REPRESSION AND SPECTACLE
Eric Reyes-Lamothe.
October, 2007
Text for Renée Green's seminar "Spheres of Interest", SFAI
"Things we do not understand" was the title of Harun Farocki's exhibition at the Reina Sofia Museum in January 2006. After reading his essay "Controlling observation" I reminded of the images on the exhibition, specially the fights inside the prison. In his text, he talks about the "dispassionate repression", expressed through a desire of objectivity in the surveillance. But after watching the video installation, I felt I turn into a "dispassionate observer" as I was watching the brutality of the images, hiding behind the camera eye as the guards would be. Is not this the point of view of the Panopticum eye, the eye that observes and is not observed?
With the footages, Farocki is making evident the task of the control tower, and converts the reading of the video surveillance into a spectacle. In a way, he's giving back to society the images of the punished.
But society does not want to see the images of reality. Fiction is much more comfortable. This is the real show, the real "big brother", something too harsh to be watched. Prisoners are the anti-heroes, the ones that have to be hidden, the losers.
They shall be punished and make them carry with the burden of their shame. Through the surveillance camera, the guards are the beholders of this punishment, of the shame happening behind the walls of the prison. They are the only ones allowed to do it. As Farocki says, "the guard is society's representative". No one else is watching.
The justice department made a video for the media, intended to prove that "those sentenced to prison do not lead a life of luxury at all, but on the contrary have a tough time there". The video is showing the discourse of the Institution, that of the severity of the punishment. Modern prisons are intended to be for punishment, not correction. In this sense, Farocki compares the video with the propaganda film produced by the nazis in 1943 at Brandenburg. For him, both films make the criminal into a spectacle.
Why is Farocki displaying that which is forbidden to see? Why is he showing images -not of the depressed and shameful prisoners- but of the revolting ones? "Things we do not understand" might mean also the things we do not want to understand, or we do not want to see. He is saying, "even if you do not want to, I'll show to you this event that you do not want to understand". Farocki is not showing the romantic paradigm of the melancholic prisoner. He is talking about the scheme of power inside the jail.
But, is not Farocki perpetuating the scheme of the spectacle of the jail? What is he giving to the viewer, a critique of the system, or a reinforced curiosity of what is going on inside the jail?
Jails are heterotopias of punishment. Places that our society needs to purify and normalize those who are not in the parameters of normality. Why is it so rare to see what is happening inside? Is this a dirty job that has to be done, and no one wants to hear about it? Is it for the respect of the punished shame? Maybe this is what Faruki is trying to point to.
Being in jail is like being in silence. This is the way the State brings silence to the political enemies. It is not a death sentence, is just the appearance of being death. I remember how Siqueiros spent almost 4 years of his life in prison. During the last years of his life he was still in jail, in Lecumberri, "the black jail", the most fearful of jails in those days. The 60's in Mexico were years of revolt, and prison played a big part, controlling the political enemies of the Government. Of course, this is still happening.
PURIFICATION
The modern concept of prison is not anymore that of rehabilitation of the individual. It is a place for punishment. But still, the fact that someone is sent to prison delineates the need of "purification" of the social body. This action is done with materialist purposes. In the History of shit, Laporte says that
"Under the seal of divine power, the city -the site of exchange from the earliest moments of generalized circulation- was subject to purification. Whether belly or granary, the city is that place where merchandise accumulates and is consumed before being turned into gold. To purify the city, one must enrich it in a manner that makes way for the means of production..."
If the city is the place for the accumulation of money, and it needs to be purified, how does it takes place? The purification of the city occurs through the repression of the citizen. In Laporte's words "repression was not the principal agent of its purification; rather, repression's sublimated return, through which the city was "enriched" and, at the end of the tale, came to shine with the flash of a thousand lights. Her lights would never have enlightened the world so superbly if primitive accumulation had not found in France such inspired contact with a political system bent on castration and laundering." Laporte is talking about repression and cleanness. Is purification, then, achieved through punishment?
We can assume, that there is a material profit after the repression of the individual. Laporte is talking about the implementation of rules regarding the disposal of wastes, comparing them with a system of ordinances that imply a new codification of the intimacy of the house that define the tolerance levels toward shit. “Without a master, one cannot be cleaned. Purification, whether by fire or by the word, by baptism or by death, requires submission to the law.”
CYCLES, RECYCLES
In a personal sense, I have been attracted to the symbolism of the waste, which I considered to be inscribed into a wider context of the processes that affect the multitude. In order to approach the multitude, I observe the traces it leaves behind, being its wastes part of those traces.
Some questions have been orbiting: How can I relate the garbage with an artistic practice? Is waste a political actor? What is the meaning of recycling the waste in a developing society in the third world? To which extend is society taking care of its own wastes opposed to the State doing it?
As a mere experiment, I studied a mid-size city in Mexico (Tulancingo, Hgo, 120,000 inhabitants). I am interested in this kind of cities because I consider they are still malleable and take a certain shape as an urban environment. As Mexico City is the closest example of the idea of what a big city should be, most of the cities in the country tend to grow in that direction. Is it possible to build the city we need? Or better, the city we want?
My interest was directed towards some points:
-The relationship of waste with the traffic on the streets; pollution on the river; floods; political discourse and social organization.
- First, I found that the area does not have a center for waste recycling, but there are people who collect plastic and metal and sell it, creating an informal network that works with no intervention of the State’s waste collecting system. So, this is an informal industry that works independently from the Government and behaves as a social organization.
- The river is connected to the city in some points: two major floods have affected the area in less than ten years, generating a sort of paranoia in the community when the raining season starts. On the other hand, the river brings polluted waters for agriculture into rural communities. The vegetable products go to the city containing the same contamination that the city made.
- The buses collecting garbage run through the city during the day. People take the garbage out of their houses just when the bus is a approaching. Everyone knows when a bus is approaching because it has speakers on it, playing a mambo song that says: “go and hide, cause the garbage collector is coming”.
It is a fact that there is a connection with music as an art, and the collecting of wastes.
- The waste-recycling center is a heterotopia. It is a place where no one should approach. And still, there is an alchemic happening inside, as the garbage is turned into a profitable resource, as might be the transformation of organic waste into soil. Here is where connect the profit of punishment, and the purification of the waste.
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THEORETICAL PRACTICE
Eric Reyes-Lamothe. December 2007
Text for Renée Green's seminar "Spheres of Interest"
AN EXPERIMENT
A big part of the discussions in class was about the relationship of theory and artistic practice. I have been thinking on the possibilities of making a bridge between theory and art practice. My intention is to make a connection of the theory of the multitude with my own practice.
In his influential essay, A Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno defines the multitude as a plurality, a network of individuals, considering these singularities as a point of arrival, not as a starting point: “The individual of the multitude is the final stage of a process beyond which there is nothing else, because everything else (the passage from the One to the Many) has already taken place.”
Before this process of individuation occurs as a result of a complex differentiation, there is a state called the preindividual reality, which is common, universal and undifferentiated. An example of this pre-individual reality is language, which belongs to everybody and to nobody: “The use of the spoken word is, at first, something inter-psychic, social, public. A ‘private language’ does not exist –in any individual case, and even less in the case of an infant. In this respect one comprehends the full extent of the concept of ‘public intellect’ or general intellect”.
Virno rescues the term multitude from its historical abandon, as it was “people” the notion used to describe the forms of associative life and the public spirit of the constituting states in the seventeenth century. One no longer spoke of multitude, but of people.
Using the concept of singularities defined by Virno, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri published Empire and Multitude. For them, the multitude is a new social class that removes itself from nations and parties to challenge the Empire.
About Multitude, Negri says, “it is a book that presents the problem of the political subject, of its actual novelty and, above all, its production. Since Empire, the multitude was defined neither as people, mass or a set of individuals: instead, it was defined as a network of singularities, where this singularities, in order not to be chaotic, must recognize themselves in the common that extends between them.”
The problem with their idea of the multitude is that a multitude capable of doing such a feat does not exist. It is still a hypothesis and for some is hard to swallow the idea that capital could be destroyed by such an essentialist notion1.
Using Negris’s political ideas as a starting point, I asked two friends in Mexico, Eunice and Mario, to make an experiment of contact networks. I was having discussions with both of them separately about Art Institutions and their relationship with the artists, so I suggested having group e-mail conversations.
Eunice Limón is a sociologist and philosopher working as adjunct professor in UNAM, the main public Mexican University. I participated wit her in series of projects during last summer in Mexico, dealing with the problems of the growing cities where we could have incidence through sociological methodologies and art practices in order to make the government and citizens observe the problems that should be taken in account.
Mario Patiño is a painter living and working in Pachuca, who has a strong definition of his own practice through philosophical ideas, looking for a closer interaction of the observer with arts, especially through education. The first letter started with Mario's questions: Are we intellectually colonized? Are there philosophies, aesthetics and sociology made by Latin Americans?
What he implies in his questions is the history of cultural colonization in Latin America, which casts a long shadow since the Spanish Colony times. Colonization relates to Globalization. As Denning points out, Globalization starts with the conquest of the New World and the slave trade in 1492; and 1791, the year of the Santo Domingo revolt marks the beginning not of two centuries of European urban insurrections, but of two centuries of global anticolonial revolt. Denning mentions the classic book about the Haitian revolution, the Black Jacobins, where C.L.R. James arguments that modernity began in the periphery of our world system as the New World plantation slaves were the most modern people in that time.
Slavery was among other common characteristics between the colonized South. By the mid-twentieth century, the dream of anticolonialist intellectuals of creating a transcontinental movement took form through the Pan-African congresses, The Congress of Colonized Peoples, and the writings of Gandhi, C. L. R. James, and W.E. B. Du Bois, among others. But it was until 1955 at Bandung, when the South claimed its nonalignment with the Soviet Union and the United States of America, the two superpowers that emerged after Yalta.
In this respect, Françoise Vergès says that, ”The Bandung Declaration constructed an imaginary and ideological space in which the Third World was no longer the site of raw and massive exploitation by Europe, inhabited by passive people who could not transform their environment and who could not use the most recent technologies to bring progress and education to future generations.”
The struggle against Colonization is still present in our time, adopting the shape of a battle against Globalization, or civic resistance. Among an avalanche of information, Mario sent some links with titles like “The art of Resistance” or “The Decalogue of cultural resistance”.
On the other hand, Eunice was positive about the future of Latin American philosophy, having the example of Mexican theoreticians from the 1970’s. Her sociology thesis is about the relationship of artists with Institutions. She is doing specific studies in the Mexico City Metro, which she considers a type of Art Institution, because inside the underground corridors of the Metro there is a network of displays where artists can show their works to the millions of passengers that traverse those spaces daily. Most of the questions raised by her were about the position of the artist in relation to the Institutions. “One is artist after a process of socialization, and this is possible only because there is an Institution”, she said.
In the group conversations I mentioned some extracts from Institutional Critique and After, where Fraser examines the Caravan piece presented by Asher in 1977 in the Skulptur Projekte Münster. The work consisted of a caravan parked in different parts of the city during the exhibition. At the museum, visitors could find information about the location of the caravan, but at the site itself nothing indicated that the caravan was art. Fraser considers that what is announced as art is already institutionalized, because it exists in the perception of participants in the field of art, a perception fundamentally social in its determination, observing the institution as a component of the artistic practice:
“There is, of course, an ‘outside’ of the institution, but it has no fixed, substantive characteristics. It is only what, at any given moment, does not exist as an object of artistic discourses and practices. But just as art cannot exist outside the field of art, we cannot exist outside the field of art, at least not as artists, critics, curators, etc. And what we do outside the field, to the extent that remains outside, can have no effect within it. So if there is no outside for us, it is not because the institution is perfectly closed, or exists as an apparatus in a ‘totally administered society’, or has grown all encompassing in size and scope. It is because the institution is inside us, and we can't get out of ourselves.”
What is evident in our ongoing group conversations is that the paper of the Institution must be examined in order to fulfill the needs of the art producers and consumers.
A BOOK
I found quite interesting the way Lovett/Codagnone related their artistic practice with philosophical ideas, bridging both. The performance of theory was actually the presentation of their thesis. This presentation was done using excerpts from Foucault’s writings, to make more evident the bridge they wanted to build. They transformed textual ideas into a script, performing the idea of the mirror contained within the same text.
Perhaps the most feared feature in the dawn of writing was the possible lost of memory, as reading could minimize the traditional transmission of ideas trough spoken language.
My question in the class was related with the tricky experience of building bridges from theory to practice. The problem goes back to the very origins of written language itself: Is not theory a set of ideas that we borrow from somebody else? What is the price of using those ideas without actually experimenting and acting on them? If the reader gets information, what is returned in exchange?
In his 39 microlectures Matthew Goulish invites the reader to read his book as a “creative act”. He pulls together thoughts that he considers important, letting them sit next to another:
“Now those thoughts have become a book, and acquired certain undeniable qualities of bookness, ends, and middles. One may enjoy these such and fell thankful for tradition”.
The idea of reading as a creative act allows the reader to turn into an actor who gives life to the book in every read sentence. Lovett/Codagnone were readers and actors at the same time, and their creative act was performed in front of an audience that turned into a tertiary actor-reader. When turned into sound, Foucault’s text (contained in a hypothetic book) is spread through the air in the voice of the actors.
For me, the ideal book is a fortress, an enclosed space where wisdom is kept protected from the outside. The open book might then be observed as an invitation to a series of relationships, as it gives to the reader all kinds of sensational experiences, from the inner sounds produced in the mind when reading (or when reading aloud) to the tactile sensation of holding the object in the hands. Meanwhile, the reader performs and interprets the written signifiers in the book, giving life and purpose to the book.
When Goulish mentions Paul Klee’s Open book, he says:
“The book, seen from above, unfolded its pages in all directions –left to right, top to bottom, impossible triangulations near the center. It looked like an oversized flower, a brown rectilinear artichoke opening. No, it looked like a miniature model for a city.”
In its particular symbiosis of material and intellectual, the book is the environment where theories develop. Even if it is an object, it has a series of elaborated immaterial structures developing inside, summoned in the act of reading. The “environment-book”, is where theory and materiality gather.
The limits of the comprehension of the book are defined by culture, so the interaction with it must be in the realm of human language. The process may not be applied backwards, saying that the world is an open book, because it is a human artifact. In this sense, Gary Snider points that “Metaphors of ‘nature as books’ are not only inaccurate, they are pernicious. The world may be replete with signs, but it’s not a fixed text with archives of variora. The overattachment to the bookish model travels along with the assumption that nothing of much interest happened before the beginning of written history.”
The environment-book is then, a place where the representation of the world is taking place in theoretical ways, through language. The writer has poured a set of ideas into the book using language and the reader must understand the same language in order to perform what the writer wants to evoke. Thus, the book symbolizes a fortified city protected from the natural world. Inside, there is a common trade through language, and/or a stage performance where the reader is the actor, and the book is the stage. I consider the book as a symbol of the connection between theory and practice, an imaginary space where ideas are made physical, into written words or sounds or acting.
As a postscriptum in relation with the practice of the arts I want to quote Rukeyser who says: “Art is action, but it does not cause action: rather, it prepares us for thought.
Art is intellectual, but it does not cause thought: rather, it prepares us for thought.”
REFERENCES
GOULISH, Matthew
39 microlectures in proximity of performance
Routledge, London and New York
SNYDER, Gary
The Practice of the wild
Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004
VIRNO, Paolo
A Grammar of the Multitude
Semiotext(e), MIT Press, 2004
NEGRI, Antonio
Movimientos en el Imperio. Pasajes y paisajes
Paidós, Barcelona, 2006
DENNING, Michael
Culture in the age of three worlds
Verso, USA, 2004
VERGÈS, Françoise
Writing on water: Peripheries, Flows, Capital, and Struggles in the Indian Ocean
Duke University Press, 2003
Welchman, John
Institutional Critique and after
Fraser, Andrea. From the critique of institutions to an institution of critique
Southern California Consortium of Art Schools, symposia, 2006
Sylvère Lotringer, We, the Multitude, in the Foreword of Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude.
Documental "El arte de resistir"
Decálogo de la resistencia cultural. Costa Rica