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Schizoanalysis as a Method in Artistic Research

Tero Nauha

Journal for Artistic Research 3/2013

http://www.jar-online.net/index.php/issues/view/485

Abstract This exposition uses concepts of contamination, sponge and plasticity to approach the heterogeneity of a schizoanalytic practice - and as such as a method for artistic research. These concepts are singular to my research on the amalgamation of performance, subjectivity and contemporary forms of capitalism. My argument is to a large extent based on the theoretical thinking and practical works of Félix Guattari. The singular concept of ‘sponge’, developed here, can be linked to Guattari’s concept of chaosmosis and to the concept of plasticity, which has been reworked from its Hegelian comprehension by Catherine Malabou.

The foundation of my research is my artistic practice in the field of performance art. It is a practice based research including three artistic works – “Loop Variations” (2008), “Life in Bytom” (2012) and “Astronomer” (2014). Aside from supporting my artistic practice and exposing it as research, my aim is to predicate it within the larger context cognitive capitalism, the neoliberal economy and post-industrial labour. From this vantage point artistic practice is a device located within and conditioned by each economic and political ideology or order. However, an artistic practice is not only a formal production, but also produces content, which is not yet categorized, in other words something which is considered new. Often in the discourse of neoliberal culture production, this new is described with the word ‘innovation’. In my opinion these terms are not equivalent, but often contest each other. This exposition takes place at the convergence of performance studies, psychoanalysis, French theory and the contemporary critique of neo-liberal capitalism. My overall aim is to produce a contribution in this convergence. However, a theoretical approach is necessary not only to scrutinize what these potentialities might be, but also to formulate a support for a practice. In relation to this theoretical apparatus, the three artistic works function not only as singular instances, but also as considerations of the present neoliberal conditions, from the point of view of a critique. My research, in the field of performance art and theory, is deliberately restricted to the aspects of performance art practice and the concept of performance in the context of capitalism. Furthermore, it concentrates on the subjectivity of a performer in these two contexts; performance art and performance in capitalist practices. I am interested in articulating the complexity of an event experienced by either performing, or witnessing, subjectivity. What are the qualities of subjectivity for a performer, and are these qualities commensurable with the state of subjectivity in other particular contexts, such as in the contemporary political situation? What is the particular locus of a performer in the setting of performance art or social practices, where borders between everyday life, audience, performer, physical setting or duration are not explicit? Performance art functions as an analytical tool for the investigation of subjectivity and biopolitics. It is also part of the discourse of any capitalist apparatus. Artistic practice has

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rather limited means to effect these conditions. However, such a practice may produce the effect that potentialities may actualize as singular events. As an artist I desire to make a difference in the world and to articulate the particularity of the often bleak conditions where artistic practices take place. Aside from my own artistic works, this exposition includes some descriptions and analysis of other artistic works, events or phenomenon, which are tied in with the particular discourses of capitalism and subjectivity.

Introduction The concept of schizoanalysis was developed by Félix Guattari and Jean Oury at the clinique La Borde. (Genosko 1996, 8-12) Schizoanalysis has its origin in the heterogeneous and radical “anti-psychiatric” movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Italy, France and England. (Genosko 2002, 30-36) So far it has been seldom used in practice, but some recent examples include the appropriation of schizoanalysis by the Ueinzz Theatre Group in São Paulo and the performance group Plastique Fantastique initiated by Simon O’Sullivan and David Burrows

1. Even at the clinique La Borde schizoanalysis was not the base for

therapeutic practice, but used as an experiment for social organization. The attention in schizoanalytic practice is on the group, rather than the individual, which, for Guattari, was a politically necessary move away from ‘bourgeois’ Freudian and Lacanian analysis. However, as a student of Lacan, Guattari still owed a lot to psychoanalysis. In Addition, the development of schizoanalysis was influenced considerably by his collaborator and friend Gilles Deleuze. These links have been researched by Janell Watson in her book Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze (2009). Both her book and the more recent book on subjectivity and diagrammatic thought by Simon O’Sullivan (2012) are excellent philosophical investigations on this topic, and provide thorough introductions to Guattari’s idea of metamodelization, therefore I will not go any deeper on these relations here.

Instead, I will try to develop an argument for the usefulness of schizoanalysis for artistic practice, which is inevitably an appropriation. I am appropriating schizoanalysis both as a working method and as a tool for analyzing other works or practices. Appropriation is a way to use these tools outside the therapeutic context. However, what is significantly similar between artistic practice and therapy is the production of subjectivity in both instances, and how this production can be approached by schizoanalysis. The event of performance is a site for potential possibilities to become actual. However, infinite actualization of potential is never possible. Yet this is what the capitalist paradigm aims to do, to simulate the actualization of infinite possibilities. (O’Sullivan 2012, 22) Thus, schizoanalysis is not a manual for full potentiality, but an analysis of the subjectivization accommodating such a promise of infinity. I have taken the liberty to develop some concepts of my own, based on Guattari’s own articulations and experiments, since he warned us not to replicate a model from one context to another, but to check if the map is still valid and calibrate this into a different context.

Production of transformation in art practice The contemporary capitalist paradigm aims to capture potential knowledge, but only 1 See http://www.plastiquefantastique.org

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succeeds to build a promise of fulfilment. Adversely, we may experience a possibility of potentiality in our presence. (Virtanen 2011, 57) For this potentiality to be actualized, it requires signification by speech or other semiotic expressions and this process does not necessarily produce explicit meaning, but rather affects. Capitalist production’s aim to capture potential knowledge, remains an attempt to control its full potentiality.

An artistic practice concerning affects also aims to actualize potentiality. It aims to produce “more mutations, more lines of flight, more alternative temporalities.” (O’Sullivan 2007, 5) To distinguish such a practice from the overall knowledge production of capitalism, artistic practice must carry out actualization with rigour, and aim not for the truth of this potential, but for mutations and variations instead. There is no identical actualization of potentiality, only interpretations and variations. However, capitalist knowledge production creates predominant refrains

2, which are based on the promise and obstructions of alternative

articulations of potentiality. (O’Sullivan 2007, 4) Such dominant articulations organize subjectivity in the present conditions of neoliberal and post-industrial semio-capitalism. The dominant articulation produces a ‘home’ or ‘nest’, where only specific components are protected, in other words, specific interpretations of the potential are nurtured while minor ones diminish ever further. Repetition modulates and translates potential and such articulation acts as a refrain, which provides orientation for subjectivity, like a lullaby sung to children or a form of camouflage, for example the Brazilian Caligo butterfly described by Roger Caillois

3. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 311)

Artistic production cannot produce any affective transformation in actuality, unless it seriously considers its task to produce expressive support for minor refrains. Affective production itself does not create anything ‘new’ – new subjectivities, approaches, alternatives – when artistic and affective production aims only to produce discord for the dominant refrains. Dissonance for the dominant refrain is not yet new, nor does it alter the actualization of potential. Simon O’Sullivan argues for the distinction between the repetition with the same, and repetition with a difference – as seen in fashion and art. (O’Sullivan 2008, 91) Repetition with a difference is not a simple recombination – reorganization or mixing of heterogeneous materials in the way fashion industry does it – but production of an impasse, denoting transformation. (O’Sullivan 2008, 95) This is what practice does. Impasse may be frequent or rare in the process of artistic production, but it is essential for any modulation of potentiality with a difference. Impasse, as described in the language of Gestalt therapy, is a: “situation in which external support is not forthcoming and the person believes he cannot support himself. The latter is due in large part to the person's strength being divided between impulse and resistance. The most frequent method of coping with this is to manipulate others.” (Yontef 1993) Difference may feel like failure or disaster, thus it is avoided by returning to ‘nesting’ refrains and ‘home’. However, if an alien and threatening refrain gains expressive support, in other words if it begins to actualize, such a “rupture itself needs to be followed by new refrains, new habits.” (O’Sullivan 2008, 96) We cannot reside in the impasse or stay in the

2 Guattari on refrains: ”I would say that the refrain does not rest on the elements of form, material, or ordinary signification,

but on the detachment of an existential "motif' (or leitmotif) instituted as an "attractor" in the midst of sensible and significational chaos.” (Genosko 1996, 200) 3 “it exposes them abruptly with their two large blue "eyes" on a red background, giving the aggressor a sudden fright. The

butterfly, wings spread, thus becomes the head of a huge bird of prey […] the "eyes" of the Caligo should probably be compared to the apotropaic Oculus indiviosus, the evil eye that can not only harm but protect, if one turns it back against the evil powers to which, as an organ of fascination par excellence, it naturally belongs.” (Caillois 1935/1984, 18-19)

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liminal stage infinitely, we must return and only in the act of returning does the production of the ‘new’ occur. The emergence of transformation is the task of alternative artistic production.

The concepts of plasticity and sponge Plasticity as a concept is closely related to the fine arts and theatre, since it describes an idea of giving or receiving form – mould and impression, as predicated by Plato in the third book of Republic (2004, 66-102). Later, Hegel uses plasticity as a concept in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). He reserves the use of this biological concept to describe the sculptural and ethical ability to give form to, mould and stage subjectivity. (Clemens 2010) The aspect of giving form implies the modification and transformation of subjectivity. However, the plasticity suggested by Hegel and in particular the way in which it was appropriated by National Socialism has been criticized by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in their essay “The Nazi Myth”. (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1990) More recently this concept has been reworked by Catherine Malabou, first in her dissertation in 1996

4, and in several of

her later books. Malabou uses this concept in order to connect psychic and cerebral plasticity and to provide a comprehensive analysis of connections between the neurosciences, political thought and psychoanalysis. In their criticism of the concept of moulding ‘types’ of subjectivity, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy do not consider the aspect of annihilation as being part of plasticity. However, Malabou inventively distinguishes three aspects of plasticity in the following way:

"[Plasticity] means at once the capacity to receive form (clay is called 'plastic,' for example) and the capacity to give form (as in the plastic arts or in plastic surgery). […] plasticity is also the capacity to annihilate the very form it is able to receive or create. […] to receive and to create his or her own form does not depend on any pre-established form; the original model or standard is, in a way, progressively erased." (Malabou 2008, 5-6) Annihilation is caused by a psychological or physical trauma – an accident or disaster, which will change the subjectivity irreversibly. There will be a cut, which will separate the subjectivity from the past entirely. The French noun plastique or verb plastiquer, aside from moulding refers to plastic explosive substances, such as Semtex. (Malabou 2008, 5) Semtex has a feature of being easily malleable, transportable and difficulty to detect. These three distinct and opposing forms of plasticity function as an ability to receive form like clay, to bestow form, or to refuse “to submit to a model.” (Malabou 2008, 6) What follows, is that plasticity is not only reserved for moulding types or identities, in other words, to perform normatively or well, but also that there is an implicit potentiality for annihilation or rupture. The materiality of our existence is not similar to clay, marble or stone, but rather fluid, like plastic polymers. Plastic – in contrast with marble or hardened clay – is flexible, mouldable and elastic. The twenty-first century subjectivity is akin to plastic polymers; it is a sponge. With caution I have used the concept of plasticity in relation to performance or performing subjectivity to produce a concept of sponge subjectivity. Sponge has a form, which is able to absorb affects and information. It is able to mix and use information without losing its form. Sponge is resilient, flexible and it is plastic. Sponge balances rigidity with suppleness — thus it has a memory and resilience to change. How I perceive this obscure object, is that while it

4 L’Avenir de Hegel, plasticité, temporalité, dialectique from 1996. It was published in English in 2005 titled The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic.

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is supple and flexible, it is more inclined towards the return of the same than repetition with difference. Sponge is prone to control, since the function of a sponge is directly linked with the appropriate amount of wetness absorbed in its pores. It is a subject, which controls itself, in a way similar to that described by Deleuze in the Postscript on the societies of control (1990) or by Foucault in his analysis of the development of homo oeconomicus in neoliberal governance, in his series of lectures published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 (2008). Like an alcoholic, who meticulously controls the right amount of intake, the sponge maintains his or her material and virtual intake, as well.

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There is a difference between the rigidity of the sculptural form of marble and the supple flexibility of sponge. It is the pertinence of potential plasticity in a sponge, which is valuable for creative processes, alongside the social, mental and political aspects of subjectivity. The three aspects of plasticity are inherently potential and not actual: potential forms are taken, given or destroyed. It is the potential annihilation, which is constituent, that allows the production of repetition with a difference. In a manner of speaking, the sponge has a shadow, in its potential for annihilation. It is not the presence of death, but the presence of irreversible change, which lies in the shadow of the sponge. It is important to remember, that flexibility and elasticity are also attributes requested from a subject in contemporary capitalism. (Malabou 2008, 71-72) Such subjectivity is like a sponge: absorbant, flexible and elastic.

The economy of sponge Sponge remains elastic until it is thoroughly worn out and exhausted and as such it is an ideal subject for the contemporary capitalist paradigm. Sponge subjectivity is employable, which implicitly proposes infinite elasticity and flexibility. (Malabou 2008, 46) In the hard conditions of cognitive capitalism, the subject is presupposed to bear attributes of flexibility and elasticity in relation to time, space, performance and abilities. Flexibility “confounds them within a pure and simple logic of imitation and performance. It is not creative but reproductive and normative.” (Malabou 2008, 71-72) The flexible and elastic sponge is “the exact opposite of plasticity! While plastic material holds its form and cannot return to its initial state once it has been configured (as happens for example, with sculpted marble), elastic material does return to its initial form and loses the memory of the deformation that it has undergone." (Malabou 2012a, 177) It is a form, which in caricature represents the desired attributes of a performer in present conditions. However, it is not a fluid or gaseous subject, as Finnish political theorist Jussi Vähämäki proposes for the subjectivity of abstract and cognitive labour. (Vähämäki, 2006) Some forms of capitalism may function like gas, but subjectivity has the form of a sponge: resilient, responsive and firm. It is able to absorb new refrains and mix them in appropriate ways for it to be productive. However, plastic is not only elastic and flexible, but also brittle, rigid, liquid and explosive. Sponge subjectivity is an ideal mode for a cognitive worker, which inexorably holds within itself other aspects of plasticity. When the plastic soul loses its breath, a shadow of flexibility, which has detonative unpredictability, potentially a Semtex-subjectivity becomes activated as part of its essence. Sponge subjectivity is linked to a “homeostasis of affective economy,” which maintains subjectivity and its identity – the economy of drives, stimuli and their representations. (Malabou 2012a, 29-37) It is an affective economy of sponge subjectivity and one in which 5 I want give thanks professor Esa Kirkkopelto on this notion.

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we are not aware of our identity being formed by this economy. In relation to this, what kind of subjectivity is produced by the accident or annihilation of some attributes of sponge? Amidst the familiar refrains, repetition with indifference, we are running the course of life, with predictability and an amount of necessary flexibility meeting the bumps and turns life has reserved for us. Our identity is solid like a plastic sponge – resilient, but flexible. Malabou describes: “transformations do nothing but reinforce the permanence of identity, caricaturing of fixing it, but never contradicting it. They never disrupt identity.” (Malabou 2012b, 1-2) When rupture is taking place in the form of an accident or disaster, then an “unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person, and eventually takes up all the room. An unrecognizable persona whose present comes from no past. [...] A form born of the accident, born by accident, a kind of accident.” (Malabou 2012b, 1-2)

When change is taking place in artistic production, this unknown matter is the unpredictable duration of an impasse. It is not a case of normative adjustment but, similar to a trauma, a place, which will leave a ‘mute’ mark on subjectivity and transform it for good. Such a rupture in the course of life or artistic process is always violent and irreversible. The presence of a shadow of plasticity is apparent, while new forms of potentiality are being actualized. In this context, artistic practice does not only release tension, or produce cathartic change, but create irreversible contradictions and establish further rigidity.

Shadows In the shadows resides the mimetic monstrosity and abnormality of sponge subjectivity. The sponge is betrayed by a soul-less SpongeBob SquarePants, which is a facsimile of a desired subjectivity. The shadow is a soul that disturbs, which remains as a link to mortality. (Rank 1971, 57)

In his notes from his neuropsychological practice, Antonio Damasio introduces the phenomena of akinetic muteness, in which "the patient no longer manifested any emotional reactions and seemed neither surprised nor unhappy to be in the hospital." (Malabou 2012, 51) Such ‘numbness’ is not on the level of neurosis, but deeper, on the level of cerebral structure where the link between the emotional and the rational has been damaged. In the early twentieth century such rupture was diagnosed as neurasthenia, and more recently as panic disorder. (Jones 2004, 28) The affect of panic or numbness is more and more present in the context of cognitive labour. It might not be brain damage, which causes a numb and disinterested behaviour, but more an overwhelming exhaustion with the present context. (Berardi 2010) Where a plastic potentiality of giving is eliminated, potentiality withdraws. In the language of Guattari's metamodelization, subjectivity reterritorializes into a limited existential territory – into homely refrains and repetition with indifference. The result is depression and suffering. Moreover, annihilating plasticity of the self does not reveal archaic subjectivity, it is not a regression, for exhausted subjectivity is without a past. It is neither primitive nor infantile. (Malabou 2012a, 59)

Transformation includes a necessity of a double — shadow, mirror or echo.6 A

transformation includes discomfort, where a potentiality of annihilation is present, in the form of this double. Transformation with difference, therefore, only takes place in the discomforting presence of this shadow. Transformation of this kind is a process distinct from 6 I want to give my thanks to Kelina Gotman on the issue of shadow, mirror and echo. Her presentation on the philosophy of Clement Rosset at the "How Performance Thinks"-conference in London, April 2012 affected great deal on my articulation of this subject.

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a sudden trauma or full annihilation. This process heightens the presence of suffering. Shadow is distinct from a sudden impact, causing trauma, where suffering has no duration. Thus sponge has three, unconscious ways of proceeding: to receive form, while not being able to leave the subdued position of a 'user'; to give form and produce an event, while following a method with identifiable contours or; to risk annihilation in the process of probing the unclear potentiality. It is a process of suffering in the sense that there is no comprehension of an end - which in turn creates exhaustion. Suffering and panic are produced by the constant presence of these three aspects of plasticity. In turn, when an event is being produced and somewhat finalized, the three aspects of plasticity are fixed in semi-stable positions. However, the potentiality of destruction or annihilation remains present as incomprehension, shadow or doubt.

A true contingent event, as Elie Ayache writes, is "truly unpredictable" and "can be real without yet being actual". (Ayache 2011, 28-29) It is the virtual unpredictability which lies hidden in the annihilating plasticity, and not the possibility of destruction. The deterritorializing power of an event lies hidden in the virtual real of the annihilation. Beyond comprehension, there are no preceding signs of an event, such as an accident approaching. "The true contingent event creates possibilities that will have lead to it," so that the virtual potential of annihilation is an event that will reveal what might have been there all the time. (Ayache 2011, 28-29)

Artistic practice takes place in contingency and is a method without a path. It entails a conscious choice to accept the presence of shadows and the incomprehensible virtual, so that the three aspects of plasticity have potentiality to actualize. The method could be aleatory as used by the Surrealists, John Cage or Fluxus, it could be a proto-performance as employed by Baroness Elsa, No Wave and noise-music, or it could be about annihilating the identity as explored in recent projects by the Danish artist Nielsen.

7 The process seeks not to neutralize

potential suffering, boredom or annihilation, but instead invites the shadow in. The shadow is the annihilating black hole, about which Deleuze and Guattari warn us, and the process may lead into a flat, pear-shaped numbness – instead of the joyous new.

Chaosmic sponge ”Chaosmosis: the (mental) apprehension of the world [...] I absorb and I dissolve all discursivity while affirming this discursivity. But in general this time of fusion, or absorption, goes completely unrecognized, or is even thought.

8” (Watson 2009, 133)

Chaosmosis is a process of the first two types of plasticity: of receiving form and giving form - and it goes completely unrecognized. "You are the music while the music lasts," writes Damasio about the continuous auto-production of the self and subjectivity. (Damasio 1999, 191) Sponge follows the path of chaosmic becoming-something. This unrecognized process is easily considered as a creative procedure, where form is being received or simultaneously given to a performance, drawing, composition, etc. However, what Deleuze and Guattari emphasize on this becoming, is that it does not follow a path. (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 7 See: http://nielsen.re/

8 “Dans Chaosmose, je développe l’idée que l’appréhension du monde, le fait d’être dans le monde (le « da sein »), est

essentiellement une appréhension chaosmique : on s’abolit dans le monde, le monde se met à être pour soi, « je suis dans le monde parce que je suis le monde », j’absorbe et je dissous toute la discursivité dans le même temps où j’affirme cette discursivité. Mais généralement ce temps de fusion, d’absorbsion est complètement méconnu, voire même combattu.” (Guattari 1992, 1-2)

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232-309) Becoming-something is a process of transformation, not a state of imitation, but a real incarnation of something yet to come. Becoming-something is discomforting, with the potential danger of annihilation or becoming neutral, cool and flat. For Deleuze and Guattari becoming-animal is "traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than the human." (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 237) It is a process of becoming in which receiving, giving form and annihilation of form are simultaneously taking place. It is the production of the new and a monster with a shadow.

The Brazilian artist Lygia Clark worked with both therapeutic and artistic practices to search for all sides of plasticity in relation to social trauma. Her works have been widely publicized, and connected with relational art practices initially by Suely Rolnik (2007). Clark’s works were not processes of becoming as mimicry, but becoming as irreversible transformations of subjectivity. For Lygia Clark the presence of annihilation is doubled, but not yet amalgamated with the presence of affectivity. Such practice may have produced a transformation – becoming-something – of subject and social body surrounding the event of her practice. Her work as a type of schizoanalytic practice, produced psychic, social, political transformations on the spatio-temporal politics of the time. (Rolnik 2007) Such practices bear a similarity to psychoanalytical practices, though they are not discursive or purely analytical. It is the exteriority and potentiality of the real, which gives form to sponge subjectivity, and to chaosmic subjectivity. At the other end of the spectrum there is psychopathic subjectivity, which has cut off affective connections with the world and become numb. (Malabou 2012a, 160) There is no effect on the coolness of such subjectivity, which is epitomized in the environment of the neoliberal economy. The neoliberal economy requires subjectivity to stay cool, focus on details and retract from the ability to be touched. It is what Malabou defines as "difficulty letting oneself be touched” which she explains “is the evil of our times, the paradoxical result of being wounded.” (Malabou 2012a, 160)

Amateur sponge Becoming something is exemplified in the story of Robert Alan Zimmerman as becoming-Bob-Dylan. It is not only an inclination to become a song-writer or simply imitating others, “soaking everything up” with “immense curiosity”. Similarly, it is not only the plasticity of giving new forms by “mixing up” or “adding up” but also through the annihilating side of plasticity and the shadow of becoming – the motorcycle accidents, addictions, exhaustion and despair – which produces Bob Dylan, an artist. (Hyde 2010, 199) It is all these aspects, which argue against a simple, relational nature of a sponge. Dylan is plasticity in process, Robert Zimmermann becoming-Dylan.

A sponge subject is an amateur. He or she absorbs refrains, mixes them and produces either repetition with the same, or with the new. The amateur is neither ignorant, nor specialist. Sponge subjectivity is an individuation process, but not a conscious one. It is a social transindivuation process. (Stiegler 2012) Individuation is never finished, but a becoming. Sponge in a modest form is a user watching a TV series, while his or her attention is divided between this and other, minor refrains. (de Certeau 1988, xii) Sponge is not a simple consumer, but a sponge of potentiality. However, it is only a potentiality, as long as sponge only receives form, in other words as long as his or her attention is captured, the refrain of the same is repeated. Stiegler writes on attention and the destruction of this, stating “the destruction of attention is both the destruction of the psychical apparatus and the destruction of the social apparatus (formed by collective individuation) to the extent that the latter

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constitutes a system of care, given that to pay attention is also to take care.” (Stiegler 2012, 1) Sponge has no identity, but only distracted attention, following a repetition with the same, which in turn is considered an identical form. Sponge is not a metaphor, but actual matter and relations between other matters. Skin and brain are sponge-matter, while abstract relations of power and affection function like a sponge: following the cavities and fold of matter.

Sponge functions through connections, references and attention to connections. With attention, sponge is potential and new: an amateur with a difference, as Dylan was. Amateur sponge absorbs a repetition with a possible difference and seeks for actualisation of potential. With distracted attention, sponge becomes ignorant, and loses the flexibility for potential. Distracted sponge with no attention is an idiot

9, a simple user with no specific skills, but only

flexibility – or in terms of Malabou, employability. (Malabou 2008, 68) An idiot sponge is on his or her own, spending life outside the social. In some sense he or she is like Bartleby (Melville1853/1997), but also he or she is opportunistic, and does not value the attention. He or she fails in the process of transindividuation. The idiot sponge is not stupid, but non-attentive and repetitive in his or her actions.

The performance of sponge in relation to milieu “Playing prepared CDs according to the score was like advancing in a maze where ambush was everywhere and that made the performance situation all the more interesting.”

– Yasunao Tone What can a performance do? It can distinguish two aspects of rigidity and plasticity to recognize the impermanence of rigid forms and identify the ‘type’ of subjectivity, as criticized by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy.

10 What performance art or artistic practice may do

is to enhance awareness of the uncertainty of a system – the uncertainty of the articulations of ‘types’ and subjectivities. Plasticity articulates the modes of folding, forming and explosive attributes of our sponge subjectivities. What performance articulates subjectivity as a sponge? In turn, what is the role of a participant or witness of an event as a sponge? If our relations are bound with the permeable structure of a sponge, then what makes an event or performance coherent and signified, in other words, embedded with meaning? For noise-music pioneer and Fluxus artist Yasunao Tone the approach to his milieu was not that of an idiot, but an amateur. He started dismantling and reconfiguring CD-players and CDs immediately, right after their arrival on the consumer market in 1984. (Kelly 2009, 234-238) Tone’s production can be seen as not only an avant-garde anomaly or oddity, but also

9 “In the ancient Greek sense, an idiot is someone who does not speak the Greek language and is therefore cut off from the

civilized community. […]But Deleuze’s idiot, borrowed from Dostoievsky and turned into a conceptual character, is the one who always slows the others down, who resists the consensual way in which the situation is presented and in which emergencies mobilize thought or action. […] Don’t ask him why; the idiot will neither reply nor discuss the issue. The idiot is a presence or, as Whitehead would have put it, produces an interstice. There is no point in asking him “what is more important?”, for “he does not know.” But his role is not to produce abysmal perplexity, not to create the famous Hegelian night, when every cow is black. We know, knowledge there is, but the idiot demands that we slow down, that we don’t consider ourselves authorized to believe we possess the meaning of what we know.” (Stengers 2005, 994-995) 10

“With the idea that the nature and the finality of myth, or of the dream, is to incarnate itself in a figure, or in a type. Myth and type are indissociable. For the type is the realization of the singular identity conveyed by the dream. It is both the model of identity and its present, effective, formed reality.” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1990, 306)

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attention to and utilization of the third aspect of plasticity. In the context of neurology and politics, which are the main topics of Malabou, destructive plasticity is related to trauma produced by illness or accident. Artistic practice such as Tone’s is based on error and accident, and the ability to repeat a process. Accident is not the meaning of a process, though, but more an ‘icon’ or index of the potentiality produced by attention, in other words by a transindividuation process. In the case of Tone this process included a CD-player, CD, adhesive tape and Tone himself. Listening to the album Music for 2 CD Players (1985) reproduces the rupture that Tone himself encountered when tampering with a CD. It is a milieu, which defines in what way this event may be decoded or understood. Milieu constitutes distinctions and forms. More and more, human beings live in a technological milieu, one of asignified code. A milieu is a system of relations, and where the attention is becoming more and more disparate, it turns into a ‘dissociated milieu’. (Stiegler 2012, 13) Code or passing information is modified, in other words contaminated. Events do not follow an expected path, and therefore sponge subjectivity must adjust. This leads eventually to exhaustion, depression and an increasing need for stratified, fixed structures in the milieu. New forms, which require attention, develop “in conformity with the code's requirements; and the form can develop only through intermediary milieus that regulate the speeds and rates of its substances.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, pp.51-52) So, what happens to a sponge, and how will it perform in a dissociated milieu? Sponge subjectivity may turn into a Semtex-Sponge, which explodes. Beyond this point, the river of life does not follow the predetermined path, but one of another subject and another identity - if indeed any identity at all follows. The sponge subjectivity is related to the vulnerable construction of the cerebral, as Antonio Damasio writes: "The entire biological edifice, from cells, tissues, and organs to systems and images, is held alive by the constant execution of construction plans, always on the brink of partial or complete collapse." (Damasio 1999, 144-145) However, the sponge aims to maintain the coherence of identity as long as possible, at the price of lost attention and inability to perform. Like a damaged CD, it keeps on going, skipping and glitching, but unlike a vinyl record or magnetic tape, CD or computer file, it never wears out, but at some undefined point simply stops. In the meantime, there is meaning, as long as the received signals can find reference in past memories; as long as the positive aspects of plasticity are there. However, when there is a scission, rupture or cut – or several of them in sequence – the milieu stops making sense for the sponge, which ceases to perform. This is the destructive side of plasticity, which – as Malabou articulates in her book The New Wounded (2012) – produces irreversible changes in subjectivity and even full transformation into a neutral, cool and flat entity. Not only physical trauma, but exhaustion produces irreversible changes in subjectivity.

11 “The transformation of identity emerges from

a sudden, isolated event, unrelated to other events that constitute an individual life story.” (Malabou 2012a, 52).

The metamodelization of Félix Guattari Félix Guattari made a diagram, describing ”four domains of the Plane of Consistency or plane of immanence [for] mapping the unconscious and subjectivity, the four functors are mapping existence itself.” (Watson 2009, 123) The mapping of metamodelization is not a model for a system, but a meta-model or remapping; Guattari suggests making maps for each singular situation. (Watson 2009, 123)

11

See, Amelia Jones on war neuroses, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, 2004, 52-53.

11

The four domains, with four distinct functions are as follows: In the lower right, there is the existential territory (T) of subjectivity, which is the realm of dominant and minor refrains. This territory is the nondiscursive and real but only virtual; it is ‘life as it seems’ – my ‘apprehension’ of the world, with some respect to Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary. (Watson 2009, 133) In the lower left, there is the realm of material fluxes (F): intensities of play, joy, sadness and semiotics. These fluxes, which are actual and real, are reterritorializing by function. On top of them, there is the actual and potential Phylum (Φ) of abstract machines: blueprints, plans, rules, and regulations. These machines do not only regulate and organize the flows, but also: “Phyla are in essence creative, and also connect with the creativity of the artistic process.” (Watson 2009, 126) The most difficult to comprehend is the virtual possibility of the realm of incorporeal universes (U). It is non-signified and nondiscursive domain of virtual content, unformed matter and the realm of potentiality, as Watson writes: ”Universes [U] – concrete, oniric, pathological, or aesthetic. [...] A Universe is constellation of values, of nondiscursive references, of virtual possibility, not real and not actualized, and yet necessary to any process of actualization and realization. Crystals of singularization.” (Watson 2009, 124/129) She defines the relationships between the different domains as such, that: “the Phyla supply the plans and diagrams, which must be realized in the matter and energy of the Flows. [...] The full cycle of assemblages is not complete until the Universes and Territories also become involved, incorporating both machinic proto-subjectivity and human experience.” (Watson 2009, 131) The question of nondiscursive matter is essential, aside from the discursive signification. In addition to the horizontal division between real, potential or reterritorializing and deterritorializing, Guattari’s map is divided vertically, as such that: “Quantity belongs to scientific, method and the discursive, economic, rule-driven side of the Phyla and the Flows on the left side of the graph. Qualities are the concern of philosophy, aesthetics and subjectivity, which are located on the side of Territories and Universes on the right side of the graph.” (Watson 2009, 124)

The vertical division corresponds to the division between objective and subjective: the left side deals with the ‘given’ while right side is the domain of the ‘logic of body without organs’. (Watson 2009, 125) Artistic processes dealing only with semiotic significations and working with power and language, consequently produce more signification. However, without taking the right side of Universes and Territories into consideration – the virtual and potential – we are replicating already existing flows. In turn, artistic practice cannot reside only in the domain of potential Territories and Universes, since it requires some machines, in other words significations and material flows of the real. In order to produce changes and transformations both in the singular, existential territory or ‘how life seems’ and in the relationships between the organizing power of machines and material fluxes. Thus, practice ought to consider both signification and asignified potentials. We could think of an affect, how it traverses from the potential and virtual Universe through signifying Machines, which utilize the Fluxes of the corporeal, linguistic or relational. Therefore, affect alters the existential territory without direct signification, but requires support in doing so, in other words some aesthetic formations and aesthetic machines. They give form to the material fluxes and enable changes in the existential territory. With some differences, the four domains correspond to Aristotle’s’ four causes ensuing: causa materialis describes the Flows (F) of matter, libido, capital, signification, labour; causa formalis, the abstract machinic Phylum (Φ); causa finalis, the referential Universes (U); and causa efficiens existential Territories, which include selfhood (T). (Watson 2009, 128-129) Machines are not only abstract but also technological. Watson

12

defines the difference between the Heidegger’s reading of four causes (1977, 289-291) and Guattari’s rather different take on them: “he is always quick to point out that machines cannot attain existential consistency without the active involvement of Universes and Territories. In the final schema of the main text of Cartographies, Guattari maps his four ontological functors onto Aristotle’s four causes.” (Watson 2009, 128-129) Instead of a silver chalice, which Heidegger uses to exemplify the relations between the four causes, Guattari demonstrates the incapacity of the ontology by giving the example of Concorde, the supersonic jet. (Watson 2009, 129-130) Concorde was a technological success, but an absolute failure commercially. In other words, the Concorde never reached its full existential potential. Guattari explains that the “ontological consistency” of the Concorde airplane depends not only on material Flows and the machinic Phyla of technology, but also on a number of Universes: diagrammatic (plans, theories, feasibility studies), technological (transposition into material terms), industrial (production capabilities), collective imaginary (sufficient desire to bring the project to fruition), political and economic (release of funds, etc.). These Universes comprise many more elements than the simple purpose of flying, or the classical causa finalis. In terms of Guattari’s model, the Concorde was never successful because its economic Universe lacked consistency. In another example from Guattari, the diagrams of Leonardo da Vinci will never lead to actualization, because of the lack of existential support or ‘collective enunciation’ – of pooled knowledge and desire. (Watson 2009, 130) A Universe is a constellation of values, of nondiscursive references, or virtual possibility, not real and not actualized, and yet necessary to any process of actualization and realization. Crystals of singularization and bifurcation points may serve as the point of emergence of new “mutant universes of reference” or in Guattari’s words of new “incorporeal Universes,” “Universes of reference,” or “Universes of enunciation,” which are constituted by “something that is repeated, that is affirmed, that is neither localized nor finite nor discursive, but which is singular, or better, irreversibly singularizing.” (Watson 2009, 129) Mere recombination of material and immaterial fluxes by the machines does not produce the new, but only recombination of discourses: a repetitive rhythm with a difference. However, producing the new, a process bound to helping new refrains develop and probing potential, often appears fragile and difficult to capture in practice. The potentiality to alter the existential territory needs to go beyond simply remaining potential. It requires a form and alteration of the material fluxes. Transformations must consider all four domains of the diagram proposed by Guattari.

Witnessing performance In performance practice, whether involved in the making of or the witnessing of an event, there is a discrepancy between the signified matter of flux and the nondiscursive and affective. Often the material flux or the existential territory of corporeality and objects is not fully signified, in other words not everything is represented as ‘meaning something’. The complexity of the event is not fully articulated in the collective enunciation, which for me is the sole difference between the mediated entertainment and the performance practice that I am here predicating. In the latter, both the performer and the audience know by heart how the Concorde should fly. In the performance event – the schizoanalytic performance practice, which is the topic here – the performer and witness share the incongruous fluxes of signification and asignified potentialities, and not only the predictable flow of things and emotions.

13

When I am not able to signify or interpret what moves me, affect bypasses Phylum and links with a potential, yet nondiscursive reference (U). All four domains are affected and for a moment put into a destabilized movement for a potential ‘new’. Territory (T) is being altered and potentiality released into a new form of signification in the domain of the Real. New is not a repetition of affected refrains, but destabilization of the existential territory of subjectivity. However, in order to produce support for the new, repetition is required, in other words production of collective enunciation. The production of the new is a production of these minor, and occasionally dominant refrains. Such refrains of collective enunciation are affective and precarious. It is not a recombination of discourses, but a production of new and minor refrains of subjectivities. When recombination itself is not virtual, but a repetition of the actual and signified, then recombination lacks true political power, and only repeats the already signified. Agonisms or antagonisms are put forth only through movement caused by the presence of the nondiscursive potentials, altering the four domains.

However, minor refrains of the potential are not gateways to production of the new. A refrain may also be a catastrophe and annihilation of subjectivity; negative plasticity and reversal of the event. It is the shadow or the difference of the new: the destructive side of plasticity. Refrains may become simple automatisms, as Akseli Virtanen and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi define while describing the precarious process of production of the new.

12 The refrain of

artistic practice would, and I would say it inevitably will, be commodified or reterritorialized as a fixed relation between a machine and flux. Some crude examples of this are for instance how ‘punk was sold out’ or how 1970s body art became mainstream in the styling of superstar sideshow artists like David Blaine.

In the event of performance there is transversality between the performer and the audience. Similarly with transference in the Freudian tradition, Guattari’s concept of transversality is not a ‘hypnotic’ relation between members of a group, but rather a production of both conflicting and confluent refrains within the group; the production of narratives based on the affects and unconscious desires within the group.

13 Transversality produces nonsignifying

gaps and breaks in the group, between the performer and the witnesses. (Watson 2009, 23-31) Witnessing performance produces knowledge, which is discursive and nondiscursive, territorial and fleeing singular existential territory. The knowledge is embodied but not altogether signified, thus an event produces conflict between the previous refrains and with the already signified relationships between the Machines, Fluxes, Territories and Universes.

The mess of contamination Signification functions through contamination and in the context of the neoliberal economy or semiocapitalism, contagions produce mess. A mess is exhausting, since there is an excess 12

“Multitude does not express itself as autonomy, but as dependency on automatisms and self-evidencies which the arbitrary power builds everywhere in our everyday life, in our senses, sensibilities, and psyche. This is the discreet charm of the precariat which turns wealth into misery, potentiality into anxiety, creativity into dependency. Swarm does not have a political soul, but an automatic soul.” (Virtanen and Berardi 2010, 41-42)

13 ”Transversality in the group is a dimension opposite and complementary to the structures that generate pyramidal hierarchization and sterile ways of transmitting messages. Transversality is the unconscious source of action in the group, going beyond the objective laws on which it is based, carrying the group’s desire […] It is my hypothesis that there is nothing inevitable about the bureaucratic self-mutilation of a subject group, or its unconscious resort to mechanisms that militate against its potential transversality. They depend, from the first moment, on an acceptance of the risk – which accompanies the emergence of any phenomenon of real meaning – of having to confront irrationality, death, and the otherness of the other.” (Guattari 1984,22-23)

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of signified matter, and abundant asignified matter coagulates together. What is missing in the mess is accuracy. Contamination as a term was used by Freud (1921) and Gustave Le Bon (1895) to describe the affective nature of the crowd and mass-subjectivity. Contamination is easy to detect, but not so easy to explain, and it is affective by nature. Contamination corrupts; it transforms but does not destroy attributes of subjectivity. It is not colonization, repression or suppression. Contamination takes place transversally among the group as a desire. In contrast to the nineteenth century discourse of le Bon, neoliberal contagions are not ‘hypnotic’, affecting the hysterical or neurasthenic subjectivities, but more like an unclear form of noise or a hyperabundancy of signals – an effluvium of affects, too subtle to be perceived by touch or sight. In neoliberal capitalism affective relationships are produced between subjectivities, devices and machines. An asignified refrain is contaminative as such, because it functions by producing a collective enunciation and desire for nostalgia, utopia, hatred, nationalist identity and so on. Affective contamination is signified as pragmatic, sensible and efficient. On the asignified level, these refrains produce mess and exhaustion. The result of this double acting contamination is confusion and an inability to approach potentiality, leading to production of repetitive mimicry and negative homeostasis. In the mess of heterogeneous contagions, minor refrains of potential are difficult to approach. Mess is a liminal state, where potential is perceived as a threat or as simply impossible. The undisclosed continuity of the liminal is the existential territory produced by neoliberal capitalism. In a way such a mess is ‘pseudo-liminality’, since the mess has no exteriority – a place where this liminal passage would lead into. Therefore, this pseudo-liminal continuum of neoliberal capitalism is the context for artistic practice, where it is often difficult to recognize the nature of each contagion. It is in the mess, where practice and research must probe into the potential of the new. Artistic practice and practice as research do not function solely on the signifying realm, but are also in contact with the asignified matter of potentiality. Therefore, such a method of probing the mess of heterogeneous contagions will have evident problems of signification. Probing as a method is a blind war-machine or black hole, which may function as disempowering, inhibited and destructive or in turn induce creativity, emerging potentiality or act as a catalyst. (Watson 2009, 94-96) O’Sullivan writes about the probe-heads as embarking from faciality towards becomings

14, as one alternative organization of the

heterogeneous mess of capitalism. (O’Sullivan 2006, 312)

Schizoanalytic performance practice presented by “Plastic Fantastique”, “Ueinzz” theatre group and myself is not a way of producing truth, but a form of sensibility towards the minor refrains, which linger in the mess of dominant contagions. This practice produces ‘expressive support’ and collective enunciations, which nevertheless remain asignified affects. It expresses the contingencies between fluxes, rules and virtual potentialities. In the general episteme of post-industrialism each particular context is contaminated with heterogeneous but localized contagions. These contagions can be found in different locales and contexts. However, in each singular location, these relationships between contagions – dominant and minor refrains – have utmost significance. Mess has a relationship between the materiality of the contagions, since a mess is not gas where these relationships would be

14

“Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of "probe-heads"; here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities. Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created.” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 190-191)

15

imperceptible.15

Instead of rational Fordist-Keynesian organization, sponge subjectivity finds itself amidst a mess of heterogeneous orders. Mess confuses and exhausts the sponge, while signal and noise are not significantly differentiated. (Terranova 2004) There is a lack of direct command and, instead, a mere maintenance of delocalized subjectivities. “Cerebral organization and socio-political organization are collided in the individuation process of subjectivity, in the daily experience of life, in the potential or annihilation aspect of subjectivity.” (Malabou 2008, 49) In the mess, subjectivity performs only to adjust the delocalized performance in the ever-changing conditions. Yet, it is not the survival of the fittest, per se, but a mode of self-regulation. Therefore, in the mess, there is a strong need to build rhizomatic structures, since each link may collapse or corrupt in any instant. However no archaic community of wolves huddled around the fire is possible. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 33-34) Sponges do not stand side by side, but are rather confusedly in a mess; dislocated like the depressed or the ill. Contagions of neoliberal capitalism are explicitly producing maladies. Performance management, as proposed by Jon McKenzie, may well function in corporations and institutions, but not as a rule in a neoliberal mess of life. (McKenzie 2001, 61) For McKenzie the shift from Taylorist management of labour, starting in the 1980s, into ‘Performance management’ is a paradigm shift. (McKenzie 2001, 6) Taylorism was based on the rational and scientific organization of labour, which had a downside of massive, centralized production lines and a lack of flexibility, insufficient to meet the changed social discourse, emerging in the 1980s. For McKenzie: "Performance Management, in contrast, attunes itself to economic processes that are increasingly service-based, globally oriented, and electronically wired.” (McKenzie 2001, 6) He argues that the shift is from rational management to performance. Following Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics (2008) and Deleuze’s Postscript on the societies of control (1990), McKenzie continues to distinguish disciplinary power from the performative, in that "it is not repressive desire; it is instead ‘excessive’.” (McKenzie 2001, 19) Disciplinary power organizes by regulations and obstructions, while the performative produces through excess amounts of contagious elements. The indirect product of neoliberal capitalism is a kind of subjectivity, which is compatible with this mess. It is that subjectivity whose attributes are precariousness, cynicism, opportunism, and distractedness: the supple and employable – yet often capricious subjectivity described by Malabou. (Malabou 2008, 68) Possessing this subjectivity, a sponge is able to maintain its form and perform in the conditions required by the neoliberal apparatus.

16 In the effluvium of neoliberal mess, where all aspects of plasticity are producing

a coagulation of affects, it is hard to distinguish a meaningful signal from the abundance of noise. The strategic objective would be distraction and distress – and not management of performance. Neo-liberal cognitive capitalism does not function through clear signs, as a mess is a productive force. The performance of sponge is located in these perturbed

15

However, these minute differences effect significantly the proliferation of social based practices in the art field. 16

Dispositif; device or apparatus is ”a strategic nature, which means assuming that it is a matter of a certain manipulation of

relations of forces, either developing them in a particular direction, blocking them, stabilising them, utilising them, etc.” and

more ”that what I call and apparatus is a much more general case of the episteme; or rather, that the episteme is a

specifically discursive apparatus, whereas the apparatus in its general form is both discursive and non-discursive, its

elements being much more heterogeneous” (Foucault 1980, 196-197).

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conditions, where adjustments and elaborations of conditions and the functioning of the apparatus are not executed as disciplinary, but as controlling modifications. Needless to say, there is no executing power controlling these modifications. The contamination is a self-organizing system. It is a heterogeneous apparatus of discursive and nondiscursive elements, with the aim – following Foucault’s description of the function of apparatus – of producing subjectivity compatible with itself. Mess has no representation, but subjectivities, machines and potentialities must distinguish the fluxes of matter and meaning from one another by affective sense. Neoliberal capitalism does not know where the right direction is, preferring to squirm around. Following McKenzie’s argument of the performative power as excess, control in the mess is executed by the expansion of the mess. Mess is unlimited, apeiron – a devouring and productive space.

The intensity of performance by sponge subjectivity Mess has a different intensity in its periphery than in its centre. Mess is not a thicket from the midst of which you can make your way out, but more a milieu consisting of intensities or affects. Mess is not constant static, but run through with variations and modulations of varying intensity. When the Japanese noise band Astro Twin creates an environment of mess, it is very often quiet and almost inaudible. Utah Kawasaki’s electro-acoustic noise, static, clicks and hiss and the vocal bustle, moan and snarls of female vocalist Ami Yoshida produce an atmosphere of deflation. My main impression of their concert at the Avanto festival in Helsinki in 2004, was of the lack of a clearing - aletheia - from which I could observe the performance. I was so immersed in the affects and subdued intensities. The grunts and vocal snarls made by Yoshida, felt like they were leaking by accident through her vocal chords. Yoshida and Kawasaki write that Astro Twin is interested in: “[The] boring sounds / unevolving sounds / unproductive sounds / lazy sounds / garbagelike sounds [...] these infinitely divided sounds are scattered everywhere. Each sound is junk, but some sounds may be important. They are for you to seek. We want you to find them — that is Astro Twin's request.” (Astro Twin, 2003)

This is the strategy of a whole generation of noise and contemporary improvised music. Similarly to earlier avant-garde movements such as DADA, Fluxus and Punk, they cherish junk, waste and the creative potentiality of boredom. Intensities produce mess, which is neither overwhelming nor discursive. If The Ramones, Lydia Lunch, DNA, Mars, Debbie Harry and James Chance despised art in the favour of No Wave and Punk, then Astro Twin and Finnish noise bands such as Kemialliset Ystävät, Launau or Islaja value naiveté, inventiveness and transient ethereality. In this way, these experiments locate themselves in the continuum of the avant-garde. However, the apparatus of digital media has introduced an aesthetics of contemporary noise practice with a different range of possibilities to the early 1980s noise bands in New York. One such example is the aesthetic development of the drummer of DNA, Ikue Mori and her journey from a 1980s No Wave band to her contemporary, digital drum machine experimentations.

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In contrast to this, in schizoanalytic performance practice there are rarely any digital devices used, but I would argue that the mental milieu has certain affinities with the above mentioned practices. To put it simply, schizoanalytic performance practice is about intensity, affects, repetitions, rhythms and refrains. All three aspects of plasticity; of giving form, taking form and annihilating form are taking place, and yet the only material is the body of the performer. 17

http://www.ikuemori.com/bio.html

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The audience is often silently involved not as a witness of an authentic event, as it would be in the case of authentic movement (AM), where the witnesses (both inner and the others) have become conscious of the act of witnessing, (Stover Schmitt and McKeever 2013) but as sympathisers. However different my approach may be from AM, the ‘crowd’ affects me as a performer in my journey. I experience the panic of being on stage, being in the position of an object, as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen writes: “panic is precisely uncontrollable breaching by the ego by (the affects), since panic is breaching by the ego (the affects of) others, or […] a mimetic, contagious, suggested narcissism, [and it is the] sympathetic relationship with others [which] is simultaneously the ultimate nonrelationship with others: each imitates the “every man for himself” of the others.”18 (Leys 2000, 35)

Schizoanalytic performance practice saturates the audience with an excess of ‘noise’ or mess of signals. The physical act of schizoanalytic performance is a mapping and metamodelization of a contaminated subjectivity. Jacques Attali writes about the political aspect of such noise being a process of:

“Inventing new codes, inventing the message at the same time as the language. Playing for one's own pleasure, which alone can create the conditions for new communication […] Alienation is not born of production and exchange, nor of property, but of usage: the moment labour has a goal, an aim, a program set out in advance in a code-even if this is by the producer's choice-the producer becomes a stranger to what he produces.” (Attali 2002, 134-135)

My repetitive and spastic movements on stage, or gurgling syllables are not just meaningless and infantile static, but fractions of the mess the subjectivity is in – and, as such, shared intersubjectively. Schizoanalytic performance practice is a production of subjectivity in the post-industrial era. Grunting, moaning and repetitious movements in front of the witnesses seem not to be able to find a direction. Such practice is not contemplation of a collapse, but investigation of the intensities and fraction of contagions residing in the performer. It is a performance of the sponge subjectivity unfolding. The performance of sponge subjectivity has diffused the performer’s decisive abilities. However, the internalized and externalized judgement is ever present, as it is in the case of AM, and it appears as a form of repetition, in other words in the need to produce some meaning out of noise.

Schizoanalytic performance practice unfolds the shadow of a sponge – the plastic, polymeric rhizome of its subject. In this mess, both unlimited apeiron and preindividual

19 ground are

taking place. In the digital noise of Astro Twin, Ikue Mori or Kemialliset Ystävät, the product bears the imprints of the shadow of technology itself. In schizoanalytic performance practice similar imprints of contagion also appear. The fallacy of technological transparency can be found in the claim that in each digital act, fragments of shadows can be found embedded on the recording. Pristine digital background — music, images, movement — is not blank, but saturated with digital memory. It is the dark background of digital silence and

18

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. 1993. The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and affect. Standord: The Stanford University Press, 9.

19 Preindividual is a term used by Gilbert Simondon, and later on by Bernard Stiegler to describe the process of individuation, a continuous process of using the potentiality. Simondon writes that, ”that individuation does not exhaust all of the preindividual reality, […] that the constituted individual transports with itself a certain associated charge of preindividual reality […] a certain level of potential remains, and further individuations are still possible. This preindividual nature that remains linked to the individual is a source for future metastable states from which new individuations can emerge.” (Simondon 2009, 8)

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the shadow of a sponge subject, which is infinitely present, nondiscursive and potential. (O’Sullivan 2012, 41-42) Ami Yoshida’s barely audible, violent grunts steal away from their identical aletheia, and give way to the excess of probabilities.

Sponge subjectivity is not a digital robot or android: it will not collapse from a repetitive glitch. Sponge is embedded in the digital milieu through technological devices. Any device will enhance or obstruct perception and decode relationship with experienced reality in a specific way. “There is not subject opposing other subjects, but the transversal flows of imagination, technology, desire: they can produce vision or concealment, collective happiness or depression, wealth or misery,” writes Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi about the present context of cognitive capitalism (Berardi 2009, 120). Production in neoliberal capitalism is substantially based on immaterial labour, capitalization of relationships and digitalization of communication. It requires a compartmentalization and cohabitation of heterogeneous objects, which in turn are interdependent and transindividuating.

20 Production requires a

network of asignified, nondiscursive mental networks, where the meaning is produced with sort of plug-ins, in other words, with the means that the sponge subjectivity uses to distil meaning from the mess. However, negative plasticity travels in the network, as well.

Schizoanalytic performance practice is probing the nondiscursive matter of the mess and the intensity of singular milieus. This probing investigates the tension of a mess, a taut and nervy process, but not one of disclosure. It examines the group transversality or, in other words, the transindividuating operations at play.

Kukkia (The Flowers or To Bloom) was a performance collaboration between myself and Karolina Kucia. We worked together from autumn 2004 to summer 2008. (Kucia and Nauha 2010) The aim of this work was to find out why and how to practice performance. Simultaneously it was a process of ‘clearing’, but also a site for shoots of confusion and contradictory thoughts to propagate. In a tense situation between producing a ‘piece’ and experimenting with the mess, we encountered numerous instances of fighting, quarrelling, indecisiveness and hesitation. It seemed that Kukkia performances were often still not ‘cleared enough’, or they were ‘too obscure’ to gain recognition as truthful. In the rigorous terms of Heidegger, these works were not art, if art is seen as the “truth of beings setting itself to work”: giving form to a mess. (Heidegger 2001, 35) We felt distracted and far from happy about the outcomes we created. Art practice ought to be representative of mess, but not a mess itself. To work with the mess itself, is counteractive to the other attributes of art in cognitive capitalism, namely compatibility and performance itself. A messy performance does not perform the production of meaning well.

Schizoanalytic practice in Tomar, Portugal on May 2010. I am walking around in circles on the stage. I feel disoriented and distanced from this place. It is a café with a stage, some lighting on the ceiling. The audiences is either sitting or standing a bit further away and lower than the stage. They are quiet, and I cannot see them well, because of the stage-lighting. In general the whole room is quite dimly lit, and the effect is not so staged. There is a blue curtain covering the back-wall behind the stage. There are a double bass, an electric guitar and an amplifier on stage.

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“Now, transindividuation is the way psychical individuations are metastablized as collective individuation: transindividuation is the operation of the fully effective socialization of the psychical. With the social networks the question of attentional technologies becomes manifestly and explicitly the question of the technologies of transindividuation.” (Stiegler 2012, 3)

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I am standing on the stage with a small guitar amplifier, guitar and loop-box. I do not have a direct plan to begin with, but I have decided to use guitar and loop-box at some moment. As happened in the previous practice of this kind in Tampere, March 2009, I walk around in circles on the stage. After that I try to take of my shirt. I do not make direct contact with the audience, but I am hypersensitive to their presence, which makes me nervous. I walk around the stage and for some reason, which is not fully intentional, I start to grunt, make noises and grimace at the audience and to myself. I let myself fall down on the stage-floor and I scratch the floor – which is covered with a carpet – with my nails. I wave myself from side to side, then stand up and swirl around some more. I fall on the stage a little bit harder, and this leads into a loop of falling, coming up and swirling. A few times I fall intentionally off the stage. I am aware of the frame that I am in. I do not go crazy but I am conscious, I do not forget where I am. I am performing but ambiguous about what is really happening. There is no clear observer or judge in me or projected into exteriority, but rather an effluvious presence of consciousness. I pick up my electric guitar, which is connected to a digital loop-box, and play some aggravating riffs. I use the loop-box to build a loop of around forty seconds, on which I can layer more and more guitar noises. The sound of the guitar is very dry and without any bass. It reminds me of the sound of the band DNA, as you can hear it for instance in their first album A Taste of DNA, or in the film “Downtown 81” (1981) directed by Edo Bertoglio. While I am messing around with the guitar and layering more loops, I am whirling around the stage on the verge of falling. It feels clumsy, tense and I notice that I am more conscious of what I am doing, in contrast to the beginning of the performance. I am ashamed of my lack off skill. The layers of repetitive sound build up a noisy and chaotic frame – a protective ‘shield’ from the audience – which makes me feel uncomfortably distant. I dwindle more in my thoughts. I am aware of my actions, but I am utterly uncertain what is going on. I do not want to entertain, but neither do I deny it completely. I feel extremely tense and stressed, and feel that I am on the verge of my mental capacity. I don’t like to fool around just for my own pleasure. I lie down on the ground and turn off the loop-box and turn down volume of the guitar. Then, once again, I am twirling and walking around the stage. I am busy doing something. After a while I walk off the stage and pick up my shirt. I stay for a while in the shadow, but not off-stage enough for the audience to believe that the performance might have ended. I walk back on the stage, and explain that buttoning up my shirt is a similar action to what the audience had just seen – automatic and repetitious. Then I walk off the stage and audience applaud. Someone screams for an encore. I think about it for a moment, but feel awkward, since repeating a performance seems out of line. However, the context is different from a typical art performance setting: there is a stage, lights, guitar, amplifier and props. After some hesitation I promise to do a one minute encore. I walk on the stage and make a short noise loop again. I lie on my back and take a tense position on the floor for a minute. Then I stand up; turn off the loop box and amplifier and walk off the stage.

Tell Me about Your Machines I did a series of five performances in The New Performance Festival in Turku, from 3 to 5 May 2012. Each performance lasted one hour and took place in the Titanik Gallery. The room was 40 m2, with large windows on the one side. For the performance the windows were covered so that subdued light entered the room, but it was not possible to see out of or into the space. At the beginning of the performance I sat on a chair facing the audience, who sat in a semi-circle around me. There was lot of black electric cable and wire on the floor, creating a kind of ‘nest’ or ‘network’ between myself and the audience. In the beginning, I

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asked three to five people from the audience to become participants in the performance. They were asked to sit in different chairs closer to me. These participants heard my questions through headphones, while the rest of the audience as witnesses, heard my voice normally without amplification. Participants were asked questions about the machines they have, and eventually they were asked to choose one machine, which they felt a particularly close contact with and wanted to work with. While working on the performance in 2011, I attended a concert by Eliane Radigue at St. Stephen’s church in London. This event instigated my work on the topic of the affective relationship between a technological device and human being, a relationship which Gilbert Simondon (and later Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler) defined as a transindividuation process with attention. (Stiegler 2012, 3). The piece that I heard from Radigue was called “Trilogies de la Mort, part 2, Kailasha”. For most of her compositions she has been working with an ARP 2500 analogue-synthesizer and in an interview she has described the first meeting with the machine: “I really fell in love with the ARP (2500) synthesizer. Immediately. Immediately! That was him! [Laughs]” (Rodgers 2010, 56) In this concert, which lasted about hour and half, she presented extremely long, slowly evolving and modulating sounds from four loudspeakers. Sitting there on the church bench I had a very curious insight: I realized I am thinking! I realized that when I am thinking, it most of the time nothing but an internal dialogue, a messy and constant chat with myself. It is this chatting, which is called thinking, which is not thinking at all, but only a mess. In the performance Tell Me About Your Machines, the participants were asked prepared questions by me, around twenty-five of them. The questions had a logic, starting with rather obvious ones, but leading into the issue of transindividuation, care and attention. They were questions like: Can you tell me what kind of machines you have?

What do they do? What do you do with the machines?

Where are these machines? Do they work together or separately?

How do you use them? Do they use you?

Do you use them at the same time? Is this machine controlling you in some ways?

What does it control? Do you control the machine, what it is doing?

Do you control yourself of using the machine? What do you think the machine wants you to do?

Does it command you to do something? Do you command the machine?

After the question part, the participants were asked to take off the headphones and project a mental image of this machine of theirs onto the opposite wall, in other words to imagine how

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this machine looks, feels and smells. After a short period of time, I stepped into that area of projection and ‘became’ a subject of their projections of machines. Following this change, I asked them to give me directions, how they wished or desired a machine to function, serve or command? ”I am your machine. You can direct me; tell me what to do, ask me to control you. I am your machine.” They started to direct me and I would repeat them, following the manner of performance as described previously about schizoanalytic performance practice. There was no logic of imitation but only affective association in my responses to their directions. In a similar way to the performance in Tomar, I felt clumsy, tense and the performance seemed too fast for my state of mind. My actions resulted in the participants following some questions more than others. Occasionally the results were humorous. I felt that the situation was ‘hypnotic’ and compassionate. Since the participants had invested one hour to answer my interview questions, they really projected their mental images onto me, and as such I ‘became’ their technical device. After a period of experimentation, the session was over.

When I had asked people to describe, if they had an intimate relationship with their bicycle, smart-phone or toaster, such a question seemed to amuse people, at first. However, each participant took the task seriously, and from the comments that I heard afterwards, their relationship with the machines had altered and shifted. It changed their attention with the device such as a toaster and the transindividuation process was transformed. A rupture had occurred between multitudes of technological devices. Machines and humans either produce deadly repetitions, which are automatic projections of desire on the device, or rupture may result in a process of transformed relationship with the milieu.

This performance was part of a larger project called "Life in Bytom". From the beginning of 2012 I visited Bytom for several times – usually for a week or less. These visits comprised of workshops, interviews, field trips and other events. In between the visits I worked with the material gathered. My starting point was to ask, how life has changed in the past twenty years in this particular context of Bytom – a post-industrial town in Upper Silesia, Poland. I encountered many individual and singular stories and events, which revealed things that are not particular only to Poland, but a general feature of neo-liberal Europe. My approach was at first theoretical, circling around the problem of economic transformation, which I call the mess of capitalism. It is a state of no certainty or centre – which is in straight dissymmetry with the previous, state controlled socialism in Poland. However, my approach was merely theoretical, with very little grounding in this particular place in Poland, Silesia. From the first meetings with the curator of Kronika Contemporary Art Centre in Bytom, Stanisław Ruksza, one aspect of the state of Bytom became clear, when he called Bytom the “Detroit” of Poland. These places are not going through a controlled transformation period, but a series of arbitrary changes. There is no straightforward answer, ideology or roadmap, but a mess of collapsing buildings, infrastructures where no one knows what the duration of this process is or what forms it will take. It is the precariousness of this mess, where my endeavour took place. In this context, what can a performance do?

Conclusion I have described some artistic processes which revolve around minute and often nondiscursive matters. These processes may seem, to some extent, failures or cultivated

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disasters. It may appear that the aspiration of these projects is to conjure up ridicule and destructive annihilation, in a similar manner to the performances of some historical avant-garde artists or groups. If this were the case, it would make this practice anachronistic. Moreover, it would debilitate the constituent link between performance art practice and contemporary notions of the performative in terms of political subjectivity. For me, however, such practice is not an articulation of an artistic problem, per se. These issues are not reserved only for the minor subject of performance art, but they should be appropriated into any area which deals with the question of performance or production of meaning from nondiscursive potentialities. Notwithstanding my emphasis on the ‘off the cuff’ nature of performance practice, my aim is to link such a practice with other performances, as well. By this I mean those performances which Paolo Virno identifies when he writes that “every political action is virtuosic,” or those McKenzie introduces with the idea of controlled performances, as discussed earlier. (Virno 2004, 53) A sponge subjectivity is a virtuoso, bestowing potential onto his or her existential territory; he or she is a homo œconomicus – virtuosic, performing subjectivity, fitted into the neoliberal economy.

I have tried to estimate the different levels of contamination, which occur in different forms and magnitude. The nature of contamination is corruptive and infective.

21 Moreover,

contamination is abhorred in present everyday practice, as if it would be the reminder of our corporeality. Contamination denotes smell, decay, and the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans in the shared milieu. While describing the appearance of Baroness Elsa, Jones associates Baroness’ malodorous appearance with the ragpicker, which “can provoke a radical sense of dislocation […] the person who encounters the ragpicker or détraqué suddenly calls into question her own corporeality, her coherence, her methods of making sense of the world [and] the confrontation can be very scary.” (Jones 2004, 199)

In my argument, schizoanalytic performance practice emphasizes this incomprehensible pressure of present contaminations and reflects on how our subjectivity is in a sense nothing but a hyper complex amalgamate of contagions, affecting the three aspects of plasticity; giving, receiving and annihilating form. Such practice may not produce similar affects as the avant-garde proto-performance by The Baroness, but it may dislocate the witness from his or her trust in essential subjectivity. This is the other side of sponge, the virtuoso of neoliberal capitalism. It is the shadow, or in other words the nondiscursive, virtual potentiality, which appears only in the form of affects, never to be fully recognized. It is a nondiscursive contamination, which consecutively will be given form through the Machines of the Real. Eventually, nondiscursive potentiality alters the existential Territory of a subject or a group. The artistic practice is not only confined in the territory of avant-garde or mainstream, but is a part of the production of subjectivity, which is a transindividuation process. It is for this reason that I find such a practice, dealing as it does with nondiscursive potentiality, to have a significant role in conversing with the political agenda of neoliberal capitalism, specifically when it aims to capture the full potentiality of our everyday existence. Neoliberal capitalism diffusely aims to contaminate subjectivity and its performance by producing types, which in a subdued manner can be considered as not so distant from what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have criticized as the totalitarian use of plasticity.

22 In this light, when the discursive nature

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“[Freud] questioned the value of conceptualizing trauma on the model of an infectious foreign that automatically produces symptoms of inflammation, on the grounds that the organization of memory is far more complicated than such a causal analogy would imply.” (Leys 2000, 265)

22 “With the idea that the nature and the finality of myth, or of the dream, is to incarnate itself in a figure, or in a type. Myth and type are indissociable. For the type is the realization of the singular identity conveyed by the dream. It is both the model of identity and its present, effective, formed reality. One attains, in this way, an essential sequence in the

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of artistic practice incorporates the dual nature of nondiscursive potentiality – of being exploited or revered as an actuation of the new with difference – it is expressly a political task. It is an articulation of the contemporary political subjectivity.

construction of myth: [Alfred] Rosenberg declares: "Freedom of the soul . . . is always Gestalt." ("Gestalt" means form, figure, configuration, which is to say that this liberty has nothing abstract or general about it; it is the capacity to put-into-figure, to embody.) "The Gestalt is always plastically limited." (Its essence is to have a form, to differentiate itself; the "limit," here, is the limit that detatches a figure from a background, which isolates and distinguishes a type.) "This limitation is racially conditioned." (Thus one attains the content of the myth: a race is the identity of a formative power, of a singular type; a race is the bearer of a myth.) "Race is the outward image of a determined soul" (M[yth of the Twentieth Century], p. 331; p. 559). This last trait is a leitmotif in Rosenberg and is also found, more or less explicitly, throughout Hitler's writing: a race is a soul, and in certain cases, a genial soul, [Mein Kampf (1925/1940), translated by Alvin Johnson et al., New York, pp. 403-4] in the sense that German romanticism gave to the word, within which individual differences remain, as well as individual geniuses, who better express and form the type.” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nanci 1990, 306)

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