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Editorial

Material-Specific Performativity

Arcadia Missa

Understanding phenomena and facticity, creating an art-object for subjects within constellations of agential-realism.

I

There are two absolutes we can never attain. One is freedom and the other is authenticity. These have simultaneously been promised as absolutes; logos, hegemonic since the commodification of identity made it less of a thing, more of an attitude. If this is the case, how is it possible that, in the apparently end-times of socialism – where we are reckoned to feel that there is no option but to comply with hyper-resilient networks – the futurity of being a free and authentic subject still applies as an ideal?

If these ‘absolutes’ are unattainable, contingently emerging abstracts, why is the best art that which fluxes desperately in a carry-on struggle to reach both?

Ultimate freedom would inherently be one of an anarchist individualist position perhaps – following from Erich Fromm, negative freedom, freedom from, in purity is a myopic libertarianism – at the same time authoritarian as it is conformist and destructive.

Power relations, governed by notions of freedom, inflect not only policy, but also Californian Ideologues. Freedom slides through the rationalist and individualist liberalism that “forecloses the acknowledging the nature of collective identities” (Mouffe, 2005, 10) beyond the free markets of financial capital.

Authenticity, another unattainable absolute, is presumed to be that essence of a ‘natural state.’ Indeed Rousseau, in his work describing the different formations of authentic and inauthentic, claimed that the authentic is that of the natural self (prior to or outside of external factors, like society). Heidegger (the Nazi) said that it is one’s choosing of identity that makes one authentic, that and the awareness of mortality, that incredible human gift of knowing we are all going to die. That’s fucking real.

The authentic is specifically right, judged against a universalised rightfulness. Being both total and individual like this, authenticity speaks of a de-evolutionary perspective: of attempting to gain freedom from the responsibility of societal development and therefore destructively compliant (in Fromm’s terms) with liberal agendas.

Ultimate authenticity cannot really be described; it is as such a useless paradox. It supports the falsity of freedom – of a natural, or proper, state that freedom can be measured against. Its existence is dependent on its polarity with the non-free. In this it becomes paradoxical. The authentic, ‘the natural’, continues to lay claim to this condition of authenticity within its enclosures of Globalised primitive accumulation.

The ‘necessary’ freedom of markets, the imperative towards the unbridled production of specific and hyper-channelled accumulation, is a freedom that can only be met by the same markets (Steerk, 2012, 38), and too presents an equally myopic freedom. This is discernable when thinking about a freedom from subjugation, via a complete rejection of subjecthood. The myopia here is in the denial of the becoming of a subject by those whose lives-as-objects are predetermined and biopolitically enforced (Bromberg, 2013). It is here that artists examine re-definitions: an escape from subjugation via an apparently autonomous creation of an object: an object bound with traces and fabrics of woven subjectivities. As put by Katrina Palmer (as Hegel) in her novella The Dark Object “in order to be realised as a subject you must first negate the object - this negative action is becoming through negotiation”. Artists modelling affect do not so much negate the object, but rather, imbue it.

This autonomy of injecting life, of re-centring the subject in negotiation with the art object brings us back to the confusion of freedom, of Fromm’s negative freedom – what subjectivities are re-written through the object’s life, whose are not?

Angelo Plessas’ artwork Re-Twittering Machine (2012), used a programming code to collect tweets hashtagging #freedom. This was a perfect visual example of the idea of freedom under collapse. Amongst reams of pro war, anti abortion, and bible belt fundamentalist tweets, there were some left wing hopes, some liberal hippy whimsies, and various forms of #freedom that could all be argued as violent in their opposition to the rights of other humans desires of certain types of #freedom, or freedom of individuals. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Do we believe in the idea that freedom (the word, the idea), that #freedom is enough to combat the non-free, the controlling ways by which we experience it or its opposite.

“When the terms ‘power’ and ‘control’ are used in this context, this is really a shorthand for the material effects of media-systems — the materiality of the media is, we are told, determinant of power relations, not the reverse.” (Galloway, Thacker, 2007, 9)

Equally, can we really say that by extending #freedom outwards, among and across ubiquitous networks, its symbolic weight makes it real? Galloway and Thacker go on to describe how al-Qaeda typify this problem in the contemporary moment: at once we are told that “the new enemy is networked and distributed to such a degree that it cannot be named” — so we have an increasingly abstract war on ‘terror’ — “And yet there continues to be to be the persistent naming of the entity-that-cannot-be named”(Ibid, 11). What is free must be corralled by the specificity of the non-free

As Plessas’ work makes clear, the projection of freedom into momentary communities hashed together, is the collapse of its unnameable form, through its name.

II

For Satre, authenticity is bound with angst, emanating from one’s apparently ingrained personal freedom to act. Satre moved past ‘natural essence’, or choosing of essence, and into a notion of authenticity that acknowledges and incorporates the responsibilities of an individual, within society. This version of authenticity is the easiest to believe. It is an authenticity that understands existence before essence, and ‘individual’ as one that continually self-forms (or becomes) via the grabbing of responsibility of one’s actions. Angst is then what becomes from the realisation of this taking (of responsibility), that we are to blame ourselves, that we are the forces of our own nature; yet, thankfully, Satre acknowledges that this is constrained by context, structure, or ‘facticity’.

Someone said recently of their work, made using CGI, that they liked the way that it appeared to be self-produced – imitating a departure from the angst around ‘freedom to act’, free from the ardours of subjective production. 3D thing dancing on infinite black (for example). This proposition of self-reproduction (or non-facticity) resounds in the weak image of Groys which ‘are able to originate, multiply and distribute themselves through the open fields of contemporary communication without any curatorial control ’: similarly in Steyerl’s poor image: “the poor image is a rag or a rip, a lumpen proletariat in the class society of appearances, liberated from the vaults of cinemas and thrust into digital uncertainty”. Yet, it is striking that this propensity to read self-production in the floating CGI image is thoroughly compromised by even a passing glance at the exploitation involved in its display as well as the dependence on these technologies in this aesthetic mode. (Sanderson, 2013). While pointing to the inherent construction of the digital image through capital, Steyerl’s proposition must be metered against the ideological fluidity, mutability and fungibility of the digital file, which simultaneously enacts the opposite on bodies.

This type of subjecthood amongst globalisation — and the need to presume that things merely self-reproduce – is only the latest feint in a long history of Capital’s capacity for exploiting free labour. Free in its true iteration – free for one, chains for another. Similar to the idea of self-production of the digital, is the idea of the self-reproduction of the worker against which Silvia Federici (with many others) has battled since the 1970s. This focus on the end-user (of labour-power / visual technologies) experience, like much current incorporation of self-production into ‘critical’ aesthetic production, has coloured historical resistance to capital: “...the only relevant agents [Marx] recognises in this process [of reproduction of labour power] are the male, self-reproducing workers, their wages and means of subsistence” (Federici, 94, 2012), as such this misses in its analysis of the effects and methodology of Capital, the free or enclosed labour of “...women, domestic labour, sexuality and procreation.” (Ibid). As Federici goes on to explain, this disinterest in continued production (or reproduction) in spite of labour shifts can be extended into the globalised exploitation of the practically free labour both caused, and needed, by the open market.

[1] Groys, Boris, “From Image to Image File and Back”; “Art Power”; MIT Press (2008)

Federici’s critique of Marx’s technological determinism, in which he “remained wedded to a technologistic concept of revolution, where freedom comes through a machine” (Federici, 95, 2012), figures heavily in contemporary offerings of digital freedom: it is at odds with the fact that global industrialisation has only led to further enclosures of, for example, subsistence farming and non-proletarian modes of existence (Ibid, 77). Seen from afar this is the primitive authenticity that supports the bogus freedom of self-production / self-reproduction and, if reproduction (of bodies and ideologies) is continued to be taken for granted, that which now supports our current user-generated digital experience.

The hegemonies, against which Federici has fought, are not simply a case of structural conditioning, but of affective coercement too. Echoing Federici in her many writings on Wages for Housework, Elizabeth Gumport describes how, when women's domestic labour was supposedly paid for by love, similarly, representation of women in public was assumed through influence they might be able to have on their men - "private relationships constituted, or compensated for, public recognition" (n+1 Anthology, 2012, 228) or, “freedom”. Gumport goes on: “Historically, privacy has not defended the rights of women, but perpetuated the lie that they are already free” what is instead claimed is that privacy (like forms of representation, or visbility, or authenticity) protects from reality (or structural subjugation), that private space is somehow a free domain, as opposed to also being predicated on a structure that controls via affective coercement, and more.

Kraus picked up on this in Video Green, in her critique of the MFA system’s flattening and homgenising of all difference, but especially the diaristic. “There is no problem with the female confession so long as it is made within a repentant theraputic narrative.” (Kraus, 2004). The representation of person, the confessional, the self-diagnosed as sick, is fine, but those (artists) “who refuse to stop there – who move from confession, which describes a situation, to analysis, which seeks to explain it” (Gumport, 2013, 215) is too confrontational, too representational of a non-free structural context, facticity. Once experience moves beyond the private, into the space of social determinancy, and experienced by some who is “sane and lucid and doesn’t want to get well – who will not even identify as sick” (ibid) then the privacy can no longer act to conceal problems surrounding ‘freedom’ behind closed doors, or, the apparent freedom of individualism.

Kraus picks this up – via her experience as editor of Native Agents and of teaching on L.A. MFA programmes of a pre-emptive, neo-conceptual, emptiness that forecloses the biography of the artist (for example) – as an invocation towards an expansion of the personal and private to addressing it, and its problems at a universal and public level.

“To be female still means being trapped with the purely psychological…Because emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as a discipline, as form… If woman have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?’ (Kraus, 1997)

This was 1997, now as visibility and transparency take precedence over the delineation between public and private that once characterised the diaristic versus the universal, the same structural distinctions must be examined as to their implication of freedom and authenticity.

III

Both the physical structure, for example the industrial grid of electricity up and down, left to right, and all directions in between, which run across the country; and the affect that is spun into our relations through intercourse, history, language, ‘culture’, et al., are, as explained by Karen Barad: material realities. One of the best ways for visualising and conferring these simulations, these affects-as-material, as opposed to as-representations, is to understand them as being intrinsic to the body. Not only in a semi-Satrean sense of the body intersected with facticity, but also the body as a historicised locus for matter. Barad terms this as agential realism.

These collections of material realities, memories, histories inscribed onto a gendered, raced, classed body, love letters sent through your wifi to the swoosh sound effect of Apple Mail, is phenomenological, as Barad herself describes it, “a relationality between specific material (re)configurings of the world through which boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted”. This causal relationship between the apparatuses of bodily production and the phenomena produced is one she names “agential intra-action”.

Using ubiquitous networks, and unnameable forms, agential intra-action, to address the conflicting relationship of ‘freedoms’, is being attempted by cultural producers, such as the artist Ann Hirsch – striving for something honest within the paradigm of the inauthentic, via a sundry of performative operations/materials.

The yarn is neither metaphorical or literal, but quite simply material, a gathering of threads which twist and turn through the history of computing, technology, the sciences and arts. (Sadie Plant, 1997)

Good artists’ use of phenomena, yarn, as material, frequently seems to place them into a ‘post-irony’ bracket, operating in inauthenticity to become always, the lived-out unsuccessful grasping of freedom and authenticity.

After the happening, yet their lives fully part of the performance-spectacle of their own art production, skewered from Phelan’s understanding of performance (as only in the present), and instead attempting a pre-failed feat, only through the representational as relational qualities that inform their practice, and its distribution (as practice). By this I am thinking of artists such as Amalia Ulman, Bunny Rogers, Megan Rooney, Holly White and Steve Roggenbuck. The consumable presence of their everyday life folded into their practice in its entirety. Some are artist-poets, others just one or the other, narrative cutting through their practices as object. All have various research interests, and different ways of conducting their practices; what is concurrent between them, however, is the embedded relationship between discursive and non-discursive practices. The representational and relational, arched into one, as a holistic endeavour, as material that continuously builds upon the object.

IV

This relationship between discursive and non-discursive practices that mesh together the quotidian as well as the imagined relies on a now prosaic semiotic flexibility: the juncture between the signifier and signified is not freely floating but stretched and wilfully distorted, amongst the lived nodes and hard relations of a socially reproductive system.

Irony is the dissolution of authenticity via the collapsing of temporal, geographic and ‘historical’ symbolic reference, and has proved itself in many ways to be a zero sum. Karen Barad’s understanding of the historicity that is firmly material, and materialises in the body refuses the collapse demanded by irony. Under neoliberal structural adjustment (of everything), irony has morphed, through cynicism, or perhaps the disappointments of experienced policy et al, into post-irony. On the one hand dealing with it, on the other, just dealing with it. The closest to authenticity we have become. For Bifo:

[T]he ironist simply refuses the game and recreates the world as an effect of linguistic enunciation. [. . .] In the second part of the 1970s, the Italian autonomous movement practiced irony as a critique of power and dogmatism. A historical catastrophe occurred due to the confusion between the ironic and cynical modes: Autonomia was overwhelmed and erased by the wave of cynicism that coincided with the media dictatorship under which we still labor.

Drawing on Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, Bifo distinguishes irony and after-’68 cynicism (of lost faith and complicit scepticism). The cynicist, more often than not, slips back into the ironic gesture from which they are attempting escape. According to Bifo and Sloterdijk, cynicism encapsulates the recognition something is failing, or wrong, such as a power structure, yet remains on the side of said power structure. Cynicism plays nice with power, as it stems from its own self-effacing fear (or even just knowledge) of ruin by the power it maintains. Post-irony on the other hand has left this behind, but it does not return to a symbolism flexible beyond its materiality, history, or relations – its context.

As a practice, this is agential realism: all forms of material making up the art object, which is distributed through its documentation just as much as its contextual language and physical presence. Holly White’s fanfics, first person shot YouTube videos and printed out celebrities sellotaped together to be life size and strung up in a space, all disseminate through her blog, Twitter, YouTube, website, all made up of matter in conversation and embroiled with each other. Rosi Braidotti’s nomadism (of practice): existential condition of the art object.

Returning to Irony – distinct to a contemporary cynicism – as creating the linguistic conditions for a contingent, anti-hegemonic art of agential realism; it is worth returning to this distinction: “Ironic discourse never presupposes the existence of a truth that will be fulfilled or realized. Irony implies the infinite process of interpretation, whereas cynicism results from a (lost) faith.” (Bifo, 2012, 166) And so, while Bifo proposes a return to Irony, the approaches to practice by White, Rooney, Rogers, Ulman or Roggenbuck (loosely located in post-irony), provide our constellation of affect, and are submerged with experienced biopower. They crystallise the interwoven narrative across sites, as art object. They know we are mining the Earth and on the edge of the stack. Hybrid life. This is the artwork rehearsing – knowing and saying that which is unnamed; yet doing so by binding the threads together instead of unravelling them further.

The move by artists to both understand and present their distribution and narrative as, or a part of, the art object – and this an object of life, simulation as reality, representation as matter (as opposed to representation), is a move in coherence with Barad’s understanding that:

Representationalism separates the world into the ontologically disjoint domains of words and things, leaving itself with the dilemma of their linkage such that knowledge is possible. If words are untethered from the material world, how do representations gain a foothold? [. . .] representationalism never seems to be able to get any closer to solving the problem it poses because it is caught in the impossibility of stepping outward from its metaphysical starting place.

Language cannot be representation, a way to describe an ontological state, to mediate between us; our relations are not clung together by words. Words appear under our skin as effecting objects. As phenomena – described as ‘comforting’ by Theresa M. Senft, permeating her stack of reality way ahead of us: “I can't see any bodies here, online. Yet words, seemingly attached to bodies in some way, fly past me on this screen.” Barad’s posthuman performativity is far from a Senft-style 90’s posthumanism, as in, it is not grouped together with TAZ dotcom dreams. It doesn’t look to an existential condition, but rather the inauthentic, our performativity, as part of the conditions of power that construct material reality in all its forms.

The value of an authentic work is based on some fantasy of the artist’s touch or presence in the object that’s still there, that we still yearn for, or that we monetize, I’m not sure which. (Amy Adler, 2013)