From February 6 to 10, 2006, the second joint theory session will start with a day of studio visits and one-to-one tutorials. On Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday we will go on with lectures and presentations in the seminar room starting at 10 am in the morning and screenings and debates in the afternoon. The three of us will work on the topics: Collaboration and Participation.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their book Empire make a distinction between ‘multitude’ and ‘people’ in that the former is a multiplicity with an open, inconclusive constituent relation while the latter is homogenous and merely a resource for the state: the people are constituted in preparation for sovereignty. However, if people – activists - are conceived as multitude then things change.
First, the activist event is not static which it might be if it is subsumed into the ‘res-publica,’ (for instance the sphere of state designated spaces for protest – city squares, avenues etc.) organized around a specific object ('res') for dissent.
Second, the activist group can now be conceived as what Hardt and Negri call a ‘posse.’ This term is not invoked by them in the sense of the Wild West group, in the service of the Law, chasing an outlaw, but rather in its renaissance sense of ‘power,’ as a verb and activity, and of being something mobile and productive; crossed by knowledge rather than organized around an object of it. Important for them, posse is the becoming-subject of multitude and its mode of production, and more importantly, perhaps, it is mobile like contraband that is always in motion and forever modulating its form.
Spinoza asked "what is a body capable of?" This could be thought through, for instance, as the unfolding of a smuggler/artist/installation in an airport (considered around Robert Smithson’s essay ‘Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site’). Alternatively, it might be the 'puissance' or ‘power’ of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic war machine or rhizome that are about the potential of singular bodies to maximize and act out subjectivity in its own sphere – like multitude, neither organized around an object nor reacting to oppression from above.
Now, Hardt and Negri raise exactly the same issue regarding posse:
"Posse is what a mind and a body can do". (Empire p408)
SIMON HARVEY
In the second session from February 6 to 10 we are going to continue our small series of theory films up there in the Skybar. After "L'intrus (Intruder)" by Claire Denis during the last session we will have the really rare pleasure to see "Antigone" by Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, filmed in 1991 in an old greek theatre in Sicily. The original title, "Die Antigone des Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht 1948 (Suhrkamp Verlag)" already refers to a very distinct filmic approach that works with different layers of text and urgency.
We suggest to see the film in relation to both Lacans ethics and the sepcific notion of autonomy as well as the terrific work of two filmmakers whose work may mark the passage from modernism to postmodernism in an extra-ordinary way.
Brecht's Antigone (1948) is a bold adaptation of Holderlin's classic German translation of Sophocles' play. A reflection on resistance and dictatorship in the aftermath of Nazism, it was a radical new experiment in epic theatre.
"Antigone presents herself as autonomos, the pure and simple relationship of a human being to that which it miraculously finds itself carrying, that is the rupture of signification, that which grants a person the insuperable power of being - in spite of and against everything - what he [sic] is... Antigone all but fulfills what can be called pure desire, the pure and simple desire of death as such [i.e., of that which is beyond the pleasure principle]. She incarnates this desire." (Lacan, Jacques: Le séminaire livre VII: L'éthique de la psychanalyse.: p. 328-29)
"Antigone incorporates in many ways the return to mythic origins suggested by films such as "Moses and Aaron" or "From the Cloud to the Resistance". It returns to the aesthetic origins of contemporary film and theater in its use of the visual simplicity of the silent cinema and the staging of Sophocles' play in a Greek theater of his era. It also returns to the mythic origins of civil society in the death of the heroic individual: Antigone's voluntary self-sacrifice parallels Moses' sojourn in the desert and Empedocles' plunge into volcanic fire. And its visual images, like its language, straining to be both German and Greek, mark the border between Europe and the other continents: the "African sun" shines on Sicily, as Huillet has put it."
http://texts.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft4m3nb2jk&chunk.id=d0e6311
Some more links:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103707
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/39/straub_holderlin_cezanne.ht...
http://www.apaclassics.org/AnnualMeeting/05mtg/abstracts/miller.html
On the occasion of its opening in 2002, the Palais de Tokyo immediately struck the visitor as different from other contemporary art venues that had recently opened in Europe. Although a budget of 4.75 million euros was spent on converting the former Japanese pavilion for the 1937 World’s Fair into a “site for contemporary creation,” most of this money had been used to reinforce (rather than renovate) the existing structure. Instead of clean white walls, discreetly installed lighting, and wooden floors, the interior was left bare and unfinished. This decision was important, as it reflected a key aspect of the venue’s curatorial ethos under its codirectorship by Jerôme Sans, an art critic and curator, and Nicolas Bourriaud, former curator at CAPC Bordeaux and editor of the journal Documents sur l’art. The Palais de Tokyo’s improvised relationship to its surroundings has subsequently become paradigmatic of a visible tendency among European art venues to reconceptualize the “white cube” model of displaying contemporary art as a studio or experimental “laboratory.” It is therefore in the tradition of what Lewis Kachur has described as the “ideological exhibitions” of the historical avantgarde: in these exhibitions (such as the 1920 International Dada Fair and the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition), the hang sought to reinforce or epitomize the ideas contained within the work.
Collaboration is one of the guiding terms of an emergent political sensibility in which certain collectivities and mutalities are being redefined as modes of affectual politics. Collaboration, literally, means working together with others, especially in an intellectual endeavour.
The term is widely used to describe new forms of labour relations within the realm of immaterial production of varying areas, but though significantly present there is very little research and theortical reflection on it. What is at stake is the very notion of establishing a new understanding of the term ‘together’ within a dynamic of ‘working together’.
The problem is, that most often collaboration is used as a synonym for cooperation, although etymologically, historically and politically it seems to make more sense to elaborate the actual differences that shift between the various coexisting layers of meaning.
In contrast to cooperation, collaboration is driven by complex realities rather than romantic notions of a common ground or commonality. It is an ambivalent process constituted by a set of paradoxical relationships between co-producers who affect each others.
1. An indecent proposal
As a pejorative term, collaboration stands for willingly assisting an enemy of one's country and especially an occupying force or a malevolent power. It means to work together with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected -- for instance the French Vichy regime in the 1940s, which collaborated with the German occupiers.
Collaboration as a traitorous cooperation with the enemy provides a counter to what management theory since the 80s has been promoting as team-work: The act of subjugation of one's own subjectivity under the omnipresent control regime of a group which has conceptually replaced the classical role of the "foreman" as the disciplying force. Rather than by repression, efficiency is increased by the collective identification of small groups of co-workers.
Meanwhile various research studies have shown that often teams make the wrong decisions, especially when the task involves solving rather complex problems. This insight is even more staggering since rapid technological development and global availability of intellectual resources increase the pressure on individuals to exchange knowledge within and between groups.
Teamwork often fails because of the banal fact that the internalized modes of cooperation are characterized by the opposite of sharing knowledge: In order to pursue a career, one has to hide the relevant information from others. On the other hand it also refers to the fact that joining forces in a group or team increases the likelihood of failure much more than the likelihood of success. Awkward group dynamics, harmful externalities, bad management practices are responsible for the rest.
2. In Praise of mutuality
There is more and more evidence that shows that working together may also happen in unexpected ways. Instead of exerting an alleged generosity of a group, where individuals are supposed to pursue solidarity, it may be the reverse: a brusque, in principle, ungenerous mode, where individuals are relying on each other the more they go after their own interests, mutually dependent through following their own agendas.
Such a paradox of "friendship without friends", as Derrida pointed out in a different context, characterizes contemporary forms of collaboration. Collaborations are black holes within knowledge regimes. Collaboration produces nothingness, opulence or ill-behavior. It does not happen for sentimental reasons, charity nor for the sake of efficiency, but for pure self interest.
For instance claiming transparency within what is called "information society" reveils as hypocrisy: the emerged and yet emerging new information and communication technologies replace conventional strategies of walling off knowledge from the public by intellectual property regimes and digital rights management that grant or refuse access to immaterial resources through operations in realtime. The concept of individual rights has vanished as well as the logics of inclusion and exclusion. It applies to both, the so called real and virtual space, knowledge as well as border regimes.
Against the background of a postmodern control society collaborations are all about exchanging knowledge secretely and apart of borders. The escape agent, human trafficker or "coyote" - as it is called at the US-mexican border - supports undocumented bordercrossings that want to make it from one nation state to the other without the usual paperwork. The "coyote" as an allegory of collaboration is permanently on the move, only temporarily employed, nameless and anonymous, constantly changing faces and sides.
The "coyotes" motivations remain unclear or do not matter at all. It is a postmodern service provider par excellence: There is no trust whatsoever and this does not even create a problem. The conceptual insecurity overrules the eventual financial aspects of the collaboration and triggers a redundancy of affects and percepts, feelings and reactions: Those who do not need the coyote's support are hunting and demonizing it; those who depend on the coyote's secret knowledge and skills are longing desparetely for it.
Nevertheless the collaboration between the "coyote" and the clandestine immigrant refers to the certain amount of illegitimacy that is inherent to any form of collaboration. It stands for the attempt to regain autonomy amidst a society of control.
3. Singularities
While cooperation happens between identifiable individuals within and between organizations, collaboration expresses a differential relationship that is composed by heterogenous parts which are defined as singularities: out of the ordinary, in a way that produces a kind of discontinuity and marks a point of unpredictability, even if deterministic.
This is revealed in post-fordist production, "affect industries" as well as networking environments in general. People have to work together in settings where their efficency, performance and labor power cannot be singled out and measured on its own, but in each case refers to the specific work of somebody else. One's own producing is very peculiar but generated and often also multiplied in networks that are composed of countless distinct dependencies constituted by the power to affect and to be affected.
In respect of such excessivity that is essentially beyond measure, collaboration relates to the mathematical definition of singularity as the point where a function goes to infinity or is in certain other ways ill-behaved. The concept of singularity once more distinguishes collaboration from cooperation. Furthermore it refers to a notion of precariousness that is emerging these days and that can been seen as the crisis that goes along with this rupture or the transition of modes of working together from cooperation and collaboration.
The nettings of voluntariness, enthusiasm, creativity, immense pressure, ever increasing self-doubt and desparation are temporary, fluid and appear in multiple forms, but refer to a permanent state of insecurity and precariousness that becomes the blue print for widespread forms of occupation and employment within the rest of the society. It reveals the other face of immaterial labor that is hidden behind the rhetoric of cooperation, networking, and clustering.
In contrast to cooperation, which always implicates an organic model and some transcendent function, collaboration is a strictly immananent, wild and illegitimate praxis. Every collaborative activity begins and ends within the framework of the collaboration. It has no external goal and cannot be decreed; it is strict intransitivity, it happens, so to say, for its own sake.
Cooperation necessarily takes place in a client-server architecture. It follows a metaphorical narrative structure, in which there is a coherent assignment of every part and its relation to another. Collaboration on the contrary presumes rhizomatic structures where knowledge grows exuberantly and proliferates in a rather unforseeable fashion.
The relationships between collaborators can be understood as from peer to peer. Peer-to-peer computer systems or "P2P-networks" appeared on the internet in the 1990s and created a revolution of the conventional distribution model. Such networks are designed to enable people, who do not know each other and probably prefer not to know each other, to exchange immaterial resources like computing time or bandwidth as well as relevant content. Their anonymous relationships are based on an irony of sharing even in a strict mathematical sense: due to lossless and costfree digital copying the object of desire is not divided but multiplied.
Finally, collaborations are the sites of revolutionary potential. In the last instance collaborations are driven by the desire to create difference and refuse against the absolutistic power of organization. Collaboration means to overcome scarcity and inequality, as well as to struggle for a freedom to produce. It carries an immense social potential, as actualization and experience of the unlimited creativity of the multiplicity of all productive practices.
FLORIAN SCHNEIDER
In addition to 'Antigone' on Wednesday, on Thursday we will be watching another very exciting film 'Zizek!' that follows the philosopher Slavoj Zizek from his sickbed to Boston and Buenos Aires. This film, sourced by Jean for KIT before it has even been released in Europe, is of particular interest in relation to aspects of Lacanian 'desire' that we talked about in the first week of the semester. Morfe info at: http://www.zizekthemovie.com/
We shall probably also watch 'The Specialist' by Eyal Sivan that Florian has managed to source.
At the EGS website you find some interesting references to Judith Butlers work on Antigone: In "Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death" (2000) Judith Butler redefines Antigone's legacy, recovering her revolutionary significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and sexual politics.
Butler's new interpretation reconceptualizes the incest taboo in relation to kinship — and opens up the concept of kinship to cultural change. Antigone, the renowned insurgent from Sophocles's Oedipus, has long been a feminist icon of defiance. What has remained unclear is whether she escapes from the forms of power that she opposes. Antigone proves to be a more ambivalent figure for feminism than has been acknowledged, since the form of defiance she exemplifies also leads to her death. Butler argues that Antigone represents a form of feminist and sexual agency that is fraught with risk. She considers the works of such philosophers as Hegel, Lacan, and Irigaray, and she asks how psychoanalysis would have been different if it had taken Antigone — the "postoedipal" subject — rather than Oedipus as its point of departure. If the incest taboo is reconceived so that it does not mandate heterosexuality as its solution, what forms of sexual alliance and new kinship might be acknowledged as a result? The book relates the courageous deeds of Antigone to the claims made by those whose relations are still not honored as those of proper kinship, showing how a culture of normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what sexual freedom and political agency could be.
"The depraved heroes of 24 are the Himmlers of Hollywood" is the main argument Zizek makes in this text for the "Guardian". Referring to Hannah Arendt and her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" he points out: "What if people do commit terrible acts as part of their job while being loving husbands, good parents and close friends? As Arendt says, the fact that they are able to retain any normality while committing such acts is the ultimate confirmation of moral depravity."
http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/news_item.2006-01-16.9282463496
When Adolph Eichmann was brought to trial in Israel in 1961, the event was broadcast live under the direction of documentarian Leo Hurwitz. That footage, over 500 hours of it, has been locked away in the decades since. Eyal Sivan, inspired by Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, received permission to dig through the footage for a concentrated portrait of the trial and the man.
The balding, middle-aged Eichmann looks as scary as an accountant as he snaps to attention for every question, answering with a "Yawohl" before reading from records or repeating his mantra: "I had to obey... I was a soldier." Painting himself as nothing but a bureaucrat with a ruthless efficiency ("I does not mean Eichmann," he claims, trying to distance himself from the odious orders he signed), the only emotion he exhibits is a terrifying pride in his meticulous service: "I was never reprimanded," he offers by way of explanation. Though Sivan compiled this film from documentary recordings, he finds some haunting images: the reflection of newel footage on the glass cage that protects Eichmann as he blankly watches the record of atrocities, the concentration camp tattoo on the arm that reaches into frame to play evidence from a tape recorder, the bland, emotionless face of Eichmann that dominates the film. Far from an "objective" record of the event, The Specialist indeed captures the "banality of evil" in Eichmann, and that's genuinely frightening. (Sean Axmaker)
"It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never radical, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrowand lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ’thought-defying,’asI said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its banality. Only the Good has depth and can be radical." (Hannah Arendt, Encounter, Jan. 1964, vol. xxii, No. 1, p. 56.)
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=18645999013447
"But in The Specialist , Sivan and Brauman make no pretense of objectivity. They are sophisticated people; as a filmmaker, Sivan has been concerned with the politics of memory and with the Israelis' attempts to write the Palestinians out of history, while Brauman, as a past chair of Médecins Sans Frontières, knows something about the relationship between relief efforts and the news media. The two filmmakers seem to have noticed the irony inherent in the "complete record" of the Eichmann trial, which is not complete at all but rather the semi-rotted remains of whatever Leo Hurwitz selected from whatever could be seen from four distinct viewpoints. It might have been possible to conceal how these materials, with their blind spots and damage, fall short of the implied goal, which is omniscience. Instead, Sivan and Brauman have chosen this very inadequacy as their theme." Final Cut on Final Solution? by Stuart Klawans
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000508/klawans
More reviews at:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/001434print.html