The DAI commissioned this meditation by Sara Benaglia on the occasion of the symposium How To Undo Things With Theory (Bergamo, March 26, 2022), which brought students, tutors and the public in conversation around a variety of themes and topics of contemporary relevance to the thinking of art in the world. To this aim the members of the tutorial team of “How To Do Things With Theory” generously shared their emerging research.

For many years the theory program “How To Do Things With Theory” has been a central element in the DAI's curriculum. A group of outstanding and outspoken theorists/curators from the fields of critical theory, performance studies, queer studies, art theory, and postcolonial theory brilliantly teach DAI's seminars. They bring cutting-edge academic thinking to their study groups by exploring topics such as the urgent need to decolonize Western societies, the rising threat of fascism, the indeterminacy of contemporary art, and fugitive readings that challenge the canon and generate new forms of political practice.

Unforeseen Imaginaries, Exit Routes, or How To Undo Things With Theory

What follows is a set of unforeseen imaginaries; paths that can be taken to rethink ourselves as political subjects, to question how we do research, our ethics and our methods. I recorded them—with a series of gaps and even misunderstandings in my own translation—during the Theory Symposium in Bergamo in Spring 2022. Four months have passed from my first listen to these voices to the present day in which I trace them back, trying to remember through aged ears and eyes. I represent here inputs that crossed us together in a cinema theatre, voices that I re-encountered as words and holes in my page. There’s the potential to fill the gaps with possible changes, but also the chance to see the structure behind each composition. I probably couldn’t grasp many details, but what I feel after all this time is that, beside the “what”, it is the “how” that matters, perhaps because I feel that this allows us to sense the network of relationships in which we are immersed beyond words. If a specter roamed the space with us during the Theory Symposium, it was the very European ideals of the Left. This ghost shook our chairs, and perhaps you will find it in some of the details left written down. From How To Do Things With Words to How To Undo Things With Theory, the language that is action rather than structure takes up the critique of the saying/doing dichotomy to become something else, an undoing. The Symposium was an opportunity to follow the work in progress of the research of Amit Rai, Ghalya Saadawi, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Hypatia Vourloumis, Grant Watson and Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga more closely, beyond their theory programs at the DAI. Most of all it was a way to see their how.

The critical terrain in which Amit Rai thinks Towards An Embodied Ethic Of Attention is composed of multiple questions. What is the genealogy of your habituations? How did you develop the set of habits that you call yourself? What impact do postcolonialism and decolonial movements have on how we think our embodied relation towards ecology? If attention is a practice of linking ecologies together, how can we produce common notions to be better connected with our ecologies under the regime of racial capital? How can we think of attention together with racial capital? What happens to attention under racial capital, under necropolitics? Why are people in love with subjugation, and if this happens within the habituation of attention, how can we attend otherwise? What would it mean to bring a revolutionary becoming take to attention? How does attention impact on organization? How is attention important for organizing practices? How is marketing manipulating our affects? How is it directly addressing itself to our bodily capacity of being affected? How is financialization an unconscious part of our habituations? How is it a booster (thinking through Adorno) to creative industries? What is creativity—another form of habituation—doing in the economy? What is being habituated doing to economy? How can we understand attention as an object of critique, as a practice of liberation and emancipation?

How can we develop and understand an arena of conflict of attention that presents a series of paradoxes? The first paradox is the fact that racial capital demands the sacrificial creative destruction of the multitude’s creativity; the colonization of our attention is constantly destroying our capacity to create and be creative. The second paradox lies in how we are constantly asked to attend to things that are moving, but attention and movements are negatively correlated: you can attend more to something that is moving less. The third paradox is the relation between attention (both embodied and transcendental) and judgement. How is ambiguity involved in attention? When does attention allow us to understand the complexity of a nebulous set that has gradients of belonging? And do we need judgement to attend? A transcendental understanding of attention is to understand your capacity to attend that is not activated.

We are all colonized by racial capital in time. We are separated from what we can do. How can we reclaim embodiment from attention? What are the limits and integrations, destructions and deconstructions of attention in the racialized pedagogies of neo-liberal, financialized creativity and mindfulness?

Moving among many questions—as if on the run so as not to get caught—what does it take to change the future? Can we imagine a terrifying or optimistic future? Is there a future?

***

Ana Teixeira Pinto’s Energy and Chronopolitical Allegory traces a path along Western science, the production of energy, and chronopolitics. In her presentation she refers to Allen MacDuffie, who in Victorian Literacy, Energy and The Ecological Imagination (2017) describes how, from the 18th century onwards, Western science began to tap into the large, new and unrenewable capital of energy. The shift from agricultural production to industrial production coincided with Victorian racial inscription. The transition from fossil fuels implies an intensification of already-ongoing processes of racialization, since both processes work with and under the edges of a chronopolitical schema. The term “chronopolitical” refers here explicitly to what Charles Mills calls “the racialized time of white modernity,” [1] foregrounding the notion that time itself is a cultural construct that can and does mobilize us on behalf of a political project.

So, what does it mean to say that time can be racialized?

Racism is the most important political ideology of modernity, and bleeds into the entirety of the semantic field. The modern era is defined by the belief that the future will be different from the past. Modernity entails a forward-looking and unidirectional temporality, predicated into the differentiation of time in two different moments. This comparative chronology intersects with racial difference: the premodern is defined by a lack of technology and having a need to be modernized. For Hegel, to be human is to free oneself from nature. The function of culture is to undo nature so as to create a manmade world, a second world. The failure to free ourselves from nature is therefore a cultural failure, attributed to conceptual inadequacy. Race is an index of this failure and inadequacy. Whiteness is thus not a race, but the absence of race.

During the Enlightenment, a mission intolerant of otherness, the State was involved in programs of social pattern-making. Racism, Enlightenment and Imperialism formed together. The very categories of political differentiation in the modern era are temporal modalities of power to shape the future one wishes to obtain. The distribution of time becomes the distribution of territory and ends the distribution of life. Successive waves of colonial and neocolonial plunder are to this day justified by the necessity to assimilate to modernity, to dispense futurity.

In the second half of the 20th century, the preoccupation with temporality found its way into the natural sciences’ representation of nature, with the introduction of the concept of evolution in biology and entropy in physics. Both theories, Teixeira Pinto argues, mobilize the physical world on behalf of imperial politics while nature becomes progressive or temporal. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) uses the word “race” instead of “species.” Darwin didn’t mean human races and was referencing his study of finches; yet the theoretical framework introduced by evolutionary theory opened up the frightening possibility of degeneration: of regressing to a former so-called Savage State, to move back temporally.

Regarding entropy, thermodynamics deals with the dissipation of heat in a process that occurs only in one particular direction, something like an arrow of time. Thermodynamics' novel concept of energy is also equivocal, conflating to vitality or (muscular) strength and (electrical or mechanical) power. Victorian scientists did not disambiguate between these different meanings. On the contrary, since the human body was described as a thermodynamic system, and the social body was conceptualized via the analogy with the human body, it came naturally to 19th century scholars to refer to society as a thermodynamic system, in which the amount of entropy is a measure of the molecular disorder or randomness of a system. The associated word “dissipation,” introduced by William Thompson, carried additional moral connotations: the universe itself seemed to be indulging in habits of dissipation. Thermodynamics allows imperial and industrial expansion through moral urgency, as it suggests that turning the compressed time of fossil deposit into the accelerated time of propulsor engine is the way to cosmic salvation. Thermodynamics is entwined with patriarchal ideology at multiple levels.

Gothic novels are, in this lecture, rich in examples where any conversion that runs counter to the colonial norm is figured as an unnatural inversion. The gothic representation of monstrosity—like in Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde—shows how monstrosity is mobilized to connote energy conversion via embellishment with the racialized inscriptions of difference, in order to strengthen colonial categories of self and other.

Each pair of concepts—energy and entropy, capital and labor, male and female, mind and matter, nature and culture, the West and the rest—become the condition for the possibility of the other, developing dialectically in a mutually enforcing manner. Each term declines either in the direction of entropy or energy, and is described as either conservative, restorative or as wasting agency.

The political answer to the question of energy depletion within a closed system is Imperial aspiration, or more concretely, the scramble for Africa, which had its apex with the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. The ever-expanding colonial frontier is very silently narrated at this time, as an attempt to plan the voracious energy-consuming industrial system of Europe.

Underlying the geographical order imposed by colonialism, there are temporal frameworks or economies of time that persist largely unquestioned. Further, the chronopolitical expression of these economies of time is saturated by colonial formations. What the collusion between sovereign powers and monopolistic trade set in motion is not so much development or growth but, to use Andrea Malm’s expression, a fire that demands its fuel, the metabolizing of all nature, including human nature, into universal values.

The culture of taste is the interlaced experience of the enslaved and the cultured subject of modernity. As David Lloyd argues, “since its inception in the late 18th century, aesthetic philosophy has functioned as a regulative discourse of the human on which the modern conception of the political and racial order of modernity rests.” [2] So, how to do and undo things with art? Does the contemporary aesthetic speech differ from the one of modernity or does it share with it uncomfortable and unyielding roots?

What does undoing look like in this instance?

***

The presentation Vapid Virtues, Real Stakes: Diagnosis For Left Art Protocols by Ghalya Saadawi derives from her essay published in Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (2022). This book, edited by Bassam Baroni, aims to map a theoretical framework to think about contemporary art through the activity of speculation as a kind of transformative fiction, or construction of futurity; as something that disrupts linear conceptions of time though art’s potential leveraging possibility in the age of finance.

Ghalya Saadawi’s essay deals with the contradiction of contemporary art, essentially a neo-liberal space, and contemporary art critical virtues as a mechanism of valorization. Her text proposes examples of dissent in view of “Left art protocols” as a way to consider infrastructural critique rather than institutional critique.

Rethinking the relation between contemporary art and dissent is complex when art is constituted as an anti-institutional or negational space. Suhail Malik critically conceives the idea of art’s total freedom from the institution as a radical human-rights claim, which secures contemporary art’s virtue as an affirmative negation of institutionalization. Art’s innocuousness and inconclusiveness is what has become art’s valorization. Civic virtues embedded in contemporary art that identifies with them secures for it a primary market, which validates a secondary market: a cartel of gallerists that protect artists from the variation market. The protection of particular virtues is the way artists increase their marketization, and this also expands art’s entrepreneurism as a business model. Modern art grew out of the fight between capitalism and communism. Contemporary art was also a hangover of modernism’s battles with capitalism. Capital has produced specific modes of dissent. A portion of it is grounded in critical claims around reforms, rights and representations, and they can come as a mode of confrontation or a form of art. The EU-American context still sets the tone for the transnational arena of art. Here, after Occupy, after the financial crisis and the subprime crash, the question emerged of the labor in art through organizations like WAGE, WAGENCY and the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition. The #MeToo movement also influenced the arts through a shift towards representational politics; letter writing became a mode of denunciation, moving toward a culture of outing, and cancel culture becoming more broad. There has been a turn towards a kind of neo-liberal legalism, which has moved away from infrastructural critique. Ghalya Saadawi describes the necessity for evaluation of different forms of dissent, especially in view of Left art protocols or a commitment to a kind of a critique grounded in infrastructural critique, in a sort of Left leveraging. What would a Left transnational protocol look like? How would it relate with the art that is produced?

***

Hypatia Vourloumis’ Insurgent Matters is an ongoing research project on Indonesian paralinguistic performances that started from an interest in the materiality, or matter of language, through paralinguistic insurgencies.

Paralanguage comprises all the non-lexical or non-verbal components of language (including the voice, gestures, and all the embodied aspects of verbal and written communication). The preamble of Vourloumis’ path towards paralanguage is a sequence of events: in May 1998 on the streets of Jakarta, in the midst of the Revolution that took down Suharto’s dictatorship, a young man performs a traditional Javanese dance to break the vocabulary of custom and tradition, and to scream, but his mouth is filled with clothes; the encounter with Giorgio Agamben’s book Means without Ends (1996), where he talks about the gestures of politics; being aphasic for a short period of time in which she was already thinking theoretically about questions of language, and the loss of language; and reading How To Do Things With Words? by J. L. Austin, from which the DAI’s seminar series, “How To Do Things With Theory,” is derived.

What is the relationship between the national language of Indonesia and paralanguage? What is its relation with performativity, the theory of the performative? How can performance be an excess of performativity?

Indonesia is one of the few postcolonial nations with an official language designation that does not recognize the language of the colonizer. When anticolonial revolutionaries organized against the Dutch in 1928, they also claimed Indonesian as their national language, despite not yet speaking it. In order to make a nation you need to speak a language, and the language is learned in the institution of schooling: this is how you learn to be a citizen. But Indonesian is based on the lingua franca of the region, which was already spoken across the archipelago. It was a language of trade, learned mutually through encounters with other people in the archipelago. A few years after the 1959 Bandung Conference was the US-backed extermination of the Indonesian Communist Party, a genocide of incalculable proportion that is denied to this day. In 1966 the general Suharto became the dictator of Indonesia for thirty-two years. As a result, the Indonesian language, an anticolonial political project of emancipation and liberation, becomes a language of control, repression, censorship, subordination and violence.

Paralanguage plays a fundamental role in connecting politically to the history of Indonesian language. After 1966-67, in Indonesian poetry, literature, theatre, performance art, feminism expressions and in queer vernaculars, there was a move towards the materiality of language and an embracement of the paralinguistic, as it turns away from language as a means to an end.

Sutardji Calzoum Bachri’s poems, composed during the 70s and 80s, when the Suharto regime was becoming more efficient and established, open the word into unexpected internal intensities. In his manifesto Poetic Credo, he writes “words are not implements for conveyed meaning. They do not carry their intent the way a pipe carries water. Words are their own meaning.” [3] In his efforts for the words’ materiality to escape meaning, Sutardji’s poetry ally’s signification by turning into the matter of language itself and its potential to not signify. In Sutardji’s minor literature, the sound of the word traverses a new deterritorialization; it no longer belongs to a language of sense, even though it derives from it. Remy Sylado was also able to alter the geometries of attention. One piece was, as a consequence, called by the establishment “worse than a dirty piece of wreck.”

In the last decade, Indonesia has formed a huge part of the massive transnational noise scene. The sound of Senyawa in the Ruan Grupa space in Jakarta is connected to the paralinguistic insurgencies. Sarana—a name that in Sanskrit means “refuge”—is an ambient experimental group, whose sonic practice is a noise bombing that disrupts Indonesian as the language of the neo-colonial, political and economic ruling class.

Sutardji, Sylado, Senyawa, and Sarana are “for the dispossessed, the ones who disavow possession, the ones who, in having been possessed in the spirit of dispossession, disrupt themselves.” [4] What happens to the relation with language when one is aware that language is made? What happens to language when it is made with an explicit means to an end, that is in this case postcolonial sovereignty and obedience?

We compose ourselves.

We are things that compose.

Just as a speech is composed or decomposed, us.

Compost.

***

Grant Watson introduces Why We Behave, a grown and developing project that he started in 2012. Among the reading from which the project started is Michel Foucault’s The Hermeneutis of the Subject, a text that collects the philosopher’s lectures given at the College De France from 1981and 1982. In these lectures Watson found the idea of the care of the self, the technique of the self, and how one can formulate a life practice; how we formulate ethics in relation to others. A French journalist asked Foucault about the political implications of some of his research, and this conversation was published in Vanity Fair in 1983. [5] He speaks here about the formulation of an ethics in a situation when there is no kind of moral code, as in the second half of the 20th century, when liberation movements were deconstructing what was considered to be this very framework. What do we put in place of that? How could this be formulated from a critical position?

During an event in Amsterdam, I read How We Behave, Michel Foucault’s interview. What does Queer Life Practice means in the 2010s? How can we go beyond the limits of Foucault? The performance and these questions were Watson’s impetus to start a project (with If I Can’t Dance) that found its form in a series of interviews made over a period of two to three years. From the recorded material, Watson edited excerpts and removed his voice from the interview, positioning the interviewees in relation to one another. He then asked the interviewees to read their own script in front of a camera, making explicit a quality of language here made. After a three-year break, he revisited the project whilst at BAK, and took away this time the image, working with the scripts as a reading of sound fragments.

What was the demographic of the interviewee selection? Taken firstly from the author’s network, it then extends geographically. Drawn out from those interviews are queer and feminist narratives, but the project is not about the identity of the interviewees, but about the material that emerges through the process.

One of the aims of these interviews was to find better words to describe “Queer Life Practice,” to not use this specific expression that sounds like a dead term, and doing so with interview narratives in which those involved are familiar. Language is the medium: just descriptive, analytical, and poetic.

The social situations described by the interviewees are political. As Michelle Dizon says, “the situations are historically constituted sites of oppression . . . violence, subordination, silencing and what people might call micro-aggression. And addressing this requires forms of ethical attention, that is Fred Moten’s point out going over the inter-subjective.” Suely Rolnik says that the interview goes beyond representation, and speaks of the effort involved in putting things into words. Drawing up these biographical recollections and descriptions of places and projects, juxtaposed not as evidence of objectivity or privatized experience, what is described is the consistency of a shared micropolitics: practices of the self and self-reflection that are not inherently selfish.

The feminist and media activist Diana McCarty, talking about the politics of behavior, asks: how to be in the world in a way that matters, when you understand your politics? How does it factor when I go back to my daily life? What do I drink, what I eat, who I drink and I eat with, how I get from point A to point B? What are the conditions that allow me to move freely or not?  What are the conditions that allow others to move freely or not?

There are different ways of looking at, observing and narrating theory, and through practices of transversal alliances, they show us what can happen when one invests in interdependence, in affinity, while disintegrating identities.

***

In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni is a palindrome, a verse recalled by Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga, that refers to a poem in which a few soldiers wander in the forest at night, get lost, and stop before a fire. Night after night, they end up ceasing to be soldiers, giving in to consumption and wandering. It is the starting point of a script for a lecture performance, co-written with Manuel Segade in 2018.

The term “nocturnalization” used by Morandeira Arrizabalaga is taken from the book Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (2011) by the historian Craig Koslofsky. It describes the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic usage of the night. Koslofsky focuses on 17th century Europe, constituting an important framework for reading the night against. This century holds the moment in which the electric illumination of cities and houses advanced a radical transformation not only of forms of use, but of symbolic discourses placed upon the night, specifically because the night emerged as a sphere of the respectable public, which the authorities helped to colonize.

With this nocturnalization, the 17th and the 19th century no more identified with diurnal reason, power and authority, generating dark others and encounters at home and around the globe. Departing from this nocturnalization’s historical roots—and specifically in the context of Spain, where the “Spanish night” contributed to create the idea of backwardness of Spain—one can think through the night, to think in the ways darkness alters perceptions, transforms our relationship to others, and modifies the experience of time. What Morandeira Arrizabalaga is trying to propose with the nocturnal is a gesture of adjectivising the night, to derive a speculative texture rather than a category of analysis: a texture of analysis that cultivates an attention to the sensual, political and ephemeral enrichments, all radically ambiguous, with a sense of ambivalent possibility.

Some of Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga’s questions, to which she answers with different practices, are: what is the infralanguage sensation, the perceptual attention and chromatic realm established by darkness? What is a nocturnal perspective? What type of performativity epistemology does it signal to, pointing towards how we know rather than what we know? How is indeterminacy a way to resist or to trouble the Derridean idea of photology? And then, following José Esteban Muñoz claim for the ephemeral, how to pose the nocturnal as something that does not rest on epistemological foundations but is interested in following traces? How does nocturnality shift semiotics? How can we utter the undecidable that interrupts diurnal law and legibility? What forms of deconstructing can the nocturnal imprint in different communities?

The nocturnal constellation Morandeira Arrizabalaga is trying to share—thinking the nocturnal as a performative provocation—does not imply only adjectivizing the nocturnal, but sitting towards it.

Language is what connects all these talks.

How do we want to think the speech act?

What do we give attention to? What was is it asking our attention for?

How does it feel listening to voices?

How does it feel reading these lines?

And back thinking about the how…

How… exit routes? (within theory)

Notes:
[1] Charles W. Mills, “The Chronopolitics of Racial Time, ” Time and Society 29, no. 2 (May 2020): 297-317.
[2] David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).
[3] Sutardji Calzoum Bachri, Black Soup (Singapore: Department of Malay Studies: National University of Singapore, 1993).
[4] Fred Moten, Stolen Life: Consent Not to be a Single Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 188.
[5] https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1983/11/how-we-behave.

The author Sara Benaglia wishes to thank Dorothy Hunter for the talk around this text.

Read more about the symposium How To Undo Things With Theory.