You will have wanted to open up. You will have wanted to feel. You will have wanted to experience the other. Its nearby orient. Its distant diversity. But did you experience yourself? This is a spiritual problem. A practical problem.
We will play a game. The game of wander. I’ll be the one who’s lost. You will vaguely try to find me. I will arch myself in the future. You will curl into a ball of past. There. Let’s not move. Here we are. Transparent. A Friction of present.
To open up, and thus experience the subtle alchemy of the outside, is like having a soul – it is not about you only. 1
***
1st
exercise: Imagine you are as transparent as glass, and that everything that is inside of you can be is visible. You do not need to offer words or thoughts or change anything, just imagine that everything that is inside of you can be seen by whatever is outside of you. This is an offering and that which is being offered is your soul. 2
2nd
exercise: The care for opacity. 知其百, 守其黑, 为天下式 (zhi qi bai, shou qui hei, wei tian xia shi). «Know the white, keep the black, and become the model of the world». Taoist exercise at the end of which the practitioner can disappear and multiply. To be practiced at dusk, in touch with your shadow.
3rd
exercise: The Kafka method. It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.
4th
exercise: the islamo-apocalyptic or cyclonopedic way. Very risky. Lock yourself in a strategic alignment with the outside in such a way to achieve complicity with the anonymous materials and other dark and highly inflammable matters that make up the universe. Farthest from any desire to open up to the world, bury methodically yourself in yourself in order to obtain a hollow. Then arouse capture by outside forces and make yourself a lure for them. You shall be flesh, prey, flame and spirit. Wide open.
5th
exercise: To practice the chiaroscuro of love: To live in intimacy with a stranger, not in order to draw him closer, or to make him known, but rather to keep him strange, remote: unapparent – so unapparent that his name contains him entirely. And, even in discomfort, to be nothing else, day after day, than the ever open place, the unwaning light in which that one being, that thing, remains forever exposed and sealed off. 3
***
At the heart of Zoo 2011, we do not find individuals, but practices: heterogeneous, singular, divergent practices; practices of subsistence, of resistance, practices that draw planes of consistency. Each practice puts the subject accomplishing it under tension, opening a possibility to go beyond oneself – a life in exercise. And you, viewer, you are also, at this very moment, in practice. Can you feel it? Remember: we are touching each other.
***
Spectators see, feel and understand something in as much as they compose their own poem, as, in their way, do actors or playwrights, directors, dancers or performers. (…)
The collective power shared by spectators does not stem from the fact that they are members of a collective body or from some specific form of interactivity. It is the power each of them has to translate what she perceives in her own way, to link it to the unique intellectual adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as much as this adventure is not like any other. 4
***
At the heart of every practice, there is something that requires a particular care. Let’s call this thing, after Isabelle Stengers, the sedentary component of practices. Stengers emphasis on oikos, domus or sedentarity must be understood in its most literal sense, that is, as relative to ethos, a way of being through which one ‘in-habits’ and produces an existential territory. In this sense, each practice, in its irreducible difference, literally, matters. “The way a practice, a mode of life or a being diverge designates what is important to them, in a sense that is not subjective but constitutive – if what is important to them can’t be made important, they will be mutilated or destroyed.” 5
In the perspective of an ecology of practices that promotes transductive experiences of deterritorialisation, the sedentary component refers to the interiority of a fold, a minima of belonging, a threshold of territoriality, a differential vulnerability – that is, a soul – that constitutes itself as a practical limit against the destructiveness of generalized equivalence. The affirmation of the sedentary component of a vital practice opposes the modernist and hegemonic understanding of economics: all things – all practices – are not equal! “Whoever is engaged in an activity such that all ways of doing are not equivalent” is, in this sense, a practitioner. This means of course that an economic order in which it is normal to “sell one’s own workforce” is an order dedicated to destroy practices.” 6
Where capitalism pretends to offer an enchanted and smooth economic rationality, it is important that we learn how to explicate the question of our vulnerability to that logic that isolates and neutralizes us. Here is why Stengers is so interested in the magical practices of contemporary witches: their first gesture consists in tracing a circle, an inner space in which to produce a collective immunity and thus “creating the closed space where the forces they have a vital need for can be convoked.” This praxis of existential catalysis highlights our own ways of preserving our capacities to hold on and act.
***
Here it is difficult as it were to keep our heads up, — to see that we must stick to the subjects of our everyday thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties, which in turn after all we are quite unable to describe with the means at our disposal. We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.
We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground! 7
***
Your soul is defined by the risk of losing it. It can be torn, forgotten, reduced. It can also be saved. The soul and its constant need for refocusing. But don’t forget: we are modern now. To have a soul obliges us to grapple with the problem of how to inhabit your present. In all eternity. “In your patience you shall possess your souls.” (Luke, 21 :19) In this regard, some practices are more conducive than others, as you well know.
***
Most people take pride at being good at something specific, which happen through the accumulation of experience. Yet the flitting disposition is pressed upon workers from above by the current generation of management revolutionaries, for whom the ethics of craftsmanship is actually something to be rooted out from the workforce. Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right. In management speak, it is called “being ingrown”. The preferred role model is the management consultant, who swoops in and out and whose very pride lies in his lack of particular expertise. Like the ideal consumer, the management consultant presents an image of soaring freedom, in light of which the manual trades appear cramped and paltry: the plumber with his butt crack, peering under the sink. 8
***
The temporality of capital is nothing else than neurotic temporality: dodging the present, clogged past, predictable future; future conjured in the form of risk management, past conjured in the form of commemorations (compulsive rites, if any). But cognitive capitalism now corners each person in the double injunction of settling in a neurotic temporality that, as it is, makes life impossible, and to unfold for one’s sake the dimensions of time simultaneously, by which the accomplishment of life can only be experienced. Maybe the current “crisis” and those to come find, with this subjective tension related to time, their most profound resources. 9
***
We are now arrived at the threshold of communism. Communism understood not as another way of distributing wealth or to manage society, but as an ethical disposition. A disposition to let ourselves be touched, in our contact with other beings, by what is common to us. Disposition to share what we have in common.
***
We get together again as whatever singularities. That is to say not on the basis of a common affiliation, but of a common presence. This is our need for communism. The need for nocturnal spaces, where we can get together beyond our predicates. Beyond the tyranny of recognition Which imposes recognition as a final distance between bodies. As an ineluctable separation.
I make the experience of this slight displacement. The experience of my own desubjectivisation. I become a whatever singularity. My presence starts overflowing the whole apparatus of qualities that are usually associated with me.
I need to become anonymous. In order to be present. The more anonymous I am, the more present I am. 10
- This text was part of a theatrical performance entitled ZOO 2011, created by Rodrigue Jean and Gaétan Nadeau and held at Espace libre from October 11-29 2011. ZOO 2011 presented practitioners coming from a variety of horizons and invited them to simply “do their thing”; the public for its part could freely wander around in the space and think, among other things, about its own relation to the practice of spectatorship.→
- Cooley Windsor, «Futurefarmers Rosary: A series of spiritual Exercises for Perceiving the Soul», 2011→
- Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, State University of New York Press, New York, 1995, p.61→
- Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, Verso, New York, 2009, p.13-16→
- Isabelle Stengers, Au temps des catastrophes, La Découverte, Paris, 2009, p.146→
- Isabelle Stengers, La vierge et le neutrino, Seuil, Paris, 2006→
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations, Blackwell publisher, Oxford, 1997, p.46→
- Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, Penguin Books, New York, 2009→
- Bernard Aspe, Les mots et les actes, Nous, Caen, 2011, p. 129→
- Translated by Patrick-Guy Desjardins→