by Jelena Vesic and David Riff
With the occupations and counterinsurgencies in Afganistan and Iraq, and the normalized states of exception and biopolitical clampdown in the global war on terror, we all find ourselves in nations at war. This is not only the case in the US and Western Europe, but also in Russia, where the war in Chechnya, the construed or real threat of collateral terrorism, and a stimulated fascist threat all legitimate the Kremlin’s claim to absolute state corporate power. What does this mean to discourse, and far more important, how is discourse structured by juridical rules of speech, applied in the acts of speech performance? Which positions are involved? Where and how are they situated?
In their lunch lecture on the collaborative project 9 Scripts From a Nation of War, the artists Andrea Geyer, Ashley Hunt, and Katja Sanders all tried to provide some preliminary answer to these questions, by talking about their work. The discussion was moderated by Simon Sheikh, and went really well. It was accessible to a general public, and the speakers took exactly the right time to make their points. You can find it on the audio transmission on this web site.
The work itself is a set of appropriately designerish video tables with headphones in the documenta-Halle, where all our lectures and workshops have been taking place. On subtle split and single screen videos, they present dislocated speech acts, read back from transcripts by lay or professional actors: the notorious combatant status review tribunals (CSRTs) instituted by the US military, the position of a lawyer working in getting prisoners out of the Guantanamo concentration camp, testimony of veterans, accounts of journalism and blogging. All of these were read back from written texts, transcripts or scripts by different agents than the ones who had produced them, and in different sites than the ones where they were originally produced. This dislocation is very important as an artistic device that could be compared to a Brechtian V-effect, as Simon Sheikh and Ashley Hunt mentioned.
The most important dislocation, perhaps, is that the piece is very much about the US, conceived as a nation whose status of war is not a literal situation (in which civilian populations are robbed of their livlihood and displaced by constant violence), but a figure of speech, interwoven with subjectification itself. In what Andrea Geyer called the bookend of the 9 Scripts, we see a person’s hand doing an exercise in subjectification, writing a set of sentences on paper with a pen. All the sentences starts with 'I.' These 'I-s' are connected to the position that particular and universal 'I' has in society. The speaker is not determined by his/her ability to talk, but with the fact that somebody's ability to talk can be heard. It is not just about free speech, but about how to address such ability in the space where it can produce some effect.
All the participants also note their interest in the mechanisms of hearing and not-hearing in the space of power, asking how the muteness of subalternity is reproduced. Power is not understood as a homogeneous instance “from above,” but as something distributed horizontally, over various sites and more or less scripted, interpolated implementations. One constantly sees how flexible discourses governable by laws – to which the speaker is answerable – produce the possibility not only to articulate but also to hear 'I-speech,' or avoiding hearing it, even if it has taken on massive proportions. As Ashley Hunt points out, global protest – capable of bringing millions onto the street – can go unheard, simply because it is not “coming from the right place” and therefore lacks legitimacy. The key question become: how do we narrate and situate our speech? We speak languages that exceed us, as Katja Sanders put it in a somewhat Bataillian vein. Each form of addressing speech as well as redistributing or disseminating it, is always-already subject to/of procesess of re-staging and re-interpretation. There is always-already a staging influence on the automatic reading of the text.
The discussion was further developed around the questions of public and counter-public with the examination of the speaker’s position in journalism, as the panel’s participants discussed how they examined both “wide spectrum” media (in a scripted interview with a TV journalist) and “vague spectrum” forms such as blogs. As Andrea, Ashley, and Katja all noted, these are fundamentally different positions. Katja Sander mentioned her personal experience in reading the blogs of her friends from Lebanon during the siege and being part of the 'vague audience' of blogs. As an example, she took a post which was supplying very personal and emotional accounts of what was happenining 'here' and 'now', describing the very moment of B52 bombers approaching Baghdad.
In opposition to the scripted mainstream media (where the speaking subject speaks for a corporate network), the blog is a form of counter-public sphere and is not obliged to the professionalist doxas of timeliness and objectivity, though it is still somehow always already-overdetermined. The bloggers cannot imagine their audience, and are essentially writing in a self-formulating hypersubjective mode, one that then needs to formalized by an external set of rules. Katja cited myspace bloggers of the US military, whose writings are overshadowed by big posters in computer rooms prohibiting them from broaching certain topics. But more interestingly, such rules can also be abstracted into formulas and reproduced. The US military issues phrase books and manuals of suggested formulations, teaching its soldiers how to blog, to win a virtual war against less formulaic subjectivity.
This last aspect seem quite symptomatic, and gives 9 Scripts from a Nation at War an interesting quality. The piece itself has elements of neo-formalism, both in good senses and bad. It presents a pallette of formal grammars for discourse, which it then tries to render dialectical and fluid, dislocating and re-staging them, in what the Soviet avant-garde literary critic Viktor Shklovsky called estrangement, rendering fluid their juridical claim to the absolute truth.
But at the same time, it runs the risk of falling into idealism, in which reality itself (or at least the reality of the speech act) is constructed as little more than a grammatlogical result. What are human rights in such an entropic reality that is only defined by discourse? Is it right to speak about the “right to be” at all? Somewhere, Jacques Ranciere writes about the skepticism of the young Marx toward “human rights” and “abstract humanism,” and explores what this skepticism could be today. Part of that skepticism would be to move from the theatrical staging of this “empowered” citizen (with the right to enunciate) to the question of what keeps us on the enclosure. Obviously, it is not only politics or the continually constructed rules of language, but the material conditions of production, our mortages, school bills, gadgets, and high definition TVs. For all its subtlety and political importance, this is something that neither panel discussion nor the piece itself really fully address.
LabforCulture is a partner initiative of the European Cultural Foundation. LabforCulture is grateful for the support provided by its funders.
