Anthony McCall
selections from part 6 of ‘Sparing with the Spectacle’
BRANDEN JOSEPH
As noted, when discussing “Long Film for Four Projectors” McCall
Consistently chose not to emphasize the installation’s spatial or
sculptural effects for themselves so much as for their impact upon the
viewers, specifically the manner in which they disrupted the
audience’s identity as a defined or unified entity. “Though providing
an enormously increased set of viewing options over the ’screen’ film,
the ‘Cone’ series still dictated an axis of attention which pointed to
the light-source, the film-projector,” he observed. “This had the
consistent effect of clustering the audience along the light-beam.
Now, I wanted the light-beam to occupy the space in a way that did not
emphasize certain viewing positions over others.” As quoted
previously, such spatial dispersion was combined in “Long Film” with
an extended duration that similarly disarticulated the audience as “an
essentially passive congregation with a single focus and homogeneous
behavior patterns.”
The same year that Long Film debuted, McCall codified his
presuppositions about duration in Two Laws of Presentation, a d
(literally) small work made for artist Herbert Distel’s The Museum of
Drawers (1970-77). In it, McCall postulated two rules, drawn from a
larger set of notes entitled “Aspect of Temporality”: (1) The form of
attention is a function of the form of attending. (2) The form of
attending is a function of the duration.” These were schematically
illustrated by a set of nine index cards, each of which corresponded
to a separate duration. Representing time as space in a manner
reminiscent of a graphic music score, McCall plotted durations–ranging from five seconds to twelve years–by means of a simple horizontal line. Black dots denoted the relative density of the attending audience. At five seconds and one, five, and even thirty minutes, the group forms a definable circle with all individuals apparently focused on the event. By three and, especially, six hours(the minimum length of Long Film) the audience has ceased to be an identifiable group, and the attention of certain individuals is shown wandering to other areas or corners of the virtual room depicted by the card. Spatial and temporal diffusion are reciprocally determined.
The material interrelation of space and time would be most explicitly manifested in McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light(1975). Spatially, the work consists of a loft or gallery space the windows of which are covered by white paper that admits light during the day and reflects it at night. Completely devoid of film projector, interior lighting is produced by a single, constantly illuminated light bulb hung in the middle of the room. A wall text, “Notes in Duration,” is included as an integral part of the installation. In it McCall criticized the conventional distinction between static and temporal events, a division underlying the supposedly medium-based distinction of art from cinema:
This film sits deliberately on a threshold between being considered a work of movement and being considered a static condition….
Art that does not show change within our time-span of attending to it we tend to regard as “event.” Art that outlives us we tend to regard as “eternal.” What is at issue is that we ourselves are the division that cuts across what is essentially a sliding scale of time-bases. A piece of paper on the wall is as much a duration as the projection of a film. Its only difference is in its immediate relationship to our perceptions.
Occasional works like these derived from the active drawing characterized by Line Describing a Cone. McCall’s concern with duration, however, predated the conception of the solid light films and formed the basis of a much more elaborate series of fire performances. These began as early as 1971 as private and largely audienceless Fire Events. A glascene envelope containing the burnt remnants of Fire Event // (1971) was mailed to Schneemann on the day of its performance, bearing the following handwritten inscription:
Performed Saturday 27 Nov ‘71 at 43 Egerton Gardens SW3, at 20:00 hours. There were three other performances the same day, at 19:55 hours, 20:05 hours and 20:10 hours. The selected audience was invited not to attend, after the event had taken place. There will be no repeat performances.
The Fire Events soon transformed into a series entitled, Landscape for Fire. The first was performed in 1972 on the occasion of the wedding of McCall’s friend, Anthony Howell, in a field on Howell’s mother’s farm near the town of Reading. “This first Landscape for Fire was relatively small scale,” McCall explains,
involving, I think, a grid of nine or perhaps 12 points. I only recall myself as a single performer, but my notes and drawings suggest that there were others. For instance I used two foghorn elements, which would require two people, and at least one performer with a white square, so perhaps there were in fact four performers. The piece had a duration of maybe 15 or 20 minutes. The occasion was Anthony’s wedding (the reception which had occurred earlier in the day); older family visitors had long gone when Landscape for Fire was performed. There was an audience of around 20, almost all artists, poets or dancers.
With Landscape for Fire II(1972), which took place that August, McCall began working with a group known as Exit. Founding members of the group, J.J. Ratter and Gee Vaucher had been active in the CND “scene” mentioned by McCall and Bygrave in “Zap! Pow! Zowie!” and had been living communally in a farmhouse dubbed Dial House, located in North Weald, close to London, since 1967. Rechristening themselves Penny Rimbaud and G Sus (and joined by fellow Exit member Steve Ignorant), they later formed the radical punk band Crass, whose political music and performances led to a temporary alliance with and revival of the CND in the early 1980s. Exit was in fact also a band, of sorts, which had evolved out of an even earlier group, The Stanford Rivers Quartet. Whereas The Standford Rivers Quartet had utilized a series of graphic scores consisting of laying grid paper over paintings and other visual material in order to determine the amplitude, duration, and pitch of the sounds to be performed on keyboards, piano, trombone, and drums, Exit had evolved into a larger and more improvisational outfit alone the lines of British contemporaries The People Band.
McCall first met the Exit group in the context of ICES 72, which they had helped Matusow and his fourth wife, composer Anna Lockwood, organize and for which they designed and silkscreened the posters. By 1972, the lines between experimental composition and artistic happenings in London had become thoroughly blurred. Exit’s own performances, according to Rimbaud, had by that time “expanded to almost circus-like proportions with anything up to fifteen musicians playing while a team of artists executed often complex art happenings.” Thus, although ICES primarily featured experimental music, several artists, including McCall, Schneeman, and Geoff Hendricks were invited to perform. While most of the musical performances too place at THe Toundhouse, where Cage and Hiller’s HPSCHD was staged, Exit offered Dial House as an alternative venue for artistic events. Finding the spatial requirements of Landscape for Fire II too large for Dial House’s grounds, however, they negotiated to use the adjacent North Weald Airfield and also offered to assist McCall in the execution of the work(and, as it would turn out, many of the subsequent ones as well).
Exit proved extremely disciplined, often arriving on the scene the night before and camping on the site so as to be there early enough to begin laying out and checking the required materials as McCall arrived. Indeed, as McCall readily acknowledges, it was Exit’s interest and availability that ultimately allowed the fire performances o extend in length and complexity. Rimbaud recalls that he and the group “took an instant liking” to McCall: “his quiet, considered approach [was] one we felt was reflected in our own work.” And there were further affinities to be found between them on the point of duration. Before meeting McCall, Exit had already started to transgress the distinction between traditional concert performance and something closer to a sound installation. As Rimbaud explains:
Exit’s pieces were less scored that those of the [Standford Rivers] Quartet. We depended on improvisation based on the understanding that had by then built up between [what was originally] the three of us. [Exit was formed after the departure of the trombonist.] Although we would advertise start and finish time for our performances, we had a policy of starting at least an hour earlier than billed, this being so that the audience would walk into a musical environment which had not been conditioned by their presence. Likewise, finishing times were random, our performances often going on late into the evening(or until we were switched off by uncomfortable management).
Frequently, the audience did not wait for any such conclusion. According to Rimbaud, the group had taken the name Exit on account of “that being the direction we imagined most of any audience would take at our performances.”
By the time of Exit’s collaboration on Landscape for Fire III (1972), executed behind the sports ground at Oxford University on November 30, 1972, the duration of McCall’s “Conditions” (a term he adopted at the suggestion of Ehrenberg) had begun to extend toward durations that, a couple years dissolving latter, would reach twelve to thirteen hours, effectively dispersing the audience’s attention to the maximum–according to the second to last cards of McCall’s Two Laws of Presentation–before dissolving away entirely.
The next March, McCall stretched the performance duration of such events to the theoretical limit, drawing up the score for an “eternal performance” of Landscape for Fire that could conceivably be constituted indefinitely. That same year, he also produced Found Solid Light Installation (1973), which consisted simply of an appropriated map showing all the lighthouses in England. Tacking the map to the wall of the gallery pointed toward an event of enormous spatial and temporal dispersion.
For the Exit group, one of the most interesting aspects of McCall’s performances was its inhabition of the exterior realm staked out earlier by Kaprow’s happenings and more contemporary land art practices: “Anthony’s piece appealed greatly to us because although the happenings’ element of his work was one that we too had been developing, the idea of moving out of the confines of galleries and performance venues into open space was something that hitherto we had not really considered.” Exit soon followed McCall’s lead, similarly moving outdoors for such works as Oxford Piece(aka Water Piece), which would also take place in an open air field at Oxford.
Interestingly, McCall and the group got on so well that Exit decided to continue performing fire conditions after he relocated to New York, First following and then deriving variants of McCall’s scores, Exit was not entirely entrusted with the details of preparation and execution. Though they had long since proven themselves capable of dealing with bureaucratic fine points of obtaining site permissions, the group’s anarchist leanings soon took them toward the idea of “squat performances,” executed without authorization and advertised by word of mouth. The first and last of these took place on a hillside near beside a major automobile thoroughfare: “Apart from a small audience, the performance inevitably attracted the attention of the police who appeared so bemused by what was happening that we got away with nothing more than a warning not to return.” According to Rimbaud, an emerging environmental awareness would ultimately lead them to abandon the performances: “It was a case of beauty or the beast; the fire pieces had been undeniably beautiful, but we now realized with regret that they were environmentally unsound. The Colchester performance was our last.” The idea of squat performances, however, continued to appeal; as Crass they would stage other unauthorized events and attract a much less benign form of police intervention.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Notes on Drawing
Richard Serra
When I was twenty, I traveled to Mexico City via Guadalajara to see the murals of Diego Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros. After having particularly studied Orozco’s murals in the Hospicio Cabanas in Guadalajara and in the courtyard of the Colegio Grande in Mexico City, I was convinced that the Mexican muralists, in grappling with the problem of architectural space and structure, were more advanced than their contemporary North American painters. The context was the issue, not the stretcher.
I started the black canvas drawings after I completed Strike (1969-1971, plate 37) and Circuit (1972, plate 67). For Strike I placed a steel plate, measuring 8 x 24′, into the corner of the room, so that the plate is held by the corner, dividing the room into two equal juxtaposed spaces. As one walks around the work, it is perceived as plane-line-plane. For
Circuit I placed four plates into the four corners of a square room. The edges of the plates, functioning as lines, and the spacial quadrants, resulting from the placement of the plates, converge towards a central core. The open square of the central core becomes the perceptual intersection of lines, planes and volumes, creating the simultaneity of a centrifugal
and centripetal effect. After Strike and Circuit I became involved with sculpturally structuring a given context and thereby redefining it.
This preoccupation with site and context was paralleled in drawing, in that my drawings began to take on a place within the space of the wall. I did not want to accept architectural space as a limiting container. I wanted it to be understood as a site in which to establish and structure disjunctive, contradictory spaces. By the nature of their weight, shape, loca tion, flatness and delineation along their edges, the black canvases enabled me to define spaces within a given architectural enclosure.
The weight of a drawing derives not only from the number of layers of paintstick but mainly from the particular shape of the drawing. It is obvious-from Mantegna’s Christ to Cezanne’s apples-that shapes can imply weight, mass and volume. A square carries more weight-gravitationally-than a rectangle: a trapezoid, more than a diamond. A triangle is a light, very quick shape.
The only way to hold a weight within the confines of a given space is by defining the shape of the drawing in direct relation to the floor, wall, corner or ceiling of the space. In so doing, a space or place can be located within the architectural container that differs in character from the architectural intention. The black canvas installations are successful when they
achieve the displacement of the architecture on the flat surface. All illusionistic strategies must be avoided. The black shapes, in functioning as weights in relation to a given architectural volume, create spaces and places within this volume and also create a disjunctive experience of the architecture.
To give an example: Two black shapes installed on opposite walls foreshorten the width of the room. The enclosure becomes narrower; the compression of the space is haptically registered. Very specific decisions have to be made to determine size and directionality, horizontality or verticality of a drawing in a given space. How much surface is actually needed in order to hold the shapes as weights in relation to the size of a given space? Which are the cuts that have to be made in order to destabilize the experience of the space? The process of decision-making is similar to the conceptualization of site-specific
sculpture in that the site determines how I think about what I am going to do. I usually us my studio only to prepare the canvas with glue and gesso. I cut and cover the canvas with paintstick in the place of installation. Theoretically, there is no need for me personally to surface my drawings. But in the process of covering a canvas with paintstick, moving from the inside out, I often find the solution needed in terms of weight and shape of the drawing in relation to the total field of the wall and the total volume of the space.
The cutting decisions have to be based on the actual experience of the site of installation. To cut is to draw a line, to separate, to make a distinction, to define the specific relationship between the lines of the drawing and the lines of the architecture. The cut as line defines and redefines structure. If one works for several days continuously in a space, one becomes aware of how people transverse that space, how the light appears in that space how the entrances and exits of that space are being used, whether it is a transitory space or a gathering space. Depending on the different functions of a space, different drawing solutions must be found. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to make these decisions with out having an experience of the space firsthand. I would never send a few assistants out and have them work from a given scheme. I am not interested in ‘applied’ art. To work from a priori premises or schemes invariably leads to ornamentation and decoration. That is the reason why most wall drawings resemble wallpaper. They have a decorative, not a structural, function.
To use black is the clearest way of marking against a white field, no matter whether you use lead or charcoal or paintstick. It is also the clearest way of marking without creating associative meanings. You can cover a surface with black without risking metaphorical and other misreadings. A canvas covered with black remains an extension of drawing in that it is an extension of marking. The use of any other color would be the extension of coloration, with its unavoidable allusions to nature. From Gutenberg on, black has been synonymous with a graphic or print procedure. I am interested in the mechanization of the graphic procedure; I am not interested in the paint-allusion gesture. Black is a property, not a quality. In terms of weight, black is heavier, creates a larger volume, holds itself in a more compressed field. It is comparable to forging. Since black is the densest color material, it absorbs and dissipates light to a maximum and thereby changes the artificial as well as the natural light in a given room. A black shape can hold its space and place in relation to a larger volume and alter the mass of that volume readily.
Canvas is my most expedient solution for extending drawing directly to the wall. Paper is limited by its size and its strength. It is too flimsy to carry several layers of paintstick and to adhere flush to the wall. Canvas comes in large rolls that I can cut in place. After being treated with rabbit-skin glue and gesso, the canvas remains thin but becomes firm and can be easily worked on the wall. Paper carries the paintstick on the surface, whereas with canvas the paintstick becomes one with the surface. Paper is always understood as vehicle with paint applied to it. I wanted paintstick and support surface to be read as one.
Any kind of joint-as necessary as it might be for functional reasons-is to me always a kind of ornament. The notion of using canvas has a flip side, in that this conservative medium is put to the end of realizing a drawing concept that contradicts its established and traditional use in painting. My necessities were to resolve drawing in relationship to architecture. Freed
from its traditional use in painting, canvas enabled drawing to play off and against an architectural context.
I am aware that people call my black drawing installations sculptural. Not only are these drawings flat and flush with the wall, but they do not create any illusion of three-dimensionality. They do, however, involve the viewer with the specificthree-dimensionality of the site of their installation. The drawings make the viewer aware of his body movement in
a gallery or a museum space. They make him aware of the six-sidedness of a room. In creating a disjunction in the architectural entity, the drawings bring formal and functional characteristics of the architecture to the viewer’s critical attention. It is this experience, I assume, that is equated with a sculptural experience. To call the drawing installations
sculptural for any other reason is a complete misrecognition; it is as wrong as calling my films sculptural. When people are confronted with experiences that are new, instead of accepting them as such, they try to relate them back to secure knowledge. By denying the new they not only deprive themselves of its experience but contribute to a basic misun-
derstanding of development in art. Everything is seen in the lineage of… ; breaks and disjunctions are not allowed for.
If they are only formal hand-me-downs, metholodogical preoccupations become the content of one’s investigation, and then the work ends up being a reformulation of formalist strategies. If the art is so tightly bound and contingent upon a historical referential tradition, it will be severely limited and susceptible to obvious formal analyses. The drawing installations do not accept a static definition, do not give over easily to analyses and categorizations; they negate traditional definitions.
The drawings on paper are mostly studies made after a sculpture has been completed. They are the result of trying to assess and define what surprises me in a sculpture, what I could not understand before a work was built. They enable me to understand different aspects of perception as well as the structural potential of a given sculpture. They are distillations of the experience of a sculptural structure. Drawing is another kind of language. Often, if you want to understand something, you have either to take it apart or to apply another kind of language to it. Since I started working, I have always thought that if I could draw something I would have a structural comprehension of it. I do not draw to depict, illustrate or diagram existing works. The shapes in paper drawings originate in a glimpse of a volume, a detail, an edge, a weight. Drawing in that sense amounts to an index of structures I have built. I never make drawings for sculptures. Drawing is a separate activity, an ongoing concern, with its own concomitant and inherent problems. It is impossible, even by analogy, to represent a spatial language. Most depictions and illustrations are deceitful.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
from Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
FRIEDRICH KITTLER
The whole Spectrum of sound from infra- to ultrasound is, as was the case with Kafka’s mice, not art, but an expression of life. It finally allows modern detection to locate submarines wherever they may be, or tank brigades where they are not. The great musicologist Hornbostel had already spent the First World War at the front: sound location devices with huge bell-mouths and superhuman audibility ranges were supposed to enable ears to detect enemy artillery positions even at a distance of 30 kilometers. Ever since, human ears have no longer been a whim of nature but a weapon, as well as (with the usual commercial delay) a source of money. Long before the headphone adventures of rock’n'roll or original radio plays, Heinkel and Messerschmitt pilots entered the new age of soundspace. The Battle of Britain, Goring’s futile attempt to bomb the island into submission in preparation for Operation Sea Lion, began with a trick for guiding weapon systems: radio beams allowed Luftwaffe bombers to reach their destinations without having to depend on daylight or the absence of fog. Radio beams emitted from the coast facing Britain, for example from Amsterdam and Cherbourg, formed the sides of an ethereal triangle the apex of which was located precisely above the targeted city. The right transmitter beamed a continuous series of Morse dashes into the pilot’s right headphone, while the left transmitter beamed an equally continuous series of Morse dots–always exactly inbetween the dashes–into the left headphone. As a result, any deviation from the assigned course resulted in the most beautiful ping-pong stereophony (of the type that appeared on the first pop records but has since been discarded). And once the Heinkels were exactly above London or Coventry, then and only then did the two signal streams emanating from either side of the headphone, dashes from the right and dots from the left, merge into on continuous note, which the perception apparatus could not but locate within the very center of the brain. A hypnotic command that had the pilot–or rather, the center of his brain–dispose of his payload. Historically, he had become the first consumer of a headphone stereophony that today controls us all–from the circling of helicopter or Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland all the way to the simulated pseudo-monophony, in the midst of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, that once more wishes for the acoustics of targeted bombing.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Symbolic Capital Management
or what to do with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
HANS HAACKE
When I looked up the key word “culture” in Bartlett’s collection of memorable quotes, I discovered the startling phrase “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.”
I did not find the decidedly less militant phrase “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my checkbook,” that I had set out to research because it seemed pertinent to the topic of symbolic capital management. After my initial disappointment, I realized that the martial quotation I had found by accident was not without relevance and, in fact, complemented the one I was looking for.
The gun-toting speaker is one of the heroes of a play that premiered in Berlin on Hitler’s birthday, a short month after he had seized power in Germany in 1933.[1] The author, Hanns Johst, had earlier made a name for himself as an expressionist writer and poet. With a pledge of undying loyalty, he dedicated his new play to Hitler, and two years later, Johst was put in charge of the literature section in Goebbels’s propaganda ministry.
High culture was recognized by both the protagonist on-stage as well as the playwright’s new bosses as something to be watched, as potentially threatening and, if need be, to be regulated or even suppressed. However, as Johst’s personal career demonstrates, the new masters also recognized, as others had before and would do later, that the symbolic power of the arts could be put to good use.
The Medici in Florence already knew of the persuasive powers of the arts. But the relations between sponsors and sponsored have never been free of tension. The Inquisition in Venice, for example, was suspicious enough of Veronese’s treatment of the “Last Supper” to summon him before its tribunal. As a matter of fact, they were right to be wary of him.
Mistrust, hostility, an urge to ridicule or censor the arts are not foreign to our time. Nor are we unaccustomed to seeing them used as instruments for the promotion of particular interests. We hardly remember that only 40 years ago, abstract art was suspected by influential Americans as being part of a communist conspiracy, and that shortly afterwards, in an ironic twist, Abstract Expressionist paintings were sent to Europe to play a combat role in the ideological battles of the cold war. We have fortunately been spared the degree of fundamentalist fervor that calls for the killing of artists accused of blasphemy. But we have had our share of incendiary speeches in the hallowed halls of the U.S. Congress. One indicator of the intensity of the contemporary culture wars in the United States are the fortunes of the National Endowment for the Arts. As of today, Senator Jesse Helms and his cohorts have not yet succeeded in eliminating the NEA, even though the House of Representatives did vote in July to do just that. However, it is now a ghost of its former self, with a fraction of the budget it had in 1989, the year when the campaign against the NEA was kicked off. For good measure, Morley Safer, a Sunday painter and well-known TV-journalist, lectured the 31 million viewers of the CBS program 60-Minutes in 1993 that contemporary art, the kind shown in museums like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, was nothing but a hoax.[2] Hilton Kramer, the neo-conservative critic from New York served as key witness.
Europe is not far behind. In 1995, the Austrian politician Jörg Haider counted on winning votes for his right-wing party by attacking contemporary culture. In response, the governing parties in Vienna have since been curtailing their support for the arts (in 1999 Haider was elected governor of the Austrian province of Carinthia). Also Jean-Marie Le Pen has been betting on a culture war as a strategy to enlarge his electoral base. He is not alone. The French press has devoted extensive coverage to a broad campaign for a retour à l’ordre, in which Jean Clair, of 1995 Venice Biennale fame, and Jean Baudrillard play major roles. After Baudrillard’s photographs, presented in a Parisian art gallery, in Galeries Magazine and in a side-show of the 1993 Venice Biennale, did not receive more than a tepid reception, he thought of getting even with the art world, whose darling and guru he had been for more than a decade. Shortly before the 1997 French national elections, Libération published his latest diatribe against what he called the “nullité of contemporary art.” According to Baudrillard, this “nonsense” is being kept alive thanks to a “conspiracy of idiots.” However, the virtual sociologist sees a remedy: “The only real challenge to contemporary art can come from reactionary and irrational thinking, i.e. from fascism.”[3] These examples, uneven as they are, and coming from varied historical periods and diverse social contexts, illustrate a truism of the sociology of culture: Art works do not represent universally accepted notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Whether viewed as uplifting, destructive, or nothing more than a profitable investment, depends on who looks at them. In extreme situations, as the quotation that triggered these thoughts suggests, culture is silenced with guns. Contrary to Kant’s dictum of “disinterested pleasure”, the arts are not ideologically neutral. They are, in fact, one of the many arenas where conflicting ideas about who we are, and what our social relations should be, are pitted against each other. Encoded in cultural productions are interests, beliefs, and goals. And, in turn, they affectwhat is at stake for us, what we believe, andwhat we strive for. Artists and arts institutions – like the media and schools – are part of what has been called the consciousness industry. They participate to varying degrees in a symbolic struggle over the perception of the social world, and thereby shape society. Pierre Bourdieu, one of the eminent contemporary sociologists of culture puts us on the alert: “The most successful ideological effects,” he says, “are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence. It follows…that any analysis of ideologies, in the narrow sense of ‘legitimating discourses’, which fails to include an analysis of the corresponding institutional mechanisms, is liable to be no more than a contribution to the efficacy of those ideologies.”[4]
As our notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful, the classical triad, are contingent, endlessly negotiated or fought over, so the encoded meaning of cultural productions is not something permanent, comparable to the genetic code. The context in which they appear has a signifying power of its own. As the context changes, so does the way audiences respond. The same artifact can elicit rather varied reactions depending on the historical period, the cultural and social circumstances, or, for that matter, its exchange value. The phrase, “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my checkbook,” could make us think that the speaker understands that high culture is an expensive enterprise which needs not only moral but also financial backing, and that he is willing to chip in. It conjures up the image of the altruistic private patron who has been the proverbial mainstay of the arts in the United States. However, the comment also has a cold, cynical ring. In fact, it was this ambiguity which led me to research its origin. With the help of knowledgeable friends I eventually traced it.
Like the “revolver”-quotation, this phrase is uttered by an actor. Jean-Luc Godard, in his 1963 screenplay “Le Mépris” (Contempt), puts it into the mouth of Jack Palance.[5] In Godard’s film, Palance plays the role of a movie producer. Working for him is Fritz Lang, who plays himself as a film director. In the opening sequence, Lang and the producer look at rushes from the Ulysses film Lang is shooting. The scene of an alluring nude siren languorously swimming under water, prompts the producer to ask the director: “What will go with this?” Lang answers with a recitation of a passage from Dante, whereupon the producer jumps up in a rage, tears down the projection screen, tramples on it, and screams: “This is what I’ll do with your films!” When Lang mumbles something like “culture” or “crime against culture”, the producer cuts him off: “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my checkbook.” In effect, he pulls out his checkbook, writes out a check on the back of his attractive young secretary and gives it to the screen-writer, who pockets it, presumably with the understanding that he will rewrite the script.[6]
The parallelism of the two quotations is probably not accidental. Fritz Lang certainly knew of the outburst on the Berlin stage in l933. What we know about Jean-Luc Godard suggests that he had heard the phrase too, perhaps even from Fritz Lang. It is fair to assume Godard not only saw a linguistic connection, but invented this scene as a parable that allowed him to link the violence of the gun with economic violence. Lang’s symbolic capital, i.e. his reputation as a film director, proves not to be a match for the producer’s economic capital, although the producer is nothing without Fritz Lang. Symbolic and economic capital constitute power. They are linked in a complex, often strained, and sometimes even violent but inescapable relationship. They are rarely equal partners.
In 1972, Marcel Broodthaers presented the Eagle Department of his Museum of Modern Art at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. In his preface to the catalogue Broodthaers wrote:
As a foreign artist, I am glad that, for the purpose of an analytical (in contrast to an emotional) consideration of the concept of art, I was able to benefit from the freedom of expression in the Federal Republic. What are the limits to the freedom of expression an artist is granted? In practical terms, it is where the political leadership of a country draws the line. Therefore it is only natural that I express my gratitude to the chancellor of the Federal Republic, Willy Brandt.[7] Such a catalogue statement is unusual. All the more did it intrigue me, as did the exhibition The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present. In his fictional museum, Broodthaers equates the power popularly attributed to the eagle with the aura surrounding art. He suggests that neither the authority of the state nor the symbolic power of art, interchangeably represented by the eagle in his metaphoric universe, are innate, god-given and universally recognized. Rather, like in the story of The Wizard of Oz, they are projections of power, social constructs, to which Broodthaers alludes using the term “ideology.” His catalogue preface implies that public analysis of the ideological underpinnings of power, like those of art, has political ramifications which may test a society’s limits to freedom of expression.
Indeed, museums – and exhibition ventures like documenta – are institutions which contribute to the shaping and promotion of the ideas that govern our social relations. Consequently, whether intended or not, as managers of consciousness, they are agents in the political arena. It is perhaps for this reason that Broodthaers paid tribute to Willy Brandt for having created a climate favoring freedom of expression.
In my view, however, Broodthaers may have overstated the power of the central political leadership in democratic societies and underestimated the degree to which local and regional powers, and powerful private individuals and pressure groups, are able to control the public discourse.
But Broodthaers was quite aware that power relationships in the world of symbolic capital were more complex than the catalogue preface, isolated from his work and other writings, seems to suggest. In fact, at the occasion of his entry into the art world in 1964 he unmistakably alluded to the connection between the symbolic value of art works and their exchange value. He also knew, of course, that the reputation of artists is subject to currency fluctuations and that the art market, like markets of other goods of fictional value, invite the manipulation of the price for which the ornithological commodities are traded.
On one of the four installation photos in the retrospective volume II of the Düsseldorf catalogue, connoisseurs of the German art scene of the l970s can identify Willy Bongard, the inventor of the Art Compass. Annually, since l970 and continuing today, this art stock market analysis has been published in the German business magazine Capital.[8] On the catalogue photo, one can discern that Bongard is carrying a copy of the first volume of the Broodthaers catalogue. He is looking to the left, in the direction in which a slide projector is pointed. However, one cannot see what is being projected. On the wall behind the projector hangs a banner with a double-headed eagle as part of the coat of arms of Cologne, the city of the first post-war art fair. Reflecting on his own enterprise, this photo of l972 seems to restate the artist’s understanding that the symbolic and the economic capital of what Broodthaers, in 1964, called “insincere”[9] products, do affect each other. But contrary to the perennial suggestions of the Art Compass of Capital their respective ratings do not match.
In spite of his professed “insincerity”, Broodthaers was not particularly interested in being a big player in the high stakes game of the art stock market. In his post-exhibition volume of the catalogue, he expressed with pride that he had plucked some feathers from the mythical bird. But he also acknowledged a degree of failure: “The language of advertising aims for the unconscious of the consumer/viewer; that is how the magic eagle regains its power.”[10] Closing in a tone of resignation he described a world which, at the time, appeared to many readers to be the bitter fruit of a paranoid imagination: “Art is used in advertising with enormous success. It rules over bright horizons. It represents the dreams of mankind.”[11]
Today, marketing is firmly established in museums as a high art. While sponsors usually underwrite only a small part of the costs of an exhibition, and never contribute to the operating budget, they have been gaining indirect veto power over programming in many institutions. Oblivious to what is at stake, and abetted by an equally insouciant press, the political class in Europe is shirking its democratic responsibilities by allowing or even advocating the de facto takeover of the institutions with which they, as public servants, have been entrusted. In a neo-liberal frenzy the museums that were built and are maintained by public funds are, in effect, being expropriated and made to serve business interests.
Like in the United States, where it is almost a given, exhibition programs in other parts of the world are increasingly determined by the degree to which they lend themselves to a positive image transfer for sponsoring corporations or, for that matter, the public relations needs of politicians. As a consequence, crowd pleasing, usually uncritical blockbusters become the order of the day, not feather plucking events. Under these pressures, programs with low entertainment value, and events planned with critical, analytic, and experimental ambitions fall victim to institutional self-censorship. The press, often in gullible collusion with the sponsors, pays little attention to less glamorous, and for that reason usually underfunded projects, because they are not touted by a big publicity machine like the one that corporations often pay for at the same rate as the sponsored events. In effect, the public is given the impression that only blockbusters are worth seeing. It stays away, at other times. Caught in a vicious circle, the financial health of institutions that take risks and are governed, above all, by professional criteria are endangered by poor box office figures. Public officials are tempted to mistake high attendance figures as a sign of curatorial excellence that deserves being rewarded when institutional budgets are set. Eagles mutate into parrots.
Since the arts are no longer seen as the pastime of “effete snobs,” and, in effect, have become fashionable and integrated into today’s entertainment culture, public relations experts are convinced that the association with culture improves their clients’ standing in the arena of public opinion. Without studying sociology, the P.R. wizards have understood high culture’s symbolic power. They know it is the aura that matters. The instrumentalization of the good, the true and the beautiful by business interests is to affect favorable tax rates, trade rules, health, safety and environmental legislation, as well as labor relations. And it is to subtly dissuade elected officials and the press from scrutinizing corporate conduct and to deflect public criticism.
A PR-man from Mobil Oil once explained his company’s rationale for supporting the arts: “These programs build enough acceptance to allow us to get tough on substantive issues.”[12] One of the Mobil ads on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times put it more bluntly: “Art for the sake of business.” This includes, according to Alain-Dominique Perrin, the CEO of Cartier, to “neutralize critics.” Monsieur Perrin is an enthusiastic practitioner. In an interview he confided: “Arts sponsorship is not just a tremendous tool of corporate communications,” he crowed, “it is much more than that: It is a tool for the seduction of public opinion.”
Art institutions, in turn, have learned to woo prospective sponsors with attractive packages and to assure them, as the Metropolitan Museum did: “The business behind art knows the art of good business.” For the CEOs who had no taste for word plays, the museum spelled out what it meant: “Many public relations opportunities are available through the sponsorship of programs, special exhibitions and services. These can often provide a creative and cost effective answer to a specific marketing objective, particularly where international, governmental or consumer relations may be a fundamental concern.”[13] Art professionals now use their colleagues in the development office as a “reality check”. Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is certainly a connoisseur in these matters. He has no delusions: “It’s an inherent, insidious, hidden form of censorship,” he admits.[14] But the imposition of the sponsor’s agenda not only has an effect on what we get to see and hear. Mr. de Montebello’s president at the Metropolitan Museum explained: “To a large degree, we’ve accepted a certain principle about funding that, in passing through our illustrious hall, the money is cleansed.”[15]
His suggestion that the sponsor’s money is dirty came in response to a question about his Museum’s collaboration with Philip Morris. The world’s largest maker of carcinogenic consumer products also happens to be the most conspicuous corporate sponsor of the arts in the United States and increasingly so in Europe. But not only of the arts. Philip Morris also gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Jesse Helms Center in North Carolina, a museum designed to celebrate the right-wing Senator’s vision of America. And Philip Morris sponsors the Bill of Rights. As contradictory as this may sound, it makes perfect business sense. Jesse Helms was instrumental in breaking down trade barriers against the import of American cigarettes in Asia, the one market of the cigarette industry that is still growing. And he battles untiringly against tobacco tax increases and efforts to protect the public from the health hazards of smoking, which annually leads to the death of 500,000 Americans. In 1989, the Marlboro men paid the National Archives $600,000 for the permission to “sponsor” the Bill of Rights in a two-year $60 million campaign. The campaign was designed to frame the cowboys’ arguments against smoking restrictions as a civil rights issue. Their support for the arts is to build constituencies and to keep the lines open to the movers and shakers in the media and in politics. When the New York City Council deliberated in 1994 over restrictions on smoking in public places, Philip Morris threatened to stop sponsoring cultural programs in the City and to move its headquarters to more hospitable environs. Nevertheless the City Council passed the restrictions. The company’s bluff was called. It stays, and continues to believe in the business rationale of sponsoring art events in New York.
California’s penchant for discouraging indulgence in carcinogenic pleasures probably was also the reason, in l995, for Philip Morris to sponsor the exhibition “1966-l975: Reconsidering the Object of Art” at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary in Los Angeles. This investment was not an unqualified success. A number of the artists in this survey exhibition of so-called conceptual art, discovering as late as the show’s opening, that Philip Morris was its sponsor, protested vociferously and managed to have the national press amplify their anger. Adrian Piper withdrew her works when the Museum was unwilling to substitute them with a work commemorating her parents, who both died from smoking related diseases. The case of Adrian Piper demonstrates that artists risk losing access to the public and foregoing participation in the public discourse, if they don’t want to lend their work and their name for the promotion of corporate interests – in this example of a company whose products killed the artist’s parents. The non-representation in large survey-shows can jeopardize the recognition artists receive when history is written and, of course, also the prices for which their works are traded.
A few months after MOCA’s abduction of artists into Marlboro Country, Sol LeWitt, one of the MOCA protesters, rejected a major commission from the Guggenheim Museum when he learned that the survey show Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline for which the commission was intended, was sponsored by Philip Morris. The exhibition opened without him.
Fearing that the awareness of the health hazards of smoking with its attendant legislative consequences may eventually also hit Europe, Philip Morris is busy developing preemptive strategies. Again, the arts are to play a supportive role. In Germany, the company held a competition for art exhibition organizers. The impresarios were invited to submit proposals for the exhibition they always wanted to do but could not for lack of funds. Philip Morris promised to pay for the winning dream project. Covering all bases, Philip Morris, astutely, chose artists to be the jurors. In contrast to Sol LeWitt, several prominent artists were happy to lend their names to the tobacco rescue mission as jurors. Jochen Poetter, the director of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne was the lucky winner. His exhibition had the engaging title “I love New York!” It had only one problem: the reviewers did not
love it. A quick look into art magazines of recent vintage suffices to recognize that the fashion industry and the art world have entered into what appears to be a symbiotic relationship. While fashion and its promotion are treated as high art, art institutions have become eager partners of the apparel industry. Although Oliviero Toscani has not yet been invited to a solo show in Jean-Christophe Ammann’s Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art, as he has in other art venues, for many years a taste of the brave new world of Benetton has been a part of the filling of Ammann’s Frankfurt art cake. Ammann also invited Karl Lagerfeld and his models for an exclusive performance. The Frankfurt municipal collection served as a stylish back-drop.
In 1995, as commissioner of the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, he moved to the cutting edge. Together with the cowboys of Philip Morris, he invited Hugo Boss to sponsor Germany’s showcase in Venice. The late Hugo Boss, like the architect whom Hitler commissioned to give the German pavilion a martial face-lift, was a Nazi party member in good standing. Politically correct, he had made a living as purveyor of SA and SS uniforms. The apparel industry is also close to the heart of Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Museum. Appropriate events have been staged under his roof, and an international art prize and galleries of the museum have been named in honor of the uniform manufacturer Hugo Boss. After a 1998 motorcycle rally on the ramps of the Guggenheim, sponsored by BMW, an exhibition to honor Giorgio Armani is planned for the new millenium. The Guggenheim’s predilection for German partners culminated in 1997 in a joint venture with the Deutsche Bank Unter den Linden in Berlin.
Meanwhile, Jean-Christophe Ammann, who does not have a business degree like Krens, is struggling mightily to match the New Yorker’s visionary schemes. He is campaigning vigurously for a change of the German tax laws and proudly proclaimed: “We want to become part of the “philosophy” of a corporation.” He also plans (in competition with Christo) to turn the entire facade of his museum into an advertising billboard. Designs for a Coca-Cola and an American Express shrink-wrap exist already. Hans Hollein, the museum’s architect came up with a wise alternative. He proposed that advertising messages are to be tattooed on the director’s forehead.
Since corporate contributions to museums are tax-deductible, we, in effect, pay for the campaigns that are to influence how we live and what we think. We underwrite the expenses of our own seduction. This strategy succeeds as long as we are convinced that we get something for nothing – and believe in “disinterested pleasure.”
Broodthaers chose as the first illustration for Volume II of his post-exhibition catalogue, the gold-framed painting of a castle nestled in a romantic mountain landscape. He supplied the following caption: “Oh melancholy, brittle castle of eagles.”
© Hans Haacke, 1997/1999
___Footnotes:
[1]Johst, Hanns. Schlageter, Munich: Albert Langen/Georg Müller, 1933, p.26
[2]Safer, Morley. “Yes…but is it art?”, 60 Minutes, CBS television, Sept. 19, 1993. Transcript: Burrelle’s Information Services, Livingston, N.J.
[3]Jean Baudrillard. “La conjuration des imbéciles,” Libération, Paris, May 7, 1997.
[4]Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. 1977, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 188.
[5]Collet, Jean, edit. Jean-Luc Godard. No. 18, Collection Cinéma d’aujourd’hui, Editions Seghers, Paris, 1963. p. 140-142
[6]ibid.
[7]Marcel Broodthaers, Museum: Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute, Vol I. Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1972, p.4.
[8]Bongard’s widow Linde Rohr-Bongard titled her 1993 installment “Kunst gleich Kapital.” Capital (Cologne) (November 1993), pp. 212-242
[9]Cit. in Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Open Letters, Industrial Poems.” October (New York)42, (Fall 1987), p.71.
[10]Marcel Broodthaers, Museum: Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute, Vol.II. Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1972, p.19.
[11]Ibid.
[12]D’Argenio, Raymond. “Farewell to The Low Profile”, address to the Eastern Annual Conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, New York, November 18, 1975, typewritten manuscript, p.3.
[13]The Business Behind Art Knows the Art of Good Business, leaflet addressed to corporations, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, undated, (approx. l984).
[14]“A Word from our Sponsor”, Newsweek, New York, November 25, 1985, p.98.
[15]Wallach, Amei. “Keeping Corporate Funds, In the Name of Art”, New York Newsday, August 8, 1990, p. II 2.
This article was stolen from the Society of Control website.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
SOCIALLY SIGNIFICANT DRUGS
FELIX GUATIARI
Translated by Mark S. Roberts
The most important thing is to subvert the simplistic attitudes taken toward the phenomenon of drugs whether in terms of a medicalized view or in terms of psychological, sociological, or criminological ones. These simplistic attitudes are deeply rooted in all of these “specializations.”
One cannot separate the mechanisms of delinquency and criminalization from the mechanism of the drug in itself. The drugs are so costly; they involve such a lifestyle, that they imprison the addict in a sort of ghetto. There is an infernal economic machine at work here, that no one can escape unless a free distribution of drugs were to come about. Perhaps this could take place under medical supervision. But the question is inconceivable unless a new nonrepressive approach, and therefore a new relation of power between the people involved and political power, were to be established. By and large, the results would certainly be far less disastrous than the present situation, which drives addicts to live in a state of constant panic and anguish. A situation, moreover, that imbues drug use with a highly developed mythological-proselytizing-atmosphere that enables the pushers to come out on top. That is the problem. It is not the alleged escalation from soft to hard drugs that is at issue. Rather, it is a question of defusing the systems that lead to the proselytizing of drugs. Could one possibly imagine a syphilitic being forced to spread syphilis in order to survive? It seems essential to me that hard drugs have to be freely distributed for there to be a possibility of offering the addict a choice among a range of alternative products. The ways of organizing this kind of therapeutically motivated distribution would be defined by the addicts themselves, with the help of social workers, physicians, and others. But the first principle would be to proscribe any repressive intrusion into this area by the police or the judiciary.
The “scientific” methodology that defines the mechanism of hard drugs as stemming from biochemical processes, which are said to be radically different from other drugs, parallels the mythology conveyed by the addicts themselves. Alcohol is an extremely dangerous drug, and it is not because it is freely sold that there are many chronic alcoholics or cirrhosis of the liver. The same kind of regulation should apply to hard drugs. A regime of free distribution would doubtless lead to a decrease in the volume of drug use, due to the fact that it would lessen the intensity of the drug mythology, and lead to the disappearance of its principal advocates.
Before considering such an orientation, it would be helpful to closely examine an experiment in England(see Vancouver’s current heroin harm reduction program) based on these principles. It is true that a great number of addicts refused to be registered in the program, and many just equated the use of legally distributed drugs with illicit ones; but the resulting analyses must be given priority over the institutional context of this experiment, which, doubtless, was unable to discount the economic dependence and the criminalization associated with drug use. To repeat myself, the fundamental prerequisite is an unequivocal decriminalization of drugs. If this cannot be obtained from the political authorities-at the level of personal consumption and petty dealing it may be necessary for a number of militant groups and associations to take responsibility and organize alternative forms of distribution. This has been tried in France (at V) under difficult conditions, and it at least succeeded in allowing some kind of collective control over the quality of the drug product.
In my opinion, the most general form of the problem stems from the fact that the old modes of subjective territorialization have collapsed. There now exist phenomena of the type I call “echoes of the black hole,” which compel people to grab hold of territorialities, objects, rituals, altered behaviors, at any cost, rendering them ridiculous or disastrous. In this respect, one can place the love of a teenager for his motorcycle or for rock music, or the love of a child for her dolls in the same series-much less, the reterritorialization of the gang of four on its emblems, that of a household on goods consumed, or that of a ranking system used for promotions. The question of drugs, then, moves along the passages between the different social, material, and psychological drugs. Why is there a reterritorialization focused on one drug rather than on another, on one “socialized” route, or on something that will be disastrous for the individual or his or her group?
The common characteristic of hard drugs that leads us to place them on levels as disparate as the faked “suicides” of bikers at the Rungis wholesale market, and a generalized audiovisual intoxication appears to me to be the existence of a kind of subjective “black hole,” which I would characterize as microfascist. These black holes continue to multiply, proliferating in the social field. It is a question of knowing if subjectivity echoes them in such a way that the entire life of an individual, all his modes of semiotization, depend upon a central point of anguish and guilt. I propose this image of a black hole to illustrate the phenomenon of the complete inhibition of the semiotic constituents of an individual or group, which then finds itself cut off from any possibility of an exterior life. By the expression “echo of the black hole,” I wish to resonate several systems of blockage. (Example: You have a stomach cramp and you can no longer think about it; you “embody” it; you invest an erogenous zone on your pain, you torment your wife, your children, and all these domains at once resonate.)
Very few people successfully leave the world of hard drugs unscathed, apart from some rock groups that make it a form of public expression, their license to “theatricalize” their condition. The others, if I might say so, are in deep shit. It would be a mystification to seek support from those few types who are able to articulate something of their drug experience just to sustain the mythology of hard drugs.
The distinction between hard and soft drugs is, in the final analysis, rather artificial. It appears poorly grounded on a clinical level. There is a hard use of soft drugs and a soft use of hard drugs. It is always the same nervous system that is afflicted by “what happened,” and there is a replacement of thought by what, in the end, involves the density, intensity, the forms of administration, the material, subjective, and social assemblage (agencement) of drugs. ‘
In other words, what counts are not only the physiochemical characteristics of drugs, but also the style of buying, the atmosphere, the context, and the myths. And the whole question is of knowing if such complex agencies (agencements) do or do not lead to a reinforced individuation of subjectivity, usually in the sense of an inescapable solitude (solitude en impasse), or of a social and addictive entrapment.
The social grid and control imprisons most individuals between extreme Situations:
* a solitude without recourse
* a, complete inability to accept any type of solitude, and thereby one is constantly draw to all modes of dependence, all the “hang-ups”: sports, television, married life, the pecking-order, and others.
Hard drugs seem to heighten the first situation and soft drugs the second, insofar as they sometimes lead to an overcoming.
Soft drugs are consumed by people who build a microeconomy of desire, that is, mare or less collective assemblages (agencements collectifs) at the center at which drugs intervene only as a lesser constituent.
A drug can be said to be soft from the moment it ceases to work in the sense of the above subjective individuation, of an entrapment, of a break with external realities. Those who use them effect collective assemblages of enunciation (agencements collectifs d’enonciation), allowing certain individuals to remove their inhibitions; to question their lifestyles, their moral and political preferences, their social and material environment.
One of the formative elements of the myth of hard drugs lies in the idea that they inspire a specific and novel kind of production. There would thus be a culture linked to drugs-a theme exploited particularly by the “Beat Generation.” This mystification appears to” me to run parallel to that established with regard to the art of the insane. Consider, for example, the two short films Henri Michaux has devoted to hallucinogenic drugs. In point of fact, they don’t have very much to do with the experience of drugs! Certain images are extremely beautiful, but’ what the film really illustrates is Henri Michaux’s literature, and not at all the modes of semiotization proper to drugs. It is aberrant to even imagine the existence of an art, specific to the insane, children, addicts,’ etc. That a child or madman produces these artworks only implies that its production is essentially infantile or mad! Certain drug environments develop Certain cultures, but one cannot infer from this that drugs create a specific mode of expression.
Perhaps anthropological and linguistic studies will one day demonstrate’ that far from belonging to a marginal world, drugs have played a foundational role in all societies, in all cultural and religious areaS. One might think that it was the use of drugs, beginning in the Paleolithic era, that contributed to producing the earliest “ascent” of human language (which I have called, in another connection, “paradigmatic perversion”). But the solitary drugs of capitalism very rarely function in the collective mode, which was, for example, the case with shamanism. It is our, entire society that is drugged, that “hardens” its drugs, and that connects them increasingly to a taste for disaster, to a drive for the end of the world.
There is no longer anything to say, nor anything to do. The only thing left is to follow the movement. Fascism and Stalinism, were collective hard drugs. Consumer society shortens the road to passivity and death. All the less need to build death camps; one can design one on one’s own.
In essence, the break between hard and soft drugs occurs between a new lifestyle-I prefer here to call it a “molecular revolution” rather, than a new culture-and the microfascist elements of industrial capitalist and bureaucratic socialist societies. I will always stand by, be in solidarity with, the addicts, such as they are, against their repression. But this doesn’t imply a defense for hard drugs:, which I consider to be essentially microfascist in nature. Not insofar as they are chemical molecules, but to the extent that they are molecular assemblages of desire (agencements moleculaires de desirs) crystallizing subjectivity in a vortex of abrogation.
The way in which drugs and psychosis are assimilated or, rather, subtly differentiated, appears to me “to be seductive, but dangerous. In the case of psychosis, one would experience an attempt to overcome the disabling semiotics of the body, whereas drugs present a micropolitics of the will,,)Jn urge “to perform this disabling by oneself. I do not believe this idea i~ tenable. I would always depart from the idea of an assemblage (agencement), of the importance of the, assemblage over its components. The design, I believe, is not the delusion, symptom, or the hallucination. Rather, it is something that implies much more and much less thad the particular; it includes parts of the socius, economic structures, organic functions, and an ecological environment. Addicts don’t have access to a great deal more initiative (Roberts translation probably doesn’t do justice to what Guattari said here, I would suggest the pair of words: agency and code) than psychotics. I am here pushing a process of responsibility and accountability that I myself often challenge. A psychotic is a psychotic. lt’s not his or her fault. But an addict is a filthy bum; he’ or she is just a goad con artist. Anything that even provides pseudoscientific support for this genre of collective fantasy should, it seems to me, should be examined under a magnifying glass and disassembled.
We must en with the idea of collective responsibility and accountability. There are SOme types who are situated in a field of micropolitical possibility, leaving a way out, and others who find themselves at a complete impasse. This depends both on objective and micropolihcal facto1!s at the level of the most intimate and immediate assemblage of enunciation (agencement d’enonciation). There are those who, in a flood, reach out and hang on to a plank, and those who are swept away. It is necessary to arrive at a kind logic, not dualistic, but triplistic, multiplistic, polyvocal, that gives both a full responsibility and a full irresponsibility to individuals, according to the micropolitical arrangement through which one considers them.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Actors/Agents:
Bertolt Brecht and the Politics of Secrecy
written by EVA HORN
In modernity, political secrecy is something fishy. While for centuries circumspect rulers and skilled generals practiced the art of secrecy to implement and secure their power, the modern ideal of political transparency is suspicious of every state secret. Whatever governments keep secret, whatever is not exposed to public judgment, is seen as something that cannot be legitimated, State secrets are always potentially state crimes. Today, secret intelligence is accepted only as a necessary evil: At its best it is half-heartedly accepted as an instance of control and defense that cannot help but violate civil liberties and privacy. At its worst Secret Services are regarded as ruthless organizations executing the government’s dirty work. Tn a democratic culture, secrecy is generally seen as a “pathology” of the political. 1
This view, however, in its overall dismissal of secrecy as a problematic, if somewhat subordinate and ‘dirty’ instrument of government and warfare overlooks the profound involvement of modern states in the politics of secrecy as well as the political and ethical dimensions of this involvement. Secrecy is a fundamental characteristic of modern power not only in its totalitarian variant. “Real power,” as Hannah Arendt put it, “begins where secrecy begins.”2 Historically, the gigantic, highly professional intelligence administrations we know today are products of twentieth century states. Modern democracy, as much as nondemocratic regimes, uses espionage and covert operations, deception and disinformation as political techniques indispensable for waging war, gathering foreign information, and running an effective government. The twentieth century was not only, as Margret Boveri wrote, the “century of treason,”3 but more generally that of a new type of secretive politics alongside or underneath the proclaimed political values of transparency and participation, of rational jurisdiction and public debate. It saw the emergence of secret services as instruments both of war and of domestic surveillance; it was the century of covert operations as a mode of political intervention, the century of state paranoia, conspiracies, veiled propaganda, and psychological warfare.
European states only began to institutionalize secret service administrations as we know them today during and after World War I, the United States only after World War 11.4 Whereas in premodern absolutism the arcana imperii-the art of political ruses and secrets-were a legitimate means of efficient government, in modernity these arcane sides of power pose a fundamental political paradox that needs to be analyzed in its legal and ethical dimension. The secrets of the state threaten from within the very values that modern democracy outwardly proclaims: the primacy of public debate, parliamentary deliberation, transparency, and legality. Secret services inevitably operate on a clandestine level withdrawn from public scrutiny and control. Simplifying this fundamental paradox, the rhetoric of legitimation for this underside of modern power has always emphasized the need for defense and preemption: defense against external and internal enemies threatening the stability of public order, preemption of future attacks. Secrecy, however, not only has a defensive but always an aggressive side. It is used not only to protect the state’s security but also to spy upon, undermine, and take violent measures against whomever a political community defines as its enemies, very often its own citizens. Secrecy is never merely defensive, but rather a highly ambivalent instrument of politics-an ambivalence that is likewise neglected by dismissive and apologetic interpretations.
Faced with this dual nature, it is too simple to reduce the sphere of political secrecy either to a realm of crime and brutal raison d’etat (in other words to the famous and wholly fictitious “license to kill” given to James Bond), or-apologetically-to a necessary means of selfprotection. The relationship between legal order and political secrecy in modern democracy is more complex than a wholesale criticism or an apologetic praise would have it. Contrary to totalitarian regimes state secrecy in democracies does not simply suspend or ignore laws, due process, and public control; instead it opens up an outside, an “exception” to the sphere of legality that is not to be confounded with a realm of mere crime or illegality. This exception is located outside both the public and the legal spheres. It is withheld from what can be known and thus withdrawn from legal judgment. This outside entertains a relationship to the law that forms an exception to its rule, both affirming and suspending that rule. In this sense, secrecy can be seen as an exception to the sovereign rule of law, a sphere in which acts are committed that are neither legal nor illegal but exempt from prosecution. Adopting Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the necessary relation between the sphere of law and its exception, the realm of political secrecy could thus be called a “permanent state of exception” paradoxically coexisting with the legal order by defending and protecting it, while at the same time suspending and contradicting it.5
Carl Schmitt, to whom Agamben is profoundly indebted, related the theory of the state of exception (in which, as Schmitt famously claimed, sovereign power paradigmatic ally shows itself6) to the concept of MaBnahme (executive measure) as opposed to the concept of law. When, in a situation of extreme political crisis, law cannot be enforced, measures-MaBnahmen-have to be taken, measures or decisions tailored exclusively to the situation at hand.? These measures, however, cannot and must never be justified by referring to general rules or norms; they are nothing but momentary, often violent acts aimed at stabilizing a situation of imminent danger or crisis. Secrecy and the acts committed under its veil can be conceived of as such an exceptional instrument: a political measure, morally and juridically highly questionable, but nevertheless necessary for exceptional situations or goals. And yet, if democracy protects itself by monitoring its citizens, if it wages war by using informers and traitors or if it takes covert action against foreign governments it takes exception to the values it proclaims in the very act of protecting them. This exception, much like the state of exception, is supposed, paradoxically, to prove the rule, stabilizing and protecting a given legal order by suspending it and thereby preserving the institution of the state as such. And therein lies the fundamental crux raised by the politics of secrecy.
|||||
This crux, not simply a “pathology” but an inherent paradox in the conception of modern power, has been pointed out not only by political theorists such as Schmitt and his closest reader, Agamben. The most penetrating analysis of the pitfalls and paradoxes of a politics of secrecy has been-surprisingly enough-presented by the playwright Bertolt Brecht. It might not be entirely coincidental that, while Schmitt in 1930 was writing on MaBnahmen and had, in 1922~ published his theory of sovereignty and the state of exception, 8 Brecht brought out his most scandalous piece of experimental theater, topically titled Die MaBnahme (The Measure Taken). 9 Brecht’s so-called LehrstUck (learning play) not only deals with the ethical and political aporias of a politics of secrecy but also proves that its author-the early Brecht of the end of the Weimar Republic-was surprisingly well-informed about the techniques and tactics of clandestine political activity.10 This is what links Brecht’s thought to Carl Schmitt’s theory of the state of exception and to his concept of MaBnahme as opposed to the concept of law. What makes Brecht so interesting for the analysis of the politics of secrecy is the fact that, unlike Schmitt who attends to the legal problem of MaBnahme, Brecht focuses on the position and the tactics of the subject in the jungle of secrecy. He not only presents the rules and tactics of covert agitation that the political activist must follow. Brecht also elucidates the ethical aporias that the subject faces once being involved in clandestine work and ultimately being forced to execute “MaBnamen.” Moreover, in Die MaBnahme as well as in his theory of experimental learning play theater, Brecht links his analysis of the tactics and ethics of secret agitation to a theory of theatricality as an aesthetical and political practice. Brecht’s idea of theatricality is not limited to the aesthetic realm of the stage but it exposes the dimension of playacting and dissimulation in all political activity. Political work cannot dispense with techniques of acting, dissimulating, and deception. Instead of naively criticizing this secretive side of politics in the name of authenticity and frankness, Brecht emphasizes the need for tactical clandestinity. Effective politics, Brecht claims, the politics of change and of justice, paradoxically cannot succeed without ruses, betrayal, secret subversion, and tactical alliances with the enemy. Under the conditions of the politics of secrecy, the political (and aesthetic) subject is always already caught between truthfulness and play-acting, between self-effacement and heroic commitment, between the idealism of revolutionary change and the ruthlessness of clandestine activity. The paradox borne by a politics of secrecy thus always affects and taints the subject in its attempt to intervene and change the political order for the better.
Covert political activities are based on certain rules and standards of conspiratorial behavior. Secret agents or agitators need a social and rhetorical suppleness, such as the ability to defend positions without believing in them, to camouflage their identities or to blend invisibly into a crowd. In the opening poem of his Lesebuch fur Stadtebewohner (Ten Poems from a Reader for Those Who Live in Cities) Brecht, with a surprising tactical savvy, outlines the rules for such clandestine behavior.11 The poem is called “Verwisch die Spuren” (”Cover Your Tracks”) and was written in 1926. It has traditionally been read as the expression of urban coldness and voluntary social isolation, as an imperative of Weimar Republic “cool conduct,” as Helmut Lethen put it.12 Only Brecht’s friend Walter Benjamin saw the political message encrypted in the poem, calling it “an instruction for the illegal agent.”13
Part from your comrades at the station
Enter the city in the morning with your jacket buttoned up
Look for a room, and when your comrade knocks:
Do not, o do not open the door
But
Cover your tracks!
If you meet your parents in Hamburg or elsewhere
Pass them like strangers, turn the corner, don’t recognize them
Pull the hat they gave you over your face, and
Do not, o do not show your face
But
Cover your tracks!
Eat the meat that’s there. Don’t stint yourself.
Go into any house when it rains and sit on any chair that is in it But don’t sit long. And don’t forget your hat.
I tell you:
Cover your tracks!
Whatever you say, don’t say it twice
If you find your ideas in anyone else, disown them.
The man who hasn’t signed anything, who has left no picture
Who was not there, who said nothing:
How can they catch him? Cover your tracks!
See when you come to think of dying
That no gravestone stands and betrays where you lie
With a clear inscription to denounce you
And the year of your death to give you away.
Once again:
Cover your tracks!
(That is what they taught me.)14
The poem describes a group of “comrades” who travel by night and who must immediately separate when they arrive at their destination. They are admonished not to contact one another, not to communicate with whatever relations they may have, even to avoid being recognized or addressed by their relatives. This is more than an expression of coldness and Sachlichkeit; this is an instruction for those who must unconditionally conceal their identity, origins, network, and mission: secret agents. “Cover your tracks!” here means to cover up one’s past, social origin, friendships, and family bonds. The poem goes on to instruct the would-be agitator in the art of self-effacement: Seize opportunities, but never stay. Never leave anything personal behind. And never admit what your true position is. One must never know that it is the Communist who is speaking. What Brecht is suggesting here is the technique of Zersetzung (insinuation or manipulation), a kind of subversion that was a principal goal of Communist infiltration of the police and army during the Weimar Republic. As a rhetorical strategy, Zersetzung is based on dissimulatio, a figure of speech in which the position held by the speaker is blurred or denied. Technically, dissimlliatio means covering up one’s position by saying the exact opposite, but Zersetzung is more than that; it is the rhetorical technique of political destabilization and insinuation. The subversive agent does not loudly preach the gospel of revolution but instead asks suggestive questions, sows doubts, and spreads critical thoughts. He will never openly foster any position but will seek to get others to form opinions and, ultimately, a “critical consciousness.” The precept of self-effacement is meant to govern even the death of the secret agitator. Not even his mere existence can be commemorated, as this could betray his mission: “See, when you come to think of dying / That no gravestone stands and betrays where you lie.” The agent is to die without a trace, without a memory, his death is to be a sacrifice without glory. At the end of the poem, the text itself ultimately enacts the very effacement of identity. The last line, within parenthesis, “(That is what they taught me.),” cunningly liquidates the lyrical subject, relativizing everything it has proclaimed so far as mere quotation, as a reference to instructions received from others. Thus, at the very moment when the poem assumes its-rhetorical and political-subject “I,” this very subject withdraws and disappears. The poem fulfills its instruction in a final gesture, covering the tracks of its own discourse.
While “Verwisch die Spuren” addresses the tactics and techniques of clandestine agitation, the play Die MaBnahme, first performed in December 1930, enacts the drama, if not the tragedy, ‘of the secret agent. The plot was summarized-slightly misleadingly-in the original program notes as follows:
Four Communist agitators are facing a Party inquiry, represented by the mass chorus. They have been conducting Communist propaganda in China, and in the course of this they had to shoot their youngest comrade. In order to convince the court of the need for their decision to shoot him, they show how the Young Comrade behaved in a number of different political situations. They show him as a revolutionary in his feelings but inadequately disciplined and too reluctant to listen to his reason, so that in the end he became a real threat to the movement.”
For a long time, debate about Die MaBnahme revolved around the conflict, suggested in Brecht’s summary, between “emotions” and “discipline.” Yet perhaps this all-too-simple polarization was a ruse, itself a literary cover-up. Brecht dissimulated the conspiratorial subtext of “Verwisch die Spuren” by integrating it into a volume of poetry on urban life, and likewise he deliberately seems to obscure in his summary of Die MaBnahme the play’s political content. This summary omits the decisive fact that the propaganda work of the Soviet agitators among Chinese workers is illegal and therefore has to cloak itself in utter secrecy.
The first scenes of the play present how, on various occasions, the “young comrade” fails to observe the tactical rules of clandestine work, the chief imperative being to camouflage the agent’s origin [Moscow) and mission [to bring Communism to the Chinese). He is not a talented agent but rather a frank enthusiast. Instead of inciting overworked coolies to demand better working conditions, he simply helps them until he is chased away by the overseer (Sc. 3, “The Stone”). Instead of discretely distributing pamphlets to striking workers, he involves himself in a brawl with policemen, obliging his group to retreat underground for several days (Sc. 4, “Justice”). Instead of demurely dining with a cynical rice merchant who is to sell them munitions for an upheaval, he expresses his disgust for him, thus dooming the weapons deal (Sc. 5, “What Is a Man?”). Finally, he attempts to stage a poorly prepared and inadequately armed insurrection, thereby revealing the agitators’ identities (Sc. 6, “Betrayal”).
Under the strict imperative of clandestine activity, the agitators are prepared for their work in a scene called “Die Ausltischung” (Sc. 2, “The Effacement”). Before they cross the border for their secret mission in China, they are to assume Chinese identities, to behave as “Chinese, born of Chinese mothers, yellow-skinned, who in sleep and delirium speak only Chinese.”10 Hereupon the actors on the stage put on masks. In the end the young comrade’s major mistake is to have taken off his mask and revealed his identity. The obliteration of national and political identities-demanded by the politics of secrecy-is thus coded by the very gesture that indicates theatricality: the use of a mask. This gesture of assuming another identity-staging, as it were, a political conviction-relates the politics of secrecy in Die MaBnahme to Brecht’s idiosyncratic Lehrstuck-theorie, the theory of the learning play. Brecht had developed his theory of theatrical pedagogy in the late nineteen twenties as an explication for his own theatrical practice. The central idea of the Lehrstuck and its pedagogy is not to instruct an audience but to enable the actors to explore and adopt the standpoint their roles suggest in the process of playing these. The actors are to speak their lines not as if presenting their own convictions but, in Brecht’s words, “like a quotation.” Brecht writes,
In principle the learning-play does not need an audience, though it may make use of one. The learning-play is based on the assumption that the actor can be politically influenced by enacting certain behavior, adopting certain attitudes, repeating certain utterances … The imitation of highly exemplary paradigms plays a great role therein, but equally the criticism of those paradigms which can be conveyed by intentionally re-playing the same part in different ways.17
For the early Brecht, acting itself is a form of political reflection that explores and criticizes political patterns by performing them like a role. It is also a form of indirect speech, an exercise in presenting a standpoint without really sharing it. Acting is thus one of the main arts of a cunning agent or agitator. Agents are actors, and actors become agents: the subject becomes a political subject to the extent that she/he is able to play-act, to present and perform a certain position and by this performance explore its consequences. Political agency is thus always linked to the ability to distance oneself from the position one affirms. In Brecht’s Lehrstucktheorie, not only does theater become a fundamental exercise in the politics of secrecy, but also politics itself is seen as a form of play-acting, performing, and dissimulating.
In Die MaBnahme this crossover between play-acting and political activism is an essential element of the theatrical presentation itself. The four agitators are supposed to reenact what happened during their mission in China in order to have their executive measure, their MaBnahme, judged by the control chorus. The episodes concerning the young comrade’s behavior are thus a play-within-a-play. The four agitators are to reenact his errors but also how they came to kill him-a theatrical setup that obliges the killers to replay and thus empathic ally identify themselves with the behavior and motivations of their victim. It is no wonder that Brecht called the Lehrstuck a “a dialectician’s exercise in suppleness”18–a particular dialectics, however, which does not culminate in any higher synthesis.
The art of this type of acting resides in a reflexive distance between the player and his lines. This reflexive distance links the Lehrstucktheorie to the rhetorics of subversion and dissimulatio exposed in “Verwisch die Spuren.” The learning play’s theory and practice of play-acting is thus an essential part of the technique and tactics of clandestine operations and certainly the opposite of the zealous confessionalism shown by the young comrade. Yet the Lehrstuck adds a reflexive moment to the rhetoric of dissimulatio: the position to be presented is analyzed and reflected in the act of its enacting. In Die MaBnahme this reflection is twofold: First, the agitators reconstruct their actions as well as the young comrade’s; second, they reflect these actions and are observed doing so and commented upon by the control chorus.
The young comrade’s inability to adopt the conduct of self-obliteration and dissimulatio finally leads to his most catastrophic and fatal step. He takes off his mask, exposes his face, and confesses the agitator’s mission:
“I have seen too much. Therefore I will stand before them / As no one but myself, and tell them the truth. [He takes off his mask and cries out.] We have come to help you. We have come from Moscow.”19 He thereby not only jeopardizes the lives of the group but also betrays the secrecy of their operation. Displaying his face, his beliefs, his truth, the young comrade assumes the pose of heroism. Stating his empathy, proclaiming his cause, he is ready to sacrifice himself for it. Unfortunately, illegal conspiratorial work is the opposite of heroism. The song “Lob der illegalen Arbeit” (In Praise of Illegal Work) makes this explicit:
It is good to use the word
As a weapon in class warfare.
To call up the masses to battle
With loud and resounding voices.
…
Our petty daily work, however, is difficult but useful. Tenacity and secrecy are the links
That bind the Party network against the Guns of the Capitalist world:
To speak, but
To conceal the speaker To conquer, but
To conceal the conqueror To die, but
To hide the dead.
Who would not do great things for glory; but who
Would do them for silence?20
Secret agents, if they are good, can never be heroes. They can never be celebrated, never be remembered. “To speak, but / To conceal the speaker / To conquer, but / To conceal the conqueror”-the act obliterates its subject, whether grammatical, discursive, or historical. Clandestine revolutionary politics has no subject but is an entirely impersonal progression of history toward an almost transcendent goal: world revolution. The politics of secrecy paradoxically demands that the subject’s dedication exceeds all subjective commitment. Its agents-in both senses of the term-are thought of as mere instruments or media to the historic-political process:
“You are nameless and without a past, empty pages on which the revolution may write its instructions,” the head of the party house says to the agitators.21
In the turmoil caused by the young comrade’s betrayal, all five agitators are hunted by the police. The young comrade, wounded, slows down the group’s escape. This is the moment when the four decide on the eponymous “measure” (Sc. 7, “The Limits of Persecution and Analysis”). They decide to kill their fellow agent and-in order to eliminate every trace of him-throw his body into a lime pit (Sc. 8, “The Burial”). Their “measure,” the killing of the young comrade, is decided upon under extreme pressure: the imminent danger of discovery and, worse, the knowledge that the police will massacre the raging workers if it becomes clear that they have been infiltrated by Communists. In this perilous situation, seemingly without resort and without time for deliberation, they find themselves in precisely the Notstand (the state of emergency) that calls for MaBnahmen (emergency measures). The measure taken, however, is not a judgment or punishment, it is not the application of any norm or law, and it cannot and must not be generalized. It has no legal form, since it is precisely an exception to legality and legal judgment taken in a state of emergency. Brecht made that clear in a later version of the play: “So it was no judgment?” the chorus asks. “No, a measure,” the agitators answer.22 The measure taken is a singular decision, dictated by the exigencies of a given situation, and thus it does not invoke law but! temporarily usurps its rule in a realm where laws cannot be applied.
This is the realm of revolution-which, however, must not be seen as mere chaos. Revolution, according to Brecht, has its proper legality, represented by the control chorus. But this revolutionary legality aims at a different, better justice than that of the capitalist order. The idea of a struggle between the classes implies that the capitalist legal system is class justice, a partial justice withheld from the proletarian class. Or to put it more generally, it recognizes the fact that poverty and economic dependency obstruct a person’s access to the legal system and thus to justice-which is what Brecht points out in his learning-play Die Ausnahme und die Regel (The Exception and the Rule), Revolution, on its way to “true” justice and in its struggle for justice, has to take measures, it has to operate under cover, and-as a final paradox-it has to act unjustly. This, I contend, is the meaning of the most often quoted, most scandalous lines of Die MaBnahme:
With whom would the just man not sit
To help justice’!
…
fat last you could change the world, what Could make you too good to do so?
Who are you?
Sink in filth
Embrace the butcher, but Change the world: It needs it!23
The paradox of doing evil for the sake of the good is not, as Brecht was often accused, the principle of ruthless opportunism laid bare in the Jesuit motto “The ends justify the means,” What Brecht presents in Die MaBnahme is rather the profoundly paradoxical program of an ethics appropriate to the politics of secrecy, an ethics that I call “tainted ethics.” It is, as Slavoj Zizek pointed out, “an inherent self-negation of ethics, that is: an ethical injunction which suspends ethical universality.”24 Such an ethics rejects the universalism of humanistic ethics and its ultimate goal: the integrity of the human being conceived of as an individual, whose suffering should be alleviated immediately and individually. Humanist universalism simply generalizes individual welfare, while a dissenting (in Brecht’s terms, Communist] view argues that welfare and justice can only be those of;) nonuniversal collective. When judged in conflict with this collective welfare, “individual” ethics might well be suspended. A “tainted ethics” aims for a justice beyond the given, beyond the immediate, even beyond the individual’s life itself; it strives for something that is “out of this world,” beyond history, just as the Communist idea of world revolution had, according to Karl Lowith, strong eschatological undertones.25 Brecht’s imperative-”Change the world, it needs it!”–must thus be conceived of only negatively as the desire for an entirely other world. The “filth” with which the political subject is inevitably tainted, his defilement through an unacceptable deed (such as the killing of a goodwilled young comrade), constitutes a kind of moral self-laceration in which the most precious idea of the revolution is at stake-that of another, better justice. To do evil for the sake of the good is ultimately to compromise the good, to change the goal by the very act of approaching it. The imperative “Sink in filth” thus creates a double bind in the relation between ethics and politics: the morality of the individual is in direct conflict with the necessities and the goals of the collective-and yet cannot be entirely detached from it. One man’s desire to be “good” can cost the lives of many, as Die MaBnahme demonstrates. The suspension of ethics in the moment that it impinges upon the Political can therefore no longer be described in terms of sacrifice and tragedy and their reliance upon a classic conflict of values. The decision-the measure-although inevitable, cannot be justified. The agitators are not acquitted, only “assented to” by the Control Chorus: “We agree with you.”26 The Control Chorus points out the unsolvable conflict of contrary values in the revolutionary work. The last words of the Control Chorus, added in the second version of the play, state:
And yet your report shows us what is
Needed to change the world:
Anger and tenacity, knowledge and indignation
Swift action, utmost deliberation
Cold endurance, unending perseverance
Comprehension of the individual and comprehension of the whole:
Taught only by reality can
Reality be changed.27
In two respects this is the heart of Brecht’s political and theatrical mission, often misunderstood as plain socialist utopianism. First, Brecht points out the dialectical contradictoriness of all political action (framed in the polarities of perseverance and swiftness, anger and tenacity, the individual and the whole), and of the behavioral imperative implicit in the politics of secrecy: namely to act strategically, contrary to personal convictions, and in spite of individual suffering. Second, he emphasizes the possibility of changing the world. The world ought to be different; it ought to be understood as changeable: “to present the world as one changeable” is one of his most frequently repeated aesthetic aims. This does not mean that the world should be re-formed into a definite shape but that its possibilities for change must constantly be explored anew, Brecht insists on a politics of contingency, not of necessity or impossibility. The world in which Die MaBnahme is set is-by contrast-a world of sheer necessity, of inescapable exploitation and complete cynicism, as is evident in the songs of the coolies and the rice merchant. Even the agitators’ measure is conditioned by the dangerous situation and the constraints of clandestine operation. The world of Die MaBnahme is a world of inevitability, the absence of contingency, which is why it so urgently “needs to be changed.”
This is why one can legitimately ask whether the measure taken by the agitators is really-as John Willett’s translation of the title has it-a decision.28 The agitators do not face a free choice but what Zizek calls a “forced choice.” This brings us to the play’s most startling moment. For instead of summarily killing their young comrade, the agitators, after asking him whether he knows any other alternative, ask him to consent to their measure. And he does. How could he not agree? How can one fail to consent without the possibility of dissent? He chooses that which he cannot decline. So why ask for his consent (Einverstandnis), a sanction that the agitators in turn demand of the Control Chorus? What is the meaning of this bewildering request? It is, an affirmation of common goals, of the very community that is about to exclude the young comrade. Even when being executed, even when being excluded from the community of fighters, even when disappearing without a trace-through his agreement the young comrade remains a member of the community, shares its vision, and leaves an epitaph in the play itself. His last words combine his affirmation of the revolution with his agreement to his physical obliteration: “And he said: In the interests of Communism / In agreement with the progress of the proletarian masses / Of all lands / Consenting to the revolutionizing of the world.”29 Consent in a phrase interrupted by death, countersigned by it. Nonetheless, it is a forced consent. The young comrade does not have two sides to freely choose between, as in a classical dilemma, but only the freedom of either having or not having a choice. Had the young comrade disagreed, he would have abdicated even that last freedom. Zizek analyzes this situation as a form of meta choice:
What is at stake in the situation of forced choice is that the subject freely chooses the community it always already is a member of. … [T]he paradox of the forced choice has nothing mad about it, … on the contrary the person is mad who behaves as though it was a free choice …. The structure of the choice is always such that it implies a meta-choice: if we take the wrong choice, we loose the very possibility of choosing at all. 30
The paradoxical nature of this “impossible” choice or forced agreement defines-in a purely negative way-the political program of change with which Brecht emphatically closes Die MaBnahme. What does it mean to change a world where one does not really have a choice? It would mean, first and foremost, to choose to have other choices. It would mean reflecting upon the very settings of the choice. The young comrade’s agreement with revolutionary politics is at the same time a radical disagreement with the world as it is. His agreement affirms a revolutionary instance or subject whose essence is change or-more philosophically stated-contingency: the world’s potential to differ from what it is. For these very reasons, one should not reduce Brecht’s concept of Communism to a Marxist ideology preached by historical Communist parties. For Brecht, Communism is the very potential of contingency. Brecht’s revolutionary subject is pure virtuality, an evocation of contingent acts, of choices not yet imaginable, of laws not yet applied.
What then is Die MaBnahme with respect to the revolutionary and secretive politics whose paradoxes I sketched in the beginning? Is it, as has often been argued, an apology-alternately solemn and cynical-for the ruthlessness of Communist agents? Ruth Fischer, sister of the play’s coauthor, Hanns Eisler, bitterly called Brecht the “minstrel of the CPU” (the Soviet secret police), and saw the playas an anticipation of the Stalinist purges.31 Is the work thus an instruction for aspiring secret agitators: to learn their brutal lessons well and to avoid repeating the mistakes of the young comrade? Or is it, to the contrary, a clear-sighted warning of the ethical and political pitfalls of any political enterprise compromised by secrecy and clandestine tactics? Does the play aim instead at an effect of deterrence, by showing how the murder of an innocent and zealous young activist is justified by a heartless and cynical logic? Perhaps the question cannot be decided in these terms. Actually, it is the wrong question. As a learning play and thus an application of Lehrstuck pedagogics, Die MaBnahme is, first and foremost, a training and an exercise in political reflection. It trains the subject’s flexibility when confronted with contradictory political options and it is an exercise in taking even the wrong ones. This implies a critical distance-the actor’s distance from himself, his standpoint, his role-text-and means reflecting on one’s position as something contingent and subject to change and to criticism. Secret agitation, self-effacement, and the rhetorics of Zersetzung in “Verwisch die Spuren” imply the separation of the subject from its discourse by definitively abandoning any rhetoric of expression, vocation, and hence of heroism. The politics of secrecy liquidates the heroic individual as historical subject and presents the tactics of self-effacement and distancing as the only viable means of political action. The individual is reduced to being an instrument of history, a medium rather than a mover: “empty pages on which the revolution writes its instructions.” Precisely by becoming the medium of historical change, the subject gains a new realm of agency and political impact that goes beyond all poses of heroism or self-sacrifice. The revolutionary politics of secrecy, as analyzed (not denounced or celebrated) by Brecht, is thus built on an ethical and political paradox that is marked by the tension of irreconcilable antagonisms: it links the ideal of justice with the necessity of MaBnahem, the ethically unacceptable with the politically necessary, an ethos of enlightenment with a practice of dissimulation, the absence of choice with the choice of mere change. This paradox, Brecht claims, cannot be overcome; it is the inevitable burden of the Political. All we can do, according to Brecht, is play with it, in the very sense that the learning play gives to the term play. But if revolution is the name for the potentiality of radical change, it might be worth it.
Notes
1. Carl J. Friedrich, The PatholQgy of Politics: Violence, Betrayal, Corruption, Secrecy, and Propaganda (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
2. Hannah Arendt, The Burden of Our Time (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1951), 386.
3. Margret Boveri, Treason in the Twentieth Century, trans. Jonathan Steinberg (London: MacDonald, 1961).
4. For an outline of the theory of secret intelligence, see Eva Horn, “Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence,” Grey Room 11 (Spring 2003): 59-85.
5. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
6. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).
7. Carl Schmitt, “Legalitiit und Legitimitiit” (1932), in Carl Schmitt, Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsdtze (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1985); and Carl Schmitt, “Die staatsrechtliche Bedeutung der Notverordnung” (1931), in Schmitt, Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsdtze, 261.
8. Schmitt, Political Theology.
9. Bertolt Brecht, The Measures Taken and Other Lehrstilcke, trans. Carl R. Mueller (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001). Mueller translates the title “Die Mafinahme” as “The Measures Taken,” converting the German singular to plural.
10. As for Brecht’s contact with Komintern secret agents, see Eva Horn, “Die Regel der Ausnahme. Revolutioniire Souveriinitiit und bloJ3es Leben in Brecht’s Maj3nahme,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift (4/2001): 680-709.
11. Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913-1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Mannheim (London and New York: Methuen, 1987).
12. Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct. The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans.
Don Reneau (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).
13. Walter Benjamin, “Kommentare zu Gedichten von Brecht,” in Gesammelte Schriften II, vol. 2 (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp 1991), 556.
14. Bertolt Brecht, “Cover Your Tracks,” in Brecht, Poems 1913-1956, ed. Willett and Mannheim, trans. Frank Jones. Translation modified.
15. Bertolt Brecht, Die Maj3nahme, ed. Rainer Steinweg (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 237; trans. John Willett, in Bertolt Brecht, The Collected Plays (New York: Pantheon, 1971), vol. 3, part II, 232.
16. Brecht, The Measures Taken, 13.
17. Bertolt Brecht, “Zur Theorie des Lehrstucks,” in Reiner Steinweg, Das Lehrstilck: Brechts Theorie einer politisch-dsthetischen Erziehung (Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1972), 51; my translation.
18. Reiner Steinweg, ed., Brechts Modell del’ Lehrstilcke: Zeugnisse, Diskussion, Erfahrungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 198.
19. Brecht, The Measures Taken, 29-30.
20. Brecht, The Measures Taken, 13-14; translation slightly altered.
21. Brecht, The Measures Taken, 12.
22. Brecht, Die Maj3nahme, 100; my translation. Brecht made the change for his fifth (and final) version ofthe play, produced in Moscow in 1934/1935.
23. Brecht, The Measures Taken, 25.
24. Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 177.
25. Karl Uiwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).
26. Brecht, The Measures Taken, 34.
27. Brecht, The Measures Taken, 34.
28. Bertolt Brecht, The Decision, trans. John Willett, in Brecht: Collected Plays: Three, ed. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1997).
29. Brecht, The Measures Taken, 34.
30. Slavoj Zizek, Liebe dein Symptom wie dich selbst! Jacques Lacans Psychoanalyse und die Medien (Berlin: Merve, 1991), 122-123; my translation. Zizek’s Liebe dein Symptom is a collection of essays that is not identical with his Enjoy Your Symptom.
31. Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948).
Horn I Actors/Agents: Bertolt Brecht and the Politics of Secrecy 55
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Search
