square white world

subject matter

The role of political management over the last two years of pandemic, or, to be histrionic, plague, has looked to be a direct use of biopolitics. Control of populations has been control of bodies, control of movement. And there looks to have been something sacrificed.

Biopolitical policing of populations, infected populations, has seemed to bring about a concession of the kind, since it is on a global scale, not seen since the mass mobilisations at the time of the globalisation of warfare, in the first and second world wars. Apparently it turns on matters of economy, this concession, where it is both disincentive to ‘growth’ and incentive to a type of specialised ‘wartime’ economy, to which the first makes its concession. Or sacrifice. But the sacrifice the political apparatus makes to biopolitics is of itself.

I think we can see this in a small change made in the vocabulary of New Zealand government representatives. As if by policy, for political reasons, the change has been from speaking of the vaccination metric in terms of the ‘protection’ of populations to speaking of it as immunisation. From a medical, scientific standpoint, this change seems unmotivated.

In consideration of climate change could or would we similarly replace environmental protection with environmental immunisation at stake might be human affairs in their entirety. The environment would need to be immunised against every human action. Can we imagine what this immunity might look like?

It has been said that it is capitalism, the capitalist plunder of resources, from which we must protect the environment. OK, why not immunise it? The thought is also there that we might do so by introjecting the problem—of capitalist plunder of resources—into the economic form of capitalism. The carbon market to trade in pollutant emissions seems exemplary in this respect. And the thought is there too, and to the contrary, that pandemics are natural forms of defenses: that is, the nonhuman environment’s immunity system.

We can, however, lay human affairs in their entirety at the door of politics. Or should that be at its feet? Then, I would have thought, since the forms of social organisation of politics are sacrifice, it is at its feet that they already lie. And herein the concession: biopolitics in fact looks like an abrogation of politics and a reduction in its political means such that it has no power. Or, it is immune to the charge making it responsible. Is immune to being asked to take responsibility: for what? human affairs in their entirety; every human action.

Politics no longer answerable, the forms of social organisation of politics sacrifice, the immunisation of populations as a political project: well, what meaning does this have other than the auto-immunity of political systems? That is, it’s no longer about the suppression of symptoms symptomatic to power but of political immunisation against those powers. They slide off, like the skins of images. So that the most obviously biopolitical plays into the freedom of politics from tragic necessity, from the tragic necessity of responsibility, plays as, slipping up on its own skin, comedy.

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subject matter

At some level, somewhere, everything is moving too fast. Where this is so, what grants us immunity from it? Movement.

Roberto Esposito has developed the political theme of immunity. He finds a relation by contrasting the immunitas and the communitas that unites the two. It is physically there in the words to see.

Esposito does not follow the route of pitting one against the other, of making communitas in the community an exclusionary principle. The exclusion of what is external to that principle does not make it an internal principle forming the community, the political community. The pushing out of foreign matter, foreign subjects, does not form the community in its ontological integrity.

Instead, Esposito has it that the immunitas is in the community. And it is this which makes it one. It is always a little bit of the outside raised to play on the surface of political certainty.

Immunity is then a matter of what Althusser calls interpellation, whereby the individual is interpellated within the ideological state apparatus. This is perhaps a funny way to put it, but isn’t it the case that ideology is made to work by including what is foreign to it? And isn’t this especially true at the level of the state? It would, in fact, be to construct it as apparatus, or what we have also called mechanism, that it does.

As soon as we say everything is moving too fast, we are struck by its inadequacy. More than its inadequacy to actual experience, what strikes us is either that the opposite is true, instead, or that it can be. And this makes for uncertainty: we are uneasy at comparing the surface of the world to the weather. Beautiful day. Ever get the feeling everything’s moving too fast? Well, it’s not!

We are in a stasis comparable to the last stages of a depression, a state of catatonia, where movement has become impossible. Ideology no longer covers over the truth while initiating us into it, as if it were a conspiracy. We are no longer covered by false beliefs of a false, imposed consciousness against the climate. The two directions, extreme as they are, coexist. The reason for this is that as a result of its suppression by the mobility of the surface, political movement has become impossible.

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subject matter

The combination of repression, suppression is followed by a further suppression. But this time it is a suppression of the political in the political. The political is now what does not play.

The reversal we talked about is this: where comic levity was suppressed, today it is tragic necessity which comprises a content or substance that is suppressed. Now, we might suppose content or substance to be bodies, to be the embodiment of what bodies collectively embody. The bleeding bits, not the edges. Animals, and so on.

We might suppose content or substance to be the bios. Or, at least, to refer to it. It would then refer to the ground and foundation of forms, since it would be that from which these are made. In-formed, as it were, or ex-formed. Licked like bear whelps into cubs. Or programmed by genes in the living cells to form tissue, flesh, the flesh of plants, the flesh of animals.

And in a way it is the case that the living-being of the planet is suppressed, but it’s more accurate to call it depressed. Its resources are depressed. The content or substance which is suppressed is so by … the surface. The surface here is the whole playing field. This politics occupies without itself being in play.

What plays on the surface is exactly the play of the surface: a kind of limitless mobility of a smooth surface which does not admit of bumps—or of cracks. That craze below the ice is at another level, a lower one, a compression layer, and an archeological one, a temporal one.

Time, now, time in all the massy heft of it, the unrolling gigantism of its inflated sense of urgency, the urgency of tragic necessity is packed deep down, lower than the void over which the surface slides: we might say it is in the invisible work. That work that now feels so weighty, so urgent, so intractable. That work, for example, of lowering carbon emissions, of assaying the cessation of unceasing destruction, of … bios.

Politics has no power to undertake the invisible work. That part of it that could is the rendering of all content and substance into air—of a particular kind: the burnt. Comedy today subsumes the bios and its tragedy. All that is light and air is the burning of content and substance, making light, the burning of the air.

…

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subject matter

Suppression, repression: theatre suffered these for politics. It led to a reversal of roles, but we can only speak of a role reversal in view of theatre, and of the surface with limitlessness in its potentiality, because this is where it occurs. However, there also looks to be a restriction in powers: the potential limitlessness of reach is paired with impotence when it comes to consequence. Added to this, we have asserted of such powers that what lies in reach, which is movement, is both indivisible and of indeterminate duration: there’s no going back. What happens comes to us by report of the actions, events, subjects on the stage, who are not altogether human, and when they are mobilise forces which are not. So there is also a notional completion, a closure of the circle, where the circle is but another figure of performance, and, as Deleuze might say, a repetition of difference.

Was there political recognition of what had occurred, of what had been reported on? Was this of such a nature that political forces rallied to suppress theatre—as if it had the slightest importance? No, I would say the politicisation of theatre closed it off from itself: now that is the further reversal we are getting to, the role reversal whereby political recognition reciprocated, and, like theatre, closed itself off from being a politics.

Then, should we ask what is politics? A matter of social organisation. Like theatre, it need not have at its centre a principle, about which it revolves: anarchy is politics. Like theatre, it needs no morality to guide it (quite the contrary), to police its edges, directing policy, as we have said about being directed in that fashion: it too is amoral.

More than this, politics represents to itself its mechanism, it demonstrates to itself, in a way that we could also say that it reports on it, what it is doing, or, as some are fond of saying, what is to be done. How think of the social organism? It doesn’t matter but that this thought has to be tied to actions, events and subjects. Politics concerns the movements of subjects, that is, their conflict; but, again, these are only political subjects to the extent there is political recognition, to the extent that they share the stage. So its subjects, and its subject matter, are those of self-representation and recognition, political subjects.

…

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subject matter

On one side, the suppression of movement on a then contagious surface, relating to the disordering by comedy, public shaming and so on; on the other side, the self-appointment of theatrical means to be those representing order, with a relation to a tragic representation: both worked together. The one was by political expediency, since it meant to show self-identity in the political subject. He is the one good at playing the tragedy, believes in himself, takes it for necessity. The other was an internal suppression of subjective powers in theatre, those appertaining to the surface. Against these the state defined itself, while, naturally, making use of them, in fact, needing expert advice to do so, derived from a psychological theatre, psychological theatre representative of structural, legally constituted necessity, and subjection, with, as we know, the necessary redundancies that come with representing self to self. Mirror of the soul; mirror of the state.

Between one and the other, or we might as well say, between political suppression and repression, a reversal, a swapping of masks took place. The tragedian’s for the comic actor’s. But this is only half the story. The reversal occurred to the political surface, itself. Representatives of the state arrived at the theatre wearing masks. And looking out from the stage across the audience, our actors recognised the task that had befallen them: they were to speak the truth. To power.

And what did the audience do? It listened with reverence. Because its members knew too that this was their role. And, so all speaking to power goes.

At interval it saw itself in diminishing numbers, took on the (surface) size and scale of the calamity. And the tears that came with that acknowledgement acted like glue on the underside of the masks. While our actors, at the end, empty as usual, came out to the bar and congratulated each other mildly but the director profusely and seriously, who bore the weight of responsibility for all.

…

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subject matter

What was suppressed in theatre was levity. What caused the suppression was the fluid and mobile nature of the surface: it might spread, like a contagion, bringing with it fluid identities, sexualities, cross-dressers and all manner of erotic, aesthetic, and political perversion. Worst of all, it would inject humour into the proceedings, upsetting them with a disorder related to comedy and the unexpected.

If it did so with, with what it brought and brought out, this was because it was a medium for change, for the dosing out of change. In other words, its power to invoke this power, indulge those tastes, entertain these notions, demanded that it be suppressed. For the sake of order, an order not yet one said to belong to the public, but for the sake of an order related to tragedy, theatre called down on itself a suppression of the surface. This had the result of lifting it up, the surface, to command, command and withdraw, issue orders, hide behind a deus ex machina, or in a cloud. A stormcloud.

A stormcloud voices its displeasure. And, as Anouilh writes in his rewrite of Antigone, the spring is wound up tight. It unleashes a mechanism that punishes exactly what has been suppressed: all the comic actors, as we know, are tragic ones.

They are not yet depressed. Instead they follow the order of tragic necessity. They are not yet just doing their jobs: instead, their jobs are the most important in the world; a tragic knowledge of the threat theatre posed. So, you see, it is the efficacity of the stage that was condemned, what we may call its comic potential.

The reversal, going around the turn of mediation, of what it might bring with, should theatre not be directed in this fashion, made it seem as if the danger, threat, the risk of it, lay in what it represented, making it all the more necessary to represent it, in what we now call a feedback loop, but is really just recursion. The threat of the tragic end of one of our dictators was thought to represent not a subjective power but an objective one, and a political one. This feeds, as we can see, into a politics of representation: better for the dictator to be herself a comic actor.

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subject matter

What constitutes the surface, stage, the theatre as a political field—its strategic importance for us—is not its representative nature, is the same as what constituted first its suppression and now its redundancy, its gathering of differences without loss of identity or difference. This conduces to conflict, but not the conflict of opposites, the conflict of disparates, the conflict of decisions; and, as we have said, decisions without consequence apart from on the surface, where they surface, concerning how they move. The same movements can be seen in both humour and in sexuality, the same political stage in its various phases.

Now this conflict, these conflicts, only resolve in the story, which, as we know, is a poor excuse for staging them. The narrative, along with the desires to either stick to it or to change it, gives the weakest excuse for the violence of the conflicts, which never reach the violence of their potentiality. The violence is not necessary; this is what qualifies the surface, the stage, theatre as a political field, as opposed to what we might call blood sports: it does not require violence.

We might consider here what rape as an example of sexual violence does, or plucking out, popping one’s eyes, or having a redhot poker shoved up one’s arse, they promote the plot. In other words, they mediate. So in relation to theatre, we are also talking of unmediated conflicts.

At one end, conflicts have, take from the story, their excuse. We can immediately see what this means in terms of changing the narrative. It means to focus on contingency and may feed into the desire but does not issue in change. At the other end, they have their terminus in a violence that never actually arrives.

In the story, the violence may not be put off until the end. It may arrive in the middle. The one who desires change more than anything, the young revolutionary, runs out and presses her point: she wants to puncture, to rupture and burst like a melon, the asinine complacencies of those who want to stick to the story. Yes, it’s usually a young man.

And he is histrionic in his masculinity. It is the necessary thing! This toxin. But it could just as easily be played by an actress, say the one who lost her lines, and turn to comedy.

Yes, so the plot jumps forward. It has been given a kickstart. But, whether the violence was ill or well conceived, it is one without the freedom in the act.

The freedom is to perform the action, but the action is now bound to a subject. The rape decides on who is the rapist and who is raped. And the issue is resolved in the name of the rape, or the punch, the stab, or the rupture some insist on, to shake things up, so the action, as they say, solves nothing. It simply mediates, is the mediate point, for a whole new series of conflicts.

Judgement may come, may not: it too is a violence. And what it does is suture the ragged edges of the wound. It is, as they also say, the continuation of war with other means. The paradox would seem to be that in the effort to render a discontinuity a continuity is produced.

The paradox of politics, of the state, is that the peaceful state of society is enforced by its hegemony over the means of violence, of violent force. So that it was not so peaceful after all. Or it was peaceful only for as long as there was no violence.

The logic here has the pretension of being ironic; or of participating in the gutter humour of, I told you so: fascist pigs! When in fact the logic is exactly that of humour. Or of sexuality. Or, we are saying, of theatre: it holds the contradictory ideas at once. We see both the violence and its potentiality in peace together.

And note von Clausewitz’s use of the word means, Mitteln. Violence is nothing but the continuation of the state because of a mediation that is always in potentiality. The theatre, as the surface of the state, is this political phase space for having, gathering discontinuities, without requiring either their resolution into identities or violence in the mediation of their differences. That is, it is so, when it is so. And so we will have to return to the suppression of theatre and the depression of its resources.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

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subject matter

An actor who stakes her life on the squeak she makes with her gumboots, playing Rosalind in As You Like It, rubbing one rubber gumboot against the other: a very human privilege, and a privilege amongst humans. Squeak, squeak. It has even more weight than the sound of her voice, but when her voice comes it’s like it has been infected with the sound, making something else sound in her speech than the well-formed words. Giving another sense, and, de-structuring the existing or pre-existing one.

The resonance is first on another surface than the stage, an ideational surface, perhaps, ideal surface of the actor’s finding something out, which she is reporting on, all speech onstage having something of the nature of indirect speech. The words consist in a participation, participate in the script, and counter-actualise it, in Deleuze’s terms, without contradicting it. The deformation enacted is not of purpose, necessarily, of what one purposes to say. Rather it removes something which it does not replace. This removal is not to the heights, a withdrawal, or retraction; neither is it to the depths, a regression or subduction.

The removal may be said to be of the whole, for the sake of consistency. Not that saying so would be in order to be consistent, but that what is left is the play of parts which form a consistency. The sense of a whole withdraws durationally, is reserved for the subjective power of an indeterminate duration. Then again, it’s not as if we hold off from telling you the whole story until an end is reached, with which the story was, had been, was always going to be self-identical, in a sort of retroaction devised to make, or give the impression of, everything falling into place.

In each playing his part, it’s more the case of an internal cohesion of conflicting elements. The conflicts are great but effortless; and the conflicts are diminutive, at the vanishing point: because the withdrawal or removal of the whole, reserving it to a subjective duration that is indeterminate, is for the sake of indeterminacy and consistency. The body, for Bergson, is a centre of indeterminacy. It too has a centre of reception, where what is being reported on is given time for an action which is as yet not fully determined; we can say, when it is, it will be actualised. And, for Bergson, such an action that is as yet indeterminate is also a sensation, the act of sensation.

Sensation acts or interacts in and with the world at large, does not provide representation of it, or give information to us, in the way of what it is like. No likeness, action: and we have set up the surface of the stage to be a field for the grossly indeterminate. We have deemed it to have the consistency of indivisible movement, going from one thing to another without regard for the different frames or structures of reference being trespassed on: structure has been left behind. Is left behind at the first step. That is, the thing structuring the world is removed for the play of parts, where there is great division, clashes of what we may call conscience; and yet the movement is indivisible: so we go from world to world as easily as going from part to part (the reason for taking out the whole, or, and, taking it for being simply one more part: now one part less). In fact, we go from subject to object and back again.

The play of movements is reflected at smaller and smaller scales, degrees of difference, all the way down to the most minute. At the level of the vibrationary squeak, a particle is emitted. If we imagine it in wave form and blow it up enormously, we can see the peaks as well as the great troughs, which at this level are of worlds colliding. The overall, duration, is what enables the one and the other, by consenting to the formation of a single surface, having the singular consistency to comprehend, so hold in contemplation, the great play of the world with the fraction of a vestigial sound or gesture, glance, grimace. Structures clanging against and destroying each other. Then, no more than gumboots rubbing, as small as a mouse, singing.

…

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subjective powers

What is he afraid of, the beginning actor? We have attributed to him and to her a fear akin to losing control of your own stuff. That, once it’s out there, on the surface, for all to see, even if there’s noone there to see it, it is no longer his and hers. Beyond his and hers, that action is more or less raised by the lines of exaggeration and artifice.

In the state of exaggeration, that action, it stands in relief from the surface, in a queasy way. The state of artifice… a beginning actor might rightly fear he will be found out for showing himself in a good light. Producing the standardised pout or stance, which on him is vaguely ridiculous. And we’ve said about this that what is happening is the action being cut from the body, which acts, by the blade, the line, of the surface, or stage, on which it features, which receives it, on which its report is made, as any body’s. What is personal, now impersonal; action to event: and this, because of its little bit of outside, itself subject, subjectivated, or having its own life, apart from the erstwhile host, donor or sacrifice.

Another sort of fear perhaps is more realistic: of putting the inside outside. Now there’s no retreat. Another sort of exaggeration: commit thyself, we say to the beginning actor; and she puts it all out there, tits and all. Or he is the striding cock strutting across the play area. Another sort of artifice, then, of the most realistic kind: the body as its own prosthetic. …but it is exactly by the body a beginning actor, having committed an action to the stage, is not protected. What’s inside is now outside. And we’ve suggested it now like a birth, an afterbirth, or an excrement, has to make its way on its own.

In Minus Theatre, the group I led for some years, we praised commitment. But we had a saying about that first decision, which the whole practice focused on, perhaps unduly: There are no bad decisions that you can make. But you can get better at making them.

In exaggeration and artifice some comfort lies, a comfortable zone of the indiscernability of one’s artifice to others, or one’s (exaggerated) forthrightness. Yet a beginning actor finds herself out. Or fools himself. And so commences the process of becoming a selfish actor.

What does the surface have that there’s no retreat from it? That whatever I have decided to ‘commit’ to it is unretractable. Is a commitment. Yes, we can see here the fear of the institution of the stage, the theatre, performance, to which a beginning actor feels himself having to make a commitment. But beyond that, it’s more obvious: fear of not being praised; fear one is no good. One is bad. It hasn’t quite sunk in that one is not what one does, that the gesture, the noise, motion one elicited from oneself, being out there, is no longer one’s own. And should a beginning actor be so informed?

Should we say to her, that glance you made to me full of the hope of being recognised, was it part of the action? Cut it. The line is not yours, it’s the character’s. Those guts you left out on the stage, leave them for the stagemanager to pick up; yes. I recognise they’re still attached. Cut it.

What’s out is out. There’s no going back now. That arm you waved with, that heart that beat, yes, I know that if I prick it it will bleed, with your blood. And yet, no, no. I am not in judgement. This is how we console ourselves standing on the outside, standing, as it is said, off.

Fear of being judged precedes the fear whatever we do will produce that judgement. And don’t these two things go together? Fear of losing what one had inside, one’s precious life, one’s precious death; fear that comes when it is outside. Fear that comes too early and fear that comes too late.

Committing to the surface of psychoanalysis used to be the fear of many creative people, lest the engines of creativity are disassembled on the surface, and, when brought back together never work the same way again. Not so much the fear of having one’s dirty little secret outed as of seeing it for oneself, for itself: that this is all I am, because it is all I ever was: my work is the working out of the most trivial complex! and common!

It is strange given the ubiquity of the digital surface it does not occasion a similar fear. … And there, on it we are productive of our performances, showing through our engagement our will to humanity, our good will. And what wonderful sense we can make when we try! How witty! … and how good we can look when we are properly made up.

Attachment anxiety is given new meaning by an inability to separate ourselves from those actions on the surface. Separation anxiety is given new meaning by our capacity for attachment to the slightest gestures of our digital personae. Commitment anxiety has the meaning it has from attachment to those personae. Like an analyst, it interrogates us, the surface; like an analyst whose analysis goes all the way to the psychic source: an engine we proudly display in the exploded view.

Do we inform ourselves of so being analyzed? When it is in the company of friends we are swapping parts? As if it was entailed by our interconnectivity that it resemble a giant psychic swap-meet.

…

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subjective powers

The funny thing is, we know what the stakes are, yet we do nothing. A sort of collective catatonia has descended. The funnier thing is with the restrictions on freedom of movement imposed globally, in the time of pandemic, that it is given mandate, for the sake of health. The higher principle comes from the depths of sickening, dying bodies.

We elect, select, for this higher principle and it governs our decisions. That is, in the strongest way possible it determines the perception of reality on which we act. And that is in the nature of power, to create reality. In staying home and keeping safe, in taking measures to protect others, maintaining distance, blocking the transmission of aerosols, in suppressing the emission of Covid-Delta particles and of bodily particulates, we are not repressed, we are expressing the reality.

It is in reality that the risk lies that keeps us from doing anything. And in ourselves what is happening? There is a distinct reduction of subjective powers.

And what are these again, as we have enumerated them? Well, the first is impotence exactly, as it applies to a surface which does not effect action. The second is reduction such that a choice is made, a living choice, since it implies an internal relation which has its own life: at its simplest, it is the choice to step out onto the void, void because that is the only support the surface, or stage, has. And we are immediately mistaken to think of ourselves as being upheld by anything else, either of our own resources, like, for example, self-determination, identity, and so on, or of an institutional… perhaps architecture is the best word, meaning to identify the surface with a pre-existing structure, a symbolic one or a discursive one, like, for instance, a stage in the institutional architecture of a theatre.

The third we named as the condition for the other two: that we are always on a complete surface insofar as time is concerned and insofar as it is of indeterminate duration. The report made on it, since it is a centre of reception, will always be complete. In a beautiful phrase of Bergson’s, “the past presses up against the present and draws from it a new form, incommensurable with its antecedents.”

The time, this indeterminate duration we are talking about, is complete not when the action is complete. The subjective power of not effecting action restricts action to movement; movement mobilises the surface: movement confers on the surface the mobility that time has in going past, in passing. It is the mobility we do it for: and now the best word for this is change.

A fourth dimension was added when we said that perception cut off from action, and the impotence of the surface to act on what is outside itself, in the shape of change or pure mobility was in contemplation of itself—and this led to knowledge as a subjective power. Knowledge such as we have described it cannot lead to its institutional enactment, or re-enactment, to its being represented by or in an institution. Out of it cannot follow self-knowledge, because it is always moving that self-knowledge forward to a new form, incommensurable with its antecedents. So that from the shape of change or pure mobility, mobility without consequences, in action, and so on, in contemplation of itself, it follows that the self-contemplation is of that form. A new form. And so, a new form of knowledge.

Can we make then of this a higher principle? No, it can never ascend to the heights, and descends from them only to find itself in immanence, on an immanent and mobile and durational surface. Can we say then that this concerns embodied knowledge and involves actual experience, including the experience of the sickening and dying body? No, because it undoes them. In fact, it is a politics without principle.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

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