda Shapiro. For many enjoyable and meandering discussions, I thank Jeffrey Sacks and Sabine Doran. Marguerite Waller has offered unmitigated support from my first day in the program. Her encouragement and belief in me coupled with her attention to iv detail and her kindly way of pushing for a deeper analysis and richer consideration have been ever so important to my scholarly growth. Finally, thank you is not enough to say to James Tobias for four years of thoughtful mentoring that involved sharing his beautiful mind, pushing me to work harder and step beyond my limits, and take really hard risks. He offered exquisite, consistent care, characterized by deep, rich kindness, and from the start he unreservedly agreed to the possibility of imagining six or more impossible things well before breakfast. At last, my dear and cherished mystery companion, Bryan Gorrie, whose tender belief and rigorous critique continue to make me better. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Collaborative Aesthetics and the Politics of Trans-Subjectivity by April Louise Durham Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, August 2013 Dr. Marguerite Waller, Co-Chairperson, Dr. James S. Tobias, Co-Chairperson This dissertation explores how creative collaborative practice transforms subjectivity, before it is leveraged as an industrial resource. Raising key questions about the nature of collaborative practice itself, I discuss in detail the histories and processes of select collaborative groups in order to unfold an idea of intensity among participants that exceeds the boundaries of each artist without eradicating individuality. I argue that from the commingled exchange occurring in a material and discursive mash-up called “the mangle,” emergent onto-epistemologies arise that disrupt static physical and identity formations. From this disruption, the ways in which language or sense-making functions are transformed and begin to include alternative ways of knowing that occur in bafflement, the inability to comprehend, and dysfunction. I work rigorously to transform the chaotic status of these negative terms into something that can be understood as lively, creative, and transformative in their own right and not merely opposites of order, understanding, clarity, and sanity. Overall, the project is highly trans-disciplinary in that I analyze art works and art practices, films, musical performances, composition techniques, and my own long-term creative collaborative work with a group called Multipoint. Further, in a very focused effort to transgress disciplinary boundaries, I place Material Feminism and post-Marxist theory alongside the philosophical works of Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Agamben, and Derrida. Divided into five chapters, the project vi addresses different aspects of intricate sharing and mangled time. The preface and the first chapter introduce the concept of trans-subjectivity and outline a chaotic, intense description of collaborative practice as I conceive it for this project, tracing a myopic history from the 1950s to the present to consider various forms of collaboration and their effects. The second chapter imagines networked, complex bodies in the video works of Natalie Bookchin and in installation art generally. The third considers the way language becomes complicated and remade through forms of virtuosity and incomprehensibility, while the fourth develops a theory of a-productivity involving lingering in conditions of highly queered time. The last chapter reads Giorgio Agamben’s “whatever being” through Derrida’s concept of impossible hospitality to envision the potentials for emergent forms of community. vii Table of Contents List of Figures .................................................................................................................. ix Preface: Collaboration, Time, and Becoming Trans-Subjective ....................................... x Hypertext, Alephs, Queer Clock Ticks ...................................................................... ...x Time as Collaborator: Queer Clocks Acting ........................................................... ...xix Chaos and Numbers, Group Logics ...................................................................... ...xxvi Love in the Time of Chaos: The Emergence of Trans-Subjectivity ...................... ...xxix Chapter 1: Spinning, Flying Networks .............................................................................1 Trans-Subjectivity and Collaborative Ensembles ........................................................ 1 Collaboration and the Abyss: Approaches, Histories, Ensembles, Networks ............... 7 Allan Kaprow, Happenings, and the Non-Object ................................................. ...9 Feminist Crossing, Global Collisions ................................................................. ...17 Trans-subjectivity I: Intra-Acting, Co-constituting, Breathing ................................... 20 On House and Home: Collaborative Style in the Work of Meredith Monk ....... ...27 Trans-subjectivity II: Empathy, Less-Ness, Breathe ................................................... 35 Fool Misplaces Border: Trans-subjectivity and Multipoint ............................... ...46 Chapter 2: Nomadic Trans-Bodies Orchestrated in the Video Artworks of Natalie Bookchin ......................................................................................................................... 55 Bodies, Interactivity, Trans-corporeal Nomads .......................................................... 55 Bookchin’s Bodies: Trans-Corporeality in Expressive Networks .............................. 62 Bookchin and Installation: Digital Bodies and Cinematic Perceptions ................... ...68 Chapter 3: Games of Sorrow and Invention ................................................................... 86 Language and Sense in the Trans-Subjective .............................................................. 86 Idiots, Language Games, Sorrow ............................................................................. ...87 Speaking the Bolshe Vita: Nomads and Babble....................................................... ...98 Fractured (Medieval) Language Games Assembled Like Bones: The Structure of Monk’s Dolmen Music .......................................................................................... ...106 Chapter 4: Play, Purposelessness, and A-Productivity .................................................. 118 A Loitering Mode of nonWork ................................................................................... 118 A-Productivity: the Semantics of Virtual Nothingness .......................................... ...126 Ethics, Refusals, Communes .................................................................................