“ Becoming is being, multiplicity is unity, chance is necessity. ”
2) The Anarchive. The anarchive refers to the fact that the archive in the digital age never sits still. Digital media events are reactivatable by nature, and lend themselves to re-uptake, remix and contagion. There is an in-built unruliness to them. This calls into question traditional practices of documentation and archiving, which operate on a model of passive storage. The anarchive is a kind of dynamic, open-air archiving in which media events are let loose to proliferate through networks, mutating as they go, and triggering follow-on events.
The web-based project ANARCHIVE (http://www.anarchive.net/) is a good example of the concept: while it is a forum for the archiving of digital media, this collective explicitly foregrounds the fact that a digital archive involves the creation of "an original artwork." Another example is Constitution of the Damned which describes itself as "a project setting up scenarios to activate codes and rules of self-organization" emphasizing that in the anarchive, archiving itself is an event. Working with co-applicant Ricardo Dal Farra, who is a specialist in digital archiving, a consultant with archival experience shared between Artexte and the project, a postdoctoral researcher who
specializes in curatorial practices and archiving and the wider knowledge base of the entire partnership group, we will build on such areas as network studies (Terranova 2004, Latour 2007, Castells 2009), “intermediality” theory (Ellström 2010, Oosterling 2010), "media archaeology," museology, curatorial studies, archive studies, theories of “art intervention” and complexity and chaos theory (Prigogine/Stengers 1984). [...]
(excerpt from SHHRC research proposal)
“ a thing has as many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it ”
— Nietzsche & Philosophy
Anarchiving: Precarity
Toward a becoming-constituting procedure
The world as one finds it: a concatenation of partial procedures or procedure-like occurrences, diffuse or defused procedures, incomplete or bedeviling ones.
That which counts as procedural will need to be enlarged and made to exist so that it can beentered wittingly.
Always invented/reinvented on the spot … in the tense of the supremely iffy.
Body-wide acquiescing to a procedure buds, then blooms open.
An inquiry on the go into one’s own constituent factors.
(Arakawa and Gins)
Preprocedure (for the threshold) - invent a rhythm.
Form is the rhythm of the material. (Henri Maldiney)
The rhythm of a form is the articulation of its implicate time. (Henri Maldiney)
Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become expressive. (Deleuze and Guattari)
It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition. (Deleuze and Guattari)
Score Keys
Postprocedure : endtroduce yourself
Motion implies terminus; and how can terminus be felt before we have arrived? (William James)
Invent a postpostpreprocedure for launching collectivity
Landing site configurations articulate at least this many positions; nearnearground, nearmiddleground,nearfarground, middlenearground, middlemiddleground, middlefarground, farnearground, farmiddleground, farfarground; nearmiddlefarground, nearfarmiddleground, middlenearmiddleground, middlenearfarground, farnearmiddleground (Arakawa and Gins)
3 The perceiver-producer is a wayfarer, and the mode of production is itself a trail blazed or a path followed. (Tim Ingold)
4 Responding to cue is at once realigning and priming to future realignments. (Erin Manning)
There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not.
-Virginia Woolf, The Waves
what would it be like to have a reading-group discussion, laying on the ground and looking up. how would that shift the tone of the discussion, if a 'wondering up and outward' were activated through the speaking 'up' and spiralling out, rather then across or directed towards another body?
what would it be like to use the rock/air cushions while talking? would it shift where you spoke from? would it help push through the threshold of not-speaking to speaking? or vice versa?
what is the precarity of an audible voice, a speaking aloud, to be heard aloud, allowing one's self to be heard. or to be at the threshold before speaking?
Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, 71
Schizoanalytic cartography consists in the ability to discern those components lacking in consistency or existence. But it is a question here of an essentially precarious undertaking, of a continual creation, which does not have the benefit of any preestablished theoretical support.
Bracha Ettinger, Fragilization and Resistance, 104
Encountering vulnerability in and by self-fragilization is always a proto-ethical resistance—resistance to any social and cultural pressures to define the ethical in terms of boundaries that might pave the road to abandonment.
Anyone can say cut. Anyone can weave. Anyone can c/leave.
Moving and thinking, with thinking through movement propositions to create rhythms to enter, to begin from the middle, rhythms to think with and through (rhythms that are the act: act-ivating tending, for whole-holding invitations), enabling mobility as porous and elastic, as many more-than-one and more-than multiple.
a’strophe
cloven life grows c’lover
sprouting verdant and
stretching tendrils of tensors
tenderly grown closer
c’lovers discourse, these
verses in order, intension
a tentative holding
or folding or creasing
before suddenly c’leaving
un’folding
re’leasing
Precariousness is not a social relation, but an ecological one.
The equilibrium of an ecology is often called a precarious ecology. Every entity has its place in that natural order. If one element in the system changes, everything changes, transforming from one functional state to another one in a predictable way.
How to think precarity beyond the dichotomy of stability/instability?
Precarity becomes a refrain, oscillating between stability and instability: it is not about ir/regularity, it is a movement in between both.
Precarity operates through a milieu of threat.
- Move from precarity as a form of power to precarity as a form of experiment and resistance.
Undoubtedly, current perceptions of insecurity are complex and cannot be traced to a single source such as global terrorism, precarity at work, environmental risk, or exposure to the volatility of financial markets (say through pension investments and/or interest rates). At the existential level, these experiences mix or work in concert to create a general feeling of unease. And the conviction that the state (whether conceived on the national scale or in terms of some more extensive sovereign entity like the E.U.) can provide stability in any one of these spheres is not necessarily separable from the notion that it can eliminate risk and contingency in another. Not only does this imply that the struggle against precarity, if not carefully conceived, may bolster and/or feed off state-fueled security politics, but also it suggests that there is something deeper about precarity than its articulation to labour alone would suggest – some more fundamental, but never foundational, human vulnerability, that neither the act nor potential of labour can exhaust. This is certainly the sense in which Judith Butler, in Precarious Life (2004), confronts what she calls precariousness (which should be distinguished from precarity intended in the labour market sense). For Butler, precariousness is an ontological and existential category that describes the common, but unevenly distributed, fragility of human corporeal existence. A condition made manifest in the U.S. by the events of 911, this fundamental and pre-individual vulnerability is subject to radical denial in the discourses and practices of global security. For instance, Butler understands President George W. Bush’s 921 declaration that ‘our grief has turned to anger and our anger to resolution’ to constitute a repudiation of precariousness and mourning in the name of an action that purports to restore order and to promote the fantasy that the world formerly was orderly. And she seeks in the recognition of this precariousness an ethical encounter that is essential to the constitution of vulnerability and interdependence as preconditions for the “human”.
Key to Butler’s argument is the proposition that recognition of precariousness entails not simply an extrapolation from an understanding of one’s own precariousness to an understanding of another’s precarious life but an understanding of ‘the precariousness of the Other’. Her emphasis is on the relationality of human lives and she sees this not only as a question of political community but also as the basis for theorising dependency and ethical responsibility. Rather than seeking to describe the features of a universal human condition (something that she claims does not exist or yet exist), she asks who counts as human. And with this reference to humans not regarded as humans, she seeks not a simple entry of the ‘excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade?’ (2004: 33). At this level, the theorisation of precariousness impinges on fundamental ontological questions and, to this extent, it suggests a means of joining some of the actions and arguments surrounding precarity to a more philosophically engaged encounter with notions such as creativity, contingency, and relation.
As noted above, Butler’s argument, while claiming to affect an ontological insurrection, takes shape above all in the post-911 United States.
Brett Nielson and Ned Rossiter, from Fibreculture no. 5, 2005
propositional gift from Zurich, activated in Montreal
have each participant place a finger on a single balloon, held relationally at the center of the collective.
each time this proposition was activated that weekend, a climax was always reached where in the balloon started to rise higher and higher, until it eventually lost it's balance betwen our tending fingers.
qualities of precarity made palpable...
how much of this was in relation to the materials (the lightness and buoyancy of the balloon, the curvature of the surface) and how much of it is the tensile tending of the collective. what other materials might provoke a collective sense of becoming precarity(ous) 'across' , without necessary reaching a climax, but at the threshold (in micromovements)?
Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing, utilizes a large, nearly vertical wall with multiple holes. Three dancers climb the wall using handholds and footholds and often find themselves in perilous positions—sideways, at sharp angles to the floor, or entirely upside down. Projected onto the dancers is a film by Jud Yalkut, and the sound track is a score by Forti for voice and vacuum cleaner. The performers wear specially designed jumpsuits painted black on one side and white on the other, so they either seem to disappear as they are swallowed up by the film or become pop-out silhouettes depending on the direction they are facing. Planes plays with perception so effectively that the dancers sometimes seem to be crawling on the ground, and at other times appear to be skydiving far above viewers’ heads.
Three Steps Toward a Precarity of Experiment
1. Ecologies of In/Stability
Precarity is not exclusively a human condition.1 Precariousness is not a social relation, but an ecological one. Ecologies are on the other side not a nonhuman, “natural” condition. They are no condition at all. They are precarious becomings.
Conventional ecologies are often thought of as stable equilibriums and functional systems. They are described as fragile, loosing their balance easily. The equilibrium of an ecology is often called a precarious ecology. Every entity has its place in that natural order. If one element in the system changes, everything changes, transforming from one functional state to another one in a predictable way. Relationality here figures only in pregiven principles. Stability and Instability are often thought of as dichotomy, only shifting in between stable states.
How to think change in terms of the ecology as well as the singular generic (Massumi, Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers)?
The ecological relation is not the actual but the virtual composition. The Milieu is the milieu to come. The relation of the ecological composition is the potential for change. This renders the ecology precarious in a double way and not only related to its stability. How to think precarity beyond the dichotomy of stability/instability? As relation and composition elements in ecologies are precarious, related to something, which they are not. But not only the composition consists of precarious relations, it is precarious because of its openness to the future, its potential for change.
This is a double precarity, a precarity in movement. Movement towards change. Stability is only a precarious stability in a sense Simondon would call metastable: full of potential for change, the slightest alteration would break that stability. Stability and Instability here are no oppositions. The milieu is not thought of as stable and than altered, but meta-stability itself is the potential toward change.
To think Ecology not as a harmony always reproducing the same but as a precarious state of futuriousness, one has to start with the singular generic not with the system or whole. Not orders or systems act, but the singular generic as virtual “agent” in between systems.
Precarity becomes a refrain, oscillating between stability and instability: it is not about ir/regularity, it is a movement in between both. It is a wave, a relation, a constant movement which does not lead to one single stable state, neither stability nor instability (Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway). None of them pre-exists and none of them excludes the other – precarity.
2. Precarity, Neoconservatism and Precarious Powers
There is a form of power exploiting the precarity in its doubleness. Precarity as Bourdieu and other sociologists argue, is a form of power (Bourdieu, Precarity is everywhere), which controls the future in its openness. The cutback of state security and welfare systems paralyses the precarious individual. Thread is the only generic force. Crisis becomes generic. But it does not allow for the new: The Openness of the future is used as the greatest thread by neoconservative politics.
Precarity becomes a technique of gouvernementality by transforming the openness of the future in a state of total closeness at the very same time: Everything can happen but nobody can do anything about it. Precarity becomes a milieu of thread by occupying the potential for change.
3. Experiment!
Why experiment precarity? Experiments do not represent the ecological system, its rules and laws. They cannot be reduced to the sciences, they are in between science, arts and the social. Ecologies itself experiment (Darwin, On the Origin of Species) and experiments are ecologies. They are created by precarious milieus of change. They create precarious milieus of change. They are movements toward the openness where the unexpected can happen instead of reproducing the already known.
How to create precarious experiments?
-
Become multiple: be excessive, mutate, express.
-
Create situations that are neither over- nor under determined.
-
Create liquids, which allow crystallization. Mind the precarity of the liquid: neither too thick nor too thin.
-
(But:) Don’t be harmonious (too).
-
Don’t create experiments that represent the world or falsify a given thesis.
-
Create machines instead.
-
Interfere with your experiments: become part of the resonance, the rhythm of in/stability. Rhythm creates diagrams not representations.
-
Experiment with the uncertain: The World is not a whole, no system unites it all, so there are no laws of nature to be represented by the experiment but singularities to arrange.
-
Create “milieus of resistance” to the closing of the openness of the future.
-
Alter forms of power to forms of resistance: Deleuze writes in his book on Foucault about Life as resistance to Bio-Power. Also affect is a form of power and resistance. So:
-
Move from precarity as a form of power to precarity as a form of experiment and resistance.
-
Don’t rule with crisis, don’t rule with harmony.
For precarity as a human condition and the relation of precarity and precariousness see Butler, Precarious Life.
Entroduction:
Endings can reactivate - Invitations can re-emerge -
What appears to be a cut transmutes into a refrain, cleaving new thresholds into rhythms of assemblage moving towards a collective metastability
an alternative invitation to e n d through a falling-spiralling-middling from the inside
Music: Precarity as “stripped” compositional style.
Organised sounds during a period of political convulsion, with a military president and guerrillas around the corner. [local] simplicity challenging [foreign] complexity. A cultural confrontation.
An alternative vision of reality, with a sense of instability, unpredictability and precarity, where silence occupies a significant space, and time.
Facing the increasingly precarious nature of labour, there is a tendency among the left to wax nostalgic for post-war good old days when a 40 hour/week, unionized job and retirement pension were attainable on a mass scale. This wish for a return to the pre-neoliberal days is admirable because it stems from a wish for increased personal and social security. Yet the left should not wish old forms of oppression back into existence. The most stable 40 hour/week job with a full pension is still precarious! Such a form of employment is precarious not because it is constantly at risk of being taken away (which is certainly a real risk given austerity measures sweeping the globe and government disinvestment from public sector jobs and social welfare programs), but it is precarious in its stability. Perhaps the definition of precarity needs to be expanded in order for this to make sense, since at first glance a stable job seems to contradict the very definition of precarity, for it is neither dependent on chance nor likely to collapse.
Yet this expanded application of precarity does indeed make sense when precarity is considered as the biopolitical – and not solely economic – problem that it is. The most decent of incomes, the most regular of work, the most guaranteed of pensions: they are precarious not for what they are as work, but for what they do to life. They are life, sold (as labour). Lived time parcelled into wage units.
So then, maybe it is most appropriate to speak of precarious life, rather than precarious work. Nevertheless, from this perspective, a stable job is still better than a precarious one because it carries some guarantees of security for the excess life not sold on the labour market. But we must emphasize that Fordist-style salaried labour is not the way out of precarity; it is a deal bargained with precarity. To de-precari-ize (?) life, a new relationship between life and work must be sought, where “stable work” and a “stable economy” are not sought as the solution to precariousness.
The intervals of “capital time” are a starting point for the exploration of non-precarious life. By intervals in capital time we do not mean “leisure time”, but rather the un-coded intervals, the moments where capitalism schizzes out and produces times of non-determinate action. Perhaps resisting precarity is a project of harvesting ambiguity that thwarts the automatisms of neoliberalism; making swiss cheese of capital time.
Carving out these temporal black holes of indeterminacy where action stems from imperatives outside of capitalist automatisms can be understood as the construction of a reserve of potential energy. It is potential energy quantified not through the eyes of capital but from the perspective of the totality of social machinisms. Of course, there is a gross overlap between processes of capitalist codification and the totality of social machinisms, but there is also always a molecular excess non-reducible to the molar apparatuses of capture deployed by capital. This non-reducible, non-coded temporal excess, the schizz on the margins of capture, is pure potential because it exists prior to being made use of (to whatever, to whoever's ends). As pure potential, it contains the potential to multiply its potentiality, to build its energy reserves, thus forcing the system from which it is irreducible (capitalism) to adapt to its own demands. Capitalism and the precarity it harvests mutates in the process, perhaps over the threshold of being the prime actor in the social system it both leeches from and produces.
Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism
49 The thesis that is being put forth here is that financialisation is not an unproductive/parasidic deviation of growing quotas of surplus-value and collective saving, but rather the form of capital accumulation symmetrical with new processes of value production. Today’s financial crisis is then interpreted more as a block of capital accumulation than an implosive result of a process of lacking capital accumulation
56 non-material organizational systems suck surplus-value by pursuing citizens in every moment of their lives, with the result that the working day, the time of living labor, is excessively lengthened and intensified
75 The violence of crises consist in this destruction of capital, a destruction that in biocapitalism strikes the totality of human beings, their emotions, feelings, affects, that is, all the ‘resources’ put to work by the capital.
98 “Taking time means giving eachother the means of inventing one’s own future, freeing it from the anxiety of immediate profit. It means caring for one’s life[?] and the environment in which one lives, it means growing up in a socially responsible way. To overcome this crisis without questioning the meaning of consumption, production, and invesment is to reproduce the preconditions of financial capitalism, the violence of its ups and downs, the philosophy according to which ‘time is everything, the man is nothing.’ For man to be everything, we need to adapt ourselves to the time of his existence”
Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, 18-19
In this conception of analysis, time is not something to be endured; it is activated, orientated, the object of qualitative change. Analysis is no longer the transferential interpretation of symptoms as a function of a preexisting, latent content, but the invention of new catalytic nuclei capable of bifurcating existence. A singularity, a rupture of sense, a cut, a fragmentation, the detachment of a semiotic content – in a dadaist or surrealist manner—can originate mutant nuclei of subjectivation. Just as chemistry has to purify complex mixtures to extract atomic and homogeneous molecular matter, thus creating an infinite scale of chemical entities that have no prior existence, the same is true in the “extraction” and “separation” of aesthetic subjectivities or partial objects, in the psychoanalytic sense, that make an immense complexification of subjectivity possible – harmonies, polyphonies, counterpoints, rhythms, and existential orchestrations, until now unheard and unknown. An essentially precarious, deterritorialising complexification, constantly threatened by a reterritorialising subsidence.
Event Ecologies. Synthesizing research areas 1 and 2, it is here that research-creation as an emergent terrain in the "ecology of practices" will be most foregrounded. Through the concept of the event, our goal will be to become a leading voice in the definition of research-creation, bringing to the fore both new ways of understanding how knowledge is crafted and new forms of collaboration for the dissemination of these ways of knowing. Conceptually, our work will pivot on Whitehead’s process philosophy, whose rigorous attention to how fields of experience evolve and are differentiated from one another make it particularly useful as a central point of reference for a synthesis of the theoretical references informing the project. Whiteheadian philosophy is currently undergoing a dramatic renaissance, and we have in the partnership some of the most well-known contributors in this development. [...]The concept of event ecologies conceived as an ecology of practices will serve as general framing for the research activities of the project rather than a template. The development of a diversity of elaborations will be encouraged in the dialogue among the partners. The aim will be to construct a repertory of keystone concepts to stimulate and orient further event-centred research in immediation, and to exemplify its potential through hands-on research in collaborative techniques.
(excerpt from SHHRC research proposal)
Listen to hear more on invitations to weft and weave the Precarity issue with the Radical Pedagogy issue
what is a falling from the inside?
what does that taste like?
what is the somethere of that movement's threshold?
what qualities of (w)holding does it make palpable?
We endure to create, to resolve and after all it is a system of wishes in which our children are wrapped and thrown in the open to be engulfed by a mist of poisonous. Wishes revolve dirt to inseminate a conscious wakening to just awake and to be embraced by a bear hug, hidden by softness and pretend we are fine. A change must be around. An incorruptible dream is to force to reorganize a fragile system of affectiveness.
"One of the best discoveries the modern dance has made use of is the gravity of the body in weight, that is, as opposite from denying (and thus affirming) gravity by ascent into the air, the weight of the body in going with gravity, down... By its nature this kind of moving would make the space seem a series of unconnected spots, along with the lack of clear-connecting movements in the modern dance"
(Cunnigham, "Spaec, Time and Dance," in ibid., p.38)
The unpaid internship is a procedure for precarity:
1. It puts those who cannot afford to work for free at a professional disadvantage, unable to acquire the prestige value of an internship. As they inevitably preselect candidates from a familial level of prosperity, unpaid internships actively reproduce social inequality. This is particularly disconcerting when such internships are offered in government agencies.
2. It devalues the skills and education of those who can afford to work for free. On the one hand, this leads to a transfer of the financial burden from institutions onto families, turning labor cost into private spending. On the other hand, interns themselves don't believe in the value of their work anymore.
3. The intern's reward is the supervisor's reference, uncertain until the end, occasionally refused on a whim. Leverage. This is why the intern is precarious in the proper sense of the word: "held or enjoyed by the favour of and at the pleasure of another person; vulnerable to the will or decision of others" (OED).
4. It mocks both education and professionalism: Criticizing that it's unpaid work, one is told that an internship is an educational program (see multiple scholarship opportunities for internships). Conversely, criticizing the lack of an structured training program, one is told that an internship marks the entrance into the working world. You want to be paid; sorry, but you're still learning. You want to learn; sorry, but this is the real (working) world. A convenient double bind.
Entre la pauvreté et la précarité le rapport n'est pas d'isomorphie. Leur mode d'opération respectif et les événements qu'elles rendent possibles déterminent ce qui, de l'une à l'autre, fait nuance. L'individu est à lui seul l'illustration d'un appauvrissement de l'expérience. Nos avoirs ne disent rien de la métastabilité inhérente à nos mouvements de déterritorialisation et de prise de forme. Partant, la précarité d'une situation de trans-apparition ne peut être homologuée à une comptabilisation des éléments dont elle serait propriétaire. Contrairement à la pauvreté, la précarité n'est pas de l'individu, mais de l'individuation, de la trans-apparition animant et ranimant le réel menacé du sceau chronopolitique de l'inertie. Qu'on se le dise, la trans-apparition ne machine pas aux dividendes. La précarité qui réjouit, c'est la trans-apparition comme tendance ou stratégie de modulation, et non l'individu comme unité prélevée dans le sillage de ses mouvements d'individuation.
Precariously
This text has been elaborated by cutting, pasting and re ordering (spatially and temporally) three specific laws subtracted from the Civil Code of Québec, that have the word “precariousness”(and derivates)in their sentences. Each page of the text reorganizes the sentences and words of one of the particular laws that are transcribed in their original form below. In the case of the first two laws a selection of the entire text has been made.
1991, c. 64, a. 274.
275. During proceedings and thereafter, if the form of protective supervision is a tutorship, the dwelling of the protected person of full age and the furniture in it are kept at his disposal. The power to administer that property extends only to agreements granting precarious enjoyment, which cease to have effect by operation of law upon the return of the protected person of full age.
Should it be necessary or in the best interest of the protected person of full age that his furniture or his rights in respect of a dwelling be disposed of, the act may be done only with the authorization of the tutorship council. Even in such a case, except for a compelling reason, souvenirs and other personal effects may not be disposed of and shall, so far as possible, be kept at the disposal of the person of full age by the health or social services establishment.
1991, c. 64, a. 2913.
2914.A precarious title may be interverted by a title proceeding from a third person or by an act performed by the holder which is incompatible with precarious holding.
Interversion renders the possession available for prescription from the time the owner learns of the new title or of the act of the holder.
1991, c. 64, a. 2914.
2915.Third persons may prescribe against the owner of property during its dismemberment or when it is held precariously.
Precarity is a condition but is also a perception. And it could bring as a consequence a way of living in despair and/or perhaps paradoxically without any fear.
similar proposition with a difference, activated and proposed by Mayra at .leaky cauldron.
everyone pairs up, sitting side by side, each in the peripheral vision of the other.
at the beginning one person is leading and the other mirrors their gestures.
then switch roles.
continue switching until the lines between leading and mirroring blur. until the relation becomes most palpable
an excercise in creating a rhythm for begining (at the threshold) ; tending tendencies within movement workshops that enter against another body, rather then with
Multiplicities for entering the threshold:
A falling away, a spiralling out, an entering from the middle, foregrounding minor gestures to activate emergent forms of collective attunement, gestures emergent across a multiplicity of movements and materialities neither-both human and more-than human;gestures that explore how the smallest shifts can produce waves of affective tonalities.
Holding the space and/or a (w)holding in place
“A (w)hole is very difficult to hold (in place)”
Somethere where it isn’t one or the other, rather both and between
The whole hole holding(ness) of the somethere, spirallingly so.
Somethere where there are no pre-assigned landing sites or assumed ‘trajectories’
1) Recomposing Experience: how do new creative practices reorganise experience and
perceptions, and with what social and political ramifications?
2) The Anarchive: what kinds of archiving
and documentation practices are able to capture the innovative force of research-creation activities?
3) Event Ecologies: what can an expanded notion of the ecological bring to the domain of research-creation and the understanding of transdisciplinary knowledge practice in general? The
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nearnearground, nearmiddleground,nearfarground,
middlenearground, middlemiddleground,
middlefarground, farnearground,
farmiddleground, farfarground; nearmiddlefarground, nearfarmiddleground, middlenearmiddleground, middlenearfarground,
farnearmiddleground
An incorruptible dream is to force to reorganize a fragile system of affectiveness.
In this conception of analysis, time is not something to be endured; it is activated, orientated, the object of qualitative change. Analysis is no longer the transferential interpretation of symptoms as a function of a preexisting, latent content, but the invention of new catalytic nuclei capable of bifurcating existence. A singularity, a rupture of sense, a cut, a fragmentation, the detachment of a semiotic content - in a dadaist or surrealist manner--can originate mutant nuclei of subjectivation. Just as chemistry has to purify complex mixtures to extract atomic and homogeneous molecular matter, thus creating an infinite scale of chemical entities that have no prior existence, the same is true in the "extraction" and "separation" of aesthetic subjectivities or partial objects, in the psychoanalytic sense, that make an immense complexification of subjectivity possible - harmonies, polyphonies, counterpoints, rhythms, and existential orchestrations, until now unheard and unknown. An essentially precarious, deterritorialising complexification, constantly threatened by a reterritorialising subsidence. (Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, 18-19)
Schizoanalytic cartography consists in the ability to discern those components lacking in consistency or existence. But it is a question here of an essentially precarious undertaking, of a continual creation, which does not have the benefit of any preestablished theoretical support. (Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, 71)
Encountering vulnerability in and by self-fragilization is always a proto-ethical resistance—resistance to any social and cultural pressures to define the ethical in terms of boundaries that might pave the road to abandonment.
(Bracha Ettinger, Fragilization and Resistance, 104)
Many performers valorize precariousness in an economic context that defines it as absence of value, in a market context that labels it as failure, in a moral context that condemns it as debility and deficiency, in a psycho-social context which associates it exclusively with penury and sadness.
Here precariousness is not a villain to be combated—rather, it is potency that can become a mode of creating and of producing.
Precariousness is not a deplorable condition of what is irremediably condemned to time, but the very potency of the performative body
If the ephemeral is transient, momentary, brief (the opposite of what is permanent), the precarious is unstable, risky, dangerous (the opposite of what is secure, stable, and safe).
If the ephemeral is diaphanous, the precarious is shaky.
If the ephemeral can open spaces of melancholy, the material emergency of precariousness innervates bodies and spaces.
If the ephemeral refers to the non-lasting, the precarious discovers that “what is under construction is already a ruin,” [Verse from Caetano Velosos’s song Fora da Ordem (Out of Order)]. thus revealing the generalized shakiness of capital.
284 Soigner, avant même de vouloir dire : “Comment je peux guérir?”, suppose une question préalable : “Quel monde faut-il actualiser?”
Maybe it is most appropriate to speak of precarious life, rather than precarious work.
The intervals of “capital time” are a starting point for the exploration of non-precarious life. By intervals in capital time we do not mean “leisure time”, but rather the un-coded intervals, the moments where capitalism schizzes out and produces times of non-determinate action. Perhaps resisting precarity is a project of harvesting ambiguity that thwarts the automatisms of neoliberalism; making swiss cheese of capital time.
Basaglia, Institution et Negation
“La situation (la possibilité d’une approche thérapeutique du malade mental) se révèle donc sous l’étroite dépendance d’un système où toute relation est strictement déterminé par des lois économiques. Cela signifie que tel ou tel type d’approche n’est pas établi ou décidé par l’idéologie médicale, mais par le système socio-économique qui en détermine les modalités à différents niveaux.” 110
Preprocedure (for the threshold) - invent a rhythm.
Form is the rhythm of the material. (Henri Maldiney)
The rhythm of a form is the articulation of its implicate time. (Henri Maldiney)
Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become expressive. (Deleuze and Guattari)
It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition. (Deleuze and Guattari)
It is not that Simondon does not countenance the fragility (or, we might say, precarity) of humans, but it is not for him an ontologi¬ cal ground. Humans for him are not originally or primarily fragile or lacking; they are also potentiality, capacity, powers in the world. Our situation vis-à-vis technics today is indeed precarious, but Simondon does not see it as a psychological or existential problem: if the situation is grim, it is not because we have ignored that we are ontologically constituted by lack. Rather, he says, we are practically alienated from our potentiality. As such, modern alienation is not ontologically given and thus predestined (deriv¬ ing from lack) as in Stiegler. Instead, modern alienation is ontologically produced and historically constructed.
Thomas Lamarre, “Afterword,” in: Combes, Muriel, Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013, p. 98
A sense of disability to function – “to be” simply * L’individu est à lui seul l’illustration d’un appauvrissement de l’expérience.
Contrairement à la pauvreté, la précarité n’est pas de l’individu, mais de l’individuation, de la trans-apparition animant et ranimant le réel menacé du sceau chronopolitique de l’inertie
La précarité qui réjouit, c’est la trans-apparition comme tendance ou stratégie de modulation, et non l’individu comme unité prélevée dans le sillage de ses mouvements d’individuation. *
The grief procedure came first
Entroduction:
Endings can reactivate - Invitations can re-emerge -
What appears to be a cut transmutes into a refrain, cleaving new thresholds into rhythms of assemblage moving towards a collective metastability
an alternative invitation to e n d through a falling-spiralling-middling from the inside
Ci-dessous un extrait d’un livre obscur et passionnant d’Agamben, peut-être ça pourrait vous intéresser?
“Quand Lucius, à la fin de l’Âne d’or, décrit son initiation aux mystères d’Iside, il définit comme “précaire” la salvation qu’il y a trouvée. Il n’y a aucune certitude, mais une avancée hésitante dans l’obscurité ou la pénombre, sur un sentier suspendu entre les dieux inférieurs et supérieurs. Ceux-ci apparaissent surtout dans le rêve et la salvation qu’ils portent est essentiellement précaire, parce qu’elle a lieu dans une zone d’indistinction entre la perplexité entre le bas et le haut, la lumière et l’ombre, le sommeil et la veille.
Praecarius signifie, en latin, ce qui s’obtient seulement à travers une praex, une requête verbale, distincte de la quaestio, qui est une requête avec toues les moyens aptes à assurer l’atteinte de ce qui est à obtenir (c’est ainsi que le terme quaestio finira par désigner la torture, par laquelle on obtient toujours ce que l’on veut.
Si le mystère chrétien est, en ce sens, toujours efficace, la précarité est la dimension – aventurière et nocturne – dans laquelle se meut l’initié païen."
Giorgio Agamben, La ragazza indicibile, Electa, Milano, 2010.
- Folding
- Overlapping
- Scale
- Foregrounding
- Erasure
- Juxtaposition
- Repetition
- Gesture
- Attunement
- Care
- Traces
- A doubling – a double return
- Becoming
- Active - Reactive
- Positive – Negative [double negative]
- Can we generate the confidence to fail?
- Can we invite the potential for failure from the very beginning?
- Can we foreground the gap, extend the pause?
- Can spending time [as in the active commitment to linger] become relevant in the process?
- Will it exhaust? Invite surrender? “Failure”? Activate a place for convalescence?
- Can we avoid starting with content?
- Should we consider limiting the materials to help bring about the above ideas?
- Harnessing the local
- Gathering into collectivity
- Aligning or opening into materiality
what noise
what twitching and recursions of doubt
tentative outliers
monstrous machinations
grinding and callused
but unpracticed in it's allucution
seizing upwards
dazed
a tightening inwards with topographic edges of worry
pulled twisted squeezed within the high hummmm of the nervous system
a very aptly name system, this system of nerves, but in my case less biological and more basedly instinctual.
why do they call it flght or flight?
when there is always more then those two options. one can be flying on the inside, within any state of fight.
there are many thresholds of movement moving becoming across. aikido like. spelunking.
Plan C, “We Are All so Very Anxious”.
3: Capitalism has largely absorbed the struggle against boredom. There has been a partial recuperation of the struggle against boredom. Capitalism pursued the exodus into spaces beyond work, creating the social factory – a field in which the whole society is organised like a workplace. Precarity is used to force people back to work within an expanded field of labour now including the whole of the social factory.
Capitalism has encouraged the growth of mediatised secondary identities – the self portrayed through social media, visible consumption, and lifelong learning – which have to be obsessively maintained.
The present dominant affect of anxiety is also known as precarity. Precarity is a type of insecurity which treats people as disposable so as to impose control. Precarity differs from misery in that the necessities of life are not simply absent. They are available, but withheld conditionally.
A hundred varieties of “management” discourse – time management, anger management, parental management, self-branding, gamification – offer anxious subjects an illusion of control in return for ever-greater conformity to the capitalist model of subjectivity. And many more discourses of scapegoating and criminalisation treat precarity as a matter of personal deviance, irresponsibility, or pathological self-exclusion.
The situation feels hopeless and inescapable, but it isn’t. It feels this way because of effects of precarity – constant over-stress, the contraction of time into an eternal present, the vulnerability of each separated (or systemically mediated) individual, the system’s dominance of all aspects of social space. Structurally, the system is vulnerable.
One major problem will be maintaining regular time commitments in a context of constant time and attentive pressure.
Thinking/making with the constraints of weft and warp,During the precarity-making weekend the montreal hub used balloons and oil-based ink pens to write down key discussion points, quotes, and ideas that emerging from our movement-material-explorations and close-readings of the texts submitted for the issue.
Initially the balloons were written on when inflated, at appropriate scale. however, when once deflated the writing shrunk in relation to the size of the elastic surface, perforating delicate minute sized inspired texts along the sides. And when re-inflated we discovered the ink for the text would start to flake off from the balloon surface. over time.
The delicacy lent to the text when moving between its expanded and contracted forms, seemed to express a quality of precarity we were interested in activating. The fact that the text might not even last beyond on 're-inflation' of the balloon, flaking off in shedding at the hands of a new reader/participant, seemed like another potentiality for thinking/moving/making with precarity.
Also thought In tangent with the anarchive, we thought of using this material as a proposition for not just sharing, but activating a quality of precarity with the other Immediations hubs, and in our 'inflexions making'.
Thus, when Erin visited Zurich we sent a little package of 2 select balloons with her to gift to the Zurich/European hub. They returned a gift to us, that we will activate in the coming months.Thinking/making with the constraints of weft and warp,
during the precarity-making weekend the montreal hub used balloons and oil-based ink pens to write down key discussion points, quotes, and ideas that emerged from our movement-material-explorations and close-readings of the text submitted for the issue.
Initially the balloons were written on when inflated, at appropriate scale. However, when deflated the writing shrunk in relation to the size of the elastic surface, perforating delicate minute sized text along the sides.
When re-inflated we discovered the ink for the text would start to flake off over time.
The delicacy lent to the text when moving between its expanded and contracted forms, seemed to express a quality of precarity we were interested in activating. The fact that the text might not even last beyond on 're-inflation' of the balloon, flaking off in the hands of a new reader/participant, seemed like another potentiality for thinking/moving/making with precarity.
Also thought in tangent with the anarchive we thought of using this material as a propositin for not just sharing, but activating a quality of precarity with the other Immediations hubs, participating in our 'inflexions making'.
Thus, when Erin visited Zurich we sent a little package of 2 select balloons with her to gift to their hub. They returned a gift to us, that we will activate in the coming months.
“I think that aesthetics exists in a special relationship to political economy, precisely because aesthetics is the one thing that cannot be reduced to political economy.”
By pushing capitalism’s own internal tensions (or what Marx called its “contradictions”) to extremes, accelerationism hopes to reach a point where capitalism explodes and falls apart.
Shaviro, Accelerationist Aesthetics (in eFlux)
Invent a postpostpreprocedure for launching collectivity
Landing site configurations articulate at least this many positions;
nearnearground, nearmiddleground,nearfarground,
middlenearground, middlemiddleground,
middlefarground, farnearground, farmiddleground, farfarground; nearmiddlefarground, nearfarmiddleground, middlenearmiddleground, middlenearfarground,
farnearmiddleground
(Arakawa and Gins)
The dramatic proposition is synthetic, therefore essentially pluralist,
typological and differential
An event needs silence and time to
discover filially the forces which give it an essence
The time that Nietzsche speaks of, on the contrary, is necessary for the formation of the forces which give the death of God a sense that it did not contain in itself, which give it an essence determined as the magnificent gift of exteriority.
”
while driving back from the eastern townships (for our precarity-making weekend) while navigating on google maps we discovered that there was an asteriod crater in the area.
.... we thought about how interesting it might be to propose a 'return' to such a site, one that had been touched by the futurity of outside galaxies and star light
what if the work of this living issue is no longer 'about' precarity or even attuning to its qualites of experience. what if the work is now 'after precarity', in the similar way we have activated 'after Lygia Clark'. What if we move towards a collective rethinking (and remaking) of what a precarity can do. compose with the aftermath of it's qualities of experience
maybe this is why there has been an emergent exploration around thereputic, thereputic objects and philosophical inquiries exploring the thereputic?
is this our new emergent ecology?
Re: Event Ecologies
what was particularly nice about our 'precarity-making' weekend is that it was one of the first times that we found a rhythm for rest and activity, collectively generated but allowing for multiplicities. 'when the work would happen' was not scheduled. the relation was always moving. people could rest, retreat or repose, play, create invitations for group yoga, cook collectively..... all weaving through our propositions for 'inventing rhythms' such as jumping rope, and cutting mangoes, along with close reading of text relating to precarity and philosophical inquiery.
This experience fed future explorations of, and propositions for mobility and porousness within movement workshops (and material experiments) -- vocabularies around invitation and tending.
