Time Makes Sense
Duration and Coalition Discourse in Conversational Art Practices
by Lillian Fellmann
(This paper was delivered at a conference in October at the University of Minnesota.)
(How to escape false communities, and totalitarian formations(pulling people too close to one another), how to unite or value singularity and multitude within discourse at the same time, and how to resist senseless mobilization?)
I would like to talk about conversational art practices that choose discourse as a means of action.
Conversational art practitioners like WochenKlausur (Austria, Boat colloquies), Gaststube (Switzerland, Gespraechsprojekte), Platform (London, England, Discussion feast) or me (Experimental public pograms)that develop concrete proposals aimed at small, but nevertheless effective improvements to socio-political deficiencies or have in mind the exploration of cultural blind spots through conversation. Artistic creativity in the manipulation of social or cultural circumstances is a practice of art just as valid as the manipulation of traditional materials.
Let us look at what the specifics would be of an interventionist practice based on conversation in order for it to be successful?
First, it seems that social renewal in a highly mobilized society must take the form of a contemporary stable coalition to challenge the atomizing and disabling forces of our political and technological economies. This coalition has political potential only if it dares to be self-creating and fall out of time with the rest, while being most concise and conscious about the realm of action or interaction it provides or denies.
Second, within conversational art practice speaking must equal action. In Hanna Arendt’s view, the attempt to find the right word in the right moment, independent of its informative content, is a political action. In this sense action and speaking are one, and they always echo directly or indirectly the presence of others. This freedom of contemplation as a political condition for the act of speaking opposes the all-pervading notion of a lack of time in our society.
Third, speaking in conversational art practice needs to differentiate between the cause, the group and the individual and at the same time suggest coalition discourse as a temporarily shared context.
The questions that concern all three points are the following:
How can we make sure that speaking among strangers is more than a useless repetition of well-implemented interactions and genericized discourse but really is acting as an opportunity of experimentation and self-transformation with regard to an attempted common goal? How can we rediscover our status as individuals without activating our aggressive drive of the ego? And what does it take to break the logjam of belligerence and apology that paralyzes so many public and semi-public conversations among strangers? (silence)
I would like to suggest that it is self-criticality. Self-criticality is potentially painful, and what makes it more suspicious in a goal-driven and minutely administered society - it is time-consuming.
Lingering (if not legitimized by consumption) is doubtful. It is something for the privileged or the outsourced, for those who don’t have to care anymore, for one reason or another. However, self-criticality as related to bad self-promotion and always linked up with contemplation (as spending or wasting time) has an ambiguous taste or meaning.
In spite (or because of this void or ambivalence), I attempt to redefine coalition discourse around self-criticality as the base for a speaking as acting along the lines of Hanna Arendt’s definition.
Here comes my sketchy 5-point map (mind the gaps!)
(1) Thrown into togetherness, we find ourselves in a state of tension. It is a state of projection and self-expectation that needs to be resolved in order for the individual to be productive. In other words, it is through observation (not discourse!) and imitation, adaptation, refusal and acceptance that we establish a sense of alliance. Coalescing means risk taking, experimenting with distances and delinquencies, above all trial and necessarily failure.
(2) Self-criticality is the condition of being crucial, decisive, or extremely serious, it is the point in an intensifying reaction at which’s peak it becomes self-sustaining. In that sense, self-criticality does not mean destabilization of subjectivity, identity, and spatiality. It is a means of survival, position-taking but also integration or connection of or with the surroundings. Self-criticality is a ritual of attentiveness.
(3) Attentiveness looks out for alteration in the world and in us. How something differs in kind from the things around it and how something differs from itself in time, this alteration is one with the essence of a matter, or a person. Unless we give ourselves the time to experience and contemplate alteration in others and us, we do not understand a/the thing.
(4) Self-criticality is catalyzed by the excitement of self-discovery and self-interest. Self-interested discourse as I would like to theorize it requires, on the one hand, a willingness to take a position as a subject of one's desires, aspiration and perceived needs—that is, to speak a "self" that is interested on its own behalf. On the other hand, it requires a high level of critical, skeptical interest in that desiring self—its unity and stability. By interrogating one’s own position from within one can transform it.
(5) Only if this practice of critical self-interest is performed in the context of the desire for alliance, can it contribute a vital radicalizing element to coalition discourse.
To rephrase, those projects that dare to linger and observe, create an atmosphere of listening rather than counter-poised argumentation. Layers and layers of defense, shyness, shame, memories, needs and desires must be weighed and balanced because of, with and for the surroundings and with the chance and the threat of rephrasing, correcting and changing what was said on behalf of our own interest and with the risk that it accomplishes nothing else but exactly that. This relational sensibility (as I call it) that depends on time alone can address the uneven conditions of adjacencies and distances between one thing, one person, one place, one thought, one sentence NEXT (not in opposition) to another.
French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy suggests the only good enough subject as one that is always coming into being, infinitely open and ecstatic, dependent on the somatic shock confrontation with the other’s death. Not seeing oneself reflected in the other is liberating. I find the idea of the constant need for radical rupture and antagonism in order to sense the self and to gain agency boring if not dangerous. Gregg Bordowitz’ idea of self-mortification as a means of liberation, action and activism seems more fascinating: Self-mortification means to kill the image others have of us, instead of having to see the other killed. Self-mortification and self-criticality (both shouldn’t be confused with self-censorship) seem to share a sweeping interest in self-negotiation (as an access to the other) rather than negation of the other. With one decisive discrepancy: self-criticality offers no climax or point of salvation.
To sum up and protract, speaking as acting within conversational art practice asks for duration as it embraces self-criticality that only dares to productively appear in time alone. Self-criticality is a way out of the human state that is, I think, not so much isolation but tension. A tension resulting from an overpowering (chaotic and immediate) connectivity, founded on the fact that we are always/already linked to others by a “ontological and original sociality”, as
Nancy (*) calls it.
To my mind, it makes sense for a conversational art practice that wants to leave a social mark to reflect more on temporality than exclusively site in order to not plunge into the pitfall of false communality and community-forming. Coalition discourse that wants to see singularity and multitude coexist needs to be out of time with precision and punctuality.
Lillian Fellmann, October 2005
*Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative community, orig. 1987, transl. 1991.
Hanna Arendt, Vita activa, German.
Gregg Bordowitz, “Grief, sexuality, and volition”, Presentation at NYU, September 2005.
“Second, within conversational art practice speaking must equal action.” It seem that this is suggesting that attitude would equal behavior, terms from social psychology.
“dependent on the somatic shock confrontation with the other’s death. Not seeing oneself reflected in the other is liberating.”
Object theory argues that the person is the reflected object. It would be liberating, but might be impossible. It is similar to Foucault comments that there are no authors. In the best case there is a collaboration going on even if it is negative. In the worst, you confront a narcissist, who does see you at all.
