CRITICAL STUDIES NOTES: ART, BECOMING AND PARTICIPATION #13

CRITICAL STUDIES NOTES: ART, BECOMING AND PARTICIPATION #13 Eduarda Neves, Nuno Rodrigues and Susana Caló The Edições Caseiras [Homemade Editions], published by ESAP’s Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo [Arnaldo Araújo Research Centre] seek to present academic studies produced in the scope of its research and interests. These publications are subject to double blind peer review. Critical Studies: Art, Becoming and Participation marks the launch of the Visual Arts and Critical Studies Group, recently formed within the scope of the Arnaldo Araújo Research Centre (CEAA). The book seeks to rehearse what may become, in the next future, a Brute Theory, whose territories of action remain under definition but whose company we wish to keep along future trajectories. As the singular is a collective, in this publication dispersion overrides the search for any type of unity. Brute Theory, as a pocket of resistance to current models of academic domination anchored in profitable, efficient and, as repeatedly stated, competitive research, proposes precarious dynamics, such as risk and drift. CEAA Edições Caseiras 22 I Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo Escola Superior Artística do Porto CEAA I SATH Secção Autónoma de Teoria e História escola superior artística do porto cooperativa de ensino superior artístico do porto.CRL CRITICAL STUDIES NOTES: ART, BECOMING AND PARTICIPATION #13 Eduarda Neves, Nuno Rodrigues and Susana Caló Edições Caseiras / 22 Title: CRITICAL STUDIES NOTES: ART, BECOMING AND PARTICIPATION #13 Autores: Eduarda Neves, Nuno Rodrigues and Susana Caló © Eduarda Neves, Nuno Rodrigues and Susana Caló CESAP/CEAA, 2012 Graphic Design: Jorge Cunha Pimentel Edition: Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo da CESAP/ESAP Property: Cooperativa de Ensino Superior Artístico do Porto R. do Infante D. Henrique, 131 4050-298 PORTO, PORTUGAL Telef: +351 223 392 100/40 Fax: +351 223 392 101 Printed by: LITOPORTO Artes Gráficas Lda First Edition, Porto, Junho de 2014 Print: 300 copies ISBN: 978-972-8784-52-2 Legal Deposit: This book was subjected to double blind peer review. The texts published in this book were produced within the project Art and Criticism (ESAP/ 2013/ P04/ SATH), conducted in the framework of the Secção Autónoma deTeoria e História (SATH) [Autonomous Section of Theory and History] / Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo (CEAA) [Arnaldo Araújo Research Center] of Escola Superior Artística do Porto (ESAP) and as such, funded both by the ESAP budget and by national funds by FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology (PEst-OE/EAT/UI4041/2014) under the Development, Consolidation and Strengthening of National ID Institutions Network (OE). The authors of the texts have the exclusive responsability of image copyrights printed in the correspondent texts. The editors do not take any responsability for any improper use of images and any consequences following. Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo Escola Superior Artística do Porto Largo de S. Domingos, 80 4050-545 PORTO PORTUGAL Telef.: 223392130 / Fax.: 223392139 e-mail: [email protected] www.esap.pt INTRODUCTION Eduarda Neves ART AND UTOPIA. THE SIRENS´ LESSON SELF-PORTRAIT II (LOST IN THE CITY) Nuno Rodrigues FEED-BACK LOOP: FROM PERCEPTION TO BRAINTIME THE SCREW: BETWEEN WEARING AND WATCHING Susana Caló BECOMING MINOR, SPACE, POLITICS AND EMANCIPATION MASOCH, FROM THE FIGURE TO THE PROBLEM 7 9 15 21 29 37 43 Contents Critical Studies: Art, Becoming and Participation marks the launch of the Visual Arts and Critical Studies Group, recently formed within the scope of the Arnaldo Araújo Research Centre (CEAA). The book seeks to rehearse what may become, in the next future, a Brute Theory, whose territories of action remain under definition but whose company we wish to keep along future trajectories. As the singular is a collective, in this publication dispersion overrides the search for any type of unity. Brute Theory, as a pocket of resistance to current models of academic domination anchored in profitable, efficient and, as repeatedly stated, competitive research, proposes precarious dynamics, such as risk and drift. Therefore, and taking into account the following presuppositions: 1 - In Art and Utopia. The Sirens´lesson, possible relationships between artistic practice and the concepts of Utopia, Heterotopia and Dystopia are proposed. Within this context, art is perceived as a singular space of resistance and called upon in its heterotopic dimension. This also involves reflecting upon the questionable approach of the Vatican to contemporary art and the resulting, usually dystopian implications, such as the Holy See's representation at the 55th Venice Biennale. 2 – in the text Self-Portrait II (Lost in the City), the author's artistic programme is grasped as a political and paradigmatic strategy. Considering the reading developed by Walter Benjamin around Edgar Allan Poe's work The Man of the Crowd, this strives to conceive the city as a potential space for trans-subjectivity and for the limitless explorations of the flâneur through a critical approach to the work Self-Portrait II (Lost in the City). Between Baudelaire and Poe, the flâneur and the man of crime, Lost in the City draws combinations, deviations and dispersions. 3 – During the 1960s and 1970s the relationship between spectator and artwork underwent considerable transformations as the modernist notions of aesthetic experience, authorship and objecthood were critically dismantled. INTRODUCTION Eduarda Neves, Nuno Rodrigues and Susana Caló In Feed-back Loop: from Perception to Brain-time and The Screw: Between Wearing and Watching Nuno Rodrigues analises, respectively, Dan Graham's Present Continuous Past(s) and Hélio Oiticica's Parangolés highlighting the heteronomous dimension that underpins this critical endeavour. 4 – Following a careful exploration of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming-minor, and its development vis-à-vis the relationship to the axiomatics of capital in the form of the problem of the minority, Becoming Minor, Space, Politics and Emancipation proposes thinking on the concept of minor vis-à-vis issues of space and territory, as a practice of resistance in articulating both a micro and a macro-politics while warning against the dangers of mistaking minor for small, independent or marginal. The working hypothesis here states that a struggle for spaces of existence is a struggle for life and that defending the right to a territory also involves defending the right to participate in the invention of a world. 5 – In Masoch, From the Figure to the Problem, literary production is portrayed as the power to open up spaces enabling new human dimensions to emerge. In Masoch, Deleuze conveys how literary production entails the creation of worlds that exceed pre-existing clinical concepts and reach beyond mere biographical projection. This essay explores the exercise of literature as something that proceeds according to an opening to the world or a 'becoming-world' of the biographical. Brute Theory seeks out conceptual approaches to authors whose programs ensue from an extreme necessity. Only those that remind us of the cynicism of Diogenes in which critique, polemics and courage constitute true sovereignty. Eduarda Neves Nuno Rodrigues Susana Caló 15 1. Edgar Allan POE – “O Homem da Multidão”, in Histórias Extraordinárias. Mem Martins: EuropaAmérica, s /d, p.109. “Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul”. 1 La Bruyère Self-Portrait II (Lost in the City) is a paradigmatic photomontage by Martha Rosler (1943-). In this self-portrait the multiple and complex territories that shape her route are all present. Influenced by feminism and a conception of art as an activist social practice and engaged opposition, her work is driven by the appropriation of mediatized images from television, advertising, photography, and ideological representations of daily life, which the artist enacts in a process of collage and photomontage. Her critical essays in which she addresses the art system, the aestheticization of the real produced by photo-journalism, the humanist ideology of documentary photography, or the power structures that dominate public and private space, are indicators of the multitude of questions that we find in her vast production. Leaving painting behind and making recourse to installation, video, mail art and performance amoung others, the artist uses a multiplicity of media, themselves constituting truly political and semantic problematizing platforms which destabilize power representations. The ironic, explosive and surprising plastic of her mode of production, is marked by the questioning of femininine stereotypes or even by an active criticism of capitalistic economy, American imperialism and social misery. The use of photomontage, an historical practice with political traditions, formally and conceptually meets one of the coordinates of her program. In 2008, Martha Rosler produced fully digital art works, presenting images in accordance with the higher printing quality of current magazines and periodicals, by reinforcing the sophistication and glamour of the people represented in those publications. As Hal Foster emphasizes, artists such as Martha Rosler, Mary Kelly and Barbara Kruger, among others, have made the most productive criticism of minimalism as “they came back to images and discourses adjacent to the art SELF-PORTRAIT II (LOST IN THE CITY) Eduarda Neves 16 world, specially to the representation of women in mass culture and to the 2 construction of femininity in psychoanalytical theory” . Photography´s relationship with language and text, with context and personal experience, becomes structuring in the use of photographic image as visual paradigm of modernist myths deconstruction. Her artistic practice not only explores themes that dominate our daily lives and our contemporaneity, but also appeals to the public's involvement with the art work. Without any kind of didacticism, her images enunciate questions, they do not generate answers. Rosler says: “My work seems didactic but if you try 3 figure out what the message is, I don´t think it´s so clear” . The issue is not to search for the answer but for each individual to produce and reformulate meaning. The artist aims, in her own words, to “provoke a reaction and give it life (...). If we get people to hold back, even if momentarily, in the act of making actions and give thoughtless answers in daily life, a détournement may be produced and a breakthrough in understanding may be possible. (…) In my work I intend to open a space in which the spectator may come in enter and rethink the received the incoming 4 messages” . 2. Hal FOSTER – El Retorno de lo Real. La Vanguardia a Finales de Siglo. Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2001, p. 62. 3. Martha ROSLER interviewed by Benjamin BUCHLOCH – “A Conversation with Martha Rosler“, in Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World. New York: MIT Press, 2000, p. 54. 4. Martha ROSLER interview by Alan GILBERT – “La Calle es un Collage: entrevista a Martha Rosler”, in Martha Rosler. La Casa, la Calle, la Cocina/ The House, the Street, the Kitchen. Granada: Centro José Guerrero, 2009, p. 124. Martha Rosler - Self-portrait II (Lost in the City) Photomontage, 16x20 40,6x50cm, 1966-72 17 Considering that, presently, what happens in public art spaces of art ends up projected into the public sphere, her works draw attention to the appearance of art not only in traditional means of communication such as the press, but also in political publications, on the Internet or in blogs. Rosler is interested in attracting a public who usually does not attend museums or galleries, thus broadening the intervention scope of her work. She proposes the creation of fissures in standard daily life. Her work has always been widespread not only in underground territories, in the street, but also through the mass media such as television. Self-Portrait I and Self-Portrait II (Lost in the City) are two interconnected self-portraits that integrate the series Body Beautiful: Beauty Knows no Pain. However, considering the framework of reflection that we intend to develop, only Self-Portrait II (Lost in the City) is subject to analysis here. Interviewed by Benjamin Buchloch, Martha Rosler mentions that she 5 began this series in 1965 and that the statement Beauty Knows no Pain, was taken from an Elliot Erwitt´s film, where the phrase was pronounced by a Texas cheerleader. According to the artist, this series is fundamentally about 6 the representations of the feminine in advertising and art . The reference to urban space, present in this self-portrait, leads us to evoque Rosler´s interest in street photography. Although she has hardly photographed people, as her motivation was the street itself, in this black and white photomontage the passersby acquire the configuration of black spots moving through the city. Despite predating Secrets from the Street, the attention to urban social space, however, is already delineated in Self-Portrait II (Lost in the City). Taking up almost all the image, passersby are moving in the street protecting themselves from the rain with umbrellas. A photograph of a female is placed at the bottom left corner of the image. Her back turned to the walkers and facing the spectator. It is she who “illuminates” the image. As a strange and disturbing element of the photographic situation, this woman in pose, sunglasses placed on top of her head, denaturalizes the realism of a rainy day, to which the photographic image refers to. She also establishes a meta-critical relationship with the apparent instantaneous record of the photographed situation. Recognizing the influence of Bertolt Brecht's didactic plays, the political dimension of her work is still present in the representation of identity. In SelfPortrait II (Lost in the City) we could talk about an effect of estrangement or distancing in the brechtian way. This distance of the Self in relation to the city, which the title of the artwork reminds us of, gets reflected also in the viewer's attitude. We are confronted with the strange relationship between the image of passersby on a street in the rain and the portrait of the woman represented. There is always more beyond the Self. If Brechtian distancing refused the viewer the scenic illusion, the use of 5. Martha ROSLER interviewed by Benjamin BUCHLOCH – “A Conversation with Martha Rosler...”, p. 47. However, according to information communicated by the artist via e-mail, the series was probably initiated in 1966. 6. Martha ROSLER interviewed by Benjamin BUCHLOCH – “A Conversation with Martha Rosler…”, p. 47. 18 7. “I was influenced by Brecht´s Lehrstücke. I get to pose the questions. But I feel it would be selfdefeating for me also to generate the answer. I may have an answer, but there is more to the world than me. It is very likely that the answer that you generate will be a better answer than my answer, so why should I presume to tell you what my answer is?” (Martha Rosler interviewed by Benjamin BUCHLOCH – “A Conversation with Martha Rosler…”, p. 55). 8. Gilles DELEUZE – Crítica e Clínica. São Paulo: Editora 34, p.77. 9. Gilles DELEUZE, Crítica e Clínica...p.75. 10. As there are books that don't permit themselves to be read, there are also secrets that don't permit themselves to be told. So begins and ends this work. 11. “The crowd is not only the newest asylum of the outlaws: it is also the latest narcotic for those abandoned. The flâneur is an abandoned man in the middle of the crowd. In this he shares the situation of the commodity. (...) It penetrates him like a narcotic that compensates him for many humiliations. The trance to which the flâneur surrenders is that of the commodity displayed and vibrating in the middle of the stream of buyers.” (Walter BENJAMIN - “O Flâneur”, in A Modernidade. Obras Escolhidas de Walter Benjamin. Lisboa: Assírio e Alvim, 2006, p. 56-57). photomontage likewise potentiates image denaturalization. Just as in Brecht the montage of epic resistances interrupts identification and initiates criticism, similarly in this self-portrait the photomontage defamiliarises that 7 represented. At the artistic level, the Lehrstucke is suspended while nevertheless remaining at the political level. The brechtian dialectical jump is clearly experienced in the recourse to photomontage which, in turn, constitutes a political strategy. Lost in the City, presents itself as a map of intensities, a cartography of affections, of forces. The image, according to Deleuze “ is not only path, but becoming (devenir.). (...) We clearly see why the real and the imaginary had to be overcome, or even interchanged: a becoming is not an imaginary, as well as a trip is not real. It is the becoming that makes the minimum path, or even stillness in the same place, a journey; and it is the path what makes imaginary 8 a becoming. Both maps, from paths and affections, refer to one another.” Photomontage is closer to that of a mapping; it operates through displacements, gaps, paths, from images in to images. In the text What Children say, Deleuze notes that “maps (...) overlap, in such a way that each one meets in the following a reallocation, instead of finding in the preceding an origin of a map to another one. It is not about seeking an origin, but an 9 assessment of displacements” . Photomontage, as a map, defines processes composed by several paths and trips that can be made by one or multiple travelers, but they coexist in it: difference as production of the collective, as Deleuze and Guattari note. We can say that the city – striated space of the crowd - implies deterritorialised, decoded and interrupted flows, which are present in Lost in the City. While a force that articulates processes, the city is a live experimentation, rhizomatic, a mapping without beginning or end, where flows circulate and are articulated: a real agencement. If traveling is thinking, we travel in plane or striated, in passages, connections, combinations. Between detours and dispersions, the city is drawn as a potential space of trans-subjectivity, of unlimited expedition for the flâneur. In the era of advanced capitalism – to paraphrase Walter Benjamin with regard to Baudelaire – if a flâneur might be considered in this Rosler's Self10 Portrait, perhaps he is closer to Poe and also the deterritorializing crime . According to Benjamin's reading, the flâneur seeks to overcome boredom in the city and within the crowd. While, on the one hand, the crowd acts like a 11 drug to the flâneur and places him in the same condition of the commodity , on the other hand, it functions like a mass that, as an asylum, "protects the asocial from his pursuers. (...) In times of terror, when everyone has something of a conspirator, everyone may also play the role of the detective. Flânerie offers the best prospects for it. (…) When the flâneur thus becomes a detective malgré lui, transformation befits him socially because it legitimates 12. Walter BENJAMIN – “O Flâneur”, in A Modernidade...p. 42-43. 13. BENJAMIN says “Baudelaire loved solitude, but if possible in the midle of the crowd” (Walter BENJAMIN – “O Flâneur”, in A Modernidade. Obras Escolhidas de Walter Benjamin...p. 51). 14. Edgar Allan POE – “O Homem da Multidão” in Histórias Extraordinárias...p.119. 15. Walter BENJAMIN – “Pequena História da Fotografia”, in A Modernidade. Obras Escolhidas de Walter Benjamin...p. 261. 19 his leisure. (...) Whatever track the flâneur follows, all will lead him to a 12 crime” . 13 Between the outlaw and the flâneur the border fades away . In Poe's words: "this old man – I said at length - is the type and the genius 14 of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd” . It is about the collective as subjectivation. Lost in the City situates the female figure on the margin of the image, but, like The Man of the Crowd, she refuses to be alone. As Benjamin said, regarding Atget's photographs, "isn't every corner of our cities a crime 15 scene?” A flâneur never moves. A flâneur is never lost. 1. This is how Graham describes the piece: “The mirrors reflect present time. The video camera tapes what is immediately in front of it and the entire reflection on the opposite mirrored wall. The image seen by the camera (reflecting everything in the room) appears eight seconds later on the video monitor (via a tape delay placed between the video recorder, which is recording, and a second video recorder which is playing the recording back). If a viewer's body does not directly obscure the lens's view of the facing mirror, the camera tapes the reflection of the room and the reflected image of the monitor (which shows the time recorded eight seconds previously). A person viewing the monitor sees both the image of himself eight seconds ago, and that reflected of him/herself on the mirror from the monitor eight seconds ago, which is sixteen seconds in the past (because the camera view of eight seconds prior was playing back on the monitor eight seconds ago, and this was reflected in the mirror along with the then present reflection of the viewer). An infinite regress of time continuums within time continuums (always separated by eight second intervals) within time continuums is created. The mirror at right angles to the other mirror-wall and the monitor wall gives a present-time view of the installation, as if observed from an “objective” vantage point exterior to the viewer's subjective experience and the mechanism that produces the piece's perceptual effect. It simply reflects (statically) present time". (“Present Continuous Past(s)” in Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art (Massachusetts: MIT Press 1999), pp. 39–40. Originally published in Dan Graham: Video/Architecture/Television: Writings on Video and Video Works 1970–1978, ed. Benjamin Buchloh [Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1979, p. 7]). 2. Throughout the text, the term perception relates to the production of actual images. 21 Perception Part of Dan Graham's work deals with the structural tension arising from the interplay between objective and subjective perception within a given visual milieu and the self-perceptions of the perceiver. He does so by constructing technical apparatus that set up vertiginous circuits through which the perceiver and the perceived continuously change both position and status; this represents an investigation into the techno-social structures of perception and the specular mise-en-abyme inherent to contemporary subjective experience. This represents an essential aspect to his work that is particularly to the fore in his pieces intersecting video information circuits, architectural structures, and live performance. 1 For example, take the work Present Continuous Past(s) (1974) . In this piece (as in many others), Graham constructed both a perceptive and a specular apparatus in which the production of images fundamentally results from an optico-reflective structure that functions insofar as the viewer is a constituent part. When the installation room is empty, nothing happens. The optical machine remains inactive, time and space are abstractions empty of empirical content. When members of the audiences walk in, their movements are immediately reflected on the mirror; they immediately see their images on the mirror-walls. After an eight second interval, images become produced out of other images. The subject of perception then becomes split into an optical point of view and the image's 'content'. Once the image becomes the image of something, perception occurs; once the image becomes the image of the perceiver perceiving, a series of close specular and/or informational circuits are formed. Two distinct 'eyes' set the visual apparatus – the I-eye of the spectator and the mechanical eye of the camera – to which a subjective (human-moving) and an objective (mechanic-static) point of view are connected. Here, subjective and objective perception refers to the point of view implicit in the image, that is, to the spatial and temporal position of the 2 image in relation to the visual apparatus making the image possible . In a first instance, the subjective perception corresponds to the image captured by the eye and framed by the mirror, the reflective images created by the mirror facing the video camera and monitor and by the mirror perpendicular to it. FEED-BACK LOOP: FROM PERCEPTION TO BRAIN-TIME Nuno Rodrigues 22 Conversely, the objective perception corresponds to the images mechanically captured by the camera and shown on the monitor. On this level, we argue that the set of reflective and projective images produce objective and subjective perceptions as these indicate what is perceived from 'subjective' and 'objective' viewpoints. There is, however, another set of relations between the images created that complicates this first distinction between the objective and subjective perceptions. Here, the objective and subjective stand stems from the interrelation of the images within the installation's schema, the way they bring about an internal or external space for perception. On the one hand, there are the images created by the feedback loop, which originate within the optico-informational circuit mirror-camera-monitor; on the other hand, there are the perpendicular mirrored walls which allow, according to Graham, the objective perception of the installation's mechanism. Insofar as the objective and subjective perception are distinguished in terms of their ability to point to a place which is, respectively, external and internal to the set or frame constituting the visual milieu of the image itself, we may argue that the monitor presents a series of subjective perceptions whereas the perpendicular mirror presents a series of objective perceptions. This occurs because the mirror reflects the 'external' and objective viewpoint of the installation's visual circularity and the monitor shows the set of images that immerses the viewer in the installation's visual apparatus. In this sense, the camera produces 'subjective' specular images whereas the perpendicular mirror provides 'objective' reflection. We may refer to a visual apparatus through which visual reflection and speculation is respectively connected to objective and subjective perception. However, this connection is valid only insofar as the objective and the subjective, the reflective and the speculative, Dan Graham, Present Continuous Past(s), 1974 23 3. Friedrich Wolfram Heubach, “The Observed Eye, or Making Seeing Visible (on the video works of Dan Graham” in Dan Graham ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998), p. 193. perceptions interrelate with each other. These are perceptive positions arising from the interrelationship between reflective and circular images. Present Continuous Past(s) constructs singular viewpoints that prove both 'objective' and 'subjective' insofar as they are positioned within a close, in relation to itself, but partial and open, in relation to the whole of the installation, optical circuit. Both the closed relationship of the image to the implicit point-of-view and the dynamic relationship between 'objective' and 'subjective' images bring about the opticalisation of the viewer as he/she is reduced to optical positions and image content. However, the circuit mirror-camera-monitor (the circuit which positions the camera as the 'subjective' point-of-view) and its timedelayed feedback loop, repositions, as it were, the perceiver as the subject who perceives him/herself perceiving. Through the images originating from the closed time-delay circuit, a kind of image-subject takes shape. As soon as the viewer recognises him/herself on the monitor, he/she actively responds to the time delayed feedback circuit mirror-camera-monitor. Here, the subject is not reduced to an optical point of view within the given visual structure as he/she 'interacts' with the images produced in his/her capacity as perceiver, actor and object perceived. We may even argue that the subject regains its interiority, but only through the production of external images (reflection and projection). We are certainly far from the formation of a zone of narcissistic fascination in which the image of the self is repeatedly posited as a moment of self-recognition. The installation connects subjective recognition with the presence of another observer (the camera and the future viewer of the video monitor), so that observing is equated with being observed. In Friedrich Wolfram Heubach's words: After all this, it is quite clear that Dan Graham's video installations give the observer a view of himself in which he does not find himself confirmed as a subject but experiences himself dissolved into his dynamic relationship to his image. They illustrate his subjectiveness as an attitude toward his image, his relationship to himself in an image — his dynamic relationship to his image. 3 And relating oneself to one's image is a social condition. This social condition arises therefore from the confrontation of the subject with an external image of which he/she is the content; from the very possibility of becoming an image. Symptomatically, Graham identifies two main theoretical influences behind his production of the video installations in the 1970s: I was very interested in behaviourism and phenomenology. 24 Behaviourism was an American idea of just functional description, of the physiological movement of the body outside of consciousness. Phenomenology was a European idea of consciousness that also became important in American art at that time. Then primitive video was used in scientific laboratories to investigate physiological 4 movement and I used it in time-delays to investigate brain-time. Action Following the analysis advanced above, the tension arising between behaviourist physiological externality and phenomenological subjectivity reflects the move towards the relationship between perception and action. As seen, the circuit mirror-camera-monitor generates such a kind of images of movement whereby the 'subjectivity' of the observer is shaped by his/her relation to his/her own image. This condition only proves possible through the insertion of the viewer into a given techno-optical situation. As Graham suggests, the images of action stem from the interrelationship between a certain milieu (the techno-optical structure) and the corresponding action of the perceiver 'caught' within it. From the point of view of the video installation's optical construct, the actions or behaviours (observable actions) of the viewer seem alien and unproductive since they are unable to change the given parameters of the mechanism. Actions are only able to determine the content of subjective perception but not the technical milieu that makes this possible. Furthermore, the time-delay relationship between action images already indicates a productive process which, as far as behaviourism goes, overflows the redundancy of “functional description” as technical 5 observation conditions the behaviour of the subject observed . The perception of action is short-circuited through the insertion of two specific visual axes: the perpendicular mirrored-walls and the feedback loop 6 based on an 8 second time-delay . From a perceptive point of view, the perpendicular mirrors 'suspend' the movement of the video feedback loop giving a view of the installation's wider schema. However, for Graham the 'objective' viewpoint provided by the mirror is in fact constructed so as to frame the viewer in an inverted “Renaissance painting” visual set. Moreover, Graham, influenced by Lacan's notion of the mirror stage, associated the framing of the perceiver in the “picture-window” or mirror to the formation of a perceiving self. In a mechanism parallel to the video-mirror circuit, subjective and objective reflective perceptions are mutually conditioned. The viewer is torn between the 'objective' and the 'suspended' viewpoint of the visual apparatus, and the perception of oneself through the Renaissance pictorial frame; likewise, the visual milieu is either the installation's technical apparatus or that framed by the classic pictorial window. By looking in the 4. Apolonija Sustersic, “One Morning Talking with Dan Graham” in Dan Graham ed. Gloria Moure, p. 33. 5. The performance Performance/Audience/Mirror (1977) provides a good account of what might be termed the behaviourist continuous dislodgment of both perception and behaviour. This is how Graham describes this piece: “A performer faces a seated audience. Behind the performer, covering the back wall (parallel to the frontal view of the seated audience), is a mirror reflecting the audience. Stage 1 The performer looks in the general direction of the audience. He begins a continuous description of his external movements and the attitudes he believes are signified by this behavior for about five minutes. The audience hears the performer and sees his body. Stage 2 The performer continues facing the audience. Looking directly at them, he continuously describes their external behavior for about five minutes. (See observation 2.) Stage 3 The performer faces the mirror (his back turned to the audience). For about five minutes he continuously describes his front body's gestures and the attitudes it may signify. He is free to move about, in order to better see aspects of his body's movements. When he sees and describes his body from the front, the audience, inversely, sees his back (and their front).The performer is facing the same direction as the audience, seeing the same mirrorview. The audience cannot see (the position of) the performer's eyes. Stage 4 The performer remains turned, facing the mirror. For about five minutes he observes and continuously describes the audience who he can see mirrorreversed from Stage 2 (their right and left now being the same as his). He freely moves about relative to the mirror in order to see different aspects of the audience's behavior. His change of position produces a changing visual perspective which is correspondingly reflected in the description. The audience's view remains fixed; they are not (conventionally) free to move from their seats in relation to the mirror covering the front staging area.” Graham notes that “in stage 2, the audience sees itself reflected by the mirror instantaneously, while the performer's comments are slightly delayed and follow, as they are verbal discourse, a continuous temporal forward flow […] First, a person in the audience sees himself 'objectively' ('subjectively') perceived by himself; next, he hears himself described 'objectively' ('subjectively') in terms of the performer's perception […] Cause and effect relations are further complicated when members of the audience (because they can see and be seen in the mirror by other members of the audience) attempt to influence (through eye contact, gestures, etc.) the behavior of other audience members, which thereby influences the performer's (of the audience's behavior)” [In Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, MIT Press, 1999, pp. 124–5. Originally published by in vernacular and popular aspects of Brazilian urban culture and society, such as samba and the urban space of the favela. Lastly, Oiticica never fully abandoned the constructivist (geometric-abstract) framework of concrete 3 and neoconcrete art . He explored new sensorial and material possibilities through continuing his systematic study of the three-dimensional expansion of colour. The ludic and sensuous aspects of the pieces produced during the 1960s are arranged according to the framework of reference provided by the highly architectural conception of space and structural notion of colour 4 developed during a formative period in the late 1950s and early 1960s . These three aspects — the participation of the spectator, sensory-material heterogeneity, and the structural spatialisation of colour — shaped the Parangolé series as well as the rest of the work produced that decade. However, the capes establish a singular direct link with dance. More specifically, the usage of soft materials as a way to create a wearable shelter composed of several layers/surfaces, in a certain sense re-actualising painting's classic relation between draperies and compositional planes, and the presentation of the capes as art pieces to be worn and danced with, connect the Parangolés to performative movement, to popular dance, and samba in particular. In light of Oiticica's notes on dance, we may consider the Parangolés as a means of negotiating between the 'warmth' of vital movement and the 'coldness' of modern visual arts, opening the latter to the primordial zone of sensuous expression enacted by the former. To put it differently: the capes operate as art mediators between the pre-artistic world of spontaneous rhythm and the highly intellectualised world of contemporary art. However, this mediation is far from unproblematic as it relies on the tensional relationship between the formal aesthetic structure and mythical human vitality. To borrow Waly Salomão's words, Oiticica's work stems from the “pendulous tension transgression/constructivism”. The environmental program emerges from within the midst of such antagonism. The discovery of what I call Parangolé signals the crucial point and defines a specific position within the theoretical position of all my experiments with color-structure in space, especially with regards to a new definition of what may be, in those same experiments, the “plastic object”, that is, the work. It is not the case — as the name Parangolé, taken from folklore slang, might lead one to suppose — of implying a fusion of folklore with my experiments, or any identification of that kind, transposed or otherwise, completely superficial and useless (…) In this search for an objective foundation, for a new space and time in the work in environmental space, this constructive sense of the Parangolé aspires to an “environmental art” par excellence (…) The 3. Briefly, the neoconcrete movement emerged as a response to the deadlock reached in late 1950s by Brazilian constructivism (concrete art). Through the theoretical orientation of the poet and art critic Ferreira Gullar, neoconcrete artists engaged in the persistent, even if multifarious, critique of the “exacerbated rationalism” of concretism which, according to the neoconcrete standpoint, had reduced geometric abstraction to a technical expression of scientific knowledge (particularly Gestalt psychology), objective positivism and modern mechanicism. In contrast, neoconcrete artists attempted to elaborate a new position regarding the history of Brazilian geometric abstraction. This was a position that proposed a renewed and autonomous relationship between art and subjective perception, expression and intuition (without abdicating the geometric rigour and objectivity of concrete art). Although short lived (1959-61), and somewhat parochial (the neoconcrete movement resulted from the reaction of a group of artists from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo's concrete art scene), the neoconcrete movement would define much of the avant-garde art produced in Brazil in the 1960s. The writings of Gullar, particularly the “Neoconcrete Manifesto” and “Theory of the Non-object”, and the art work of Oiticia and Lygia Clark (among others) would prove pivotal in framing the conceptual debates and artistic practices of the following years. Significantly, as Ronaldo Brito asserts, the neoconcrete art movement signals the historical closure of Brazilian constructivism and the opening of a new set of parameters for Brazilian art (see Aracy Amaral, Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte. (1950-62). Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; São Paulo : Secretaria da Cultura, Ciência e Tecnologia do Estado de São Paulo, Pinacoteca do Estado, 1977; R. Brito, Neoconcretismo: Vértice e Ruptura do Projecto Construtivo Brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro: Marcos Marcondes, 1975). 4. The beginning of Oiticica's artistic trajectory is part of the history of Brazilian constructivism, more specifically the history of concrete and neoconcrete art. This trajectory starts with Oiticica's involvement with the Rio de Janeiro avant-garde cultural scene associated with the Grupo Frente, which included the artists Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape and the influential art critics Ferreira Gullar and Mário Pedrosa. In the mid-1950s, Oiticica participated in several exhibitions of Grupo Frente and in the 1st Exhibition of Concrete Art. Like other concrete art painters, he explored the formal problems then being addressed by contemporary, i.e. concrete, constructivism: the pictorial structure of the painting's surface, notions of repetition and seriality, figure-background relations, and the formal functions of colour. In the late 1950s, Oiticica begins to develop an individual artistic path, producing a group of paintings titled Secos [Dry] (1956-57) and Metaesquemas [Metaschemes] (195758), in which his investigations on structure and colour and formal seriality gain consistence. As he would retrospectively acknowledge, this body of work inaugurated a line of enquiry which would lead to the production of the three-dimensional “environmental” art in the following decade. In 1959-60, during the formation of the neoconcrete art 31 spectator's participation is, once again, characteristic of what exists today generally in art: a search for “environmental totalities” that are created and explored throughout all their orders, from the infinitely small to the architectural, urban space, etc. (…) The “finding” of Parangolé elements in the landscape of the urban or rural world is also part of “establishing perceptive-structural relations” between what grows in the structural grid of the Parangolé (representing here the general character of colour-structure in the environmental space), and what is “found” in the spatial environmental world. In the architecture of the “favela”, for example, a Parangolé character is implicit, such is the structural organicity of its constituent elements, alongside the internal circulation and external dismemberment of these constructions; there are no abrupt transitions from “room” to “livingroom” or “kitchen”, only the essential that defines each part connecting to the other in continuity (…) All these matters remain for a critical theorization, including a return, through the concept of the Parangolé, to that mythical primordial structure of art, which, of course, always existed and defined to a greater or lesser extent (…) There is a “will for a new myth”, brought about by these art elements; 5 they interfere with the spectator's behaviour. Therefore, the articulation of dance with fine art took place within the framework provided by the environmental program. However, as the above passage suggests, the relationship between the operational realm of the environmental project and the mystical sphere of the “primordial structure of art” remains unresolved. On the one hand, the total experience of the artwork was accomplished through the interpenetration of the abstract-geometric framework and certain aesthetic dimensions of the socio-cultural Brazilian reality of that time. As the citation shows, Oiticica sought to incorporate facets of Brazilian life into his work, bringing it closer to specific 6 contemporary aspects of Brazil's relentless process of modernisation . In this sense, the environmental program entailed a process of reconnecting artwork to a precise social field, operating within the cultural parameters stemming from a defined socio-historical territory. On the other hand, the transhistorical and archetypical notion of primordial rhythm (dance) remains a crucial facet regarding the political remit of artwork, for the idealised totalisation of the collective body is accomplished through a “return” to a mythical world of spontaneous experience. Oiticica refers to two different kinds of experiential totalities or lived experiences (vivências) whose interrelation is the very means through which the mythical world of primeval rhythm and the topological socio-political reality of urban Brazil violently displace each other. Oiticica saw the stages for this tensional relationship in the “spectator's behaviour”. group, the three-dimensional spatialisation of colour takes on the architectural dimension characteristic of his mature work. In 1959, Oiticica initiates the production of a series of paintings, which are monochromes deriving from tonal variations of one indexed “nuclear” colour (white, yellow or red) while exploring the limits of the frame's bidimensionality. While reducing painting to a flat surface, Oiticica released the paintings from the wall, creating three-dimensional constructions that establish a spatio-temporal relationship with the surrounding environment. These three-dimensional structures result in the production of the first Nucleus in 1960. As experiments in the spatialisation of colour, the Nuclei bring about a dynamic interrelationship between the experiential (spatial and temporal) trajectory of the viewer, the rhythmic arrangement of colour staged by the orthogonal construction, and the involving space of the gallery. They represent, in this regard, Oiticica's contribution to the neoconcrete response to the impasses pertaining to Brazilian geometric abstraction. However, as Oiticica realises, they opened a set of possibilities that went beyond the neoconcrete framework and the constructivist tradition. To a certain extent, the Nuclei signalled the closure of the constructivist project and the forging of the environmental program that later culminates in the Tropicália (1967) and Eden (1969) installations of the late 1960s. 5. Fundamental Bases for the Definition of 'Parangolé'” in Hélio Oiticica , p. 85-88. Translation modified. 6. Oiticica found in the informal and interstitial spaces brought about by the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of the country (the social spaces of the 'street' and the favela) a productive source for his work. Socially, Oiticica tapped into the way of life of the underclasses (the petty criminal, the outcast, and the poor) while, culturally paying particular attention to the dimensions of urban vernacular culture that conveyed notions of precarity, improvisation and resourcefulness. 32 Participation The Parangolés are meant to be danced in or with (or inhabited) to the sound of samba music. According to Oiticica, the act of wearing the cape corresponded to a “bodily-expressive transmutation” of the wearer, the participator, into a new subjective position that only the art piece brings forward. The wearer becomes a participator who becomes a dancer. Specifically, Oiticica points to a crucial difference between wearing and watching: “The “wearing”, in its greater and total sense, counterpoints the “watching”, a secondary feeling, thus closing the “wearing-watching” cycle (…) Wearing, by itself already constitutes a living experience of the work since, by unfolding it and having his/her own body as the central nucleus, the spectator experiences, as it were, the spatial transmutation which takes place there (…) Watching already leads the participator towards the objective spatio-temporal plane of the work, while in the other [state of wearing], this plane is dominated by the subjective-experiential; therein lies a completion of the initial 7 experience of wearing” In this text, by pointing out the objective and subjective position of the wearer (dancer) and the watcher, Oiticica makes reference to the “environmental structure” of the Parangolé in terms of “participator-work”: the spectator experiences the work, as it were, either from within, 'inside' the performative act of completion, or outside that spatio-temporal zone, as a passive spectator that observes an external event. As an environmental piece, the cape puts into motion a “cycle” (wearing-watching) that is opened by these two oppositional experiential positions and completed by ways of the continuous interchange between subjective participation and objective witnessing. Crucially, Oiticica considered the series of stoppages and restarts of movement necessary for the changing between dancers and viewers, an important dimension of such cycle. In the “Notes”, the artist suggested that the total (environmental) experience of the Parangolé is attained through the equivocal position of the dancer-spectator, that is, through the experience of a participator that is a performer for others and simultaneously a spectator of the movement of other performers (within a group of participators-spectators). However, the closure of the cycle wearing-watching does not amount to a definitive completion of the artwork, as if one were the adequate supplement of the other; as if the total experience of the Parangolé was accomplished through the necessary and smooth transition from the position of passive spectator to active participator. 7. “Notes on the Parangolé” in Hélio Oiticica, pp 93, 96. Translation modified. 33 What sustains the 'environmental totality' of the capes is the antagonism arising from watching and wearing, contemplation and action, and the very irreconcilability of these two subjective positions. The participator-spectator is torn between two different experiential situations, occupying the complicated position of mediation between two divergent zones of subjectivity. As such, the Parangolé does not represent an attempt to stage within the artwork the critique of the passive experience of art, so important for participatory art, in terms of active participation as 'primary feeling' vis-àvis secondary inactive observation. Environmental totality implies that participation is always participation for the observation of a spectator that is captured by a performative event that demands external, but also 'internal', observation. Through the transformative act of wearing, the spectator is transmuted into the witness of an event as dependent on the dancer as on the viewer. Thus, the wearing deploys the wearing-watching dichotomy. In this case, the watcher is caught in a situation where objective observation is fundamental, as if the act of watching were also the object of someone's external observation. The contemplation of the dance movement, qua work of art, is the means through which the observer becomes the watcher-watched, a witness conscious of its witnessing. Contrasting with the position of the spectator, Oiticica referred to the violence related to the wearing of the cape, assailing the individual's pre-established way of “being in the world”. The transmutation related to the immersion in the mythical world of dance (wearing) involves the radical shattering of given subjective positions, rather than the spontaneous release of vital sensuous expression unblemished by violence. Following Oiticica's notes on dance, this violence seems linked to the dissolution of the subject's mode of being in a social world structured by social conventions, class division and intellectual abstraction. It is a violence that de-naturalizes the subject's 'natural' place in society. Oiticica attempts to reconnect the mythical conflation of individual and collective vital forces to the concrete urban social underworld that resulted from the accelerated process of modernization of Brazil. The Parangolés, being hybrid constructions that operate between makeshift shelters and capes to dance with, powerfully conjure this urban reality. However, Oiticica's comments on the Parangolé point to a direction very different from any configuration of a harmonious social totality. As he pointed out, the Parangolé is first and foremost a visual work of art that operates within an inter-subjective perceptive field composed of dancers and observers. Here, dance is a primary, and subjective, experience of the artwork insofar as the dancer becomes part of the visual art object (to be perceived by others). The seeming empowerment of the spectator, who, by wearing and dancing becomes an active participator in the making of the art object, is critically dislodged for participation is primarily manifested in terms of action pertaining to the completion of the artwork, that is, as an aesthetic component of the visual 34 piece. In this sense, the cape is the perpetrator of a violation that is not connected to primordial vital movement, but to the objectification of the dancer. Wearing marks precisely the tension emerging between acting and performing (acting for a spectator that, in turn, objectifies his/her own observation). From this point of view, the collective dimension of the Parangolé is brought forward both through the connection and disjunction of seeing and being seen, and doing and seeing. Modern Primitivism If there is a reconciliatory and utopian facet to the Parangolé, it is found in the reciprocal overlapping of the mythical expression of life and the material world of those formally excluded from — but fully socially and economically part of — modern Brazil. Here, the urban vernacular bears the mark of a socio-cultural domain that is as primitive (outside the formal and institutional framework of the nation-state) in as much as it is modern (intrinsic to the process of the nation's modernisation). Rhythmic myth, that pre-social zone where society can be experienced as a whole, was actualised in the concrete social life of the informal urban world, the negative reality of the idealised image of the modern nation. According to Oiticica, this modern primitive world — a world produced by the state's developmentalist surge as its negative over-spillage — engendered the conditions for the reactivation of the primordial pulsation of collective life. However, as the notion of participation indicates, the immediacy of the connection between urban vernacular culture and primeval performative movement remains far from unproblematic for it is forged within the social arena of inter-subjective processes of objectification and subjectification. In this regard, the capes stage the encounter between two different but correlated zones of social positioning: the Brazilian modern primitivism of the favela and the contradictory process of objectification of the subject (dancer) and subjectification of the object (work). 'Environmental totality' is the process through which the socially located 'pre-social' mythical sphere of dance and bricolage is brought about by a visual art object and sustained through an equivocal subjective position (wearing-watching) that functions as a kind of primeval stage necessarily conditioned by today's forms of subject formation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Oiticica, Hélio. Aspiro ao grande labirinto. Edited by Luciano Figueiredo, Lygia Pape, Wally Salomão. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986. Brett, Guy, Catherine David, Chris Dercon, Luicano Figueiredo, Lygia Pape, 35 eds.. Hélio Oiticica. Paris: Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume; Rio de Janeiro: Projeto Hélio Oiticica; Rotterdam: Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, 1992. 36 When Deleuze and Guattari refer in Mille Plateaus to the project of “becoming-minor” (devenir mineure) in terms of a revolutionary practice with the potential to resist the axiomatics of capitalism, the concept is invested with a political dimension that merits exploration. With this in mind, this paper will explore the relations between space, politics and social emancipation drawing on the notions of “becoming minor” and “minority”. Two ideas are key: I demonstrate, first, how the concept of becoming minor exposes the epistemological criteria defining majorities and minorities, second, how it relates to a practice that operates a minorization of the major to make it minor, discarding the simple minor/major opposition. The concept expresses a concern with the creation of conditions of possibility for other 4 forms of thinking and living that reflect the multiple experience of the world . 5 It is important to consider, however, as Maurizio Lazzarato pointed out, that the notion of becoming minor is born in a specific period of struggles of the 60's, and reflects a context in which minoritarian formations seemed to offer lines of escape to the political rigidity of major social, institutional and partidarian formations. Nowadays, however, the situation is a different one. Because the neo-liberal model operates on a double register - at a microBECOMING MINOR, SPACE, POLITICS AND EMANCIPATION Susana Caló Becoming-Minoritarian as the universal figure of consciousness is called autonomy. It is certainly not by using a minor language as a dialect, by regionalizing or ghettoising, that one becomes revolutionary; rather, by using a number of minority elements, by connecting, conjugating them, one invents a 1 specific, unforseen, autonomous becoming. Minor languages do not exist in themselves: they exist ony in relation to a major language and are also investments of that language for the purpose of making it 2 minor. There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. (...) A language is never closed upon itself, except as a 3 function of impotence. Deleuze e Guattari, Mille Plateaus 1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1980. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 1987, p. 118. 2. Ibid., p. 116. 3. Ibid., p. 8. 4. For an extended discussion of these issues, see my recently edited Dossier for journal Lugar Comum, n.41, 2014, in Brasil, entitled “Becoming Minor, Space, Politics and Emancipation. Perspectives from Iberoamerica”, with contributions from several authors analysing the territorial dynamics of power, and the relations between spatial practices and social emancipation across Ibero-America. An on-line version can be found here: http://uninomade.net/lugarcomum/41/ 5. Non-published interview, May 2013, London. 37 political level, through the capture of the production of subjectivity, and at a macro-political level, through the mobilization of state institutions - the traditional opposition between minor social movements, institutions and parties needs to be re-evaluated and up-dated. For this reason, it is crucial to clearly distinguish the “becoming minor project” from praise for the marginal, the small, or the non-institutional. Therefore, I will emphasize the notion that politics is always both a micro and a macro-politics. It seems to me that if the concept still has something to offer today it is because it summons the need to seek ways of articulation and formalization between these two dimensions. I 6 Developed in regards to the political nature of Kafka's work , the concept of becoming minor refers to the process by which, in a context dominated by a hegemonic language, passages and spaces are generated for the variation and multiplicity that goes unreflected in the dominant forms of representation. In keeping with the idea that "the unity of language hides a political manoeuvre" and that hegemonic languages r einforce homogenization, identity and "constants of expression or content", becoming minor is a treatment of the standard language whose purpose is to extract language from the power relations otherwise imprisoning it and thus re-connecting it with the variation and heterogeneity that characterize the experience of the world. In this respect, neither the minor nor the major concern two different languages but rather different treatments or usages of language. The crucial definition involves how the major determines the pattern or rule in relation to which all other usages are qualified and subject: representations of power and knowledge, norms and laws, immanent to both content and form, which regulate not only discursive practices but also behaviours, ways of speaking, doing and thinking. Given such standardization, a minor treatment of language (langue) finds its justification in the premise that the multiplicity of the world should be returned to language to safeguard the feasible scope for enunciation as the capacity inherent to formulating new problems and introducing new objects of struggle into the political space. According to Deleuze and Guattari's definition, a minor literature is characterised by affecting the major language with a strong degree of deterritorialisation and subjecting it to a series of displacements and renegotiations that push the major language to its own limits. In Kafka's case, this is particularly achieved via the contextual displacements (for instance in The Metamorphosis) that produce problems whose nature always requires a renegotiation of familial, economic, bureaucratic and juridical structures. This becomes clear when adopting the view put forward in Mille Plateaus 6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Minuit, 1975. 38 that the politics of language is pragmatics: thus, that language does not in itself exist but instead depends on external and internal factors that determine its effectuation and the usage of linguistic elements in a certain social field and at a particular moment in time. Therefore, confronting language with its limits aims to precisely show this pragmatic dimension and reveal the network of elements on which language production depends. In this sense, language is best grasped if perceived as a dynamic system with breaks and transitions at the frontiers of micro and macro struggles reflecting both the power modulations existing at any given point in time by which the expression gets distributed. Should we continue to extrapolate the political meaning of framing language in terms of this dynamic, then we would understand how, just as the enclosure of language upon itself freezes its revolutionary political potential (through overshadowing its collective and social aspect), similarly, the enclosure of the writer upon him/herself suspends the revolutionary political potential of literary creation. Thus, in terms of the minor, and in contrast to a phenomenological or psychoanalytic conception of literary production, Deleuze and Guattari contend that the true writer is one who induces a force of de-subjectivation upon experience or an elevation of experience to the impersonal as the condition necessary to engaging with the collective (and singular) experience of the world, and thereby connecting the individual to the collective. On this basis, the notion of t he 'collective assemblage of enunciation', also introduced in the Kafka book, is central to understanding what minor literature means: writing implies an act of writing with rather than a writing of things. This, in fact, describes the political condition of literature. In this manner, the making of a language is no individual affair but is above all a people's concern and in this respect a process of constituting a collective. This is why Deleuze and Guattari suggest that a minor literature creates the conditions of possibility of 7 "a people still to come”, a people that is missing . However, discerning that "people" in this manner does not refer to any particular or ideal group proves vital since instead it calls into being the political question of the yet-to-come, of other ways of life, of other values and modes of thinking for which conditions of possibility have yet to be established. Indeed, it is this movement of 'becoming", forcing the minor upon the major, that should be strategized. II Moving on from these considerations while bearing in mind the contemporary commodification of city and territory as a dominant trend, I now describe how the idea of 'becoming minor' informs a counter-hegemonic thinking and practice of space. However, I should first clarify that when 7. This articulation between a minor treatment and the notion of “a people to come” is best articulated in Cinéma 2: L'Image-temps (1985), Critique et Clinique (1993) and Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (1991) in relation the concept of fabulation. 39 speaking of a dominant, hegemonic language in the domain of the problematic of space and territory, we refer to the global process by which urbanization today promotes the expansion of capital, structuring both city and territory in ways that not only generate social exclusion and discrimination but also inevitably result in the affirmation of certain modes of spatial relation that require the asphyxiation of many others. The aspects I noted earlier – namely, the deterritorialisation of the major language, the elevation to the impersonal, the connection between the individual and the collective, and the collective assemblage of enunciation – reveal important dimensions to take into consideration when analysing engaged spatial and social practices. Two aspects resulting from the previous examination should be added; firstly, the political investment of life and everyday existence – following due recognition that power operates across different levels, from the production of subjectivity to the modes of social organization – and, secondly, the importance of creating modes of articulation between the subjective dimension, social movements, forms of representation and institutions. Clearly, politics cannot be reduced to the larger dimension of representations or institutions, as it also underpins the production of subjectivity and forms of life, as much as the 'way we speak' or 'what can be said'. Indeed politics is made and practiced, traversing the fabric of existence both at the individual level as much as at the social level. If it is crucial to convey the need to conceive of existence and daily life from a critical perspective, it is precisely because if life has been constituted an object of power, it can also represent a strategic force of resistance. Power in this sense, as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari contended, is better defined neither as a structure nor as an institution nor even as a property one gets endowed with, but instead as a set of relations of forces that traverse the social and the individual accounting for particular institutional or social crystallizations. It is clear that material and spatial domains are traversed by power relations both in an explicit and implicit manner and transmitting regulations upon modes of social relations, forms of life and values. As such, space is not a simple neutral container of social and cultural relations and should be understood instead as something that plays an active role at a molecular level in the singularization and renovation of cultural and social modes of relation. As Guattari reminded us, the production of subjectivity depends on a series of polyphonic factors, spatial and material, discursive and non-discursive, signifying and assignifying. Thus, if we consider that practices of emancipation are space contingent (and space forming) inasmuch as social and spatial relations are interrelated, we should be able to carry out analysis of the institutions or places we inhabit not only to identify modes of rigid and hegemonic organization but also to reform them. We would thus approximate the process of institutional analysis or critique developed by Guattari and 40 multiple revolutions against the Habsburg Empire during 1848, just as much as the work of Sade is inseparable from the French Revolution. However Deleuze's response points towards yet another dimension of the sociopolitical valence of Masoch's work, sought beyond the identification of some of its historical and social features. It seems that what is at stake here is not just a political-cultural investment in the work, but in a work that in itself perverts the world, through a crossroads of the personal with the collective, or of a becoming-world of the 10 biographical . Such would also be the mark of the writing of the writer in contrast to that of the 'neurotic'. The novel of the 'neurotic' in which the world is a projection of a second order, the fruit of an indirect relation mediated by the phantasm (the world as the projection of my phantasms, or the origin of my phantasms, thus both cause and product) and of the writer who, while trying to directly relate to it, turns out as much a 'patient as a doctor of civilization'. Therefore, the excessive projection of man over the world would be repaired on that other plane that is literature, or the literary plane, through a specific practice of experience and an openness to the de-subjectified forces of the Outside. Hence, to say that experience is elevated to the literary equates with the conception of a process of personal trans-biographization that would refer experience to the world and to a collective. In this sense, it seems that it matters less to think of the literary operation as the negation of the biographical, but rather as a particular process of agencement with an out-ofself, a collective and impersonal (though singular) outside, in which literature finds its highest justification. As Éric Alliez explains, from the moment in which the personal and the collective coalesce – as happens with Masoch – 11 the phantasm becomes part of an existential and political program . From that point onwards, masochism is not only Leopold von Sacher Masoch's masochism, but something that inscribes and re-enacts the liberation movement of the world within a program of masochism: the writer diagnoses 12 the world and evaluates the chances for a new health, or for a new man . Also at stake is the breaking of the merely fanciful statute of fiction, taking part in it and connecting it to the social and the political so as to extract its greatest potential, which is the potential of the false (that is not constituted by opposing the true, nor as its negation), and that opens up as political possibility of creation. It is in this sense that Deleuze affirms that true writers are those who make of the phantasm not the origin but the work itself: "What properly belongs to Sade, Masoch and a few others (for example, Robbe-Grillet or Klossowski) is making the phantasm itself the object of their work, whereas usually it is only the origin of the work. What literary creation and the constitution of symptoms have in common is the phantasm. Masoch calls it 'the figure' and in fact says 'one must go beyond the living figure to the 10. 'The artist is not only the patient and doctor of civilization, but also its pervert'. Logique du sens Paris: Minuit, 1969. The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. NY: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 238. 11. cf.: Éric Alliez, "Deleuze avec Masoch", Multitudes, 2006/2, 25, p. 53-68. 12. In "Re-présentation de Masoch", 1989 (reprinted in Critical and Clinical, pp. 53 -xx): "More a physician than a patient, the writer makes a diagnosis, but what he diagnoses is the world; he follows the illness step by step, but it is the generic illness of man: 'the legacy of Cain', 'the Sign of Cain' as the total work (p.53). 47 problem'. If the phantasm for most writers is the source of the work, for those writers who interests me it is precisely the phantasm that is at stake in the work and has the last word, as if the whole work 13 reflected its origin” . The literary (or the phantasm elevated to the literary) therefore represents a means through which one goes from 'the figure to the problem'. In The Logic of Sense this idea of movement from the figure to the problem is taken up in terms of an extraction of the non-actualizable of the pure event and of going from the causes of the symptoms to the quasi-causes of the work, in 14 opposition to that which takes place in the familiar novel of the 'neurotic' . Thus the production of a symptomatology involves this movement of the 'figure' – in the sense of the personal, of the familiar, of the neurotic – to the problem or structure in which the problem is placed. That is to say, this involves a movement from the personal to the collective. The power of fiction and perversion as program We find in Masoch a pedagogical relationship with the ideal woman who corresponds to the phantasm, however, within other terms, we might also state that the masochist manipulates the real directly, for creates his own through a pedagogy of the phantasm. Thus, the distinction between the lived real and the phantasm does not take place in Masoch as, on this level, the object par excellence of the masochist is the fetish object, which in itself is a phantasmatic construction (the phantasm suspends the ideal in his interiority and makes itself permeated by the real). We should then note that, while remaining true that the masochist prefers phantasm to the real this is because law prohibits a relationship with the real (in Freud, the prohibition of incest, where the Law is no longer the law of father and mother, but becomes the moral law). The masochist operation simultaneously also allows the thought that the terms are not of an escape from the real to the imaginary, but of the movement of the phantasmic as a creation of new conditions of existence 15 beyond transcendental Law (of the possible) . Additionally in this case, this is the brutal power of fiction that begins being delineated in Masoch. The phantasmic, or the movement of the figure to the problem, represents the maximal figure of the fictional, not because the phantasm is an escape from the real, but because the phantasmic movement carried out in masochism creates its own conditions of possibility. The ideal, now phantasmal, ceases to be transcendent and fiction starts creating its own conditions of realization. Let us see how through the contract, the masochist makes use of the law by which the real is manipulated to the point of matching and being permeated by the phantasm. The despotic woman of the masochist rules over him and 13. Interview by Madeleine Chapsal, "Mystique et Masochisme" in La Quinzaine littérire 25 (April 115, 1967): 12-14 reprinted in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, trans. Michael Taormina. Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2004, p. 132. 14. "The neurotic can only actualize the terms and the story of his novel: the symptoms are this actualization, and the novel has no other meaning. On the contrary, to extract the non-actualizable part of the pure event from symptoms (or, as Blanchot says, to raise the visible to the invisible), to raise everyday actions and passions (like eating, shitting, loving, speaking, or dying) to their noematic attribute and their corresponding pure Event, to go from the physical surface on which symptoms are played out and actualizations decided to the metaphysical surface on which the pure event stands and is played out, to go from the cause of the symptoms to the quasi-cause of the oeuvre - this is the object of the novel as a work of art, and what distinguishes it from the familial novel (Logic of Sense, p. 237). 15. See François Zourabichvili's "Kant avec Masoch", Multitudes, 2006/2 no 25, p. 87-100, which develops the idea that Deleuze finds in the work of Masoch as the means for a total reconfiguration of the question of the critique, since it is in Masoch that the meeting of Art and Law occurs on which the critical and clinical depends and the fetish as condition for freeing the imagination of the Kantian conditions of possibility. 48 has rights over his life, from the way he acts and speaks to the choice of his name. We correspondingly then perceive the relevance of Deleuze's criticism of the inscription of the negative upon desire and the transcendent ideal of the phantasm. While psychoanalysis understands that the masochist, like everyone else, seeks pleasure but is not able to achieve this except through pain and phantasmatic humiliations whose function is to appease deep anguish, Deleuze shows that what is important to note is how the suffering of the masochist is the cost he has to bear, not to access pleasure, but to dismantle the pseudo-connection of desire with pleasure, which throws back into obscurity an entire existential and political program of the masochistic fiction, of the creation of the woman-executioner, and of suspension as 16 practice . Therefore, the assumption that literature should reflect not only the phantasm (as an origin of the work), but also the real problem, implies, from the part of Deleuze, providing literature with a unconditional relationship with the real, established through, among other means, a relationship of pedagogy and the disconnection of the negative from desire. According to Freud, the masochistic drive realises itself when a third party emerges in the process, a third indeterminate object that occupies the place of the first subject, who moves to the place of the object and is mistreated. In the place of the first, another is placed, the idealized woman of the masochist, for example, that occupies the place of ruling subject. In keeping with Freud's conception, the masochist, a dominated and mistreated object, determines the conditions of his own domination as it is he himself who creates his dominating subject, the 'cold and cruel woman'. However the subject occupying the place of the first subject (absent in order to be violated as an object) is the sadist, or the reverse of the masochist drive. Thus, in Freud's understanding, masochism is de-sexualized sadism directed against the self. Furthermore, the empty place occupied by an undetermined third subject, born in the process of masochist movement of the death drive directed against itself, is an event of depersonalization necessary for accomplishing the masochistic drive. As the subject-object relationship becomes damaged, jeopardizing the Other as a structure, it happens that perversion produces depersonalization, creating "a world without the Other", to making recourse to the words of Deleuze. As Freud explains in The Drives (Instincts) and their Vicissitudes (1915), the subject moves and this aspect distinguishes, for instance, masochism from self-punishment in obsessivecompulsive neurosis. Now, while Freud is able to conceive of this idea of Other, this third indeterminate, he is unable to see these same mechanisms operating in sadism and masochism as entities in their own right, creating their own interior element of difference, an Other of masochism and an Other of sadism, whether real, whether imaginary, and corresponding to the idealized woman-executioner. 16. In Re-présentation de Masoch, Deleuze clearly equates suspension to juridical formalism in Kafka "a justice that is not confused in any way with Law p.77) Cf: also the dissent among the conceptions of desire and pleasure in Deleuze and Foucault in terms of an opposition between desire and pleasure, suspension and satisfaction, that correspond to different political strategies of resistance. 49 We would state that it is precisely in this capacity for creating that Other, in the literary worlds of Sade and Masoch, that the literary operation resides. In other words, masochism's Other or sadism's Other correspond to an idea of sadism existing in Masoch and an idea of masochism existing in Sade and not necessarily complementary. Thus, from the point of view of an analysis of the biographical dimension in relation to Masoch's construction of the plane of the literary, the clinical disjunction of the entities sadism-masochism opens up a space to grasp an Other that finds its origins in the interiority of the work and concerns the construction of literary experience on a phantasmatic plane as the suspension of subject-object relations, determinants of a certain structure of the experience. In this sense, one should think the model of masochist perversion in relation to the reconfiguration of the relations of enunciation and their relation with the real to understand the influence of masochism – as a literary machine – in the thought of a minor practice of literature, in which speech is on the side of the victim, that is to say, in which the subject that subjects himself originates a new speech. Conclusion The understanding of literature as symptomatology involves operating two inflections of thought around what literature is and does, and how the personal-biographical element is operated: literature is a way of opening to the world, for it is more on the side of the 'world' - the writer as the 'clinician of civilization' – and of the collective than of the personal, with a primarily political sense that Deleuze later develops ('the formation of a people to come' particularly in Kafka with Félix Guattari) and the assertion of literary production to the extent of a speculative extraction of the event that launches and renews the conditions of the experiment beyond the possible. In short, we may say there are six key factors resulting from analysis of the formulation of the critical-clinical question in the work of Deleuze's SacherMasoch that are crucial to the exploration of how personal biographical elements are treated in literature: 1) the formulation of an idea of the 'other' that is interior, resulting in a process of depersonalization in Masoch, denoting the power of the fictional as the opening up of a space of difference, or a figure of an Other that is not formed by subjugation, but in which the very act of its creation implies a de-subjection via the creation of the other. In this continuity it should be noted that this mental 'other', that is created, is not projected on the real, but is – 'the masochist 's ideal woman executioner' – formed by a relationship of pedagogy in which the real can be said to be manipulated, contradicting the very idea of either t ranscendental Law or of the father; 2) the development of an idea of literature inseparable from a 50 practice and a politics of life through a thinking of the contract in opposition to the institution, and of desire as the suspension of pleasure; 3) the renewal of the subject-object relationships in the literary plane and, specifically, the dissolution of the Other as structure. This essentially allows us to conceive of a process of constituting experience that does not in its genesis impose a domain of the subject on the object, or at least the possibility of a concomitant 17 relationship with the object ; 4) the re-singularization of the biographical and personal experience of the author when thinking about the connection between the writer and the world, the one that becomes with the world, the one who is delirious while perverting the world and making the world delirious – 'from the figure to the problem'; 5) speculative fiction and perversion as a literary model in which the phantasm, the fictional, is thought of with a productive and constitutive valence; 6) finally, masochist perversion as a minor practice in which speech is on the side of the victim. 17. In Logic of Sense: "In other words, the positive, highly affirmative character of desexualization consists in the replacement of psychic regression by speculative investment. This does not prevent the speculative investment from bearing upon the sexual object - since the investment disengages the event from it and poses the object as concomitant of the corresponding event" (p.238). 51