Real Dirty Ethics: An Interview With Mika Hannula

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[An edited version of this interview was first published in C Magazine #93.]




I first encountered the writings of Finish curator, teacher and art critic Mika Hannula in 2001 in a bookstore in the basement of Kulturhuset, Stockholm. The actual reason I discovered his writing was perhaps less than spectacular: the only English book in the theory section was his book Why Do I Like Rock Music? - Theoretical Discourse on Contemporary Visual Art and Culture and very simply the title caught my attention. However, right from the first page I was hooked. One passage, in a piece about Donald Kuspit, has somehow stayed with me:


It seems that the core of the contradictions, and the very core of his negativity is the notion that Kuspit […] really wants to change the world. His cynicism goes sky high as he has increasingly realized that this is not achievable through art, whether it be avant-garde or another type. Thus, art has lost its weight and meaning. But the fact that art is not capable of changing the main structures of western societies, is not, contrary to what Kuspit believes, something negative. The political system of western representative democracies is based on certain rules in which all equal citizens can participate. It is a vulgar appeal against these principles that through art, not through democratic rules, the whole system should or could be altered.


At that time Kuspit-style negativity was a position I perhaps over-related to and seeing it defeated with such a straightforward, civic-minded argument struck me as almost audacious, somehow deeply contrary to the manner politics were most frequently discussed in art and critical theory.

Since then I have devoured everything I could find by Hannula. His writings always circle around the same vivid questions - he is certainly not shy to push his central points and perspective - but nonetheless do so with an energy and lightness I would even describe as contagious. That ethics and the necessity of an open encounter with the other are central to any artistic undertaking, and that this process should be ignited from a situated position that is transparent but never rigid, is a thematic never far from the core of his writings.

The following interview took place via email some time in 2007. An abbreviated version of this interview was originally published in C Magazine.


Jacob Wren: So I thought I would begin with what is perhaps a naïve question. One of the things that interests me most about your writing is the very specific way you deal with questions of ethics. And I was wondering if you think there is any implicit connection between ethics and visual art and if so what might such a connection might be.

Mika Hannula: Yes, the reason why I deal with ethical questions is a rather simple one. It is kind of backbone to anything and everything I have been interested since, well, since being able to articulate somewhat what I want and what I feel important enough to deal and confront with. Thus, I am actually classical educated philosopher of ethics, specialized in Aristotelian ethics of virtue, or more precisely, contemporary readings of and with it.

That said, I can't say I see any specific relationship between ethics and visual arts, besides the basic fact that all ethics is about how we manage to negotiate our ways of being-in-the-world, and therefore, when meaningful, visual art is connected and situated in our daily lives.

I can turn the question around a bit, and perhaps you can even get a proper answer. I think one of the main openings with the relationship of ethical questioning in connection to visual arts is that, at least in those areas that I am active at, visual arts proves to be a field in which there is still room for activities that do not have an instant price-tag attached to them, and activities that don’t need to produce a product. In other words, the reason I am active in the field of visual art is precisely because of this: there are ways and means to shape and shake out alternative ways of thinking through who we are, where we are and how we are where we are.

JW: Your specific approach to ethics has many aspects I find counter-intuitive: focusing on how we can be open to an encounter with another person or group and how this openness is only meaningful if it is strongly situated in one’s own history and point of view. You also often focus on the need to take a stand, and the fact that taking a stand is not in contradiction with an ability to meet with the world in an open manner. This way of thinking about ethics seems quite different to me from the more traditional ethical position which concerned with ‘doing the right thing.’ Would you agree with this (obviously simplified) characterization of you work? In the end is the purpose of such openness mainly for ‘the right thing’ to emerge or would you say such situated openness is also a kind of ethical end in itself?

MH: Your short description is fine, and thanks for that, and thanks for also pointing out a clear difference between an approach within ethics of trying to figure out the "right thing" and a version of situated ethics that I, for example, try to argue for.

The difference from my, or our side, as in critical hermeneutics a la Vattimo and others, is not that there is no truth or no “right thing”. The point I try to make is that chasing this “right thing” is not helpful, and can be very dangerously counter-productive in sites and situations within which the protagonists do not share the same common ground or positions.

Or, if you allow me trace some steps sideways, instead of an illusion of an extensive common ground (or our ability to achieve it a la Habermas), this type of thinking starts from the presupposition that in any site or situation, there are always and continuously present conflictual views of the same event and reality. Thus, if and when reality is not one, and can't be forced into a box of one without harsh structural violence, we exist in sites and situations where there are competing, plural versions of realities. Versions that collide and crash, but also caress and kiss.

And yes, in this kind of a situation, who has got it right is not really helpful at all. Instead, it is about how to deal with differences, and differences that stand out and are respected and cherished, and not differences that are forced to be ironed out. It is about how to deal with uncertainties and complexities both within yourself and your surroundings. It is a never-ending process. It is, at its best, about how to move towards elaborated ways of relating to one another - and to do it so that it comes as close as possible to the idea of both a loving conflict and a reasonable disagreement.

And yes, not to forget. All this is not about a cynical or relativist position. Instead, a loving conflict and reasonable disagreement is only even potentially possible to get closer to if each participant speaks from a committed and situated point of view - that is, situated self not as a ready-made model but a commitment to a view which comes from somewhere but which is constantly re-made during the processes it goes through.

But, a question to you. Why is the idea of ethics as a process of trying to respect and cherish differences, as in the process of difference speaking to difference, counter-intuitive to you?

JW: Perhaps counter-intuitive is the wrong word. I was only thinking that in an encounter of ‘difference speaking to difference’ there is no guarantee the results will be ethical, there is always the possibility it could turn bad, that misunderstandings will outweigh communication, that potential difficulties will dominate the experience. And thinking of such a highly contingent space as the true sight for ethics is not the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word. The first thing that comes to mind, probably only a cliché, is a kind of step by step analysis of what to do in certain situations which might prove ethically difficult or are ethical conundrums.

MH: See, you need to up-date your version of ethics - but do not try to do from the internet.

Seriously speaking, the chance, or often actually the necessity, of a failure in ethical confrontation and ethics of meetings is very much the core of the point I am struggling to make. However, as always, it is not a struggle or conflict without a past, presence and a future. And it is not a site without certain clear presuppositions - and the one that must be noted is that for any kind of ethical confrontation to be meaningful, it must be so orchestrated that each participant agrees to follow and respect the rule of non-violence.

Here, again, we get to "real" dirty ethics. Because here the question is: what is violence?

Not only talking about hitting someone with a stick (remember the movie Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence with David Bowie as a British soldier?), but about other nuances of violence: structural and hidden ones.

And yes, this brings up the point of the inherently powerful and potential possibility of dealing with these confrontations with the means and within the field of contemporary art. A field within which I believe we must have ability and courage to get closer and to confront views and positions that we do not agree with, and which we fail to see as interesting.

Thus, the task for contemporary visual art is to question and to eventualize. To put the finger where it hurts. Not by shouting, but by luring those who are next to each other, but currently do everything not to notice each other, to confront and discuss.

What am I talking about? I am talking about differences. Differences in political views, differences in takes on human rights, differences in taste, in quality of what we do when we do what we do, I am talking about tolerance and civil courage. I am talking about love hate fear and hope.

JW: Maybe this would be a good time to ask you about the ‘Rape Park’ project.

MH: Rape Park, yes. Obviously, the starting point is the concept of a rape park, which assumingly exists in any city of a certain size. It is a park through which the inhabitants of the city “know” that you are not supposed to go through – a park in which a lot of violence and unfortunately also rapes are concentrated.

For us, it is a project that we have now started to focus on at the Academy of

Fine Arts, Helsinki. Us as in me, a professor for Art in Public Space, and Veronica Wiman, a curator from Stockholm with a strong feminist background. The park in question is a strange one. It is in the very middle of Helsinki, just behind the main railway station. It is not a big park, and most of its corners are rather ok lit - also in the night time. However, it is the Rape Park in Helsinki, a site where disgusting crimes have happened – and their numbers are a bit increasing.

The idea is very simple. We will highlight this particular site. It is we as with a group of 10 MA level students from the Academy. We want to use the benefits that we have as people working through the arts. The kind of diplomatic status you gain to get access to information not often open for “normal” citizens, and the expectation and often a fact that we are rather harmless.

Thus, the idea is to think through what this site is. Obviously, a whole load of issues are tangled together. We will think through the role and possibility of visual arts in public space, we will address the growing feeling of fear even in Helsinki (private guards and a whole lot of surveillance cameras), and we will look into how this site has been used for demonstrations, and also how the police relate to it.

The task is, at its core, three fold. Use this opportunity to seriously question the idea of bringing any kind of art into a public space such as this park. It is to think through the whole set-up of what it means once we leave the white cube. We actually have only one pre-set limitation. There will be no exhibition at the end. There will be something at the end of next May, but what that is, is still completely open.

Secondly, it is to generate a platform for not only us, but for professionals dealing with the park (from health care to urban planners to police), to bring them together. It is not about bridging gaps, but making these different situations and the people working in them aware of the different co-existing realities and approaches in it. Thirdly, the idea is to raise the question: to whom does the city space belong? This is highly relevant in Helsinki where the city government has since 10 years followed a full-blown fascist ideology of non-tolerance to graffiti and posters. And yes, surprise surprise, it is a city that is as clean of them as it gets. But yes, at the same time commercial messages have launched their reach even further into the public sphere. The question is how to generate space in the public real that is not about profit making, but about something else.

So far, we have just started. We have invited a policeman to discuss this, a priest working at the area, a lawyer for attacked women, and a feminist activist. I believe there are a lot of possibilities in this project. The positive side is that in a social democratic Hell like Helsinki, it is possible to reach out and touch almost anybody in the society. Thus, you have a connection. The problem is how to get each person committed, and how to make this project run, not for a year, but for 5 years.

And just to add a short comment. We are by no means the pioneers of this. A lot of great work in this field has been done in Europe at the Environmental Art department at the Glasgow School of Art, an Academy that we often collaborate with.

JW: Last time we spoke in person you said something that really struck me: that what we needed was not less, but more Nation States. I wondered if you could say a bit about this idea.

MH: Yes, this is my claim. We need more of Nation State Cultural Policy. A provocative statement, which is productive because its leads to so many different paths – some of them which I want to address, and some of them not.

The paths I want to pursue with it are at least three interwoven ones. I do want to question the neo-liberal dogma that less state is always and anywhere better. I want to argue, instead of this all-encompassing ideology of privatization, that many parts of our daily lives are much too important to leave only for the market forces to decide and run. In other words, there must be spaces and time in our realities within which we can live and reflect without being forced into products with price tags and last sale dates.

The other implication is to think through the problems of state cultural policies, for example, in Finland. Needless to say, there is much to wish for in how the state conducts its policy. However, the point that it is now done rather conservatively and without enough focus on quality, just quantity, does not mean it cannot be done better. And better as in more courage for experiments and risks, for challenges and collisions of opinions, more of generating platforms for those loving and caring conflicts.

The third element is a more abstract discourse that annoys me from most of my friends and colleagues. With our age of globalized this and that, there seems to be a naive belief that nation-states have no role or no weight anymore. True and blue, its reigns have lessened, and a great deal of what matters to us (economy, for example, or ecological problems) is out of its reach as a single entity within closed borders. But then again, so many basic things in our daily lives are still controlled and constructed within a given particular place and site, a particular singularity of a situation. To put it simply: all “good” things about globalization are not bound to a fixed physical locality, whereas all “bad” things, such as unemployment, ecological catastrophe, alienation, etc are not issues that travel and cannot be moved to a better and cheaper place.

And yes, unless we - any society - is able to take a serious look at how it wants to take care of those who are less well off, and to generate potentialities of second and third chances, I think we are in the long run in deep trouble. This is not a sign of Mother Theresa symptom, just an argument based on plain self-interest and self-defense.

And yes, a counter question. Looking from your site and background, does what I just said make me sound like another bleeding liberal with no sense of reality?

JW: Something I often notice in critical theory is how much easier it is to identify and brilliantly analyze the many problems of the world than it is to propose anything resembling solutions. Analysis of problems seem accurate and convincing (and depressing) while proposed solutions often seem so weak and ineffective in comparison. I often wonder if this is a problem with the world or actually a more schematic problem that has to do with almost mythological aspects of language. How writing something negative and apocalyptic seems so much more compelling than writing something civil or, for example, about having more community meetings. Adam Phillips writes: “the sane person sees life as a novel where the bad guys get all the best lines.”

Therefore, I don’t know if it’s actually possible to wrest any given nation state away from the corporate agenda. It seems that nation states, one by one, fall prey to right wing governments that, in the end, are little more than lapdogs for the agency of global capital. What kind of activism would be required to have different governments? And then also the problem that such a project seems notably unexciting. A lot of really hard work and the results are only civic, difficult to make such endeavours seem romantic or exciting.

I do think in this respect Scandinavia is an interesting case. It’s one of the few places in the world that has a reputation of having governments that represent a fairly effective vision of social democracy. In Stockholm I read a t-shirt, I suspect it was an artist project, that read ‘Sweden frightens me, everything is so well organized and it actually works.’ My first thought on reading your last answer wasn’t that it was ‘bleeding liberal’ but that it was somehow particularly Scandinavian. There is a story circulating, I don’t know if it is true, that Iceland plans to have switched all cars over to hydrogen by the year 2007. This would be an example of the nation state taking positive action and I find it unimaginable that something similar might happen in Canada. Would you agree there is something inherently Scandinavian in your position. If so how would you characterize it?

MH: Yes, of course it is as Scandinavian or Nordic as possible. Quoting a classical Björk song: "Organizing freedom, how Scandinavian of me."

I come from a certain background, and speak from a certain position. However, none of these are solid as rock – they are contested and constructed. And they are demanding in all possible ways.

First of all, I am not saying that the Scandinavian model is the dream come true. I am not selling it. On the contrary, I am more interested in showing the hypocrisy behind it. As in the case of Iceland, don't know about their hydro-schemes, but I do know they just started hunting down whales, and that they have huge plans of building dams for electricity in the north – on such a scale that it would damage the whole eco-system there, and the reason is to provide dead cheap electricity to French aluminium factories.

In case of Finland, it does not look that much better. Greenpeace has been criticizing, for good reasons, Finnish companies cutting down these Ur-Wald forests in the north. And yes, in Finland, domestic violence is a huge problem. Up to every fourth woman has experienced either violence, or a threat of violence, in their relationships.

But sure, there is hope. Hope that comes out of the situation in which there is still enough of a common base (not necessary values) of being so close in terms of income and social status. In other words: it is really impossible to try to be a huge rock star in these places. Volumes just don’t match.

Where does this leave us? It is our task to stay put with the boring and tacky local problems, instead of jumping on the next helicopter. There are never any solutions, just processes of taking part in managing the mess. But I can guarantee that if you think things look bad now in Finland or in Canada, there are always ways of making it an even bigger mess.

Thus, it is about underlining the fact that not everything must be funny, sexy and sellable.

But why have you lost your hope in local activities and commitment?

JW: Well, I don’t know if I ever had any hope in local activities or commitment, but this might only be a personal shortcoming. I’ve never had an experience where people have tried to achieve something on a local level and met with any success or even felt they had any real ground beneath there feet upon which to stage a battle. I continuously have the feeling that all real decisions are actually being made elsewhere. Perhaps this has a lot to do with the fact that Canada is so close, and so economically dominated, by the United States.

I had the experience in the mid-nineties of a local right wing government in the province of Ontario led by Mike Harris sweeping in and more or less killing everything that had been happening in the early nineties. People protested like crazy and Harris said let them protest till the grass is completely worn away in front of the parliament buildings. Now the exact same thing is happening here on federal level.

And then, I travel a lot, and everywhere I go they’re now getting these local, right wing governments who are cutting everything. It feels to me like these governments aren’t springing up locally, that decisions are being made elsewhere that help these parties win. At the very least the political techniques which allow these parties to win are circulating like mad.

At the same time, I find your position convincing. And I think it’s important not to let the dominance of global capital ossify into paranoia. Global capital is not omnipotent. There are always fissures, cracks into which local initiative can break through and have an effect.

I also thought about bringing the discussion back around to art. Because practically all artists begin their formation in a local context, develop their position in and around other local artists who all influence each other and of course also compete with each other to a certain degree. When you find an artist you like it is almost certain that when they started out their were other interesting artists around who also had a lot to do with the art you are now looking at. However, when you have success as an artist today you are basically pulled out of the local context. You travel a lot. Perhaps you move to New York or Berlin. A significant portion of your contacts and your career, and therefore also your attention, lies outside of your former local context. For artists the local context might start to seem like little more than a place where it’s good to start out.

It might perhaps sound naïve, but it makes me wonder if there’s something artists can do in terms of re-thinking the relationship between the local and global.

MH: Yes, certainly. On a grand scale, but also very much based on ones experiences. I think the current situation demands that each of us speak and act from a position. But this position – or locality – is not only a physical element. The core argument in my and Tere Vaden's book Rock the Boat is the point of seeing a locality as an active participation into a discourse. Thus, it’s not only about where we wake up or all sleep, but about who we want to talk with, argue with, and share things with.

This highlights the necessity to activate and shape many, not just one context or site. This, on the other hand, does not mean that we should engage in every possible theme, but it does mean that each of us has to find the adequate focus for us – and that is personally, and thus, politically.

We all have the need to belong to something. And this belonging can be satisfied partly by taking part in discussions and activities that we burn for. There is never one collective, but many overlapping ones. The search is to find those people who you want to share your work and thoughts with – and then keep on keeping on with it.

This is a topic I have been talking a lot about with many colleagues and artist friends here and there and everywhere – artists like Roddy Buchanan in Glasgow, curators like Ina Blom in Oslo, and just to throw one more name into the soup, the curator Vasif Kortun from Istanbul.

But here is a question to you: To which discourses do you belong to? What are the themes and issues you want to participate and do participate in?

JW: I was thinking the other day about this interview and about how I have in many ways been trying to keep it focused on you. And, I suppose one of the reasons I have become so interested in your work is because so many of your concerns are similar to mine: I’m interested in ethics, in how ethics can sometimes be a positive force and sometimes serve as a kind of cover for something more sinister; I’m interested in how the left might re-invent itself, what philosophical or theoretical positions might underlie such a re-invention; I am interested in art, in what the ideal of art might still mean as it struggles to keep up with a contemporary world that will always be ridiculously ahead of it, and what it might mean to think of art in relation to politics and vice versa (I particularly like the Hannah Arendt quote: “The conflict between art and politics… cannot and must not be solved.”); I am interested in the intimacy that can be generated between a viewer and a work of art and how powerful that experience is and what that power might mean or how it might be re-thought. And, much like you, I have come to the conclusion that it is important to take a stand, while at the same time being open to the possibility that in one’s encounter with others one’s ideas can continue to grow and change.

It is true that I pursue most of these interests in relative isolation. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I approached you. I often work in theatre, but on the very edge of the theatre, where it begins to bleed into performance art or the more contemporary concerns of visual art. In many ways I try to use this marginalized theatre work (by which I mean marginalized within the art form of theatre) as a collaborative laboratory to explore many of these questions. At the same time, I don’t really know anyone working in theatre who shares my interests or concerns so I also try to search elsewhere. I often joke that the problem with my theatre work is that people who like theatre simply don’t like what I do, I suppose because they see it as a kind of anti-theatre, and the people who might really like my work believe (correctly) that they don’t like theatre and therefore will never come. This is of course a painful but also extremely interesting situation. Therefore, I am also interested in the fact that my position is not entirely consequent and trying to think about what kind of room there might be for paradoxes, and even bad faith, in art and political thinking.

MH: See, I managed to squeeze a truly hopeful comment from you. And yes, there is a lot of stuff that I find interesting in your approach – not the least your stoic participation within a field that you don’t really feel comfortable – or in which you don't have loads of friends within. A position that most of us – me included – would find too isolated and annoying. And yes, Hannah Arendt, one of the thinkers that most commentators fail to read productively because they look for some systematic analyses of her themes, which she, obviously, does not provide. Instead, we get a fantastic case of a human being stuck by/with loads of controversies she tries to deal with – relationships to Heidegger, to Zionism, to democratic politics and so on. There is a quote from her I can’t remember fully but it goes about like this. She said it when receiving at the end of the 60's some prize, and what she said, while giving her acceptance speech, is that it is great to receive such recognition, but quite often she would rather feel, instead of being recognized, a feeling of being welcomed. A point that very well reminds me of the Israeli artist Yael Bartana, currently living in Amsterdam, who did a brilliant work at the Istanbul Biennial in 2005 – very much about her relationship to the state of Israel and its current politics.

But let me insist on your belonging to something. Ok, not many friends with similar ambitions in the field of theatre. What about this magazine you write for? Or some other critics?

JW: Yes, of course I belong to many things and many communities. I didn’t mean to suggest that I don’t. For example there are many others working in theatre who share my interest and dedication to what now sometimes seems like an almost paradoxical connection between theatre and the contemporary world. And, though often we don’t share so many thematic concerns, we all share the intense feeling of alienation that comes from working in an art form that, in some general sense, would simply prefer we disappear. It might seem that all we share is a negative condition but in fact this particular condition has many positive and fascinating aspects. And, though I am extremely critical of the art world, I share many concerns that are prevalent in contemporary art and am trying, with great difficulty, to build bridges between my practice and many of the discourses that currently surround art, yours included. And I am a great fan of music. And I firmly align myself with the left.

But all of this in fact leads me somewhere quite different. Because as an artist I somehow consider it part of my job to break away from the pack, to search for something original, for something that no one else is doing or even thinking about. Is this an old fashioned way of thinking about art? Too individualistic or avant garde? Because somewhere I suspect that all of the art works that have moved me most fiercely were made by artists or groups that broke away from those around them and in some way re-invented their form. And along with this comes a certain understandable degree of alienation. What do you think of a conception of art that accepts, for the artist, a certain degree of originality and therefore isolation?

MH: Yes, sure, there is something to it, but what?

Brings to mind two things. The old saying: Everything new comes from something old. Meaning, for me, in this context that we need to be aware where we come from, where we are and where we might want to move towards – and this in connection to whatever we do, whatever themes we address. Thus, not hunting for that authentic moment, or that original position, which I believe you did not mean anyhow, but I think it’s really important to distance ourselves from any of that essentialistic thinking or wishing and whining.

Second anecdote, which links us back to the axis of evil of foot-loose global capitalism and spineless local politicians. Just got a re-issue of the classic Curtis Mayfield vinyl, dating, I guess from 1972-73, or so. Called simply Curtis, including such heartbreakers as Miss Black America, Move on Up and others. Got it in a DJ-store in Helsinki called Lifesaver. It is a re-issue of the original. And it cost 10 euros. Do any royalties filter back to Curtis? No idea who owns the rights for Curtom records nowadays, the label where he did his best stuff. But what I do know is that if I need a helping hand in lifting the spirits, this is where I look. This is my context. This is my discourse.

And yes, of course it is a sentimental season, very much so. Opening the fold-out album cover, I find a huge picture inside of Curtis having, assumedly, his daughter, around 3 - 4 years old, sitting on his shoulders, holding her hands around his chin. And what does this make me feel? Not quite real, but it makes me feel alive. Connected, and inspired.

But back to your question. Certainly, any creative act or person taking part in the processes of production of knowledge must be partly in the opposition, and in the margins. But I will not call it isolation. Why? Well, simply because I firmly believe that for us to do what we want to do in a meaningful and enjoyable way, we need a context, we need at least a discursive community. We need people to argue with, intellectual walls to bounce against. We need someone to talk and walk with. And no, that can't be done in isolation.

Linking back to the arts, and linking to the sentimental season, when was the last time you felt “alive” at an exhibition or a theatre piece?

JW: I was really moved by the Bas Jan Ader retrospective I saw in Rotterdam. The kind of consistency of his entire project, the mix of conceptualism with so much humour and sadness felt very consequent and human to me. Another was the show by Canadian art group B.G.L. at Mercer Union two years ago, the way they completely transformed the space had such a deep and visceral effect, the experience of not knowing how to navigate through the gallery and having to figure it out little by little.

However, it’s true that my most intense experiences with culture are with music and literature. Reading and re-reading Readers Block by David Markson, Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley or The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis, these books (and many others) never fail to make me feel a little bit more alive. And with music, there’s so much that has played such an overwhelming role in my life. I’ve been listening to this song over and over again: Go To Hell, Miss Rydell by Pelle Carlberg. It’s a song about phoning up a critic whose given you a bad review, a subject I relate to for obvious reasons. It’s so simple and on point. Popular music, which is so deeply intertwined with capitalism, manages to attack the essential places with so much energy and panache. Even the way Al Green hits certain notes, the way his voice bends around them, seems so much more profound than so much of what passes for contemporary art. But I’m not sure if Adorno would agree.

I often have the experience of meeting other music fans, and we start talking about records and suddenly three or four hours have gone by and all we’ve done is name records and talk about them and what we know about them and how we feel about them. These are truly some of the most excited conversations I am capable of having. And it’s strange how so much excitement can be packed into such a simple, or even simplistic, activity.

But it’s absolutely true what you say: "we need a context, we need at least a discursive community. We need people to argue with, intellectual walls to bounce against. We need someone to talk and walk with. And no, that can't be done in isolation." However, it seems to me not so easy to find, and therefore very much an ongoing process.

MH: Yes, very true. As in any site, a context in which you are active, needs to be activated on and on and on. The moment you take it for granted, it’s gone. It is very much about becoming a place, and generating situations in which we can do what we want to do - and to do it on long-term commitment, not a 3 hour project, but looking for those next great 53 years +.

But, just to conclude, and referring back to your answer about situations when you felt “alive”, I can very easily relate to them, even if I haven't myself seen or experienced them. I was not there, but I have been very close to them, next to them. Your examples, for me, show how there are, indeed, good things happening the community – and that community being a really loose abstract frame within which acts of contemporary art and culture happen.

In other words, these are the moments that we have, and they are the only ones. Because when in doubt, always reserve enough energy and time and go back to the basics, go back to the substance, back to the individual works of art and yes, talk with them, be with them, stay with them and take always something with you just in order to be able to give it away again and again.



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Mark von Schlegell on Science Fiction and Criticism

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It helps science fiction to have a tinge of the journalistic about it. An argumentative spirit of common-sense debate and politics should be in SF if I'm going to like it. A critical voice can be welcome. Poe (the creator) first published SF, in fact, in newspapers as hoax journalism, and he was a savagely intense critic. I came of age as a writer just before the blog and when I came to L.A. there were a number of small-budget, good, lively local magazines that had real local and international effect, particularly in contemporary art. As a critic, I could offend people and do favors, tributes, write about almost anything I wanted to in the guise of anything else and be expected to argue about it in the bar at night with other writers. I even published my own newspaper. Having been that sort of critic taught me a lot about worlds. Nevertheless it didn't lead anywhere professionally. In fact, editors grew increasingly conservative, friends died, ideas were stolen, reused, disrespected, all sorts of depressing things occurred, and the magazines all folded. I discovered how rare an opportunity I had enjoyed only later.

These days I look at it like this. For me, the only way to get at the truth is to admit I'm lying from the beginning. So if you ask me for criticism, expect a story. Science fiction helps my criticism. I often mix it in directly now. I found it adds humor, imagination, makes what is often a terrible chore done for money suddenly fun to do. Of course, this means my criticism is pretty "out there," and appears in publications of the sort rarely available to U.S. readers. But wherever they're interested in cultural criticism by trees, collaborations by time-traveling Stalinist collectives battling time-traveling fascists, fake diaries of schizophrenic eighteenth-century botanists, I'm the go-to guy.

- Mark von Schlegell



Taken from Petting the Singularity: An Interview with Mark von Schlegell which can be found here



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Jacques Roubaud on haiku

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Whatever the case may have been, he told me something about haiku that exerted a decisive influence on my Project, and on the dream of my novel:

- that a haiku was always (something I knew) open, implicitly extendable into a long linked poem, a renku, but that perhaps, even more so than at the start of a renga, a hokku, it was virtually infinite in the direction of the future; that is to say:

- that each haiku was the beginning of an infinite poem, in both senses of the word: a fresh start extending all preceding haiku,

- but above all, potentially and in imagination infinite as to its actual composition;

- that renku imitated this, through the conditions of change imposed by its traditional rules, just as in the potentially infinite realm of time (infinite for all practical purposes), the seasons, flowers, rainfalls, and phases of the moon change into infinity;

- that the voices of poets who share in the composition of the strophe-links of a renku are like the generations;

- And that's why (but at this point enters in my own interpretation) at least three people are necessary to have a renku, for the deepest resemblances among human beings are not always with their parents but often at times with grandparents, or farther back still;

- five is the maximum, for voice-transmissible memory never extends over more than five generations;

- the end of a haiku, a renku in short, is merely a halt in the perpetual form, a kind of death.



- Jacques Roubaud, The Great Fire of London



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Hospitality goes beyond invitation...

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Hospitality goes beyond invitation. With invitation we expect a guest to arrive without surprise. Hospitality requires absolute surprise. We are unprepared or prepared to be unprepared, for the unexpected arrival of any Other. Hospitality is the receiving or welcoming which has no power, protocol or law. It is an opening without the horizon of expectation where peace can be found beyond the confines of conflict.

- Marko Zlomislic



Taken from the article Conflict, Tolerance and Hospitality which can be found here.

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Selected blogs written by contributors to The Resistable Demise of Michael Jackson

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Marcello Carlin - The Church of Me


Robin Carmody - Sea Songs


Joshua Clover - jane dark's sugarhigh


Mark Fisher - k-punk


Dominic Fox - Poetix


Owen Hatherley - Sit Down Man, You're A Bloody Tragedy


Charles Holland - Fantastic Journal


Reid Kane - Planomenology


Steven Shaviro - The Pinocchio Theory


Alex Williams - Splintering Bone Ashes


Evan Calder Williams - Socialism and/or Barbarism



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That which is absent from reality is that which is truly important

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[Some lines copied out from the novel The Absent City by Ricardo Piglia:]



As soon as she walked through the bars she decided she would tell the truth. She was a madwoman who believed she was a policewoman who was forced to be hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic; and she was a policewoman trained to pretend that she was in a machine exhibited in a room in a Museum.



It was like an emotion, and yet it had a cold quality, so perhaps it was not an emotion at all.



There is only one known case in the history of the island of a man who knew two languages at the same time. His name was Bob Mulligan, and he claimed that he dreamt incomprehensible words whose meanings were transparent to him.



On the island, being fast is a category of truth.



“Look,” he said, “politicians believe scientists and scientists believe novelists. Scientists are big readers of novels, the last representatives of a nineteenth-century public, the only ones who really consider the uncertainty of reality and the form of a story. Physicists, Macedonio would say, added the quarks to the basic particle of the universe, in homage to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The only friend Einstein had at Princeton, his only confidant, was the novelist Herman Broch, whose books, especially The Death of Vigil, he could quote from memory. The rest of the world spends its time believing superstitions on television. The criteria of reality” the Russian said, “ has crystallized and become concentrated, and that is why they want to deactivate the machine.”



That is how the State thinks, and why the police mainly torture the poor, only the poor or the workers or the dispossessed, who you can see are darker-skinned or mesitzos, they are tortured by the police or by the military. Only in very exceptional cases have they tortured people belonging to other social classes, and these cases have always become major scandals, like when Bravo, the student, was tortured by Amoresano and Lombilla in the time of General Perón. Because when they decide to torture people of slightly higher social standing, it always leads to scandal, and in the last few years, in which the Army has acted with a homicidal and paranoid rancor, and men, women, and children belonging to distinguished spheres of society have been tortured and brutalized, everything has been denounced and become known. And even if, of course, the largest number of those killed were workers and peasants, they have also executed priests, landowners, industrialists, students, and at the end they had to retreat before international pressure, which accepts as a given that the humble from the fields, the wretched and feverish from the ghettos and the poorest neighborhoods of the city will be massacred and tortured, but reacts when intellectuals and politicians and the children of well-to-do families are treated this way. Because, in general, the latter already collaborate of their own accord and serve as an example and adapt their lives to the criteria of reality established by the State, without there being any need to torture them. The others would do the same, but they cannot because they have been leveled and cornered, and even if they wanted to and took great pains to that end, they can no longer act like model citizens.



In a way, a formula like the title "The Absent City" is the most Macedonian aspect of the novel. What I mean is that it alludes, even if it is not immediately obvious, to one of Macedonio's fundamental ideas: that which is absent from reality is that which is truly important. This idea expresses his nonpragmatic ethics, which I believe are very appropriate for our time.



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Most blues are subtitled either no sense of wonder or no sense of scale

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Gastr del Sol lyric:



Most blues are subtitled either no sense of wonder or no sense of scale



From this song.



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I hope for poetic expressions that are aggressive, baroque and esoteric...

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… I hope for poetic expressions that are aggressive, baroque and esoteric; I prefer ridiculous and embarrassing to perfection. On the literary market, which is dominated by the aesthetic and social ideals of the upper middleclass, it is unacceptable to be excessive in any way – one adjective too many and you’re out. There’s a stubborn cliché that the sober, quiet and elegant, the so-called “simple” is categorically more informative than the noisy. The fleshy, screamy and overdone, the vulgar, desperate and pathetic are so taboo in our culture that there must be dog buried in the phenomenon.*

- Aase Berg, from It’s Not Acceptable to be Fatso





* In Swedish, “a buried dog” has the same meaning as “a dead rat” in English.



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Felix Guttari Quote

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Or rather: either a revolutionary machine that can harness desire will take shape, or desire will go on being manipulated by the forces of oppression, or repression, and so threaten, even from within, any revolutionary machine.

– Felix Guttari



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Response

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[In the comments section, in response to the post below, Gabe wrote:]


------------------------------


I don't know if it would be possible to persuade you, but I think you over estimate the extent to which markets and capitalism are based on exploitation. Also the idea of turbo capitalism compared to earlier eras is overdone, and is somewhat a case of the left taking at face value the rhetoric of the business world.

Down to earth flexible markets have also been just as historically effective in degrading the environment, whatever their benefits in terms of reduced alienation.

I haven't watched this, but the relevant book is good:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yYQqKxz8Tg


I don't know what it means for art if one no longer believes that the current moment is apocalyptic and that everyday social solidarity like well funded schools and childcare is where attention should be directed. High profits can be and are redirected for social good by being taxed, and they don't always or even usually depend on destroyed lives.


------------------------------


[It's true this is not really how it seems to me, but I want to remain open to the idea that I might, in general or just on specific points, be completely and utterly wrong. And I do feel apocalyptic thinking - which I am often guilty of - is always overly romantic, always contains more than a touch of wishful thinking: our times must be 'important' because we have come to 'the end'. And I remain in constant fear that I am simply becoming paranoid to the point of distraction. Still, the levels of global unequality do seem particularly savage to me. Not to mention the levels of inequality within any given society. Then again, what is this desire for the world to be fair.]


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Hospitality & Resistance

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1.

The energy of the market-place, at times, possesses an astonishing versatility, diversity, creativity and inventiveness, in the realm of ideas as well as actions.

The neo-liberal, turbo-capitalism – in which we currently live – is the emptied out, apocalyptic perversion of this potential.

We are integrated into this system at the level of our desires. When I want something, or have a fantasy, this want or fantasy are shot through with capitalism.

I don’t know about you, but speaking for myself, I am totally fucking in it. I behave, not like a capitalist, but like capitalism itself. And I am against capitalism. So I am against myself.

The only accurate proof of how I feel will be my suicide. So perhaps there will be no proof. This is what one might call a generational break. Science requires proof, for everything else there is activism, wishes or prayer.

The greater the margin of economic profit, the more people’s lives are destroyed, the more completely people’s lives are destroyed. This is why I prefer only a little bit of profit. (While secretly hungering for larger conquests.) How can one honestly look at the world, have a good heart, and still not be didactic. The fear of empty words, or worse, of hypocritical gestures, is far greater than the fear of doing nothing. But there is no pleasure, no risk, in being only consequent.

I started writing this in Geneva. Now I am writing in Madrid.

There is an incredible electric charge, an overwhelming surge of perverse empowerment, in consciously or unconsciously doing something that one knows is wrong. Good deeds cannot match this pleasure, they have only a tepid narcissism with which to rally.

Acts of kindness are plentiful in the world, but most often take place on a modest scale. Acts of malice can be monumental. I don’t know if this is even true. And if true I don’t know why. But I wrote it and as I was writing could feel it resonate.

Monumental acts of malice often require a great deal of technology. What are the technologies of kindness? A genocide is a monumental, terrifying act of malice. What is the equivalent in the realm of kindness?

But perhaps kindness is beside the point. To witness a monumental act of malice (the French revolutions descent into terror, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.) is to experience a violent, equally out of proportion, sense of disillusionment.

Then again, perhaps freedom is always connected to disappointment. If one can do anything, what is the single, concrete thing that can match the potency of endless possibilities. Even building pyramids falls short.

A little bit of freedom is a thrill. A little bit of freedom equals a little bit of exploitation. A little bit of freedom equals a little bit of disappointment. A little bit of freedom creates the hunger for more.

This isn’t what most people think of when they hear the word poetry.

Cancer is to our times as lead poisoning was to the Romans. A clear sign that the empire is falling. Evidence of the ‘planned obsolescence’ of all current models of industrial production. (The previous two lines equal wishful thinking.)

People are an astonishing mix of complexity and non-complexity. Subjectivity is produced. What I think of as myself in fact doesn’t really come from me. It comes from advertising, television, pop songs, magazines, the odd book, half understood social conventions and taboos, the failures of my education and, I suppose, my parents. A hodge-podge, a bricolage.

This is the self with its endless patterns I can see myself repeating endlessly though it remains elusive just exactly where they came from or why. Of course there are answers, theories, therapy. But like all useful reductions, they fail to grapple with the fullness of the struggle. A struggle not only with myself but with the world. With the marketplace of the world.

What is the direct connection between the pauper and the billionaire? Does the billionaire own the company from which the pauper was downsized, from which he never managed to recover? Does the fact that there are billionaires, that we allow the existence of billionaires, also mean, at the level of our conception of the world, that there will never be enough to go around? Why when I write about these questions, which in fact affect our political lives more ferociously than any others, do I feel naïve and trivial?

Subjectivity is produced. Deep in our consciousness we are given a challenge: either you attempt to become rich or you will end up poor. This has nothing to do with Darwin. Nature is chock-a-block full of symbiotic relationships. Animals help each other survive. Neither the billionaire nor the pauper are animals. We invented this madness.

As I am writing this, the fact that I know I can write anything and it will have absolutely no effect on the larger social world is the most striking example of what I am speaking about. This is another kind of poverty.

As now I am writing in Montreal, the most charming city in Canada. (I dare you to tell me that its not.) I struggle to call it home.

A frenzy of dissatisfaction: in which one feels any attempts at improvement will only lead to further disappointment, yet the dissatisfaction is so intense that one must, nonetheless, continuously strive towards new frontiers. The self-aware hungry ghost.

The self-aware hungry ghost. But the hungry ghost is something within ourselves that can and must be overcome. While this self-awareness, for some reason, has nothing to do with change or wanting to change. It is self-awareness in service of everything remaining, more or less, the same.

This dissatisfaction has nothing to do with wanting to change and yet everything within it screams out that things must, that the situation cannot go on. Like a Chinese finger trap, the more it struggles towards change, the more fixed and rigid the trap becomes. The greater the knowledge that what one must actually do is relax, let go, let some things take their natural course, the more fierce and violent come the surges of futile resistance. Spitting in the face of your torturer when you are exhausted, chained down, and he has all the tools.

The entire model of opposition needs to be re-thought. Yes, fascism must be opposed and fought against in all instances. (The fascism of capital, the fascism within ourselves, the crypto-fascism of everyday life.) But perhaps it must be fought against using a model somehow other than opposition.

Opposition always leads to one of two things: to being absorbed or being destroyed. It is true that when ones ideas are absorbed one does – in some sense – alter the status quo. However, if the original model was less about attacking and more about something else, I am once again thinking along the lines of symbiotic relationships found in nature, than perhaps a greater degree of change might be possible, one that does not create the insidious distortions beneficial to power that absorption so often entails.

Fierce opposition always leads to something akin to a cycle of revenge: positions on both sides harden, become further ingrained, more rigid, the longer the antagonism continues to escalate. Both sides become less likely to soften, shift or change.

And yet the more I think about such questions, the more unclear I become as to what this other model might look or feel like. Might it be a model based on listening?

Listening to the enemy? Not dialogue, not some naïve belief in the power of communication. Simple listening as the first step before any move. But what if, as you are listening, all you hear are lies? What if, as you are listening, you receive three bullets in the back of the head (when one bullet would have been utterly sufficient.) How to transition from a state in which listening is dangerous and foolish towards a state in which it is, once again, constructive? Listening for the insecurity behind power. Thinking if there are other ways, less violent ways, to make it feel secure. And once again, as I write, I feel naïve.

Where is power in capital? In the things it makes us do? In the things it allows us to do (to ourselves, to others)? In the things it makes possible: the organization, hierarchy and destruction? The overwhelming imbalances of power that simply could not exist without it.

It seems misguided to attempt to make ‘power feel secure’, but if power is little more than a savage over-compensation for the most violent forms of insecurity, then perhaps there is no other way. But why do I think power is like that? Is it little more than projection. Or is it only because I don’t believe in evil. (No, Hitler wasn’t evil, he was just really, really, really insecure.)

Evolution doesn’t explain everything, no key can unlock every door. Capital is not omnipotent, cannot absorb every single resistance.

Where is the power in capital? In the fact that nothing seems possible without it, without a bit of dosh, that even the homeless panhandle, and must feel they have no choice, that it seems nearly impossible to imagine our world organized in some other way? Capital is not omnipotent, but neither does it have to be in order to maintain a fairly consistent and spectacular control.

Now I am writing in Toronto, the city that instilled in me a deep, but cautious, antipathy towards business, sports and post-modernism.

Nature is not based on competition, it is organized through and around ecosystems. In some sense we could make an analogy between ecosystems and listening.

Competition isn’t natural. Competition is produced like everything else. In the natural world they don’t compete because of some implicit ideology that competition lends value. Animals hunt for food out of necessity. Where is the necessity in everything around us? Where is the necessity in writing overly-earnest, anti-capitalist very long poems that will change nothing and will likely not even compel the average reader to continue reading even up until this point? Where is the average reader?

The overwhelming disillusionment of the atrocities of recent history. The overwhelming disillusionment of reading the newspaper on an average Wednesday. And the concurrent knowledge that, no matter what, people continue to fight and to hope and fucking beautiful things continue to happen all the time.

How to imagine deep, structural change, happening slowing over decades, overcoming the continuous onslaught of insurmountable obstacles and continuing to push through. Beginning with subtle but ongoing shifts in our most basic understanding of ourselves and of the world. Is that a place to begin? What would it mean to listen to the insecurity behind the savagery of power abused? It is possible to begin a dialog with people who only want to fuck up your shit? A series of rhetorical questions is cheap writing but cheap writing must not be dismissed. How rigid our personalities, our understanding of the world, becomes over time.

At the door of Kafka’s castle you can’t haggle. At the Wall Mart and gas station you cannot haggle. But in the marketplace, the dirty marketplace of ‘early capitalism’, my romantic misconception of a marketplace before the hard shock of industrial production, there was still a certain one-to-one level of give-and-take. What would that marketplace look like without a king, without a church, growing out of some improvised combination of barter and local currencies?

If they can have the psychotic fantasy of a pure, unregulated free market, why can’t I have the idyllic fantasy of some future, down-to-earth, flexible, generous marketplace of necessities and ideas?



2.

They’re ideologues, and ideology is like an addiction to one’s own position. Ideologues don’t stop until someone stops them. But how to stop them without becoming equally, negatively tenacious and single-minded yourself.

We all have fixations, obsessions, things about which we are absolutely stubborn. But ideologues want everyone under the boot of their own infinite stubbornness, which they view as noble discipline, and they keep coming back.

Are these the ones I’m suggesting we listen to?

But it’s easy to call your enemy’s names, easy to demonize them, infinitely more difficult to find the miniscule point from which some degree of communication might begin.

Resistance is always unfinished, always a work-in-progress, because if you win then you’re in power, and somebody else has to resist against you. Might such an idea ease the inherent frustration involved in any act of sustained resistance?



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Evan Calder Williams Quote on NGOs

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In this period, a new imperialism was taking shape, in which those being colonized were no longer designated as enemies. Instead of being classified as conflicts between sovereign powers, wars became clashes between “humanitarian interventions” and insurgents who refused to accept the “restructuring” of their state according to neoliberal conventions of international access to markets and resources. And with that came the false universality of an inclusion of those enemies who you don’t dare call as such: you are on our side, you just don’t know it yet. NGO’s, whose mission ran from hunger relief to debt “relief”, functioned as the humanizing face of these imperial projects, both laying a groundwork for larger organizations (such as states themselves) to get involved in these “troubled” areas and acting as a public relations band-aid on those areas already invaded or damaged from a century of exclusion from the global circuits of capital. In other words, beneath the “good intentions” of NGOs and the surface appearance of an under-funded group of “one world” humanitarians, ran a massive flow of money and military might largely responsible for the very problems addressed by the NGOs. They became, wittingly or not, an advanced tactic in the broader neoliberal program of privatization and new imperialism.

- Evan Calder Williams



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A little anguish over the instrumentalization of one’s own creativity, in order to produce a new niche product for the originality markets

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The problem, however, is not only the gradual phasing-out of national cultural institutions, together with their outdated canons of beauty and elitist ideals of identity. The deeper problem is that in order to survive as exploratory and transformative practices, and in order to generate enough interest and involvement to reconstitute a socialized cultural sphere under fresh auspices, the contemporary arts have to throw off their blatant or subtle dependence on the new corporate-oriented institutions that promote an opportunistic and flexible subjectivity. This is easier said than done, as is shown by the ambiguous relations between cultural producers on the museum circuit and activists seeking forms of organization for precarious labor. Because it is easy to invest a little anguish over the biopolitical instrumentalization of one’s own creativity, in order to produce a new niche product for the originality markets – and it’s just as facile to criticize that investment. Indeed, hyperindividualization and the capitalization of everything seems to be the very formula for the breakdown of the solidarities and the emergence of liberal fascism. What’s more difficult – as those involved in the precarity movements are discovering – is to create lines of invention and critique that reinforce each other in their differences, across professional and class divides. In this respect, the role of knowledge producers in recreating an ability to say “we” is potentially decisive. By pursuing a new transvaluation of the old national values, it may be possible to arrive at what is now lacking: a sustainable constitution of multiplicity. But there is no assurance whatsoever that his potential will be realized.

- Brian Holmes



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HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY

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Introduction

Hospitality goes beyond invitation. With invitation we expect a guest to arrive without surprise. Hospitality requires absolute surprise. We are unprepared or prepared to be unprepared, for the unexpected arrival of any Other. Hospitality is the receiving or welcoming which has no power, protocol or law. It is an opening without the horizon of expectation where peace can be found beyond the confines of conflict.
– Marko Zlomislic

Interdisciplinary work, so much discussed these days, is not about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, in fact, is willing to let itself go). To do something interdisciplinary it’s not enough to choose a ‘subject’ (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.
– Roland Barthes

Begun in 2007, HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY is an ongoing project by PME-ART created collaboratively between Caroline Dubois, Claudia Fancello and Jacob Wren. It is a series of performances, workshops, interventions, events and conferences that take place in venues as varied as bars, theatres, art galleries, parks, record stores, international festivals and restaurants. While the precise nature of each edition can vary, all HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY activities focus on questions surrounding how friends and strangers alike can interact in a manner that is at the same time useful, critical, hospitable and surprising.

We are using the word hospitality in an old world sense: a stranger arrives at your door, and if you decide to let them in, in what way do you welcome them into your home? The hospitality you choose to show might determine whether they come to think of you as a friend, remain a stranger or become a future antagonist. We can think of the people who come to see a performance or work of art as strangers in an analogous sense. But also people on the street, who sit next to you on the train, anyone. Some of these people might hold views you don’t understand, or that you find repellant. Might hospitality be a way to begin to open a dialog? Without some way to open a dialog with people we don’t know, or don’t agree with, how can anything begin change?

Raised on a steady diet of television, recorded music and the internet, people today might sometimes feel more comfortable mesmerized by recordings, or interacting through the interface of a computer screen, than they do dealing directly with real human beings. HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY will not shy away from this discomfort (a discomfort often present at any live performance), rather it will honestly address it in order to deepen our understanding of what it might mean to share space with a group of people one doesn’t necessarily know, of how we can participate within a “community of strangers”.


Project Description
HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY is an ongoing project we plan to explore over many years. Some of the editions will be smaller projects while others will be considerably more elaborate, and yet all of the different editions will relate to, and greatly inform, one another. Material from one edition will fluidly leak into another, and in general the project should be treated as a whole, though, of course, each edition can also be experienced as a satisfying autonomous work. The first five editions are as follows:


HOSPITALITY 1:
THE TITLE IS CONSTANTLY CHANGING
Performance, between 15 and 30 minutes
Studio 303, Centre Clark & Cagibi (Montreal), Rhubarb! Festival (Toronto), all 2008

HOSPITALITY 1: The Title Is Constantly Changing is a performance created for a dance context. It will focus on the act of playing live music as a choreographic activity that has the potential to make the spectator feel both comfortable and unnerved. (Music will also feature in many of the other Hospitality events.)

In HOSPITALITY 1 we will play music and at the same time search for what other activities, what other ways of welcoming and addressing the spectator, we are able to perform simultaneously. The rules of the exercise are as follows:

1) Try to make it sound like music, preferably like a pop song.
2) Put yourself in as awkward relationship to your instrument and to the other performers as possible.
3) Maintain a constant relationship with the audience.

We are not exactly professional musicians but we all have some musical ability and will attack our own compositions in a manner that is both endearing and precise. The line-up will consist of drums, guitar, melodica, xylophone, singing (and who knows what else).

We have chosen playing music as the first Hospitality installment because, in light of the theme, we feel it is an honest and convivial way in which to begin our work together.


HOSPITALITY 2:
GRADUALLY THIS OVERVIEW
Installation/performance, during gallery hours
Articule (Montreal), 2010

You have an appointment. You don’t understand precisely what the appointment is but the person who randomly phoned you was extremely charming, their ideas in and around hospitality seemed intriguing, and you have a bit of free time so, what the hell, you decide to take a chance and attend. The appointment is at an artist-run centre so you suspect it will have something to do with art.

When you arrive at the gallery you are handed a pad of post-it notes and told you will be asked a series of six questions. You should answer these questions spontaneously. Your entire answer must fit on a single post-it. Your answers will be anonymous. The questions are:
- How do you enjoy being difficult?
- How do you know when you are part of a community?
- What is one rule you love to break?
- Where is the vulnerability in power?
- How do you alter the system?
- What song most shaped your personality?

As you write down each of your answers, the post-it note is taken from you and placed on the wall. The entire gallery is covered in rows and rows of post-it’s, each one containing a single answer.

Soon you to are taken to the wall, to a specific section of the post-it note array, and you watch as post-it notes are rapidly removed from the rows and placed in smaller groupings, each grouping representing a ‘category’. For example: answers that suggest ‘community is based on common ideals’ are placed in one group, answers that suggest ‘community is based more on personal friendship’ are placed in another, and answers suggesting that community is ‘mainly just an alienating experience’ are placed in a third. You watch as your own answers are placed into different groups and listen to the explanations. If you disagree with a category your answer is being placed within you can certainly say so, discuss these decisions and how they are being made.

And yet as soon as one series of categories are established they are just as quickly undone, the post-it notes placed back in their original rows as the process begins again, as a completely different set of categories are tentatively set out. For example: answers that suggest ‘power comes from the self’, answers that suggest ‘power comes from working together with other people’ and answers that suggest ‘power is something we are subject to, that comes from above’.

As this process of categorization and re-categorization is enacted, together the spectator and performers can think about how such processes are in many ways arbitrary, at the same time seeing whether or not they can also shed new light on the original questions, whether or not we can make interesting observations about the community of people who have agreed to partake in this experiment. Of course, as you watch, this process also makes you further consider your own approach to this very particular game.

This is just one of the ways people might experience PME-ART’s gallery-based project HOSPITALITY 2. We will also take the post-it notes out onto the streets, into cafes and restaurants, to parties, learning everything we can about the community of people willing to answer our questions. During the span of the exhibition there will be events and discussions that question and re-invent the project from different angles, culminating in a performance on the final evening in which we arrange and re-arrange the post-it notes in every possible combination, constantly explaining and re-imagining as we go.

HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview uses the simplest possible materials (post-it notes, pens) in order to examine certain intersections between community, audience, data and real life. But at the core of Gradually This Overview is a distinct paradox. On the one hand its questioning produces the widest possible range of responses, showing individuals in all of their personal eccentricity and diversity. On the other hand it attempts to categorize these answers into meaningful patterns, patterns that the extreme diversity of the answers constantly reject and defy. If we were simply to ask people ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions it would be very easy to turn their answers into data. We are definitely not choosing the easy route. Instead, we are much more interested in the paradox of seeing what happens when we allow the full diversity of human response to crash into our attempt to arrive at a meaningful overview of some kind of community.


HOSPITALITY 3:
INDIVIDUALISM WAS A MISTAKE
Performance, 90 minutes
Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Usine C (Montreal), 2008, Perfect Performance Festival (Stockholm), Inkonst (Malmö), BRUT (Vienna), FFT (Düsseldorf), 2009

HOSPITALITY 3: Individualism Was A Mistake represents an energizing new wave in the life of PME-ART. The remarkable openness of the structure – with every show uncannily different yet also loosely the same – allows for a performative freedom we have never before approached. Each and every time we perform HOSPITALITY 3 this freedom is further developed, engaged with and refined, challenging us with its natural disequilibrium.

In a broader sense, HOSPITALITY 3 asks if our culture’s over-emphasis on individualism prevents us from more effectively working together for political change. In positively demonstrating how the three performers collaborate (spontaneously, in real time) – each struggling with their own individualism but at times experiencing moments of pure synchronicity – the performance allows the spectator to reflect: where in their daily lives might they discover similar experiences of working together, and what might the political efficacy of such collaborative efforts eventually be?

Video excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yUVSiYJhg



HOSPITALITY 5:
THE DJ WHO GAVE TOO MUCH INFORMATION
Performance, between 20 minutes and 8 hours

It never ceases to amaze us how important and resonant songs can be in our personal and social lives. In one sense, the three-minute pop song is the perfect embodiment of capitalism, a three-minute commercial for itself that weaves deeply into the fabric of ones life and memories with startling intensity. Often connected with childhood and adolescence, it is difficult to imagine the modern world without the pop songs that form its continuous soundtrack.

The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (Hospitality 5) will explore the way popular music – and the stories that surround it – fully infiltrates our personal lives, affecting our ongoing understanding of love, work and how we think society should operate. It starts from a deep love of music, and takes us towards how the songs we love create our subjectivity, changing the way we understand the world in which we live.

Music feels like the purest art form and yet it is also the most loaded: with social and cultural baggage, with personal memories and aspirations, with imagery from album covers, publicity photographs and videos. In some sense its very purity, the way it slips past our defenses and heads straight for the emotional core, makes it a magnet for every kind of experience and reflection.

On stage is a pile of records and a record player. For each record we have one story at the ready. One after another, we put on the records and tell our stories about them, each story growing out of the last and into the next. These stories have come from hearsay, internet research, books, magazines, friends and from our personal lives. The stories each loosely fall into one of three categories:

1) Anecdotes and historical facts about a band or musician.
2) Personal stories (from us, from friends or told to us informally by audience members) about how music has affected our life and thinking.
3) Tangential stories that launch out from the music or album cover in completely unexpected directions.

Each time we perform The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information we will play the records in a different order, adding and taking away records from the pile, creating a loose, improvised, but still surprisingly effective, dramaturgy in real time.

Video excerpt: http://youtu.be/6m476iXUkCM


Conclusion
HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY is an ongoing endeavor that can continue to grow and morph within different settings. Clearly we are searching for forms that are not fixed, that are flexible enough to absorb new information and discoveries. It is our conviction that the work most effectively happens over time, through an extensive collaborative process, moving towards a vibrant, ever-changing form of performance and inter-relation that both mirrors and critiques the fast-paced, ever-changing world in which we live.

Clearly hospitality is an important theme for PME-ART. For us it is a way to open up both to the spectator and to the world (hospitality in the sense of welcoming complete strangers into your home), to build a thematic bridge between difficult artistic works and an audience that may or may not be ready for them. We believe strongly both in the necessity of politically and aesthetically challenging artistic propositions, and in the importance for such propositions to be heard. For us, hospitality is a concept that suggests starting up a dialogue, even though there is no way to know where such an opening might lead.



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They’re ideologues...

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They’re ideologues, and ideology is like an addiction to one’s own position. Ideologues don’t stop until someone stops them. But how to stop them without becoming equally, negatively tenacious and single-minded yourself.

We all have fixations, obsessions, things about which we are absolutely stubborn. But ideologues want everyone under the boot of their own infinite stubbornness, which they view as noble discipline, and they keep coming back.

Are these the ones I’m suggesting we listen to?

But it’s easy to call your enemy’s names, easy to demonize them, infinitely more difficult to find the miniscule point from which some degree of communication might begin.

Resistance is always unfinished, always a work-in-progress, because if you win then you’re in power, and somebody else has to resist against you. Might such an idea ease the inherent frustration involved in any act of sustained resistance?



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To blight the land, to exhaust and even kill the laborer, to ruin the value of the money through unchecked speculation...

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What we managed to explore last year was above all a single thesis, drawn from Karl Polanyi’s notion of the “double movement.” This refers to the fundamental paradox of capitalism, which by commodifying everything, by bringing every aspect of human experience under the rules of profit and reinvestment, at the same time provokes a defensive reaction of breakup, of escape, whether through withdrawal and autarky, warlike aggression or the search for a better alternative. Polanyi, whose major work is called The Great Transformation, is really an ecological thinker. He shows how the notion of the self-regulating market, which is supposed to assign a proper price to everything and thereby secure the necessary resources for the continual production of an ever-expanding range of goods, fails tragically to account for all the factors involved in the reproduction of land, of labor, and of the very institution of exchange, money itself. What happens instead is that careless trading in these “fictitious commodities” tends to destroy them, to blight the land, to exhaust and even kill the laborer, to ruin the value of the money through unchecked speculation. Polanyi showed how these self-destructive processes operated up to the First World War, how they ultimately wiped out the international gold standard that had been built up by British liberalism and then brought on the Great Depression. What resulted was a division of the world into five rival currency-blocs, which went to deadly war against each other from 1938 to 1945. After the war, of course, the people of the world had to pick up the pieces; for better or worse, they had to establish new balances, new systems. Giving in to the history obsession, I tried to explain both the new basis of stability and the potential weakness of the postwar world-system that came together under the domination of the United States. With David Harvey’s help we analyzed the very shaky state of that system today, examining all the strains that neoliberal globalization is now placing on the world ecology, on the conditions of existence for the global labor force, and even on the hegemony of the US dollar, whose continuing status as the international reserve currency has never been so uncertain.

- Brian Holmes



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Listening and Power

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And yet the more I think about such questions, the more unclear I become as to what this other model might look or feel like. Might it be a model based on listening?

Listening to the enemy? Not dialogue, not some naïve belief in the power of communication. Simple listening as the first step before any move. But what if, as you are listening, all you hear are lies? What if, as you are listening, you receive three bullets in the back of the head (when one bullet would have been utterly sufficient.) How to transition from a state in which listening is dangerous and foolish towards a state in which it is, once again, constructive? Listening for the insecurity behind power. Thinking if there are other ways, less violent ways, to make it feel secure. And once again, as I write, I feel naïve.

Where is power in capital? In the things it makes us do? In the things it allows us to do (to ourselves, to others)? In the things it makes possible: the organization, hierarchy and destruction? The overwhelming imbalances of power that simply could not exist without it.

It seems misguided to attempt to make ‘power feel secure’, but if power is little more than a savage over-compensation for the most violent forms of insecurity, then perhaps there is no other way. But why do I think power is like that? Is it little more than projection. Or is it only because I don’t believe in evil. (No, Hitler wasn’t evil, he was just really, really, really insecure.)

Evolution doesn’t explain everything, no key can unlock every door. Capital is not omnipotent, cannot absorb every single resistance.

Where is the power in capital? In the fact that nothing seems possible without it, without a bit of dosh, that even the homeless panhandle, and must feel they have no choice, that it seems nearly impossible to imagine our world organized in some other way? Capital is not omnipotent, but neither does it have to be in order to maintain a fairly consistent and spectacular control.

Now I am writing in Toronto, the city that instilled in me a deep, but cautious, antipathy towards business, sports and post-modernism.

Nature is not based on competition, it is organized through and around ecosystems. In some sense we could make an analogy between ecosystems and listening.

Competition isn’t natural. Competition is produced like everything else. In the natural world they don’t compete because of some implicit ideology that competition lends value. Animals hunt for food out of necessity. Where is the necessity in everything around us? Where is the necessity in writing overly-earnest, anti-capitalist very long poems that will change nothing and will likely not even compel the average reader to continue reading even up until this point? Where is the average reader?

The overwhelming disillusionment of the atrocities of recent history. The overwhelming disillusionment of reading the newspaper on an average Wednesday. And the concurrent knowledge that, no matter what, people continue to fight and to hope and fucking beautiful things continue to happen all the time.

How to imagine deep, structural change, happening slowing over decades, overcoming the continuous onslaught of insurmountable obstacles and continuing to push through. Beginning with subtle but ongoing shifts in our most basic understanding of ourselves and of the world. Is that a place to begin? What would it mean to listen to the insecurity behind the savagery of power abused? It is possible to begin a dialog with people who only want to fuck up your shit? A series of rhetorical questions is cheap writing but cheap writing must not be dismissed. How rigid our personalities, our understanding of the world, becomes over time.

At the door of Kafka’s castle you can’t haggle. At the Wall Mart and gas station you cannot haggle. But in the marketplace, the dirty marketplace of ‘early capitalism’, my romantic misconception of a marketplace before the hard shock of industrial production, there was still a certain one-to-one lever of give-and-take. What would that marketplace look like without a king, without a church, growing out of some improvised combination of barter and local currencies? If they can have the psychotic fantasy of a pure, unregulated free market, why can’t I have the idyllic fantasy of some, future, down-to-earth, flexible, generous marketplace of necessities and ideas?



[Unfinished.]



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Sentimentality is cruelty by other means.

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In Winnicott’s preferred developmental story it is only through hatred that relations between people move out of fantasy and into reality, into the possibility of actual exchange. And this is for a simple reason: hatred is what the child feels when he can let himself acknowledge that the parent (inevitably) frustrates him; that the parent is a real person (it is not the real mother who has limitations, it is the idealized mother who cannot actually nourish the child). It is only when we compare real people with the men and women of our dreams that they disappoint. In Winnicott’s view, once the child has felt and lived out his frustration with the real mother and father, and they have survived it – which might involve hating the child back, but without in any way abandoning him – he can resume his relationship with them more realistically; he has added to the stock of available reality. If he had turned away from them at this point – retreated from real engagement, stopped making demands – or they had turned away from him, they would have all gone on living a fantasy life together (ideal relations as an enraged retreat from real life). Real kindness, real fellow feeling, entails hating and being hated – that is, really feeling available frustrations – and through this coming to a more realistic relationship. This, one might say, is a more robust version of kindness, a kindness made possible through frustration and hatred rather than a kindness organized to repudiate (or to disown) such feelings. Kindness of this variety allows for ambivalence and conflict while false, or magical, kindness distorts our perceptions of other people, often by sentimentalizing them, to avoid conflict. Sentimentality is cruelty by other means.

- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness



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It is kind not to overprotect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality.

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Ordinary kindness is not a manipulative bribe or a magical cure, but a simple exchange. In a parent-child relationship where no one is looking to the other to rescue him, each can enjoy the other without needing to transform him. The modern child is perceived as someone who is always running the risk of having to become a parent to her parents; someone whose concern for her parents’ well-being can be the very thing that waylays her developmental needs. In other words, modern stories about child development are like cries for help from the grown-ups, who sound strangely oppressed if not actually enslaved by their children. It is as if now parents are more dependant on their children than children are on their parents; that what we are left with after two hundred years of intensive study of children is a world in which parents are frightened of their children, of their vulnerability, their neediness, their frustration and their rage, and in which parents look to their children for so-called self-esteem, to give their lives point and purpose. In which, to put it as simply as possible, parents and children are unable to collaborate with each other in the ordinary business of growing up. Committed to an image of the child as a bundle of rapacious, fundamentally insatiable desires, growing up becomes little more than a type of profiteering. It is this predicament that psychoanalysis seeks to address: what happens to kindness and fellow feeling in the hothouse of the family? What, if anything, can be done to prevent kindness becoming the first casualty of family life?

Whatever else it is, psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other. What Freud called defenses are the ways we protect ourselves from our desires, which are also our relations with others. Indeed, the history of psychoanalysis after Freud reflects many of the dilemmas we have about kindness (it would be an interesting exercise to read ‘sexuality’ as Freud’s word for ‘fellow feeling’). Are we, Freud’s followers wondered, committed to our desires and their gratification, or to other people? And what, if anything, could such a distinction mean? Do we crave (sensuous) satisfaction as so-called drive theorists say, or do we crave intimacy and relationships? Do we want good company or good sex, if we have to choose? If kindness, in its anti-sentimental sense, is at the heart of human desiring, then these become merely false choices, the wrong way of talking about what goes on between people. Sex becomes one of the more complicated forms of fellow feeling (there is no sex without kindness or its refusal); and aggression becomes one of its more obscure, least articulated forms (there is not kindness without aggression or its refusal). It is kind not to overprotect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality.

- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness



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No key can unlock every door.

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Evolution doesn’t explain everything, no key can unlock every door. Capital is not omnipotent, cannot absorb every single resistance.



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From On Kindness by Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor

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The child’s first, formative trauma is his growing acknowledgement of his need for others (in actuality the mother is as vulnerable to her need for her baby as the baby is to his need for her; parents need their children not to worry about them too much). The needy child experiences a trauma of concern (‘How can I take care of my mother to ensure that she takes care of me?’) which calls up his natural kindness; but this concern – and the later forms of kindness that emerge from it – is too easily turned away from. This turning away we call ‘self-sufficiency’, and when we want to pathologize it we call it ‘narcissism’. The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call ‘failings’ when we are at our most frightened.) And vulnerability – and particularly the vulnerability we call ‘desire’ – is our shared biological inheritance. Kindness, in other words, opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we long for and dread. How can people, from childhood onwards, feel confident enough to take such risks?

People want safety, whatever the cost. Perhaps it is one of the perils of secularization that if we no longer believe in God – in a Being who is himself invulnerable, and so capable of protecting us – we cannot avoid confronting our own relative helplessness and need for each other. If there is no invulnerability anywhere, suddenly there is too much vulnerability everywhere. How do we deal with this? In his novel Raw Youth (1875), Dostoyevsky describes a morning when people wake to find themselves alone in a godless universe. Instead of bewailing their loss, they turn to each other, substituting their own tenderness and concern for divine protection. Acknowledging human vulnerability, they respond to it positively. Kindness, for them, becomes a way of experiencing their vulnerability that tests the strengths and limits of their resources to deal with it. When God is dead, kindness is permitted. When God is dead, kindness is all people have.

So it is not that real kindness requires people to be selfless, it is rather that real kindness changes people in the doing of it, often in unpredictable ways. Real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can. (The notion of ‘self-interest’ implies that we always know what we want, by knowing what the self is, and what its interests are. It forecloses discovery.) Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them. By involving us with strangers (even with ‘foreigners’ thousands of miles away), as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality. But as we shall see, the child needs the adult – and his wider society – to help him keep faith with his kindness, that is, to help him discover and enjoy the pleasures of caring for others. The child who is failed in this regard is robbed of one of the greatest sources of human happiness.

- Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor, On Kindness



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Opposition and Listening

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A frenzy of dissatisfaction: in which one feels any attempts at improvement will only lead to further disappointment, yet the dissatisfaction is so intense that one must, nonetheless, continuously strive towards new frontiers. The self-aware hungry ghost.

The self-aware hungry ghost. But the hungry ghost is something within ourselves that can and must be overcome. While this self-awareness, for some reason, has nothing to do with change or wanting to change. It is self-awareness in service of everything remaining, more or less, the same.

This dissatisfaction has nothing to do with wanting to change and yet everything within it screams out that things must, that the situation cannot go on. Like a Chinese finger trap, the more it struggles towards change, the more fixed and rigid the trap becomes. The greater the knowledge that what one must actually do is relax, let go, let some things take their natural course, the more fierce and violent come the surges of futile resistance. Spitting in the face of your torturer when you are exhausted, chained down, and he has all the tools.

The entire model of opposition needs to be re-thought. Yes, fascism must be opposed and fought against in all instances. (The fascism of capital, the fascism within ourselves, the crypto-fascism of everyday life.) But perhaps it must be fought against using a model somehow other than opposition.

Opposition always leads to one of two things: to being absorbed or being destroyed. It is true that when ones ideas are absorbed one does – in some sense – alter the status quo. However, if the original model was less about attacking and more about something else, I am once again thinking along the lines of symbiotic relationships found in nature, than perhaps a greater degree of change might be possible, one that does not create the insidious distortions beneficial to power that absorption so often entails.

Fierce opposition always leads to something akin to a cycle of revenge: positions on both sides harden, become further ingrained, more rigid, the longer the antagonism continues to escalate. Both sides become less likely to soften, shift or change.

And yet the more I think about such questions, the more unclear I become as to what this other model might look or feel like. Might it be a model based on listening?

Listening to the enemy? Not dialogue, not some naïve belief in the power of communication. Simple listening as the first step before any move. But what if, as you are listening, all you hear are lies? What if, as you are listening, you receive three bullets in the back of the head (when one bullet would have been utterly sufficient.) How to transition from a state in which listening is dangerous and foolish towards a state in which it is, once again, constructive? Listening for the insecurity behind power. Thinking if there are other ways, less violent ways, to make it feel secure. And once again, as I write, I feel naïve.

Where is power in capital? In the things it makes us do? In the things it allows us to do (to ourselves, to others)? In the things it makes possible: the organization, hierarchy and destruction? The overwhelming imbalances of power that simply could not exist without it.

It seems misguided to attempt to make ‘power feel secure’, but if power is little more than a savage over-compensation for the most violent forms of insecurity, then perhaps there is no other way. But why do I think power is like that? Is it little more than projection. Or is it only because I don’t believe in evil. (No, Hitler wasn’t evil, he was just really, really, really insecure.)

Evolution doesn’t explain everything, no key can unlock every door. Capital is not omnipotent, cannot absorb every single resistance.

Where is the power in capital? In the fact that nothing seems possible without it, without a bit of dosh, that even the homeless panhandle, and must feel they have no choice, that it seems nearly impossible to imagine our world organized in some other way? Capital is not omnipotent, but neither does it have to be in order to maintain a fairly consistent and spectacular control.

Now I am writing in Toronto, the city that instilled in me a deep, but cautious, antipathy towards business, sports and post-modernism.

Nature is not based on competition, it is organized through and around ecosystems. In some sense we could make an analogy between ecosystems and listening.



[Unfinished.]



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Tell Your Friends

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I have called this book Tell Your Friends because I would like people to read it and then tell their friends about it. For example, you, if you are reading this book now, when you finish I would like you to recommend it to as many people as possible. It is not difficult to understand why I, the author, should request this of you. However, this book will have to be enormously persuasive if there is any hope of every single reader actively complying with the request of the title. In the past, I don’t believe anyone would have described me as particularly persuasive, therefore this book will ask the question to what extent can I transform myself into a considerably more persuasive writer.



[Unfinished.]



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Selected Responses to 'For Art and the World'

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There were a number of responses to my text For Art And The World:

http://www.valeveil.se/en/pdfs/vv_polemics_wren.pdf

I thought I would share just a few of them here.



Liv Sommerfelt wrote:

I will share this. This is a subject thar keeps nagging me. What is the sense in the fact that the time of a norwegian worker is so much more valuable than that of a congolese. First-worlders use this to exploit resources that should be shared. We abuse the globe because we can pay for it.
Yes, this is a subject for art.



Rosemary Heather wrote:

robert kennedy saw 'enjoy poverty' at TIFF and told me: "holy shit!" wish i could see it. maybe it will show up here again. it also reminded me about something elke said when she came back from burkina fasso (which is basically the world's most impoverished country). she thought the NGOs where just there to provide "jobs for Germans."



David Jhave Johnston wrote:

enjoyed yr polemic

resonated of course with "a simple truth:
that the first world achieves its wealth and comfort by ripping it violently off the backs of people in the
third world. And that our compassion for the malnourished in far away lands serves to mask the fact that
we are the ones economically benefi ting from their misery, which is in fact just a disguised form of slavery"

but
the first half of your statement is a truth i've often pondered
& i think most folks at some time (briefly, fleetingly) recognize it's validity
but it's like staring at the sun
hummans are not physiologically capable of calibrating each mouthful as a morsel of another's pain
(metabolic 'limits of empathy' meets the prevalence of carnivore activists)
while the second half of yr statement is challengable: compassion does not necessarily in and of itself 'mask the fact'
compassion may even occasionally, in rare instances of authentic altruism, be motivated by it

and since polemics are designed to provoke
yr final sentence works well: "Ignoring it should not be an option."
it provoked me to disagree: ignoring it (the complicit misery) is more than an option, it's an inevitable fact,
consciousness is disparate, diffused, multi-faceted, easily distracted and resolutely malleable
i for one find myself thinking about a lot of other stuff
i don't ignore it, i'm just incapable of always thinking about it

and compounding issue
i think distribution of wealth conforms to mathematical models of dynamic systems
it may have less to do with a failure of human empathy and political malevolence
than it is simply a structural feature of this bizarre existential field we inhabit



To which I responded:

Yes, it's true that at times compassion can lead to authentic acts altruism. However, I feel that when I see a photo of starving Africans, the compassion I feel has somehow become unlinked, disengaged, with the concrete reality of the situation. What I feel is: poor Africans, I want to help them. However, a more concrete response would be: capitalism is an untenably savage system, how can we think about starting to change it. This sympathy I feel serves to distract me from my role in the system that creates such injustices. It gives me a sense of emotional altruism which is in fact very much unearned.

However, maybe this way of putting things is overly influenced by the book I just finished reading; Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. Fisher uses the term Capitalist Realism to refer to the idea that capitalism is the only possible system and that there is no way to change it. When I see images of third world suffering I think capitalism - which I am complicit with on the level of my life and of my desire - must change, but of course have no idea how to open up this possibility even for myself.

Maybe I should have written 'completely ignoring it is not an option.' Of course if I think about these questions all the time I will drive myself insane. But at the same time I feel there must be ways to think about them.

All right, tomorrow I fly to Geneva (damaging the environment in the process, etc.) In one way, I feel all of this is just empty talk. But in this empty talk there is also a sincere desire to re-open questions which, in my daily life, seem far to closed and impermeable.



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Anger can only be a matter of venting, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality.

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The closest that most of us come to direct experience of the centrelessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call centre. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centres, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call centre? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centres does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centres weren’t the systematic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything.

The call centre experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller – there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centreless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself.

- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism




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Mark Fisher quote

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The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de-politicization. Considering mental illness as an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.

- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism



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Mark Fisher on the fight against Capitalist Realism

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At one level, to be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far from being ‘unrepresentable voids’ for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing. What this treatment of environmental catastrophe illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market. […] Yet environmental catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be assimilated into the system. The significance of Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being they only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment. The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital’s ‘need of a constantly expanding market,’ its ‘growth fetish’, means that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.

But Green issues are already a contested zone, already a site where politicization is being fought for. In what follows, I want to stress two other aporias in capitalist realism, which are not yet politicized to anything like the same degree. The first is mental health. Mental health, in fact, is a paradigm case of how capitalist realism operates. Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect.) In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many young people are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

The other phenomenon I want to highlight is bureaucracy. In making their case against socialism, neoliberal ideologues often excoriated the top-down bureaucracy which supposedly led to institutional sclerosis and inefficiency in command economies. With the triumph of neoliberalism, bureaucracy was supposed to have been made obsolete; a relic of an unlamented Stalinist past. Yet this is at odds with the experiences of most people working and living in late capitalism, for whom bureaucracy remains very much a part of everyday life. Instead of disappearing, bureaucracy had changed its form; and this new, decentralized, form has allowed it to proliferate. The persistence of bureaucracy in late capitalism does not in itself indicate that capitalism does not work – rather, what it suggests is that the way in which capitalism does actually work is very different from the picture presented by capitalist realism.

- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism



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What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation.

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To reclaim real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto the fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.

- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism



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For Art and the World

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Download my text 'For Art and the World' here. It's part of the Valeveil polemics project:


http://new.cdn.valeveil.se/2010/12/vv_polemics_wren.pdf





(You can also find the other polemics here: http://www.valeveil.se/project/polemics)



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Glad The CIA Is Immoral

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[This text was originally published in C Magazine #99.]



Lene Berg’s artist book arrives in the mail in a zip lock bag. On the front of the bag is a large green sticker with a text in white letters. The heading reads INSTRUCTION MANUAL and it begins as follows:

Gentlemen & Arseholes consists of the first issue of the cultural journal Encounter from 1953, along with a series of supplementary materials that are inserted between the original pages. The inserts were collected over a long period, from books, newspapers, private albums, conversations, and so on, and thus vary in their character and form. What they all have in common is that they describe aspects of that which, for various reasons, was never mentioned in Encounter, nor in connection with any of the other undertakings of the sponsor and publisher, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (1950-1967).

The ‘aspects’ in question, which were never mentioned in any issue of Encounter but are documented extensively in it’s re-printing as Gentlemen & Arseholes (2006), concern the fact that the Congress for Cultural Freedom – which also organized international conferences, artist residencies and publications in other languages – was secretly funded by the CIA with the objective of turning the European intelligentsia away from Communism and Socialism and of ameliorating the image of the United States. For a long time these aspects have no longer been secret, and in fact now anyone can read about them on the CIA website.

The re-printed first issue of Encounter features beautiful literary texts and essays from Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Christopher Isherwood, the Japanese writer Dazai Osama and many others, all of whom apparently knew nothing about the CIA agenda of the publication (though as the years rolled on there would certainly be rumors.) Neither did editors such as Stephen Spender or ‘Honorary Chairmen’ such as Karl Jaspers and Bertrand Russell.

But one man definitely did know. In a sense Gentlemen & Arseholes is the story of Michael Josselson, founder and head of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Many of the inserts in Gentlemen & Arseholes tell the story of Josselson and the charm and persuasiveness with which he led his double life as both the head of a prestigious cultural foundation and a CIA agent. In Lene Berg’s accompanying video The Man In The Background (2006) his widow Diana Josselson is interviewed at length about their life together:

It was life pervasive. […] You couldn’t talk freely to anybody that was not a co-CIA person. And as I said: it comes at every turn. This was easy, because Michael was a charmer and he did it naturally. I followed as well as I could.

Later she goes on to defend him quite bluntly (and yet I also found this moment strangely touching):

It wasn’t a question of what these people in the books say, that he was a stooger for the CIA. He was an independent thinker and actor, and part of his problem was to keep the boss happy, and mostly he did that.

Berg focuses on Michael Josselson not only because he was in charge but also, more importantly, because when in May 1967 Thomas W. Braden (in fact one of the very bosses mentioned above) published the article I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral’ in The Saturday Evening Post, an article which confirmed the link between the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Josselson almost exclusively took the fall. All of the other writers and thinkers associated with Encounter emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed, claiming they didn’t know a thing, continuing their prestigious careers in the arts and academy. But Josselson’s life was completely ruined. Braden’s article was apparently the CIA’s way to get rid of an organization that had become a burden. By 1967 speculations about the CIA link had grown pervasive, focusing on the fact that there had been no mention of Vietnam in any issue of Encounter. (What better way to ‘ameliorate the image of the United States’ than to act as if the Vietnam war simply didn’t exist.)

Thomas W. Braden – who was head of CIA’s international Organizations Division (IOD) from 1950-1954 – makes other appearances in the inserts of Gentlemen & Arseholes, including this quote from the Granada television program World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA (1975):

It [CIA] never had to account for the money it spent except to the President… the funds were not only unaccountable, they were unvouchered, so there was really no means of checking them – ‘unvouchered funds’ meaning expenditures that don’t have to be accounted for… […] Since it was unaccountable, it could hire as many people as it wanted. It never had to say to any committee – no committee said to it – ‘You can only have so many men.’ It could do exactly as it pleased. It made preparations therefore for every contingency. It could hire armies; it could buy banks. There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war – the secret war… It was a multinational. Maybe it was one of the first.

This notion of the CIA as the first multinational strikes me as extremely resonant. For many years now I have often found myself thinking that the world we live in is so utterly influenced by CIA thinking, strategies and money. The more I learn about the extent of CIA activities since the end of World War Two the more I feel that other, more subtle, explanations for our current predicament – the startling rise of the right and concurrent decline of the left, the war on terrorism, the unfettered expansion of capital, etc. – are relatively unnecessary. The CIA of course cannot be held responsible for all of the world’s ills, but they worked really hard and did a lot. Definitely more than most people realize. And yet at the same time I am extremely careful who I say such things around. To be branded a ‘conspiracy theorist’ is a further marginalization I don’t exactly feel like I need in my already marginalized cultural existence. (Ironically, who else but the CIA could dream up a strategy as simple and effective as branding someone a conspiracy theorist.) So it is likely that before I had even opened the zip lock bag, Lene Berg had already found a true fan. But this work then went on to earn my love, speaking to my interests with an eloquence, perceptiveness and conceptual rigor that for me are the very essence of art.

There is no evidence that the CIA ever censored Encounter, or in any way told the editors or writers what they should write, think, or say. Judging by all available facts, the whole thing was based on a tacit agreement between what the people associated with Encounter wanted to do, and what the CIA wanted to fund.

Because Gentlemen & Arseholes is not only about the possibly CIA-influenced world in which we currently live. It is also, like all of Lene Berg’s work, about a more basic relationship between art and politics. The secret nature of the CIA funding makes it a particularly insidious example, but we can certainly find parallels for this ambiguous dynamic in all historical periods in which artists have received support, whether it be from the church, the king, the bourgeoisie, the state or the market. Artists always need money and, fiercely dedicated to artistic concerns, it might even seem natural not to question too much where the money comes from or why. Why not simply be grateful that it is possible to continue producing artistic works in (what are always for artists) difficult times?

It seems clear to me that Josselson believed he was doing the right thing and genuinely believed that he was taking government money and putting it towards a good cause. Of course he also believed in the fight against communism. Much like the fight against terrorism today, such battles are an excellent pretext for the re-distribution of priorities and the re-distribution of wealth. Give the money to artists and writers who are not communist, raise their profiles, build their careers and reputations. The writers and artists who are communist will take the hit indirectly, falling ever so slightly behind, with only unfounded suspicions as to the real reasons why. In The Man in the Background Berg questions the long-term effects of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, wondering if perhaps it is one of the reasons that today 90% of all cultural products in Europe are produced in America. Of course there is no way we can find out what the world would be like if Michael Josselson and the Congress for Cultural Freedom had never existed. But there is plenty of room to speculate.

There is much art today that gives lip service to being ‘political’ but it is rare for an artwork to ask difficult, compelling, real-world political questions in a manner that at the same time resonates so effortlessly with the dilemmas of artistic praxis. Such battles are political but they are also, on so many levels, deeply romantic: concerning the real questions of what we believe in, how much we believe in it, and whether or not we are willing to fight. It is rare I get to write about art that makes me think and feel as much as the work of Lene Berg. And therefore I would like to end with something that, like all romantic battles, goes a bit too far: far enough to take on the violence of the very rigged historical battle between the CIA and the left, to match Michael Josselson’s perhaps inevitable, yet somehow still tragic, fall from grace. But all I have come up with is this (and I write it here because it is true): Lene Berg is the artist I have been waiting for all of my life.



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