Osmotic Performance of subjectivization – a schizoanalytical artistic research on the potentiality of collective subjectivization within the processes of art-making and between the relationships of audience and performer.

This is a first version of this text, which is in progress.

(Topics: subjectivity, post-fordist condition, joy, trauma and a-signifying processes.)

AA: Micropolitical level

1. Production of subjectivity
2. Affect ability
3. Relationship to copoiesis, to context of art world. The strategizing of art markets.

Introduction

My starting point on the research of the production of subjectivity is how it is done in the context of post-fordism, in fine-arts and in culture in general. I am researching subjectivization as affectivity and through the processes of joy, sorrow an a-signification. For the general ability of being affected has become part of the production in the cultural capitalism in general. In a way, performance art and labour have converged with each other. I am using a concept of copoiesis, which is developed by psychoanalyst and artist Bracha Ettinger. For her copoiesis is not to be used as a method, model or strategy, but we may find some expressive support for it. For this reason, Ettinger rather talks about art-making, rather than art as a prospect of clearly defined objects or acts. In my interpretation copoiesis is being attached with the general ability to become affected, or general intellect – and therefore it is one of the interests to utilize with the cultural or cognitive capitalism.

The social aspect of processual subjectivization

One starting point to think about the relationship between the performer and audience (in a stage of in general on the cultural capitalist work environment) comes to me from Ettinger, and how she perceives a foetus in the womb. She defines the womb being a resonating chamber, where an unborn child is never alone, but from the level of micro-organism she resonate with the world. The world for a developing embryo or for and adult is a network of affects, where the clearly-defined subject is never existing, but instead one is constantly becoming: becoming-animal, -cosmos, -woman, -black, and so on. In the process of becoming my point is not to claim it as a lack of subjectivity, rather that the processuality is something different than shift from one identity to another. Another point is that, there is nothing more unnatural than some preconceived idea of naturalness; a natural nature, human or eventually a natural identity. My focus is based on that the subjectivization is a social event, something preceding the development of an individual, which creates a context where for instance in a performance situation builds up a temporary collectivity and a social subjectivization. Nevertheless, the social subjectivization will lead into individuation: a position or a reflection of the collective subjectivization. This thinking of processual and a-signifying subjectivization I see based on potentiality and a human ability in relation to actuality. I would claim it to be found somewhere in the thinking of Ettinger as well, in what way the social or matrixical subjectivization is developed into individuation? There is an option that a subject is frozen under the gaze of fascinum, the evil eye, which will be part of a process of paranoid or cynical subjectivity. The other option is where the collective subjectivization supports individuation with compassionate, transforming gaze, with fascinance in a way, which the matrixical jointness is not being lost.

«When self-exploitation acquires a central role in the process of valorisation, the production of subjectivity becomes a terrain of the central conflict» says Andre Gorz and defines the relationship between the cognitive capitalism and the general intellect. The general abilities of human being have become part of the production of value, and have also become part of the project of so called relational aesthetics in contemporary art. Now, relations, which work through affectivity, are more valuable than traditional power or hierarchical relations. Nevertheless, the foremost is the production of subjectivity, without any other capitalistic production is not possible, as Deleuze and Guattari write. The production of subjectivity is bone marrow of capitalism. Production of subjectivity is also the part of collective and matrixical copoiesis.

I would like to define performance or an event of being as a production or a process of production, part of the larger discourse of subjectivity production. This process of subjectivization is different than some «progressive» discourses of subjectivity, for instance the subjectivization of avant-garde. A discourse, which aims towards more, differentiated or enlightened subjectivity, but also more estranged as well. One may call it a «bourgeois» subjectivity. Neither do I intend to create an emancipatory process or some neo-liberal research-project of «creative self». These projects have a desire to combine the general potentiality with the more traditional forms of production of surplus value. In the field of contemporary art, these projects carry around themselves some kind of an aura of «pseudo-criticism» towards market economy, but they operate only in the levels of communication and representation. Eventually the goal of these projects is to make profit on general human potentiality and affectivity – on the proxy of positivism.

As an example of bourgeois subjectivity, Peter Sloterdijk has written about the subjectivity of Dadaism. Here a subjectivity attempt to create a rupture with the world – in a similar manner as a cynical subjectivity of cognitive worker would do it: ”Weimar art cynics train themselves to play masters of the situation, while the situation in fact is one in which things have gotten out of control and sovereignty is no longer possible [...] they impudently place their poses against the equally overwhelming and mediocre destiny of the period: cynically allowing themselves to be swept along — Hey we’re alive! The modernization of unhappy consciousness.”

Later, Sloterdijk is interpreting Heidegger’s idea of «Everyman», the connection with social of him, and the rift he has created. This rift becomes the component of paranoid subjectivity, which can be defined as ‘scopic’, where a subject is only taking part in the world with observations and representations.

Osmotic boundaries

In my research project on performance studies and theory, my subject is not to search for an over-coding collectivity to signify all singularities. The most important in the process of collective subjectivization is in what relation is it with the singular subjectivization. Becoming-animal or –woman does not mean that one should resemble, sound or act in some certain way as such; it is not about mimetic behaviour, but the emphasis is on the becoming, in the affective process. Collective subjectivization is temporary and at the same time becoming, at the same time of singularity being present. Singular processes of subjectivization are resonating with each other within the collective process, in a similar way as a foetus in the becoming-mother’s womb in the example of Ettinger. Subjectivity is a fold or a pleat. A collective process of subjectivization of an event or experimentation is has a similar nature of a fold. It has no permanence except on the very elementary level. So that the process of temporary collective subjectivization would not reterritorialize – for instance after the workshop, experiment, or witnessing an act of performance – into mere meaningful memories, but would continue thickening within the singular subjectivity, there is a necessity of singular present in the process of collective subjectivization. Thus, the process should not «iron out the wrinkles». Neither the process should not concentrate on the production of a personalized individual. Often in the context of pedagogy of fine arts the subjectivity is understood as a process of a personalized individual, which is supported by the social structure. In my point of view, this leads to inevitable conflict between the collective subjectivization and a personalized individual. Therefore the balance should not be on the pure individuals but on the process of individuation and singular subjectivities, because an individual clearly defines its contours and aims, while a singularity I consider as being part of the social production of subjectivization. A processual and collective subjectivization is synthetic and relentlessly produced.

How to remain open to the world, when a resonating and coming subjectivity already exists in the world? In my approach a collective subjectivization is diverged from the collective desire to find a lost community, to establish a tribal bonfire and to imagine the world not existing behind our backs. Based on the resonating matrixical a collective subjectivity cannot be defined from one point of view, without the other. Desire for archaic communities is an obstruction and against becoming, it erases the singular subjectivization, as well. In this way we might create pseudo-tribes and hierarchical gangs, but not becoming packs. Becoming-animal does not mean that one would become a single wolf, mouse or lap-dog, but becoming a singular pack and multiplicity. A singular subjectivity of a collective subjectivization is already many. In contrast an individualized artist may not bear within himself anything but phantasms of bestial families.

Fusion is not inevitable, when a subjectivization can exist with boundaries, if the singular contours function osmotically, smooth and permeable, yet intensive. Ettinger, again has an affective example of matrixical, where the bipolar communication can become osmotic in a similar way as it existed in the a-signifying level between becoming-mother and foetus in the womb.

Paranoid tight-rope walker

A different process than the one of fordist subjectivity is going on in the post-fordist capitalistic society. If the urban modernist subjectivity was defined as paranoid and cynical, as Sloterdijk among others has analyzed, then in the context of post-fordism, subjectivity might be defined with matrixical copoiesis, as well – yet not archaic, but singular. Yet, this might not be anything non-existent in the fordist 19th and 20th century context, but rather something latent throughout the existence of modern subjectivity. Still, like Ettinger shows, Freud for instance would never give a chance for a matrixical concept to exist. In contrast to the avant-garde paradigm, processual copoiesis does not attempt to give an emancipatory, transgressive or enlightening impact on the world. On the terminology of Lacan, the nature of modern, paranoid subject is scopic, where subject functions within imaginary and representations: ”The libidinal cathexis heightens the images that have become perceptions, transforming them into hallucinations” A world is being transformed into a hostile place, against which the subjectivity must protect itself with representations and individualization. There is the spectre of an evil eye tracing the limitation of a paranoid subjectivity. He is like a tight-rope walker, and for him the fascinum function as an incentive and a judge, as well – yet, the evil eye is draped behind the screen, as Lacan writes. Contrary to fascinum, the matrixical subjectivization is haptic, transformative, sensitive, a-signifying and processual.

The transport-station of art-making

An example: I was instructing a workshop in a small village Maçao in Portugal, where a group of twenty participants, students from Portugal, Estonia and Finland took part. During the workshop I initiated an exercise, where I asked each student to pick up a line from balls of thread lying on the floor. After that we were moving around in the space, until everyone was entangled with each other more or less. Following this, we tried to move out from the space as a «assemblage» of this kind. After some effort we were able to get out, where we dismantled the threads from our bodies. A suggestion of untying the tangled knot was aroused, so proposed it that it should be done. But the actual proposal was given from the group members themselves. This part of the process lasted more than two hours, in comparison that it took 15 minutes to make this snarled knot. I have been analysing this process in the way, that first the singular movements create a complex, existential expression. A group will define itself a form, and later disentangles itself collectively. The knot is processualy being opened, which will be enunciated; it will express the collective articulation. Enunciation will have a form of expression and is collectively being dismantled. The singular forms are appearing from the collective process, and the opening of the knot brings up the appearance of singular subjectivization within the collective process of subjectivization. So, they co-exist.

To analyze this project and other performative events, I have been using the concept metamodelization from Félix Guattari. He writes: «‘Schizoanalysis, I repeat, is not an alternative modelling. It is metamodeling’ (Guattari, 1996: 133). It is ‘a discipline of reading other systems of modelling, not as a general model, but as instrument for deciphering modelling systems in various domains, or in other words, as a meta-model’ (Guattari, 1989: 27). ‘Schizoanalysis does not… choose one way of modelling to the exclusion of another’ (Guattari, 1995: 60-61). ‘What distinguishes metamodeling from modelling is the way it uses terms to develop possible openings onto the virtual and onto creative processuality’ (Guattari, 1995: 31). Metamodeling produces, creates, and finds new paths. In trying to follow this model, I have tried to differentiate how, in action, workshop or performance the interpretation of an action – could be phantasm, as well – is locating itself in the actual, and becoming signified. But, could there be some existential refrains to support the articulation, without such clear signifying process? This is yet a question for me, which I will not go into now.

Brazilian artist Lygia Clark(1920-1988), whose works have been posthumously defined as the predecessor of relational aesthetics, worked from 60′s on, until her death in 1988 with the forms of collective enunciations. She often used very ordinary materials such as plastic, fabrics, paper and thread to create kind of costumes for couples or groups: assemblages as such. In this way she manipulated or altered the social, subjective and corporeal perceptions and this way the structures as well. Her works, in my opinion are an excellent example of an «transport-station of trauma», and idea of art-making created by Ettinger. Moreover, that in Clarks works the emphasis is in the art-making, and not on the production of artefacts. Clark was living and teaching in Paris as well, and she was very much influenced for her practice in visiting the Clinique of La Borde, which was directed by Guattari.

Clark often used to define her works and processes with words like ‘vomiting’, ‘anthropophagic drool’ or ‘bichos’, animals. Then, how to work with such concepts that does not transfer easily in the representation; these vomitings and flows of collective subjectivization. So that they would not be located under the signifier, which according to Guattari’s idea of metamodelization would mean that potential matter would have a signified form of an expression: «this one here, means this…», and so on. In this way the self-image of a subject would become at stake, and the process would become a process of individualities, at cost of diminishing process of singular subjectivization. Through signification there is also a possibility to be stuck with the need of community in the way of three possible forms of state: the state of heroes, state within the walls of the city and the pastoral state that has build the walls of the city inside the subjectivity, who is wandering in the desert.

Nevertheless, without enunciation, Clark’s experimentation would remain in the level of strange experiences, and her work would become just «engineering of experiences» as she noted herself. «At the very moment when the artist digests the object, he is digested by society, which has already found him a title and a bureaucratic function: he will be the future engineer of leisure, an activity that has no effect whatsoever on the equilibrium of social structures. »

In this way these engineers or ‘groomers’ of experience will create expression without minor articulation, if minor can be understood, as Deleuze and Guattari wrote about Kafka, who wrote in German, but was Czech in nationality, thus writing in minor German language. Thus, these groomed experiences, might become localized expression, but not minor expression, but in search of legitimate signification.

The corporate state of art-making

In my research I will try to analyze some different forms of collective subjectivization in the area of performance art or in general performative events. For instance, one form opposing the practice of Lygia Clark could be the workshops of performance artist Marina Abramovic, where the participant locates him or herself in very hierarchical, submitted and «cloistered» relationship to the instructor herself. More similar to Clark, but in the area of live art practice one might think of the devising practices of Wooster Group, Goat Island and Forced Entertainment. Also the relationship with audience is in extremely important role in these examples. In the one-minute sculptures of Erwin Wurm, the affective agency is the viewer herself, and she can do variation according to simple instructions of the artist. In Finland, among other attempts, the similar singular-collective practices one might think of the practice of Toisissa Tiloissa-group. My question in the research is, how does these different models relate to the collective, audience, singularity and performer?

The collective subjectivization in art should be seen as an dispositif, or as a device as Brian Holmes writes, in which ”The consisting of a human assemblage results from the flow of desire, involving a multiplication of the self, indeed a kind of a delirium in relation to other, to language, to images and to things [...] Cognitive capitalism, characterized by the rise of an intellectual or ”immaterial” labour based on cooperation and open resource-sharing, but also by its contrary: the commodification of enclosure of knowledge in the form of intellectual property, which is then deployed as a source of rent. [...] Urgent need for an articulation of aesthetics and thinking – the need for and intellectualized art, or what might be called ”cognitive creativity”.

This urgent need for articulation is the form, how the enunciations of collective subjectivization in the field of fine-arts and cultural production are transferred immediately from the sphere of a-signifying and singularity to significant interpretations and legitimate relationships. This has been the case for the works of Lygia Clark, as well. Her works are now exhibited in museum context as objects and in the best occasions with a demonstration, but representation has replaced the affective aspect of her works.

The relationship with audience or «user» of art could be expressed with words of marketing guru Peter Drucke with some alterations: ”There is only one valid definition of business [art] purpose: to create customer [audience].” In this way, audience is nothing but a particular, individualized and specialized audience, nevertheless how heterogeneous it might be. This general performance creates individuals. Performance is a general mode of strategic management , and in cultural context the production follows the strategies of cognitive capitalism, in exchange. They are producing subjectivity and individual’s relationship to collective subjectivity as well. Anyhow, I would insist to keep the concentration on the production side, and not on the discourse of «passive consumers».

A collective subjectivity as matrixical is between singular subjectivization instead. But, it is also one possible material for the production of value in the cognitive capitalism, for instance to be used in some works of relational aesthetics.

If an artist or similar agency, functions only in the macro political level, as an activist artist, these works, however critical they might be, are in this respect part of the capitalistic production. It works merely on the level of representations, and in this pursuing a model of capitalistic production – in fact the fordist model. Retournement of signs does not influence the collective process of subjectivization; it does not amplify the affective ability, but increases cynicism instead and in this way push forwards the agency of capitalistic value production. In this form, art is functioning, as Guattari says «[the]’overcoding’ of experience. What Guattari designates with this word is the establishment of abstract models of collective behaviour, and the use of these models as guidelines for the creation – or if you prefer, the ’coding’ – of real environments, which are expressly made to condition our thinking, our affects, our interactions.»

Yet, some examples from the combination of affective artistic practices and activism could be for instance CIRCA (The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army). CIRCA, utilized the affective aspect as a form of resistance in demonstrations, in a similar way as The Yes Men in the corporate context. Artur Zmijewski’s video «Them», which was based on a workshop he did for «Four very different groups were involved in the workshop project: a group of female Radio Maryja listeners, members of the far-right All-Polish Youth group, members of a left-wing organisation and a group of young Polish Jews. Sarzynski describes the project: “Each group is given the task of creating something that expresses their ideological orientation. The older ladies paint a church, the members of the All-Polish Youth draw the sword of the Polish kings with a national flag, the Jews a card with ‘Poland’ written on it in Hebrew, the leftists the word ‘Freedom’… The initial atmosphere of tolerance becomes increasingly aggressive. The participant’s start cutting up each other’s T-shirts and end up setting the ‘works of the enemy’ on fire… The final scene shows an image of destruction in the aftermath of the meeting.»

In my opinion these are examples, where contemporary art functions with some elements of activism or vice versa, where activism utilizes some affective aspects of art-making.

Mikropolitical affect

On her article about Lygia Clark, Suely Rolnik has brought up the level of micropolitical, where sensitivity and affectivity is in the centre. Tuning with the aesthetical affectivity creates a matrixical relationship within art-making, a relationship with a collective trauma and the a-signifying nature of that – a Brazilian military junta in the context of Clark. A connection with trauma is created with the support of matrixical fascinance, which is connected with the com-passionate. Com-passionate is what is co-affective, but not «grooming», in Ettinger’s examples com-passionate is the analyst, who is affected by herself in transference – without direct signification. In art, with Clark as well as in the works of Ettinger, the works go further than signified experiences, but into the sphere of affective micropolitics.

Based on my own experiences from the workshops that I have held, and tried to process affectivity, a-signified does not become conscious, but the affectivity functions as an intensity: it connects with potentiality and power. The general ability of human being, potentiality as a collective subjectivity is connected with the affective agency. The need for archaic or sacral group-formations emerges as well, and there is an aspect of the instructor – or someone else – becoming a demiurge, while the group creates a collective consciousness. However, to maintain the singular subjectivities, there should be a process, where there is a way from the a-signifying back to conscious – even, if this would mean that the process is in danger of becoming fully analyzed and signified. In my opinion, this is one way to avoid the creation of tribes and demiurges – however, there are another ways, for sure. Microsocial is jointed with the cognition of macro-level, but in my opinion to utilize the meta-modelisation of Guattari, is essential. ”He sketched diagrams showing how people on a given existential territory come to mobilize the rhythmic consciousness of poetic, artistic, visual or affective fragments – the refrains of what he called ’universes of reference (or of value)’ – in order to deterritorialize themselves, so as to leave the familiar territory behind and engage themselves in new articulations. These would take the form of energetic flows, involving economic, libidinal, and technological components (flows of money, signifiers, sexual desires, machines, architectures, etc.). He explained how these machinic flows are continually transformed by contact with the abstract phyla of various symbolic codes, including formalized juridical, scientific, philosophical and artistic knowledge. The point was to suggest how a group could act to metamorph itself, to escape from the overcoding that tries to fix it in one position, and to produce new figures, forms, constellation – in short, original material and cultural configuration that are inseparable from collective statements. This is what Guattari calls an agencement collectif d’enonciation – the phrase which I have translated as ’an articulation of collective speech.’/ writes Brian Holmes.

Enunciation of art-working subjectivities

Performance-art, art and art-making as a collective subjectivization in situations here described, require existential support for the enunciation: the immaterial of potentiality to be enunciated. This is the appearance of collective expression of affectivity – it is the object of utilization as well, where the potentiality of affectivity is becoming actual. Enunciation requires existential support, which, in my opinion should not become immediately signified and actual.(liite )

These forms of enunciation are part of the copoiesis without a strategy, but bringing forth potentiality, still. In this process the enunciated are the social expression of becoming, in which the social subjectivization is being transformed into individuation. It will not freeze under the spell of evil eye and become paranoid subjectivity, but the transformative process of individuation is resonating in matrixical fascinance.

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