Ethics of Contemporary Art: in the Shadow Of

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Ethics of Contemporary Art In the Shadow of Transgression

Theo Reeves-Evison

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Reeves-Evison, Theo, author. Title: Ethics of contemporary art : in the shadow of transgression / Theo Reeves-Evison. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020035674 (print) | LCCN 2020035675 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501339905 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501339912 (epub) | ISBN 9781501339936 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Art and morals. | Art–Moral and ethical aspects. | Art and society–History–20th century. | Art and society–History–21st century. Classification: LCC N72.E8 R44 2020 (print) | LCC N72.E8 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035674 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035675

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For Ada

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Contents

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgements x

Introduction 1

Empty ethics, resurgent morality 3

Lacan and Guattari: Diagnosis and production 5

Critical cultures of transgression 9

Integrating transgression 12

1 Four snapshots of transgression 27

Snapshot 1: The dialectics of descent 27

Snapshot 2: The politics of ecstasy 32

Snapshot 3: The inversion of values 38

Snapshot 4: The disorientation of morality 45

A postface to transgression 49

Princely pursuits 50

Just say yes 54

As if on wheels 55

2 Magic models 69

The puppet master 74

Breaks and continuities 77

Intergenerational games 85

Fragments of reality 91

3 Knots and partial enunciators 105

Psychosis in a swarm 107

Borromean Joyce 111

A Guattarian graft 119

‘Language leaks all over the place’ 120

Existential pragmatics and the production of subjectivity 128

Aesthetics everywhere 133

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viii Contents

4 Repair 145

Defining repair 149

Space-time polyphony 151

Sinthomatic repairs 156

Between change and continuity 159

Holding things together 161

5 Experiments with truth 167

From intention to effect 168

Lying to liars 171

Intimate percussion 175

Talking back 179

Knot not true 181

Conclusion 191

Bibliography 197 Index 213

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Figures

1.1 Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl and Adolf Frohner, Die Blutorgel/The

Blood Organ (1962) 28

1.2 Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy (1964) 34

1.3 Thrust in Me (1985), dir. by Richard Kern and Nick Zedd 39

1.4 Thrust in Me (1985), dir. by Richard Kern and Nick Zedd 39

2.1 Artur Żmijewski, Repetition (2005) 70

2.2 Artur Żmijewski, Them (2007) 72

3.1 Three-Ring Borromean Chain 112

3.2 Unlinked Three-Ring Chain 114

3.3 Unlinked Three-Ring Chain with Repair 117

3.4 The Role of the Signifier in the Institution 123

3.5 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Conflicted Phonemes (2013) 126 4.1 Paul Landowski, Monument to the Dead of Algiers, or

‘Le Pavois’ (1928) 146

4.2 M’hamed Issiakhem, Monument to the Martyrs (1962) 147 4.3 Kader Attia, The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures

(2012) 151

4.4 Kader Attia, Open Your Eyes (2010) 152

5.1 Pilvi Takala, The Trainee (2008) 172

5.2 Dora Garcia, Heartbeaters (2005) 179

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Acknowledgements

Books come to be finished for a variety of reasons. Sometimes a train of thought reaches a natural stopping point, sometimes a new project beckons and sometimes contractual obligations force the author’s hand. The first iteration of this book was finished in the run-up to my daughter’s birth, and for this gentle imperative I thank her. Much of the research for Ethics of Contemporary Art was conducted at Goldsmiths College under the supervision of Matthew Fuller and Simon O’ Sullivan, who provided advice with patience and generosity. Conversations with various people I met and spoke with at Goldsmiths, as well as numerous conferences, reading groups and seminars, reminded me that research is always to some extent a collaborative enterprise. Institutional and professional support has been gratefully received from Birmingham City University, who eased my teaching load towards the end of the project. My colleagues within the School of Art, in particular John Wigley, Jenny Wright, Lisa Metherell and Anthony Downey, have offered invaluable support in the early stages of my academic career, and collaborative work with Jon K. Shaw greatly sharpened my thoughts about fiction. Many of the chapters of this book have been considerably enriched by conversations with artists, especially Dora García, Kader Attia and Pilvi Takala, who each contributed invaluable clarifications to my writing about their work. I’m grateful to Margaret Michniewicz at Bloomsbury Academic for her initial enthusiasm for the book, to April Peake and Barbara Cohen Bastos for helping bring the project to completion, and to Ilavarasi Selvaraj for her work on copy-editing. Finally, I express my gratitude to Maggie Reeves and Barrie Evison for support that began when this book was little more than a loose set of intuitions and continued well after these thoughts found their way onto the page. The first few paragraphs of Chapter 4 appear in the introduction of a special issue of the journal Third Text that I co-edited with Mark Rainey in 2018. I am grateful to Mark and Taylor & Francis for their permission to reprint this material.

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Acknowledgements xi

Chapter 5 is a reworked version of an article I published in 2015 under the title ‘Rogues, Rumours and Giants: Some Examples of Deception and Fabulation in Contemporary Art’ in the journal Parallax. Taylor & Francis deserve another mention here, as does Agnieszka Jasnowska for her editorial input.

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xii

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Introduction

Scatological shock-merchants, irresponsible social workers, conflict-zone tourists: discussions of the ethics of contemporary art often gravitate towards actions that would otherwise be frowned upon in any other field of activity. At their centre stands the figure of the artist, whose personality and intentions often serve as an ethical measure of the work. This book operates on the basis of a different premise: that the artwork itself has an ethical content, and looking at this content more closely can tell us about how we are constituted as ethical subjects. More than simply condensations of an artist’s own moral or ethical disposition, artworks fundamentally channel, express and help shape the attitudes at play in the social field. And these attitudes, in turn, shape us. Shifting the emphasis away from an artist’s intentions and onto the ethical force their work contains is merely the first step on the path towards a larger shift in how the ethics of contemporary art can be thought differently. This second shift is announced in the subtitle of this book: In the Shadow of Transgression. It is now over thirty years since Hal Foster called time on transgressive strat-

egies in visual art,1 and yet conversations on the subject remain caught in the wake of this influential critical concept. While the word ‘transgression’ itself may have receded into the background in more recent years, survey books on contemporary art and ethics nevertheless remain preoccupied with artworks that court controversy, rather than ameliorate social problems or promote new

values.2 One of the key arguments of this book is that ethics can be more than a warning light that periodically flickers on when an artwork crosses a moral boundary, visible or otherwise. To put it another way, the radical potential of ethics is wasted if it serves only to help us recognize and prevent bad things from happening from time to time. Artworks have the capacity to produce new values, as well as to endlessly problematize existing values. While artworks that do the former may speak at a lower volume than their transgressive counterparts, they are nevertheless significant and when taken together announce a break from the

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2 Ethics of Contemporary Art

preoccupation with transgression that has dominated discussion of the ethics of contemporary art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This ambition does not disavow the historical significance of transgressive strategies in art or aim to banish them from discussions of ethics entirely. In attempting to shift the accent away from transgression, this book merely seeks to show that art has the capacity to engage with ethics in multiple ways. While it does so by adopting a primarily speculative approach – considering the ways in which future values may be incubated within the field of contemporary art – an equally valid strategy would be to look backwards to a time when discussions of ethics were dominated not by art’s transgressive potential but by its capacity

to edify those lucky enough to bask in its supposedly enriching light.3 Charting the decline of discussions of the edifying role of art would be a vast art historical undertaking exceeding the scope of this book. Merely invoking the fact that art has not always been figured as a sphere of human activity devoted to the sanctioned transgression of moral limits is, however, enough to show that there is no permanent fixed bond between ethics and aesthetics; each artwork negotiates the relationship between the two in its own way. Art is neither an inherently useful tool in the cultivation of moral virtues, as was presumed in the nineteenth century, nor innately predisposed towards the transgression of soci- etal norms, as it has come to be seen today. Contemporary art practice forces us to confront the fact that it can be both at the same time, or indeed neither. And yet this is not to say that the roles apportioned to art are mirages that have no historical relation to the artworks they purport to describe. The relationship between ethics and aesthetics is historically variable, but this variability periodically stabilizes, and patterns of interaction emerge. These periods of sta- bilization amount to what, to repurpose Félix Guattari’s term, I propose to call

ethico-aesthetic paradigms.4 Before attempting to fulfil the main ambition of this book – to propose concepts that contribute towards a new ethico-aesthetic paradigm emerging today – a pressing task is to provide a brief outline of the paradigm of transgression, accounting for some of the diversity of approaches and agendas it subsumes, as well as hazarding explanations on the reasons for its recent decline. The hope is that doing so will clear the ground for a more speculative approach, but one that is nevertheless grounded on the material conditions of the present. Before both tasks can be accomplished, it is worth pausing to consider why, amid the outpouring of books on contemporary art and politics, a book on ethics is worth writing in the first place. As we shall see, the two are never that far apart.

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Introduction 3

Empty ethics, resurgent morality

As many have noted, the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed the word ‘ethics’ invoked with increasing

regularity.5 Over the past twenty years, the rise of ethics committees, bioethics, business ethics and doomed political appeals for an ‘ethical capitalism’ have all woven ethics into the tapestry of everyday life for many Western subjects. Perhaps this would not be such a bad thing, if it were not for the fact that this contemporary configuration often reduces ethics to little more than a toolbox of regulatory implements for managing risk. These implements are often used in a mechanical fashion, blind to both the particularities of the actions they are applied to and the wider contexts that might cause these actions to be viewed in a different light. Think here of pharmaceutical giants, who may apply notions of informed consent scrupulously to individual drug trials, thereby guaranteeing that these trials are deemed ‘ethical’, but at the same time draw their test subjects disproportionately from countries where levels of poverty mean that any drugs that eventually result from the trials are unlikely to be affordable to the general

population.6 In such examples, ‘ethics’ operates by abstracting actions from a wider web of relations and bringing them before a set of pre-established rules or criteria that often remain unchanged by the process. For Alain Badiou, the contemporary configuration of such mechanisms

constitutes nothing less than an ‘ethical ideology’.7 While Badiou positions phil-

osophy as an antidote to such ideology,8 in fact the structures that underpin many contemporary manifestations of ethics are not entirely absent from the history of philosophy itself. Todd May provides a neat summary of a major shift in ethical thought when he claims that by the late eighteenth century, the Socratic question so central to the history of thinking about ethics, ‘how should one live?’, is all but replaced by the question ‘how should one act?’– the latter finding full

expression in the enlightenment philosophies of Kant and Bentham.9 While the first question attends to the full scope of a life’s processual unfolding (a process inextricably entangled in the unfolding of other lives and the objects they come into contact with), the second question isolates individual acts or attitudes and feeds them into the machinery of moral judgment. Actions take place in neat parcels of time and space. The subject is alienated from their actions and the full scope of the environment in which they occur. If one follows the etymological roots of ethics back to ethos, it is possible to find a rich variety of meanings that

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4 Ethics of Contemporary Art

include ideas of home, habitat and ‘accustomed places’ frequented by humans

and animals.10 Remaining faithful to this etymology requires taking seriously the idea that ethical philosophy entails maintaining the links between the lives of individuals and groups and the environments in which they unfold. One of the strategies that philosophers of various stripes have adopted to ‘purify’ ethics is to relegate such mechanistic approaches to the domain of morality. If ethics remains tied to the question ‘how should one live?’, then morality becomes a particular offshoot of the ethical associated with the question ‘how should one act?’. Hegel, Deleuze and Williams, each in their own way, try to

separate ethics from morality.11 Deleuze characterizes morality as a rule-based

system of judgment, which ‘always refers existence to transcendent values’.12 This act of referral enables the subject to cede responsibility to a higher authority, and reflection is reduced to a question of how to apply a rule correctly. By contrast, ethics involves a degree of flexibility, and as such requires deliberation, if not the construction of a new rule or solution to a problem. To add a further point of distinction, it could be said that ethics differs from morality on the basis that the former is historically linked to a tradition of thinking ‘positively’ about the cultivation of specific virtues, whereas morality could be seen as an essentially

corrective science that seeks to tame unruly matter.13 This book is borne out of the belief that if ethics has any meaning at all, it must be situated where such mechanistic moral judgement breaks down. Indeed, it is on this front that we are able to resist a particular (de)politicization of ethics. If this distinction between ethics and morality is maintained, the contemporary configuration of ethics starts to look suspiciously like a morality thinly disguised as an ethics, comprised of a thick tissue of norms, rules and regulatory frameworks that give us few clues as to what a ‘good life’ might look like. This repackaging of morality as ethics represents both a hollowing out of the latter’s creative potential and scaling back of its sphere of influence, causing the question ‘how might one live’ to appear quixotic by comparison to the more granular, everyday risk–benefit calculations in fields such as bioethics and business ethics. An additional consequence of the widespread appeal to ethics is the emptying out of its political dimensions. This point can be understood in two ways. The first stems from the means by which considerations of ethics have become increasingly bureaucratic in the contemporary configuration, involving apparatus designed to attribute accountability and automate decision-making (some-

times literally),14 rather than attend to the often conflicted, entangled nature of

ethical subjectivity that leaves space for political disagreement.15 The second

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Introduction 5

understanding doubles down on an accusation levelled at ethical thinking more generally: that it represents a migration of decisions from the sphere of the political – the public realm, or the polis – to the private, everyday considerations

of an individual subject.16 In other words, if ethics already represented a retreat from the political as a collective project aiming to bring about social change, then the emptying out of ethics that has taken place over the past few decades only makes the situation worse. Faced with these twin threats, how do we begin to repoliticize ethics? How do we prevent it from being further instrumentalized as a means to legitimize practices that when viewed in another light might divide opinion? My suggestion is that the fastest route back to politics may well be direct, but if we do not retrace the footsteps of the journey by which it has come to be transformed, and if we do not reclaim the radical credentials of ethics along the way, then we abandon a rich body of thought that has the potential to reconceptualize the connection between the personal and the social. This is something that the two key theoretical interlocutors in this book, Jacques Lacan and Félix Guattari, each do in their own way. It is also something that artworks, even before they are theorized in books like this, do through diverse means.

Lacan and Guattari: Diagnosis and production

In a theoretical landscape currently dominated by object-orientated philosophies and new materialisms, a book that chooses to place renewed emphasis on subjectivity might seem to be swimming against the intellectual current. Further still, a book that views subjectivity through the primary lens of psychoanalysis – albeit a psychoanalysis radically reworked and reformulated at the hands of thinkers such as Guattari – is perhaps hopelessly outdated. Given the sheer number of secondary texts now available on the seminars and writings of Lacan, or the theoretical innovations of Guattari (even though these are often labelled with the name of his frequent collaborator Giles Deleuze), it is not unjustified to ask what value is to be gained from revisiting their work now, and more crucially, what resources it provides for thinking through the ethics of contemporary art. As Parveen Adams points out, the attitude of psychoanalysis towards art is often characterized by a certain false modesty, ‘expressed in the formula “art has

much to teach psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis has very little to say to art” ’.17 This has traditionally resulted in a rather one-sided relationship. If psychoanalytical

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6 Ethics of Contemporary Art

writings deal with specific artworks at all, they often do so in a way that illustrates a particular psychoanalytical concept or theory. In his discussion of artworks such as Holbein’s Ambassadors and Piola’s Anamorphosis of Rubens, it could be

said that Lacan himself is guilty of using art in such an instrumental fashion.18 And yet, art and theories of art are not exemplary in their approach to psychoanalysis either. More often than not, they approach this dynamic field of practice as a storehouse of fixed concepts that can be applied to artworks with little attention paid to what is lost in the transaction. In an attempt to avoid these pitfalls, psychoanalysis is here treated as a praxis that changes over time in response to new symptoms brought before analysts, as well as wider processes of social change. Understood as praxis, psychoanalysis becomes a powerful diagnostic tool, able to respond to changing symptoms inside and outside of the clinic. It is in this latter category that we can place artworks. But what is a symptom in the first place? At its most basic, a symptom points towards an underlying cause, but it need not do this in a direct or unmediated fashion. A symptomatic relationship is not a wholly deterministic relationship. In Lacan’s early work, one finds a repudiation of the notion of a symptom as a direct route back to a cause, which is what distinguishes it from a medical

symptom.19 The symptom cannot be found at the end of a piece of string that one follows back through the maze of history to an original source. In Lacan’s work, there is no universally valid meaning of any given symptom. The relationship between a symptom and its cause is one that is refracted through the prism of language, at every step picking up semiotic baggage that changes its character. This is what Lacan calls the ‘formal envelope’ of the symptom, but it could be said that it is an envelope that paradoxically changes the character of the message it contains. It is not simply that causes generate symptoms and symptoms realize causes, but rather that symptoms have a part to play in the co-construction of the cause itself. When applied to artworks, this approach prevents us from simply explaining away artworks as expressions of the cultural contexts from which they arise. By treating them as symptoms in the sense outlined above, instead we are able to highlight the way in which the works discussed are inextricably woven into the social fabric from which they emerge, yet at the same time irreducible to this fabric. This irreducibility is what gives an artwork its power, overspilling its social ‘container’ in a way that has the potential to feed back into the formation of individual and group subjectivity. One way of bridging the gap between art and psychoanalysis can, therefore, be found in their respective symptomologies. But it is not only psychoanalytic

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Introduction 7

theory direct from the source that enables this bridge to be built. In a short interview entitled ‘Mysticism and Masochism’, Deleuze also speaks of symptomology, and crucially, he does so in a way that positions it as a method that has as much to do with art as it does medicine: ‘symptomology appeals to a kind of neutral point, a limit that is premedical or sub-medical …: it’s all about drawing a “por-

trait”. The work of art exhibits symptoms, as do the body or the soul’.20 Treating artworks as symptoms of underlying social dynamics places their author in the position of analyst, rather than analysand, breaking with a tradition of psychoanalytically informed art theory, inaugurated by Freud, that focuses attention on

the presumed psychic dysfunctions or personal history of the artist.21 Instead, here the artist becomes the creator of ‘portraits’ – a process that involves grouping and regrouping signs in new ways. Just as James Parkinson was able to re-order signs in such a way to isolate Parkinson’s disease at the beginning of the nineteenth century (to borrow Deleuze’s example), so too can artists and writers like Sacher-Masoch bring together signs that reveal sociocultural formations

in completely new ways.22 Likewise, treating artworks or groups of artworks as symptoms allows us to discern the means by which ethico-aesthetic paradigms emerge, gain consistency and ultimately come to pass. If engaging with Lacan is useful insofar as his work provides diagnostic tools that help isolate relationships between art and social dynamics, this is not to say that these tools do not themselves undergo transformation. The concept of the symptom itself is one such tool that is reworked by Lacan, and, significantly, its new iteration arrives by means of an engagement with art, albeit literary art. It is to the work of James Joyce that Lacan turns in the mid-1970s in order to reformulate the concept of the symptom as ‘sinthome’. Some of it only recently published in English; Lacan’s late theoretical enterprise crystallizes around this concept, and much of Chapter 3 will be dedicated to piecing together the fragmentary

exposition it is given in the recently published seminar Joyce the Sinthome.23 To give an initial gloss, the sinthome represents a reformulation of the classical psychoanalytic concept of the symptom so that it no longer represents a message to be deciphered, or a metaphoric product of the unconscious, but a subjective creation that allows Lacan’s three orders of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real to be joined to one another. Lacan hypothesizes that Joyce’s writing had a ‘sinthomatic’ function for the author, creating a ‘prosthetic’ ego that allowed his psychic world to knot together. The expression ‘knot together’ is used here advisedly, for in addition to his reading of Joyce’s text, it is by means of an engagement with the topology of knots that Lacan elaborates his concept of

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8 Ethics of Contemporary Art

the sinthome. Insofar as topology focuses on geometrical figures that withstand continuous deformation, Lacan uses it to model processes of subjective change that stave off the devastating effects of psychosis. If the engagement between art and psychoanalysis in this book is mediated through the common method of symptomology, something changes when the concept of the symptom is progressively reworked as the sinthome. The focus is no longer simply diagnostic, but also productive. When viewed in a sinthomatic way, artworks not only have the capacity to reveal something about the changing patterns of social life but to actively intervene in this life, producing points of crystallization, or vectors of change in individual and collective subjects. This makes the bridge between art and psychoanalysis into something more speculative, where the goal is not only to use psychoanalysis to ‘read’ works of art and reveal their underlying dynamics but to bring psychoanalysis and art together into variable composites that construct new objects, ideas and practices that feed back into subjectivity. Although Guattari also produced compelling diagnoses of social phenomena, as will be discussed towards the end of this introduction, it is primarily this productive dimension of his work that finds a voice here. For while Lacan’s final theoretical adventure offers indispensable resources to thinking through the ethics of art, it only takes us so far. As a one-time student of Lacan’s, and a member of the École Freudienne up until his death in 1992, Guattari was a theorist, analyst and activist well positioned to recognize the limitations of Lacanian theory. In his single-authored works and collaborations with Deleuze, Guattari became increasingly critical of what he saw as the shortcomings of this influential French psychoanalytical school. His wide-ranging critique repeatedly returns to three broad deficiencies of Lacanism: (1) the privileging of the traditional one-on- one couch setting at the expense of psychiatric institutions such as La Borde where Guattari worked; (2) the privileging of a model of the unconscious that

was skewed towards neurosis, rather than psychosis24 (a perspective that led Guattari to coin the term schizoanalysis in opposition to psychoanalysis); and (3) the reliance on structuralist (and especially Saussurian) linguistics, which led to a ‘signifier fetishism’ among Lacanian analysts and blinded them to the importance of ‘a-signifying’ forms of expression. These critiques, while important in their own right, also have a bearing on the central topic of this book: the Ethics of Contemporary Art. In some ways, Guattari’s work is already well suited to this topic. This is no more so than in his elaborations of what he alternately calls ‘the new aesthetic paradigm’ and the

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Introduction 9

‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’ (again, to be understood in a different sense to the one used earlier in this introduction). Here, ethical choice no longer emanates from a ‘transcendent enunciation, a code of law or a unique and all powerful god’, but instead flows from creativity itself, which necessitates an attitude of ‘responsibility of the created instance with regard to the thing created, inflexions

of the state of things, bifurcation beyond pre-established schemas’.25 Despite their differences – differences regularly reinforced in contemporary

scholarship on Lacan and Guattari26 – it is this creative approach to ethics that makes both thinkers invaluable to this project. An important shared source of influence for this is the work of Spinoza. References to Spinoza appear regularly in Guattari’s work, and although these are less numerous in Lacan’s, details in Élisabeth Roudinesco’s biography show just how much influence the philoso-

pher exerted on the young psychoanalyst.27 Spinoza’s oft-repeated refrain that

‘no one has yet determined what the body can do’28 is here emblematic of a creative approach to ethics. It does not only imply an act of temporal postpone- ment – no one has yet determined – but also a self-differing movement that opens up a crack for ethics to crawl into, a crack that separates a body from the understanding it has of itself, or in other words, an unconscious. Both Lacan and Guattari each in their own way occupy this crack and preserve the creative approach to ethics Spinoza’s work inspires. Only by joining these authors and stepping into the breach can we move beyond diagnosis and start to produce speculative, and necessarily partial, answers to the question ‘how might one live’. The imperative then is not only to symptomize but to scaffold, modulate and use artworks as supports for subjective mutations that do not always have their outcomes established at the outset.

Critical cultures of transgression

Before answering this imperative, it is necessary to first linger in the presence of transgression. Given the extent to which the concept still dominates discussions of art and ethics (though not always in name), it is insufficient to sweep this influential concept under the rug; it must be brought out into the open and explored in all its complexity. Transgression has a chequered history that stretches across numerous fields. The tendency to venerate scandal and shock, upset and outrage, is not a tendency restricted to visual art alone, nor is it a particularly recent phenomenon.

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10 Ethics of Contemporary Art

In humanities scholarship, the starting pistol for the critical preoccupation with transgression was fired by Michel Foucault over fifty years ago in his short essay

‘Preface to Transgression’ (1963).29 Intended as a tribute to Georges Bataille, and published in French a year after Bataille’s death, this influential text inaugurated an era of critical thought in which ‘transgression’ was elevated to the status of a master signifier. In the process, it was firmly inscribed in a philosophical context, wherein, as Guerlac notes, it was established ‘as an alternative to the machine of

dialectical contradiction’.30 Foucault’s essay is in part prophetic, suggesting that perhaps a day would arrive when the experience of transgression ‘will seem as decisive for our culture … as the experience of contradiction was at an earlier

time for dialectical thought’.31 Not only has this day arrived, I would argue, but it has since passed. As Wilson and Botting claimed (writing in 1998), Foucault’s prophecy was almost instantly fulfilled, and a ‘ “discourse of transgression” … has established itself in Britain and America in the twenty or so years since Foucault’s essay was translated into English. This discourse, associated with cultural studies and literary theory … has in many ways taken over from Hegelian- Marxist critique concerned with contradiction as the important focus for radical

academic circles’.32 It is partly by way of the disciplines of cultural studies and literary theory that transgression came to exert a hold on the imagination of artists and those writing about contemporary art in the latter half of the twentieth century. But it is not simply by means of this cross-disciplinary drift that it arrives fully formed as a concept ready for artists to employ, for the art world was already primed with its own discourse on transgression that stretches back to the Romantic period when the role of the artist is radically refigured as an individual unconstrained by the prevailing norms of society, and to a discipline still reeling from early twentieth-century avant-garde movements, many of which

placed transgression, in all but name, centre stage.33 Transgression arrives into art and discussions of art by means of these tributaries and others, allowing us to recognize a wider range of influences than those of literary theory and cultural studies. It accounts for the fact that not all artists who use transgressive strategies in their work are readers of Bataille, Foucault or Lacan; sometimes transgression appears in art without having first been mediated by theorists, and sometimes it fails to fulfil the promise that so many of them after Foucault have bestowed upon it in relation to the dialectical tradition: that it would come to supplant the philosophical dynamics of Hegelian-Marxism and all its avatars. For the term transgression does not designate one thing. The nuances, equivocations and lifespans of the artworks in which it is found are varied, and

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Introduction 11

they complicate the narrative of transgression as a single critical programme that takes Hegelian-Marxism as its enemy. Rather than cementing transgression into place as a fixed category, we would do better to sketch out a few broad characteristics before moving on to a more targeted set of critiques in Chapter 1. One characteristic of transgression is that it is an inherently relational concept. Any attempt to isolate a transgressive action from the law or limit it interacts with is doomed from the start. This relational aspect is already present in the letters of St. Paul, where transgression is shown to enter into a compact with the law so

that without one, the other ceases to exist.34 Indeed, as Tauchert argues, ‘transgression is a concept tied up with human desire and its constraints. It is situated

within a Christian (typically Catholic) paradigm of sin and atonement’.35 Given the dynamics of opposition and interdependency this entails, it might seem surprising that successive authors have seen transgression as the key that would finally allow philosophy to escape the iron cage of dialectics (or indeed that the religious tradition from which the concept emerges does not feature more prominently). And yet, as many artworks attest, it is possible to have opposition without synthesis, and there are numerous ‘more subtle and subterranean differential mechanisms; topological displacements, typological variations’ than

dialectics allows, as Deleuze claims.36 These modes of interaction and interdependency manifest themselves in important ways in post-war art, particularly in relation to body and performance art in the 1960s. One of the aims in Chapter 1 is to show exactly how these variations underpin certain artworks, allowing us to enumerate a typology of different ‘logics’ of transgression that do not necessarily adhere to dialectical schema. Despite the scope of its logical variations, transgression is nonetheless a relational concept always in some way bound up with morality. This point allows a distinction to be made between a transgressive relationship and one characterized by mere illegality. Transgression runs in parallel to illegality, not only breaking a law or limit but also doing so in such a way that attracts moral condemnation. This does not automatically imply that transgression is itself a moral concept – in some cases, the opposition to laws or limits becomes a way of life, an existential solution, and in doing so, it becomes possible to speak of an ‘ethics’ of transgression. It simply means that transgression is irrevocably linked to morality, regardless of the form this link might take. To these two broad characteristics, it is possible to add a third: transgression is a dynamic concept, which describes an action or operation, rather than a state of being. Even though I have claimed that it is possible to enumerate a number

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of different ‘logics’ of transgression, these logics should not be understood as invariable constants. Transgression has a history and geography, and the circulation of its logical forms constitutes a dynamic pattern of interactions. It is not the intention to give an exhaustive account of these interactions. In this way the discussion of transgression stops short of following Chris Jenks, whose book centres on the concept itself as it appears in academic disciplines as diverse as

anthropology, literary studies, philosophy and criminology.37 Considered as an action or operation, transgressive art cannot be treated as a particular style, movement or method. If we refrain from following the concept of transgression to the ends of the transdisciplinary terrain upon which it operates, the approach also avoids an art-historical nominalism that would impose artificial limits on what can be considered transgressive art by virtue

of its production date, appearance or the intention of the artist.38 Speaking of transgression as ‘a logic’ (a primarily relational logic at that) compels us to attend to the non-linear patterns of transgressive art’s emergence. While historical precedents may indeed exist (in the literature of Baudelaire or the painting of Manet, to take two habitually repeated examples), these precedents cannot be positioned as origins on a historical telos. As a dynamic and relational concept, transgression co-evolves in reciprocal dialogue with moral norms, institutional arrangements and legal forms – for example, article 516 of the Austrian penal code that was repeatedly used to prosecute the Viennese Actionists, as will be discussed in Chapter 1. The extent to which an artwork can be called transgressive is tied to the fate of these arrangements and forms, preventing it from being designated transgressive once and for all, and filed in an art-historian’s dossier of precedent cases.

Integrating transgression

Transgression is the primary subject of critique in Chapter 1 of this book, casting a shadow over several of the chapters that follow. In each instance, this critique is not made on the basis that transgressive artworks are morally right or wrong. Rather, these chapters attempt to see what happens to such artworks when the sociocultural coordinates of their production and reception change. The first layer of this argument builds on the psychoanalytic insight that a ‘strong’ Symbolic order is a necessary precondition of transgression and that in the post-war period, this Symbolic has been in terminal decline. The ‘decline of

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Introduction 13

the Symbolic’ thesis is an idea that can be found scattered across Lacanian scholarship and generally seeks to account for a change in the logic of social organiza-

tion linked to capitalism.39 While changes to the latter have had a visible effect on institutional arrangements, family dynamics and modes of production, it could be argued that they have also had a less visible effect on moral frameworks and the Symbolic bonds that mediate relations between people. This is not to say that laws, prohibitions or cultural norms have vanished entirely in recent years – contemporary society is arguably more densely regulated than ever before – but rather that the way authority percolates through them has changed, for better or worse. The notion that language, law and ‘structure’ cease to function as effective relays of power is an idea that finds more sustained elaboration in a number of arguments outside of Lacanian scholarship. One of the most widely cited of these, in social theory and cultural studies at least, can be found in an essay and accompanying interview by Giles Deleuze published in the early 1990s that speculates on the characteristics and implications of a shift from ‘disciplinary

societies’ to ‘societies of control’.40 The characterization of a given society as ‘disciplinary’ has as its primary reference Foucault’s discussion of the institutional apparatus of power that take the prison as their analogical model, but which encompass other institutions such as asylums, barracks, schools and factories (in the latter case, coinciding roughly with the operations of Fordism). Such apparatus work on the basis of enclosing space and ordering time into neatly delineated units. According to Deleuze, in such societies, life is characterized by the movement from one closed space to another, where bodies are regulated to different ends, but nevertheless regulated in much the same way, like molten fluids poured into static, replicable moulds. As the familiar cliché goes, in this context, transgression would consist of breaking such moulds and of flight from institutions whose effectiveness is guaranteed by the ever-present threat of coercion. By contrast, societies of control work not on the basis of enclosure and discontinuity, but through openness, modulation and permanent restructuring. As

Deleuze claims, in societies of control, ‘nothing is left alone for too long’41, behaviour is constantly monitored, whether through instruments such as performance reviews in the workplace, credit ratings in the financial sphere or data collection

online.42 Such mechanisms constitute apparatuses of control that are adapt- able, information-driven and that seek to anticipate the changing behaviour of populations, rather than to impose social norms upon individuals through coercive

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means. When faced with such apparatus, transgression appears a somewhat crude means of resistance. If transgression has always run the risk of being turned into spectacle, this is now accompanied by the additional danger of it being used to further an agenda of destabilization – or ‘disruption’, to use the term favoured by tech entrepreneurs – furthered by those that it would otherwise oppose. Seductive as it is, the argument that entire societies have shifted from working on the basis of discipline to control problematically relies on a series of grand narratives, historical ruptures and metaphors that derive their power

from some technologies and not others.43 The invocation of networks, circuits and the concept of ‘control’ itself hint at the influence of cybernetics on Deleuze’s

discussion,44 which is paralleled by another set of machinic metaphors used to characterize disciplinary societies (production lines, clocks, thermodynamic

systems).45 As Hall, Birchall and Woodbridge point out, the way in which the metaphors themselves operate as master keys to unlock insights in Deleuze’s

argument remains relatively constant from one social paradigm to the next.46 Another line of critique focuses on the narrative that one form of society can

be all but replaced by another according to a sequence of linear progression.47 This is an idea that Guattari himself was critical of towards the end of his life. In an interview with John Johnson in 1992, he advocated restraint in opposing societies of discipline to those of control, positioning both as ‘components of

subjectification that coexist with one another’.48 Nevertheless, here and elsewhere, Guattari does weave the threads of a more minor narrative according to which control ‘is affirmed more and more’, accompanied by yet another characterization of society based on the concept of ‘integration’. ‘The society of integration’, Guattari continues, is a form ‘in and by which the subject is modeled so as to function as a social robot. There isn’t even any

need to keep the subject under surveillance or control’.49 Here integration should not be confused with the concept as it appears in discussions of multicultur- alism, the potential for overlaps notwithstanding. Rather, integration is a means by which flows are captured and redirected towards dominant values, thereby ensuring their mutual homogeneity. This process can operate at various scales, at the molecular level with pharmaceutical solutions to deviant behaviour, or harnessing the development of a given technology as it affects huge swathes of the population. In each case, singularities and subjective mutations are ‘patched’ into larger networks, ultimately shoring up their power. The decline of the Symbolic, the shift from societies of discipline to those of control and integration: even without having recourse to additional

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Introduction 15

theoretical resources (economic arguments on flexible accumulation, psychoanalytic discussions of repressive desublimation or sociological considerations

of liquidity all push in the same direction),50 the diversity of means by which social change can be characterized as moving away from fixed norms is per- suasive in itself. But of all the terms, it is perhaps integration that has the most resonance, for it can be stretched to describe the mutual integration of discipline

and control themselves.51 Although he does not use the word itself, Guattari seems particularly attentive to the ways in which different regimes of power are superimposed upon one another:

Visible historical stages will not stop being doubled by ruptures, the extension of systems of deterritorialisation, followed by their taking back in hand, by reterritorialisations endeavouring for a while to overcome the same semiotic collapse, which will only become more marked from one crisis to the next, con-

stantly calling back into question previous ‘gains’.52

This characteristically dense passage speaks of the non-linear development of social forms, not simply in the sense of ‘one step forward, two steps back’, but of the shifting of power onto different planes, so that countervailing tendencies can gain momentum at the level of appearances (at the level of an ‘artificial faciality’), at the same time that social changes elsewhere seem to be pushing in

a different direction.53 This necessitates a careful contextual analysis of the actual operations of transgressive artworks, not in all societies of discipline or control, because there are variations within each, but in specific social contexts in which the two are integrated in different ways. The next three chapters are an attempt to use empirical material to test the various layers of the argument, and in the spirit of a theoretical constructivism that Guattari himself advocated, different conceptual resources will be alternately pushed to the background and brought to the fore.

* * * Chapter 1 addresses the fading significance of transgression as an artistic strategy. It does this by taking a series of snapshots of artworks that have been labelled transgressive from the 1960s to the present day. Performances by the Viennese Actionists and Carolee Schneemann, films by the Cinema of Transgression and an installation by Paul McCarthy serve to demonstrate both the diversity of artistic mediums placed in the services of transgression and expose the different relational logics that this seemingly homogenous term conceals. Rather than using artworks to illustrate these logics of transgression or exemplify the theoretical

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writings they draw upon, the ambition is to treat both as historical phenomenon that contribute to the critical culture of transgression in different ways. As well as being diverse, transgression is dynamic, and for this reason, it may seem counterintuitive to approach the subject by means of a collection of snapshots. The ambition here is to first inhabit the critical mindset that treats transgression as if it were a static category and then to put these snapshots in motion, in an attempt to see how history affects their status. In other words, it is an attempt to show that while the material facts of these artworks have not changed, the sociopolitical context they find themselves in inevitably has – a fact that in turn recodes their status as transgressive artworks. Towards the second half of this chapter, a number of arguments drawn primarily from Lacanian-inspired scholarship are used to critique transgression on this basis, and the logics of transgression that are outlined in the first half of the chapter are addressed individually to demonstrate their diminished power. Three artworks by the Polish artist Artur Żmijewski are the primary focus of Chapter 2, opening out onto a broader set of discussions on the ethics of participation and the history of Polish critical art. Żmijewski’s work serves as a proving stone in this chapter for two different ethico-aesthetic paradigms. The first focuses on the transgressive dimensions of works that employ collaboration and participation as primary tools of creation. The ‘participative turn’ in contemporary art shifts transgression onto new territory, which has in turn brought about critical writing on the ethics of socially engaged art. The chapter picks its way through some of this writing, arguing that much of it is based on a vague set of moral criteria that are hard to uphold in a Polish context. This is due to wider sociocultural dynamics associated with the erosion of public discourse in the country, which would ordinarily serve as the symbolic guarantee for moral frameworks. The second half of the chapter attempts to show that the work contains the seeds of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm that steps out of the shadow of transgression. Żmijewski’s artworks are heavily indebted to a tradition of ‘open form’ art and architecture in Poland, which explores the ability of structures, rules and non-verbal communication to shape behaviour. Such experiments shift the emphasis away from overthrowing normative models of behaviour to actively tinkering with new models in order to gauge their subjective effects. Towards the end of the chapter, this history of open form is positioned as an intergenerational exercise in ‘metamodeling’ – a term borrowed from Félix Guattari to describe a dual process of reading and intervening in existing modelling systems. In taking

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Introduction 17

such models as its subject, without for that matter overthrowing them entirely, Żmijewski’s work is bound up with considerations of how subjectivity is actively produced, aligning it with a tradition of thinking about ethics creatively, rather than simply as a means to police aberrant actions. In many ways, Chapter 3 represents the theoretical core of the book. With the exception of a brief discussion of an artwork by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, it takes a step back from art and instead sets out a series of propositions on the operations of creativity and subjectivity in their germinal forms. After an initial engagement with the Lacanian category of ‘ordinary psychosis’, which, I argue, is intimately bound up with both the ‘decline of the symbolic’ thesis and the idea of a shift from discipline to control and integration, the chapter zones in Lacan’s Seminar XXIII. As discussed earlier, this period of Lacan’s work constitutes a highly original exploration of how subjectivity is formed and deformed through acts of artistic creation. For this reason, it shows us the path away from transgression towards a relationship between ethics and aesthetics that is more experimental and processual. This experimentalism is mirrored by my own heterodox approach to Lacan’s work, whose seminar on Joyce is not predisposed to the analysis of contemporary art without a few conceptual adjustments being made first. These adjustments are made irreverently by drawing on a number of concepts and critiques laid out by Guattari. The resulting positions, it is hoped, decisively shift ethics away from being a defensive discourse into something more programmatic and speculative, drawing together elements from the work of two thinkers who are often opposed in order to create concepts that can be used in the last two chapters of the book. The fourth chapter is the first to decisively step out of the shadows of transgression through a discussion of art. It does this by taking up the concept of ‘repair’, which is first of all positioned as a subtle but persistent motif inSeminar XXIII and subsequently developed through a detailed discussion of an artwork by the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia. More than simply a case study or an illustration, Attia’s installation The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures (2012) tests the limits of any straightforward definition of repair. Rather than simply a one-time ‘fix’ to a discrete object, in Attia’s hands, repair turns into an on-going activity that is simultaneously symbolic and material, and which has the capacity to operate on multiple scales. While this places it in continuity with Lacan’s concept of the sinthome, Attia’s installation cannot be labelled ‘sinthomatic’ unproblematically, because it does not concern the closed dyad between an artist and their work. Towards the end of the chapter, an in-depth

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analysis of the installation gives way to intensified consideration of repair as a concept that unites aesthetics and ethics. Along the way, apparent paradoxes in the operations of repair are resolved through digging into a mixed bag of Guattari’s concepts elaborated in the chapter before, particularly as they relate to entities that are neither strictly objective nor purely subjective, but constitutive of what the author called a ‘machinic animism’. The final chapter demonstrates that while repair may present one option for an alternative ethico-aesthetic paradigm to transgression, it is by no means the only model. It is argued here that artworks that play with fiction and deception also unite ethics and aesthetics in productive ways. Like Chapter 2, this chapter walks a tightrope between transgression and its alternative, flanked by the danger that artworks that deceive viewers can only ever be viewed as challen- ging the moral prohibition against lying. By exploring the meaning and power of fabulation – which is both used to describe a midway point between deception and fiction, and a ‘dreamer function’ that injects possibility into ossified social forms – the existentially productive dimensions of fiction and deception come into clearer focus, without for that matter denying their transgressive power. These discussions of deception, fiction and fabulation are grounded in ana- lyses of artworks by Pilvi Takala, Dora Garica and others. While these artworks differ dramatically in the effects they bring about, they share an understanding of the pragmatic dimensions of language and the way in which truthfulness and deception are firmly rooted in social relations. This approach helps us to isolate a question at the core of this chapter: if lies, fictions and fabulation are not discrete entities that vanish the moment truth is restored, then what is their lasting effect? Through readings of these artworks, I suggest that the effects can be both critical and creative, returning us to the world with fresh eyes, or showing that another world is possible. And yet in the current sociopolitical context where discussions of post-truth and alternative facts have come to dominate political discourse, it would be unwise to offer an uncritical endorsement of the power of untruth. Towards the end of the chapter, an attempt is made to filter the concept of fabulation through the theoretical resources of Chapter 3, in particular, Lacan’s three orders of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. What emerges is a novel evaluative criterion for fabulation, which is not based on the intentions of the fabulator but on the effects of fabulation itself insofar as they range from the catastrophic to the existentially productive. Taken individually, these chapters can be understood as targeted interventions in debates on individual issues or artists. Taken as a whole, they seek to narrate

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Introduction 19

a journey away from transgression as a critical paradigm in contemporary art. While this journey moves through terrain populated by a range of different artworks, it is not my intention to compartmentalize these artworks into different ethico-aesthetic paradigms. The lines of distinction between transgression and its alternatives do not fall neatly between different periods, movements and individuals. In fact, they do not really constitute lines of distinction at all. They are lenses that can be used to see artworks in different lights, but lenses that are nonetheless licensed by the artworks that offer them up. It is for this reason that several chapters deliberately address topics such as deception and participation that invite discussions of transgression, but which nevertheless unpeel layers of interpretation in order to uncover the hidden riches of alternative ethico-aesthetic paradigms. The path away from transgression is not a journey that has an end destination, but rather a process of exposing points of bifurcation that multiply possibilities. Rather than a conclusion, the last few chapters of this book offer speculative propositions that bring theory and art together around the open-ended concepts of repair and fabulation. The bonds between theory and artworks are forged in the crucible of pragmatism, with the ultimate aim to supply new resources for processes of subjectivation. As well as being about ethics and aesthetics, it is hoped that this endeavour is itself an ethico- aesthetic enterprise.

Notes

1 Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985). Foster’s proclamation of the death of transgressive art was no doubt premature and attracted the frustration of theorists such as Rebecca Schneider, who finds it telling that ‘the avant-garde and the option of “shock” that it championed should die just as women, artists of color, and gay and lesbian artists began to make critically incisive political art under their own gender-, race-, and preference-marked banners’. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (Oxon: Routledge, 1997), p. 4.

2 Two recent books evidence the continued influence of transgression: Nina Möntmann, ed., Scandalous: A Reader on Art and Ethics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013) and Documents of Contemporary Art: Ethics, ed. Walead Beshty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). The fact that one of these books has the word ‘scandalous’ emblazoned on its cover, and the other a characteristically provocative work by Santiago Sierra (Hiring and Arrangement of 30 workers in relation to their Skin Colour [2002]), are tell-tale signs that the association between ethics and

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20 Ethics of Contemporary Art

transgression is not shifting of its own accord. For its part, Beshty’s editorial introduction is less preoccupied with transgression than its cover image suggests. A recent issue of the magazine Text Zur Kunst 109 (March 2018) indicates that transgression is still a topic deemed worthy of discussion in contemporary art. The issue is based on the theme ‘Art Without Rules’ and carries articles by the likes of Hal Foster that revisits the concept of transgression.

3 In the UK, perhaps the pre-eminent figure associated with such an edifying paradigm was John Ruskin. In his wildly successful Modern Painters, Ruskin claimed that the artist had ‘the responsibility of a preacher’ in the delivery of moral truths. See John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 6 vols (London: George Allen, 1898– 1903), I (1898), p. xlvii. The idea that art (visual or otherwise) can be of use in morally educating members of its audience finds a contemporary supporter in the philosopher Noël Carroll, who writes that ‘Like the use of heuristic devices, such as diagrams, in the education of medical students, the fact that literary examples are generally less messy than real-life cases aids the refinement of our practice of moral judgment.’ Noël Carroll, Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research’, Ethics 110, no. 2 (2000), 368.

4 The term ‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’ has been borrowed from Félix Guattari and forms the subtitle of his book Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995). Here, it is used in a different sense to the one Guattari intended, although the latter’s meaning will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3.

5 See, for example, Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2002); María Puig de la Bellacassa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Marjorie B. Garber and Beatrice Hanssen, eds. The Turn to Ethics (Oxon: Routledge, 2000).

6 For a detailed discussion, see Adriana Petryna, When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

7 Badiou, Ethics, p. 1.

8 Ibid., p. 40.

9 Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 4. The first question appears in a modified form in Plato,Republic (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), p. 32. As Nathan Jun points out, the second question in fact pre-dates Kantian or Utilitarian ethics considerably, appearing in the medieval moral casuistry of Christian thinkers such as Raymond of Pennafort, Bartholemew of San Concordio and Sylvester Prierias. Nathan Jun, ‘Deleuze, Values and Normativity’, in Deleuze and Ethics, ed. Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 91.

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10 A scholar who has followed the etymology of ‘ethos’ in detail is Arthur B. Miller, who discusses the similarities and differences between two of its roots, ἔθοs (often translated as habit) and ἦθοs (often translated as character). Playing close attention to the latter, ‘eethos’, Miller writes that ‘significantly, the basic denotation isnot character, but “an accustomed place” and in the plural may refer to the “haunts or abodes of animals”; it also may refer to “the abodes of men” ’. Arthur B. Miller, ‘Aristotle on Habit (ἔθοs) and Character (ἦθοs): Implications for the Rhetoric’, Speech Monographs 41, no. 4 (1974), 309–16 (p. 310). This meaning is further reinforced in Homer, where the word ‘ethos’ is used to refer to the living places of horses and pigs. Homer, The Iliad (London: Penguin, 2003), trans. E. V. Rieu, revised by D. C. H. Rieu, book 6, line 511; Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu, revised by D. C. H. Rieu (London, Penguin, 2003), book 14, line 411.

11 In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel links ethical life, or ethical substance (Sittlichkeit) to immediate action, decisiveness, character and so on, while Morality (Moralität) is related to reflexive action, action referred to a transcendent value beyond the domain of entities. Ethical life for Hegel is also embedded and operates on the basis of virtues, rather than prohibitions. Central to the organization of these virtues is the idea of a shared way of life, a community and individual agents within that community that fulfil particular duties that may or may not hold true for other communities. Morality on the other hand is something universal, not rooted in any particular community, and categorical (Hegel often uses the term in a way synonymous with Kantian morality). The moral position ‘knows duty to be the absolute essence’ and demands all agents, irrespective of differences in culture, community etc., to adhere to its tenets. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 365. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams claims, in a similar vein to Todd May, that morality constitutes ‘a particular development of the ethical’ linked to ‘processes of modernization’, the reformation and a rationalistic world view more generally. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana Press, 1993), p. 8.

12 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 23.

13 The key thinker here is Aristotle, whose ideas around ‘flourishing’eudaimonia ( ) form the cornerstone of his ethics. See Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

14 See, for example, Jason Millar, ‘An Ethics Evaluation Tool for Automating Ethical Decision-Making in Robots and Self-Driving Cars’, Applied Artificial Intelligence 30, no. 8 (2016), 787–809.

15 The point that ethics today often serves to mask dissensus is made in JacquesRancière, ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’, trans. Jean-Philippe

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22 Ethics of Contemporary Art

Deranty. Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 7, no. 1 (2006), 1–20.

16 Puig de la Bellacassa makes the point that this distinction rests upon the hierarchy between public and private that feminist theorists have fought hard to displace with such well-known slogans as ‘the personal is political’. de la Bellacassa, Matters of Care, pp. 133–5.

17 Art: Sublimation or Symptom, ed. Parveen Adams (New York: Karnac, 2003), p. xiii.

18 Holbein’s Ambassadors is discussed in Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. 1964, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998); Piola’s Anamorphosis of Rubens is discussed in Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992).

19 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 320.

20 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Mysticism and Masochism’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 132. Elsewhere, Deleuze credits Nietzsche with inventing a symptomological method. See Gills Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. xi.

21 This approach is distilled in Freud’s book on Leonardo Da Vinci. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, trans. Alan Tyson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964).

22 For an extended treatment of Masochism, see Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 9–138.

23 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIII: The Sinthome. 1975– 1976, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).

24 Work around the concept of ‘ordinary psychosis’ on the part of Lacanian theorists could be seen as a way of addressing this criticism and will be discussed in Chapter 3.

25 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 107.

26 These boundaries have, for example, been reinforced by Slavoj Žižek, who in Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (Oxon: Routledge, 2004) claims that ‘one can only regret that the Anglo-Saxon reception of Deleuze (and, also, the political impact of Deleuze) is predominantly that of a “guattarized” Deleuze’ (p. 18). Guattari’s crime, for Žižek, would seem to consist in ridding Deleuze of the Lacanian influence his early work attests to and introducing a logic of becoming as production, rather than becoming as effect. Among the

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Introduction 23

studies that seek to avoid such stark characterisations and find a productive engagement between the two thinkers are Simon O’ Sullivan, On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite–Infinite Relation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Janell Watson, Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2009). Watson’s book is indispensable, skilfully exposing the submerged connections between the two thinkers. Its only shortcomings arrive when claims about the increasingly structuralist character of Lacan’s work are made. Watson writes that ‘In 1954–55 Lacan’s sign is much more playful, open and interesting than it will later seem, once his structuralism subjects it to the matheme and algebraic topology’ (p. 35), and elsewhere of ‘Lacan’s increasingly purified structuralism’. See Janell Watson, ‘Schizoanalysis as Metamodeling’, Fibreculture Journal, 12 (2008) http://twelve. fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-077-schizoanalysis-as-metamodeling/ (accessed 1 June 2018). This runs counter to the widespread opinion that Lacan’s work becomesless structuralist as his attention increasingly turns from the Symbolic towards the Real.

27 See Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). The influence is sufficiently recognized by authors such as Shoshana Felman that she can claim that ‘the whole of Lacan can be understood as putting Spinoza and Freud together’. Shoshana Felman, ‘Between Spinoza and Lacan and Us’, in The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader, ed. Emily Sun, Eyal Peretz and Ulrich Baer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 461.

28 Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 71.

29 Michel Foucault, ‘Preface to Transgression’, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 29–52.

30 Suzanne Guerlac, ‘Bataille in Theory: Afterimages (Lascaux)’,Diacritics 26, no. 2 (1996), 7.

31 Foucualt, ‘Preface to Transgression’, p. 33.

32 Scott Wilson and Fred Botting, Bataille: A Critical Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 2.

33 On this point, see Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), pp. 19–20.

34 Romans 7.8. ‘without the law the sin was dead’.

35 Ashley Tauchert, Against Transgression (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 95.

36 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 157.

37 Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003). At the other end of the spectrum exist books such as Kieran Cashell, Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009). This account focuses mainly on the YBA phenomena associated with Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin,

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24 Ethics of Contemporary Art

Marcus Harvey and the Chapman brothers (among others). The study is narrow in another sense, insofar as it neglects almost all social factors such as the class dynamics at play in the YBA’s work or the burgeoning British art market at the time.

38 Here my approach differs considerably from Anthony Julius’s when he speaks of a ‘transgressive period’ with its own back history and canonical stepping stones throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Julius, Transgressions.

39 See Veronique Voruz, ‘Ethics and Morality in the Time of the Decline of the Symbolic’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 25 (2012), 167–78 and Neal H. Bruss, ‘Lacan and Literature: Imaginary Objects and Social Order’, Massachusetts Review 22, no. 1 (1981), 62–92. The idea can also be traced back to two essays by Claude Lévi- Strauss, ‘The Effectiveness of Symbols’ and ‘The Sorcerer and his Magic’, where the author discusses the power of symbols in magical rites. The social consensus that surrounds the techniques of a particular shaman, Lévi-Strauss argues, is based on its relationship to wider systems of meaning that attempt to make sense of the world and preserve consistency in their systematic functioning. Magic constitutes a language, ‘whose function is to provide a socially authorized translation of phenomena’ (pp. 184–5). At first gloss, the term ‘decline of the Symbolic’ could be said to describe a situation when this authorisation ebbs away, not simply because it is replaced by faith in the power of another language or symbolic system, but because of a more general decline in faith itself. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963).

40 Giles Deleuze, ‘Control and becoming’, in Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Giles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, in Negotiations.

41 Deleuze, ‘Control and Becoming’, p. 175.

42 On the ability of debt (and the credit ratings system it relies upon) to shape individual and collective subjectivities, see Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012).

43 As Jeremy Gilbert and Andrew Goffey point out, the extent to which ‘control’ can be taken to designate a new historical period remains dependent on other texts in Deleuze’s oeuvre and in particular texts that share common concerns with Foucault’s historiography. Jeremy Gilbert and Andrew Goffey, ‘Control Societies: Notes for an Introduction’, New Formations 84/85 (2014), 9.

44 Deleuze, ‘Control and Becoming’, p. 175.

45 Deleuze, ‘Postscript to Societies of Control’. Mark Poster significantly complicates the distinction between these two sets of machinic metaphors by arguing that databases, far from being exemplary modes of administering control, in

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Introduction 25

fact significantly amplify disciplinary power. See Mark Poster,The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). On the influence of cybernetics on Deleuze’s idea of control societies, see Alex Williams, ‘Control Societies and Platform Logics’, New Formations 84/85 (2014).

46 Gary Hall, Clare Birchall and Peter Woodbridge, ‘Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Culture Machine 11 (2010).

47 The notion that the disciplinary mode of power has all vanished has been met with considerable resistance in some scholarship that draws influence from Deleuze. See, for example, Poster, The Mode of Information; Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Roy Boyne, ‘Post-Panopticism’, Economy and Society 29, no. 2 (2000), 285–307; Micheal D. Mehta and Eric Darier, ‘Virtual Control and Disciplining on the Internet: Electronic Governmentality in the New Wired World’, Information Society, 14, no. 2 (1998): 107–16 and David Savat, ‘Deleuze’s Objectile: From Discipline to Modulation’, in Deleuze and New Technology, ed. Mark Poster and David Savat (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 45–62.

48 Félix Guattari, ‘The Vertigo of Immanence’, inThe Guattari Effect, ed. Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 25–39 (p. 27).

49 Ibid.

50 For further discussion of flexible accumulation, see David Harvey,The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 1990); for more on repressive desublimation, see Antonios Vadolas, Perversions of Fascism (London: Karnac, 2009); for discussions of the transition from ‘solid’ to ‘liquid’ societies, see Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).

51 Savat argues that the ‘superposition’ of discipline and control create opposing tendencies in relationship to subjectivity, resulting in an experience of ‘on the one hand being made into a form, an essence, a solid state, and on the other hand being made into a flow, an event, a fluid or formless state’. Savat, ‘Deleuze’s Objectile’, p. 58.

52 Félix Guattari, Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 24.

53 Ibid., p. 46.

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This ebook belongs to Bassam El Baroni ([email protected]), purchased on 22/03/2021 27

Four snapshots of transgression

Snapshot 1: The dialectics of descent

No account of transgression in post-war art, however cursory, would be complete without a reference to the Viennese Actionists – a label first used by Peter Wiebel to describe the artwork of figures such as Günter Brus, Otto Mühl,

Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Hermann Nitsch.1 Within its short lifespan of just six years (1962–8), the group performed acts that shocked the Austrian public and resulted in almost continuous criminal prosecution throughout the decade. Actions regularly incorporated animal carcasses, mock crucifixions, bodily fluids, and bloodletting, and together comprise a back catalogue whose justification frequently hinges on the dialectical play of opposites. Dialectical oppositions can be found in the structure of individual works as well as in the relationship between the group and the socio-political context in which the works were made. The relevance of post-war Austria as a backdrop to the group’s actions has been well documented in art-historical writing, but this literature often narrowly focuses on the socio-political events that took place

before and during the group’s short, intense lifespan.2 At the end of this chapter, some aspects of how this context has changed will be considered, making it possible to assess the lasting significance of their particular brand of transgression. As the only group member still working in Austria, largely in the same artistic idiom as he did in the 1960s, a more narrow focus on the work of Hermann Nitsch will provide a useful vehicle to look at this change. It is in anticipation of one of the group’s first collective actions that Nitsch, in a matter-of-fact tone, announces his plans for a piece that has since become a touchstone for transgressive art: ‘On the 4th June, 1962, I shall disembowel, tear

and pull to pieces a dead lamb.’3 The action, collectively titled The Blood Organ, took place in the summer of 1962 in a cellar belonging to Otto Mühl in the Perinetgasse district of Vienna. Nitsch, Mühl and Frohner announced that they would be interning themselves in the cellar for three days and nights without

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28 Ethics of Contemporary Art

food, with a newly constructed brick wall blocking the entrance and thereby preventing them from leaving (in fact the artists had made sure there was a back door allowing free access for the duration of the performance). Once inside the cellar, Nitsch alternated between working on the dead lamb, using his hands, teeth and tools to tear, chew and slice the animal, and creating a nine-metre long drip-and-pour painting. Mühl and Frohner created a number of sculptural assemblages individually that then merged into one another. At the end of this period, the public and members of the press were assembled to witness the lit- eral and metaphorical ‘opening’ of the show. A woman wearing high heels and a ball gown was instructed to kick down the brick wall separating the performers from their audience (Figure 1.1), and the flashlights of the press photographers revealed the results of three days of activity. In a matter of hours the police had

arrived, and the exhibition was promptly closed.4

Figure 1.1 Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl and Adolf Frohner, Die Blutorgel/The Blood Organ (1962), printed in Wiener Aktionismus/Wien 1960–1971 – Der zertrümmerte Spiegel. (Ritter Verlag: Klagenfurt, 1989).

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Four Snapshots of Transgression 29

The first, brutal performance by the group was followed by several more, culminating in Nitsch’s last public performance on 23 April 1967, when a particularly chaotic event in a Viennese restaurant entitled Zock-Fest ended in the arrival of two hundred riot police and their dogs. The following year, the remaining members of the group participated in a notorious event at the University of Vienna entitled Art and Revolution. At the invitation of the Austrian Association of Socialist Students, Brus, Mühl, Peter Weibel and Oswald Wiener staged a series of provocations in a lecture theatre that began with a speech insulting the recently murdered Robert Kennedy, as well as the Austrian minister of finance Stephen Koren (Mühl and Weibel), continued with Brus cutting his chest with razor blades, drinking his own urine, defecating on stage and smearing himself with his own faeces while singing the national anthem, and ended in Mühl whipping a masochist and drinking beer before organizing a pissing contest on stage. All the while Oswald Wiener attempted to deliver a lecture on consciousness and cybernetics, and Weibel set his arm on fire while giving a talk on the

Leninist question ‘What is to be done?’5 Such riotous events constitute high water marks in the history of transgressive art. However, their reputation is not predicated solely upon the actions themselves. Extremity alone is no guarantee that an artwork will attain canonical status. Of more significance is the relationship between such extremity and the prevailing socio-political conditions. As Badura-Triska and Kandutsch

note, the post-war climate of Austria exhibited many post-fascist traits.6 Public discussions addressing Austria’s role in the war had not yet begun, and after the war many influential positions in civic society were repopulated with former Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. Fascist ideology still saturated political institutions and influenced a cultural climate that Gerald Raunig describes as ‘rigidly con-

servative’.7 In this context the choice of the cellar as a site for their first action is significant. It both served as an approximation of the kinds of spaces in which the victims of Nazism met their death and represented the physical corollary of a psychological ‘depth’ to explore. When The Blood Organ came to an end, this private space was opened to the glare of the public spotlight, and the repressed libidinal energies were supposedly unleashed for the psychic good of Austrian society. Such therapeutic intentions were openly declared by Nitsch before the performance when he wrote that ‘Through my artistic production … I take upon myself the apparently negative, unsavoury, perverse, obscene, the passion and the hysteria of the act of sacrifice so that YOU are spared the sullying, shaming

descent into the extreme.’8 Nitsch’s talk of a ‘descent’ highlights his fidelity to this

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30 Ethics of Contemporary Art

depth model of the psyche, and his writings freely synthesize the work of Jung, Freud and Reich – the latter two being intellectuals the National Socialists had

expelled from Austria.9 Above all else, however, it is a fairly narrow appropriation of the Freudian theory of abreaction that underpins the work, whereby

pent-up instincts are released in a supposedly liberating discharge.10 In the now voluminous literature on the group, following up such stated psychoanalytical intentions has, perhaps unsurprisingly, become a dominant means of

interpreting their output.11 Rather than follow these arguments here, it will be more instructive to look at the way in which they were mobilized at the time to justify the work’s transgressive content. The need to justify their work was clearly felt by the Actionists, and the burgeoning discourse of psychoanalysis serves as a means to actively pro- claim the social good of their actions, rather than resort to the kinds of formal defences that have been used to defend other transgressive art, from Manet

to Mapplethorpe.12 To the rational, repressive law of the state the Actionists opposed a law of the psyche, which functioned as a repository of ‘instinctual’ energies and repressed traumas. The therapeutic benefit of working through traumas and channelling energies was upheld over and above the right of the state to maintain an order that was deemed repressive. Here it is not so much that psychoanalysis is inherently dialectical in itself; rather, it is the way in which it is mobilized that embodies a dialectical logic. This relationship between two competing rights is mirrored by a second dialectical play that can be discerned in The Blood Organ itself. In this performance the wall separating the cellar from the street is not simply an analogue for the ego’s barricade against the chaotic libidinal energies of the Id – the surface against the depth – it is also a temporary barrier between a group of artists wishing to break with culturally sanctioned norms of behaviour and the state apparatus that wants to keep them in place. In short, it is the physical manifestation of the boundary separating the law from its inverse: transgression occurring when the two come into contact. By staging this moment of contact between two forces – one residing in the private sphere of the cellar, the other in the public sphere of the street – the Actionists sought to expose the strong arm of the state and jump- start the juridico-legal powers it wielded. Phillip Ursprung even argues that ‘the state was the main addressee of Austrian Actionist politics, [and] the police were

the “ideal” audience’.13 In other words, there was a dynamic of engagement built into the very structure of the performances themselves. Duab furthers this point with a discussion of the photographs of the actions that were commissioned by

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Four Snapshots of Transgression 31

the group and often later used as evidence in court. As he argues, these allowed relatively private performances to be ‘preserved by and integrated into the puni- tive and penal public discourses through which Austrian cultural politics has

frequently and traditionally proceeded’.14 For Daub this argument extends to the group’s choice of titles such as Blood Orgy, which when performed in London supplied the press with a ready-made sensationalist headline – the front of the

Evening Standard reading ‘Fleet Street “Blood Orgy” – 2 For Trial’.15 The group’s anticipation of scandal reveals a strategic understanding of the points of passage between public and private, repression and expression, and ultimately the law and transgression. But to what extent can we say that these oppositions are truly dialectical in their interrelation? As Hegel claims in his analysis of tragic theatre, where he finds an exemplary set of dialectical movements, the central dynamic is one of collision between two competing rights, rather than a simplistic opposition between good and evil. There is some good to be found on both sides, and the resulting catastrophes that define the narratives of Aeschylus and Sophocles come about because the opposing sides adhere to one value system alone, blinding them to the other’s competing right. As Hegel writes of Antigone and Creon, each sees

right only on one side and wrong on the other, that consciousness which belongs to the divine law sees in the other side only the violence of human caprice, while that which holds to human law sees in the other only the self-will and disobedi-

ence of the individual who insists on being his own authority.16

It would be wrong to suggest that the Actionists were similarly one-sided in their transgressive pursuits or that the fascist traits of post-war Austrian state were legitimate. Nevertheless, the language Hegel uses is striking in the context of the Actionsist’s work. Not only were many of the actions precisely intended to critique ‘the violence of human caprice’, Nitsch’s Orgies Mysteries theatre

being particularly illustrative of this,17 but in their wilful criminality the group also asserted the right of groups and individuals to act on their own authority, circumventing the authority of the state. And yet if one reads further into Hegel’s analysis of Antigone, it becomes clear that it is not simply a question of opposed sides but of sides whose reliance on each other has somehow been disavowed. The two main characters, Antigone and Creon, are in fact constituted of one and the same ‘ethical substance’. This implies that the two positions the characters embody do not exist independently from one another before being brought into conflict. They are inseparable in the first place.

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32 Ethics of Contemporary Art

The relationship between competing rights inAntigone is therefore more of a violent fracture of this single ‘ethical substance’ than a tragic collision of discrete elements. According to Hegel, both characters are blind precisely because they do not see the connection between the laws they invoke. In viewing the other’s right as external to their own, they unwittingly undermine the very foundation of their own position. The interconnectedness of competing rights that Antigone and Creon evoke for Hegel is mirrored by the Actionist’s entanglement with the Austrian state. Not only were the Actionists continually engaging the state as a potential audience, openly publicizing their actions in the knowledge that this publicity would find its way into the hands of the authorities, they also made use of the press as a means to distribute and amplify their message. As well as acting as an engine for the production of scandal (and discourse more generally) the press liter- ately and metaphorically illuminated The Blood Organ. If, in Hegel’s analysis, the unmediated divine law uses human law as a cypher, this dynamic finds its visual analogue in the illumination of the blood-spattered cellar by the flashlights of the press.

Snapshot 2: The politics of ecstasy

On 29 May 1964, an audience filed into a small auditorium in the American Center in Paris to the sound of a recorded voice. The audio shifts between stage directions, extracts from an exercise book in beginner’s French, and the voices of vendors selling fish, chickens, vegetables and flowers on the nearby Rue de Seine. The audio marks the beginning of an artwork entitledMeat Joy by Carolee Schneemann, organized as part of the ‘Festival of Free Expression’ by dissident surrealist, poet and performance artist Jean Jacques-Lebel. Those in attendance expecting immediate debauchery either bide their time or grow restless: the audio continues for 20 minutes, the only visual accompaniment consisting of a group of nine performers facing in the opposite direction, eating, drinking and chatting among themselves; some applying make-up, others fixing their costumes. To those who now know of Meat Joy, it is perhaps surprising to learn the performance begins without spectacle. Neither raw meat nor exuberant joy is present, and there seems little to justify the now mythical status it holds in the history of performance art. Indeed, it is the banality of its beginnings that sets

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Four Snapshots of Transgression 33

Schneemann’s work apart from some other works that have been called trans-

gressive or shocking – a label that the artist herself resisted.18 There is also little in the first 20 minutes of the performance that suggests how it will end: on this particular night, with members of the audience getting undressed, crawling across the room and joining a writhing mass of actors on

stage who are covered in raw meat, fish and paint.19 Between its slow beginnings and sensational climax, Meat Joy builds in a multisensory collage of music, lights and carefully choreographed movement on a set littered with objects including paper, plastic sheeting and rope. The music includes then-current hits by the likes of The Supremes and Millie Small, as well as the continued street sounds and a ticking clock. The lights flash, change colour and direct focus to specific actions. The movements are varied, consisting of pairs of performers ritualistically stripping one another down to their underwear, women kicking their legs in the air in an approximation of synchronized swimming, men parading women on their shoulders in a parody of macho bra- vado, the same women later huddling in the centre of a circle while the men link arms around them, the group toppling, remaining horizontal, at which point a serving maid finally delivers the meat for which the performance is best known. This meat is thrown into the tangled knot of bodies, squelched, caressed, and stuffed into underwear, and followed by buckets of paint that lends the bodies a chromatic unity, dissolving the visual borders between discrete individuals and further lubricating their movements. It is only in the last ten minutes that the performance starts to take on what Schneemann describes as ‘the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent; a celebration of flesh as material’. ‘Its propulsion’, she writes, ‘is towards the ecstatic, shifting and turning between tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon – qual-

ities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent’.20 It is primarily in its ambition to produce such ecstatic states that Meat Joy allows us to elaborate an alternative to the dialectical logic of transgression. But in its affective equivocations the performance resists such flattening, and these equivocations are all the more important to maintain when the piece is studied through its documentation. This documentation tends to emphasize the messiness of the work’s climax rather than the precision of its beginning, ecstasy and abandon over humour and self-consciousness. This is exemplified in the widely circulated images of the performance’s third enactment at the Judson Church in November 1964: close up overhead photographs that show young men and women lying entangled on the floor, their faces creased into smiles that

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34 Ethics of Contemporary Art

Figure 1.2 Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy (1964), video still of the documentation of the performance at the Judson Dance Theater, Judson Memorial Church, New York, 16–18 November 1964. Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann and P·P·O·W, New York; photo: Al Giese.

simultaneously speak of pleasure, disgust and physical exertion (Figure 1.2).21 Just as its documentation cannot provide the basis of an exhaustive account of Meat Joy, neither can any writer – including its creator – have the final word on its lasting significance. For although Schneemann resists the label transgression, when placed in the context of a wider critical discourse, even the denial of trans-

gression takes on the character of a transgressive gesture.22 In a description that appears in the preface of Schneemann’s monograph More Than Meat Joy, Bruce McPherson deploys the metaphor of a car’s brake

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Four Snapshots of Transgression 35

line, which snaps underfoot ‘while you shoot through a stop sign on an empty

country road’23 to capture the sensation the artist’s work produces in a viewer. Transgression, as its etymology attests, always involves passing beyond, crossing limits, carrying actions across borders of morality and sometimes legality. McPherson is right that some of Schneemann’s work is bound up with limits and the loss of control, but the transgressions of Meat Joy do not do this in a linear fashion; the stop signs it encounters are multiple, and the road ahead forks in numerous directions. At its most general level, Meat Joy transgresses the social prohibitions on sexual expression operative in the contexts in which it was performed. These took the work to the limits of criminality under obscenity laws at the time – charges avoided by abandoning Schneemann’s original intention to use full

nudity in the piece.24 Despite its popular representation as a time of sexual lib- eration, the 1960s was still a deeply conservative decade, as acknowledged by Schneemann in her intentions ‘to eroticize my guilt ridden culture and further

to confound this culture’s sexual rigidities’25 through the use of the naked body. If this ambition largely concerned the effects her performances had on an audience, Schneemann was also well aware that the performers themselves were no less affected by the prevailing social norms, and for this reason involved them in a week’s training that involved ‘moving through taboos’ in order to dismantle

socially conditioned inhibitions.26 One can only presume that these inhibitions included the use of raw meat; by imbuing it with the capacity to produce sensuous pleasure unrestricted to the terrain of gastronomy, Schneemann further crosses boundaries that delimit one bodily function from another, prefiguring

many artworks that attracted the label ‘abject’ later in the century.27 Standards of decency and decorum are, as seventy years of feminist theory has conclusively shown, never neutral. The thick mesh of moral norms and cultural codes of behaviour is riven with inequalities that almost always coincide with divisions based on race, class, gender, sexuality and other identity markers. If Schneemann’s work breaks moral prohibitions, the transgressions at play are explicitly bound up with how these prohibitions affect men and women differently. The assumption that women were less sexually desirous than men (if they were deemed desirous at all), the positioning of men as active, women as

passive,28 the role of women as bearers of the gaze, and men its possessors, the ingrained sexism of the art world and its official canons are all issues confronted in Schneemann’s life and work. With regards to Meat Joy, the artist’s decision to include paper should not be overlooked. The paper serves a range of functions,

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36 Ethics of Contemporary Art

at one point providing a hiding place for performers, another clothing, and at the climax of the piece, picking up paint from their bodies. This final use of the paper recalls a series of performances staged in Paris just four years previously: Yves Klein’s Anthropometry of the Blue Epoch (1960). Documentation of these performances shows the besuited Klien directing naked female models to cover themselves in his trademark blue paint before arranging themselves on large sheets of paper in a variety of controlled positions. Meat Joy sits in explicit dialogue with such works, both as a form of expanded painting, and one of the first performance works to break with the gendered division of active male subjects and passive female objects, or what Klein problematically called his ‘living brushes’. In Meat Joy Schneemann positions herself as both director and participant, transgressing unwritten rules that consigned female artists to positions of passivity. One can presume that an audience familiar with Fluxus, Lebel or indeed Schneemann’s work would be unlikely to find partial nudity transgressive in and of itself. It is Schneemann’s failure to use nudity to fully replicate the prevailing

sexual inequalities that was transgressive.29 The art scene in Paris, London and New York – the three cities where Meat Joy was performed – was overwhelm- ingly dominated by men, and Schneemann spoke of her resentment at being held up as a ‘cunt mascot’ for the then-burgeoning currents of Fluxus and happenings. On the part of this group, the moral reaction to works like Meat Joy was underpinned by a set of patriarchal assumptions; in Schneemann’s words, it

came up against the ‘walls of masculine convention and ideology’.30 As Rebecca Schneider summarizes, ‘nudity was not the problem, Sexual display was not the problem. The agency of the body displayed, the author-ity of the agent – that was

the problem with women’s work’.31 If Schneemann threw the contours of this system into sharper relief, this did not necessarily place her in alignment with all members of the women’s movement. As well as transgressing common standards of decency and overstep- ping patriarchal art world constraints, for some feminists, Schneemann’s implicit embrace of erotic pleasure as a route to emancipation cut against the grain of the feminist ideas gaining dominance towards the end of the 1960s. These ideas cast doubt on the political efficacy of expressions of female sexual pleasure, largely

viewing sexual liberalization as an entrenchment of male privilege.32 Julie Gains argued that by the end of the decade, artwork that gave expression to female heterosexual desire was largely seen as incongruent with the wider aims of the fem-

inist movement.33 In this context, Schneemann’s ‘celebration of flesh as material’

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Four Snapshots of Transgression 37

as well as later sexually explicit films such asFuses (1965) and essays such as ‘istory of a girl pornographer’ (1974) place her work in continuity with what later became known as sex-positive feminism, transgressing radical feminism’s

‘movement standards of purity’.34 In her work the subversive potential of sex is upheld, promoting what could be called, following Linda Singer, a ‘politics of

ecstasy’.35 It is this third front that places Schneemann’s work in dialogue with a critical discourse on transgression that takes Bataille and Foucualt as its sources of inspiration. While the transgression embodied in Meat Joy can be framed as dialectical insofar as it is indissociable from a set of political objectives dialectically opposed to prevailing norms, the place of the ecstatic in overcoming these norms resonates with a logic of transgression that goes beyond dialectics. There is no evidence that either Bataille or Foucault influenced Schneemann’s

work of the 1960s.36 Like the Actionists, her inspiration at the time was drawn from the work of Reich, as well as heterodox theorists such as Michael McClure,

whose Meat Science Essays informed the title of Meat Joy.37 Nevertheless, in its ‘propulsion towards the ecstatic’ as well as its conjunction of repulsion and

pleasure, the work embodies some key aspects of Bataille’s writing.38 The most significant of these concerns the central role Bataille attributes to experiences of continuity afforded by transgression. As Bataille writes,

We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear. Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything

that is.39

This nostalgia for a foundational experience of unity, Bataille goes on to say, is responsible for eroticism: ‘Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy

s e a .’ 40 The tension between continuity and discontinuity, calcified moral norms that keep bodies apart and erotic acts of transgression that bring them together is clearly at play in the structure of Meat Joy. The precision of the choreography in the first half of the performance, guiding the audience through a series of affective states, slowly gives way to a conjoining of bodies, a fusion of living flesh with dead meat, all eventually subsumed under a chromatic unity made possible by the addition of paint.

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38 Ethics of Contemporary Art

This experience of continuity is not restricted to the performers on stage. Schneemann was informed by Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, which famously argues that theatre should ‘physically envelop the spectator and immerse him

in a constant bath of light, images, movements and noises’41 – a programmatic statement that could equally serve as a manifesto for Meat Joy (notwithstanding the gendered pronoun). This is not to say that the audience were actively encouraged to take part in the work – when they did during the Paris performance, they were instructed to return to the other side of the footlights,

and on a second night a man who attacked Schneemann was quickly stopped.42 Nevertheless, Schneemann recalls that the audience ‘were seated on the floor as close to the performance area as possible’, a strategy that ‘heightened the sense

of communality’.43 This was an active attempt to libidinally engage the audience, breaking with a longstanding tradition of art spectatorship that held ‘disinterest-

edness’ as a prerequisite to aesthetic appreciation.44 In its propulsion towards an experience of continuity on stage, as well as its attempt to forge a sense of communality between the performers and the audience, Meat Joy embodies a logic of transgression that can be characterized as ecstatic. If dialectical transgression revolves around the interrelation of two competing rights, mediated through language, ecstatic transgression breaks the symmetry by stepping outside of it. By moving through a series of precise and evocative movements that subsequently dissolve in front of our eyes, by layering sensory assemblages on top of one another in an arrangement that eschews linear narrative flows,Meat Joy’s transgression temporarily exposes a space between language and its outside. Boundaries disappear, discontinuities break down and signifiers momentarily fail to create recognizable meaning effects in a blur of ecstasy and excess.

Snapshot 3: The inversion of values

The short filmThrust in Me (1985) opens with a shrill guitar riff and a pair of feet pacing the streets of New York’s Lower East Side. Cymbals splash and the camera pans up to show a man in his mid-20s wearing mirrored sunglasses and a trench coat. After a few seconds the film cuts to show the same man, only this time he is staggering around a dishevelled apartment in a dress, a wig and smudged lip- stick. Both characters are played by Nick Zedd, the principle architect of a 1980s underground film movement known as ‘The Cinema of Transgression’.

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Figure 1.3 Thrust in Me (1985), dir. by Figure 1.4 Thrust in Me (1985), dir. by Richard Kern and Nick Zedd, film still. Richard Kern and Nick Zedd, film still. © Richard Kern. © Richard Kern.

Comprising one third of The Manhattan Love Suicides, a trilogy of films directed by another of the movement’s central figures, Richard Kern,Thrust in Me follows a linear narrative to its dark and shocking conclusion. Dejected, the woman slumps down on a couch and flicks through a self-help book called How to be Your Own Best Friend. Seemingly dissatisfied with it, she then turns abruptly to a book on suicide before tossing that to one side just as quickly. The man strides along aggressively kicking rubbish and colliding with other pedestrians. He passes rows of boarded-up shops and derelict buildings, one of which carries a piece of graffiti reading ‘exist exist exist’ or ‘exit exit exit’. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that this sign provides a coda to the film as a whole. The woman, now apparently intent on taking her own life, rips a picture of Jesus from a prayer book and pins it to the wall of the bathroom. She runs a bath, gets in and picks up a knife from behind the taps. Without pause for reflection she makes two deep cuts to her wrist and collapses backwards as the blood drips onto the bathroom floor. Meanwhile the man continues to act out his frustration on the streets of New York; he pushes violently through a fighting couple before stumbling up the steps to his apartment. The editing speeds up, and two still images quickly follow each other. The first is the picture of Jesus, crowned in thorns and eyes turned upwards to God. The second is a black-and- white photograph of the man, looking up in the same direction as Jesus, yet the look in his eyes is one of defiance rather than rapture Figures 1.3( and 1.4). What follows this already violent narrative is an angry scream of images that culminates with the man copulating with the corpse of his recently deceased girlfriend. The film plays like an extreme music video, the low-grade super 8

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footage serving as a visual analogue of the post-punk soundtrack that scores the film from start to finish. Filmed on an ultra-low budget, sometimes on stolen equipment, and screened alongside music and performance acts in New York clubs such as CBGB’s, films likeThrust in Me arose out of the fringes of the New York no-wave and post-punk culture. Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, David Wojnarowicz, Tommy Turner and Lydia Lunch formed the core of a movement whose work displayed the unwavering ambition to outrage and annoy as many people as possible. On the face of it, Thrust in Me would seem to display traits of the dialectical mode of transgression. The film stages a series of oppositions: Bible morality is countered with blasphemy, self-help with suicide and the two characters embody existential solutions that come into violent conflict with one another, with the suggestion that they could even be avatars of the same person. As an embodiment of the kind of virulent nihilism inherited from punk, the Cinema of Transgression (henceforth CoT) was a movement that essentially defined itself against other cultural forms. And yet opposition is not automatically dialectical; opposition can exist without synthesis in a form of transgression that inverts, rather than clashes with, the prevailing socio-cultural norms. These norms constitute a disavowed background to the film discussed. Neither Reagan nor the Moral Majority is referenced explicitly in Thrust in Me, and yet they both serve as implicit targets for the blasphemy and anger the film channels. At a time when Jerry Falwell and his followers were opposing equal rights for homosexuals, pornography and sex education in schools, the CoT broke as many of these moral prohibitions as they could. Employing typically inflammatory rhetoric, in 1988 Falwell rallied his followers against the Civil Rights Restoration Act by warning that it could force churches to hire ‘a prac-

ticing homosexual drug addict with AIDS to be a teacher or a youth pastor’.45 Against this backdrop the CoT must have embodied the worst fears of the Moral Majority. Many members of the group were active drug users, a fact reflected unflinchingly in some of their artistic output, such as Kern’s filmZombie Hunger (1984), or Tommy Turner and Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s grim collaborative film Rat Trap, which intercut images of a rat drowning with footage of a man injecting heroin. Certain members of the group were openly homosexual, such as David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1992, and others experimented with various forms of sadomasochism, such as Richard Kern, whose filmFingered (1986) opens with the warning: ‘Although it is not our sole intention to SHOCK, INSULT, or IRRITATE, you have been warned that

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we are CATERING only to our own preferences as members of the SEXUAL

MINORITY.’46 This disclaimer highlights an essential difference between the CoT and the Viennese Actionists. While both opposed the establishment values of their time, the Actionists claimed to do so in the interests of society at large, invoking psychoanalytic arguments about abreaction to justify artworks that would supposedly ‘heal’ Austrian society. By contrast, the CoT embodied a minoritarian spirit, as Carlo McCormick puts it: ‘The cinema of transgression was a deliberate attempt to regain that essence of a community, to create something in every way

unpalatable for broader public consumption.’47 This withdrawal also meant that the group rarely used their films to campaign on the issues that affected them. They simply took what was endorsed by the state and inverted it, for the most part eschewing social commentary or any affirmative values that might have

redeemed them in the eyes of a larger audience.48 This general lack of appetite for the promotion of values was also played out in the spatial politics of New York where the members of the CoT lived. Critic Cynthia Carr compared the experience of living in the East Village in the 1980s to living in the ‘epicenter of the world heroin trade’, encountering ‘whole blocks that would be deserted except for the vague drug itch hanging

in the air’.49 It was only with ‘operation pressure point’ in 1984 that Mayor Koch made the area a safer bet for investors by cleaning up some of the drugs, an operation that Zedd describes as an ‘occupation army’ in the Lower East

Side.50 Given the fact that the deserted blocks Carr refers to often served as makeshift projection spaces, squats or film sets for the CoT film-makers, one would expect gentrification and the ‘war on drugs’ to have provided the raw materials for an open engagement with the state. While certain themes did seep into the work of the CoT, such as heavy-handed policing in Zedd’s

film Police State,51 for the most part the group avoided direct contact with the authorities. At best, it could be said that they produced work that was shocking enough to exclude it from mainstream conceptions of ‘bohemia’, thereby rendering it unsuitable marketing material for the agents of gentrification. Nevertheless, to claim this was a conscious strategy on the part of the CoT would be misleading. Once again, the primary mode of engagement with the dominant Symbolic values of the day seemed to be one of inversion – affirming the aesthetic qualities of a city where people argue, buildings lay dormant and needles litter the streets.

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A final example of the group’s opposition to dominant values can be seen in their attitude towards avant-garde films produced at the time. This opposition was not particularly subtle, and in the group’s manifesto, Zedd bombas- tically proclaims that ‘all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be made again’, encouraging other film-makers to ‘violate the command and law

that we bore audiences to death in rituals of circumlocution’.52 The lifespan of the CoT coincided with a period when film theory was being elevated to the level of a recognized discipline in universities across America. This newly found academic recognition brought about a traffic of ideas between avant-garde film- makers and the academy. Stan Brakhage, for example, described his films as a

kind of ‘moving visual thinking’,53 a label difficult to imagine being applied to Zedd or Kern’s work. At a more formal level, there is a stark difference between films such as Brakhage’s, which draw on a modernist tradition of interrogating the medium of film itself, and the output of the CoT, which followed conventional linear narrative forms such as parallel montage, and gave rise to few, if any formal innovations. As the inheritors of a ‘trash aesthetic’ developed by the likes of Jack Smith, the Kuchar brothers and John Waters, the CoT celebrated everything that was generally deemed to be amateur, illegitimate or unfash-

ionable by avant-garde film-makers of the day.54 Aside from Zedd’s polemic in his manifesto, the group did not really engage with the discourse generated by avant-garde filmmakers, except by way of simply affirming a set of values that they excluded, resulting in films that often displayed an openly anti-intellectual stance. In summary, the dominant spirit of the CoT was characterized by two things: the inversion of majoritarian or mainstream values, and the unwavering reluctance to posit any new values of their own. If the group asserted any competing right, it was simply the right to be different (where different often meant opposite) and if it posited any affirmative value, it was simply the value of transgression in and of itself. It is this spirit that places the CoT in alignment with one of the most influential figures in the history of transgression: the Marquis de Sade. But it is by way of a brief detour through the work of Immanuel Kant that the significance of Sade’s work comes into focus, following the outlines of an argument made by

Lacan in his influential essay ‘Kant with Sade’.55 In the history of moral philosophy, Kant is largely responsible for emptying concepts such as ‘the moral law’ of their empirical or emotional content, arguing that morality cannot be derived from our experiences of the world in any

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straightforward sense. This ‘emptiness’ of the moral law is, for Kant, what forces the subject to take responsibility for their actions, rather than blindly pursuing moral imperatives specified by particular societies, rulers or ideologies. As soon as this duty is contaminated by motivations such as self-interest, a desire for happiness (either for oneself or for others) or anything other than duty itself, then an act can no longer be considered moral in a strict sense. The other stipulation that Kant makes for an act to be considered moral is that it should hold true as a principle of universal action, a stipulation that finds its most concise

expression in the famous categorical imperative.56 It is this formal ‘emptiness’ of the moral law in Kant’s work – expressed through the principles of duty and uni-

versality – that opens his system up to the operations of inversion.57 The conceptual lever we can pull to bring about this inversion is the concept of ‘diabolic evil’. In this concept, there lies a principle of action that follows

neither out of self-interest nor out of a moral failing, but out of duty alone.58 Diabolical evil elevates the transgression of the moral law to a law in itself, and in this respect it is indistinguishable from the highest good. Although he does not call it by name, it is clear that Lacan discerns just such an expression of diabolical evil in the work of the Marquis de Sade. If Kant’s ethics has a desubjectifying effect on the moral actor, requiring her to purify her will of all ‘pathological’ motivation and make herself into an agent of the moral law, this structure is mirrored in Sade’s willingness to endure considerable personal sacrifices in pur-

suit of transgression.59 In a further line of argument, Lacan believes that Sade exposes the operation of the superego in Kant’s work. As a product of the autonomy of the will, the moral law in Kant’s ethics supposedly comes from the subject herself, as a voice from within. Lacan accuses Kant of exaggerating the tranquillity of this voice of conscience, but this accusation is contradicted by a look at the Metaphysics of Morals, where the moral law is cast in a more pernicious light: ‘Every man’, Kant writes ‘has a conscience and finds himself observed, threatened, and, in

general, kept in awe (respect coupled with fear) by an internal judge’.60 Here a

string of affects characterize the moral law: awe, respect and fear.61 For Lacan, the threatening judge Kant speaks of may seem internal, but in fact it is nothing less than an internalization of wider social imperatives. The voice of conscience that constantly pursues the subject is nothing other than the wrathful voice of

the superego.62 The logic of the superego is such that the closer one gets to fulfilling one’s duty, the more one admonishes oneself for not living up to its demands. In this

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way it displays overtly sadistic traits, pushing one even further in the realization of its will. In the case of the CoT, it is just such a sadistic impulse that can be discerned in Zedd’s programmatic manifesto for the group:

Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many

rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression.63

More than anything else, it is the idea of ‘courage’ that stands out in this passage, highlighting the function of the superego in Zedd’s declaration of intent. Here transgression is elevated to the status of a moral imperative, an imperative that entails subjecting the 1980s’ bible morality to the logic of inversion. In the description of the film that opened this section,Thrust in Me, it is possible to find a condensation of this idea in the image of Jesus quickly followed by another of Zedd, both with eyes turned upwards and mouths agape. The relationship between the two images manifests the iconoclastic spirit of much punk and post-punk imagery. Although upon first glance the two images in Thrust in Me appear to be a relatively straightforward example of this, a neat separation between them and the ideas they represent is rendered more complicated in the detail. In particular, the words ‘Kill me’ written on the epau- lette of Zedd’s black leather jacket are significant, constituting a message to God, a challenge that bridges both the cinematic cut between the two images and the separation between good and evil. Paradoxical as it may seem, the inscription on Zedd’s jacket could be considered a challenge for God to exist. By positioning God as addressee, Zedd not only entangles himself in the nets of religion but also reveals his desire to eliminate contingency. In this way the image displays the logic of sadism, in which, as Lacan claims, the pain of existence (which is fundamentally a pain associated with indeterminacy and lack) is discharged on to the Other, which takes the form of an authority that replaces agonizing deliberation with clear,

univocal imperatives.64 Accompanying this discharge is a transfer of responsibility, and in turning him or herself into the object of the Other’s enjoyment (Kill me if it pleases you) the sadist becomes the instrument of the Other’s will. Instead of producing new values, or producing new subjects that might act as bearers for these values, many of the films associated with the CoT simply take the underside of the moral law and elevate it to a principle of action. Just as for Lacan Sade’s ‘apology for crime impels him to an oblique acceptance of

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the Law’,65 the batteries that discharge the electric shock in films such as Thrust in Me are batteries first of all charged by the law. Bound up with a superegoic imperative to transgress at all costs, these works display a curious rigidity in both their commitment to transgression and their formal properties. In summary, it could be said that while in psychoanalysis the superego is conceptualized as an internalization of society’s imperatives, in the work of the CoT this internalization occurs with a twist: it is the inversion of majoritarian social values that are given the force of an imperative, and in doing so, these inverted values become the sticks with which they beat themselves.

Snapshot 4: The disorientation of morality

When such inversions are repeated several times, their effects can no longer be limited to an exchange, a flip or a 180-degree turn. They start to turn into processes associated with disorientation. Disorientation implies the loss of one’s bearings, which happens when the Symbolic referents used for orientation disappear and the ground is rendered unstable. When these referents are physical, the resulting experience takes place on a perceptual-affective plane; when the referents are norms and values, the resulting disorientation takes place on the plane of morality. Unlike the three logics of transgression already discussed, disorientation does not automatically entail the crossing of limits. The relationship between the two comes into a clearer focus in the work of Paul McCarthy, an artist well known for provocative performances and installations that can have a disorientating effect on the viewer. Long hailed as a central figure in the history of American performance and installation art for his visceral performances in architectural enclosures involving food substances and psycho-sexual pastiche, in recent years McCarthy’s back catalogue has been reappraised, and a quieter side to the artist’s work has been emphasized. This was especially so in a 2008 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, curated by Chrissie Iles, which explored the themes of rotation and dislocated space in a number of McCarthy’s works from

the 1960s to the 1990s.66 While this exhibition offered an important vantage point on the artist’s oeuvre, the theme of disorientation was explored on a primarily perceptual-affective level, providing few conceptual resources to think through its implications in the sphere of morality.

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This is exemplified by one artwork in particular,Spinning Room (1971/2008),67 which is atypical of the artist’s oeuvre for a number of reasons. There are no scatological or pop cultural allusions; no nudity or horseplay; and his signature materials of ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard are notably absent. However, it is by looking at this piece before better-known works that it will be possible to isolate the trope of disorientation with greater ease. The first thing one notices aboutSpinning Room is that it is made up of a room that does not spin. A cuboid frame supports four large double-sided projection screens that remain rooted to the spot. Outside the enclosure, four projectors beam images onto the screens, the latter leaving openings at the corners to allow viewers to enter into the cube’s interior. Once inside, a tiered cylindrical pedestal becomes visible at the centre of the structure. This pedestal supports four cameras arranged like points of a compass on a platform that spins irregularly, changes direction, changes speed and periodically stops altogether. Coloured electrical wires carefully routed through the centre of the pedestal disappear into a custom-made computer at the base. This is what controls the spinning movement, as well as a series of visual effects applied to the imagery after it has been captured. Other than the camera pedestal the only thing the viewer sees inside the space is themselves: enlarged, distorted and back-projected onto one of the four screens. Because the cameras also film projections of the images they capture, this creates a mise-en-abyme, and the viewer is trailed by a series of recursive ghost images that recede to the limit of the projector’s resolution. Spinning Room attacks the viewer with a range of visual and spatial effects: the video feed periodically flips upside down, changes speed or direction, is put into photographic negative, or subjected to a small delay, throwing it out of sync with the viewer’s live movements. Four overhead studio lights suspended on the corners of the frame flash off and on without ever creating a genuinely stroboscopic effect. While this ensemble of effects may be caused by pre-programmed invariants, no discernible pattern stabilizes to put the viewer at ease. Periodically, one of the cameras will project the coloured bands of a test pattern instead of the video feed, providing a point of orientation that serves the machine and its colour-matching imperatives rather than the viewer themselves. Spinning Room was conceived in the same year as another film preoccu-

pied with disorientation, Michael Snow’s film La Région Centrale (1971).68 Set in an area of wilderness in northern Quebec, La Région Centrale was made by stationing a camera on a mountaintop. The star of the film is arguably a pre- programmed rotating camera mount that traces a series of horizontal and

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vertical pans, lens rotations and zooms. In using this device, Snow claimed to be breaking with the tradition of subjecting camera movement to the dictates of plot, or consigning it to the role of imitating the human eye, by giving the

camera ‘an equal role in the film to what is being photographed’.69 Both Spinning Room and La Region Centrale unleash a force that is first and foremost perceptual-affective, presupposing a particular sensory apparatus to act upon. This is a point that Tila Landon captures well in a discussion of Snow’s film, when she writes that it ‘rends the eyes, attacks balance in the inner ear, challenges the stomach, contests eye-ear integration, and denies the pace and focus of perception constrained in a head that looks forward, on a neck with

restricted rotation, on a body that walks, turns, stops and blinks to see’.70 As Landon makes clear, La Région Centrale is as much an embodiment of manifold sensory assaults on the human body as it is a film about the Canadian wilderness. The film dramatizes the convergence of a range of analogue camera effects on the viewer’s motor-sensory apparatus. As inSpinning Room, the primary effect is disorientation, sweeping away habituated modes of perception in favour of speeds and intensities. As one critic put it, in La Région Centrale, ‘the world is inverted for so long, that when the camera swings vertically through a full circle to restore the horizon line to its rightful position, above the earth, it

looks wrong’.71 The same could be said for Spinning Room, except here there is no horizon, the only point of orientation is an image of the viewer themselves. If La Région Centrale and Spinning Room both embody disorientation on a primarily perceptual-affective level, then another exhibition by McCarthy combines this

with both moral and semantic disarray.72 Caribbean Pirates (2005) is an exhibition conceived and executed together with the artist’s son Damon McCarthy at a project space in London and comprises one of a number of works by McCarthy

that draws on the iconography of fairgrounds and theme park rides.73 As the title suggests, the exhibition was inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean Disneyland theme park ride in California, and predates the release of the subsequent films produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Filling a vast warehouse space off Brick Lane, the exhibition featured various vessels: a houseboat, frigate and a pirate ship heaving back and forth on a giant mechanical frame. Props and detritus from a film shoot littered the space and filled the nostrils, as severed prosthetic limbs lay in pools

of ketchup and wrecked power tools dripped with chocolate sauce.74 Videos of pirate-themed bacchanalia were haphazardly projected around the space and involved thirty buccaneers enacting violent scenarios of pillage and terror for a

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month. Any speech or dialogue in the films was lost as the soundtracks merged into a chaotic maelstrom of babble, shrieks and cries. These elements combined to offer the visitor to Caribbean Pirates a multisensory experience of disorientation. The large kinetic sculptures are a nau- seating sight from the beginning, and the feeling is augmented by almost every other element in the exhibition, from jerky video projections to a confusing mess of scattered limbs. The transubstantiation of body fluids for foodstuffs in the piece (and in many others by McCarthy) serves both as an abject appropriation of American family brands and as a semiotic substitution in which one signifier assumes the place of another in a disorientating metaphoric movement. As McCarthy claims, ‘reality itself can fluctuate. The bottle of mayonnaise within the action is no longer a bottle of mayonnaise; it is now a woman’s genitals. Or

it is now a phallus’.75 The theme of moral disorientation in the exhibition bears more scrutiny. As well as referring to Disney, the exhibition literature positions the pirate theme as a trope of ‘invasion and occupation of foreign lands … that resonate[s]‌ with

contemporary global events’76 (given the year of the exhibition, one can safely assume that the ‘foreign lands’ in question here are Afghanistan and Iraq). More generally, the pirate is a figure of disorientation par excellence, existing in a Symbolic space where the legal and moral structures of the land cease to govern so tightly. The pirate is an outlaw with respect to these structures, and in associating the outlaw with the American state McCarthy is reversing the usual transgressive arrangement where the former is acting against the interests of the latter. Here the authority that underpins the law and the actor that undermines it become one and the same thing, and the state assumes the power to suspend prohibitions when this coincides with its own interests. This places McCarthy himself in a rather ambiguous position. While his work is frequently labelled transgressive for its sexual and violent content, here he seems to be using these strategies to critique transgression itself, casting a spotlight on British and American foreign policies in the process. From this standpoint, McCarthy’s work does not, therefore, embody a transgression against the law (the dialectical model), a transgression at the limits of the law (the ecstatic model), nor even a transgression elevated to the status of morality (the model of inversion), but a logic of transgression that turns back on itself, suspending the boundary lines

that divide the law from its transgression in the first place.77 What, then, does this reveal about the more general relationship between transgression and disorientation? If transgression is, first of all, considered a

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concept tied to morality, disorientation could be considered an amoral concept that creates the conditions of possibility for transgression. An experience of disorientation might cause limits to blur or disappear entirely – the moral equivalent of being spun around on a fairground ride so fast that the borders separating the objects in one’s field of vision disappear into a smear of colours. Here disorientation serves as the precondition for an act of transgression that may be only partially deliberate. But there is another relationship between disorientation and transgression at stake in McCarthy’s work. Here it seems perceptual-affective disorientation can also serve as a symbol

of transgression.78 If Spinning Room displays a desire to place the viewer’s habituated categories of perception under duress, then this drive migrates into the domain of morality in works such as Caribbean Pirates. In this installation the usual codes and categories that shape the world are deformed on multiple planes at the same time: moral, semantic and perceptual-affective, with the latter serving as a symbol of the former. The result is not intended to be progressive, constructive or conducive to new subjective forms. Rather, disorientation is the clearing house for a new value that McCarthy, like the CoT, is unwilling to deliver.

A postface to transgression

Despite their superficial resemblance, the above examples show that transgressive art cannot be capitalized as the name of an artistic movement whose members subscribe to the same ethical, political or aesthetic values. It can only ever denote a set of artistic strategies that are varied in both motivation and outcome. Selecting just four examples will always be inadequate to the task of providing a comprehensive account of the variety of work that has attracted the label, but it does help us to isolate a series of underlying logics that characterize transgression. These examples show that transgression can be underpinned bydialectics when armed with a competing right, motivated by ecstasy when aiming at experiences of continuity beyond language; bring about inversion when reluc- tant to posit any value of its own; and produce an experience of disorientation when turned against transgression itself. While not exhaustive, this list attempts to isolate some of the dominant tendencies in how transgression has been deployed in post-war art. The lines that demarcate one tendency from another

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are far from solid, and to a greater or lesser degree it is possible to find traits of dialectics, ecstasy, inversion and disorientation in all of the examples discussed above. Meat Joy in particular displays traits of dialectical transgression insofar as it invokes a competing right, and the work of the Viennese Actionists displays a long-standing preoccupation with the ecstatic. Overlapping in its tendencies, varied in its aesthetic manifestations, transgression is as messy a concept as some of the artworks that pass under its name. There is however one uniting principle that binds all four logics of transgression discussed above: they are each reliant on what we could call, following Lacan, a ‘strong’ Symbolic order. And when this Symbolic order fades or fractures, the art that was made in response ceases to be transgressive and takes on new characteristics. Armed with this hypothesis, it is worth briefly revisiting each of the four examples above.

Princely pursuits

What power structures were the Actionists up against in the 1960s Austria, and how have these changed today? During their short lifespan, there was a restrictive permit system for performances and events; institutions that were otherwise unaffiliated with the state commanded respect and wielded power as if they were acting on its behalf; and, at a more fundamental level, a particular entanglement of Catholicism and fascism constituted what Daub calls a ‘vast harmonising

consensus between nominally disparate institutions or apparatuses’.79 In short, it could be said that at the time the Actionists were making their most transgressive performances, there were few spaces available for dissent. Here the idea of a ‘strong’ symbolic order can be taken to mean a form of authority that is totalizing, rigidly enforced, and locks political discourse into a set of social scripts that admit little deviation. In this context, one significant aspect of the Actionist’s work was its ability to make this organization of power more visible. Despite resurgent right-wing populism, today political power in Austria is not wielded in the same way. The fact that both Brus and Nitsch have since been awarded the Grand Austrian state prize, with the latter being singled out as ‘a

central figure in Austrian art creation’ by the artistic senate of the state,80 is one sign that the context for their work is radically different. This official state recognition has been matched by artworld celebrity: Nitsch now has not one but two museums dedicated to his work – the first in the Austrian town of Mistelbach,

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the second in Naples – and in 2004, no fewer than three large museums in

Austria staged retrospectives of the group as a whole.81 When not fulfilling these commitments, Nitsch develops the increasingly elaborate Orgies Mysteries Theatre, now a multisensory performance that has been staged on the grounds of his castle in Prinzendorf since 1971, with its longest iteration to date comprising

of a six-day festival in 1998.82 This performance, which includes elements such as animal sacrifice and mock crucifixion even made an unlikely appearance in

the 2005 edition of the Lonely Planet guide to Austria,83 prompting Bernhard Doppler to note that Actionism has now become ‘quite compatible with the con-

cept of “provincial tourism” in Austria’.84 More than simply a parable of institutional recuperation, the recognition the Actionists have received can be viewed as symptomatic of a shift in the way power functions. The dialectical model hinges on the interaction of two parties who each invoke a competing right, in this case ‘decency’ and ‘order’ on the part of the Austrian state apparatus in the 1960s, and ‘psychic health’ on the

part of the Actionists.85 Once the right to overtly police culture is revoked and disciplinary power is overlaid by control, the transgressive pole in the dialectic is fundamentally weakened. The authorities are now more likely to offer crowd control for Nitsch’s performances than persecute him, and following a period of public soul-searching in the 1980s, when Austria’s official ‘victim’ narrative regarding Second World War was put into question, claims about the therapeutic effects of Nitsch’s work have slowly faded into the background; they now advertise themselves as offering audience members an opportunity for ‘self-

discovery’.86 This decisively shifts the accent away from collective opposition to fixed psychosocial narratives, and onto the individual and their personal navi- gation through the open spaces of control. Furthermore, Nitsch no longer relies on the press to create a discourse about his work – his writings are published

by a state-owned publishing house,87 and there has been a considerable amount of ink spilled by art historians in recent years on all four main protagonists of the Actionists. As the last remnants of the old political consensus all but vanish in Austria and power starts to function in a different way (no less perniciously perhaps), strange things start to happen to the dialectical logic of transgression. In response to barriers which are now porous, or power which is now decentralized to a much greater extent, Nitsch’s OMT could be viewed as a peculiar reaction formation. Staged in the private grounds of a castle, and drawing on a range of classical art forms such as lyric poetry and opera, as well as Greek mythology

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and ecclesiastical iconography, Nitsch’s work possesses a distinctly aristocratic tenor. The artist has repeatedly called Prinzendorf ‘his Bayruth’ (after the town in which Wagner’s performances are regularly staged) and expressed a strong desire that his festivals pass into tradition and continue to be celebrated for cen-

turies to come.88 In the context of a society where class stratifications still have an influence on cultural life, these references will have ‘blue-blooded’ connotations for many Austrians, displaying traces of nostalgia for modes of power that once provided the necessary conditions for transgression.

Diminished ecstasy

The narrative of a declining Symbolic, or a shift from a society of discipline to one of control, is harder to discern in the shifting contextual backdrop to Carolee Schneemann’s work. This is for two reasons. First, even though Schneemann explicitly cites an opposition to American foreign policy as a motivating factor in her work, public discourse in 1960s New York, Paris and London was not dominated by fascist elements to the same extent it was in Austria. Second, the patriarchal authority that Schneemann came up against at the time – what she calls the ‘wall of men’ – is clearly not something absent from the art world today. The narrative of loosening Symbolic prohibitions is made all the more complicated when we consider Schneemann’s reflections on the changing role of the naked body. On the occasion of a re-performance of Meat Joy in 2002 at the Whitechapel gallery in London, Schneemann reflected that the naked body has shifted its meaning because we are ‘more conservative … more fearful and …

more cautious’ today than we were when the work was first performed.89 If anything, this would imply that the taboo surrounding nudity has become more powerful since the 1960s, intensifying the transgressive potential of the naked body in the process. The point Schneemann makes however is more subtle; it is not so much that the taboo has become stronger, but that today the naked body is no longer ‘casually pleasurable’; it is deemed either dramatic or

pornographic in a context in which we are ‘more prurient’.90 This is radically different from saying that the standards of decency and decorum thatMeat Joy came up against have been tightened. It speaks of an accretion of new layers of signification on the body since the 1960s and of a society that offers sexuality in a variety of pre-packaged forms. It is not so much that nudity today is taboo;

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rather, in its ubiquity, its meaning has changed, and so too has the meaning of Meat Joy. Schneemann herself has expressed sensitivity to the shifting socio-cultural backdrop to her work, writing that censorship is ‘flexible, responsive, motile,

adaptive’, 91 echoing the narrative of a shift from disciplinary power that operates on the basis of fixed norms to control and integration that accommodate and anticipate socio-cultural change. In 1975 she ceased to work with performance altogether, moving into installation and projection work, some of which remained sexually explicit. In 1980 she is quoted as saying that she was no longer looking for ‘communal ecstasy’, signalling a distinct shift in emphasis from her

earlier work.92 This earlier work can still be viewed as containing dialectically transgressive elements, insofar as some of the rights it invokes periodically come up against

symbolic prohibitions.93 But in a society where Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm is held in public libraries, rather than burnt en masse, as it was under McCarthyism, in a society in which newspapers and magazines encourage guilt about an absence of libidinal pleasure, rather than its presence, Meat Joy’s implicit promotion of a politics of ecstasy no longer swims against the current

of dominant discourse.94 This could be seen as a symptom of a wider social shift in the way prohibition facilitates eroticism. As a theorist preoccupied with the relationship between the two, Bataille was critical of the new era of sexual freedom he saw ushered in towards the end of his life, writing of ‘the futility of the common contention that sexual taboos are nothing but prejudice, and it is high time we were rid of

t h e m’. 95 Bataille’s erotic transgression, driving towards a point of excess beyond the Symbolic, was reliant on the latter’s structuring principles remaining relatively stable. Even though it aims beyond language, like its dialectical counter- part, ecstatic transgression nevertheless depends on it as a field of difference through which to pass. The momentary experience of continuity ecstatic transgression affords is only made possible by experiencing the discontinuities that the Symbolic imposes on speaking subjects. In the same way that a disordered library makes it impossible to notice whether or not a book is missing, once the discontinuities of language shift at pace, the points of excess that operate in its blind spots become increasingly difficult to locate. For a transgressive experience of ecstatic continuity, the discontinuities of life must be discrete, collectively shared, and relatively stable.

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Just say yes

Eking out an existence on the fringes of 1980s New York, the CoT rarely came to the attention of a mainstream audience. Like a lit match and a fuse that never quite connect, the transgressive possibility of their work was held in suspension throughout the decade. This decade was characterized by economic and social liberalization on the one hand, and a resurgent conservatism and populist moral crusades on the other. As the culture wars rumbled on in the background, at a local level the group faced the effects of aggressive gentrification, heavy-handed policing, and the gradual eradication of spaces of dissent. Here once again we find power operating on the basis of prohibition, coercion and enclosure, creating ideal conditions for the emergence of transgressive art. It was against this backdrop that the group elevated transgression to the status of an imperative, in the process inverting the values of mainstream America. If the transgressive energy of the CoT’s work was never fully discharged, it is perhaps because now that it has found a larger audience – exemplified in an institutional survey show in 2012 and numerous screenings in prestigious venues – the work

finds itself in a culture that has itself been twisted by the force of an inversion.96 This cultural inversion is analysed in the work of Lacanian cultural theorists such as Slavoj Žižek and Todd McGowan, both of whom have advanced the idea of a fundamental shift in the logic of social organization along the axis of enjoyment. For McGowan, this is encapsulated in the idea that ‘Whereas formerly society has required subjects to renounce their private enjoyment in the name of social duty, today the only duty seems to consist in enjoying oneself as much

as possible.’97 Here the invocation of ‘duty’ should alert us to the presence of the superego. This is a superego unalloyed from the structures of prohibition. For

Lacan, it represents a law ‘insofar as nothing more than its root remains’.98 With respect to the CoT, this root is planted upside down, so to speak, so that it is the opposite of traditional and mainstream social values that constitute the ‘content’ of the superego’s commands. This inversion now seems peculiarly congruent with an American context in which the Reagan era imperative to ‘just say no’ has arguably been eclipsed

by the commercial exhortation to ‘just do it’.99 Among the examples of this shift McGowan cites is George Bush’s message to the American public that it was their ‘patriotic duty’ to go shopping, and following September 11, that the public

should ‘get on board’ and ‘go to Disneyland’.100 Although rarely so explicit, what

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these official messages reveal is a more general social shift that positions enjoyment as a social duty in a consumer economy. The contemporary superego, as an internalization of these messages, has the effect of constructing an illusory image of total enjoyment. This idea of ‘total enjoyment’ recalls the ‘heaven of sin’ held forth in Nick Zedd’s manifesto for the CoT. If films such asThrust in Me exemplify a more general tendency of the group, twisting the usual content of the superego, flipping the script on fixed moral codes, then this inversion now dovetails neatly with a set of social pressures that actively command enjoyment. While religion undoubtedly still enjoys a privileged place in American society, buttressing all manner of prohibitions and prejudices, these have slowly yielded to the pressures of consumerism. Under this regime, strategies of transgression associated with inversion no longer oppose the norm but find their apogee in various main-

stream practices and products.101

As if on wheels

Although not immune to censorship,102 Paul McCarthy’s work sits apart from the other artists discussed in this chapter on the basis that it found recognition early on. Unlike the Actionists, McCarthy did not have a fascist state apparatus to contend with; unlike Schneemann, he did not find the ‘wall of men’ an impedi- ment to his career; and while contemporaneous with the CoT, McCarthy found institutional recognition far more readily, enjoying both artworld visibility and commercial success. This institutional recognition does not mean that the transgressive content of his work is automatically annulled. To stop here would be to level a rather superficial critique. More significant is the relationship between the transgressive logic of disorientation and the new cultural context it finds itself in. Moral disorientation occurs when the fixed coordinates that anchor prohibition become harder to recognize. But in order for this experience to be felt as disorientating, it must follow from a prior experience of orientation. According to Lacan’s theory of discourse, such orientation is provided in the ‘discourse of the master’, which anchors the transindividual relationships at work in trad-

itional societies based on prohibition.103 The figure of the master could apply to the traditional role of the father in family structure, the monarch or ruler in

social structure, or any transcendent idea structuring knowledge.104 A significant feature of the master’s discourse is its reliance on symbolic prohibition.

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The master’s position is established simply by decree; it cannot be justified and requires the continual exercise of power. But, as Lacan points out, ‘something

changed in the master’s discourse at a certain point in history’.105 Under capitalism, Lacan indicates that authority takes a different form. The split, supposedly liberated subject is the key agent in the discourse of capitalism, but this freedom is illusory because its hidden truth is mastery. Capitalism is a system predicated on infinite circulation, if not infinite integration (to speak with Guattari), which

‘works as if on wheels’.106 What makes this circulation possible is a removal of the blockage between the subject and enjoyment. While in the master’s discourse enjoyment posed a problem that required prohibition, under capitalism the surplus is packaged up and reintegrated into circulation. ‘The important point is that on a certain day jouissance became calculable, could be counted,

totalized.’107 This logic can be seen at work in a range of contexts, from the capitalist construction of ‘leisure time’ as critiqued by Lefbvre, to Laporte’s account

of the history of shit and its profitability.108 In both cases, that which formerly served as waste for capitalism is patched and integrated into the system. In replacing a univocal, fixed point of identification that imposes limits with an increasingly sophisticated armoury of tools that integrate externalities, the discourse of capitalism is inevitably corrosive on social forms that stand in its way. The removal of blockages in the circulation of capital often coincides with the removal of the Symbolic prohibitions that serve as points of orientation. McCarthy’s work could be said to allow the viewer to navigate through the wreckage of prohibition by offering up a kind of cognitive map. This is a paradoxically disorientating map, for it produces a cartography of disorientation itself. In his work the infinite transformation of surplus jouissance into surplus value under capitalism finds its visual analogue in the substitution of consumer condiments for bodily substances, where food and excrement ultimately become part of one and the same infernal flow of capital. This may temporarily send a viewer spinning, but it also stabilizes into an image of disorientation itself, where transgression becomes a State tactic rather than one confined to those who oppose it. * * * ‘Transgression has a tendency to proliferate’, writes the literary theorist Ashley Tauchert, and ‘in forwarding its proliferation some recent critics have taken transgression to levels of influence to which it can only really have a meta-

phoric claim’.109 To the extent that transgression still dominates discussions of the ethics of contemporary art, even if the word itself has fallen out of the

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critical vocabulary, then this claim holds true for art as much as literature. In its stubborn persistency, the label ‘transgressive’ is applied to a broad range of artworks and then left in place long after their transgressive credentials expire. Under new socio-political conditions, artworks often cease to function as they did when they were first conceived, and the transgressive label accordingly edges ever further from the actual operations of the work itself. While this chapter has attempted to curb the proliferation of transgression as a critical concept, it is not intended as a final nail in the coffin. Transgressive art has neither ceased to exist in many parts of the world and nor should it. In many western countries, I would argue that what has ceased to exist are the preconditions that make transgression possible. And yet critical discussions of the ethics of art drag their heels, generating few concepts that signal alternative conjunctions of ethics and aesthetics. The next chapter looks at one area in which conversations have been forced to adapt: in the still relatively recent discussions of social practice.

Notes

1 Wien: Bildkompendium Wiener Aktionismus und Film, ed. Peter Weibel and Valie Export (Frankfurt am Main: Kohlkunstverlag, 1970).

2 The main example of this approach can be found in Vienna Actionism: Art and Upheaval in 1960s Vienna, ed. Eva Badura-Triska and Hubert Klocker (Cologne: Walter König, 2012).

3 Hermann Nitsch, ‘The O.M. Theatre’, in Theories and Documents on Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 747–8 (p. 747). ‘O.M.’ stands for Orgies Mysteries, the collective title for a body of actions Nitsch has choreographed and performed over the last fifty years.

4 Philip Ursprung, ‘ “CATHOLIC TASTES”: Hurting and Healing the Body in Viennese Actionism in the 1960s’, in Performing the Body/Performing the Text, ed. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 129–42 (p. 136).

5 For a fuller description of Zock-Fest, see Otmar Bauer, Autographische Notizen zu Wiener Actionismus, Studentenrevolte, Underground, Kommune Friedrichshof, Mühl, Ottos Sekte (Meria Enzerdorf: Rosesner, 2004), pp. 18–20.

6 Eva Badura-Triska and Kazuo Kandutsch, ‘The Political Situation in Post-War Austria and Its Historical Background’, in Vienna Actionism: Art and Upheaval, p. 12.

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7 Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. Aileen Derieg (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 188. Daub furthers this point: ‘Actionism arose in a culture of inflationary respect, in which a great many institutions that elsewhere have no association or alignment with the government or state apparatus require or solicit respect as somehow official organs of the state.’ Adrian Daub, ‘Hermann Nitsch – Austria in the Age of Post- Scandalous Culture,’ German Life and Letters 67, no. 2 (2014), 260–78 (p. 275).

8 Nitsch, ‘The O.M. Theatre’, p. 747.

9 See Kerstin Barnick-Braun, ‘Vienna Actionism and Psychoanalysis: Freud, Jung, Reich’, in Vienna Actionism: Art and Upheaval, pp. 67–8 (p. 67). This quote also highlights the Christian motif of sacrifice that permeates Nitsch’s work.

10 The Actionist’s reading could be considered narrow because it positions violence, sex (almost exclusively heterosexual in their work) and the fundamental desire for excess as natural human instincts that are subsequently repressed by an artificial culture, ignoring the subtleties the term Trieb [drive – often wrongly translated as instinct] carries in Freud’s work, and the more constructivist interpretations these subtleties have generated.

11 For example, Eva Badura-Triska, ‘Hermann Nitsch’s Orgies Mysteries Theater’, in Vienna Actionism: Art and Upheaval, pp. 33–4 (p. 33).

12 A formalist strategy was used by Zola, whose disingenuous defence of Manet in 1867 implored audiences that ‘He should be judged simply as a painter.’ A not dissimilar defence of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work was launched in a courtroom in 1990. Notably, a photograph of urophagia was defended on the basis that the arc of urine the image depicts possessed a formal beauty that overshadowed its content. As Peggy Phlen put in an article published shortly after the trial, ‘the lawyers insisted that Mapplethorpe’s work was art because of its formal argument, not its content. Thus, the most conservative interpretive paradigm of art history – formalism – was used to defend and protect a so-called radical artist’. Peggy Phelan, ‘Money Talks, Again’, TDR 35, no. 3 (Autumn, 1991), 131–41 (p. 139).

13 Ursprung, ‘ “CATHOLIC TASTES” ’, p. 137.

14 Daub, ‘Hermann Nitsch – Austria in the Age of Post-Scandalous Culture’, p. 270. Judging by their decision to include an appendix listing all incidents where the Actionists came into contact with the police in their 1970 compendium (cited above), Weibel and Export seemed to have shared the opinion that these encounters were central to the works themselves.

15 Ibid.

16 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 280.

17 Numerous references to modern warfare were present in Nitsch’s six-day staging of the O.M. Theatre in 1998, but perhaps the most redolent of the ‘violence of

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human caprice’ was the sight of two Panzer tanks repeatedly grinding over animal carcasses in a trench, pointlessly rolling back and forth on their caterpillar tracks.

18 Steve Rose, ‘Carolee Schneemann: “I never thought I was shocking” ’, Guardian, 10 March 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/10/carole- schneemann-naked-art-performance (accessed 1 June 2018).

19 Nelcya Delanoë, Le raspail Vert: L’American Center a Paris 1934–1994 (Paris: Seghers, 1994).

20 Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (New York: McPherson, 1997), p. 63.

21 As well as these photographs, documentation of the piece includes written summaries by critics and a 16 mm film compiled of footage from all three performances. Some of this footage was lost, according to Schneemann, but a six-minute edit and more recently a longer version are in existence. Meat Joy (1964), filmed by Pierre Dominik Gaisseau, edited by Bob Giorgio, 16 mm, 6 min., sound/colour; 10:35 min., version 16 mm film on video, 2010. Electronic Arts Intermix. On the challenges of studying body and performance art entirely through its documentation, see Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). This pivotal book on the history of body art takes a nuanced position that resists claiming that firsthand experience has any privileged relation to a given work’s truth (p. 11).

22 This point is made by Rebecca Schneider, who writes of another piece,Infinity Kisses (1981–7) that ‘Schneemann does not claim transgression, rather she claims quotidian normativity – and that claim of quotidian becomes, ironically, her transgression.’ Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, p. 49.

23 Bruce McPherson, ‘Foreword’, in More Than Meat Joy, ed. Carolee Schneemann, pp. iii–vii (p. iii).

24 Carolee Schneemann, ‘The Obscene Body/Politic’,Art Journal 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991), 28–35 (p. 29).

25 Schneemann, ‘History of a Female Pornographer’ in More Than Meat Joy (1974), pp. 192–5 (p. 194). Elsewhere Schneemann writes that ‘There is also a pervasive prejudice about the sixties, that we could be impulsive, just get it on, and could do whatever we wanted.’ Carolee Schneemann, ‘Interview with Carl Heyward’, in Imaging Her Erotics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 196–207 (p. 200).

26 Carolee Schneemann, lecture, Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, 25 April 2008, quoted in Rachel Middleman, Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (Oakland: University of California Press: 2018), p. 42.

27 The term ‘abject’ was used with increasing regularity in art theory and criticism towards the end of the twentieth century, drawing predominantly on the work of Julia Kristeva, and culminating in books and exhibition catalogues

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such as Jane Philbrick (ed.), Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993).

28 The dichotomy between passive and active is a key aspect of Laura Mulvey’s widely cited essay on the role of the male gaze in cinema. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), 6–18.

29 Schneemann’s filmFuses (1964–7) is also exemplary in this respect, eliciting a particularly violent response when screened at the 1969 Cannes film festival, where a group of angry male audience members used razor blades to tear up seats. Schneemann interpreted this incident as a reaction to the way in which sex was represented in the film, which broke with the genre conventions of pornographic cinema, rather than the fact that it was represented at all. Carolee Schneemann, ‘On Censorship: Interview with Aviva Rahmani’, in Imaging Her Erotics, pp. 210–15 (p. 211).

30 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Q&A with Carolee Schneemann’, interview by Wendy Vogel, Modern Painters 27, no. 2 (February 2015), 50–5 (p. 54).

31 Schneider, The Explicit Body, p. 35.

32 See, for example, DanaDensmore, ‘Independence from the Sexual Revolution’, in Radical Feminism, ed. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine and Anita Rapone (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973), p. 111.

33 Jane Gaines, ‘Feminist Heterosexuality and Its Politically Incorrect Pleasures’, Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 (1995), 382–410. Lucy Lippard, in an influential essay for Art in America in 1976, also wrote of the danger of women using their bodies in performance art insofar as the results were at risk of being appropriated to arouse heterosexual men. Lucy R. Lippard, ‘The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: Women’s Body Art’, Art in America 64, no. 3 (May/June 1976), 73–81.

34 Gayle S. Rubin, ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, in Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader, ed. Richard Parker and Peter Aggleton (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 143–78 (p. 167). The term ‘sex-positive’ only gained traction during the feminist ‘sex wars’ that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the formation of opposing groups such as Samois and Women against Pornography.

35 Linda Singer, Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 115.

36 The same cannot be said for later feminist performance art in the 1980s, in the work of Karen Finley, to take one example. See also Susan Suleiman, ‘Pornography, Transgression, and the Avant Garde: Bataille’s Story of the Eye’, in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 117–38.

37 Michael McClure, Meat Science Essays (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1963).

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38 The conjunction between the repulsive and the erotic finds ample expression in Bataille’s erotic fiction, but it also surfaces in his reading of the Marquis de Sade: ‘What de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind. For him the most revolting thing was the most powerful means of exciting pleasure.’ Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1986), p. 195.

39 Ibid., p. 15.

40 Ibid., p. 22.

41 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958).

42 Delanoë, Le raspail Vert.

43 Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics, p. 61.

44 On the political nature of body art’s challenge to disinterestedness, see Jones, Body Art. For a different treatment of the subject, see Cashell,Aftershock . Cashell sees the war on disinterestedness as a fundamental characteristic of contemporary transgressive art.

45 Gustav Niebuhr, ‘Why “Moral Majority,” A Force for a Decade, Ran Out of Steam’, Wall Street Journal, 25 September 1989, p. 1.

46 When screened publicly, the filmdid insult and irritate. At the Kino Eiszeit in Berlin, for example, Franz Rodenkirchen reported that ‘ten men and women attacked the staff, stole the money, destroyed the projector and sprayed the film with paint’. Rodenkirchen quoted in David Kerekes, Sex, Murder, Art: The Films of Jög Buttgereit (Manchester: Critical Vision, 1994), p. 33.

47 Carlo McCormick, ‘Cinema of Transgression: Reprisal in Rewind’, in You Killed Me First: The Cinema of Transgression, ed. Susanne Pfeffer (London: Koenig Books, 2012), pp. 34–41 (p. 39).

48 Notable exceptions to this general characterization can be discerned in a number of film-makers who operated on the periphery of the Cinema of Transgression. Casandra Stark’s delirious depiction of domestic abuse in Wrecked on Cannibal Island (1986) was not intended to titillate a minority with a sexual preference for sadism but rather highlight and condemn masculine aggression. Similarly, Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s stark depictions of rape in a late film,Nymphomania (1994) caricature and critique sexual aggression in the myth of Pan, the fiction of David Wojnarowicz and the films of Beth B (made both collaboratively with her former husband Scott B and individually) could also be said to display a number of ‘redeeming’ qualities in their overtly political content. (This point is made by Sargent, who sets the B’s movies apart from some of the other members

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of the group. See Jack Sargent, DeathTripping: The Cinema of Transgression (San Francisco: Creation, 1999) p. 24.)

49 Cynthia Carr, ‘Hanging Out on the Lower Worst Side’, New York Times, 22 October 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/nyregion/thecity/22downt.html?_r=0 (accessed 1 June 2018).

50 Sargent and Zedd, ‘An Interview with Nick Zedd’, in DeathTripping, ed. Jack Sargent, pp. 57–78 (p. 65).

51 Police State (1987) depicts the arrest and torture of a young man accused of taking drugs. The film becomes increasingly absurd as the man is asked to alternately stand on a table and sit on a chair by the two police officers. Notably, however, it does not hint at any systematic corruption within the police force but rather focuses on sadistic and thuggish individual police officers.

52 Nick Zedd, ‘The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto’, inYou Killed Me First: The Cinema of Transgression, ed. Susanne Pfeffer (London: Koenig Books, 2012), pp. 10–17 (p. 17). In the same vein, Carlo McCormick describes the CoT as a ‘vital corrective moment’ that comes into play when the avant-garde gets ‘smug, complacent and overly ossified in its orthodoxies’. McCormick,Reprisal in Rewind, p. 40.

53 Suranjan Ganguly, ‘All That Is Light: Brakhage at 60’,Sight and Sound 3, no. 10 (1993), 20–3 (p. 21).

54 Jack Smith’s name is firmly inscribed in underground cinematic history for titles such as Flaming Creatures (1963), which was filmed on out-dated celluloid, giving the film a bleached effect. As a resident of the Lower East Side until 1989 (when he died of AIDS-related illnesses), Smith worked with film-makers associated with the CoT on a number of occasions, starring in Beth and Scott B’s The Trap Door in 1980. George and Mike Kuchar’s films were also notably trashy, and works such as Thundercrack (1976) displayed a transgressive impulse that influenced the CoT. John Waters is perhaps the most infamous of the three directors. His trash trilogy (Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977)) featured transgressive acts such as a character eating real dog shit in one unedited take. Jack Sargent describes the trilogy as ‘a blueprint for punk aesthetics and behaviour, with the emphasis on the screeching desperation of the protagonists, anxious to annihilate every value’, Sargent, Deathtripping, p. 12.

55 Jacques Lacan, ‘Kant with Sade’, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (London: Norton, 2006), pp. 645–68.

56 ‘So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law.’ Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 164.

57 To be precise, what I am calling the ‘operation of inversion’ is not so much applied to Kant’s work itself in the essay ‘Kant with Sade’. Rather, Lacan shows that Kant’s

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moral philosophy renders the opposition between good and evil in classical systems of ethics less stable (and therefore reversible), rather than rendering its own definitions of these concepts less stable.

58 Kant provides a range of other evils from which to choose. There is the evil of failing to apply a moral law consistently or in full, either out of weakness of heart or logical error; the evil of allowing pathological motivation to impact upon moral decision-making, and the related evil of acting in accordance with the moral law only when it coincides with one’s pathological motivation – a species of evil Kant labels ‘radical’. Immanuel Kant, ‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,’ in Immanuel Kant: Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Alan W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 39–216.

59 At times, this sacrifice is carried out in the name of a higher authority, such as ‘mother Nature’, and in Philosophy in the Bedroom Sade writes that ‘were she to order us to set fire to the universe, the only crime possible would be in resisting her: all the criminals on earth are nothing but agents of her caprice …’ Marquis De Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 361.

60 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 189. In the footnote accompanying this passage, Kant writes revealingly that ‘a human being who accuses himself in conscience must think of a dual personality in himself, a doubled self which, on the one hand, has to stand trembling at the bar of a court that is yet entrusted to him, but which, on the other hand, itself administers the office of judge that it holds by innate authority’. [my italics]

61 See Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real (London: Verso, 2000) on the role of affect in Kant’s work, especially chapter 7: ‘Between the Moral Law and the Superego’.

62 It was Freud who first hinted at the presence of the superego in Kant’s work, for example, in ‘The Ego and the Id’ writing that ‘As the child was once under a compulsion to obey its parents, so the ego submits to the categorical imperative of its super-ego.’ Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the ID’, inThe Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 19 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 12–66 (p. 48).

63 Zedd, You Killed Me First, p. 17.

64 Lacan, Écrits, p. 656.

65 Ibid., p. 667.

66 ‘Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement. Three Installations, Two Films’, curated by Chrissie Iles, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 26 June–12 October 2008. Accompanying exhibition catalogue published as

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Chrissie Iles, Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement: Three Installations, Two Films (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

67 Conceived in 1971, Spinning Room was only realized in 2008 for the exhibition ‘Central Symmetrical Rotation’.

68 Although made in the same year that ‘spinning room’ was conceived, McCarthy claims not to have seen the film until the late 1970s. According to the artist, he did however see images of the spinning camera mount used by Snow earlier in the decade. Iles, Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement, p. 64.

69 Michael Snow and Louise Dompierre, eds. The Collected Writings of Michael Snow (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1994), p. 53.

70 Tila L. Kellman, Figuring Redemption: Resighting My Self in the Art of Michael Snow (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002), p. 117.

71 Peter Rist, ‘La Région Centrale: The Most Spectacular Experimental Film’,Off Screen 6, no. 11 (2002), http://offscreen.com/view/region_centrale(accessed 1 June 2018).

72 The term ‘semantic disarray’ is borrowed from Ralph Rugoff, ‘Mr. McCarthy’s Neighborhood’, in Paul McCarthy, ed. Ralph Rugoff, Kristine Stiles and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (London: Phaidon, 1996), pp. 30–87 (p. 33).

73 ‘Paul McCarthy: Caribbean Pirates’, Whitechapel Gallery (off-site), 23 October 2005–8 January 2006. Mad House (2008) was another work in the Whitney exhibition that reimagined a theme park ride.

74 According to Adrian Searle, McCarthy’s son Damon (a frequent collaborator with his father) lost two real fingers in an accident that took place during filming. One can only speculate whether or not these fingers were left as post-performance reliquaries in the exhibition. Adrian Searle, ‘Shiver Me Timbers’, Guardian, 24 October 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2005/oct/25/1 (accessed 1 June 2018).

75 Paul McCarthy, ‘Interview by Kristine Stiles’, in Paul McCarthy, ed. Rugoff, Stiles and Di Pietrantonio, pp. 6–29 (p. 14).

76 Paul McCarthy, ‘LaLa Land Parody Paradise’ [exhibition hand-out] (London: Whitechapel, 2005).

77 The paradox of McCarthy’s antitransgressive transgression is highlighted by Cary Levine in Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon (London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 6.

78 Although there is no space to do so here, it would be interesting to develop this in dialogue with Kant’s much-discussed assertion that beauty serves as a ‘symbol of morality’. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 225.

79 Daub, ‘Hermann Nitsch – Austria in the Age of Post-Scandalous Culture’, p. 276.

80 Brus won the prize in 1996, Nitsch in 2005. The German term used was ‘eine zentrale Figur österreichischen Kunstschaffens’, Volker Ladenthin, ‘Literatur als Skandal’, in Literatur als Skandal: Fälle – Funktionen – Folgen, ed. Stefan Neuhaus

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and Johann Holzner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), pp. 19–28, quoted in Daub, ‘Austria in the Age of Post-scandalous Culture’, p. 262.

81 These exhibitions were held at the The Museum Moderner Kunst, the Museum of Applied Arts (both in Vienna) and the Neue Galerie Graz. A further exhibition on the theme of ‘the Feminine’ in Viennese Actionism was mounted in 2012–13 in Prague. The exhibition ‘AMOR PSYCHE ACTION – VIENNA. The Feminine in Viennese Actionism’ ran at the Dox Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague from 19 October 2012 to 28 January 2013. A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition: Karl Iro Goldblat and others, Amor, Psyche, Action – Vienna: The Feminine in Viennese Actionism (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2012).

82 For a vivid description of a recent staging of the OMT, see Susan Jarosi, ‘Traumatic Subjectivity and the Continuum of History: Hermann Nitsch’s Orgies Mysteries Theater’,Art History 36, no. 4 (2013), 834–63.

83 Neal Bedford, Mark Honan and Gemma Pitcher, Austria (London: Lonely Planet, 2005).

84 Bernhard Doppler, ‘Hermann Nitsch’s Festivals: Observations from the Prinzendorfer Six-Day-Play in 1998’, in Literature, Film, and the Culture Industry in Contemporary Austria, ed. Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 64–76 (p. 65).

85 The law most frequently used against the Actionists was article 516 of the penal code which concerned gross violations regarding decency and public nuisance. Eva Badura-Triska and Kazuo Kandutsch, ‘Art and the Authorities: Criminal and Police Prosecutions of the Vienna Actionists’, in Vienna Actionism, Art and Upheaval, pp. 188–9 (p. 188).

86 Nitsch quoted in Doppler, ‘Hermann Nitsch’s Festivals’, p. 75.

87 These publishers include ‘Residenz’ and ‘Edition Brandstätter’ that are subsidiaries of the state-owned ‘Österreichischer Bundesverlag’.

88 Nitsch quoted in Doppler, ‘Hermann Nitsch’s Festivals’, p. 74.

89 Carolee Schneemann, quoted in Anna Dezeuze, ‘Meat Joy’, Art Monthly 257 (June 2002), https://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/meat-joy-by-anna- dezeuze-2002 (accessed 1 June 2018). Schneemann’s position is echoed by Banes, who writes in a broader sense that ‘in the context of the present mainstream mania for bodily control, when we look back at the Sixties, the ways in which those bodies produced by the avant-garde were allowed to run rampant all through the culture seem to us incredible, even impossible’. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant- Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 233.

90 Schneemann quoted in Dezeuze, ‘Meat Joy’.

91 Carolee Schneemann, ‘The Obscene Body/Politic’, p. 35.

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92 Jane Springer, ‘Developing Feminist Resources’, FUSE magazine 4, no. 2 (January 1980), 113–16 (p. 114).

93 For example, when Fuses was screened at the Moscow Film Festival in 1989, over 20 years after it was made, it was also met with censorship. See Schneemann, ‘On Censorship’.

94 On the transformation of sexuality from something one should feel guilty about to a duty, historians of sexuality D’Emilio and Freedman write that in 1975 ‘even books aimed at supposedly traditional American’s dispensed with reticence. Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman may have held that woman’s place was in the home, but it also instructed housewives to greet their husbands at the end of the day dressed in a transparent nightgown’. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 3rd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 330.

95 Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1971–88), vol. 3, p. 512.

96 Zedd, ‘You Killed Me First: The Cinema of Transgression’, curated by Susanne Pfeffer at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 19 February 2012–9 April 2012. For this exhibition, the curators recreated a strange facsimile of 1980s New York. For three months in the spring of 2012, Thrust in Me was projected for a strictly 18+ audience amongst freshly spray-painted graffiti, painstakingly smudged windows and stuffed beanbags that resembled rats – an unusual solution to the problem of gallery seating. Several films by Zedd and Kern have also been screened at MoMA in New York.

97 Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (New York: SUNY, 2003), p. 2. McGowan uses the word ‘enjoyment’ as a translation of Lacan’s jouissance throughout the book. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the price a subject is asked to pay upon entering society is enjoyment, but this is an enjoyment the subject never really possessed in the first place. It is only created retroactively on the basis of prohibition. It is not simply that in ‘traditional societies’ people enjoyed less, and that today’s social forms create a haven of enjoyment. Rather, the renunciation of enjoyment is precisely what introduces the possibility of its attainment. This supports the notions that while the decline of the Symbolic may seem to represent the erosion of social barriers to enjoyment, this does not necessarily mean that enjoyment becomes readily accessible.

98 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique. 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 102.

99 Nike’s slogan was reportedly inspired by the last words of the serial killer Gary Gilmore before he was executed by a firing squad, lending it a further frisson of transgression. Jeremy W. Peters, ‘The Birth of “Just Do It” and Other Magical

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Wo r d s’, New York Times, 9 August 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/ business/media/20adco.html?_r=0 (accessed 1 June 2018).

100 McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction, p. 36. A revealing anecdote relayed by Barbara Ehrenreich in The Hearts of Men further attests to this point: ‘As one motivational psychologist told an audience of businessmen, “we are now confronted with the problem of permitting the average American to feel moral … even when he is spending, even when he is not saving … One of the basic problems of prosperity, then, is to demonstrate that the hedonistic approach to his life is a moral, not an immoral one.” ’ Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor, 1984), p. 45.

101 This point could be linked to a number of recent cultural franchises, from the hugely popular Sex and the City to the more recent 50 shades of Grey, both of which commodify sexual transgression and present it as a consumer choice. See Alex Dymock, ‘Flogging Sexual Transgression: Interrogating the Costs of the Fifty Shades Effect’, Sexualities 16 (2013), 880–95.

102 Most recently, in 2014, McCarthy’s public sculpture of a Christmas tree was vandalized and subsequently removed from the Place Vendôme in Paris on account of its resemblance to a butt plug. For a summary of McCarthy’s reaction, see Anne Penketh, ‘Paul McCarthy Hits Back at French Critics of His “Butt Plug” Sculpture’, Guardian, 23 October 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2014/oct/23/paul-mccarthy-france-butt-plug-sculpture (accessed 1 June 2018).

103 Like Foucault after him, Lacan grants discourse an expansive conceptual range, defining it broadly as a ‘social link lien[ social], founded on language’. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore. 1972–1973, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 17.

104 Lacan’s concept of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ will receive more sustained attention in Chapter 3.

105 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. 1969–70, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 177 (10 June 1970). In this seminar series, Lacan identifies four types of social link – the discourse of the university, the hysteric, the analyst and the master – and two years later in a paper delivered in Milan, he identifies a fifth: the discourse of capitalism. It is the algebraic ‘matheme’ that appears in this later paper that provides grounds for the following inferences. Jacques Lacan, ‘On Psychoanalytical Discourse’. Conference paper given by Jacques Lacan at the University of Milan, 12 May 1972. Unpublished translation by Jack W. Stone.

106 Lacan, ‘On Psychoanalytic Discourse’, p. 11.

107 Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 177 (10 June 1970).

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108 Lefebvre shows both how the freedom to indulge in leisure activities exists in an economy that requires citizens to ‘buy’ this time with work, and how it is inextricably bound up with consumption. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Volume One: Introduction (London: Verso, 2008), p. 31. See also Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

109 Tauchert, Against Transgression, p. 41.

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Magic models

In perhaps one of the most famous and discredited psychological experiments of the twentieth century, Phillip Zimbardo boarded up both ends of a large corridor in the basement of the university department where he worked and constructed a mock prison. Zimbardo paid twenty-four male students $15 a day and randomly assigned them the roles of prisoner and guard, enlisting the local police force to ‘arrest’ the prisoners in their homes and bring them to the facility. The primary aim of the Stanford prison experiment was to study the effects of deindividualization and institutional validation on an individual’s behaviour. Despite Zimbardo’s intention to run the experiment for two weeks, it was aborted after just six days, by which time the guards had begun to display increasingly sadistic behaviour. After the experiment had finished, Zimbardo declared it fundamentally unethical to carry

out research in such a way,1 a condemnation that would later be confirmed by the American Psychological Association code of ethics and the widely implemented Belmont report, both of which make it impossible to repeat the experiment in a

research context in America today.2 As well as these concerns, there have been serious questions raised about the scientific validity of the experiment, the way in which the participants were hired, and the fact that the results were never peer-reviewed. From the outset then, the decision by the artist Artur Żmijewski to re-stage the experiment in 2005 was a wilfully transgressive gesture. While most of the details were duplicated as closely as possible, several key differences in the way the second experiment differed from the original make for an interesting comparison. In Żmijewski’s experiment, the participants were not students but unemployed men, and the prison was located not in the basement of a university but in an industrial unit on the outskirts of Warsaw. Moreover, while the experiment ended prematurely, it did so not through the intervention of the ‘warden’ but rather through mutual agreement between the prisoners and the guards. Another crucial difference between the two films involved the surveillance employed by Żmijewski – five cameras placed behind mirrored glass and several

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CCTV cameras inside the ‘prison’ – the footage from which was then edited into a 75-minute film entitled Repetition (Figure 2.1), which has been exhibited glo-

bally, including in the Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005.3 The title of the book published on the occasion of this exhibition is sug-

gestive: If It Happened Only Once It’s as If It Never Happened.4 Rather than being simply a disavowal of contingency, it highlights an ambition to challenge the status of the knowledge produced by Zimbardo’s experiment, which, in spite of its methodological shortcomings, is to this day taken as evidence of the uni-

versal human capacity for cruelty given the right circumstances.5 In an interview with Daniel Miller, Żmijewski claims that he repeated the experiment ‘because, unlike scientists, I can do this, because in art it is still allowed. It doesn’t mean that there is more freedom in art; it just means that there is cultural permission

for rebellion in art’.6 This cultural permission builds on precedents established by transgressive artworks from the romantic period to the present day, a small selection of which

Figure 2.1 Artur Żmijewski, Repetition (2005). Installation, single channel video, 39.17 min., colour, sound. © Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw and Galerie Peter Kilchmann.

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were discussed in the last chapter. For the most part, however, these precedents operate on the terrain of representation, and transgression occurs when an image, film or performance is deemed offensive to an audience that remains unable to change the material composition of the artwork itself. By contrast, in the last twenty years, artworks that take models of collaboration and participation as their form have repeatedly sought to transform ‘passive’ audiences

into ‘active’ participants, shifting the terrain of transgression in the process.7 The ascendency of participative art in the 1990s, has, in turn, brought about the emergence of new critical frameworks underwritten by vague ideas about

what it means to act ‘ethically’ as an artist.8 It is in the context of these critical frameworks that Żmijewski’s work is often judged, as will become apparent in the first section of this chapter. But it is not only his work’s ability to problematize recent discussions of ethics in participative art that warrants Żmijewski’s inclusion here. While this work does move the discussion of transgression onto different terrains, transgression is only one lens through which to view its ethico-aesthetic significance. Żmijewski’s work is also important insofar as it contains the seeds of an ethico- aesthetic paradigm that steps out of the shadow of transgression, one that takes the modelling and remodelling of reality and behaviour as its focus. Two further examples drawn from Żmijewski’s oeuvre bring this aspect to the fore. The first is set in an environment resembling an art school. In a large whitewashed space with painted stud walls and overhead strip lights, groups of participants apply paint to supported sheets of paper. The participants belong to one of four groups: elderly Catholic women, members of the neo-nationalist Union of Polish Youths, Jewish teenagers and young left-wing activists. InThem (2007) (Figure 2.2), the task Żmijewski has set his participants for the day is to make a symbol of their organization and their beliefs. The results range from a boldly outlined painting of a church to a mixed media collage of the Szczerbiec sword – a nationalist symbol of Poland. When the groups are satisfied with their efforts, Żmijewski takes photographs of the works, and the next day hands them T-shirts with their designs printed on the front. He announces what will happen next: ‘our game begins here. If you don’t like something about this situation you can change it. You can re-edit it, re-write it, draw it again, destroy or add something. There are no restrictions’. The groups go to work on each other’s paintings, at first working tentatively: the activists carefully cut between the church doors to open them up; the Jewish teenagers apply a rainbow flag across the Szczerbiec sword. As the exercise continues, however, the alterations get increasingly

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Figure 2.2 Artur Żmijewski, Them (2007). Single channel video, projection or monitor, 26.30 min., colour, sound Polish OV/English and German subtitles. © Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw and Galerie Peter Kilchmann.

destructive, culminating in several of the pieces being entirely burnt, and one of the elderly Catholic women having her mouth taped shut with gaffer tape. A third example, The Game of Tag [Berek] (1999), is ostensibly a lot simpler than the other two works. For just under four minutes a group of around eight participants of mixed ages and genders play the game naked. They shuffle into a small concrete room timidly, swinging their arms or jumping up and down to keep warm. As the game begins they become more relaxed, laughing and engaging in horseplay as the power shifts around the room. The game picks up a rhythm, and they run around in circles or group together in corners. Midway through the film the camera cuts to another space that appears very similar to the first. The participants are playing the same game with similar exuberance. It is only when the credits roll that the viewer is told in a matter-of-fact way where the film was shot: in the first place, the basement of a private house; in the second, the gas chamber of a former concentration camp. The veracity of this information is worth questioning but has until now passed without interroga- tion in the art press.

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When it was exhibited at the exhibition Side by Side. Poland – Germany. A 1000 Years of Art and History, at the Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, the video was removed from the exhibition at the request of Jewish leaders, specifically Hermann Simon, the director of the New Synagogue Berlin and Centrum Judaicum Foundation, who wrote a letter to the director of the gallery expressing

his condemnation of the video.9 A year later, when Żmijewski was appointed curator of the Berlin Biennial, he chose to re-exhibit the piece, in his own words,

‘to react against this impulse to censor, self-censor, and close off discussion’.10 Reacting against such an act of censorship was again clearly a transgressive gesture, especially since this censorship was enforced on primarily moral grounds. The Game of Tag is perhaps the starkest example of the two ethico-aesthetic aspects of Żmijewski’s work I want to foreground in this chapter. On the one hand, it displays an open challenge to censorship predicated on a moral code of conduct – a characteristic it shares with the work of other members of the Critical Art movement in Poland that came to prominence in the 1990s. As well as Żmijewski, artists such as Katarzyna Kozyra, Zbigniew Libera and Grzegorz Klaman have all courted controversy in their work, a fact that invites reflection on the socio-cultural backdrop of the period, which I will attend to in Section ‘Breaks and continu-

ities’.11 On the other hand, much of Żmijewski’s work is characterized by visual or verbal games that performers then play out. Each of the three artworks discussed above involves games of one sort or another, and these games only function by means of a set of rules of engagement, stages of progression and roles assigned and exchanged among participants. These features draw upon a long history of participative artworks in Poland influenced by the architect Oskar Hansen, whose ideas were filtered through the emergent disciplines of cybernetics, systems theory and semiotics by some of his students. This history will be retraced in the second half of the chapter and positioned as an intergenerational dialogue that comprises an exercise in ‘metamodelling’ – a term used by Félix Guattari to describe a pragmatic process of mapping existing modelling systems (be they religious, artistic or psy-

choanalytic) that show how they work.12 These two overarching concerns – the transgressive and the game-like character of Żmijewski’s work – could be treated separately. However, to do so would be to miss the significance of their interrelation. The aim of this chapter is to show that they represent differing, but not entirely incompatible relationships between ethics, morality and aesthetics, and signal the emergence of a post- transgressive paradigm that will be given more extensive development over the final three chapters of this book.

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The puppet master

Perhaps understandably, the majority of critics and art theorists have hitherto focused their attention on the transgressive dimensions of Żmijewski’s work. As well as the overtly provocative gestures of repeating an experiment deemed off-limits by the scientific community, toying with the Holocaust as a subject matter or bringing groups into a contact in such a way that their mutual antag- onism is amplified, the charge frequently levelled at Żmijewski is that his work transgresses the unspoken rules for making participative art. In an article in Frieze magazine, for example, Nina Möntmann opposes Żmijewski’s work to ‘genuinely participative’ art, writing that

Despite the differences in the treatment of those involved, the vaguely defined community in the projects of Alimpiev, Bartana and Żmijewski is ultimately united by the defenselessness of the human individual at the mercy of a power

structure set up to control, discipline, or destroy them.13

To this judgment could be added those of other critics such as Ken Johnson, who on the occasion of Żmijewski’s solo show at X Initiative in New York in 2010 described him as a ‘puppet master who uses people less sophisticated than him-

self as marionettes in a game whose point they may not fully understand’.14 These passages highlight the moral tenor of many of the responses to Żmijewski’s work, a reaction that, in many ways, the works themselves anticipate. For Claire Bishop, reactions such as these represent an ‘ethical turn’ in art criticism, prompted by the ‘social turn’ in contemporary art towards forms of

participation, collaboration and community engagement.15 This ‘ethical turn’ implies a continuum according to which the more an artist is willing to relin- quish control in the service of a work that is ‘genuinely participative’, the more

‘ethical’ it is presumed to be.16 In other words, in the writing of a number of prominent art theorists, the renunciation of one’s authorial input is implicitly or explicitly associated with moral rectitude. In opposition to this, Bishop counts Żmijewski among a number of artists who ‘do not make the “correct” ethical choice, they do not embrace the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice; instead, they act

on their desire without the incapacitating restrictions of guilt’.17 The polemical nature of this debate leaves open the possibility of a third perspective, from which it is possible to see both the shortcomings and merits of either side. Bishop’s criticisms of the ‘ethical turn’ were first made in an article in 2006, where she attempts to bracket such judgments from other ‘aesthetic’

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evaluations of artworks and stresses that it is important that critics also ‘discuss,

analyze, and compare such work critically as art’. 18 This article prompted a reply from one of the key targets of Bishop’s critique, Grant Kester. Several years later, in her 2012 book Artificial Hells, the brackets are opened once again, and Bishop draws on Lacan’s seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis to offer an alternative approach to the ethics of authorial renunciation she thinks Kester’s work

implies.19 While the present book also draws inspiration from Lacan, Bishop’s interpretation of this seminar differs substantially from the one proposed here and repeats an obstinate misreading by focusing on the apparent ‘maxim’, ‘do not give ground relative to your desire’, which serves as an imperative to stay true to one’s desire. This can be considered a misreading for a number of reasons. In this seminar and elsewhere, Lacan does not advocate throwing off the shackles of social pressure and acting on desire alone, and the passage that Bishop quotes, when read in full, does not take the form of an imperative. The clause of the sentence that is often omitted in such readings – ‘from an analytical point of view’ – limits the applicable situation to the psychoanalytic clinic, and by placing the sentence as a whole in the past tense, it can be inferred that Lacan is merely suggesting that both analyst and analysand should pay attention to instances in which the latter has already given ground relative to her desire, rather than

issuing a command orientated towards the future.20 Although seemingly insig- nificant in the wider context of the debate on the ethics of participatory art, Bishop’s misreading of Lacan is important insofar as it compels her to support artworks that supposedly manifest the desire of their author over and above any socio-cultural restriction, problematically assuming both that these desires are legible to an observer in the first place and that socio-cultural restrictions cannot themselves be taken as objects of desire. Given the restricted sphere of application that Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis involves, it is my view that this seminar does not provide a particularly useful resource through which to think the ethics of participatory art. Stripped of this intellectual justification, Bishop’s argument slips into a defence of the unquestionable ascendance of the artist, whose desire is presumed to be progressive simply by virtue of its disruptive effects. This once again risks elevating transgression to the status of an imperative and gives artists the permission to perpetuate inequality on the condition that their work challenges socio-cultural norms that are positioned as always already regressive. These reservations notwithstanding, Bishop’s suspicion of authorial renunciation as a yardstick to judge the ‘ethical’ character of a work of art seems

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justified. Apart from the difficulty of determining what constitutes ‘genuinely participative’ work, such criteria would be difficult to apply to other art forms such as theatre or classical music, where (despite notable exceptions) agency is rarely distributed evenly between those who conceive or direct a perform-

ance and those who perform or participate in its execution.21 When the latter are drawn not from a reservoir of professional actors or musicians but from a pool of unemployed men in a district of Warsaw, as they were for Żmijewski’s Repetition, the stakes clearly become a lot higher, as do the risks of exploitation. It is these risks that representatives of the ‘ethical turn’ are keen to direct our attention to, but in doing so, the frameworks at play bear a striking similarity to a contemporary configuration that reduces ethics to little more than a toolbox of regulatory implements for managing risk, in this case the risk of an artist abusing the power he or she wields over the participants in their work. Here ‘ethics’ is defined negatively as the prevention of harm, and a preconceived value (‘genuine participation’) is applied to an artwork often shorn of its contextual background or actual effects. For these reasons, it is more appropriate to label this tendency moral, rather than ethical. A moral framework is not entirely lacking from Bishop’s arguments either, which operates on the basis of a hidden calculus that weighs the risks to those who ‘directly’ participate in the work’s creation, against the benefits of the audience who experience it sometime after in a gallery, museum or biennale. This latter audience may well find the work conducive to reflection on their own values, be they aesthetic, ethical or both. But for fear of slipping into a utilitarian ethics, it is important not to view this benefit as something that can be offset

against any harm caused to direct participants, presumed or otherwise.22 To find merit in both sides of this debate, perhaps it is possible to guard against exploitation without requiring the even distribution of agency among artists and participants. Perhaps it is possible to derive such action from a flexible ethics that responds to unique situations, rather than a generalizing set of moral rules that risks extending the reign of research ethics into the domain of art practice. In his most recent book, Kester comes close to advancing just such a vision of ‘a situationally grounded notion of ethics, which can only be determined through a pragmatic assessment of the modes and effects of social interaction at a given

s i t e’. 23 This vision is not fully realized in The One and the Many, and the ‘given sites’ the book describes, while discussed in detail, are not granted the power to generate their own criteria for judgment. The extent to which effects of social interaction in participative art can be assessed rests, in part, upon the direct

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experience of the participants. An accurate record of this experience is admittedly difficult to regain years after a work has been executed, and it is for this reason that my own assessment of the three pieces by Żmijewski discussed above cannot fulfil this promise. The option that is available is to expand the frame on Żmijewski’s work, paying close attention to the vicissitudes of language, morality and power that the works challenge. While admittedly partial, this will hopefully allow for a situated ethico-aesthetic appraisal of the work that has the capacity to immanently generate criteria for evaluation.

Breaks and continuities

What is the ‘site’ of Żmijewski’s work? In terms of its reception, the work has found a global audience partly due to its inclusion in prominent art world events such as the Venice Biennale. Yet in terms of its inception, the work is firmly rooted in a Polish context, which has witnessed a dramatic series of shifts in the function of political power within Żmijewski’s lifetime. Since this shifting power has brought about a wide range of effects on the function of language and prohibition, it provides a useful optic through which to view the three works discussed above. The generation of Polish artists to which Żmijewski belongs spent their for- mative years in Poland at a time when one axis of authority was crumbling and another was establishing a foothold in power. Many artists of this generation, Żmijewski included, studied at Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1990s, shortly after the establishment of semi-free elections in Poland in 1989 and the resulting ascendency of the Solidary movement [Solidarność] to a position of government. In a little under five years, the economic and political transformation of Poland was complete, and state socialism had been swept away by a mixture of democratic elections, free market economics and Catholic Nationalism. Despite this rapid transformation, there is nevertheless a significant line of continuity in the way the production and dissemination of artworks have been influenced by the state from the 1950s to the present day. The cultural landscape in Poland under communism was not, as one might expect, subject to the same levels of control as it was in many other countries in the Eastern Bloc, and from the 1950s onwards, Socialist Realism was slowly swept out of the public sphere,

and artists in Poland were granted unparalleled freedom of expression.24 The art-historian Piotr Piotrowski writes that the political thaw in the 1950s ‘created

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a veritable explosion of Modern Art in Poland’ which became something of a

destination for artists from all over the eastern bloc.25 This apparent freedom continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s, during which time several artist-run galleries were funded by the regime, the most prominent of which was the Foksal

gallery in Warsaw.26 The power the state wielded over the art-world during this period was therefore not as nakedly repressive as one might expect. Nevertheless it did come at some cost: financial as well as other tools of influence had an effect on the kind of art that was being produced and displayed. Autonomy was only granted to artists and galleries on the understanding that criticism of the regime would not be tolerated. When this tacit agreement was broken, the authorities were quick to take action, for example, in 1968 when Kazimierz Dejmek’s production of Adam Mickiewicz’s play Dziady at the Polish Theatre in Warsaw was shelved for its supposed antisocialist references. The censorship of the play prompted a student march, backed up by members of the Warsaw branch of the Writer’s Union, which in turn precipitated further repression of writers,

intellectuals and students, some of whom chose to emigrate as a result.27 Fast-forward several decades to 2001, when a sculpture by Maurizio Catalan, The Ninth Hour (1999) was removed from the Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw. The sculpture depicts Pope John Paul II crumpled on the floor having

been struck down by a meteor, which lies static on top of his legs.28 Rather than the artist, it was the curator of the National Gallery Anda Rottenberg who became the target of a campaign led by two politicians, Halina Nowina- Konopka and Witold Tomczak, who used their parliamentary immunity to physically damage the piece on the grounds that a ‘civil servant of Jewish origin should not be spending the Roman Catholic majority’s money on disgusting

works of art’.29 Konopka and Tomczak were eventually joined by ninety other members of parliament in signing a less openly anti-Semitic letter that eventually forced Rottenberg to resign. In the same year, the Polish artist Dorota Nieznalska was also sentenced to six months community service for a fragment of her work Passion, which consisted of a Greek cross onto which a photograph

of male genitalia had been attached.30 Although Nieznalska’s sentence was suc- cessfully appealed, it was on the grounds that it was not her intention to ‘offend religious sentiments’ in the first place, rather than because the right to cause such an offence should be protected by law. Such examples expose a line of continuity in the way visual art has been policed before and after the political transformation of Poland. Underpinning these otherwise isolated examples is an infrastructure that has ideologically steered

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art production away from openly criticizing the regime and its allies. Piotrowski describes the cultural policies adopted by the state in the decades leading up to 1989 as ‘pseudo-liberal’, insofar as they incorporated modern art into the same ideological state apparatus that once promoted Socialist Realism, only this time under the auspices of ‘freedom of expression’. Several decades later, a cursory glance at the cultural policies encouraged by the post-communist regime and the Catholic Church reveal a similar situation. Just as the communist regime funded galleries and exhibition spaces during its reign, so too did the Catholic Church provide outlets for artistic expression in the period during and shortly after Martial law from 1981 to 1983. In the 1980s, a series of ‘church exhibitions’ were staged across Poland as a means to escape the system of state-funded institutions and censorship (implicit or otherwise). These occurred on such a scale that the critic Dorota Jarecka writes that ‘ “church exhibitions’ have become almost syn-

onymous with the art of the decade’.31 These exhibitions could be described as a series of test beds aimed at adding iconographic flesh to the bones of a new power base that was still taking shape. Solidarity’s subsequent ascendency to government effectively made this iconography into a state-sanctioned aesthetic, galvan- izing the links between the Church and the new state in the process, with certain

Catholic principles enshrined to this day in the Polish constitution.32 This narrative exposes a line of continuity that traces its way through Polish visual art over the last sixty years. But the narrative remains relatively localized to the context of art and occurs against a broader backdrop of breaks and discontinuities in the operations of political power. Although the continuities in how art is steered and censored go some way to contextualizing Żmijewski’s apparent appetite for transgression, it is a set of larger social shifts that serves as the main site of his work. In contrast to the dominant narrative of a ‘political thaw’, the transition from communism to capitalism in Poland was so fast that it can be more appropriately described as political sublimation in the sense of ice being transformed directly into gas. As Jane Hardy elaborates in Poland’s New Capitalism, the ‘shock therapy’ administered in 1990 comprised a raft of policies that were put in place almost overnight, as massive government cuts were levied and high interest rates were

set.33 In a narrative reminiscent of the economic experiments in South America, Hardy writes that ‘In 1990 neoliberal economists saw CEE [Central and Eastern Europe] as a laboratory in which they could experiment with the implantation

of “capitalism in the raw” through market driven policies.’34 ‘History, society and politics were viewed as impediments to the design of the transformation agenda

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by those who knew best.’35 While the economic aspects of this transformation have been covered in detail elsewhere, what is less discussed is the socio-cultural

effect that the transition brought about in the sphere of artistic production.36 The art critic and curator Joanna Mytkowska has written that the economic transformation of Poland post 1989 was so rapid that ‘language failed to keep pace with [it]. The exhaustion of language, the wearing away of public discourse, is doubtless a measure of the crisis of social communication’. Under these circumstances, according to Mytkowska ‘A gap emerged between a hastily and superficially imported liberal discourse supposed to explain the world, and

native traditions struggling with memory and a description of new identity.’37 The collapse of the communist regime exposed a chasm in the functioning of language that a new axis of power was at first unable to fill. This chasm is precisely what is exposed in many of Żmijewski’s artworks, and admitting its presence further complicates the critical reactions quoted above, which are underpinned by a liberal right-based discourse with few established roots in the Polish context. This context is an important site of the work, but the wider claim that political transformations can erode the authority of language is not restricted to Poland. In a number of recent works of psychoanalytically inflected critical theory, it surfaces as a more general dynamic associated with late capitalism. The concept of ‘Symbolic efficiency’ proposed by Slavoj Žižek is one such example. Žižek argues that Symbolic efficiency ‘concerns the point at which, when the Other of the symbolic institution confronts me with the choice of ‘Whom do you believe, my word or your eyes?’, I choose the Other’s word without hesitation,

dismissing the factual testimony of my eyes’.38 Put otherwise, Symbolic efficiency amounts to what might be called trust in a signifier’s power to describe reality, which, to expand the terrain of Žižek’s proposition, need not be based on written or spoken language alone. Here ‘institutional authority’ should be thought of in an expanded sense to account not only for institutionally sanctioned roles such as those of judge, CEO or professor but also any Symbolic role or function that is socially agreed and has performative effects. Recalling the work of Philip Zimbardo, it could be said that the Stanford prison experiment was precisely a test of such Symbolic efficiency, in that the roles accorded to prisoners and guards (as well as other factors such as architecture and clothing), validated behaviour that would normally appear excessive. Following Lacan, Žižek claims that referential stability has been eroded in recent years: ‘The key to today’s universe of simulacra, in which the Real is less and less distinguishable from its imaginary

simulation, lies in the retreat of “symbolic efficiency” ’.39 The erosion of Symbolic

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trust has for Žižek given rise to a range of psycho-symbolic phenomena such as widespread cynicism and a fragmentation of the social body. For Žižek and others this comes as a direct result of the disappearance of ‘the Big Other’, or in

other words, a disappearance of the authority underpinning the Symbolic order.40 Another author of popular critical theory, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, has couched the debate in different terms but makes essentially the same point as Žižek. In The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Berardi looks at the effects financial capital has had on the way language is used and conceptualized. He writes that ‘Financial pathogenesis sucks down and dries up every social and linguistic potency, dissolving the products of human activity, especially of collective semi-

otic activity.’41 Here one might be tempted to ask why financial capitalism in particular has had this effect, rather than capitalism in general. The answer for Berardi is that with finance capital, accumulation ‘no longer passes through the production of goods, but goes straight to its monetary goal, extracting value from the pure circulation of money, from the virtualization of life and intelli-

gence’.42 Finance capital, as one aspect of what Berardi and others have called ‘semio-capitalism’ automatizes language, which is now able to operate irre-

spective of corporeal investment.43 Once again, the result of this process is a general crisis in referentiality, whereby ‘the ontological guarantee of meaning

based on the referential status of the signifier has broken apart’.44 Žižek and Berardi’s arguments, while compelling, are not without internal contradiction and lack a concrete engagement with specific social contexts. The latter’s prescriptive argument – in short, that it is up to poetry to reinvest language with sensuous potential – throws up a range of questions, not least of all concerning the central link that Berardi sets up between dereferentialization in Symbolist poetry

and the crisis in referentiality caused by financial capitalism.45 Nevertheless, the central idea of the referential stability of the Symbolic being weakened in response to particular mutations in global capitalism would seem to possess some descriptive potential when connected with the political realities of Poland post 1989. It could be said that during the communist years, Symbolic efficiency was anchored by the regime. A central authority institutionally sanctioned positions of public office, and cultural and economic activity was closely monitored for deviation from predefined norms. Even when the Symbolic guarantee the regime provided seemed under threat in the 1970s and 1980s, the fact that sections of the population were rebelling against this authority shows that they still had trust in its Symbolic efficiency. When the Solidarity movement shifted the emphasis towards building a counter-structure with the slogan ‘Don’t tear down the

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institutions, build your own’, it was not long before the movement found a new guarantee for their counter-institutions in the form of Catholic Nationalism. For many, the twilight of communism in Poland was a period when the direction of psychic investment shifted from the State to the Church, whose authority then underpinned the incoming government. In this scenario, it would seem that a loss of Symbolic efficiency did not occur, that ‘guarantees’ for referentiality were provided both before and after the fall of communism. Nevertheless, the shift from one Symbolic guarantee to another exposed the contingency of both. The fact that the official discourse could change so rapidly exposed the superfici- ality of both the defunct Symbolic universe of authoritarian rule and the newly installed ideology of Catholic Nationalism. While many citizens were quick to pledge their allegiance to the new Symbolic authority, the group of artists of which Żmijewski was a part positioned their work precisely in the rift that had been exposed. To use Mytkowska’s words, Żmijewski’s work occupies the place of ‘the deficiencies of our dominant ways of naming things’, which is to say, the deficiency (or inefficiency) of language

itself.46 When situated in this context the three works described at the beginning take on added significance, occupying gaps in the functioning of public discourse that expose the contingency of the moral regimes that rely on it as a guarantor. Here it is worth reassessing each of the three pieces discussed at the beginning of this chapter from this new vantage point. How exactly does The Game of Tag occupy a gap in the functioning of public discourse? The overt target of Żmijewski’s provocation seems to be a particular discursive approach to the Holocaust. Two things can characterize this approach: solemnity and non-representation. Żmijewski’s challenge to solemnity is clear, and the glee the participants show while playing the game of tag can easily be taken as a mark of disrespect. When it comes to non-representation, The Game of Tag acquires added significance when read alongside other works, such as Luc Tuymans’ Still Life (2002), which serves as an example of a ‘correct’ non-representational approach to tragedy. When invited to make a painting in response to the attacks of September 11, Tuymans responded by exhibiting a still life of some fruit and a jug of water measuring some five meters in diameter. In doing so he chose to represent the limits of representation itself, as if to ask ‘how can art deal with subject matter this traumatic?’ For many, the ‘correct’ answer to

this question is that it cannot.47 It is declared impossible for art to represent the

enormity of tragedies such as September the 11th or the Holocaust.48

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Even though the viewer of The Game of Tag only learns of the intended subject matter before they see the film (in the press, or through word of mouth) or as the credits role, this information recodes all that has just been seen, and the simple combination of naked bodies and a gas chamber creates a representative nexus that is deemed offensive because it simultaneously steps too close to the original events and too far from them. Herein lies the difficulty of the work: it dissolves the bond between non-representation and solemnity. The paradigm of non-representation is considered appropriate only insofar as it anchors art to a primordial trauma and in so doing preserves this space as one of mourning and loss. It could be argued that the very link between non-representation and solemnity is founded upon the stability of language, broadly understood. The power of Tuyman’s painting is derived less from what it shows than from its Symbolic position in relation to the subject it deals with. Unless the viewer knows the backstory to the painting, they might take it at face value – as a rather large still life painted in muted colours – and nothing more. The Game of Tag uses a similar technique of socio-symbolic framing by means of the text at the end of the film, but in this case one cannot even be sure if the artist is telling the truth. Even if it is conceded that the performance probably took place in the way it is claimed, the work then becomes a meta-commentary on the ‘correct’ Symbolic means of dealing with the Holocaust, rather than genuinely commemorative. This again can be attributed to a certain loosening of the effects of language, akin to questioning whether or not a funeral is in fact the most appropriate way to mark somebody’s death, rather than accepting it as an unquestionable Symbolic

marker anchored by tradition.49 Of the three artworks introduced at the beginning of the chapter, Them is perhaps the least obviously transgressive. In a narrow sense, it could be seen as transgressing a prohibition set by Żmijewski’s former teacher Kowalski, whose participative pedagogic exercises explicitly prohibited destructive behaviour, as will be discussed in the next section. And yet, this meaning is beyond the reach of anyone who does not know the art-historical precedent to the work. Rather, the central provocation of Them is once again directed towards a particular discursive construction, in this case a liberal-humanist construction founded on consensus and respectful debate. This is a challenge that Żmijewski has manifested with other works. For The Singing Lesson II (2002), for example, a work redolent with associations to reality TV, Żmijewski recruited a group of severely hearing impaired teenagers and trained them to sing a Bach cantata in the church in

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Leipzig where Bach himself is buried.50 In both of these pieces, a confrontation is staged that challenges consensus. In a culture where classical music is promoted as an unquestionable good for everyone, how do those who cannot participate live up to this ideal? Żmijewski points to the irresolvable antagonisms in society, highlighting a situation in which mainstream discourses cannot rule over everyone without an irresolvable excess emerging. Them dramatizes the violence that this excess generates. It also bears a striking resemblance to a series of recent events that have occurred subsequently in Warsaw. On 11 November 2013, a large public sculpture of a rainbow by Julita Wójcik was burnt down for the fourth time since its installation in June 2012. The rainbow, which was intended as a general symbol of tolerance, was made of artificial flowers and situated near a large catholic church in central Warsaw. Taken as a symbol of homosexuality, the sculpture was last burnt down during a march of the far right on Polish Independence Day, which itself was fragmented into eleven separate marches with different routes and agendas. A few days later around 200 people visited the square to

place their own flowers among the charred remains.51 This turn of events is further testament to the fragmentation of Polish political life, with symbols serving as weapons in a proxy war for the power to describe reality. The fact that the meaning of the symbol at the heart of the episode was itself the subject of disagreement, its indexical link to God in the myth of Noah seemingly overlooked by many protesters on the Christian right is further testament to the erosion of

Symbolic efficiency.52 The third work by Żmijewski discussed at the beginning of this chapter, Repetition, seeks to challenge the hegemony of scientific knowledge. The alternative ending to the experiment highlights the contingency of the knowledge produced by the original, questioning the self-appointed authority of Zimbardo to draw conclusions about human nature in general. By choosing such a famous experiment, Żmijewski’s reworking exposes both endings as contingent. This moment of exposure between one ending and another mirrors the Symbolic deficiency that momentarily appeared when one regime was replaced by another in 1980s Poland. When read alongside pieces such as Them, it is clear that the ‘alternate ending’ that occurs in Repetition is not necessarily one that Żmijewski supports. In his own words, the target of the film is a certain ‘cognitive funda-

mentalism’.53 The fact that the Symbolic roles accorded to the prisoners no longer held as they did in the original experiment, collapsing into an act of cooperation that resulted in a premature ending, is further suggestive of a decline of Symbolic

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efficiency. Ultimately this is the only conclusion that can be drawn. Once again, the work questions the ability of language, visual or otherwise, to describe reality rather than offering a theory of human nature in the manner of Zimbardo. This expanded context of the work helps us to do several things in concluding this section. First, it allows us to see that Żmijewski’s work stems directly from a specific historical juncture that had wide-ranging effects on the functioning of public discourse in Poland. Second, it allows us to frame the work as transgressive vis-à-vis the liberal humanist discourse that Mytkowska describes as ‘hastily and superficially imported’, rather than in relation to a moral code particular to the Polish context. These insights go some way to helping clear the way for an ethico-aesthetic appraisal that arises immanently from the specific situation in which the work was made, but this task remains incomplete in so far as a sketch of the broader ‘site’ of the work comprises only one piece of the puzzle. The crucial missing piece consists of testimonies of participants in the works. In this respect a number of questions remain unanswered, even unanswerable: did the unemployed men that helped repeat the Stanford Prison experiment feel exploited? Did the political groups that participated in Them leave the work with a heightened understanding of Polish political life, or were their worst prejudices about the other participants in the piece confirmed? And finally, did the players ofA Game of Tag know they were in a former concentration camp, and upon the realization that they were, did they feel culpable in an act of offence to others, or perhaps even proud that they had participated in a work that the artist describes as ‘therapeutic’? The immediate answers to these questions are difficult to recover over a decade after the works were produced. Even proposing them suggests a closing of the critical distance at which art theory is typically conducted. Nevertheless, they encourage us to attend to the way in which ethico-aesthetic problems call for patient engagements with the messy set of interactions that artworks carry with them at every stage of their life. This approach, when joined with a sensitivity to contextual factors, serves as an effective inoculation against hasty judgments imposed on the basis of preconceived moral values.

Intergenerational games

So far the discussion of Żmijewski’s work has mainly operated within the parameters of a debate on the ethics of participative art, with a focus on the

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negative, transgressive and potentially exploitative dimensions of his practice. This is useful insofar as it moves the discussion of transgression onto new territory, but it does not edge us closer to tracing the contours of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm that steps out of the shadows of transgression. Against a backdrop of referential instability, reduced Symbolic efficiency and shifting political power, there exists a narrative of post-war Polish art that not only points to the insufficiency of language to describe reality but also generates a language of its own. The cradle of this language was not art but architecture, which was later influenced by the new discourses of linguistics and cybernetics, with their interest in structures, rules and signaletic systems that have the capacity to shape behaviour. This history converges on the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw where Żmijewski studied in the 1980s and 1990s, and where the concept of ‘open form’ was explored by successive generations of students and teachers. The progenitor of open-form theory was the architect, educator, theorist and urban planner, Oskar Hansen. The theory was elaborated in a number of Hansen’s writings, but perhaps most concisely in The Open Form Manifesto, which was enthusiastically received at the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in Otterlo in 1959. Hansen put great store by his concept, writing that the open form ‘will awake the desire of existence for every one of us, it will help us to define ourselves and find ourselves in the space and time in

which we live’.54 The theory as a whole can be described as an early attempt to make architecture more responsive to individual and group desire. Amenable to multiple uses and scales of operation, the theory extended over art, architecture and urban planning, and in each case foregrounded social use over and above rational planning, presupposing a form of subjectivity based on diver-

sity and process, rather than unity and stasis.55 For Hansen, the ideal outcome of any given project involved the ascendency of the ‘user’ to the position of co-author. This was decisively not the case in what he called ‘closed forms’, ‘in

which the formal and often also the contextual components are fixed’.56 Closed forms objectify those who occupy them, making them feel as if they were living among ‘somebody else’s souvenirs, feelings, somebody else’s houses and housing

settlements’.57 As much as possible, a building or urban space should facilitate the subjective emancipation of its users, rather than their objectification and alienation. Although these ideas are relatively commonplace today, in their time they ran against the grain of technocratic rationalism that characterized much early modernist architecture still under the sway of Fordist modes of produc-

tion, with their emphasis on standardization as a means to achieve efficiency.58

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Despite the emphasis he placed on process and indeterminacy, Hansen also wished to cultivate a quasi-scientific approach to his projects. Łukasz Ronduda et al. write that the theory and practice of the open form combined a ‘determination to move experimentation … to the socio-political sphere [with a] fascination with the attitude of the scientist-artist participating, on par with the

contemporary science, in the transformation of reality’.59 One way Hansen occupied the role of the ‘scientist-artist’ was to minimize his own subjective input in various projects, distilling his creativity into a series of objective rules or functions that were nevertheless flexible enough to respond to users’ needs. Although there is little to suggest Hansen had anything other than a passing acquaintance with cybernetics, the subsequent interpretation of his work by a generation of artists he trained in the 1970s, in particular Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik (together known as KwieKulik), suggests that open-form theory contained within it principles that were easily filtered through a cybernetic

frame of reference.60 For one, the objective rules and functions mentioned above could be described as command structures within a cybernetic model, and their responsiveness to the behavioural ‘output’ of the people who used them could be said to constitute a feedback loop, in that the principles underpinning the

design of buildings were open to reformulation.61 This extended to the principle of open form itself, which was left constitutively vague as a means to accommodate change. Furthermore, various projects by Hansen display what Pask has described as a ‘system-orientated thinking’ in architecture, in which buildings

were not designed as discrete entities but components in larger arrangements.62 This is no more the case than in Hansen’s Linear Continuous System project, which was developed together with his wife, Zofia Hansen, and constituted a wildly ambitious master plan for the reorganization of Polish urban space that would replace the concentric model with four large settlement strips spanning the width of the country. This focus on buildings as relational entities rather than discrete units opened Hansen’s theory up to a range of applications beyond architecture. Distilled down to its fundamental elements, open-form theory concerns itself with the relationship between subjectivity and form. In Hansen’s case, the forms in question were primarily physical, and in many cases constructed of relatively standard building materials. Glancing back at Żmijewski’s work, however, we could just as easily discern a series of forms at play in the structures, norms, rules and values deployed in his work. If these forms are considered ‘objective’ in Hansen’s work, then in Żmijewski’s they are rendered historically contingent, gnawing

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away at the very concept of ‘objectivity’ in line with the broader retreat from positivism in the second half of the twentieth century. Accompanying the cross- disciplinary drift of open-form theory into art is, therefore, a shift in emphasis from the objective to the subjective, a shift precipitated by Żmijewski’s teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Grzegorz Kowalski. After studying at the Academy himself, Kowalski worked as a teaching assistant in Hansen’s studio and established the Repassage gallery in Warsaw along with a number of other young artists. In an autobiographical essay, he writes that ‘Ninety-nine per cent of those people had [been] through Hansen’s studio and, to a greater or lesser extent, assimilated the principles of “Open

F o r m” ’. 63 In the 1970s and 1980s, Kowalski made a series of performances at the gallery he loosely called ‘action-questions’, which positioned the artist as an ini- tiator and regulator of the artwork, setting up a series of inputs or constraints, but minimized his or her authorial voice in their processual realization. In this respect they drew on the cybernetic characteristics and dialogic nature of Hansen’s approach, while at the same time broadening the parameters to include a wider range of potential effects and responses. Ronduda et al. argue that ‘Kowalski always tried to imbue the quasi-scientific (objective and ration- alist) paradigm of games and interactions … with humanist elements, power- fully existential, sensual, subjective, irrational, psychological, subconscious

(even spiritual), and was open to situations eluding rational analysis.’64 In this way his artwork represented more of a reformulation of open-form theory than simply its application to the sphere of art. It is as much through his pedagogic practice as his artwork that Kowalski’s influence on the next generation of Polish artists was felt – so much so that his atelier at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw was nicknamed ‘kowalnia’ (the smithy) for the number of well-known artists that were trained there. Making the distinction between Kowalski’s ‘artworks’ and his ‘pedagogic activities’ becomes difficult when specific examples are considered, as is positioning Kowalski as their sole author, since many of his activities encouraged collective forms of authorship. For example, Common Space, Individual Space, Realisation VIII (1993), while formally a pedagogic exercise with specific learning objectives, also generated a film, which is currently held in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The exercise involved a group of participants interacting with one another by means of non-verbal communication in a performance arena divided into collective spaces and individual spaces – this spatial division bearing

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testament to the continued architectural influence on Kowalski’s work. When the participants were in the common spaces, they were encouraged to react to one another’s gestural or physical messages, simultaneously checking whether or not someone else was interpreting them. The primary aim of the exercise was to encourage students to cultivate a sense of the communicative power of art. The common space (as a field of inter-subjective communication) stood in for public space in general, and having the students occupy this space was intended

to teach them the responsibility that work in the socio-political sphere entails.65 This responsibility is distributed evenly among the participants. As Kowalski himself described the piece:

We all find ourselves in ‘common space, private space,’ students and teachers, on equal terms … The goal of the exercise … is to ensure active participation in the process of non-verbal communication. The course of the process is unpredictable and depends on the participants’ ingenuity and the temperature of the inter-

action between them. We agree on one thing: we avoid destructive behaviours.66

Żmijewski’s Them sits in clear lineage from this pedagogic experiment, but an even more direct engagement with open-form theory can be seen in a joint exhibition with another of Kowalski’s former students Paweł Althamer, at CCA Ujazdowski Castle Warsaw in 2005. Entitled [S]election.pl,‌ the exhibition restaged Common Space, Individual Space, inviting other former students to contribute to a game of non-verbal communication on the condition that anyone could adapt, improve or destroy the work on display. As the exhibition developed, Althamer invited more and more participants, including a group of children, his daughter and at one stage a group of female escorts. In the same way that Repetition re-staged the Stanford prison experiment, [S]election.pl constituted a repetition (with a difference) of Kowalski’s pedagogic exercise – the difference being that destructive behaviours were no longer prohibited. As Żmijewski puts it:

Making sure our actions are protected from destruction handicaps our knowledge about the mechanisms of destruction: we do not learn to destroy. We repress anger and oppression but obviously they always come back, this time

as demons.67

Żmijewski’s polemic against his former teacher could be filtered through the usual Oedipal narratives of art history, according to which an artist must kill off his or her predecessors before they can make an original contribution to the field. An altogether more interesting way of viewing the interaction would be according to the sequential logic within the works themselves. As already

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discussed, many of the works take the form of games and semi-structured interactions. Expanding the frame, we might come to view the interactions between Żmijewski, Kowalski and Hansen as a game in itself, one that takes

place across multiple generations.68 Hansen’s open-form theory mobilized an architectural aesthetics of movement, process and plasticity, underpinned by an ethical appeal to subjective differenti-

ation within large aggregates of people, or what he called ‘the greater number’.69 In the context of an increasingly scientific socialism in Poland, with its one- size-fits-all solutions, his work represented a dramatic departure from modes of

production reliant on standardization and serialization.70 Hansen’s alternative was not simply to promote a blinkered individualism, but probe the interface between the individual and the collective, searching for an architectural form up to the task of mediating between the two. This alternative to top-down socialist planning was suffused with a post-war optimism in the power of technology and scientific objectivity. While some of the artists influenced by Hansen, such as Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek, sought to push this dimension of open-form theory further, attempting to integrate the objective models of communication embodied in cybernetics into their art, others (Kowalksi included) emphasized a different approach. Kowalski’s take up of open-form theory placed humanist ideals at its core, according to which the harder edges of Hansen’s ideas were softened by existential, psychological and emotional questions. This was no less the case than in Kowalksi’s studio at the Academy of Fine Arts, which as well as providing instruction in art, according to Weider, also ‘offered techniques and methods to enable the tolerant coexistence and mutual interests of a society

composed of individual others’.71 This was training of an ethico-aesthetic kind, with experiments in the field of art leading to new ways of inhabiting society at large. The next move in this intergenerational game hollows out Kowalski’s humanist agenda from within, and yet it does not appeal to the structural comforts of cybernetics, logic or other quasi-scientific disciplines. While for Hansen these embodied ideals to be aspired to, for Żmijewski, science’s ideologically reinforced credibility needs to be continually questioned. Żmijewski’s move in the game is to remove the prohibition on destructive forces in order to gain a stronger purchase on social reality. This leads to a paradox insofar as acts of destruction do not end the intergenerational game, nor do they destroy the individual artworks themselves. Instead they become yet another move. Żmijewski’s contribution to the game is not simply a negation; more accurately, it is both negation and

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affirmation; both transgressive and existentially productive, and in this way it straddles two distinct ethico-aesthetic paradigms.

Fragments of reality

In an influential essay entitled ‘The Applied Social Arts’, Żmijewski himself

stresses the affirmative potential of art.72 The main argument of this essay is that artworks should produce knowledge rather than simply ask questions, a position repeated in press conferences accompanying the Berlin Biennial in 2012, which he curated. Żmijewski decries a situation in which art can only ‘act politically in

galleries but not in real-life debates’.73 At face value, this claim represents little more than a reiteration of the historical avant-garde’s position of heteronomy. And yet when placed against the backdrop of recent Polish art history, the emphasis on application and engagement reverses the conditions by which a certain art-theoretical discourse of autonomy oiled the ideological cogs of the state. ‘The Applied Social Arts’ is an ambitious attempt to think through the various means by which art can shape reality free from state control. At its heart is the analogy that art can operate as an ‘existential algorithm’ to exert influence in the social field. For Żmijewski, ‘algorithms imply something operational and positive, a mode of purposeful action’. The virtue of the analogy, according to the artist, is that it allows us ‘to consider the possibility of impact, to see art as a “device that produces impact”. As guiding the system from a certain initial state

to a desired final state’.74 The argument here is only developed in embryonic form, and Żmijewski’s discussion of algorithms does not extend much further than the Wikipedia def-

inition he quotes.75 Nevertheless, the use of the term is indicative of a certain cultural atmospherics of cybernetics already discernible in the work of Oskar Hansen and the generation of artists he trained in Warsaw. At its most basic, an algorithm is a set of instructions designed to complete a predefined task or achieve a finite outcome. While essentially this set of instructions constitutes an abstract and internally consistent whole, existing independently of the ‘hard- ware’ for which it is designed, as Andrew Goffey points out, algorithms also have a fundamentally pragmatic dimension: ‘Algorithms act, but they do so as part of an ill-defined network of actions upon actions, part of a complex of power- knowledge relations, in which unintended consequences, like the side effects of

a program’s behavior, can become critically important.’76

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It is this expanded conception of an algorithm that Żmijewski seems keen to embrace, taking into account effects that overspill discrete, internally consistent spheres of influence. This is a position that is further echoed in a set of reflections on his education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Like an algorithm that is viewed from the perspective of its formal properties, rather than the pragmatic effects of its implementation, Żmijewski sees his education under Kowalski as operating at one removed from reality. At the Academy, Żmijewski writes, ‘instead of creating reality, we construct its models, which become the objects of our operations. … “Common Space, Private Space” was just such a magic model of reality. It resembled reality but was not identical to it. … It seems to me that academic didactics teaches students to create models and put a spell

on reality, instead of acting directly on the “sensitive tissue of the social body” ’.77 On this point I disagree with Żmijewski, not simply on the basis that Kowalski’s didactic exercises have had effects beyond the academy (including on Żmijewski’s own work) but also because processes of modelling need not achieve short-term calculable effects in order to have far-reaching ethico-aesthetic significance. This is a view that can be developed by drawing conceptual resources from the writings of Félix Guattari, whose work is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. In many of Guattari’s writings, ‘modelling’ and ‘metamodelling’ comprise key

terms,78 and an important distinction between the two hinges on the degree to which they are prescriptive and fixed, or free and open to modification. Models constitute prescriptive norms that are passed down through the family, institutions or cultural practices that often serve the interests of particular social orders. They exercise a powerful influence on the production of subjectivity, shaping patterns of behaviour from micro-gestures to entire nations. Some of the critical responses to Żmijewski’s work appear to operate on this basis, prescribing existing models about what it means to act ethically as an artist, which ultimately come to shape the subjectivity of artists as a professional class, for better or worse. In one sense ‘metamodelling’ is the name Guattari gives to processes of

deciphering such modelling systems as they operate in various domains.79 In this way, it can be seen as a reading device that looks backwards to try to ‘under-

stand how it is that you got where you are’.80 But it also has a more pragmatic and prospective dimension, insofar as it encourages experimentation with a variety of existing models and parts of models, and a heightened awareness of how they continue to feed into the production of subjectivity. Metamodelling possesses a power that is simultaneously critical and pragmatic, seeking to prise open- learned patterns of behaviour that remain locked into position, and tinker with

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them in a creative, processual manner. Herein lies its relevance to Żmijewski’s work. All of the works discussed at the beginning of this chapter concern the power of models to shape behaviour, whether it concerns the protocols of respectful democratic debate or the ‘correct’ response to a historical trauma. This comes into clearest focus in the Stanford Prison experiment, which continues to provide the basis of a model of human nature in psychology textbooks, despite the criticism it has attracted. Repeating the experiment under different circumstances encourages a cross-referencing of subjective effects. This does not replace one model with another, rather it both critiques Zimbardo’s findings and grafts it onto another set of models drawn from the history of open form. But Żmijewski does more than map existing modelling systems to show how they work. The magic models of which the artist is so critical involve the selection of fragments of reality that actively shape subjectivity for limited periods of time. This happens through diverse means and does not stem solely from their ability to function as ‘arguments in a debate’. When the works are instead treated as ensembles of elements that include specific affects, creating different ‘temperatures’ of interaction (to take Kowalski’s phrase), then they are shown to have a greater capacity to feed back into the production of subjectivity. In this way the individual artworks that comprise the history of open form actively start tinkering with different modelling systems, sometimes reinforcing them, at other times opening them out onto new possibilities. When individual artworks are viewed as part of a tradition, they sometimes have the capacity to turn the characteristics of the works that influence them into empty rituals, adding fresh layers of sediment that become all the more difficult to shift. From the brief history of open form discussed above, it would seem that the opposite is true. The models of behaviour that individual works contain are constantly constructed and reworked in an ongoing and increasingly self-referential dialogue between practitioners, displaying a tendency towards openness and proliferation, rather than rigidity and sedimentation. The way in which subjectivity is modulated in one performance shapes the formal mechanics of the next, and insofar as this intergenerational game remains open to further input, it consists of a metamodelling exercise that spans several decades.

* * *

The question of metamodelling upon which this chapter draws to a close represents a small step away from the preoccupation with transgression that

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characterizes much writing on the ethics of contemporary art. Żmijewski’s work provides a rich point of departure because it simultaneously invites accusations of transgression, and, in the deeper history of its development, provides the means to move beyond it. A familiar cliché accompanying artistic transgression is that it challenges conventions and breaks moulds. Speaking with Guattari, we might say that transgression also claims to break models, insofar as they are understood as a set of passively adopted norms. Models undergird morality in its static form, supplying unequivocal answers to the question ‘how should one act’. By contrast, metamodels take such answers as partial, connecting them to other answers that might be contradictory. It is this openness that makes of metamodelling a fundamentally ethical enterprise, insofar as it requires deliberation, experimentation

and speculative answers to the question ‘how might one live?’.81 But by eschewing questions of morality in participative art, are we com- pelled to embrace all artistic exercises in metamodelling equally, regardless of how exploitative their internal dynamics become? I would argue that the answer to this is negative, for two reasons. The first is that metamodelling does not follow the impulse of transgression and promise a world without models. Its principle of operation may be pragmatic, but this is not to say that it does away with values or abrogates responsibility entirely. It makes use of existing modelling systems, drawing together fragments in order to solve a problem, rather than drawing ready-made answers from dogma. The second is answered by way of Guattari’s ultimate test of metamodelling, which can be gauged by the extent to which it transforms itself into ‘auto-modelling, or auto-

gestation’.82 While the history of open form starts this process in motion, the metamodels in Żmijewski’s work cannot complete the transformation as long as the group subjectivity of his participants remains fixed. For metamodelling to transform itself into auto-modelling, a degree of openness and self- direction is needed. Here a question Guattari asks of schizoanalysis seems equally relevant to participative art: ‘how can a de-alienated, de-serialized

subject be reassembled’.83 It is this question, rather than a moral framework based on authorial renunciation, that provides the means to evaluate Żmijewski’s work from the perspective of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm other than transgression. As we shall see in the next chapter, this is a paradigm that does not arrive in the work of any one theorist fully formed. We will need to construct it, pulling in resources from two thinkers whose differences are usually seen as insurmountable.

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Notes

1 In his book The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo apologized for his role in the experiment, writing that ‘I was guilty of the sin of omission – the evil of inaction – of not providing adequate oversight and surveillance when it was required.’ ‘The findings came at the expense of human suffering. I am sorry for that and to this day apologize for contributing to this inhumanity.’ Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (London: Random House, 2011), pp. 181, 235.

2 The Belmont Report is a document published in 1979 that outlines a set of ethical guidelines for research involving human subjects. Despite the fact it was written with behavioral and biomedical research in mind, according to Papademas the Belmont Report set out ‘basic ethical principles for the many particular ethical prescriptions and evaluations of human actions in general’. See Diana Papademas, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Ethics in Visual Research’, Visual Studies 2, no. 19 (2004), 122–6. For a full text of the Belmont Report, see United States National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research, Volumes 1–2 (Washington, DC: United States. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1978).

3 For a discussion of the role of surveillance in the piece, as well as the power dynamics it compounds, see Anthony Downey, ‘The Lives of Others: Artur Zmijewki’s Repetition, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Ethics of Surveillance’, in Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art, ed. Outi Remes and Pam Skelton (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 67–81.

4 Joanna Mytkowska, ed. Artur Żmijewski: If It Happened Only Once It’s as If It Never Happened (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2005). The title is a translation of a German proverb, Einmal ist Keinmal.

5 This and similar interpretations of the experiment are regularly repeated in psychology textbooks. In 2014, a study of thirteen individual textbooks by Richard Griggs found that of the eleven that discussed the experiment, five did not summarize any of the numerous criticisms it has attracted, and the remaining six included ‘very minimal’ discussions of the flaws in the study. Richard A. Griggs, ‘Coverage of the Stanford Prison Experiment in Introductory Psychology Textbooks’, Teaching of Psychology, 41, no. 3 (2014), 195–203.

6 Daniel Miller, ‘The Politics of Fear: Artur Żmijewski Interviewed by Daniel Miller’, Art Monthly, 333 (2010), 1–4 (p. 2).

7 Books and articles on participatory art are now so numerous that they constitute a sub-discipline within art theory. Despite its shortcomings, the book that

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remains foundational to this sub-discipline remains Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Paris: Les presses du réel: 2002). ‘Relational’ is one of the many names that has been used to describe this art. Other labels include ‘socially engaged’, ‘dialogical’, ‘collaborative’ or ‘new genre public art’. Since this book is not primarily about such art, I will avoid extended discussion about terminology and opt for what is perhaps the most neutral of the terms: ‘participative’.

8 See, for example, Maria Lind, ‘Actualisation of Space: The Case of Oda Projesi’, in Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation, ed. Claire Doherty (London: Black Dog, 2004), pp. 109–21 and Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). A critique of the ethical dimensions of these authors’ work is provided in Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’,Artforum 44, no. 6 (February 2006), 178–83, discussed later in this chapter.

9 The exhibition was curated by Anda Rottenberg and took place from 23 September 2011–9 January 2012.

10 ‘Berek’, Artur Żmijewski, http://www.berlinbiennale.de/blog/en/projects/berek-by- artur-Żmijewski-22243 (accessed 1 June 2018). The decision to place the video in a black box–viewing room on the top floor of the K.W. Institute in Berlin makes for a more tepid challenge to the ‘censorship’ than the Biennial literature makes out.

11 A good round-up of the ‘Critical Art’ movement in Poland is provided in Artur Żmijewski, ed., Trembling Bodies: Interviews with Artists (Krakow: Kronika, 2010). Several of the artists interviewed are known for work that could be considered transgressive, among them are Zbigniew Libera’s Lego Concentration Camp (1996), which drew legal complaints against the artist from Lego, Katarzyna Kozyra’s Olympia (1996), an uncompromising series of photographs and a video that documents the artist’s fight with cancer, and Grzegorz Klaman’sFlag for Third Polish Republic (2001), a violation of the ban on placing a three-coloured polish flag on the facade of the building in Gdańsk.

12 I am not the first to discuss Guattari’s work in the context of participative art; Bourriaud devotes an entire chapter of Relational Aesthetics to Guattari’s significance. Yet for the most part, Bourriaud treats Guattari’s ideas independently of art practices themselves. Those that are discussed comprise a potted history of the avant-garde from Duchamp to Broodthaers, with discussions of individual works, their context and their ethico-aesthetic significance generally absent.

13 Nina Möntmann, ‘Community service’, Frieze 102, October 2006, p. 39.

14 Ken Johnson, ‘An Artist Turns People into His Marionettes’, New York Times, 29 November 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/arts/design/30Żmijewski. html (accessed 1 June 2018).

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15 Bishop, ‘The Social Turn’, p. 183.

16 Bishop formulates the problem in the following way: ‘Artists are increasingly judged by their working process – the degree to which they supply good or bad models of collaboration – and criticized for any hint of potential exploitation that fails to “fully” represent their subjects, as if such a thing were possible.’ Bishop, ‘The Social Turn’, p. 180.

17 Ibid., p. 183. The other artists Bishop places in this camp are Jeremy Deller, Phil Collins and Carsten Höller.

18 Ibid., p. 180.

19 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 1959–60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992).

20 Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Seminar of 6 July 1960; this is a point made in Marc de Kessel’s exemplary reading of the seminar: Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, trans. Sigi Jöttkandt (New York: SUNY, 2009), p. 262. The tendency to extract a maxim from Lacan’s seminar on ethics parallels the tendency to reduce the figure of Antigone in his discussion to an example for ethical conduct, and the two misreadings often buttress one another, as they do in Bishop’s argument.

21 On the problem of determining what constitutes genuine participation, see Karoline Gritzner and Alexander García Düttman, ‘On Participation in Art: A conversation with Alexander García Düttman’, Performance Research 16, no. 4 (2011), 136–40. For a catalogue of exceptions to the idea that theatre must operate on a top-down model of authorship, see Alan Read, Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (Oxon: Routledge, 1993). Exceptions to the idea that music necessarily follows this model can be found in works by Terry Riley, particularly In C (1964), which allowed participating musicians to select from fifty-three melodic fragments with few constraints, or Cornelius Cadew’s scratch orchestra, operative between 1969 and 1974, and which assigned programming responsibility on the basis of reverse seniority.

22 David Beech has written about the split nature of the audience in Żmijewski’s work, which has a number of art practices that ‘mine fissures in the cultural and social fabric that demonstrate the falsity of the aesthetic spectator’s universality’. David Beech, ‘Uncompensated Trauma: On Art, Technique and Division’, in The Applied Social Arts: Artur Żmijewski, ed. Liz Burns Clodagh Kenny (Dublin: Fire Station Artists Studios, 2010), pp. 59–63 (p. 61).

23 Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 185. Kester also writes of a ‘reciprocal testing of both ethical and aesthetic norms, the outcome of which can

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only be determined through the subsequent forms of social interaction mobilized by a given work’.

24 Needless to say, considerable restrictions were placed on artistic expression in many other Eastern European countries where artists were prohibited from deviating too far from the party aesthetic of Socialist Realism. Aside from Poland, another exception is Yugoslavia, which existed in a different political grouping to those countries directly absorbed into the USSR. For more on this, see Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2012).

25 Piotrowski, Art and Democracy, p. 68.

26 As Piotrowski writes the Foksal galley was one of a number of art spaces that ‘were firmly inscribed into the discourse of autonomy developed in the 1950s. While they rejected the modernist construction of the image, its visuality and abstraction, they did not dispense with its self-contained independence vis-a-vis the external reality’. Piotrowski, Art and Democracy, p. 88.

27 John M.Bates, ‘Adam Mickiewicz’, in Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, ed. Derek Jones (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), 4 vols, vol. III, pp. 1585–7 (p. 1587).

28 For more information about the incident involving Maurizio Catalan, see Piotrowski, Art and Democracy, p. 268.

29 Apollinaire Scherr, ‘A Fallen Pope Provokes a Sensation in Poland’, New York Times, 13 May 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/13/arts/art-architecture-a-fallen- pope-provokes-a-sensation-in-poland.html (accessed 1 June 2018).

30 For a full account of the incident involving Dorota Nieznalska, see Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Visual Art Policy in Poland: Democracy, Policy and Censorship’, in The Populism Reader, ed. Cristina Ricupero, Lars Bang Larsen and Nicolaus Schafhausen (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005), pp. 187–93.

31 Two examples of church exhibition are ‘The Sign of the Cross’ (1983) and ‘The Apocalypse – A Light in the Darkness’ (1984). For further details, see Dorota Jarecka, ‘Janusz Bogucki, the Polish Szeemann?’, in Rejected Heritage: Polish Art of the 1980s, ed. Karol Sienkiewicz (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, 2011), pp. 8–31.

32 To take one example of this, there is a law in Poland that enforces the respect of ‘Christian values’ in radio and television programmes, which effectively gives the Church the right to ban broadcasts that it does not approve of. For more examples of the links between Church and state, see Andrzej Dominiczak, ‘Church and State in Post-Communist Poland’, International Humanist News (2002), http://iheu.org/ content/church-and-state-post-communist-poland (accessed 1 June 2018). The links between the Solidarity movement and the Catholic Church are evident in the former organization’s official iconography, which includes Catholic elements,

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such as crosses and images of the Virgin Mary. In the early 1980s, there was also pressure for artists to incorporate religious iconography into public sculptures.

33 Jane Hardy, Poland’s New Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2009), p. 34.

34 Ibid., p. 31.

35 Ibid., p. 33.

36 As well as Hardy, see Tadeusz Kowalik, From Solidarity to Sell Out: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012) and Gavin Rae, Poland’s Return to Capitalism: From the Socialist Bloc to the European Union (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008).

37 Joanna Mytkowska, ‘Too True Scenarios’, in If It Happened Only Once, It’s as If It Never Happened, ed. Joanna Mytkowska (Ostfildern: Hatje Kantz Verlag, 2005), pp. 12–23 (p. 12).

38 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), p. 327. Elsewhere in the same book (p. 195), Žižek claims that the concept of Symbolic efficiency is ‘Lévi-Straussian’, presumably referring to the latter’s arguments in two essays: ‘The Effectiveness of Symbols’ and ‘The Sorcerer and his Magic’. See endnote 39.

39 Ibid., p. 195.

40 As Žižek writes, ‘the “nonexistence of the big Other” is strictly correlative to the notion of belief, of Symbolic trust, of credence, of taking what others say “at face value.” ’ Ibid., p. 323.

41 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), p. 19. Much of the material underpinning Bifo’s argument can be found in a more systematically elaborated form in the chapter ‘Hyperreality of floating values’ in Jean Baudrillard,Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage Publications, 1993).

42 Berardi, The Uprising, pp. 23–4.

43 Elsewhere, Berardi connects this idea to the changing nature of language acquisition, claiming somewhat hyperbolically that today ‘human beings learn more vocabulary from a machine than from their mothers’. This, he claims, weakens the affective dimensions of language and results in a situation where ‘meaning is not rooted in the depths of the body’. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (London: Verso, 2015). Berardi attributes these ideas to the work of Luisa Muraro, see L’ordine Simbolico Della Madre (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1991).

44 Berardi, The Uprising, p. 27.

45 Berardi claims that symbolist poetry prefigured the dereferentialization of finance capital. This prefiguration seems directly at odds with the task Berardi then sets poetry.

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46 Mytkowska, ‘Too True Scenarios’, in If It Happened Only Once, 12–23 (p. 12).

47 Such answers often draw inspiration from Theodor Adorno’s frequently quoted remark that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. When placed in context, Adorno’s claim is not in fact an injunction against writing poetry (or creating art) in response to historical traumas such as Auschwitz, but an injunction to create in spite of the inevitable failure of the resulting creation, to persist in failing. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 17–34 (p. 34).

48 The paragon of a ‘sensitive’ non-representational artwork that deals with the Holocaust is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), a nine-hour documentary consisting largely of interviews with camp survivors, which eschewed dramatic reconstructions and stock footage. For a discussion of non-representation as it relates to Shoah, as well as a contrasting representation in the TV miniseries Holocaust, see Rancière, ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’.

49 There are a number of other Polish artworks that demonstrate a similar approach to the Holocaust as a subject. See, for example, Zbigniew Libera’s ‘Lego concentration camp’ (mentioned above) or his ‘Positives’ (2002–3), a set of photographs that restaged historically significant works of photojournalism. For example, Positives: Residents (2002), which shows a group of people wearing dressing gowns and prison clothing smiling behind a barbed wire fence, was based on a photograph of Auschwitz survivors liberated by the Red Army in 1945. Żmijewski’s own work 80064 (2004) also caused controversy in its approach to the subject. In this piece, he cajoles an elderly Auschwitz survivor to restore the camp number tattooed on his forearm.

50 In the first installment of the project, Żmijewski enlisted hearing impaired teenagers to sing a fragment of the ‘Kyrie’ from Maklakiewicz’s Polish Mass, written in 1944. The irony of this choice is made manifest when among the cacophony of voices, Polish-speaking audiences are able to hear the lyrics ‘our voice rises to you and erupts as the sea roars from the deep abyss. O Christ, hear us! O Christ, listen to us!’

51 L. N., ‘Burning the Rainbow’, Economist, 18 November 2013, http://www. economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2013/11/poland (accessed 1 June 2018).

52 For more on the symbolism of the rainbow, see Raymond L. Lee and Alistair B. Fraser, The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth, and Science (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2001).

53 Żmijewski, Trembling Bodies, p. 29.

54 Oskar Hansen, ‘Open Form Manifesto’, in Figuration/Abstraction: Strategies for Public Sculpture in Europe 1945–1968, ed. Charlotte Benton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 272–3. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in Hansen’s work

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within the art-world leading to a number of major museum exhibitions such as ‘Oskar Hansen – Open Form’ at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), 10 July 2014–6 January 2015 (curated by Soledad Gutiérrez and Łukasz Ronduda in collaboration with Aleksandra Kędziorek).

55 Łukasz Ronduda, Michal Wolinski and Alex John Wieder, ‘Games, Actions and Interactions: Film and the Tradition of Oskar Hansen’s Open Form’, in 1,2,3 … Avant-Gardes Film/Art between Experiment and Archive, ed. Łukasz Ronduda, Florian Zeyfang (New York: Sternberg Press, 2007), pp. 88–103 (pp. 91–2).

56 Hansen, ‘Open Form Manifesto’, p. 5.

57 Ibid.

58 The group of architects known as ‘Team 10’, of which Hansen was a part, gradually distanced themselves from the orthodoxy of Le Corbusier and his followers, eventually creating a schism within the CIAM organization itself.

59 Ronduda et al., ‘Games, Actions and Interactions’, pp. 92–3.

60 In 1971, Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek collaborated with various other students at the academy of Fine Arts Warsaw on the filmOpen Form, which interpreted Hansen’s theory by means of a series of visual games and structured performances. In the same year KwieKulik, together with a number of other artists, attempted to set up a section on aesthetics at the Polish Society of Cybernetics. This resulted in a series of meetings between artists and cyberneticists, one of which involved the artists presenting their artwork Activities and Visual Games, which was then analyzed in the cybernetic vocabulary of ‘input’, ‘output’ and ‘feedback’. KwieKulik were also invited to discuss their work at Professor Stanisław Piekarczyk’s seminar in mathematics and logics at the University of Warsaw. While few other students threw themselves at the field with such enthusiasm, the efforts of KwieKulik provided a conduit for ideas associated with cybernetics to influence great number of other artists of the era. Handout accompanying the exhibition ‘Operator’s Exercises: Open Form Film & Architecture’ at Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Buell Hall, New York. 30 March 2010–7 May 2010. Curated by Łukasz Ronduda and Mark Wasiuta, ‘Operator’s Exercises’, p. 20.

61 Insofar as cybernetic principles can be retrofitted to Hansen’s theory of Open Form, these theories bear more resemblance to ideas associated with the ‘New Cybernetics’ of Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Felix Geyer and Hans van der Zouwen that emerged in the 1970s. Bailey characterizes this body of work as having a focus on ‘information as constructed and reconstructed by an individual interacting with the environment’. Kenneth D. Bailey, Sociology and the New Systems Theory: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis (New York: SUNY, 1994), p. 163.

62 Gordon Pask, ‘The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics’,Architectural Design, September 1969, 494–6 (p. 496).

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63 Żmijewski, Trembling Bodies, p. 169.

64 Ronduda et al., ‘Games, Actions and Interactions’, p. 102.

65 For further information, see Karol Sienkiewicz, ‘The Necessity of Existence: Grzegorz Kowalski and the Milieu of the Repassage Gallery in Warsaw’, Own Reality 4 (2013), 2–25 (p. 23).

66 Grzegorz Kowalski, ‘Excerpt from Sculpture Studio Programmatic Premises’ (1985), quoted in Ronduda et al., ‘Games, Actions and Interactions’, p. 103. Although the title Kowalski uses to refer to the work is ‘common space, private space’, the piece is more commonly referred to as ‘common space, individual space’, as I have done elsewhere in this chapter.

67 Artur Żmijewski, ‘[s]‌election.pl. Repetition of the Studio Exercise “Common Space, Private Space” ’, Piktogram 5/6 (2006), 128–9 (p. 128).

68 The description of this lineage as an ‘intergenerational game’ is borrowed from Michał Woliński, ‘Building Activity, Sculpting Communication’, in Open Form: Space, Interaction, and the Tradition of Oskar Hansen, ed. Axel Wieder & Florian Zeyfang (Berlin: Sternberg, 2014), pp. 18–31 (p. 30).

69 Oskar Hansen and Zofia Hansen, ‘The Open Form in Architecture – the Art of the Great Number’, in CIAM ‘59 in Otterlo, ed. Oscar Newman (Stuttgart: Karl Krämer Verlag, 1961), pp. 190–1.

70 Felicity D. Scott, ‘Future Adaptability’, in Open Form: Space, Interaction, and the Tradition of Oskar Hansen (Berlin: Sternberg, 2014), p. 35.

71 Axel Wieder, ‘Works-for-Film and Open Form’, in Open Form: Space, Interaction, and the Tradition of Oskar Hansen (Berlin: Sternberg, 2014), p. 56.

72 Żmijewski, ‘The Applied Social Arts’, pp. 13–29, originally published as ‘Stosowane Sztuki Społeczne’, Krytyka Polityczna (2007), pp. 11–12.

73 Ibid., p. 17.

74 Ibid., p. 24.

75 Żmijewski suggests this analogy is better placed to take account of art’s social effects than the metaphor of a virus, which he sees as commonplace. The distinction between the two is difficult to uphold when considered in light of ‘new cybernetics’, which frequently draws tools and conceptual models from biology.

76 Andrew Goffey, ‘Algorithm’, inSoftware Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 19.

77 Żmijewski ‘[s]‌election.pl.’, p. 129.

78 The ordinary French term modélisation‘ ’ is sometimes rendered in English using the neologism ‘modelization’ by Guattari’s translators. Here I stick to ‘modelling’, and, for the sake of consistency, opt for ‘metamodelling’ as the translation for ‘métamodellization’.

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79 Guattari writes of schizoanalysis as ‘a reading discipline of other systems of modeling. Not as a general model, but as a deciphering instrument of modeling pragmatics …’. Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–85, trans. Chet Wiener and Emily Wittman (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 205. [translation altered].

80 Félix Guattari, The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 133.

81 See the introduction of this book for a longer discussion of these two questions.

82 Guattari, The Guattari Reader, p. 133 [translation altered].

83 Ibid., pp. 124–5.

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Knots and partial enunciators

The last chapter ended with a question, borrowed from Guattari: ‘how can a de-alienated, de-serialized subject be reassembled?’ In placing the emphasis on reassembly, this chapter steps out of the wake of transgression, with its attendant strategies of shock and provocation. Here ethics shifts from being a defensive discourse that surfaces when moral infractions take place to a speculative, programmatic mode of thinking and doing. In the process, ethics exceeds the space it is allotted as a regulatory implement for managing risk and becomes entangled with broader processes of subjectivity. At the core of Guattari’s question is a conception of subjectivity as the convergence of a number of processes that can be modulated, worked and produced. While art has a role to play in this process, this chapter will take a momentary step back from the discussion of art in its institutionalized forms, and instead set out a series of basic propositions on the operations of creativity and subjectivity in their nascent states. The ambition here is not to generate a theoretical framework that explains the nature of creativity or subjectivity in general by means of a set of axioms or structural invariants but instead to gather together a collection of concepts that can be run up alongside artworks in the final two chapters of this book. The conceptual instruments for this task will be drawn from both Guattari and Lacan, in many ways unnatural bedfellows, if the paucity of scholarship

dealing with the two in combination is anything to go by.1 Academic scholarship on Lacan typically places his work on a trajectory that begins with Kant or Hegel and ends with his ‘natural inheritors’ such as Alain Badiou, Julia Kristeva or the Slovenian school. While secondary writing on Guattari is typically less sealed off, it is also much less voluminous and usually overshadowed by his compara-

tively better-known collaborator, Giles Deleuze.2 This lacuna in contemporary scholarship is neither surprising nor unjustified given that the majority of Lacan’s work to appear in English to date is drawn

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from a period of his oeuvre in which structuralist motifs take centre stage, providing few opportunities to connect with Guattari’s avowedly anti-structuralist writings. Neither is it surprising that discussions of ethics, in particular, have failed to bring the two authors into dialogue. In Lacanian scholarship, these discussions rarely stray far from Seminar VII, where arguments cohere around transgressive figures such as Sade and Antigone, who provide few bridges to Guattari’s work. And yet I would argue that a bridge is both possible and profitable if we take Lacan’s work of the mid 1970s as our primary point of reference. Here the accent shifts decisively, especially inSeminar XXIII, where James Joyce provides an example of a conceptual persona who ‘authors’ himself through an act of extra-literary composition. The concept of the sinthome that lies at the heart of this seminar names a hybrid construction that transforms the subject, and in so far as artistic production is involved in this process, it strikes at the core of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Although the word ‘ethics’ is itself nowhere to be found in Seminar XXIII, I would argue that its preoccupation with the experimental modelling of subjectivity connects it to a long tradition of creative ethical thinking and makes a good point of departure for entering the work of Guattari. The argument that Lacan and Guattari’s work shares points of common- ality, however convincing, should not gloss over the fact that insurmountable differences exist between them. For our purposes, a fundamental point of distinction lies in their respective attitudes to linguistics and semiotics. While Seminar XXIII is less dogmatic than earlier seminars, containing manifold diagrams and discussions of nomination and phonetics, work on and by Lacan remains overwhelming characterized by what Guattari described as ‘signifier fetishism’. When it comes to Seminar XXIII, this fetishism has knock-on effects insofar as it places the sinthomatic function of an artwork beyond signification, and consequently (from a Lacanian perspective) unable to bring about effects on anyone other than its creator, in this case James Joyce. It is in the endeavour to explore this ‘beyond’ that Guattari’s work becomes particularly useful. His wide- ranging discussions of the role of ‘a-signifying’ semiotics explore the potential for subjective mutations to spread by diverse means. As such, they can be used to overcome the conceptual problems that Lacan’s late work poses for a discussion of the ethics of art. A second point of difference between Lacan and Guattari concerns their respective attitudes towards psychosis, which Lacanian psychoanalysis typically

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places beyond the reach of analysis, again, partly a result of its emphasis on signifying semiotics. This criticism applies most forcefully to a view of psychosis

drawn from the early Lacan.3 Later in the course of Lacan’s work this view is taken up and reworked, particularly in Seminar XXIII, and has since been further reconceptualized under the banner of ‘ordinary psychosis’ by a number of clinical theorists associated with the World Association of Psychoanalysis. It is to this concept that the chapter will turn first of all, partly because it constitutes a direct response from some Lacanian analysts to changes in the logic of social organization linked to a ‘decline of the Symbolic’ and partly because it sets out a useful backdrop for a discussion of James Joyce, whose work Lacan discusses in the same breath as psychosis, pinpointing a number of instances in which psychic coherence threatens to break down for the author. It is in this context that the question of reassembly takes on added significance.

Psychosis in a swarm

For many contemporary readers, the concept of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ comprises one of the least appealing terms in Lacan’s work, both because of its gendered nature and its links to structuralist thinking that has since been subjected to sustained critique. The baggage the term carries might be considered ample justification for jettisoning it altogether. And yet doing so deprives us of a useful tool for thinking about psychosis, and a key indicator of how structuralism cedes to pragmatism towards the end of Lacan’s life. There’s no denying the gendered roots of a concept that makes explicit reference to the Oedipus complex. The ‘Name-of-the-Father’ first appears in the context of Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’, which involved the appropriation and formalization of pre-existing Freudian concepts. In the early 1950s Lacan exploits the homophony between le nom du père (the name of the father) and le non du père (the ‘no’ of the father) to emphasize the dual function of the father as both the one who prohibits incest in the Oedipus complex and the name that

symbolizes the Law in Freud’s myth of the primal horde.4 Lacan writes that ‘It is in the name of the father that we must recognise the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with

the figure of the law.’5 A few years later in Seminar III the concept is written ‘Name-of-the-Father’ and elevated to a fundamental structuring principle of

the Symbolic order.6 In abbreviated form, Lacan’s argument here is that in the

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Oedipus complex, the function typically fulfilled by the father is to enact a separation between the child and its mother. The child must substitute the desire of the mother for the Name-of-the-Father. This process of substitution has the effect of creating a template for all future metaphorical substitution, enabling the subject to manipulate language and ultimately produce meaning throughout their life. This developmental view of the symbolic role of the father has important implications for the theory of psychosis elaborated in Lacan’s early work. Here psychosis is characterized by a very specific attitude towards the Name-of-the- Father. Lacan labelled this attitude ‘foreclosure’. What distinguishes foreclosure from repression is that with the latter the excluded element is buried in the unconscious, while with the former it is expelled from the psychic apparatus altogether. According to Freud (from whom the term derives), with foreclosure ‘the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with its affect and behaves as if

the idea had never occurred to the ego at all’.7 With repression, on the other hand, the affect is simply displaced onto other signifiers, while the ‘idea’ is locked away in the unconscious, destined to return again as a symptom. From this brief summary it is already apparent that the difference between foreclosure and repression constitutes forked paths in the psychic life of the subject, with the Name-of-the-Father serving as a key term enabling Lacanian analysts to distinguish neurosis from psychosis. When Lacan continues to reformulate the concept of the Name-of-the-Father over the next few decades, it has knock-on effects on these two clinical categories whose stark difference becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Further reformulation is signalled in the year 1963–4 when Lacan announces

‘On the Names of the Father’ as the title of his seminar.8 In the wake of his fateful ex-communication from the International Psychoanalytical Association, the first session of this seminar also turned out to be the last. Nevertheless, here and almost a decade later in Seminar XXII, it is significant that one is no longer dealing with one Name-of-the-Father, but many. What does this shift imply? In the first place, that the name is no longer unique, and that both the Law and the Symbolic have changed as well, partially aligned with some of the arguments already discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. According to Marie-Hélène Brousse, in this period of Lacan’s work ‘there’s a change from the power of one element organizing all the other elements to the swarm implying a multiplicity of signifiers functioning together but not centralized in relation to one which

they would obey’.9

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In 1973 Lacan tests the limits of his audience’s appetite for wordplay when

he calls his seminar ‘les Non-dupes errant’.10 This can be roughly translated as ‘the non-dupes stray’, but doing so misses the homophony between les non- dupes errant and ‘les nons/noms du père’. Here ‘the non-dupes’ can be understood as those who claim to know a truth outside of discourse, thinking they have shattered its fictions and pinned the father down once and for all. As if in reply to these ‘non-dupes’, in Seminar XXIII, Lacan puts forward a confounding maxim that ‘the Name-of-the-Father … can just as well be bypassed … on the

condition one makes use of it’.11 What does this mean? In the first place, that one cannot just bypass the Name-of-the-Father and leave it at that. From a Lacanian perspective, doing so could bring about a psychotic break. The idea that one or more points of consistency need to be retained in the wake of a pluralization of the NoF does not resolve the paradox that Lacan puts forward, namely, that ‘making use of something’ excludes ‘bypassing’ it. This supports the assumption that Lacan is talking about two different Names-of-the-Father, a point confirmed by Jacques-Alain Miller, who glosses the expression in the following way: ‘One can make do without the Name-of-the-Father qua real on condition that one

makes use of it as semblant’. 12 To qualify the expression still further, it could be said that the Name-of-the-Father qua real is the principle underpinning and yet outside of the Symbolic order, as a foundation of meaning, while the Name-of- the-Father qua semblant is a constructed principle that comes to operate in its

stead as a subjective ‘repair’.13 In summary, over the course of Lacan’s work, this fundamental structuring principle of the Symbolic is progressively eroded, emptied out, until with this final formulation it is nothing more than a semblant, a construction that one ‘makes use of’. In using the concept to trace a path through Lacan’s work we get a sense of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a praxis that constantly evolves in response to wider sociocultural changes: the fallout of 1968, changes in family dynamics and the appearance of new symptoms and ‘borderline disorders’ that become difficult to categorize using pre-existing schemas. Although Lacan’s reformulations also address logical problems internal to Lacanian theory itself, it is primarily in response to such wider sociocultural changes that the concept of the Name-of- the Father’ undergoes revisions. The category of ‘ordinary psychosis’ can be seen, in part, as a continuation of this effort. Formulated on the basis of Lacan’s late work, the term was first developed by Jacques-Alain Miller to inaugurate a research programme, rather

than establishing a new nosological classification.14 If, as some Lacanians

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suggest, the power of the Name-of-the-Father to organize psychic life has been diminished, one result is a blurring of the boundary separating neurosis and psychosis, and a move away from a theory in which the former serves as a ‘wall- paper’ against which extraordinary cases of psychosis periodically emerge. To go further still, Jacques-Alain Miller has argued that one of the theoretical consequences of ordinary psychosis is a ‘generalization of psychosis’, with the implication that there has been an accompanying generalization of the mech-

anism of foreclosure.15 This follows from Lacan’s late perspective according to which ‘everyone is mad’ (‘madness’ being a term he often used to denote

psychosis).16 Despite this turn in Lacan’s work and the subsequent clinical theory it has inspired, it is important to stress that the link between the concept of ordinary psychosis and wider social change is the subject of some debate. There are some analytic theorists, such as Éric Laurent, who describe ordinary psychosis

as ‘what the psychotic subject is when the psychosis has not been triggered’.17 For others, such as Marie-Hélène Brousse, the idea cannot be accounted for on the basis of existing concepts used to describe psychosis (such as ‘triggered’ or ‘untriggered’). Ordinary psychosis is fundamentally different at the level of its relationship to society. It is ‘both clinical and political – in the sense of the

development of the dominant modalities of the social bond’.18 My own summary foregrounds these political aspects and in so doing positions the emergence of ordinary psychosis as one possible symptom of wider shifts in the operations of

power discussed in Chapters 1 and 2.19 Whether it is framed as a decline in the symbolic, or a shift from societies of discipline to those of control and integration, changes in how power functions cannot help but affect the way in which subjects are formed and deformed. For Deleuzian scholars such as Colwell and Savat, the experience of being alternately moulded into a stable self and being made into a flow or series of events is one of the key characteristics of the push

and pull of discipline and control.20 In Lacan’s work, we find a useful logical model for thinking through this push- and-pull process. As Brousse makes clear, the concept of ordinary psychosis also belies a shift in the underlying logic used to theorize psychosis: ‘As long as you are functioning in that orientation of a complete set defined by the element that is an exception to that set, psychosis is extraordinary, but when you function in

another logical model, psychosis is no longer extraordinary.’21 The first logical model Brousse refers to can be derived from Cantorian set theory, according to which a set of any given elements can only be articulated on

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the basis of one element being excluded, which comes to serve as the boundary to the set. This is equivalent to saying that there cannot be a set of all sets – or, to use Lacan’s phrase, ‘there is no Other of the Other’ (written as Ⱥ). In the theory of psychosis drawn from Lacan’s early work, the element excluded from the set is the Name-of-the-Father, and its exclusion comes to define the category of psychosis as a whole. When the Name-of-the-Father is pluralized and rendered unstable, sharply delineating ‘psychosis’ from other clinical categories becomes

more difficult.22 As we will see in the next section, it is topology that offers Lacanian psychoanalysis a second logical tool, and in particular the topology of knots. This branch of mathematics – sometimes nicknamed ‘qualitative mathematics’ – underpins what Jacques-Alain Miller and others have called ‘a differential clinic of psychosis’, providing a logic that is less black and white; less reliant on breaks

and ruptures; and more elastic, continuous and relational.23 Insofar as it makes room for the consideration of so-called borderline cases of psychosis, the use of topology has a clear clinical rationale. However, for the purpose of this discussion it can also be used to think about wider processes of subjectivation that constitute a response to the decline of the Symbolic, or a superimposition of control upon discipline. In the next section I will elaborate how topology comes into play in Lacan’s reading of James Joyce, and the ethical moment his work reveals.

Borromean Joyce

For all its wide-ranging implications, the transition from set theory to topology does not appear as a dramatic turning point in Lacan’s work. Topology periodically appears from as early as the 1950s as a means to move beyond classically hydraulic models of the psyche found in Freud. At first, figures such as the Mobius strip, the Klein bottle, the torus and the cross-cap are used to illus-

trate the structure of the subject in their relationship to language.24 From the early 1970s onwards, Lacan increasingly turns his attention to knot theory, a particular branch of topology. In both knot theory and the topology of surfaces, distance, angle, size and area are all irrelevant, the only things that count are relationships that withstand deformation. For Lacan, knot theory provides a resource for thinking through dynamic relationships in a non-representational way. As Lacan repeatedly stresses in

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Seminar XXIII, the knot is ‘forbidden to the imaginary’ and in no way does it

‘constitute a model’.25 Here ‘model’ could be understood in two senses: as a prescriptive norm, in the sense used in the last chapter, or as a descriptive second- order representation of a pre-existing object or phenomenon. Claiming that topology does not operate as a model in the second sense is a way of negating the idea that it is a simplified abstraction from reality. This does not justify the claim that ‘mathematics is ontology’ (pace Badiou) because the topology of knots is in no way ‘prior’ to the Symbolic as an ontological ground. If topology partakes in the Real more than the Symbolic, it is insofar as the Real is neither the ground

from which the latter emerges nor its secondary representation.26 In Seminar XXIII, Lacan focuses on one knot in particular, the three-ring Borromean knot (Figure 3.1), which in mathematical terms is strictly speaking

a chain.27 The significant feature of the Borromean knot is that cutting one of the three rings causes the other two to come apart. No two rings are joined to each other without reference to a third. In Seminar XX Lacan labels the rings Imaginary, Symbolic and Real, thereby emphasizing that the three orders are interdependent. As Pierre Skriabine notes, the three-ring Borromean knot already implies a fourth term, which is the knot itself.

The common measure between the three resides in the possibility of their being knotted, knotted in a Borromean manner, and the knotting, the Borromean knot, is a fourth, new entity: it is the common measure a minima, in a way the

perfect solution.28

Figure 3.1 Three-Ring Borromean Chain.

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Although the Borromean knot suggests the possibility of a ‘perfect solution’ to the problems of psychic life, this is not one that is readily available. Right from the beginning, the Lacanian subject is positioned as constitutively maladapted to the world, a stubbornly square peg in the round hole of language. When the orientation that language provides by way of a centralized, univocal NoF gives way to a plural swarm of names, the idea of a ‘perfect solution’ seems even more remote. It is for this reason that Lacan begins to introduce an explicit fourth element to the Borromean knot in Seminar XXIII. This acts as a repair, holding the other three rings together, and provides a point of orientation for the subject. This fourth element is given several names during the course of the seminar but per-

haps most consistently it is called the ‘sinthome’.29 James Joyce plays a crucial role in the elaboration of this concept since his work evidences a struggle to maintain subjective consistency that generates a creative response. Zoning in on a passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s semi-autobiographical first novel, Lacan suggests that the author suffers disturbances in relationship to his body, which are expressed in the novel using

the metaphor of a fruit being divested of its ‘soft ripe peel’.30 This phrase is used by Joyce to describe a feeling of powerlessness that Stephen, his fictional alter

ego,31 experiences after receiving a beating from two of his classmates. When Stephen is divested of this soft ripe peel, it triggers a reflection on another psychic disturbance that occurred years earlier. Here Stephen is walking through Clongowes school with his father, who wants to show him where he carved his name on a desk. Instead of his father’s inscription, Stephen sees the word ‘foetus’ roughly engraved on a desk, and this brings about a dramatic dislocation that Joyce describes as follows:

His very brain was sick and powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops. By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him. … He could scarcely recognise his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself: – I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria.

Names.32

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This passage condenses several crucial concerns ofSeminar XXIII and a number

of other themes that have since been discussed in Joycean scholarship.33 In relation to the topology of knots, Lacan uses it to isolate a way in which the Imaginary ring becomes disentangled. This can be inferred on the basis that for Lacan the Imaginary is inaugurated by the mirror stage, through which the infant first receives a sense of his or her body as a totality, and consequently the image of the body as ‘soft ripe peel’ implies the undoing of the mirror stage, the shedding of the Imaginary identification that confers identity on the body. The psycho- somatic identity afforded by the Imaginary is illusory, but it nevertheless allows the subject to keep a foothold in ‘reality’. Lacan writes the problem of this loss of Imaginary consistency topologically as follows: Throughout Seminar XXIII, Lacan repeatedly asks himself whether or not

Joyce was ‘mad’ (by which he means psychotic).34 In the absence of a spoken answer to the question, we can infer from Figure 3.2, in which a ‘slip’ causes the Imaginary ring to drift off while the Symbolic and the Real remain interlinked, that the answer is a cautious ‘yes’. But determining Joyce’s diagnostic status once and for all, I would suggest, is not the primary aim of this seminar, nor is it of particular relevance to the broader topic of this book. The significance of Joyce as an individual is less important than what his work reveals about a general psychic condition. Seminar XXIII is not exclusively devoted to Joyce’s writing, and although it periodically slips into

Figure 3.2 Unlinked Three-Ring Chain.

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psychobiography, it is decidedly not an applied psychoanalysis. The idea of a pluralization of the NoF and the subsequent implications explored through the concepts of ‘ordinary psychosis’ and ‘generalized foreclosure’ suggest that Joyce’s work can be used as a vehicle to think through the implications of a new modulation of the social bond. In other words, the turn to Joyce and topology, far from representing one last, self-indulgent adventure of a psychoanalyst whose work is renowned for its baroque style, is important on the basis that it is applicable to broader processes of subjectivation. This question as to the broader implications ofSeminar XXIII divides opinion in scholarship on this period of Lacan’s work. Some secondary commentaries advance the idea that Lacan’s use of the Borromean knot is able to account for a widespread characteristic of psychic composition today and that constructing a fourth ring of the knot is an imperative in an era characterized by a pluralization of the NoF. For others, slips such as those in Figure 3.2 emerge only in cases where a traditional (singular) Name-of-the-Father fails to occur, and additions are not an imperative for those considered to have neurotic or perverse clinical structure, according to the classical Lacanian diagnostic categories. The confusion is deepened when two opposed interpretations are put forward in the same book, albeit by different authors:

Let us use the Lacanian term sinthome in the case of psychotics who produce works of art or at least signifying structures that protect them against the devastating effects of their madness by knotting the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary, with the help of a fourth consistency, the sinthome, that can be a

work of art.35 Thesinthome – this symptom that knots together the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary – is the singular invention of the subject, and more especially so in

psychosis, since it does not use the “standard” of the Name-of-the-Father.36

In the first quote, Kaltenbeck implies that the concept of thesinthome does not apply to subjects unless they can be considered psychotic, while in the second quote, Morel claims that it is a creation of any subject, including the non- psychotic – albeit a less singular or less inventive creation. Charting a heterodox path away from both positions, it could be argued that the sinthome is but one example of what Guattari called ‘auto-modelling’, a term briefly touched upon in the last chapter, which describes a process that does not require a particular ‘clinical structure’ to guarantee the singularity of the approach. Understood as a process of auto-modelling, the sinthome serves as

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a point of differentiation that allows any subject to creatively knot themselves together in a new way. If the inter-relations between language (the Symbolic), meaning and identity (the Imaginary), and their respective ability to latch on to the Real are rendered less stable (as the figure of an untied Borromean knot suggests), then such creative additions become all the more important. In his focus on specific passages of Joyce’s work, Lacan reveals pointers to how this might be done. Again, these should not be interpreted as blueprints, templates or generally applicable models but rather singular responses to a generalized condition. In the passage from A Portrait quoted above, Stephen pulls himself back from the brink of a psychotic episode by clinging to names: to his name, his father’s name, and the name of the hotel and the city in which they are staying. Although names such as ‘Stephen’ or ‘London’ do have meanings, these rarely come into play in everyday language. In this context they serve more as signifiers-in-isolation that nominate their objects than signifiers-in- combination that derive meaning from an entire web of signification (as in

the classically Saussurian model of language).37 In this way the names invoked by Stephen straddle the Symbolic and the Real, pulling signifiers away from a fluid differential sphere of language and using them as anchoring points, or to borrow another term from Guattari, enunciators that create ‘existential territories’. Naming in this passage, therefore, has a reparative function, coming into

being in the place where the father’s name fails.38 Once again, this evokes Lacan’s suggestion that the Name-of-the-Father can be bypassed ‘on the condition one

makes use of it’.39 The repair that pulls Stephen back from the brink of psychic dissolution can be represented in a Borromean way as follows (Figure 3.3), with an addition holding all rings in relation: Tacking between Joyce and his alter-ego with irreverence, Lacan describes

the former as a ‘pure artificer … a man ofsavoir-faire ’. 40 He is a synthetic man, a ‘synth-homme’ with a prosthetic ego. What form of creation is Lacan advo- cating here? Roberto Harari argues that a distinction can be made between a ‘creationism of the signifier’ in Lacan’s early work from another form of creativity based on ‘Symbolic nomination’:

On one side there is the fiat Lux!, the act of naming something and founding it, making the Real emerge on the basis of the Symbolic; and on another, quite distinct side we have the invention of a name – both the proper name and the common noun – that attains its real through the abrogation of the identity

authorized by the code.41

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Figure 3.3 Unlinked Three-Ring Chain with Repair.

Here Harari’s claim that creative nomination can only function through ‘an abrogation of the identity authorized by a code’ again brings to mind the concept of the ‘signifier-in-isolation’. However, while the latter involves a withdrawal of the signifier from the commonly agreed circuits of meaning, what Harari has in mind is closer to the neologisms invented by Joyce. Finnegans Wake in particular contains a proliferation of obscure idiolects comprising of literally thousands of new words. This act of invention has the effect of circumventing the authority that gives recognized speech genres the appearance of stability and homogeneity. As Harari points out, ‘by foreclosing meaning that is congealed or frozen,

I am able to engender new, unprecedented meanings’.42 In Joyce’s work as elsewhere, linguistic monsters are not immediately amenable to the understanding, leading to the idea that they work at the level of a ‘modality of jouissance’ more than a mode of communication. It is on this point that we run up against one of the barriers that Seminar XXIII poses to the discussion of the ethics of art, namely, that the ‘modality of jouissance’ Lacan finds in the work of Joyce has very little chance of affecting anyone other than the author himself. As he put it in the opening address to the 1975 Joyce Symposium, ‘the symptom of Joyce is a symptom that concerns you in no respect whatsoever. It is the symptom inasmuch as it stands no chance what-

soever of hooking anything of your unconscious’.43 In Lacan’s late seminars there is a proliferation of different modes ofjouis -

sance, which have been explored in a range of secondary texts.44 Here I want to

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concentrate on just one: so-called opaque jouissance, which represents an individual ‘subjectivation’ of jouissance that is associated with the sinthome and not collectively negotiated in the usual way. Joyce’s achievement, according to Lacan, consists in creating for himself an idiosyncratic mode of jouissance that is not reliant on the Symbolic in general, and thus neither collectively negotiated nor ideologically conditioned. Opaque jouissance is opaque precisely because its dis- connection from the shared sphere of the Symbolic excludes it from meaning. It is associated with the sinthome, which, unlike the classical concept of the symptom, is not a message to be deciphered. Nevertheless, it does not seem that Lacan is claiming that the jouissance associated with the sinthome bypasses the Symbolic entirely. Joyce has a ‘cancelled subscription [désabonné] to the unconscious’, with the latter still having a primarily linguistic structure for Lacan. This implies a two-stage process: first a subscription,

then a cancellation of this subscription.45 The subscription is progressively with- drawn by stripping the sinthome of its Symbolic properties, eventually arriving at a kernel of non-sense that resists interpretation. According to this reading, after these two stages a third stage of re-inscription can begin. As in the example of Joyce, this installs a new, particularized Master-Signifier, in contrast to the ‘off-the- shelf’ solution of the Name-of-the-Father. In Seminar XXIV, Lacan claims that art, as a representative of this secondary process of re-inscription, is ‘not pre-symbolic,

but symbolic to the power of two’.46 In other words, the ‘non-sense’ embodied in Joyce’s art emerges from within sense, rather than vice versa. The theoretical position here seems problematic in several respects. When reduced to its basic elements, the interpretation makes for a rather schematic ‘three-step’ process of analysis, and the necessity of passing through the Symbolic would seem to privilege a mode of inhabiting language that is always already skewed towards neurosis, with art as a means to pass ‘beyond’ this neurosis. This begs the question of psychotics, or those on the autistic spectrum, who do not

inscribe themselves in the Symbolic to the same degree.47 Second, the ideas of a ‘kernel’ and a ‘particularized Master signifier’ (both common in Lacanian scholarship) create an image of a subjective construction that is built upon static foundations by an individual. The first term presumes an impenetrable core to the subject’s psychic structure, while the second suggests that the subjective creation coheres around a single fixed pole of organization, and one necessarily based on signification. To pre-empt a later discussion of Guattari, it is important to insist on the necessity of any fourth term being

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processual, open to constant reformulation and comprised of elements from different semiotic regimes not subsumed under one principle of organization. Before looking at how Guattari’s work helps us to expand this argument, it is worth recapitulating on some of the decisive shifts thatSeminar XXIII represents. Taking as its logical backdrop a society in which ‘foreclosure’ is generalized, the seminar marks the departure from a psychoanalytic theory based on stark oppositions between psychic structures to a differential theory based on pragmatic savoir-faire. This is broadly in line with Lacan’s witz introduced in the last section: that the Name-of-the-Father can be bypassed ‘on the condition one

makes use of it’.48 ‘Making use’ of something is a constant activity, which entails pulling elements together around points of crystallization that lend the subject just enough consistency to avoid psychic dissolution. Although not ostensibly a seminar about ethics, Lacan’s late work constitutes an exploration of how the knots of subjectivity are tied and untied through on-going acts of artistic creation. As such, it contains a series of speculative answers to the question central to creative ethics: ‘how might one live?’ The problem, for us at least, is that the fragmentary answers found in Seminar XXIII revolve around a closed relationship between an artist and his artwork, accompanied by the production of a jouissance that is ‘opaque’. Little room is left for the possibility of inter-subjective forms that do not rely upon signification, or to put it in Joyce’s words, the

‘intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators’.49

A Guattarian graft

There is no telling whether the shift to a more pragmatic approach in Lacan’s work was precipitated by an engagement with Guattari, an analyst and militant

who was once a loyal devotee.50 Nevertheless, Lacan’s late theoretical adventure overlaps with Guattari’s in interesting ways, particularly in its treatment of subjectivity as something that can be produced, or worked ‘in the sense that one

works iron’,51 rather than deciphered in order to expose its timeless structure. In a turn of phrase that recalls Lacan’s description of Joyce, Guattari emphasizes the

‘artificial and creative character of the production of subjectivity’52 and the range of heterogeneous components that make up its composition. This expanded conception of subjectivity runs through all of his theoretical works, from an early collection of essays entitled Psychoanalysis and Transversality to later monographs such as Schizoanalyic Cartographies and

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Chaosmosis (a term that Guattari borrows from none other than Joyce). In these later works much attention is given to what Guattari alternately calls the ‘ethico- aesthetic paradigm’ and the ‘new aesthetic paradigm’, both of which are opposed to the reigning scientism (be it structuralist or logico-positivist) in psychoanalysis and culture at large. Although Guattari stops short of laying the charge of scientism at Lacan’s feet directly, he regularly bemoans the extent to which models borrowed from structural linguistics underpin Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is no doubt possible to trace a path away from such linguistic models in Lacan’s late work, which contains a wider appraisal of semiotic operators than previous seminars (if we take into account concepts such as ‘lalangue’, which introduces considerations of affect into language, or indeed an argument he picks up in Seminar XXIII from Clive Hart, for whom Joyce’s last book is organized around two interlocking forms – the sphere and the cross – which determine the form of the entire book without

passing into signification).53 Nevertheless, it would seem that the promise of these openings arrives too late in Lacan’s oeuvre for their full implications to take root. As a consequence, the fact that the sinthomatic function of an artwork is placed beyond signification means that it is also rendered mute, on account of the fact that inter-subjective communication, in Lacan’s work, remains the sole preserve of signifying semiologies. Anything transmissible outside of signification is relegated to a form ofjouissance , of which Joyce’s jouissance remains ‘opaque’. Guattari saw the shortcoming of linguistic models early on, and many of his collaborative or single-authored works contain wide-ranging critiques of ‘signifier fetishism’. This critique is bolstered by some serious and sustained attempts to think through alternative semiotic models, which are articulated in a compressed form in an essay entitled ‘The Role of The Signifier in The

Institution’.54 Before expanding on this, it will first be necessary to sketch the main points of Guattari’s critique of the linguistic underpinnings of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

‘Language leaks all over the place’

The first of Guattari’s criticisms involves the infamous ‘Saussurian bar’ between the signified and signifier. For Lacan this bar acts as a one-way street, with the signifier perpetually acting on the signified in a non-reciprocal manner

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according to which ‘the word kills the thing’. For Guattari, this has the effect of petrifying the possibilities inherent in signified matter on one side of the bar and establishing a veritable ‘signifying ghetto’ on the other. Related to this critique is the claim that Lacan gave very little account of how

signifiers come into being in the first place.55 The Lacanian signifier ‘lacks onto-

logical heterogenesis’.56 As if to add grist to Guattari’s mill, Lacan was fond of quoting William Burroughs to the effect that ‘language is a virus from outer space’ – perhaps with the addendum that it destroys the possibility of finding

out which galaxy it came from.57 For Guattari it is important to think about processes of semiotization rather than any autonomous semiotic sphere: ‘the question is neither to abstract out from signified content, nor to confer on it a

separate and autonomous ontological status, but to determine its conversions’.58 A third rejoinder to Lacan concerns the relationship of signifying semiotics with capitalism, a line of analysis that has been taken up and developed by

theorists such as Berardi and Lazzarato under the banner of ‘Semiocapitalism’.59 In fact, while certain passages from Guattari’s work might suggest that capitalism derives a huge amount of power from ‘despotic signifying machines’, another prominent current in his thought (both individually and with Deleuze) emphasizes the manifold ways in which capitalism uses a-signifying semiotics – perhaps most obviously in the financial sphere, where technical apparatus, trading algorithms, financial ratings etc. act directly on flows of material and the organization of commodity chains. Whilst, on the one hand, Guattari makes a quasi-economic claim that capitalism positions the signifier ‘profit’ as the general equivalent against which everything else is measured (a ‘transcendent enunciator’), his sensitivity to the increasingly sophisticated a-signifying apparatus of capitalism shows that he is clued up to other operations taking place

beneath the surface.60 This results in a characterization of capitalism as an economic system that marshals various semiotic components at the same time, but whose ultimate coup is to integrate these components in such a way that they are ‘ordered to comply, to be accountable, to be translated/brought before the

tribunal of syntaxes, semantics and pragmatics of dominant power formations’.61 It is because psychoanalysis reinforces semiotic operators upon which dominant power formations rely that it can be said to be complicit with capitalism. Psychoanalysis’ devaluation of extra-linguistic forms of expression is also of

fundamental clinical significance to the treatment of psychosis.62 To develop a criticism made earlier, the structuralist emphasis on signifying forms is ill- adapted to the analysis of those whose orientation in the world is not primarily

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determined in relationship to signifying semiotics. As such, it requires some drastic modifications if it is to be used in what Guattari first called ‘institutional analysis’, and later schizoanalysis. It is in this context that the essay ‘The Role of The Signifier in the Institution’ should be placed; with its primary aim to pluralize the modes of semiotization that psychoanalysis takes into account so as to render them operative in institutional settings with a high proportion of psychotic patients, such as La Borde, where he worked. In formulating part of his alternative ‘general semiotics’, Guattari replaces the usual references to Saussure and Jakobsen with terms drawn from the Danish

linguist and semiotician Louis Hjelmslev.63 This is perhaps a surprising move,

given the highly structuralist character of the latter’s work.64 From the 1930s onwards, Hjelmslev and his colleagues in the Copenhagen school sought to iden- tify the algebraic structures and basic units common to all language, both actual

and potential – an endeavour they called ‘glossmatics’.65 In spite of his place in the history of structuralism, there are several reasons to make a ‘detour through Hjelmslev’ (as Guattari puts it in The Machinic Unconscious). These reasons will become clearer once some of Hjelmslev’s terms have been explained. The table which appears at the beginning of ‘The Role of the Signifier in the Institution’ (Figure 3.4) uses several terms taken directly from Hjelmslev – matter, substance, form, expression and content – which form a lattice overlaid

by a series of arrows to designate various kinds of semiotic manifestation.66 Perhaps the most fundamental distinction for Hjelmslev is that between ‘expression’ and ‘content’, which Guattari plots onto the left-hand side of his table. Some linguists have chosen to neatly map these categories onto Saussure’s

distinction between signifier and signified,67 an association that is not without justification in Hjelmslev’s own work. As one might expect, Guattari (this time with Deleuze) is quick to disagree with such interpretations, writing of the expression/content planes in A Thousand Plateaus as follows:

There is never conformity between the two, or from one to the other. There is always real independence and a real distinction; even to fit the forms together, and to determine the relations between them, requires a specific variable assem-

blage. None of these characteristics applies to the signifier-signified relation.68

The idea of a ‘variable assemblage’ between content and expression highlights the fact that the boundary between them is not simply associative, but func- tional, working as an interface of conversion.

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semiotically formed substance

matter substance form a -signifying semiotics

of expression signifying of content semiologies

a -semiotic encodings

Figure 3.4 The Role of the Signifier in the Institution. Based on a table in Félix Guattari, ‘The Role of the Signifier in the Institution’, inMolecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (London: Penguin, 1984).

The relationship between content and expression is figured as independent and yet structurally isomorphic. In other words, the planes have no correspondence with one another and yet the way in which they are organized is similar. Furthermore, while formally independent, they in fact mutually presuppose one another: there is no such thing as an expression without content or an expres- sionless content. In Hjelmslev’s words: ‘They are defined only by their mutual solidarity, and neither of them can be identified otherwise. They are each defined only oppositively and relatively, as mutually opposed functives of one and the

same function.’69 The fact that neither plane takes primacy over the other sets them apart from Saussure’s signifier/signified relation and allows Hjelmslev to claim that it should be possible to find a way of analysing expression starting

with content,70 a distinctly immanentist position that appeals to Deleuze and Guattari. As well as the two planes of expression and content, Hjelmslev elaborated three further categories: matter (or purport), substance and form. Hjelmslev described the first category as an ‘amorphous mass … which is defined only by its external functions’, and in the Prolegomena purport is likened to sand that

can be put into different moulds.71 Just as the same sand can be moulded differently and yet the underlying matter remains the same, so too can the same purport be structured differently in different languages without the purport itself

changing.72 This description of purport as something amorphous and passive- like sand again seems uncannily close to Saussure’s signified, which is perhaps why Guattari felt the need to call into question Hjelmslev’s description. In The

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Machinic Unconscious, he writes that ‘sense is by no means an “amorphous mass” … waiting upon an external formalism that would come to animate it. … [It] is manifested across a spatial, temporal, substantial, multidimensional, and deictic rhizome in the midst of which it operates every possible transmigration, every

transmutation’.73 Even if this is not true for Hjelmslev, for Guattari matter is a fundamentally active and intensive realm, and of all the categories in the table it is perhaps the closest to the Lacanian Real, insofar as the latter is conceptualized as a realm of imminent causality. The two remaining categories in the table, form and substance, are fundamentally relational terms, insofar as substance only exists as the formalization of matter (or purport). Hjelmslev famously describes substance as appearing ‘by the form’s being projected on to the purport, just as an open net casts its shadow

down on an undivided surface’.74 As this quote implies, forms are like the strings of a net, holding each other in place in an expansive web of language. This net groups undefined multiplicities into semiological ‘sets’ of specific languages or conceptual systems. This is true on the content plane as well as the expression plane, and one could feasibly speak of a ‘zoological set’ of animals (such as marsupials) as it pertains to content, as well as a ‘signifying set’ of semaphore signals as they pertain to expression. In fact, forms cannot really be said to exist independently of this grouping function. Their existence fundamentally depends on being put into action, making and unmaking words and things with unformed purport. This basic summary of some of the terms that Guattari appropriates from Hjemslev already paints the picture of a semiotic model better equipped to take

account of non-linguistic forms.75 What is of particular interest for the purposes of our argument, however, is not the terms themselves, but the lines and labels that traverse the six squares of the table designating different semiotic and a-semiotic systems. For Guattari the small oval shaded grey represents the ‘signifying ghetto’ of

the Lacanian Symbolic.76 Its centre of gravity is at the dividing line between the two axes of form-substance and expression-content, and it involves the formalization of various types of substance, from linguistic expression to Morse code. Signifying semiologies can be further divided into ‘symbolic semiologies’ and ‘semiologies of signification’. The former employ such substances as gesture, mime, tattoos, insignia etc. while the latter are ‘centred upon a single signifying

substance’ – linguistic expression. 77 All the semiotic forms in this sphere are

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‘structured like a language’ and ‘other poly-centered semiotic substances become

dependent upon a single specific stratum of the signifier’.78 To provide a concrete example of this reduction at work, it is enough to turn to an artwork by Lawrence Abu Hamdan entitled Conflicted Phonemes (2012). The piece highlights immigration authorities’ use of accent and language tests, which attempt to determine the validity of an asylum claim solely on the basis of

whether the claimant’s accent matches the place they say they have come from.79 Once their claim has been rejected, the asylum seeker is unable to dispute the ruling. Made as an outcome of collaborative workshops with rejected claimants in Holland, one of the resulting diagrams (Figure 3.5) shows just how plural and complex a person’s linguistic profile often is, resulting from all manner of personal encounters and material influences. This is intended to directly contrast with the categorical link between accent and territory that the state seeks to establish, which has the effect of converting heterogeneous semiotic substances, such as accent and intonation into the all-important signifier of origin (e.g. Somalia). The driving force of Hamdan’s maps is to offer the rejected/silenced asylum seeker an alternative and non-vocal mode of contestation, thereby bringing about an ever so slight deterritorialization of semiologies of signification to incorporate symbolic semiologies. Put otherwise, the maps serve to illustrate Guattari’s point that ‘language leaks all over the place’, its relationship to the

social field cannot be rationalized objectively and reduced to a pin on a map.80 At the other extreme are a-semiotic encodings, which operate independently of substance, connecting purport with form directly. The most obvious example of this is DNA, but one could also speak of chemical compounds more generally, hormones, enzymes, psycho-active substances and so on. Strictly speaking, such formalizations of material intensities are untranslatable, and yet Guattari does highlight the example of pharmacological substances sometimes being made to serve signifying semiologies, as well as the dictates of profit more generally. This becomes immediately clear when consideration is given to such endeavours as the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM) produced regularly by the American Psychiatric Association, which sets out diagnostic criteria in neat arboreal arrangements that determine the eventual prescription of pharmaceutical drugs. An additional feature of semiotic encodings is that they operate independently of the division between expression and content. To paraphrase Marshal McLuhan, it could be said that in such cases the matter is the message. DNA triggers all manner of complex sequences of cause and effect, but it does so

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1 2

8 [SOM] [SOM]

[SOM] [SOM - BEN] [YNM]

[ENG] 3 [YMM]

[ENG] [DUT] [SOM] 7 4

[DUT][ENG]

6 5

PERSON SPOKEN PERSON SPOKEN TO [SOM] STANDARD SOMALI [SOM - BEN] BENAADIR (SOMALIA) [YNM] MAAY (SOMALIA) [ENG] ENGLISH [DUT] DUTCH REFUGEES/ASYLUM SEEKERS IN SOMALIA: IN THE NETHERLANDS: 1 MOTHER 2 FATHER 7 EGYPTIANS 3 SOMALI & ENGLISH TEACHER IRAQI 4 FELLOW PUPIL FROM LIBYANS Part C (voice mapping) of CONFLICATED PHONICES Lawrence Abu Handam & Janna Ulrich NTM SOMALIA SYRIANS Utrecht. 2012 IN THE NETHERLANDS: TUNISIANS 5 DUTCH (ARRIYAL IN NL) 8 SOMALI Commissioned by Casco - Office for Art. Design and 6 DUTCH (CURRENTLY) Theory in collaboration with Stichting LOS

Figure 3.5 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Conflicted Phonemes (2013). Detail. Digital print. © Courtesy: The artist and Maureen Paley, London.

independently of representation. For this reason a-semiotic forms are by definition untranslatable into signifying semiotics. Their instrumentalization at the hands of the latter, which under capitalism ultimately results in their sub- jection to the dictates of profit (as the pharmaceutical example readily attests), constitutes more of an overcoding than a translation.

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Over and above such a-semiotic encodings, Guattari holds out the most hope for the third and final form of semiotic manifestation: ‘a-signifying semiotics’. Examples of these include musical notation, mathematics and computer code. In each of these instances, signs and things have the capacity to connect directly, without recourse to representational paradigms. These forms are ‘flush with the

r e a l ’. 81 And yet just as a-semiotic encodings have the potential to be operated by signifying semiologies, so too can a-signifying semiotics influence signification. In a phrase that recalls Lacan’s description of art as ‘symbolic to the power

of two’, Guattari describes this semiotic form as ‘post-signifying’.82 A-signifying semiotics ‘remain based on signifying semiotics, but no longer use them as

anything but a tool, an instrument of semiotic de-territorialization’.83 In other words, a-signifying semiotics have the capacity to creatively retool signifying semiotics. To borrow a term from Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work we will turn to shortly, a-signifying semiotics ‘polophonize’ signifying semiotics, steering them away from any general equivalent and onto singular, and singularizing paths. This is as true in visual art as it is in literature. A huge variety of a-signifying forms traverse the works of Joyce, one example of which can be seen in the influ-

ence of musical techniques and notation on Ulysses.84 Elsewhere, Guattari associates a-semiotic forms with a ‘diagrammatic’ function. To grasp this point it is important to distance Guattari’s sense of the ‘diagram’ from its quotidian meaning. A graphic table such as Figure 3.5 could serve a diagrammatic function or it could not. This is equally true of algorithms, or algebraic equations. What is important is not its visual ‘diagrammatic’ appearance but its generative properties. The function of a diagram is ‘not to denote or to image the morphemes of an already constituted referent, but

to produce them’.85 It does this by forging a two-way bridge between form and matter, short-circuiting representation and providing vectors for subjectivity in

the process.86 With the diagram we arrive at a concept that captures a form of creativity in its nascent state; making models that take signification as their only point of reference seem overly restrictive by comparison. Nevertheless, it is important to resist the temptation to elevate the concept to a universal panacea able to both reform psychoanalysis and corrode capitalist systems from within. There is nothing inherently oppositional about diagrammatism, as Guattari points out, ‘diagrammatic assemblages already exist everywhere in capitalist societies: they

constitute the very motor of their semiotic potential’.87 What is important is the way in which the creativity embodied in the diagrammatic function is channelled

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in such a way to ‘mobilise a sort of molecular semiotic energy’and disrupt strati-

fied systems.88 If channelled in this way, diagrams can have a powerful existential dimension, assembling a new type of reality. It is the twin creative and existential dimensions of Guattari’s diagrammatic function that have most relevance to the concept of the sinthome. Indeed, topology is even characterized as a creative means of ‘fabricating the real’ by

Guattari,89 as long as it is not used to shore up universal paradigms. I would suggest that the concept of the sinthome has a power that is precisely diagrammatic in Guattari’s sense. Not because it is ‘diagrammed’ visually using topological figures. Rather, it is in its capacity to traverse diverse semiotic strata, from mathematical notation to the writing of Joyce (which is distinctly poly-semiotic in its own right) and account for the existential function of an artwork, that the sinthome can be viewed in this way. If this seminar is read against the grain of some contemporary Lacanians, and the temptation to position the mathematical elements as an ontological ground supporting other theoretical elaborations is resisted, it is possible to see that topology, and the Borromean knot in particular, serves a highly creative and diagrammatic function that has the capacity to feed back into the production of subjectivity. The advantage of framing the sinthome in this way is not simply to expose disavowed connections between the two thinkers. Rather, Guattari’s concept of the diagram and the mixed semiotic theories from which it emerges allows us to account for modes of subjectivation ‘that by rights cease to be attributable

to individuated persons’.90 In other words, by making a Guattarian graft we are able to account for the fact that the sinthomatic function is not restricted to a closed dyad between Joyce and his writing simply because it takes place outside of signification. The sinthome is not individualized, particularized or opaque, it is crossed by diverse material and semiotic flows that have the capacity to carry their existential function far and wide.

Existential pragmatics and the production of subjectivity

Guattari’s concept of the diagram enables us to see that his programme is not only to pluralize the semiotic models available to psychoanalysis but also to show that such pluralism has a distinct existential function – that it can produce a Real. This existential function is a central component of the ethico-aesthetic paradigm, which will be discussed in the concluding section of this chapter.

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The key point that warrants the word ‘existential’ is Guattari’s assertion that the activity of enunciation has certain effects that bear on the production of subjectivity. In a passage from one of his seminars, Guattari argues that existential pragmatics involves the ‘ontological singularities of the self-appropriation of the

self, the singularities of self-consciousness’.91 The idea of a ‘self-appropriation of the self’ represents a curious conceptual figure that seems to take inspiration from similar process of auto-affection in

Spinoza’s Ethics.92 For Guattari it is a way of describing the activity of enunciation that continually returns back to the subject, giving consistency to an existential singularity in the process. This singularity is ‘incorporeal’ insofar as it cannot be reduced to the biological or cognitive existence of the subject. As Guattari puts it in the same seminar, what is at stake is a ‘transitional subject-

ivity that produces itself within its own movement’.93 This is radically opposed to ontological formulations that take existence as something fixed from the outset that progressively unfolds and manifests itself in the world. Here existence is constituted by the very act of unfolding. As one might expect, for Guattari, ‘the activity of enunciation’ does not simply refer to the activity of speech and signification. Enunciation takes place across a range of strata, encompassing everything from utterances, gestures, glances, transactions or indeed anything that constitutes an action in the world. Guattari’s existential pragmatics involves all of these signifying and a-signifying forms, and accounts for a heterogeneous range of components that feed into the production of subjectivity. Among the many components that Guattari maps are ‘individuals, groups and institutions’, ‘technological machines of information and communication’

as well as ‘scriptural, vocal, musical or plastic discursivities’.94 These components work in concert to form ‘universes of reference’ that interact with the subject

in a constant and reciprocal manner.95 For Guattari, schizoanalysis is about the ‘co-management’ of the production of subjectivity, which could involve making all manner of subtle changes to the subject’s material and semiotic milieu. Guattari viewed institutions of all kinds as ‘assemblages of subjectivation’ where such subtle changes could take place, for better or worse. For example, in the La Borde clinic where he worked most of his life, Guattari and his colleagues instituted ‘la Grille’ – a rotation system that required doctors, patients and other staff to exchange tasks in the day-to-day running of the clinic, thereby allowing frozen subjective positions to thaw and institutionally sanctioned power to cir- culate more freely.

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Institutions often constitute major junctions where diverse components cross and conjoin to produce subjectivity. To draw a useful, albeit artificial, line between different kinds of components, we could distinguish between those that operate at an ‘infra-individual’ (or molecular) level and those that work on a ‘supra-individual’ level. To demonstrate the supra-individual level of subjectivity, it is enough to cite Guattari’s early opposition between ‘subject groups’ and ‘subjugated groups’, which is loosely based on Sartre’s distinction between ‘serial being’ and ‘groups

in fusion’.96 A subjugated group finds the principle of its unity outside of itself, with each of its elements relating to one another through this external referent, whereas a subject group interiorizes its principle of unity, steering it towards its own purposes. Although references to Sartre gradually disappear from Guattari’s work, echoes of this line of thought (as well as Marx) can be heard in

Guattari’s rallying call to seize the ‘means of production of subjectivity’.97 Such a seizure might enable new collective subjects to form along unpredictable paths of singularization. One of the pre-personal elements in the production of subjectivity involves ‘pathic apprehension’ that exists before, and then parallel to, the subject–object relation. In Schizoanalytic Cartographies, pathic categories are figured as ‘existential filters’ that organize the ‘primordial soup of the plane of

immanence’.98 They constitute a kind of preconceptual apprehension of phenomena – a form of proto-subjectivity that is unrelated to ego or identificatory formations. To make this argument, Guattari draws on the distinction made by the German physician and philosopher Viktor von Weizsäcker between pathic categories and ontic categories. As the label implies, ‘ontic’ categories relate to being and can include such relations as ‘time, space, numbers and

causality’.99 Von Weizsäcker links pathic categories to such modal verbs as ‘can’, ‘will’ and ‘ought’, which embody processes that are undergone, expressing movement, desire or obligation. Movement and response imply a minimal level of subjectivity for von Weizsäcker. This may be as simple as the reflex reaction in a Venus flytrap or anything that changes in response to its environment. As von Weizsäcker points out, it is simply ‘the dualism of percep-

tion and movement that implies the introduction of a subject in biology’.100 This level of pre-personal subjectivity should not be seen as a pre-condition to group subjectivity. A more global shift in subjective forms might feasibly change subjectivity at a pathic level. A change in the fly population as a result

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of human behaviour might require Venus flytraps to react faster or develop larger trigger hairs, and vice-versa. The specific role accorded to art in the production of subjectivity lies some- where between these two poles. In Chaosmosis, Guattari describes art as having

a catalytic function in the production of subjectivity.101 Artworks or parts of artworks are variously described as ‘vectors of subjectivation’ or ‘nuclei of dif-

ferentiation’.102 Understood in its widest sense as creative output, art has the capacity to launch somebody or something on a new subjective trajectory. But how, exactly, does it fulfil such a lofty function? Guattari is clear that it is ‘not through representation, but through affective contamination. They [aesthetic

assemblages] start to exist in you, in spite of you’.103 In the phrase ‘in you, in

spite of you’ the reverberations of Lacanian theory can be felt.104 Elsewhere Guattari makes this link explicit, calling for an expansion of the psychoanalytic concept of the ‘part-object’ to account for all the channels that flow into the production of subjectivity, an ambition he sees Bakhtin’s work as partially

realizing.105 For Freud, part-objects are objects that occupy a position extraneous to the infant’s body but which nevertheless play a role in his or her subjective develop-

ment. 106 The key examples are the breast (which became particularly important for Kleinian psychoanalysis) and the faeces. Some years later Lacan would shift the emphasis away from the breast as the pre-eminent part-object and expand the list to incorporate the gaze and the voice. With this move the concept of the part-object already starts to loosen from its moorings. Whereas Freud’s original usage links it to an instinctual dive – to eat, to shit – Lacan’s additions are more closely linked to desire and eventually to the object of desire itself – object a – the place of which can feasibly be occupied by any object. Guattari whole- heartedly approves of this expanded part-object, calling for it to be followed

up even further.107 The cost of not doing so would be to relegate such objects to ‘normative landmarks’ on a road to the generic subjective state of ‘oblative

genality’.108 According to Guattari, Kleinian and Lacanian analysts situated the part-object or transitional object at ‘the junction of a subjectivity and an alterity which are themselves partial and transitional … they never removed it from a causalist, pulsional infrastructure: they never conferred it with the multivalent dimensions of an existential Territory or with a machinic creativity of boundless

potential’.109 Guattari’s name for a new, expanded part-object that redresses this deficiency is ‘partial enunciator’, and to add theoretical scaffolding to the concept he draws on the early work of Mikhail Bakhtin.

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Bakhtin’s writing is situated in a different context to many of the theorists discussed thus far, and it is a distinguishing feature of Guattari’s work that he is able to borrow from such diverse sources. In his early work, Bakhtin positions himself against the formalism that dominated Russian art theory in the early twentieth century, which sought to establish the primacy of the material in the interpretation and analysis of works of art, taking in such considerations as scale,

texture or shape.110 In contrast, he insists that an aesthetic object is irreducible to its material composition:

The aesthetic component … is neither a concept, nor a word, nor a visual representation, but a distinctive aesthetic formation which is realized in poetry with the help of the word, and in the visual arts – with the help of visually apprehended material, but which does not coincide anywhere with any material

combination.111

On this basis, Bakhtin asks himself how aesthetic form, while necessarily dependent on material combinations, manages to spill over its material con-

tainer to become ‘the form of content’.112 A straightforward psychologistic answer to this question might try to account for the aesthetic component of a work of art as a subjective projection of the human mind. For Bakhtin this is only partially what is going on. While in this essay, and in much of his work, he grants the spectator a decisively active role in the ‘co-creation’ of a work of art, for Bakhtin an artwork’s significance cannot simply be put down to an aesthetic projection. Rather, he seeks to account for a process of aesthetic contemplation that gives the spectator a feeling of his or her own subjectivity joining with an object in a moment of ‘co-creation’, which, in turn, reveals the aesthetic form

that made this creative moment possible.113 Modes of contemplation that do not pass through this circuit of creative contemplation are described as ‘cognitive’, rather than aesthetic thinking. Only through entering into the form as a co-creator, and by consciously experiencing this process, does aesthetic contemplation become possible. Before any of this can happen Bakhtin asserts that the work first of all needs to be detached from ‘the unity of nature and the unity of the ethical event of

being’.114 This is not a typical autonomist argument, wherebyonly the artwork itself should be taken into consideration in the study or contemplation of art, because as Bakhtin makes clear, passing from a cognitive to an aesthetic mode of contemplation does not wipe the slate clean. Contextual information, biographical details of the artist or knowledge about the object’s production may all be retained by the viewer and may even comprise part of the newly detached

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aesthetic object itself. Isolation of the aesthetic form is what finally cleaves it from its material substrate, opening it to subjective input: ‘Isolation is … the negative condition of the personal, subjective (not psychologically subjective) character of form; it allows the author creator to become a constitutive moment

in form.’115 Bakhtin’s account of the extra-material dimensions of aesthetic objects chimes with the extra-material significance placed on part-objects in psychoanalysis. From a Kleinian perspective, a breast is not simply a body part or a potential source of nourishment; it plays an active role in the formation of the subject. For Guattari, Bakhtin’s achievement was not only to extend the notion of the part-object (without having recourse to psychoanalysis itself) but also to discuss it outside of any normative model of psychogenetic development or the circuits of the ‘component drives’. When passages from Bakhtin that speak of the artwork as ‘a segment of the unitary open event of being’ are considered, the potential for a Lacanian-inflected interpretation becomes clear. Guattari makes this connection vivid and immediate, writing that aesthetic perception and artistic creation ‘detach and deterritorialise a segment of the real’ effectuating a

‘complex ontological crystallization’.116

Aesthetics everywhere

Guattari’s appeal to Bakhtin knocks the discussion back into the court of art, but only for the ball to rebound again elsewhere. As Maurizio Lazzarto has pointed out, what distinguishes Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm from similar theoretical projects, such as Foucault’s turn to ethics in the last decade of his life, is that it draws its models not from religious techniques or philosophical traditions

but from artistic practice.117 These models are then invested with the power to migrate well beyond the sphere of art, constituting key components of a broader ethico-aesthetic paradigm that can challenge the rule of ‘scientism’, with its emphasis on structure, universalism and linear causality. The significance of aesthetics does not only emerge from Guattari’s semiotic pluralism, which makes it possible to see how non-linguistic enunciations feed into the production of subjectivity. It accounts for the existential force these enunciations carry. Here aesthetics captures an operation of creativity in its germinal form as a process that produces a subject and a milieu simultaneously. It is this existential dynamic that marks Guattari’s project as fundamentally an

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ethico-aesthetics, insofar as it concerns the creative unfolding of a life in reciprocal dialogue with the world. It is difficult to imagine a confluence of ethics and aesthetics more different from those discussed in the first chapter of this book. The tendency to focus on laws and their infraction, shock and outrage, sin and atonement here recedes far into the background. This is not to say that these subjects are invisible from the new vantage point. They can still be approached, but like the recoding of previous scientific discoveries in Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, they take on a totally different significance. Instead of discharging an electric shock, revealing a line of force that was hitherto accepted as a given, transgression takes on a new set of valences. From the perspective of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm ‘after’ transgression, transgressive artworks constitute particular assemblages of enunciation that, almost despite themselves, create existential territories and have the power to produce individual and collective subjects. In the development of Lacan’s seminars we walk a winding path away from figures such as Antigone and Sade, for whom the law and its transgression are central in different ways, and find ourselves wandering in the thicket of Joyce’s writing. This late theoretical adventure generates the key concept of the sinthome, a subjective construction that is both pragmatic and experimental, singular and synthetic, and which marks a paradigm shift from an ethico- aesthetics predicated on transgression to another focused on subjectivation. Taking this seminar as our point of departure, and reading it against the grain of some contemporary Lacanians, it is possible to see the grounds for a rapprochement between Lacan and Guattari. They each develop a tradition of ethical thinking that focuses on the creative question ‘how might one live?’ where life, existence and subjectivity are not given once and for all, but assembled in and through acts of enunciation. Lacan’s late focus on the topology of knots is an attempt to diagram specific transformations in subjectivity. When coupled with Guattari’s uniquely inventive semiotics, and his theorization of art as the realm of ‘partial enunciators’, we find ourselves well stocked with tools to think through the production of subjectivity in concrete artworks.

Notes

1 For further details, see endnote 26 accompanying the introduction.

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2 One of the few books to redress this imbalance between Deleuze scholarship and work on Guattari is Eric Alliez and Andrew Goffey eds,The Guattari Effect (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

3 The theory of psychosis in Lacan’s early work centres around the essay ‘On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’, in Écrits, p. 445–88 as well as The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses. 1955–1956, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993).

4 ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, inÉcrits, 197–268.

5 Lacan, Écrits, p. 230. The reference here is to Freud’s myth of the primal horde in Sigmund Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 13 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 1–162.

6 In recasting the term in a more structuralist light, Lacan moves away from the idea that it is necessarily the physical father who names or lays down the law in the family. Here and elsewhere the father is simply a function, rather than a person.

7 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’, inThe Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 3 (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), pp. 45–61 (p. 58). ‘Foreclosure’ is derived from the term ‘verwerfung’ used by Freud.

8 Jacques Lacan, On the Names of the Father, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).

9 Marie-Hélène Brousse, ‘Ordinary Psychosis in the Light of Lacan’s Theory of Discourse’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 26 (2013), 23–33 (p. 26). The notion of the master as a ‘swarm’ is already present in Seminar XVII, when Lacan pronounces his algebraic symbol for the master signifier, S1, as l’essaim [swarm]. See Lacan, Seminar XVII.

10 This could also be interpreted to pun on the English ‘parents’, both pluralizing the locus of power, and further evening out its gender bias.

11 Lacan, Seminar XXIII, p. 116.

12 Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent, ‘The Other Who Does Not Exist and His Ethical Committees’, Almanac of Psychoanalysis, 1 (1998), p. 19. [my italics].

13 An additional point of reference here can be found in Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of transgression in Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (Montréal: New World Perspectives, 1990), where he seeks to distinguish the law from the rule, writing of the latter that ‘One neither believes nor disbelieves a rule – one observes it. The diffuse sphere of belief, the need for credibility that encompasses the real, is dissolved in the game. Hence their immorality: to proceed without believing in it, to sanction a direct fascination with the conventional signs and groundless rules.’

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(p. 133). Factoring in this description, the Name-of-the-Father qua semblant could be considered closer in form to a rule than a law.

14 The term emerged from a series of conferences that took place in Angers, Arcachon and Antibbes between 1996 and 1998. Extracts from the second event have been published as Jacques-Alain Miller and others, ‘The Conversation of Arcachon (Extracts)’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 26 (2013), 61–81. An extensive clinical discussion of the concept has also been published in Jonathan D. Redmond, Ordinary Psychosis and the Body: A Contemporary Lacanian Approach (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

15 Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Ordinary Psychosis Revisited’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 26 (2013), 33–51 (p. 45).

16 Lacan’s position in 1978, from an article translated into English as Jacques Lacan, ‘There Are Four Discourses’,Culture/Clinic, 1 (2013), 1–3 (p. 1). The subtleties of this proposition are addressed in a number of articles in the same journal issue, most extensively in Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Everyone is Mad’, Culture/Clinic, 1 (2013), 17–42.

17 Éric Laurent, ‘Psychosis, or a Radical Belief in the Symptom’, Hurly Burly: The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis, 8 (October 2012), p. 249.

18 Brousse, ‘Ordinary Psychosis’, p. 25.

19 For many readers the political dimensions of ordinary psychosis will evoke Deleuze and Guattari’s reflections on the deterritorializing force of capitalism in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. In Anti-Oedipus, for example, they claim that capitalism works through an ‘axiomatic of decoded flows’ (p. 208), and more specifically ‘decoded flows of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labour in the form of “free worker” ’ (p. 47). Just as the concept of ordinary psychosis elaborated in this chapter is linked to a wider decline of the Symbolic under capitalism, for Deleuze and Guattari the deterritorializing force of the latter has schizophrenia as its psychic corollary, which in Anti-Oedipus is positioned as the ‘malady of our era’ (p. 48). Another point of correspondence between the Lacanian inflected approach used here and an approach inspired by Capitalism and Schizophrenia concerns the transformation of language, which under capitalism ‘no longer signifiers something that must be believed, it indicates rather what is going to be done’ (p. 288). This point almost directly echoes the notion of a ‘decline of Symbolic efficiency’ elaborated inChapter 2 , and the idea that language can be transformed from a medium of psychic investment that solicits belief to a command mechanism that has pragmatic effects hints at an influence of cybernetics on Deleuze and Guattari’s thought.

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20 C. Colwell, ‘Discipline and Control: Butler and Deleuze on Individuality and Dividuality’, Philosophy Today 40, no. 1 (1996), 211–16, p. 216; Savat, ‘Deleuze’s Objectile’, pp. 58–9.

21 Brousse, ‘Ordinary Psychosis in the Light of Lacan’s Theory of Discourse’, p. 27.

22 As has rightly been pointed out in criticisms of the work of Alain Badiou, logical models derived from Cantorian set theory are fundamentally blind to how different elements within the set relate to each other. See Think Again: Alain Badiou and The Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum, 2004). For Badiou, non-denumerable or qualitative relations are continually reduced to quantitative elements (a situation) or characterized as what a situation excludes (a void). This tends towards a model that privileges rupture, in which novelty can only come about when ‘a truth punches a hole in knowledge’ (a phrase Badiou derives from Lacan), with knowledge being figured as what can be counted. Badiou,Ethics , p. 70.

23 Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘A Contribution of the Schizophrenic to the Psychoanalytic Clinic’, Symptom, 2 (2002), http://www.lacan.com/contributionf.htm (accessed 1 June 2018). Pierre-Gilles Guéguen, ‘Who Is Mad and Who Is Not?: On Differential Diagnosis in Psychoanalysis’, Culture/Clinic, 1 (2013), 66–85.

24 To take one example, just as the torus’ centre of gravity lies outside of its volume, for Lacan the subject is fundamentally decentred. It is nowhere to be found within the confines of a biological body, it is rather an effect of the signification process. This point is encapsulated in the neologism ‘extimacy’, showing that the most intimate kernel of the subject is in fact external to its biological body.

25 Lacan, Seminar XXIII, pp. 22, 30.

26 This much can be inferred from Lacan’s comments inSeminar XXII when he posits that the Borromean knot is ‘a writing that supports a Real’. If the Real were indeed the ontological ground upon which everything else rests, then it would have no recourse for support from elsewhere. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXII: R. S. I. 1974–1975 (unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher), p. 24 (17 December 1974).

27 The Borromean knot has three elements. In mathematical theory, a ‘knot’ can only have one.

28 Pierre Skriabine, ‘The Clinic of the Borromean Knot’, inLacan: Topologically Speaking, ed. b Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic (New York: Other Press, 2004) pp. 249–67 (p. 253).

29 Even without taking into account the other labels Lacan uses, the word sinthome itself has several meanings. It puns on ‘synth-homme’ to suggest a kind of self- creation that produces a synthetic man, ‘saint homme’ to describe Joyce as an exemplary case, and even ‘st. thom’, a reference to Thomas Aquinas, a catholic thinker whose aesthetic theory exerted considerable influence on the young Joyce.

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30 Lacan, Seminar XXIII, pp. 128–9.

31 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 93. Here it is necessary to avoid eliding the author with his literary avatar, a mistake that Lacan himself makes in Seminar XXIII. Important differences exist between the two, and despite the autobiographical dimensions of The Portrait, the reader is nevertheless dealing with a distorted (self)representation of the author.

32 Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, pp. 104–5. Stephen’s experience of disorientation in this passage has relevance to the argument made in Chapter 1, and the fact that he reorientates himself by primarily Symbolic means (a list of proper names and geographical locations), further supports the claims made in the earlier chapter for the link between a decline in the Symbolic and a rise in disorientation.

33 For example, see Luke Thurston,James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), particularly chapter 6: ‘God’s Real Name’ for a commentary on the significance of the term ‘foetus’ in Joyce’s work.

34 Lacan, Seminar XXIII, p. 71.

35 Franz Kaltenbeck, ‘Sublimation and Symptom’, in Art: Sublimation or Symptom, ed. Parveen Adams (New York: Karnac, 2003), pp. 103–22 (p. 117).

36 Genevieve Morel, ‘A Young Man Without an Ego: A Study on James Joyce and the Mirror Stage’, in Art: Sublimation or Symptom, pp. 123–46 (p. 141).

37 I have borrowed the terms ‘signifier-in-isolation’ and ‘signifier-in-combination’ from Tom Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the Real (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Eyers make the important point that ‘the signifier-in-isolation and signifier-in-relation should be considered as potential “states” for any signifier, rather than as different signifiers or fundamentally different modalities of signification’ (p. 38).

38 Lacan’s preoccupation with the issue of naming seems to have stemmed from his reading Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981) which is alluded to in Seminar XXI, p. 49 (11 December 1973), and Seminar XXII, p. 44 (11 March 1975). Coining the term ‘ridged designators’, Kripke claimed that proper names refer to their object in a direct fashion, without having recourse to description.

39 Lacan, Seminar XXIII, p. 116.

40 Ibid., p. 99.

41 Roberto Harari, How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan (New York: Other Press, 2002), pp. 346–7.

42 Ibid., p. 301.

43 Lacan, Semimar XXIII, p. 145 (transcript of Lacan’s opening address to the 5th International Joyce Symposium, 16 June 1975).

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44 See Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Paradigms of Jouissance’, Lacanian Ink, 17 (2000), 8–47, or the final chapter of Lorenzo Chiesa,Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007).

45 Lacan, Semimar XXIII, p. 146 (transcript of Lacan’s opening address to the 5th International Joyce Symposium, 16 June 1975).

46 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIV: L’insu que sait… 1976– 1977 (unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher), p. 58 (18 January 1977).

47 It could equally be said that psychotic subjects have something of a head start in this process. This is the point that Phillip Dravers has made with regard to Joyce, whose probable psychosis – untriggered or otherwise – means for Dravers that there is no need for him to traverse his fantasy, but does introduce an added imperative to create for himself a particularized master signifier. Phillip Dravers, ‘In the Wake of Interpretation: “The Letter! The Litter!” or “Where in the Waste is the Wisdom” ’, in Re-Inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan, ed. Luke Thurston (New York: Other Press, 2002), pp. 141–6.

48 Lacan, Seminar XXIII, p. 116.

49 James Joyce, The Restored Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin Classics, 2012), p. 214.

50 As François Dosse writes, ‘Lacan considered Guattari to be a brilliant young intellectual and raised his hopes of becoming the preferred interlocutor of the guru of the Parisian scene, and Guattari was dismayed to watch the Maoist group around Jacques-Alain Miller gain favor with Lacan.’ Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 71.

51 Félix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 20.

52 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 8.

53 Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962). Lacan is quick to see in the interlocking figures of the sphere and the cross another way of writing the Borromean knot, in which the cross, when its points are extended to infinity, essentially serves the same function as two interlocking circles would, in effect containing the third circle by locking it into position. Another stepping stone on Lacan’s path away from semiotics of signification arrives inSeminar XXI, when the psychoanalyst uncharacteristically describes his elaboration of the link between two signifiers in his early Saussurian inflected essay ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’ as ‘an error’. See Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXI: Les Non Dupes Errent (Unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher), p. 50 (11 December 1973).

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54 Félix Guattari, ‘The Role of the Signifier in the Institution’, inMolecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London: Penguin, 1984), pp. 73–81.

55 While generally true, there are exceptions to these characterizations of Lacan’s work. As Watson points out in Guattari’s Diagrammatic thought, Lacan’s very early seminars give a cursory account of ‘sign-particles’ that serve as pre-signifying semiotic units.

56 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 39.

57 William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 112.

58 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, p. 163.

59 See, for example, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (New York: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 21, and Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014).

60 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 104.

61 Guattari, Lines of Flight, p. 9.

62 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 72.

63 For a detailed discussion of Guattari’s work on semiotics, see Gary Genosko, ‘Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Semiotics: Mixing Hjelmslev and Peirce’, in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, ed. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller, 175–90 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

64 Guattari was not the first cultural or critical theorist to turn to Hjelmslev. See, for example, Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957).

65 Hjelmslev called the basic units of language ‘glossemes’, taken from the Greek ‘glossa’ meaning tongue or language.

66 For more extensive readings of this table, see Gary Genesko, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London: Continuum, 2012), or Watson, Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought.

67 See, for example, Miriam Taverniers, ‘Hjelmslev’s Semiotic Model of Language: An Exegesis’, Semiotica, 171 (2008), 367–94.

68 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 74. In the endnote corresponding to this point, Deleuze and Guattari write categorically that ‘We consider Hjelmslev, despite his own reservations and vacillations, to be the only linguist to have actually broken with the signifier and the signified.’ Ibid., p. 574.

69 Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), p. 60.

70 Ibid., p. 75.

71 Hjelmslev, Prolegomena, pp. 50–1.

72 Ibid., p. 52.

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73 Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), pp. 218–9. The usual translation of purport ismatière or sens in French. As a result in the Adkins translation of The Machinic Unconscious, it has been rendered into English as ‘sense’, when it should perhaps have been left as matter.

74 Hjelmslev, Prolegomena, p. 57.

75 One of the distinguishing features of Guattari’s semiotic models is that they never have pretension to being universal. This is also true of the concepts he appropriates from Hjemslev, which should be interpreted as provisional. As Guattari writes in Lines of Flight, ‘No formal structure presides over the different semiotic strata, except in the minds of theorists of art or epistemologists.’ Guattari, Lines of Flight, p. 128.

76 Interpreters of Guattari’s work have observed that because signifying semiologies are placed outside of the ‘matter’ (purport) column of this table, it follows that semiologies of this kind are cut off from the Real. (See Watson,Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought, p. 48.) In fact I would argue that while Figure 3.5 does lend support to this interpretation, it strikes me as paradoxical that there could be any semiology that did not in some way involve purport. Perhaps, therefore it would be more accurate to say that signifying semiologies are only consciously cut off from purport, while unconsciously their nets still cast long shadows onto the underlying realm of active and intensive material. As Guattari himself argues, signification ‘seems to make all semiotics originate from the signifier’. Ibid., [emphasis added].

77 Guattari, ‘The Role of the Signifier’, p. 75.

78 Ibid.

79 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, ‘Conflicted Phonemes’ [exhibition hand-out] (London: Tate, 2013). As the exhibition literature points out, asylum seekers from Somalia are particularly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of this test, which often conveniently places their accents as originating from safe pockets of northern Somalia. For a country that has been in relative turmoil for the past 40 years, giving rise to numerous migration flows and population upheavals, putting such faith in the connection between voice and territory would seem like a strategic choice on the part of the authorities.

80 Guattari, Lines of Flight, p. 119.

81 Guattari, Lines of Flight, p. 155.

82 Guattari, ‘The Role of the Signifier’, p. 75.

83 Ibid.

84 On this, see Zack Brown, Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995).

85 Guattari, Machinic Unconscious, p. 216.

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86 This expanded sense of the diagram also finds expression in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, where he described the panopticon as ‘the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form’. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 205. The concept of the diagram is pinpointed as a crucial dynamic in Foucault’s work in Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Continuum, 1999). Another point of reference for Guattari’s concept of the diagram is Charles Sanders Peirce, who pioneered the use of ‘existential graphs’ in, among other places, Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘Existential Graphs’, in The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958–66), IV (1960), 293–470.

87 Guattari, Lines of Flight, p. 99.

88 Ibid., p. 159.

89 Ibid., p. 62.

90 Ibid., p. 96.

91 Félix Guattari, ‘Singularité et complexité’, http://www.revue-chimeres.fr/drupal_ chimeres/files/850122.pdf (accessed 1June 2018), transcript of a seminar given on 22 May 1985, quoted in Lazzarato, Signs and Machines, p. 205. Much of Guattari’s work that Lazzarto draws upon in the chapter of Signs and Machines dedicated to existential pragmatics has not yet been translated into English, and for this reason I remain indebted to his particular reading of this primary material.

92 The link between the two is elaborated further in Chapter 4 in relationship to the concept of ‘repair’.

93 Lazzarato, Signs and Machines, p. 207.

94 Ibid., pp. 1, 4, 19.

95 Ibid., p. 18.

96 A distinction found in Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume 1 (London: Verso, 2004). In Lines of Flight, Guattari warns that this ‘must never be taken as an absolute distinction’. p. 156.

97 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 13.

98 Guattari, Schizoanalyic Cartographies, pp. 108–9.

99 Ibid., p. 110.

100 Viktor von Weizsäcker, Le Cycle de la Structure (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1958), p. 229, quoted in Watson, Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought, pp. 133–4.

101 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 19.

102 Ibid., pp. 25, 92.

103 Ibid., pp. 92–3.

104 In particular the last chapter of Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, has been given the title ‘in you more than you’ by its editor Jacques-Alain Miller.

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105 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 14.

106 See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), pp. 317–26 (p. 321).

107 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 14. Part-objects also play a decisive role in Anti-Oedipus, where they are conceived of as interruptions in the flows of libido. These interruptions are not overcome on the route towards sexual maturity, as Klein’s work implies, but constitute the machinic components of the unconscious that can be engineered and modulated through schizoanalysis.

108 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, p. 31. ‘Oblative genality’ was for Freud the ‘normal’ outcome of passing through all the stages of psycho-sexual development.

109 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 94.

110 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Art’, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 257–325.

111 Ibid., p. 300.

112 Ibid., p. 304.

113 Ibid.

114 Ibid., p. 306.

115 Ibid., p. 308.

116 Guattari, Chaosmosis, pp. 96, 131.

117 Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘The Aesthetic Paradigm’, in Deleuze, Guattari, and the Production of the New, ed. Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 173–83 (p. 174).

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Repair

When the French authorities commissioned a monument in Algiers in 1922, it is doubtful they would have anticipated that fifty years later it would stand in the same spot encased in concrete. TheMonument to the Dead of Algiers (Figure 4.1) was created by Paul Landowski and carried overt symbols of friendship and alliance between France and Algeria. In the period immediately following independence, such friendship seemed undesirable, if not impossible, and the mayor of Algiers asked the modernist painter M’hamed Issiakhem to ‘do something’ about the monument. Issiakhem’s solution was neither to destroy Landowski’s work nor to simply replace it, but to preserve it within the interior of his own sculpture and give the end product a new title: Monument to the Martyrs (Figure 4.2). In 2012 a crack appeared in the surface of Issiakhem’s sculpture and its contents threatened to emerge once again. The decision as to whether to remove the concrete casing altogether or smooth over the cracks prompted a public discussion that centred on the past and its representation in a postcolonial context. The curious history of this monument highlights a number of features of the concept of repair that are developed in this chapter. In the first instance, the monument shows the different scales in which repair can operate, from small additions to individual objects to large-scale responses to global change. More fundamentally, these two extremes are always already in dialogue, and what may appear at first to be inconsequential repairs carried out between objects and people trace the contours of history’s lines of force. The monument also reveals the entanglement of symbolic and material processes involved in acts of repair. Landowski’s monument was in the first place a material intervention that attempted to contribute towards repairing the emotional damage inflicted by the First World War, but fifty years later this repair was seen to mask the true nature of colonial relations between the two countries and became a source of embar- rassment for the nascent Algerian state. Finally, insofar as Issiakhem’s response

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Figure 4.1 Paul Landowski, Monument to the Dead of Algiers, or ‘Le Pavois’ (1928) Algiers, Algeria. Stone and reinforced concrete. Image: SPUTNIK/Alamy Stock Photo.

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Figure 4.2 M’hamed Issiakhem, Monument to the Martyrs (1962), Reinforced concrete applied to existing monument. Photo: Henry Grabar, 2011.

can be seen as a second act of repair that took as its object the first repair by Landowski, the monument reveals something about the processual nature of repair. Issiakhem’s response could also be seen as a gesture that left future generations the option to remove his sculpture, erase the original or arrive at

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a hybrid mixture between the two – a proposition the artist Amina Menia has recently put forward – which would constitute a third repair in the history of

the monument.1 The emphasis on process is perhaps a distinguishing feature of repair when considered alongside related practices of restoration and renovation. Above all else, repair cannot be considered a static ‘fix’ to a breakage or problem, but rather invokes the potential for modification, transformation and creative addition. These three preliminary lessons about repair – that it has the capacity to operate at different scales, that it constitutes a practice that is neither strictly material nor primarily symbolic and that, even when chiselled from stone or cast from concrete, repairs are processual rather than one-off solutions to breakages or crises – are what place it in continuity with the ideas proposed in the last chapter. Here repair constituted a leitmotif, associated with reassembly and the topological dynamics of tying and untying. The French verb réparer itself attracts passing mention in Seminar XXIII when Lacan refers to the sinthome as ‘un moyen de réparer’ (a way of repairing) that does not return

the knot to its original state.2 Although the role of repair is admittedly minor in the seminar itself, the concept is nevertheless rich enough to reward closer attention. Instances of repair can be discerned everywhere but have particular significance here as processes of breakage and reassembly in the psychic life of the subject. Guattari’s mixed semiotics allows us to think through the inherently hybrid and synthetic nature of repair as a process that gathers together fragments of matter and meaning without erasing their differences. At its most basic, repair pivots on the idea of a creative response to a breakage, involving an additive process of recomposition. Here again transgression could not be further from view, as the emphasis is shifted decisively onto an ethico-aesthetics centred on creativity and reassembly rather than disruption and dislocation. These are lessons that the artist Kader Attia teaches us about the meaning of repair, which is an idea that he has progressively redefined in numerous projects over the course of a decade, transforming it from an everyday word

into the name of an elaborate ethico-aesthetic philosophy.3 In the artist’s words, in his work repair ‘is first broached concretely and only then does it become

more metaphorical, even metaphysical’.4 It is one artwork in particular that this chapter will focus on, The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures (2012), a complex installation that tests the limits of any definition we are able to give to the meaning of repair.

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Defining repair

In everyday usage the term ‘repair’ can mean to ‘fix’, ‘mend’, ‘renovate’ and ‘restore’. Additionally, it can mean to ‘have recourse to’, or ‘to return’, as in the phrase ‘repairing to’. Stretching across this web of synonyms lies a multitude of differences, however, and only in attending to them does the specificity of repair come into focus. In their most immediate senses, words such as ‘restore’ and ‘renovate’ suggest an attempt to recapture a previous state or condition. The kinds of interventions they describe are founded on ideals of what things should be like – ideals that are located in the past, but a past that is more often than not a phantasmatic projection from the present. Whether it concerns the past condition in the life of an object, a person or a social group, in each case an ideal is held forth as a reified image that an intervention – the restoration or renovation itself – attempts to actualize in the present. If successful, it may not be apparent that an intervention has taken place at all, for renovation and restoration generally attempt to cover their tracks, subtracting themselves from an

object as if the intervention had never occurred in the first place.5 The etymological root of renovation is novus meaning ‘new’, and renovation implies a process of ‘making new again’. By contrast, one of repair’s etymological links is to the Latin parāre, the idea of making ready, of preparing and producing. Like renovation and restoration, an act of repair also holds the future in its sights, but this future is not treated as the receptacle for an ideal situated in the past. Rather, it is a future held open to contingency, and the object of the repair is given the time to shape and be shaped by the ongoing consequences of the intervention. In this respect, repair invokes the potential for modification, transformation and creative addition that can render something operative in new ways. Another relative of repair is replacement. While repair may bring forth a new, hybrid object, if it strays too far from the original one enters the domain of the replacement. A replacement substitutes that which can no longer be repaired (or that which nobody wishes to repair) and often entails the partial or total destruction of the old object. The motto for replacement is ‘out with the old, in with the new’, and it is perfectly at home in a consumer culture that idolizes the new while simultaneously rejecting objects and experiences that bring about more fundamental transformation. In parts of Europe and North America the difference between repair and replacement has recently been thrown into sharp

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relief with the emergence of ‘repair cafés’ – spaces in which volunteers repair

consumer items for free, or in exchange for other skills and services.6 Extricating repair from its synonyms allows us to return to Algiers with fresh eyes, for the difference between renovation/restoration, replacement and repair here trace forked paths in the life of the Monument to the Martyrs. Replacement would have entailed an act of iconoclasm towards Landowski’s memorial, a more or less ubiquitous outcome of the energy that revolutions discharge on public reminders of the conditions that lead to their emergence. Since this path was not taken, the predicament that arose from the fact that a crack had appeared invites us to attend to the tensions within the monument. Filling in the cracks in Issiakhem’s sculpture (the course of action eventually taken by the authorities) might have momentarily resolved these tensions, but it has once again put the original monument under erasure. This solution is a renovation, rather than a repair, insofar as it clings to an ideal of what the monument’s recent appearance should be. Another solution would have entailed the destruction of Issiakhem’s concrete addition, which one can assume was only ever intended as a temporary solution, and the full-scale renovation of the Monument to the Dead of Algiers. This would also have resolved the tensions between the two monuments, but it too would have harked back to an ideal object prior to Issiakhem’s symbolic and material addition. A third, genuinely reparative solution, and one proposed at the time by the artist Amina Menia, would have been to acknowledge the layered history of the monument by means of an addition, rather than direct attention towards one period of its history at the expense of others. It is fundamentally this aspect of repair as a creative addition that this chapter seeks to build upon. More than simply semantic distinctions, the decisions that affect this monument show that the difference between repair and its synonyms represent distinct ethico-aesthetic attitudes, where a society’s ability to negotiate between a perceived obligation to the past and a projected vision of the future is also a decision as to whether to side with the purity and stasis of closure or a messy plurality of open acts of becoming. Placing repair in contrast with its semantic relatives does not resolve a fundamental tension between change and continuity. One the one hand repair is distinguished from a replacement insofar as it does not break with a prior state or condition completely; on the other it is distinct from a renovation insofar as it avoids a mimetic relationship to an original. This throws up a seemingly contradictory aspect of repair. It seems to encapsulate both change on the one hand and continuity on the other. How is a balance between these two poles possible?

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It is through an engagement with the work of Kader Attia that we might find an answer.

Space-time polyphony

It is straight into the tangle of history that Attia’s installation The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures (Figure 4.3) plunges us. This large installation comprises a series of second-hand anthropology books, wooden and marble sculptures, ‘metiso objects’ (extra-occidental objects that incorporate occidental elements) and trench art (objects made by soldiers during the First World War from bullet cartridges and artillery shells). On a large wall a two- screen slide projection shuffles through a series of headshots of injured soldiers

Figure 4.3 Kader Attia, The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures (2012). Mixed media installation. Exhibition view ‘dOCUMENTA 13’ at Fridericianum, Kassel, 2012. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of the Artist, Galleria Continua, Galerie Nagel Draxler, Galerie Krinzinger and Fondation nationale des arts graphiques et plastiques, France. Courtesy of the Artist and Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha/Qatar Museums. Photo: Roman März

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Figure 4.4 Kader Attia, Open Your Eyes (2010). Double channel slide projection, eighty slides each. Courtesy of the Artist, Collection MoMA, New York; Collection FRAC Pays de la Loire; Collection Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Private collection; and Galleria Continua. Photo: Musée du Service de Santé des Armées, Paris, Martin Monestier; and Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren.

and a collection of African masks (Figure 4.4). The faces that appear are badly maimed. Often the same face is shown before and after surgical reconstruction. Misshapen noses, lips pulled askew; the black-and-white photographs capture the damage in a clinical, documentary fashion. As the unsettling effect of these images wears off, attention shifts to the images adjacent, to the African masks. The two halves of the slide show slowly synchronize, and it becomes clear that the masks too have undergone repairs – in similar places as the faces, and using strikingly similar means. One of the first words that viewers might reach for when asked to describe the relationship between the two elements of the slide show in Attia’s installation would be ‘juxtaposition’. Theoretically, one might juxtapose any two items; all it requires is that they be positioned (poser) near or beside (iuxta) one another. A juxtaposition is a linear relationship in space. By contrast, the two collections of slides in Attia’s installation constitute packets of relations that connect with each other in time and space. What are the temporal resonances of the work? The anthropology books are vintage, dating back to the early half of the last century – the sort of books that Picasso might have used as source materials during his ‘African period’ from 1906 to 1909. As if in direct reference to the Western appropriation of African art during this period, Attia has bolted some of the books to the shelves, either closed or open at a specific page. This suggestive move could be interpreted as an overzealous attempt to prevent the books (or their contents) from being

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pillaged. Such a defensive gesture would be at odds with the hybrid forms the exhibition plays with. While a great deal of Western art was ‘anthropophagic’, to borrow a term from Oswald de Andrade, the cannibalization of other cultures is not seen as something to be halted entirely in Attia’s work. It is rather a fundamental dynamic that inheres in all relationships. As de Andrade would have it, ‘Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The

world’s single law.’7 The gesture of bolting the books closed is more likely a critique of such limits, implying a process of ‘fixing’ mobile cultural motifs into a specific place or disavowing them altogether. It is significant that both the anthropology books and the ‘trench art’ date back to a time period largely concurrent with the birth of modernity. The Great War was the first war in which technology played a pivotal role, and the broken faces (gueules cassées) are testament to this in two ways. In the first place, the injuries are the result of the great force of impact between men and machines. In this war, injuries caused by shrapnel, grenades and high-explosive shells predominated. In the second place, the rudimentary cosmetic surgery is evidence of new technology entering the domain of the medical sciences. Not only could wounds be sewn up, but also metal plates could be inserted, glass eyes could be fitted, and synthetic elements could be introduced into the human body. The aim of these repairs, as much as possible, was to return the broken face to its original state, to a time before the war. At irregular intervals in the slide show the images give way to written messages such as ‘The modernist myth of perfection’, which partially connect back to the immaculate white marble busts on the adjacent shelves. The association between modernity and notions of perfection, especially in relation to the body, is perhaps more conflicted than the exhibition’s sloganeering here lets on. In the notorious Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, originally staged in Munich in 1936 by the National Socialist regime, the inverse held true: modernism was tainted by its association with the impure – the primitive, infirm and infantile – and was contrasted with works endorsed in The Great German Art Exhibition, held concurrently as a deliberate counterpoint. On the front of the brochure for the Degenerate Art exhibition was printed an image of Otto Freundlich’s Der Neue Mensch (The New Man) (1912), which drew inspiration from the ‘primitive’ stone busts that so puzzled and amazed visitors to Easter Island. The appropriation of non-Western aesthetic forms, together with the fact that Freundlich was a Jew of Polish origin, placed him squarely in the category of degenerate art in the eyes of the Nazi regime. The fact that some of the busts in Attia’s installation resemble Der Neue Mensch is perhaps not

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accidental, especially when coupled with the installation’s focus on war and the deformed or distorted bodies it leaves in its wake. Drawing on this connection, it is worth pausing to reflect on the relationship between Degenerate Art and Documenta itself. Here again, the concept of repair could be used as a lens through which to view the artistic and curatorial responses to the cultural policies of the Nazi era. The first Documenta, organized by Arnold Bode just eighteen years after the Degenerate Art exhibition, was deliberately positioned as a response to the latter’s denunciations. All that the Degenerate Art exhibition held up as base, degraded or impure, Bode defended as an essential and progressive contribution to twentieth-century culture. As such, it attempted to right the cultural wrongs of the Nazi Regime, repairing the symbolic and physical violence it perpetrated in the domain of art. This ambition was carried through to Documenta II, which was held in 1959 and curated by Werner Haftman under the banner ‘abstraction

as a world language’.8 If, as the Babel myth goes, conflict arises out of differences in language, with miscommunication serving as the basis for friction and disson- ance, then Haftman’s appeal to the supposedly universal language of abstraction was yet another attempt to repair the cultural fault lines created and exploited by the Nazis during the Second World War. This repair pinned its hopes to the ideal of a neutral field of intercultural communication, and yet this supposed neutrality was simultaneously undermined by the early Documenta exhibition’s reliance on a roster of European and American artists to the exclusion of artists from other parts of the world, including Eastern Germany. In this respect it is not difficult to agree with Walter Grasskamp when he argues that despite the lofty ambitions that underpinned these first Documenta exhibitions, their rebuttals of the Degenerate Art exhibition were as timid as they were inadequate, and a more thoroughgoing repair would have to wait until 1972 when Harold Szeemann staged a radically heterogeneous Documenta 5, not only affirming all that the Nazis denounced in art but complicating the very categories through which they

did so.9 Attia’s installation inserts itself into the history of the exhibition to which it belongs, highlighting the nature of repair as thickly layered. The installation’s dialogue with the history of Modernism extends to more general discussions of place and territory, and in particular the territories that get ignored. In all the emphasis placed on the ‘Western Front’, it is easy to forget that the Great War was also the First World War. France drew heavily on its colonies in South America, Asia and especially Africa for manpower, and the South African Brigade, among many other forces, played a crucial role for the

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British military effort. While European soldiers were the subject of extensive photographic and moving image documentation, which served as the material base for other less obvious material practices such as patriotism, charity and heroism, there are very few symbolic traces of the war dead from former col-

onies.10 Connecting the broken faces to the broken masks, it is almost as if the latter serve as a stand-in for the former. The masks come to speak in the place of the absent photographic documentation of the injured and maimed colonial Soldiers during the First World War, demanding equal symbolic inscription, serving as makeshift ‘monuments’ that simultaneously erect a protective barrier to a trauma and invite one to reflect on its significance. This demand opens out onto the issue of the museum and the object’s place within it. The Repair prompts the viewer to consider the disparity between objects that are given pride of place and other objects that are buried deep in the archives (if they are archived at all). The repaired masks and the ‘metise’ objects on display in Attia’s exhibition are examples of excluded items, comprising what Gregory Sholette calls ‘dark matter’, which he characterizes as a

‘shadow archive’ or ‘an unseen accretion of creativity’.11 The repaired masks are deemed impure by virtue of their visible temporal layering, the hybrid objects by virtue of their territorial indeterminacy. By contrast, in museums all over the world it is common to see unrepaired stone statues – battered Greek marbles

with missing limbs that are positioned as ‘pure’.12 Attia’s installation exposes the line of exclusion that separates these two classes of objects and relegates such hybrid or repaired objects to obscurity. In doing so he places monological cultural attitudes in dialogue with their outside, an outside which is co-constitutive of monological forms in the first place, insofar as the latter exist solely on the basis of a series of exclusions. Glancing back at the anthropology books, it becomes clear that they are all spatially indexed; if the titles do not relate to specific nation states, then they are linked to cultural groupings based on territory. They cling to a notion of culture as something that can be cleanly categorized according to specific criteria. They are literally and figuratively bolted in place, while the metise objects are mobile, testament to an intercultural encounter, a bridge between two different spatio- temporal regimes. In Attia’s installation the temporal resonances are inextricably linked to spatial resonances so that the term ‘spatio-temporal’ should be understood to denote an unbreakable bond between the two. The temporal rupture of modernity is often also spatially located in the West, and as postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha have shown, this spatial positioning is

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in part what allows for the temporal narrative of rupture to be asserted in the

first place.13 The past is always ‘over there’, while the future is ushered in by modernist innovations cultivated in the occident, many of which in fact drew on ‘primitive’ cultures for inspiration. In a smaller way, the various objects in Attia’s installation also express distinctive space-time relations. As an installation The Repair has a tangled temporal and territorial make-up. Objects are shuttled back and forth between different times and places. Early anthropology books sit next to recently made wooden sculptures from Dhakar based on the photographs of soldiers wounded during the First World War. The polished marble busts are also new, but their aesthetic pre-dates the facial injuries whose repair they inspired. The traffic between these temporal and spatial coordinates runs in a number of different directions at the same time, and this traffic in itself amounts to a distinctive space-time relation, whereby disingenuous macro-historical claims are overrun with smaller spatio-temporal relations and heterogeneous semiotic materials. Signifying and a-signifying semiotics, ‘here’ and ‘there’, the future, the present and the past are linked in a way that allows for mutual contamination. As well as attempting its own admittedly partial ‘repair’ on the rift at the foundations of modernity, the installation attempts to infect an aesthetic ideal of ‘perfection’ with a more hybrid sensibility. In both the metise objects and the repaired masks, the additions are not disavowed but celebrated. The bound fragments of pottery, patched-up holes and stapled hairline cracks embody a radically different aesthetic imperative to that of the Western ‘myth of modernity’, as Attia understands it, affirming the impure over the pure. In the installation, an aesthetic of repair simultaneously embodies an ethic of repair, but the degree to which this ethico-aesthetics can be considered ‘sinthomatic’ is not yet self-evident.

Sinthomatic repairs

Lacan’s conceptualization of the sinthome provides a rich point of departure from which to think about repair. In Seminar XXIII, threads of chord are cut and retied, psychic coherence is lost and re-found, and episodes from Joyce’s writing which appear to describe psychotic breaks are seized upon for their significance as sites of repair. And yet if the sinthome embodies a ‘way of repairing’, this would seem to operate in a different register to the repairs embodied in Attia’s work. The object

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of a sinthomatic repair in Lacan’s seminar is Joyce himself, who insulates himself against a psychotic break through his writing. By contrast, Attia’s conception of repair seems both less direct and more wide-ranging than the one that can be derived from Lacan’s work. As well as enacting repair, Attia’s installation constitutes a speculative meditation on the function of repair itself. The installation is simultaneously about repair and of it. However, unlike Lacan’s reading of Joyce’s text, it is not at all clear that Attia’s installation enacts a repair on its creator. Instead, the internal dynamics of the piece seem to demonstrate the potential for repair as a process of affective contamination that goes beyond a closed relationship between the artist and their artwork. These differences suggest that Attia’s work is not ‘sinthomatic’ in a straightforward sense. If the word is used in a way that hews closely to the letter of the Lacanian text, then the extent to which the work can be filtered through this theory rests upon an analysis of Attia’s place within the work, in the same way the reading of Joyce’s work as sinthomatic rested upon its relationship to Joyce the author. Even if we break open this dyad, as attempted in the previous chapter, and frame the issue in Guattari’s vocabulary of auto-modelling (which, to recapitulate, involves a process in which the self appropriates the self), the question as to where this ‘self’ is located in Attia’s installation nevertheless rears its head. If the artwork were directly participatory the question might be easier to answer, as Guattari’s language of subject and serial groups could be brought into play and considered in relation to the various semiotic forces that traverse such groups. But Attia’s work employs none of the typical apparatus of participatory art – workshops, games, orchestrated actions – nor does the majority of his work treat the social fabric as an arena in which to conduct small, localized acts of repair with marginalized groups. To think through the existential dimensions of Attia’s work we will have to look elsewhere. Guattari is clear that artworks need not be directly participatory to have a decisive impact on the production of subjectivity, a position one can only presume would have been upheld had he lived later into the 1990s when artworks associated with relational aesthetics gained traction. In various places Guattari draws on canonical examples to argue in the strongest possible terms that paintings can have dramatic effectsoff the canvas. The fauvism of Van Gogh

transports the spectator to ‘a blazing becoming of Provence’,14 and the paintings of Modigliani ‘changed not only his own way of seeing a face, but also the col-

lective way of seeing a face’.15

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Such rhapsodic arguments could be made in relation to Attia’s work, which explicitly aims to change the way aesthetic ‘imperfections’ such as hairline cracks, stapled joints and repaired fragments are seen. While this may be the case, it is the mode of subjectivation ‘prior’ to its possible effects on a spectator that sets the stage for such effects to cascade. In other words, the mechanics of the installation are important not only in how they change people’s perception of repair but in how they act independently as a complex zone of individuation. Repairs cannot be centred on an individual or reduced to a set of images seen by a pair of human eyes. They are enacted in the very fragments that combine to produce an acentred cluster of material and semiotic components. These components can be viewed as neither objective nor subjective. They operate as nothing less than partial enunciators or component parts of an aesthetic machine that possesses

a degree of subjectivity all of its own.16 This is one of the radical implications of Guattari’s work, which implies a kind of machinic animism, or machinic creativity in which subjectivity is no longer attributable to individual people. To quote Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who frames the problem with admir- able clarity, for Guattari ‘the subject is an objective function that one can find deposited on the surface of everything. It is not a kind of special object – the

subject is a way to describe the action of a thing’.17 If subjectivity is a function or action, as already suggested by Guattari’s engagements with Viktor von Weizsäcker and Mikhail Bakhtin (discussed in the last chapter), the action required for subjectivity to emerge has a specific quality. This quality can be thrown into sharper relief by following Guattari into a third area of theory – the influential idea of ‘autopoesis’ as it was developed by Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana. In abbreviated form, an autopoietic relationship is one that accounts for the way in which entities ‘self separate’ from their background environment at the same time as they ‘regen-

erate and realize the network that produces them’.18 Freely expanding Varela’s ‘bio-logic’ concept to discuss aesthetic objects, Guattari speaks of artworks as both expressions of the environments from which they emerge and in some

ways constitutive of new ‘existential territories’ at the same time.19 When transmigrated into Guattari’s work the concept loses its reliance on biological systems and becomes a general mechanism by which creativity manifests in the world, gaining subjective consistency independent of its presumed or actual effects on a spectator. Viewing Attia’s installation in this way allows us to see that a sinthomatic function exists neither in the relationship between the work and its creator, in

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the mode of Lacan’s Joyce, nor solely in the relationship it sets up with an ideal spectator. Rather, the work creates an existential territory in itself, in which a poly-centred semiotic element, from visual gestures such as cracks, staples and stitching to flows of finance redirected to craftsmen in Dakar, constitutes a -dia gram of a set of relationships that itself effects a repair.

Between change and continuity

The notion of subjectivity as a function or action, rather than a specific class of object, helps resolve a seemingly contradictory aspect of the repair, namely, that it serves as a principle of both change and continuity. The balance between the two poles is possible only if we think of repair as a process. This process involves both continuity and change. This seems to be the implicit force of Attia’s installation. Each of the objects on display existed before the exhibition, and by bringing them together nothing has outwardly changed, and yet their function is different. On the one hand the anthropology books, the sculptures, the metise objects, the trench art and the slide show are the same as they always were, and yet on the other hand, bringing them together has caused them to alter. If this cumulative effect creates a new spatio-temporal arrangement, as I have claimed, then the arrangement is irreducible to the range of individual spatial and temporal references belonging to the objects, and yet also in continuity with them. Fundamentally, the elements of the installation embody a change in continuity with a prior state of existence. This method of balancing change and continuity implies an essence according to which a thing might develop. For example, a broken pot might still embody the essence of what it means to be a pot, its ‘potness’, despite having been repaired in such a way that renders it unusable. This way of balancing change and continuity suggests a mode of individuation, where the individual thing or person changes along a line of continuity. The conception of essence at stake is not one that is easily recognizable, for the change comes about not through the external- ization of an innate quality (a genetic model) but through a process of continual self-production in dialogue with the world in which this production takes place, or, to use the language of the last chapter, an existential pragmatics. A repair entails precisely this kind of balance between change and continuity, where the repair itself changes the object in question, while nevertheless remaining within the limits that define it. A repair enables an object to produce

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itself anew each time, without for that matter entirely abandoning its prior state of existence. If this conception of repair hinges upon a notion of an object’s essence, preventing the repair from becoming a replacement, then it is worth looking at the concept of essence in more detail, particularly as it relates to the two models mentioned above. The genetic model could be allied with Aristotle’s concept of entelechy, which in Joe Sachs’ translation of the Physics is rendered as ‘being-at-work-staying-

itself’.20 As the translation suggests, entelechy involves an element of endurance, whereby the particular thing that endures is pre-established from the outset. What occurs over the lifespan of the thing’s existence is not so much a series of changes in dialogue with its surroundings, but rather the fulfilment of a purpose – just as the purpose of an acorn is assumed to be its development into an oak tree. From this perspective, each successive stage in the tree’s development can be considered a repair on its previous state of existence, progressively moving towards a pre-established end. In his essay Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel Bakhtin criticizes the influence of the concept of entelechy on ancient forms of biography, claiming that it results in a narrative where

‘Character itself does not grow, does not change, it is merely filled in.’21 Likewise, it could be said that whereas the concept of entelechy offers a balance between change and continuity to a theorization of repair, it does so at the expense of reducing transformation to the fulfilment of an essence within a narrow set of parameters established at the outset. There is a similar idea at play in Spinoza’sEthics , where things are conceived

as nothing more than endurances over time.22 They are singular modes of individuation that strive to continue to exist. This idea of striving to continue to exist is encapsulated in the term ‘conatus’. This provides yet another principle that balances change and continuity. While for Aristotle entelechy implies the actual- ization or endurance of a pre-established essence, for Genevieve Lloyd, Spinoza shows that ‘a thing’s endeavour to persist in being becomes its very essence’;

the two cannot be separated.23 This would seem to imply that it is not so much that an object endures by actualizing (or externalizing) an essence that is pre- established from the outset, but rather that this essence is the very same thing as the act of striving to continue to exist. In part III of the Ethics it is Spinoza’s claim that the essence of a thing is its conatus: ‘The striving by which each thing

strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.’24 Without the striving of an object to exist there can be no essence. Spinoza’s conception of conatus could be stretched to say that it is only through activity

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that a thing perseveres in its being, even if this activity involves little more than self-maintenance (the activity of resisting external causes that would otherwise destroy a thing). A final point that distances this account from the teleological character of Aristotle’s concept of entelechy, whereby a thing moves towards the fulfilment of its original purpose, is that for Spinoza one of the characteristics of God or Nature is the radical absence of purpose, for within his work ‘Nature has

no end set before it, and that all final causes are nothing but human fictions.’25 Drawing on the Spinozian theory of conatus, it is finally possible to arrive at a

definition of repair that seems adequate to Attia’s exhibition.26 It is distinct from the renovation or the restoration on the grounds that it does not aim to recapture an ideal; different from the replacement in that it keeps all or part of the thing in question, and transformative in the sense that it actualizes the essence of a thing – where essence does not imply a fixed and final ‘purpose’ but rather a principle of striving to exist.

Holding things together

As the example of the hybrid monument in Algiers that opened this chapter attests, repairs proliferate, extend beyond themselves or otherwise collapse into acts of renovation or replacement. In many ways this chapter is an attempt to embody this logic of repair. Sidestepping the usual impulse to explain an artist’s work through biographical information or artistic development, the focus instead has been on a single installation, which has cascaded into wider discussions of the philosophical significance of repair. Without Attia’s artwork as a starting point these discussions would not have been possible, and the chapter as a whole could be considered a demonstration of an artwork’s power to extend

beyond itself, affectively contaminating other fields within its reach.27 For the purpose of this discussion, one of the effects of Attia’s work is to demonstrate a new conjunction between ethics and aesthetics. This conjunction is in sharp contrast to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics centred on transgression. Where transgression attempts to disable existing arrangements, repair proposes the creation of new ones; where transgression privileges rupture, repair involves conjunction. The conjunctions that repair brings about are not, however, subsumed under one homogenous block or made to march to the tune of a despotic master signifier. While the word ‘repair’ is, needless to say, itself a signifier, what it denotes is

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a poly-centred collection of fragments that are not dependent on the word itself for their existence. Instead, these fragments produce their own presence through combination, which is what brings them into alignment with the concept of the sinthome – a principle that names a form of auto-foundational subjectivity, and with Guattari’s input, a subjectivity that achieves consistency through action. Like the sinthome, the repairs discussed in this chapter are not generaliz- able and do not constitute a prescriptive model of how ethics and aesthetics should necessarily be conjoined. And yet they are not so particular that they are restricted to a bilateral relationship between an individual repairing subject and a discrete repaired object. They are distributed among networks of human and non-human actors. Their end beneficiaries may in some cases be limited to humans, or even limited to one individual, but more commonly the effects of a repair will be disseminated across a multiplicity of entities and agencies. As Guattari teaches us, the ‘subjectivity’ of these agencies is not guaranteed by bio-

logical composition, but rather by their status as ‘nuclei of differentiation’.28 It is in facilitating the composition of such nuclei by holding heterogeneous fragments in relation that repair is able to also hold ethics and aesthetics in conjunction.

Notes

1 For Enclosed (2012) Amina Menia conducted visual research into the history of the monument and its makers, and produced sketches of possible designs based on a range of suggestions that incorporate elements from both monuments alongside new design elements. I am grateful to Amina for bringing the monument and its history to my attention.

2 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan Livre 23: Le sinthome. 1975–1976 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005). The official English translation renders réparer as ‘mend’. Lacan, Seminar XXIII, p. 77.

3 A large share of the inspiration for this formulation of repair has been drawn from Attia’s work. Among his exhibitions that have included references to the concept of repair are ‘Nature, another Culture repaired’, Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, Belgium (25 October 2014–29 March 2015); ‘Show Your Injuries’, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, US (8 November–13 December 2014); ‘Continuum of Repair: The Light of Jacob’s Ladder’, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (26 November 2013–23 November 2014); ‘Reparatur 5 Akte’, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (26 May 2013–25 August 2013); ‘Documenta (13)’, Fridericianum Museum, Kassel, Germany (9 June 2012–16 September 2012).

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4 Kader Attia, ‘Correspondence with Olivier Galaverna’, in Repair: Kader Attia, ed. Léa Gauthier (Paris: Blackjack editions: 2014), pp. 415–16 (p. 415).

5 It was for this reason that John Ruskin dubbed the related practice of preservation ‘a lie from start to finish’. Like restoration and renovation, in its mid-nineteenth- century manifestations, preservation involved manipulating historic objects without leaving traces of the processes that had been undertaken. Later on, preservationists such as James Marston Fitch set the precedent for architectural preservation that does reveal some of its processes. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York: John Wiley, 1849), p. 162.

6 While repair cafés serve as a vital corrective to some of the more wasteful habits that consumer capitalism encourages us to cultivate, they can also be seen as the formalization of practices that occur by necessity in many parts of the world already. For a detailed discussion of these dynamics rooted in an Indian context, see Nandita Badami, ‘Informality as Fix: Repurposing Jugaad in the Post-Crisis Economy’, Third Text 32, no. 1 (2018), 46–54.

7 Oswald de Andrade, ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’, Latin American Literary Review 19, no. 38 (1991), 38–47. In his celebrated manifesto, Andrade uses cannibalism (anthropophagia) as a metaphor for the Brazilian assimilation of Western art.

8 Walter Grasskamp, ‘ “Degenerate Art” and Documenta I – Modernism Ostracised and Disarmed’, in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, ed. Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 163–94.

9 Ibid.

10 A similar situation with African American Troops is described in Arthur E. Barbeau, The Unknown Soldiers (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1996).

11 Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto, 2011), p. 45.

12 It has not always been considered best practice to leave ancient statues unrepaired. In the nineteenth century, it was common for missing parts to be replaced. When attitudes changed in the twentieth century, a number of ancient statues were in effect ‘de-restored’ and later additions, however sensitive to the original, were removed. See History of Restoration of Ancient Stone Sculptures, ed. Janet Burnett Grossman, Jerry Podany and Marion True (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003).

13 Bhabha joins many others in critiquing the enlightenment myth of progress by pointing to its foundations in colonial oppression, but he also specifically addresses the subject of modernity, writing that ‘Without the post-colonial time- lag the discourse of modernity cannot, I believe, be written.’ Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 361.

14 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 93.

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15 Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), p. 260.

16 Guattari discusses aesthetic machines in, among other places, Chaosmosis, pp. 90–1.

17 Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Assemblages: Félix Guattari and Machinic Animism’, E-Flux 36 (2012), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61259/ assemblages-flix-guattari-and-machinic-animism/ (accessed 1 June 2018).

18 Francisco Varela, ‘Autopoiesis and a Biology of Intentionality’, in Autopoiesis And Perception: A Workshop with ESPRIT BRA 3352 (Addendum), ed. Barry McMullin and Noel Murphy (Dublin: Dublin City University, 1992), pp. 4–14 (pp. 7, 4). As Varela writes, ‘an autopoietic system depends on its physico-chemical milieu for its conservation as a separate entity, otherwise it would dissolve back into it. Whence the intriguing paradoxicality proper to an autonomous identity: the living system must distinguish itself from its environment, while at the same time maintaining its coupling; this linkage cannot be detached since it is against this very environment from which the organism arises.’ p. 7.

19 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 15.

20 Joe Sachs, Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 31.

21 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84–258 (p. 141).

22 ‘Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.’ Spinoza, Ethics, p. 75.

23 Genevieve Lloyd, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and the Ethics (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 9 [emphasis added].

24 Spinoza, Ethics, p. 75.

25 Ibid., p. 27.

26 Here it might be objected that the term conatus only really refers to humans and cannot be appropriated for the analysis of an exhibition. In fact, Spinoza says that every mode strives to exist, not just those modes classified as human, or indeed living. Spinoza, Ethics, p. 75.

27 The recognition that practices of repair often have effects that extend beyond the limits of the discrete object, person or relationship that is its direct focus is present in a range of existing literature on the subject. See, for example, Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, ‘Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance’,Theory,

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Culture and Society 24, no. 3 (2007), pp. 1–25 (p. 4) and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care. This idea also informs the introduction to a special issue of the journal Third Text I have edited, together with Mark Justin Rainey, on the subject of repair. Theo Reeves-Evison and Mark Justin Rainey, eds. ‘Ethico-Aesthetic Repairs’, Special Issue, Third Text 32, no. 1 (2018).

28 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 92.

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Experiments with truth

The age-old association between politics and deception has shown few signs of weakening since the turn of the Millennium, a period that has witnessed the emergence of a new vocabulary that includes ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’. Over roughly the same period, deception has also become resurgent in contemporary art. Instead of simply tricking the eye through feats of perspective, artists have broadened the range of deceptive work, staging advertisements for non-existent events, inventing historical personae, pioneering tactical uses of new media, imitating newspapers and websites, and inventing a variety of pseudonyms for various

purposes.1 By engaging with art practices that employ deception, this chapter ostensibly returns us to the subject of transgression. Artworks that consciously deceive challenge the moral prohibition against lying. And yet many of the artworks in this chapter also do something altogether more ineffable: they fabulate. This term, with its venerable philosophical history, will serve as shorthand for a mode of experimentation that blurs the boundaries between deception and fiction, and which has the capacity to inject possibility into the most calcified of social arrangements. In this sense, fabulation has a sinthomatic function that does not simply embellish the Imaginary, or reconfigure the Symbolic, but is also involved in the construction of a new subjective arrangement that helps produce the Real. Even if fabulation has a greater ability to surpass the given than deception, both concepts are dynamic. That is to say, they are both produced and productive, put to work, made affective and conditioned by the mediums that are used to craft and distribute them. To account for the processual nature of artistic experiments with deception, the art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty has coined the term ‘parafiction’, using it to describe artworks that actively deceive

viewers, often before self-consciously shepherding them back to the ‘truth’.2 The question at the heart of this chapter is ‘what remains of deception and fabulation once ‘truth’ has been restored?’ Once their objects are revealed to be

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false, lies and fabulations do not simply evaporate; they leave behind them a residue that generates real effects. This chapter will focus on two broad classes of effects: those that are predominantly critical, that turn one’s attention back on the truth-framing devices that allow for deception to work in the first place, and those that are germinal, that inscribe the image of a possible world into the social milieu in which they operate.

From intention to effect

An important yardstick in the philosophy of deception revolves around the concept of intention. It was St. Augustine who first outlined a systematic theory of lying that rested on the intentions of the liar. In claiming that ‘not every one who

says a false thing lies, if he believes or opines that to be true which he says’,3 he argued that it is not so much the relation between the utterance and reality that characterizes a lie, but rather the intention to deceive. To illustrate this point it is enough to cite an anecdote found in Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, which involves a dialogue between two Polish Jews who meet on a train. ‘ “Where are you going?” one asks. “I’m going to Cracow,” the other replies. To which the first answers, “You say you are going to Cracow, because you want me to think you are going to Lemberg. But I know

you are going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?” ’4 In this example, the second character takes the first to be lying to him, even though he supposes that what he says corresponds exactly to the truth. Here it is possible to make a distinction between truth/falsity (which concerns the epistemological accuracy of

a statement) and truthfulness/deception (which is based on intention).5 The first character’s utterance is perfectly true, but if, as the second character believes, it were founded on an intention to deceive, according to the Augustinian model it would be classed as a lie. If we accept this provisional definition of the lie we are obliged to consider the intersubjective dimension of lying, in which utterances are inseparable from the concrete situations in which they operate. An engagement with the social field is one of the distinguishing characteristics of a pragmatic approach to language that Guattari embraces. From a pragmatic perspective, language is not simply the transmission of information in self-contained signifying chains, as some variations of linguistics would have us believe. Language is thoroughly entangled with social forms, and in Guattari’s hands, also entangled with other

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modes of semiotization beyond signification. This view now seems particularly prescient in the face of discussions of post-truth, a term that describes (among other things) the effect that non-linguistic digital networks ordered by logics of

connectivity and visibility have had on public discourse.6 Freud’s joke provides us with a vivid picture of the social life of language, in which an anticipated response has a decisive impact on what is said and how the utterance is received. It is limited, however, in its focus on a bipolar axis of

listener-speaker.7 In the majority of situations, utterances cascade in multiple directions simultaneously to recipients whose anticipated response retroactively shapes what the speaker chooses to say in the first place. This is also true of deceptive utterances. A pragmatic view of language allows us to step beyond the narrow definition of the lie based solely on epistemological accuracy and see it as a temporally extended discursive object freighted with assumptions and value judgments about the world. Moreover, it allows us to see that processes of determining the epistemological accuracy of a given statement are neither universal nor purely interpretative; they are coloured by the language(s) in which the process takes place and co-constitutive of the statement themselves. As the example from Freud’s joke book shows, truthfulness and deception are embedded in social relations and a series of assumptions and predictions pertaining to the behaviour, culture and linguistic norms of others. Nevertheless, with the category of truthfulness we are still narrowly concerned with the intentions of the liar. A focus on intentions inevitably leads to their schematization according to a pre-established moral code, giving rise to such categories as ‘white lies’, ‘noble lies’ or ‘malicious lies’ (to name but a few), which can be distinguished from one another only when we take into account their intended outcome. Augustine himself makes a distinction between eight classes, arranged in ascending order of how forgivable they are in the eyes of God, for it is only God who has the ability to traverse the boundary between the soul and

the world in order to see the truth.8 The moral ordering of lies based on intention could be used to think about artworks such as Dow Does the Right Thing (2004) by The Yes Men. In what is probably the most famous intervention by the group, and a defining example of ‘tactical media’, one of the group’s members, Andy Bichlbaum, posed as a representative of Dow Chemical for an interview on BBC World TV. The interview took place on the twentieth anniversary of the 1984 Union Carbide chemical spill at Bhopal, in India, which killed around twenty thousand people and damaged the health of countless others. As the parent company of Union Carbide since

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2001, Dow has continually refused to take responsibility for the environmental after-effects of the spill and have offered no compensation to those still suffering

from related illnesses.9 It was therefore a surprise to many viewers when on live TV, a representative of Dow pledged 12 billion US dollars to make reparations to the victims and clean up the spill site. It took the BBC just two hours to reveal the spokesperson as an imposter, by which time shares in Dow had already dipped

on stock markets around the world.10 According to a theory of lying based on intentions this artwork could perhaps be considered to embody an altruistic lie. But what does characterizing it as such really tell us? Fundamentally, any schematization of lies founded on intention simply applies pre-existing moral categories of good and evil to a person or group’s presumed motives. In the introduction to this book such mechanical approaches were associated with morality, rather than ethics. If ethics has any meaning of its own, this meaning is rooted in situations where rules fail to apply – in short, where genuine deliberation is required rather than the impos- ition of ridged moral frameworks. Specific cases of deception rarely yield reliable knowledge of the intentions of the deceiver. With The Yes Men we may be on relatively firm ground when we assume that their intentions were to help victims of the spill, but in the great majority of cases artists’ intentions are a lot more opaque. Furthermore, by devoting our attention to a moral calculation based on intention we miss the thoroughly ethical stakes involved in the artworks themselves. The Yes Men justified their intervention with a phrase associated with the antiglobalization

movement at the time: ‘We were trying to show that another world is possible.’11 An approach geared towards unpacking the ethical stakes of the work would focus less on the intention ‘We were trying …’ and more on the production of alternative universes of reference: ‘another world is possible’. Such an analysis would look at the range of novel effects on the production of subjectivity that an artwork such as Dow Does the Right Thing sets in motion. To the two broad takes on the subject of deception already discussed (truth as epistemological accuracy and truthfulness as the product of an imputed intention to be truthful), we could add a third: that of a truth effect. In the field of psychology the term ‘illusory truth effect’ was first used by Hasher, Goldstein and Toppino to describe the increased likelihood of false facts being intuited as

true after they had been repeated several times.12 To translate this into the post- truth idiom, in the words of Evegny Morozov, ‘truth is whatever produces the

most eyeballs’.13 Here the term ‘illusory truth effect’ could be used in a different

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sense, inspired by the work of Barbara Cassin.14 In Sophistical Practice, Cassin focuses on the lines of mutual influence between philosophy and sophistry, claiming that the latter’s privileging of rhetorical forms over and above any ontological claims amounts to a privileging of effect over intention:

Philosophy never relinquishes its claim to unmask sophistics by banking on the concept of intention; sophistics never ceases to distinguish itself from philosophy by emphasising the accounting of effects. The consideration of effects can match that of intention because the effect is no longer at the mercy of a dichotomy: faced with the polarized duplicity of intention, there is or there is

not an effect, de facto, precisely.15

Our understanding of intentions is reliant on how they are communicated, and for this reason they are at the mercy of a dichotomy between genuine and disingenuous speech. Effects, on the other hand, are signs of themselves and cannot be falsified. Faced with the inscrutable nature of intentions, this chapter wagers that a focus on the effects of artistic practices of deception will be more fruitful. This is not to argue that the definition of lying should be refounded on the basis of the effects of lies, but rather that it is more productive to consider the aspects of the lie which becomes public, participatory and dialogic. The effects of deceptive utterances are rarely as clear-cut as the example drawn from Freud. Their edges bleed into the fabric of social life, addressing multiple audiences at the same time, bringing about all manner of secondary and tertiary effects – some intended, others not. In the reverse direction, a widespread ‘culture of lying’ might also render the task of isolating an individual lie as difficult as abstracting a subject from the discursive community to which they belong. By focusing on effects rather than intentions we can better account for the scope of the social domain of which lying is a part.

Lying to liars

A work by the artist Pilvi Takala demonstrates the embedded nature of deception and the critical effects it can discharge. ForThe Trainee (2008), Takala masqueraded as a student trainee in the marketing department of Deloitte for an entire month, all the while filming her actions on hidden cameras. Takala changes her first name from Pilvi to Johanna, presumably to prevent her new colleagues from finding out that she is an artist and not an aspiring marketing executive. After an initial settling in period of two and a half weeks, during which

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she sought to gain acceptance among her colleagues, the artist then proceeded to play a modern-day Bartleby by doing as little as possible in and around the

building for the remainder of the month.16 Colleagues look on as she spends a day at the library of the Tax and Legal department of the firm, neither consulting documents nor working on a computer but staring dreamily into space. On another day in the consulting department Takala sits redundantly in the middle of a busy open-plan office, justifying herself to bemused colleagues by saying that she is ‘doing brain work’ and mumbling vague thoughts about her ‘thesis’. The situation reaches a comic climax when on February 28, Takala spends an entire day shuttling between floors in the building’s lift. A secret camera documents the forced smiles of colleagues hiding their disbelief when Takala explains that she finds the lift conducive to thinking – ‘like being on a train.’ This concern grows towards the end of Takala’s time at Deloitte as a series of glances, emails and conversations are exchanged about the new employee’s disruptive presence. When the project was exhibited in the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki in 2008, it included a power-point presentation showing some of these emails (Figure 5.1). The ‘senseless amount of time’ employees at Deloitte apparently spent specu- lating on Takala’s presence is testament to the disruptive effect her performance had. Elsewhere the artist has described the intervention as a ‘threat to order’ – ‘sitting in front of an empty desk with your hands on your lap, thinking, threatens

the peace of the community and breaks the colleagues’ [sic] concentration.’17

Figure 5.1 Pilvi Takala, The Trainee (2008), installation. Courtesy of Galerie Diana Stigter and Carlos/Ishikawa.

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If The Trainee can be considered to have a disruptive effect, this effect is discharged by means of a set of deceptive strategies. Takala’s presence in Deloitte is initially accepted on the basis of a verbal lie pertaining to her reasons for being there, backed up by company management, who secured her a job for which she was not sufficiently qualified, and supplemented by a number of other choices involving everything from her mode of addressing other employees to office attire. But Takala’s work hints at another raft of lies, and she herself has described the way employees at Deloitte and elsewhere hide laziness and time-wasting

under a mask of false-productivity.18 A furrowed brow and a concentrated stare are sometimes all that is needed to hide hours spent scrolling through social media. If anything, open-plan office environments encourage such duplici- tous behaviour, and the email chain shared among concerned employees in The Trainee is testament to the way in which they also encourage a regime of col-

lective self-policing.19 The lie at the heart of Takala’s piece is therefore directed critically at another set of lies and perhaps ultimately at the managerial practices and spatial systems that make such lies necessary. This coupling of one lie with another is also fundamentally what is at stake in a literary device Bakhtin labels ‘gay deception’, described as ‘a lie justified

because it is precisely directed at liars’.20 The ‘lie’ to which Bakhtin opposes ‘gay deception’ is ‘the lie of pathos’, which characterizes what he calls novels of ‘the first stylistic line’. A few points require explanation here. First of all, as Morson and Emerson point out, the Russian pafos, although from the same Greek root as the English word, does not carry the same connotations of sadness and could

even be translated as ‘enthusiasm’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘animation’.21 Second, when Bakhtin speaks of ‘novels of the first stylistic line’ he is using his own typology of prosaic forms to talk about novels that try to wash their hands of the patchwork of different discourses and tongues ‘still warm’ from their usage in everyday speech. In other words, this is language divorced from its pragmatic dimensions. Novels of the first line make use of a ‘respectable’ or ‘ennobled’ discourse that tries in vain to rid itself of contextual contamination. As such, for Bakhtin this

class of novel has pretensions to neutrality and universality.22 For Bakhtin the lie of pathos to which ‘gay deception’ is opposed is ‘accumulated in the language of all recognized and structured professions, social groups and classes … the language of priests and monks, kings and seigneurs, knights and wealthy urban types, scholars and jurists … the languages of all

who hold power and who are well set up in life.’23 It is not so much that these particular professions and social groups are prone to lying more than anyone

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else, but that they have forgotten the arbitrariness of their discourse. They have forgotten that language itself lies, and in doing so, they participate in a literary discourse which attempts ‘to faithfully reflect reality, to manage reality, and to

transpose it’.24 In other words, for Bakhtin these professions often appear in the novel as overly confident of their ability to minimize the distorting effects of language and describe reality as it is. It could be argued that such is the underlying dynamic of The Trainee. In a spirit of gay deception, Takala effectively tests the limits of the office culture within Deloitte, where a particular way of speaking and acting assumes a dominant position. The ennobled discourse of the business world is often hostile to other discourses that would force it to recognize the contingency of its own position. In her act of withdrawal from the company discourse, Takala holds these other discourses in potential, not committing to any one of them in particular, and therefore not identifying with the group or profession to which she supposedly belongs. This has the effect of directing attention towards the authorized language, rather than simply replacing it, and this critical attention is accompanied by a parodic, if not openly mocking stance. In his discussion of literary characters such as the clown, the fool and the merry rogue, Bakhtin claims that they allow languages to be perceived ‘physically

as objects’. 25 Similarly, in isolating the office culture as an object of attention,The Trainee brings the contours of the discourse and the managerial structures that make it possible into clearer focus. Although this effect is initially achieved by means of deception, Takala’s lie is purposely not so good that it goes unnoticed. It is the points of difference that allow the office discourse in Deloitte to emerge as an object – sitting at a desk without a computer, riding the lift without a set destination and thinking without writing materials. It is these moments of slippage that culminate over the course of the month and ultimately cause the lie to unravel, a process that transforms it into fiction, with the word fabulation

serving as useful shorthand that is capable of accommodating both.26 Some three months after the internship had formally ended, the Deloitte employees who fell prey to Takala’s intervention were told that they had been part of an artwork. Although there may have been suspicions beforehand, it is at

this moment that the deceptive content of the artwork was formally dismantled.27 This is perhaps also the moment when the critical affect of the work was fully discharged to this section of the audience, and perhaps also a wider audience who might see documentation of the work. As Takala herself writes, ‘after I left, the conversation about acceptable working methods continued at the workplace.

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Whether accepting my behavior or not, I forced my co-workers to reconsider their expectations of shared rules and I think the same happens to people who

see the documentation as my art piece.’28 It is perhaps slightly surprising to learn then that Takala’s intervention at Deloitte was carried out in the full knowledge of the CEO and manager of the marketing department, who gave his permission to carry out the action and in

fact directly contributed to the work by supplying company emails.29 A question that is often overlooked in discussions of this piece concerns what the manager thought the benefits of inviting Takala into his office would be. Is he simply a benevolent lover of contemporary performance art, or did he see the advantages of an artwork that denaturalized a stuffy office culture in the anticipation of new, more efficient forms of collective behaviour? Perhaps at this level, practices of ‘gay deception’ are not incompatible with an office culture that embraces bonding

exercises, weekend retreats and ‘dress down’ Fridays.30 This idea is perhaps the ultimate critical effect of Takala’s intervention, highlighting the perversity of a system that welcomes critique with open arms. If Bakhtin’s concept of gay deception offers a model of lying that reprocesses discourses and exposes a kind of truth through deception, this is not simply the truth of contingency and heteroglossia, but also of the effects of interactions between different languages and discourses and the power play that allows one to absorb another. The effects of fabulation inThe Trainee are therefore predominantly critical. What follows is an example of an artwork that makes use of similar strategies, but whose effects are altogether more germinal, producing an image of a possible world.

Intimate percussion

In 2005 a strange rumour spread through the Spanish city of León. Groups of young people were increasingly turning their back on conventional music in preference for the sound of their own heartbeat, which was said to have addictive properties. Personal music devices were being modified to amplify the heartbeat of the user, and prolonged exposure had the capacity to induce a trance-like state. Signs of this nascent trend seemed to be materializing all over the city: graffiti and posters appeared in public places carrying slogans such as ‘intimate percussion’; special events were held at a local venue; and the story seemed to be

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gaining traction in the local media as well, with an interview broadcast on radio León and scattered articles in the local press. When the record label ‘Musique Camus’ gathered together several bands in order to record an album of music entirely inspired by the heartbeat – later reviewed by the music critic Carlos del Riego – it seemed that the private practice had suddenly developed into a full-blown subculture, further bolstered by the website heartbeaters.net, which functioned as an online portal for the growing community. Although outwardly extreme, the rumour was lent some credibility by a number of existing media narratives. Studies into the effects of repetitive audio on the listener’s heartbeat were quoted and circulated as factoids that fed into the rumour. The practice of ‘heartbeating’ also resonated with a number of techno- logically alarmist voices that had previously lamented the decline of face-to-face interaction. Furthermore, this decline was linked to familiar narratives of a gen- erational disconnect between a self-obsessed youth culture and an older generation that looked on in dismay. To the latter it might have been understandable for music itself to give rise to a new subculture, but the onanistic nature of a younger age group that preferred to get high on their own heartbeats seemed to symptomize a greater range of underlying social ills. For many, the revelation that the rumour was in fact a work of art by Dora Garcia, who made the announcement on the occasion of her exhibition opening at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), did not

come as much of a surprise.31 This is because many of the participants were enlisted as collaborators some three months before Garcia revealed the work’s fictional content. A second group of disbelievers may have had doubts after seeing Garcia’s name on the heartbeaters.net website. There, a previous work by

the artist on the same theme – Heartbeat (1999),32 first exhibited at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Andalucía – was posited as an originary fiction, which precipitated the real-life spread of the practice to urban centres across Spain and beyond. For a surprising number of others, the fiction had become a reality, and many of those who contributed material to the website heartbeaters.net did so of their own volition, presumably in the belief that just such a subcultural form was in fact emerging. The project’s success not only lay in its ability to play on existing social anxieties but also make use of particular circuits of distribution. Garcia was quick to involve professionals in the fields of music, radio and TV, who made use of both official channels of communication in the broadcast and print media, and propagated the fiction by means of word-of-mouth or ‘word-of-web’. Like all rumours, the sources

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of the heartbeater stories in León were obscure, and at the beginning lacking in empirical validation. In this way the rumour existed as an artefact of unofficial speech that once released into the wild began to mutate and have real effects. Here the proximity of Heartbeaters to commercially driven campaigns of a similar character is significant – both seek to insert stories into pre-existing social networks as if they had occurred spontaneously, ultimately with the aim of greater market/ audience penetration. Produced in 2005, Garcia’s rumour was, however, passed through circuits of distribution that seem significantly less developed than those that came to prominence a decade later, with social media giants such as Twitter and Instagram not yet in existence. Another factor that distinguishes Heartbeaters from PR practices that make use of rumour, whether recent or decades old, is that the anonymous, distributed deception was ultimately reigned in and assigned to a specific author with a specific motive. Like Takala’s revelatory message to the employees at Deloitte, the lie was in effect terminated; and in both cases this is what caused it to assume the status of a fiction. Here it is useful to consider the difference between lies and fiction. One distinction between the two hinges on their differing relationships to truth. While lies attempt to pass themselves off as true, fictions make no claims to the truth, a point sometimes made explicit by means of a disclaimer accompanying films

or books.33 Just as lies need to take the listener into account, the fictional status of an object is worked out in a dialogue between an author, an artwork and

its audience according to a shifting set of conventions that change over time.34 Heartbeaters played with such conventions, suspending them at a temporal juncture that caused the project to exist at one stage as a lie and at another as a fiction. As a term that covers both practices at the same time, here again the word ‘fabulation’ could be used to describe the project as a whole. But fabulation also names a force that exceeds the space it is allotted in dictionary definitions between deception and fiction. The concept hails from Henri Bergson who in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion accords fabulation

the power to ‘prevent or modify action’.35 This power is for Bergson a function

of what he calls ‘closed societies’.36 Myths, gods and ‘semi-personal powers’ play an essentially regulatory function, helping to bind societies together in rigid or static ways. When the concept is discussed by Guattari, both in his solo writing and with Deleuze, the term is largely emptied of these negative connotations. In What is Philosophy? the authors give the term a decidedly creative meaning, associating it with artists and novelists who go beyond the ‘perceptual states and

affective transitions of the lived.’37 If for Bergson, fabulation is a function that has

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real effects on society, then for Deleuze and Guattari these effects are no longer linked to static regimes of behaviour, rituals or structural constants. Rather, the

fabulatory function has the capacity to ‘invent a people to come’,38 providing an image of a collectivity in such a way that is processual, collaborative and open. The processual dimension ofHeartbeaters is plain to see, amounting to what we might call an epistemological choreography. Although it is generally unproductive to treat audiences as blocs of individuals who experience an artwork in the same way, here we can think from the perspective of the artwork to describe the ideal sequence of experiences it presupposes, each of which adds news layers to an evolving narrative authored by its participants. This ‘ideal’ sequence involves three stages. In the first stage elements of the story were allotted a space within a material network of signs and relayed via circuits of distribution, with the antecedent myth of a previous artwork aimed to reinforce the veracity of the piece. Here the fabulation had the capacity to be registered as factual and to change the affective qualities of other clusters of signs it came into contact with. For example, after hearing a radio broadcast on the subject of the heartbeater subculture a listener may view a teenager wearing headphones in a slightly different way, accompanied by a sense of curiosity, miscomprehension or a moral judgement. During the second stage some aspect of the fabulation was revealed to be factually inaccurate or false. This was set in motion by an element of the artwork itself, and here it could be argued that Garcia’s termination of the deceptive content can be considered part of the overall choreography of the piece. The initial deception subsequently started to unravel, and the experiential quality of the fabulation changed. The final stage would seem to involve two different processes, which are not mutually exclusive. One allowed the viewer to critically revisit the site of the original deception, in the process reflecting on the range of truth-framing devices that made it possible for the work to be perceived as truth in the first place. The final manifestation of Garcia’s project consisted of various didactic elements chronicling events in the life of the artwork (Figure 5.2), thereby facilitating a critical return to these very devices. In this way Heartbeaters created a discourse on fabulation, as well as fabulation itself. This aspect closes the work back on itself, but it also encourages a critical literacy that may be transferred to other objects, giving the unsuspecting participant a crash course in the arts of rhetoric. And yet another process is at work if we entertain the idea that some ‘residue’ of the original deception may still remain. Even though the deceptive content of the artwork is dismantled, allowing us to subsume the piece as a whole under

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Figure 5.2 Dora Garcia, Heartbeaters (2005), Installation view at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (10 September 2005–6 December 2005). © The artist.

the category of fabulation, this deceptive content may have slightly changed the objects of knowledge it came into contact with during the first stage. The transformation of deception into fiction does not bring about a return to a former situation in which deception ceased to exist. The truth does not constitute a stable ground upon which layers of deception can be added and subtracted without transforming the ground itself. The transformations at stake are always

additive and irreversible, even if they are imperceptibly small.39

Talking back

The idea that Garcia’s work not only has the capacity to sharpen a viewer’s critical faculties but also, somehow, leave a ‘residue’ of its false content even after truth-claims have been dropped points towards a possible effect on the production of subjectivity, with fabulation as the motor for the process. In an essay about Jean Genet, Guattari describes a similar relationship between fabulation and the production of subjectivity, whereby Genet brings a ‘dreamer

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function’ to bear on the plight of the Black Panthers and the Palestinians in his

last novel Prisoner of Love.40 Guattari argues that Genet’s ‘dreamer function’ does not work towards the ‘derealization of these movements’ but ‘is perhaps even

a means of conferring on them a more intense subjective consistency.’41 Genet passes from being a practitioner of ‘derealizing fabulation’ to the constructer of

‘fabulous images’ that produce the real.42 Guattari’s argument here is significant because it leads in a different direction from the claims made for the ‘truth’ of fictive or deceptive art. In the first half of this chapter, Bakhtin’s figure of the merry rogue was summoned to show how deception might expose the fundamental contingency and contextual col- ouration of discourse. Such a conceptual figure could be said to highlight the corrosive potential of artworks that deal with untruth. By contrast, here Guattari positions art as capable of augmenting reality and granting it a greater ‘subjective consistency’. This is linked to the formation of a collective subjectivity in the groups Genet worked with. Both in his essay on Genet and his collaborative writing with Deleuze, the link Guattari establishes between fabulation and the production of subjectivity brings to mind the role of ‘partial enunciators’. For Guattari, at a certain point the fabulous image exceeds the dominant co-ordinates of language to become

‘self-sufficient, self-referent, self-processual’,43 and in doing so it becomes an image that can speak back to an audience. As discussed in Chapter 3, it is by way of a reading of Bakhtin that Guattari expands the psychoanalytical concept of the part-object so that it becomes a ‘partial enunciator’. Although this concept is not connected explicitly to the notion of fabulation, it would appear that similar processes are at stake. In both cases an object is charged with a power that then feeds back into the production of subjectivity. In Bakhtin’s account the necessary precondition for this is the object’s detachment from the given co-ordinates of reality. Isolation is, to

recapitulate, the ‘negative condition’ of the subjective character of form.44 This moment of isolation in Bakhtin’s aesthetic theory sheds light on Guattari’s claim that the fabulatory image needs to gain a certain ‘consistency’ in order to play a part in the production of subjectivity. It is also echoed in his last collaborative work with Giles Deleuze where fabulation is associated with the construction of

monuments or giants.45 Only once these larger-than-life forms have been created and isolated can the fabulatory images they embody take on a life of their own. To discuss artworks in the same breath as monuments or giants might imply that the fabulatory function is restricted to materially discrete objects whose

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towering status dwarfs apparently less significant artworks. And yet if we turn back to Guattari’s essay on Genet, we can discern fabulation working at a more modest scale. Early on in this essay Guattari zones in on a key visual metaphor from Prisoner of Love. The metaphor involves the vapour from a boiler, which ‘steams up a window, then gradually disappears, leaving the window clear, the

landscape suddenly visible and the room extended perhaps to infinity’.46 The sequential nature of the image resonates with the progressive unfolding of Garcia’s artwork. If it is possible to align Heartbeaters with this image, it delivers us back to the question ‘what remains when the steam (or fabulatory content) of the work has evaporated?’ Guattari suggests that Genet’s fabulous images leave

trails behind them, like ‘stroboscopic after-images of other universes.’47 Perhaps the same might be said for works of contemporary art that experiment with fabulation. The after-images they leave behind are wedded to the way in which the works themselves unfold, and in Garcia’s case this unfolding creates the image of a collectivity. However fragile and temporary, the original fiction set in motion a process that produced links between people bound together by the a-signifying rhythms of a heartbeat.

Knot not true

If the last twenty years of British and American political history has taught us anything, it is that blanket endorsements of untruth are best avoided. Fabulation may have the capacity to disrupt calcified social arrangements, it may even have the capacity to ‘invent a people’, but there are few guarantees that such openings and groupings will be progressive in character. We are therefore forced to make a choice: either we supplement the creative power of fabulation with a set of political criteria that allow us to distinguish between its ‘good’ and ‘bad’ variants or we attempt to find a set of criteria within the operations of fabulation itself. The first option has the danger of collapsing politics into morality, insofar as a set of broad progressive political values come to serve as checks and balances on the power of fabulation. As with any morality, these values are placed above the fray and insulated from the power of fabulation itself. For this reason, it is important to look to the second option: to think about how different modes of fabulation vary from one another, and how these might bring about radically different effects. Here once again, Lacan’s seminar on Joyce provides some useful theoretical resources.

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At the heart of this seminar is a discussion of fiction as a form of enunciation capable of granting the subject a certain consistency. Joyce is exemplary in this respect, using his work to author himself in a singular act of composition. And yet this example does not exhaust the possibilities of fabulation. The Borromean knot implies other modes of tying and untying. In modelling fabulation on this basis, we necessarily start with a knot that already threatens to come undone, which in Chapter 3 was linked to the concepts of ‘generalized foreclosure’ and ‘ordinary psychosis’. Talking this untied knot as our point of departure, the next step is to look at where fabulation intervenes. An intervention that primarily works with the Imaginary could be associated with ‘mythomania’. This clinical category, first employed by the psychologist

Ernest Dupré,48 is used to describe the behaviour of individuals who weave intri- cate webs of fiction and deception, often over a considerable period of time. From a Lacanian perspective, it could be seen as a way of using the Imaginary as a means to defend oneself against the disruptive effects of the Real. This is not to say that mythomaniacs are necessarily unaware that their delusion is out of sync with the ‘facts’ of their biography, for often the subtlety of their methods requires them to have an accurate sense of what is believable. While the mythomaniac is often highly adept at manipulating Symbolic structures, this activity serves to shore up a fantasy of totality, in which every eruption of lack can be plastered over with another layer of deception. For this reason it is weighted towards the Imaginary. The lies and fictions that the mythomaniac may be highly inventive, but they are nevertheless unable to alter a basic narrative template that remains curiously static. Dupré writes of the process as follows:

As each invented idea is produced, it is then registered as if it were an incon- trovertible fact, inscribed, as it were, on a ‘mythomanic dossier’. After a while, secondary interpretations and the guiding influence of emotional preoccupa- tions then consolidate a complex system which constitutes the more or less per-

manent phase of a confabulatory delusional state.49

The elaboration of a mythomaniacal delusion could therefore be considered ‘processual’ – to recall a key adjective deployed by Guattari to describe fabulation – but the way the mythomaniac layers lies and fictions does not create new vectors of subjectivation. The underlying ideal that yokes them together remains fixed, with each new lie only serving to increase the power of an underlying fantasy. This highlights the essentially narcissistic character of deception and fiction if they remain in the Imaginary, which although still ‘constructive’, also, invari-

ably ends with the destructive emergence of the Real.50

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While mythomania might partake of the Symbolic, a mode of fabulation that falls more squarely in this order is associated with performativity. For Austin, performativity involves a highly codified speech act, which depends on the rules of a given social scenario in order to accomplish an action through language. The extent to which a performative is ‘happy’ (successful) or ‘unhappy’ (unsuccessful)

for Austin depends on the context and the authority of the actor in question.51 Performativity has become a significant leitmotif in much post-structuralist theory, and thinkers such as Derrida and Butler have both questioned the absolute distinction between successful and non-successful speech acts and expanded

the category to account for a range of socio-semiotic effects.52 Among the key theorists in the development of performativity it would be surprising to find the name Karl Rove, a senior advisor to the Bush administra- tion between 2001 and 2007. And yet a statement attributed to Rove in 2002, just prior to the invasion of Iraq, is exemplary in its succinct demonstration of

the concept: ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’53 Rove is quoted as making a distinction between the ‘reality-based community’ with people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from … judicious study of dis-

cernible reality’ and another community of ‘history actors’ who create reality.54 But what was the reality that Bush, Rove and a great many others created in Iraq by means of performative fabulation? The answer is surprisingly similar to the false pretext under which the war was begun: an unstable alliance between Ba’athist and religious fundamentalists, which existed first as a false rationale for military intervention, and subsequently as a political reality. In a contemporary political context, few would disagree that untruth has a performative power. Such power is not leveraged through military might alone but by means of a series of carefully calibrated semiotic devices that operate on the Symbolic. Politicians now wield media power like never before, constructing fabulations that are disseminated via massive circuits of distribution, quickly saturating Symbolic universes of reference and distorting everyday ‘socially agreed’ reality. Fabulations of this kind have a dramatic effect on the production of subjectivity, but the kind of subjectivity they cultivate, again, tends towards stasis and closure, rather than processual openings. One reason for this is because performativity depends on a set of pre-existing conventions in order to be effective. Herein lies one of the problems of endorsing the performative power of fabulation to construct reality: as well as creating new universes of reference, performative speech acts also bolster the Symbolic structures they rely on. With every declaration of marriage conferred on a couple by a priest, to cite Austin’s famous example, the power of the priest and the institution from which

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they derive their authority are strengthened.55 Likewise, fabulation that operates predominantly at the level of the Symbolic can only ever serve as a prophylactic against the emergence of subjective arrangements that are processual and open. In this way they create by means of calcification, layer upon layer until the joints of possibility seize up. The third category of fabulation involves the Real, but it cannot be inscribed within this domain entirely. This is because from a Lacanian perspective the Real is considered ontologically anterior to codifications of truth and falsehood. It is however possible to speak of a ‘sinthomatic’ form of deception or fiction that binds the three orders together in a novel way. To recapitulate some of the points made in Chapter 3, the concept of the sinthome constitutes a way of allowing a psychic construction to hang together in a way that avoids static laws of psychic coherence (such as those embodied in the Oedipus complex) in favour of a process of existential unfolding. Here one is reminded of Lacan’s description

of James Joyce as a ‘pure artificer … a man of savoir-faire’56 who managed to make for himself a new, particularized master signifier. If performativity has as its ultimate outcome a bolstering of the Symbolic ring of the Borromean knot, and mythomania an expansion of the Imaginary, then sinthomatic fabulation has the capacity to incorporate elements of all three registers as a means to create genuinely novel subjective effects. Filtering the concept of fabulation through the theoretical resources of Chapter 3 shows how the concept operates in different orders of experience, and how it can have effects that range from the catastrophic to the existentially creative. Crucially, it does so without importing a moral framework in order to determine what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ fabulation. Instead the criteria for evaluating fabulation arise immanently from the process itself, creating a bond between an aesthetics that relies not on the presumed intentions of the fabulator but on the subjective effects their creations make possible.

Notes

1 To cite a handful of these works, in 2013 the artist Ryan Gander commissioned the advertising agency Kirke and Hodgson to produce a PR campaign for a fictional government initiative to promote imagination (Imagineering, 2013). For the 9th Istanbul Biennial in 2005, the artist Michael Blum chose to pay tribute to a little known historical figure called Safiye Behar by mounting a display of letters, books,

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documents and photographs in her former apartment in the Beyoglu district of the city, before critics and audience members discovered she was fictional. In 2008 The Yes Men created a ‘special edition’ ofNew York Times bearing the headline ‘IRAQ WAR ENDS’. They have also made websites that deliberately imitate those of the World Economic Forum, Apple, Halliburton and others. See The Yes Men, ‘Museum of Fake Websites’, http://yeslab.org/museum (accessed 1 June 2018) for a full archive. Countless artists have used pseudonyms for various reasons. In 2009, the Czech artist David Černý invented 27 artists who were supposed to have collaborated on the Entropa sculpture unveiled at the headquarters of the council of the European Union. In 1997 Cornelia Sollfrank submitted no fewer than 200 entries to the Hamburg Art Museum’s first.Net art open competition ‘Extension’ under the guise of different female pseudonyms. Despite this number comprising over two thirds of the total entries received, all three of the winners were male, a fact that Sollfrank’s work, entitled Female Extension (1997), both anticipated and critiqued.

2 Carrie Lambert-Beatty, ‘Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility’,October , 129 (2009), p. 51. Lambert-Beatty’s article provides an excellent summary of a number of artworks that experiment with truth.

3 St. Augustine, ‘On Lying’, in Seventeen Short Treatises of St. Augustine, ed. C. Marriott, trans. C. L. Cornish and H. Browne, 382–425 (Oxford: John Henry Parker 1847), p. 383.

4 Sigmund Freud, ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’, inThe Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 8 (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), pp. 9–238 (p. 115).

5 The distinction between objective truth and truthfulness is made in Immanuel Kant, ‘On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy’, in Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 611–15 (p. 611).

6 Together with John K. Shaw, I have written about this at greater length in the editorial introduction to Fiction as Method (Berlin: Sternberg, 2017).

7 For a critique of the bipolar speaker-listener axis, see Guattari, Lines of Flight, p. 154.

8 These classes range from ‘lies told in teaching religion’ as the least forgivable to ‘lies which hurt nobody and protect a person from physical defilement’ as the most. Augustine, ‘On Lying’.

9 According to the Bhopal Medical Appeal, some victims received between $300 and $500 from Union Carbide in 1989, worth about five years of medical care. The Bhopal Medical Appeal, ‘Union Carbide’s Disaster’, http://www.bhopal.org/what- happened/ (accessed 1 June 2018).

10 The Yes Men claimed on their website at the time that Dow made a loss of 2 billion dollars on the German stock exchange.

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11 The Yes Men, ‘Dow Does Right Thing’.

12 Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Toppino, ‘Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity’, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 16, no. 1 (1977), 107–12.

13 Evegny Morozov, ‘Moral Panic Hides the Real Enemy – The Digital Giants’, Guardian, 8 January 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/ jan/08/blaming-fake-news-not-the-answer-democracy-crisis (accessed 1 June 2018).

14 Barbara Cassin, Sophistical Practice: Towards a Consistent Relativism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

15 Ibid., p. 40.

16 Email conversation with the artist.

17 Takala, ‘The Trainee’,http://www.pilvitakala.com/thetrainee01.html (accessed 1 June 2018).

18 Ibid.

19 For a discussion of Takala’s piece that focuses more on the relationship between contemporary performance practice and such post-Taylorist management regimes, see Sami Siegelbaum, ‘Business Casual: Flexibility in Contemporary Performance A r t ’, Art Journal 72, no. 3 (2013), 48–63.

20 Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p. 401. Although the concept of ‘gay deception’ is embedded in Bakhtin’s discussion of the novel, it is my contention that it can be separated from this discussion on account of its close links to what Morson and Emerson have called ‘global concepts’ in Bakhtin’s work, specifically the concept of dialogue. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

21 Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 355. This meaning becomes clearer when Bakhtin speaks of the various discourses of pathos in the novel, which as well as ‘sentimentalising pathos’ also include ‘high-heroising pathos’ – a construction that would normally seem oxymoronic in English.

22 Bakhtin also elaborates a rival to the tradition of the first stylistic line, the second stylistic line, which he casts in a more positive light. Novels of this class embody the clamour of interactions between different languages, dialects and worldviews, ultimately exposing the relative contingency of each. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p. 375.

23 Ibid., p. 401.

24 Ibid., p. 412.

25 Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p. 404. In Bakhtin’s work, the figure of the merry rogue re-accentuates the discourse of pathos, whether it is heroic or sentimental, in order to ‘ “distance it from the mouth” … by means of a smile or a deception, mock

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its falsity and thus turn what was a lie into gay deception.’ Ibid., p. 402. In charting the history of the merry rogue from dawn of the novel’s history, Bakhtin argues that in modern times it is ‘cut loose’ and ceases to be a ‘symbolically static image’, thus opening the door to viewing the character as a wider cultural trope. Ibid., p. 405. Modern and contemporary art is no stranger to the figure of the trickster, with artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Maurizio Catalan and Ryan Gander playing the role with differing degrees of verve and subtlety.

26 The OED defines the verb to fabulate as ‘to relate as a fable or myth’ and ‘to invent, concoct, fabricate’. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, 20 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), V (1989), p. 640. In the next section, the philosophical meaning of the word will be elaborated at greater length.

27 Three months after the internship ended, employees who were directly filmed were asked their permission for the footage to be used. Employees who did not feature directly were informed a month after this. Email conversation with the artist.

28 Jacquelyn Gleisner, ‘New Kids on the Block: “Brain Work” with Pilvi Takala’, http:// blog.art21.org/2012/12/10/new-kids-on-the-block-brain-work-with-pilvi-takala/#. VINFPVesVuA (accessed 1 June 2018).

29 Email conversation with the artist.

30 This new office culture is precisely the site of another, more recent intervention by Takala, who in July 2016 spent ten days in ‘Second-Home’, a trendy working space in London’s east end that features such office innovations as ‘roaming zones’ and ‘hanging gardens’. Entitled The Stroker, the piece involved Takala once again going undercover, this time as Nina Nieminen, an entrepreneur whose fictional business ‘Personal touch’ promoted the therapeutic benefits of touch in the workplace, and whose services were integrated within Second Home’s well-being programme.

31 The announcement was made on 10 September 2005.

32 The original manifestation of the work comprised of a hyperlinked text narrative, posters, videos and pseudo-scientific reports.

33 A provisional definition of fiction could therefore be ‘a lie revealing itself as a lie’. Karl Scheibe, ‘In Defense of Lying: On the Moral Neutrality of Misrepresentation’, Berkshire Review 15 (1980), 15–24 (p. 21). When the discussion is shifted onto a more philosophical plane, this definition seems restrictive. Fiction need not always be defined in relation to deception, or indeed to fact, as discussed below, as well as in Theo Reeves-Evison, ‘Surface Fictions’, inFutures and Fictions, ed. Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed and Simon O’Sullivan (London: Repeater, 2017).

34 It is worth noting that such conventions do periodically change, as in the case of Thomas More’sUtopia , which when first published in 1516 was taken so seriously by some members of the Church that the possibility of sending missionaries to

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convert the population of the imaginary island was apparently discussed. Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1971–3), II (1973), p. 23.

35 Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (London: Macmillan, 1935), p. 89.

36 The French ‘fabulation’ is rendered as ‘myth-making’ by Bergson’s English translators.

37 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Birchill and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), p. 171. The concept of ‘fabulation’ also appears in a number of Deleuze’s solo writings but is never developed at any length. See Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Michael A. Greco and Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 3–4 and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time- Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Caleta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 150–4, where it is translated as ‘story-telling’, as it also is in Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 108. For a detailed discussion of the concept in the context of literature, see Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

38 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 150.

39 This additive quality of fiction is described persuasively by Simon O’ Sullivan, who positions it as a form of spatio-temporal layering, where one reality is nested within another. Simon O’Sullivan, ‘Myth-Science and the Fictioning of Reality’, Paragrana 25, no. 2 (2016), pp. 80–93 (p. 85). In both solo writing and collaborative work with David Burrows, O’ Sullivan has perhaps pushed the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of fabulation (as well as its conceptual relatives such as ‘fictioning’ and ‘myth-science’) further than any other in the field of art theory and visual culture. In one of its earlier iterations, this chapter benefitted greatly from his advice.

40 Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003).

41 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, p. 221.

42 Ibid., p. 221.

43 Ibid., p. 229.

44 Bakhtin, ‘The Problem of Content, Material and Form’, p. 308.

45 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 168, 172.

46 Genet, Prisoner of Love, p. 367.

47 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, p. 219.

48 Dupré defines mythomania as a ‘confabulationary delusional state which derives from a “disequilibrium in the imaginative faculty” ’. Ernest Dupré and Jean Logre, ‘Confabulatory Delusional States’, in The Clinical Roots of the Schizophrenia Concept: Translations of Seminal European Contributions on Schizophrenia, ed. John

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Experiments with Truth 189

Cutting and Michael Shepherd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 157–67 (p. 162).

49 Dupré and Logre, ‘Confabulatory Delusional States’, p. 165.

50 As illustrated in the case of Jean-Claude Romand, a French family man who at the risk of having his lies unmasked, killed his parents, wife and two children before attempting to commit suicide. For a longer discussion of this case, see Jean Michel Rabaté, The Ethics of the Lie (New York: Other Press, 2008). A number of films also dramatize with the story: Time Out (2001) by Lauren Cantet, The Adversary (2002) by Nicole Garcia and La Vida de Nadie (2003) by Eduard Cortes.

51 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 28.

52 The first of Butler’s works to draw on the theory of performativity was Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). It was subsequently developed in Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993) and Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). For Derrida’s main contribution to the conversation on performatives, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature, Event, Context’, in Limited, Inc, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 1–23.

53 Ron Suskind, ‘Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush’, New York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/ magazine/17BUSH.html?_r=0 (accessed 1 June 2018). The quote was later attributed to Karl Rove, in Mark Danner, ‘Words in a Time of War: On Rhetoric, Truth and Power’, in What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics, ed. András Szántó (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), pp. 16–36 (p. 17).

54 Suskind, ‘Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush’.

55 Austin, How to Do Things, p. 5.

56 Lacan, Seminar XXIII, p. 99.

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Conclusion

In 2004, Tate joined a long list of other cultural institutions by establishing an ethics committee to preside over its four galleries. After the committee approved a cor- porate sponsorship deal with petroleum giant BP – a decision that became particularly controversial following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in

2010 – many wondered whether it was fit for purpose.1 Several years later, following a freedom of information request from arts and campaign groups Platform and Request Initiative, committee proceedings were finally released, revealing both the sums of money involved and the internal mechanics of the institution’s decision- making process. Although it cannot be taken as representative of the role of ethics committees in general, the minutes of this meeting highlight how little the word ethics has come to mean in some contexts, often depoliticizing sensitive issues. Here ethical deliberation is reduced to a utilitarian risk- benefit analysis, where the risk is to the organization’s reputation rather

than to the natural environment.2 This book is not an attempt to argue that ethics committees are always bad, nor is it an appeal to abandon the kind of granular risk-benefit calculations that characterize research ethics, which are often intended to protect vulnerable groups. What it has tried to show is that restricting the discussion of ethics and art to such institutional forms is at best hopelessly limited, and at worst a conscious evacuation of the radical potential that ethics embodies. But it is not just committees that clip the wings of ethics. Scholarship plays its part too. Art theory that restricts the discussion of ethics to the judicious appraisal of a handful of controversial artworks inadvertently transforms ethics into a reactive discourse. While there is no shortage of controversial artworks in this book too, the intention has been to cast them in a different light, where ethics represents more than a toolkit of ideas that can be used to determine whether an artwork has crossed a moral line.

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192 Ethics of Contemporary Art

The relationship between ethics and aesthetics is historically variable, perhaps infinitely variable, but this does not preclude the fact that stable relationships between the two can emerge at certain points in history. Chapters 1 and 2 attempted to trace the outlines of a paradigmatic relationship between ethics and aesthetics articulated around the concept of transgression. When transgression is treated as a ‘logic’, or set of logics, rather than an aesthetic style or art-historical denomination, the possibility of an artwork being considered transgressive becomes contingent upon the set of rules or prohibitions it comes into contact with. The decline of transgression, it was argued, is partly attributable to a shift in the way power functions, whether this is described as a ‘decline of the Symbolic’ or a shift from societies of discipline to those of control or integration. The theoretical bricolage of ideas associated with this argument is testament to the fact that one master narrative is not indisputably correct in itself, rather different facets of the argument have more or less purchase in different contexts. These arguments pull the rug from under artistic transgression, but the continued assumption that it still represents an inherently progressive force is further undermined by contemporary political events. In her book Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle chronicles the numerous skirmishes between online subcultures

that took place in the immediate run-up to the election of Donald Trump.3 While conservatives once regarded the sexual and cultural transgressions of the 1960s counterculture as degenerate, certain sections of the right now style their own politics as non-conformist, irreverent and having anti-establishment qualities that extend all the way to the Whitehouse. In many ways this is the situation that Paul McCarthy’s work was said to highlight in Chapter 1, where State transgression turns against its own prohibitions, resulting in disorientation that makes transgression for the rest of us even more difficult. The last three chapters were an attempt to step out of the shadows of transgression and propose concepts around which alternative relationships between ethics and aesthetics might cohere. Despite their differences, the discussions of ‘repair’ and ‘fabulation’ in Chapters 4 and 5 each in their own way position ethics as a speculative and programmatic endeavour. Instead of focusing on dis- junction and the liberating flash of insight that transgressive art holds out as its promise, repair and fabulation involve conjunction and processes in which

subjectivity is worked, ‘in the sense that one works iron’.4 If the term ‘ethico- aesthetic paradigm’ has been repurposed in this book to describe a situation where the relationship between ethics and aesthetics periodically stabilizes, in

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these last chapters it comes to coincide with the meaning Guattari gave to it in Chaosmosis. If we are to decisively step out of the shadow of transgression, this cannot be back into the Victorian ideal of culture’s edifying effects. It must be into a pluralistic philosophy of machinic animism, existential pragmatics and subjective mutation supported in and through artworks where the subject is irreducible to the individual. The opposition to Tate’s sponsorship deal with BP mentioned above exposes another pole around which a new ethico-aesthetic paradigm might emerge: ecology. This is a subject to which the artworld has had various liaisons, some of them centred around buzz words that may prove to be short-lived, others committed and politically engaged. Ecology, understood in a broad sense to encompass eco-philosophy, is a subject that Guattari turns to towards the end of his life in The Three Ecologies, but which is prefigured by many of the concepts he generated in earlier writings. In Guattari’s hands ecology cannot be reduced to a body of thought or mode of action that tackles ‘green’ issues alone. On a sociological plane, it ‘must stop being associated with the image

of a small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists’.5 Ecology, or

rather ‘ecosophy’, is a set of ‘interchangeable lenses’6 that reveals entanglements, aggregates and reciprocal co-evolutions of organisms and environments. As well as the environmental, these interchangeable lenses include social ecology

and ‘ecology of mind’ – a term drawn from Gregory Bateson.7 Rather than treat these as separate domains, the imperative is to draw on them simultaneously, exposing transversal connections that operate at multiple scales. Even if this book does not address the ecological directly as a subject, or indeed the diverse set of conjunctions between art and the environment embodied in movements such as earth art, environmental art and eco art from the 1960s to the present day, it has sought to embody certain ecological principles. First among them is the attempt to position artworks as crossing points for a diverse collection of social forces and yet not entirely determined by these forces. Artworks gain their consistency in reciprocal determination with the social, which is ultimately what gives them the ability to feed back into the production of subjectivity, rather than simply reflect society as it is. More generally, the theoretical bricolage that attempted to reconcile elements of Lacan’s late work with Guattari’s deliberately seeks to break with the tribalism of much contemporary theory, a position akin to Guattari’s decision, in the early

1990s, to join two opposed factions of the French green movement at the time.8 This approach may result in theoretical mongrels to the eyes of a purist, but

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194 Ethics of Contemporary Art

they are mongrels placed in the service of solving particular problems. This is especially the case in Chapters 4 and 5, which constitute speculative propositions that speak of encounters with artworks – a ‘thinking with’ – rather than

distanced assessments of an artwork’s historical significance or moral status.9 Nested within these composites are artworks, theories and formal languages that are themselves preoccupied with modes of relation, for example, the topology of knots or the artwork of Kader Attia. Understood as a speculative endeavour, this book embodies an ecological approach in one final sense – insofar as the latter can consist in an ‘ecology of the virtual’. A key characteristic of ecological systems is not their tendency towards harmony, or balance, as some might believe. It is their open-endedness and capacity to change. When species lose this capacity, they become living fossils and museum pieces, stripped of their vitality, and often their resilience in the face of crises too. This is as true in environmental ecology as it is in the social or the psychological sphere. It is for this reason that Guattari claimed that ‘an ecology

of the virtual is […] just as pressing as ecologies of the visible world’.10 Each in their own way, the concepts of fabulation and repair embody this processual imperative. They are not prescriptive models on how art and ethics should relate, merely openings onto future relationships that are yet to be determined.

Notes

1 In 2010 and 2011 the Tate ethics committee met to discuss the issue of BP sponsorship, on each occasion deciding that continuing the sponsorship arrangement was the right thing to do. Heavily redacted minutes from these meetings were put in the public domain, and in December 2014 a tribunal ordered that more of the redacted minutes should be released. A revealing passage from the May 2010 minutes reads that ‘Taking a moral stance on the ethics of the oil and gas sector, and the Canadian Oil Sands initiative in particular, is outside of Tate’s charitable objectives.’ David Carrington, ‘What should Tate have done differently’, Arts Professional. https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/284/article/what- should-tate-have-done-differently (accessed 1 June 2018).

2 As stated in minutes taken at the 2011 Tate ethics committee meeting: ‘The executive view is that currently the benefits of BP’s support for Tate far outweigh any quantifiable risk to our reputation.’ Author Unknown,http://platformlondon. org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/BP-Sponsorship-and-Documents-1-4-updated- redactions-4154-2617-7538-v-11.pdf (accessed 1 June 2018).

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3 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester: Zero, 2017).

4 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, p. 20.

5 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 2000), p. 52.

6 Ibid., p. 42.

7 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballentine, 1972).

8 In 1992 Guattari stood as a candidate in regional elections in Paris, affiliating himself with two parties at the same time: Les Verts (est. 1984) and Generation Ecologie (est. 1990).

9 Various reflections on the significance of ‘thinking with’, as opposed to thinking for, or thinking ‘by discovering the stupidities of others’ are scattered throughout Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

10 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 91.

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Index

Abu Hamdan, Lawrence 17, 125–6 Daub, Adrian 31, 50 Conflicted Phonemes (2013) 125, 126 Deleuze, Giles 4–5, 7–8, 11, 13–14, 105, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw 77, 86, 110, 121–3, 177–8, 180 88, 90, 92 societies of control, 13 Adams, Parveen 5 Dejmek, Kazimierz 70 Althamer, Paweł 89 Disneyland 47, 54 Antigone (Sophocles, 441BC) 31–2, Documenta 151, 154, 162 106, 134 Artaud, Antonin 38 ethico-aesthetics 1–2, 7, 9, 16, 18–19, 71, Attia, Kader 17, 148, 151–9, 161, 194 73, 77, 85–6, 90–2, 94, 128, 133–4, Open Your Eyes (2010) 152 148, 150, 156, 193 Repair from Occident to extra-Occidental Cultures, The (2012) 17, 148, 151, Falwell, Jerry 40 156 Foksal Gallery 78 Augustine, St. 168–9 Foster, Hal 1 Avant-garde 10, 42, 91 Foucault, Michel 10, 13, 133 ‘Preface to Transgression’ (1963) 10 Badiou, Alain 3, 105 Freud, Sigmund 7, 30, 107–8, 111, 131, Badura-Triska, Eva 29 168–9, 171 Bakhtin, Mikhail 127, 131–3, 158, 160, Frohner, Adolf 27–8 173–4, 180 Die Blutorgel/The Blood Organ (Frohner, Bataille, Georges 10, 37, 53 Mühl and Nitsch, 1962) 27–30, 32 Bateson, Gregory 193 Berardi, Franco “Bifo” 81, 121 Garcia, Dora 176–9, 181 Bergson, Henri 177 Heartbeat (1999) 176 Bishop, Claire 74–6 Heartbeaters (2005) 177–9, 181 Bode, Arnold 154 heartbeaters.net 176 Borromean knot 112–13, 115–16, 128, Genet, Jean 179–81 182, 184 Guattari, Félix 2, 5, 8–9, 14–18, 56, 73, 92, Brakhage, Stan 42 94, 105–6, 115–16, 118–25, 127–34, Brousse, Marie-Hélène 108, 110 148, 157–8, 162, 168, 177–82, 193–4 Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Carr, Cynthia 41 Paradigm (1995) 120, 131, 193 Cassin, Barbara 171 machinic animism 18, 158, 193 Catalan, Maurizio 78 Machinic Unconscious, The (2011) Ninth Hour, The (1999) 78 122, 124 Centro Andaluz de Arte metamodelling 16, 73, 92–4 Contemporáneo 176 new aesthetic paradigm/ethico-aesthetic Cinema of Transgression (CoT) 40–2, paradigm 2, 7–9, 16, 18–19, 86, 91, 94, 44–5, 49, 54–5 120, 128, 133–4, 148, 156, 192–3 cybernetics 14, 29, 73, 86–8, 90–1 partial enunciator 131, 134, 158, 180

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214 Index

Schizoanalytic Cartographies (2013) 130 Lacan, Jacques 5–10, 13, 16–18, 42–4, 50, subjectification/subjectivation14 , 54–6, 75, 80, 105–21, 124, 127, 128, 19, 111, 115, 118, 128–9, 131, 134, 131, 134, 148, 156–7, 159, 162, 181–2, 158, 182 184, 193 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and decline of the symbolic 14, 17, 84, 107, Guattari, 1980) 122 110, 111, 192 ego 7, 30, 108, 113, 116 Hansen, Oskar 73, 86–8, 90–1 ethics 75, 106, 117, 119 The Open Form Manifesto (1959) 86 imaginary 7, 18, 112, 114–16, 167, Harari, Roberto 116–17 182, 184 Hardy, Jane 79 ‘Kant with Sade’ (1963) 42 Hegel 4, 31–2, 105 Name-of-the-Father (NoF) 107–11, 113, Hegelian-Marxist 10–11 115–6, 118–19 Hjelmslev, Louis 122–4 psychosis 8, 17, 106–11, 115, 182 glossmatics 122 real 7, 18, 80, 109, 112–16, 124, 127–8, 167, 182, 184 Iles, Chrissie 45 Seminar III: The Psychoses (1955–56) 107 Issiakhem, M’hamed 145, 147, 150 Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Monument to the Martyrs (1962) 145, (1959–60) 106 147, 150 Seminar XX: Encore (1972–73) 112 Seminar XXII: R.S.I (1974–75) 108 Johnson, Ken 74 Seminar XXIII: The Sinthome (1975– Joyce, James 7, 17, 106–7, 111, 113–20, 1976) 17, 106–7, 109, 112–15, 117, 127–8, 134, 156–7, 159, 181–2, 184 119–20, 148, 156 Finnegans Wake (1939) 117 Seminar XXIV: One Knew That It Was a A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Mistaken Moon on the Wings of Love (1916) 113 (1976–77) 118 Ulysses (1922) 127 Sinthome 7–8, 17, 106, 113, 115, Jenks, Chris 12 118, 128 symbolic 7, 12–14, 17–18, 41, 45, 48, 50, Kant, Immanuel 3, 42–3, 105 52–3, 56, 80–4, 86, 107–12, 114–16, Kern, Richard 39–40, 42 118, 124, 127, 167, 182–4, 192 Fingered (1986) 40 symptom 6–8, 110, 115, 117–18 Manhattan Love Suicides, The (1985) Lambert-Beatty, Carrie 167 39 Landon, Tila 47 Thrust in Me (Kern and Zedd, 1985) Landowski, Paul 145–7, 150 38–40, 44–5, 55 Monument to the Dead of Algiers, or Zombie Hunger (1984) 40 “Le Pavois” (1928) 145, 146, 150 Kester, Grant 75–6 Lebel, Jean-Jacques 32, 36 Klein, Yves 36 Anthropometry of the Blue Epoch May, Todd 3 (1960) 36 McCarthy, Paul 15, 45, 47–9, 55–6, 192 Knot theory 111 Caribbean Pirates (2005) 47–9 Kowalski, Grzegorz 83, 88–90, 92–3 Spinning Room (1971/2008) 46–7, 49 Common Space, Individual Space, McCarthy, Damon 47 Realisation VIII (1993) 88 McGowan, Todd 54 Kulik, Zofia 87, 90 McPherson, Bruce 34–5 Kwiek, Przemysław 87, 90 Menia, Amina 148, 150

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Index 215

Mickiewicz, Adam 78 La Région Centrale (1971) 46–7 Dziady (1822) 78 Spinoza, Benedict de 9, 129, 160–1 Miller, Jacques-Alain 109–11 Stanford prison experiment 69, 80, Möntmann, Nina 74 85, 89, 93 Mühl, Otto 27–9 Die Blutorgel/The Blood Organ (Frohner, Takala, Pilvi 18, 171–5, 177 Mühl and Nitsch, 1962) 27–30, 32 Trainee, The (2008) 171–5 Mytkowska, Joanna 80, 82, 85 Tate 191, 193 Tauchert, Ashley 11, 56 Nitsch, Hermann 27–9, 31, 50–2 topology 7–8, 111–12, 114–15, 128, Die Blutorgel/The Blood Organ (Frohner, 134, 194 Mühl and Nitch, 1962) 27–30, 32 transgressive art 12, 15, 16, 27, 29, 30, 49, Orgies Mysteries Theatre (1971–) 51 54, 57, 70, 134, 192 Nieznalska, Dorota 78 Tuymans, Luc 82–3 Passion (2001) 78 Still Life (2002) 82

Oedipus complex 107–8, 184 Ursprung, Phillip 30 ordinary psychosis 17, 107, 109, 110, 115, 182 Venice Biennale 70, 77 Viennese Actionists 12, 15, 27, 30–2, 37, Piotrowski, Piotr 77, 79 41, 50–1 psychoanalysis 5, 6, 8, 30, 45, 75, 106, 107, 109, 111, 115, 119–22, 127, 128, Weibel, Peter 29 131, 133 Weizsäcker, Viktor Von 130, 158 Lacanian psychoanalysis 106, 109, Whitney Museum of Modern Art 45 111, 120 Wiener, Oswald 29 Kleinian psychoanalysis 131 Wójcik, Julita 84 participative art 71, 74, 76, 85, 94 Wojnarowicz, David 52 performance art 11, 28–30, 32–8, 45, 51–3, 76, 83, 88, 172, 175 Yes Men, The 169–70 Dow Does the Right Thing (2004) 169 Reich, Wilhelm 30, 37, 53 Roudinesco, Élisabeth 9 Zedd, Nick 38–42, 44, 55 Rottenberg, Anda 78 manifesto 44 Police State (1987) 41 Sade, Marquis de 42–3, 106, 134 Thrust in Me (Kern and Zedd, 1985) 38– Saussure, Ferdinand de 120, 122–3 40, 44–5, 55 schizoanalysis 8, 94, 122, 129 Zimbardo, Phillip 69–70, 80, 84–5, 93 Schneemann, Carolee 15, 32–8, 52, 55 Žižek, Slavoj 54, 80–1 Fuses (1965) 37 Żmijewski, Artur 16–17, 69–74, 76–7, ‘istory of a girl pornographer’ (1974) 37 79–80, 82–94 Meat Joy (1964) 32–8, 34, 50, 52–3 ‘Applied Social Arts, The’ (2010) 91 Schneider, Rebecca 36 Game of Tag, The [Berek] (1999) 72 semiotics 73, 106–7, 121–3, 126–7, 134, Repetition (2005) 70 148, 156 [S]‌election.pl (Althamer and Żmijewski, sin 11, 44, 55, 134 2005) 89 Skriabine, Pierre 112 Singing Lesson II, The (2002) 83 Snow, Michael 46–7 Them (2007) 72

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