Metal Works

Richard Serra’s new show of monumental sculptures heralds the artist’s first exhibition in London for 16 years. In a rare interview, he talked with Adrian Searle about the evolution of his ideas and his plans for the future

For over 40 years, American artist Richard Serra has tested the limits and possibilities of sculpture, film and drawing. In the 1960s he began his investigation into the imaginative and physical potential of materials and their relationship with the site and viewer. Since the early 1970s Serra has become best-known for the monumental sculptures he has created for various architectural, urban and landscape settings. In 2007 New York’s Museum of Modern Art honoured Serra’s career with a retrospective and earlier this year his major work Promenade was installed at the Grand Palais, Paris. His current show at Gagosian Gallery, London, runs until 20 December, and includes three new steel sculptures. It is the first exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK since Weight and Measure was presented at the Tate Gallery in 1992. He gave a rare interview to Adrian Searle in London in late September.

ADRIAN SEARLE You have mentioned that Mark Rothko’s late paintings remind you of the poems of Fernando Pessoa, after whom you’ve named a recent sculpture. Could you elaborate on that?


RICHARD SERRA I recently read Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet [which was written in the 1920s but first published in 1982]. In it Pessoa constantly probes his thought and analyses his personal sensations. The book is made up of fragments by a writer who is obsessed with his own emotions. His voice is one of unsparing introspection. The questions he asks over and over again are: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Why do I write?’ By extension, I find myself asking: ‘Why do I make what I do?’ The same probably held true for Rothko. For Pessoa, to think is to live and to feel is merely food for thought. These fragments deal with an endgame, they are Kafka-like, and similar to Rothko’s last 12 years. 


AS Pessoa really only wrote for his friends, which was a problem with the arts in Portugal for much of the 20th century; he was talking to a small bunch of people.

RS Portugal feels very nostalgic. The Portuguese constantly look back to their lost empire. Although it is part of Europe, when you are there, you feel like you are on an island. 


AS Yes, in fact, in José Saramago’s novel The Stone Raft (1986) Portugal drifts away from the coast of Europe. I found myself, not long ago, reading something you wrote for Steve Reich, for his 70th birthday tribute. You were talking about Yvonne Rainer and the whole gang in New York in the 1960s and how you were each others’ critics, which is not unlike Pessoa writing for his friends.


RS We were a small group making work for each other – and the women led the charge. 


AS Yvonne Rainer was here in London a few weeks ago, talking about dance. 


RS I wonder if young people now know anything of the pivotal role she played in the 1960s. She opened up and carried much of the scene for six or seven years.


AS The talk was full, although it was 90 percent dance people; but I was chatting to a successful young choreographer working in London, and he’d never heard of her.


RS She was one of the best performers I’ve ever seen. She would bring all kinds of objects into play. Her dancers would throw powder, dirt, each other and mattresses around and use different sorts of people and different body types: young, old, fat and thin, running and jumping and falling constantly. I remember in one performance she lowered an enormous transparent flat, a grid, in front of the entire width and height of the stage, held it for a couple of seconds and lifted it. This was one grand mocking gesture: the frontality, the stage, the grid, the perspective measure, every part of it dissected. I never forgot it.


AS I know you think a lot about duration as one of the dimensions of sculpture.


RS Duration is a subtext of how the space of the work is experienced: the diversity of time, the intensity of time or time in particular is what individuates us more than anything else. Everyone’s relationship to their own time is more personal, more private and more singular than anything I can think of. My interest is in what animates movement, what fragments movement, what dislocates movement, what disorients movement. For me temporality is a value.


AS There is still so much interest in the conversations artists were having in the 1960s, when there wasn’t much of an audience for art.


RS I’ll give you an example. We’d all go to Max’s Kansas City, and one night, when I was with Michael Snow, we heard there was a performance across the street and we went over to watch it on the 22nd floor. The choreographer and dancer Simone Forti was going to present a performance along with Rauschenberg. When we arrived, the Rauschenberg performance had already begun. He was pulling a series of boxes across the floor with people underneath them accompanied by random musical sounds, a predictable Cageian event. All of a sudden the performance ended, the room went dark and light appeared in the space outside of one window and then someone fell outside the window; then another, and another, and another. At least two dozen people dropped through space. It was then that you realized that the first person who had fallen by, fell by again. This was repeated four or five times. What was out of view was that mattresses had been piled on the roof of the 21st floor so that the performers could land, run up the stairwell and return to jump again from the 23rd floor. Michael was completely stunned. I remember what he said: ‘This is a Muybridge framing device in real time.’ These were performances we did for each other and afterwards we would always pass a hat around. Talk about a cohesive group, we were each other’s audience. At the time I was living with Joan Jonas and Robert Smithson was my best friend.


AS These kinds of dialogues happen against a work and a context that have been lost. 


RS I think every generation defines itself; only the issues and options change. In the 1960s there was no cultural industry. Large scale merchandising did not exist. It could be that the over-emphasis on merchandising has become problematic for a younger generation. But I don’t know.


AS There’s certainly a real break between generations – perhaps we all felt that. When I was an art student, I didn’t want to hear about David Hockney or about the American Greenberg acolytes we were being told about either. Perhaps it’s the same now – art students now don’t want to hear about Damien Hirst. For you, were you trying to break with something or make with something?


RS Breaking or making did not seem to be on the radar. Postmodernism has created an overt interest in historical references. It was not our problem. Back in the mid-1960s, if I had to give a brief on what I thought sculpture needed to be, it was to do away with the object, to get sculpture off the pedestal and expand the space of the field, to open up the container and to foreground time and bodily movement in relation to the intensity of place and context. I am basically still doing that. When I graduated from Yale in painting, I went to Paris for a year, got a Fulbright and went to Florence where I stopped painting and decided to start over again. I began to stuff animals. I did not have the faintest idea what I was doing.


AS You did taxidermy?


RS Yes, I was stuffing animals. I started juxtaposing live animals with stuffed animals, making surrogate zoos. I collected 22 animals of all kinds – some live, some dead – and a lot of other debris. In a broad sense it was a kind of assemblage that was an extension of what was going on with Rauschenberg and a lot of other people who had come out of the American scene. I had reduced it to barnyard Surrealism. Even then, I thought of it as student work, nothing more, and went back to America. But it did get me into using the diversity of non-art materials.


AS Facts, factual materials, real materials. Which is a kind of distinction, isn’t it? I was thinking earlier today, of a nice resonance between your installation in the Tate’s Duveen Galleries in 1992, Weight and Measure, and Martin Creed’s piece Work No. 850 which is taking place now.


RS What is he doing?


AS Every 30 seconds a runner appears at one end of the empty Duveen Gallery and runs as fast as they possibly can to the other end of the empty gallery, where they disappear around the corner, go downstairs, walk the length of the Duveen Gallery, climb the stairs again, go up near the entrance and run. 


RS He’s a performance artist? 


AS Martin makes sculptures and performances and works with orchestras. I feel it’s about the body and it’s about time.


RS It seems to be about measuring a space.


AS There are no barriers. 


RS I like it. 


AS The runner has to dodge gallery visitors, and they have to dodge the runner. It’s a bit like something that was happening between those two blocks you placed there.


RS I told Nicholas Serota, prior to mocking up Weight and Measure, that it would have three components, but then I realized that the centre of the Tate’s Duveen Hall with its circular intersection was an obvious magnet; a collecting zone for the viewer. I decided that I did not need a weight in the middle so I reduced the sculpture to two blocks of differing heights and weights at either end of the hall. I wanted to deal solely with the elevation over the distance. I remember Nick came down to see what I was up to, and for a minute he was taken aback, but he came around. David Sylvester was a big help. He was one of my closest friends at the time.


AS I think Sylvester compared it to an ice-cream van that had somehow arrived in his front garden – a big, ­obdurate mass outside his window blocking the daylight. I remember him trying to deal with his physical relationship to it. There was this strange thing happening between the two related sculptures you showed at Gagosian in New York just after 9/11: you had to go into two different rooms. It’s sort of doing that here in your new show in London. It’s about the presence of the piece you can see and the other one, which you can feel behind your back and which is nearby but not visible. One also had this same sensation walking between the five enormous elements of Promenade (2008) in the Grand Palais in Paris.

RS Promenade was totally driven by the context. The internal relationships of measurement and placement related to the central axis of the site. The placement of the rectangular plates followed a strict logic in that the plates tilted away and towards the center line in an asymmetrical counterpoint. However, the perception of the sculpture contradicts the logic of its relation to the site. As you walk inbetween the plates you see fragments, you see the work in part, you cannot grasp the whole. The plates appear and disappear, lean away or toward you depending on your location. I work in different ways with space. Take Open Ended (2008) in my new show in London which belongs to a series of sculptures that combine toruses and spheres. Open Ended grows out of a piece called Blindspot (2002–3), which comprises three toruses and three spheres that diminish in length as they create a path that leads to a dead end: you have to reverse to exit. The corners where toruses and spheres join are not on axis. Each path as you turn the corner leads you directly into a wall, so you have to counter step and it throws off your cadence.


AS Because you don’t actually see the turn until a little too late.


RS Yes, it dislocates your orientation and then you have to step off in another direction, and you are not quite sure where you are headed.


AS That’s part of the control of the piece, isn’t it? 


RS The control of your duration. It breaks your cadence. 


AS Exactly, and you don’t want to turn it into a fairground ride, so it’s mis-stepping you without becoming some squeaky entertainment. It’s not playing with your body in the way that a roller-coaster might. 


RS The experience of these works has nothing to do with entertainment. There is an obvious disorientation and at some point you lose your sense of direction. You are trying to navigate an unknowable condition.


AS When I was inside Open Ended, I kept thinking, this is too big. 


RS There seems to be more space than can possibly occupy this place and the room has completely evaporated. 


AS It is as if the space that’s outside is too small for the space inside.


RS Open Ended makes me more anxious than Blindspot. Now you’d say it’s open-ended, and it ought not to be because there’s a release in this piece in that you have two entrances/exits. I am not interested in the number of parts but I am interested in their interlocking or their spatial unfolding. The interest for me is not the specificity of form, the fact that they are toruses and spheres. I am interested in what they can do. The interlocking of three sets of toruses and spheres sets up a seemingly irrational continuation of spaces. In effect, you lose track of where you are and you cannot anticipate where you are going. The internal differences explain the various moments of tension and release. The singular dynamic of bodily movement close to the surface of the curvature is responsible for the intensity of the experience of space.

AS Your body is a pendulum. 


RS Yes, and you want to get out of there, so your cadence speeds up.


AS It engenders feelings of anxiety and of losing one’s place, and being made very aware of one’s equilibrium or lack of it. And yet we habitually suppress these feelings of doubt and uncertainty, or we wouldn’t be able to cross the road, would we? 


RS Or we deny them, because we don’t want to take the time to investigate them. I got interested in curves because I felt it was very difficult to understand them, to understand what is on the opposite side, to understand the difference between convexity and concavity. Not too many contemporary architects or sculptors have worked with curves.


AS Oscar Niemeyer has, a bit.


RS In Brazil, OK, and maybe Le Corbusier, but very few people have dealt with that problem. I think that one of the things that really outraged people about Tilted Arc (1981) was not that it was a big sculpture that bisected a plaza, but that it was a big curve.

AS Most curves can only be seen from the air.


RS In circulation, maybe, but not in structure. And certainly no one was using reverse curves in structure.


AS Is that for technical reasons? Is it easier to do that now than it was 20 or 30 years ago?


RS There was not much interest in the invention of form. It was easier to mass produce right angles than to mass produce curves. Today you can easily mass produce curves because of developments in computer technology. The right angle reflected the zeitgeist of the 20th century but that is over. I think the speed of the skin dominates now. 


AS There’s a lot of globby architecture and blobs. Norman Foster’s done a few, but I’m not a fan of them at all. Zaha Hadid has made some wonderful maquettes of forms that curve, of envelopes, so you’re not sure whether you’re on the inside or the outside, like undersea molluscs.


RS I’m interested in the structure of the form that makes the space. I’m not so interested in the free-flowing blob, although I can understand why people are interested in them. When I was working in rubber, very early on, I actually made a piece called Blob.


AS So you made a blob, and you made Charlie Brown (2000). How did you get from the blob to Fernando Pessoa?


RS I also named pieces after David Sylvester, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Charlie Chaplin.

AS It seems to work very well. They have something to do with the people and nothing at all to do with them.


RS Well, they have nothing to do with them. But somebody may ask, who’s Pessoa? And if that encourages curiosity about him, that’s all to the good.


AS He should be much better known than he is. Or perhaps he is known just enough, in the right way, at the moment.


RS That might be true. The people who need to will find him.


AS It’s true of art too in some ways. All that debate about Tilted Arc – wasn’t there a stage play about it, or a novel? Did William Gass write a novel about it? 


RS I think a lot of people used it for a lot of purposes, I didn’t follow it. For a while it just got to be an albatross.


AS There was a bit of a fuss about your Abu Ghraib drawing (Stop Bush, 2004) in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, wasn’t there? It was then reduced to Stop BS, I think, when it was turned into a poster.


RS It wasn’t the Whitney that made the fuss. In order to mass produce posters for distribution by political action committees we couldn’t use Bush’s name.


AS It means the same thing anyway, bullshit or something, one or the other. In a way it was contiguous with the sculptures, or your other oil-stick drawings. That silhouette is so unmistakable now. That silhouette has become the ideogram of the entire war.


RS It also has a multiple read-out. In the States it’s the Ku-Klux-Klan, racism, atrocity, Bush, American aggression, it’s all of it. I tried to reduce the detail in order to open the image up to multiple readings.


AS We reduce, and we read things, and just as we walk through a sculpture we think we know, we imagine what the other side of the concavity is going to be like, and then when we meet it, it’s even more of a surprise because we’ve got a mental image.


RS I think that a lot of depiction and illustration leads you back to the references that are contained within them, not within you.


AS Are you still looking at a lot of younger art?


RS I try to look at as much as I can. In New York right now there’s a lot of neo-assemblage, a lot of bricolage and photographs. The big influential figure once again seems to be Rauschenberg.


AS Yes, I saw the sculpture show at the re-vamped New Museum in New York and that was very much the mode, and also at the Whitney Biennial. Have you ever wanted to use lighter materials – straw or balsawood?


RS I’m interested in weight and mass and measure; it’s what my sensibility responds to. 


AS When you were in Paris for the Grand Palais show earlier this year, talking with the curator Alfred Pacquement, you described walking the space and thinking about it, and then going back to your sandpit where you arrange elements like a model. How big are those maquettes?


RS Small – some an inch to a foot, but mostly half inch to a foot.


AS Do you approach a work in the landscape in the same way?


RS If I can, I mock up full scale. I mocked up a full-scale piece recently for a collector. He didn’t want it. It happens.


AS I guess this has probably always been a problem between artists and their patrons, going back hundreds of years. Now it seems that the market is king. 


RS We are all implicated in the market, we can’t get away from it. But your work does not have to be market-driven, and you don’t have to produce merchandise. I think right now for a lot of artists the market is the context and that explains the recent mass production of luxury goods.


AS It’s just that everyone else’s interests become implicated in your interests when you’re asked to do things, and you have to say no, a lot. That’s the big thing.


RS The fact that the market has become the context is just a recent phenomenon. I think there’s a fiction perpetrated by the market that the aesthetic value is synonymous with price. The art market is probably one of the only unregulated speculative markets out there.


AS They haven’t got someone trying to punch 70 billion dollars into it. 


RS No, I think the bubble might just burst. 


AS It’s terrifying. The physical experience of being with someone’s work – your work, for example, doesn’t just resist the lie: it resists all that flim-flam. It slows you down.


RS My work is not motivated by resistance.


AS It seems to be a function of its physicality and its specificity.


RS It brings you back to yourself and the place where you are. You have to deal with your internal relationships, both physical and psychological and you either deal with it or you don’t.


AS Fernando Pessoa, which is a rectangle, is positioned so one longer side faces the window. The other side is always in shadow. It holds its space, and it invites a particular physical relationship with it and with the space it occupies.


RS It was the most simple and most singular statement I could make and it deals with everything that’s relevant to my work.

Richard Serra with Fernando Pessoa  (The poet is a faker who is so good at his act… He even fakes the pain of pain he feels in fact)


AS There’s such a nakedness with the kind of work you make too: it will either cut it or it won’t. 


RS That’s what artists do: they deal with their vulnerabilities. But you can’t foresee how you’re going to be misused. 


AS They have Mark Rothko T-shirts at Tate Modern and scarves in his autumnal russets and oranges and what looks like a tie-dye T-shirt in grey and black, which is, for me, a horrible apotheosis and an appalling idea. Anyway, what are your plans now?


RS I went to Dunkirk. There’s a possibility of building a piece there. Then I’m building a piece for Norman Foster for his home in Geneva, and two pieces for the Prado.


AS Dunkirk is amazing. Hard to escape the history of that coast. 


RS I’m going to have to deal with it. That is the context. 


AS All those incredible concrete structures from both wars.


RS What’s interesting about those concrete structures is that there is no foundation to them, so they’re continually shifting in the sand.


AS Do you think about getting older?


RS It’s interesting, yesterday someone asked me that, and I said, I try not to. I never want to look over my shoulder. 


AS There’s a great last interview with Frank Zappa when he had prostate cancer. They said, how do you want to be remembered, and he said, it doesn’t matter, really, if I’m remembered or not. It’s not the point.


RS Exactly, and all he was really interested in was making his work. There is a purpose and dignity to that.


AS So, will Barack Obama win? That’s the other thing.


RS I hope so. But there’s a strong racist element in America and it is hard to predict how that will influence the outcome of the election. When people pull that lever, you don’t know what’s going to happen. I met Obama and I found him intelligent and intellectually adroit. It may be that America can’t deal with a statesman of that stature.

                                 Serra portraying ‘The Architect’ in Matthew Barney’s ‘Cremaster 3′

Adrian Searle is art critic for the Guardian. 

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About this article

Published on 27/10/08

Richard Serra, TTI London (2007), weatherproof steel, installation view

Through the Glasses Darkly

What if the between-the-lines Republican message (don’t be afraid, there will be no real change) is the true illusion?

By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

When the hero of John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live puts on a pair of weird sunglasses that he has stumbled upon in an abandoned church, he notices a billboard that once invited us to a Hawaii beach holiday now simply displays the words:

“MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Ad copy on another billboard — this one for a new color TV — says, “DON’T THINK, CONSUME!”

The glasses, then, function as a device for the critique of ideology. In other words, they enable him to see the real message lying beneath the glossy, colorful surface.

What would we see if we were to observe the Republican presidential campaign through such glasses?The first thing would be a long series of contradictions and inconsistencies:

• Their call to reach across party lines — while waging the cultural war politics of “us” against “them.”

• Their warning that the candidates’ family life should be off limits — while parading their families on stage.

• Their promises of change — while offering the same old programs (lower taxes and less social welfare, a belligerent foreign policy, etc.).

• Their pledge to reduce state spending — while incessantly praising President Reagan. (Recall Reagan’s answer to those who worried about the exploding debt: “It is big enough to take care of itself.”)

• Their accusations that Democrats privilege style over substance — which they deliver at perfectly staged media events.

The next thing we would see is that these and other inconsistencies are not a weakness, but a source of strength for the Republican message. Republican strategists masterfully exploit the flaws of liberalism: Its patronizing “concern” for the poor that is combined with a thinly disguised indifference toward — if not outright contempt for — blue-collar workers, and its politically correct feminism that is usually combined with an underlying mistrust of women in power. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was a hit on both counts, parading both her working-class husband and her femininity.

The earlier generations of women politicians (Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and even, up to a point, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton) were what can be referred to as “phallic” women. They acted as “iron ladies” who imitated and tried to outdo male authority, to be “more men than men themselves.”

Writing in Le Point, a French weekly, Jacques-Alain Miller, a follower of the late French philospher Jacques Lacan, pointed out that Palin, on the contrary, proudly displays her femininity and motherhood. She has a “castrating” effect on her male opponents, not by being more manly than them, but by sarcastically downgrading the puffed-up male authority. According to Miller, Palin instinctively knows that male “phallic” authority is a posture, a semblance to be exploited and mocked. Recall how she mocked Sen. Barack Obama’s work as a community organizer.

Palin provides a “post-feminist” femininity without complexity, uniting the features of mother, prim teacher (glasses, hair in a bun), public figure and, implicitly, sex object, proudly displaying the “first dude” as a phallic toy. The message is that she doesn’t lack anything — and, to add insult to injury, it was a Republican woman who realized this left-liberal dream. It is as if she simply is what left-liberal feminists want to be. No wonder the Palin effect is one of false liberation: “Drill, baby, drill!” Feminism and family values! Big corporations and blue collars!

So, back to Carpenter’s They Live. To get the true Republican message, one should take into account not only what is said but what is implied.

Where we hear the message of populist frustration over Washington gridlock and corruption, the glasses would show a condoning of the public’s refusal to understand: “We allow you NOT to understand — so have fun, vent your frustration! We will take care of business. We have enough behind-the-scenes experts who can fix things. In a way, it’s better for you not to know.” (Recall Vice President Dick Cheney’s hints at the dark side of power, as he successfully orchestrated an expansion of presidential executive power.)

And where the message is the promise of change, the glasses would show something like this: “Don’t worry, there will be no real change, we just want to change some small things to make sure that nothing will really change.” The rhetoric of change, of troubling Washington’s stagnant waters, is a permanent Republican staple. (Recall former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s populist anti-Washington rise to power in 1994.)

Let us not be naïve here: Republican voters know there will be no real change. They know the same substance will go on with changes in style. This is part of the deal.

Four years ago, Sen. John Kerry lost because he was President Bush with a human face. Today, Sen. John McCain is Bush with a lipsticked face. It’s a rhetorical lipstick of “No bullshit!” When Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, author of the bestselling On Bullshit, was asked which U.S. politician breaks out of the predominant bullshitting, he named McCain — and thereby tragi-comically missed a key point. Talking straight, displaying no-bullshit honesty, can be the cleverest form of bullshitting, a mere populist pose.

What if, however, the between-the-lines Republican message (don’t be afraid, there will be no real change) is the true illusion, not the secret truth? What if there really will be a change? Or, to paraphrase the Marx brothers: McCain and Palin look like they want a change and talk like they want a change — but this shouldn’t deceive us, they might very well accomplish a change!

Perhaps this is the true danger, since it would be change in the direction of “Country first!” and of “Drill, baby, drill!”

Luckily, as an electoral blessing in disguise, a sobering thing happened to remind us where we really live: in the reality of global capitalism. The state is planning emergency measures to spend hundreds of billions of dollars — if not $1 trillion — to repair the consequences of the financial crisis caused by free-market speculations.

The lesson is clear: The market and state are not opposed. Indeed, strong state interventions are needed to keep markets balanced.

The initial Republican reaction to the financial meltdown was a desperate attempt to reduce it to a minor misfortune that could easily be healed by a proper dose of the old Republican medicine (a proper respect for market mechanisms, etc.). In short, the Republicans’ between-the-lines message was this: We allow you to continue to dream.

However, all the political posturing of lower state spending became irrelevant after this sudden brush with the real. Today, even the strongest advocates of diminishing the excessive role of Washington accept the necessity for a state intervention that is sublime in its almost unimaginable quantity. Confronted with this sublime grandeur, all the “no bullshit” bravado was reduced to a confused mumble. Where, today, are McCain’s steely resolve and Palin’s sarcasm?

But was the financial meltdown really the awakening from a dream? It depends on how the meltdown will be perceived by the general public. In other words, which interpretation will win? Which “story” about it will predominate?

When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field of “discursive” ideological competition opens up. In Germany in the late ’20s, Adolf Hitler won the competition for the narrative that explained to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it. (His plot was the Jewish plot.) In France in 1940, Marshall Petain’s narrative, that France lost because of the Jewish influence and democratic degeneration, won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat.

Consequently, the main task of the ruling ideology is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system as such, but on, say, lax legal regulations and the corruption of big financial institutions. Against this tendency, we should insist on the key question: which “flaw” of the system as such opens up the possibility for — and continuous outbreaks of — such crises and collapses?

The first thing to bear in mind is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one. After the dot-com bubble exploded in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across party lines was to facilitate real estate investments to keep the economy growing and prevent recession. Today’s meltdown is the price paid for the United States avoiding a prolonged recession five years ago.

The danger is that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one that, instead of waking us from a dream, will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry — not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but also about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and U.S. interventionism in order to keep the economy running.

Sarah Palin: Operation “Castration”
Jacques-Alain Miller
translated by Jake Bellone with James Curley-Egan

 

The choice of Sarah Palin is a sign of the times. In politics, the feminine enunciation is hence called to dominate. But be careful! It’s no longer about women who play elbows, modeling themselves on the men. We are entering an era of postfeminist women, women who, without bargaining, are ready to kill the political men. The transition was perfectly visible during Hillary’s campaign: she began playing the commander in chief and, since that didn’t work, what did she do? She sent a subliminal message, one that said something like: “Obama? He’s got nothing in the pants.” And she immediately took it back, but it was too late. Sarah Palin is not only picking up where she left off but, being younger by fifteen years, she is otherwise ferocious, slinging feminine sarcasm like a natural; she overtly castrates her male adversaries (and with such frank jubilation!) and their only recourse is to remain silent: they have no idea how to attack a woman who uses her femininity to ridicule them and reduce them to impotence. For the moment, a woman who plays the “castration” card is invincible.

In France, we were able to see Ségolène accomplish Operation “Castration” on Fabius and Strauss-Kahn, but, subsequently, she tried to give herself a motherly image and thus she neglected Sarkozy, who was able to paint her as a twit. And thus she joined the ranks of Martine Aubry or Michele Alliot-Marie, the standard models…

What is the precise difference between the women of these two generations? The first ones imitated man, respected the phallus, and performed as if they had one. The second wave knows that the phallus is only a semblance and, furthermore, one not to be taken seriously: it is the de-complexified femininity. A Sarah Palin puts forward no lack: she fears nothing, churns out children all while holding a shotgun, and presents herself as an unstoppable force, “a pitbull with lipstick”.

Has Obama already lost? By not choosing Hillary as his partner – in the instances of his spouse, who is quite a pitbull herself – he paved the way for McCain to drive right in. Thanks to Palin, McCain is back in the race. Sarah impassions America, she brings a new Eros to politics. If Obama wins, she has better chances to be his challenger in four years. If it’s McCain, Hillary will be his number one adversary. In any case, a new race of political women rise to power.

There are moments in one’s existence that stand out, as if of a more solid texture, drawn in stronger lines contrasting with the uzziness and fathomless ambiguity of the rest of life. And they really are charged with objective meaning, imparted by the movement of a sort of historic overdetermination. Often that special quality only reveals itself retrospectively, but sometimes, too, it is perceived immediately.

That is what I experienced on the day, in autumn 1959, when I first glanced through an issue – number 3, I think – of the SI [Situationist International]. At the time, I participated in the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, and in the journal of the same name, for which I wrote, as was the rule, under a pseudonym: P. Canjuers. That day, as a few of us were going through the weekly mail, my eye was attracted by that sleek, elegant publication, with its scintillating cover and incredible title. I took grabbed hold of it, and immediately began to explore what I gradually came to see as a new-found land of modernity, bizarre but fascinating.

Now we, at S. ou B., felt that we epitomized modernity, and I continue to think us completely justified in doing so. S. ou B. had broken with orthodox Marxism-Leninism, and gone on to radically criticize the Eastern European Communist regimes, but also to reformulate the criticism of capitalism, through the analysis both of its most sophisticated forms of domination, and of the most advanced experiences of the working class movement. Among these, the revolutionary workers’ councils in Hungary in particular fed our thinking about what, positively, might be the content of a truly revolutionary program.

How passionate were those years of searching, its fever further intensified by the position of quasi intellectual clandestinity to which the utter rejection of our ideas confined us. For, despite the Kruschev report and the uprisings in Poland and Hungary, the French political scene was still essentially paralysed by the intellectual blackmail of both Stalinists and the most cowardly “pentiti” of bourgeois ideology, such as Sartre. So we explored the deep waters Nautilus-like, almost unknown to the world on the surface, freely and audaciously, to a point that would perhaps not have been possible had we been obliged to battle foot by foot against dishonest opponents who, furthermore, had nothing of interest to say to us.

And now, looking through this perfectly singular booklet, I discovered a small group of unknown people who did have some terribly exciting things to say to us. Definitely strange things for us, with our eyes glued to the Marxist horizon, even though the point, for many of us, was to travel beyond it; totally inhabitual in regard to the messages sent out to us by other tiny groups intent on saving some vestiges of the revolutionary past from the Stalinist disaster. The strangeness was not uncanny, but rather, attractive, incredibly enticing. The criticism of art and culture led on to a utopian, liberated life, already experimented by these young adventurers in practical poetics such as “derives” around cities, or the illustrated description of a fantastic place called the “Yellow City.” And that utopia already haunted the people whose faces could be seen in a few dim photos, sitting around cafe tables engaged in ardent, infinite conversation that lofted them through the nights. With the frenzy of escaped prisoners, in the secret folds of the city, they too were struggling to elucidate the deepest roots of modern misery, and living, in fantasy, the upheaval that would overthrow it. And the journal was something of the tale of their efforts, in a sharp, tense style, almost stiffened in the same arrogant conceit with which we too affected to steel ourselves, both to reflect back on our opponents the scorn they inflicted on us, and to convince ourselves of how radical we really were.

As I read that issue of the SI, then, I realized that what was occurring was an objective encounter, so to speak, a criticism in action of “separation,” to use an expression in consonance with my emphatic feeling of the time: a meeting at the acme (no doubt hidden to everyone but us) of modernity. Over the following months, Debord and I checked out in detail just how necessary and fertile that encounter was, during long talks in bistros, and endless roamings through the city streets. In the project of self-management embracing every aspect of social life, as expressed by the workers’ movement at the heights of its spontaneous creativity – from the Paris Commune to 1956 in Hungary – resided the social and political underpinnings for the utopia of people constantly inventing their “use of life,” like a perpetual composing of music or poetry. And in turn, the subversion of the artistic and cultural institution, which the SI claimed to embody, came as an extension and a consecration, so to speak, in what was reputed to be the highest spheres, of the subversion of every agency of domination and exploitation. The text that we finally wrote jointly, and pompously entitled Preliminaires pour une definition de l’unite du programme revolutionnaire, definitely gives an idea of the ambition behind our exchanges, but tells hardly anything about how rich they were, and even less of the friendship that was built up through that conversation.

In a restaurant on rue Mouffetard, on July 20, 1960, we put the finishing touches on what we viewed as the guidelines of an agreement between the cultural vanguard and the vanguard of the proletarian revolution. We were very finicky about the title and its print, designed, according to Debord, so that the document would be referred to as the “Preliminaires” – and I smiled, indulgent and foolish, knowing nothing about communication at the time. After that, we parted for the summer, each with the task of circulating the paper among his comrades. In the fall, I had to leave France for 9 or 10 months, and during my absence I learned that Debord had formally become a member of S. ou B, was participating fully in its activities, especially during the group’s action within the major strikes that shook the Belgian Borinage in the winter of 1961. The news surprised me. His membership, I felt, exceeded the closeness we had actually achieved: and above all, it seemed useless, and in fact, in our discussions Debord had expressed the view that each group should continue, in practice, to follow its own path. The news of his resignation came as less of a surprise, since he had based it on his disagreement with the internal functioning of the group, and on the role played by some domineering individuals. Apparently, he had attempted to foment a revolt among the younger members, mostly students, but that had been no more than a Fronde.

I have stressed the episode of Debord’s relations with S. ou B. because it seems significant on several counts. First, the person I knew and loved at that time was, so to speak, a nascent Debord. Although he already had a brilliant career as an agitator in the cultural sphere behind him, the most singular traits of his personality as a revolutionary, as well as the most fertile and most perspicacious of his inventions still retained a vivaciousness and an accuracy that would subsequently be somewhat adulterated by his obsession with being public enemy number 1, and also by the structural stupidity of disciples, from whom he proved unable to take sufficient distance. At the time there were Khayati, Kotanyi, Jorn . . . friends, not disciples.

Above all there is a need, I think, to point up the importance, for the road Debord followed, of that involvement with S. ou B. – particularly so since he and most everyone who has had anything to say about his adventure have practically systematically ignored it. The point is obviously not to stake any claim either for S. ou B. and even less for myself, as having fathered the thinking of a man who went on to become a celebrity. To the contrary, it is the objective nature of our encounter that I would emphasize once again, and what it revealed about a particular moment in history. Debord did not succeed in wrenching himself from the curse that Stalinism and the bureaucratization of the working class organizations had laid on the revolutionary movement by dint of reading Hegel, the young Marx and Lukacs. It was the insurgent Hungarian workers and the Councils they created who lifted that curse, at least for those who were prepared to listen to what they had to say.

At this point in his itinerary, Debord was ready. He had broken with the Lettrists and with a criticism that remained complacently restricted to culture: in his opinion, the cultural vanguards did nothing but repeat ad nauseam the scene of the break-off with art, originally performed by the Dadaists after World War I. A clean break was called for, and a way of moving beyond art had to be found. Art conceived as play, as the freeing of desire, as subversion, as negation of the deathly, repressive social order, for this was the sense of modern art, as Debord saw it. The creation of “situations” was a response to that exigency: “The arts of the future will be upheavals of situations, or they will not be.” There was clearly a parallel between the revolution as the invention of society and those “upheavals of situations” as the invention of daily life.

Now, the link between so radical a demand and the concrete action of the proletariat turned out to be thinkable again. For anyone intent on seeing the true situation, the Budapest insurgents – about whom Debord had learned first hand from his friend Attila Kotanyi – had overthrown not only the colossal statue of Stalin, but also the terrifying image of a proletariat whose mission it was, as the sadistic agent of historic necessity, to force all of humanity, once and for all, to endorse industrial discipline, the cult of the leader, the annihilation of individuals, reduced to being the masses, etc. For artists and intellectuals, that proletariat was truly a bogy man, who so many had determined to serve nonetheless, out of fear, masochism or ambition.

In the West, by the same token, all those libertarian anarchists, anti-authoritarian Marxists, council communists, etc. who had never ceased to denounce the Stalinist imposture, began to gain some acknowledgement. And among them, S. ou B. and such sister groups as Solidarity in England, Correspondence in the USA, and Unita Proletaria in Italy, had undertaken a complete reinterpretation of the proletarian experience, highlighting the significance, for a liberatory movement, not only of the great moments of revolutionary creation, but of the everyday struggles around the work process and the creativity with which workers combat the disciplinary industrial organization. In doing so, S. ou B. revived the radicality characteristic of the anarchists, and of the very beginnings of the socialist movement, and geared thinking about the revolutionary utopia (“the contents of socialism”) to call every aspect of life into question, from the shape of cities to gender relations.

Clearly, then, there was nothing fortuitous in the arrival of an issue of the SI in the mailbox of S. ou B., any more than in the passionate interest it drew from a young member of that group, or the excited discussions that ensued. . . . And conversely, the reader will understand that when such themes as the criticism of daily life or all-encompassing self-management became the battle cries of the SI years later, I was not overwhelmed by their novelty, and I was surely not the only one.

How is it, then, that my excitement of some 30 years ago, when I first discovered the SI, is still tingling – not as some narcissistic pleasure in reliving the vanished past, but truly as the ongoing perception of an invaluable uniqueness? It is, I believe, because of the sense of form and the artistic quality that inhabited everything Debord undertook, and contributed enormously to making him effectively subversive.

I am of course not by any means contending that Debord should be embalmed in museums of modern art. It is true that he boasted of being the inventor of the major modern-day cinematographic innovations. . . . And one could also argue that as a virtuoso in the collage, photomontage and “detournement” of ads and comics, he was a great pop artist, – but the only sense in doing so would be for the (mediocre) pleasure of drawing screams from his devotees. Or again he may, as late sycophants would have it, be ranked among the great French writers of this century, thanks to his resolute style and the fine boldness of his assertions. And Sollers, who is one of Paris’ highest-paid literary clowns, and can therefore get away with anything, even took advantage of his position to subject Debord, alive and kicking, to the insult of claiming to be his spiritual heir; shortly thereafter he supported Balladur for President.

No, what I would like to demonstrate is quite the opposite: how the artistic treatment, so to speak, applied by Debord to revolutionary activity constitutes the exact, faithful expression of the contents of that activity, and gives its perspective proper depth.

To call Debord an artist is obviously something of a paradox. His criticism of art, intended to be devastating, was two-faceted. Modern art, on the one hand, with its succession of repetitious vanguards incapable of surpassing themselves, has exhausted its critical bite on alienated existence. But on the other hand and more deeply, art contrasts with “true life” in that it is congealed, so to speak, and therefore doomed to be no more than a cemetery of moments, affording fictitious, fallacious fulfilment of desires.

The same alienating force that Debord would later extend to the entire functioning of society, through the concept of the spectacle, applied, then, to the very principle of art. Art was nothing but separation from life.

Perhaps the explanation of the paradox by which the promulgator of so vivid a criticism actually turns out to be an artist, and profoundly so, resides in the fact that this criticism misses its mark, leaving its object intact, in essence. In fact, to reduce 20th century art to the movement of negation embodied by those vanguards is to mistake official art and some historicizing discourse on art for art work itself. The fact that Dada, and above all Duchamp, traced the theoretical limit of 20th century art with exemplary clarity – namely, that in the last resort it is the signature that makes the work of art, and for anything to be art the condition, necessary and sufficient, is that an artist decides it is – has in no way prevented art since then from being rich and meaningful within that limit. In striving obstinately to define what present-day art can or should be, the vanguards have succeeded only in becoming the “art pompier” of the second half of this century, in the person of Beuys, Buren and so many others – and in this it really has succeeded. And again, in any reference to vanguards, it is important not to align them all on any single historical trend. The Cobra movement, for instance, exemplifies a positive renewal much more than the work of negation.

This work of negation, which cannot be completed by art itself and can only achieve completion when life itself surpasses art – in “situations” – seems to rehash the old denial not only of art, but of symbolization, and of mediation by signs or figuration. To condemn art – and thence signs as well, or symbols – as false, in the name of the truthfulness of life or of things themselves, is not a judgment but a pure act of violence: does that make it revolutionary? Swift derided the academicians of Lagado who replaced words by specimens of things, in their attempt to reform language by doing away with its unfortunate polysemia, that is to say its very power of symbolism: endless transports were needed to have the slightest conversation!

Symbolization has avenged itself of this violent dismissal by taking over the very field of “destructive” activity to which Debord devoted himself, and by conferring the aura of the work of art on his life, as well as on his writings and films. And this came about through play and style.

As we all know, nothing is more serious than play, where the exercise of freedom adventures as close as possible to material and social constraints, or to chance; it guards us, then – but at such great risk ! – from the most repugnant kind of comfort: repetition – death in disguise in the eyes of Debord. But its seriousness also derives from its always, and especially in revolutionary action, being a world-play. Be it in tarots, chess or go, the physical objects and the rules of the game compose an analogue of the world, and each game or each move reorganizes and recommences the world. In the case of a group of revolutionaries, however small, the form of its organization, the way it functions, the content and the modalities of its action all prefigure, as in a microcosm, the desired state of the world. This was one of the bitter lessons drawn from the fate of the Bolshevik party, and the group S. ou B. was intent on drawing the consequences and on behaving immediately, concretely and on its own microscopic scale, as we thought a free society would demand.

Debord quite naturally extended this exigency to the area in which his desire to break with the “old world” was in fact most strongly focused, and which I will not call everyday life, because of the somewhat futile connotation of the term, but rather, “the use of life,” use of the fleeting moments, and of the most concrete contents of situations. And play was necessarily the model here, in the sense that the artist is playing when the progress of his work proposes an unheard of, desirable modulation of the course of time or the unfolding of space. “Experimenting” with the urban environment was this sort of play: through wanderings imbued with the hues and resonances lent by the peculiar qualities of the places visited, the drinks downed here and there and the remarks exchanged. The same was true of conversation, to be taken almost in the original sense of “shared life,” for it embodied something of a sensual fulfilment of friendship. For Debord it was a verbal derive, the playful experimenting, by several people, of ideas, words, new fancies – and anyone who ever spent some time with him knows how his presence and talk succeeded, in these exchanges with friends, in catalysing and freeing their imagination, in its liveliest expression. With real opponents, on the other hand, the discussion veered to another type of game, which he called a “boxing match” but was actually more of a free-for-all since he had no qualms about resorting to every available means, including the lowliest personal attacks.

In friendship, however, – and I think friendship is what really most accurately prefigured the kind of society he expected a revolution to produce -, he was intent on enforcing the rules dictated, in his opinion, by the constraints inherent in the fight against the existing order, and the degree of freedom required to be worthy to fight. And he often pushed that inflexible stance to the point of formalism, and of arbitrariness as well, since it was he who set those rules unilaterally, and most often left them implicit, the understanding being that they were self-evident. His disciples obviously were incapable of anything but an exaggeration of these practices, turning them into the most putrid fashionable snobbishness.

I myself was victim of that formalism, without even understanding, at the time, what had transpired, since the notion that relations between friends could be regulated by a code was completely alien to me. On the evening when Guy and Michele invited me to dinner at impasse de Clairvaux and served me a chicken-and-French-fries plate bought in some greasy joint on boulevard de Sebastopol, I should have understood that my hour of disgrace had arrived, even if the “insult” was strangely cloaked in an apology – “we’re broke” – which cancelled it and which I definitely could not revile. Had I been less of a fool I would probably have read the signals more fully, and understood that the mixture of chicken-fries plus apology was a sort of self-contradictory compromise between the will to exclude me – clearly imputable to Michele – and a desire to be indulgent. Etc. Here, then, in any case, is the method Debord chose when he felt the time had come to put an end to our friendship, without informing me of his reasons, even in the form of insults. Too bad for me, and for him.

The May ‘68 retreat by the SI, calling itself the council for the pursuit of occupations, into the Institut Pedagogique National (!), seems to me to be an infinitely more serious perversion of this kind of play. In doing so, the SI usurped the title of council which, in its own eyes, was supposed to designate the agency of collective empowerment of the revolutionary masses, turning it into a camouflage for a separate authority handing down judgments – that is, condemnations – of the innumerable protagonists of the May revolt, and above all of those people who dared to defend ideas barely distinguishable from their own.

Playing, under the circumstances, would definitely have demanded that the game be waged on a much broader scope, and Debord would no doubt have lost control of it, and the possibility of imparting a style to it.

No irony is intended in my use of the term “style.” Style, to me, is not an affected form used to facilitate or embellish the communication of a message, the meaning of which is located at some basement level of expressiveness. Play involves style; and so does the revolutionary action of a minority group, the idea being to give shape to a vision of the world that cannot be achieved at its own small scale. Each move or combination of moves outlines a gesture or a figure, projecting an order, however fleeting, into the existent chaos. To speak of beauty or elegance in reference to play is not superficial, but truly imparts the awareness that play operates in the objective world. And again, style cannot be defined as the mark of subjectivity, but rather, as the tension between the ephemeral and the utopian dimensions – between movement, on the one hand, wresting free speech from the inertia and senselessness of the pervading verbal noise to adventure it, in all its vulnerability, suspended over “the cataract of time,” and on the other hand utopia, the projection of a figure offering, by analogy, a foretaste of some desirable ordering of the world.

When a minority group acts, then, it is style more than the necessarily limited material effect that propels reality to a breaking point where open-ended time, and the incompletion of history, and the possibility of revolution make themselves felt, by surprise.

In the work of art this gaping openness to time, signature of its uniqueness, is what Benjamin called the aura. He deemed relinquishment of it necessary, in the name of his melancholic subjection to modern technicity. At a time when the fate of the revolution was believed to be tied to machines and the massified humanity presumably generated by them, he proclaimed “What one man has done can be done again by another” as a liberatory slogan. Now that we know a bit more about machines, and above all about society as a machine, it seems to me that the revolution needs to bet on the postulate that “what one man has done cannot be done again by any other” if we are truly intent on acknowledging equal dignity for all subjects, referred to here as men.

This is the postulate asserted in his practice by Debord, haunted by his horror of repetition and, what comes to the same, by his acute perception of the uniqueness of each moment: “(what is) beyond the violence of intoxication. . . peace, magnificent and fearsome, the true taste of time passing.”

The mirror as a figure – mirror adhering so closely to the fluctuating image of reality, but, at the same time, reversing it – acts as a deeply unifying structure for Debord’s work, and perhaps even for his life, from his writings to the singular critical posture he adopted, and including the contents of that criticism: the concept of the spectacle.

But again, the mirror figure embodies all of Debord’s ambivalence toward any mediation by signs, representation and symbolisation. It would ensnare us in alienation and commodity fetishism, or in the substitute for true life that art extends to us: because it is fake, distorting and fragmented, it is the instrument of domination through the spectacle. It must constantly be broken, to liberate “true life,” to rid oneself of the petrifying hold of images and reassert authenticity, constantly to be reinvented. From Memoires to Panegyrique, however, and in all of his films – down to the palindromic title marking his last film -, the mirror also figures remembrance: a memory both hurt to the quick, ravaged by nostalgia, and at the same time controlled and guided by critical thinking.

In his writing, then, mirrored phrases, used as a mode of criticism in themselves, proliferate. Debord himself theoretized “this insurrectional style that turns the philosophy of wretchedness into the wretchedness of philosophy,” and “is not a negation of style, but the style of negation”: because it ferrets out the instability in the “existing concepts . . . it simultaneously includes the grasp of their rediscovered fluidity, of their necessary destruction.”

On a broader level, the mirror served Debord again, as an instrument for reversing “existing concepts,” in an on-going reflection trained on the course of events, a sort of chronic of current events, of the kind he wrote in the twelve issues of the SI, and in Commentaires. And to me, it is when he did just that, speaking within the surging movement of history, that he saw farthest and aimed most accurately. He had to defend his life and work inch by inch, against concrete, constantly repeated facts, in “the resounding cataract of time.” And through that fight he drew a sort of reasoned, demythifying portrait of present times, yielding the subject matter for theorization, but still retaining the very grain of the event.

But when he came to a halt, and attempted to stand at a distance to construct a theoretical battleship, The Society of the Spectacle, he got bogged down, in my opinion – but I will not attempt to explain my reasons here. The very expression “society of the spectacle” seems abusive to me, but probably because I am captive of the existing meaning of the words. And the word spectacle seems right to me as a metaphor, not as a concept; that is, precisely, not as the generalization that Debord so stubbornly defended. The metaphoric power of the word, so cuttingly critical in partial applications, takes its revenge when Debord attempts to make all of social reality fit into it, and traps him; this is clear in Commentaires, in particular. Society is reduced to the oversimplified model of the conventional theater, and the dialectic of alienation wears thin in a pitiful denunciation of the stagehands pulling the strings behind the scenes. The society of the spectacle then becomes a society of backstage manipulations. . . . Here again, the demythification of how domination works is reduced to the simple denial of the symbolic dimension. The concept of the total spectacle completely flattens out the sphere in which, precisely, the enormous complexity of representation, and of the alienation generated by it, unfolds.

The extraordinary effectiveness of the machinery combining the commodification, the market economy, representative democracy, opinion polls, the mass media and the social sciences resides precisely in the fact that it does not impose its discourse unilaterally, as being the law, but rather, that it is interactive. The TV commentator is not Big Brother, authoritatively proclaiming the official lie, he is John Doe, who reads your mind and utters your thoughts. The agitated clowns on the screen have our faces, our gestures, our voices, and the thundering discourse that oppresses us and drives us to despair is depicted as our own. And in a sense, it is: lies, like taxes, are levied directly at the source. It is from us that a vast scheme extorts the basic material out of which the various organs of the domination-producing apparatus, and the social sciences in particular, then proceed to isolate the active principle of the lie, and to resynthesize a social discourse that is a sort of clone of our own – uncannily familiar. And, stupefied at hearing and seeing ourselves speak and act from outside of our selves, we shut up. Can there be any worse censorship?

Would Debord have agreed with an analysis such as this? Probably not. It hardly matters.

What does matter is that he denounced and described the universal lie proffered by our society about itself and the world; that he showed how this lie destroys reality by saturating everything animate and inanimate with inauthenticity and eliminating the temporal dimension, so that we circle ’round endlessly in the perpetual present of current events. And above all, what matters is that he detected the sickly locus of the devastating lie: the denial of death. “The social absence of death is the same as the social absence of life.” “The spectator mind no longer moves through life toward achievement and toward death.” “He who relinquishes expending his life can no longer admit his own death to himself.”

At such depths of critical thinking, Debord was very much alone. The denial of death also inhabited the revolutionary movement, with its dire need for positivity and optimism. Around ‘68, it was fashionable to qualify death as “reactionary.”

And, too, at such depths there can be no empty talk. Debord was not content to oppose a few statements to the key imposture of the times: his entire work and life were spurred by an awareness of the presence of death, and tensed between the ephemeral and the utopian dimensions. The “true taste of time passing” is also the taste of the true, be it in savouring wine, in certain moments, or in a revolutionary struggle. The presence of the “movement toward death” is the touchstone of authenticity, which revolution should restitute – or institute. It is in this sense that Debord was radically an artist. In the same sense that he acknowledged that his friend Asger Jorn had remained a situationist although, when enjoined to choose between the two, he gave up being a member of the SI to continue his work as painter, sculptor and ceramist. For, as Debord said in Une Architecture sauvage, writing about the perpetual metamorphoses operated by Jorn in his home and garden in Albissola, despite that choice, his life never ceased to be propelled by a constant spate of invention and desires.

Being by numbers – interview with artists and philosopher Alain Badiou – Interview

Lauren Sedofsky

Alain Badiou is an anomaly. What he has attempted has all the allure of the obviously impossible. That’s the fascination of the thing. Judge it retrograde or eminently contemporary, aberrant or a stroke of genius, but take it squarely for what it is: the painstaking effort on the part of an Althusserian Marxist, longtime Maoist, and unanalyzed disciple of Lacan to quit the confines that several generations of “limit-makers” have erected around philosophical practice.

 Wittgenstein’s fragmentary sophistics is merely a symptom. Revolutionary political theorizing, the various positivisms, and the vast textualization of the world all share the same restrictive modus operandi of suturing philosophy to some other, seemingly stronger, extrinsic body of thought. What’s more, Jacques Derrida’s interminable perambulations inside Western metaphysics involve a swap of one kind of system for another: the compelling demonstrative logic of systematic philosophy for the latent tissue of relations embedded in language. With the revelation of writing as the long-repressed factor–and its ultimate fetishization–the issue of demonstrability has curiously vanished from the horizon. Odd, wouldn’t you say, in a century thoroughly dominated by mathematization? Badiou emerges right here, with a singular question: how do we advance, proceed, reinsert ourselves into a pattern of succession, the “plus-one” established by taking “one step more”?

 In a word, Badiou has founded a philosophy. Take “founded” in the full philosophical sense. And that philosophy is rigorously systematic. Take “systematic” in the full philosophical sense. What does it require to reanimate a dead tradition? A single consolidating intuition permitting the kind of strategic move, in its elegance and simplicity, most often associated with a game of chess. It goes like this: ontology is mathematics. DON’T RECOIL. NOT YET. Some people don’t know what ontology is, and even those who do, don’t. (For confirmation, read the opening pages of Heidegger’s Being and Time.) The word “Being” has always resonated with a mysterious attribution of some extra added value to “what simply is,” and its science has remained philosophy’s foremost red herring. By slipping mathematics into that eerie slot, Badiou snaps the file shut with assurance of ontology’s thorough rationality. “What is” is pure multiplicity. As for what can be said about it, the mathematicians are still at work.

In his massive L’Etre et l’evenement (Being and the event), Badiou makes mathematical set theory the reader’s guide to some 2,500 years of problems raised by ontology. From the axioms of set theory he not only recapitulates the history of philosophy but derives all the concepts of his system. DON’T RECOIL. NOT EVEN NOW: his prose is so tight and lucid that even in your relative mathematical illiteracy you’ll be surprised to discover, like Plato’s Meno, that you already knew how to draw the inferences. And in those inferences the stakes are revealed. What were the devastating criticisms forever leveled against systematic philosophy? That the system was invented and arbitrary, its propositions unverifiable. In Badiou’s reformulation of philosophy as a contemporary systematics, only mathematics, the unassailable archetype of demonstrability, intelligibility, and transmissibility, can offer sufficient authority, sufficient legitimacy–not as a model but as the very armature of the system itself.

 Badiou’s philosophy, however, is not a philosophy of mathematics. For him there is no such thing. Nor is it about the world or consciousness or knowledge. He calls it a philosophy of time. Forget teleologies and historical determinisms, the Kantian a priori, Husserl’s time consciousness, Bergson’s duration. Think of it rather, to risk a neologism, as a neology. Set theory’s closing chapter, the generic set, the set with no ascertainable identifying characteristic, the “set without qualities,” provides Badiou with a unique and provocative prototype for theorizing the emergence of the new. The event is no more than an extraneous, evanescent incident–but it may make waves. When it does, it involves the active participation of subjectivities in a process whose contours and destiny elude and exceed them. To grossly reduce the subtleties of Badiou’s argument, call the sum total of activity in that formative stage a generic set. The time traced there is the discrete time of random, heterogeneous advances, indiscernible quantum leaps that jolt science, politics, art, and love, the four Platonic conditions on which Badiou’s system reposes. Yes, Platonic–Badiou is an unabashed Platonist, as may be surmised from the mathematical premise.

What’s happened to his Marxism? This, I think: change is precisely the issue. Badiou fixes his attention on disruptions of the status quo, the kind that have the power to activate human agency. The essence of history’s movement, we now know, boils down to these unpredictable, disparate, indeterminate countercurrents that circumscribe times of truths in the making, truths that lose their truth value once fully acknowledged and fully accepted. Times, truths, heterogeneity, pure multiplicity. No totalizing here. No forcing of the venture, no specific investments. Philosophy, in Badiou’s terms, stands outside these temporal ramifications. It guarantees only its aptitude to seize what’s happening and provide an aftermath for calculating what it will have been worth–in a future perfect tense that underscores endurance.

LAUREN SEDOFSKY: The return to systematic philosophy today might seem archaic, if not impossible. How do you explain your conviction not only that the systematic thinking that runs through the history of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger is still possible, but also that this architecture serves some purpose?

 ALAIN BADIOU: Philosophy is always systematic. Naturally, if by “system” you mean an architecture necessarily endowed with a keystone or a center, then you can say, to employ Heidegger’s vocabulary, that it’s a matter of an ontotheological systematicity, and therefore no longer valid. But if by “system” you mean, first, that philosophy is conceived as an argumentative discipline with a requirement of coherence, and second, that philosophy never takes the form of a singular body of knowledge but, to use my own vocabulary, exists conditionally with respect to a complex set of truths, then it is the very essence of philosophy to be systematic.

The distinctive service that philosophy renders thought is the evaluation of time. The issue is whether we can say, and according to what principles, that this time, our time, has value. For that the systematic dimension is necessary. To my mind, it’s one and the same question to ask whether philosophy can be systematic and whether philosophy can exist at all.

 LS: Your project is strictly philosophical, “a thesis about discourse, not about the world.”

 AB: Absolutely. Strictly speaking, philosophy doesn’t take the form of knowledge about the world. What’s more, like Lacan, I’m inclined to think that the idea of the world is itself in the final analysis a phantasy. My project makes claims on the strictly philosophical, within a general logic of delimitation. Philosophy is irreducible to other forms of thought. And it should maintain this criterion of delimitation as one of its most precious possessions. The threat that has loomed throughout its history is a confusion between what philosophy is in itself and what it is not, for example political, or esthetic, or scientific discourse.

It should be understood that philosophy, in itself, has no object. It isn’t and mustn’t become a body of knowledge. Here I remain faithful to Louis Althusser, who was the first to have pointed this out with perfect clarity. What’s astonishing is that the thesis “philosophy is philosophy” seems original today. However tautological, it’s a militant thesis, and not at all accepted. We are in a period when philosophy is marked by doubt, or even by a conviction that it is extinct.

 LS: The striking equation “ontology = mathematics” has the immense merit of eradicating the mystification that clings to the word “being.” You’ve identified this choice as an exit from romanticism and a program for the death of God.

 AB: We’re far from having exhausted the consequences of the question of the death of God. The philosophical destiny of atheism, in a radical sense, lies in the interplay between the question of being and the question of infinity. The real romantic heritage–which is still with us today–is the theme of finitude. The idea that an apprehension of the human condition occurs primordially in the understanding of its finitude maintains infinity at a distance that’s both evanescent and sacred, and holds it in the vicinity of a vision of being that’s still theological. That’s why I think the only really contemporary requirement for philosophy since Nietzsche is the secularization of infinity.

If we take “ontology,” as we must, literally or etymologically, that is, as what can be said about being qua being, then we ought to say that it’s mathematics. Mathematics secularizes infinity in the clearest way, by formalizing it. The thesis that mathematics is ontology has the double-negative virtue of disconnecting philosophy from the questioning of being and freeing it from the theme of finitude. That’s why it represents a powerful break.

 LS: In your magnum opus, L’Etre et l’evenement (Being and the event, 1988), you manage, in an astounding way, to elaborate all the concepts of your system inside a presentation of the axioms of set theory. What led you to this improbable wager?

 AB: [laughs] To a degree, this performance is easy–once you’ve thought of it. The moment it occurs to you that mathematics is ontology, that idea itself has a considerable capacity to clarify mathematics. I was astonished myself. If we begin with the thesis that being is fundamentally pure multiplicity, including infinite chains of multiplicities, and if we consider that the most formalized, most complete framework of axioms of the multiple today is set theory, then why not examine set theory, axiom by axiom? What do those axioms say about being qua being? The mathematician doesn’t need to ask himself this kind of question. He can be an ontologist without knowing it.

If the philosopher examines set-theory axioms with the idea that they are statements about being qua being, he sees an unexpected pertinence emerge. Let’s take the simplest possible example, the axiom of extensionality, which says that two sets are equivalent when they have the same elements. It’s very straightforward. But if we look at it closely, we realize that this is in fact a theoretical deployment of the old question of identity and difference, same and other, that any thinking about being qua being must inevitably address. And it’s the same for the entire set of axioms. They constitute a coherent body of propositions about being qua being, based on the implicit supposition that being is reducible to pure multiplicity.

 LS: In Le Nombre et les nombres (Number and numbers, 1990), you write, “A number is neither a characteristic of a concept, nor an operational fiction, nor an empirical given, nor a constitutive or transcendental category, nor a syntax or a language game, nor even an abstraction of our idea of order. A number is a form of Being … the infinite profusion of Being in Numbers.” What is mathematics, then?

 AB: Ultimately, being qua being is nothing but the multiple as such. What there is is the multiple. Mathematics is the kind of thought, and consequently the kind of discourse, that apprehends the configurations of multiplicity independently of any characteristic other than their multiplicity. As a thought procedure, mathematics will be subject to general laws. It will be scanned by events, radical innovations, breaks, and interruptions.

From the moment that what is being taken into account is being qua being, that is, pure multiplicity, it is indispensable that language rid itself of its equivocalness. (There we are with Lacan.) Formalization, this way of tearing language away from its status of mother tongue, this transformation of the mother tongue into a tongue that no longer offers any natural reception for the speaker, is the discipline through which thought appropriates the form of the pure multiple.

 LS: You make another rather audacious wager on the possibility of resurrecting a philosophical concept of truth.

 AB: The relative discredit of the category of truth today has two sources. For a long time, philosophy suspended the question of truth on the protocol of the question of being, with the Supreme Being as an ultimate guarantor. The death of God, then, as Nietzsche saw, amounts to a checkmate of truth. The second source is the vast contemporary movement to anthropologize philosophy–the idea that philosophy deals with more or less heterogeneous linguistic or cultural organizations of thought, and is itself the result or production of one such organization. This movement obviously entails a relativism, what could be called “a pragmatics of exactitude.”

Mathematics dismantles the perilous theological connection Truth-Being-One. And quite apart from anthropological thought, I’m deeply convinced that procedures of a universal kind do exist. That’s why I’ve undertaken to reorganize philosophy in its entirety, entrusting it to the category of truth, at the price of a radical reformulation of the notion.

For me, paradoxically, truths are the nonphilosophical, even truths about being qua being when they’re mathematical. At the same time, the nonphilosophical is precisely what provides for the existence of philosophy. As a category specific to philosophy, truth is what I call an operator for seizing truths. Philosophy is active; at the heart of its discursive organization is an act, the particular act of seizing truths, principally the truths of its time, truths in progress, incipient truths, truths in the process of constituting themselves, the truths that indicate what our time is really made of. It is philosophy’s seizing of these truths that designates them as truths; they don’t appear as such in themselves. A work of art appears as a work of art, a mathematical theorem as a mathematical theorem, a great love as a great love, a political revolution as a political revolution. For philosophy, these are truths in my own special sense: they are truth procedures. Philosophy’s task is to show why and under what conditions these absolutely heterogeneous truths are, at least, compossible.

 LS: What does “compossible” mean?

 AB: Compossibility, a true philosophical creation, can’t be understood simply as empirical collection. Truths are compossible because philosophy’s seizing of them simultaneously designates them as truths. Truths are multiple and heterogeneous, but the philosophical act displays them together. In doing so, it evaluates its time. By “evaluating time,” I mean evaluating how far this particular time has gotten in its capacity to generate truths. It’s a matter of measuring our time according to an idea of what that time contains that exceeds it. A truth is what within time exceeds time. And the philosophical act is its active witness.

 LS: These truths emerge inside “the situation.” How do you put a mathematical construction on such a simple word?

 AB: The situation is an ordinary multiple, a multiple that is obviously infinite because all situations in reality are infinite. It can be a historical, political, artistic, or mathematical situation; it can even be a subjective situation. I take the situation in an exceptionally open sense, and to capture that openness I say it’s a multiplicity.

I also posit that every situation is accompanied by a language, a capacity to name that situation’s elements, their relations, their qualities, their properties. And in every situation there is also what I call “the state of the situation”–the order of its subsets. The situation’s language aims at showing how an element belongs to such and such a subset. The situation is what presents the elements that constitute it; the state of the situation is what presents, not the situation’s elements, but its subsets.

From this point of view the situation is a form of presentation, the state of the situation a form of representation. And knowledge, being the way we organize the situation’s elements linguistically, is always a certain relation between presentation and representation. Knowledge is most simply defined as the linguistic determination of the general system of connections between presentation and representation. The set of a situation’s various bodies of knowledge I call “the encyclopedia” of the situation. Insofar as it refers only to itself, however, the situation is organically without truth.

Considering the privilege I give to Plato–out of coquetry, or to go against the current–

 LS: Coquetry? And I’ve been taking you seriously!

 AB: [laughs] And you were right to–I mean, out of serious coquetry! Our century is fundamentally anti-Platonist. So there’s an element of coquetry in calling yourself a Platonist, which I am, profoundly.

In any case, as a Platonist I don’t make a clear distinction between knowledge and opinion. So the encyclopedia is the anarchy of our knowledge. You’ll find things in it that are correct, things that are incorrect, interesting classifications, lively opinions and sterile ones, reactive ideas and active ones. But this is all still without truth.

 LS: So how do you bring truth into the situation?

 AB: My system’s second major thesis, after “ontology = mathematics,” is: in order for there to be truth, there has to be something other than the situation. Now I am absolutely an immanentist–I am convinced that if there is truth, it isn’t something transcendent, it’s in the situation–but I am nevertheless led to the conclusion that the situation, as such, is without truth. This antinomy must be resolved. That’s where I turn to the category of “the event,” which pushes the system in another direction.

 LS: Everything hinges on the event, this possibility of the new that emerges in the situation and gives it a temporal, even transtemporal, dimension. How should we understand the event?

 AB: The event has posed formidable problems for me, and still does. Here, following both Mallarme and Lacan, I have recourse to the logic of the term “the evanescent”–something whose very being is to disappear.I think of the event as a totally chance, incalculable, disconnected supplement to the situation. It will be recorded in its very disappearance only in the form of a linguistic trace, which I call the “name” of the event, and will supplement the situation with next to nothing. You might say my thinking on this point is a minimalism of the new.

 LS: Still, the evanescent has to fit the system’s mathematical base.

 AB: Through a kind of miraculous convergence–but that’s how philosophy works–I found what I needed in mathematics. In 1964, the American mathematician Paul Cohen elaborated a doctrine concerning the generic subsets of a given set. That doctrine provided me with the concept of a subset whose particularity is precisely to have no particularity. This was truly a moment of discovery for me, a moment of real illumination. We were getting to the thesis that a truth is not in a simple regime of opposition to knowledge; as a generic subset, it’s really a gap or break in the encyclopedic organization of knowledge. It constitutes the void specific to this encyclopedia. All of this clarified the fact that a truth is a truth about the whole situation, not simply a truth about this or that.

 LS: A set with no apparent shared property among its elements must necessarily remain invisible or, to use your key word, indiscernible. Faced with the indiscernible, what do you do?

 AB: Take a simple event like the encounter of love. The encounter is the event’s specific mode in the truth procedure called “love,” the procedure that renders the truth of that totally particular situation, sexuation. The event itself is the encounter. The encounter does not constitute the situation, it supplements it: there is what there was before, and then there’s the encounter.

Next comes the truth procedure of love itself. Its name is marked by the various forms that the declaration of love can take; the declaration of love is strictly what constitutes the name, the enduring trace, of the event of love. We have to explore the situation with respect to this new entity in such a way as to find out what is related or unrelated or difficult to relate to this primordial event. In so doing, we will trace a subset of the situation, little by little over time–because the extraordinarily ramified activities of love necessarily circumscribe a particular time. The subset is generic and, therefore, indiscernible. This means that the lovers cannot discern the subset that they themselves constitute. It’s in this sense that I’d say they are its subject.

 LS: In entering into the truth procedures that activate the four Platonic conditions of philosophy–mathematics, politics, art, and love–are we exclusively in the realm of thought?

 AB: A truth procedure is the experience of thought, or thought as experience. All the possible elements of human activity–sensitivity, emotion, concepts, practice, violence–can be mobilized by the deployment of a truth. The doctrine of truth I propose has the merit of ending the confrontation between thought and experience, theory and practice. Those dichotomies are subverted by this conception of truth and of its subject.

 LS: What kind of subject is this exactly?

 AB: Truth induces the notion of a subject in a totally singular manner. The subject of a truth is the term or terms (here, the lovers) of the situation that are seized or engaged by a truth procedure, and that constitute the generic subset–that is, they trace the path by which this subset emerges as a truth. They are factors of the indiscernible. At the same time, it is only because there is this process of indiscernibility that the subject, in this singular moment, finds itself constituted. The subject of a truth is certainly not in a position of mastery over a truth. The only subject is the subject of truth. What is not the subject of truth is only an inhabitant of the situation.

 LS: The procedure has more being than the subject?

 AB: Inevitably. Because a single generic set of the situation, even if it’s always incomplete, is in its being essentially infinite. The subject, though, is only engaged in finite operations. The subject is always the differential or finite dimension of the truth procedure.

 LS: You characterize your system as a “philosophy of time of this time.” How do you situate the time you’re theorizing within the history of philosophy?

 AB: That’s an immense question. Every event constitutes its own time. Consequently, every truth also involves the constitution of a time. So there are times, not one time. On the other hand, philosophy doesn’t constitute time. That’s why I was led to reintroduce the old word “eternity,” which was even less used than “truth” was. I sought it out to designate the singularity of philosophy’s relationship to time.

Philosophy has a relation to the different heterogeneous times of truths, since those are what it seizes. It exposes these times to precisely the aspect of time that is not temporal. Because what within time is constituted as truth both marks a new time and, strictly speaking, exceeds the singularity of its time. What is specific to truth, after all, is that it endures. Philosophy tries to seize truth’s endurance, to capture the eternity contained within time.

 LS: What about the event’s historical dimension?

 AB: The fact that events belong to history signifies only that they can be located in arrangements of before and after. Those arrangements offer no reason to argue that they constitute a history. Historicism consists in referring the singularity of a procession of events to a historical meaning that penetrates it and goes beyond it. I’m not at all a historicist, in that I don’t think events are linked in a global system. That would deny their essentially random character, which I absolutely maintain.

 LS: Michel Foucault drew our attention to the breaks, the discontinuities, the nonlinear aspect of history, without proposing a thesis about the jolting of what you call the situation. Might you be the philosopher that many take Foucault to be?

 AB: Foucault is a theoretician of encyclopedias. He was never really interested in the question of knowing whether, within situations, anything existed that might deserve to be called a “truth.” With his usual corrosiveness, he would say that he didn’t have to deal with this kind of thing. He wasn’t interested in the protocol of either the appearance or the disappearance of a given epistemic organization. As long as you don’t have an immanent doctrine of what in the situation exceeds the situation, you can’t be concerned about answering the question of how we pass from one system to another.

 LS: In your Manifeste (1989), you propose the following program of compossibilization: mathematics from Cantor to Cohen, Paul Celan’s poems, love under the sign of Lacan, and, in politics, the “obscure incidents” of the period 1968-80. In the framework of a “philosophy of time of this time,” are these events really on the breach?

 AB: Today, I would certainly rework this mapping of events, which was meant only as an indication. Anything empirical is always only indicative, and rapidly contestable. In mathematics, something else would be needed to be on the breach; that would be the theory of categories, which has led me to further systematic developments that I hope one day to write as a sequel to L’Etre et l’evenement. In the arts, we would have to examine how arts other than poetry function as conditions for philosophy. Gilles Deleuze wasn’t wrong to consider film philosophically important; I’d like to say something a bit more elaborate about it. And music, in its complexity and relative uncertainty, interests me. And then of course there would be the visual arts. Supplementary deployments also need to be made in relation to the “obscure incidents” of politics. Politically the ’80s were strongly reactionary, and in no way clarified the new.

 LS: Mathematics is only one of the four conditions of philosophy, yet it constitutes the concepts and structure of your system. Isn’t your philosophy sutured to mathematics?

 AB: It’s an obvious objection. The impression that I privilege mathematics comes from my announcement that mathematics is the science of being qua being. But just as the declaration separates philosophy from ontology, from a questioning of being, it also separates philosophy radically from mathematics. It’s a protocol of distinction, not of suture at all.

The mathematical thread was absolutely necessary in L’Etre et l’evenement, but not in everything I’ve written. There, I wanted to convince my reader that mathematics is the science of being qua being. I couldn’t do that without making abundant use of mathematics. I also wanted to assure myself that the theory of truth I was proposing was mathematically consistent. But you mustn’t think that mathematics occupies such a privileged place in the whole of my philosophical program.

 LS: I would have thought that the strategic move of putting mathematics in the place of ontology would at last open the way to a philosophical seizing of the theoretical sciences, written in the same formal mathematical language and possessing an oblique, if not to say blind, relation to phenomena. You have remained silent on this point.

 AB: My silence about science is entirely temporary and contingent. There’s absolutely no principle involved. A whole series of aspects of the sciences, and particularly of contemporary physics, are of great philosophical interest. I had launched into arid studies of quantum mechanics years ago. But for the moment I still don’t feel sufficiently experienced or intimately acquainted with what’s in question there to talk about it. You can’t do everything!

 LS: Forgetting for the moment the military/industrial establishment, is there a better example of the truth procedure than the scientific community?

 AB: If the scientific community designates the system of protocols for evaluating scientific innovations, you’re quite right. Scientists are a body of the faithful. But the scientific community sometimes designates something more institutional: efforts to impose State control–which falls into the order of subsets that I refer to as the state of the situation–on the truth procedure. The relation between the state of the situation and the truth procedure is always complex, since the truth procedure disrupts the state of the situation, feeding on that situation’s void, not its closure. This makes for an ambivalence in the scientific community. On the truth side, it’s a community of the faithful. On the state side, it will always involve an attempt to sell its fidelity to the State.

 LS: Concerning politics, why have you seized on the “obscure incidents” of the period 1968-80 rather than a namable event?

 AB: I call these happenings obscure because I’m not convinced they have received their name yet. Nomination takes place in an aftermath. It can be left in abeyance for a long time. I have the feeling that what happened in the ’60s received a series of false names, because it wasn’t clearly perceived that what was at stake in these happenings was, precisely, a calling into question of the previous protocols of political nomination. (That’s why they’re obscure.) A lot of young activists in this period spontaneously tried to name what was happening through the Marxist vocabulary of class, or to inscribe it in the logic of a new party, or used the signifier “revolution,” etc. But these words were inadequate for what was happening. What events showed was exactly the opposite: even and especially in revolutionary politics, there was something used up, inoperative, and outdated in this protocol of nomination.

 LS: It’s possible there was no event at all?

 AB: It’s entirely possible that there was no event at all. I really don’t know.

 LS: You must know, or you wouldn’t have designated that obscure time for examination.

 AB: No, I really don’t know, because it’s possible that we’re in a time, itself uncertain, when we’re going to be able to find names for a whole series of events that have disappeared into the past. Although they remain undecided for the moment, they may become fixed as events. Undecidability is an intrinsic attribute of an event.

 LS: What was the last namable event?

 AB: In politics, the revolution of October 1917.

 LS: We’re very far behind.

 AB: We’re very far behind. But that’s the situation of politics.

 LS: In the U.S. right now, the left is splintered into communities organizing to promote the rights of those who are denied them. These subcommunities have spawned sectarian modes of thought. How do you see this situation?

 AB: As one of the most catastrophic imaginable. Some day it will be necessary to review this communitarian venture and the considerable damage it entails for thought itself. In order for there to be emancipatory politics, it is absolutely necessary that the substantiality of the community remain unnamable. If emancipatory politics claims to proceed in the name of any predicative characteristic, it denies itself the possibility of being generic. When you’re for African-Americans, women, and others having the same fights as anyone else, it’s absolutely indispensable to support that on other grounds than the existence of a community of African-Americans or women.

The theme of equal rights is really progressive and really political, that is, emancipatory, only if it finds its arguments in a space open to everyone, a space of universality. If not, despite all the apparent radicalism a community puts into its system of demands, we have a profound submission to the figure of the state of the situation. To every generic procedure I attach a limit, a term I call its “unnamable point.” More and more, I am tempted to think that in emancipatory politics the community in a racial or biological sense is strictly an unnamable point. In order for politics to remain emancipatory, the community must not be named as such.

 LS: Marxist from the outset, Maoist for a long time, would you accept the accusation of having yielded to a philosophical idealism?

 AB: Not at all. To be an idealist you have to distinguish between thought and matter, transcendence and immanence, the high and the low, pure thought and empirical thought. None of these distinctions function in the system I propose. Actually, I would submit that my system is the most rigorously materialist in ambition that we’ve seen since Lucretius.

 LS: Concerning the condition of love, is the event situated in the encounter of love or in Lacan’s renovation of Freud?

 AB: In the truth procedure that is love, the immanent event is the encounter of love. If I mention Lacan as a theoretical event, it’s because Lacan represents psychoanalysis’ contemporary time, when the question of love, in a modern form, has returned to the scene of thought as a real theoretical issue. Lacan tried to grant a quasi-ontological significance to the encounter of love. He inscribed love in its real terrain, the formula of sexuation. And he also tried to disentangle the extraordinarily complex web that ties and unties love and desire. For all these reasons, he made invaluable contributions to restoring love to its function as a truth procedure, a point that had been partially forgotten since Plato.

 LS: You’ve found a generic set and truth inside the analytic situation.

 AB: Until now, my interest in Lacan and psychoanalysis has been confined to showing that what I was saying in philosophy was compatible with Lacanian thought. In doing this, I was led to say a number of things about the situation of the analytic cure. But I’ve never resolved the issue of whether the analytic cure represents an independent, autonomous truth procedure. The difficulty is that there’s something in the analytic situation that’s analogous to the love situation. Transference, after all, is an encounter that is supposed to take the form of knowledge. Lacan himself was unable to clarify transference except by referring to the great philosophical works on love. The determination of the analytic situation’s exact point of autonomy requires research on my part that is not yet complete.

 LS: Sexuation enters your system as a radical disjunction between the fundamental Two. Expelling all pathos, you equate feminine jouissance with the structure of an axiom, and a woman with the generic function.

 AB: Given my relationship to the axiom, it’s hardly an insult to say that feminine jouissance is axiomatic. What interests me in feminine sexuality is its singular link to infinity. It’s a quasi-ontological process, a test of infinity, that seems subtracted from the finite regime prescribed by phallic logic. I don’t see how the irreducibility of this jouissance could be a source of any pathos whatever. That’s the price of a deromanticization of infinity.

 LS: How do you identify the unity of an pertinent for philosophy, what you call a “configuration”?

 AB: In music there is a sequence that starts with Arnold Schonberg and renders the truth of the tonal system retroactively by proposing an essentially different figure of musical composition. This sequence has all the attributes of a truth procedure. The protocol of the break is grouped around certain works by Schonberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern, the uncertain progressive protocol of nomination, dodecaphonic, then later serial music, and the labor of fidelity to that event. I would call this set a “configuration.” It’s not the work of an artist, or even of several artists, but a sequential constellation of works, inaugurated by an event and tracing a singular trajectory. In the investigation of art, we should completely abandon the notion of the auteur. Because of the encyclopedia, however, the auteur continues to paralyze our thinking.

 LS: You’ve explicitly rejected the kind of suture of philosophy to the visual arts that we find in the works of Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard, among others. Is that why you’re kept a distance from visual art?

 AB: Of all the arts, it’s the one that intimidates me the most. Its intellectual charge is the greatest. In front of great painting, contemporary as well as past, I’m often seized with emotion. So turning to visual art philosophically has always been rather difficult for me. It’s not a feeling of ignorance at all, but a feeling that the mode in which intellectuality proceeds irreducibly into complex and powerful sensory forms . . . really, painting intimidates me. That’s why I never talk about it.

What’s more, I’ve never been very satisfied by the attempts of my predecessors to place themselves under the condition of painting. Nor have I ever found a regime of prose adequate to talk about painting. Where phenomenology is concerned, it isn’t badly deployed, but it hasn’t brought anything really decisive to the problem, even in texts of great quality like Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s on Cezanne. Even if we take Lacan’s brilliant analyses, or Foucault on Velazquez, we see that painting is missing somehow, that it isn’t really the issue. Where my program is concerned, I don’t know if I’m capable of including it. I like painting too much, perhaps. Or it’s a lack of inventiveness on my part.

 LS: In the Manifeste, however, you propose an approach to painting: “exhibit what in painting is the gesture of all painting or, precisely, what is the nonspecifiable in painting as such,” by asking “where is the indiscernible in this affair.”

 AB: I think I see it in what I know about painting, which is incomplete, fragmentary, and now perhaps outmoded. The movement to disengage painting from mimetic space consisted in producing the pictorial configuration’s genericity, not as an induced or secondary effect, but as the central volition. When I propose exhibiting pictorially the act of painting itself, and showing its specific intellectuality in the work’s visible form, that obviously means rendering the generic truth of painting’s singular situation. That gesture is indiscernible in the sense that it will not allow itself to be captured by any of the encyclopedia’s previously constituted predicates for the recognition of forms.

 LS: As reference points in the arts you take Mallarme, Rimbaud, Osip Mandelstam, Fernando Pessoa, Kasimir Malevich, and Schonberg. How is it that a philosophy of time of this time remains faithful to the high Modernism of the early century?

 AB: I don’t in any way think the high Modernism of the early century has gone without breaks up to the present–that we can still refer to it as a notion of the contemporary. I don’t at all maintain that nothing is happening, that there are no new works. It must be remembered, however, that what philosophy designates as susceptible of being seized in truth procedures are generic truths, rather vast subsets, vaster generally than is imagined within the interior movements of these arts. I take these examples as testimony or metonymy of the configuration; I could take other, more contemporary ones. But in terms of configurations, is there an essential break? Of that I’m not completely convinced.

In the last twenty or thirty years, what intrigues me is: what is emerging? I can see this a bit in terms of works, but it’s much harder in terms of configurations.

 LS: Since the truth of each condition of philosophy is both immanent and singular, can we speak of political art?

 AB: Yes, we can, because there are different ways of singularizing the types of generic procedures. There is a matheme of politics; in its events, its names, its protocols of fidelity, its slogans, etc., every singular political sequence is irreducible to any other. But there is also the singularity of the unnamable term that remains the limit point of a generic procedure–for politics, the substantial community. Providing the matheme of each of the procedures–which I haven’t done in any of my published works–is a very important task. It’s what I call “time-two” of the event.

 LS: And if I were to ask you for the matheme of art?

 AB: Right now, I don’t think I can go any further.

 LS: You’ve made the choice, not without grave consequences, to situate ethics inside the generic procedures. Why?

 AB: Obviously, the idea of a general ethics overhanging ordinary situations would take me out of my general philosophical organization, which is under the merciless rule of immanence. Moreover, if ethics, in the real sense of the term, exists, it must be attached to what is not the ordinary regime of the situation’s pure and simple living multiplicity. In this way, ethics must be connected to truth procedures. There will be as many ethical forms as there are truth procedures, as many singular, ethical actions or determinations as there are singular truths.

 LS: But can one seriously confide and confine ethics to mathematicians, political activists, lovers, and artists? Is the ordinary person, by definition, excluded from the ethical field?

 AB: Why should we think that ethics convokes us all? The idea of ethics’ universal convocation supposes the assignment of universality. I maintain that the only immanent universality is found in the truth procedure. We are seized by the really ethical dimension only inside a truth procedure. Does this mean that the encounter of ethical situations or propositions is restricted to the actors of a truth procedure? I understand that this point is debatable.

Of course, it can happen to anyone. Anyone can be seized by a political event, anyone can be seized by love. Most of the time, the great majority of us live outside ethics. We live in the living multiplicity of the situation. When we are engaged in a truth procedure, however, we are seized by it and follow the maxim of fidelity to it. There is no ethical imperative other than “Continue!,” “Continue in your fidelity!”

 LS: If we find ethics inside the truth procedure, evil must inhabit the same space.

 AB: That’s the problem with which the trajectory ends. It’s necessary to understand how evil is connected to the existence of truth procedures: there can be an imitation, what I call a “simulacrum,” of the truth event, convoking not the void but the plenum. It’s a pseudoevent that has a substance as its agenda. Any closed community always approaches this kind of racial, biological, or territorial conception. In connection with fidelity, evil presents itself in the choice of fidelity. Only a fidelity offers the possibility of what I call “betrayal.” In connection with the unnamable, evil takes the form of the idea that a truth can be total, that a truth is not just a subset of the situation but can englobe the entire situation, ignoring the points that must remain unnamable. When a truth is forced beyond its unnamable point, the consequences are necessarily ruinous, even criminal. That’s what I call “disaster.”

 LS: As your ultimate wager, you acknowledge that philosophy itself can expose us to disaster.

 AB: In seizing truths, philosophy may come to consider itself the sole, synthetic source of all possible truth. Once it dominates, directs, or subsumes, it can constrain truths to make claims to totality, breaking their limits, smashing their unnamable points. When philosophy articulates its seizing of truths in the form of identity or fusion, it exposes us to disaster.

The Emancipated Spectator

Jacques Ranciere

I have called this talk “The Emancipated Spectator.”* As I understand it, a title is always a challenge. It sets forth the presupposition that an expression makes sense, that there is a link between separate terms, which also means between concepts, problems, and theories that seem at first sight to bear no direct relation to one another. In a sense, this title expresses the perplexity that was mine when Marten Spangberg invited me to deliver what is supposed to be the “keynote” lecture of this academy. He told me he wanted me to introduce this collective reflection on “spectatorship” because he had been impressed by my book The Ignorant Schoolmaster [Le Maitre ignorant (1987)]. I began to wonder what connection there could be between the cause and the effect. This is an academy that brings people involved in the worlds of art, theater, and performance together to consider the issue of spectatorship today. The Ignorant Schoolmaster was a meditation on the eccentric theory and the strange destiny of Joseph Jacotot, a French professor who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, unsettled the academic world by asserting that an ignorant person could teach another ignorant person what he did not know himself, proclaiming the equality of intelligences, and calling for intellectual emancipation against the received wisdom concerning the instruction of the lower classes. His theory sank into oblivion in the middle of the nineteenth century. I thought it necessary to revive it in the 1980s in order to stir up the debate about education and its political stakes. But what use can be made, in the contemporary artistic dialogue, of a man whose artistic universe could be epitomized by names such as Demosthenes, Racine, and Poussin?

On second thought, it occurred to me that the very distance, the lack of any obvious relationship between Jacotot’s theory and the issue of spectatorship today might be fortunate. It could provide an opportunity to radically distance one’s thoughts from the theoretical and political presuppositions that still shore up, even in postmodern disguise, most of the discussion about theater, performance, and spectatorship. I got the impression that indeed it was possible to make sense of this relationship, on condition that we try to piece together the network of presuppositions that put the issue of spectatorship at a strategic intersection in the discussion of the relationship between art and politics and to sketch out the broader pattern of thinking that has for a long time framed the political issues around theater and spectacle (and I use those terms in a very general sense here–to include dance, performance, and all the kinds of spectacle performed by acting bodies in front of a collective audience).

The numerous debates and polemics that have called the theater into question throughout our history can be traced back to a very simple contradiction. Let us call it the paradox of the spectator, a paradox that may prove more crucial than the well-known paradox of the actor and which can be summed up in the simplest terms. There is no theater without spectators (be it only a single and hidden one, as in Diderot’s fictional representation of Le Fils naturel [1757]). But spectatorship is a bad thing. Being a spectator means looking at a spectacle. And looking is a bad thing, for two reasons. First, looking is deemed the opposite of knowing. It means standing before an appearance without knowing the conditions which produced that appearance or the reality that lies behind it. Second, looking is deemed the opposite of acting. He who looks at the spectacle remains motionless in his seat, lacking any power of intervention. Being a spectator means being passive. The spectator is separated from the capacity of knowing just as he is separated from the possibility of acting.

From this diagnosis it is possible to draw two opposing conclusions. The first is that theater in general is a bad thing, that it is the stage of illusion and passivity, which must be dismissed in favor of what it forbids: knowledge and action–the action of knowing and the action led by knowledge. This conclusion was drawn long ago by Plato: The theater is the place where ignorant people are invited to see suffering people. What takes place on the stage is a pathos, the manifestation of a disease, the disease of desire and pain, which is nothing but the self-division of the subject caused by the lack of knowledge. The “action” of theater is nothing but the transmission of that disease through another disease, the disease of the empirical vision that looks at shadows. Theater is the transmission of the ignorance that makes people ill through the medium of ignorance that is optical illusion. Therefore a good community is a community that doesn’t allow the mediation of the theater, a community whose collective virtues are directly incorporated in the living attitudes of its participants.

This seems to be the more logical conclusion to the problem. We know, however, that it is not the conclusion that was most often drawn. The most common conclusion runs as follows: Theater involves spectatorship, and spectatorship is a bad thing. Therefore, we need a new theater, a theater without spectator-ship. We need a theater where the optical relation–implied in the word theatron–is subjected to another relation, implied in the word drama. Drama means action. The theater is a place where an action is actually performed by living bodies in front of living bodies. The latter may have resigned their power. But this power is resumed in the performance of the former, in the intelligence that builds it, in the energy that it conveys. The true sense of the theater must be predicated on that acting power. Theater has to be brought back to its true essence, which is the contrary of what is usually known as theater. What must be pursued is a theater without spectators, a theater where spectators will no longer be spectators, where they will learn things instead of being captured by images and become active participants in a collective performance instead of being passive viewers.

This turn has been understood in two ways, which are antagonistic in principle, though they have often been mixed in theatrical performance and in its legitimization. On the one hand the spectator must be released from the passivity of the viewer, who is fascinated by the appearance standing in front of him and identifies with the characters on the stage. He must be confronted with the spectacle of something strange, which stands as an enigma and demands that he investigate the reason for its strangeness. He must be pressed to abandon the role of passive viewer and to take on that of the scientist who observes phenomena and seeks their cause. On the other hand the spectator must eschew the role of the mere observer who remains still and untouched in front of a distant spectacle. He must be torn from his delusive mastery, drawn into the magical power of theatrical action, where he will exchange the privilege of playing the rational viewer for the experience of possessing theater’s true vital energies.

We acknowledge these two paradigmatic attitudes epitomized by Brecht’s epic theater and Artaud’s theater of cruelty. On the one hand the spectator must become more distant, on the other he must lose any distance. On the one hand he must change the way he looks for a better way of looking, on the other he must abandon the very position of the viewer. The project of reforming the theater ceaselessly wavered between these two poles of distant inquiry and vital embodiment. This means that the presuppositions underpinning the search for a new theater are the same as those that underpinned the dismissal of theater. The reformers of the theater in fact retained the terms of Plato’s polemics, rearranging them by borrowing from Platonism an alternative notion of theater. Plato drew an opposition between the poetic and democratic community of the theater and a “true” community: a choreographic community in which no one remains a motionless spectator, in which everyone moves according to a communitarian rhythm determined by mathematical proportion.

The reformers of the theater restaged the Platonic opposition between choreia and theater as an opposition between the true living essence of the theater and the simulacrum of the “spectacle.” The theater then became the place where passive spectatorship had to be turned into its contrary–the living body of a community enacting its own principle. In this academy’s statement of purpose we read that “theater remains the only place of direct confrontation of the audience with itself as a collective.” We can give that sentence a restrictive meaning that would merely contrast the collective audience of the theater with the individual visitors to an exhibition or the sheer collection of individuals watching a movie. But obviously the sentence means much more. It means that “theater” remains the name for an idea of the community as a living body. It conveys an idea of the community as self-presence opposed to the distance of the representation.

Since the advent of German Romanticism, the concept of theater has been associated with the idea of the living community. Theater appeared as a form of the aesthetic constitution–meaning the sensory constitution–of the community: the community as a way of occupying time and space, as a set of living gestures and attitudes that stands before any kind of political form and institution; community as a performing body instead of an apparatus of forms and rules. In this way theater was associated with the Romantic notion of the aesthetic revolution: the idea of a revolution that would change not only laws and institutions but transform the sensory forms of human experience. The reform of theater thus meant the restoration of its authenticity as an assembly or a ceremony of the community. Theater is an assembly where the people become aware of their situation and discuss their own interests, Brecht would say after Piscator. Theater is the ceremony where the community is given possession of its own energies, Artaud would state. If theater is held to be an equivalent of the true community, the living body of the community opposed to the illusion of mimesis, it comes as no surprise that the attempt at restoring theater to its true essence had as its theoretical backdrop the critique of the spectacle.

What is the essence of spectacle in Guy Debord’s theory? It is externality. The spectacle is the reign of vision. Vision means externality. Now externality means the dispossession of one’s own being. “The more man contemplates, the less he is,” Debord says. This may sound anti-Platonic. Indeed, the main source for the critique of the spectacle is, of course, Feuerbach’s critique of religion. It is what sustains that critique–namely, the Romantic idea of truth as unseparateness. But that idea itself remains in line with the Platonic disparagement of the mimetic image. The contemplation that Debord denounces is the theatrical or mimetic contemplation, the contemplation of the suffering that is provoked by division. “Separation is the alpha and the omega of spectacle,” he writes. What man gazes at in this scheme is the activity that has been stolen from him; it is his own essence torn away from him, turned foreign to him, hostile to him, making for a collective world whose reality is nothing but man’s own dispossession.

From this perspective there is no contradiction between the quest for a theater that can realize its true essence and the critique of the spectacle. “Good” theater is posited as a theater that deploys its separate reality only in order to suppress it, to turn the theatrical form into a form of life of the community. The paradox of the spectator is part of an intellectual disposition that is, even in the name of the theater, in keeping with the Platonic dismissal of the theater. This framework is built around a number of core ideas that must be called into question. Indeed, we must question the very footing on which those ideas are based. I am speaking of a whole set of relations, resting on some key equivalences and some key oppositions: the equivalence of theater and community, of seeing and passivity, of externality and separation, of mediation and simulacrum; the opposition of collective and individual, image and living reality, activity and passivity, self-possession and alienation.

This set of equivalences and oppositions makes for a rather tricky dramaturgy of guilt and redemption. Theater is charged with making spectators passive in opposition to its very essence, which allegedly consists in the self-activity of the community. As a consequence, it sets itself the task of reversing its own effect and compensating for its own guilt by giving back to the spectators their self-consciousness or self-activity. The theatrical stage and the theatrical performance thus become the vanishing mediation between the evil of the spectacle and the virtue of the true theater. They present to the collective audience performances intended to teach the spectators how they can stop being spectators and become performers of a collective activity. Either, according to the Brechtian paradigm, theatrical mediation makes the audience aware of the social situation on which theater itself rests, prompting the audience to act in consequence. Or, according to the Artaudian scheme, it makes them abandon the position of spectator: No longer seated in front of the spectacle, they are instead surrounded by the performance, dragged into the circle of the action, which gives them back their collective energy. In both cases the theater is a self-suppressing mediation.

This is the point where the descriptions and propositions of intellectual emancipation enter into the picture and help us reframe it. Obviously, this idea of a self-suppressing mediation is well known to us. It is precisely the process that is supposed to take place in the pedagogical relation. In the pedagogical process the role of the schoolmaster is posited as the act of suppressing the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignorant. His lessons and exercises are aimed at continuously reducing the gap between knowledge and ignorance. Unfortunately, in order to reduce the gap, he must reinstate it ceaselessly. In order to replace ignorance with adequate knowledge, he must always keep a step ahead of the ignorant student who is losing his ignorance. The reason for this is simple: In the pedagogical scheme, the ignorant person is not only the one who does not know what he does not know; he is as well the one who ignores that he does not know what he does not know and ignores how to know it. The master is not only he who knows precisely what remains unknown to the ignorant; he also knows how to make it knowable, at what time and what place, according to what protocol. On the one hand pedagogy is set up as a process of objective transmission: one piece of knowledge after another piece, one word after another word, one rule or theorem after another. This knowledge is supposed to be conveyed directly from the master’s mind or from the page of the book to the mind of the pupil. But this equal transmission is predicated on a relation of inequality. The master alone knows the right way, time, and place for that “equal” transmission, because he knows something that the ignorant will never know, short of becoming a master himself, something that is more important than the knowledge conveyed. He knows the exact distance between ignorance and knowledge. That pedagogical distance between a determined ignorance and a determined knowledge is in fact a metaphor. It is the metaphor of a radical break between the way of the ignorant student and the way of the master, the metaphor of a radical break between two intelligences.

The master cannot ignore that the so-called ignorant pupil who sits in front of him in fact knows a lot of things, which he has learned on his own, by looking at and listening to the world around him, by figuring out the meaning of what he has seen and heard, by repeating what he has heard and learned by chance, by comparing what he discovers with what he already knows, and so on. The master cannot ignore that the ignorant pupil has undertaken by these same means the apprenticeship that is the precondition of all others: the apprenticeship of his mother tongue. But for the master this is only the knowledge of the ignorant, the knowledge of the little child who sees and hears at random, compares and guesses by chance, and repeats by routine, without understanding the reason for the effects he observes and reproduces. The role of the master is thus to break with that process of hit-and-miss groping. It is to teach the pupil the knowledge of the knowledgeable, in its own way–the way of the progressive method, which dismisses all groping and all chance by explaining items in order, from the simplest to the most complex, according to what the pupil is capable of understanding, with respect to his age or social background and social expectations.

The primary knowledge that the master owns is the “knowledge of ignorance.” It is the presupposition of a radical break between two forms of intelligence. This is also the primary knowledge that he transmits to the student: the knowledge that he must have things explained to him in order to understand, the knowledge that he cannot understand on his own. It is the knowledge of his incapacity. In this way, progressive instruction is the endless verification of its starting point: inequality. That endless verification of inequality is what Jacotot calls the process of stultification. The opposite of stultification is emancipation. Emancipation is the process of verification of the equality of intelligence. The equality of intelligence is not the equality of all manifestations of intelligence. It is the equality of intelligence in all its manifestations. It means that there is no gap between two forms of intelligence. The human animal learns everything as he has learned his mother tongue, as he has learned to venture through the forest of things and signs that surrounds him, in order to take his place among his fellow humans–by observing, comparing one thing with another thing, one sign with one fact, one sign with another sign, and repeating the experiences he has first encountered by chance. If the “ignorant” person who doesn’t know how to read knows only one thing by heart, be it a simple prayer, he can compare that knowledge with something of which he remains ignorant: the words of the same prayer written on paper. He can learn, sign after sign, the resemblance of that of which he is ignorant to that which he knows. He can do it if, at each step, he observes what is in front of him, tells what he has seen, and verifies what he has told. From the ignorant person to the scientist who builds hypotheses, it is always the same intelligence that is at work: an intelligence that makes figures and comparisons to communicate its intellectual adventures and to understand what another intelligence is trying to communicate to it in turn.

This poetic work of translation is the first condition of any apprenticeship. Intellectual emancipation, as Jacotot conceived of it, means the awareness and the enactment of that equal power of translation and counter-translation. Emancipation entails an idea of distance opposed to the stultifying one. Speaking animals are distant animals who try to communicate through the forest of signs. It is this sense of distance that the “ignorant master”–the master who ignores inequality–is teaching. Distance is not an evil that should be abolished. It is the normal condition of communication. It is not a gap that calls for an expert in the art of suppressing it. The distance that the “ignorant” person has to cover is not the gap between his ignorance and the knowledge of his master; it is the distance between what he already knows and what he still doesn’t know but can learn by the same process. To help his pupil cover that distance, the “ignorant master” need not be ignorant. He need only dissociate his knowledge from his mastery. He does not teach his knowledge to the students. He commands them to venture forth in the forest, to report what they see, what they think of what they have seen, to verify it, and so on. What he ignores is the gap between two intelligences. It is the linkage between the knowledge of the knowledgeable and the ignorance of the ignorant. Any distance is a matter of happenstance. Each intellectual act weaves a casual thread between a form of ignorance and a form of knowledge. No kind of social hierarchy can be predicated on this sense of distance.

What is the relevance of this story with respect to the question of the spectator? Dramaturges today aren’t out to explain to their audience the truth about social relations and the best means to do away with domination. But it isn’t enough to lose one’s illusions. On the contrary, the loss of illusions often leads the dramaturge or the performers to increase the pressure on the spectator: Maybe he will know what has to be done, if the performance changes him, if it sets him apart from his passive attitude and makes him an active participant in the communal world. This is the first point that the reformers of the theater share with the stultifying pedagogues: the idea of the gap between two positions. Even when the dramaturge or the performer doesn’t know what he wants the spectator to do, he knows at least that the spectator has to do something: switch from passivity to activity.

But why not turn things around? Why not think, in this case too, that it is precisely the attempt at suppressing the distance that constitutes the distance itself? Why identify the fact of being seated motionless with inactivity, if not by the presupposition of a radical gap between activity and inactivity? Why identify “looking” with “passivity” if not by the presupposition that looking means looking at the image or the appearance, that it means being separated from the reality that is always behind the image? Why identify hearing with being passive, if not by the presupposition that acting is the opposite of speaking, etc.? All these oppositions–looking/knowing, looking/acting, appearance/reality, activity/passivity–are much more than logical oppositions. They are what I call a partition of the sensible, a distribution of places and of the capacities or incapacities attached to those places. Put in other terms, they are allegories of inequality. This is why you can change the values given to each position without changing the meaning of the oppositions themselves. For instance, you can exchange the positions of the superior and the inferior. The spectator is usually disparaged because he does nothing, while the performers on the stage–or the workers outside–do something with their bodies. But it is easy to turn matters around by stating that those who act, those who work with their bodies, are obviously inferior to those who are able to look–that is, those who can contemplate ideas, foresee the future, or take a global view of our world. The positions can be switched, but the structure remains the same. What counts, in fact, is only the statement of opposition between two categories: There is one population that cannot do what the other population does. There is capacity on one side and incapacity on the other.

Emancipation starts from the opposite principle, the principle of equality. It begins when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting and understand that the distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection. It starts when we realize that looking is also an action that confirms or modifies that distribution, and that “interpreting the world” is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it. The spectator is active, just like the student or the scientist: He observes, he selects, he compares, he interprets. He connects what he observes with many other things he has observed on other stages, in other kinds of spaces. He makes his poem with the poem that is performed in front of him. She participates in the performance if she is able to tell her own story about the story that is in front of her. Or if she is able to undo the performance–for instance, to deny the corporeal energy that it is supposed to convey the here and now and transform it into a mere image, by linking it with something she has read in a book or dreamed about, that she has lived or imagined. These are distant viewers and interpreters of what is performed in front of them. They pay attention to the performance to the extent that they are distant.

This is the second key point: The spectators see, feel, and understand something to the extent that they make their poems as the poet has done, as the actors, dancers, or performers have done. The dramaturge would like them to see this thing, feel that feeling, understand this lesson of what they see, and get into that action in consequence of what they have seen, felt, and understood. He proceeds from the same presupposition as the stultifying master: the presupposition of an equal, undistorted transmission. The master presupposes that what the student learns is precisely what he teaches him. This is the master’s notion of transmission: There is something on one side, in one mind or one body–a knowledge, a capacity, an energy–that must be transferred to the other side, into the other’s mind or body. The presupposition is that the process of learning is not merely the effect of its cause–teaching–but the very transmission of the cause: What the student learns is the knowledge of the master. That identity of cause and effect is the principle of stultification. On the contrary, the principle of emancipation is the dissociation of cause and effect. The paradox of the ignorant master lies therein. The student of the ignorant master learns what his master does not know, since his master commands him to look for something and to recount everything he discovers along the way while the master verifies that he is actually looking for it. The student learns something as an effect of his master’s mastery. But he does not learn his master’s knowledge.

The dramaturge and the performer do not want to “teach” anything. Indeed, they are more than a little wary these days about using the stage as a way of teaching. They want only to bring about a form of awareness or a force of feeling or action. But still they make the supposition that what will be felt or understood will be what they have put in their own script or performance. They presuppose the equality–meaning the homogeneity–of cause and effect. As we know, this equality rests on an inequality. It rests on the presupposition that there is a proper knowledge and proper practice with respect to “distance” and the means of suppressing it. Now this distance takes on two forms. There is the distance between performer and spectator. But there is also the distance inherent in the performance itself, inasmuch as it is a mediating “spectacle” that stands between the artist’s idea and the spectator’s feeling and interpretation. This spectacle is a third term, to which the other two can refer, but which prevents any kind of “equal” or “undistorted” transmission. It is a mediation between them, and that mediation of a third term is crucial in the process of intellectual emancipation. To prevent stultification there must be something between the master and the student. The same thing that links them must also separate them. Jacotot posited the book as that in-between thing. The book is the material thing, foreign to both master and student, through which they can verify what the student has seen, what he has reported about it, what he thinks of what he has reported.

This means that the paradigm of intellectual emancipation is clearly opposed to another idea of emancipation on which the reform of theater has often been grounded–the idea of emancipation as the reappropriation of a self that had been lost in a process of separation. The Debordian critique of the spectacle still rests on the Feuerbachian thinking of representation as an alienation of the self: The human being tears its human essence away from itself by framing a celestial world to which the real human world is submitted. In the same way, the essence of human activity is distanced, alienated from us in the exteriority of the spectacle. The mediation of the “third term” thus appears as the instance of separation, dispossession, and treachery. An idea of the theater predicated on that idea of the spectacle conceives the externality of the stage as a kind of transitory state that has to be superseded. The suppression of that exteriority thus becomes the telos of the performance. That program demands that the spectators be on the stage and the performers in the auditorium. It demands that the very difference between the two spaces be abolished, that the performance take place anywhere other than in a theater. Certainly many improvements in theatrical performance resulted from that breaking down of the traditional distribution of places (in the sense of both sites and roles). But the “redistribution” of places is one thing; the demand that the theater achieve, as its essence, the gathering of an unseparate community is another thing. The first entails the invention of new forms of intellectual adventure; the second entails a new form of Platonic assignment of bodies to their proper–that is, to their “communal”–place.

This presupposition against mediation is connected with a third one, the presupposition that the essence of theater is the essence of the community. The spectator is supposed to be redeemed when he is no longer an individual, when he is restored to the status of a member of a community, when he is carried off in a flood of the collective energy or led to the position of the citizen who acts as a member of the collective. The less the dramaturge knows what the spectators should do as a collective, the more he knows that they must become a collective, turn their mere agglomeration into the community that they virtually are. It is high time, I think, to call into question the idea of the theater as a specifically communitarian place. It is supposed to be such a place because, on the stage, real living bodies perform for people who are physically present together in the same place. In that way it is supposed to provide some unique sense of community, radically different from the situation of the individual watching television, or of moviegoers who sit in front of disembodied, projected images. Strange as it may seem, the widespread use of images and of all kinds of media in theatrical performances hasn’t called the presupposition into question. Images may take the place of living bodies in the performance, but as long as the spectators are gathered there the living and communitarian essence of the theater appears to be saved. Thus it seems impossible to escape the question, What specifically happens among the spectators in a theater that doesn’t happen elsewhere? Is there something more interactive, more communal, that goes on between them than between individuals who watch the same show on TV at the same time?

I think that this “something” is nothing more than the presupposition that the theater is communitarian in and of itself. That presupposition of what “theater” means always runs ahead of the performance and predates its actual effects. But in a theater, or in front of a performance, just as in a museum, at a school, or on the street, there are only individuals, weaving their own way through the forest of words, acts, and things that stand in front of them or around them. The collective power that is common to these spectators is not the status of members of a collective body. Nor is it a peculiar kind of interactivity. It is the power to translate in their own way what they are looking at. It is the power to connect it with the intellectual adventure that makes any of them similar to any other insofar as his or her path looks unlike any other. The common power is the power of the equality of intelligences. This power binds individuals together to the very extent that it keeps them apart from each other; it is the power each of us possesses in equal measure to make our own way in the world. What has to be put to the test by our performances–whether teaching or acting, speaking, writing, making art, etc.–is not the capacity of aggregation of a collective but the capacity of the anonymous, the capacity that makes anybody equal to everybody. This capacity works through unpredictable and irreducible distances. It works through an unpredictable and irreducible play of associations and dissociations.

Associating and dissociating instead of being the privileged medium that conveys the knowledge or energy that makes people active–this could be the principle of an “emancipation of the spectator,” which means the emancipation of any of us as a spectator. Spectatorship is not a passivity that must be turned into activity. It is our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know, as spectators who link what they see with what they have seen and told, done and dreamed. There is no privileged medium, just as there is no privileged starting point. Everywhere there are starting points and turning points from which we learn new things, if we first dismiss the presupposition of distance, second the distribution of the roles, and third the borders between territories. We don’t need to turn spectators into actors. We do need to acknowledge that every spectator is already an actor in his own story and that every actor is in turn the spectator of the same kind of story. We needn’t turn the ignorant into the learned or, merely out of a desire to overturn things, make the student or the ignorant person the master of his masters.

Let me make a little detour through my own political and academic experience. I belong to a generation that was poised between two competing perspectives: According to the first, those who possessed the intelligence of the social system had to pass their learning on to those who suffered under that system, so that they would then take action to overthrow it. According to the second, the supposed learned persons were in fact ignorant: Because they knew nothing of what exploitation and rebellion were, they had to become the students of the so-called ignorant workers. Therefore, initially I tried to reelaborate Marxist theory in order to make its theoretical weapons available to a new revolutionary movement, before setting out to learn from those who worked in the factories what exploitation and rebellion meant. For me, as for many other people of my generation, none of those attempts proved very successful. That’s why I decided to look into the history of the workers’ movement, to find out the reasons for the continual mismatching of workers and the intellectuals who came and visited them, either to instruct them or to be instructed by them. It was my good fortune to discover that this relationship wasn’t a matter of knowledge on one side and ignorance on the other, nor was it a matter of knowing versus acting or of individuality versus community. One day in May, during the 1970s, as I was looking through a worker’s correspondence from the 1830s to determine what the condition and consciousness of workers had been at that time, I discovered something quite different: the adventures of two visitors, also on a day in May, but some hundred and forty years before I stumbled upon their letters in the archives. One of the two correspondents had just been introduced into the utopian community of the Saint-Simonians, and he recounted to his friend his daily schedule in utopia: work, exercises, games, singing, and stories. His friend in turn wrote to him about a country outing that he had just gone on with two other workers looking to enjoy their Sunday leisure. But it wasn’t the usual Sunday leisure of the worker seeking to restore his physical and mental forces for the following week of work. It was in fact a breakthrough into another kind of leisure–that of aesthetes who enjoy the forms, lights, and shades of nature, of philosophers who spend their time exchanging metaphysical hypotheses in a country inn, and of apostles who set out to communicate their faith to the chance companions they meet along the road.

Those workers who should have provided me information about the conditions of labor and forms of class-consciousness in the 1830s instead provided something quite different: a sense of likeness or equality. They too were spectators and visitors, amid their own class. Their activity as propagandists could not be torn from their “passivity” as mere strollers and contemplators. The chronicle of their leisure entailed a reframing of the very relationship between doing, seeing, and saying. By becoming “spectators,” they overthrew the given distribution of the sensible, which had it that those who work have no time left to stroll and look at random, that the members of a collective body have no time to be “individuals.” This is what emancipation means: the blurring of the opposition between those who look and those who act, between those who are individuals and those who are members of a collective body. What those days brought our chroniclers was not knowledge and energy for future action. It was the reconfiguration hic et nunc of the distribution of Time and Space. Workers’ emancipation was not about acquiring the knowledge of their condition. It was about configuring a time and a space that invalidated the old distribution of the sensible, which doomed workers to do nothing with their nights but restore their forces for work the next day.

Understanding the sense of that break in the heart of time also meant putting into play another kind of knowledge, predicated not on the presupposition of any gap but on the presupposition of likeness. These men, too, were intellectuals–as anybody is. They were visitors and spectators, just like the researcher who, one hundred and forty years later, would read their letters in a library, just like visitors to Marxist theory or at the gates of a factory. There was no gap to bridge between intellectuals and workers, actors and spectators; no gap between two populations, two situations, or two ages. On the contrary, there was a likeness that had to be acknowledged and put into play in the very production of knowledge. Putting it into play meant two things. First, it meant rejecting the borders between disciplines. Telling the (hi)story of those workers’ days and nights forced me to blur the boundary between the field of “empirical” history and the field of “pure” philosophy. The story that those workers told was about time, about the loss and reappropriation of time. To show what it meant, I had to put their account in direct relation with the theoretical discourse of the philosopher who had, long ago in the Republic, told the same story by explaining that in a well-ordered community everybody must do only one thing, his or her own business, and that workers in any case had no time to spend anywhere other than their workplace or to do anything but the job fitting the (in)capacity with which nature had endowed them. Philosophy, then, could no longer present itself as a sphere of pure thought separated from the sphere of empirical facts. Nor was it the theoretical interpretation of those facts. There were neither facts nor interpretations. There were two ways of telling stories.

Blurring the border between academic disciplines also meant blurring the hierarchy between the levels of discourse, between the narration of a story and the philosophical or scientific explanation of it or the truth lying behind or beneath it. There was no metadiscourse explicating the truth of a lower level of discourse. What had to be done was a work of translation, showing how empirical stories and philosophical discourses translate each other. Producing a new knowledge meant inventing the idiomatic form that would make translation possible. I had to use that idiom to tell of my own intellectual adventure, at the risk that the idiom would remain “unreadable” for those who wanted to know the cause of the story, its true meaning, or the lesson for action that could be drawn from it. I had to produce a discourse that would be readable only for those who would make their own translation from the point of view of their own adventure.

That personal detour may lead us back to the core of our problem. These issues of crossing borders and blurring the distribution of roles are defining characteristics of theater and of contemporary art today, when all artistic competences stray from their own field and exchange places and powers with all others. We have plays without words and dance with words; installations and performances instead of “plastic” works; video projections turned into cycles of frescoes; photographs turned into living pictures or history paintings; sculpture that becomes hypermediatic show; etc. Now, there are three ways of understanding and practicing this confusion of the genres. There is the revival of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which is supposed to be the apotheosis of art as a form of life but which proves instead to be the apotheosis of strong artistic egos or of a kind of hyperactive consumerism, if not of both at the same time. There is the idea of a “hybridization” of the means of art, which complements the view of our age as one of mass individualism expressed through the relentless exchange between roles and identities, reality and virtuality, life and mechanical prostheses, and so on. In my view, this second interpretation ultimately leads to the same place as the first one–to another kind of hyperactive consumerism, another kind of stultification, inasmuch as it effects the crossing of borders and the confusion of roles merely as a means of increasing the power of the performance without questioning its grounds.

The third way–the best way in my view–does not aim at the amplification of the effect but at the transformation of the cause/effect scheme itself, at the dismissal of the set of oppositions that grounds the process of stultification. It invalidates the opposition between activity and passivity as well as the scheme of “equal transmission” and the communitarian idea of the theater that in fact makes it an allegory of inequality. The crossing of borders and the confusion of roles shouldn’t lead to a kind of “hypertheater,” turning spectatorship into activity by turning representation into presence. On the contrary, theater should question its privileging of living presence and bring the stage back to a level of equality with the telling of a story or the writing and the reading of a book. It should be the institution of a new stage of equality, where the different kinds of performances would be translated into one another. In all those performances, in fact, it should be a matter of linking what one knows with what one does not know, of being at the same time performers who display their competences and spectators who are looking to find what those competences might produce in a new context, among unknown people. Artists, like researchers, build the stage where the manifestation and the effect of their competences become dubious as they frame the story of a new adventure in a new idiom. The effect of the idiom cannot be anticipated. It calls for spectators who are active interpreters, who render their own translation, who appropriate the story for themselves, and who ultimately make their own story out of it. An emancipated community is in fact a community of storytellers and translators.

I’m aware that all this may sound like words, mere words. But I wouldn’t take that as an insult. We’ve heard so many speakers pass their words off as more than words, as passwords enabling us to enter a new life. We’ve seen so many spectacles boasting of being no mere spectacles but ceremonials of community. Even now, in spite of the so-called postmodern skepticism about changing the way we live, one sees so many shows posing as religious mysteries that it might not seem so outrageous to hear, for a change, that words are only words. Breaking away from the phantasms of the Word made flesh and the spectator turned active, knowing that words are only words and spectacles only spectacles, may help us better understand how words, stories, and performances can help us change something in the world we live in.

JACQUES RANCIERE IS PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS VIII.

* “The Emancipated Spectator” was originally presented, in English, at the opening of the Fifth International Summer Academy of Arts in Frankfurt on August 20, 2004. The text appears here in slightly revised form.