Category: Volume 24 – Number 2 – January 2014

Jason M. Baskin is Assistant Professor of English at University of Wyoming, where he specializes in modern and contemporary literature and critical theory. He is completing a book about embodiment and aesthetics in late modernist literature. His essays have appeared in Cultural Critique and Mediations: A Journal of the Marxist Literary Group.
 
Ulrik Ekman is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Ekman’s main research interests are in cybernetics and ICT, the network society, new media art, critical design and aesthetics, as well as recent cultural theory. He is the head of the Nordic research network “The Culture of Ubiquitous Information,” with more than 150 participating researchers. Ekman is currently involved in the publication of Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity and Culture (Routledge, forthcoming 2015), a comprehensive anthology treating the question whether and how the development of network societies with a third wave of computing may have brought about the emergence of a new kind of technocultural complexity. Ekman’s publications include “Of the Untouchability of Embodiment I: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Relational Architectures,” in C-Theory (2012); “Irreducible Vagueness: Augmented Worldmaking in Diller & Scofidio’s Blur Building,” in Postmodern Culture 19.2; and “Of Transductive Speed – Stiegler,” in Parallax 13.4. He is also the editor of Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing (MIT Press, 2013).
 
Gregory Flaxman is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Director of Global Cinema Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and the editor of The Brain is the Screen (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). His latest book (coauthored with Robert Sinnerbrink and Lisa Trahair) on “cinematic thinking” will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2014.
 
Janis Butler Holm is Associate Professor of English at Ohio University. Her prose, poems, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. Her plays have been produced in the U.S., Canada, and England.
 
David Kaufmann teaches literature at George Mason University. His most recent book, Telling Stories: Philip Guston’s Later Work, appeared in 2010. He has just completed the manuscript of Other People’s Words: Subjectivity and Expression in Uncreative Writing.
 
Jacques Lezra is Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish at New York University. His most recent book is Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (2010; Spanish translation, 2012; Chinese translation, 2013). With Emily Apter and Michael Wood, he is the co-editor of Dictionary of Untranslatables (Fr. Vocabulaire européen des philosophies). He is the author of articles on “The Futures of Comparative Literature,” Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, on Adorno’s monsters, on Cervantes, on contemporary and early modern translation theories and practices, on Freud, Althusser, Woolf, and other topics. With Paul North, Lezra edits the Fordham University Press book series IDIOM.
 
David Rokeby is an independent artist living in Toronto. His early work Very Nervous System (1982-1991) pioneered interactive art, translating physical gestures into real-time interactive sound environments. It was presented at the Venice Biennale in 1986, and was awarded a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for Interactive Art in 1991. Several of his works address digital surveillance, including “Taken” (2002), and “Sorting Daemon” (2003). Other works engage in a critical examination of the differences between human and artificial intelligence. The Giver of Names (1991-) and n-cha(n)t (2001) are artificial subjective entities, provoked by objects or spoken words in their immediate environment to formulate sentences and speak them aloud. David Rokeby has exhibited and lectured extensively in the Americas, Europe and Asia. His awards include a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2002), a Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art (2002), and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts “BAFTA” award in Interactive art (2000).
 
Leif Sorensen teaches twentieth and twenty-first century American literature at Colorado State University. His published and forthcoming work includes essays on ethnic writers of the modernist era, pulp fiction, early Tejano radio, Colson Whitehead, and Nalo Hopkinson in American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Modernism/Modernity, African American Review, MELUS, and Genre. He is completing a book on the recovery of multiethnic modernism and the development of literary multiculturalism in the U.S.
 
Patricia Vettel-Becker is Professor of Art History at Montana State University Billings. She is the author of Shooting from the Hip: Photography, Masculinity and Postwar America (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and has published articles in American Art, Art Journal, Genders, Men & Masculinities, American Studies, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She is currently working on a book addressing femininity and visual culture in the 1960s.
 
Jeffrey Wallen is the Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), and has published on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature and culture, on biography and literary portraiture, on Holocaust Studies and Berlin Jewish history, and on debates about education. He is currently working on a study of the archive in contemporary thought and art.
 

A review of Lance Duerfahrd, The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett’s Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis.  Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013.

Why does Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot have such resonance when performed in extreme circumstances? Why does a play in which little happens, and which offers little hope for transformation, have such strong “emotive appeal” when performed for those locked in prisons for long sentences, for those undergoing the siege of Sarajevo, or suffering from the hurricane, flood damage, and inadequate government response in New Orleans? Why does a play that is not overtly political or “committed,” and that does not put forth a prospect for change, illuminate the conditions in which it is performed (the prison, the city in crisis) in ways that the plays of Brecht would not?
 
Lance Duerfahrd’s The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett’s Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis provides illuminating and multilayered responses to these questions, as it develops an understanding of Beckett’s writing as “destitute art,” a work of elimination, subtraction, and depletion, an “impoverished aesthetic.” At the center of this lively, engaging, and well-researched study are chapters that explore the performances of Waiting for Godot in prisons (most famously San Quentin, but several others around the world as well) and in places of civil catastrophe (Susan Sontag’s performance of Godot in Sarajevo, Paul Chan’s in New Orleans). These first two chapters open up our understanding of this much discussed play, deftly exploring several ways in which the play and the situations it is performed in illuminate each other. The second half turns to some of Beckett’s prose works, focusing on the figure of the vagabond, and on reader response. How do we confront “the indigence of Beckett’s work and respond to its needfulness without substituting something of value in its place?” (10). The book concludes with a brief discussion of Duerfahrd’s own staging of Waiting for Godot in Zucotti Park during Occupy Wall Street.
 
The Work of Poverty opens with a short introduction that incisively juxtaposes the work of Beckett and Brecht (a juxtaposition that was central for Adorno) and wonderfully analyzes Brecht’s own rarely discussed efforts, very late in his life, to rewrite (to produce a Gegenentwurf of) Waiting for Godot. Brecht’s attempt to rework the dialogue hit an impasse, and he decided instead to recontextualize it, preserving Beckett’s words but projecting cinematic footage of social revolutions behind the actors. Duerfahrd writes, “Brecht understands something crucial in his effort to elicit meaning from Beckett: though too poor to instantiate a reality, Godot demands juxtaposition to one. The condition of need on Beckett’s stage exerts a radiant effect over contiguous spaces” (4). This discussion serves to set up Duerfahrd’s larger point that the performances of Godot in prisons and in Sarajevo and New Orleans are not footnotes to the play’s performance history, not deviant or aberrant performances (and Beckett was notoriously restrictive in allowing productions that took license with his work, altering the text or even stage directions), but rather are essential for understanding Beckett’s “aesthetic of poverty.” Duerfahrd claims, “The response of the flood evacuee, the inmate, and the siege victim help us engage the play’s drastic address. As I will show, these audiences’ reception illuminate waiting, structures of the waiting process, names for waiting, and the awaited” (6). For the inmate, with plentiful experience of impoverishment and destitution, and certainly of waiting, the play is not the type of mimetic representation that it is for the theatergoer in New York or Paris.
 
The first chapter, exploring the production history of Godot in various prisons, and Beckett’s own involvement with some of these productions as well as his interactions with prisoners, is the most wide ranging and provocative part of the book. It contains fascinating material, including information gleaned from Duerfahrd’s own discussions with Rick Cluchey, who first saw Godot as an inmate in San Quentin and later became friends with Beckett and acted in several of his plays. Particularly interesting is a biographical anecdote about Beckett’s writing space in an apartment of his that looked out at the Santé Prison, and his communication in Morse code with an inmate across the way. In each part of the book, Duerfahrd articulates several key ideas for grasping Beckett’s texts, and here he identifies four aspects of Waiting for Godot that invite “prisoners to relocate the performers and performance within their predicament . . . exposure, routine, closed space, and the movement on Beckett’s stage” (16). This chapter skirts the risk of presenting the prison performances of Godot as the genuine staging of Beckett (all else is mere theater) and the prisoners as having special access to the play (as with Althusser’s suggestion that members of the working class can grasp Marx’s Capital more easily than bourgeois intellectuals). Duerfahrd’s arguments never come close to this reductionist endpoint. Rather, Duerfahrd continually gives us counter-interpretations—not (yet another) new perspective, or the revelation of hidden or essential meanings that are covered over by conventional theatrical contexts, but persistent reframings of the concepts and terms that structure our understanding of the play.
 
Duerfahrd writes, “The play takes great measures to keep the characters’ thinking from coagulating into knowledge, something for either us or them to know” (55), and he elaborates this idea by examining the prisoners’ responses to the play:
 

[T]he prisoners raise some of the fundamental questions about the play, not in an essay or review but by hurling the questions at the play itself and at the character on stage: What is a performance of thinking? What knowledge (useful or otherwise) is rendered by the characters? How de we separate blather and thinking? When does the thinking on stage become our own thought? (55)

 
Duerfahrd’s own writing proceeds by elegantly hurling and tenaciously addressing such questions. Nothing here feels cranked out, or written to meet the demands of producing a book for tenure. Rather, there is a strong effort throughout to pose questions that clearly matter to him, and also to engage an audience.
 
At the heart of this book is a dynamic questioning that moves between the work and the conditions in which it is received. The second chapter focuses on two well publicized productions of Godot in “crisis” situations—Sontag’s during the Bosnian war and Chan’s in the aftermath of the flooding and destruction in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Duerfahrd writes:
 

History conspires to turn the description of a city under siege into a synopsis of Beckett’s play. Abandonment, hunger, the limit of the bearable, life without assurance: uncannily these are the fundamental terms for any analysis of Godot. It suggests that Sarajevo had become a living paraphrase for the play Sontag brings to the city. . . As with the inmates, it is not a question of what the Sarajevans see in the play but of how they experience a feeling of affirmation because the play sees (understands, anticipates) the audience.  (67-8).

 
This chapter develops increasingly nuanced probings of the interplay between abandonment and affirmation. Not unlike the play itself, Duerfahrd keeps pressure on the particular descriptions and analyses he puts forth:
 

Godot begins by announcing that nothing is to be done. What it performs is all that must be undone, a diligently negative labor. It undoes the questions through which we coercively ferret out the practical value of the artwork. It requires us to rethink the use value of theater. Godot achieves this not by reasserting its utility but by belaboring, even tiring out, all the variations on this question of “Why?” (74)

 
A similar critical movement is at work in Duerfahrd’s description and critique of Sontag’s staging of the play. In discussing Sontag’s decision to make her performance of the play one act rather than two, Duerfahrd explains what he thinks Sontag gets wrong about aspects of the play, offers a critique of some of the main criticisms directed by others at Sontag’s production, and then uses Sontag’s (and Chan’s) productions to push further against our notions of “context.” These productions become essential for understanding both something further about the play and about the world we live in. Duerfahrd does not proceed towards an interpretation that would be the best one, threading the needle between the various positions he analyzes, but rather unsettles and rethinks the standpoints from which we would generate our own critiques.
 
The concluding pages of the chapter are especially insightful, exploring how the “image made by Godot in Sarajevo and New Orleans differs starkly from images of the respective disasters disseminated through television and other media” (110). Duerfahrd’s discussion of the weaknesses of Robert Polidori’s After the Flood and Chris Jordan’s In Katrina’s Wake demonstrates a striking visual awareness that in turn highlights what Sontag and Chan achieved. In contrast to the photographs—in which “this stocktaking is made literal while it becomes the mourning of lost property . . . the name brand emerges here as a life raft for our perception” (110)—Sontag’s and Chan’s performances
 

enact a subtraction process directed at the remnants allotted to the stage. . . By means of vagabonds speaking in rage and irritability about the “enough,” Beckett produces images insufficient unto themselves, which echo (rather than merely indict) the absence of Godot. (111)

 
Duerfahrd’s writing is often animated by such striking and memorable sentences, which complicate as much as they illustrate the point that is being made (“These performances absorb the environment beyond space of audience and stage, not like a sponge but like a concussion” [106]).
 
The second half of the book is less compelling, though still rewarding. It offers readings of selected prose works by Beckett that elaborate various forms and figures of poverty (the vagabond, indigence) and provides a more standard contribution to the already enormous mass of Beckett criticism (of which Duerfahrd amply demonstrates his awareness and grasp). The third chapter centers on a discussion of the “vagabond” and on Molloy (really, Molloy, the subject of the first half of that book). While filled with sharp insights, the subtle yet forceful dynamics of the earlier chapters are stripped down here, and the larger tension isn’t sufficiently worked through: the emphasis on the “vagabond” reinforces a reliance on some form of subjectivity even as the analysis traces its dismantlement.
 
The last full chapter addresses the role of the reader and asks, “What is an impoverished reading of Beckett?” If a key task in grasping an “aesthetics of poverty” is to avoid moving from poverty to aesthetics, from lack to value, how are we to avoid in turn transmogrifying lack into a positive category? Duerfahrd acutely explains the ways Bersani and Dutoit’s analysis of How It Is seems “to cancel the poverty of Beckett’s work,” and he offers strong alternatives to their interpretation of the narrator as “a kind of stopping point for voices” and “a collecting depot for all the words” (160). Yet his own critique seems to endow the work with a transformative and thereby redemptive power: “Beckett’s impoverished syntax makes us, as readers, into beggars. The nonrelation between terms on the page forces our eye to take a vagrant itinerant path rather than obeying a syntactic regularity” (159). Do Beckett’s texts really have such an “impoverishing” power, turning us into beggars, vagrants, itinerants (we who are also immersed in the scholarly discourse about Beckett)? And if they do, wouldn’t this be the ultimate sign of their richness? Even if these tensions are not fully worked through, the sophistication and liveliness of the interpretations push the reader to confront the trajectories of lack, reduction, and impoverishment that Duerfahrd establishes. This chapter fittingly ends with a discussion of Beckett’s late Worstward Ho, brilliantly reading it as a response to Shakespeare’s King Lear.
 
In the “Afterword,” Duerfahrd writes that each “performance of Godot in this book assaults theatrical decorum in its unique way, breaching the line between the play and its surroundings” (188-9). This describes the power of The Work of Poverty as well—a book that works to disturb if not assault some of the boundary lines that regulate academic discourse, even as it makes a substantial and important contribution to Beckett scholarship.

A review of Catherine Zuromskis, Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.

What typically escapes interpretation and analysis is the commonplace. This is certainly true of snapshot photography, a practice so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Long dismissed by art historians as unworthy of aesthetic consideration, snapshot photography has only recently captured the attention of visual culture scholars, who have begun to examine snapshot images as both personal artifacts and cultural documents. In Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images, Catherine Zuromskis sets out to explore the genre “as a public and political form of visual expression in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century” (10). Zuromskis argues that because the “social life” of snapshot photography resides in both the private and public realms—in that its images are intended for family and friends, yet are consumed through conventional codes—the genre uniquely lends itself to a sense of communal belonging, and thus has the potential to aid the construction of alternative group identities. She introduces this argument by juxtaposing two images: a tourist snapshot of a little girl standing in front of the White House, and a snapshot of a group of drag queens photographing each other’s performances of femininity. The first snapshot reinforces convention, and the second subverts it, albeit by invoking the conventions it subverts.
 
Zuromskis devotes the book’s first chapter to defining the genre of snapshot photography. The following four chapters are then organized around a series of case studies that seek to elucidate this definition.  Zuromskis’s first chapter is the most important in the volume, for defining snapshot photography is not as straightforward a task as it may seem. After all, any photograph could be considered a “snap.” Theorizing the genre as both a set of “image-objects” and cultural practices, Zuromskis addresses the production of snapshots, as well as their display, exchange, editing, and ownership. Although she carefully nuances the difficulties involved in defining the genre, her lack of a conclusive definition creates difficulties for her argumentation throughout the book. Her use of the term “vernacular” often overlaps with that of “snapshot,” whereas in the book’s introduction, Zuromskis describes a snapshot as a photograph taken by an “amateur” and “made for use within the private sphere of the … family” (2). Yet this definition does not hold in the cases of the photographs featured in the book’s last two chapters, taken by artists Andy Warhol and Nan Goldin, nor does it apply to many of the photographs included in the Family of Man exhibition discussed in Chapter Three—especially those taken by professional photojournalists and produced for public consumption.
 
Despite these inconsistencies, Zuromskis’s first chapter makes a very important contribution to critical photography discourse: it argues against the longstanding notion of photography as an inherently aggressive act in which the photographer exercises power over what is photographed. This formulation, most closely associated with Susan Sontag’s influential book On Photography (1973), has undergirded feminist arguments about photography’s masculine gaze for decades. Zuromskis raises the possibility of a more intimate and shared (or shifting) power dynamic within the genre of the snapshot, and notes the snapshot’s potential to record one’s own vision of oneself and of history.
 
The book’s five chapters stand brilliantly on their own. One might argue that they collectively function to define snapshot photography according to the contradictions that, as Zuromskis puts it, “lie at the heart of snapshot culture” (111). For example, in Chapter Two, Zuromskis posits “snapshot culture,” as rendered in the 2002 film One-Hour Photo and the long-running television series Law and Order: SVU, as combining the idealism of American family values with the forces that threaten to corrupt these values, through a process she cleverly terms “snapshot perversion” (93).  Zuromskis attempts to define snapshot photography not by its “essence,” but by that which undermines its perceived qualities, reinforcing Roland Barthes’s notion that “the photograph shows us everything and nothing” (111).  Although we may accept the “truthfulness” of the photographic image due to its indexical quality, we can have no such certainty about the photographer’s motivations and intentions. Here Zuromskis begins to build her argument about the “malleability” of snapshot photography—its potential use as a means to fashion alternative modes of “sociability and personal gratification” (111).
 
In the book’s third chapter, Zuromskis turns to the inclusion of snapshot photography in museums, explaining that the institutional framework both “valorize[s]” snapshots and negates their “particular cultural relevance” (120), an argument that has long been made with respect to other visual artifacts not produced with the modern Euro-American notion of “art” in mind. In this discussion, Zuromskis focuses on a range of exhibitions: The Family of Man (1955) and The Photographer’s Eye (1962) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Snapshots (1998) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Other Pictures (2000) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Close to Home (2004) at the J. Paul Getty Museum; and Picturing What Matters: An Offering of Photographs (2002-2003) at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. Not surprisingly, she concludes that it is only the latter—the one exhibition launched by a museum dedicated solely to photographic media—that does justice to the genre. By foregoing the modernist emphasis on the rarified print and the individual artist or collector, Zuromskis argues, the Eastman Museum achieved the “revolutionary” aim of publicly displaying personal snapshots without curatorial mediation, even though the exhibition through which it did so was largely “unintelligible” to its audience (178).
 
In Chapters Four and Five, Zuromskis analyzes Andy Warhol and Nan Goldin’s uses of the “snapshot aesthetic,” testing her hypothesis that the genre can be used to form communal alternative identities. For both artists, she argues, snapshooting was performative, a “social” act that allowed them to document their interactions with members of their inner circles, and ultimately to create what Michael Warner has termed “counterpublics” (Zuromskis 211).  Although Goldin is primarily known as a photographer, Zuromskis reminds us that Warhol is not, despite the fact that he was a prolific snapshooter and that photographic images were central to his artistic practice. Unlike “art” photographers who privilege the refined print and the aesthetics of detachment, Warhol preferred the low-tech print and the suggestion of physical and emotional intimacy. What distinguishes Warhol, Zuromskis argues, is his “queering of the snapshot,” his ability to appropriate a genre embedded in the private domestic realm and publicly politicize it (209). Likewise Goldin, whom Zuromskis characterizes as Warhol’s “heir apparent” (240), rejects the postmodern emphasis on detachment and instead photographs her countercultural community “‘inspired by love’” (241). For Goldin, what is most appealing about the snapshot aesthetic is that it lends itself to the creation and validation of a personal history, as demonstrated in her groundbreaking 1980s slide show, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. However, by the time she exhibits Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls in 2007, Zuromskis argues, “Goldin … sees the snapshot for what it is: at once a liberatory mode of constructing human relations and a tool of repressive normalcy, a device for constructing and reinscribing cultural mythologies” (306). As Zuromskis explains in the title for Chapter Five, it is at this moment in Goldin’s oeuvre that the genre reaches “the limits of photographic possibility.”
 
In a short conclusion, Zuromskis raises the question that has remained implicit since its brief mention in her introduction: about the impact of the rise of digital photography on “snapshot culture.” In short, her answer is “not much.” Social exchange and the documentation of specific events are still snapshot photography’s primary functions, whether they are achieved on film or digitally. Thus the conventions and meanings of the genre remain consistent; they are merely accelerated, and rendered more accessible, immediate, and even liberating, through new technologies and media venues. Zuromskis’s “Conclusion: Afterlife” may be brief, but I agree with her that it is appropriate to leave many questions unanswered, as we have not yet acquired the critical distance to effectively analyze the shift from analog to digital. There is little doubt, however, that a major concern will be the question of indexicality, and the possible erosion of belief in  photography’s claim that what it pictures once was.
 
Zuromskis does not provide us with a history of snapshot photography, but rather with an insightful examination of this under-theorized genre. Consequently, her book will undoubtedly make its greatest impact on the field of photography theory—not on art (or even photography) history, which traditionally build narratives based on archival and other forms of primary evidence. Besides the photographs themselves, Zuromskis’s sources are almost exclusively other cultural theorists and critics; she very convincingly positions her argument within the theoretical and critical frameworks established by such figures as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Geoffrey Batchen, Michel de Certeau, Douglas Crimp, Lauren Berlant, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and of course Sontag. Her narrative is most compelling when she provides her own analysis of photographs and other visual media. This is particularly true of her work on One-Hour Photo and Law and Order: SVU, projects that, like snapshots, seem quite superficial, but which are revealed, through Zuromskis’s astute analysis, to be rich sources for understanding cultural values and behaviors—perhaps more so than visual artifacts produced for a narrow audience, such as an art world public.
 
Snapshot Photography raises as many questions as it attempts to answer. For instance, in whose scholarly domain do these image-objects reside? Art historians and visual culture specialists have the acquired skills to closely “read” images, yet they tend to aestheticize these images, and thus risk their decontextualization, as Zuromskis reminds us in her analysis of museum-exhibited snapshot photography. Such scholars and critics often focus on “high” art dignitaries, such as Warhol and Goldin, whose visual artifacts may reveal less about broader cultural leanings than those produced by the rest of us. We might also consider how successful Warhol and Goldin actually were at producing alternative modes of social belonging, especially once their photographs were subsumed by art’s institutional context. This fate has even befallen Warhol’s personal snapshots, including his Polaroids and photomatons, many of which were disseminated to museums and galleries by the Warhol Foundation after the artist’s death, along with strict stipulations as to how they are to be framed and exhibited. Perhaps the answer to the enduring mystery of photography, which has exercised a powerful hold on us since it first appeared almost 200 years ago, lies in its personal and banal appearances, rather than in the museum or fine art print. Snapshot Photography takes us a step further towards unraveling this mystery, helping us understand the important role these image-objects play in the practice of everyday life.
 

A review of Gina Osterloh, Group Dynamic. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 2013.

Group Dynamic is a brief but intensive introduction to the work of Gina Osterloh, a Los Angeles-based artist best known for her photographs of meticulously crafted room-sized sets with partially obscured figures that flout the conventions of portraiture. The occasion for the book is Osterloh’s three-month residency at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in 2012, during which, at the invitation of curators Carol A. Stakenas and Robert Crouch, she moved her studio to the main gallery, there to engage visitors in both her process and her completed work. Group Dynamic includes an interview with the artist, a detailed account of her video installation Pulling Apart Voice, and contextualizing essays by art historians Kris Cohen and Matthew Thompson. Aptly designed by UCLA’s Willem Henri Lucas, this compact monograph features foldout color photographs and smaller black-and-white images of both work in progress and finished compositions.
 
Osterloh’s cross-platform project, fully titled Group Dynamic and Improper Light, amplifies and extends her exploration of the cognitive and perceptual operations by which we identify objects–and human bodies in particular. At the beginning of her residency, she built a large wooden set, lining the walls and floor with hand-striped paper in a neutral shade. Inviting gallery visitors to position themselves in front of cardboard, she traced their shadows and cut out their silhouettes, later covering these with the same striped paper. Osterloh then experimented with various groupings of the cutouts within the papered “room,” photographing the final assemblages with a four-by-five-inch large-format camera. In the resulting group and individual portraits, the patterned figures mimic their patterned environment. While their edges are discernible, figure-ground contrast is muted, such that visual recognition is slightly delayed.
 
In this moment of visual hesitation, the viewer becomes conscious of what is ordinarily a very rapid and unconscious process: distinguishing objects in the field of view by way of familiar optical cues. By intentionally withholding some of these cues, Osterloh impedes the interpretive process and calls attention to how representational practices guide our understanding of photographed bodies. In traditional portraiture, figures are typically foregrounded and centered, facing the viewer. Backgrounds provide color contrast, and faces are sharply focused. Standard lighting plans bring out facial detail and control shadows. Expression, posture, and gesture may be staged to suggest mood or personality. And clothing and other props provide selective information about the figures and their social contexts. As Cohen observes in his essay on Osterloh’s earlier work, “The conventions of photographic portraiture accommodate, even coddle, the act of looking” (20). Interpretation and identification are rapid because specific expectations are already in play.
 
In photographs leading up to those produced at LACE, Osterloh has progressively decentered the human figure through a number of bold antiportrait strategies. In early self-portraits, her face is turned away from the camera or hidden by her hair, or her eyes and mouth are covered by paper ovals. Her clothing frequently matches the color or pattern of her set, and in some photographs only parts of her body are visible. Gradually replacing the human figure with faceless papier-maché models and then faceless cardboard cut-outs, Osterloh has moved increasingly toward abstraction; in recent work, her backgrounds seem almost to absorb the shapes before them. As the artist indicates in her interview with Michelle Dizon, “I consider the backdrops active and having as equal a presence as the figure” (8). Without the focalizing effects of sharp contrast and “proper” light, her photographs resist the patterns of inference that most viewers–including artists and critics–customarily employ. As one of her LACE curators has confessed, he initially found the work quite perplexing. “I could not figure it out at all,” Crouch has said. “I found it really confusing but in a good way” (qtd. in Mizota).
 
In her interview, Osterloh explains that she wants her work to raise questions, including “what is the line between formlessness and recognition of a body?” (7). Citing Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, she reminds us that recognition of the other occurs through difference, and it is in the manipulation of difference–particularly in the removal of expected differences–that she draws attention to how identity is articulated in the photographic realm. But Osterloh’s work is much more than an academic exercise in challenging the status quo. As one who has lived with the consequences of racial difference, the artist has a personal interest in interrupting what she terms the “call-and-response process” of identification: “Growing up in Ohio with mixed race parents, there was a literal calling out to me in school, ‘Hey, are you white or black?’” (10). From her perspective, the partly camouflaged figures of her photographs signal a resistance to the assignment of reductive social categories.
 
With Pulling Apart Voice, the three-channel video installation that accompanied the striped set and photographs described above, the call-and-response process and its interruption are literally enacted by human speakers. Seven actors have taken turns articulating basic calls (“Hey, you,” “Hi,” “How are you?”) and select responses (“Fine,” “Good,” “Yes,” “No”). The calls play on a central monitor while the responses play on either side. These familiar words and phrases do not mimic the rhythms of everyday speech but are, as Osterloh explains, “slowed down, pulled apart, stuttered, articulated, and repeated” (15). The actors’ scripts (included in Group Dynamic) indicate how many seconds are to be spent audibly breathing, articulating beginning consonants and vowels, and pronouncing entire words or phrases. The result is not so much a three-part chorus as a series of jazz riffs in slow motion–with irregular timing. At any one time, three actors face the viewer in conventional portrait mode, but the three screens require the spectator to direct her attention without a prior sense of where to look or whom to follow.
 
By using multiple centered figures and by extending the duration of habitual speech acts, Osterloh again engenders a useful uncertainty, calling attention to behavioral norms by way of their absence. Though the words spoken are among the simplest in our daily vocabulary, the “exchanges” of the actors are not conversations as we know them, and “yes” and “no” are not typical replies to “hey, you,” “hi,” and “how are you?” (Does “no” indicate a refusal to respond?) “Fine” and “good” may be perfunctory or even obligatory responses to “how are you?” but may also serve respondents who choose to withhold information. If, as Louis Althusser has suggested, the process of hailing is a process of interpellation, a means of imposing cultural identities through discursive practices, Osterloh’s installation can be seen as modeling her resistance to, and rejection of, some of these practices. Acknowledging that “[i]n terms of subject formation, call-and-response is a perpetual . . . force we all participate in” (10), Osterloh shows that our roles in that dynamic may take unexpected forms.
 
But if resistance is a primary motivation for her body of work, what is to prevent our seeing her partially obscured figures as emblems of cultural assimilation or of an oppressive invisibility? What is to prevent the slowed speech and repetition of the videos from signifying the unhurried but inexorable forces of dominant practices? The answer, of course, is nothing–and therein lies the strength of Osterloh’s oeuvre to date. The experiences that define human beings, for themselves and for others, are active, passive, surprising, familiar, individual, communal, contradictory, consistent, transgressive, compliant, and so forth, and together form a differential field from which identity emerges. Even as her work is driven by a particular sense of self–that of a resisting self–Osterloh as artist is committed to exploring this differential field. Her concern is not to offer up readymade identities but to provoke us to consider the conditions required for producing identities. In line with this concern, her art does not tell us what it is or how to view it. It leaves us to ponder how we delineate ourselves and one another.

A review of Nathan Widder, Political Theory After Deleuze. London: Continuum, 2012.

It’s no coincidence that Gilles Deleuze’s most sustained discussions of politics dwell on its plurality; politics is not given any clearly denotative sense, nor do we find its determinate abstraction (“the political”), except insofar as particular instantiations give rise to “many politics.” In an eponymous essay, Deleuze begins by explaining, “Whether we are individuals or groups, we are made up of lines,” and he elaborates each line according to a different political dimension (Dialogues 124). The most recognizable and rigid of lines determine our lives according to the institutional segments through which we pass and to which we return (family, school, the military, one’s profession).[1] Nevertheless, these lines are liable to give rise to encounters which detour us into more supple lines, aberrant paths and anomalies (the bourgeois housewife who, by some contingency, confronts the factory: “I thought I was seeing convicts…” [qtd. Negotiations 178]). Finally, Deleuze says, there are lines of flight that carry us beyond the thresholds of both rigid segments and supple movements—delirious and insurgent lines whose destination we cannot predict (“Instead of being bombarded from all sides in a limiting cosmos, the people and the earth must be like the vectors of a cosmos that carries them off” [Thousand 346]).
 
Given these varied lines, which Deleuze will only divide and multiply, it’s hardly surprising that he never wrote a master-work of political philosophy—no theory of justice, sovereignty, or democracy. Like Nietzsche, he regarded the task of Bildungsphilosophie with suspicion, if not distaste: the earnest questions asked of these “big concepts” and the architectural lines they inspire are grounded in the presupposition of the state-form (above all, the reasonable subject and rational consensus). Forgoing the thick geometry of such segments, Deleuze and Guattari devote themselves to the most slender of lines, the most oppressed but also the most vital, which effectively disappear into molecular movements. From their analysis of the compulsory system of grammatical instruction (“all children are political prisoners”[2]) to their elaboration of Kafka’s political conjecture (“a literature of small peoples”[3]), Deleuze and Guattari affirm the power of what has been subjected to domination—the “minoritarian”—to create forms of life, expression, and politics that elude the stratifications of the state.[4]
 
Thus it’s strange to read critics who condemn Deleuze as the advocate of a radically totalizing politics when, especially with Guattari, he writes to escape the overcoding elements of the state-form (A Thousand Plateaus notoriously begins by declaring that its “plateaus may be read independently of one another” [xx]). Far from a “grand politique,” Deleuze devises a “micro-politique” that insists on the modesty of power and the multiplication of its lines into ever finer gradients. Politics is capillary, and the same ought to be said of Deleuze’s own “political theory,” which forgoes the model of state-form for the profusion of lines, a garden of forking paths: so many politics! For this reason, the real problem of Deleuze’s political theory has always been: which one? Do we consider Deleuze’s explicit political interventions, such as his devotion to penitentiary reform or the letters he published in protest of Antonio Negri’s imprisonment? Should we begin, instead, with Deleuze’s philosophical interventions into recognizable domains of political theory, where he and Guattari analyze the conditions of the Greek polis or the capitalist state-form? Perhaps we ought to return to the concept of minorization as the revolutionary political project of painting, literature, and then cinema to invent a “people who are missing”? Alternately, we could focus on Deleuze’s devotion to a lineage of “minor philosophers”—above all, Spinoza and Nietzsche—in whom he discovered the most intimate relations between politics and life. Or should we rather start with Deleuze’s enduring engagement with Michel Foucault, from whom he derives a remarkable account of power-knowledge and develops a critique of our new “control society”? Where do we begin?
 
In Political Theory After Deleuze, his smart and tightly argued new book, Nathan Widder formulates an ingenious solution to the dilemma. In the face of so “many politics,” among which we would otherwise be forced to choose and prioritize, Widder actually turns away from politics stricto sensu to something like an ontology of the political. This is by no means a conventional move, and it has a number of advantages, perhaps the greatest of which to is avoid the question of “which one” by virtue of Deleuze’s concept of univocity—the “one-all.” Like many recent commentators, Widder takes univocity to be the basis for an ontology that displaces the traditional account of being. As he explains, Deleuze produces an “ontology of difference in which what is expressed in a ‘single voice’ is nothing but difference itself” (27). In a sense, Widder affirms Deleuze’s diverse profusion of politics as expressions of the self-same (i.e. univocal) voice: “A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings” (Difference 304).
 
Readers may recognize in this quotation the nominative source of Alain Badiou’s lamentably opportunistic commentary, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. And it’s worth noting that Widder’s engagement with univocity, going back to an important essay of his, “The Rights of Simulacra: Deleuze and the Univocity of Being” (2001), represents a genuinely rigorous response to Badiou’s bad faith. Widder is rightly regarded as one of the most penetrating and lucid commentators on Deleuze’s metaphysics, and while there may be reasons to resist the equivalence that he reads between this metaphysics and full-blooded ontology, there can be little quarrel with his command of Deleuze’s philosophy or his engagement with the history of philosophy. In his previous writings, Widder has worked through many of the philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, and Nietzsche—who inform Deleuze’s concept of univocity; and in concise, well-wrought prose he returns to that lineage in this new book. But if the terrain is familiar, the task is different: Widder’s aim here is to leverage Deleuze’s ontology for the purpose of political theory. What does this mean? There are, I think, two discrete (if related) senses in which we can understand this aim. In the first place, as I’ve already said, Widder renders univocity the differential field within which Deleuze’s “many politics” are grasped. In this respect, the “ontology of differences” is also a methodology according to which Widder extends his premise into what might otherwise seem more or less ontologically obvious domains, such as Deleuze’s readings of Nietzsche and Foucault, or his collaboration with Guattari on Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
 
This approach underwrites the book’s second aim, namely, to demonstrate that Deleuze’s ontology has profound ramifications for political theory, challenging certain assumptions and reorienting others. The time for such a project seems propitious: not only is “Deleuzianism” enjoying a kind of ontological moment but, as Widder suggests, the same can be said of political theory. Thus, the turn to Deleuze’s ontology responds to a broader ontological turn in political theory, and Widder’s first chapter sketches in broad strokes a history of how this has come to pass. The turn itself has been gestating, he says, for some time, but Widder traces its recent efflorescence to the fate of post-war liberalism, perhaps even to a tipping point when the latter’s metaphysical modesty no longer seemed sufficient. “Dominant forms of postwar liberal political thought have frequently conceived the human self in minimalist terms,” Widder explains in the book’s introductory chapter (2). But this effort to avoid metaphysical controversy, emblematized by Rawls’s Theory of Justice, has become the subject of increasing skepticism and critique for having reduced any “thick description” of subjects and objects, thoughts and things, into the narrowest of bandwidths. The injunction to produce an ostensibly universal theory demands the exclusion of other political “levels” (or what I have called other lines). “The ontological turn in political theory has sought to explore these levels,” Widder explains, adding that it “has stretched and revised the terms of political theory in the process” (7).
 
In this light, Political Theory After Deleuze initially seems to be a species of recent work, particularly notable among Australian philosophers (e.g. Paul Patton, Simon Duffy, and Sean Bowden, among others) dedicated to bridging the divide between Deleuze and the tradition of analytic (or at least Anglo-American) philosophy. But this is not really Widder’s game: while he frames the ontological turn in light of Rawls, his interlocutors—chiefly Judith Butler, William Connolly, Ernesto Laclau, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Žižek—are by no means analytic philosophers. In other words, Political Theory After Deleuze is addressed to, and seeks to intervene in, what is still loosely called theory (if I’m reluctant to call it political theory, this is due to a disciplinary difference and a terminological discrepancy between England, where Widder is located, and the U.S.).[5] Of course, Deleuze’s philosophy already claims currency among the aforementioned roster of political theorists, and so Widder dispenses with the “need to introduce a Deleuzian perspective” (ix) and, instead, produces a different perspective on Deleuze. Among its many virtues, Widder’s perspective remains a paragon of synthetic clarity: while this is not strictly speaking an introduction to Deleuze, Widder has produced a rigorous introduction to a particular kind of Deleuze. This particularity, which is also the source of the book’s originality, demands a measure of explanation. Widder writes an ontology organized by political theory, no less a political theory conditioned by ontology, and this approach entails specific and even structural decisions. Presumably, if the question of politics were not in play, Widder would have devoted greater space to Spinoza, Bergson, and even Whitehead—that is, philosophers who seem to precipitate Deleuze’s ontological commitment—and less to Nietzsche and Foucault. Likewise, if ontology were taken out of the equation, Widder surely would have devoted greater attention to Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborations (Kafka is never mentioned, and What Is Philosophy? appears somewhat tangentially) and less to his more traditionally philosophical texts.
 
The important thing to say here is that Widder’s choices concern a thoroughgoing effort to shift the question of politics away from what have been, for some time, the default texts for Deleuze’s political theory: the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The importance of these books, especially in the U.K. and U.S., derives in large part from a history of translation and reception that lent Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus prominence (the former, originally published in 1972, appeared in English in 1977, while Difference and Repetition, originally published in 1968, did not appear in translation until 1994). While the two volumes inspired great enthusiasm, often outside philosophy proper, they also inspired rabid criticism. Deleuze and Guattari were cast as poets of liberated and irresponsible desire—Deleuze the beautiful soul and Guattari the avowed anarchist (and, often, the “bad influence”). In Arguments within English Marxism, to take one of the more famous and colorful examples, Perry Anderson dismisses Anti-Oedipus as the “the expression of a dejected post-lapsarian anarchism” (178). The great danger of this “subjectivist Schwärmerei,” he adds, is that it “can legitimate the desire for death” (ibid)—and Anderson leaves no doubt that the danger of Deleuze and Guattari’s desire consists in having followed Nietzsche’s path.[6]
 
When Widder seeks to develop a Deleuzianism that would “free Deleuze’s thought from some of the usual interpretations and appropriations” (ix), we should recall this reception history and recognize his own countervailing inclination. By no means does Widder omit Capitalism and Schizophrenia, but the center of gravity decidedly shifts to Difference and Repetition and, by extension, to Deleuze’s philosophical commentaries (especially those on Nietzsche and Foucault, as well as Spinoza and Leibniz).  After the introductory chapter describing the ontological turn, Widder elaborates Deleuze’s ontology on the basis of Difference and Repetition (and, to a lesser degree, The Logic of Sense). We ought to imagine this second chapter as the most contracted point of a series of concentric circles that extend Deleuze’s ontology into less suspected areas of Deleuze’s philosophy, especially in relation to Nietzsche (chapter three) and Foucault/Lacan (chapter four), before situating micropolitics once more at the heart of Difference and Repetition (chapter five). The order of chapters is belied by a kind of double movement: in the first place, Widder locates politics in the most philosophically recognizable (and, dare we say, legitimate?) of Deleuze’s writings, those that concern his putative ontology; but in the second place, Widder extends the ontology into more philosophically political (or politicized) regions of Deleuze’s philosophy.
 
One of the most significant results of this operation is that Nietzsche, who had formerly been the saint of schizoanalysis, now appears as the avatar of Deleuze’s ontology. Widder argues for this reading on the basis of Nietzsche’s late notebooks, the Nachlass, which anticipate the “ontology of sense” (63). While I don’t share Widder’s interpretation of Deleuze’s Nietzsche, it is (like every chapter in Political Theory After Deleuze) an undeniably formidable contribution to the project of a political ontology.[7] If there is a productive argument to be had with Widder’s book, it’s not about the impact that Deleuze’s ontology may yet have on political theory: rather, it’s about the equation of Deleuze’s philosophy with ontology, which this book all but presumes. Of course, this is not an uncommon position, but why is it an obvious or inevitable one?[8] Given Deleuze’s increasing allergy to the very word ontology, the localization of univocity as a concept, and his final insistence on constructivism as the definition of his philosophy, one can justly ask why the burden of proof, so to speak, should attach to the rejection of Deleuze’s ontology and not to its assertion. We don’t need to have answered this question to acknowledge the critical role ontology has played in so much recent scholarship on Deleuze or to intuit what this work tends to shunt aside. Notwithstanding the significant virtues of Widder’s approach and the seemingly ecumenical nature of univocity, his ontological turn tends to exclude (or, at least, occlude) the sorts of political lines that we might ascribe to fiction, fabulation, or art. Discussions of the minor and minoritarian never precipitate a discussion of minor literature, and aesthetics plays virtually no part in Political Theory After Deleuze.
 
This is not a criticism; after all, it’s silly to ask a book to be what it manifestly is not, and it’s especially silly in the context of this fine book. But perhaps it’s worth considering, by way of conclusion, what the project to render a Deleuzian ontology often (perhaps even necessarily) discards.[9] When Deleuze says that the plane of immanence is a plane of consistency and of inconsistency, he means that the plane is open to the outside (le dehors)—to incalculable forces, to chance and improvisation, to the future. As Widder demonstrates, we can understand the relation to the outside topologically or metaphysically, but what of the forces themselves, which Deleuze affirms as “nonphilosophical” and “revolutionary”? Is ontology the best way to get at those unrepresentable forces, or are there other ways to think the outside which might incarnate a different sense of Deleuze’s philosophy and politics? There are times, reading recent ontologically-oriented scholarship on Deleuze, when one might wonder what role the outside can play, or whether history can claim a vital place, or how we can account for significant transformations within Deleuze’s own philosophy.[10] These strike me as the questions that Deleuzian ontologies confront, but it is thanks to Nathan Widder that those questions seem so profound and vital for political theory. Ironically, the success of Widder’s book lies in having contradicted the temporality of its title: Widder has brought Deleuze to life for political theory today.

Footnotes

[1] While is it true that the institutions of the welfare state (we could call them, as Althusser did, “ideological state apparatuses”) are breaking down, new forms of segmentation are already on the scene: the sciences of “assessment,” for instance, now insinuate their way into every one of these institutions. See Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies” in Negotiations.
 
[2] Deleuze borrows this line from Jean-Luc Godard (specifically, his television series Six fois deux). See Negotiations (41).
 
[3] The quote is taken from Kafka’s remarkable diary entry of Christmas day, 1911 (“Schema zur Charakteristik kleiner Literaturen”), which Deleuze and Guattari make the source of “minor literature.” See their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.
 
[4] Notably, this is why, for Deleuze and Guattari, the threshold of all becoming is becoming-imperceptible, which is to say, the point at which metaphysics is metamorphosis.
 
[5] Very broadly construed, as a field, political science in the U.K. and elsewhere is less contested and more ecumenical today than it is the U.S. Among the American theorists to whom Widder turns, only one (William Connolly) is “in” political science. More to the point, I’d venture to argue that the very sense of the phrase “political theory” is more disputed in the U.S. and more inclusive in the U.K. (it’s worth remembering that “theory” today is frequently invoked as a pejorative).
 
[6] I’ve dealt with this particular Marxian reception history in Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy (14-15, 68-70), but readers might also consult Gregg Lambert’s Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? and Ian Buchanon’s Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Anti-Oedipus’: A Reader’s Guide.
 
[7] Briefly, I think the stress that Widder places on Hegel as Nietzsche’s primary enemy ignores a more subtle, but perhaps more important, rivalry. There is no shortage of anti-Hegelianism in Nietzsche, who fundamentally rejected the “labor of the negative,” but the philosopher with whom he struggles is more truly, as Deleuze recognizes, Kant: “Although this supposition must be verified later we believe that there is, in Nietzsche, not only a Kantian heritage, but a half-avowed, half-hidden, rivalry” (Nietzsche, 52). After all, Deleuze says, Kantian critique is the precursor of and rival to Nietzsche’s genealogy. The problem is that Kant does not extend critique far enough—to the value of values, especially reason itself. In a sense, Deleuze says, the history of idealism that follows from this—especially, in Hegel and Schopenhauer—is the prolongation of an already corrupt principle, critique, which bids us to return to Kant and correct the problem at its source. And this is precisely what Nietzsche does in On the Genealogy of Morals.
 
[8] Today, it’s a lot easier to answer the question “who doesn’t believe in Deleuze’s ontology?” than “who does?” Whereas the believers include a great many scholars, the doubters are so few that, as in a Kafka or Borges story, one can wander for long stretches without finding a fellow thinker: in addition to myself, I count Anne Sauvagnargues, Gregg Lambert, and the late François Zourabichvilli.
 
[9] See my own Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy, especially chapter three, where I respond to Badiou’s reading of Deleuze, as well as chapter four and the “Coda,” where I regard univocity as a matter of free-indirect discourse.
 
[10] Widder does consider the outside, but only briefly and without the revolutionary political significance that Deleuze gives the term in relation, especially, to Foucault (18-19).

A review of Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley, et al., The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. Print.

Since 1999, Tom McCarthy—recently heralded as the “standard-bearer of the avant-garde novel”—has served as General Secretary of a “semifictitious avant-garde network” called the International Necronautical Society, or INS (Kirsch; McCarthy, Remainder). In its “Founding Manifesto,” the group declares its commitment to “bring[ing] death out in the world.” Death, necronauts insist, “is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonize, and, eventually, inhabit.” Vowing to “sing death’s beauty—that is, beauty,” they “tap into its frequencies,” which suffuse our daily life, from communication technologies (radio, television, the internet) to “dustbins of decaying produce.” Even “our very bodies” are “no more than vehicles carrying us ineluctably toward death”: “we are all necronauts, always, already” (Mattering 53). Under McCarthy’s leadership, the INS has engaged in a variety of activities—conducting interviews, staging “hearings,” delivering and publishing “reports,” and exhibiting installation pieces across Europe and the U.S.—which address topics such as language, technology, art, politics, and money.[1] The Mattering of Matter, a new collection of selected INS documents published by Sternberg Press, includes transcripts of key interviews, public addresses (principally by McCarthy himself and INS Chief Philosopher, Simon Critchley), and all of the group’s previously published statements, with an introduction by Nicolas Bourriaud, contemporary curator and theorist of “relational aesthetics.”
 
McCarthy’s rise to literary prominence began in 2007 with the U.S. publication of his debut novel Remainder (originally published by the Paris-based Metronome Press in 2005),[2] and he became a full-blown literary success after his third novel C (2010) was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. Yet many of McCarthy’s admirers are unaware that his INS activities not only preceded the publication of his fiction, but were integral to it. McCarthy has consistently relied on the INS to explore the inchoate themes of his fiction in extra-literary form.[3] Blurring the boundaries between high art and commercial culture, the INS consciously recalls the historical avant-garde’s assault on the familiar social and institutional confines of artistic production. As Bourriaud points out in his introduction, like the Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists before it, the INS draws explicitly on “the dominant forms of its era” (11): commercial enterprise, mass communication, and politics. For the INS, this includes the language of investment banking, venture capital, and social networking as well as conspiracy theories, bureaucratic proceduralism, spying, and terrorism; in a typical recent statement, the INS claims to be “recruiting agents, sleepers and moles throughout American institutions and networks” (220). Onto these pervasive rhetorical forms the INS projects the untimely concerns of an outmoded and apparently retrograde modernism: “transgression, death and sacrifice” (Mattering 207).
 
Their “Founding Manifesto” clearly signals this affinity with the modernist avant-garde, boldly announcing the group’s arrival in The Times of London ninety years after the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti published “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” in Le Figaro. In contrast to Marinetti’s florid narration, dripping with disgust at the Italian bourgeoisie, the INS proceeds less confrontationally, putting forward a terse four-point plan that reads more like a shareholder memo than an artistic credo.[4] They conclude with a promise that their research into death’s myriad forms will culminate in the construction of a “craft that will convey us into death” (53). The First Committee, we are told encouragingly, is already considering a variety of projects, including the “patenting and eventual widespread distribution of Thanadrine [TM]” and the “building of an actual craft” (Mattering 54).
 
McCarthy and Critchley’s “Joint Statement on Inauthenticity” (2007) provides the most concise summary of necronautical philosophy. Drawing on the opposition between form and matter fundamental to Western thought, McCarthy and Critchley argue that art follows one of two paths: artists can either emulate Hegel’s privileging of the concept and “soak up” the material world until there is nothing left; or they can “let matter matter” by affirming the specificity and particularity of the material world, which disrupts any attempt to assimilate it completely (224). Affirmation, however, turns out to be too strong a word for what it takes to capture this “experience of failed transcendence” (Mattering 222). Rejecting naturalism and traditional realism, McCarthy privileges an experimental, often abstract aesthetic that is marked by continual attempts at conceptualization gone awry.
 
The tautological simplicity of the phrase “letting matter matter” therefore belies the technical difficulties of getting language to evade its tendency to mean and signify. Here the INS’s philosophical framework, provided mostly by Critchley, gives way to McCarthy’s specific interest in “craft,” a term he uses to foreground the relationship between language and technology, art and exploration. In “Calling All Agents,” McCarthy argues that language is fundamentally a means of transmission that projects the self not only into, but physically onto the world. Yet as such, language contains a material remainder that cannot itself signify—a mark of death that dooms all attempts at self-projection to failure. For the INS, old communication technologies like the radio—in which the apparent instantaneousness of communication is tainted intermittently with the faint but discernable crackle of materiality—offer a more direct means of accessing this dark underbelly of language than today’s newest technologiesThe INS literalized this understanding of writing as transmission in a 2009 gallery installation entitled “Dortmund Black Box,” in which they broadcast spliced texts lifted from local media in twenty-four-hour streams for five months, through a radio transmitter lodged inside a black box flight recorder. This audio homage to Burroughs’s “cut-ups,” also inspired by Jean Cocteau’s use of the car radio as a means of communicating with the dead in Orphée, serves to illustrate the technological enmeshment of the supposedly “free” and “autonomous” individual, one of the crucial themes of McCarthy’s anti-humanist bildungsroman, C.
 
For McCarthy, necronautical insights are not limited to specific writers but pervade all artistic traditions. Several pieces in this volume (“Navigation Was Always a Difficult Art” and “Calling All Agents” in particular) are devoted to McCarthy’s bravura elucidation of the intertwinement of language and death in Shelley, Melville, Stevens, Rilke, Joyce, Faulkner, Cocteau and Beckett. Yet with the exception of a memorable discussion of Queequeg’s coffin in Moby Dick, McCarthy’s identification of necronautical tendencies in art and literature tend to be more interesting when they move beyond the familiar modernist literary canon that McCarthy repeatedly praises in his frequent pieces of literary journalism—when located, for instance, in Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark, or in the array of contemporary writers, visual artists and musicians that McCarthy discusses or has interviewed directly on behalf of the INS (including Stewart Home, Jean-Phillipe Toussaint, Mark Aerial Waller, and the Fall). This more catholic strain in INS thought helps to explain why his own fiction, while indebted foremost to modernist abstraction and anti-realist experimentation, relies heavily on traditional genres of literary narrative like the bildungsroman and the historical novel, as well as the low-brow mode of Buster Keaton’s slapstick comedy (72). This is also why his novels are so funny, though they have won mainstream critical acclaim for their obvious formal and philosophical sophistication. McCarthy sees literature as inherently comedic, and thus as an antidote to philosophy’s investment in tragedy. Necronauts reject tragedy because its emphasis on suffering and death confers meaning and authenticity on life. By contrast, comedy involves a doubling of self that highlights the inescapable inauthenticity of existence, as Baudelaire noted. In a comment that clearly echoes the central episode of Remainder, in which the hero momentarily believes that he has somehow managed to “transubstantiate” his car’s wiper fluid (before it ends up spilling all over him instead), McCarthy suggests that Beckett is about “the failure of tragedy, the failure of matter to get aufgehoben, to go up there and be sublime. We want to go to the heavens as heroes but we trip over our own shoelaces and piss ourselves” (Mattering 73).
 
There is thus a strong element of performance art chicanery to the INS’s activities, a theatricalized seriousness that, while signaled throughout this volume, can’t be fully appreciated through documents alone. For instance, after McCarthy and Critchley delivered their “Joint Statement on Inauthenticity” in New York City, they subsequently hired actors to impersonate them, delivering the written statement and taking questions. In 2002, the INS held its Second First Committee Hearings, a set of interviews with artists and academics focused on the themes of “encryption, sound, communication and broadcasting” (160) on a stage-set specifically designed precisely to mimic famous moments of public, state-sponsored interrogation: the HUAC hearings and Stalin’s show-trials. In 2003, the INS expelled five of its original members and blacked their names out of all INS documents for various offenses, including “not being dead” (214). And the group claims to have produced their recent “Interim Report on Recessional Aesthetics” at the request of the Obama Administration in response to the recent economic crisis. Drawing on Shakespeare, Joyce, and Faulkner, the report fervently recommends that Obama keep Finnegans Wake on his bedside table, and that we celebrate the death-like event of recession as the “muted truth” of all economics (Mattering 244).
 
Much of the INS’s antics can—and perhaps should—be taken quite simply as mere posturing: a deadpan, ironic pose that today’s readers might expect from a novelist fluent in post-structuralist theory. Not surprisingly, a knowing irony pervades the scant coverage of INS events in the literary press. The group, one assumes, is a joke or parody, a manifestation of what Paul Mann has called the “theory-death of the avant-garde,” a condition in which art’s commitment to the “new” dooms it to a perpetual obsolescence that serves merely to spur further, empty repetitions. Yet the reduction of the INS project to postmodern irony doesn’t quite capture the nuance of the group’s relation to its modernist predecessors. I would suggest that the INS represents more than a rehearsal of the avant-garde’s death, which has been declared repeatedly for more than half a century, in the wake of a triumphant postwar capitalism and the assimilation of modernist experimentation into a corporate-led culture industry. Instead, by making death the object of its absolute commitment—to “do for death,” as an early interviewer has put it, “what surrealism did for sex” (“Repeating”)—the INS reevaluates the meaning of the avant-garde project today.[5]
 
Consider the group’s approach to a topic crucial to any idea of an avant-garde: the future. McCarthy begins the most recent piece published in this volume—the elaborately titled “INS Declaration on the Notion of ‘the Future’: Admonitions and Exhortations for the Cultural Producers of the Early-to-Mid-Twenty-First Century”—by returning to the text that many would consider the primal scene of the modernist avant-garde, Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto. Not surprisingly, given the INS commitment to death, the future holds little appeal for them. McCarthy aims to interrogate this “lazy and overstuffed meme” by reminding us that, even in Marinetti’s text, which is famously driven by a desire for the “new” to be ushered in by an open embrace of futurity, “the future begins with a car crash” (267). That is, before Marinetti can get his movement started, he crashes his car into two cyclists and ends up in a sewer ditch. McCarthy argues that Marinetti’s car crash does not give birth to the Futurist movement so much as “derail[s]” it before it gets under way. The avant-garde succumbs to a “literal retrenchment [that] form[s] part of its raison d’être” (Mattering 268).
 
McCarthy does not return to Marinetti here simply to mock his predecessor, or to repeat the now-familiar charge that the avant-garde itself should be discarded as false or ideological. Rather, he suggests that buried within the familiar progressive vision of the avant-garde is an alternate message we have not yet decoded. We should ignore this emphasis on the future—a notion endemic to the narratives of progress that remain prevalent despite their increasing implausibility—so that we might focus instead on the avant-garde’s overlooked but equally persistent commitment to the past: its preoccupation with “the circular structure” of traumatic repetition, with temporalities of “loops, not lines,” with “gazing in the rearview mirror” (272, 276). Marinetti’s crash does not represent modernism’s famous historical break with the past, which gives birth to the future; instead, McCarthy insists that the “crash” is another name for what Benjamin and Blanchot considered the “catastrophe” of history itself, which is occluded by the liberal humanist fetishization of the future (270). In contrast with Marinetti, then, there is nothing futuristic or utopian about the INS obsession with technology. McCarthy scathingly dismisses today’s would-be futurists—technological “posthumanists” like Michel Houllebecq who actually represent a “Humanism 2.0” (271)—and instead emulates figures like Beckett’s Krapp, for whom time does not move forward in a line but “in a loop” like the audio tapes of himself that he replays obsessively, or Ballard’s Vaughn, the anti-hero of Crash who “archives” famous crashes and then reenacts them (271, 275). Likewise, McCarthy argues, we should shun the future “in the name of the sheer radical potentiality of the past, and of the way the past can shape the creative impulses and imaginative landscape of the present. The future of thinking is its past, a thinking which turns its back on the future” (Mattering 270).
 
This radical commitment to the past offers a framework through which to understand the INS’s engagement with the modernist avant-garde that goes beyond parodic repetition.[6] For McCarthy, to look to the past is not merely to repeat it on its own terms. Today, the avant-garde’s “radical potentiality” does not lie in its differentiation of the new from the old, as Marinetti claimed. Rather, it paves the way for something completely different, “the sudden, epiphanic emergence of the genuinely unplanned, the departure from the script” (276): more like the anticipation of death than of a new, future life. Like death, this event would not be part of any linear narrative—not even a narrative of avant-garde innovation to which McCarthy’s work is consistently assimilated and which echoes contemporary corporate rhetoric of “disruptive innovation,” as McCarthy himself surely recognizes. It would be an abandonment of narrative progress altogether. Instead of re-enacting the avant-garde’s demise, the INS recuperates an avant-garde committed to death as a way of signaling its own possibility today, when the idea of an avant-garde itself seems merely laughable. It may be that the avant-garde has not gone away, but that, as if to elude the authorities, it has simply started to broadcast on a different frequency.

Footnotes

[1] In accordance with the group’s devotion to bureaucratic process, INS activities are thoroughly archived on their website (http://www.necronauts.org/).
 
[2] Rejected by mainstream publishers, Remainder was picked up by Metronome, a publisher of fiction by artists, after its editors met McCarthy in his capacity as head of the INS. Initially, the novel was available only in art shops until it was bought by the independent UK press Alma, and ultimately by Vintage in the US. See McCarthy, “Interview.”
 
[3] McCarthy claims that the INS developed in part because the art world provides a more hospitable environment for experimentation than mainstream literary publishing: “It seems to me that art is now the place where literature can happen. Almost all the concerns of the INS come from literature, but art has provided the place for it to unfold…. The art world is definitely the more literate place. There’s definitely a more intelligent set of conversations around culture and around literature going on in the art world” (“Interview”).
 
[4] Indeed, in a coincidence the INS surely relished, their manifesto appeared alongside a news story about the impending financial takeover of the British department store chain, Marks & Spencer (55).
 
[5] See, for instance, John Roberts’s concept of a “suspensive” avant-garde that persists beyond and within the failure (death) of the historical avant-garde.
 
[6] McCarthy insists that contemporary writers must confront this legacy, whether they like it or not: “For us to dismiss [modernism’s] legacy as if it was just some irritation that got in the way of an ongoing rational enlightenment is negligible to say the least. In fact, I think it’s actually offensive…. Modernism is a legacy we have whether we want it or not. It’s like Darwin: you can either go beyond it and think through its implications, or you can ignore it, and if you do that you’re a Creationist” (“Conversation”).

Is Conceptual writing still interesting?  Not that long ago—in the summer of 2013—Robert Archambeau looked at the buzz around Calvin Bedient’s and Amy King’s attacks on Conceptualism and claimed that, yes, Conceptualism was indeed still interesting.  Arguing that “things we find interesting, much more than things we find beautiful or cute or gaudy or charming, invite and demand us to be with them or against them,” Archambeau wrote that the small hornets’ nest kicked up by King and Bedient stood as “testimony to conceptualism’s interest—and in this sense affirm[ed] conceptualism’s success on its own terms.”
 
Conceptualism’s claim on us lies with its demand that we choose sides. Its defenders cite many reasons for wanting to play on the Conceptualist team. Vanessa Place has claimed in a number of venues that Conceptualism mounts a frontal assault on capitalism. As Kenny Goldsmith argues—repeatedly and variously in Uncreative Writing—Conceptualism attacks the present order of poetry, in no small part because it is boring in novel ways and because it mirrors the present order of technology. For Marjorie Perloff, it represents the truly new while drawing on modernism.  By the same token, Conceptualism’s detractors find all sorts of reasons to dislike it. Amy King maintains that Conceptualism actually supports the present order of capitalism. Alan Davies says that it is boring in a boring way. For Bedient, Conceptualism stunts political action. It represents the old, not the new; the forces of reaction, not the agents of change.  I could go on, but you get the point. Conceptualism’s ambiguities provide ample ground for dispute and that dispute is a sign that Conceptualism is interesting.
 
As Archambeau points out, “interesting” as an aesthetic judgment also registers our sense of pleasurable or unpleasurable irritation. The interesting work defies our expectations.  This element of surprise means that the “interesting” is always in danger of becoming annoying on the one hand or stale-dated on the other. The interesting speaks to a moment.  Has Conceptualism’s moment passed?  There is an odd radio silence about Conceptualism these days. I can easily imagine a time when Ron Silliman’s recent Against Conceptual Poetry would have generated some good, harsh argument. Perhaps I am looking in the wrong places, but I don’t see that argument anywhere, beyond Vanessa Place’s witty and somewhat predictable response in The Constant Critic.  In other words, there hasn’t been much third-party action recently, just the occasional call-and-response of the interested players.  A year and a half after Archambeau’s article—as we are clearing the snows of 2015–can we say that he is still right?
 
I am going to argue that he is, but not in the way it might first seem. While we have to take seriously Conceptualism’s demand that we choose sides, we should recognize that Conceptualism makes such choices difficult. The most compelling Conceptualist works seem to demand that we take a position, however uncomfortable, in relation to the specificity of their found materials, no matter how impossible that position may be. But that doesn’t mean that we need to decide whether or not to throw our lot in with Conceptualism as a whole. Conceptualism has established itself. It has found its institutional niche. To that extent, the moment for polemics about Conceptualism has probably passed.
 
In order to make my argument that Conceptualism is about difficult or even impossible choices, and in order to put Conceptualism in the broader context of avant-garde tactics and strategies, I want to answer my initial question with yet another question. As Doug Nufer put it in a discussion about Conceptualism a few years ago:  “the essential question for anyone who would explain this stuff: isn’t it just bullshit?” (3). The argument about Conceptualism—the argument about “the interesting” and the avant—might just come down to this. Is it, or isn’t it, bullshit?
 
So, I want to talk about bullshit. What is at issue in my discussion is the structure of bullshit. I will not ask whether Conceptualism is in fact nothing more than bullshit. Some of it surely is. Some of it isn’t. I am less concerned about the rather explicit value judgment that inheres in the claim that something is or is not just bullshit than I am interested in bullshit as a form of relation. Conceptualism is an avant-garde that actively solicits the suspicion of bullshit. I am interested in its complicated claims on its audience.
 
Consider in this context Harry Frankfurt’s now-famous anatomy of bullshit.  Frankfurt argues that bullshit, not lying, is the real enemy of the truth because it is indifferent to whether a statement is right or wrong. Liars care enough about the truth to simulate it.  Bullshitters do not care if what they say is true or not. Bullshitters are phonies and only worry about the effect they create (Frankfurt 47-48). They may intend to deceive us not about the facts, but about the nature of their enterprise. Their only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way they misrepresent what they are up to.
 
Bullshitters thus sin against ethos, not logos. They counterfeit their authenticity, not fact. Their bullshit is all about pretense and their motive is often pretension. They want to appear somehow loftier, somehow better than they actually are and they do this in order to gain some advantage.
 
Frankfurt’s emphasis on ethos means that the question of intention, taken rather broadly, is central to our understanding of bullshit and therefore of the avant-garde. As the avant-garde has repeatedly rejected the traditional canons of beauty and sublimity and has largely eliminated craft as a necessary criterion for evaluating art, the relationship of the vanguard artist to his or her work—or, more importantly, to the object matter of that work—and to the audience has become increasingly crucial as a basis for judgment.  In an odd and surprising way, the artist’s intention became key, even as criticism became suspicious of the very notion of intention..
 
At the same time, we should recall that the credibility of the avant-garde—even its identity—depends on its desire to be rejected by large numbers of people. The avant-garde seeks to be a contemporary “outlaw,” even if it aspires to become “classic” some day. If we draw on Bourdieu’s map of the cultural field, we see that the avant-garde knows that it has to stand on the fringe, not at its center. That means that in order to be successful, the avant-garde has to summon up two audiences, not one. It speaks to a friendly minority that somehow “gets it” and provokes a hostile majority that doesn’t. The avant-garde needs a group that has sufficient cultural capital to understand the stakes and the nuances of the vanguard gesture. It relies on this cohort to find it interesting. It relies on its detractors to think that it’s just bullshit.  In other words, the avant-garde needs to court distrust if it is to be trusted.
 
One of Warhol’s most important contributions to postmodern art and literature—what makes him the patron saint of Conceptual poetry—is that he reversed the poles of avant-garde bullshit. Whereas a painter like Pollock could be accused of aspiring to an unearned sublimity, Warhol aspired to none for his own art. But still, he left a large measure of doubt about his enterprise, with the result that a good part of the debate about Warhol turns, in Thomas Crow’s words, “on whether his art fosters critical or subversive apprehension of mass culture and the power of the image as commodity, succumbs in an innocent but telling way to that numbing power, or exploits it cynically and meretriciously” (49). In the end, the question remains: what does Andy intend by all this? What did he want us to think?
 
The jury, as they say, is still out, and therein lies a good part of Warhol’s continued fascination. Warhol cued us not to take his supposed coldness, his insistent superficiality at face value. We can thus take his laconic refusal of the cult of genius as a kind of inverted bullshit. Whereas we might suspect that Pollock’s paintings mean a good deal less than the artist claims, Warhol gets us to suspect that his paintings mean a good deal more than he lets on. His lack of pretension is to be taken as an obdurate kind of pretense, something to be read into and read through. So although Warhol was said to have said that he painted outsides, not insides, that is not the case.  Warhol did not switch insides and outsides. Rather, he exacerbated the difference between them in a way that made his audience keep seeking insides and reasons, in part because he kept hinting that there were insides and reasons to be sought and to be found.
 
I am therefore using Warhol to argue that those questions about bullshit and about trust that the avant-garde elicits are really more questions about intention than about execution, about the artist’s relation to both the subject and the object matter of avant-garde art.  Furthermore, I am suggesting that as avant-garde artists have increasingly rejected the self-contained, expressive auratic art object, the question about bullshit has become more acute. From Pop to Minimalism to Conceptualism and beyond, the increasing emphasis on what Richard Wollheim called the “pre-executive” function of the artist in Pop and Minimalist art has meant that artists’ relation to their materials—especially when these are found materials–has become even more central to our discussion of art (Wollheim). Or, as Lyn Hejinian puts it, “If one can’t see a connection, one must assume a decision” (80).
 
The withdrawal of the artist into pure decision—and here it is hard not to see that the artist comes to resemble both the consumer on the one hand and the corporate “decider” on the other—means that arguments about intention cannot help but come to the fore. And as intention comes to the fore, it can become maddeningly ambiguous, forcing the audience to toggle back and forth between the object matter of the work and suppositions about what the artist could possibly have meant by presenting it.
 
Vanessa Place has made the most of this maddening ambiguity and has made a career out of teasing her audience with the threat of inert meaninglessness.  She insists that we take her seriously, though that means we shouldn’t take her seriously at all.  As she says in a footnote, she is fond of the footnote as a form because it permits “discursiveness upon a platform of authority, that is to say, it not only … literalizes and effaces the spot of castration (the author’s lack of authority), but allows the author to make even less supportable claims under its egis” ( “The Case for Conceptualism”). The citation is thus a talisman against the fact that the author has no call to say what she says, or at best, can only call on others to say it.  But the author’s lack is merely a shiny bright version of the lack that besets all of us. We might think we are possessed of the good stuff that constitutes a self-contained interiority, but she subjects us all to a fine Lacanian disdain for such imaginary identifications and such spurious self-regard.
 
So, Place warns us that if we do indeed take her at her word, we should be wary of her word and of her authority–a fine Warholian gambit. What then does this tell us about her most sustained poetic performance to date, her legal trilogy, Tragodía? By her account, it is up to us to make something of it—the onus lies with the reader, not the soi-disant author who is not an author or an authority at all (Quaid). The text is about the reader, not the writer. More to the point, she maintains that the text is just—that just again!–a dead object. It confronts the reader both as the Real and as a mirror—as a figure for both the unsettling discovery of the Symbolic and the trauma of the Real.
 
Now, you can easily see the kind of readerly discomfort that Place refers to in the odd brouhaha at a 2010 conference on poetics, when Marjorie Perloff was understood by the audience to be claiming, apropos of Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts, that some victims of rape are as bad as their rapists, or rather, as Perloff then put it, that Place’s book demonstrated that “the culture of rape is largely a socio-economic problem.” This comment, of course, led to further dispute, and at one point Juliana Spahr did indeed “demand” that the author make clear her intent as Place knows she must (Spahr). Place went on to dismiss Spahr’s demand even though the very nature of Place’s work—at least as she presents it—makes that demand necessary. By the same token, her own sense that the work mirrors the reader, not the writer, makes her dismissal appear to be necessary as well.
 
But is Place right?  Should we trust her authority on this one? Is Statement of Facts just inert matter, merely a mirror for our own disavowed desire? I am not convinced. It is not clear just how anyone might consider thirty-three anatomically-correct accounts of sex crimes—some rapes, some torture, some group-sex scenes, some consensual acts of sodomy—“dead.” Unlike the traffic reports in Goldsmith’s Traffic or the weather reports in his Weather, sex never becomes yesterday’s news, especially when the sex is coupled with violence and crime.  The controversy over Perloff’s reading of the book stems from just how alive and touchy the sexual object matter of the book actually is. If there is indeed dead matter in Place’s Tragodía (of which Statement of Facts is just the first volume), it is to be found in the laconic accounts of the juries’ decisions in Statement of the Case and in some of the rather technical piles of precedent that make up Argument.
 
But even then—however dead it may seem—Tragodía does not come to us as a completely dumb object. It is not completely up for grabs because it is always already framed. The book appeared on publication festooned with comments and explanations and apologias and blurbs by the author’s friends and co-conspirators (like Goldsmith and Kim Rosenfield.) More to the point, its appearance in 2010 coincided quite nicely with Place’s savagely lucid The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and the Law, which tells us precisely what Place thinks is at stake, politically and ethically, in our criminalization of certain forms of sex.
 
Tragodía thus arrived on the scene slathered in commentary and authorial intent. But to reduce the text to a poetic version of The Guilt Project misses the point. Tragodía comes to us in three parts and presents itself as a poem. Even if we did not have Place’s own extramural comments on Dante, the tripartite structure with thirty-three sections of the provocatively titled Tragodía squares the work in literary-historical relation to the Commedia. (In the end, we do have Place’s account and she does claim Dante—transformed to be sure—for her own [Hardy].) With clues such as these, the reader cannot be expected to look for her own reflection in the text. She will be worried about poetry and authorial intention.
 
And let me be clear. I mean the reader here as a “real” reader, not a phenomenological abstraction. Place’s reader is sociologically concrete. She is an educated person who is well versed in avant-garde work and wants to pick up a book by Vanessa Place. What is more, the reader the book imagines and calls forth knows enough about modern poetry not to dismiss a poem that consists of transposed legal cases as mere bullshit. She is willing to follow the clues that the title and the structure of the book entail.  In the end, Place doesn’t want us to get too lost.  She has left a trail of literary crumbs.
 
The stories in the Tragodía—all those acts of rape and incest, all that inexplicable groping and handling—are hardly dumb or inert. They are charged with discomforting desire. But they are remarkably undermotivated, held together by the weakest of links. How to interpret them?  The problem for the reader is not that too little is going on here, but rather that too much is, and the structure of the book warns us against the all-too-easy categorizations of the legal system.  All these poor folks and people of color—Place is, after all, a public defender—are they victims or are they perps?
 
This brings us to a major point of my argument, the one that was brought up by Marjorie Perloff’s comments about the poverty that serves as the perhaps necessary but never sufficient background to Statement of Facts. The stories in the book are mostly tales of the economically challenged and socially underprivileged.  The readers of Tragodía can be assumed to possess a fair amount of cultural capital; otherwise they would not read the book as a poem, let alone as a version of Dante’s Commedia. The donnybrook that Perloff caused when she brought up–however tactlessly–the question of social class was not solely the fault of Perloff’s sociology. Tragodía draws a uncomfortable distinction between the people it describes and the people it addresses. When Juliana Spahr asks about Place’s alliances and intentions—a question that the text raises by its very nature–there is no answer that Place could give that could close the gulf the book opens up before its audience.  Not knowing what the author intends us to do with this stuff, we don’t know what to make of it.  We are here. The victims, the perps, and the survivors—they are over there, in more ways than one.
 
This social and hermeneutic divide between the object matter and the audience is vexing. It is also hardly unique to Place’s work.  It becomes one of the chief difficulties that a number of Conceptual texts raise. For instance, it confronts the reader of Ara Shirinyan’s Your Country Is Great, a book that mashes together tourist reviews, economic forecasts, nationalistic blasts, and racialist slurs, all connected through the search term “X [country name] is great.”  The poems in the book tempt us to condescend to its fractured grammaticality and misspellings, to the odd global English you find in the volume and on the Web. It is just as tempting (if not inevitable) to condescend to the opinions of the yahoos you find on Yahoo, whose vulnerabilities—both social and emotional—become quite clear even as they are arguing about something else. I cannot help suspecting that part of the readerly enjoyment of Shirinyan’s collection as a work of the avant-garde lies in our enjoyment of our cultural capital, in the not-quite-conscious recognition of the training that allows us to appreciate it as poetry.  In the end, it is one of the functions of the reframing that goes on in this book—the translation of information from the language game of information into the language game of poetry–to offer its language up to the judgment of modernist literary norms of grammar and affect, even as those norms are themselves subject to critique. Its frequent exclamation marks have no place in our various modernities, post- or otherwise. If they do, they only sneak in under the sign of irony and affective erasure.
 
What are we to do with the witch’s brew of affect and reaction that a book like Your Country Is Great presents? Are we supposed to feel superior to the speakers in the poems? Is this superiority supposed to make us feel better or worse? As with Place’s Tragodía, the traces of Shirinyan’s intention are unmistakable–the line breaks and the cutting and pasting are not natural occurrences—but the intent of that intention is ambiguous and recognizably literary.  Through our shared and learned conventions of literary reading, which is the acquired habit of years of training, literary readers are led to toggle back and forth between the actual choices that make up the poem, to questions about the person who made those choices and about what our reactions are supposed to be.
 
This is, in other words, the structure of Warholian bullshit replayed. If we stick with the poem and do not reject it out of hand, we will be looking for the more where less is being offered, for the depth where we are given merely surface.  And when we do, the poem becomes a complex and uncomfortable performance of our social and cultural privilege.
 
I hope that I have made clear the mechanism by which this happens. The artist retreats to the pre-executive function of choice and disappears, much like the god of the Epicureans, into the realm of pure decision. The audience’s hunch that this choice needs to be defended forces that audience to concentrate on the artist’s intention—an intention that is only legible in her decisions. This means that the audience must pay great attention to the object matter that has been chosen and the possible range of stances that the author and the audience might take towards that object matter.  Unless you short-circuit the process and dismiss the work out of hand, there is no place to rest here, only the insistent question of what you are supposed to do, of how you are supposed to react to the detritus of the Internet or the travesties of our legal system or the creepy consequences of other people’s desires.  As a result, the more compelling Conceptualist poetry does not present us with a triumphant or fragmented interiority, as previous forms of lyric have done. It presents us with a subjection that is vulnerable not only to the violent contingencies of the world but also to our aggression and condescension as readers.  And it does not tell us what to do with those contingencies, that aggression, or that condescension.
 
In the end, that’s my point of my argument and the point of my decision to make Place exemplary here.  If “the interesting” is about the continued and continuous claim on us to take sides in a given debate, then Conceptualist writing will remain interesting for a while yet, because the most provoking individual works will stage that debate within themselves. Conceptualism’s scandals–its lack of creativity and all that—have faded. A number of its more repeatable tics have already gotten old. Even so, its most telling works are the most telling because they keep the question of bullshit—ours, the avant-garde’s, even poetry’s—unsettled and therefore alive.

1. Introduction

David Rokeby began exploring questions of interactivity while studying at the Ontario College of Art (OCA) in 1981. His earliest interactive pieces were constructed with text or photography and specifically designed to be completed by the audience in one manner or another. There were no technological interfaces involved. At OCA, Rokeby discovered a small group of teachers and students in the school’s tiny Photo-Electric Art Department, where it was possible in the early ’80s to take courses like “Programming for Artists” and “Cybernetics for Art” with remarkable teachers like Norman White and Doug Back. Although Rokeby had had some experience programming computers in high school, he had not seriously considered using them in his art. His encounter with the Photo-Electric Art Department at OCA led him to bring together his interests both in audience-involvement and in computer technology.
 
Most of his time at OCA was occupied with the development of what was to become Very Nervous System. Advancing from interactive sound systems involving single light cells and analog electronics, this project evolved over a decade into a sensitive interactive sound installation in which everything from the audience’s small finger movements to large leaps drew out accompanying sounds that interpreted these movements in some manner.
 
Alongside its life as an artwork, Very Nervous System served the practical study of intense physical computer-human interaction. As a result of observing both himself and thousands of others in this installation, Rokeby generated ideas about the characteristics of the machine-human relationship. These ideas were first expressed in his 1989 text “Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media.” In producing Very Nervous System, Rokeby not only designed and built his own specialized computers, he also wrote some simple computer languages, and a lot of other code. While he did this, he watched himself program and, as a result, became interested in programming as a cultural practice, and in the role of programmers as cultural producers.
 
While Very Nervous System focuses largely on the relationship between human bodies and computers, his next major work, The Giver of Names, looks at the relationship between human intelligence and machine intelligence. For this project, Rokeby spent more than ten years working along the edges of artificial intelligence research, developing software that attempted to replicate human perceptual and cognitive abilities. The Giver of Names was an artificial subjective entity that considered objects presented to it and responded with spoken sentences. The aim of this pursuit was not so much to succeed at replicating human behavior as to provide an inside view of the process of trying to do this, in order to open the pursuit to some sort of questioning. The installation was presented, in part, as a sort of public research space where anyone could explore issues of (artificial) perception and intelligence in a practical and playful but non-trivial way.
 
At the time he developed The Giver of Names, Rokeby turned his attention to surveillance systems. His surveillance installations of the late ’90s and early 2000s, such as Watch, Taken, and Sorting Daemon, brought the real-time interaction of Very Nervous System together with the more advanced perceptual and cognitive processing of The Giver of Names to examine the social implications of the proliferation of networks of sensors and attentive intelligences.
 
David Rokeby has received numerous awards, including the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art (2002), Canada’s Governor Generals Award in Visual and Media Arts (2002), and the first BAFTA in interactive art from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2000.  His major exhibitions include the Venice Biennale (1986), the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2002), the National Gallery of Canada (2002), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007). He currently teaches at Ryerson University and is an adjunct professor at OCAD University (formerly OCA), both in Toronto.
 
This interview addresses the status and development of interactive media art in network societies. Of specific interest are those societies in which developments in networked or interactive arts occur in tandem with the emergence of a third wave of computing (understood as coming after the mainframe and the personal computer), a phenomenon usually referred to as  ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, and the Internet of Things. This is the third in a series of four interviews conducted in February 2014. All four interviews took place via daily e-mail exchanges over the course of several weeks, and each was followed by a set of revisions undertaken by both the interviewee and the interviewer. These interviews had their beginnings in a presentation given by Rokeby in 2011 at Invisibility and Unawareness: Ethico-Political Implications of Embeddedness and the Culture of Surveillance, a conference in Copenhagen, Denmark held by “The Culture of Ubiquitous Information,” the Nordic research network, and supported by the NordForsk research organization. The three other interviews titled “Complexity and Reduction,” “Context-Awareness and Meaning,” and “Politics and Aesthetics of Interactive Media Art Today” constitute key parts of Rokeby’s contribution to the final publication project in this series, the forthcoming anthology titled Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity and Culture (Routledge).

2. Interview

Ulrik Ekman: In network societies, which today have entered their second phase, an intensification of network logics is underway. Interactive media art finds itself in a context that includes the interactivity of the Internet, social media, and mobile media. It also includes situations and events relating to the pursuit of the goals of other technocultural developments in a so-called third wave of computing.  Parts of the major initiatives towards ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, and the Internet of Things are being rolled out, and they are said to be human-oriented.[1]
 
The multiplication of names for third wave computing makes clear both that its history is still to be written, the history of the present, and that several potential lines of development are at stake. If these names are not synonymous, they nevertheless index an effort to realize the promise of out-of-the-box computing, which involves billions of computational units. They all imply a socio-cultural and technical thrust to integrate and/or embed computing pervasively, to have information processing thoroughly integrated with or embedded into everyday objects and activities, including those pertaining to human bodies and their bodily parts.
 
We now find a great many projects moving towards concretization of a heuristic idea of computation qua environmentally embodied virtuality. The diagram today for this is supposed to be an intelligently context-aware and more or less “calm” computing. In an information-intensive environment this seems to map out in practical concretizations of multitudes of wired and wireless computational infrastructures with decentralized distributions of sometimes highly specialized units, many demonstrating mobility and ad hoc networking.
 
I know you regard this with skepticism, seeing here sources of beneficial and/or perilous complexification of human and technical context-awareness and adaptation to context, including the production and recognition of what makes sense for humans and machines. You affirm a need to safeguard humanist concerns and you insist on a certain critical distance from developments of a machinic intelligence that may well be invisible. It would be interesting to hear your position as compared with the remarks made earlier in your text on interactivity, “Transforming Mirrors.”[2]
 
Do you think that interactivity in cultures developing in company with ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) will increasingly involve technical processes that mirror human self-reference? Or is it more likely that most such ubicomp processes will parenthesize mirrorings of human self-reference in favor of other technical feedback loops and interruptions, as in invisible computational infrastructures and networks populated by autonomous intelligent agents with their own modes of operation and reference?

David Rokeby: It is hard to predict long-term trends in this field. We are living with technologies that were not visible on the horizon thirty years ago.
 
But I think that the answer rests as much in the realm of shifting cultural attitudes as in that of technological breakthroughs. The shift on the iPhone from skeuomorphism, where the familiar physical world was the reference for most interface elements, to iOS7, which makes assumptions about the interface literacy of its users, shows how the terms of engagement continue to change. It is not clear what kinds of interfacing relationships we will feel comfortable with in the future. Are piercing and body modification unconscious preparation for the embedding of sensors and actuators in the body?
 
It will likely end up being a question of efficiency and convenience. The two directions you pose are towards dialogue on one side and augmentation on the other, and hinge on the degree to which the ambient algorithmic environment is felt as an attribute of self, coherent other, or environment. The membrane separating self and environment is fairly porous if the environment is ubiquitous and homogenous, and so in most cases it is a question of whether we sense the responsive environment to be part of us or not.
 
When the system becomes involuntarily internalized as a part of one’s own identity, there is a question of where to turn when something goes wrong. “This pervasive anxiety that I am feeling … should I see a therapist or the system administrator?” I think that this is more serious than it might at first appear. The ubicomp component of a workplace is an extension of its corporate culture; the cost of not fitting in is tangible both socially and in terms of career advancement. The natural response is to change oneself to fit the environment better, and much of this happens involuntarily, especially if the source of the issue is hard to put your finger on (i.e., ubiquitous and transparent).
 
An algorithmic environment where the engagement is dialogic is easier to critique, but distracting and inefficient.
 

UE: Yes, perhaps not least because this demands a more explicit recognition of another agency?

DR: Norbert Wiener proposes that autonomy can be determined by whether the amount of information transfer within a system is greater than the information transfer across its boundaries. At some point in the discussion of sensor spaces and ubicomp, I think this measure starts to become relevant. We can think of the relative locality of parts of the system in terms of the intensity of the connecting information flow. Is a camera observing you closer (in this informational sense) to being part of you than a mouse or track pad that you are actually touching? Or is there insufficient information flow in the opposite direction to make this stick?
 
You interact with Siri, the iPhone voice-activated assistant, in a simple dialogic manner and it is clearly experienced as “other.” In theory this service could be delivered as a technological extension of one’s own cognitive processes, and therefore experienced as part of one’s self. Intent is an important part of this. If we must consciously engage a behavior, and that behavior includes a delay, then it is experienced very differently than if it were ubiquitous, always active, and instant.

UE: Is this set of distinctions reflected in your works?

DR: In 1995, I created a video installation called Watch, in which an artificial perception system parses the video signal of a camera looking onto the street corner outside the gallery, separating movement from stillness, “verbs” from “nouns.” In Watch, you effectively wear the installation as a set of real-time filters on your perceptual field; you do not look “at” this work so much as look “through” it. The processes that the computer is applying to the live video feel almost internal.

Fig. 1. Still, Watch: Broadway and Houston, Hollo Solomon Gallery, New York City, 1996. © David Rokeby. Used by permission.
 

At the same time, I was creating installations that intentionally played with different rates of processing. Very Nervous System, which responds to people’s movements with a real-time sonic accompaniment, was as real-time as possible, and Watch attempted the same thing. The Giver of Names pushed in the opposite direction. In this work, a computer looks at objects that visitors have chosen and placed on a pedestal. Through processes of visual analysis, association and grammatical construction, the computer responds to the objects, constructing sentences, which it speaks aloud. Here the processing loop was extended to create the space for mental reflection inside the feedback loop, both because it was doing more processing and because The Giver of Names was intended to be experienced as a self-contained entity. It was also a response to my observation that people interacting with Very Nervous System were often so enthralled with the intensity of the interaction that they did not think more deeply about the experience and its implications.

Fig. 2. Very Nervous System, Winnipeg, aceartinc., 2003; image-array design by Mike Carroll; photo courtesy of aceartinc. © Risa Horowitz, William Eakin, and Liz Garlicki. Used by permission.

But immediacy and fluidity are certainly desirable in many situations. I was making art and trying to tease out difficult questions. That is not the goal of most interactive systems. For the broader practical applications of ubiquitous intelligent sensing systems, my main concern would be our mental health.

 
UE: My immediate impression here is that you answer by way of reinscribing versions of the undecidable. A remarkable series of your works are not altogether foreign to this mode of operation. One might be tempted to see here something of a more general import to many of your installations. Your work bears witness to an insistence on the differential repetition of an immanent critique of human and technical decision.
 
Your installations return human interactants to an undecidability interior to given decisions or decisions that are taken for granted. They also include a computational “perversion,” as you call it: algorithms turning back against and into themselves to reinvoke undecidability, typically as a ghost of the classical halting problem. I am thinking of the problem of deciding, given a program and an input, whether that program will eventually halt when run with that input, or will run forever. As you know, Alan Turing proved long ago that a general algorithm to solve this does not and cannot exist.
 
The near obsession in your work with mirroring feedback could be approached as the more decidable side. Mirroring feedback happens when interactions take place through solvable or semi-solvable decision problems. Your repeated use of the mirror metaphor is a particularly apt gesture, since in computational complexity theory these two types of problems concern a recursive set or a recursively enumerable set.
 
However, your “natural” drift towards undecidability as a dynamic space of potential for complexification makes this a little less apt. Perhaps this is why you use the phrase “transforming mirrors,” which points in the direction of heterogenesis rather than autogenesis.

DR: I suspect that feedback is necessary for emergence. Can you think of an emergent phenomenon that does not require feedback?
 
Mirroring feedback is only interesting to me when it is faulty or incomplete: transformative, modulated, or otherwise opened out towards the world. I prefer Echo’s transformed and delayed reflections to Narcissus’s servo-mechanical relationship to his own image (McLuhan 63). Recursion is interesting when a structurally or functionally coherent meta-phenomenon emerges that is open enough to not be purely self-referential. I think it was Daisetsu Suzuki who suggested that Heidegger, of all Western philosophers, had come closest to Zen, but that he approached it backwards, through an infinite regression that never achieves its goal.[3]
 
UE: In this adherence to the transformative potential residing with Echo, I also hear an affirmation of a growing complexity. I have to admit my admiration for your work on this. But I also find here two kinds of reduction leaving me uncertain as to the reach of your work in relation to current ubicomp cultures. I think they stem from your ethical responsibility toward the anthropos. A certain safeguarding reduces the question concerning Echo to one of human complexification. Echo is heard as another technical irritation internal to the human – and you grant priority to the human orchestration of technology. This entails a reduction of technological agency,[4] or a reduction of the autonomy of a universal technical tendency.[5]

DR: Yes, I privilege the human and wish to safeguard it, but not in a purely reactionary or conservative way. There are a lot of problems in the human realm. There are a lot of ways that technological developments could lead to positive changes in this situation. But I think there is a good chance that an emergent intelligence would decide that humanity is not worth preserving. If an emergent, silicon/binary/logic/network-based intelligence is incapable of appreciating some of the factors that might bear on that decision, then perhaps this would be a tragedy. It comes down to a question of values. What values should bear on decisions that might emerge in an autonomous or semi-autonomous ubicomp scenario? Or, less loaded: what parameters should such a scenario be responsive to? As with all neural net, machine, etc. scenarios, much is determined by this choice of inputs.
 
Secondly, we cannot discount the value of the robustness of the natural world, and of ourselves. Today’s life forms are the products of absolutely continuous, unbroken lines of aliveness leading back to the origins of life. Millions of years of continuous “beta testing” have generated an unimaginably valuable body of information, partly held genetically, partly held in evolved and integrated biological ecosystems. While the speed of twenty-first-Century computers allows them to compress evolutionary processes by orders of magnitude, they still fail the robustness test if they do not take all relevant opportunities and threats into account.
 
So my argument for “safeguarding” is the following:  We created the technology. It is our responsibility. It is a reflection of our desires and aspirations. Before deciding to allow it autonomy, we have a responsibility to put the maximum effort into the task of preparing it for autonomy. I consider my process and line of inquiry as part of this effort. As a father, I am engaged in a somewhat analogous process with my daughter. I am consciously adopting a paternalistic relationship to the technology. There is a danger that I might choose to quash “objectively” positive behaviors that I find threatening. (And this comes full circle to the question of whether humanity is “objectively” a net positive presence on the planet.)
 
Even if our intention is to develop technological entities or systems that will endure past our perhaps inevitable self-destruction, and we ignore human values, we still need to make sure that we are adequately preparing our creations for long -term adaptive existence—that we are not ignoring abilities that may be crucial to long -term adaptation but are not easy to describe or program. Most of the computed environment is produced in a rush to get products to market. And most research is now channeled towards product development. Philosophical speculation is not conducive to meeting product-shipping deadlines. This is a bad way to design the future, or to set up the conditions for the future to design itself.
 
It comes down to this question: Do I trust emergent autonomous entities with my fate and that of my culture? Similarly, do I trust emergent social entities like government with my fate? Trust necessarily involves a leap of faith, even if that leap is supported by promising statistics. I do not trust autonomous technologies to have my best interests in “mind.” Since it is almost inevitable that it will become increasingly present and common, I need to keep asking the best questions I can, to call it (or at least those developing it) to account.

UE: One can hardly avoid sensing the call for a balanced, coevolutionary attunement here. Your deep investment in a complex and wide-ranging “harmonics of interactivity” continuously makes itself heard (Rokeby, “Harmonics”).
 
If this deserves the status of an ideal, maybe a utopian one, most of the time it involves individuations qua temperings. Dynamically uncertain, these individuations are disharmonic, asymmetrically inclined, always attunements to someone and something other. Perhaps this explains the important place reserved in your installations and texts for “transformative mirrors,” with emphasis on the “transformative.”
 
You mentioned earlier being fond of the Narcissus and Echo myth. You grant Echo the privileged position as a patron deity of interactive art. In a sense, you have always been at work on transformative mirrorings, which return to interactants the same expressing itself in delayed and displaced ways as something or someone other. I wonder how you see the asymmetries in mirrorings and assign relative weights to self-reference, other-reference, and undecidability in human and technical individuations?

DR: My interest in mirroring must be understood in relation to my understanding of my role as an artist, expressing myself to people who are, through no fault of their own, essentially self-centered and attached to their personal world view and life experience. I follow Varela and Maturana in thinking that we do not transmit messages into the minds of others when we communicate; rather we perturb their surface and cause a rearrangement of what is already inside.[6]
 
Transformed mirrors become ways of using the intensity of other people’s self-awareness as a “carrier” that can be used to enable communication, much as the FM radio station’s frequency is used as a carrier that is modulated with the sonic signal. In my installations that use transforming mirroring, your image/action/sound is modulated by my system, and that distorting signal is decoded by you as a difference between your inner sense of self and this reflected self.
 
This is therefore not as user-centric or mirror-obsessed as it might seem. It is a strategy that seeks to sneak past our defenses against otherness.

UE: I wonder whether your creations of interactive installations and automata and their interaction designs could be said to reserve for themselves a certain second-order status.
 
If both technical and human becoming through interactivity are at stake, are the artist and the automata rather to be called “transforming transforming mirrors” whose activities may be self-generative, heterogenerative, or undecidable, if not entropic?

DR: I have often explored second-order artistic expression. In most of my work, I have de-emphasized the “surface content” of the work. All the interesting stuff I have put in these works is at least second-order. People tend to overestimate the empowerment that most interactivity provides. The artist/technologist has given the user control over surface content, but is generally reserving for him- or herself the control at one level of abstraction above. I have played with this in the past – allowing, for instance, users to change the responsive behavior of the program using a simple UI, gestures, etc. (thus giving them some second-order control, and taking the third-order control for myself…). How might we describe the role of a programmer programming a learning system that recalibrates the responsive character to engender a certain overall system behavior itself?
 
But a real second-order transforming mirror would need two levels of selves being mirrored. The first-order users experience a transformation of themselves. Does the second-order user (the artist creating the transforming mirror) experience a self-transformation reflected back by the authoring system and what is created with it? Certainly some of the ideas I have been expressing in this conversation are plausibly the result of such second-order transforming mirroring. I have described the development of The Giver of Names explicitly as a performance piece performed for myself, in which I dress up as an artificial-intelligence researcher and feel myself affected by the process of doing the research, watching the way my decisions are guided by the task and the limits of the tools, etc.

Fig. 3. Still from The Giver of Names, Windsor Art Gallery, 2008. © David Rokeby. Used by permission.

UE: How do the echoings of echo become, and what is the role of the technical and human audience of interactants?

DR: This is a good question. It was in order to open more of the second-order experience to the users that I made the feedback loop in The Giver of Names so slow. You are allowed to be a bit of a researcher yourself. That is not entirely satisfying the idea of really passing on the second-order experience, however. It is perhaps why I wrote articles like “Transforming Mirrors,” and this is perhaps even truer for “Constructing Experience,”[7] which is really a kind of guidebook for people creating experiences in this second-order manner. Writing and talking about my experiences is a way to shed a little light on the second-order. But that is not really the point of your question either. Can one imagine an interactive relationship where all participants are operating on all imaginable levels of responsibility – having the base-level experience, modulating it, modifying it in permanent ways and generating mechanisms for continued automatic modification? This sounds like an interaction between two conscious entities, capable of understanding that there is always one more step up the chain of abstraction, and along the chain of recursion, and ready to act on any of these levels, to grasp the concepts of recursion and abstraction and see them shoot off into infinity, to abstract recursion and abstraction themselves. As long as we have to open each of these doors for our synthetic intelligences, we have to consider how to describe and encode each surrounding context and we continue to have responsibility for their resulting actions. Consciousness does not substantially increase our ability to do harm. It does increase our ability to accept responsibility for the harm we might do and to work to preempt it.
 
As for the question of entropy, second-order (and higher) agencies need to maintain a careful balance between entropic and anti-entropic tendencies. This would require a sort of entropy governor that prevents uncontrolled growth and allows for renewal but keeps the system from dissolving. Is this a plausible minimal definition of some sort of ethics for autonomous systems, or is this perhaps built-in – in that systems with an excessive tendency towards entropy will simply dwindle away? Perhaps the most important thing is to rein in excessively anti-entropic systems because those are the ones that will persist.

Fig. 4. Installation view, n-Cha(n)t, Banff Centre for the Arts, 2001.[8] © Don Lee/The Banff Centre. Used by permission.

UE: I was trying to keep open a question of both technical and human interactants as an audience, given your safeguarding of the human. This openness would concern all orders of abstraction and recursion to see how far you go towards complexity or rather introduce reductions. My focus was on second-order interactivity (“transforming transforming mirrors”) and the becoming of “echoings of echo.”
 
I tried to indicate major potential directions for this second-order interactivity – the self-generative, heterogenerative, undecidable, and the entropic – not only to hear you on epistemological quandaries for interactivity (circularity, infinite regress, undecidability), and on the quasi-ontological inclinations towards energetic complexification and passing away in the play of the negative.
 
It was also, perhaps primarily, to hear you on the tempering tilts in the practical reason embodied in your installations. Do these installations tend towards inviting the audience to engage ethical responsibility, goal-oriented political action, and a presencing of interactive potentiality, or do they tend rather towards the points and waves of energy in interactive practice that delimits live and living systems (technical, biological, and human)?

DR: In my text “Predicting the Weather,” I end by asking: “How does one best function within a situation one cannot hope to entirely understand???” I was explicitly talking about accepting responsibility for your actions even when the results of those actions are not predictable. I was struggling to find a model of responsibility that could work in the contemporary world. In my early vision of interactive utopia, I saw interactive installations as ways of developing and practicing this kind of responsibility. The idea was to engineer an interactive space in which one could simultaneously grasp that one had agency and that one did not always see a clear causal line from one’s actions to their results. In such a space, you could come to terms with influencing without controlling, and perhaps imagine a way to live like that, perceptive and active at all times – literally responsive, and perhaps by extension, responsible.
 
The dark cloud that enveloped me through the ’90s was partly a result of my growing understanding that people were excited to participate, but not so interested in bearing any responsibility—that, indeed, interactive technologies were just as good at creating a fake enfranchisement, a fake empowerment, as they were in encouraging actual engagement. This is not surprising in retrospect, but it was a surprise to my younger, utopian self.
 
I still present my interactive installations to the public as opportunities to play directly with issues like surveillance in the hope that I will further the dialogue, and in large part to increase interactive literacy incrementally. It was the ease with which we can be fooled or too easily satisfied by interactions that pushed me out of the interactive Eden, and so this interactive literacy question is very important to me. This is a way to develop ethical responsibility and goal-oriented political action. But I generally shy away from strong political statements in my work because I am not interested in preaching to the converted or simply polarizing debate. My role is to churn the soil so that people can be surprised by their responses to something, perhaps enough to get under their assumptions and actually change their mind. I do not really have a firm “position” on most aspects of surveillance, ubicomp, etc. But I have a feeling that we as a society are not engaging in a sufficient discussion about the future we are inventing and allowing to settle into place.
 
So if my installations have a mission, it is to undermine assumptions, to destabilize familiar experiences and habits of perception and mind. This is in direct response and opposition to the fact that so much is underexamined – things (technologies and ideas and attitudes) are left to cool and crystallize too quickly, becoming hard yet brittle.
 
As for points and waves of energy in interaction: for me these are no less politically charged. Understanding autonomy and feedback and permeability and transparency and internalization of tech and externalization of self are all things we need to become literate in if we are to make good decisions. This is particularly problematic given the momentous shift in the locus of policy-making (especially in the USA), where policy is now largely made through consumer choice and corporate lobbying. The deep suspicion of intellectuals in the United States means that informed top-down decision-making is regarded as elitist. So how do we come to make smart decisions about the future?

UE: You trust in the development of a smarter interactive literacy via invitations to the audience to encounter interactivity of another order—Hence a certain trust of yours in the responsiveness and responsibility of the audience. But you also trust that the audience will just participate (staying on a first -order plane, presumably for and with themselves), rather than being or becoming responsible unto the other on another plane?

DR: It is important to distinguish between what I hoped for in the early years, and what I learned to fear later on. I had to revise my position of naive trust to one that is a bit more tempered. I learned that I had to be a better and more thoughtful artist in order to nurture a smarter interactive literacy.
 
One of my biggest concerns was that people interacting with my installations have often not grasped that their interaction was clearly limited to the first order. I did make some experiments allowing interactants to change the behavior of the piece through a UI and some mouse gestures. This was interesting, but I did not continue these initial explorations of second -order interactivity with the audience because I was more interested in understanding better why people were satisfied with the first order. I think our human grasp of interactive relationships is often pretty limited. I think that we like the fact that we have some responsibility but that it is clearly circumscribed. We do not want to take it all on. This leaves the playing field pretty open for unguided emergence of entities and “evil geniuses.”

UE: My question concerning the audience was meant as a sincere and respectful bow in the direction of these technical and human others. I am struck by a tension in your remarks. You acknowledged early that the audience is the primary medium for an interactive artist. One could see an affirmation here that your privileging of mirroring, feedback loops, recursion, and responsibility implies a rather humble recognition of the audience as the very condition of existence of your installations. This recognition seems to coexist with but also be less privileged than the creative act of the artist of interactive media art installations. This remains a decisive act that opens the stage for interactive exploration of structures of possibility of a certain complexity but also always already delimits these in a reduction of complexity. This asymmetry is clearly tempered by the inclusion in your installations of experiments with co-responsible “audiences” (or “co-creators”). However, you seem to parenthesize this, granting primacy to human reductions of the complexity of interactivity to a first-order plane. This seems out of tune with your harmonics of interactivity. Here I am left wondering whether one should hear a kind of disenchantment?

DR: Certainly there is disenchantment. It was inevitable, considering the utopian place I started from. On the other hand, if we take an enlarged view of what interactive toolset robust enough for others to use. Sharing these tools is a level of sharing and co-creation beyond what is normally possible in any kind of installation. The reason is “time.” Substantive meta-creation takes time. Simply creating the possibility of higher order engagement with the audience in the code does not add up to much unless you can provide the proper conditions for its use.
 
Artists who have used my tools often comment that they appreciate the “character” of my tools. They feel my thinking in them. I am excited to share the potentials that these tools opened up for exploring interactivity.
 
As for creating interactive systems that emerge or evolve, let me note that this is easier said than done in a practical and satisfying way. I am an artist and so my motivations, while sometimes parallel to those of a researcher or academic, are also often quite different. I am not sure how to characterize the differences, but I could say that my audience is much broader. For my own pleasure I may play with algorithms in my studio that will never be of interest to my audience, but my aim is usually to find ways to share aspects of my “research” with everyone (and those “everyones” are all human). This is one great promise of interactivity, occasionally fulfilled: it allows one to make accessible things that are normally hidden behind firewalls of ultra-specialized language and slowly evolved, deeply invested mental constructs.
 
In “Transforming Mirrors” I talk about the experience I had in 1984 with the earliest versions of Body Language, in which I handed as much control as I could to the participant.[9] I found that the experience had too many dimensions of interaction, and so the sense of interactivity was, for many users, completely lost. Reducing the dimensions of interactivity produced a greater sense of interaction. This was another facet of my loss of innocence – I was very disappointed by this apparent paradox. Of course, time is one of the important issues here. With enough exposure, perhaps people would come to have a more satisfying experience with the more complex interaction. But I need to acknowledge the duration of interaction that I can expect with my audience and work within its frame.
 
These may seem like bizarre limitations from a pure research perspective, but I am not a pure researcher.

Footnotes

[1] For the first book-length engagement with the sociocultural, aesthetic, and artistic implications of these developments, see Ekman, Throughout. At least three earlier monographs have contributed to an understanding of these developments in the contexts of interaction design, architecture, and the cultural ethics of ubiquitous computing: Dourish; McCullough; Greenfield. Interesting and technically well-informed introductions presented from the perspectives of different disciplines can be found in: Abowd and Mynatt; Beigl; Bell and Dourish; Galloway; Rogers; Symonds.
 
[2] See Rokeby, “Transforming Mirrors.”
 
[3] Upon reading a book by D.T. Suzuki, Heidegger is reported to have said, “If I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings” (Barrett xi).
 
[4] See Latour.
 
[5] See Leroi-Gourhan.
 
[6] See Maturana and Varela.
 
[7] See Rokeby, “The Construction of Experience.”
 
[8] In n-cha(n)t, seven computers form a small community of entities with significant cognitive and linguistic skills. They slowly fall into unison chanting when left alone, sharing ideas amongst themselves until a consensus is reached. The chant scatters into a jumble of independent voices when disrupted by words spoken by gallery visitors, disrupting the coherence of the group.
 
[9] See Rokeby, Body Language.

Abstract

Footnotes

[1] The bibliography on this extraordinary passage is immense.  Quine’s own review of early criticism of the gavagai example is most useful.  See his “On the Reasons” (178-183).  An early, critical piece is Steven Davis, “Translational Indeterminacy and Private Worlds.”  Christopher S. Hill’s early “’gavagai’” (1972), reprinted with an important “Postscript” in his 2014 Meaning, Mind, and Knowledge, and his recent “How Concepts Hook onto the World,” also in Meaning, Mind, and Knowledge (66-87), seem to me the most serious and consequential arguments retaining both Quine’s deflationary position with respect to translation, and a strong affirmation of the determinability of meaning, where “meaning” is understood to pertain to what Hill calls the “reference of concepts” (4).  Narrowing the definition of “meaning” in this way succeeds only partly in limiting the argument to the ways in which concepts in “possession” of qualities refer to objects that are in “possession” of those concepts.  The tautology on which Hill verges should prove disconcerting (an object determinably possesses a concept, and that concept’s possession of a quality entails that that quality necessarily “hooks onto” the concept; that “hooked-onto concept” then “hooks onto” the object, and this chain stands in for reference).  Hill leaves open the question whether statements regarding the “possession of a quality” “really do have determinate answers” (4), which seems to open a further, if different, domain for indeterminacy.   Lieven Decock provides a helpful overview of Quine’s developing position with regard to indeterminacy in “Domestic Ontology and Ideology,” in Quine: Naturalized Epistemology, Perceptual Knowledge and Ontology.  For further accounts of Quine’s position, see Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison, Word and World, 203-207 and 291-309.
 
[2] “And a mortal existence, for from the moment that it has a name, its name survives it. It signs its potential disappearance.  Mine also, and that disappearance, from this moment to that, fort/da [here/there, present/absent], is announced each time that, with or without nakedness, one of us leaves the room” (Derrida, The Animal 9).  The French is from Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis, 26.  Other, important, work by Derrida on animality: “‘Eating Well,’ or The Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida”;  “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”; “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand”; and “Violence Against Animals.”
 
[3] Derrida’s approach to Enlightenment is far from Habermas’s, and from Martha Nussbaum’s as well.  See Cary Wolfe’s positioning of Derrida’s thought, in contrast to Nussbaum and Cora Diamond, in this passage in particular.  Wolfe notes the way the animal/animot poses a limit to philosophical humanism.
 
[4] Derrida, Béliers.  The French reads in full:
 

Il y a la guerre et le bélier, le bélier de chair ou de bois, le bélier sur terre ou dans le ciel s’élance dans une course. Il fonce pour enfoncer l’adversaire. C’est une charge (“In- / to what does he not charge?” pour citer ici la judicieuse traduction de Michael Hamburger). Cette charge – l’équivoque entre les langues donne ici plus d’une chance –, n’est-ce pas aussi une accusation ou un prix à payer (“charge” en anglais), donc l’acquittement d’une dette ou l’expiation d’un péché? Le bélier ne charge-t-il pas l’adversaire, un sacrificateur comme un mur, de tous les crimes? Car la question, nous le notions plus haut, est de forme interro-négative: contre quoi ne court-il pas? Ne charge-t-il pas? Il peut le faire pour attaquer ou pour se venger, il peut déclarer la guerre ou répondre au sacrifice en y opposant sa protestation. Le sursaut de son incompréhension indignée n’épargnerait rien ni personne au monde. Nul au monde n’est innocent, ni le monde même. On imagine la colère du bélier d’Abraham et d’Aaron, la révolte infinie du bélier de tous les holocaustes. Mais aussi, par figure, la rébellion violente de tous les boucs émissaires, de tous les substituts. Pourquoi moi? Leur adversité, leur adversaire serait partout. Le front de sa protestation jetterait le bélier contre le sacrifice même, contre les hommes et contre Dieu. Il voudrait enfin mettre fin à leur monde commun. Le bélier chargerait contre tout et contre quiconque, dans toutes les directions, comme si la douleur l’aveuglait. Le rythme de cette strophe, Wo- /gegen / rennt er nicht an?, scande bien le mouvement saccadé de ces coups. Quand on se rappelle que Aaron associait de jeunes taureaux au sacrifice du bélier, on pense à la dernière ruée de l’animal avant sa mise à mort. Le toréador ressemble aussi à un prêtre sacrificateur.
 
Autant d’hypothèses, bien sûr, et d’indécisions. Cela reste à jamais l’élément même de la lecture. Son «processus infini». La césure, le hiatus, l’ellipse, autant d’interruptions qui à la fois ouvrent et ferment. Elles retiennent à jamais l’accès du poème sur le seuil de ses cryptes (l’une d’entre elles, l’une seulement, ferait référence à une expérience singulière et secrète, toute autre, dont la constellation n’est accessible qu’au témoignage du poète ou de quelques-uns). Les interruptions ouvrent aussi, de façon disséminale et non saturable, sur des constellations imprévisibles, sur tant d’autres étoiles, dont certaines ressembleront peut-être encore à cette semence dont Iahvé dit à Abraham, après l’interruption du sacrifice, qu’il la multiplierait comme des étoiles: l’abandon de la trace laissée, c’est aussi le don du poème à tous les lecteurs et contre-signataires qui, toujours sous sa loi, celle de la trace à l’ œuvre, de la trace comme œuvre, entraîneront ou se laisseront entraîner vers une tout autre lecture ou contre-lecture. Celle-ci sera aussi, d’une langue à l’autre parfois, dans le risque abyssal de la traduction, une incommensurable écriture.

 
[5] I have tried to spell out the notion of a “defective concept” in Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic, especially 110-150.

Abstrat

Footnotes

[1] For examples of the growing popular visibility of these scenes, see the documentaries Punk in Africa (2012), A Band Called Death (2012), and The Punk Singer: A Film about Kathleen Hanna (2013). The development of the Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales, and the publication of the Riot Grrrl Collection book by the Feminist Press are two signs of the growing scholarly interest in women in punk. For recent scholarly work on punks of color, see Mahmoud, Ngyuen’s “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival,” and Vargas. For queer readings of the punk scene, see Daniel, Muñoz, and Nyong’o’s “Do You Want Queer Theory or Do You Want the Truth?” For discussions of international punk scenes outside the US and the UK, see O’Connor’s “Punk and Globalization” and Wallach.
 
[2] My sense of the need to complicate punk origin myths is informed by José Muñoz’s claim, in his consideration of the doomed figure of Darby Crash, that “punk itself is often fragmentary, refusing the origin myths that have been ascribed to it, insisting on a fragmentariness that feels no responsibility to adhere to any idea of an a priori whole. Punk is about inelegantly cutting and stitching a sense of the world together; it is about imagining a commons that is held together by nothing more than a safety pin” (105). In a similar vein, Mimi Thi Nguyen acknowledges the importance of exploring “what punk stories become canonized … because it does matter what we know and value about punk parameters” (Nguyen and Nikpour 12).
 
[3] For samplings of recent academic approaches to punk, see the journal issues and essay collections edited by Brown et al., Duncombe and Tremblay, Ngô and Stinson, and Furness. For a thoughtful reflection on what it means to contribute to such an archive, see Nguyen’s “My Fales Library Donation Statement.”
 
[4] Also see Nikpour’s review of Duncan and Tremblay’s White Riot for a despairing account of academic punk studies.
 
[5] The autobiography is not Hell’s first attempt at such a remediation; his 1996 novel Go Now is a fictionalized account of a 1980 road trip he took with photographer Roberta Bayley in a 1959 Cadillac.
 
[6] For a discussion of the incorporation of punk, see Hebdige 92-9.
 
[7] In calling attention to punk’s utopian side, I am building on Muñoz’s account of the punk rock commons as a formation that is “simultaneously utopian and marked by negation” (98).
 
[8] For Althusser’s full discussion of the function of the school, see 104-106.
 
[9] The Patti Smith Group’s 1975 debut Horses came out on Arista Records and Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ 1977 Blank Generation was released by Sire Records.
 
[10] Hell’s was the second release from Ork, the first being Television’s 1975 single, “Little Johnny Jewel,” which was released in advance of the band’s 1977 debut album, Marquee Moon, on Elektra records.
 
[11] Private Stock’s mainstream ambitions are evident in another 1976 release, the hit single “Don’t Give Up on Us” by David Soul, who played Hutch on Starsky and Hutch.
 
[12] Seymour Stein and Richard Gottehrer cofounded Sire in 1966; Arista was founded by Columbia Pictures International in 1974, the same year that Larry Uttal, the former head of Columbia’s Bell Records, founded Private Stock.
 
[13] For a detailed account of Hell’s experiences with Sire, see Tramp 189-195.
 
[14] See O’Connor, Punk Record Labels 3-9 for a theorization of punk scenes as autonomous fields of cultural production. For a detailed account of DIY as an ethical practice, see Gordon.
 
[15] For an attempt to write such a comprehensive history, see Spencer, especially her discussion of the rise of punk zines (185-199).
 
[16] For Hell’s account of these years, see Tramp 54-56 and 86-91.
 
[17] For a detailed account of Hell’s relationship to the New York School, see Kane 341-48.
 
[18] This entry is misdated January 26, 1970; its context in the journal clearly indicates that it was composed in 1971.
 
[19] See Kane 355-58 for a consideration of Andrews’s appearance in Genesis : Grasp.
 
[20] For production information on Buffalo Stamps, see Clay and Phillips 267. For information about Schuchat, see Tramp 90-91.
 
[21] In addition to the final numbers of the magazine (#4 appeared in 1970 and the final double issue #5/6 in 1971), Genesis : Grasp also published three book-length supplements (Yuki Hartman’s One of Me accompanied #4 and #5/6 had two supplements, Simon Schuchat’s Svelte and Ernie Stomach’s uh) and folders of poems by each editor (Richard Meyers’s Fun: A Folder of Four Poems in 1970 and David Giannini’s Opens: A Folder of 6 Broadsides in 1971).
 
[22] Dot Books, Richard Meyers’s last gasp in publishing, produced only one other book in addition to Wanna Go Out? Andrew Wylie’s Yellow Flowers, although Meyers had planned to release Tom Verlaine’s 28^th Century and Patti Smith’s Merde.
 
[23] Hell’s correspondence with Anthony P. Harrison, the acting head of the book section of the copyright office, indicates that he had first sought to identify Theresa as the author and only acknowledged her status as a pseudonym after receiving an official inquiry (11 July 1975).
 
[24] Since leaving music in the mid-eighties, Hell has returned to the Theresa persona. He gave a reading of her work at the festival Balthazar in Paris in 2002. For this reading he also produced a booklet of Theresa’s poetry illustrated with images of him in the Theresa wig and makeup, and screened a short film, Meet Theresa Stern. The film is an eighteen-minute excerpt of a longer work, The Theresa Stern Story, written by Hell for which he worked to secure funding periodically between the eighties and the early 2000s.
 
[25] Random House, Doubleday, Pantheon, Grove, New Directions, City Lights, Scribners, Knopf, and MacMillan were among the publishers that rejected Theresa’s book.
 
[26] Hell provides an account of the thought process behind these materials in Tramp (138-145). The Television review is reprinted as “My First Television Set” in Hot and Cold (39-40).
 
[27] “The Heartbreakers” is reprinted in Hot and Cold, from which all subsequent quotations are drawn.
 
[28] For Hell’s most recent account, see Tramp 155. For an account that includes Hell’s, Verlaine’s, and Richard Lloyd’s perspectives on Hell’s exit, see Heylin 133-39.
 
[29] According to Hell, the Voidoids began rehearsing in June 1976 and recorded the demo that would become their Ork EP by the end of the month.
 
[30] Theresa’s appearances in Punk also might be a sign that Hell still had high hopes for this poetic persona since, as John Holmstrom recollects, Punk had national ambitions: “[w]e didn’t want PUNK to be ‘The CBGB/Max’s Fanzine,’ and compete with the New York Rocker…. We were hoping that PUNK’s style made us more than just our substance, and that the way that we covered CBGB bands could be expanded to the rest of the world” (Holmstrom and Hurd 107). The interview was a collaboration between Mary Harron, who wrote the questions and gave them to Hell, and Hell, who wrote the answers. Harron would go on to interview Eddie and the Hot Rods, Johnny Rotten, and Brian Eno. The Theresa Stern interview is reprinted with the original artwork in The Best of Punk (89-90). A longer, text-only version is reprinted in Hot and Cold (31-35). All quotations are drawn from the original.
 
[31] See McNeil. Hell reprints this interview with Legs McNeil in Tramp as evidence that he had “given deeply nihilistic interviews before the Sex Pistols” (199).
 
[32] This blank plays on the chorus of Hell’s “Blank Generation,” in which the opening words, “I belong to the blank generation,” are repeated in the third line with the variation “I belong to the ______ generation.” For Hell’s comments on this refrain, see Tramp 206-208. Meyers began using this phrase in correspondence with contributors to Genesis : Grasp, like Clark Coolidge, Bruce Andrews, and Simon Schuchat, to refer to what he envisioned as their collective poetic project.

 
The archival research for this essay was supported by the Coleman Dowell Fellowship for Study on Experimental Works from Fales Library at New York University. I want to thank Marvin Taylor and Brent Phillips at Fales for their help with this research. Ann Butler and Mike Kelly helped me learn how to work with archival materials. My fellow panelists and the audience at the 2008 Cultural Studies Association Conference heard an early version of this work. Lee Konstantinou and Lynn Shutters read drafts and provided invaluable suggestions.