Those who come after

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What does it mean to “come after”? Does it mean we are destined to live with the sad remnants of futures past? That is, after all, what they have been stating for so long now, those who endlessly mourn the passing of a time when events still had a place in the great order of things, those who retrospectively prophecize the beginning of the end, as fated destiny of a history in ruins that has perpetually been piling up wreckage upon wreckage. Does it mean we are living through the end of times, bound to wait for an improbable insurrection to come? After all, that is what we have learned from those who present us with the enigma of a new interminable future, as the horizon that will violently awaken us from the slumbering sleep that has prevented us from fulfilling the promises of the past. Is that where we find ourselves now, roaming in the twilight times between regret and expectation, between the time of an end on hold and the time of a new dawn in infinite suspension? Forever haunted by the ghosts of what should have been, hiding in the shadows of what will be?

With all these comings and goings between past and future, are we not at risk of loosing sight of our present? Is it not possible to rather think of “coming after” as a continuous exploration of the present moment, on the rhythm of our own steps, in the confidence of our own gaze? Without a beginning to contemplate or an end to anticipate, without point of departure or point of closure, where would we go? Are we going somewhere at all? We all know what they say, those prophets of disaster and redemption: that there is no use in trying to deviate from the path of historical necessity without map or guide, that there is no point in questioning the naturalness of the structure of our lives without perspective on a time to come. But where we are now, where we choose to be, time doesn’t commence, and it doesn’t culminate, it continues, it continues to happen. Make no mistake, it is also up to us to make it happen, to take it in, to try to take a hold of its course, without ever knowing for sure where the journey will be taking us. We will fail, and we will have to learn to fail. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better”?

Perhaps it’s too easy. Too easy to say we don’t know. Too easy to rejoice in the absence of strategic reason. Too easy to dwell on our micro-revolutions, to change lifestyles, to live differently, consume consciously, behave conscientiously. Too easy to withdraw from the spectacle of consumption in order to escape the empire of necessity. “Coming after” does not only involve changing our way of living in this world, it also means committing ourselves to the wager of composing another one. It means that, in putting our confidence in what we see and do in the present moment, we must also try to invest in its prolongation, in the believe that there are presents that actually do create possible futures. We all know that failures and disillusions will continue to come our way, but isn’t it precisely this vulnerability that is our strength, that what allows us to reshape the world through the eyes of many? Isn’t it this sense of disorientation that makes it possible to orient ourselves, to persist in the curiosity of our gaze, to invent new ways of seeing, and act upon them? “Apart, we are together”, a poet once wrote. Perhaps, amid our division, in our coming after, we are bound by the fragility of what we are bearing together: in the face of the present intolerable and the as yet unimaginable, we are all afraid. Perhaps we should let each other know that that’s ok.

(Some thoughts after reading Sarah Jaffe’s ‘Post-Occupied‘)

notes on courtisane

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Time and time again we are asked the same questions: what is this thing called “Courtisane”? What exactly is it that you are proposing? And every time our response falls short. Because the honest answer is that we don’t know very well either, and that, perhaps, we don’t really want to know.

Time and time again we are told that we need to define ourselves. Communication specialists have been saying for years that we ought to think of a “unique selling proposition”. Specialists of whatever kind have urged us to be clear about our “identity”. And yet we feel increasingly incapable of coming up with the right words, words that somehow feel right.

Surely, we whisper hesitantly, it must have something to do with “cinema”, as a configuration of images and sounds, an experience of seeing and listening, a surface of percepts and affects, a construction of a sensible world for us to engage with. And yes, there was a moment when we proclaimed that we were defending “cinema at the margins”. As if that in itself meant something. As if defining oneself as the other of the same, as the outside of some inside, could really make a difference.

And yes, there were moments when we foolishly fell into the trap of some kind of sectarian academism, considering films as scientific or historical objects, testimonies of all that was other or all that had come to pass, museum pieces to behold in all their rarity and sterility. It’s not that we were all that wrong, it’s just that we didn’t say what needed to be said: that what you are seeing up there, flickering on the screen, are not some dead objects. That they are very much alive, alive with sensation, affect, thought.

And that they can make us feel alive in return. Isn’t that what matters most after all? In a world where it feels as if our places have always already been decided on and our paths have been set out for us, where we are constantly dared to be different and perform our own little micro-revolutions, without ever being able to question “the way things are”, isn’t it this aliveness that can give us the energy and courage to trust in what we do not know, in this as yet unknown place of possibility for which we crave to take responsibility?

Glauber Rocha once recalled a Portugese saying: we don’t know where we are going, but we know we can’t get there this way. Perhaps that is the choice we are trying to make: to leave the safe grounds and start trusting in what we see in front of us, even – especially – when shrouded in darkness. To leave behind the categories pinpointing us to places that could be easily recognized and identified. To put our confidence in what resists us, what forces us to think anew. To realize what we have been sensing all along, that there is something else at stake. To let go, slowly, of the certainties of knowing and accepting one’s place. To get lost.

How utterly naive, you say. We don’t even disagree. In light of the all too contemporary mindset of rationalism, cynicism, and common sense realism, we prefer to be naive. It’s not that we are turning our backs to the world – that would be plain nihilism, and there’s too much of that already. We certainly do not want to turn a blind eye to the petrifying darkness surrounding us, nor revel in fantasies of colored rainbows and shiny meadows. But we do need to allow ourselves to dream, dream out loud, dream with our eyes open.

Our “proposition” is perhaps just that: to give you some things to wonder about, things that, maybe, just maybe, make you want to wander yourself. That is all we can do, the rest is up to you.

Apart, Together, or the other way around –
we get there when we do.

(Courtisane festival 2014, 2 – 6 April)

Passion for the Impossible

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A well-known art critic and historian recently wrote: “At least for the time being, any redistribution of the sensible through contemporary art is a mirage and, when pitted against the capitalist transformation of things into signs, it is little more than the opiate of the artworld left.” An old sour exposed. At a time when the weakening of the political theatre is forcing art to take the upper stage again, at a time when it is increasingly under pressure to make itself “useful” in light of the local and global struggles that are raging all over the world, we are once again confronted with some of the fundamental challenges surrounding the tensions between art and world, form and life, appearance and reality. The problem has been roaring its ugly head ever since the current paradigm of art has been defined. “In how far is appearance allowed in the moral world?”, asked Friedrich Schiller more than two centuries ago. Disenchanted with the French revolution and its failure to come to terms with social inequality, the German poet proposed another revolution: a revolution of the sensible. For him, the banishment of the hierarchy of classes, founded on the domination of the men of culture over the men of nature, manifested itself in the aesthetic experience. It was through this experience that the partition of the sensible sustaining this domination could be dismantled, giving way to a new kind of “equality” – an equality in the realm of appearances, an equality that could ruin all hierarchies between matter and form, passivity and activity, feeling and thought. The potential of art, he argued, is not based on its alliance with reality – how art affects reality and the other way around – but conversely on its independence from it. Against the critics who, even then, complained that all solidity had disappeared from the world, that all reality had dissolved into appearance, he answered: the power of art can only be fully appreciated as long as it is first and foremost considered as appearance, not because it is held to be something that could supplant or influence reality. We can only experience it as such as long if we stop looking for ends and means, as long as we do not grant imagination a prescription of its own. Indeed, if art can be considered to have a political dimension, it’s perhaps not so much due to the commitment invested, but because of the “indifference” experienced; it’s not due to its ability to transmit messages through a certain suitable form, but because of its promise of “freedom”, which is itself its own end and means.

But this promise of freedom – “to grant freedom by means of freedom” – also involves a strange paradox. On one hand, art is put forward as a sphere of autonomy and self-containment indifferent to any association of cause and effect, an embodiment of freedom unassignable to any single desire or interpretation. On the other hand, it is through the experience of “free play” in front of the “free appearance” of art, this strange appearance out of reach from fixed aspirations and interpretations, that another promise is made: that of another form of life. Indeed, the solitude of art, in all its inexplicability and unavailability, holds the possibility of a another future. Jacques Rancière has argued that this paradox is in fact constitutive of a whole regime of identification of art and its politics: the autonomy of aesthetic or artistic experience is at the same time the principle of the formation of what Schiller described as a new “art of living”. Rancière writes: “the aesthetic education thus is the process which transforms the free appearance into a lived reality and the aesthetic free play into an agency of the living community.” This implies, however, that the separations between art, life, and politics are lifted, which essentially entails the emergence of two opposed types of politics, which are in effect two vanishing points: on one hand the logic of art becoming life at the price of its self-elimination, on the other the logic of art getting involved in politics on the condition of not having anything to do with it. The politics of art actually thrive on the tension between these two logics, on the undecidability between art and non-art. The dominant paradigm of what is called “critical” art for example combines the sensible heterogeneity from the first logic with the political intelligibility from the latter, in view of provoking a break in our perception and mobilize our political energies. It is a formula that it is still very much on our agendas nowadays, although it seems to have lost most of its political force – mainly due to the loss of the emancipatory perspective that sustained the dialectical clash of heterogeneous elements. It has even been overturned: whereas the strategies of critical art were predicated on the effort to reveal the reality beneath appearances, some critics – from Debord to Baudrillard – have advocated that all is appearance, that everything is is equivalent with its image, and every image with its own lie. What these arguments, still very much inherent to our zeitgeist, leave us with is either a deep-felt melancholy or a numbing irony, suggesting that through our own continuous “consumption” of commodities, spectacles and demonstrations, we do nothing else but contributing to the reign of commodity equivalence: as if the world of consumption and the world of struggle have become one and the same.

If the traditional modes of critical art have lost their legitimacy, it’s certainly not because the forms of domination and oppression they opposed have disappeared, but rather because the critical worldview that nourished these modes and the political struggles based on this vision have lost much of their credibility. How to think differently then about the “usefulness” of art, without having to rely on a revolutionary horizon to look forward to? What would it mean to think critically without “a darkened mirror to be made clean by a critical operation which makes it declare all that there is to say”? How to think about the potential of art forms that do not depend on demystification, asking us “to discover the signs of capital behind everyday objects and behaviors,” but in so doing only confirming the “transformation of things into signs”? In practice, the foundering of the critical system into this vicious circle has led many contemporary artists to invest directly in political activism, which has its own value and significance, but at the same time this involves a certain de-neutralization of the idea as art as we know it: art steps in for politics. For his part, Rancière proposes another way of thinking about the relation between politics and art, as alternative for the critique of appearances in the name of an underlying reality and the hermeneutics of suspicion that accompanies this critique. It involves, first of all, the acceptance of the condition of appearance and illusion, as it functions as a condition for the possibility of what Schiller has defined as a kind of “freedom”, which is not abstract but entirely sensible. Rancière: “It is in the moments when the real world wavers and seems to reel into mere appearance, more than in the slow accumulation of day-to-day experiences, that it becomes possible to form a judgement about the world”. It follows that political effects can never be located in the artwork itself, nor in the intention or commitment of the artist. It is exactly by not assigning a specific role or destination to the work and leaving it to their own idleness (as Mallarmé upheld, the works must “prove themselves”), that it may become susceptible to a multiplicity of unforeseen appropriations.

Secondly, there is still something in the dispositive of critical art that has political potential, which is what Rancière calls “dissensus”, meaning a disruption of a given organization of the relation between sensible presentations and forms of meaning, put forward as a challenge to the “reality of the real”. The idea of disturbance has been hailed as a political-artistic strategy for a long time now – think of Eisenstein and Brecht who have both, in different ways, played on the element of “strangeness’, either as “verfremdung” or “eccentrism” – but in this approach the disturbing element leads to no specific form of awareness or mobilization. Art can redraw the borders of the possible and the impossible, oppose the singular outlines of a landscape of the sensible to all the forms of banalization unleashed by the dominant regime of information and explanation, but only on the condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated. That is how art continuously oscillates between autonomous form of life and the promise of political emancipation, between shuddering point of arrest and explanatory instrument of transmission, between the “naive” (in tune with the world) and the “sentimental” (at a distance from everyday life), but these possibilities in themselves can never be integrally fulfilled except at the price of abolishing the singularity of art, that of politics, or both at once. Following Rancière’s reasoning, the issue at hand is thus not whether the work that artists do is political or not, but rather what work we can do with it as political subjects; the question is not whether art can intervene in the social world and construct better relations between existing communities, but how it can shape new communities of sense that can put to work a new sense of community. If it’s important to try to understand and engage with this utterly “foolish” (Rancière’s own word) proposition today, it’s because it is grounded in a much needed intuition of hope and trust, opposing all ideas of necessity and legitimacy with the contingency of social order, opposing all sense of distrust and fatalism with the unrealized potentials borne by the capacities shared by all. It is then up to us to take up this foolishness and exchange our compulsive passion for the real with a wholehearted passion for the impossible. It is time for us to start dreaming, dreaming out loud, dreaming with our eyes wide open.

Afterlives of the militant image

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I am currently working on an event that aims to deal with some of the contemporary resonances of militant film culture. The premise of the event, entitled “The Fire Next Time (Afterlives of the militant image)” is at least twofold, in that it wants to engage with the attraction that this particular notion of militancy currently has – not in the least in the contemporary art world – and wants to re-evaluate the discursive practices that have informed this notion, without resorting to nostalgia or romanticism. The main challenge is then one of setting up a “dialogue” with the period in question, as well as the associated thinking about politics on one hand and cinema on the other, in search for reverberations that can help us to think their relation today. Here’s an introductory text:

“There was a time when cinema was believed to make a difference, to be able to act as a weapon in struggle, to operate as a realm of discord. The so-called “militant cinema” was not only considered as a tool to bear witness but also to intervene in the various political upheavals and liberation movements that shook the world in the 1960s and ‘70s. What remains of this unassailable alliance between cinema and politics? After the flames had died down, all that seemed to be left was a wreckage of broken promises and shattered horizons. Today it feels like we have been living through a long period of disappointment and disorientation, while the sense of something lacking or failing is spreading steadily. An overwhelming melancholy seems to have taken hold of our lives, as if we can only experience our time as the “end times”, when the confidence in politics is as brittle as our trust in images. Perhaps that is why, for those who came after, there is a growing tendency to look back at an era when there was still something to fight for, and images were still something to fight with. Can a re-imagining of old utopian futures shed a new light on our perceived dead-end present, in view of unexpected horizons? Can an understanding of past dreams and illusions lead to reinvigorated notions of responsibility, commitment and resistance? Can a dialogue with the period in question help us to find the very principles and narratives capable of remedying its impasses? And how can this questioning help us to think about how cinema, unsure of its own politics, can be “political” today? In light of a potential rebirth of politics, would it still be possible for the art of cinema to appeal to the art of the impossible?”

The Fire Next Time is a two-day program of interventions and screenings (3-4 April 2014), organized in conjunction with an exhibition of work by Eric Baudelaire and Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc. This event will take place during the forthcoming Courtisane Festival, in the framework of the research project ‘Figures of Dissent’ (KASK/HoGent) and the EU project ‘The Uses of Art’ (confederation L’Internationale).

For those interested: we’ve set up a Tumblr as a kind of repository of images, fragments, articles and quotes. Check out fire-next-time.tumblr.com.

The pursuit of trivial men

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“Russell Brand may have started a revolution”, a headline reads. “Brand nails the political zeitgeist”, says another. Why is it that Brand’s recent interview on BBC’s Newsnight sparked so much attention? A video of his discussion with Jeremy Paxman went viral overnight, popping up all over the global infosphere. Why is it that so many who otherwise would not even think of striking up a conversation about the necessity or possibility of change, seem to get all worked up when seeing a “trivial man” like Brand call for revolution? After all, he is not saying anything we don’t already know: indeed, the world is full of dark shadows, terrible injustices, growing social and economic inequalities; yes, in the name of the crisis, all aspects of life have increasingly been submitted to the laws of the market; yes, the notion of liberal democracy is hollowed out by an excessive diet of cynicism, corruption and indifference; surely, many of us feel afflicted with a wearying syndrome of apathy, impotence and nihilism; and yes, this sense of political disappointment has been appropriated equally by right-wing and left-wing discourse, the first driven by outright rage, the latter steeped in dreary melancholy. These are not trivial matters, nor, by any means, should they be trivialized. But isn’t this just what is happening, Paxman seems to suggest, when they are being taken up by a buffoon – he who can never resist a joke, he who lacks good taste and refinement – who is really “out of place” and “out of line” when trying to voice political concerns? But perhaps what strikes us is not what the celebrity fool is “inexpertly” saying for our own amusement, but precisely the out-of-placeness of his voicing, and the condescending attitude with which it is being condemned.

Perhaps, we too, are tired of hearing how unrealistic and utterly naive it is to try to think about change without being able to put forward a well-defined alternative. Perhaps we are just affected by the proclamation that this man, however vain he may be, just doesn’t know either. And perhaps we are slightly tantalized by the thought that it is not the point of knowing where to go, as long as we dare to take a leap of faith, led us lead by what the act itself holds as possibility. For how long now have we been hearing the rhetoric of illusion and incapacity coming from the mouths of the so-called specialists? “Forgive them, for they don’t don’t know what they do” is the never ending mantra preached by those who, yesteryear, claimed to know what was needed to break with the dominant ideological illusions, and today, complain that there are no ideologies left to guide the quest for change. To take action, so the argument goes, only makes sense when there is a sense of direction. If there is no direction, there is no point in mobilizing for change. It implies that “realistic” and “democratic” politics can only be a matter of creating alliances, setting out strategies and managing common economic interests, all univocally in the name of a non-conflictual principle of community or identity. That is what the political horizon of the thinkable is today, defined by the logics of what is called capitalism and liberal democracy. Without a view on another future, we can only keep circulating, or as the police always says in case of disturbances: “move along!” It really means that change can be nothing else but moving in place.

But do we really need what Badiou has called “the existence of the inexistent” to give sense to political processes? Is framing a future not part of (political) invention itself rather than being its condition of possibility? In the words of Rancière: “if people are moving today we don’t quite know what we are moving towards, which perhaps obliges us to shift the question into the logic of what we said earlier about the fact of ‘coming after’ – namely that, perhaps now more than ever, the meaning or direction [sens] of the action is given by the potentialities of the action itself.” We have seen in recent years how sentiments that were deemed useless and senseless have led to a renewed trust in political action. What was important in these cases was not so much the attempt to unveil the illusions and laws of the system in name of a better future, but precisely the emergence of a new collective sentiment, based on a certain intolerance with the dominant order and, at the same time, of a communal trust amongst those who are searching for a way out, unsure of their orientation. Perhaps this is what is appealing in Brand’s plea for “revolution”: not the spectacle of a clown whose only concern should be to amuse others, deliriously ranting about what is obviously not his to talk about, but the recognition of a “trivial man” who speaks out about what is, more than anything else, ours to say and do. Perhaps the court’s jester is, after all, not betraying our grievances, but urging us to all play the fools at the king’s table.