On making (it) /procedure for overproduction....../

You make something

 you make something out of the something you have just made

you make something which cannot be bought

you make a gift

you make something which is the opposite

of what you have just made

you make fake money and you sell it for real

you make a little note inviting people to invite other people

you make a meeting about what other people are making

you make a communication

you make a trailer for a movie somebody else once made

you make a performance for webcam that no one will watch

you make an animation

you make yourself into an animation figure

who can make other things than you can, so

you make an album

you make voice expressions that no one can read but everyone can understand

you make something that has no physical existence

you make thoughts make other thoughts

you make a lecture performance

you make a text out of the lecture and publish it on the net

you make a video registration which is so long

that no one will ever look at all of it

you make a compressed version so they might anyhow

you make sure not to make compromises

you make a space

you make a workshop in the space

you make a fictional documentary about the workshop you already made in the space

you make a chair you can sit in when you have made enough other things

you make a choreography for furniture

you make sure not to make anything that cannot also be used to make something else

you make functions change

you make people go look at a squash match and call it a performance

you make someone write that it was a great show

you make things up

you make small lies

you make people curious by being secret

you make up a strategy

you make a party that no one knows where the DJ plays the music

you make people move

you make a fake fight in the party

you make a rumor about a scandalous performance

you make a discussion

you make yourself misunderstood in order to be able to change direction

you make a lunch meeting for everybody

you make a text about the discussion which can be rewritten by others

you make a collection of the texts and redistribute them

you make a library

you make a book about the making of the library

you make something that can go on when you cannot anymore

you make a recording

you make cinematic expressions

you make a casting for a film which will never take place

you make the making more important than the result

you make other kinds of products

you make products circulate

you make circulation


Mette Ingvartsen/ Procedure for Overproduction

On "doing something"...

The pressure "to do something" here is like the superstitious compulsion to make some gesture when we are observing a process over which we have no real influence. Are not our acts often such gestures? The old saying "Don't just talk, do something!" is one of the most stupid things one can say, even measured by the low standards of common sense. Perhaps, rather, the problem lately has been that we have been doing too much, such as intervening in nature, destroying the environment, and so forth...Perhaps it is time to step back, think and say the right think. True we often talk about something, instead of doing it, but sometimes we also do things in order to avoid talking and thinking about them, such as throwing 700 billion at a problem instead of reflecting on how it arose on the first place.

From Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (p.11)

note on dramaturgy

So maybe instead of huge systems and thousand of collaborations and subtle actions, maybe dramaturgical work is in recognizing these zones of nothingness, zones where things are yet to happen, where there are possibilities for something to grow. Maybe instead of establishing conditions for this task to function smoothly and productively, dramaturgical work must take these fields - choreography, direction, performance - somewhere, where they mind find some answers.

Now don't take this as a kind of illusion or a dreamy escape from the thing itself. Everything that I am saying is much more oriented in the direction of what the performance could be, instead of limiting ourselves at a very early stage, for instance, either to a strictly direct or to a strictly cooperative approach. Or perhaps we can be really radical and approach the spectator in such a way that we might collaborate on an equal level? And here, I think that this idea or Ranciere's concept of working with spectator activity again becomes an interesting point of departure for dramaturgical work. Not to say that art is not already working with it; a lot of great art engages with spectator activity. But the question is: how do you invite? And if you invite, are you interested in what the spectator brings to the work or have you invited them simply because you feel lonely, need company, or want to manipulate?

Janez Jansa/ Self-interview: from Dramaturgy to Dramaturgical

Words, yet more words, and nothing but words...

Today, we have theater without speech, and spoken dance; installations and performances by way of plastic works; video projections transformed into series of frescos; photographs treated as tableaux vivants or history paintings; sculpture metamorphosed into multimedia shows; and other combinations. Now, there are three ways of understanding and practicing this melange of genres. There is that which relaunches the form of the total artwork. It was supposed to be the apotheosis of art become life. Today, it instead tends to be that of a few outsize artistic egos or a form of consumerist hyper-activism, if not both at once. Next, there is the idea of a hybridization of artistic means appropriate to the postmodern reality of a constant exchange of roles and identities, the real and the virtual, the organic and mechanical and information-technology prostheses. This second idea hardly differs from the first in its consequences. It often leads to a different form of stultification, which uses the blurring of boundaries and the confusion of roles to enhance the effect of the performance without questioning its principles.

There remains a third way that aims not to amplify effects, but to problematize the cause-effect relationship itself and the set of presuppositions that sustain the logic of stultification. Faced with the hyper-theater that wants to transform representation into presence and passivity into activity, it proposes instead to revoke the privilege of vitality and communitarian power accorded the theatrical stage, so as to restore it to an equal footing with the telling of a story, the reading of a book, or the gaze focused on an image. In sum, it proposes to conceive it as a new scene of equality where heterogeneous performances are translated into one another. For in all these performances what is involved is linking what one knows with what one does not know; being at once a performer deploying her skills and a spectator observing what these skills might produce in a new context among other spectators. Like researchers, artists construct the stages where the manifestation and effect of their skills are exhibited, rendered uncertain in the terms of the new idiom that conveys a new intellectual adventure. The effect of the idiom cannot be anticipated. It requires spectators who play the role of active interpreters, who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the 'story' and make it their own story. An emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators.

I am aware that of all this it might be said: words, yet more words, and nothing but words. I shall not take it as an insult. We have heard so many orators passing off their words as more than words, as formulas for embarking on a new existence; we have seen so many theatrical representations claiming to be not spectacles but community ceremonies; and even today, despite all the 'postmodern' scepticism about the desire to change existence, we see so many installations and spectacles transformed into religious mysteries that it is not necessarily scandalous to hear it said that words are merely words. To dismiss the phantasies of the world made flesh and the spectator rendered active, to know that words are merely words and spectacles merely spectacles, can help us arrive at a better understanding of how words and images, stories and performances, can change something of the world we live in.

(From Ranciere's The Emancipated Spectator p.21-23)

Solo Solo Solo

Approach solo work rather more like call and response. Take up antiphony as a model of reading.

If we think against the grain of the solo as discrete, we can begin to hear solo in collectivity - and not just by tracing influence in uni-directional lines of influence, but lines of influence or reverberation that, rather than Klein's leap, shoot the call backward as well as forward, anticipate misrecognition, court it, and simultaneously, redirect the past as having become itself through re-enactment. We can approach solo rather in the way that "solo" is indicated in jazz or blues - as an artist makes a call and another responds and another responds to that response as a call and response is made, which, agai, becomes a call citing, or reciting, a response as call.

Solos, in jazz, cite each other, bleed into each other, react to each other, re-enact each other, and perform an entire cross-hatch of work, in which the "solo" quality of any one action becomes profoundly riddled with the echoes of precedence and the fore-cast of future response (as one waits for the response after a call, mishearing that response in the call, before a response is even uttered). We might make a cross-hatch of works to produce a kind of visual or performance jam where we read sets of solo performance works as "riffing" across media, and across time, undoing any clear access to "origin" (mythic or otherwise). [...]

After all, this kind of play - this sense of playing, even play-acting - is the primary principle of postmodern production. But what kind of historical "lineage machine" can fully adopt this as scholarly practice? Since such a history could not offer a lineage that allows for singularity or discrete or unitary origins, "lineage" seems like a profoundly inadequate word. Perhaps an illegitimate history, a history of illegitimacy - that which we leave out, put back - is more (im)precisely the point.

from Solo Solo Solo by Rebecca Schneider, included in After Criticism (ed. Gavin Butt) (p.37)  

Can the Subaltern Speak?

The unrecognised contradiction within a position that valorizes the concrete experience of the oppressed, while being so uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual, is maintained by a verbal slippage. Thus Deleuze makes this remarkable pronouncement: 'a theory is like a box of tools. Nothing to do with the signifier'. Considering that the verbalism of the theoretical  world and its access to any world defined against it as 'practical, is irreducible, such a declaration helps only the intellectual anxious to prove that intellectual labor is just like manual labor. It is when signifiers are left to look after themselves that verbal slippages happen.

The signifier 'representation' is a case in point. In the same dismissive tone that severs theory's link to the signifier, Deleuze declares, "There is no more representation; there's nothing but action' - action of theory and action of practice which relay to each other as relays and form networks'. Yet an important point is being made here: the production of theory is also a practice; the opposition between abstract 'pure' theory and concrete 'applied' practice is too quick and easy.

If this is, indeed, Deleuze's argument, his articulation of it is problematic. Two senses of representation are being run together: representation as 'speaking for', as in politics, and representation as 're-presentation', as in art or philosophy. Since theory is also only 'action' the theoretician does not represent (speak for) the oppressed group. Indeed, the subject is not seen as a representative consciousness (one re-presenting reality adequately). These two senses of representation - within state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subject-predication, on the other - are related but irreducibly discontinuous. To cover over the discontinuity with an analogy that is presented as a proof reflects again a paradoxical subject-privileging. Because 'the person who speaks and acts...is always a multiplicity,' no 'theorizing intellectual...[or] party or...union' can represent 'those who act and struggle'. Are those who act and struggle mute, as opposed to those who act and speak? These immense problems are buried in the differences between the 'same' words: consciousness and conscience (both conscience in French), representation and re-presentation. The critique of ideological subject-constitution within state formations and systems of political economy can now be effaced, as can the active theoretical practice of the 'transformation of consciousness'. The banality of leftist intellectuals' lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed, representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent.

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My view is that radical practice should attend to this double session of representations rather than reintroduce the individual subject through totalizing concepts of power and desire. It is also my view that, in keeping the area of class practice on a second level of abstraction, Marx was in effect keeping open the (Kantian and) Helegian critique of the individual subject as agent. This view does not oblige me to ignore that, by implicitly defining the family and the mother tongue as the ground level where culture and convention seem nature's own way of organizing 'her' own subversion, Marx himself rehearses an ancient subterfuge. In the context of post-structuralist claims to critical practice, this seems more recuperable than the clandestine restoration of subjective essentialism.

The reduction of Marx to a benevolent but dated figure most often serves the interest of launching a new theory of interpretation. In the Foucault-Deleuze conversation, the issue seems to be that there is no representation, no signifier (Is it to be presumed that the signifier has already dispatched?There is then no sign-structure operating experience, and thus might one lay semiotics to rest?); theory is a relay of practice (thus laying problems of theoretical practice to rest) and the oppressed can know and speak for themselves. This reintroduces the constitutive subject on at least two levels: the Subject of desire and power as an irreducible methodological presupposition, and the self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject of the oppressed. Further, the intellectuals, who are neither of these S/subjects become transparent in the relay race, for they merely report on the nonrepresented subject and analyze (without analyzing) the workings (of the irreducibly presupposed by) power and desire. The produced 'transparency' marks the place of 'interest'; it is maintained by vehement denegation: 'Now this role of referee' judge, and universal witness is one which I absolutely refuse.' One responsibility of the critic might be to read and write so that the impossibility of such interested individualistic refusals of the institutional privileges of power bestowed on the subject is taken seriously.

(from Can the Subaltern Speak? by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)

   

The aim is to get out...

 It is very hard to 'explain' oneself - an interview, a dialogue, a conversation. Most of the time, when someone asks me a question, even one which relates to me, I see that, strictly, I don't have anything to say. Questions are invented, like anything else. If you aren't allowed to invent your questions, with elements from all over the place, from nevermind where, if people 'pose' them to you, you haven't much to say. The art of constructing a problem is very important: you invent a problem, a problem-position, before finding a solution. None of this happens in an interview, a conversation, a discussion. Even reflection, whether it's alone, or between two or more, is not enough. Above all, not reflection. Objections are even worse. Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: 'OK, OK, let's go on to something else.' Objections have never contributed anything. It's the same when I am asked a general question. The aim is not to answer questions, it's to get out, to get out of it. Many people think that it is only by going back over the question that it's possible to get out of it. 'What is the position with philosophy? Is it dead? Are we going beyond it?' It's very trying. They won't stop returning to the question in order to get out of it. But getting out never happens like that. Movement always happens behind the thinker's back, or in the moment when he blinks. Getting out is already achieved or else it never will be.

(From Dialogues II by Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet)