Traffic in words // breaking silence

If I say to you, “I am struck”, as in, “I am struck by the way we speak”, what kind of speech act would I be embroiling you in? Mostly, I want to say (and the very fact of my desire signals my failure), I am struck dumb. How could I possibly SAY this? What locutionary force could possibly be present in an act that cancels itself by its utterance? Entirely infelicitous, you would say.

This is precisely my predicament. And it is my predicament because I suffer it alone, I should properly say. My silence, my inability not just to express my thoughts (as if thinking were ever a purely interior experience, which I’ve never felt to be true), but to contribute generously to the collective conversation, I experience as a meanness on my part. (And if my silence is now marked by the recent outpouring of words concerning the necessary silence of white South Africans, I can do nothing about that except try to register my sense that MY silence is not that silence, that those words miss the mark – miss my mark).

And my mark, my aim, is to register some sense of the conversation, its qualities, textures, tones, excesses, brevities, of the JWTC this year. If the critical question of conversation is one of HOW we enter into it, how we enter the right words, transmit them, receive them, roll in them, then I want to say it should be, must be, mutual. Mutuality, after all, was staked as the vital source of redeeming the human from capital’s tendency to make waste human life – if I can retrieve Achille’s generous thought of 2009. What then of hesitation, accent, tone, unfinished thinking? What then of listening? Of performatively making hearing the critical question of conversation? What then of the question of voice and ear, rather than, or as well as, or alongside, eye and image? Commodity and spectacle and politics routed through image and screen contra voice, register, ear?

I am struck. The speech act again, but not just by accent and style and the profusion of words that trample, strike, drown, but by the queasy discomfort with thinking the ordinary, the everyday. I register the blow in the viscera. How much talk on the limit of the ordinary has turned on the capacities of the various parts of the body amenable to thinking? Those parts seem to stretch at the limit of metaphor, of metaphoricity, precisely because we want to resist the ordinary senses in which we speak with and from those capacities. We want them to perform extraordinarily, perhaps because we’re disappointed with the work they’ve done in the history of philosophy. But beneath, or alongside, our talk of the senses, in particular the eye and the skin in framing image and surface as concepts that labour across domains of thought and local instantiations, we have spoken of the psychoanalytics of teeth and power, of the political economy of evisceration, of the pulse of the archive, of the dialectics of tangibility (and striking and stroking). And yet we want not to take this kind of talk too seriously, as it were, for fear of being simple-minded, of taking it too literally, of missing some profundity. In this regard I am reminded of Stanley Cavell’s response to Derrida’s reading of Austin, in particular of Austin’s criticism of philosophy’s craven desire for profundity. Without developing fully the lines of thought I would otherwise want to, and putting aside the question of “ordinary language” (or at least our telling avoidance of the question of the ordinary as having something to do with fragility of the everyday, that is, the threat of our words missing their mark, of our saying more and less than we meant to, of our failing to recognise ourselves, or our world falling out from underneath our feet, as a condition of life not simply or entirely assimilable to a set of political, economic, psychic, or historical forces), I am tickled, as it were, by a week’s worth of sophisticated words and eloquent theories of the ordinary. We have battled with the question of what it is to enter into the mutuality of thought entirely implicitly – and thus regrettably. Big words up front about not doing Northern performance (by which we were meant to understand something like “showing off for the sake of appearing intelligent”), and self-reminders about “theorising from the South”.

I wager, here and now, late in the day though it is, that something of the form of conversation as we find it here in southern Africa would be useful as a mode through we might seek both theory and mutuality. It is a form that seeks to afford respect as much it seeks to garner it; it greets, enquires, affirms, honours, invites, circles, pauses, waits, deliberates, deflects, returns, and much more. Without descending to the order of proper or clean language, such a form, it seems to me, proceeds, can only proceed, because of some quiet acknowledgement of the capacity of these very words of ours for repudiation, failure, insult, or misdirection. Perhaps those meadows of communication* we all long for must remain just beyond our grasp, ever obscured by scepticism and its irritations. Or perhaps we relax into minor ordinariness.

* See Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 172.

Thomas Cousins, graduate student, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

Wrecking Theory or Politics? Ackbar Abbas on Wrecked Objects and Poor Theory

Ackbar Abbas

Ackbar Abbas' wonderful talk, entitled "Wrecked Objects, the Ordinary, and Poor Theory," provided an opportunity to think more deeply about how it is that we can theorise the ordinary in light of its relationship with objects and situations of ruin. Drawing from examples ranging from Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, to Junichiro Tanazaki's In Praise of Shadows and Wong Kar Wei's film In the Mood for Love, Professor Abbas led the workshop through an examination of the nature of objects, the concept of dis-appointment, and the impact of these reconceptualisations on the act of theorising (what Abbas calls "poor theory") and the politics that emanates from this version of theory.

The discussions of Lord Jim and Anna Karenina provided the first building blocks of Abbas' argument. Both texts, Abbas argues, show us one of the key unreflected-upon elements of objects - namely, that "the more they remain the same, the more they change." In leaving us with their ruin, we can only take either a position of melancholic longing for a former state, or one of boredom. Even though Walter Benjamin argues that boredom is a state of mental relaxation that prepares us for seeing the world in a different way (the "profane illumination" he draws from the Surrealists), Abbas' reading of Anna Karenina gives two different angles on this - the failed quest for the ever-new or interesting, and the realisation that the repetitive, irritative aspects of the undifferentiated object or life is what must be worked through, or as Freud put it, turning neurosis into "ordinary unhappiness."

Abbas then turned to a discussion of how it is that we can work through this "ordinary unhappiness," or what he termed dis-appointment. Here, he takes dis-appointment as not the sadness that comes from having expectations not be met, but rather as "things not being in their appointed places"; or, to put it another way, the disjuncture between how we expect the world to be and the card hand we are dealt (hence the hyphenation to distinguish between the two senses). Moving through discussions of Tanazaki's aesthetics and Julien's praise of blandness, as well as the experiences of boredom and distraction, Abbas draws out the insights that ordinary objects offer us in their ordinariness an opportunity to speculate on alternative possible histories and futures, and do so by opening not onto some new exciting metaphysical reality, but rather onto the plenitude of this reality, in which we should abide.

This then led Abbas to the discuss some of the contours of what he terms "poor theory." Drawing from Henri Lefebvre's work on the critique of everyday life, Abbas offered the insight that the goal is not the critique of the ordinary, but rather seeing the ordinary as a form of critique. Reading Charlie Chaplin's "Tramp" character as attempting, though humourously failing, to conform to the morés of contemporary society, Abbas offers the insight (in some ways paralleling Ann Stoler's earlier talk on "imperial debris") that theorising as a practice needs to begin from the ordinary, working with the ruins of the situation in which we theorise in order to develop the building blocks of a better society. But, Abbas argued, these blocks are incomplete; the objects and states of life from which they draw are in ruins, changed through their repetition and our changed frame of reference. Hence, we must work with what we have, "tinkering" with both theory and method in relation to our situatedness and the objects with which we work. Because we start from the ruins, the hope for some idealised state of affairs falls away as a possibility; we must necessarily move from a politics of hope to a politics of dis-appointment, recognising that objects, states of living, and even the unanticipated consequences of our actions are never quite where we think they should be, and may not end up necessarily fitting our vision of what the world should be or the time frame in which we think it should happen.

[It should be noted that, most likely for reasons of time, Abbas was unable to fully detail his conception of "poor theory." In the interests of figuring it out for myself, I found "Poor Theory: Notes Toward a Manifesto" online - http://www.humanities.uci.edu/critical/poortheory.pdf - and have incorporated elements of that manifesto into this discussion.]

There was much in Professor Abbas' talk to spark response, and the workshop certainly availed itself of the invitation, especially taking the discussion in the direction of playing with the distinctions and tensions offered in the conceptions of the politics of hope and dis-appointment. I won't take it in that direction. Instead, I want to play with two elements of Abbas' presentation that either tie directly to the theme of this year's workshop - "Ordinary States | States of Ordinariness" or to my own reasons for being here. The first has to do with Abbas' conceptualisation of the "ordinary" as, to paraphrase Abbas, the undifferentiated, that which either resists representation or can only be represented negatively as boredom. There are a couple of concerns about this version of the ordinary. The first is how this squares with what I have seen developing across the workshop to date - namely, a conception of the ordinary that is analytically circumscribed by its scale, the frame with which we orient to it, its frequency, and a dialectics of proximity to the situation we seek to understand as ordinary or in its ordinariness. This circumscription of the ordinary would seem to be extensible; that is, we can take it to places other than those we might common-sensically or automatically call "ordinary," such as interactions with one's local pub owner or experiences of commuting on a packed highway. Bringing to bear these four elements, we can begin to understand such experiences as those of Black men seeking to enter Johannesburg for work in their monthly dealings with the influx control bureaucracy (as illustrated during the Workshop's visit to the Old Pass Office -- http://www.southafrica.info/about/social/usindiso-shelter.htm) or of people's experiences of surveillance under Soviet rule as "ordinary." We could even go so far as to use it to examine "ordinary violence," whether exerted by states or other people. But what happens to this extensibility of "the ordinary" if we also insist that the ordinary must be undifferentiated, unable to be represented, or just plain boring? Do we lose a certain degree of that "profane illumination" by virtue of adding this fifth criterion? Does it reinforce a bias about the ordinary that has until recent times left it unexamined? Does it return us to an "extraordinary | ordinary" binary that leaves these kinds of experiences only able to be thought through a perspective of these moments as deviant, out of the norm, unusual?

The second concern I have has to do with what I am sure was a "throwaway" comment, in which Professor Abbas said, "Thinking from the South is not the same as Southern thinking." My primary reason for attending this workshop was precisely to work on this problem and to gain a deeper insight into both sides of this inequation, both what it means to theorise "from the South" and to understand Southern theory. If we take the invitation to do "poor theory" offered by Abbas, we must necessarily start with the ruins of things. For the South, this has an entirely different set of meanings and enacts an entirely different set of constraints and contours on theorising than it does from the North - and it necessarily means that there is not one "theory from the South," but multiple versions of this precisely because there are multiple Souths, itself an effect of the ruins of the various colonial empires, neocolonial relations, and experiences of the global hegemony exerted by the US and the increasing investment, especially here in Africa, by the Chinese government. As the "Poor Theory Manifesto" itself points out, "Poor theory thinks historically, relationally, and theoretically around and against denials of co-evalness. Through new mixings of the practical and the theoretical, it destabilizes prior and continuing formations of the national, the colonial, the imperial, and the postcolonial as pure categories." If that is indeed the case, when we think broadly about the South(s) or "thinking from the South," then the undifferentiatedness of the ordinary must necessarily and logically fall away from "poor theorising." But what does that leave us with as the building blocks, or even the broken stones, through which we can theorise? On the one hand, it seems to suggest that there are significant variations between versions of "Southern thinking"; on the other, we are left with an inability to think about the varieties of thinking of "the South" precisely because they are differentiated and therefore violate the starting premises.

To my mind, there is no easy way to solve these dilemmas. My own inclination is to preserve the profane illumination Abbas suggests is key to the endeavour of "poor theorising," and to follow the call to destabilise the conceptions of the national, the colonial, the imperial, the postcolonial, and even the South offered in the "Poor Theory Manifesto." However, much like the concept of the ordinary, we as theorists have not yet really unpacked the implications of the idea of "poor theory" nor heeded its demands, and seem to find it easier to assume the lowest common denominator of these analytic frames. If that is indeed the case with our discussions or our efforts, then I fear that we will fail to really develop either an agentic thinking from the South or Southern thinking, and will instead wreck Southern theory, leaving it trapped in a collection of dusty relics like Stein's butterfly in Lord Jim. Abbas' idea of "poor theory" appears to give us the tools to do what I think we should be doing; the question remains as to whether or not our project is already ruined.

Scott Schaffer is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, where he is a member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism and the Africa Institute. His research is in the areas of contemporary and non-Western/Northern social theory, cosmopolitanism, ethics, sacrifice, and the traces of the Protestant ethic in social development policies and programs. He is the author of Resisting Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), the PDF of which he is happy to send you upon request as long as you promise to read it in its entirety and to find the joke. Email: sschaff2 [at] uwo [dot] ca.

Ann Stoler: Ruin | To Ruin | Ruination

Ann Stoler at JWTC

I.

Ann Stoler’s presentation was a provocative and inspiring invitation to open the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism for 2011. She addressed the problem of the tangible as an aesthetical and political possibility to activate postcolonial thinking in the present.

The dialectical structure between materiality and the psychic condition, which Benjamin sets on the ruin, allows Stoler to re-think the conditions of possibility of temporality and spatiality of the colony and the imperial forms of domination.

If the ruin stands as a tangible form that activates the past in the present, to open the question of potential futures, maybe the ruin, as a remain of the past, can be a setting to locate the relationship between the colonial past and the imperial present in a way that it re-activates postcolonial thought in the blind spots that resist thought.

Stoler shifts the benjaminian argument of the ruin as a form of the critique of modernity - the object that condenses the promise and the failure in a dialectical image - to the possibility for a present critique of the colonial past. The vocabulary that Stoler proposes seeks to generate other articulations between persons and objects to explore the different folds that systems of domination create and that, most of the time, remain hidden. If domination is not always tangible or visible (as visibility is also a political condition), we must search elsewhere, and the ruin opens a wide spectre of possibilities.

Beyond the benjaminian vocabulary, in Stoler’s invitation, the ruin becomes more than a noun and takes the role of a violent verb – to ruin— that creates other temporalities that allow us to think of history as a process that remains on time and where the effects and affects still create the configuration of the sensible. Ruination becomes then a possibility and an invitation to re-think the past in the present as a rotten materiality that needs to be explored in order to activate a potential future.

Perhaps, in order to activate postcolonial critical thought, going beyond disciplines is needed and searching in the tangible, in the specific form that emerges in the surface, as a trace or a witness, to collapse temporality and opens up the possibility of time and the creation of other subjectivities.

Stoler’s talk resonates in very different fields. It is interesting to think how this question of the ruin, as tangible materiality, has been working as a critical device to dislocate historical discourses. Art practice is one form of experience that has been working around this site of temporalities, allowing the sensible to emerge as a political form. Some contemporary art practices, which follow the radical avant-garde traditions, keep searching for those blind spots to create a tension between visibility and invisibility in the form of the aesthetical experience.

II.

This is an exploration that does not pretend to be an example or a case but only a specific site to locate potential lines that might create a constellation with Stoler’s invitation. The ruin can be addressed, not as a monumentm but as a site where the uncanny emerges in the surface and collapse time, experimentations that, in the form of the work of art, allows us to have an experience of the tangible. Teatro Ojo is a Mexican collective that has been working on activate this uncanny spaces to dislocate official narratives and temporalities.

III.

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. Walter Benjamin, On the concept of History.

Teatro Ojo is an artistic exercise that overflows disciplines, contaminating public spaces with a practice that seems to go against the current of artistic tendencies in Mexico. In a circle that privileges the modern tradition of artistic disciplines, still searching for autonomy and the fetish, Teatro Ojo comes out of the theatre and works in terms of the stage, like narrative unities with a spatial character that dislocate temporality to make way for the past to come. They also renounce artistic practice that intervenes as a relational exercise in order to conjure and create nonexistent relationships to invoke some kind of reconciliation. Rather, they approach art in a poetics of chance and contingency, they intervene without having any ultimate goal and without looking for an object that would materialize their process in a work of art. A theater-less theater and an objectless art, Teatro Ojo renews artistic practice by an experimentation that allows for a search for those fissures through which the instant slips in, hitting us like a profane enlightenment and letting a sort of estrangement surge forth, wherein daydreams begin to collapse. As actions devoid of spectacle, their work is almost imperceptible. They work in uncanny spaces, hidden or forgotten by the passer by, to seek out the dialectical image that allows promise and failure to emerge so as to collapse any sense of progress as a political construction of time that justifies domination. They know that the only way to crumple the promise of progress is on the ruin that stands, as Benjamin says, as the production of a time in which each epoch dreams the one that follows.

In México mi amor, nunca mires atrás (Proyecto Estado Fallido 2. Multifamiliar Juárez) (Mexico my love, never look back [Failed State Project 2. Juárez Housing Project]) Teatro Ojo worked on the soccer fields of the Juárez Housing Project in order to explore reality not as a representation but as a confrontation. The group held a soccer match between two of the teams whose league plays on those fields with the aim of intervening in their game. The match was played on the dirt fields while a general audio track narrated the 1966 World Cup match between England and Mexico, creating a dislocation between the present and the past, the visible and the invisible, the future and the time to come. The game was halted every so often and the audience could approach the players, who, paralyzed in a dust cloud that transformed their sweat into a thin film of clay, held small speakers that played back audio recordings of political speeches of the ancient regime that ruled the country for more than 70 years, presidents justifying the implementation of neo-liberalism, public declarations about NAFTA, radio slogans from political campaigns from the 60’s to 2000’s, advertising campaigns with the promise of a better future and voices of intellectuals and common people full of anger and despair. Voices from recent Mexican history that invoked a nation made up of the ruins of a project of modernization we have seen fall again and again...

For the second half of the nineteenth century, the plot on which this soccer field was built used to be the La Piedad civil cemetery. Later, in 1924, it was home to the National Stadium – promoted by José Vasconcelos, one of the architects of Mexico's post-revolutionary institutions – where presidents like Plutarco Elías Calles and Lázaro Cárdenas took oath. Twenty-six years later it was the site of one of the architectural works characteristic of Mario Pani, an architect who attempted to implement Le Corbusier's ideas in Mexico, in a development project aimed at the modernization of Mexico: namely, the Juárez Housing Project.

Two of the buildings in this housing unit collapsed in the 1985 earthquake, burying hundreds of people beneath them. The only thing that could be done with the rubble was to put up some dirt soccer fields where the residents of the area now play their neighbourhood leagues, beneath a Nike poster promoting commodities and the spirit of competition so needed for capitalism which declares: "Never look back."

México mi amor, nunca mires atrás is an historical intervention that breaks with the modern enchantment of time as a continuum, where the juxtaposition of temporalities gives way what has failed or been annulled. With this action, Teatro Ojo does not just attempt to activate memory, but to seek out through repetition those moments that produced this epoch, where the promise has been betrayed and we inhabited it as deception. The work of history is not to commemorate or to celebrate, but to assume that history is never a matter of the future but of the past, that justice will only be able to emerge from there.

The Juárez Housing Project soccer fields are presented as the witness to a space that denounces the failure of the utopia of the modernization project in Mexico and that assumes the complex fabric of heterotopias as paradoxical layers that are superimposed in urban space and that annul any hegemonic project. Heterotopia is concentrated in space, but this juxtaposition also generates another uneven and disjointed time that annuls all social projects based on progress as promises of a better future to come. Here there is a series of folds and layers superimposed atop one another, and Teatro Ojo intervenes in their unfolding and in their activation, where everything happens at the same time, to reassemble the political structures of a nation whose modernizing project attempted to consolidate a utopia while ruins were accumulating beneath our feet.

Teatro Ojo is theater without a theater, for which the world itself is a stage. Here the attempt is not to dramatize reality but rather to intervene in each fold and each layer, to dislocate time and to let the past spill out its effects. It is a political project that knows that history is our battlefield and that art is the device that lets us stir up space and time and produce affects to create another stage upon which the only way to move forward is by looking back.

By Helena Chávez Mac Gregor (UNAM).