NIGHT FOR DAY EMILY WARDILL Emily Wardill NIGHT FOR DAY SECESSION, Vienna September—November 2020 3 THE SCOLD’S BRIDLE: SOME THOUGHTS ON POLITICAL LINGUISTICS, THE PENCHANT FOR CONSPIRACY, AND WITCHES By Marta Kuzma 16 THE LIFE OF PSEUDO PROBLEMS. “The I is unsalvageable.” By Kerstin Stakemeier 29 I WAS TRYING TO DESCRIBE WHO YOU ARE 49 NIGHT FOR DAY OR DAY FOR NIGHT 69 TRIANGLE IN THE ROUND 89 YOU LIKED THE BEACH BECAUSE IT WAS PUBLIC SPACE BUT I LIKED IT BECAUSE ON THE BEACH PEOPLE LOOK LIKE GRAPHICS 109 THAT WAS THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE HOUSE BUT REALLY IT WAS MY JOB TO MAKE SURE THAT THE HOUSE WAS HAUNTED 129 NEVER WORK WITH CHILDREN OR ANIMALS 149 THE LAST WOMAN THE SCOLD’S BRIDLE: SOME THOUGHTS ON POLITICAL LINGUISTICS, THE PENCHANT FOR CONSPIRACY, AND WITCHES By Marta Kuzma POLITICAL LINGUISTICS, 2011 I first met Emily Wardill atFilm as Critical Practice, a weekend symposium and screening program held in Oslo in May of 2011. The event had been organized by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), an institution I led for some eight years, during which time it served as a foundation, research institution, exhibition platform, and school of sorts. It was a state-funded experimental program that had been granted permission to run with things for a while and A WOMAN WEARING A SCOLD’S BRIDLE, 1655 just see where they could go. Things went to some FROM A FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT BY JOHN exciting places in those eight years, before eventually WILLIS IPSWICH OF ANN BIDLESTONE BEING congealing into a technobureaucratic realm of fixed DROVE BY ROBERT SHARP boundaries and clear rules, the institution’s previously nimble way of proceeding lost to approvals and corrections. This particular symposium was held in one of those extraordinary Funkis cinema houses in the city where we gathered an extraordinary group—Kodwo Eshun on the Black Audio Film Collective, Hito Steyerl on the archive and film, Boris Budan on the forgotten past of cinema and communism, Catherine Ross on the French workers’ films of May ’68, Harun Farocki on montage as a critical device, and Ian White with a screening program that included Wardill’s work. Harun and Ian, both incredible forces with respect to film production and film curation, are now gone from this earth, though they were alive and well that weekend as the collective explored through a cacophony of perspectives (two speakers nearly broke into a physical fight over the legitimacy of Debord as a countercultural leader) the political legacy of film as a medium—one that abstracts from rather than merely mirrors societal and political realities inasmuch as it manages to resist industry tropes of narrative documentary. It was during that same weekend, if memory serves, that Emily first spoke to me about a film she was working on based on research and interviews conducted at a West Coast think tank called the Rockridge Institute. Our conversation led me to reconsider the role of think tanks and why they exist—the term originated during World War II to describe a 3 secluded place where strategies and plans could be formulated. It evolved from there wrote with similar concern in his State of Exception (2005) about how the United States, to describe organizations whose mission is typically some combination of research post-9/11, adopted, amplified, and extended a state of emergency in order to justify the and advocacy intended to inform government policy-making. The first of the American suspension of principles around the rule of law, in effect establishing an “extra-juridical think tanks was the RAND Corporation. Established in 1948 as a non-partisan national space” whereby acts that would be considered criminal otherwise were legitimized in security organization to connect military planning with research decisions, RAND the name of protecting the nation against existential threats.4 ultimately steered U.S. foreign policy throughout the Cold War period. Although the concept of a think tank was initially founded on a principle of bi-partisanship, in practice Wardill’s research in “political linguistics” resonated with my own research interests they lean right or left, and, since the 1970s, conservatives have gained greater ground around the late twentieth-century dissolution of the political left globally and the in building think tank institutions in the U.S., pooling greater wealth for the purpose. structural ways in which the language of resistance, traditionally embedded by the left, However, Wardill was specifically focused on Rockridge, a left-leaning think tank began to appear within conservative rhetoric, as well. Wardill’s film,Sea Oak, made founded in 1997 and located at Berkeley from 2003 to 2008, where it was led by George apparent the mode of such linguistic engineering in the formulation of right-wing Lakoff, a cognitive linguist. Lakoff’s aim for Rockridge’s research was the monitoring political rhetoric, particularly in her decision to eliminate any correspondence to visual of “framing” language—key metaphors driving communication of political concepts— narrative, placing the weight of the viewer’s attention on the act of listening. I collided particularly that used by right-wing organizations and politicians. For example, Lakoff with Emily and her project at a time when I had just completed a multi-year research- authored an opinion piece titled “Staying the Course Right Off the Cliff” in the New York exhibition project salaciously titled Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia. It Times in 2006 that elaborated then-U.S. President George Bush’s formulation around was my attempt to map a divergent history around the formation of the radical left the “stay the course” phrase so often used in the president’s speeches following the within early twentieth-century cultural circles across Scandinavia and to track its 9/11 attacks.1 “Stay the course” drew from a history of political spin on the part of subsequent evolution (or rather, dissipation) throughout the Cold War period. It was a presidents and government leaders, as documented by William Safire, a New York passion project, a stew of subjects and temporalities, though it did reflect an ongoing Times writer and author of The Political Dictionary, first published in 1968, revised in commitment to my postgraduate research into the Frankfurt School and the thinking 1993, at which point it included the following entry: and writing of Herbert Marcuse. I became a Marcuse junkie, recognizing in his early writing a coherent mapping of the postwar American industrial and political complex STAY THE COURSE – Persist in an action or policy; remain with a plan despite that had steadily worked itself into a global construction—one socially engineered to criticism or setbacks. This phrase, perhaps based on a sailing metaphor of steer individual instincts and desires through its advancement as what Wendy Brown keeping an unchanged course in navigation, was popularized during the 1980 has referred to as “stealth neoliberalism.”5 Presidential campaign. Republicans have helped to popularize the expression. During 1982, according to the Washington Post, Ronald Reagan “visited 14 Emily and I bonded over ideas we were committed to exploring and sharing, but our states in 10 days of campaigning since Labor Day, carrying his ‘stay the course’ alignment as friends held something more than a research thread to unravel. We had message.”2 a penchant for learning the history of the left as it had constituted a sphere wherein intellectuals, artists, writers, and beings sought to connect inner life with ideological Rockridge’s Lakoff observed that Bush used this “stay the course” metaphor when constructs in a meaningful way. There was no better author to express this than Vivian delivering the speech in Autumn 2002 that announced his authorization of the war Gornick, who published The Romance of American Communism in 1977, regarding against Iraq for the purpose of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and laid out the plan “the relationship between ideology and the individual, showing clearly how the universal for the U.S. to occupy Iraq for years to come, without articulating a clear strategy or hunger for a large life is inscribed in the relationship—and how destructive of that a rationale as to why such an invasion was warranted. Bush continued to repeat the hunger it is when ideology is overtaken by dogma.”6 Gornick maintained that socialism phrase throughout his presidency, spurring citizens’ emotions to remain steadfast allowed for organic connectedness in relationships, and that it was Marx whose “moral in support of the occupation of Iraq. Lakoff argued that “to stay the course, given the authority gave shape and substance to an abstraction, thereby making of it a powerful obvious reality, (was) to get deeper into the disaster of Iraq, while not staying the course human experience.”7 She described the foundation of this consciousness: (was) to abandon one’s moral authority as a conservative.”3 The political rhetoric of “staying the course” conveyed the moral authority assumed by the State as of 9/11 There are few things in life to equal the power of experiencing oneself. under the guise of protecting national security, asking citizens to adhere to status quo Rousseau said there is nothing in life but the experiencing of oneself. Gorky while veiling ulterior motives for the occupation. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben said he loved his friends because in their presence he felt himself. “How 4 5 important it is,” he wrote, “how glorious it is—to feel oneself!” Indeed, how libidinally, burrowing into our biological foundations. Counter-Revolution and Revolt impossible it is not to love ardently those people, that atmosphere, those (1972) was among his last attempts to warn that the Establishment was now militantly events and ideas in whose presence one feels the life within oneself stirring.