John Drummond. “The aim would ... in Landy's work suggest a shedding of
attachment, similar perhaps to that of the Sadhus of India, the followers of. Vishnu
or ...
Breakdown, transcendence and the future in my space: studying new forms of collective subjectivity.
John Drummond
“The aim would be less to overthrow neoconservatism than to counteractualize its residually molar individuals as a local-global correlation of becomings-other. We are in this together, and the only way out is together, into a supermolecularity where no quasicause can follow: a collective ethics beyond good and evil. But most of all, beyond greed.” - Brian Massumi
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Breakdown When, in February 2001, the artist Michael Landy made his installation, Break Down, he called it the happiest day of his life. The work, which took over 2 years to plan and 2 weeks to complete, was sited at the old, empty, C&A department store in Oxford Street in London. It entailed the absolute destruction of everything he owned, 53/4 tons of possessions, over 7200 individual objects. Each item was meticulously catalogued and categorised under ten headings: art, clothing, electrical equipment, furniture, kitchen contents, leisure, perishables, reading material, studio contents and motor vehicle, before being reduced to its elemental parts. His stereo for instance, comprising 243 components, was carefully taken apart. Even the wires were stripped of their insulation copper to one bin, plastic to another. A similar fate awaited his Saab motor car, the largest of his possessions. The work was performed by 10 identically dressed operatives, including Landy himself, who directed proceedings from an overhead gantry. Conveyor belts, carrying recycling trays, moved steadily across the space to industrial shredders, which in turn reduced the material to pulp and granules. Nothing was put aside, neither sentimentality nor intrinsic value excluded an object from the process. His father’s old coat which he had cherished for years and gifts of artwork from some of his fellow artists were destroyed alike.
The reaction of visitors to the installation was interesting. Some found the spectacle amusing, others attempted to liberate or steal items awaiting destruction, some became angry at the apparent cold-blooded self mutilation they perceived, others were moved to tears.
Landy himself said little about his motivation, allowing his audience to experience the work, to guess and to interpret. Was it a stunt, an intriguing and ultimately successful attempt to create a landmark artwork which might confirm Landy’s name in the future posterity of art history? Or perhaps a moment of deconstructive postmodern sensitivity, a mute moment of aesthetic attenuation? Some commentators found similarities in the conveyor belt reference to the prize selection gimmick of the Generation Game, or to the stripping of possession, and of identity, carried out by the Nazis during the holocaust. Was it an intense self-directed jibe of an eco-warrior? Perhaps the installation was a form of anti-shopping therapy - its location in Oxford Street, rather than in a factory unit on the city edge, seemed to support the idea. Certainly it might have been seen as a critique of consumerism, represented broadly in the questions “to what extent are we what we own?” “Does our identity really depend on what we use, or on what we are able to take for granted?” 1
In the sense of a personal transformation or a bid for freedom, did the voluntary disinvestment of property in Landy’s work suggest a shedding of attachment, similar perhaps to that of the Sadhus of India, the followers of Vishnu or Shiva, who renounce their possessions in an attempt to transcend the material world and thus gain enlightenment? Or, for instance, in the Buddhist Theravadin tradition, where a renunciate monk will reduce the totality of his belongings to his robes, bowl, water strainer, needle and thread, in pursuit of nirvana. Certainly, visitors to the installation, aware of such traditional ways of being, may well have seen the work in this context.
It can be argued that all of these interpretations, and many others, might be thought of as possessing a reality. Each can be validated by context, to be explored and dissected, framed by the particular subjectivity of the viewer.
In terms of future sustainability, an understanding of subjectivity will prove to be important. We are being required to ask “how can we take responsibility for a future we cannot know?” The question is paradoxical, but one which increasingly refuses neutrality. The habitual response to paradox, effectively to ‘live with it’, can, in this context, be understood as reinforcing a tendency towards irresponsibility, which might be described as a deliberate or implicit decision to act inadequately. Nevertheless, the future is believed to be unknowable; if it is possible to rely neither on an objective, science based understanding of a problem nor on an authentic historical perspective, perhaps a subjective, instinctive response is called for. Possibly we will decide to look again at the nature of subjectivity, particularly collective subjectivity, and in perhaps increasingly profound ways.
The connection between caring for an ecological future, no matter how difficult or unpredictable, and personal or collective subjectivity, is reinforced when considering the views of those, including many in the West, who believe that a link exists between an individual’s level of awareness and self-development and a sensitivity towards global sustainability. Such a view, if not to fail through romantic self-delusion, requires real commitment. It is surprising how very little we might be entitled to use, and to own, if we seriously attempted to live without overshooting our own ecological footprint. However, there is some evidence that this underlying awareness is becoming increasingly prevalent, and perhaps more certain, not only as an instinctive and intuitive response to the need to develop strategies for a partial ecological sustainability, but to realise a desire to live free of the constraints of national, social or ideological boundaries and to live in the present moment, tuned to the dynamic of an unfolding future.
If we are to establish any relationship between ecological sustainability and personal self-awareness then it seems reasonable that such a path might be developed only through a desire for a change of mentality not moderated by the action of fear, guilt and repression. Such a path must be active not passive. The subjective implications of guilt are invariably constriction and corruption, and a tendency to produce an immobility of action, or, if in a creative mode, an insistence on becoming-the-same at the expense of any possibility of becoming-other. What is called for is a celebration of both similarity and difference, an acceptance of mutation, a shift from the individual to the communal, and the active exploration of freedom, although perhaps not the freedom of a hedonist, but that of an eco-warrior.
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Transcendence (1) - Becoming If transcendence infers, for example, the gradual letting go of attachment in pursuit of enlightenment, it is in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their collaborative thinking described as schizo-capitalism, that the term takes on a different, arguably opposite, dimension. Called a ‘non-dialectic philosophy of becoming’, this thinking is variously described as a curiosity by some and as the most important philosophy of the 20th century by others, including Foucault, who wrote of their first collaborative volume, Antiœdipus, that it might be read as a manual designed to help us lead an antifascist life. 2 Building on, or more accurately, lying in close relation to the writings of Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche amongst others, the collaboration, as in previous examples of Deleuze’s own writing, attempts to fabricate concepts through the process of ‘becoming-thought’, effectively an intuitive mapping of the problem it seeks to address. Such methods can be described as immanent; unprejudiced or transcended by previous concepts or ideas, or even by a pre-formulation of their own first thoughts or first principles.
Schizo-capitalism describes an opposition between freedom and repression, immanence and transcendence, at all levels of humanity, from the personal and psychological, to the global and social. In terms of the individual, desire, for example, may be productive, free of repression, when not overwhelmed, or transcended, by fear, guilt or neurosis, or moderated by ideology. Society is described in terms of a continual state of flux, decoding and recoding the flows of capitalist production. The presence of such turbulence, and the subsequent unexpected or inevitable, massive or minute separations in the social structure are a condition which may operate, in one way or another, against the transcending forces of aggregation and control, and the voices of repression. Tree like - or arborescent - hierarchical structures and historically wedded, organisational modes are broken up into unanchored flows through the action of desire and moments of escape. The condition is schizophrenic, rhizomic and fluid. And, by any definition, charged with creativity.
Within this context, our possessions, with their attendant signs and signifiers, may constitute a territory which functions to suppress immanence. They may anchor us in the comfort zone, a transcendental territory from which escape routes, or in Deleuzian terms, lines of flight, become ever more difficult. We become overcoded by what we own, and by what we fail to give away. Certainly, visitors from other places, places where possessions are few and the struggle is often to feed oneself or one’s family, places called under developed by the West, seem often to comment how sad we appear to be. In schizo-capitalism, society is seen to be in continuous movement, deterritorialising and reterritorialising incessantly. Within this flux and in moments of change, individuals may attempt to remain sedentary or they may develop lines of flight only to reterritorialise on new hierarchies: on hyperconsumption or on the State apparatus, or possibly on more radical or repressed ways of thinking, or ever more extreme forms of religion and nationalism. In the latter case, it seems that there exists within the human psyche, and precisely to avoid feelings of loneliness and isolation, a strongly dominating appetite to embrace almost any form of separatist subjectivity at the collective level.
Deleuze and Guattari however offer a different possibility: that of nomadic thought, in which the moment of reterritorialisation is forever suspended; the nomad reterritorialising on the act of deterritorialisation itself. It terms of immanence, such a figure may be considered to be a paradigm; the nomad achieving a continuous state of 3
becoming. The nomad plays a central role in schizo-capitalism: a conceptual persona, a private thinker who thinks for herself by means of her own innate, untutored understanding. Such figures are familiar in philosophy and literature: Socrates in Plato, I in Descates, the Antichrist in Nietzsche. For Deleuze and Guattari they exist in a variety of guises, laying down the plane of immanence and drawing out the subjectivity of the author, 3 and exist to maintain a link between the concept and the plane of becoming-thought.
We can imagine that, living in the absence of his possessions, the months following Break Down must have been a challenging time for Landy. He had divested himself of the tokens of his relationship with the State birth certificate, passport; with the fiscal world - tax documents, bank statements, credit cards; with his emotional life - address book, mobile phone; and with the physical representations of his memories - objects, photographs and memorabilia. He had acquired the attributes of a nomad, and the challenges he faced, including the knowledge that these challenges were self induced, will have had a profound impact on his psyche and, possibly, a very real sense of becoming. Certainly he had departed the comfort zone. The installation promoted a sense of empathy with the viewer. We could not really know how the artist felt, but clearly incorporated within Break Down there existed a conceptual persona, the figure of the man who has lost everything. This person was not Landy, but a synthetic construct - an oscillation between artist and viewer - an either and which invited entry at the subjective level to deeper realms of sensation, feeling and comprehension.
It is significant that the work Landy chose to follow Break Down was a series of highly detailed but simply rendered etchings of weeds extracted from between city paving slabs. Entitled Nourishment, these illustrations are of plants which appear to have little consequence, and are often ignored, but which have the power, through their tenacity and resilience, to alter fundamentally the landscape. By the actions of their roots and the fact that they thrive on a minimum of nutrients, these plants are able, with the help of weathering and erosion, to widen the cracks and return their micro-environments to greater friability. They may be joined later by an increasing spectrum of vegetation, including grasses and brambles, whose persistent rhizomic action serves to accelerate and deepen the process of reclamation.
Transcendence (2) - The University In 1992, Felix Guattari noted that the ecological crisis might be understood as part of a more general malaise within the political, social and existential territories we inhabit.4 This crisis stems from a kind of revolution of mentalities which appears to have stopped all investment in developments, developments which might extend beyond a productivism which ignores human futurality. He asks the question; how can we change mentalities? How can we reinvent the means, the social and political practices, which would return to humanity a sense of responsibility, not just for its own survival, but for the future of all living species on the planet, and for the “incorporeal species” such as music, art, cinema, and our relationship with time, compassion and love and “the feeling of fusion at the heart of the cosmos”? The crisis can be traced, historically, to a shift from a communal consciousness and to the associated loss of what he called “territorialised assemblages of enunciation”, heterogeneous and polyvocal in nature, which maintained a transversal collective identity, and supported an entire array of partial subjectivities. This loss might be thought to have resulted in a kind of neurosis: a cultural
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infantalisation now fed endlessly by the media, a collapsed, unquestioning and intensely individualised level of subjectivity.
For Guattari, an answer would seem to lie within the locus of cultural creativity, in the production of new polyphonic, pre-personal, collective subjectivities not predicated on reductivist modes or on the universalising claims of psychological modelisation. A new ethico-aesthetic paradigm; ethical in the Spinozan sense of a power to live in the world. How this might achieve an academic impetus, however, seemed problematic. He wrote that,
“a systematic rejection of subjectivity in the name of a mythical scientific objectivity continues to reign in the University. In the heyday of structuralism the subject was methodically excluded from its own multiple and heterogeneous material of expression. It is time to re-examine machinic productions of images, signs of artificial intelligence etc. as new materials of subjectivity.”5
Ironically, in the last decade and a half, the problem seems to have deepened. It is in art, and in creativity, that personal and collective subjectivity might best develop the power of its polyvocality yet there is certainly anecdotal evidence to suggest that, in colleges of art in the Western world, the possibility seems as remote as ever. Much still seems to be taught, for example, of the metanarrative of postmodernism. Lacanian theories, centred around his extension of Freud’s view of human psychology, are delivered in quite determinist ways: notions of the unconscious, the id, the screen which separates us from the traumatic sublime, that elusive objet petit a, and the mirror stage of infant development, are frequently taught as if they possessed scientific facticity, rather than as metaphors. This might be convenient in considering the work of artists who had themselves adopted these ideas as factual, but it hardly points to a way forward. The work which emerged from these modes was often deconstructive and sensationalist and, at times, deliberately repellant, but the artists could not defend themselves against accusations of kitsch once the public became inured to the shock.
No one teaching in Higher Education in the UK over the last decade can have failed to be aware of a fundamental shift of emphasis. The loss of the student grant and the adoption of modular, outcome predictive curriculum and assessment structures has resulted in a transfer of influence from the academic/practitioner to the bureaucrat; effectively a slide from immanence to transcendence. It is easier to explain the under performance of a student to a disappointed, out-of-pocket, and potentially litigious parent if course delivery is systematised, unchallenging and predictable. Ironically, this trend runs counter to the often expressed desire for emerging students to be more creative and lateral in their thinking so as to contribute to an ideas based, rather than production based, economy. Naturally, some teachers may be pleased with this shift where it happens to coincide with their own ideology. In certain art colleges for example, and possibly as a result of a disaffection with postmodernism amongst the practitioners, or perhaps a fear that students might adopt a demotivated, deconstructive postmodern view of their own situation and begin seriously to question their own presence within the system, there seems at times to be a revisionist’s attempt to return to a values based, hyperconformative authoritarianism, implied in aspects of late modernism, which serves to suppress exploration, instinct and selfexpression. We live in complex times, and levels of complexity are accelerating. Placing simplicity before complexity, the methodologies of reductionism would seem to provide inadequate tools in aiding our understanding 5
of the emerging human ecology of the present. Such simplifications are inappropriate, and indeed, when used to form the basis of education, they may be thought to be cruel.
The transfer of power from the practitioner to bureaucrat certainly will affect the quality of research. Creativity requires freethinking whereas the competition for research points not only limits the number of academics and practitioners free to undertake research, but produces an increasingly vociferous demand for detailed justifications. In terms of thought, Deleuze and Guattari warned that concepts must invariably be created; that an adherence to a readymade, unrenewed concept is the work, not of a philosopher, but a functionary.6 Thinking is relevant when it addresses the temporal and spatial ecology in which it is created. For the researcher, the student, and also for the artist, it may even be more rewarding to misunderstand a concept than to adopt it wholesale. Such errors may be the result of a lack of insight, but can equally indicate a subjective displacement between the ontology of the original work and that of the present moment. In this case, misunderstanding may be the beginning of new thought. Certainly freethinking cannot be forever predicated on the need to refer to and pacify previous work; the transcendent, quasi-evolutionary consequences of dialectic methodologies are fundamentally restrictive.
To accept responsibility for the future will entail a shift in mentalities at the subjective level which will not be achieved through abdication. The objective, scientific mode, of itself, may be of little help. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the present ecological crisis is the result of an over reliance on technological and scientific thinking resulting in an allegedly unstoppable evolution of systems and production, an unthinking, a-sensitive and profit hungry pursuit of the value-added, generally at the expense of both humanity and the planet. In any case, trust is lacking; there have been too many instances of polarised agendas and of research vulnerable to the manipulations of commercial interest. Political solutions are similarly problematic. With regard to ecological and ethnographic issues, it can be argued that to await genuine State enlightenment would be to ignore the fact that democracy itself does not deliver a positive feedback cycle in favour of sustainability, a lesson the present UK Government learnt to its cost when it decided to impose an environmental surcharge on fuel in 2000. There are, of course, exceptions to this apparent political impotence discovered, for instance, in the education of young children, where an ecological awareness is being developed in the next generation often seen as torch bearers of the future and healers of our collective conscience. To aid this process, mainstream early years education in certain areas of the UK is slowly shifting from an 80’s curriculum based model to one partly located on the outdoor classroom.
Naturally, there are many people actively seeking alternative ways of living which speak of greater levels of sustainability. Centres which offer an ecological consciousness with a commitment to personal and communal creativity and education are now becoming more common. New research into construction methods is leading to the development of different kinds of building, for example, a visitor centre in West Wales, an architecturally and aesthetically articulate structure, in which all the main load bearing walls are of compacted earth. 7 The building is a net exporter of energy to the electric grid. The creation of a network of enclosed, ecologically conscious communities is slow but there are an increasing number of eco-villages, with habitation designed on principles of partial sustainability and with the attendant absence of much of the trappings of unnecessary consumption.
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In a wider sense and with potentially global impact it is possible to discern future trends, based, for example, on new modes of communication which may provide for at least a partial reenergising of collective subjectivities. They may be thought of as a consequence of social and political fragmentation and represent a challenge to the status quo, and to the forces of aggregation and control. It is with the emergence of new virtual communities that this trend is most evident.
My space There is no doubt that new technologies: GPS, the mobile phone and the internet, are having a profound psychological and social impact. The development of e-mail technologies is most interesting. With the invention of broadband and the improvement in data transfer rates, the possibilities for realtime conversation and file sharing are accelerating rapidly. At least 100 million people across the world are signed up to use Myspace, a virtual community subdivided by interest and association. The number of people involved appears to be growing exponentially. Individuals meet others by joining interest or cultural groups, through forum-based discussion, by using boolean search facilities, by chance, or, perhaps most commonly, by networking beyond existing friendships. This virtual territory can be described as an open community since all parts are available to all members. Profile pages abound, but individuals may be selective of their identities and only present a small part of their personal reality. Or none; they may be entirely creative, although this is be thought to be rare. Myspace is used for a multiplicity of purposes: as a meeting place for private or public communication, the sharing of images and music, networking, and for the exploration of relationships. Other such communities exist: Bebo is similar to Myspace, but is a closed community as access to each participant’s profile is by invitation. With MSN Messenger, also a closed community, the focus is purely on text. An interesting feature of the relatively anonymous nature of these virtual territories is that conversations can become profound, challenging and even intimate, but with few of the usual consequences. If the contact proves to be unhelpful, either participant can simply stop the conversation, or block further communication. The psychological effect might be to promote a sense of becoming, of intimacy and levels of interpersonal commitment, but without attachment. The potential social and political effect of such communities is immense. Individuals are empowered by the global nature of the network, and are able to explore and proclaim their own subjective realities and to be in contact with others across the world who share, or dispute, their way of thinking. The effects of such communities are immanent and, in all senses rhizomic, and would seem to satisfy many of the conditions of Guattari’s new collective assemblage of enunciation. In political terms, there now exists a potential which may steadily become a new global refrain; certainly an opportunity for the quick dissemination of information and for the mobilisation of action. Demonstrations have been organised online and e-mail campaigns mounted which have brought the voices of people to the attention of the State. However, such communities should not be thought of as the emergence of some new form of utopia. Participation is restricted to those who have access to the internet. Present interest seems to be centred around a particular age group; most members are probably under 30. In some parts of the world, membership is difficult or impossible; State controlled service providers block all access. And even in the ‘free’ world, within these virtual communities there may exist an implicit seed of transcendent containment. There is a danger that the existence of such communities, of itself, will provide a major new opportunity to those, State sponsored or otherwise, who feel the need to enforce control.
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During the cold war, the polarisation of political ideologies served, in part, to reinforce social cohesion. In an Orwelian sense, it was a symbiosis. It can be argued that the command economy of the Soviet bloc could only be sustained through propaganda and the fear of invasion, either physical or economic, by a corrupting external force. Equally, in the West, similar levels of propaganda were applied. Capitalism was celebrated, hyperconsumption was patriotic. In narrow political terms, both sides benefited. Levels of research and spending on armaments would not have been tolerated had the perceived threat not been made real. The true threat was, of course, global psychosis; that of mutually assured destruction.
To apply the same understanding to the present might be to consider the social and political effects of the ‘war’ on terror. The threat is no longer universal, but local; some people feel it to be personal. However it is interesting, if not convenient, that the focus of State interest has undergone a seismic shift from military hardware to surveillance.
At times it is possible to discover an undercurrent of fear, or paranoia, amongst some of the members of the new, virtual communities. Are they being watched? Are their opinions, their interests and activities, and the nature of their relationships, being dissected and analysed? Their answer would almost certainly be yes; in the digital world, whatever is possible is probably already happening. It is known that some organisations providing internet search facilities will hand over their databases to the authorities if required to do so by the judiciary. This is possibly cosmetic however, with sufficient motivation and investment, such information is probably already being hacked by governments across the world. In the name of State interest and the fight against terrorism, almost anything appears to be acceptable and, if it proves to be illegal in one place, the work can always be commissioned somewhere else.
Whether or not this fear contains an element of truth within present realities, it is not unreasonable to suggest that it will become an aspect of future State intervention. Certainly, in terms of computational power, the sifting of billions of pieces of data in real time is already available. The development of behaviour predictive software, capable of determining, at both local and global levels, the undercurrents of human social subjectivity, in all its complexity, may not yet be possible. Nevertheless, the connection between information technology and subjectivity will almost definitely become a dynamic in the future studies of social surveillance.
From the viewpoint of schizo-capitalism there is a strong suggestion that a portion of humanity will adopt an existence, be it social, political or psychological, which lies outside the locus of repression and the reductive, homogenising influences which serve to transcend creativity. Complexity will be celebrated and at least a partial understanding of the connections that exist between a multiplicity of fragments and flows will be sought. The effect will not be chaos, but rather a greater sense of immanence, and of the present moment, in which lines of flight may develop and new nomadic territories of thought and living may be explored. Neither previous assumptions, nor a vector representing the collapse of communal ways of living into self-perpetuating, self-referential cycles of individualism will return to humanity a sense of future responsibility. Certainly at the level of the individual, new subjectivities, both personal and collective, are, and will remain, an essential aspect of our attempt to sense a future we cannot know. The University will seek to engage with this process through the support of new modes of 8
creativity and in the study of complexity. But equally, in other faculties, or in other places, this study will be appropriated, handing back to the transcendent forces of repression the tools of social control.
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Notes 1
Massumi, B., ‘A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari’ MIT Press, Camb. Mass and London, 1992, p141
2
Foucault, M., preface to ‘Anti-Oedipus’, Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., Athalone Press, 1983 pxi-xiv
3
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., ‘What is Philosophy’, Verso, London and New York, 1994, p62
4
Guattari, F., ‘Chaosmosis’, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995
5
Ibid., p133
6
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., ‘What is Philosophy’, Verso, London and New York, 1994, p51
7
The visitor centre at the Centre for Alternative Technology, Machynlleth, West Wales
Biographical note John Drummond is an installation artist and general trouble maker whose work is centred around a wish to form a symbiosis between practice and theory. For the last 3 years he has attempted to make visible some ideas contained in schizo-capitalism. In this respect, he takes heart from John Rajman’s observation that every philosophy needs a non-philosopher to understand it. ‘Breakdown, transcendence and the future in my space’ might be seen in this light and in relationship to the installation ‘Deep Water’, which is exhibited at the Futures Conference. He is founder of Art Is Real, an art projects organisation which aims to discover and bring to the public the work of new artists and create exhibitions in unusual spaces.
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