Arts, Faculty of
Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, Institute for
DSpace
UBCV
Desideri, Valentina
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
This exegesis reflects on a set of objectless and objectiveless art practices that compose my Studio Practice, which I propose as an approach to artmaking as study and to study as artmaking. In addition to reviewing the relevant theoretical concepts that inform my practice, I discuss four instances of my Studio Practice: the practice of Political Therapy , the collaborative practice of Poethical Readings with Denise Ferreira da Silva, an example of my approach to teaching as study and the performance practice Performance Studies. Political Therapy is a one-to-one artistic practice that addresses through touch a political problem brought up by the participant. Poethical Readings experiment with well-known and newly-designed reading tools – such as the Tarots, Fake Therapy, Reiki, Astrology, amongst others – to image ethical and political questions. My approach to teaching as study experiments with turning any invitation to teach as an occasion for study to self-organize. Finally, Performance Studies is a collaborative practice of performance-making that considers the specific ways in which performance plots attention as productive of knowledge. As an aesthetic praxis, Studio Practice experiments with ways of knowing and making that do not presuppose a knowing subject, an author, or a beholder but rather remain incomplete, in/as study. Indebted to black study, study is understood as a political practice of self-organization which experiments with modes of being together that enact a critical perspective on the modern Subject.
STUDIO PRACTICE EXPERIMENTS IN OBJECTLESS AND OBJECTIVELESS ARTMAKING by VALENTINA DESIDERI A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2023 © Valentina Desideri, 2023 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: Studio Practice: Experiments in Objectless and Objectiveless Artmaking submitted by Valentina Desideri in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice Examining Committee: Denise Ferreira da Silva, Professor, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBC Supervisor Mark Harris, Associate Professor, Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Phanuel Antwi, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, Professor , Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBC University Examiner Scott Watson, Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, UBC University Examiner iii Abstract This exegesis reflects on a set of objectless and objectiveless art practices that compose my Studio Practice, which I propose as an approach to artmaking as study and to study as artmaking. In addition to reviewing the relevant theoretical concepts that inform my practice, I discuss four instances of my Studio Practice: the practice of Political Therapy , the collaborative practice of Poethical Readings with Denise Ferreira da Silva, an example of my approach to teaching as study and the performance practice Performance Studies. Political Therapy is a one-to-one artistic practice that addresses through touch a political problem brought up by the participant. Poethical Readings experiment with well-known and newly-designed reading tools – such as the Tarots, Fake Therapy, Reiki, Astrology, amongst others – to image ethical and political questions. My approach to teaching as study experiments with turning any invitation to teach as an occasion for study to self-organize. Finally, Performance Studies is a collaborative practice of performance-making that considers the specific ways in which performance plots attention as productive of knowledge. As an aesthetic praxis, Studio Practice experiments with ways of knowing and making that do not presuppose a knowing subject, an author, or a beholder but rather remain incomplete, in/as study. Indebted to black study, study is understood as a political practice of self-organization which experiments with modes of being together that enact a critical perspective on the modern Subject. iv Lay Summary This exegesis reflects on my approach to artmaking as study and to study as artmaking, which I call Studio Practice. I discuss a set of artistic practices which, rather than creating objects, create the conditions for collaborative thinking and making, that is study. Conversely, I discuss study as a creative and critical practice of self-organization that produces knowledge through the kind of sociality it generates. v Preface This exegesis is original, unpublished work by the author, Valentina Desideri. The thinking around affordances that I discuss in Chapter 1, is a new trajectory in my ongoing collaboration with Stefano Harney, it is still being developed and it has not been published before. The practice and conceptual framing of Poethical Readings that I present in Chapter 3 has been created in collaboration with Denise Ferreira da Silva, and any published materials are quoted in the text. My PhD research is practice-based as it is an original investigation that gains knowledge through practice, namely through the approach to study as artmaking and to art-making as study, which I call Studio Practice. In this exegesis I present four examples of Studio Practice that I have performed in the past by narrating from my own perspective what has happened in those collective study sessions. Although I give an account of conversations that involved other people and that have not happened in public (in Chapter 2 and Chapter 4), the personal information of the participants is completely anonymous. Neither their identity, nor the identity of the institutions in which the sessions took place can be found by cross-referencing information present in the text. Moreover, those sessions were never recorded and there is no data stored anywhere, thus their information is anonymous and not just anonymized. For these reasons, ethical approval was not required for this exegesis. vi Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ................................................................................................................................. iv Preface............................................................................................................................................. v Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ ix Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ xi Dedication .................................................................................................................................... xiii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Studio Practice ............................................................................................................................ 4 An Objectless and Objectiveless Practice ................................................................................... 8 Chapters’ Description ............................................................................................................... 12 Chapter 1: Theoretical Context ..................................................................................................... 16 On Study ................................................................................................................................... 17 The Studio ................................................................................................................................. 19 A Figurative Approach ............................................................................................................. 22 The Circle.................................................................................................................................. 25 The Performativity of Discourse ........................................................................................... 25 The Psychic Apparatus ......................................................................................................... 27 The Subject in Language ...................................................................................................... 30 The Function of Representation ................................................................................................ 33 The Cut...................................................................................................................................... 42 Material Aesthetics ................................................................................................................... 47 vii Chapter 2: Political Therapy ......................................................................................................... 55 Part one: Theoretical Considerations ........................................................................................ 56 The Trajectory........................................................................................................................... 56 A typical session ....................................................................................................................... 58 Self-Education........................................................................................................................... 61 Intimacy .................................................................................................................................... 62 Speculative Practice .................................................................................................................. 66 Part two: The Practice ............................................................................................................... 69 Four Individual Sessions ........................................................................................................... 70 Session One ........................................................................................................................... 70 Session Two .......................................................................................................................... 74 Session Three ........................................................................................................................ 77 Session Four .......................................................................................................................... 80 Reflections ................................................................................................................................ 91 Chapter 3: Poethical Readings ...................................................................................................... 95 Part one: Theoretical Considerations ........................................................................................ 98 The Trajectory........................................................................................................................... 98 A Typical Session ................................................................................................................... 100 The Modern Subject ................................................................................................................ 103 Reading as Imaging................................................................................................................. 108 The Poethical .......................................................................................................................... 111 Part Two: The Practice............................................................................................................ 114 Not Fully Human, Not Human at All...................................................................................... 114 The Image ............................................................................................................................... 117 The Reading ............................................................................................................................ 118 Reflections .............................................................................................................................. 127 Chapter 4: Teaching as Study ..................................................................................................... 131 Part One: Theoretical Considerations ..................................................................................... 132 The Trajectory......................................................................................................................... 132 viii A Prophetic Organization ....................................................................................................... 136 Learning and Black Study ....................................................................................................... 141 Part Two: The Practice............................................................................................................ 145 Studio Practice: On Problems ................................................................................................. 146 Day one ............................................................................................................................... 148 Day Two.............................................................................................................................. 152 Day Three............................................................................................................................ 156 Day Four ............................................................................................................................. 158 Day Five .............................................................................................................................. 167 Reflections .............................................................................................................................. 169 Chapter 5: Performance Studies.................................................................................................. 172 Part One: Theoretical Considerations ..................................................................................... 173 The Trajectory......................................................................................................................... 173 Performance as Study ............................................................................................................. 177 Attention ................................................................................................................................. 180 Part Two: The Practice............................................................................................................ 184 Performance Studies: On Abundance ..................................................................................... 184 Session One ......................................................................................................................... 188 Session Two ........................................................................................................................ 195 Session Three ...................................................................................................................... 201 Session Four ........................................................................................................................ 205 Reflections .............................................................................................................................. 217 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 220 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 226 ix List of Figures Figure 1 Schema of the exclusionary matrix of discourse ............................................................ 26 Figure 2 Schema of the isometric relation of subject-formation .................................................. 26 Figure 3 My drawing of the psychic apparatus according to Freud ............................................. 28 Figure 4 Schema of the psychic apparatus .................................................................................... 29 Figure 5 My drawing of the subject according to Lacan .............................................................. 31 Figure 6 Schema of the subject in language ................................................................................. 32 Figure 7 Schema of the function of representation ....................................................................... 36 Figure 8 My drawing of the play of Reason ................................................................................. 39 Figure 9 Fake Therapy deck of cards ........................................................................................... 57 Figure 10 Example of a Political Therapy map ............................................................................ 60 Figure 11 Political Therapy map: session one .............................................................................. 71 Figure 12 Political Therapy map: session two ............................................................................. 75 Figure 13 Political Therapy map: session three ........................................................................... 78 Figure 14 Political Therapy map: session four ............................................................................. 81 Figure 15 Political Therapy: a composite image .......................................................................... 86 Figure 16 Installation view of the Sensing Salon in Kunstverein Hamburg ............................... 116 Figure 17 Image of the question “How is the Covid-19 pandemic affecting the Human?” ....... 117 Figure 18 Collective map of problems........................................................................................ 155 Figure 19 Reading astrological charts......................................................................................... 157 Figure 20 Collective map: what is performance? ....................................................................... 159 Figure 21 View of the forest ....................................................................................................... 169 Figure 22 Screenshots of the video recording of SO WHAT at MDT, Stockholm, 2011 .......... 175 x Figure 23 Still from the film “There is Always Dance in Abundance” ...................................... 189 Figure 24 A typical spread of Fake Therapy cards ..................................................................... 194 Figure 25 Image of Performance Studies, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu ........................................ 196 Figure 26 Image of Performance Studies, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu ........................................ 200 Figure 27 Image of the Erotic Listening practice, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu ............................ 202 Figure 28 Image of Performance Studies, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu ........................................ 205 Figure 29 Cutting onions, photos: Alexandra Ivanciu ................................................................ 206 Figure 30 Cutting onions, photos: Alexandra Ivanciu ................................................................ 207 Figure 31 Mapping our question, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu ...................................................... 208 Figure 32 Image of Performance Studies, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu ........................................ 209 Figure 33 Map drawn during Performance Studies .................................................................... 210 Figure 34 Mapping the question, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu ...................................................... 212 Figure 35 Erotic Viewing practice, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu ................................................... 214 Figure 36 Eating onion soup, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu ............................................................ 216 Figure 37 Eating onion soup, photo:Alexandra Ivanciu ............................................................. 217 Figure 38 Map of my notes of Paracelsus’s Opus Paragranum ................................................. 225 xi Acknowledgements I am beyond thankful to my supervisor Denise and my committee members Mark and Phanuel. Thank you, Denise, for your endless patience and brilliant guidance throughout this process. Studying with you has transformed my thinking and nourished my practice in ways that I could not anticipate, and that I am forever grateful for. The depth of your thinking and the generosity of your doing are an inspiration and a source of strength to continue trying. Thank you Mark for your openness in engaging with my practice and for the support you provided with your generous feedbacks. Thank you, Phanuel, for your passionate thinking and the brilliant suggestions, comments, and questions you offered throughout. I thank my cohort and classmates for sharing the time and intensity of graduate school, and especially Amilcar and Marika, whose friendship, work, and presence made the university a more habitable place. To all my friends and collaborators, the work I describe in this exegesis was inspired by and co-created with all of you. Without our conversations, our dancing, our laughing and crying, the work would simply not exist. I thank Stefano for encouraging me to study and for bearing with me in the process, our conversations traverse every bit of this exegesis. I thank my friends Corazon, Paula, Nina, and Daniela for sharing with me their knowledge, their love and for always being there for me. I thank Annick, Amelia, Amalle, Isaiah, M, and Roya, for emotionally and grammatically proofreading this text. xii To Alice, Alix, Anne, Jennifer and Zoe, thank you for making the dance studio a place and a way to hang out and study. To Jan, thank you for everything, I can only wonder what you would have thought of this writing, but I am sure you would be proud, even if just to disagree. To my parents and my family, thank you for your unconditional love and support. You have literally always been there for me. Your support, love and belief in me continues to help me grow. Lastly, I would like to thank my partner Valerio. Thank you for creating the most loving conditions for writing ever, for holding my feelings along the way, and for making everything feel possible. xiii Dedication This exegesis is dedicated to PAF (Performing Arts Forum): the place, the project and the people who organize and inhabit it every day. To the study that is ongoing and the transformation it brings about. 1 Introduction When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.1 -Stefano Harney and Fred Moten My artistic and intellectual training has been largely informal and embedded in the self-educational practices that have been ongoing at Performing Arts Forums (PAF), a self-organized artist-run space in France with which I have been collaborating since 2007.2 As the name suggests, the space was originally created by performing artists, especially contemporary dancers and choreographers looking for a non-institutional space to meet and exchange. The space has always been approached as a performance rather than as an institution. It has only four rules: 1. Don't Leave Traces, 2. Make It Possible for the Others, 3. The Doer Decides, 4. Mind Asymmetries. They are treated as scores, principles that need to be considered and enacted in 1 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 110. 2 "Performing Arts Forum," accessed June 8th, 2023, http://pa-f.net/. 2 order for self-organization to happen. Considering the rules as scores shifts attention to the practice, the "how" of self-organization, for the rules do not just set a norm or an abstract ideal of "what" self-organization is, which then needs to be implemented. Instead, they ask the question of "how" that rule shall be actualized at any given moment by each person in relation to a context that is always shifting. This attention to practice and the intense sociality that comes from sharing a living and working space with an ever-changing group of people created many experimental learning situations where I first felt “study” happen. I describe study as something that I "felt" because study is, to me, an experience of sense-making in which I do not only make sense of something I am trying to understand but one in which my senses are (un)made in and through the doing. If the ways I go about knowing something are experimental, they also always feel slightly unfamiliar, unplanned, and uncertain. There is an openness that sets in, a certain hailing of the attention that makes possible unlikely alliances, connections, and intuitions. We, those participating, are gathered in new configurations, and our senses, as well as the sense we make, are reconfigured. Beyond or beneath the forms and the formats the experiments may take, which can be very original or very traditional, there is a certain improvisational aspect that makes study not only an experiment with knowing something but also an experience of un/knowing ourselves in the doing. Guided by this experience of study, the relations that those experiments have fostered, and the body of work that has been generated in the past 15 years, my project lays the foundations to research and conceive of an artistic and social practice that approaches study as artmaking and artmaking as study, which I call Studio Practice. What if the practice of artmaking would deliberately remain incomplete, committed to the (re)generation of a sociality that is not based on the individual, rather than to the (re)production 3 of either objects or subjects? Could an objectless and objectiveless art practice be approached as a collective practice of study that gathers and (re)generates modes of living and knowing otherwise? In order to reflect on how my practice researches those questions, this exegesis reviews the broader theoretical context that informs my practice and then presents four instances of Studio Practice: the practice of Political Therapy, the collaborative practice (with Denise Ferreira da Silva) of Poethical Readings, an example of my approach to teaching as study and the performance practice Performance Studies. Writing this exegesis allowed me to articulate some important terms that will continue to accompany and orient my practice. First of all, it enabled me to appreciate my practices' objectless and objectiveless qualities. Their resistance against formalizing into well-defined artworks (their objectlessness) and their inability to establish a clear aim or even stay within a field (their objectivelessness) indeed facilitate the rehearsal of a different sociality, one that, without objects, perhaps requires no subjects. Most importantly, the critical-racial, anticolonial, and black feminist perspectives I have encountered through my studies shifted my understanding of self-organization and allowed me to see study as a political practice, one that, by insisting on its own conditions of existence, self-organizes modes of being together that enact a critical perspective on the modern Subject.3 In this exegesis, I deeply engage with the work of four thinkers in particular: Denise Ferreira da Silva, Stefano Harney, David Lloyd, and Fred Moten. I repeatedly refer to their work 3 I talk in more depth about the relationship between study and self-organization in Chapter 4. I explain how I came to think of study as the kind of experimentation that happens whenever we try to live without the imposition of (self-)possession. Self-organization can then no longer be thought about as the autonomous organization of 'selves' but as the regeneration of the undercommons and elemental sociality that precedes and exceeds individuation. 4 for several reasons. Firstly because their writings had a profound influence and serve as a reference I return to, time and time again, to revise and rethink my practice. Secondly, because I consider thinking a collaborative practice, and I involve those thinkers in real and/or imaginary dialogue throughout my practice as well as the process of reflecting on it afterwards. And lastly, because I approach this exegesis as an occasion for study–-that is, an occasion to practice and enact a kind of mutual dis/possession by way of hapticality (or love) that can be felt for books as much as for anything else.4 Studio Practice The point of my Studio Practice is to experiment with modes of knowing and making that do not presuppose a knowing subject, an author, or a beholder but rather remain incomplete, in/as study. I take the concept of study from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, who talk about study as "what you do with other people," a kind of sociality that is not premised on the individual and his self-possession but is an opportunity to be possessed by others and break down individuation.5 In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Harney and Moten attend to the ungovernable and unmanageable social life that proliferates below and beyond the attempts at its regulation that institutions like the State, the University, and the Police are called to perform. Study, they propose, is “the incessant and irreversible intellectuality” that is at play in the undercommons, an ongoing experimentation with the informal capacity of the general antagonism, a general “sense of dispossession, and possession by the dispossessed”.6 I 4 See the subchapter “Hapticality, or Love” in Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 97-99. I will return to hapticality in Chapter 4. 5 Harney and Moten, 110. 6 Ibid., 109. 5 began with the basic premise put forth by Harney and Moten and experimented with what would happen to study if it were performed and what would happen to performance if it were study. The immediate challenge of addressing study as a practice that we can (and do) perform is to displace the figure of the subject, the one(s) supposedly performing the study. It requires a shift in sensibility, for it asks us to attend to the sociality that already composes whatever arrangement, situation, or question that is gathering us in study, and to attune to the "kind of common intellectual practice" which goes on unseen in all those practices that are usually not considered as productive of knowledge.7 My research joins this ongoing intellectual practice, and further occasions study through speculative practices and tools that do not separate between the intellectual, physical, emotional, and social registers of existence but experiments with ways of sensing and making sense that (try to) attend to the multiplicity of sense. It is possible to imagine such a sensibility through a reformulation of aesthetics that Denise Ferreira da Silva calls "material aesthetics."8 Contrasting the centrality that Kant grants to the optic and the visible in his formal conceptualization of aesthetics, via a reference to dark matter, Ferreira da Silva speculates on a sensibility able to encompass “both the experience of the perceptible and the imperceptible” and that “gives the haptic and the sonic as much value as is ascribed to the optic under dominant culture.”9 A sensibility that attends to the haptic and the sonic, to all that vibrates, would allow us to sense not only what is actual, but it would literally “put us in touch” with what is unknown and 7 Ibid., 110. 8 Denise Ferreira Da Silva “Material Aesthetics: Note 1 - Tangible Possibility”, Drift: Art & Dark Matter, Sunny Kerr ed., 134-143 (K. Verlag & Agnes Etherington Art Centre: forthcoming). 9 Ferreira Da Silva, 136. 6 unknowable, what exists only virtually, or as a possibility.10 Considering how much brutality the need for knowing with certainty has unleashed on earth and all its beings, an ability to sense (i.e., to have a mental image and a feeling of) the unknown and the unknowable may help us undo the very assumption that such a thing (knowing with certainty) is even possible. It would allow us to experiment with modes of knowing and making that not only are able to attend to those multiple dimensions of existence but perhaps can also operate through them, creating things that may not be visible or cohere into objects for a subject, but that nevertheless exist through the touch and resonance they effect. My Studio Practice directly attempts to cultivate, or rather (re)generate such a sensibility by experimenting with modes of knowing and making that rehearse (prepare and practice) and perform (enact and instantiate) other modes of living on this planet.11 Following Harney and Moten I approach study as black study, as a creative and improvisational enactment of a critique of the modern Subject and a refusal to live in his World, which is simultaneously a "prophetic organization" of decolonization.12 If we understand decolonization as "the restoration of the total value expropriated from Native lands and Slave bodies under total violence," as Ferreira da Silva argues, a material approach to aesthetics is an integral part of devising the tools, figures, and 10 Ibid., 142. 11 The term rehearsal, which appears abundantly in this exegesis, is intimately connected to both the idea of being in the studio (and in the dance studio in particular) and to the kind of black study that goes on in the undercommons, the ongoing refusal of the brutality of individuation that is simultaneously an affirmation of another life in common. The commitment towards a practice that is ongoing and the opening that this term offers to our political imagination is beautifully articulated by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in their recent book. In this epistolary conversation, written during the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, they offer their black and indigenous abolitionist perspective on what world must end and what world we need to build. Simpson states: "We are remaking the whole world—at once in our most intimate and local places, and through our matrix of relationality with all living things and anticolonial movements on the planet. A never-ending project, a practice, a way of living." Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (New York: Knopf Canada, 2022), 186. 12 I elaborate on their use of the term “prophetic organization” in relation to black study in Chapter 4. 7 practices that can make such a demand comprehensible and to create the conditions for its realization.13 My Studio Practice — as an aesthetic praxis experimenting with ways of knowing and making that assume implicancy14 — is a humble contribution to this process. Without separability (between a knowing subject and a known object, or between the interiority of feeling and the exteriority of things), all sorts of assemblages for knowing and making become possible or at least imaginable. Knowing becomes a movement of re/de/composition of sense in which both the thing-knowing and the thing-known are affected and materially change in the process.15 Moreover, the process of knowing and the process of making — which are usually connected to study and artmaking, respectively — become entangled in interesting ways, for they can generate all sorts of 'things': visible and invisible things that may be actual (corporeally perceptible) or just possible or even virtual (not corporeally perceptible but affecting bodies nevertheless). 13 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022), 273. 14 Denise Ferreira da Silva uses the term deep implicancy to refer to the fundamental inseparability of matter at the elemental level. The term relies on quantum mechanics notions of entanglement and, in particular on Karen Barad's agential realist framework, which foregrounds the indeterminacy, infinity, and virtuality at the core of matter. Considering both the quantic level (entanglement) and the cosmic level (primordial formation) of the elemental particles, Ferreira da Silva proposes an image of existence premised on infinity and implicancy (rather than unity and necessity), which assumes "that the elementa that enter the composition of everything, anything, that exists in spacetime have always already existed but also include what can, could, and may never come into actual existence.” Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 15-16. See also Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy (2018), and Karen Barad in What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice, dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts. N. 99 (Hatje Cantz 2012) 15In her book Unpayble Debt, Denise Ferreira da Silva deploys the figure of the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation as a reading tool which re/de/composes the existing description and interpretations of racial subjugation into the image of the racial event, which repeats "without time and regardless of place." (106) The work of re/de/composition, she explains "is simultaneously disunifying, disfiguring, and redesigning that which necessity sustains." (26) Re/de/composition is a method for reading and knowing that makes sense from within a different image of existence, which she calls Corpus Infinitum, which allows us to consider "how everything that exists could, might, may, or will be a singular re/de/composition of everything else". (260) I use the term throughout this exegesis, and in particular in Chapter 3, where I describe our collaborative practice of Poethical Readings. 8 An Objectless and Objectiveless Practice The “studio” is the term that refers to this entanglement in my Studio Practice. Both a score and a rehearsal, the studio is always a composition. Rather than a place in which study happens, the studio is any composition of affordances that makes study possible through the very specific conditions they offer. As such, the studio is also a score, an arrangement that changes as it is performed.16 The objectless and objectiveless practices that I will present in this exegesis attempt to remain objectless precisely by staying in/with the studio, sensing its composition and its offerings for study, without congealing into artworks. Since objects always presuppose an apprehending subject (like an artwork, its beholder), I am experimenting with practices (modes of knowing and making) that do not formalize into objects or artworks. Instead, they try to attend to and stay with the (elemental) sociality that composes whatever question, situation, or arrangement gathering us as an occasion for study—that is, as an occasion to echo and augment the materiality that precedes and exceeds the formation of the object (and its subject) that both art and knowledge are supposed to produce. The work of Adrian Piper, as well as Fred Moten’s discussion of her performances, inspired me to formulate my practices as objectless and objectiveless.17 Piper's performances, indeed, are often simple interventions that, rather than becoming an object for a beholding subject, disrupt and expose the very context in which they intervene.18 A contemplative response 16 I introduce and discuss "affordances", a term by psychologist JJ Gibson, in Chapter 1. 17 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 18 Besides her Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City (1970), which I discuss in Chapter 1, I am thinking in particular about her performance piece, My Calling (Card) #1 (1986), in which Piper distributes a card to anyone making racist comments in her presence, reminding them that she is an African American woman. Or her 1970s 9 is not an option, for her acts shift attention to and make tangible the necessary exclusions that constitute the (art) context in which everyone, including herself, is implied. In a way, everyone loses their definition, the clear boundaries of their position tremble, study as re/de/composition can happen. Contemplation is supposed to be the appropriate response to artworks, objects that, by having been framed and limited in specific ways, acquire a sense of totality. Thanks to this gesture, Fred Moten observes, artworks are set aside as different kinds of objects that possess an "internal difference," which mirrors the internal difference of the beholder (the interiority of the subject).19 Moten calls the artwork’s limit, boundary, frame, its parergon: that which makes the artwork emerge out of the milieu.20 According to Moten, "Piper is the parergon” for she makes both the work and the milieu emerge at the same time.21 Her embodying the parergon breaks the mirror-function of the artwork, for she interrupts the subject/ive (re)production the artwork is supposed to instantiate. It also provides me with inspiration to ask how else this process of subject/ive formation (that necessarily implies subjection) can be interrupted.22 Could an objectless and objectiveless practice offer occasions to study (rehearse and enact) what a subjectless and subjectionless existence may be? 23 How to refuse the interiority that the subject relies upon for (self-)reflection and (self-)representation? For this interiority requires and calls into being objects, as well as a strategy towards those objects (an objective). Can practices and street performances Catalysis series, in which she spends a week moving around New York's subway and bookstores completely drenched in vinegar, egg, milk, and cod liver oil. 19 Moten, 237. 20 Ibid., 247. 21 Ibid., 249 22 I am referring to the analysis of subjection that Butler provides in The Psychic Life of Power, in chapter 1. See Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (California: Stanford University Press, 1997) 23 For an objectless and subjectless approach to Asian American studies, see Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Chuh proposes to reframe Asian American studies as a study defined not by its subjects and objects but by its critique. 10 tools that do not assume the interiority of the subject release the object (and the subject) from their formalization and allow both to exist simply as parts of the world? In a conversation Denise Ferreira da Silva and I published in 2015, she states: “we change the way we live by living differently and we change the way we think about living, by doing it differently rather than by having a plan.”24 My shifting the attention towards the object(less) is a way to begin imagining a different kind of doing, a practice of making and knowing that does not aim at cohering whatever it makes into ‘objects’ to be apprehended by a ‘subject’. Instead, in my Studio Practice, I am interested in experimenting with modes of knowing and making, of sensing and making sense, that by not presupposing interiority, are open to rehearse and enact other possible ways of existing with each other and everything else. Paradoxically, this is much more easily done than said. Language, by being based on a grammar organized around subjects and predicates (that are objects in different spatial or temporal relation to the subject), often fails to describe ways of being with ‘each other’ that do not rely on (and already assume) single units, subjects and objects. However, it is possible to sense openings (cuts and breaks) in the grammar once we approach it figuratively.25 Since I mainly think through images, figures, and gestures, I have approached reading the literature for this exegesis by making maps, which allows me to visualize the information spatially. Inspired by Ferreira da Silva's refiguring of modernity as the modern text (staging the 24 Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “A Conversation”, 3. This conversation was self-published as in the frame of the exhibition Double Bind showed at Rupert in Vilnius, Pabrade and Visaginas (LT), at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (NO) and at The Living Art Museum in Reykjavik (IS) from Oct 2015 to March 2016. 25 I am thinking about looking at grammar not as a code that repeats but spacially as a stage, a scene, or a composition. I borrow the figurative as approach from Denise Ferreira da Silva. See Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 273. 11 ‘play of Reason’)26 and by David Lloyd's critique of modern representation,27 I went to look at the descriptions of subject formation that Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan provide and found myself drawing a similar image for all of them: a spinning triangle that draws itself as a circle. As I will explain in Chapter 1, I recognize in this figure of the circle 'the function of representation' that David Lloyd identifies in his critique of modern representation. Lloyd understands representation as an "act of formalization" (which I drew as another circle) that structures the most intuitive and seemingly 'natural' movements of thinking: reflection and self-reflection. I see reflection as the act of mirroring; It creates an image (as an object) through which the subject can recognize himself formally (for the image is only a shape or a form). Knowing is thus rendered as an act of formal recognition that effectively displaces the material particularity of both the subject and the object. Recognition sets dialectics in motion and renders thinking a somewhat progressive movement through which the subject and its objects co-constitute. This act of formalization that structures modern representation also structures our thinking, like a grammar. Any thinking about the subject or the object that does not question how those figures are formalized will inevitably reproduce the (modern) grammar and the exclusion, displacement, or erasure of the material particularity this grammar assumes. Approaching reading those texts figuratively, however, allowed me to trace their limits and to begin imaging the cut as a different figure that gestures towards literally cutting through or at least cracking the circle. The cut refers to the gesture of simultaneously interrupting and 26 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2007) 27 David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018) 12 exposing the brutality of subject/ive formation (the circle) while echoing and augmenting the materiality that precedes and exceeds it. I first encountered the term in Fred Moten's writings on black performance and then recognized it in Gayatri Spivak's discussion of the proliferating work of the trace.28 The cut appears again in the wounded flesh of the figure of the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation that Denise Ferreira Da Silva deploys in her book Unpayable Debt where she also articulates an image of existence that grounds the kind of material aesthetics and sensibility that directly informs and inspire my practice.29 Following this figure, my Studio Practice attempts to interrupt the production of objects (artworks) and subjects (beholders) by staying in the studio, with the study that goes on before and beyond the making of objects, through a set of objectless and objectiveless practices that I will introduce in this exegesis. Chapters’ Description Each chapter of this exegesis covers one aspect of my Studio Practice, beginning, in Chapter 1, with a discussion of the relevant concepts and formulations. Here I further elaborate on the notion of study proposed by Harney and Moten in relation to artmaking and to my experience in contemporary dance, which influences how the 'studio' and the 'study' come together in Studio Practice as a composition. I also lay out the theoretical context figuratively by mapping my tracing of the two figures I introduced above: the circle and the cut. 28 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999). 29 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt. 13 Each of the following substantive chapters is divided into two parts. The first part introduces the trajectory of the practice and how it was assembled, as well as elaborates on some theoretical considerations that are particularly relevant to the practice. The second part of the chapter offers a description and documentation of a specific instance of the practice and concludes with an overall critical reflection. In Chapter 2, I introduce Political Therapy as a first instance of a Studio Practice. In the first part of the chapter, I narrate the trajectory that led me to the creation of Political Therapy, and I describe a typical session. I then elaborate on the specific notions of self-education, intimacy, and speculative practice that entered the composition of this practice. In the second part of the chapter, I describe four individual sessions of Political Therapy that I have performed with curators working in the same institution, and I then share the collective map and conversation that they generated. After providing this concrete example of the practice, I close with a critical reflection on the ways Political Therapy has informed the more general idea of Studio Practice and shaped its development. In Chapter 3, I focus on the collaborative practice of Poethical Readings as a second instance of Studio Practice. In the first part of the chapter, I describe the trajectory of my collaboration with Denise Ferreira da Silva and describe a typical session. Since the question that inaugurated and still guides the practice is "How to image an ethics with/out the subject?" I elaborate on the critique of the modern Subject. I then describe our approach to reading as imaging and our use of the term “poethical”. In the second part of the chapter, I give an example of the practice by sharing an image and an edited transcript of a reading we assembled in collaboration with Arely Amaut for the exhibition Not Fully Human, Not Human At All in 2020 as a result of a series of Poethical Readings we performed for the question “How is the Covid-19 14 pandemic affecting the Human?”.30 This example is followed by a reflection on the practice and on the generosity and generativity of the study it enables. In Chapter 4, I describe how my experience with self-organization is entangled with the notion of study I am working with and how they come together in my approach to teaching as an occasion for study to self-organize. In laying out the theoretical considerations that constitute my approach, I first retrace the trajectory of my experiences with self-organization and the way they have shaped my understanding of study and then discuss the difference between learning and study. In the second part of the chapter, I provide a concrete example of a Studio Practice that approaches teaching a study: a five-day long session that took place at an Academy of Fine Arts in central Europe in January 2023. I share the sequences of events, the scores that we engaged in, and the general lines of conversations we have entered, which I describe sequentially, day by day. Finally, I close the chapter with a reflection on two elements that are key to my approach: the objectivelessness of study, and its improvisational quality. In Chapter 5, I focus on my experience in European experimental contemporary dance, and I share a first attempt at a new practice of performance-making that approaches performance as study, which I call Performance Studies. In laying out the theoretical considerations that inform this approach, I first trace the trajectory of how I stopped making performances in 2011. I explain how failing on stage has informed my practice and led me to delve deeper into the kind of study that goes on in the dance studio before the performance, which informs my approach to performance as study. I then foreground attention as a key element that is rehearsed and mobilized in performance and wonder how the tools, practices, and experiments that are 30 The exhibition was shown at Kunstverein in Hamburg from October 24th, 2020, to January 24th, 2021, and it was curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Bettina Steinbrügge. 15 constantly devised through dance and choreography can help unsettle the view of attention as an "economy". In the second part of the chapter, I describe the first experiment I tried at GfZK, a museum in Leipzig, in January 2023. The event was titled Performance Studies: On Abundance, and it took place in four sessions of three hours each, happening over two days. I share in this chapter a partial narrative of each session, accompanied by images documenting our practice. Finally, I close the chapter reflecting on the double proposition that Performance Studies is trying to make: that, on the one hand, performance offers an occasion for study, and, on the other, that what performance "does" is, perhaps, that it studies.31 Bringing together and reflecting on all the practices I describe in this exegesis allowed me to articulate how the practice of artmaking and the practice of study come together in my Studio Practice. I hope that this general proposal to creatively approach critical issues and to critically approach creative endeavors can be of relevance for (artistic and non-artistic) practices of self-organization as well as for performance and other artistic practices that already rehearse the possibility of non-representation. Because if study is any self-organized practice that rehearses modes of living otherwise, then the question of how to compose, support, participate in, and (re)generate such practices can be taken creatively and compositionally, that is, as an aesthetic praxis. Similarly, if artmaking is the (re)generation of the elemental sociality of study, then the practice is no longer limited to the production of objects or 'artworks' but takes on the political commitment of study and enacts its critique of (self-)possession, whatever it makes. 31 I explain in Chapter 5 how I am thinking about performance literally as that which does the study by rehearsing and enacting attention in ways that produce knowledge. 16 Chapter 1: Theoretical Context The practices of dance and artmaking have always provided me with space to exist: to think, feel, act and imagine with others beyond the normative registers available within the social structures into which I happened to be born.32 I was never driven by the perspective of becoming an artist nor by some inner creative urge that needed expression. I only kept dancing and making art because of the practice itself, the doing of it: going to the studio to move and be moved, trying something with others, repeating things, figuring them out, thinking about them, feeling through the process, making something, questioning how else it could be. Whatever we make - a dance, a sculpture, a reading, a text, a song, an image - there is a specific way of being with each other that is mobilized by the thing that we are trying to make, or that perhaps is trying to make us, or make itself through/with/as us. Those specific ways of being together that artmaking offers always rehearse some kind of sociality and, implicitly or explicitly, propose specific modalities of life in common. Different art forms, disciplines, histories, and contexts will provide different conventions for the formal arrangements of "how" making should proceed and how to gather. Those arrangements can be thought about critically to intentionally set up experimental ways of working that challenge those conventions. However, beyond the intentionality of how we come together to make something, there is the materiality of both "what" we make and the material conditions of "how" we make, which constantly exceeds our intention or planned arrangement. The dissonance and ongoing improvisation between our planning and the materiality of our doing offers an occasion for study by way of the sociality it engenders. I am thinking about 32 I grew up in the periphery of Rome (Italy) and in the nearby peasant villages of my grandparents, in a catholic and conservative environment. I began taking ballet dance classes in my neighborhood at the age of 13 to help my general lack of bodily coordination. However, it has also provided me with a space for being with others and for thinking in movement that has opened unexpected avenues. 17 sociality at large, with all that is there — humans and more-than-human participants as well as references, ideas, memories, ghosts, concepts, materials, emotions, and differences: a sociality that can be rehearsed in different ways. How to take this offering and approach artmaking as a practice of rehearsing a different life in common? Suppose the goal would not be to understand, formalize, instrumentalize, or even perform that sociality (materializing it in/as discourse). Could we take this offer by approaching artmaking as study? On Study In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney consider the ungovernable and unmanageable social life which institutions such as the State and the University attempt to regulate and manage. They call study the “kind of common intellectual practice” that is always going on in the undercommons.33 “Another word for incompleteness is study, or more precisely, revision” they add in their later book All Incomplete. Study is "our sumptuous revisions of one another out of existence, as existence. Study happens and it don't stop. In study, we are engaged consciously and unconsciously. We revise, and then again."34 Study refuses the individuation and sovereignty that completion and improvement assume and effect. Study happens in the undercommons, in “the refusal of the interpersonal, and by extension the international, upon which politics is built. To be undercommon is to live incomplete in the service of a shared incompletion”.35 The commitment to existence as already shared, already given, always incomplete, is a refusal of the entire project 33 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 110. 34 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All incomplete (Minor Compositions, 2021), 43. 35 Harney and Moten, All incomplete, 123. 18 of modern thinking and the subjects and objects it creates. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, it is precisely its commitment to " prophetic organization" which differentiates “study” from “learning”. When Harney and Moten use the term “study” indeed, they mean black study, a collective practice that is indebted with and inseparable from blackness "as the ongoing present of a common refusal."36 Harney and Moten describe study as a refusal of imposed individuation and self-possession: “Study emerges as the collective practice of revision in which those who study do not improve but improvise, do not develop but regenerate and degenerate, do not receive instruction but seek to instantiate reception. Study is our already given gift of the general dispossession of ourselves for each other, and our service to that dispossession. Study is the (im)permanently unformed, insistently informal, underperforming commitment to each other not to graduate but instead indefinitely to accumulate an invaluable debt to each other rather than submit ourselves to their infinitely fungible line of credit.” 37 What if the practice of artmaking would deliberately remain incomplete, committed to the (re)generation of a sociality that is not based on the individual, rather than to the (re)production of either objects or subjects? Could an objectless and objectiveless art practice be approached as a collective practice of revision that gathers and (re)generates modes of living and knowing otherwise? 36 Fred Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful”, African Identities 11, no.2 (London: Routledge, 2013), 238. 37 Harney and Moten, All incomplete, 68. 19 As I will discuss in more detail in the following chapters, my artistic practice emerges from experiences of self-organization and self-education, which are inseparable from the way I conceive artmaking. Since 2006 I have collectively self-organized (and mostly improvised) the conditions for learning and making anything I was seeking. I learnt to approach the gathering of these conditions as a king of staging, literally “setting the stage” for something to happen: an artwork, some shared time, some specific knowledge, some money, or sometimes, something entirely unexpected. Therefore, my attention was always on the "how" of making - practically and theoretically - more than on "what" to make. As I continued trying all sorts of different things and collaborating with others, I came to understand study as my artistic practice - both what my work is made of and what it addresses - since it experiments with different possible arrangements for gathering and knowing. I began to call what I do Studio Practice - a practice of study that is also a practice of making art - a simple description that turned out to be an invocation, as it has guided my work since and now forms the basis of this research. The Studio The ‘studio’ and the ‘study’ in Studio Practice is a composition, both a score and a rehearsal. Inspired by my experience of the dance studio, where multiple proposals, spoken or simply enacted, follow one another and travel through bodies and registers of existence (physical, intellectual, emotional, social), my approach to the studio has always been transversal and improvisational. I am referring particularly to the dance studio of the experimental contemporary dance scene of the 2000s-on in Europe, of which I am part. André Lepecki has written extensively on, and with, the generation of dancers and choreographers who, since the 90s, have questioned the philosophical and political implications of dance and its context of 20 emergence, many of whom have been directly or indirectly my teachers, references, and colleagues.38 By 2007, thanks to their work, the dance studio I encountered was not only a place of disciplinary training, nor the solipsistic abstract space in which dance was supposed to find its artistic autonomy, as Lepecki pointed out. The studio had instead become a space of deep sociality, collaboration, and experimentation.39 In the dance studio, sequences of actions, silences, discussions, attempts, critiques, banalities, conflicts, and excitements composed specific modes of "ensembling" which I consider "study". Rather than a place where study happens, I am thinking about the Studio as a score, a composition of the conditions that make study possible. One way of thinking about this is through affordances, a term I have been recently discussing with Stefano Harney, and it is a new component in our ongoing collaboration. The psychologist James Gibson developed the notion of "direct perception" in the late 1970s.40 He argued that an object could be perceived directly through its affordances rather than through the mediation of cultural representations already existing in the mind. For Gibson, the potential for an object to sit on can be perceived directly without needing to have a representation of a "chair" in mind - to give a known example. There is an interesting shift here away from a conception of 38 I am thinking about the work of choreographers like Mette Ingvartsen, La Ribot, Antonia Baehr, Jérôme Bel, Juan Domínguez, Xavier Le Roy, amongst others. Performance Studies scholar André Lepecki has written with and through (and not only about) those choreographers' work to establish dance and choreography as a critical discursive practice. For it offers an essential perspective on the politics of movement which are central to contemporary Neoliberal economies. See André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (London: Routledge, 2006) and Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (London: Routledge, 2016). 39 André Lepecki traces the fusing of dance and writing back to the coinage of the term choreography in 1700 (and earlier its first version as Orcheosographie in 1589) and shows how the possibility for dance to claim autonomy as an art form relied on its capacity of being notated and recorded. The dance studio enables writing by providing an abstract space that separates the subject (male) from the rest of society; the studio then is akin to the space of the page for the author. See André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance, 19-44. 40 J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition, 1979, (London: Psychology Press, 2014, first printed by Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 21 cognition as happening solely in the mind and towards a conception of materiality as that which generates affordances. Gibson states: "Perhaps the composition and layout of surfaces constitute what they afford. If so, to perceive them is to perceive what they afford. This is a radical hypothesis, for it implies that the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ of things in the environment can be directly perceived”.41 Another radical implication of his hypothesis, if we stay with affordances, and assume neither separability nor determination between the perceiving subject assigning meaning and the perceived object, we can conceive of any existing thing as at once constituting and being constituted by unstable, constantly morphing affordances that are always a provisional composition. With Stefano Harney, we are beginning to think about affordances as offerings. Rather than naming a relation between two bodies, affordances constitute the very shifting surfaces of what might be called “body”, and thus allow us to think without relations. Immersed in a field of offerings (existing, possible, and virtual ones), we may think about study as a practice of tuning in with affordances, of sensing the yet unattended offerings that host ways of existing that would not be thinkable or possible otherwise. The Studio then is any composition of affordances we may find ourselves in (or rather part of) that we enter in study with, and de/re/compose. In this sense I understand the Studio as a score for study: if an improvisational score is an arrangement that changes as it is performed, the Studio is a composition of affordances that morphs as study happens. Rather than a place, the Studio refers to the ensemble sociality of affordances that composes whatever situation, question, image, or conversation is gathering us in study. Study in/as such an ensemble is also a performance, intended here as a 41 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach, 127. 22 praxis (a doing and a thinking) that rehearses modes of existing otherwise. Following Fred Moten's articulation of black performance in In the Break, I understand performance as a disruption, a cut: an interruption at the level of discourse which also is an augmentation of the materiality and sociality that exceeds the marking.42 I will discuss in this chapter how encountering the limits of performativity as an analytical tool for thinking about the materializing effects of our doing led me to consider study as a specific kind of making that attempts at remaining in the sStudio, rehearsing and experimenting with modes of doing and knowing that do not let neither objects nor subjects cohere. A Figurative Approach I will borrow Denise Ferreira da Silva’s figurative approach to lay out the theoretical basis that informs my practice. In her book Unpayable Debt Ferreira da Silva explains how, unlike the descriptive or interpretive approaches, the figurative is a mode of engagement that “neither presumes nor demands data, meaning, evidence, or ground.”43 Instead, it releases the imagination from the limiting constraints of the Understanding and approaches knowing as re/de/composition, both a critical and a creative task that does not concern (nor content) itself with "understanding". Rather each figuring is a re/de/composition of that which is being figured, and because both what is being figured and what is doing the figuring are materially implicated with each other and everything else, then each figuring is also a material (elemental) transformation, a re/de/composition.44 42 Fred Moten, In the Break, 2. 43 Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 273. 44 Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 273-75. 23 I often organize my notes spatially as maps, and since I tend to think through images, figures, and gestures, I have approached studying theory by making maps and drawings for the texts I read in order to visualize and retain information. Two figures have repeated in my notes and became each a referent for what I consider two different approaches to the “how” of materialization: the circle and the cut. The circle is a triangle that spins and draws itself. It figures the movement of how the subject self-represents, which delimits how it is materialized and what can possibly (come to) matter. I began drawing triangles and circles when reading Judith Butler’s work and psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan), to visualize for myself the isomorphism between the exclusionary matrix of discourse, the formation of the psychic apparatus, and the entrance of the subject in language. Reading Bodies That Matter, I did not understand how such a focus on the subject and on the exclusionary matrix of its discursive production could provide a base for a radical political praxis.45 I did not want to assume that subjection (as both a process of subordination and subject-formation) was inevitable, a given. It was only when I read my drawings through David Lloyd's critique of representation that I saw the underlying function of representation (another circle) at work in structuring the exclusionary mode of materialization that performativity assumes.46 The cut is instead a figure I cannot draw but refers to the gesture of simultaneously interrupting and exposing the brutality of discursive formation while echoing and augmenting the materiality that precedes and exceeds it. I first encountered it in Fred Moten's writings on black performance. I then retrospectively found it in Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of Derrida and deconstruction in the appendix to A Critique of Postcolonial Reason in the proliferating work of 45 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993). 46 David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 24 the trace.47 I found it again in the wounded flesh of the figure of the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation that Denise Ferreira Da Silva deploys in her book Unpayable Debt where she also articulates an image of existence that opens up the imagination toward possible non-exclusionary modes of materialization.48 By showing how I see those two figures at work in the texts I am presenting, I hope to figuratively convey their differences in more generative and generous ways than the discursive register alone allows. For example, when I talk about the limits of performativity, I am not identifying the error in Butler's discourse and proposing a better or more accurate interpretation or description of modes of materialization. I understand the limits literally, as the lines tracing the circle as a figure, which only allows me to attend to how the “play of representation” enters the composition of its conceptual articulation, and to imagine other possible modes of figuring materialization: the cut only being only one amongst many, or even infinite others. Inspired by the figure of the cut, my approach to study as artmaking and to artmaking as study, which I call Studio Practice, attempts to interrupt the production of artworks by staying in the studio, with the study that goes on before and beyond the making of objects. It hopes to echo and augment the elemental sociality that precedes and exceeds the (art) object and its (aesthetic) subject. 47 Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason. 48 Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt. 25 The Circle The Performativity of Discourse In Bodies That Matter Judith Butler considers the discourse of “sex” and its performative capacity to materialize bodies. “Sex” functions as a regulatory norm that materializes sexual difference to consolidate the heterosexual imperative.49 This imperative, the “law of sex”, is not given as a fixed form prior to its citation, rather “it is repeatedly fortified and idealized as the law only to the extent that it is reiterated as the law, produced as the law, the anterior and inapproximable ideal, by the very citations it is said to command.”50 Thus, discourse is performative in as much as it compels the reiterated citing of the norm, a gesture that simultaneously produces the norm (as if retroactively installing it) and repeats the norm, sedimenting it in time. The simultaneity of this operation only allows for a certain kind of materialization, namely that which cites the norm - no matter how properly or improperly. "Sex," for example, is the norm through which one comes to qualify as a body at all within cultural intelligibility. This norm only makes certain identifications possible while excluding or foreclosing others. This exclusionary matrix simultaneously produces the subject (the intelligible, livable body) and the abject (the unintelligible, unlivable body).51 The abject is the constitutive outside of the subject; although excluded, it is not posed as an absolute outside but rather it is constitutive of the subject and thus belongs to it.52 I drew the exclusionary matrix of discourse as a triangle that turns on itself and draws a circle. The turning is given by the 49 Butler, Bodies That Matter. 50 Butler, 14. 51 Butler, 3. 52 Or rather, it is “inside” it, as Butler writes: “the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, "inside" the subject as its own founding repudiation.” Butler, Bodies That Matter, 3. 26 reiteration of the citing of the law, which makes the triangle spin and draws a circle that marks the intelligible subject establishing itself. Figure 1 Schema of the exclusionary matrix of discourse This matrix is modeled in isometric relation to the formation of the subject in psychoanalysis: Figure 2 Schema of the isometric relation of subject-formation Constitutive Outside The Law of Sex / Discourse Body / Subject 27 The Psychic Apparatus According to Freud, the ego is an intermediary between the instinct (ID) and the external world. It has a deciding function; it strives after pleasure and seeks to avoid unpleasure as it performs its task of self-preservation.53 A newborn child does not separate their ego from the outside world but gradually learns to do so because the desired stimulus (the mother's breast) is not always there and needs to be called for. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud explains this encounter between the newborn and the mother’s breast as a first confrontation: “In this way the ego is for the first time confronted with an ‘object’, something that exists ‘out there’ and can be forced to manifest itself only through a particular action. A further incentive to detach the ego from the mass of sensations, and so to recognize a ‘world outside’, is provided by the frequent, multifarious and unavoidable feelings of pain (or absence of pleasure), whose termination and avoidance is required by the absolute pleasure principle.”54 This required termination establishes the mother as the love-object and forms the attachment on which the formation of the super-ego relies. The super-ego is indeed formed through the prolonged dependency of the child on the parents (and reinforced by all subsequent authorities) and prolongs their function of limiting satisfaction while fixing aggressive instincts towards the ego.55 The authority of the parent function is, according to Freud, a portion of the 53 Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1940 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), , 5-6. 54 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1930 (London: Penguin, 2002), 11. 55 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 9-11. 28 external world that "has, at least partially, been abandoned as an object and has instead, by identification, been taken into the ego. [...] It observes the ego, gives it orders, judges it, and threatens it with punishments, exactly like the parents whose place it has taken. We call this agency the super-ego and are aware of it in its judicial functions as our conscience.”56 Here is how I visualized for myself the psychic apparatus, according to Freud. Figure 3 My drawing of the psychic apparatus according to Freud 56 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 113. 29 According to this narrative, the Ego is the effect of a painful and inevitable separation from both the mother and the “world” since it acts as a boundary that renders both the mother and the world as “objects” while also trapping the ID (the unconscious from which the ego supposedly emerges) in interiority, as an inner world.57 The pain of this separation is then reiterated through the judgment of the super-ego, which constantly measures the ego against a normative ideal (ego-ideal) that the ego can never match or fully identify with. I recognized here a similar triangle to the one I drew for the exclusionary matrix of discourse. The act of judgment of the super-ego reiterates/establish the law (parental/social) and excludes the ID from consciousness. This reiteration of the judgment of the super-ego on the ego motorizes the spinning of the triangle, which marks the circle of the psychological subject establishing itself. Figure 4 Schema of the psychic apparatus 57 I am puzzled by how the separability between the child and his mother is assumed as a given, even though everyone is literally made of the same flesh as their mothers. The fact that we may not know how to sense this material/maternal entanglement talks more about the construction of our sensibility rather than the inevitability of separation. ID Super-ego Ego 30 The Subject in Language According to Jacques Lacan, the subject is not the ego, it does not have any deciding function, rather it is "frustration in essence".58 Lacan locates the beginning of the formation of the subject in the scene of jubilant play of the infant in front of the mirror. Lacan understands “the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image”.59 The coherent body image (imago) the child sees in the mirror is a mirage of the maturation of his own power, but it's given to him in exteriority (Gestalt), inverted and fixed (organizing his uncoordinated movements). At first, the image in the mirror provokes aggression (rivalry) but is then sublated by the identification with the image. The image symbolizes the mental permanence of the I and thus gives the I existence at the same time as it alienates him from himself.60 The ego then emerges as a synthesizing function that resolves the alienation of the mirror stage through language. However, it is a méconnaissance, only an illusion of autonomy and mastery, a libidinally invested object that remains irreducible to the individual and introduce him to the order of the imaginary.61 That split internal to the subject, its alienation, is the condition for entering language, which is then fully effected by the Name-of-the-Father ( the symbolic father) who separates the child from his mother by establishing the law (the symbolic order) and forcing the child to behave like an adult.62 That on which the symbolic and the imaginary falter or stumble is of the order of the real, "the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed 58 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection. 1966 (Routledge, 2001), 10. 59 Lacan, Ecrits, 2. Italics in original. 60 Ibid., 2. 61 Ibid., 3–5. 62 Philip Hill, Lacan for Beginners (London: Writers and Readers, 1997), 122. 31 element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic."63 Here is how I visualized the psychic apparatus according to Lacan while reading his work: Figure 5 My drawing of the subject according to Lacan I recognized here a similar triangle to the one I drew for the exclusionary matrix of discourse. The play of identification and objectification going on in the Imaginary (o - o' as the small other and the ego) reiterates/establishes the law of the Symbolic order (big Other) excluding the Real from representation. The subject (circle) thus establishes itself in language. 63 Alan Sheridan, “Translator’s note” in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, ix. 32 Figure 6 Schema of the subject in language In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler explores the ambivalence of the term "subjection", which simultaneously “signifies the process of becoming subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject.”64 At the psychic level, Butler assumes that subject formation is enabled by the subordination of the child to the parents or caregivers that he is entirely dependent on. Butler is aware that this "double aspect of subjection appears to lead to a vicious circle" in which the agency of the subject is an effect of its subordination.65 However, they consider how the act of appropriation of power may alter its repetition and even act against subordination. As the site of reiteration of power, "the subject is neither fully determined by power, nor fully determining of power (but significantly and partially both)" thus the subject "exceeds the logic of noncontradiction" and can be approached as a site of political agency.66 64 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 3. 65 Butler, 12. 66 Ibid., 17-18. The Real The Symbolic O The Imaginary o - o’ 33 Even though performativity can be a useful analytical tool to orient a political re-articulation of what comes to matter thanks to the difference that any citation or repetition produces, I find that this formal understanding of how our doing materializes bodies, poses a limit to the imagination. For the exclusionary matrix that structures and motorizes the performativity of discourse is formalized as a recursive and sequential movement that is perhaps not the only possibility for things to matter. My attempts to draw the shape of subject formation in Butler, Freud, and Lacan allow me to attend to the play of representation that I see structuring their theories. Reading my drawings through Denise Ferreira da Silva's analysis of modernity as the “text” of the “play of Reason” and through David Lloyd’s critique of representation as inherently racialized, I was able to see to what extent representation sustains and reproduces the racial-colonial-cis-hetero-patriarchal grammar of modernity. The Function of Representation In his book Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics, David Lloyd focuses on representation as a function that upholds what he calls "the racial regime of aesthetics", which is perpetuated by the work of artists and intellectuals in the humanities to this day.67 Aesthetics is a racial regime because it has "the function of regulating and distributing the access of human individuals or groups to the place of the Subject."68 According to Lloyd, representation is not only a matter of depiction or mimesis but a "movement of formalization through which the Subject emerges or by which the pathological is barred."69 I will discuss in the following chapter 67 David Lloyd, Under Representation. 68 Lloyd, 40. 69 Ibid., 39. 34 how, for Lloyd, aesthetic judgment constitutes the “subject without properties” as a universal abstract unit necessarily defined “against the underdeveloped racialized other”.70 For now, I would like to focus on his analysis of the function of representation because it shows the kind of "coup" that representation stages, occupying the imagination and tuning in to a single score.71 Lloyd shows how representation fundamentally structures the most intuitive and seemingly “natural” movements of thinking: reflection and self-reflection. Like a mirror, reflection creates an object (as an image) for its subject, establishing them both. The image produced by the reflection is a shape (a form) that the subject can recognize as himself (or not himself). This description establishes formal recognition as the act of knowing (or the act through which knowing happens) while effectively displacing/erasing the material particularities of both. Recognition sets dialectics in motion and renders thinking a somewhat progressive movement through which the subject and its objects co-constitute. David Lloyd’s analysis of representation departs from Gayatri Spivak’s reading of Karl Marx, and the two “related but irreducibly discontinuous” German terms that Marx uses for representation that she identifies: vertreten and darstellen.72 Vertreten is the standard term for political representation. It carries a strong connotation of substitution and replacement since it implies that to be represented also means to be displaced or silenced/erased from the scene.73 Dartsellen instead indicates the theatrical meaning of representation that is “to appear as”, and in 70 Ibid., 10. 71 I unsurprisingly drew it as another triangle. 72 I am only describing Lloyd's reading of Spivak and how he uses her distinction to make his point here. Spivak distinguishes the two terms to expose the complicity between 'speaking for' and 'portraying' the other. Through this distinction, she is not attempting to resolve or describe representation; rather, she raises the question of representation as a problem, for it is a "speaking in the name of". Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (University of Illinois Press, 1988). 73 An example would be a lawyer representing their client in court, and effectively taking their place in court. Lloyd, 103. 35 philosophical usage it indicates “something as it “presents itself ” or appears to perception in an immediate way.”74 Lloyd identifies a third German term that Marx uses for representation: vorstellen, which implies a certain degree of reflexivity or self-consciousness. Marx uses it in Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte where he explains how “in order to become a class for itself, […] the members of a class would have to represent or imagine themselves to belong to it”.75 According to Lloyd, Kant uses the same term vorstellen/vorstellung to characterize the act of judgment as the movement from mere presentation of an object to the senses, to a reflective representation of it. It is a movement of generalization (from particular to universal) and formalization (as it lets go of the material and sensual aspects of the mere presentation).76 Similarly, Hegel considers this movement of representation the defining characteristic of human beings, which identifies Man with Spirit: "Things in nature are only immediate and single, while man in spirit duplicates himself, in that (i) he is as things in nature are, but (ii) he is just as much for himself; he sees himself, represents himself [stellt sich vor] to himself, thinks, and only on the strength of this active placing of himself before himself is he spirit.”77 By recovering this third term, Lloyd describes representation as a dialectical triad and a formal narrative structure that moves from: darstellen immediate presentation (particular) → vorstellen self-reflexive representation (formal) → vertrenen legal and political representation (universal).78 74 Ibid., 104. 75 Ibid., 104. 76 Ibid., 105. 77 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., (Oxford University Press, 1975), quoted in Lloyd, 106 78 Ibid., 108. 36 Figure 7 Schema of the function of representation This act of formalization through self-reflexivity allows the particular subjects to represent themselves as if they were equivalent formal units and thus as universal Subjects representable by the State. However, Lloyd argues that through this movement, representation stages a "coup" since it displaces the subjects at the same time as it makes them representable, by effectively taking their place.79 This coup of representation yields several effects: 1. By transforming “a contingent aspect of the phenomenology of perception into a decisive moment in a universalizing narrative”, it renders the activity of self-reflexive representation the index of human subjecthood.80 2. This index of Humanity also stands as an index of civilization, making the West representative of humanity and freedom. As the bearer of civilization, the West is 79 Ibid., 108. 80 Ibid., 110. Darstellen Immediate presentation Particular Vorstellen Self-Reflexive representation Formal Vertrenen Legal representation Universal 37 legitimized in the colonial domination of its "Others", who, defined by their incapacity to represent themselves, must be represented (and thus displaced or erased).81 3. Representation's coup occludes the founding violence of the State. It naturalizes political representation (vertrenen) as the self-evident mode of liberal societies and hides its act of displacement. Through this coup, the State does not represent society (and its members) as it should, but effectively replaces it.82 This movement of representation as a formalizing act (from the particular to the universal) has become commonsensical and is hard to break since it is modeled on a process of perception that is given as natural. “We perceive as impressions present themselves to us and then we re-present them and in doing so become conscious of (apperceive) both them and ourselves.”83 However self-evident it may seem, this definition of perception had to be trained and is the result of the aesthetic education of man, which is still performed today by the humanities. According to Lloyd, “the intellectual oversees pedagogically the repetition and normalization” of the movement of representation.84 The work of the intellectual is to reproduce the function of representation (vorstellung/self-reflection) and to naturalize it as the disposition of the ethical subject. The intellectuals do not only mediate and regulate how subjects become representable/representative citizens for the State, but they also "are constituted as the representative instances of 81 Ibid., 109. 82 Ibid., 110-113. 83 Ibid., 108. 84 Ibid., 108. 38 representation" through which the fundamentally racial and political "regime of representation is installed and reproduced."85 David Lloyd's analysis of the function of representation exposes how the most intuitive modes of thinking, such as reflection, self-reflection, and critique (judgment), are activities that are structured by the racial regime of aesthetics and inherently uphold it, even when they aim to elaborate social justice claims or to prefigure other possible modes of living and existing otherwise. Reflection and self-reflection have become so naturalized that they seem to describe the movement (or action) of thinking intuitively. As such, they limit what is thinkable, sensible, and imaginable. Another movement that has shown me how representation is instrumental to subtly reproduce and naturalize the grammar of post-Enlightenment thinking and its brutality, is the reframing of modernity as the “modern text” which Denise Ferreira da Silva proposes in her book Towards a Global Idea of Race.86 She reads modernity as a text staging the “play of Reason” which unfolds through two signifying strategies and "metanarratives": history, which sets the stage of interiority, and science, which sets the stage of exteriority.87 I will discuss her analysis in more depth in chapter three, but I would like to highlight here how the ‘play of Reason’ frames and delimits Thought itself and thus continues to structure, like grammar, what is possible to think, sense, and imagine. It does not only delimit the content of what can be thought but mainly sets the score for "how" to think. However, once the play is exposed, it is possible to 85 Ibid., 114. 86 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race. 87 Ferreira da Silva, Towards a Global Idea, 30. 39 see the stage's limits and shape and imagine what may lie beyond and/or before it. In my notes, I drew the play of reason like this: Figure 8 My drawing of the play of Reason In the drawing, the stage of interiority deploys and is constituted by “the signifying gestures — displacement, negation, and engulfment — that render exteriority an (im)possible ontological moment.”88 These violent signifying gestures are repeated and upheld through representation, through the act of formalization that negate and displace the particular, the sensuous, and the material as merely a "constitutive outside" of that which is signified. However, the irreducible materiality of exteriority exceeds and precedes its reduction. 88 Ibid., 31. 40 I insisted on drawing these circles to show figuratively how the limits of performativity are, for me, mainly formal. Firstly, the theory of performativity assumes as a given the figure of the Subject, which, even in its psychological refashioning, relies on judgment and self-reflection to emerge in/as consciousness. No matter how deeply felt or experienced, its existence depends on an act of formalization. Secondly, representation continues to structure the material and materializing capacities of the performative embodied acts, for they are framed as formal acts, recursive (sequential) and citational (of the law/norm). I hope that those spinning triangles provide an image of how formal logical thinking literally “scores” the movement of thinking and limits it in very specific ways. In order to begin to loosen its grip on the imagination and to interrupt its brutal matrix of signification, we need a different understanding of matter (as that of which something consists of) to guide us towards non-exclusionary modes of knowing and existing. Judith Butler offers a feminist genealogy of matter in Bodies That Matter that is useful to consider, for it discusses the redoubling of matter posited by Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray.89 Both postulate a "matter that cannot be contained within the form/matter distinction," and that stays radically excluded from any binary oppositions because it is the very condition of possibility of such binaries.90 Irigaray aligns this excessive unthematizable materiality with the feminine, which is redoubled as site, receptacle or chora through the (specular) phallogocentric economy.91 Butler contests the use of this term as they argue that “the feminine, strictly 89 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter. 90 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 38. 91 Irigaray explains her siding of “woman” with excess in this passage: “Woman is not to be related to any simple designatable being, subject, or entity. Nor is the whole group (called) women. One woman + one woman + one woman will never add up to some generic entity: woman. (The/ a) woman refers to what cannot be defined, enumerated, formulated or formalized. Woman is a common noun for which no 41 speaking, cannot be named at all and, indeed, is not a mode”.92 To name the non-figurable the feminine or the woman, according to Butler, would only produce another set of foreclosures and could stand as a phallogocentic act of appropriating the whole "elsewhere". Thus, Butler goes on to discuss "matter as a sign which in its redoublings and contradictions enacts an inchoate drama of sexual difference” that produces bodies through its exclusionary matrix.93 Matter is here a sign that enacts the play of sexual difference through its redoublings and its citations of the law of sex. Even though this provides a more dynamic description of matter, the how of its formalization is imaged as a recursive and sequential movement that makes only some things matter, the intelligible ones. How to account for the matter that is not visible, not intelligible, not held within the confines of time and space, and that yet shapes and affects the compositions of bodies?94 Can a consideration for such matter allow us to imagine other modes of materialization that do not assume productivity as being necessarily exclusionary? identity can be defined. (The/ a) woman does not obey the principle of self-identity, however the variable x for self is defined. She is identified with every x variable, not in any specific way. Presupposed is an excess of all identification to I of self.” Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 1974 (Cornell University Press, 1985). 92 Butler, 39. 93 Butler, 49. 94 I am thinking here about the different but related questions on matter raised by Avery Gordon in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), by Denise Ferreira da Silva in “Material Aesthetics: Note 1 - Tangible Possibility” and by Karen Barad in What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice. 42 The Cut I first saw the possibility of such a mode in the working of the “trace” that Gayatri Spivak discusses in the appendix to A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Spivak traces a genealogy of the term “deconstruction”, from Derrida’s coining of the term to her setting-it-to-work within postcolonial theory.95 Deconstruction, she explains, is the work of tracking the gestures implied in establishing a definition. In the moment in which a term is defined, it is set off from all that it is not and thus pushes away all its antonyms. Without this gesture of differentiation/deferment, it is not possible to define any term and, therefore, not possible to construct any argument. In reading philosophical texts, Derrida tracks the rhetorical maneuvers that words perform to conceal their first différance, the setting off from, and continuous pushing away of all that they are not. The inevitability of this differentiation from, and deferment of the "trace," or the track of all that is not what is being defined, is what Derrida calls différance. The naming of différance is “a necessary but impossible move”. It is impossible because by being named, différance obeys its very law and performs its own differing/deferring of all what it is not. However, it is a necessary move, for it allows the trace to work.96 I began to visualize the "trace" (or the track of all that is not what is being defined) not as a linear sequence of gestures (a track like a trajectory) but as a sedimented superimposition (a kind of materiality) that the movement of différance proliferates. For what-is-defined is made 95 Gayatri C. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 424. 96 Spivak writes: “This irreducible work of the trace not only produces an unrestricted economy of same and other, rather than a relatively restricted dialectic of negation and sublation, in all philosophical oppositions. It also places our selfhood (ipseity) in a relationship of différance with what can only be "named" radical alterity (and thus necessarily effaced).” Gayatri C. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 424. 43 immediately available to the intellect by virtue of being named, while all-that-is-not-what-is-being-defined exists in a semantic and coded (and I would say material) excess to what-is-being-defined and thus proliferates the trace which, according to Spivak, can be set to work through a practice of deconstructive reading. If the point of the reading is not further naming - a coming into being or into discourse of the trace — then it is possible to attend to the proliferation of the trace as already composing discourse, and possibly re/de/composing it through the very act of reading. I will further discuss how reading can be approached as imaging, and thus as a re/de/composition in Chapter 3 when I describe the collaborative practice of Poethical Readings. For now, it is important to show how Spivak's approach to deconstruction already offers through the trace a first image of the cut as another mode of conceiving the materializing effects of our doing, one that does not resolve or re-names or materializes but rather cuts, interrupts and complicates its brutal patterns. One reason I have been drawing all those spinning triangles is to visualize for myself how the exclusionary matrix of discourse that Butler identifies materializes the subject/body as the circle and, at the same time, forecloses the materiality of the page: not just the surface on which the triangle/circle is inscribed (as if a receptacle) but the paper/tree/ground/water that composes the page and exceeds its surface. The value and generative capacity of this excessive materiality— which despite being foreclosed does not cease to exist— is what Fred Moten attunes himself to, I believe, when he discusses black performance as the resistance of the object in his book In the Break. 97 97 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 44 Moten opens the book by inhabiting “the discourse of the cut”98 that Saidiya Hartman explores in her book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America,99 where she refuses to reproduce the "terrible spectacle” that introduced Frederick Douglass to slavery, the beating of Aunt Hester, which he narrates in the first chapter of his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.100 Hartman chooses not to reproduce his account of the beating of Aunt Hester in order "to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated", and to how, instead of causing indignation, they "immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity".101 Although the reader of the repetition of such accounts would be called in as a witness to the violence, Hartman reminds us that the line between witness and spectator is uncertain, and she goes on to explore the "precarity of empathy" by looking at less obvious scenes of violence, such as the minstrel stage, the dances of the enslaved at the marketplace and in their quarters, and other mundane ways in which terror and violence were "perpetrated under the rubric of pleasure, paternalism, and property".102 Her refusal to reproduce the beating of Aunt Hester is, according to Fred Moten, illusory, since the scene is inevitably reproduced not only in her reference to it but in the way it echoes in every other scene of subjection that she goes on describing in the book. However, her refusal generates a space, the space of the cut, where the violence becomes louder, is rendered audible and augmented. The 98 Moten, In the Break 1. 99 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 100 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. In The Classic Slave Narratives (New York: Mentor Books, 1987) in Moten, 3. 101 Moten, 3. 102 Ibid. 45 space of the cut allows her readers to linger and stay with the violence, paying attention to its operations and presence in those less obvious scenes of enjoyment and empathy.103 From this “massive discourse of the cut, of rememberment and redress” opened by Hartman, “where blackness marks simultaneously both the performance of the object and the performance of humanity”,104 Moten questions the originarity of violence and the inevitability of subjection by attending to the resistance of the object, the materiality that is foreclosed (and yet exists) in the object’s appearance into/as discourse.105 He attends to what is apparently not valuable and not meaningful, like the passage on the commodity that speaks, which Marx writes as an allegory in volume 1 of Capital, failing to learn from its actual existence in the experience of the enslaved person. In this passage, Marx stages an imaginary conversation about value between objects and economists, in which, amongst other things, the objects are made to claim their intrinsic value. Marx writes their speech as a farce since he assumes that commodities cannot speak. Moten, however, reads this passage starting "with the historical reality of commodities who spoke – of laborers who were commodities before, as it were, the abstraction of labor power from their bodies".106 He hears the commodities speak and registers "the fact – the material, graphic, phonic substance – of the object's speech" as their intrinsic value, that is their value before exchange. "Moreover, it [value] exists precisely as the capacity for exchange 103 Ibid., 4. 104 Ibid., 1. 105 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have recently begun differentiating violence from brutality to establish that violence is prior. Brutality emerges out of violence, but it is a reduction of violence to degraded and vicious ends. Thinking about descriptions of violence rather than interpretations, they see violence as an interruption in the process of being, a reconfiguration of entanglements to which brutality responds and tries to regulate. For the ontological assumption of interiority requires brutality to maintain the fantasy of the individual. See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. On Violence #2. YouTube. Akademie der Künste der Welt. 106 Moten, In the Break, 6. 46 and the capacity for a literary, performative, phonographic disruption of the protocols of exchange".107 Aunt Hester's scream is then heard as an objection to exchange, as black performance, in which the materiality of her speech as breath and sound, disrupts the protocols of exchange, and embodies and reproduces a critique of value.108 The irreducible materiality of this broken and breaking speech is what animates black performance. Black performance is a disruption, something that causes an interruption at the level of discourse, a cut, which Moten reads through Jacques Derrida as an “invagination”: “an internal pocket larger than the whole”109 formed by a dividing mark that simultaneously marks its belonging to the set and its being in excess to it. However, what is made larger than the whole, what is augmented through the cut of black performance for Moten is not the set, as a category or sign, but its (phonic) materiality, the "substance of which something consists" – to recall the definition of matter that Denise Ferreira da Silva uses to understand blackness in her "equation of value".110 This figure of the cut thus refers to an interruption, or an absence that makes the gesture of marking visible, but also materially exceeds it.111 Hartman’s cut, her attempt to interrupt the 107 Ibid., 10. 108 Similarly, the Creole described by Eduard Glissant in Caribbean Discourse is heard by Moten as a critique of the valuation of meaning over content. Glissant reminds us that “for Caribbean man, the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech. … [The scream] is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.”, in Moten, In The Break, 3. 109 Ibid., 258. 110 Denise Ferreira da Silva, 1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value. e-flux journal #79, February 2017. 111 The cut shifts attention away from the mark. Neither the writing nor the trace, the cut registers the discontinuity or interruption at the level of the flesh that the marking operates. The cut amplifies and echoes its feel rather than describing what the marking or the surface marked is. 47 repetition of the violent originary act, exposes the violence of representation while echoing and amplifying the materiality of Aunt Hester's scream. Moten's reading of the absence produced by Marx's casual dismissal of the commodity's speech exposes the racial capitalist protocols of exchange and echoes the materiality of the commodity's speech. I am interested in this double movement which is not so easily representable as a scheme. Perhaps an actual cut in the page could do it, but then one would need to be able to hear or sense the scream of the trees, the noise of the paper factory, the water flowing towards the roots of the trees. Such a sensibility could only be possible through a complete shift in thinking, based on another image of existence that Denise Ferreira da Silva introduces at the end of her book Unpayable Debt. Material Aesthetics In Unpayable Debt, the figure of the cut comes through the wounded flesh. Denise Ferreira da Silva assembles the figure of the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation to read and disrupt the intrastructure of post-Enlightment thinking.112 Her figure exposes how the economic and juridical relation of ownership and the total violence it authorizes are at the core of the modern political program.113 She also shifts attention to (echoes and augments) the elemental moment of matter and takes it as the point of departure for thinking.114 The capacity to attend to how the "transfer of potential energy (flesh, bone, blood, etc.) of the enslaved person's body did result in the creation of value" would make visible, on the one hand, how slave labor (as 112 Ferreira da Silva uses the term intrastructure “to capture and comment on the microforms (pillars and descriptors) that compose modern thought, those that enter into the constitution of concepts and categories and are presupposed (as the operative element) in its formulations.” Unpayable Debt, 28. 113 Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 36. 114 Ibid., 46. 48 potential and internal kinetic energy) enters the composition of today's global capital, and on the other, how that extracted value could be returned.115 However, such a "raw materialist" approach would require another image of existence, not bound by the limitation imposed on thinking by time and space nor by the assumption of separability and determination. Ferreira da Silva describes two significant movements in thinking that such an image of existence would enable and require: “... first, ‘the things of the world,’ emancipated from time and the categories of understanding, would no longer be addressed as phenomena; second, they would be considered without space at the level of the elementa that have existed since the unfolding of spacetime and also enter into the composition of all that has existed, does exist, and will exist. In short, existents and events considered not as separate entities but as deeply implicated pars, as elementa, as singular compositions, would regain their orientation toward the infinitum.” 116 Released into/as the world, the human, already implicated in everything else, no longer needs to control, determine and resolve. The possible modes of knowing and living that open up are infinite, together with the possible ways to contemplate and bring about decolonization as “the restoration of the total value expropriated from Native lands and Slave bodies under total 115 Ibid., 47. 116 Ibid., 264. 49 violence,” which according to Denise Ferreira da Silva “is the only acceptable meaning for justice.”117 This image of existence enables a reformulation of aesthetics towards what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls "material aesthetics," which implies a sensibility able to encompass "both the experience of the perceptible and the imperceptible" and that "gives the haptic and the sonic as much value as is ascribed to the optic under dominant culture."118 Thinking about the experiments devised to identify the elementary particles that would explain dark matter (called WIMPs, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), Ferreira da Silva notes how some of the experiments “are not designed to make the WIMPs visible, but rather to gather details on what happens when they touch solid matter.”119 These haptic modes of going about knowing something that is invisible and yet affects the composition of matter open up a whole range of possibilities for thinking about ways of knowing and making that, rather than determining, are dedicated to sensing. No longer only submitting sensations (as representations) to the Understanding, sensing could refer to the making imaginable and the making sensible of that which is not graspable by the Understanding. Be it through figures, tools, practices, or ciphers, sensing re/de/composes all it touches, at once sensing (materially affecting the composition of both the ‘knower’ and of ‘what is known’) and making sense (producing mental images). Sensing guides my approach to study as artmaking and to artmaking as study. Indeed, I consider Studio Practice an experiment with modes of knowing and making –- ways of sensing and making sense –- that do not presuppose a knowing subject, an author or a beholder but rather 117 Ibid., 273. 118 Denise Ferreira Da Silva “Material Aesthetics: Note 1 - Tangible Possibility”, 136. 119 Ibid., 138. 50 remain incomplete, affected by and affecting anything that enters their composition. Through a set of objectless and objectiveless practices, I try to attend to the elemental sociality that is always already implied in the making of art, which our doing (re)generates. Inspired by the figure of the cut, Studio Practice attempts to interrupt the production of objects by staying in the studio, with the study that goes on before and beyond the making of objects. The hope is to echo and augment (re-generate/re-materialize) the elemental sociality usually captured in the production (realization) of the art object and its aesthetic subject. Even just considering all the "labor (potential energy) and calor (internal kinetic energy)” that enter into the composition of an artwork, which is clearly not only human, gives a much more expansive picture of the sociality that artmaking implies and generates.120 By an objectless and objectiveless practice, I do not mean an immaterial practice where no-thing is ever made; on the contrary, I am trying to attend to and stay with all the materialization that goes on before and beyond the production of the artwork, which may as well release whatever things art makes from their status as “objects”. Objects always presuppose a perceiving subject, for they are objects of experience, things that have been apprehended by the intuitions of time and space of the perceiving subject and can thus be understood or judged. However, through a raw materialist approach, it is possible to imagine ways of knowing and making that neither presuppose nor reiterate the subject, but that address and redress material entanglements of very different scales, re/de/composing them rather than determining them. It is also possible to make things that do not cohere or formalize into objects, but re/de/generate the elemental sociality that composes them. 120 For an understanding of labor as transfer of energy see Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 249-250. 51 In the last chapter of In The Break, Fred Moten discusses the difference between “objects” and “artworks” that art critic Michael Fried insists on, via the work of Adrian Piper.121 Moten explains that, according to Fried, artwork possesses a 'syntax' - a difference internal to the artwork, which is the condition of possibility of signification - which the mere object does not possess, for it does not differentiate itself from the rest of the world, nor from itself.122 This internal difference in the artwork is its parergon, a frame/support/boundary that functions as a “constitutive outside-on-the-inside”123 and makes the artwork a meaning-producing representation (like an actual frame to a painting). Thanks to this framing, the artwork becomes a mirror where the interiority of the artwork reflects the interiority of the subject: a formalizing act that enables (self-)reflection and aesthetic judgment as the proper response to the artwork. However, through Derrida, Moten attends to the materiality of the parergon. Neither outside nor inside the ergon (work), the parergon is (at) the border touching both, informing and deforming both the work and its milieu. Indeed, the parergon in/as material, in/as the milieu, makes the milieu also stand out as the ground. Moten explains that "to the extent that the parergon has catalytic effects, it reproduces the milieu as figure. The material figures, re/con/figures, the milieu.124 The parergon appears here as "material fullness" rather than as a supplement to a lack (of meaning or function internal to the work, or the subject). Its materiality refigures the milieu, and objects to the subject/ive by rematerializing the object. To discuss performance as the "resistance of the object", Fred Moten thinks with Adrian Piper's "metaperformances", particularly with her Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City. 121 Fred Moten, In the Break. 122 Ibid., 237. 123 Ibid, 243. 124 Ibid., 249. 52 In 1970, Piper refused to participate in Max's very environment, which she describes as an "Art Environment, replete with Art Consciousness and Self-Consciousness about Art Consciousness".125 She resolved to protect her consciousness by privatizing it, isolating herself from any visual, aural, and tactile stimuli. She presented herself as a passive object that was nevertheless unassimilable by Max's art consciousnesses because her voluntary sensory deprivation "implied aggressive activity and choice, an independent presence confronting the Art-Conscious environment with its autonomy." 126 “My objecthood” she states, “became my subjecthood”.127 As a black woman in the art world, Piper understands her position as a "foreign guest in a private club" whose consciousness is not allowed to just "externalize creative impulses in unreflective actions" but instead has to be able to provide a critical and discursive matrix in order not to be dismissed, censored or ridiculed.128 In other words, she has to provide 'objective evidence' of her self-consciousness, which exposes how against any “common sense” (and its presupposition of formal equality), subjectivity is not already assumed for racialized persons. She exposes it precisely by withdrawing sensorially from "common sense", i.e., from the very activity of self-reflective experience that allows subjects to represent themselves (as Self-Consciousness). Her refusal echoes and augments the resistance of the object, the irreducible materiality that exceeds signification and is never fully absorbed by the consciousness of the beholder. Moten reads her performance as a "lived critique of the assumed equivalence of personhood and subjectivity and, by extension, a force of resistance or objection that is always 125 Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 1: 27. In Fred Moten, In the Break, 239. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid. 128 Piper, Out of Order, 1: xxxix, in Moten, 241. 53 already in excess of the limits of subjection/subjectivity".129 For Moten, "Piper is the parergon, the foreign guest, withdrawing from the artwork and the art world, into the exterior, into the external world” for it is this exteriority that is most internal to the work even though it keeps being posited as a lack. Even though I do not make a distinction between artworks and objects - and I consider artwork just particular kinds of objects (perhaps doubly objectified) - I am also interested in the rematerializing support that the parergon may offer. For I am thinking about ways of knowing and making that, like a parergon could ground and support (as figures or tools or things) the regeneration of exteriority towards the “restoration of the total value extracted". I am thinking about ways to approach artmaking that produces neither objects nor artworks but rather stay in/as study. Without congealing into an object which presumes a perceiving subject (objectless) and without an aim that also presumes a strategizing or strategized subject (objectiveless), my Studio Practice attempts (and often fails) to tune in with the materiality and elemental sociality that a specific question, situation or arrangement gathering us in study, already offers. How to sense the offerings that things afford? How to go about knowing without recourse to interiority? In the following chapters, I will describe four instances of Studio Practice and reflect on how each practice engages these questions. Each practice indeed experiments with modes of knowing and making that (re)generate and rehearse a sensibility that tries to encompass the actual, possible, and virtual dimensions of what happens and exists. The practice of Political Therapy, which I describe in the following chapter, uses touch and directly engages physical sensations to discuss and map political questions. The collaborative practice of Poethical 129 Moten, 242. 54 Readings (with Denise Ferreira da Silva) that I discuss in Chapter 3, uses reading tools usually deemed “irrational” (such as Tarot and Astrology) to image the ethical and political questions we read for. By re/de/composing the issue, the readings usually dissolve and diffuse the questions rather than resolving or understanding them. In Chapter 4, I describe my approach to teaching as a collective and collaborative practice of study which does not aim at sharing and producing knowledge but rather improvises, engaging the generative movement of knowing and its sociality, without any objective. Finally, in Chapter 5, I describe a recent attempt to create a performance that is simultaneously a study group called Performance Studies. On the one hand, the practice considers the public or staged setting of performance as an occasion for study (thanks to the specific arrangement of attention it offers) while on the other, it recognizes that performance itself — as an ongoing experimentation on the condition of attention and sensibility—can perhaps be said to study. 55 Chapter 2: Political Therapy I have used the term “study” to stand for a series of theoretical concerns and considerations that have inspired my Studio Practice. As I outlined in the first chapter, Harney and Moten have a number of ways of explaining what they mean by study. One way is to use the term to indicate a commitment to being together to tackle a problem or an interest, through text, art, or other forms of social life, by taking as much time as necessary, in the space that is necessary, and with the people who are necessary.130 I took their concept of study from early in their collaboration and I have been adapting it to my own purposes through Studio Practice for several years, as reflected in the example that follows in this chapter and in subsequent chapters. In each case, I began with the basic premise put forth by Harney and Moten and experimented with what would happen to study if it were performed. I also experimented with what would happen to performance if it were study: could such an approach help performance to remain in the space it claims of non-representation? In this chapter, I will introduce Political Therapy as a first instance of a set of studio practices that this exegesis reflects upon. I will first discuss the trajectory that led me to the creation of Political Therapy and describe a typical session, to then review some of the theoretical considerations that entered into the composition of the practice: self-education, intimacy, and speculative practice. I will then give an example of the practice by first describing four individual sessions I have performed with curators working in the same institution, and then share the collective map and conversation they generated. This example will allow me to reflect 130 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “On collaboration within practice research”, Practice Research Assembly, held online on 10 November 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgeArR7GWys 56 on how Political Therapy has informed the more general idea of Studio Practice and shaped its development. Part one: Theoretical Considerations The Trajectory Political Therapy is an artistic practice that borrows from the therapeutic set-up and that tries to address through touch whatever political problem the participant brings.131 I devised this practice in 2011 as an extension and variation of another practice I had started experimenting with the year before: Fake Therapy. Fake Therapy is a practice that creates the conditions for anyone to try to heal anyone else without knowing how to do it and without assuming anything in particular about what healing is. As the name suggests, no expertise is required, nor is such expertise sought after, and "pretending" is taken as a valid way of doing and knowing. The practice is done through a deck of cards I developed in summer 2010 in K3-Hamburg, during an artist residency of the self-organized project "Sweet & Tender Collaborations".132 Every day a group of people would get together and split into pairs. For twenty minutes, one person would try to 'heal' the other, without knowing how. The main focus for the one performing the therapy was to maintain themselves in a state of not knowing what they are doing, while setting the intention to heal the other person. To set the intention simply meant that the therapist was invited to assume that whatever they were doing or was happening as healing. Every time the roles were reversed, the last ten minutes 131 I explain what I mean by "political problem" in the following section, in which I describe a typical session. 132 Sweet & Tender Collaborations is a loose collective of artists I have integrated from 2007-2012. More on this project in Chapter 4. 57 were dedicated to describing in the most detailed manner what the "therapists" did. The indications written on the card come from these descriptions.133 Both the cards and a basic score to practice Fake Therapy are published online under a creative commons license. Anyone is welcome to download the cards, use and modify the practice as they wish.134 Figure 9 Fake Therapy deck of cards In the spring 2011, a friend and collaborator shared with me an ethical impasse they were facing. As we could not go beyond that impasse only by talking, I intuitively proposed them to lie down and embody the question, so that I could perform Fake Therapy on their body as the question and see if that could make any difference. I thought that attending to the body of my 133 For a more detailed account of a session of Fake Therapy and a version of its score, see Chapter 5. 134 Valentina Desideri, Fake Therapy, www.faketherapy.wordpress.com/fake-therapy/. 58 friend as the question could perhaps add some information, hint, or perspective to our conversation, and something which was there but we could not see or conceive. The touch, happening in silence, suspended the use of language for a moment and provided a space to contemplate the issue, the sensations occurring, the ways thoughts wandered and deviated, the random images that appeared, the feelings that were at play, and so on. All those elements shifted our conversation and once we got back to talking about the issue, there was a sense of relief, or rather an opening in the way we looked at the issue, which no longer felt like an impasse. I immediately felt this was a new practice, a way of approaching a question that I wanted to repeat. I devised a basic score and called the practice Political Therapy, since my intention was to study - through touch and conversation - what “politics” is (or could be) for each of the people I would practice with.135 A typical session A session of Political Therapy is individual and begins with a conversation, where the participant is asked to share a "political problem", which is any problem that they are currently experiencing in their life that we will address in its political dimension. The premise is that on the one hand, the personal is political, and on the other, I had defined "politics" as the ways in which we organize life together (and life together is organized for us).136⁠ 135 Valentina Desideri, Political Therapy, www.faketherapy.wordpress.com/political-therapy/. 136 I had defined politics in this rather simple and pragmatic way because I did not want to assume any specific definition of politics; rather, as in the case of healing for the Fake Therapy, I wanted to see what else politics might be. 59 According to these premises, anything from a difficulty in the workplace to the dynamics of a heartbreak, to feelings about a specific situation or life in general could be brought up as a political problem to start with. The first movement of the session consists of a brief conversation where we figure out together how to formulate a question that is more general, something we don't have an answer for and that we both are curious about. Since the session is not a service that one participant knows how to provide to the other, both can approach it from a position of not-knowing, as simply an occasion for study. For example, a conversation that began with the person sharing their feeling that the more political theory they read, the less capable of political action they feel, led us to ask: "How to go from observation to action?" Once the question is formulated, we write it on a piece of paper, and I ask the person to embody the problem; to lie down and assume that their body is the question, and that whatever they would feel, sense, imagine, think, or dream of during the silent hands-on healing part should be treated as information about our question. Then I pick four cards from the Fake Therapy deck and follow the instructions on the card to treat their body/question for about 10-15 minutes. Once I finish, I wake the person up and, as they are still lying down, I ask if they had any sensations, thoughts, images, or words that came up, and I note what they say on the piece of paper all around the question. A conversation follows, we look at the information we collected, and we try to make sense of them in relation to the question, drawing connections, entering side-lines speculations, asking new questions as we map it on the paper. The session stops when we feel it is done. Usually there is a sense that the question has shifted, or that some other ways of looking 60 at it are opening up, or sometimes a clear direction appears, but in any case, the concern has changed. 137 Figure 10 Example of a Political Therapy map Although in 2011 I was operating within the field of contemporary dance, I could hardly consider Political Therapy a dance performance, for it did not really have an audience. Also, the time and energy a single individual session required made it rather anti-economical for any theatre or festival to program. So, I mainly organized sessions myself, either privately with people I met, or through institutions and events that would invite me nevertheless, or on the side 137 To give a more concrete example, I will narrate specific sessions in the second part of this chapter. 61 of some other ongoing event. However, this rather informal circulation created an invisible support net made of friendships, alliances, hospitality, invitations to do other things (including the possibility of doing my MA) that have sustained me through the following years. It made me think about the nature of the artwork I was producing, since it never became any kind of object, nor did it have any specific objective besides studying what politics may mean, and yet it generated so much. Political Therapy became a tool I used for study, for entering a speculative practice with others around political issues and got me interested in experimenting with and imaging more ‘objectless’ and ‘objectiveless’ tools that could gather us in study. Self-Education At that time, I was living and working at the Performing Arts Forum, PAF, a self-organized artist-run space which, as I have mentioned in the introduction, has generally provided me with a context for self-education. I had always been part of self-organized artistic initiatives and I wanted to learn more about the theoretical infrastructure supporting practices of self-organization and to imagine what kind of life in common those practices could support in turn. Since I had no academic training in either political or critical theory, I embraced as my "methodology '' taking an interest in anything that would come by. After all, I was already living and working in a self-organized space, so I could assume that any theory or idea circulating there was a valid-enough element to take into consideration simply by virtue of being there. Artists and intellectuals circulating through PAF constantly proposed reading groups, organized lectures or shared their work, often heavily influenced by philosophy or critical theory. The authors who were most read and mentioned in the conversations I was part of in PAF since 2007 were: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Brian Massumi, Jacques Rancière, Michael Hardt 62 and Antonio Negri, and later on, a younger generation of philosopher engaging with Speculative Realism began to populate the space. I would read and participate in the conversations of whatever text was shared, however my lack of academic training meant that I had no clear understanding or way to frame how the different thinkers and their specific fields related to each other. I thus approached whatever content I encountered in an intuitive manner and began talking individually with the people I felt more comfortable with, gathering from them more information and a better understanding of what was being said and read, which often led to us becoming friends. In 2011 Stefano Harney was invited to give a talk for the Spring Meeting, a lecture series that is organized in PAF every year. His talks introduced me for the first time to the black radical tradition, which I was completely ignorant of, and connected it to the Italian Autonomia movement, with which I was instead very familiar. He articulated ideas of resistance and refusal that I could intimately relate to and that continue to inform my thinking and practice to this day. This encounter inaugurated a friendship and collaboration between us that is still ongoing and that allowed me to take intimacy seriously as a condition for learning and knowing. Intimacy Intimacy carries a sense of immediacy, as Lauren Berlant reminds us: “To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity”138. It is an attachment, which may turn out to be temporary or not, that is felt at once and establishes a sense of proximity and access to someone or something. Although it is normatively relegated to the private sphere, Berlant insists that " the intimate is everywhere" 138 Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A special issue”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no 2 (1998), 281. 63 and thus "transects the private and the public".139 They are interested in a drive towards intimacy that "can be portable, unattached to a concrete space: a drive that creates spaces around it through practices."140 I am interested in their understanding of intimacy as an immediate attachment that, by traversing the private and the public, creates a space that is still political even though it does not directly produce a "public sphere" or an audience. Sara Ahmed provides a different reading of intimacy in her essay “Intimate Touches: Proximity and Distance in International Feminist Dialogues”.141 The essay is an attempt to “introduce 'intimacy' to the scene of international feminism in order to re-think how feminism can render 'cultural difference and distance' a point of entry for dialogue rather than a problem”.142 She criticizes the understanding of intimacy as an inherent "need" of the subject, which "inscribes intimacy as a normative condition of 'humanness' itself".143 According to this understanding of intimacy, the ‘need’ for intimacy originates in the primal scene of being-in-the-womb. Painfully lost through separation at birth, intimacy can only be sought after through substitution, leaving the subject in a permanent attempt to recover the primal intimacy with the mother in other intimate relations.144 Ahmed criticizes the fantasy of closeness and the subjectivity already inscribed in the fetus that this description entails and problematizes the embodiment of the fetus as being at once part of the mother's body but also an "other". She 139 Hans Demeyer, “Lauren Berlant on Intimacy as World-Making.”, Extra Extra Magazine, no 16 (Bruil & van de Staaij, 2021), https://extraextramagazine.com/talk/lauren-berlant-on-intimacy-as-world-making/. 140 Berlant, “Intimacy: A special issue”, 284. 141 Sara Ahmed, “Intimate Touches: Proximity and Distance in International Feminist Dialogues.” Oxford Literary Review 19, no. 1/2 (1997). 142 Ahmed, 28. 143 Ahmed, 25. 144 Ibid. 64 arrives at the conclusion that: "If pregnancy invites a discourse on intimacy, then it may do so precisely by suggesting that closeness or proximity is constituted through rather than against such otherness and distance".145 Similarly enabled by the distance it tries to reduce, touch can be conceived as a temporary encounter that brings together different domains that cannot be reduced one to the other, rather touch can be understood as a “re-forming of the relationship between self and other”.146 Touch is then a movement that, while getting closer to another, “does not grasp that other, rendering its otherness an object. The movement towards, in touch, is always already a movement away.”147 These rewritings of touch and intimacy represent for Ahmed possible avenues for ethical engagements across differences. The kind of ethical engagements we may be able to enter through intimacy are, however, very different depending on what we understand to be the "primal scene" that creates that irreducible difference in the first place. In her essay Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe Hortense Spillers returns to the violence of the Atlantic Slave trade as marking the "beginning" of the symbolic order, which she calls the "American grammar". 148 She describes how the “theft of the body” of the enslaved persons produced a loss of gender difference and imposed external significations onto the “captive” bodies, which became 1. a source of sensuality, 2. a “thing” for the captor, 3. an expression of “otherness” (lacking subjectivity) and 4. signify sheer powerlessness.149 Spillers makes an important distinction noting that “before the "body" there is 145 Ibid., 26. 146 Ibid., 28 147 Ibid. 148 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book”, Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 68. 149 Spillers, 67. 65 the "flesh," that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse”.150 Even when the body changes its legal status from "captive" to "liberated", it is the flesh that registers the wounding. She regards the theft-of-the body, "this human and social irreparability" that is slavery, "as high crimes against the flesh". When read as a grammar inaugurated by the violence of the "theft of the body", the distance between "self" and "other" appears in a very different light than when it is considered as a process of mutual material engendering that Ahmed still assumes through the reference to pregnancy. More importantly, the way we may go about "bridging" or engaging differences may change entirely. If we go with Ahmed and consider how distance also enables proximity, then touch is a way to produce encounters and proximity - granted that any desire for universality is abandoned. If we go with Spillers, the distance will always reproduce itself at each attempt to rewrite the narrative, for it follows the same grammar. Through Spillers' lesson, I engage intimacy as the kinship that materially disrupts the categories that the symbolic order establishes, and touch as an address at the level of the flesh, which can be generative or violent, enable or disable kinship, for it never loses its ambivalence.151 Informed by those thinkers, I began to consider intimacy as a valid modality for knowing, especially when I realized that the affective and affectable way I intuitively approached study was not really a choice, nor a desire to get closer. It was just a material condition, a learnt behavior and attitude that could be read through my positionality in terms of gender, class and race, and therefore also a political attribute. How to pay attention to the complexity of that 150 Ibid. 151 For more on the ambivalence of touch, see Hortense Spillers, “To the Bone: Some Speculations on Touch,” There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude, Stedelijk Museum of Art and Studium Generale Rietveld Academy, 23 March 2018, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvL4wUKIfpo 66 specific composition and stay with the kinships that are already there? I began to think about intimacy as all the attachments that are already here, as offerings, no matter how beneficial or damaging they may be, how temporary or long-standing, and to consider the encounters I had through Political Therapy as occasions to sense them, beyond the harsh individuation or even loneliness one may feel. By attending to my ongoing practice of intimate conversation with friends and people I felt curious about, I observed the sense of safety, the openness to play, and the curiosity that those one-to-one conversations seemed to afford, and I wondered how easily that could be felt with a stranger. Would that enable us to attend to the many ongoing attachments and find perhaps unexpected kinships there? Speculative Practice In conversation with Stefano Harney, I began thinking about Political Therapy as a speculative practice: a practice of theoretically contemplating an issue with someone by considering partial and not necessarily real information. A sensation of heat could be part of developing our thoughts as much as a vision of a unicorn, or a concept. Released from the aim of establishing any truth about the issue and yet committed to it, we were able to enter a dynamic of thinking, imagining, associating, critiquing, feeling, revising, and hesitating as we moved through waves of excitement and/or got lost at dead-ends. I considered this activity study not only because of the interesting thoughts we were able to formulate during the sessions, which have surely contributed to my knowledge, but because of the sociality the sessions enabled. 152 152 I am referring not only to the sociality between the people doing the practice but to the sociality of all the elements invoked in a session. During a session, in fact, both participants bring in texts, images, experiences and knowledge they have, and all those elements enter a sort of improvisation with each other. I personally have the feeling that each session I perform is a rehearsal, the rearrangement of everything that I have ever thought, read, heard, or talked about coming out to play. 67 Harney and I began talking about this sociality as militant preservation, a kind of rest that happens when we enter into speculative practice with each other, when we engage in modes of living and being together that allow us to unmake ourselves in what we called "complicit love". This radical sociality is “an experiment conducted within and against ourselves, with and for others, a constant invention of the form of sociality not its content, not its plot.”153 To seek this "conspiracy without a plot" - and against the plot - brings us into complicit love. Complicity and conspiracy are terms that imply a crime, some sort of unlawful activity that gathers us. When considering Political Therapy as a speculative practice that brings us into complicit love, I wonder if one of our “crimes” may be improper thinking, which is perhaps close to what Moten and Harney have called study, the “kind of common intellectual practice” that goes on incessantly in the undercommons. In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney consider what lies beneath and beyond the institutions that govern and manage the commons, such as the State and the University. They come up with “the undercommons” as a term that refers to the ungovernable and unmanageable social life of those who have been refused entry to - or have been marginalized by - those institutions. They call the sociality generated by all those ways of being with each other, study, which they see as a “kind of common intellectual practice” that is always going on.154 If the undercommons "is what emerges from the enclosure of the common, within and against enclosure", then the undercommons may be understood as a fugitive practice, a doing that generates a spacetime that does not conform or 153 Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney, “A Conspiracy Without A Plot”, The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (London: Bloomsbury, 2013),125. 154 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 110. 68 reproduce the space and time of the self-possessed individual and the institutions it plots.155 Study then is all the ways in which we go about knowing that make the undercommons, that make life livable. Infinite ways to go about knowing become possible once the constraints of what counts as knowledge are set aside and the "how" of knowing is not taken for granted. An infinite number of practices may be imagined and tried out. Practices that target the (racial-patriarchal-capitalist) plot and sabotage it while also simultaneously sabotaging ourselves, or rather the "subjectivity" that the plot presupposes and arms us with. I am thinking here of practices of study as much as of study as a praxis, given that study is a doing, "something we do with others" again and again.156 What if all those times we lose ourselves in a book (in the imaginary company of the authors and anyone else who has read it) or in conversation, or having a good time with someone or even a bad time (in the real or felt company of another, or the sea), what if we were studying? It would raise the question not only of what we might be studying through this doing but also of how we are studying and where else study might be happening unseen. As we begin to pay attention to it, we may begin to feel it; and as we feel the "touch of the undercommons", we may want more of it. Moten and Harney call this feel hapticality: "the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you”.157 155 Desideri and Harney, 128. 156 I am thinking here with Antonio Gramsci and his call for a philosophy of praxis: "a fusion of philosophy and politics, of thinking and acting" in which the two are inseparable rather than sequential. Antonio Gramsci, I Quaderni del Carcere, Quaderno 7, n. 35 [1930-1932] published on 5 October 2014, my translation, https://quadernidelcarcere.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/materialismo-e-materialismo-storico/ 157 Harney and Moten, 89. 69 I consider hapticality central to study as it invokes ways of knowing and living that do not assume separability. 158 The conception of the knowable world as an ordered totality composed of separate parts which separability entails, still informs contemporary ideas of the social and is instrumental to the maintenance of the inequalities between the "geographically-historically separate units" that compose the social as a whole.159 Within and against such totality, the touch of the underscommons feels - and makes one feel – the world that stays "inaccessible and irrelevant" to Kantian knowledge. Study in the undercommons does not assume separability between different existents or their placement as subject and/or object of knowledge. Neither it assumes separability between thinking and feeling, since hapticality — a "feel that what is to come is here" — guides its speculations.160 Part two: The Practice I have done sessions of Political Therapy throughout the years with various levels of intensities and in various formats and contexts, and since the maps we draw during the session are usually kept by the participants, there are almost no traces of the sessions. However, to reflect on some of the thinking that comes out of the practice in the frame of this research, I would like to bring as an example four individual sessions that I performed in Winter 2022 with four members of the curatorial team of an art space I have visited, and a collective image 158 Denise Ferreira da Silva identifies separability as one of the three onto-epistemological pillars of modernity, together with determinacy and sequentiality. Rooted in Kantian philosophy, separability is "the view that all that can be known about the things of the world is what is gathered by the forms (space and time) of the intuition and the categories of the Understanding (quantity, quality, relation, modality) – everything else about them remains inaccessible and irrelevant to knowledge". Denise Ferreira da Silva, "On Difference Without Separability", 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016), 60. 159 Ferreira da Silva, 63. 160 Harney and Moten, 89. 70 gathering figures that emerged from these sessions, which I used to moderate a conversation with all of the participating curators. Four Individual Sessions For this dissertation, I will share the map and narrate some of the content that we discussed in each of the individual sessions without revealing the identity of the people or the institution involved. I will narrate the conversation in first person, for it will only reflect my perspective and memory of the session, and I will edit out any content that is either too personal or may give away the identity of the people involved. The purpose of these descriptions is to give a sense of the flow of the practice, and the kind of conversations and associations Political Therapy enables. It is not my intention to submit these sessions as "case-studies", nor to present the people I had the fortune to practice with as research subjects. In each account, I will refer to the person I did the session with as they/them, as I will use the first person singular for myself. Session One I begin the session by asking the first curator if they have any problem, issue, or question that they are currently dealing with that we may want to ask a more general question about. The problem should be something that is felt and experienced personally, although we will formulate a question that will allow us to think together through some of its ethical-political aspects. They share their feelings about devising educational and public engagement programs in the neighborhood. We discuss the difference between curating exhibitions in very exclusive kinds of institutions, and curating public and educational programs; we notice how each implies and requires quite different postures, performances, and systems of valuation. We discuss the lesser 71 value that is generally assigned to educational and socially engaged art forms, which are always considered a "lesser" version of a work of art. We decide to formulate our question around this, and we ask: what is / how to value education within an art institution? Figure 11 Political Therapy map: session one I ask them to embody the problem, and I pick four cards from the Fake Therapy deck, which say: - Redistribute energy along your partner’s body - Get away from the convention of the usual economy of attention 72 - Tune in with your partner’s breathing - Clean the inside of your partner’s body After I finish performing the Fake Therapy (the hands-on healing part), they report feeling a lot of sensation on their head: first a pressure headache that slowly went away, then feeling the area between their eyebrow tensing and releasing, then being aware of their stomach but letting it go, and how, while I was touching their lower legs, they were feeling sensations in their chest. They report that their thoughts moved in a similar fashion, fluctuating between thinking about things to do and letting go. I report feeling at first quite playful. I started by noticing the various heart shapes they were wearing and touching them with one hand while, with my other hand, I was moving the energy above her chest, just playing, and feeling the points of resonance between the image, the idea, and the organ "heart". Then while staying for a long time with my hands on their lower legs, I focused on their breathing. I felt all the fluids in their body rising and falling, and I had the sensation of a water pump. When I say that, they remember another image they had of spiraling colors, orange on the outside, red inside, and dark in the middle. They draw it on the map. I share how during the treatment I was also thinking about the second part of the question we had not foregrounded in the initial part of our conversation: "within an art institution". I refer to the work of David Lloyd and consider how art institutions still have to carry out the "aesthetic education of man". Their power is productive, for they have the task to make Man "as it should be". The lower value given to community-engaged or educational projects in art, derives perhaps from the fact that they are only a moment in that process, a preparatory phase in a line (we draw 73 a pyramid) that finally culminates with the fully educated free Subject, that in an art institution would be best embodied in the figure of the Artist, an Author, with a solo exhibition or a book. We ask: when considering this formal structure of the institution, what else could education be in its midst? We start to talk about their drawing of the colorful vortex as possibly a hole that could be pierced through this structure (we draw the orange hole under the pyramid). They talk about black holes, how they can appear from nowhere and suck things. I go back to the image of the pump, and how at an engineering level, a pump is a circular system. They give the example of water pumps, where the water is taken, heated, circulated, then put back in the ground. How can knowledge and resources circulate more like that? What would be an educational program that does that? We talk about the assumption that the institution has about the neighborhood and how acting according to those expectations can be part of advancing gentrification processes. We talk about the violence that art institutions carry, both for being enabled by accumulation and for what they perform. Acknowledging one's implication in all that, what to do? We question if we could think of knowledge as water, being everywhere and composing everything, but not acknowledged because of not appearing in its liquid state. Similarly, the knowledge that is the neighborhoods is not acknowledged by the art institutions because it is invisible to them, it doesn't make any sense to them. How could a curatorial practice of education care for "knowledge as water"? We discuss possible experimental approaches and remind ourselves that anything experimental is experimental because it can fail, and it does, regularly. Whenever we try something new, we find that some things are great, others are terrible, but there is nothing that is 74 really a "failure" because we can learn from whatever didn't work, including how to never do something again. We discuss from there if there is any positive side to the under-valuation of educational and community projects in art, and if its minor role may actually make it easier to just start somewhere with someone and begin an experiment. We finish noticing how orange and red are colors associated with the Hara and Root Chakra, respectively. The Hara is generally associated with creativity and desire, and the Root Chakra is associated with the materiality of Earth and basic physical needs. This observation makes us question how the whole process of learning with and reaching out to the neighborhood could be approached in more material and generative ways. Session Two The second curator brings as a concern the role of text and writing within the institution. The question seemed at first to be about how to write in more plural and decentered manners, beyond the demands of the exhibition and its theme. How to write not only efficiently or in a single voice (of the institution) but also writing about processes or writing as process. We talked about the frame of the institution, the demands, and practices that such an infrastructure sets up, how it uses time, so there is never time for writing anything more than what is necessary and urgent. They name it “the heavy gravitational pull of the institution”. Even though they see how it would be possible to work less and still achieve very good results, that can never be done because of having internalized a certain way of working. So, we begin imagining what a different infrastructure for writing could look like, we call it “anti-gravitational” to signify the way it could move against the centralizing demand of the institution and its program. They insist on using the word enunciation as we try to formulate a question, since the writing of the 75 institution is always directed to the public. We end up formulating the question: “what would be an anti-gravitational infrastructure of enunciation?” Figure 12 Political Therapy map: session two They lie down, and I pull four cards from the Fake Therapy cards, which say: - Keep yourself in a state of not knowing what you are doing - Relax your body and become a channel of energy - Be aware of your own sensations and find there clues to go on - Set the clear intention of healing 76 Doing the Fake Therapy part, I feel a great attention to detail and sounds, and I find myself thinking about distraction as a method. When I wake them up, they say that everything felt very spatial. They saw the rings of Saturn, ever-expanding, and then they felt different force fields and objects creating collisions. They felt that image was a model for connecting and finding a position within a field of power. They also mention feeling like they were floating and ask what floating would mean for an institution: floating like an astronaut in space. They also mention feeling stillness. The first thing I notice is their use of "Saturn", which is a planet and mythological figure associated with structure. Saturn is known as the taskmaster, the god of time, the law, the father (who ate his children). How uncanny that this is the specific planet they see when we try to imagine another infrastructure? Discussing the image of Saturn and its gravitational field they described, we try to imagine what enunciation could do or be in such a scene. I ask if they felt enunciation as something that produces space, making its own force field or if it is a position in the force field. They reply that enunciation is definitely something that makes space, but more like a moment or a position, they compare it to a nebula in the outskirts of the gravitational field. We talk about enunciation as a peripheral semi-formation, made of the same "stuff", the same material of Saturn and its gravitational field, which is also subject to/affected by external forces. As if it was pulling away from Saturn and its gravitational center, but weakly, sporadically, in glimpses. We speak of stillness as a glimpse, a moment, like a firefly, appearing and disappearing, and being ok with that. If those nebulas/enunciations are affected by external forces we can think of communication not as the transmission of a message, a discrete unit of meaning from A to B, but as that which brings together A & B, the attraction, affection, a weak force between them that makes the enunciation appear like a firefly, for a moment. We continue 77 by discussing detail, distraction, and sound as a possible method to see the fireflies, we ask what is the sensitivity that can appreciate the fireflies? Because there is a kind of time, a glimpse of stillness, that is required to even feet that traction, that possibility, that firefly. Stillness has perhaps to be cultivated. Saturn would still need to be fed, but what is the minimum possible amount that would still leave time and space for those glimpses to appear? Session Three The third curator shared their concern with the kind of affective labor that is both necessary and wanted in the working environment but remains unrecognized. They cannot tell what degree of affective labor is safe to perform. We discuss how productivity defines in general the degree of tolerated and fostered affective labor in an institution. As long as it increases productivity and maintains the structures of the institution, that kind of affective work is welcome and even silently required. But what about protecting each other? Building solidarity? Subverting institutional structures that we know could be otherwise? We settle for the question: what's the value of affective support within an institution beyond productivity? 78 Figure 13 Political Therapy map: session three I pick four Fake Therapy cards that say: - Redistribute energy along your partner’s body - Tune in with your partner’s breathing - Just put your hands somewhere - Enhance what is already happening I start by noticing the position of their body. Their hands clasped on top of their belly. I start drawing circles of 8 in the air around her body to redistribute energy, then I observe their 79 breathing and synchronize my touch to their breathing to redistribute energy inside her body by way of rhythmic pushes. I then tune my breath to the sounds of an art installation coming from the other room and try to blow the low hoovering sounds in their knees. When I wake them up, they notice a sense of playfulness and fuzziness around their head. They say they were busy imagining my movement and how they relate to the question. They are surprised about how much the practice resonated with their question. They did not know where the next supporting gesture would come from during the session, but they somehow trusted it, even though they were very aware of the risk that I could always cross a boundary. We talk about how the hands-on healing provided a sensory experience of her question, allowing them to feel their uncertainty in relation to what and how much could be done to make the workspace more supportive, but without being unprofessional. We talk about formalism and professionalism and consider how much those are unspoken expectations we put on ourselves and others, which are never really clear, not even to ourselves. We talk about what counts as productive and we think about all the kind of affective support which maintains the structure: the roles, the hierarchies, the functions, and how to increase its efficiency. Then we think of the kind of affective support that can potentially let something else emerge, a kind of creativity or unexpected possibility. We list all sorts of activities which can be considered "affective support" but no action fits neatly in one or the other category, it is all ambivalent and unclear. We feel that the issue is not what is done, but how it is done. We talk about the affective support people provide each other in an institution is always double edged, on the one hand it supports the institution, which needs it for its own reproduction, and on the other, it creates support amongst the team which may be able to protect each other, despite and within the institutions. Would it be possible to make such an agreement? Is it 80 something that can be openly spoken about and agreed, or not? Or should it just be done, in practice, without making it explicit? We discuss intent as opposed to will, and how much the setting of a common intent is not a protocol determining how exchange should happen, but an agreement that presupposes and institutes support. Once the intent is set, each will realize it according to their own capacity, understanding and situation. Obviously, that does not guarantee optimal support, and it will still present a risk, but it has at least the potential to establish a common sensibility. Each will be called to pay attention to whatever support they feel at each time, only because the common intent is there and can always be invoked. Perhaps then we can think of formalities, or of what counts as "professionalism" not as boundaries - lines that mark territories or pre-existing categories one should guess or know - but as the kind of practice that gets established in the doing of working together. Solidarity could then be approached as an ongoing and affective practice rather than a moral duty or law one should fulfill but never does. Session Four The fourth curator shares the emotional weight that being identified with an institution always entails. They share the exhaustion of being approached "as" an institution, as its representative and rarely as a person. They share how they need to set strong boundaries to contain their feelings, so they can feel safe and do the best possible job. I ask if perhaps the question to ask is what "best possible" means in an institutional context that is inevitably exclusionary and, at best problematic. They talk about their role as that of a mediator, between those giving money and the artists and their team, between the institution and the art world, and so on. Given the emotional exhaustion they mentioned, I question if they put themselves also in 81 that picture, mediating also between their values and energy, and the institutional demands. We settle for the question: What would "good" mediation be? Figure 14 Political Therapy map: session four I pick four cards from the Fake Therapy deck which say: - Relax to the point you might be falling asleep and become a channel of energy - Enhance what is already happening - Redistribute energy along your partner’s body 82 - Picture white energy entering from your skull, through your centre into your partner’s body. When I wake them up, they share having had the feeling of being loved and cared for, of not feeling alone and feeling relaxed. They saw a bright blue circle, moving and shifting, floating in front of their eyes. But when they would try to think about the question, they would be reminded of the negative feeling and the need to put up boundaries in order to feel safe. I map those feelings in opposite sides of the paper and notice how perhaps also those two seemingly opposite feelings and tendencies could be mediated. I draw the negative feelings and the boundaries as a kind of angular puzzle that is locked together creating a sense of solidity and safety. I explain how in the process of creating a new tarot deck with my collaborator Denise Ferreira da Silva, we began talking about fear, shame, guilt, and anger as the intrastructure of the subject. On one hand, I question how much those feelings are instrumental to the maintenance of their self-image as being in control, as the one that makes the decisions and can stay put. On the other hand, I also question how much those feelings are in the first place generated by that image and the expectations to be like that. They agree but also note how dramatic emotions can be and how putting up boundaries can be a prevention strategy. We consider how much hurt and violence both the unleashing and the bounding or repressing of those emotions can produce and how the interplay between the "danger" their expression poses and the "necessity" of their containment, are instrumental not only to individual "proper" self-regulation but to the maintenance of the violent racial and capitalist system we inhabit. How could we connect to both "positive" and "negative" feelings without being overwhelmed or afraid? They share the pressure they feel to be strong since they must be like a wall in order to protect themselves and the team. I was surprised to hear the metaphor of the wall, for I tend to 83 consider that the institution itself is the wall, the solid boundary that delimits what is possible or not possible in a given space. That observation brings us to question the level of identification one may begin to feel with the institution one works for.161 I share that from what I gathered from the other sessions, everyone in the team feels the limitations and demands of the institution very clearly. Perhaps because of the professional boundaries and the distances that each puts up to protect oneself, everybody is busy trying to meet the expectations, and getting exhausted. I question if it would not be then "safer" to renegotiate together what the expectations actually are and how to deal with the specific limitations and demands posed by their institution. How much do they all have to give? What is the minimum they have to do to keep their jobs and do it well, but without hurting each other. Is there any way to be more tactical on how the money circulates and what is made possible at the same time? A Composite Image After performing those four individual sessions of Political Therapy with each of the curators working in the same institution, I assembled a composite image, which gathers some of the issues and figures that have emerged throughout the individual sessions. The composite image was then used to facilitate a conversation between the four curators which addressed the issue figured on the composite map, without reporting too much on the individual session that 161 At the time of the session, unfortunately, I had not yet read Sara Ahmed, On Being Included, who describes the difficulty and impossibility that diversity workers face in institutions as a "brick wall". It would have been an interesting reference to bring up since she directly discusses the problem of identifying with the wall instead of going up against it. For even if the wall seems immobile, it can move. First of all because coming up against the wall makes it appear, and because "each new strategy or tactic for getting through the wall generates knowledge of what does or does not get across." Sara Ahmed, On Being Included, (Duke University Press, 2012), 175. 84 initially raised them. The conversation was private, only me and the curators attended, and it was not recorded in any way. For this dissertation, I will narrate the flow and some of the content of the conversation, again only reflecting my perspective and memory of it. It is perhaps important to say that those sessions were not part of any official program, not even of the art institution in question. They have happened secretly and unofficially. I had done a session spontaneously with one of the four curators who, since they liked the conversation that the session had enabled, they thought it would be nice if their colleagues did one too. I always wanted to do sessions with people working in the same institution to see if the openness we are able to have in the individual session could also be carried over to a collective session. The privacy of the individual sessions, their lack of recording or public display and guaranteed anonymity— which it borrows from the therapeutic model — allows an openness to think in ways one did not think before, or may even necessarily agree. The intimacy that the use of careful touch and physical relaxation establishes, enables us to attend to the affective and emotional layers that structure the political problems and questions we formulate. Weaving images, emotions, sensations, and other "unclear" elements into our political conversation generally gives us permission to embark on metaphors, associations, analogies, and lines of thought we would not normally consider if we were to approach the question only intellectually. However, whenever I have tried to perform Political Therapy with a group, the conversation part would never be as open and speculative as in the individual sessions. When working with a group, we usually take time to formulate a common question, and then half of the group embodies the question while the other half performs the Fake Therapy on the group body as the question. The experience is always very rich, many different kinds of connections between elements are established, but the conversation never moves too far from the intellectual level. 85 Group dynamics set in and govern the emotional movement of conversation. If it is a group that already works together, then the dynamics are those specific to that group, or if it is a group that comes together on that occasion, then more general dynamics are at work - such as shyness, not wanting to say anything "wrong", or performing knowledge, mansplaining of all genders, power dynamics and so on. In the specific example I am describing, the individual session made sure we could have an openly speculative, personal, and political conversation with each participant and that a relationship of relative trust and ease was established, at least between us. I then assembled a composite image gathering some of the issues and figures that emerged from the different sessions so that the image could be the mediator of our conversation. Rather than organizing the collective meeting as a kind of group therapy, where each member tells their story or experience, I approached the group session as a collective reading of the composite image. That allowed me to initiate the conversation without asking them to expose themselves further and to shift attention away from each other - and their own group dynamics - and towards a common object, the composite map. As I loosely explained each figure composing the map and how it appeared in the individual session it came from, the participants could ask clarifications, respond, and react to what I was saying without taking it too personal, since we were all engaged in a reading exercise: sensing and making sense of the image in front of us. Throughout the individual sessions, I felt that the recurring element in all their sessions was a certain emotional exhaustion and tension in relation to the institutional structure they inhabited. I thus decided to bring in all the images that had emerged in the sessions that figured the institution: the pyramid, the castle, and Saturn and its rings. I arranged them around the image of the moon, in reference to the tarot card of The Moon, which I brought in to signal the 86 emotional and relational level that all the individual sessions, more or less explicitly, addressed. This is a picture of the composite map I have assembled: Figure 15 Political Therapy: a composite image I begin by explaining the four images that I sketched in different areas of the map and how we came to them in the individual sessions. The moon in the middle of the image refers to the tarot card of The Moon, which is traditionally associated with fear and anxiety in the face of the unknown, which here signals the centrality of emotions and how the need to take them into consideration was present in all their questions. Scattered around the page are some of the images that emerged in the different 87 sessions that figure their relationship with the institution they work for, the limitations it imposes and the expectation they feel. On the right side is the image of a pyramid that we drew in the context of the question discussing the lesser value usually given to community and educational projects in art institutions. In that session we discussed how art institutions, as much as the university, have the task of carrying out the "aesthetic education of Man" and how their power is productive. They make "Man" what it should be, endowed with reason, capable of judgment and, as David Lloyd reminds us, that figure is inherently racialized. Community-engaged or educational projects in art are, according to this reading of art institutions, only part of the process, a preparatory phase in a linear construction that culminates with the fully realized Subject. This image appears on the map as a pyramid (the institution) with a stick man on top (man). The image, however, also shows a hole at the bottom of the pyramid, which stands for the possibility of piercing the architecture of the institution. I report how at first, we had tried to imagine it as a black hole sucking everything in, but we were then reminded of the sensation of a water pump that the person had felt during the session. That made us think about the knowledge and the resources held in the institution as water - liquid, relational, flowing everywhere and already composing everything - and we begin thinking about the hole as the access to a water pump which, as it extracts water (or knowledge) from the ground, also circulates it back in. We also discussed how selective this restitution becomes when it is imaged as an engineered pump, and the possibility of breaking the pump, so that some resources can leak back out unplanned. On the left side is another way of figuring the institution that appeared during another session in which the person reported seeing the rings of Saturn, feeling its gravitational field, the movement of objects within it and their occasional collisions. The initial question was around 88 infrastructures, and I had found it uncanny that they talked specifically about Saturn, which is mythologically the god of time, structure, and limitations. The image figures a strong field of power, and we discuss how enunciations (as a specific expression with an addressee) could generate space or some sort of anti-gravitational pull, away from Saturn. We pictured those enunciations as fireflies, appearing and disappearing as glimpses in the peripheral rings. Those glimpses were made of the same stuff, the same material as Saturn (its debris perhaps) but were highly affectable, sensitive, and could disappear, or be pulled off orbit, or collide and temporarily shine. We wondered what kind of time would be needed to develop a sensibility toward those glimpses. How to do just enough to feed Saturn, while leaving time and space to appreciate the fireflies? On the bottom left of the image is the drawing of a tower with a stick-figure of a man inside it. This figure comes from another session in which we discussed the need to set up clear boundaries as a means to protect oneself from the feelings of guilt or fear one might face while working in the institutions. I question how much those feelings are instrumental to the maintenance of the institution, and its violence, as they invisibly motivate our expectations, boundaries, and projections. After describing all the images that I have assembled in the map, we continue discussing how the emotional responses of guilt, fear, shame, and anger, are at once caused by and reproduce the systemic violence of the institution. Given the underlying emotional content of the individual sessions, and of the images that emerged, I asked them if they could imagine sharing with each other, or perhaps just contemplating within themselves, what their emotional investment in the institution is. This reckoning could enable the conversation that lingered in the air but could not have been had, about how else they could work together, within the limitations 89 of their institution. Would it be possible to establish a common intent that grows trust instead of boundaries and protocols? I am asked how they should do it, concretely. I reply that I don’t know because it is something that is between them, it can happen over a drink or through a mediated conversation, a reading, or it may just happen in time. This process with the Political Therapy allowed us to pay attention to the emotional layers of existing together within this institution but the working at it will be their work, as it unfolds. A complaint is expressed about how attention is always given to the negative sides of the institutions and never on what it makes possible. That feels demoralizing since they have thought a lot about how to work together, and there are many good aspects about being a small team and having the possibility to intentionally grow slower and smaller than other institutions. I reply that it is impossible to distinguish the positive and the negative side of the institution, and to only focus on one or the other, because they always are both at the same time. The fact that they are a small team and have this freedom is because they have only one source of funding, which is also simultaneously the problematic aspect of the institution, and those aspects are inseparable. The point of this exercise is to learn how to attend to the complexity of the situations and institutions we inhabit so that we may be able to sense other ways to go about them, however it offers no resolution. Perhaps a way to make something out of the possibilities this specific place offers is to acknowledge both its violence and the way it engages their emotional responses. Otherwise, they will automatically follow the emotional intrastructures already laid out by all the institutions that constituted them as a subject beforehand (family, school, State and so on), and their violence will repeat, unseen and authorized. 90 A slight relaxation sets in once we state that this is a shared condition, that no money is clean and that any position of power in this world must contend with the reality that made such an accumulation of power and wealth possible. Nevertheless, each and every one has the chance to reckon with it and try not to reproduce the same structures. I highlight how people mostly do that alone, individually negotiating their ethics with the reality of their job and how different it would be to do this collectively there, in their team. Would that make any difference? I also highlight that the point of this exercise is just to find images, develop an imagination and stimulate what we might call with Audre Lorde an erotic capacity, a depth of feeling in doing things together rather than an emotional attachment towards the institution and its values.162 We go back to discussing the emotional exhaustion that ran through each of their individual sessions and how that goes much beyond the workplace. Life in general is exhausting with the kids, the city, the money and so on. What would it be if all those conditions were taken into consideration and would play a role in how they meet and work together? We close the session considering the tasks ahead, the possibilities and shifts that were opened through the sessions, thanking each other for the time, openness and availability towards the practice and we agree to stay in touch about further developments and realizations. 162 Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." Sister Outsider (Pennsylvania: Crossing Press, 1984). 91 Reflections This is the first time I have written down and narrated sessions of Political Therapy. Even though the people involved gave me consent to describe the sessions anonymously for the purpose of this exegesis, I will keep my reflection on the practice itself and not on the specific content of the sessions, for I do not understand those sessions as "case studies." This time the conversations went in a specific direction because of the concerns the participants brought and the situation they shared. A different set of sessions in another situation would create a completely different kind of conversation, which could be more or less speculative, or philosophical, personal, explicitly political, and so on. However, this was the first time I performed individual sessions and then assembled a collective image that could be shared among the participants. I was glad to see that the conversation it generated was not conclusive, nor did it provide a sense of resolution to the questions asked. It provided some glimpse of possibilities, ways to re-think or re-work their situation, but the collective session did not offer a program or a solution for the future. It only "made sensible" some aspect of what was already happening. Whether that was "good" for the participants or for the institution they work in is neither the point nor the aim of the practice. This is an important consideration in relation to the therapeutic aspect of the practice, which I invoke in the title as a provocation and paradox rather than to describe the experience. As I already mentioned in the trajectory of the practice, Political Therapy is an extension and maybe just one possible application of Fake Therapy, which explicitly inscribes itself in an anti-disciplinary trajectory of thinking about healing. The premise of both practices is that anyone has the capacity to "heal '' anyone else if what we mean by "healing" is not a cure or the resolution of a specific affliction, but a treatment, a kind of doing that supports whatever restorative process is 92 possible or ongoing. I gathered this intuition, or perhaps it is just an observation, from dancing and handling people's bodies daily. I realized that beyond the specific movement or somatic techniques I was introduced to in my various dance experiences, there was also another training going on: a kind of literacy in attention and sensation. I use “literacy” because it felt as a kind of education in reading and writing (with) the senses, which were no longer fixed, nor just five. Different ways of modulating attention turned sensations into signs that could be read by tuning attention. Those sensations or signs also entered a general composition of what became sensible, as a score or as an activity, which was also a kind of writing. Political Therapy is the practice through which I began to explore the links between what becomes sensible (as a sensation, an intuition, a sense, an idea), what we attend to, and what we are able to think and imagine. Hence the sessions are never about solutions - even when we come up with exciting ideas - but about exercising the doing and undoing of those links. We may indulge in a sensation to see what it allows us to imagine, or to let it reveal other layers within it that we may not be attending to, or we may critique it and that may lead us to revise that sensation and sense it otherwise. In Political Therapy this play of sense(s) is dedicated to thinking through political problems - that is any concern about our life in commons - and thus tries to intervene at the level of the political imagination, treating it like one would treat leather or any other material: through a series of procedures that transform it. When I do this kind of play with others, what happens amongst us is study: it takes the time it needs (sometimes up to 2 or 3 hours), it cannot be evaluated in any way, and it opens up possibilities both in ways we comprehend and in ways that exceed us, since the effects and affects of what we discuss in a session resonate beyond the understanding. The sessions also establish a "social relation" between the two people practicing that is intimate and yet not so 93 clearly codified: it does not necessarily make them friends; it does not sanction their belonging to the same group or collective. However, the sharing of profound attention with and to each other is at some level binding, or perhaps it is just a powerful reminder of their already given entanglement. I have mentioned before how much this practice generated in my life in terms of affect, access and relations, even though it circulated largely informally, and it never became a well-defined piece or artwork.163 Reflecting upon Political Therapy now, after all those years, I have come to appreciate how it failed to formalize itself into a specific "object" and how aimless its study remains. In the years, I could have perhaps developed and formalized new concepts from all the ideas and images each session always yields, but that was not the aim of the practice. Of course, ideas and images travel from one session to another, they repeat and morph, but they only operate as tools for thinking right there and then in the sessions. In this sense, Political Therapy is not only “objectless”, but also “objectiveless”, for it is not a method that aims at producing new knowledge, nor does it solve the questions each session asks, rather it remains in/as study. These observations led me to question if perhaps one of the strengths of this practice, and of the others that later came to compose my Studio Practice, is exactly how “objectless” and “objectiveless” they are. Finally, I am aware that anything that does not formalize itself as an object, and that has no objective/strategy, is not generally considered as a serious or thought-out pursuit. However, both strategy and the apprehension of objects are moves that presuppose and cohere the idea of the 163 I have published online under Creative Commons the score of Political Therapy, and I often receive emails from people who download the cards and adapt the practice to their needs. This makes me wonder about all the relations among people who practice it amongst each other that I am not aware of. 94 individual subject, 'his' independence, his sovereignty, and his self-possession. This coherence has inflicted untold damage on the earth and other beings, as well as on everyone who has been enlisted to prove the point of the subject, and in the process has been judged less than one. Even though Fake Therapy and Political Therapy may seem ‘small’ or ‘unserious’ practices, they nevertheless aim at dangerous and powerful enemies. 95 Chapter 3: Poethical Readings Thinking along Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s understanding of study as a sort of sociality, I consider collaboration a fundamental aspect of Studio Practice.164 Not only does it happen mostly in/as collaboration, but the point of Studio Practice is to directly experiment with specific modes of knowing that assume and proliferate the sociality of study. Another way Harney and Moten describe study is as an opportunity to be possessed by others, as they lead you temporarily in the search, and to help others break down their individuation, to help them fall apart in the arms of others in study, and to let your-self do the same.165 What falls apart in/through study is the illusion and the assumption of self-possession that governs and encloses existence as “our own”. When addressing study as a practice that we do and can perform, one of the immediate challenges is to displace the figure of the one(s) supposedly performing the study. For study is a specific arrangement that gathers, makes and unmakes us, together with anything and anyone else partaking in it. Study does not presuppose a subject position, as in “I” or “we” study and perhaps whatever exercise, practice or event that denaturalizes the common-sensical stance of the self-possessed autonomous Subject, could be called study. Noticing the centrality of this figure was one of the main insights provided by the Political Therapy which clearly showed how the figure of the self-possessed individual organizes the way we narrate our experiences, and to what extent that narrows down the imagination of what is possible in any given situation. When asked about their problem at the beginning of each session, the person would naturally start to speak in first person about the situation they experienced as problematic. Both the necessary use of personal pronouns and the logical coherence of the 164 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons, 111. 165 Harney and Moten, 116. 96 sentence construction would implicitly provide an image of separate agents interacting in a situation through a relatively linear sequence of events. However, since we were focusing on the political, and since the aim of the practice was to study rather than offer solutions, we would swerve away from the centrality of the subject by asking a more general question, intentionally avoiding the use of any personal pronoun as the grammatical subject. This formal displacement of the grammatical subject in the question, made visible the usually occulted and taken for granted position of the Subject as the center and origin of thinking, which invisibly structured most political problems I was encountering. It structured the problems not only grammatically but also emotionally, since it implicitly assigned responsibility to the individual asking the question. Indeed, the initial presentation of the political problem would most often carry the unspoken assumption that the person was in a position to find a solution or to act upon the problem, which would either stimulate their desire to think about the question, feel like a burden they ought to solve, or even bring a sense of shame for having the problem in the first place, or for feeling so powerless. Beyond the emotional burden that self-possession brings to the persons who may (or may not) be feeling it, the centrality of the subject as this self-possessed autonomous figure also structures the way in which we formulate and address the ethical and political questions we collectively face. The concerns for the ethical consequences of privileging of the modern Subject in the way we make decisions, and the commitment to experiment with ways of knowing that would not presuppose that Subject, brought me and Denise Ferreira da Silva in study through our collaborative practice of Poethical Readings, which I will present in this chapter as a second instance of Studio Practice. 97 Poethical Readings experiment with well-known and newly-designed reading tools – such as the Tarots, Political Therapy, Fake Therapy as well as Reiki, Astrology, and Philosophy.166 Those reading tools and our approach to “reading as imaging” allow us to image ethical and political issues in their complexity, without centering or privileging either the individual subject, or the human experience. Approached as a collective practice of sensing (as a process of sensing and making sense) Poethical Readings release the need for a definite answer or for a correct interpretation of the issue or situation we are reading for, which is instead dissolved, displaced or otherwise shifted in the process of reading itself. In this chapter, I will first introduce the trajectory that led us to the creation of Poethical Readings and describe a typical session, and I will then review some of the theoretical considerations that constitute the practice: the modern Subject, “reading as imaging,” and the poethical. I will then give an example of the practice by sharing an image and an edited transcript of a reading we produced for the exhibition Not Fully Human, Not Human At All in 2020 as a result of a series of Poethical Readings we performed for the question: “How is the Covid-19 pandemic affecting the Human?”.167 This example will be followed by a reflection on the practice, in which I discuss the generosity and generativity of study. 166 Reiki is a technique of hands-on energy healing, which was developed by Mikao Usui in Kyoto, in the 1920s. The Tarots is a deck of playing cards of uncertain origin that was popularized in Europe in the 15th Century. Astrology is the study of the positions of the planets and their relationships as seen from Earth at any specific moment in time and space (i.e. an event or a birth). 167 The exhibition was shown at Kunstverein in Hamburg from October 24th, 2020 to January 24th, 2021, and it was curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Bettina Steinbrügge. 98 Part one: Theoretical Considerations The Trajectory I met Denise Ferreira da Silva in Naples in the spring of 2011. At the time I had just developed Fake Therapy and Political Therapy and I was researching palmistry as a tool for writing speculative biographies for my friends. Beside academic work, Denise Ferreira da Silva had been practicing Tarot, Astrology, Reiki and herbal healing for many years. Very soon in our first meeting it became evident that we shared an orientation in our separate explorations of knowledge practices and tools which are, in different ways, related to healing. We both experimented with how those practices enable thinking about political and social issues in a way that also takes into account the emotional, physical, and spiritual aspects of existence. More significantly, we both were already experimenting with these tools and practices’ capacity to complexify and amplify the ways of thinking and existing, and corresponding ways of acting politically and ethically. Since 2011, we have been learning from each other, sharing the existing reading and healing practices we knew as well as the invented practices such as Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, while also experimenting with possible combinations. Throughout the years, each of us learned how these tools and practices gather a different kind of sensibility - not only a different mode of knowing the world but a different way of existing, of being of the world, one that welcomes and thrives in complexity and implicancy. Even though we approached those practices as tools that generate more complex and collaborative ways of thinking about an issue, once we began experimenting by reading together for people, we realized how quickly and forcefully the individual subject came back into the picture. Even when trying to approach the reading as an intellectual and speculative exercise, the self-concern of the individual would always come back to ask for resolution with the question 99 “but what do I do?”. This realization led us to formulate the initial question that framed the practice and still guides it to this day: “How to image an ethics with/out the Subject?” The term subject refers specifically to the philosophical modern Subject, and corresponds to other known subjects, such as the first person singular, or I, the psychoanalytic figure of the Ego, and the social-psychological notion of Self. With the intention of engaging and dislodging this central figure in modern thinking, we realized that the readings were to unfold with/out the subject. Even though anyone coming for a reading always brings some sort of concern or crisis that affects them personally, the readings only decompose and recompose the situation, refiguring a situation in which the subject is at play – in the crisis, as the crisis, and because of the crisis - and yet one in which the subject and their mode of knowing no longer direct the play. Eventually we named this practice of reading together using and layering multiple tools Poethical Readings. Poethical Readings is thus an aesthetic praxis (a doing and thinking) that intervenes in the moment of crisis, when available answers, ways of formulating questions, and guidance for how to deal with a given critical situation prove inadequate, insufficient, or irrelevant. The complexity of the global political situation and the gravity of its crises require us to make ethical decisions, and yet those decisions are impossible to figure when we think about them beginning from the Subject. For if the Subject/Human/Self-possessed individual is figured as the central character, the agent or protagonist capable of making rational decisions about the World as if it was his playground, we fail to grasp how we are operating from within an image of the world that created the problem in the first place. Hence the decisions we are able to imagine can only 100 reproduce the violence that constitutes the image of the “world as we know it”.168⁠ When describing the Poethical Readings in our website we ask: “What if what we know and how we know played a definitive role in bringing the world to this perilous moment? What if how knowing has framed our existence explains much about recent catastrophic global events – the economic crisis of 2007–08, the refugee crisis, global warming, and now the Covid-19 pandemic? Would it not make sense to consider other ways of knowing and doing, praxis that may guide us as we go about preparing for existing otherwise?”169 A Typical Session We have been doing sessions of Poethical Readings with individuals, groups, collectives, institutions, and events since 2015, both privately and publicly. In a session we usually employ at least two reading tools to image the question brought by the participants. The question is formulated together departing from an issue they may be facing or researching, or in the absence of a question, we ask for an image of the present moment. The reading that follows the laying of the cards or the casting of the astrological chart is always collective and collaborative, in more than one sense. At the level of the room, we facilitate a collaborative reading between all of us participating by exposing the structure of the image at the beginning of each reading. In a Tarot reading for example, we explain the positions of the cards and each of their meanings to provide 168 Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics”, The Black Scholar, vol. 44, no. 2. London: Routledge, 2014, pp. 81–97, 82. 169 Desideri and Ferreira da Silva, “Poethical Readings”, The Sensing Salon, www.thesensingsalon.org/poethical-readings. 101 a few basic elements for everyone to partake in the conversation, in addition to any knowledge already circulating in the room and the immediately available visual information of the images themselves. Beyond the collaboration between us performing that particular reading in that specific space, there is the ongoing collaboration with everyone who has ever read before and will ever read after us. Indeed, anyone reading a Tarot spread, for example, has learnt the meaning of the cards from someone else, or from books written by someone who has also learned it from someone else. In addition to that, any new insight, association or meaning gained through a reading potentially enters the future meaning of that card - held perhaps in the memory of the participants, or in the air they breathe as they read, shared in future readings or books, or passed on in casual conversation. The act of reading then invokes and gathers all those meanings, temporalities, people, and references, which compose the image that is read. The readings follow erratic paths, they are improvised and conversational. They are filled with hesitations, silences, unanswered and unanswerable questions. We (anyone participating in the reading) may begin reading a specific composition in one way and then interpret it in a completely different manner. We may contradict each other and ourselves, we may get lost, we may get very enthusiastic about a line of thinking that quickly dissipates, we may laugh or cry, and none of it invalidates the session; on the contrary the movements I describe are key to the unfolding of the reading. Although healing could be an appropriate term for describing what unfolds in a poethical reading, after a few years of practice, we realized that sensing (as a process, as sense-making) is a better descriptor for what happens during the session, for the “how” of its unfolding, the process and what it entails, that is, not in the usual ways. In poethical practice, sensing is not an attempt to identify, classify, and explain what is happening, by finding a more general category 102 to fit it into, and then moving on to find out its causes or its consequence. On the contrary, a poethical reading session turns the interpretive process – the movement towards settling and fixing the meaning of something – around. It releases the question from the requirement for a decisive answer or for an accurate interpretation, and trusts that the composition will do its work; that is, figure the question in a way that sutures the emotional break. Healing, as it occurs during a reading, is sense-making. A reading shifts how one thinks and feels about a given situation or process, and thus how one may act or what may happen.170 Every reading, regardless of the tool used, re/de/composes a critical situation. Each reading, that is, takes the question as a composition. Hence, instead of addressing it as a unit (something that has been submitted and passed the check of identity/equality) and then moving to decide what it is about or interpreting its meanings, the reading decomposes the question into as many components and proceeds to try different sets of re/de/compositions (using all or some of the elements). Every reading, as such, is at once transformative, collaborative, creative, and figurative. Each reading re/de/composes what appears at first to be an emotional or intellectual crossroads into an opening which is also an experiment in existing otherwise. As such, poethical readings as an aesthetic praxis (a knowing and a doing) is an experiment of sensibility as the unknowing of this world, as the practice of existing otherwise. 170 I am thinking about healing as a praxis (a doing and a thinking) that experiments with ways to treat (i.e. to materially process) and move through/with the situation or the crisis so that it may be reconfigured, or dissolved or simply change. 103 The Modern Subject The encounter with Denise Ferreira da Silva and her critique of the modern Subject made me completely reassess the way I was understanding the problem of the self-possessed individual in Political Therapy. Until then I had understood that “autonomous subject” as a kind of illusion or limitation that could be shattered and overcome, or as a kind of performance that could be approached and performed otherwise. However her critique of the Subject - and those formulated by other critical, postcolonial and black-feminist scholars - situate the philosophical construction of the figures of the Subject and its Other(s) in the history of European colonialism and the Atlantic Slave trade, which reveals them as the still functioning operators of material and symbolic violence.171 In particular the work of Gayatri Spivak, Denise Ferreira da Silva and David Lloyd, thanks to their engagement with European modern philosophy (Kant, Hegel and Marx in particular), helped me to sense how my own way of thinking, feeling and imagining is structured by and reproduces the violence of the grammar of modern thought, even when trying to find alternatives to it. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak refers to the Subject as “the name of Man” which by writing itself as such, operates a kind of exclusion. She uses deconstruction as a methodology to read the trace of that which is foreclosed in the constitution of “the name of Man” - not to give it a proper place or name - but to use it as leverage against the axiomatics of Imperialism which subtend the philosophical texts she reads. She uses the term "native informant" “as a name for that mark of expulsion from the name of Man - a mark crossing out 171 I am thinking about the work of Sylvia Wynter, Hortense J. Spillers, Cedric Robinson, Nahum Chandler, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Franz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Édouard Glissant, Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha. 104 the impossibility of the ethical relation”.172 Even though all the philosophical texts she reads posit the European man as the human norm, she notices how his constitution constantly needs its “others”: Even here, the native informant is needed and foreclosed. In Kant he is needed as the example for the heteronomy of the determinant, to set off the autonomy of the reflexive judgement, which allows freedom for the rational will; in Hegel as evidence for the spirit's movement from the unconscious to consciousness; in Marx as that which bestows normativity upon the narrative of the modes of production.173 In this way the native informant is at once excluded yet encrypted in the name of Man, functioning as a kind of motor, a running code which sustains its “energetic and successful” disavowal or “repression into the external world”.174 Denise Ferreira da Silva also returns to the founding texts of modern philosophy, but rather than tracing there a foundational exclusion from the “name of Man'' (at the level of the symbolic) which justifies violence against its subalterns, she shows how the Subject and its Others, are both a product of Reason. In her book Towards a Global Idea of Race she refigures modernity as the “modern text” - an analytical move that reveals modern representation as an ontoepistemological context instituted by universal reason. She traces the operations of reason through the 172 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 6. 173 Spivak, 6. 174 Ibid., 5. 105 foundational texts of modern philosophy to expose how the signifying strategies produced by the fields of Science and History instituted the modern Subject by manufacturing the “analytics of raciality”, the knowledge apparatuses that construct “visible physical traits as indexes of mental and social configurations” 175. In deploying the tools of scientific reason to uncover the truth of men, Anthropology and the early sciences of man produced “two kinds of modern subjects by tying certain bodily and mental configurations to different global regions: the subject of transparency, for whom universal reason is an interior guide, and subjects of affectability, for whom universal reason remains an exterior rule”176. Those global regions are to be understood not only as geographical territories but also as ontoepistemological contexts for they institute “being and meaning” differently: Historicity presupposes and institutes being and meaning as an “effect of interiority and temporality” thus producing a Transparent I, while Globality presupposes and institutes being and meaning “as an effect of exteriority and spatiality” thus producing an Affectable I. Their difference is unsublatable because they emerge in signification: they are the product of signifying strategies that place them one before the other, always and already in contention, in a relationship that places those written in affectability before an horizon of death.177 As she demonstrates, transparency is key to sustain and reproduce their difference.178 It is indeed the capacity of the mind to self-determine which was granted to the Human by the early modern philosophers that produced interiority, the stage through which history (still) unfolds. The need 175 Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 118. 176 Ferreira da Silva, xxxix. 177 Ibid., 28. 178 For more on how transparency operates as the assumptions guiding modern representation, see Denise Ferreira da Silva framing of the “transparency thesis” in her book Towards a Global Idea of Race. 106 to protect the self-determination of the Transparent I presupposes and (re)produces its others, which remain engulfed in affectability, that is, outer determination. Her analysis thus refigures the subject as homo modernus, that is both man and its others as global-historical beings instituted by “the productive weapons of reason, the tools of science and history”. 179 Their difference is secured by the function of representation, which is instrumental to sustain the endless reproduction of the modern text and its violence. In Under-Representation, David Lloyd recalls how representation has been central in assembling the figure of the modern Subject and argues that representation continues to operate its regulatory function to this day, through the figure of the intellectual. According to Lloyd, aesthetic philosophy was instrumental in conceiving the Subject “as if” it was a formal and universal unit, an abstraction analogically extracted and separated from the materiality and singularity of the person, which he calls the subject without properties. Lloyd especially focuses on Kant’s Critique of Judgement to show how the activity of representation establishes a “narrative organization of the senses that moves from sensation to form”.180 This is because for Kant the pure aesthetic judgement “is engaged in a purely formal reflection on the object as a possible object of intuition, and therefore on the object solely as it is presented to the subject”.181 The object of representation which, being judged without interest, brings satisfaction, is beautiful. The beautiful is thus not feeling of pleasure experienced by the subject (which would constitute interest), but a property of the object that is judged formally, according to “the 179 Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, xix. 180 Lloyd, Under Representation, 72. 181 Ibid., 28. 107 agreement of its manifold with a unity (i.e., irrespective of what it is to be)” by a disinterested subject.182 On one hand, Kant’s formal and logical quality of beauty links it analogically to reason, a correlation that still holds firm in common sense today. On the other hand, the notion of a disinterested subject presupposes and institutes the “subject without properties” as a universal abstract unit that is necessarily defined “against the underdeveloped racialized other” which is instead construed in particularity and affectability.183 By virtue of being “without properties,” i.e., without material particularities, those Subjects share a formal capacity for disinterested judgement, which Kant calls the common sense, on which subjective aesthetic judgements (of taste) can still claim universality (given their formal accordance to Reason).184 Although, for Kant, common sense is assumed as latent in all humans, it still needs to be cultivated, which is the task of the aesthetic education that artists and intellectuals still provide to this day. Those critiques describe in different ways how the figure of the Subject emerges with and against its subaltern, racialized, affectable Other(s), in a relation that is unsublatable, which renders any promise of inclusion or development structurally impossible. Moreover, Denise Ferreira da Silva and David Lloyd both show how formal logical thinking both presupposes and (re)produces the figure of the Subject and is at play even when it is deployed to critique it. Acknowledging that critique is not enough, Poethical Readings intervenes at this crossroad, experimenting with modes of knowing that defy the limitations imposed by and sustaining 182 Ibid., 29. 183 Ibid., 10. 184 Common-sense also grounds the very possibility of a public sphere, and therefore of politics. 108 formal thinking, and that rehearse sense-making as a transformative, collaborative, creative, and figurative practice. Reading as Imaging Reading relies on the kind of intuitive knowing that Walter Benjamin calls the mimetic faculty, the innate capacity to imitate which he describes as the “faculty of becoming similar” that is not only at the basis of all reading, but also of writing and language. 185 He writes: “If, in the dawn of humanity, this reading from stars, entrails, and coincidences represented reading per se, and further, if there were mediating links to a newer kind of reading, as represented by the runes, then one might well assume that the mimetic faculty, which was earlier the basis for clairvoyance, quite gradually found its way into language and writing in the course of a development over thousands of years, thus creating for itself in language and writing the most perfect archive of non-sensuous similarity.”186 Giving the example of Astrology, Benjamin had discussed in the same text how reading (the stars) and writing (a predicted future) happens simultaneously in that act of reading. For it is the addition of the reader herself, as a third element, who in the instant of reading, grasps the non-sensuous correspondences that give meaning to the conjunction of two stars.187 Reading is 185 Walter Benjamin, “The Doctrine of the Similar”, 1933. New German Critique, no. 17, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), 69. 186 Benjamin, 69. 187 Ibid., 66. 109 thus subject to a certain speed, for the perception of non-sensuous similarities cannot be held fast, but flashes up only in the critical moment of reading. Poethical Readings rely on and rehearse the kind of instantaneous, intuitive knowing that Benjamin so acutely describes. Indeed, when we read, we sense correspondences, sensuous and non-sensuous ones. As we collectively read in our practice, we share the possible meanings and associations that the image that is cast stimulates or recalls, we hear the resonances at play, we rehearse possible meanings and doing so, we revise how the image is read. Rather than selecting the most appropriate meaning of a card in relation to the question asked - as if we could access the infinite archive of potential meanings of that card and select the most appropriate to the context - we simply pay attention to what emerges and resonates. Details may call each other into appearance, a specific meaning may push their way through the image with such a force to just seem obvious and to inaugurate yet another way of reading that same image. The intuition is the faculty that hosts, gathers, and senses these compositions. Perhaps what is called the intuition is not even a faculty pertaining to the human mind, perhaps it is just the sensing of that which is shared with everything else, the constant material de/re/composition that is ongoing, and reading is just one way we can attend or attune to it. Perhaps this is what Benjamin is hinting at in this passage, where he talks about reading as “the effort or gift of letting the mind participate in that measure of time in which similarities flash up fleetingly out of the stream of things only in order to become immediately engulfed again.”188 The intuition appears here as a mode of engagement that halts time by being with “things”, providing a way of 188 Ibid., 68. 110 existing as a thing amongst things, at least for a moment, moving with and across each other without needing to comprehend them as a unity, or as “objects” that make us “subjects”. Rather than interpreting the image “that is cast” (the tarot spread, the astrological chart) as an object to submit to the categories of the understanding, Poethical Readings approaches reading as imaging. It considers the image “that is read” as a de/re/composition of the question, its context and its constitutive elements, which they then proceed to re/de/compose again and again, guided by the intuition. Hence the image is not an object of representation (cast and interpreted by the reader) but rather a complex composition that is read, which is what Walter Benjamin calls a dialectical image. In The Arcades Project he states: “It is not that what is past casts lights on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past, rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been and the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural (bildlich). Only dialectical images are genuine images - that is, not archaic – images. The image that is read – which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability – bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous moment on which all reading is founded.”189 189 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 463. 111 Poethical Readings image the “perilous moment” – the crisis that brought about the reading – by opening up and figuring its complexity with/out time. The Poethical Halting time to rehearse a different mode for thinking and deciding, is perhaps one of the main contributions of Poethical Readings to the Black Feminist critical project that Denise Ferreira da Silva began articulating in “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World” and that runs through her academic and artistic work. There she first introduced the term “poethics” as the task of the black feminist critic, whose poetic intention is an ethic, which “instead of the betterment of the World as we know it aims at its end”.190 Framing the quest, she asks: “Would the poet’s intention emancipate the Category of Blackness from the scientific and historical ways of knowing that produced it in the first place, which is also the Black Feminist Critic worksite? Would Blackness emancipated from science and history wonder about another praxis and wander in the World, with the ethical mandate of opening up other ways of knowing and doing? (...) Yes. From without the World, as we know it, where the Category of Blackness exists in/as thought – always already a referent of commodity, an object, and ‘the other,’ as ‘fact’ beyond ‘evidence’ – a Poethics of Blackness would announce a whole range of possibilities for knowing, doing, and existing.”191 190 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Towards a Black Feminist Poethics, 82. 191 Ferreira da Silva, 81. 112 Moving through and beyond a critique of the ways in which the Category of Blackness has been assembled by modern Thought, a Black Feminist Poethics activates Blackness' capacity to dismantle the ontoepistemological grounds that secure both the Subject and its Object. Ferreira da Silva identifies Time as a concept that sustains both of those figures, and the World they inhabit, for the World emerges in Time. She explains how, for Kant, Time is a pure intuition, which allows the understanding “to grasp as form that which occurs in the world, in the mind itself, in interiority”.192 The Subject - equipped with an interiority and possessing the mental capacity to perceive and reflect upon those form of the World - exists as an historical/interior being, while the Category of Blackness - signifying exteriority and affectability - marks places and people as stuck outside of time, as unmoving things, justifying the racial dialectic that can only make sense in such a World.193 From with/out time, Blackness’s generative capacity can guide the quest(ion) of the end of the World as we know it and inspire modes of knowing and existing able to conceive and realize decolonization as the return of the total value “yielded by the productive capacity of the slave body and native lands”.194 Our practice of Poethical Readings specifically contributes to this trajectory towards decolonization by attempting to rehearse collaborative modes of knowing that do not rely upon that representation of the World, and as such may release our political imagination from its grip. After we named our practice Poethical Readings, we researched the term poethics and we were glad to find a different yet resonant use of the term by American poet Joan Retallack. In her book The Poethical Wager she considers how any “making of forms out of language (poesis) is 192 Ibid., 90. 193 Ibid. 194 Ibid., 85. 113 a practice with a discernible character (ethos)” and calls for an aesthetic of complexity able to take risks, and wage on ways of making and living that assume the chaos of the world, instead of trying it to subsume it into simplistic worldviews.195 She began using the term in the late 1980s, inspired by John Cage and “his aesthetic of making art that models how we want to live.” 196 Her project has a different scope than ours as it focuses on complexifying the relationship between art and life rather than questioning the very ground that makes possible their separation with a view of putting an end to the racial violence that sustains their distinction. However, we share a common intuition through the word “poethic” which bets on the capacity of the imagination to lead the way towards different modes of knowing and existing in this world, which this quote from her book beautifully captures: “A poetics can take you only so far without an h. If you’re to embrace complex life on earth, if you can no longer pretend that all things are fundamentally simple or elegant, a poetics thickened by an h launches an exploration of art’s significance as, not just about, a form of living in the real world. That as is not a simile; it’s an ethos. Hence the h. What I’m working on is quite explicitly a poethics of a complex realism.”197 195 Joan Retallack, Poethical Wager (University of California Press, 2004), 11. 196 Retallack, 44. 197 Ibid., 26. 114 Part Two: The Practice Not Fully Human, Not Human at All As an example of this practice, I would like to share an image we produced as a re/de/composition of several sessions of Poethical Readings that Denise Ferreira da Silva and I have performed together with Arely Amaut, a fellow artist and reader, in May 2020. In collaboration, we have created an installation that was part of the group exhibition titled Not Fully Human, Not Human At All curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Bettina Steinbrügge, which was shown at Kunstverein in Hamburg from October 24th, 2020 to January 24th, 2021. We had initially contributed to Not Fully Human, Not Human At All - a three-years curatorial research by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez - by gathering a Sensing Salon, a study group dedicated to rethinking the figure of Human through the four elements: Fire, Water, Earth and Air. This Sensing Salon took place at Hangar, an art and research space in Lisbon, in which we gathered local and international artists, researchers and activists to question the figure of the Human, using our various reading tools. It took place from January 14th to January 18th 2020 and since we were using Astrology as one of our tools for study, we realized that our meeting was happening at the same time as Mercury, Saturn, Pluto were conjunct in the sky, with Jupiter nearby, in the sign of Capricorn.198 We knew immediately at the time that such constellation of planets meant that an extremely significant, global event was on its way, and no matter how much we speculated, we could have not imagined that less than two months after our meeting, the entire world would enter a lockdown because of the Covid-19 pandemic. When the time came to produce the installation for the show in Hamburg, in the midst of the uncertainty and 198 A conjunction in astrology is formed when two or more planets or points are within 0 to 10 degrees from each other on the zodiac wheel. 115 crisis of the first wave of pandemic, we decided to do Poethical Readings for the question: How is the Covid-19 pandemic affecting the Human? We invited Arely Amaut to collaborate with us and together we performed several online readings for the same questions. We first performed a Tarot reading and then a reading with the Oracle of Chaupin, an Andean oracle which Arely Amaut uses in her practice. We then cast the astrological chart of the pandemic by using the date and place of the first reported case of infection by Covid-19, and finally we performed a Reiki Reading .199 Through the Reiki reading we asked seven questions, one for each of the seven main chakras: What grounds our question (base), what does it create (sacral), how does it express itself/how is it singular (solar plexus), how does it relate to other existents/events (heart), how does it communicate (throat), how does it express the unknowable (third eye), and how does it express the plenum (crown). Rather than definite answers the Reiki Reading provided us with more elements that could enter the composition, thus we noted all the sensations, images, feelings, or words we were sensing at each step of this process. The image below is the map we have composed by layering the elements of the various readings, which became part of our installation for the show. The map is accompanied by an audio file in which the three of us perform a reading of the image, which is included as a transcription below the image. The image was part of a larger installation composed of other images, scores and structures which were all elements that emerged in the various readings. The entire room was a re/de/composition in space of the readings we performed. The audience could 199 Reiki Readings are a technique developed by Denise Ferreira da Silva which consists of using the distance Reiki procedure to provide descriptions or the question or person that is being treated, corresponding to the major 7 chakras. 116 sit on one structure and listen to the audio of our reading while looking at the image. The transcript of the audio was also available in print. Here is an image of the installation view, to give a sense of the spatial arrangement. Figure 16 Installation view of the Sensing Salon in Kunstverein Hamburg 117 The Image Figure 17 Image of the question “How is the Covid-19 pandemic affecting the Human?” 118 The Reading AUDIO TRANSCRIPT VALENTINA: We are on a collapsing tower under a lightning bolt. This room images a poethical reading for a question which came out of the conversation of the Sensing Salon in Lisbon. The Lisbon episode of the Sensing Salon, a study group on “rethinking the human through the elements” happened during the week of the great conjunction of Mercury, Pluto, Saturn in Capricorn with Jupiter nearby. We knew something significant was about to happen, but we did not know what. DENISE: Many weeks later in the third week of March, the conjunction went exact and the COVID and the Covid-19 pandemic took the shape of a global crisis. We then changed the original plan for this Hamburg exhibition, which was to simply reflect on the Lisbon gathering. And we decided to do a poethical reading for this latest global crisis. And considering how to go about it, we could not avoid the question: "How is the Covid-19 pandemic affecting the Human?" So, we've read for it. ARELY: From our interpretations of the different tools, reiki, astrology, the Tarot and an Oracle, we composed the image that is before you, as well as the different elements you see in this space. Starting from the center of the image, you find the issue: a collapsing tower over the image of a happy family. 119 VALENTINA: Yeah, that is the Tower and the Ten of Cups, which form the inner cross of the Tarot spread we did for this question. We could consider this crossing as a first description of the issue, of the affect that this pandemic is having. And the Tower is clearly an image of collapse, of collapse of the structure, the social structures that were no longer needed and need to go, and it is crossed by the 10 of cups, which is a certain way of coming together. What Arely was talking about as the happy family. ARELY: Yeah, 10 of Cups also it's connected to or relates with the oracle reading about “the bridge”, which is the gift of the ancestors. And for us the bridge suggests that we have to be tolerant and keep the communication, in this moment of like, the end of a cycle, the collapsing tower. But the bridge also can give us an opportunity and make us remember the ability to connect with other types of spaces and times. DENISE: I think the potential of this moment is also registered by the lightning bolt in the Tower because the lightning is plasma right, it is fire, it is a correspondence of fire, it is actually fire and fire in in the Tarot and the different tools is related to creativity, so that force that brings down the tower is also a creative force. And I think that's also indicated by the tarot reading, sorry, the Reiki reading we did, that we have next to the Tower, the reading that came out when we were considering what the crisis has made visible. And what you see there is “your nothingness powerlessness before the simple, the uselessness of what you have built, and the fact that nothing can resist what is supposed to come anyway” like a lightning, a lightning bolt. So it makes visible the fact that something else comes about, is created, other structures are to be destroyed, 120 but because of the 10 of Cups on top, the message, if you want to call it that, is not a negative one, is the opposite. VALENTINA: It's almost like water seeping through the cracks, because the Cups are also the element of water. And that destruction is also visible when we look at the astrology. So just on top of the image, we can see the sun in Scorpio that it's also conjunct the MC and the sun in Scorpio has a transformational quality. If the Sun in a reading of an astrological chart for a person would be the sense of self, for this event it means that its core, let's say, it's a transformational one, it brings death as transformation. And it's conjunct the MC so it becomes the middle of the sky. So, it's really out in the open, it is visible to the world, publicly in the world it does the work of death and transformation which reinforces the meaning of destruction, and… DENISE: …of restructuring, because the Sun is in the ninth house, which is a house of ideals and philosophy and religion and more generally articulated ethical values. So even though it is the destruction that is coming of the structure, the destruction of the structure of society, which is also the 10th house, but still the destruction is taking place at the ethical and philosophical level, right. ARELY: I connect destruction and de-structuring with the tool that the oracle in the reading show us, which is the “plaza quadrada” or the square. And the square gives an idea of the end of a cosmic cycle. So all this process of de-structuring or transformation, in the case of the oracle, it means to stop. But to stop, imagine you stop surrounded by the color black and outside is white. 121 So, it means to have the opportunity to reflect, this moment is the moment that you can see things and how things are but also to finish some work that you need to end in order to start another cycle. So, it's doing some kind of work, but in the pause, which is what is happening because of Covid. It’s this kind of duality, or opposite feelings of not being able to move but at the same time, doing a lot of interior work. And planning, which is also connected with the Bridge. VALENTINA: Which is interesting with the Eight of wands that is in the left on the image and it's the past, not the past that is gone, but the past that has made the present possible. And it's the Eight of Wands which has a certain speed and a certain immediacy. And again, it's the element of fire reinforcing what Denise was saying before about the creative element coming through with those wands are landing in the image. So this process has started before and it is ending, and yet it's full of movement. DENISE: Also related to the element of fire and creativity, and also to the course of these transformations, because it came about all of a sudden is this opposition between Mars and Uranus. So, Mars is in the ninth house in Scorpio and Uranus is in the third house in Taurus. And it's a beautiful configuration because Mars is in a water sign and fire house. So have fire, fire, water there and Scorpio is ruled by Pluto, which is, you know, related to deep transformations, to the de-structuring of the foundations of something on the one hand, while on the other hand, Uranus is related to sudden changes, that's usually how we look at Uranus, and that is in the house of communication. But in the element of Earth, which is Taurus, so have this reciprocity, involving thinking, thinking of the third house, which is the immediate communication of 122 knowledge, thinking at the level of ninth house, which is about the basis, the principles, the ontologies and you have two fast and powerful planets, Mars and Uranus challenging each other, like facing off each other. So in a way, it is indicating the creativity, a shift that it's deep, a shift that is experienced in terms of knowledge, of what we know, how we know, but also of the whys of life. And the shift that is creative because this combination of Mars and Uranus is really telling us that we will have to learn how to live in this world in a different way, not only how to learn, but also in a way also come up with different understandings of how we should. ARELY: Yeah, I think that connects this word “creation” which is in the context of this question, I mean, what we are experiencing right now in all the levels, and it’s for the oracle “the children”. The symbol of the children in this reading means that it's the moment of the re-creation of the species in order to make life possible, which, again, I think, through the whole reading, is showing this complimentary way of understanding, like in this case, re-creation of the species, and how that really makes possible continuity, like we are really changing in a very deep level, like the interior, like interior structures, but also in our DNA. So, it's a transformation that enables different ways to experience this transition. VALENTINA: But re-creation can also, what Denise was talking about with the Mars and Uranus opposition, be a kind of disruption It might also help to look at the Tarot, at the 10 of Pentacles which is the image on the top of the image that indicates how this disruption of the towers become visible. And that is a disruption in the way we come to know, as the 10 of Pentacles is the 10 of Earth. So, it's all the ways in which we have been accumulating knowledge and resources and in this one, we read it also as a kind of an accumulation or an extractivist 123 mode of building knowledge and building the world we live in, through extraction, and maybe this is something that you know, has to come to an end in this making life possible. DENISE: And this shows up in the Reiki on the other side of the Tower, which is what it creates? Right, the question we have for the second chakra and there it say: "an opportunity, a glimpse of what is possible" which connects to what Arely was saying in terms of the children and re-creation. So even if transformation is at the level of our DNA, now we just have a glimpse of it. Because we are living the de-structuring or the destruction, we are right in the middle of it. VALENTINA: I also feel that the readings are not necessarily saying: this is what will happen. But they really carry a message in showing what the opportunity is. I was relating this to the Grand Water Trine that it's in the astrological chart. So there is a Trine which is a good flowing aspect, between the Sun in Scorpio, Neptune in Pisces and the Moon in Cancer, which gives this chart a great impact on our emotional capacity, intuitive, healing capacity, it connects, it's a very watery power, you know, and because it's a trine, it's a capacity that it carries with ease, and almost unknowingly if it would be a person, but actually, it has to be activated. So, reading it in this specific way, it allows us to think okay, there is a potential for creating care, for creating orientation through the waters, ways of navigating the uncertain times. It can also be a healing, a healing moment, paradoxically, and it connects with what came out in the Reiki when we treated the heart chakra to which we asked: how does it relate? And what we got was: "uncertainty, unpredictability, life as it is." 124 ARELY: Yes. Water is precisely this interior work, it connects with the answer of this question, in the case of the oracle, which is the number three and is represented by the stairs in the dark, in the color black. It means also this conscious transit in the subconscious spaces. So, it's a moment of a very interior work, and this interior work is connected with interior water. So how to navigate through these memories, or also how by navigating this interior water, we can end important cycles. DENISE: This score of the heart and the heart itself is an interesting image that comes out of this reading. Because it connects, I think to the cards in the pillar of transformation in the Celtic cross, those four cards. And in particular to the cards, well I'm thinking about the cards in position number seven, where we have the Knight of Cups, and position eight in which we have an environment. Well, the Knight of Cups we can describe him in different ways, he is the romantic seeker, he is the one that is connected through the intuition. But we can look at that figure as the figure of the poet and then in that sense the one that also communicates and brings out what can become possible and not only the one that communicates what is already known. And that figure of the poet, which is in position seven, is actually those who are doing the reading or who are asking the question, so that in that case, that would be us, the three of us as the poets there. But in position number eight, we have the Four of Wands which is you know, we have this image of a village, of, I wouldn't call it a community but anyway, a community, it's just one description, one way of naming people living together in a particular space, but more importantly in the Four of Wands we have this image of coming together and in position number eight, the environment. You can read it in different ways, in terms of what the environment is offering, or the environment is asking for, or what the environment is, or what you see in the 125 environment. So, from the perspective of those doing the readings, the poets, looking at the environment, we could read this spread as a response to a demand from the environment, which is related to how we come together. It doesn't give a full answer, as Valentina was saying, or Arely was saying, this is a reading, an image, you know, it can be interpreted in so many different ways. It doesn't give so much answers, but what it gives are ways of making sense, then, from this way of making sense, we can look at the poet and the coming together, that is the Knight of Cups, and the Four of Wands along those lines as a reading, actually indicating possibilities for coming together. VALENTINA: Yes, since coming together, the way of coming together we had, is disrupted in the Tower, and in this glimpse, in this moment, there is also that pause of the Seven of Pentacles, that is what's coming from the situation we're reading for, which is this moment of pause, of observation. And it is a seven, so it is a challenge. And it's a challenge to grow with patience, in the map we connect it to the same image of the heart, because it indicates the challenge to figure out another mode of growing and sharing and having, but also another mode of abundance, another relationship with abundance, which is represented by the Empress, and the Queen of Pentacles, in the Tarot spread, which are in the position of the hopes and the outcome. So that poet maybe, you know, expresses as a hope this possibility to live in abundance, of figuring out how, in this moment of pause, glimpse through the intuition and figuring out this other wealth we can share. ARELY: Yeah, this other mode, as Valentina was saying, is another mode of coming together. And I think that connects with the purpose in the reading in the case of the oracle as well, which 126 is “the unifying particle”, which I also connect with the Empress, this moment of pause, this moment of re-creation, and then maybe at some point, it can take us to this unifying particle, which means a moment, an axis that integrates everything, where everything is integrated. Also there are very clear, more clear objectives. So, it is very small. It's represented as a very small seed, or a gene as well. DENISE: Yeah, it's interesting, because this takes us also to the other side of the spread. In particular, to the two cards that are not part of the Celtic cross: the Page of Wands, which is the message, as the pages are seeds, but the Page of Wands is primarily a carrier of a message. And that's the significator, the card on top. And then at the bottom, directly under it, we have the 10 of Wands, which is the ground, and the 10 of Wands we can read it as exhaustion, right? I mean, it's the exhaustion of a creative project. But what's important, among many things, is the fact that both are cards of fire, they're both wands. The page of wands is a kind of beginning, it is a seed, the 10 of wands as the grounds, it's an end of a creative process. Read together, as like, you know, ways of, or lenses through which to look at the reading, we have these reinforced again, the fact that this is a beginning. There's an end and a beginning at the same time, there is no separation. It's all happening at the same time, though what's coming is still showing as seeds, as a message. And connected to that, here is the Reiki reading for the throat chakra, in which we asked what it communicates. And here it says that “it does not communicate, you just feel it.” And that gives a sense of immediacy, you know "You know me for what I become, I do, how I penetrate, infiltrate your body". And that, once again, connects both to the lightning bolt. I think Valentina was talking about the Eight of Wands and the immediacy of the process that brought about the inner cross and also the impact of the Tower itself, right, something that comes through 127 and dissolves it from within, but it feels like a lightning bolt because it is a Uranian, a Martian kind of event, it is quick and it’s fiery and it is definitive, definite, I should say. VALENTINA: …and it opens up the cracks, both the cracks of the Tower in the card, but also the cracks that appeared in the Reiki readings. They appeared both when we're treating the root chakra and asking what grounds this crisis, but also what is the larger connection of this crisis and always cracks appeared and these images of infiltration and something like water seeping through the cracks, and exposing "something that was already distressed, and that was a long time coming". And for me the image of the water seeping through the cracks is the 10 of Cups coming through the Tower. It also foregrounds that healing is possible, that is the Star coming through the reading, which is the potential for healing that is there, unseen but present, and the Star is literally watering the ground. So, it reinforces the way the water came out in all the readings and, it connects also with the Reiki readings. It's what came while treating the third chakra which basically asks what is this crisis about, how does it manifest. And what we got was: "pain, suffering, immense sadness, and healing comes from confronting and letting go. Death. The human dies with every and each person's death. If you mourn them, you see.” Reflections Since we began doing sessions of Poethical Readings the practice has evolved to include new arrangements, such as the Sensing Salon and is now in the process of generating a new tool for reading, the Echo Tarot Deck. The trajectory of its morphing highlights how study is also at the core of the collaborative practice with Denise Ferreira da Silva, which has been key to the unfolding of Studio Practice as an approach to ar-making as a form of study. After having 128 performed Poethical Readings at several art venues, we felt the need to share and transmit the reading and healing tools we used as a way to continue to experiment with them as tools for study. That is, tools able to gather us socially according to the specific arrangement they propose, with the intention to see what becomes of knowing when we go about it in this way. We thus began organizing the Sensing Salon as a studio practice for the healing arts at several venues since 2016. Beyond the transmission of the tools, in the Sensing Salon we focus on the collective and collaborative study of one question or issue through the employment of the different tools and practices. As we transmitted the tools, it became clear how we were tweaking and adapting them to perform the poethical task we had set ourselves, always reading them slightly against their usual interpretation and their focus on the individual. Following this movement, we are now in the process of developing the Echo Tarot Deck, a new reading tool inspired by the poems of Ai Ogawa, which is yet a new moment in the unfolding of our study.200 I consider the way the practice has morphed through the years a testimony to the generativity of study. Differently from Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, Poethical Readings and the Sensing Salon have been formalized, to some extent, as “artworks” that circulate within institutional art contexts. However, they never became fixed as well-defined objects and the difference between Poethical Readings and the Sensing Salon is rather slippery. Usually Sensing Salons are longer, they involve study groups and the transmissions of the tools, and yet when we do events of a few hours or one day in which we read collectively for a question, sometimes we call them Poethical Readings, sometime Sensing Salon, depending on the context and the inflection of the invitation. I personally appreciate the slight indistinction they maintain for it shows how they are implicated 200 Ai Ogawa (1947-2010) was an African-American-Japanese poet whose work particularly focuses on subjectivity that confronts the racial, gendered and economic violations constitutive of the U.S. American society. 129 with one another, and that the moment of formalization is just an instance of a movement that is ongoing and informal, that is study. When I observe the practice and how it has found new forms without becoming other, without negation nor improvement of what it was before, I am inspired to think about generativity as a quality of study that Studio Practice takes to heart. In All Incomplete, Harney and Moten discuss the entanglement of decay and generativity to remind us that the “generative capacity to differ and diffuse” is given in corruption, sin and incompleteness.201 Denise Ferreira da Silva, in the foreword to their book, reads the “jus generativiy” they describe “as the quality and capacity to give – not in the context of an economy (as in the managing of scarcity) but as generosity (as in the abundance of the rain forest)”.202 Reflecting upon the practice of Poethical Readings and the Sensing Salon, I see generosity as a good descriptor of “how” we go about knowing, both in the practice itself and within our collaboration. Since the practice does not aim at a resolution or at determining the correct understanding of the issue or situation we read for, anything anyone says or notices, is valid. It can be said, and it will enter the composition of the reading even if it may be contradicted, forgotten, or revised throughout. Through the practices, we were able to have incredible conversations about complex political, ethical, and philosophical questions with large and non-homogeneous groups. Expertise or eloquence does not set a bar below which nobody dares to speak; knowing more or less than one another, having this or that way of approaching the image, only enriches the general conversation. Generosity here is not a moral imperative or virtue, rather it is given in and through the practice, it is the “how” of its generativity. 201 Harney and Moten, All Incomplete, 160 202 Denise Ferreira da Silva, in the preface of Harney and Moten, All Incomplete, 10. 130 When thinking about the collaboration between me and Denise Ferreira da Silva, I can see how the work we do, as well as our generous way of working with each other, emerged from and through reading. Afterall, we started by reading together and from that practice, we then began collaborating. By the time we started to make work together there was no way to judge and negotiate each other’s ideas or imagination on how to do something, so that we could settle on a common agreement or vision. Instead, we just began discussing “work” in the same way as we were already reading. One of us would say something and the other would continue, or maybe question it or consider it from a different angle, then the other would continue from there. The moments we get stuck, or we do not know how to go on, we let the thing rest. Some elements fall off, eventually something happens, or someone reads, feels or thinks something that moves the process, so it goes on. Through this collaboration I have been unlearning what I assumed making art was. Both in dance and art school, whether I was training to become a performer and a choreographer or a visual artist, the pressure was always to find, define and make visible the uniqueness of one’s own work. That pressure never helped me, as I know it does not help many others, and I realize now that I only continued with art because of the collaborations and kinships that the practice (the doing of it) provided. Those sustained me intellectually, emotionally, and materially, and through this assumed dependency, and from the pleasures and pains of incompleteness, another mode of working became possible. This generous and generative way of working became an integral part of Studio Practice as it is a mode of being together that I invoke and try to practice in all the instances of study I set up. 131 Chapter 4: Teaching as Study In this chapter, I describe how my experience with self-organization is deeply implicated with the notion of study with which I am working and how the ongoing revision between them guides my approach to teaching as study. Indeed, I currently approach teaching as an occasion for study to self-organize, each invitation and context offering a possible and specific arrangement to gather in study. In laying out the theoretical considerations that constitute my approach, I first retrace the trajectory of my experiences with self-organization and the way they have shaped my understanding of study as a largely informal, anti- and ante-institutional practice.203 I then move to the question of teaching as study: is it even possible to practice study within the confines of a university classroom? And if so, how? To begin to answer these questions, I introduce Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's idea of study as a commitment to prophetic organization, and later discuss the difference between learning and study by engaging with Tyson E. Lewis's idea of "inoperative learning." I then move to discuss my practice and provide a concrete example of a Studio Practice that approaches teaching as study: a five-day long session which took place in January 2023 at an Academy of Fine Arts in central Europe. Given its ephemeral nature, I am only able to share a partial narrative of our sessions: the sequences of events, the scores that we engaged in and the general lines of conversations we have entered, which I describe sequentially, day by day. Finally, I 203 I am taking the prefixes anti- and ante- from Fred Moten, who uses it widely throughout his work to refer to a position that is not only against (anti-) but also before (ante-) whatever word follows the prefix, thus preceding and exceeding it. See the use of the prefix in relation to ontology in “Blackness and Nothingness,” 739. Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (October 1, 2013): 737–80, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2345261. 132 close the chapter with a reflection on two elements that are key to my approach: the objectivelessness of study and its improvisational quality. Part One: Theoretical Considerations The Trajectory Besides the formal dance and art education I received in schools, I consider that the real learning that oriented my work mainly came from my experiences with self-organization and self-education. Since my time in dance school, I have been part of collectives and small groups that would self-organize their own performances in bars, events, public spaces, or wherever was possible. We were obviously navigating extreme precarity as foreign students in London, but also, we were not excited about the possibilities we should have wanted, such as getting a job in a dance company or establishing ourselves enough to get funding and make average dance pieces that looked more or less the same. In search of "something else"— which could be anything besides going back home—I applied and received a scholarship to attend the Impulstanz Festival in the summer of 2006, just after I graduated from my Bachelor of Arts at the Laban Centre in London. Impulstanz is one of the main European contemporary dance festivals which, for a few weeks each summer, hosts a huge number of performances and workshops in several venues in Vienna. The scholarship granted me access to all the performances and to any of the proposed workshops that I wished to attend. That experience clearly shifted and opened a completely new horizon about what dance was or could be, especially in comparison to what I was taught in London or in Italy before. However, the most exciting and enriching aspect of the experience was the sociality that emerged among my fellow scholarship holders. We were a group of a little more than 60 dancers and choreographers from all over the world, between 20 and 50 years old 133 and with varying degrees of experience, access, and ambitions. Living together in the same hostel, watching and discussing performances, dancing and partying until morning most nights, we had a lot of fun and we learned a lot from and with each other. On the last night we proposed a meeting to figure out how we could go on somehow, and we did a round each saying what one would need from a continued cooperation of some sort and what one could offer. Some people just wanted to dance and were happy to dance in other people's projects, some wanted to be choreographers, some wanted to just hang out more and experiment with things together. Some people could offer rehearsal spaces or access to venues in their hometowns, some were from countries with Art Councils and had potential access to funding, some were good at organizing. We found no communal resolution in that meeting, nor did we make plans. We just shared our desires and offerings and celebrated the profound social love we were able to share. Soon after we all went home, we started to organize in small-scale ways to meet each other again. Those of us living in Europe began traveling to each other's cities to organize small workshops that could pay for the tickets and present our own performances or attempt collaborations of different kinds. We organized the first meeting in Porto that same autumn, just four or five of us. And when the time arrived to make a flyer to advertise our performance in the local bar, we realized that we had to give what we were doing a name. We asked ourselves why we were doing this, and we immediately said: because we love each other. Laughing, we started to joke about how sweet that was–so tender! We decided to call the project Sweet & Tender Collaborations and made our first flyer. As we kept meeting, I became interested in the different kinds of "conditions of production" we were creating and started to question to what extent changing the conditions under which we produce a performance could change what the performance would become. Contemporary dance performances at the time were mostly solo, 134 duos, or trios, mainly because most productions could not afford to pay for many dancers. To make a performance, one needed to find co-productions, which usually came from theaters or dance centers that also provide residency space. These were the average conditions of production that young choreographers like us could expect if they "made it" and managed to get work commissioned. However, working in a rectangular studio with a linoleum floor, alone or with a few others, for a period of two to five weeks mostly generated the same kind of black-box performances that lasted around one hour and could be more or less movement-based, intellectually stimulating, or entertaining. I thought that perhaps if we changed the conditions of productions through which we make work, we could change what we make. What if we could work for two years on Skype instead of two weeks in a studio? Or use the same budget as a regular small-scale production to make a performance in two days with fifty dancers instead? Could we rehearse in each other's dreams and just meet to perform? I thought Sweet & Tender Collaborations could do just that and following this quest, I had the chance to meet the French dance critic Jean-Marc Adolphe, who helped me to organize the first large gathering of Sweet & Tender Collaboration, which took place at the Performing Arts Forum PAF) in France in the summer of 2007. Jean Marc-Adolphe had organized a month-long gathering of dancers and choreographers called SKITE in 1992 and 1994, and got very enthusiastic about organizing a new edition with us.204 We traveled around several European dance venues in order to gather funding and a place to host the project, and we were lucky enough to meet Jan Ritsema, a Dutch theatre-maker who had just bought a huge monastery in the 204 SKITE had been a rather important meeting at the time. In the introduction of his book Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement, André Lepeki describes the SKITE performances in Paris in 1992 as his first encounter with dance as "still-acts" (16). 135 north of France and had turned it into a self-organized artist residency PAF (Performing Arts Forum). There we organized SKITE/Sweet & Tender Collaborations, a one-month residency with 35 performing and visual artists, which culminated with public performances in several theatres in the nearby city of Reims. Beyond collaborating and making work, we were able in that month to formulate the project as a kind of production experiment, in which material conditions would be shared in whatever experimental way was envisioned by those who were initiating and gathering resources for a given event. Many Sweet & Tender Collaborations have been organized since, in various parts of the world and on different scales, integrating new participants, losing old ones and inspiring other similar projects in younger generations of dancers.205 Self-organization and self-education were both principles on which PAF was based and which it sought to enable. Rather than going back to work as a waitress in London to dance in small dance companies, I remained at PAF and began working with Jan Ritsema to keep the place open as I continued my experiments with Sweet & Tender Collaborations around Europe in the following years. There I encountered philosophy and critical theory, self-educating just by being there and talking to people, attending and supporting the organization of study groups, collective readings, lectures, workshares, feedback sessions and so on. Throughout the years, I initiated informal and spontaneous collaborations whenever possible, with whomever I sensed an affinity at PAF. In the years we made random videos, short films, songs, formed bands, invented practices, wrote texts, and faked lectures, among other things. Those spontaneous collaborations 205 The last Sweet&Tender Collaborations I am aware of happened in Bern in 2012. Amongst the projects that were inspired by Sweet&Tender Collaborations, I remember Embassy of…, a similar project initiated by the DanceWeb Scholarship holders of 2008. 136 would sometimes become longer or more structured collaborations. They would become invitations, so that they could happen not only in PAF but also in the various festivals, schools and programs with which people worked. Even though I cannot tell exactly "what" I have learned from all those experiences, since their focus was always loose and scattered, I can tell "how" I learned. I learned by doing, by throwing myself into anything that sparked my curiosity, by paying attention and imitating others, by rehearsing the language that circulated even though I did not completely understand it, by questioning what I was noticing with others, by figuring out with the help of others anything that intuitively did not sit well with me, by reading and writing, but mostly by hanging out. In short, when Stefano Harney and Fred Moten used the term "study" in The Undercommons, I felt I knew exactly what they were talking about, as many others did. Since 2015, however, I began receiving invitations to teach classes and workshops in art programs in Europe. And I had to ask myself if it was possible to practice study in the University, and if so, how? A Prophetic Organization Even though, according to Harney and Moten, study can happen anywhere but in the University, study still happens there despite the University, in its undercommons. Besides the smoking room, in the seminar breaks, or before the class begins, where study usually happens, teaching can also offer some respite. The teaching labor that the University requires is indeed a profession that inevitably reproduces the institution, but it is also just a job–just labor. The University's need for labor creates a "hole in the fence", for it can let in and host "the other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the 137 knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization".206 When asked later in the book about what they mean by “prophetic organization”, they reply: “STEFANO: [... ] For me, it’s just a way to think about the already-existing enrichment of being, the already-social quality of time and space, which means that you can simultaneously be in more places, and be more than one, and that seeing things and hearing things is just a way of being with others. It means the standpoint of every standpoint and none as Fred and I say, the standpoint of the shipped, the containerized, the unsettled and unsettling. FRED: What you just said seems right to me. It is definitely about seeing things and hearing things. [...] Another way to put it would be: you talk about being able to be in two places at the same time, but also to be able to be two times in the same place. In other words, it’s very much bound up with the Jamesian notion of the future in the present-–and classically, the prophet has access to both of those. The prophet is the one who tells the brutal truth, who has the capacity to see the absolute brutality of the already-existing and to point it out and to tell that truth, but also to see the other way, to see what it could be. That double-sense, that double-capacity: to see what’s right in front of you and to see through that to what’s up ahead of you. One of the ways in which academic labor has become 206 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 26-27. All capitals in original. 138 sclerotic, let’s say, is precisely because it imagines that the primary mode, specifically of a certain kind of left academic labor, is a kind of clear-eyed seeing of what’s actually going on right now-–and that the work is reducible to that. Or, another way to put it is that, insofar as that’s what one conceives the work to be, one is only really doing the work when the work is absolutely in the absence of play, where play would be conceived of as pretending, as seeing what could be, as fantasy.”207 Even though the Fine Arts or Choreography Master’s courses in Europe do not follow the same heavy managerial models of the North American universities that Harney and Moten criticize, those institutions still perform a regulatory function. They regulate access to art funding and networks of professionals, and potentially sanction any practice as intellectually or artistically valid and "contemporary". Moreover, they happen in "fortress Europe," whose migration policy creates enormous barriers for non-European students to attend. What kind of "prophetic organization" can happen there? As I explain in the trajectory, study and self-organization have been indistinguishable in my practice since they have enabled and transformed each other throughout. I came to think about study as a kind of insistence on and towards the social conditions that make it possible, for if study is about being with whomever we need to be with, for as long as we need to, then study could be said to self-organize. Rather than individuals self-organizing to make study happen or organizing study together, perhaps study organizes "itself" as and through our mutual dis/possession. I am thinking about the general affectability of study, the ways in which study 207 Harney and Moten, 130-131. 139 gathers us in and out of passion, moves us in and out of topic, in and out of place. Be it by smoking yet a last cigarette just to continue hanging out, or by pretending to understand something just to be somewhere or with someone, be it out of love or anger, study self-organizes by way of hapticality, our collectivized self-possession “which is also at the same time our collective dispossession”.208 The notion of study has indeed changed what self-organization meant for me: rather than being about individuals organizing their “selves”, self-organization became about the de-/re-generation of our collective existence in/as study. My initial understanding of self-organization was formed through my experience at PAF. PAF was initially inspired by a mix of anarchist ideas of Temporary Autonomous Zones and Deluezianism. So self-organization meant that individuals organized themselves in rhizomatic ways that enhanced their pleasure and emancipation, fostered dissensus and did not supposedly require a common ideology.209 Engaging with postcolonial and feminist critiques, however, exposed the unmarked position of this "individual," who is supposed to organize himself as an ideal white European male subject position, which grants him the privilege of not seeing the ideology that already structures his existence. Moreover, Black Feminist critiques go further by showing how it is not unacknowledged ideology that sustains that unmarked position, rather it is total violence, which still operates today at the economic, symbolic, juridical, and ethical levels, as Denise Ferreira da Silva reminds us.210 208 Harney and Moten, All Incomplete , 39. 209 Hakim Bay, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 1985, online. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism 210 See Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, but also the work of Hortense Spillers and Saidyia Hartman in foregrounding the role of violence in Subject formation. 140 Acknowledging and sensing such violence at work in the midst of an experimental place that I deeply love led me to study and to question the practice of self-organization. For study was happening in the undercommons of self-organization as much as it happens in the undercommons of any university or institution. It was happening in the generative sociality that living, cooking, and dancing together enabled, beyond the productivity of the specific project, research, or event that people came to work on or attend. Being able to stay with that sociality for all these years allowed me to learn about the kind of "prophetic organization" that is always going on in/as study. The events I began to organize at PAF with others throughout the years, the kinds of collaborations, conversations and contents we started to have and bring in, always carried that "double-sense, that double-capacity" of the seer that Moten describes in the above quote. They were both a way to see clearly what was going on and to critique the brutality of that present, but also a way to play, pretend and invoke what was to come: a way to be in different times in the same place. This did not happen through strategy or because of individuals organizing themselves with the objective of a better future, liberated from racial-cis-hetero-patriarchal logics. We knew those logics were a problem and they were critiqued, and yet it was through/as study that we began to engage (and continue to engage) in the material transformation of the place and of ourselves. For it is not a matter of improving how we self-organize but rather undoing what grounds the very possibility of improvement, the constitutive lack that motorizes value, and the total violence needed to secure it. The commitment to this prophetic organization is what differentiates black study from learning. 141 Learning and Black Study In his book Inoperative Learning, Tyson E. Lewis challenges contemporary notions of education as learning by showing how “learning in its current configuration, is a kind of governing of abilities through finance”.211 He recognizes a common thread in all sorts of different approaches to learning, from conservative, to liberal and even revolutionary ones. All of those approaches adopt, without acknowledging, the same form of learning. To describe this form, he cites an introductory book in the philosophy of education by Cornel M. Hamm.212 Hamm defines learning as the intentional process of coming to know as a result of experience. Experience is the condition for learning, but it requires both an intention (an object) and mastery (an objective), thus requiring a standard, a way of measuring the progressive mastering of the object.213 He describes the form of learning through an equation: I(ntention) + S(tandard) + A(ctualization) = M(easurable outcome).214 He gives the example of learning how to swim. “To recap, one’s swimming abilities can be measured in terms of speed and precision in order to improve, maximize efficiency, and thus meet one’s personal swimming goals. Learning enables us to change our state from one of ignorance (not swimming) to knowledge (swimming). There is a passage from a potentiality (for swimming) to an actuality (swimming as such).”215 Learning is thus a kind of economy, an investment into the future actualization of a potential, which works as a kind of financial and logistical operation. He reads Paulo Freire's metaphor of pedagogy as a bank as "a dialectical image where learning economies and financial 211 Tyson E. Lewis, Inoperative Learning: A Radical Rewriting of Educational Potentialities (London: Routledge, 2018), 3. 212 Hamm, C. Philosophical Issues in Education (New York: Falmer Press, 1989), cited in Lewis, 2. 213 Lewis, 2. 214 Ibid. 215 Ibid. 142 economies become indistinguishable".216 Freire indeed refers to the school as a bank, not as a factory. The student invests in the promise of education and comes to the teacher in need of credits. Their relation is fundamentally unequal, and it creates a relation of power and subordination, establishing a kind of creditor-debtor relation between the teacher and the student. For Freire, the teacher fills the student with knowledge, but the student never "owns" that knowledge, only borrows it on credit. The student is present in the relationship only as "receiving, filling, and storing the deposits".217 Lewis analyzes this deep investment as a key producer of subjectivity, for the banking education does not produce only a worker but an investor. It produces the subjectivity of a life-long learner, "poised between a potentiality to act (based on a line of credit) and an impotence to not act (frozen by paralyzing debts)."218 Lewis asks how to disinvest from this endless cycle of credit and debt, and he turns to study and “bad debt.” Harney and Moten indeed decouple credit and debt by considering credit a “means of privatization and debt a means of socialization”.219 Lewis reads their "bad debt" as the debt that refuses to pay, that suspends the relation between credit and debt and thus disinvests from both credit and interest. He calls bad debt, inoperative debt, for it renders inoperative the credit-debt cycle and thus the economy of learning.220 Lewis goes on to develop an idea of inoperative learning using Giorgio Agamben ideas of “im-potentiality” and situates his project in a “larger movement in educational philosophy toward a weak philosophy, [...] in order to theorize learning as not learning.”221 216 Ibid., 20. 217 Ibid., 21. 218 Ibid., 22. 219 Ibid., 23. 220 Ibid., 24. 221 Ibid. 5. 143 Another way of reading “bad debt” though, is to read it as “real debt, the debt that cannot be repaid, the debt at a distance, the debt without creditor, the black debt, the queer debt, the criminal debt. Excessive debt, incalculable debt, debt for no reason, debt broken from credit, debt as its own principle.”222 Or through Denise Ferreira da Silva reading of Dana’s obligation—the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred—to save the life of her Slave Owner ancestor as an "unpayable debt".223 On one hand, Dana's debt is not hers to pay, for she did not incur it. It was not dependent on her choices, while at the same time, that debt is the condition of possibility of her own existence. This kind of real debt does not come from credit or a previous investment but is already given. At once it structures and enables existence. Is there really a choice or a possibility to suspend and disinvest from such debt, to "prefer not to"? This kind of real debt is already beyond measure and detached from credit. It is a cut that exposes the theft and violence that sustains the debt-credit cycle. Could that cut be our studio, the place in/through which we study? Can our study echo and augment the materiality of our shared dis/possession? I appreciate Lewis's proposal because it helps me to see the classroom as a space that could be framed in ways that can host a different kind of rehearsal. Lewis suggests the rehearsal of a suspension and disinvestment from the economy of learning. I could see there the rehearsal of a kind of sociality that temporarily uses that space but that proliferates in all directions in time and space. But how to perform such a circling, framing, or delimiting of the spacetime of study (be it a classroom or a studio) without remaining within the pedagogical project that inevitably presupposes and reproduces a subject? In Lewis's case, the risk would be that both students and teachers are still rehearsed as Subjects of judgment, now capable of even more collective "self- 222 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 61. 223 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 14. 144 control'' through their capacity to divest emotionally from credit while working for the economy of learning. In my case, with Studio Practice, the risk would be to rehearse all those ways of gathering, reading, and knowing as kinds of gregarious activities that only expand the vocabulary of the subject without challenging its very constitution. Here is precisely where the difference between learning and study lies for me. Besides differing in form, as Lewis accurately describes, they also differ in their fundamental commitment to material (elemental) change, given by study's prophetic organization. The commitment of study, which according to Harney and Moten is always black study, is "to tear this shit down and build something new," for it is bad for all of us.224 When I ask if the cut of real, unpayable debt could be our studio, I am asking how do we come together to think and feel in/through/across the violence and the wound it exposes, how to re/de/compose it (and us) in the process?225 In my personal experience disinvestment always comes from a kind of heartbreak. Investment in an idea, a project, an attachment, a place or anything else is to me a matter of love, but I think about love, with Harney and Moten, as something that releases you, sets you adrift, for it makes and unmakes you, materially, at the level of the flesh. They talk about hapticality as another word for love, "this is love for the shipped, love as the shipped".226 What if the studio was the place we could go through “heartbreak” together,227 without trying to fix each other or make it better, but rather embracing its hold, in study, moving through the many layers, 224 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 10. 225 The ethical commitment for such a practice is to make comprehensible and work towards the realization of decolonization: “the restoration of total value expropriated from Native Lands and Slave bodies under total violence” so that the debt may be settled by those who own it. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 273-275. 226 Harney and Moten, 99. 227 I think about Denise Ferreira da Silva's description of the “World as we know it" as the heartbreak that can gather us in study anytime and anywhere, because it is in time and everywhere. It would make the practice of decolonization the commitment of any study. 145 resonances, and implications (emotional, intellectual, political, and social) that hurt hosts, at once feeling how bad the present is (for all of us) and rehearsing ways of being together that play and invoke a future that we cannot yet imagine but we may perhaps begin to feel through our "prophetic organization". Part Two: The Practice I have been a guest teacher in several Fine Arts, Design and Choreography Master’s programs across Europe since 2015, and each time I am invited to teach, I propose a Studio Practice instead: a specific experiment that gathers us in study. Rather than teaching a workshop on a specific subject or devising a course, I always try to set up situations that are mutually inspiring, generative, and horizontal. Instead of considering teaching as a transactional agreement in which the one who knows transmits knowledge to the ones who supposedly do not yet know, I begin from the assumption that everything is already there in the place, the people, the bodies, the experiences, knowledge and associations of each and any thing partaking in that situation. "Teaching" then becomes an occasion to enter into study with each other, to exchange tactics and methods we are familiar with, to question and mix them, to speculate on new or other ways of doing and thinking that emerge from our conversations and our attempts. It is to establish a level of complicity and wonder that makes experimentation possible, that gives ourselves and each other permission to try things out, but also a level of sensibility that can break and unmake the kind of automatic responses and normative forces that compose us, the space and our sociality. I directly experiment with the form of the class by proposing a Studio instead, in an attempt to avoid reproducing the hierarchies, value systems, and bureaucracies that implicitly or 146 explicitly structure the institution in which the class takes place. I am interested in exploring what kind of other movements and arrangements study could take while considering the specific context and moment of the programs I visit, so that I, as much as the students, can experience and experiment with the sociality of our encounter. Studio Practice: On Problems As an example of such a Studio Practice, I would like to present and reflect upon one session I set up at an Academy of Fine Arts central Europe, which took place over the course of five days in January 2023. I conceived of this studio as an initial experiment in approaching the studio as a place of collectivized heartbreak by proposing that we begin our study from "problems". Both recalling how the crisis opens up the possibility for reading in Poethical Readings and how the political problems initiate the sessions of Political Therapy, I wondered to what extent the issues we have with our own work and creative process can help us generate the shape and content of our study. Instead of planning before a topic, deciding on an issue or texts we should read, or practices and techniques we should learn, what if we could trust that those are already there, and they will appear if and whenever needed? As I narrate the evolution of our collective process day by day, it will be evident how by day four, we figure out that "performance" is our topic and begin a more focused, although unplanned, study—asking the very broad question of "what is Performance?" A week before our sessions, I wrote the following email to the students with whom I had never worked before. 147 Dear (Name of the Program) Masters, I am writing to you to introduce a little of my intentions and loose plans for next week. I am currently developing ways of approaching study as a form of making art– and artmaking as a form of collective study. I call it Studio Practice and it experiments with different modalities each time it happens, and I would like to try something with you! I propose that we begin our study starting from the "problems" that our current work and research present. What if sharing the unresolved, unclear, or problematic aspects of our work can help us formulate questions from which we can begin our study? I am curious about the ways we can make ourselves available to each other and to the questions themselves. The formulation of the questions will enable specific readings, practices, conversations, and experiments that we will devise through a generative approach towards our questions. What are the practices, resources and knowledge that are available to us, or that are already in the room, or in potential in our imagination, and how do we engage them? How do we share and move through them with ease, presence, and curiosity? How do we give ourselves and each other permission to experiment? We will move through different arrangements, working together in a large group, meeting individually, working in smaller groups or anything else that may come. On the first day I would like each of us to present our research: we can offer a general approach to our practice, or we can focus on a specific work or project we are working on. I propose that we try to foreground the open questions, the problematic aspects, the 148 insecurities and loose ends they present. Instead of fulfilling the usual format and expectation of giving a sleek presentation of how amazing and unique our work is, we can give space to what we do not yet know about what we are doing, what we are not sure about, and even what we may be afraid of, if we feel comfortable enough sharing that with each other. Emotional problems we may have with our work are as welcome as conceptual ones! Let's keep each presentation to around 20 min (max) and keep 10 min to discuss and collectively formulate possible questions. We will start on Monday at 10 am, have a warm-up and introductions, and then we can begin! Looking forward to studying together soon! Valentina Day one We meet on Monday at 10 a.m. in a classroom space with a big table in the center of the room around which we can all sit. Everyone brought something to eat and drink, so we begin by having breakfast together, sharing our names and pronouns and chatting about how we are going to study together. They share their happiness in receiving my proposal because they rarely have space to focus on the problematic aspects of their work. They say they are especially happy to think more in depth about their individual questions collectively. However, they question how we can create enough safety in the space while sharing those issues because the situation could easily turn hurtful if it were to go into excessive critique. I reply by clarifying that critique alone 149 is not enough, and definitely, it is not the point of our study. Although the capacity for critique is sometimes equated with the capacity for thinking or has become a way to signal how smart one is in the social dynamics of the classroom, there are many other ways to approach artwork and to study with it. The proposal here is to assume that everything is valid simply because it exists: it is there, someone is making it or talking about it, that is already enough. Our critical thinking then is not dedicated to uncovering the truth of the matter, determining the validity of the question, or of the work; rather it is dedicated to creating ways to discuss the issue, breaking it apart, reassembling it, turning it upside down, ways to move it and move with it. In other words, we only try to sense and make sense of the problems and questions each brings. We continue talking about the impossibility of total safety in the act of sharing something, since sharing anything with anyone is a potential opening to vulnerability–both to pleasure (when we share with someone who gets our work and connects with it, for example) and to pain (when we share with someone who may critique us heavily or even or despise our work). In a way, we can consider vulnerability as the general condition of existing and being alive, and yet we can still try to hurt each other as little as possible. Beyond our individual intentions, we ask ourselves what else we can do collectively to avoid reproducing the value structures and habits that usually constitute the space of the classroom. We come up with the idea of writing a score that could guide our common intention and that could accompany us throughout the week. As we continue to discuss, we assemble the following score: Vulnerability Score - Be generous - Be attentive to how you feel and how other people feel as you speak (or don’t speak) 150 - Allow for opacity (notice your need for clarity, when, how, and towards what or whom it arises) - Dive into any problem with/through your interest - Establish a safe gesture (we decide that performing multiple pinky crunches will stop the situation no matter what is happening) As we write down the score, there is a request for different times to coexist. Especially if there is to be space for marginalized bodies and positions, we need to allow slower or faster paces, as well as moments of silence. Prompted by this remark, I ask if they had ever done a silent meeting. I explain that it is something I started to practice with various groups since 2013, inspired by the Quakers' religious gatherings, which happen mainly in silence. The meeting starts when any participant begins shaking hands with the other people present. After all the hands are shaken, people sit in a circle and remain silent. People can speak or make sounds or do anything if they feel called to, however nobody can reply directly. Silence should be maintained between statements and no conversation dynamic can be established. The meeting ends when any one of the participants begins shaking hands with another, and all hands are shaken. Without even deciding to do it, someone starts to shake hands and we understand we are doing a silent meeting. The atmosphere in the room is dense, suddenly the silence fills the room, and we are immersed in the unease provoked by the interruption of our constant chattering. The meeting becomes a common reflection on silence, what it evokes and triggers. Some intense 151 personal experiences are shared but the silence holds them well. We stay with the silence, contained and swimming in it for a little over one hour until someone else begins shaking hands. We stop the meeting and break for lunch. After lunch, we meet in the dance studio and the first student presents her work and shares her problem: the feeling of exhaustion from the precariousness of working in the performing arts and from the fear of failure. The conversation ranges from discussing arts funding in Europe to ways of creating mutual support structures, to the more emotional aspects of the issue. We discuss how those forms of external evaluations become internalized, and we formulate as an initial question: What are the metrics of success? The question brings us to discuss value in relation to measurement and to note how those metrics (funding received, audience attendance, published reviews, networking reach, and so on) are indeed a technology of exhaustion. From all these considerations (and more that I cannot recount here), we formulated the question: How to detach (or disidentify) from the metrics of success? Already in this first presentation, it was clear that the vulnerability score was being performed. The conversation was immediately collective.t was not a dialogue between the student presenting and me. Instead, the word circulated easily; everyone was listening attentively and posing questions that allowed the conversation to continue. This shared and sustained attention also meant that the presentations went well beyond twenty minutes and required more energy than expected. We took breaks in between presentations and heard two more students that afternoon, whose questions I will very briefly (albeit reductively) sum up. The second student, a non-binary person of color, described their long durational performances as confrontational acts against societal norms and yet felt that categories through which their body was read would 152 always frame their act as a provocation, and would sometimes just feel re-traumatizing. The ensuing conversation led us to the question: how to perform resistance? The third student shared their practice of performative research within art organizations. We discussed institutional critique, the possibility of queering the mechanics of the institution, and finally we focused on the question, “What is the social performance of art?” As we discuss their question–and the tension between performing the function of the “helper”, or “artist friend” of the institution while also critiquing its violence—we come up with the term “corpsing”, as a verb: “to corpse”, in order to describe how their practice could relate to the institution instead. Day Two The next day we meet again in the dance studio and we begin with a simple physical warm-up in which we practice "staying with the trouble". Starting from any position, the score consists in paying attention to whatever physical discomfort, pain or tension one feels in their body. Instead of stretching or trying to ease it, we stay with it. We pay attention to the physical sensation of discomfort, pain, or tension and if anything, we try to gently increase it until we notice the sensation change. Whenever needed, we can interrupt the sustained attention by pleasurably stretching around like cats. 228 228 This score is a combination of a warm-up from choreographer Jennifer Lacey (or at least my memory of her doing it), and the practice of pretending to be a cat, which I sometimes do when feeling uncomfortable in social situations. 153 We practice for 20 minutes then the fourth student shares their practice. Two main issues are highlighted: one more emotional around performance, “how to regain the joy of performing?”, and one questioning the nature of collectivity: “what is collective work?” The next student focuses their presentation on their problematic relation to discourse. On one hand, there is the discourse around spirituality, which they read about for their performances, which is heavily gendered and which they try to read through a queer, feminist lens. While on the other hand, there is the discourse of philosophy, critical and performance theory, before which they never feel sufficiently eloquent. Discussing both discourses, we begin talking about the materiality of words, their materializing power, and we formulate the question: "how to go about finding the words?". Given the deep quality of listening and conversations we experienced the previous day, we decide to alternate conversations and physical practices, to rest and shift our attention as we take care of our energy level throughout the day. As a shift, we practice Fake Therapy for 13 min 33 sec, during which half of the group treated the other half of the group by following four instructions cards they picked up from the Fake Therapy deck. After the practice, we swiftly transition to lunch break. 229 The next student presentation after lunch follows up on the discussion about words since they mainly write poetry. They begin to question their use of autobiographical material for their poems and their use of the lyrical I, as it tends to make an identity out of their queer and trans 229 Fake Therapy is a practice and a deck of instruction cards on how to perform hands-on healing without knowing how–that is without departing from any specific technique. See Valentina Desideri, Fake Therapy, www.faketherapy.wordpress.com/fake-therapy/. 154 experience. We discuss at length, and we first come up with the question "how to disidentify from that I?", but also "what to share and how?", and "is an audience even needed?". Connecting with the previous line of questions, the next student shares thoughts about her improvisational dance performance practice. She approaches dramaturgy intuitively, which leaves her with the question of "how to talk about performing?" After we discuss her question, we decide to shift registers again, and to swap roles for the Fake Therapy, so that the half of the group which was previously treating the other half, can also get treated. We repeat the practice for 13 minutes and 33 seconds. The last student reads a text he has prepared. He explains that due to his limited financial access, he always must have another job next to his artistic practice. He chose to work for private firms and auditing companies as a consultant, which he integrates to his performative work. We discuss again the place of the audience, since he films and performs in the office secretly, and whatever becomes part of the finished artwork is never the "performance" itself. His concern animated a whole discussion, and we ended up with the very large question: what is performance? A student who presented the previous day, the one questioning how to perform resistance, asks if they can add to their presentation since it had since become clear that their problem was really "how to deal with Anger?" To close the day after everyone had shared their concerns, we begin to map on a piece of paper all the questions, discussing them as we connect, add to, or deviate from them. We make this map: 155 Figure 18 Collective map of problems As we connect the different concerns, we seem to return consistently to the question of performance, what we really mean by it and/or what else it could be. We launch different lines of speculation. What if we thought of art performances as a technology, a tool for sharing something with someone else? How would they shapeshift, depending on what is shared and with whom? And what about invisible performances? The after-effects, the unintended consequences, the social relations a performance creates. We speculate on performance as the intentional making of audiences since it is enough to do anything that directly solicits attention–or just do anything outside of the norms of a given social space–to automatically create an 156 audience. Let's say I start to read a poem aloud in a pub. People will stop, and a circle of void will form around me, filled with embarrassment or appreciation, or both. What if we defined performance by its capacity to create an audience? Could those audiences also be specific collectivities or the making of communities? We look at fear (of failure, of not being articulate enough) and anger (against the systems of valuation, the political situation, normativity, precarity, etc.) as forces to work with, one arresting and the other activating. We wonder how this activating/arresting, positive/negative, +/- relation resonates with the question of how to read the gender binaries inscribed in spiritual literature: does thinking through polarities instead of binaries really help us feel differently about them? We talk about the system of valuation in art, of good and bad art as polarities, and we connect these thoughts with the notion of "corpsing" the institution that we came up with when talking about institutional critique. What would it take to corpse that binary/complementary relation between the terms? Day Three The day starts slow and there is a change of program. We only have the morning together as there will be a performance in the afternoon that the students need to attend. We decide to spend the morning looking at each other's astrological natal charts and to read them in relation to the question each asked. 157 Figure 19 Reading astrological charts We then moved to the classroom, the room with a big table, so that we could make the dance studio available for the artist performing in the afternoon. There we gathered references, texts, images or any material they associated with the discussions we were having, which I had asked them to bring in. As we discussed the various items, we returned to the question of "what is performance?". One of the materials I had brought was the first chapter of the book In the Break by Fred Moten, which I find extremely useful as a critical mapping of performance. We decide to read it together, and I propose a variation of a score for reading a text collectively that was shared by the writer and philosopher Emma Bigè during a workshop I attended in Lisbon. Anyone can begin reading aloud, starting and stopping whenever they want, with no order. They can repeat words, stop reading mid-sentence, or only say a word. Two or more 158 people can read at the same time, forming a chorus of some kind. Any sentence, or word, can be repeated as many times as one wants. The score is about attending to the sound, as much as to the meaning of the words, and to treat reading together as a collective improvisation. We read through the whole text in this way, and the score makes the text accessible even to those who later said they did not really "understand" the text. They were, however, able to grasp and absorb sentences and sounds that resonated with them immediately, in such a way that the text made sense, each grasping something about performance nevertheless. Day Four On the fourth day we decide to focus all together on the question of “What is Performance?” to gather our knowledge on the theory and practice of performance and make a map as we talk. I begin by walking through the notions of performance that Fred Moten discusses in the chapter of In the Break that we read the previous day. I will give a detailed and referenced account of the way I explained the movements of the argument in the text. 159 Figure 20 Collective map: what is performance? In the chapter “The Resistance of the Object”, Fred Moten positions his reading of black performance in “a respectful challenge” to Peggy Phelan’s understanding of performance as an act ontologically rooted in disappearance and irreproducibility.230 According to Phelan, “performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations”.231 Once it does so, it enters the phallocentric regime of the “reproductive representational economy” which, by only valuing the visible (marked) representation, perpetuates the cultural reproduction of 230 Fred Moten. In the Break, 258. 231 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked (London: Routledge, 1993), 146. 160 Western binaries ⁠ and their constitutive asymmetry (i.e. self/other, male/female, mind/body, in which the normative term has always more value).232 According to Phelan, performance, by virtue of its intentional and intrinsic disappearance, is “nonreproductive” in a strictly ontological sense and thus “clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital”.233 The clogging here is not produced through a break, but rather by the coming into being of the unrepresentable and nonreproductive as performance, which becomes the enactment of this ontological claim. Phelan’s understanding of performance therefore highlights the productivity of the act in its capacity to bring something disruptive (the nonreproductive) into being. 234 Fred Moten opposes this reading by recalling the tradition that Judith Butler initiated with her analysis of performativity, which describes the act as not only productive, but always inevitably reproductive. According to Butler “performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate “act,” but rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names”.235 In Bodies That Matter for example, she considers the discourse of “sex” and its performative capacity to materialize bodies. “Sex” functions as a regulatory norm that 232 Phelan, 91. Phelan explains the constitutive asymmetry of this binary as follows: “One term of the binary is marked with value, the other is unmarked. The male is marked with value; the female is unmarked, lacking measured value and meaning. Within this psycho-philosophical frame, cultural reproduction takes she who is unmarked and re-marks her, rhetorically and imagistically, while he who is marked with value is left unremarked, in discursive paradigms and visual fields. He is the norm and therefore unremarkable; as the Other, it is she whom he marks”, 5. 233 Phelan, 148. 234 Phelan makes her project explicit in chapter one of Unmarked where she states: “By locating a subject in what cannot be reproduced within the ideology of the visible, I am attempting to revalue a belief in subjectivity and identity which is not visibly representable. This is not the same thing as calling for greater visibility of the hitherto unseen”, 1. Hence, her project is about claiming an ontological status for the unreproductive, which gains identity and subjectivity without entering representation. 235 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 2. 161 materializes sexual difference to consolidate the heterosexual imperative. This imperative, the “law of sex”, is not given as a fixed form prior to its citation, rather “it is repeatedly fortified and idealized as the law only to the extent that it is reiterated as the law, produced as the law, the anterior and inapproximable ideal, by the very citations it is said to command”. 236 Thus, discourse is performative insofar as it compels the citation of the norm, a citation that simultaneously produces the norm (as if retroactively instituting it) and reproduces the norm (as if the norm already existed), by reiterating it and sedimenting it in time. The productive and reproductive simultaneity of this operation only allows for certain kinds of materializations, namely those which cite the norm–no matter how properly or improperly–while everything else stays unintelligible. “Sex” for example is the norm through which one comes to qualify as a body at all with cultural intelligibility. This norm only makes certain identifications possible while excluding or foreclosing others. Butler explains: “This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject.”237 Although excluded, the abject is not posed as an absolute outside ontologically rooted somewhere beyond or against the subject, but rather it is constitutive of the subject and as such, it is part of it. According to Butler then, performance is more of a production that happens through disappearance (since its appearance is made possible by the disappearance of its constitutive outside), rather than a production that disappears, as Phelan proposed. This production through 236 Butler, 14. 237 Phelan, 3. 162 disappearance happens “through a set of foreclosures, radical erasures, that are, strictly speaking, refused the possibility of cultural articulation”. 238 Fred Moten intervention sides, in my view, with this excessive materiality, that which is refused (and refuses) articulation and that, despite being foreclosed, does not cease to exist. Moten considers the resistance of the object and questions the inevitability of subjection by attending to that which is deemed not valuable and not meaningful. He considers "the historical reality of commodities who spoke—of laborers who were commodities" and registers "the fact—the material, graphic, phonic substance – of the object's speech".239 He thinks with Glissant's creole and Aunt Hester's scream and takes the irreducible materiality of this broken and breaking speech at that which animates black performance.240 The materiality of speech, as breath and sound, as/in black performance, objects and disrupts the protocols of exchange, as it embodies and reproduces a critique of value. This brings us to discuss the use of the term "performance" in business and almost everywhere in neoliberal societies, which also reveals performance's normative force. Jon McKenzie, in his book Perform or Else, brought together the different ways in which performance has been conceptualized in the fields of management, culture, and technology and considers performance the "onto-historical formation of power and knowledge" of the twenty 238 Butler, 8. See also Gayatri Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason for an analysis of how foreclosure is foundational to the institution of the name of “Man”. Borrowing from Lacan, she understands foreclosure as "a much more energetic and successful kind of defence. Here, the ego rejects [verwirft] the incompatible idea together with the affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all." The name of Man inaugurates the affect of being human and with it, forecloses the native informant, which is not merely excluded from humanity (and therefore set “outside” it), but rather comes to constitute humanity as its concealed code. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 4. 239 Moten, 6-10. 240 Frederick Douglass narrates the beating of Aunt Hester in 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Eduard Glissant discusses the creole as the speech and sound of the dispossessed in Caribbean Discourse. 163 and twenty-first century.241 Andre Lepecki, in Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance, acknowledges the constitutive ambiguity of the term which McKenzie first highlighted, and further elaborates performance as "a whole new political condition of power” shaping the neoliberal subjectivity through the constant investment in its “ultimate abstraction: one’s Self”.242 The conversation leads one of the students to bring in Paolo Virno’s conception of virtuosity as the performance of the multitude. In A Grammar of the Multitude, Virno compares the activity of the precarious and flexible immaterial workers in post-Fordist capitalist economies (the multitude) to that of performing artists.243 He considers both their activities "virtuosic". He takes virtuosity from Aristotle, who uses it to distinguish material production (making/labor/poiesis) from political action (action/performance/praxis): "we have labor when an object is produced, an opus which can be separated from action; we have praxis when the purpose of action is found in action." 244 According to Virno, both the activity of the multitude and the activity of the performing artists find their own fulfillment in themselves—for they don’t materialize into a product separate from the producing action-–and they require the presence of others or an audience. However, according to Virno, this distinction between labor and political activity collapses when, in post-Fordist societies, labor becomes increasingly immaterial, and the activity of capitalist production becomes a virtuosic performance. Labor can then be considered a political 241 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else. From Discipline to Performance (London/New York: Routledge, 2001), 18. 242 André Lepecki, Singularities, 8, 10. 243 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Los Angeles: Semiotex(e), 2004) 244 Virno, 53. 164 praxis in itself—for it has an end in itself and operates for an audience or the public sphere—which makes this multitude of virtuosos emerge as a political class. In this analogy Virno specifies that "the score performed by the multitude in the post-Ford era is the Intellect", the generic human faculty.245 For it is the very faculty of thinking and speaking, the communicability and sociality of living bodies that is put to work and extracted as a potentially infinite resource. We connect Virno's virtuosity with Butler's inevitable (re)productivity of the act, and discuss how the general intellect as a score of the multitude makes the Intellect (the human faculty), on the one hand, into that which delimits and organizes the multitude's performance (as a script), and, on the other hand, into that which (re)produces the multitude (as a score) as a real abstraction, or "a thought becoming a thing," as Virno and Marx explain.246 The most famous example of a real abstraction is money. “Money, in fact, embodies, makes real, one of the cardinal principles of human thought: the idea of equivalency.”247 We wonder if this capacity for “making real” or “embodying” thought is also a performance or could provide a possible description of what performance does: making abstraction real. How would this definition inform the way we make art performances? Besides, if performance makes abstraction real, could it also unmake it? These considerations on abstraction reminded me to add to our map the notion of “nonperformance” that Fred Moten discusses in Blackness and Nonperformance, a lecture he 245 Ibid., 64. 246 Ibid., 65. 247 Ibid., 65. 165 gave in 2015.248 Moten introduces the notion of “nonperformance” when referring to a juridical case discussed by Sora Han in her essay “Slavery as Contract: Betty's Case and the Question of Freedom.”249 In 1857, Betty, an enslaved woman who was declared free by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, decides to refuse “freedom” and return to Tennessee with her owners as a slave. This case exemplifies the paradox of contract law where “the transcendental idea of freedom is haunted materially by a notion of free will, which is free precisely because this freedom can be given away”. 250 In giving away her "freedom", in refusing to become a self-possessed individual, Betty engages in nonperformance, which is a term from contract law used to describe the failure to perform one's contractual duties. In the case of Betty, her nonperformance is a refusal to enter the kind of contractual relationship that being a "free" subject, a single being, implied, and thus a refusal of the whole category of what was being offered to her as "freedom". Instead, she returns to her family, effectively refusing what had been refused to her and consenting to what had been imposed upon her. Thinking about the relationship between slavery and freedom as "mutually metonymic" rather than oppositional, Moten reads Betty's nonperformance as a refusal of this false (and yet constitutive) opposition between freedom and slavery, and as an affirmation of the degenerative and regenerative capacity of blackness.251 After we map this theoretical background of performance the question arises: what can performance art do in a society dominated by performance? 248 Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance”. Afterlives | MoMA Live. (Youtube, 2015), www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=G2leiFByIIg. 249 Sora Han, “Slavery as Contract: Betty's Case and the Question of Freedom” Law & Literature. 27 (2015): 1-22. 250 Ibid., my transcription. 251 Ibid. 166 We discuss the possibility for performance art to disrupt the usual protocols of exchange, as well as normative social agreements. We try to give concrete examples of performances that successfully shift the social agreements that govern the contexts in which they are performed, or that produce alternative ones. One student offers the example of Erdem Gunduz, a performing artist who, in response to the brutal police repression of the demonstrations happening in Istanbul in 2013, stood in silence in Taksim square for eight hours, successfully mobilizing people and attention.252 Another brings in the example of a sleepover performance in Berlin. A few starts to talk about a performance they liked but then would disqualify it immediately. We notice how difficult it is to find good examples, as if art performances in their concreteness would all be failing at "really" shifting the protocols of exchange and attention in which they participate. We begin to question the nature of our exercise-–first thinking of a theoretical definition of performance and then trying to fit an actual performance in it-–for it renders performance always unable to exemplify the theory properly. We then decide to drop the exercise and listen to a lecture together instead. The students want to listen to Fred Moten's “Blackness and Nonperformance,” and I propose we use the “erotic listening” score to do so. Erotic Listening is a practice I devised in a Studio Practice session together with master’s Choreography students in France in 2021. It consists in listening to a lecture—originally “The Uses of the Erotic” by Audre Lorde—with the entire surface of your body. Listen to a lecture with your entire body. Move to experience listening with different parts of the body and in different ways. You may attune to the sound of the words, their meaning, 252 “'Standing Man' Inspires Turkish Protesters in Istanbul,” BBC News (BBC, June 18, 2013), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-22949632. 167 the silences, the emotional tone of the room, the broken sound of the recording, or anything else you may be able to pay attention to or feel. Whenever something hits, or profoundly makes sense in any way, you can note it on a piece of paper. We listen to the whole lecture like that, alternating movement, stillness, and writing. Afterward we share our notes and listen to what each has paid attention to. Thanks to this practice we begin to discuss the difference between instances and essences. There is a part of the lecture when Moten says something along the lines that a dance is a performance only if the club is everywhere (or at least that is what one of the students heard), which made us ask: what if performance is just an instance of something that is ongoing? Instead of assuming performance as having an essence (and always failing at that, or staying an embarrassment, a failed approximation of an idea or a definition), can we think of performance as just an instance of some relationships, conversations, practices, and materialities that are ongoing and that at times become an act, a piece, a work? Always just a possible composition of an ongoing movement. I asked them to come back the next day with an example of a work they made or that they are making, and to present it as an instance of whatever is ongoing beneath, before and through it. The guiding question was “what is your work an instance of?” Day Five As we only have the morning session to close our study, we begin immediately with a round of presentations answering the question: what is your work an instance of? All sorts of things come up: a list of fragments, a collage of contracts with institutions, "each and every moment when I am not doing something for someone else", dust, an old text that 168 gets fractured and reassembled again and again…. We just listen to each other without commenting. It begins snowing heavily outside, the mood is quiet and spacious after all the talking and thinking of the previous days, and we watch the snow covering the forest surrounding us for a while. As we idly hang out watching the snow, I remember that the next day is a new moon in the sign of Aquarius. I ask if we can continue to imagine what the ongoing movement that our work is an instance of, and to formulate it as a kind of invocation. Since the new moon is the beginning of the Moon cycle, we could literally seize the moment and close our study with a new moon action to remember and invoke all that partakes in/as our work. We begin discussing what the action should be. I propose that we take time to contemplate all that comes up and then draw or write on a piece of paper whatever our invocation will be. We discuss what to do with the papers, if we should burn it and let it sublimate in the air, or if we should dissolve it with snow, or bury it in the ground. We finally decide to go for a walk through the forest surrounding the academy. We each find a tree we like or a place we are drawn to, we ask the place for permission to bury our paper there and to plant the seed of the work to come. We wait for each other until everyone has planted their invocation, we re-gather in the middle of the forest. We thank each other for this week and say goodbye. 169 Figure 21 View of the forest Reflections Given its ephemeral nature, I can only share here a partial narrative of our Studio Practice sessions: the sequences of events, the scores that we engaged in, and the general lines of conversations we have entered. Even the maps we drew remain opaque to anyone who was not in the room since they are only material supports for our conversation rather than visual representations of it. Reflecting on the practice through this specific example, I notice two 170 elements that I believe are key to my approach to teaching as study: the "objectivelessness" of our study and its improvisational quality. Of all the questions we raised or the practices we tried, we never answered or resolved any of them. Both questions and practices only generated more questions and/or more practices. There is a tendency in the movement of our study to abandon the topic, or to deviate, rest or get distracted just when we exhaust what we can immediately know or say about the question at hand. Our study stays objectiveless, failing to produce a successful strategy towards setting standards, measures or criteria that would allow us to organize our knowledge rigorously, and thus it also fails at producing any "proper" knowledge about the issue we raise. This is only a failure if we assume the economical form of learning that Tyson Lewis describes in his book Inoperative Learning, which I introduced earlier in this chapter. However, the improper and objectiveless quality of our study takes on a different meaning when read through/as black study. Tracing the history of black educators in Fugitive Pedagogies, Jarvis R. Givens remarks how any knowledge that is not productive of the current order is not just “improper” but suspicious and degraded, if not actively suppressed.253 Its study is fugitive as it steals away from and refuses the official protocols of learning. In the session I described, we begin with problems, and we stay with problems. We do not solve them, nor provide better descriptions of the issues we formulate. We only collectivize them and move through ways of sensing them. Literally feeling them—their larger political resonance in our most immediate sensations—we may suddenly feel our most naturalized response or 253 Jarvis R. Givens Discusses ‘Fugitive Pedagogy’ with Joshua Bennett. Accessed 8 May 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2ZRwyseLVI. 171 immediate sensation in/as the resonance of a political or philosophical structure that constitutes us. I consider this way of moving in/through things, this sensing (sensing and sense-making) to be an aesthetic practice. It may not produce any knowledge as such, but it does produce experiences and experiments that generate specific modes of being together that can potentially transform the ways we go about knowing and living. Through the informality of social life and collaborative artmaking, I observed how "new" ways of doing or thinking about something would emerge out of very messy, populated, and sometimes instantaneous processes. Everything literally counts: a misunderstanding, hearsay, a previous experience, making correspondences, an intuition, a coincidence. How did all those ways of going about knowing get excluded from "proper" knowledge production? How can we consider formal analytical thinking as just one score for knowing, among and along many others? What are the different movements and kinds of attention that those scores generate? To insist on remaining objectiveless in our thinking and doing in the studio is also a way to remain open to improvisation and to the prophetic rehearsals that approaching study as a collective and collaborative practice can initiate. The collective is not only the people taking part in the studio, rather the improvising ensemble is composed by everything and anything that happens to enter its composition: it is elemental. A coincidence, a memory, a mistake, a reference, a feeling, a stone, the snow, a book, they are all improvising too: they move in/through/as our attention. Once we feel that moving with them and with each other is study, then study continues well beyond the confines of the studio, or the practice, and its objectivelessness too is only one possible score for its generative movement. 172 Chapter 5: Performance Studies In this chapter, I focus on how my experience in European experimental contemporary dance shapes my understanding and practice of performance, and I share a first attempt at a new practice of performance-making that approaches performance as study. In laying out the theoretical considerations that inform this approach, I first trace the trajectory of how I stopped making performances by describing the last piece I performed on stage in 2011. I explain how this stage “failure” has informed my practice and led me to delve deeper into the kind of study that goes on in the dance studio before the performance, which informs my approach to performance as study. Attending to performance as a practice allows me to foreground attention as another key element (besides movement) that is rehearsed and mobilized through dance and choreography. I describe how attention had been conceptualized since its beginning as an “economy” and question how the tools, practices, and experiments that are constantly devised in dance and choreographic practices can help us question this conception. Towards approaching those questions, I share an initial experiment I tried at GfZK, a museum in Leipzig, in the frame of Filipa Cesar and Diana McCharty's exhibition and film There is Always Dance in Abundance. The invitation was to gather in study around some of the notions and practices of abundance that appear in the film, and to experiment with a practice of performance that is a practice of collective study too. The event was titled Performance Studies: On Abundance and it took place in four three-hour sessions over two days. I share in this chapter a partial narrative of each session, accompanied by images documenting our practice. Finally, I close the chapter with a reflection on the open proposition that Performance Studies is trying to make. On one hand, it proposes to take the public and staged situation of performance as an occasion for study, while on the other hand, it proposes that perhaps what performance "does" is 173 that it studies, for it produces modes of being together, before and beyond whatever object it may produce. Part One: Theoretical Considerations The Trajectory The last time I performed on stage was in 2011. It was titled 'SO WHAT' and co-created with Zoë Poluch. The performance attempted to transform the theatre into a place for study: a site to study how to coexist in an 'idiorhythmic' way. In his 1977 lectures at Collége de France in Paris entitled Comment Vivre Ensemble (How to Live Together) Roland Barthes shared a fantasy: to pursue a non-contradictory way of living alone together.254 He called this an 'idiorrhythmic' community and theorized six conditions that describe the ideal situation for this community: - to share a common goal - to be a minimum of three people - to know the limits - to be able to lose and integrate members at any time - to have no subgroups - to ensure that all members feel free and important Assuming that these conditions are already naturally fulfilled in the theatre was the point of departure for SO WHAT, which was first shown in Spring 2011 at PAF and at MDT, a theatre in 254 Roland Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble. Cours et séminaires au Collège de France (1976-1977). (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2015). 174 Stockholm, Sweden. It was then performed in spring 2012 in Madrid, Spain at the "Impresentables Festival" and in the autumn at the "House of Dance" in Oslo, Norway. Alone on a bare stage dressed in a green jumpsuit, I would introduce to the audience the concept of "idiorrhythmic communities" and Barthes' outline for it, as I moved in slow motion while talking at normal speed. I then would propose that we collectively inhabit the space of the theatre as such for the next hour or so of the performance: whoever wanted to leave could leave, and those who wanted to stay could follow their own rhythm and do whatever they wanted. We were interested in ways of activating the personal and non-written rules inherent in that specific site of co-existence and to attend to the divergent curiosities emerging in this group called the audience. The performance was meant to create an experience where one could find, impose and preserve lines of thought and action at their own pace, according to their own desires, inside of a group. However, that never really worked. The conversation would always remain at a "meta" level, discussing the concept of idiorrhythmic communities and the performance itself. No matter how smooth, strange and non-confrontational the invitation was, I felt I was always keeping the audience "hostage" to some extent since its framing as a staged, frontal theatre performance kept the audience in their place, both literally in their seats and symbolically in their role. Indeed they would stay there waiting for a plot twist, or the next scene, so even if they wanted to leave, they felt they could not leave and they resented me. On the one hand I found that interesting, and most of the time during the performance we would end up talking about internalized rules, the rules of the stage, the roles of the performer and the audience, but also directly about the irritation of not having expectations met. However the intense feeling of attention and resentment towards me, and of tension in the room, was too much to hold on my own, and the attempt to shift the theatre's usual "protocols of exchange" just by asking for it directly during the piece, did not 175 work. I thus decided to stop performing the piece and to stop performing on stage all together, since I did not know how to deal with its overbearing framing of everything happening on stage as "representation": I felt I had tried and failed.255 Figure 22 Screenshots of the video recording of SO WHAT at MDT, Stockholm, 2011 This stage "failure" led me to engage more deeply in less public practices, such as Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, to lead Studio Practice sessions instead of teaching or to perform Poethical Readings, which although public, do not create or presuppose an "audience" as such. Indeed the readings are just "a doing" rather than a "showing doing", to use Richard Schechner's distinction.256 They require a kind of joint attention, for someone can only follow the readings by reading with us, by looking at the cards, observing the details, matching the nods, gestures and half sentences uttered as we read, with what they see. In other words, the readings require participation. Spectating the readings as if they were a performance would only impede the "doing" (reading together), for the reading would remain utterly incomprehensible, and 255 I am thinking about failure here with Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure, embracing this specific failure as a kind of unbeing or unbecoming (unbecoming a successful choreographer, for example), which opens up a different relation to knowledge. See Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011). 256 Richard Schechner makes a distinction between "being" (i.e., existence itself), "doing" (i.e., any activity), "showing doing" (i.e., displaying doing) and "explaining showing doing" (i.e., performance studies). For him performing is always both a "doing" and a "showing doing". Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (Milton: Routledge, 2020), 4. 176 interactions would either not happen or would have to be performed as a "showing doing" of intervention.257 The public performances of Poethical Readings taught me about attention, and that if we were ever to be able to study in the theatre, we needed perhaps a third element (at least), something "that is read" or that triangulates attention. I realized how in the performance in 2011, I had set up a binary confrontation between me and the audience which highlighted the separating line of the proscenium, bringing so much attention and symbolic value to it, that crossing it, all of a sudden, became an "act", a big deal.258 When thinking about performance not in opposition to, but in continuation with representation, I see how representation operated in that performance. In an attempt to break away form representation I “staged” a dialectic. By “staging”, I mean the framing, the circumscribing of an act or a situation that allows us to look at that thing 'as' performance. In that case, the framing was given by the fact that the performance happened in a theatre setting and by the specific way I directly addressed the audience, which staged our shared situation and my proposal as a request for a self-reflective, proto-political "act". The dialectic was set up between A. (the conventions of the theatre) and B. (my proposal to negate or ignore those conventions and instead practice the idiorrhythmism that the space technically allowed), which should have been sublated in C. - which could be any sort of development or integration of A and B, some kind of participative performance. What I find interesting here, even though it is not what I had initially intended, is how the “staging” of this dialectic created a representation of a political situation, rather than an occasion to experiment together. First of all, I addressed the audience members as political subjects (formally universal 257 I think this was exactly the problem of SO WHAT the 2011 performance I just described. The request for interaction was so explicit that any possible action anyone would take was already highlighted and circumscribed as a performance, a "showing doing". 258 The proscenium is the frontal part of the stage (what would be in front of the curtain in a classical theatre space) which establishes a dividing line (or fourth wall) between the performers and the audience. 177 and equal), then I brought attention to the rules that governed our co-habitation, and porposed them to take action to change them. What resulted was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a political debate and not study, as we had wished. How can the framing of an intelligible zone that a performance inevitably delineates gather us in study instead of gathering us as an audience, experiencing, spectating or witnessing whatever is being brought to attention? What can a staged or otherwise framed performance afford, and how can those affordances offer the occasion for study? I am at a very initial stage of formulating these questions and at the moment I am mainly moved by the intuition that performance, as an artistic practice, has something to offer to study, or rather that it can be a Studio, both a context for and a specific arrangement of study. I provisionally call this practice of "performance as study" Performance Studies, partly because I think it is funny, but also because it seriously describes what I am trying to do. Indeed this inquiry emerges from, and in dialogue with, performance studies as an academic field, and the title of this practice is an invocation of its most basic intention: to approach study as a performance and performance as study. Similarly to Fake Therapy where setting the intention of healing could guide us towards an open and ongoing experimentation of what healing might be, I hope that Performance Studies's intention to consider performance as study can guide us towards an open and ongoing experimentation of what the field of Performance Studies might be. Performance as Study I have referred to my sense that performance has something to do with (or has something to offer to) study an intuition, however I might as well call it “a deep-seated knowledge” since it comes directly from my experience within contemporary dance. Although I stopped trying to make dance performances in 2011, my practice has always remained in dialogue with dance (i.e., 178 North American and European experimental contemporary dance). It uses and contributes to the set of practices, discourses and approaches that circulate within that field. As I have already mentioned, what I have always loved the most about dance is the kind of study that goes on in the dance studio. Not only its sociality, but also its praxis, the specific ways in which theory and practice come together in the studio, where criticality and creativity engage in mutual revision. Andre Lepeki has written extensively about how contemporary choreographers and performance artists directly engage philosophical and critical thinking in their work. In his books, Lepecki generously unfolds the many layers of thinking that are inscribed in and generated by the performances he writes with, insisting on how directly and intentionally those artists keep questioning what performance is and can be through their work.259 Each performance is in a way an experiment, it does something, or at least it tries to. Each artist has their own way to go about preparing, rehearsing and making a work, but even when the work is a solo, making a dance performance is rarely a solitary task. Text, dramaturgs, friends, conversations, musicians, costume or light designers, test audiences and much others usually populate the rehearsal studio. Personally, I have always been interested in what happens before the performance, in the rehearsals, in the preparatory, preliminary phases of the performance, especially its open-ended, slightly aimless experimentation. The process of making can indeed start from anywhere: a text, a concept, an image, a practice. No matter where it begins, in order to go on, some things have to be tried, discussed, modified, discarded, questioned. The process is an inquiry, it keeps asking questions, "staging" them, moving with and through them, thinking and discussing. 259 See André Lepeki, Exhausting Dance (2006) and Singularities (2016). In both books, Lepeki articulates his theory about performance by thinking with concrete performances that directly engage similar questions. I read his thinking "with" and "along" those performances (rather than "about" them) as a testimony to the shared quest that both his writing and those works articulate, each in their singular way. 179 Philosophical and critical texts are part of the process alongside everything else, fiction, movement practices, random curiosities, jokes, coincidences, all possibly valid, all shared and negotiated as possible tools, or toys. Then, more or less gradually, the thing coheres into a piece, a performance, an "object" to be appreciated by a "subject". How can this moment of formalization be just an instance of materialization of an ongoing questioning? How would a performance need to be instantiated in order for its before to remain open and cared for? I am not only thinking about what goes on before the performance takes place temporally, but also about what goes on before the performance spatially: all that stands before it, facing it, hosting and holding all that could potentially and/or virtually happen and be.260 I do not consider this space before the performance as its "unconscious", or constitutive outside, or a kind of creative raw material that perhaps this Performance Studies practice could even equip us to better "extract" (as it studies it). I consider this before the performance, this Studio, an ongoing confrontation – which might as well feel like an embrace – in which the excessive materiality of our doing resists the law of its own formalization, shifts attention to the elemental sociality that is offered in/as study. What if performance would refuse its discursive power of materialization (via formalization) and be approached as a practice of study, that is a practice of a “prophetic organization” of life in common? How can the instance of performance be an occasion to play with its operations, to sense their sociality and to de/re/compose them, as they integrate and move life in common rather than represent it or discursively materialize it? I am interested in approaching performance as something that gathers us in study in specific ways. If we think 260 Including the audience that literally stands in front of the performance. I am also interested in the kind of sociality that the theatre (or any other space) could support if performance was taken as study. 180 about performance as “a whole new political condition of power” then we can assume that both its normative and disrupting operation are at work everywhere:261 Can the conditions in which we happen to gather – a street, an event, an art space, a school, a dinner, a forest, a performance – be approached as a Studio? Can the contradictory, ambivalent, paradoxical, impossible operations that compose a given Studio be sensed, attended to, read, de/re/composed in/as study? Could that be our performance? Could performance art practices provide some tools towards such study? What kinds of concepts, practices, improvisational knowledges, sensibilities and imaginations that have been developed in and through performance-based art can be returned to our life in common? Attention Highlighting the centrality of movement to the overall project of modernity and to the development of logistics, André Lepecki notes "how dance and choreography, as knowledge formations on the conditions of mobility, self-mobility, and generalized mobilization, become critical to address and counter the kinetic impetus in neoliberalism".262 In addition to the movement of bodies and things, dance and choreography also yield knowledge on the underlying and ongoing motion and production of attention. Throughout my experience in experimental contemporary dance, I always considered attention as the matter of performance: literally as the stuff, the substance that a performance is made of. Whether you are performing or watching someone else perform, what is literally moved is attention. Be it gazes, gestures, scores, lighting, sensations, intentions or mistakes, everything channels attention towards, or away from that 261 Lepeki, Singularities, 8. (Italics in original) 262 Lepeki, Singularities, 5. 181 which comes to be sensible, or not. Performances – understood both as discursive practices and as performative acts – rehearse and plot attention in specific ways that make some "bodies" come to matter, while others not. This intuition and observation made me approach performance as the (un)plotting of attention. In 1890, William James, offers a definition of attention in his textbook The Principles of Psychology: Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, and consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.263 Since the beginning of its conception, attention has been understood in relation to property – as a “taking possession by the mind” thanks to the exclusion of unimportant elements – and to propriety – as the opposite of confused and erratic states. Emerging as a scientific discourse, the study of attention required measurement, categorization, and experiments that shaped the conception of attention as a capacity/property of the individual, a resource that could be managed and improved. Tracing the emergence of “attention economy” in his book The Ecology of 263 William James, Principles of Psychology, Vol 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 404. 182 Attention Yves Citton begins with Gabriel Tarde, who, in 1902, was already denouncing the “exhaustion of attention” that industrial capitalism imposed on the workers, considering their repetitive and monotonous work “a new subtler form of torture”.264 He also noticed how advertisements relied heavily on attention, interrupting and calling attention to sell the overabundance of commodities industrial capitalism was producing. In 1969 Herbert Simon established the equation that an abundance of information produces a scarcity of attention, and the notion of “information overload” was popularized.265 By the end of the 1990s, the debate on the "economy of attention" takes off, and in 2001 The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business – a seminal work in management studies – was published.266 With the advancement of algorithmic technologies, social media, and big data, attention is fully integrated in/as an economy, not only as a resource but also as a producer of value. Citton suggests a shift from an economy of attention towards an ecology of attention. He considers attention a collective phenomenon rather than an individual one, "as I am only attentive to what we pay attention to collectively."267 He turns to the idea of joint attention in psychology to think about how the attention we pay in small groups and in co-presence is necessary for survival and for individuation. As such, he proposes to approach attention as an ecology so that we may care for, and have a certain level of control over the processes of trans-individuation that our collective attention, in its various registers, produces. He highlights the importance of places of joint attention, such as the classroom and live performances, for "our 264 Gabriel Tarde, Psychologie économique [Economic Psychology] vol. 1. (Paris: Alcan, 1902), in Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention (Oxford: Wiley, 2017), 5. 265 Citton,6. 266 Thomas Davenport and John Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 2001), in Citton, 6. 267 Citton, 17. 183 aesthetic and pedagogical experiences have precisely this vocation of opening up these kinds of spaces for meta-attentional reflection."268 Rather than instrumentalizing those moments of "joint attention" to produce better forms of individuation (thanks to trans-individual or inter-subjective approaches), I am interested in questioning and dwelling in those moments of "joint attention" as occasions for study that may help us undo fundamental assumptions, such as the separability between interiority and exteriority that attention secures. For William James, in fact, attention is a faculty of the subject that "takes possession" of external objects, the assumed obviousness of the experience ("everybody knows what attention is") secures the interiority of the subject. For Yves Citton, more than a century later, attention "should be thought of as an interface: it is what links a subject to the object it has selected in something external to it. So, it is irrelevant to wonder if it should be situated on one side rather than the other."269 Whether attention comes from the free will of the subject or from external stimuli, attention constitutes the boundary separating interiority and exteriority, thus securing interiority nevertheless. How can dance and choreography, with their knowledge of (and endless experimentation with) the practice of attention, help to undo the post-Enlightment plot? Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes how the intrastructure of post-Enlightenment thinking governs the way we go about knowing: relying on formality and efficacy to describe what exists (the World as we know it) while assuming separability, determinacy, and sequentiality as its onto-epistemological pillars.270 I see this intrastructure as an endlessly reproducing plot, a narrative and a pattern but also a 268 Citton, 175. 269 Ibid.. 270 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 58-59. 184 territory, plotting and materializing both subjects and objects by enclosing all that exists within its forms. Can a live performance setting and practice offer tools and context to attend to this intrastructure and undo its plot? Can we use the tools, practices, and experiments that dance and choreography devise as non-linear, implicated, indeterminate ways of going about knowing? How can performance gather us in study? Part Two: The Practice Performance Studies: On Abundance As an attempt to engage with the questions and intuitions I shared above, I have devised an initial experiment towards making a collaborative performance that is also a study group: Performance Studies: On Abundance, which I am presenting as a fourth instance of my Studio Practice. It was held on January 27th and 28th 2023, at GfZK Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig, during Filipa Cesar and Diana McCarty's exhibition. The exhibition featured a film shot with Cesar and McCarty's students at the Merz Academy, titled There Is Always Dance in Abundance. The film was partially shot during a one-week workshop I held with them at PAF Performing Arts Forum, a self-organized space I co-run with other artists in France, from May 30th to June 4th, 2022. For that workshop, Filipa and Diana had asked me to collaborate on their film by sharing practices and collective modes of working with/through abundance with their students. The resulting film was shown in this exhibition at GfZK in Leipzig, where I was then invited to do an intervention open to the local public. I took this opportunity to propose a first attempt towards this new format that I would like to further develop in the future: a study group that is also a public performance. I formulated my proposal to the institution and potential participants as follows: 185 Performance Studies: On Abundance This will be a first experiment towards a practice of performance that is a practice of collective study too. The invitation is to gather in study around some of the notions and practices of abundance that appear in the film "There Is Always Dance in Abundance" which is currently showing at GfZK Leipzig. You are invited to join a study group that takes the form of a public performance as it attempts to use the performance setting and its specific modes of gathering attention to collectively sense and make sense of abundance. The study group will gather for four sessions over two days, on January 27th and 28th, the last of these sessions will be open to the public. During the sessions we will devise the score for the performance, which will be participatory, improvised, and shifting transversally across different registers and forms of engagement. I am interested in performance as the (un)plotting of attention: whether you are performing or watching someone else perform, what is literally moved and shaped, is attention. Be it gazes, gestures, scores, intentions or mistakes, everything channels attention towards or away from that which comes to be sensible, or not. Performances – understood both as discursive practices and as performative acts – rehearse and plot attention in specific ways that make some "bodies" come to matter, while others do not. They are an ongoing rehearsal of our gendered bodies, of our identities, of our relationships, of our institutions and beliefs. I want to experiment with 186 and experience what other modes of coming together an artistic performance may offer, and how the usual arrangements of attention can be un-plotted. This experiment is part of an ongoing research project which I call Studio Practice which experiments with ways of knowing, ways of sensing and making sense, that are collective and transversal, as they take in consideration and move through different levels of existence (emotional, intellectual, physical and social). This research directly experiments with methodologies and tools that produce new knowledge and produce knowledge differently, or as I would rather say, with tools that gather us in study. I consider the studio not only as the place wherein to study, but as the place that makes study possible through its very specific conditions. In this new experiment "performance" will be our studio, and you are invited to join. Friday, January 27th 10 am – 1 pm: Performance Studies: 1st session in the exhibition spaces (before opening hours) 2 – 5 pm: Performance Studies: 2nd session in the workshop space and in the exhibition buildings (during opening hours) Saturday, January 28th 11 am – 2 pm: Performance Studies: 3rd session in the exhibition spaces (before opening hours) 187 3 – 6 pm: Performance Studies: 4th session open to the public Around ten people signed up to participate in the two days of Performance Studies. Filipa and three of the Merz Academy students who were part of the film, Su Kyoung Lee (Sugi), Patrick Urbani and Konstanze Winter (Koko) also join from Stuttgart. A few days before our meeting, I sent the registered participants a loose plan for our gathering and a few references: Dear participants, the invitation of this workshop is simply to spend two days together in study, gathering and hanging out as we move, read, eat and discuss together. We will begin our study by mapping existing notions of performance, especially tuning into Fred Moten speculations on nonperformance. We will move through various practices of touch, movement, listening and care as ways of sensing and making sense of abundance (as explored in the film "There is Always Dance in Abundance"). We will devise a tentative performance, an instance of our study to be shared with an audience on the last session of our gathering. No preparation nor previous reading is required to participate, I only share some links to texts and lectures that inform this experiment as a gift for inspiration.271 271 I share links to: Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney "Fate Work: A conversation", Ephemera Journal, Vol.13 n.1 (Ephemera Society of America, 2013), p. 159-176. Fred Moten, "Blackness and Nonperformance", Afterlives | MoMA Live. (YouTube, 2015) Fred Moten. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003) 188 Looking forward to gathering soon! Valentina Session One On January 27th, we gather with the workshop participants in the museum at 10am. We begin in the entrance hall, where there is a long table and chairs, a roll of white paper stretched over the table, coffee, tea and biscuits. We begin by introducing ourselves, pronouns, expectations, and reasons for being in the workshop, as well as our general relation with movement practices and level of comfort with using physical touch. All the participants are artists, some are students, some are local artists, some already collaborate with the museum and others are attending an art residency in the city. We are about ten to twelve people. I introduce myself last and I share the premises of our experiment. I explain that I am researching study as a way of making art and artmaking as a form of study. I want to see if the performance situation can be one of the specific ways in which we gather in study. I want to work towards a format that is at once a study group and a performance, creating a situation in which we can easily shift register, from the informal and conversational to the emotional or the intellectual, to the physical and back and beyond. Since we gather around the exhibition for the film There Is Always Dance in Abundance, we will use the film as the "text" we study: we can open it, unfold it, focus on specific elements, follow its trajectory. The film can then be a source, an anchor and an inspiration for our study. Filipa and the students who were part of the film share how the film itself is an assemblage of many pieces: it encodes multiple theoretical texts they studied throughout the year, the contribution of the people they invited to collaborate, the desires and vision of all the students, and even different plot lines within the same film. 189 Figure 23 Still from the film “There is Always Dance in Abundance” I briefly map and explain some ideas of performance that allow us to get to Fred Moten's notion of nonperformance, which is central to this experiment and to the formulation of the question that is guiding our study. 272 In his lecture "Blackness and Nonperformance" Moten discusses Betty's case and reads her refusal of freedom as a "nonperformance" of the contractual agreement that freedom and slavery constitute.273 Her nonperformance stands as a refusal of their false (and yet constitutive) opposition, and as an affirmation of the degenerative and regenerative capacity of blackness.274 I explain how Moten's reflection on the metonymic relation between 272 I use the same map on "What is Performance?" that I had created earlier with students and that I have explained in detail in the previous chapter. 273 Moten refers to a juridical case discussed by Sora Han in her essay Slavery as Contract: Betty's Case and the Question of Freedom. In 1857, Betty, an enslaved woman who was declared free by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, decides to refuse "freedom" and return to Tennessee with her owners as a slave. 274 Fred Moten, "Blackness and Nonperformance". 190 freedom and slavery made me ask if a similar dynamic was also at play with abundance and scarcity, which led me to the question: What becomes of abundance when not related/opposed to scarcity? Isn't the binary scarcity/abundance also a co-constitutive opposition that sustains the racial capitalist mode of production and thinking? What could a nonperformance of abundance be? To explain how this specific question emerged, I share with the group the initial premise of the film and what had happened during the film shoot at PAF, with the help of Filipa and the Merz Academy students who were also present in PAF. When they began shooting the film, the initial premise of the plot (written by the students) was: a group of students in the not-so-far future, whose feelings have been extracted by AI, travel in time in search of abundance. I was a bit skeptical of the plot, yet I understood why Filipa and Diana came to PAF and worked with me. There is indeed a sense of abundance in PAF that is given by the quantity of space, time and resources that are there, available for anyone and with not too many restrictions or rules attached to their use. My work also shares a similarly spacious quality; it is informal, it often uses movement or ways to attend to sensations and to consider them meaningful, which usually feels like an expansion of sorts and may be called "abundant" as an approach. And yet I felt suspicious about the premise of the film plot, which assumed "abundance" to be a purely positive thing, and "scarcity" a kind of lack (in this case, the students' feelings) that could be filled, offering a "happy end" to a form of still violent extraction (by the AI, according to the film plot). I thought it was anyway an interesting problem, so I planned to share some of the practices I work with and that I have already mentioned in the previous chapters, such as Erotic Listening or Political Therapy and through them, problematize the issue. 191 Once we met in PAF and I began sharing these practices though, the issue unfolded on its own. The students from Merz Academy were not all training to be artists, some wanted to be sound technicians, film editors, directors for TV series, costume designers and so on, which meant that most of them felt more comfortable behind the camera and not engaging in too experimental practices while being filmed. I always consider that people may not feel comfortable using touch, moving or dancing when I propose a practice, so I always have alternative approaches, such as using objects instead of hands, or the gaze, sounds, or even just thought, as alternatives to physical touch. However, the discomfort was not only caused by the specific practices I was proposing but mostly by the openness of the process itself: filming and trying things at the same time, making a plan as we go instead of having a detailed script we could just follow. This reaction from some of the students created a split in the group between those who felt able to embrace the openness of the process and those who rejected it, not just out of disinterest but out of discomfort, with all the accompanying feelings such as irritation, fear, confusion and so on. I was amazed at how the binary I was initially suspicious of reproduced itself, placing those who could be open to the process on the side of "abundance", and those who did not feel comfortable with it on the side of "scarcity", which in itself did not feel very abundant, and partially defeated the point. Filipa, Koko, Patrick, and Sugi explained that their time at PAF exposed the "crisis" – the complexities that the whole project and its context carried – but since they all decided to stay and work together nevertheless, they managed to work it out "in the doing", by assuming and navigating the complexity of the situation while still managing to have a good time together. Later during the post-production, they tell me, the crisis continued to unfold but was managed by doing the collective work of negotiating and integrating the different points of view and desires. 192 They consider that the whole film – its structure, its multiple plots and intentional ambiguity – as a testimony to the complexity of the process, which can be read as an unfolding of that crisis. They are also eager to specify that the crisis was not a "bad thing that happened", on the contrary it was very productive, it completely shaped the film, and it could be considered as "abundant" in itself. I completely agree, and I share how that experience stayed with me and kept me thinking to the point of arriving to formulate the question for this session. It made me want to question the idea of abundance and its relation to value: is abundance (inherently positive, a good thing) the opposite of scarcity (inherently negative, a bad thing) and therefore its remedy? Or are they "mutually metonymic", enabling each other in a similar way than freedom and slavery do, as Fred Moten claims?275 Everyone gets the question but none of us has an answer, so we begin our study. We move to the main exhibition room, and I share the score for Fake Therapy: Half of the group treats the other half of the group. The group which is performing the therapy picks four instruction cards from the Fake Therapy deck to begin treating the other half of the group, which is conformably lying on the floor with their eyes closed. The instructions written on the cards are meant as an inspiration for those playing the "therapists" to begin their treatment, rather than as a score to be followed, since the two main indications for the practice are: "set the intention of healing", and "keep yourself in 275 Moten, "Blackness and Nonperformance". 193 a state of not knowing what you are doing". After the first half of the group has treated the other half of the group, we switch roles and repeat the procedure. On one hand, "setting the intention of healing" is an agreement to take care of the other person(s) who are putting themselves in a vulnerable position just by lying there. On the other hand, "setting the intention" is a movement that shifts attention away from whatever may be "wrong" or in need of "healing" in the person(s) being treated, and towards where and how "healing" is already happening. Setting the intention is thus a way to release the will-to-heal (and the pretension of knowing what healing is) and to trust that healing is always going on, and by setting the intention, one may be more able to pay attention to where and how it is happening. What are the processes, the movements, the rhythms, the intuitions, the coincidences that are already taking place which we may attend to as healing?276 The other indication is "Keep yourself in a state of not knowing what you are doing". It encourages the "therapist" to go beyond whatever previous knowledge they may have about the body or any specific healing technique they may use in their life, and to instead use this moment to research what else healing might be. 276 I consider healing here any restorative movement, feeling, action or process that may be happening (in the giver as much as in the receiver or in the room) rather than the resolution of a specific issue. 194 Figure 24 A typical spread of Fake Therapy cards After the practice, people share how much their bodily sensations expanded as they were touched, how strangely secure and focused they felt while actively "not knowing what they were doing". One person reported that she could not tell how much it was herself doing the actions, and how much it just came from somewhere else. We related our experience to our question of abundance by noticing how much something that is almost nothing – a scarcity of an action, just a tiny touch, or even the absence of a touch while feeling the other person next to you – could feel so abundant, so layered and expanding and somewhat infinite. We also noticed how quietly we were speaking after the practice. We were slower and not interrupting each other, as if 'paying attention' continued after the exercise and was still rippling through, materially changing our conversation and shared time. 195 Session Two After lunch we gather again in the exhibition space, we decide to all wear the green jumpsuit used by the characters of the film, which are now hanging as exhibits in the space.277 We initially took them because we thought it was fun to all be wearing the same uniform, and to give the jumpsuit a break from their role as "artworks" and be props again. However, as we were getting dressed, we began talking about how the characters in the film are time-travellers and to question if we should also attempt to travel in time, and if so, where would we travel to in search of abundance? I propose that we use time-travelling in the present as a methodology to study abundance. Rather than going forwards or backward in time, what if we stay right where we are and pay attention to what is here? How many temporalities coexist here? How can we attend to them? What can this exercise tell us about abundance? 277 The green jumpsuits were the costumes used in the film. The fact that this is the same costume I had used in my last piece 2011 is uncanny, but entirely a coincidence. 196 Figure 25 Image of Performance Studies, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu We remember the difference between "essence" and "instance" that I had sketched out in the map about performance earlier in the day when I mentioned Fred Moten's use of the word "instance" in his lecture.278 As an exercise of time-travelling in the present, we decide to look at the space we are in (GfZK Museum) as an instance of something ongoing. We ask the assistant curator, Hanar Hupka, who is there with us, to tell us about the building we are in, the history of 278 Moten, "Blackness and Nonperformance". 197 the institution, and of the place: as we listen, we take note of anything that may answer our question: what is GfZK an instance of?279 After we listen, ask questions and discuss, we share our notes and make a list of the kinds of ongoing movements which make up the instance of GfZK. GfZK is an instance of: • unfenced resources • Claus Werner's ambition fuelled by Dr. Oetker's money • patience • communist expropriation of private property • the soil mineral wealth • a momentary vacuum of power • artists asked to do some useful work • the aesthetics of neoliberalism • reunification of East and West • flexible architecture • accumulated traces • pizza slices lunches • the dream of constant innovation, revised • collaboration 279 Now that I describe the exercise, I wish we had asked instead: what are we an instance of? I feel we should have included ourselves in the question, exploring what "we", those specific people doing that kind of work in that space, are an instance of. I think it would give a different level of implication that is clearly missing from the list of instances we were able to come up with. 198 • institutionalisation processes • countering the fear of contemporary art After the exercise, we decide to try Fake Therapy again but this time without making any distinction between the roles of giver and receiver, so that we may practice giving and receiving at once. This means that "your partner" in the Fake Therapy instruction cards refers no longer to the other person lying down, but to anyone and anything in the space. I have never tried this before, but I am excited to try. We collectively pick four cards for the Fake Therapy deck. We set the intention of healing anything and anyone in the space, including ourselves, giving and receiving at once as we stay in a state of not knowing what we are doing. We do it for 13'33". We are all surprised about how easy it was to perform both giving and receiving at once and to recognize how the exercise is fundamentally a performance practice. The act of lightly paying attention to what you are receiving as you are giving makes the doing precise. If you take for example the action of picking up a book, and you attend to what the book is giving you (weight, texture, heat, title) as you pick it up, it changes how you perform the action. The performance quality of the act becomes not accessory, not too detached (as if you were looking at yourself doing or pretending that there is a "fourth wall", as I was taught in contemporary dance school), not too dramatic and not too self-involved either (as if you were intensely feeling the surface of the book on your fingertips very slowly). We keep talking about the experience, trying to identify what was so specific in that "performance" quality we identified, especially 199 those of us who have trained in performance practice and spent time, at some point in our lives, trying to figure out how to perform, dance or act in front of other people watching. In this specific exercise, the reciprocal and diffused way of simultaneously paying attention to both your action and everything that is involved in it (the air, the book, the observer etc.) – feeling lightly their touch as you touch them (directly or indirectly) – creates a shared space of attention, shared not only between the performer and the spectator but with everything else. We wonder if this practice is like a trick that a performer can use to forget that someone is watching them and be present as they would averagely be in their daily life, or if it really produces a field of some kind. Could paying attention involve some kind of energy exchange, like breathing or touching or hearing does? Would then attending to something or someone materially change its composition to some degree? After all, this movement of paying attention to the many giving and receiving elements, felt like a sort of "augmented reality" or perhaps just an abundant one. As if our attending activity was a way to partake in a larger and speechless conversation that is ongoing at all times. We leave it open as our afternoon session is about to end. Since there is a cooking scene in the film, and conviviality is central to study, I propose to make an onion soup during our public session the next afternoon. Besides the simplicity of the recipe, cutting onions will make us cry, and this well-known theatrical trick will allow us to play with emotions, evoking the feelings that the characters of the film are looking for. One participant reminds us that onions also have strong medicinal properties. They share how they usually sleep with a cut onion next to their bed when they feel they are about to get sick, and always wake up the next day without symptoms. I also remember reading a newspaper article the previous day reporting on how onions had become a luxury staple in the Philippines due to high food inflation in the country, which sadly exposes how economic value is produced by 200 scarcity.280 We also notice how the concentric layered shape of the onion could provide a fitting image for our mode of study in its attempt to time-travel into the present, trying to deepen our attention layer by layer towards a hollow center. In short, cooking the onion soup feels like a perfect idea and we agree to each bring in some onions, knives and cutting boards for the next day. Figure 26 Image of Performance Studies, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu 280 Rebecca Ratcliffe, "Onion Smuggling Rackets Thrive as Staple Becomes a Luxury in Philippines," The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, January 26th, 2023), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/26/onion-smuggling-rackets-thrive-as-staple-becomes-a-luxury-in-philippines. 201 Session Three On January 28th, we begin the morning session by Erotic Listening to a recording of Audre Lorde reading her 1978 essay "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power".281 We use our movement to listen, we imagine that every single cell in our body is listening to the sound of her voice and receives both the materiality of the sound and the meaning of her words. After the practice we share our experiences, what each was able to feel or hear. Those of us who had done this practice with this text before, share how there are always new things to attend to in the same recording and how each time feels quite different. This time I was so touched by the listening that I almost cried twice. I felt I could hear the emotional tension held in the conference room as Lorde read, I could sense it in the intonation of her voice, in the sounds of the room, their release in laughter or claps or inaudible sighs. I could tune so precisely into the emotional quality of the room, it is the closest I have ever felt to actual time traveling, having a felt sense of a place and a time I have not been in. 281 Audre Lorde, "Audre Lorde Reads Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (Full Updated)," YouTube (YouTube, August 1st, 2019), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWmq9gw4Rq0. For the score of the Erotic Listening practice, see the previous chapter. 202 Figure 27 Image of the Erotic Listening practice, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu The heightened sensibility that practice generated made me wonder if we could continue lingering in it while figuring out what we would be doing that afternoon for the public session. I proposed we try a couple of rounds of Oracle Dance practice.282 There is one reader, one querent and at least three dancers playing the oracle. The querent shares their question with the reader, when the reader confirms they have understood the question and they are ready to read, they signal the dancers to begin 282 The Oracle Dance is a practice that originated during the TTT sessions (Teachers Teaching Teachers) at Impulstanz festival in Vienna in 2014. It was created with and by Jennifer Lacey, Alice Chauchat, Valentina Desideri, Alix Eyunaudi, Keith Hennessy, Anne Juren, Mark Lorimer, Raimundas Malašauskas, Philippe Riéra and Mårten Spångberg. It has been passed on to others since then, and circulates in various forms. 203 moving. The dancers do not know the question and their only indication is to trust that whatever they feel like doing or not doing, is part of their channeling of the oracle. The dancers in the oracle move about until they find an end. As the dancers begin to move, the reader interprets their movements as an answer to the querent's question, whispering the reading in their ear. Once the dancers stop, the group regathers and everyone brings in their perspective. The questioner reveals the original question, the reader shares their interpretation, the dancers share their perceptions from within the oracle and the witnesses (if there are any) share what they have noticed. Together they interpret the dance as an answer to the original question. In the first round of practice, I am the querent and I ask the reader the following question: how should we approach the interaction with the audience in this afternoon's performance? The oracle dance is particularly well-composed and precise. There are four dancers in the oracle, and they immediately split in two duets, one duo directly interacting, playing and facing each other, while in the other duo, one dancer is carefully following the other, mimicking and seconding her without direct interaction. Later in the dance they begin to use their bodies to connect to each other in space, until they finally tune in and gather around the round carpet, which is part of the exhibition design in the central area of the museum. They start to carefully rotate the carpet and to place their feet under it, slightly mirroring each other's movements until they end. We interpreted this as a sign that people in the audience will have to be addressed individually as they come in (as solo, duos, trios) and that we have to take time to first observe them when entering the room. If we notice that they are open and available, we can approach 204 them directly, otherwise we will have to slightly mirror them so they can feel connected enough to stay and just watch us, or, eventually, even join us. For the second question I was one of the movers in the oracle, so I initially did not know the question. The dance begins with one of the dancers opening a door to the garden, which sets off an alarm. The accident provokes laughter, shame (one of the dancers hides under the carpet) and loud screaming to reassure the museum personnel in the other room that there was no emergency and it was just a mistake. They stop the alarm without coming in the room and the dance continues without interruption. The dance is marked by lots of hand movements and a kind of haptic feel: people supporting each other, making rhythms, and resting. When we finish the dance the querent and reader reveal the question: what is the dance of abundance? The reader interpreted the dance of abundance as a constant exchange of kinetic energy, guided by haptics and rhythm, always creating support for each other to change. I also report a particularly strong feeling of connection that I felt with the other dancers and the ongoing actions, which released me from any obligation to actively "connect" with them by intervening directly in their action. I felt I could just sit somewhere and rest, for I could support anything else happening in the space just by looking at it. The other dancers also shared this feeling, and everyone noticed the calm and restful energy of the dance. It was also striking that the dance began with a crisis: the fire alarm ringing, a mistake, a break of the normal plot which released emotions. We thought about our initial conversation the previous day about the "abundant crisis" that has marked and generated so much of the film in the exhibition. We wonder if the dance of abundance often begins from a crisis or a break, or echoing Moten's writing, in the break. Before stopping for lunch, we quickly decide on a loose score for our afternoon session which will be open to the public. We decide to begin the performance by cutting the onions, we 205 will print and spread around the space some of the texts that inspired the film and its script. Then we will map our question about abundance, placing on the paper whatever elements we either remember form our conversations, or come up spontaneously, to use them as possible supports to continue thinking about our question. As we discuss, we will figure out what practices we may want to do and whenever ready, we will eat the onion soup. Session Four When we regather from the lunch break, we arrive in small groups; without any formal beginning, the first ones to arrive go to the exhibition space and wear their jumpsuits. We start by arranging the space, we place the printed papers, prepare the onions and the cutting boards. Figure 28 Image of Performance Studies, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu 206 Two visitors sit in front of the film and start watching it. We let them watch and we sit on the side, in a circle around the carpet cutting onions, chatting, while Filipa's camera is trying to capture some tears. Figure 29 Cutting onions, photos: Alexandra Ivanciu 207 Figure 30 Cutting onions, photos: Alexandra Ivanciu After a while, I begin to write our question on a big piece of paper lying next to us. We start to add some elements onto the paper to begin unfolding our question. We alternate and add words, questions and drawings on the paper in silence. 208 Figure 31 Mapping our question, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu One of us begins moving on the side of the screen. Another one starts to place onions in the space marking the trajectory from the main entrance to our exhibition space. As soon as the two visitors finish watching the film, I go to switch off the film audio, but since I could not reach the sound button, one of the two visitors offers to help and switches it off for me. I use the 209 interaction to tell them they can join us as we begin to study abundance. They join and I start introducing the question I wrote on the paper: What becomes of abundance when not related/opposed to scarcity? Figure 32 Image of Performance Studies, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu I underline the words Scarcity and Abundance and join them with an infinite sign to mark the continuity between them, picturing it as an endless movement of enabling each other. Although they are both quantitative qualifiers – one referring to having a lot of something and the other one as having not enough – they also work as qualitative qualifiers, with abundance being implicitly a positive thing, and scarcity a negative thing. How does this moral connotation get attached to these terms so tightly that it becomes implicit? I recall Denise Ferreira da Silva's 210 critique of value by highlighting the two meanings of "value", and its operations as both an ethical and an economic term.283 Perhaps abundance and scarcity are two faces of the same coin: the coin being value itself, and the indistinguishability between its economic and ethical sense. We try to think through how scarcity and abundance co-constitute value: how does their measuring act perform differently in the ethical and in the economic "scene of value", if we follow Ferreira da Silva's analysis?284 Figure 33 Map drawn during Performance Studies Since some of the people in the audience had just watched the film, we recall the scene in which a time traveler interviews Kai Burmeister, a German DGB trade unionist, and asks him: "were there always enough resources for everyone to be happy? What forced the workers to accept bad working conditions, though everyone could potentially have access to the resources for better conditions?" The trade unionist answers: "the need to accept bad work results from the 283 In her essay "Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time", in The Documenta 14 Reader (Munich: Prestel, 2017) Denise Ferreira da Silva uses "unpayable debt" as a dialectical image guiding a reading of value simultaneously in both its economic and ethical scenes. 284 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, (2022). Throughout this session, I refer to this book, where she unfolds her critique of value. 211 simple premise that a worker, a dependent employee, has nothing else to offer but sell their own manpower. From a historical perspective, the proletarians didn't have enough in their hands to feed themselves, except for the work in the factories, which was not only insufficient for living but also precarious. And in 2022 precarious work did not cease to exist."285 We discuss his answer and notice how scarcity plays out in this account. Here (quantitative) scarcity is the cause, the condition of possibility: "not having enough to feed themselves" the worker needed to accept bad labor conditions. Hence, they have to work in the factory and create abundance for the capitalists, who are then able to expand their production and create more bad working conditions. No wonder precarious work did not cease to exist in 2022 if it is inherent to the capitalist production of value. The picture of necessity given by this narrative also hides the processes of exploitation and expropriation of land that made it impossible for peasants to feed themselves, or simply places it together with colonial extraction in the past as an historical process (primitive accumulation) that has happened, rather than as an ongoing process met by an ongoing struggle. This reflection gives us a sense of how the binary of scarcity/abundance operates as a quantitative measure in the economic scene of value and as a qualitative measure in the ethical scene. On the economic scene, there is labor: "manpower" measured by time which can be exchanged for money. Labor is motivated by scarcity (not enough of something) and produces abundance by adding to the value of whatever product it creates. On the ethical scene, there is the land and the bodies of native and enslaved people who could be "lawfully" extracted and violated because they were rendered as "things", raw materials 285 Dialogue extracted from the film "There Is Always Dance in Abundance" by Filipa Cesar, Diana McCarty et al. (2022) 212 and property.286 Here the absolute (qualitative) scarcity attributed to the land and inhabitants of the colonies – lacking moral attributes and therefore ethical value – generates total abundance for the colonizers and the capitalists. Figure 34 Mapping the question, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu We mark this distinction between economic and moral value on our map. As we were talking, someone wrote on the map next to "economic value", the following question: "does measurement need scarcity?" and I write next to it: "does measurement 286 In her book Unpayable Debt (2021) Denise Ferreira da Silva activates the materiality of the incommensurable social labor needed to produce "raw materials" in the colonies to re/de/compose Marx's equation of value and to undo his delimitation of Capital as a totality. We did not get there in our conversation during the performance, but I believe that the refusal of a determinable and fully comprehensible totality is key to begin imagining and practicing "abundance" beyond its opposition to scarcity. 213 necessarily produce scarcity?", questioning what comes first. We shift the discussion from value to measurement, how it is intimately linked to time, and to performance too, since some form of measurement is needed to account for any performance (if we take performance to be what something or someone has achieved). We discuss if halting time could be a way of breaking this infinite measuring act motorized by the scarcity/abundance pair. Because of my accent, instead of "halting" different people hear instead "haunting", "hunting" or "holding". We laugh at how those terms may as well all work, since each could be a possible way of sabotaging time and to attend to what is happening beyond or before its constraints. We decide that to approach halting time, we will attempt to speak at normal speed while moving in slow motion. As we do that, we begin to talk about the role of attention in the perception of time and perhaps in halting it. People start to give examples of their experiences of halting time. Someone mentions meditation practice and how paying attention to something for long enough allows them to lose their sense of time. Others talk about being in the club, dancing all night and getting out to the daylight not knowing where time went, or spending time with friends or doing something they love. We notice that in all those instances your attention is "with" something or someone, and that perhaps time stops when we deeply encounter something or someone, be it music, a friend, your breath. New people have arrived and joined us. When we talk about this "encountering" I propose we try a new practice, something we could call Erotic Viewing. Like the Erotic Listening practice we did the previous day, we can try to watch the film with our entire body, trying to encounter the film, as if the film could touch us back.287 287 I intentionally play with touch being potentially both physical and emotional. 214 Figure 35 Erotic Viewing practice, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu Rather than assuming viewing as the relatively passive act of receiving the light emitted from the film only through our eyes, what if we could not only receive the light throughout our entire body but also emit matching energy back? How can we let ourselves literally respond to the film, encountering it back? So we begin, the two people join us, timidly but smiling. 215 Figure 5.15 Erotic Viewing practice, photo:Alexandra Ivanciu Figure 5.16 Erotic Viewing practice, photo:Alexandra Ivanciu 216 We move in front of the screen for the whole duration of the film and by the end, the onion soup is ready. We move to the long table in the entrance of the museum and our performance dissipates in conviviality and conversation until the museum must close. Then we all gather our stuff, clean and leave the space. Figure 36 Eating onion soup, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu 217 Figure 37 Eating onion soup, photo: Alexandra Ivanciu Reflections As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, this was only a first attempt at creating a performance that is simultaneously a study group. The title Performance Studies is a wordplay to signal the large and open proposal I am trying to make. On the one hand, I consider the public or staged setting of performance as an occasion for study, since it offers specific arrangements of attention through which we can study. On the other hand, I am also proposing that what performance actually 'does' is study, since it arranges modes of being together that produce knowledge, beyond and before the objects (performance pieces) it may produce. I am thinking about a practice of performance art that does not need to make performances or produce distinct artworks, but that stays incomplete, in/as study, that unmakes us, more than us making it. I discussed performance as the (un)plotting of attention, thinking specifically about how 218 performance art practices can be deployed to undo the colonial-racial-cis-hetero-patriarcal plot that shapes our senses and renders natural (as "experience") our self-conception as individual subjects who possess themselves, and their "bodies". This unplotting could also help us to pay attention to what Fred Moten describes as "the infinite avoidance of certain objects."288 Reflecting on Performance Studies as a first attempt towards such a practice, I notice how it can potentially begin or emerge from anywhere since it is ongoing and does not aim at solidifying into a piece that would require specific conditions for its production. Thanks to Filipa Cesar and Diana McCarty's invitation, this time the study began from a notion of abundance which became its focus, or rather its matter (both as its material and its topic).289 The narrative and pictures I shared, only show one possible instance of how such a performance could unfold. This time people signed up from an open call, and since people did not know each other, we planned to have three preparatory private sessions and a last public one. The last session was three hours long, so the audience came in and out in small groups, or as individuals, which always kept the balance of having more performers than audience. I believe this balance made it easier for visitors to join us, because the informal and direct way in which we addressed them and each other inevitably implied them in the situation. Even when they would just watch or listen to us, they never became an anonymous "audience" spectating our actions. However, the fact that we met before the public session meant that the audience could effectively only play the "visitor", joining something that was already happening in whatever way they could. I am not concerned here with breaking the barrier between the performers and the audience, nor to create 288 Fred Moten, In The Break, 239. In the context of discussing Adrian Piper's work, Moten states: "But Piper is all about fighting what Fried refuses to recognize: the absolute ongoingness and continuity not of attention to objects but of the aversion of one's gaze from objects", 238. 289 In Italian, Portuguese and Spanish the word "materia" also refers to a topic or subject that is studied in school. 219 the smoothest possible experience for audience participation. I am interested in addressing directly – as/through study – the clumsy and uneasy negotiations that different performative set-ups and attention regimes generate. In this practice I am particularly interested in how the performance situation produces different modalities of attention, for the tension between being looked at, performing and just being with each other must each time be negotiated according to the specificity of the context. These specific arrangements create different modalities of attention that are both an occasion for study and an ongoing study of how to undo the racist-colonial-cis-hetero-patriarchal plot that shapes our senses and governs thinking.290 I can imagine many different ways to continue unfolding this practice. I can imagine setting up Performance Studies as a weekly performance gathering that goes on for a while, or working with a group of performers for long enough to devise several public performances that stem from the same process, or setting set it up as an actual performance studies course that we study by performing, if I have the chance to teach somewhere more regularly. However, approaching performance as study may as well generate its own conditions that I cannot yet imagine since study is always going on in the undercommons and that may offer another way. 290 I am referring to the intrastructure of post-Enlightenment thinking I mentioned earlier, which Denise Ferreira da Silva describes in Unpayable Debt, 58-59. 220 Conclusion Our senses have long been understood as the means to knowledge, but not often as social means without ends, which is not the same as if they were ends in themselves but is, rather, that they are means in themselveslessness; not as theoreticians in their own right but, rather, in a rite that is not owned but shared in a jurisgenerativity whose making and unmaking is given in a general disbursement way on the other side of right’s philosophy. 291 -Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete As social means without ends, the senses offer themselveslessness to be the means (that through which) elemental sociality could be practiced. The senses as "means to knowledge" only function within the frame of a "body" which, Harney and Moten remind us, is an "imposition onto the flesh".292 The body encloses the flesh in self-possession and reduces the senses to means, instruments that gather sense perceptions to form the inner experience of the subject. They are classified, quantified, studied, and constantly trained. Seen in this way, they are like the police, the "border control" of the body, admitting or not certain things within the physical and mental of the body. However, the senses do not have much control. I do not perceive the microbes I am breathing, the neutrinos that travel through me, or the ground shifting under my feet. My senses can only maintain a fantasy of control by delimiting an interiority that is me, but that is only one possible description or narrative of existence, which, as the critiques of the 291 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete, 93. 292 Harney and Moten, 62. 221 modern Subject I touched upon in this exegesis have shown, is a pretty deadly one. What would it take to un-plot such a violent and violating formation of the senses and the figure of the autonomous individual they uphold? How do we go about knowing in ways that do not reproduce the racial-colonial-cis-hetero-patriarcal plot that constitutes both Transparent and Affectable Is: on one hand historical subjects endowed with an interiority that develops in time, and on the other hand, global subjects exteriorly determined and instituted by the racial, as Denise Ferreira da Silva shows.293 However large and existential this question may seem, it is part of the even larger demand for decolonization, to which my practice dedicates and which does not cease to be asked and answered every day. Not only in academia, but first and foremost by the communities who embody already existing ways of knowing otherwise, and who constantly reinvent them, even under the duress of racial and colonial oppression. I am thinking about all the social and collective practices of caring, dancing, playing, praying, making, cooking, and supporting each other that are intentional and ongoing experiments in living otherwise. Those practices are not naive, nor can they be reduced to mere coping strategies in the face of brutality; rather they embody and articulate a critique of the modern subject that both precedes and survives the violence of its institution. I am inspired by these practices to join in asking this question and imagine what my contribution as an artist, dancer, organizer, reader, and thinker might be. In this exegesis, I use Studio Practice as an umbrella term to describe my practices of study and artmaking as experiments with modes of knowing and making that do not presuppose an interiority but (re)generate the (elemental) sociality that is already given in/though our critical 293 See Denise Ferreira da Silva, Towards a Global Idea of Race. 222 and creative ensemble. Fake Therapy and Political Therapy (re)generate the ongoing sociality of sensations, feelings, imaginations and thoughts by playing with touch and proto-therapeutic intimate formats. The collaborative practice of Poethical Readings and The Sensing Salon, with Denise Ferreira da Silva, (re)generates the collective re/de/composition of sense by reading (Tarot, Astrology, poems, etc.) and imaging the political and ethical issues we face. My approach to teaching as study (re)generates the sociality of our collective existence by hanging out and letting our mutual dis/possession self-organize. Performance Studies (re)generates the sociality of attention that performance gathers and tries to un-plot by rehearsing (preparing and practicing) a material (elemental) sensibility. In bringing together study and artmaking, I am placing creative practice and criticality in a relation of mutual revision and infinite rehearsal. I do not see them in a complementary relation, facing each other and engaging in a developmental movement that leads to some improvement, be it a more accurate critique or a more habitable practice. Placing creative practice and criticality in such a relationship means that the planning or the critique does not come before the practice but that they are happening at the same time. In the same way in which the practice is already performing a critique, the critique is already a practice: they are implied in each other; they are each other's variation, improvisation, refusal, and rehearsal. I think about them as entangled, in ways that may often be messy but also raise new questions. Both study and artmaking are for me, expressions of this entanglement, which I would like to continue to experiment with, focusing further on the materiality of their engendering movement. I discussed in this exegesis how Denise Ferreira da Silva offers re/de/composition and fractal thinking as tools for knowing and making that assume deep implicancy and infinity as 223 descriptors of existence.294 Karen Barad, via Donna Haraway, offers a diffractive methodology for reading “that does not fix what is the object and what is the subject in advance” but reads “insights through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge.”295 Barad develops this method by contrasting two optical metaphors for knowing– reflection and diffraction - that describe the behavior of waves (light, sound, or water) when they encounter a boundary. In the context of physics, reflection refers to waves bouncing off an obstacle, while diffraction refers to the bending and spreading of waves when they encounter a barrier or an opening, creating patterns of interference. Diffraction, therefore, attends to specific "material entanglements," patterns of interference, and the differences produced, without needing to determine, reduce or order them.296 Barad and Ferreira da Silva’s methodologies attend to the materiality of knowing, both the materiality that is assumed in the assembling of their tools and the materiality they engender. This is important because, as Barad reminds us, “practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world”.297 Their work is an inspiration to continue experimenting with study as a creative and critical practice of collective material transformation. I have discussed in Chapter 4 how study is a collective practice that, by insisting on its own conditions of possibility, can be said to self-organize. Study self-organizes by way of hapticality, in general affectability and through mutual dis/possession. It does not require nor call into being individuals, rather it rehearses and enacts 294 I have not directly referred to fractal thinking in this exegesis. However, Denise Ferreira da Silva introduces fractal thinking at the end of Unpayable Debt to describe her approach to thinking about the various and interrelated dimensions at work in any particular thing. See Ferreria da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 274. 295 Karen Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 30. 296 Barad, 88. 297 Barad, 91. Italic in original. 224 (elemental) sociality through the arrangements and offerings it gathers. If what self-organizes is study rather than individuals, perhaps what is going on is not properly "organization" but rather "transmutation". For it is not the form, or the shape of our relations that is re-organized, as if we were a bunch of single dots on a page (formal units) that could be connected in ways that draw different shapes, rather it is our material composition that changes. If the dots and the page are deeply implicated, both the dots and the page re/de/compose in/as study. Study could then be also approached as a process of transmutation of the matter (and form) constituting the page and the dots, that is, their substance. I am interested in further researching how study can be approached through Alchemy, the art of transmutation of the European Renaissance. On one hand, alchemy, as the art of processing nature, already brings together study and artmaking, both philosophical speculation and material experimentation.298 In addition to that, alchemy also concerns itself with medicine (through Astrology and through making remedies) and ethics (since the alchemist has to proceed in accordance with the order of nature, and not only of humans) while returning us to a figuring of matter that precedes the modern scientific signification and its production of the modern Subject. I have drawn a map to summarize Paracelsus’ treaty “Opus Paragranum” in which he describes the relatio between Philosophy, Astrology, Alchemy and Virtues. 299 298 There are many different versions of what Alchemy is. I am here only resuming the point of view of the Swiss physician, alchemist and philosopher's Paracelsus (1493 – 1541), whose work I have researched in more depth. 299 Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim). “Opus Paragranum”. Essential Theoretical Writings. 1493-1541. Edited by Andrew Weeks, Leiden: Brill, 2008, pp. 61-259. 225 Figure 38 Map of my notes of Paracelsus’s Opus Paragranum Both Tarot and Astrology, two reading tools I already use in my practice, are structured symbolically around the four classical elements (Air, Water, Fire, and Earth), which are also the material basis of Alchemical transmutation. Alchemy, as a philosophy and as an art of transmutation, could be approached as a praxis (a thinking and a doing) that may help us reconfigure study as material transformation. Without wanting to return to the image of the world that grounded alchemical theories and practices, I am interested in researching their procedures, tools, figures, and images and in speculating on what kind of practices for knowing and making their unconcern with interiority and subjectivity still hosts. 226 Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. “Intimate Touches: Proximity and Distance in International Feminist Dialogues.” Oxford Literary Review 19, no. 1/2. 1997: 19–46. Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Barad, Karen. Meeting The Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Barad, Karen. What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice. dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts. N. 99. Kassel: Hatje Cantz, 2012. Barthes, Roland. Comment vivre ensemble. Cours et séminaires au Collège de France (1976-1977). Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2015. BBC News. “'Standing Man' Inspires Turkish Protesters in Istanbul.” London, BBC, June 18, 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-22949632. Beck, John, and Thomas Davenport. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 2001. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. “The Doctrine of the Similar,” 1933. New German Critique, no. 17, Translated by Knut Tarnowski. (Spring 1979): 65–69. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. California: Stanford Univeristy Press, 1997. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. London: Routledge, 1993. Cesar, Filipa, Diana McCarty et al. There Is Always Dance in Abundance. Video Recording, Leipzig: GfZK, 2022. 227 Chuh, Kandice. Imagine Otherwise:On Asian Americanist Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Citton, Yves. The Ecology of Attention. Oxford: Wiley, 2017. Desideri, Valentina. Fake Therapy, accessed May 7, 2023, www.faketherapy.wordpress.com/fake-therapy/ Desideri, Valentina. Political Therapy, accessed May 7, 2023, www.faketherapy.wordpress.com/political-therapy/. Desideri, Valentina, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. A Conversation. Vilnius: printed by authors, 2015. Desideri, Valentina, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Poethical Readings,” The Sensing Salon, accessed on April 13, 2023, www.thesensingsalon.org/poethical-readings. Desideri, Valentina, and Stefano Harney. “A Conspiracy Without a Plot,” The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating. London: Bloomsbury, 2013: 125-136. Desideri, Valentina, and Stefano Harney. "Fate Work: A Conversation," Ephemera Journal, Vol.13 n.1. 2013: 159-176. Demeyer, Hans. “Lauren Berlant on Intimacy as World-Making,” Extra Extra Magazine, n. 16, accessed February 14, 2023. https://extraextramagazine.com/talk/lauren-berlant-on-intimacy-as-world-making/. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 1845. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Mentor Books, 1987. Ferreira Da Silva, Denise. “Material Aesthetics: Note 1 - Tangible Possibility,” Drift: Art & Dark Matter. Edited by Sunny Kerr. Ontario: K. Verlag & Agnes Etherington Art Centre, forthcoming: 134-143. 228 Ferreira da Silva, Denise. "On Difference Without Separability," 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Incerteza Viva Exhibition Catalogue. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016: 57-65. Ferreira Da Silva, Denise. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” The Black Scholar, vol. 44, no. 2. London: Routledge, 2014: 81–97. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Unpayable Debt. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time,” The Documenta 14 Reader. Ed. Quinn Latimer. Munich: Prestel, 2017: 81-112. Ferreira da Silva, Denise, and Arjuna Neuman. 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy. Video Recording, Berlin Biennale, 2018. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. 1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value. e-flux journal #79, February 2017. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-the-equation-of-value/ Freud, Sigmund. An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1940. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents, 1930. London: Penguin, 2002. Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition, 1979. London: Psychology Press, 2014. Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: Caraf Books/University Press of Virginia, 1989. 229 Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Gramsci, Antonio. I Quaderni del Carcere, Quaderno 7, n. 35 [1930-1932]. Published on 5 October 2014, https://quadernidelcarcere.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/materialismo-e-materialismo-storico/ Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Han, Sora. “Slavery as Contract: Betty's Case and the Question of Freedom” Law & Literature, 27. 2015: 1-22. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. All incomplete. New York: Minor Compositions, 2021. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. “On Collaboration Within Practice Research”, Practice Research Assembly. YouTube, November 10, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgeArR7GWys Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. On Violence #2. Akademie der Künste der Welt. YouTube, uploaded on June 8, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I_1QAdnjic Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Introduction to Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Hill, Philip. Lacan for Beginners. London: Writers and Readers, 1997. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman, 1974. New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. 230 “Jarvis R. Givens Discusses ‘Fugitive Pedagogy’ with Joshua Bennett”. Accessed 8 May 2023, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2ZRwyseLVI. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. 1966. London: Routledge, 2001. Lepecki, André. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. London: Routledge, 2006. Lepecki, André. Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. London: Routledge, 2016. Lloyd, David. Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Lorde, Audre. "Audre Lorde Reads Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (Full Updated)," YouTube, published on August 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWmq9gw4Rq0. Lorde, Audre. "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." Sister Outsider. Pennsylvania: Crossing Press, 1984. Maynard, Robyn, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Rehearsals for Living. New York: Knopf Canada, 2022. McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else. From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge, 2001. Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance”. Afterlives | MoMA Live. YouTube, 2015, accessed on April 4, 2023. www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=G2leiFByIIg. Moten, Fred. "The Subprime and the Beautiful," African Identities 11, no. 2. London: Routledge, 2013: 237-245. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 231 Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim). “Opus Paragranum”. Essential Theoretical Writings. 1493-1541. Edited by Andrew Weeks. Leiden: Brill, 2008: 61-259. “Performing Art Forum”, accessed on June 8, 2023, http://pa-f.net/. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked. London: Routledge, 1993. Piper, Adrian, Christophe Cherix, Cornelia H. Butler, David Platzker, Glenn D. Lowry, Ann Philbin, Okwui Enwezor, et al. Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018. Piper, Adrian. Out of Order, Out of Sight. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Ratcliffe, Rebecca. "Onion Smuggling Rackets Thrive as Staple Becomes a Luxury in Philippines," The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, January 26, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/26/onion-smuggling-rackets-thrive-as-staple-becomes-a-luxury-in-philippines. Retallack, Joan. Poethical Wager. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. Edited by Sarah Lucie. 4th ed. Milton: Routledge, 2020. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987: 64-81. Spillers, Hortense J. “To the Bone: Some Speculations on Touch,” There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude, Stedelijk Museum of Art and Studium Generale Rietveld Academy, 23 March 2018, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvL4wUKIfpo Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999. 232 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 271–313. Tarde, Gabriel. Psychologie économique [Economic Psychology], vol. 1. Paris: Alcan, 1902. Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Los Angeles: Semiotex(e), 2004.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Silva, Denise Ferreira da
Studio practice : experiments in objectless and objectiveless artmaking
Text