Arrival

The train ride from Berlin to Kassel was probably one of the nicest I’ve had in a long time, a real luxury. I sat in the smokers car, drinking Duty Free whiskey behind thick plated glass, feeling cosmopolitan, thinking about Judith Butler, and isolated from all the other passengers: no eye contact, only small technical sounds and body noises. Once in a while, the voice of the conductor on the loudspeaker system would tell us which town was approaching. Wolfsburg, Braunschweig, Oldenburg, Goettingen: you have connections to.... There were no teenagers, no children, no pensioners, only middle aged business travelers, both men and women, smoking up a storm in somewhat sterile atomized luxury, that last island of modernity leftover in an otherwise smoke-free environment. (One imagines already, in a not too distant future, a banner spanning cities like Kassel, reading ‘Diese Stadt ist raucherfrei,’ macabre penance for the anti-Semitic announcements that went up after the first deportations had been effected. But for now, the point is that you can smoke in your seat. It is what I would call a luxurious capsule of the hardcore smoker’s modernity, rushing through the post-modern void at speeds reminiscent of Paul Virilio. Anybody remember him?)

Anyway, the ICE into Kassel is quite a contrast to the local I usually take at least once if not three times a week from the center of Moscow to the datcha, where my family is staying. The train into the Moscow suburbs is crowded with an almost perpetual rush hour. Vendors sell raincoats, nail clippers, flashlights, crossword puzzles, and ice cream, an entire encyclopaedia of wares, cheap and useful consumer goods breaking down the Great Walls of China, putting on a one man show as the panel houses of Moscow’s sleeping satellites turn into an abandoned country that nobody really knows, slowly being ‘developed’ from the center out now, but still somehow the sinking leviathan, whose future seems frightfully undefined. You sit with five other people, facing one another three a bench, anonymously moving laborious, a sweating collective body without a subject, breaking up and regrouping at every stop, breaking out of the dementia of the city back into the idiocy of rural life. Cigarettes cost a dollar a pack. Workers, hoodlums, pensioners and even intellectuals smoke between the cars of the train, in a little pissdrunk dirty zone of anomie. They cram open the doors of the train with empty beer bottles to let the fresh air in...The alternative to this form of transportation – which has little in common with local public transportation in Germany – is the overnight train with its Pullman carriages, which obviously is something long forgotten and exotic in the land of ICE.

Jelena Vesic sends me an SMS that she’s missed her plane. The German landscape becomes more and more hilly at an incredible speed, behind tinted glass. All the affect has waned, creating a strange sense of beauty that literally deflates when one arrives in Kassel, arguably one of the most provincial towns in the German heartland, aside from (or including) the phenomenon of documenta, which seems to be breaking the worldwide record for art exhibition visitor numbers. There are telltale signs of the exhibition right away, fully aestheticizing the otherwise eventless provincial station with handwritten pointers. A disproportionately large late modernist free standing canopy roof over the taxi stands and bus stops at the station prepares this boom of cultural tourism. I don’t know what people in Kassel actually produce, whether they work in tank factories or what. But the late modernist reduction of this canopy seems to herald a transition to a mode of production where the documenta is no longer just a didactic measure as therapy for the survivors of the Stunde Null, but an industry in its own right, suffusing what is otherwise a petit bourgeois Landesresidenz in the German province with an unnatural new life. The source of this life, among other things, lies in places like Moscow.

Anyway, the journey between these two places – I wanted to give an account of myself, onto the anonymous slate of this blog, as a traveler – is symptomatic, perhaps because it points toward two very different modes of being, whose incommensurability may become the theme of these posts, and may go at least some ways in explaining a sense of subalternity that we two Eastern European bloggers may feel as we describe our sensations here. I spent most of my trainride thinking about Judith Butler, whose book ‘Giving an Account of Oneself’ (2005) Simon Sheikh has suggested as a point of departure for the workshops to come. Before I left Moscow, I watched a YouTube video of Judith Butler, which you can find here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjFZHfTJRUM

She is speaking at a somewhat dubious educational institution. The heavy German accent of the person introducing her makes it seem a bit like a buffoonade, though the subject at hand is deadly serious. She is talking about Primo Levi. The lecture itself – in which you could recognize a virtuousic bricollage with elements from almost all thinkers of modernity, except for my favorite Marx – is somehow extremely boring. Jelena Vesic says she shares this impression. As the green hills of Germany flooded by, I was and am still wondering why. Surely, the absence of Papa Marx is not the only problem? Are we just arrogant Eastern European crypto-totalitarians, or are things more complicated? Butler’s theories are critical, to be sure, and her work on the performative aspects of gender politics is very revealing; the way she tries to provide a theoretical “dialogic” frame – reminiscent of Emmanuel Levinas, though far more Adornian opaque – for the antagonistic polyphony of social being is valuable, especially if one reads the angst it inevitably expresses. But somehow, the YouTube video of Judith Butler expresses a “talking head” autonomy, an angst that all accounts will be purely relative (to power), inadvertly incomplete, negotiating with power to construct a difficult freedom. My sense is that this set of problems, which Butler righly links to the Levinasian ideas of accountability, is only possible in the world of the ICE. But that she is right, in a way: my accounts of this journey to Kassel will inevitably be tainted by a subalternity that I myself construct in relation to the weak, anonymous biopolitical occassioning of the utterance itself.

As I perform this account – I log in onto a blog account, for which I will later hopefully receive more money on my German bank account – I am accountable to an audience, fellow travelers on an internet ICE. The conductor, in this case, is Simon Sheikh, who later greeted us outside the documenta halle. Dima Vilensky, with whom we coedit the newspaper Chto delat, was also already there. Documenta halle was already closing, so I didn’t have a chance to look at anything. The first meeting was a little difficult. Introduction were very brief and unmediated, giving the impression of “a big puzzle that we will all have to put together,” as Simon put it. There were no announcements yet, other than that and the program that is posted here. We drank and tried to make small talk, but the atmosphere was strained and unclear. We sat in front of the documenta halle outside. Everybody seemed quite tired from traveling. After this, Dima Vilensky and I went to meet John Roberts, who we have invited to give a lunch lecture on “avantgardes after the avantgarde.” A soft spoken Londoner and a brilliant long-standing author of an committed British Marxist ilk, he came in with a two hour delay. The toilet in his hotel was broken, so we hiked to the substitute they gave him. Here, we were back in more familiar waters of our good old discourses, somewhere between Adorno, Benjamin, Lukacs, Brecht, and all those familiar aesthetic and philosophical problems: the sublation of art into everyday life (whose everyday life?), the retroactive insistance on the avant-garde and even on vanguard politics. We will try to give an account of this today, though many of the people we initially wanted to involve in this discussion have not shown up. Will our colleagues from Goeteborg, Copenhagen, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, LA, and Budapest think we are being irresponsible, undialogic, unaccountable?

Anyway, we had a few nice drinks and went to bed feeling very optimistic. Despite our different positions, we seem to share so many interests. We talked about the fate of modernism in Eastern Europe, especially after the Second World War, and how it relates to documenta, and the educational-critical mission it has associated itself with. This conception of art as an edification or alibi-retraining for the social body that made up National Socialism on its transition to a more benign social democracy: how does this work today? Has anything changed about one of Hegel’s favorite dictums that Marx took over: Die Philosophie (and here one could add, art, politics, and social life in general) muss sich hueten, erbaulich sein zu wollen [Philosophy must avoid becoming edification]. “The educators themselves must be educated (not to educate)” or something like that. Maybe this is something we can learn by discussing our various speaker’s positions? It is with these preliminary thoughts, dislocated and unclear on which encounters I will account for in this week, that I end my first entry to this blog. There is more to come.