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What Are Generous Structures?

Binna Choi, Axel Wieder

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Huizinga’s observation made him an important influence for later generations, especially the utopian, progressive aspira-tions for a playful society (and liberated life) in the architec-tural, artistic and social practices of the 1960s. These earlier attempts appear to be active again in present times, and their impact on contemporary discourse and practice is one thread that this publication is following. The interest in openness within 1960s discourses, in the possibility of appropriation and the critique of authoritarian structures, is an important point of reference, yet the contemporary conditions for these claims have dramatically changed. As part of the inquiry into playfulness, this publication therefore also deals with issues involved into the historicity of many present day inquiries. What does it mean to draw connections to past movements and works? How can we develop methods of reference that do not fall into the trap of a merely nostalgic memory of a seemingly better past, but rather activate potentials for con-temporary problems?

“Always play the music when you get stuck.” à p.xx

On the other hand, gaming can be also seen as a central term to interpret contemporary socio-political regimes. In a situ-ation in which flexibility, surprise and entertainment is in-corporated into all facets of life, the game seems an accurate model to describe the way in which people already interact with each other under the motto of “lifelong learning” and “work as play”. As Luc Boltanski and Even Chiapello argue in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), ‘creativity, reactivity, flexibility’ have, since the 1990s, formed the logics of the neo-management era. Here, a playful attitude is quin-tessential for the optimisation of productive labour, and games could work as tools of the imaginary to understand one’s own role as a player and potential winner on the bat-tlefield of economy. “Playfulness” in this sense is much less loaded as a critical principle than in the ideas of the 1960s, and much more a governing principle of society, a specific

The 12th edition of Casco Issues, Generous Structures, is an enquiry into notions of “playfulness” in cultural practices, especially related to ideas of representation and social inter-action. By taking the idea of playing and the metaphor of the game as a starting point, the publication addresses what might be called a “ludic turn”—the impact of the notion of play and gaming methods in various research fields and cul-tural work. Most prominent in the Internet industries and interactive media landscapes, but also in theoretical reflec-tions, historical research, and the work of artists and design-ers, we are experiencing an interest in play as an education-al tool or model for participation. Games seem to provide a helpful schema of interaction that could be adapted in the fields of visual art, design, architecture, but also in thinking about ways to connect and to share knowledge through the-ory. This publication responds to our initial affection for the model of the game. With the conscious exception of the game per se, it attempts to trace its current impact and critical ca-pacity, and explores various notions as well as concrete modes of play including activities such as learning, sharing and group work, in relation to space, art and design.

“The brief is always wrong.” à p. xx

Generous Structures is driven from a methodological interest in the structure of playing, in its dialectics of rules and pos-sibilities, planning and non-planning, collectivity and indi-viduality. A game, in this sense, is not only characterised by its rules—or, on the contrary, by the liberty of the playing individuals—but is rather a construction of conscious inter-action, application and transgression. The idea of art as “play” can be traced back to the eighteenth century and to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which valued imagina-tive play as a non-subsidiary but intermediary faculty of hu-man experience. An even longer genealogy was identified by Johan Huizinga in his seminal book Homo Ludens (1938): ‘an-imals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.’

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cussion, transformed here into a rewritten text experiment-ing with collective authorship (Beatrice Gibson, Will Holder, John Tilbury). In a similar vein, the relation between per-formative acts and their “notations” are explored (Ei Arakawa, Hwayeon Nam, Katerina Seda). In the multifarious nature of its contributions, this publication may be consid-ered as a “generous structure” in itself. It is a space that accommodates heterogeneous forms of reflection and prac-tice, allowing them to interact with each other.

condition that we need to understand in order to discuss the status of the contemporary subject. Yet, its connection to the political euphoria of emancipation movements is essential for its impact. This connection demonstrates the complexi-ties and contradictions of socio-political concepts in relation to dominant ideologies, their changing meaning and depend-ence on context. In a historical moment, in which flexibility and self-responsibility became predominant elements of governance, it seems useful to investigate the critical possi-bilities of a dialectical play between structure and improvi-sation, between rules and subversion.

Rather than humour, irony or personal liberty, often affiliated with the interest in play and the “ludic”, some touchstones that consequently emerge are: the virtues of generosity, modalities of negotiation, manoeuvres of rules and abstraction, attitudes of amateurism, the scope of action and optimism and so on. “Playfulness”, as it is approached within the matrix of this publication, suggests a form of criti-cality that is indebted to experimentation, in collective inter-pretation, and in the celebration of possibilities. Some of the contributions deal explicitly with this thematic framework, while others consist mainly of graphical and photographic images. In this way, a relation between historical attempts and current research and work, and between text and images, will be opened up, addressing the qualities of various research methods to question the historical shift in the con-cept of the game and playfulness. One method that this pub-lication uses in various ways is commentary: as responses to historical texts (as in the reprint of Bob Black’s “The Aboli-tion of Work”), commenting captions to images, or collective discussions about the manifesto-like presentations of the working principles of two groups of architects and design-ers. Another formal topic that some contributions share is the relation between spoken and written text—the former indebted much more to a literal collective interaction. Two of the texts were conceived as lectures (Paul Elliman, Zayne Armstrong), while another is originating from a public dis-

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From Morning

Till Night

KaterinaSedá

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Village ‘B’ is part of the town of !lapanice, a short distance from Brno. It looks like a very small village; there are only 125 homes and 315 inhabitants. Right next to the town is the motorway going toward Vy"kov from which you can hear the noise of the cars, so at first it may not seem like the ideal place to live. During the day you rarely meet anyone on the streets since, as the townspeople say, everyone works ‘from morning till night’. So, in fact, they don‘t really see their town, given that they spend most of their time in the city where they work. This situation led me to the idea of trying to connect the townspeople in ‘the light of day’ and thus show them their village in an entirely new way. A chance meeting with a classmate of mine in the city centre inspired me to carry out this project; even though she lives very close to my house I never meet up with her in our town. At that very moment I realised that neighbours from this town would only meet during the day if I temporarily transferred their town to another city.

Therefore I decided to bring Village ‘B’ to a large, met-ropolitan city – in this case,

London where I am commissioned by an art institution, ‘T’, to develop a project – in such a way that nothing is to be built but it will be possible to identify the border of the town and to move within it. The town will also be visible for the external observer by preserving the social rules of the town: the townspeople will greet all those whom they pass.

By transferring the town to a completely different envi-ronment I will automatically achieve an alteration to the light, the town will transform before the inhabitants eyes. In order for the transformation to be intensive the village must be transferred on a scale of 1:1 in three different locations within London, each day the village will be in a different place. A selection of 100 inhabitants of Village ‘B’ will, for three days, from morning till night (the beginning and end of the day is determined by the period of visibility i.e. the sun-rise and sunset), move within their town that is now located in London. They will behave as if they were at home, greet-

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ing all fellow townspeople they meet. I’m convinced that this way they will not only see each other during the day, but will also see – through a city – their own town in a new light.

1st October 2009 (sunrise 6.49am, sunset 4.41pm)

MORNINGLast Sunday I met a friend on the way to the shop. She had newly coloured hair, so I asked her right away: ‘You’ve got a new colour?’ She looked at me strangely and said: ‘New? But you’ve already seen me at least three times with it.’ It was em-barrassing, just like when I meet someone and I can’t for the life of me remember who it is or from where I know them. Thankfully, she quickly helped me out: ‘We met recently when you were going to catch a train!’ I immediately recalled the meeting, but that was at five in the morning so I hadn’t gotten a good look at her. She added: ‘And that very evening you helped me with my shopping.’ But that was in the even-ing and her hair had looked the same colour as in the morn-ing. I realised that this was the first time in about two years that I’d met her in daylight, so I told her that right away. She wearily hung her head: ‘Don’t I know it, we’re all busy from morning till night.’ She picked up her shopping bag and smiled slightly: ‘I‘ve got to go – still got to cook, clean and iron and tomorrow I’ve got to get up for the morning shift. It’s never ending – it’s a good thing that I’ve got pictures of my children on the refrigerator or I’d slowly forget what they look like.’

NOONIt was shortly before noon, the sky was completely clear when I returned. Nobody, nowhere. As with the weekdays when everyone is at work, now everyone was at home hav-ing lunch. It occurred to me that it’s practically impossible to meet with people from the town these days – they work dur-

(Pragmatism, With a Bottlebrush Plant in the Room)

Zayne Armstrong

While it is not commonly produced commercially, the wood of a Bottlebrush plant can be used as a building material. This surprises me – as, until a few weeks ago, I’d only ever seen Bottlebrush growing in people’s gardens in the Los Angeles area, and as the plant grows quite slowly none that I’d seen resembled anything more substantial than a shrub. The species which commonly grow in the L.A. area, are noted in various sources for their wood, which is said to be quite dense and hard, a good wood to make tools from – such as mallets – and is suitable for underground structures, and as a material for building water vessels.

The translation process of a plant into a material, a kind of heterotopic process, while not uncommon, destabilises the meanings attached to the species, its ‘use’, the nature of its materiality, and the identity of each of its plants. How to identify a plant is a common ‘problem’. Not only does each plant grow in relation to unique environments, but there are constantly new cultivars to consider, various grafting results, shifts in classification trends, and of course identifying any plant requires subjective interpretation, possibly via media-tion. The material ‘of ’ the plant is very different to a given plant performing the role of a particular classification.

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ing the week from morning till night and on the weekend they’re either inside their homes or they go somewhere for lunch.

Nevertheless, I met up with an acquaintance that had ducked out quickly before lunch to walk her dog. I immedi-ately shared these thoughts. She nodded in agreement, ‘I don’t see anyone during the day either: I sit behind a machine all week from morning till night. Our children live in Village ‘B’, you don’t see anyone there during the day, it’s as if peo-ple disappear during the day. When I go to see them I get the feeling that it’s deserted.’

EVENINGVillage ‘B’ is part of the town of !lapanice, a short distance from Brno. At first glance it looks like a very small town; there are only 125 homes and 315 inhabitants. Right next to the town is the motorway going toward Vy"kov from which you can hear the noise of the cars, so it’s hard to imagine someone enthusiastically moving there. It was 3pm and no-body was to be seen outside. Between 4pm and 5pm I met three people and then I didn’t see anybody again until the evening when a few people went to the pub.

2nd October 2009 (sunrise 6.51am, sunset 4.39pm)

MORNINGIt was still dark when my mother, who has to be at work by 6am, woke me, she said she was running late. The door slammed behind her and outside it slowly began to become light. At that moment I realised that it is the daylight that di-vides us, that we don’t see each other through THE DAY. We are, paradoxically, more connected by the artificial light un-der which we meet at home in the evening. I therefore decid-ed to find a way for people from the town to see each other throughout THE DAY.

This is a set of notes applied to this publication that are unre-lated to the content.

A note about Bottlebrush: when I say Bottlebrush, rather than bottle brush, I mean Bottlebrush shrub – an ambiguity intact: the possibility for ‘brush’ to be read as a type of plant, as well as a tool, a brush, a noun.

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NOONI took Julie, my daughter, to the doctor’s. It looked like we’d be there for a while as the waiting room was full. Some par-ents stamped their feet because a three year old boy, who was standing at the window, greeted everyone who passed by. His mother unsuccessfully reprimanded him: ‘Only greet those you know. And it’s not morning anymore so say GOOD DAY, you can use that anytime.’ Who is known? HE WHO IS SEEN! How can you see him during the day? YOU HAVE TO GREET HIM!

EVENINGThat afternoon I went into town to arrange my tram pass. At the entrance of the public transportation centre I met my neighbour from Lí"e whom I hadn’t seen for a year, later at the train station I saw a classmate from primary school and then on the tram a friend sat down next to me. How can you see someone from a small town? YOU HAVE TO MEET THEM IN THE CITY!

3rd October 2009 (sunrise 6.53am, sunset 4.37pm)

MORNINGHE WHO IS SEEN! EVERYONE IS SEEN!YOU HAVE TO GREET HIM! YOU HAVE TO GREET EVERYONE! YOU HAVE TO MEET THEM IN THE CITY! YOU HAVE TO MEET EVERYONE IN THE CITY!

NOONHow can you meet everyone in the city? – They have to be seen in the same place! What is that same place?– The town!

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HOW CAN YOU BRING THE TOWN TO THE CITY?

EVENINGI decided to bring the town to the city in such a way that its social rules would be preserved. Nothing is to be built but it will be possible to identify the border of the town and to move within it. It is therefore necessary to move the town on a scale of 1:1 to the centre of London and to mark on a map the space in which 100 inhabitants of Village ‘B’ will live for three days. The area surrounding ‘T’ will be used, the gallery itself will host a section of the town on the ground floor. A minimum of 100 townspeople is required for the village to be clearly visible and to ensure considerable strength in the communication between the townspeople as well as between the townspeople and the observers. With fewer townspeople the area wouldn’t be covered nor would it be possible for multiple townspeople to meet up at the same time. Their task is to transfer the town socially by following the standard cus-toms for greeting one another and thereby they will literally see each other during the day. The custom in Czech villages is simple enough: you have to greet everyone that you meet!

For three days all of the selected inhabitants of Village ‘B’, from morning till night (the beginning and end of the day is determined by the period of visibility i.e. the sunrise and sunset), will move within their town and behave as if they were at home, greeting all fellow townspeople they meet. In this way they will not only see each other through the day but also see – through a city – their own town in a completely new light.

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FROM MORNING TILL NIGHTLONDON (SPRING 2011)

1st day sunrise 5.55amsunset 6.22pm

2nd daysunrise 5.53amsunset 6.24pm

3rd daysunrise 5.50amsunset 6.25pm

This is a set of notes on the content of this Casco Issues that are specifically related to the content.

I’m in L.A.Look into Meryl Streep interviews regarding the film

Adaptation.Simone Weil. Rachel Aviv essay ‘Hobson’s Choice’ in Believer

Magazine.

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The Abolition of Work

Bob Black

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but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quib-ble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed around by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed around by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology mongers have serious differ-ences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

You may be wondering if I’m joking or serious. I’m jok-ing and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn’t have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn’t triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I’d like life to be a game – but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

The alternative to work isn’t just idleness. To be ludic is not to be qua ludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of tor-por, it’s never more rewarding when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time disciplined safety valve called ‘leisure’, far from it. Lei-sure is non-work for the sake of work. Leisure is time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacation so tired that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.

I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idio-syncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labour, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or polit-

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Al-most any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering we have to stop working.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By ‘play’ I mean also festivity, crea-tivity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalised joy and freely inter-dependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with reality as it exists. So much the worse for ‘reality’, the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously – or maybe not – all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favour full employment. Like the surrealists – except that I’m not kidding – I favour full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work – and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs – they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, pro-ductivity, and profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything

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ical means, by the carrot or the stick (the carrot is just the stick by other means). But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it’s done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, some-body else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends, over time, toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or ‘communist’, work invariably acquires other attributes that accentuate its obnoxiousness.

Usually – and this is even more true in ‘communist’ than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee – work is employ-ment i.e. wage-labour, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In Cuba or China, or any other alternative model, which might be adduced, the corre-sponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled third world peasant bastions – Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey – temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agricultur-ists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most labourers in the last several millennia, the payment of taxes (that equals ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic land-lords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.

But modern work has worse implications. People don’t just work, they have ‘jobs’. One person does one productive task all the time on an ‘or else’ basis. Even if the task has a quan-tum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don’t) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic poten-tial. A ‘job’ that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say

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in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who con-tribute nothing to the project and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actu-ally have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimi-nation, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who – by any rational technical criteria – should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximisation of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organisational control.

The degradation that most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denomi-nated as ‘discipline’. Foucault has complexified this phenom-enon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the total-ity of totalitarian controls at the workplace – surveillance, rote work, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching in and out etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero, Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terri-ble. For all their bad intentions they just didn’t have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control; it is an innovative intrusion that must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

Such is ‘work’. Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the ‘suspension of consequences.’ This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related; they are the behavioural and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing, that’s why he plays. But the core

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reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huiz-inga (‘Homo Ludens’), define it as ‘game playing’ or ‘follow-ing rules’. I respect Huizinga’s erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) that are rule governed but there is much more to play than game playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel – these practices aren’t rule governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfor-tunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveil-lance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hyp-ocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalin-ised dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and fac-tories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other’s control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no

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reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called ‘insubordination’, just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired it disqualifies you for unemploy-ment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

The demeaning system of domination I’ve described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men, for most of their life spans. For cer-tain purposes it’s not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or better still industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are ‘free’ is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you’ll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinisa-tion all around us than even such significant moronising mechanisms as television and education. People who are reg-imented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologi-cally enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and every-thing else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they’ll likely submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. They’re used to it.

We are so close to the world of work that we can’t see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the ‘work ethic’ would have been incom-

A comment by Kleines

postfordistisches Drama

She now works flexibly from home, without external controls. She works when she wants to. However, she has to carry out an incalculable amount of work for a fixed fee. This means that she does nothing but work at home. The route to the desk to read emails and an-swer emails at her laptop has become as much of a routine as the way to the kitchen to make coffee. The jobs she is paid for, those done and those not done, are only a small part of what she does every day. Organising a meeting, doing the washing, learning a new programme, preparing dinner, writing invoices, shopping, doing her tax return, booking a flight, keeping up contacts, showing interest – all this becomes too much for her sometimes.

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prehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immedi-ately and appropriately be labeled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed – the Calvinist cranks notwith-standing – until overthrown by industrialism, but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.

Let’s pretend for a moment that work doesn’t turn peo-ple into stultified submissives. Let’s pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let’s pretend that work isn’t as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual labourers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing ‘free’ about ‘free time’ is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labour, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don’t do that. Lathes and typewriters don’t do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, ‘work is for saps!’

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates, and obviously share with him, an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and as a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attrib-ute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said ‘whoever gives

Recently she has begun, because of these various requirements, to put up Post-it notes everywhere in the flat list-ing the things she absolutely has get done. Often she can’t sleep at night and sits at the computer instead. She thinks she would be stuck in her workplace without her diary and address book. On the other hand, she can’t imagine a life where she didn’t organise her work her-self and had to be subordinate to her su-periors. As the work is now entirely up to her, it stimulates her organisational talent and her wellbeing, she is simulta-neously freed and subdued. She asks herself if it is really a coincidence that her workplace has moved closer to the kitchen, despiter her wanting to leave it behind forever. Sometimes she is afraid that she will be fired from her paid job, or that she will not find a new one before it is over. That happened once. As a freelancer she didn’t get unemployment benefits, though she realised that, strangely, without a paid job she wasn’t any less busy. For example she finally had time

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his labour for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.’ His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies that we want to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened western anthro-pologists. The Kapauku of west Iran, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed ‘to regain the lost power and health.’ Our ancestors, even as late as the 18th century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialisation. Their religious devotion to ‘St. Monday’ – thus establishing a de facto five day week 150–200 years before its legal consecration – was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in sub-mitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women who were accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancien régime wrested substantial time back from their landlords’ work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants’ cal-endar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov’s figures from villages in Czarist Russia – hardly a progressive society – likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants’ days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obvi-ously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, how-ever, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gath-erers. Hobbes surmised that life then was nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh nature, with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of

to visit friends abroad and saw her sis-ter’s child more often. She also had time to teach herself new programmes and teach them to friends. She met her cur-rent boss in a bar during this time. If she gets the chance to think it all through, she realises that there has to be more to it than the ability to decide what one does and when. Rather, she had to be able to decide what she really wanted to do, what for, and with whom. She would divide her time so that she could con-centrate on one thing that she really wanted to do. One thing that would have an affect socially. But she believes that no one would pay her for this. She has read that cultural and creative careers are the model of self-deter-mined work. It seems strange that her job is comparable to activities of cultur-al creatives, in terms of organisation, contacts and all the individual decision making that occurs. However she is an-noyed, as she has the feeling she is not able to decide anything, except for the fact that she can get up when she wants, or work at night. ‘As if the life and work

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government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the civil war. Hobbes’ compatriots had already encountered alterna-tive forms of society that illustrated other ways of life – in North America, particularly – but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the First Nations, understood it better and often found it attractive. Through-out the 17th century English settlers defected to indigenous tribes or, captured in war, refused to return to the colonies. But the First Nations no more defected to white settlements than West Germans climbed the Berlin Wall from the west.) The ‘survival of the fittest’ version – the Thomas Huxley ver-sion – of Darwinism was a better account of economic con-ditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, A Factor in Evolution (Kropotkin was a scientist – a geogra-pher – who’d had ample involuntary opportunity for field-work whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hob-bes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled ‘The Original Affluent Society’. They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that ‘hunters and gatherers work less than we do and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, lei-sure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.’ They worked an average of four hours a day, assum-ing they were ‘working’ at all. Their ‘labour’, as it appears to us, was skilled labour that exercised their physical and intel-lectual capacities; unskilled labour on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller’s definition of play, the only

styles of cultural creatives may be the solutions to economic and social prob-lems. One should ask unemployed peo-ple, who are now put under pressure, or their hyper-stressed colleagues in a Mu-nich software company what they think. Maybe cultural workers are the histori-cal avant garde of this post-Fordist dra-ma, but what can such a realisation bring us?’

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occasion on which man realises his complete humanity by giving full ‘play’ to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: ‘The animal works when depriva-tion is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabun-dant life is its own stimulus to activity.’ (A modern version – dubiously developmental – is Abraham Maslow’s counter position of ‘deficiency’ and ‘growth’ motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that ‘the realm of freedom does not com-mence until the point is passed where labour under the com-pulsion of necessity and external utility is required.’ He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work – it’s rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work – but we can.

The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy George’s England in Transition and Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bell’s essay ‘Work and Its Discontents’, the first text, I believe, to refer to the ‘revolt against work’ in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor cel-ebrants have noticed that Bell’s ‘end of ideology’ thesis sig-naled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (in Political Man), not Bell, who announced at the same time that ‘the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution have been solved’, only a few years before the post or meta industrial discontents of col-lege students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquillity of Harvard.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labour,

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was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smith’s modern epigones. As Smith observed: ‘The under-standings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations…has no occasion to exert his understanding…He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.’ Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writ-ing in 1956, the golden age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self satisfaction, identified the unorganised, unor-ganisable malaise of the 1970s and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW’s report ‘Work in America’, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist – Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner – because, in their terms, as they used to say on Lost in Space, ‘it does not compute.’

If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others that they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled, 20 to 25 million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work related injury. Thus they don’t count the half million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases that was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year. What the statistics don’t show is that millions of people have their life spans shortened by work – which is all that homi-

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cide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work them-selves to death in their late 50s. Consider all the other workaholics.

Even if you aren’t killed or crippled while actually work-ing, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly or indirectly, to work.

Work, then, institutionalises homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillac’s to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing, or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Chernobyl and other Soviet nuclear disasters covered up until recently make Times Beach and Three Mile Island – but not Bhopal – look like elementary school air raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, won’t help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire. Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that, as antebel-lum slavery apologists insisted, factory wageworkers in the northern American states and in Europe were worse off than southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations

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among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious implementa-tion of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they don’t even try to crack down on most malefactors.

What I’ve said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and ris-ing rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabo-tage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also wide-spread among workers themselves, is that work itself is inev-itable and necessary.

I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down mas-sively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless, or worse, and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand – and I think this the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure – we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game like and craft like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end products. Surely that shouldn’t make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recrea-tion. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

I don’t suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn’t worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work system and its political and legal appendages. 30 years ago Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent

(Pragmatism, With a Bottlebrush Plant in the Room)

I’d like to rethink or redefine ‘objectivity’, as that view of something which involves the putting to one side of one’s ‘thought’ or consideration of an item, somewhat cultural, or imposed, or projected, meanings and significations of the item, and allowing for subjectivity to become their relation-ship with that object. In this way objectivity is not the other in the polemic with subjectivity; the two are not contrasting, but rather have an integral and intertwined relationship, even a kind of symbiosis where objectivity makes transpar-ent a surface otherwise cluttered. This clutter is of course not so much inherently clutter, but functions in this particu-lar metaphysical situation, as that which buffers or pads out a close proximity between the subject and its object.

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of the work then being done – presumably the figure, if accu-rate, is lower now – would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate 10s of mil-lions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some big shot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar work-ers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and bank-ing and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper shuffling. It is no accident that the ‘tertiary sector’, the service sector, is growing while the ‘secondary sector’ (industry) stagnates and the ‘primary sector’ (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from rela-tively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to ensure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That’s why you can’t go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn’t the average working week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last 60 years?

Next we can take a meat cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant, and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we’ve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

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Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to house-wives doing housework and child rearing. By abolishing wage labour and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labour. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labour imposed by modern wage work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shit work and provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called ‘schools’, primarily to keep them out of mum’s hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid ‘shadow work’, as Ivan Illich says, makes pos-sible the work system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more fulltime students than fulltime workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because they’re better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.

I haven’t as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernising it. All the scientists and engineers and techni-cians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they’ll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they’ll set up worldwide all inclu-sive multimedia communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldn’t care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I don’t want robot

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slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labour saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encour-aging. When productive technology went from hunting-gath-ering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self determination diminished. The further evolu-tion of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labour saving inventions ever devised haven’t saved a moments labour. Karl Marx wrote ‘it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class.’ The enthusiastic technophiles – Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, and B.F. Skinner – have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, techno-crats. We should be more than skeptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularised contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, let’s give them a hearing.

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a ‘job’ and an ‘occupation’. Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs that certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of perma-nent revelry we will witness the golden age of the dilettante that will put the Renaissance to shame. There won’t be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advan-tage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do

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the things they could enjoy, it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions that afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don’t want coerced students and I don’t care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.

Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy babysitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their par-ents do. The parents meanwhile profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although they’d get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many peo-ple enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they’re just fueling up human bodies for work.

Third – other things being equal – some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surround-ings or at the orders of an overlord could be enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people don’t always appeal to all others, but every-one at least potentially has a variety of interests and an inter-est in variety. As the saying goes, ‘anything once.’ Fourier was the master at speculating about how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-civilised society, what he called ‘Harmony’. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organised in ‘Little Hordes’ to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding.

A comment by Zachary Formwalt

What is the real movement which abol-ishes the present state of things? In 1845, early on in the long text that is The German Ideology, Marx defines this movement as communism. ‘Commu-nism is not a “state of affairs” which is to be established, an ‘ideal’ to which re-ality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the “real” movement which abolishes the present state of things.’

‘Thus the economy implodes.’ Just after ‘we’ have ‘liberated tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, law-yers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them.’ The problem is not that this will never happen, but that in place of Black’s ‘we’, the movement of capital achieves this very task periodically in something we generally recognise as a crisis and its aftermath. To see this as a liberation takes a powerful imagination,

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I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we don’t have to take today’s work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed.

If technology has a role in all this, it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/cre-ation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialised department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. It’s a sobering thought that the Grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our every-day artefacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that there’s no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything, it’s just the opposite. We shouldn’t hesi-tate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer; the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive specu-lation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris – and even a hint, here and there, in Marx – there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers’ Communitas is exemplary for illus-trating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned form the often hazy heralds of alternative/appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists – as repre-sented by Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life and in the Situationist International Anthology – are so ruthlessly ludic as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the

or maybe just some slick rhetorical move. In any case, it will not be ‘experi-enced’ as such.

This is of course frustrating. When masses upon masses of capital are destroyed in a matter of days, weeks, or months, depending on the specific crisis in which this happens, it seems as though there is a real opportunity for redistribution to take place—for things to be organised other than by the logic of capital. This euphoric moment is, however, crushed by the more brutal terms in which capital establishes its new period of growth with its apolo-gists accepting, if not themselves enforcing, this new set of terms as the sacrifices necessary to save ‘the present state of things’ from total collapse. The question of how we can bring about the reality of this abolition remains. To say it is through the abolition of work seems delusional.

As a place where the everyday rules of cause and effect are suspended and thus made to appear as arbitrary, play can bring about an awareness of the set of values the perpetuation of capital

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endorsement of the rule of the workers’ councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity though than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there was no work there would be no workers, and without workers, whom would the left have to organise?

So the abolitionists will be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tire-some debater’s problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use values is coextensive with the consump-tion of delightful play activity.

Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not – as it is now – a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encoun-ter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each other’s pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalised play leads to the libidinisation of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.

Workers of the world…relax!

This essay originated as a speech in 1980. A revised and enlarged version was published as a pamphlet in 1985, and in the first edition of The Abolition of Work and Other Essays was published by Loompanics Unlimited in 1986. It has also appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, including translations into French, German, Italian, Dutch and Slovenian. Revised by the author for the Inspiracy Press edition.

growth depends upon. Articulating the basic presuppositions of capital accu-mulation can play a role in destroying, or at least slowing its continued growth. In the current conjuncture, it is not labour, but capitalism to which play should be thought in opposition. Both work and play should have a role in the abolition of the present state of things.

Five Obstructions (for Architecture)

common room

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1. APPROPRIATE THE EVERYDAYTo appropriate the everyday means paying attention, and us-ing ordinary things in extraordinary ways.

2. NEVER FINISHTo never finish is to acknowledge that to conceive and use architecture is an interconnected process.

The ‘five obstructions (for architecture)’ outlines challenges to our creative process. They are provocations for our prac-tice and the discipline of architecture in general.

(Pragmatism, With a Bottlebrush Plant in the Room)

‘These two sorts of objects, what we are immediately conscious of and what we are immediately conscious of, are found in all consciousness.’

‘Self-consciousness was to furnish us with our fundamental truths, and to decide what was agreeable to reason.’ Charles Sanders Peirce paraphrasing Descartes. Of ideas: ‘…discussion must never be able to bring to light points of obscurity con-nected with them.’

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5. DON’T BE NEWTo not be new means recognising that often what a project needs already exists within its definition or context.

3. SHARE SPACETo share space is to negotiate, to work out how and when groups and events can be sequenced or overlapped within a given space.

4. INCLUDE DIFFERENCETo include difference means an adjustment of conventional spatial / cultural boundaries.

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, by William James.

I am sitting against two cardboard boxes, one of which has some crumpled up news-print paper in it. After settling into the boxes I hear an unfamiliar sound, some-thing that I can’t quite place the source of and I think it must be the boxes. Then I think it couldn’t be the boxes, but it must be in the room, or echoing off the wall beside me. Then I realise that it must be coming from outside. I imagine that a flat soccer ball bounced along the pavement might make an appropriate noise.

New Caledonia is on the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories, and its capital is the seat of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community – an international organisation.

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Jesko Fezer

ifau und

Twelve Working Theses

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8. SPACES OF NEGOTIATIONCreate situations for conflicts to be negotiat-ed by the users.

9. APPROPRIATION DETAILINGFacilitating adaptations and modifications is a practical design task.

10. SURPLUS & DEFICITMore space is better than less space. Some-times it’s the other way round. The brief is al-ways wrong.

11. STANDARDThe common and the ordinary allow for in-clusivity.

12. MINIMUMMinimise design activities to enable program-matic interventions.

1. NON-SOLUTIONDo not try to solve social problems using ar-chitectural means. Tighten them.

2. ACCESSIBILITYBe generous to public space.

3. INFORMALISMDo not design things that you do not have to design.

4. CARING PROPORTIONSA spatial dimension is a social relation.

5. SUBOPTIMUMUndergo functional demands to open up un-expected possibilities.

6. ROBUSTNESSTough spaces are more able to stand social in-teractions.

7. CONFLICT DESIGNProduce obstacles to interrupt normative routines.

Binna Choi, Axel Wieder

Q&A with common room and

ifau und Jesko Fezer

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Binna Choi and Axel Wieder: One of many interesting echoes between the work of common room and ifau und Jesko Fezer is the emphasis you both place on incom-pleteness or openness (‘never finish’!) in building prac-tice. It seems to me to have a curiously ambivalent sta-tus. On the one hand, you as architects limit your control by giving space for the inhabitants/users to work things out on their own, on the other hand, your approach is not about a refusal of interventions, rather you define certain parameters. It almost feels like a game in which rules are established by the architects as ‘masters of the game’ so that people can start to play. Would you agree?

common room: We can understand the ‘master of the game’ in two ways; firstly, as someone who sets up and defines the

game and its rules and controls the play, acting as the author-ity, or, secondly as someone who is an expert at playing the game. Referring to the first meaning, we establish rules for the game and these define boundaries within which to play, but these rules do not provide a full definition of what is pos-sible. The rules may allow for potential misinterpretation or misuse. We are the authority only as much as we state the rules but choose not to control the play beyond that. In ref-erence to the second understanding, we hope we play the game well but only as well as other users/players.

There is always a set of rules, but they are not always identified. The five obstructions (for architecture) that have informed our practice and collaboration were identified

somewhat retrospectively – a reflection on the shared prin-ciples that seemed to shape the first few years of our practice.

ifau – Christoph Heinemann (CH): I would say that master-ing the game is an inherent feature of every planning and building process, whether it is controlled by architects or by non-professionals. There are facts and existing patterns to deal with. But most of all a space should be enabled to go be-yond an established set of rules (as common room puts it). Consequently openness and incompleteness are characteris-tics provided by the design, ambivalence is inherent and in-tended, playful adoption is what is hoped for.

What would be the condition for this process of spatial negotiation and adoption that could be described as playful? Given that a number of your works were real-ised in contemporary art institutions, did these spaces set performative parameters?

ifau – CH: Whether architecture takes an interest in open-ended processes – allowing for conflicts and negotiation – is dependent on where it is grounded, on the approach chosen and the attitude advocated while designing a space. As long as architecture is part of a social movement and strongly linked to ongoing political debates and struggles it has the potential, or so to speak, the power, to establish correspond-

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lyst for an aesthetic and political consciousness initiating a transformation of space.

It can be said that you implement a frame where the dynamics of plan and non-plan, control and openness are operative. The way a space can be experienced as open, or appropriation by the users is intended, as in many of your recent works – the shack and the fence in the Casco space, for example – is determined by the parameters of the design. The small interventions in the event space of the Goethe-Institut, New York in the Wyoming Building is another example, especially the metal ring that very literally intervenes in the audience area. Empowering the user requires acts that in them-selves are powerful. I understand your working theses

ent and respondent spaces.There have been numerous discussions about function,

use and meaning,1 there have been turning points and revo-lutions within various modern architecture movements, but the often claimed capacity of architecture to be a representa-tion of society, as well as its instrument, has never been properly contested. Spatial interventions in accordance to societal goals were backed up by practical politics, govern-mental or not. Resistance and advocacy where in no contra-diction to top-down approaches – a building for the working class could be designed with the same attitude as a building for a king. I’m painting quite a palliative image of (western) modernity here, but I would say the large common ground is lost and that the top-down philanthropic approach to design today remains merely formalistic and leaves us with exclu-

sive spaces and superficial attitudes. Architecture serves as a territorial tool only; form, content and action don’t corre-late anymore.

Thus, to allow for appropriation, negotiation, and con-flict means to stress and support the performative or trans-formative actions made by the inhabitants as an opportunity to reach, or develop, social goals. It is a reaction and critique towards the contemporary production of space, an approach not limited to specific functions. And it is no surprise that this fits within art institutions that seem to define themselves more and more as hubs for social issues and debates. They allow for radical approaches and progress, offering a room in a way that is rarely found elsewhere. They could be a cata-

1 See for instance Meaning in Architecture, eds. Charles Jencks and George Baird, London: Barrie & Rockliff the Cresset Press, 1969. This collection of essays documents a turning point in the debate on modern architecture. A special focus is given to ‘use’ as an important determinant of form, especially in Nathan Silver’s contribution, ‘Architecture without buildings’.

Goethe-Institut, New York, in the Wyoming Building

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tency beyond the reach of archetypal assignment. This fact causes a number of problems that have to be argued in each project: how to contribute (common) spatial models, char-acters or types that are open enough to allow programme related changes in use? What are the basic minimum and non-negotiable elements? Which of these elements might undergo a change in order to adapt a given structure to the given reality? That a particular structure encourages differ-ent or future forms of appropriation, at the same time as guaranteeing flexibility seems essential, both from the point of view of the evaluation of resources that are going to be invested into it and in terms of the dialogue between the user and the infrastructure that will necessarily unfold over time.

The projective or even utopian potential of architecture is definitely not the intensification and marketing of competi-

tive design strategies but rather approaching the question: to what extent is architecture capable of relating to existing social problems and conflicts? Challenging the radical opportunity to act and to negotiate could provide new or dif-ferent forms of appropriation and use.

Jesko Fezer: Indeed, since we act as architects and users in a space so inescapably determined by powerful demands and exclusions (set up by the economy, the political system, so-cial conventions, technical requirements or by formal and in-formal regimentations of habit and usage) it is fundamental-ly necessary to intervene in this field, to open it to other forms of practice. Working with and in such spaces, that

as tools to approach this dilemma, could you elaborate on your working method?

ifau – Christoph Schmidt (CS): Modernism promised a func-tionalist approach to resolving the architectural needs of the 20th century, yet the design of cities and buildings often ap-pears to confound the needs of those who use them – their design and layout being highly regulated by restrictive legis-lation, planning controls and bureaucracy. Non-plan consid-ers the theoretical and conceptual frameworks within which architecture and urbanism have sought to challenge en-trenched boundaries of control, focusing on the architectural history of the postwar period to the present day. By slightly shifting the focus from a dialectical debate to an even more contradictory development in the present, the progressive

deregulation of common and social demands challenges the understanding of cultural and architectural production not as a rash-pledged compromise, but as a direct query of reality.

Questioning the commission or the initial brief implies relating to particular circumstances and specifically evaluat-ing the relationship between clients, users, planners and craftsmen. Our working methods refer to the programme and the degree of programmatic precision assumed by the existing structure.

In general terms, our projects aim to be sufficiently generic as to transcend a precise cultural, temporal, and local demand. In that sense, we seek to go beyond the solu-tion-oriented nature of the brief and to guarantee a persis-

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spective: to construct a spatial setting which allows ‘playful’ use, by buffering some of the established rules and inventing some new and sometimes quite ridiculous ones…

We are curious about the ‘ridiculous’ rules…It would be interesting to see what happens with them in design projects with more restrictions and existing demands. After many projects for cultural institutions, most of them re-designs or re-configurations, you are currently working on the realisation of a new building for a print-ing house, we wonder in which way are your design activities informed by a critical approach? In a conver-sation that appears in the publication (‘Always Play the Music When You Get Stuck’), John Tilbury mentions the problem of dealing with the very complex situation that

can arise during an improvisation piece, that is, some-body doing something that you find utterly distasteful. His guide is: ‘You try and change a situation by playing.’

Jesko Fezer: The adverb ridiculous is usually defined in rela-tion to normative routines, restrictions, expectations and demands. So it may be absurd to minimise an already small space to enable specific kinds of social events or to build a circular barrier into a space intended to be ultimately flexible as we did in the Wyoming Building project for Goethe-Insti-tut, New York. In this case we tried to complicate an already quite complicated socio-spatial setting, this can be read as

don’t exist without strong preconditions, we feel the neces-sity to rearrange their disposition radically to open them up towards other practices and imaginations. Since a plan, as well as a non-plan, seems impossible to us in these powerful spatial settings – allowing neither a plan nor something not part of a plan to happen – we try to enable ourselves, the space, and its users to appropriate the environment in differ-ent ways through spatially and socially limited, but strong, interventions. These design interventions – which directly ask for a response, including its negation or misuse – are al-ways accompanied by ‘un-designed’ or ‘low designed’ zones or structures that are very open to further adaptations or, even need it. One could say that our role is from this per-

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goals of the project throughout the process of development. We have confidence in each other’s decisions even if we don’t agree with them. It is easier to relinquish control when there is a trust that the values for a particular project are the same, and when they address a wide range of social issues beyond the formal or aesthetic expectations for the project.

Our practice and working process is inclusive. Ideas (planning, architecture, installations, publications) under discussion shouldn’t be exclusive territory; input and feed-back from the rest of the group are important. The collabo-rative process for us is contentious and this often simply means relinquishing control. This process is reflected in our designs by openness for the user to engage in choices or by necessitating choices to be made.

Elaborating on collaboration and control, common

room couldn’t agree on a single response to your statement: ‘architectural practice is inherently collaborative but spec-tacularly and notoriously authorised…’ Some of us relate the word ‘authorised’ with ‘the Author’ of a work, the originator. Others at common room respond to issues of control and power implied by an ‘authorised’ practice. We can agree that control is the significant term here. The author’s control over the thing created; the authority granted to an individual in a group, or the difficulty in assigning authority to a group of anonymous authors.

These are interesting issues for us as we define our prac-tice. We have found that they are difficult issues within the current conventions of the media, press or public definitions

abstruse in its approach to ‘not solve a problem’, but also as very pragmatic, since it accepts architecture’s inability to de-liver solutions for social problems. In the new building for a printing company, or in the collective housing project we are working on at the moment, the economic restrictions and the technical regulations are probably tighter and also the ex-pectations of the clients are more specific. Nevertheless we believe in the importance of questioning these determina-tions: for example, to reduce costs below a generally accept-ed standard, to question the relation of different activities in a building or reject the dominance of the visual dimension of design, its formal spectacle. It’s more about re-arranging the hierarchies. Sometimes it is strategically important not to think too much about how it looks but to emphasise how it performs.

Perhaps you could tell us about the ‘common room’ and how it operates as a collaboration, how does the collab-oration work in your practice? What kind of impact does it have on your work, given that architectural prac-tice is inherently collaborative but spectacularly and notoriously authourised at the same time.

common room: For common room collaboration means ac-knowledging that each of us has a different point of view. Of-ten we don’t agree on a unified idea for a project, we find a way of working without an idealised consensus. This is only possible through a mutual trust of all those involved, a trust that is gained gradually through an open dialogue about the

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an educational model, The Public School (for Architecture) does not apply to a traditional set of values related to success and failure. Participation in The Public School requires a dif-ferent type of commitment to process. It is discursive. Par-ticipation turns the tables; reverses the authority of student and instructor; architect and public. Perhaps the general public, the groups and communities that are defined through participation, understand this better than architects them-selves. Dimensions and Relations, another project from 2009, was a series of architecture and photography work-shops for students aged 8–11 at the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side. In this project we looked for ways that the Abrons Arts Center could be re-imagined as an expanded

of architecture and architects.

Speaking about the conventions within architecture, do you refer to a system of star designers? This has indeed created a very formal idea of architecture, as something that can be identified very easily as a style. You seem to relate this to another notion of authorship, one that is closer to the idea of the auteur in cinema, who takes responsibility for all of the aspects of the final product (which can be a collective or anonymous person).

common room: We take responsibility for our designs wheth-er it be as individuals or as a group. The second obstruction ‘never finish’ proposes that there is no final product per se; the user ultimately takes on part of the responsibility of the

design. The notion of style can certainly be applied to col-laborations but this often includes a dominant figure. The ‘public’ continues to look for the singular, heroic figure of the architect, even where one does not exist. We often work with other individuals or groups and as such our collaboration process is quite open and because of this ‘style’, if there is one, becomes diluted. As we look back on five years of work we more easily identify a certain approach, a series of ideas or theories rather than a consistent style. The obstructions might be suggestive of this aspect.

To give some concrete examples from our work, The Public School (for Architecture) in New York started in autumn 2009 in collaboration with Telic Arts Exchange. As

Flowchart, The Public School for Architecture New York

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featured in this publication (‘A School is a Building with a School in It’). How do you see the role of the designer in relation to ‘the discipline’ and specialisation?

ifau – CH: Certainly De Carlo is right to be suspicious of specialists. Actually, it applies equally to specialists and spe-cialisation (of space), in the sense of a rigid setting not allow-ing for an unimpeded readjustment. The capability of read-justment is vital for buildings as well as for cities; no wonder there is a great fascination for informal urban structures to-day, structures that are adaptable, can be transformed with-out instant ruptures. Modernism introduced a scientific ap-proach to planning and many regulations where deduced from there, in the belief that these were the best solutions for everyone. This set of rules and typologies still shapes the ur-

ban space, but (as we pointed out before) the common ground and goals are not definite anymore, society has be-come much more fragmented. So these regulations and the structures they create do not provide appropriate space and often hinder adaptability and participation in the building process.

The self-conception of ‘architects as specialists’ (and even scientists) developed in the 20th century and relates directly to the definition of architecture and the profession of the architect since the Renaissance. The Palladian approach was about the sublime; disconnecting, exposing, creating a work. Architecture was understood as an inde-pendent art and something that qualified as architecture had

community architecture/art facility; a ‘place of production of space and encounter’. The Dimensions and Relations project lead to funding for a publication that starts with the Abrons Arts Center as a case study to revisit and re-evaluate educa-tion and architecture through civic structures and institu-tions (especially those built in the 1970s).

Talking about these examples, I have to think of a text that Giancarlo De Carlo wrote in 1969 about architec-ture for schools and universities, where he fundamen-tally criticised the idea of built spaces ‘for’ education, and rather suggested a process oriented approach. Deeply impressed by the student revolts, he understood the question of education as being closely linked to mechanisms of ‘opinion control’, and asked for possible

methods to design different schools. He asked himself four questions, of which the most radical (and final) one was: ‘must the planning and construction of buildings for educational activity be entrusted to specialists?’ De Carlo, himself an architect, was suspicious of the spe-cialists involvement in the very institutions that he sought to overcome. Instead, he gives the example of the French revolution during which the real centres of pub-lic education were ‘the clubs, the streets’. He saw the role of the architect rather pessimistically, and instead shifted the emphasis toward the readjustments made by those who appropriate the buildings. This view also res-onates with the transcripts of a lecture by Paul Elliman

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to stand independently. The public dialogue on architecture became a peer-to-peer discourse. This attitude was adopted for large scale developments and extended to urban plan-ning, the everyday, to ordinary architecture. This works as long as there is a certain kind of societal consensus.

De Carlo, but also Aldo van Eyck, John Habraken and many others, strongly criticised this position very early on, not as a countermovement to modernism but within the modern movement (which is remarkable compared to the polarised discussions we witness today). Van Eyck intro-duced the concept of relativity into architectural discourse, trying to allow for dialectics and continuity.2 In a similar way, Habraken pleads for a more informal approach; inviting architects to identify with and embrace their space of action as ‘a part of the field’ he defines as ‘built landscapes and the

people that inhabit them’. Ironically, many other architects were already working in this field on different levels but with the wrong premise.3 So allowing for readjustments indeed is tightly linked to the attitude of the designer and we consider it as crucial to go on with that discussion which started some 50 years ago.

common room: We agree with De Carlo’s suspicion of the specialist. The specialist is someone who needs to define the boundaries of the discipline to reassert his/her expertise, and consequently authority. However De Carlo seems to re-assign the role of the architect to the user. We feel the archi-tect can still play an important role when there is a direct en-

2 ‘Van Eyck’s thinking fundamentally proceeded in terms of reconciling opposites. Throughout his career, he applied himself to the exploration and the relationships between polarities, such as past and present, classic and modern, archaic and avant garde, constancy and change, simplicity and complexity, the organic and the geometric. […] He saw that maintaining the dialectics of these opposing factions was a necessary condition for the development of a genuinely contemporary architecture.’ From the lecture manuscript ‘Aldo van Eyck – Shaping

the New Reality’ in Francis Strauven, The In-between to the Aesthetics of Number, CCA Mellon Lectures 12, 2007. See also by the same author: Aldo van Eyck. The Shape of Relativity, Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura, 1998, or an essay by Merijn Oudenampsen in this publication entitled ‘Aldo van Eyck and the City as Play-ground’.3 See N. John Habraken in Palladio’s Children: Essays on Everyday Environment and the Architect, ed. Jonathan Teicher, Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2005

gagement with the user. The knowledge of the architect can be instrumental in combination with the user’s input and it exists only when there is input from the user.

For example, our project Dimensions and Relations explored and documented the use of a community arts and educational institution with children taking classes in the building. This gave us the opportunity to ‘see’ the building/institution through the eyes of an eight year old. Although we ourselves guided the project, the children played around with the guidelines. We gained new insight into how the building is used, and the children (and other users) gained a renewed appreciation of the building.

How can this kind of ‘participatory’ approach be differ-entiated from populist or neoliberal notions of user

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the one hand, a reactionary simplification of social complex-ities and on the other by an intensified exploitation of the subjectivities via an escalating process of self-determination and regulation – are pervasive. This is especially the case for cultural actors, model figures in these discourses, where a critical approach towards these consciously hidden ideolo-gies is essential. A laissez-faire dogmatism, which at least names its political perspective, could be one model. This is probably not against participation, or its methodologies at all, but against an inclusive model of participation that ex-cludes the contradictions actually existing between those who are asked to participate and the contextual framework of that process, which limits participation to a well measured degree.

While the criticality seems to be fundamental, even to constantly differentiate itself from the opposite force that is constantly able to incorporate it, I’m wondering if you could speak further of the so-called ‘projective’ dimension of architecture, that is to say, reclaiming its instrumental nature for a certain direction.

Jesko Fezer: The potential, and dilemma, to unavoidably change the world (or at least some small parts of it) by design as a tool of domination as well as a tool of emancipation, is probably the main challenge of architecture. But as I suggest here, the relevant question is: what kind of project is pushed forward and how do we receive and conceptualise the world

involvement? The structures that ifau and Jesko impose on spaces often function as points of negotiation, to open up a dialogue and involve the ‘participation’ of users.

ifau – CS: Understanding architecture not as a didactical and/or sublime occasion but in the broad sense of use allows a more relaxed and perhaps more genuine approach to the question of participation and user involvement. Taking ar-chitecture as a site of everyday actions requires spaces open for negotiation, appropriation and change by the user – par-ticipation in terms of everyday practice and use. So the ques-tion might be more about how to provide ‘a functional open-ness’ and resistance in the architectural design to promote and provoke different possibilities of appropriation. Relat-

ing to working thesis no. 7: ‘Conflict Design: Produce obsta-cles to interrupt normative routines’, a spatial intervention could be conceived as a detailed articulation of a social and functional problem.

Intentionally introduced complications and superimpo-sitions induce the articulation of conflict in a productive way. Consequently, integrated forms of appropriation and prac-tices of the everyday construct relationships with actuality that constantly question the social relevance and political competence of architecture.

Jesko Fezer: Indeed, the traps of a populist or a neoliberal discourse – which both tend to ‘leave it to the people’ by, on

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gether with those involved in and excluded from it. So why affirm post-criticality if there was never any real (social and political) criticality?

We do need methods and strategies for research and design that question normality and the conditions bound to it, to find out about the gaps and limitations of contemporary architectural practice, and to develop new perspectives for design from that starting point. We still need a radically criti-cal perspective on urban reality, which is not limited and pre-structured by the paradigms of productivity and feasi-bility. Of course we shall not stay at a critical distance, prop-agating some politicised rhetoric. We would prefer to nego-tiate and reformulate exactly this border: the thin line

that we intervene in (or some small parts of it)? Unfortunate-ly, in respect to the prevailing contemporary practice of ar-chitecture, I am not that optimistic about a perspective of projectability, if that is assumed as being a position against criticality. What could that without any critical perspective be other than a further reinforcement of the overwhelming conditions of late capitalist dynamics? I feel compelled to mention this matter as it refers to an ongoing discussion in architecture around the powerful discourse of ‘post-critical-ity’ as introduced by North American architectural theorists Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting.4 They ask for an end of criticism and postulate a projective practice that builds upon the transformative power of the making process. Rhetori-cally based on a (quite plausible) critique of the ‘criticality’ of a few influential North American architects, they condemn

any kind of critical/political reflection and conceptual per-spective, since (as some examples of these architects showed), this approach could not be implemented in reality as absolute. Of course architecture is not autonomous and is involved and bound to a net of different actors and interests with all their inherent contradictions, but it seems too banal to me to try to avoid these contradictions and troubles by capturing a whole profession in some self induced a-political or post-critical boundary. Such naivety not only underesti-mates the political dimension of design, but it must be re-garded as a defamation of architecture as a possibility of thinking and practicing a critical position in relation to the boring and suppressing reality of late capitalism it faces to-

4 Log 5, Spring/Summer, 2005

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criticism, critique and criticality in speaking of any practice engaging in visual culture, in order to avoid any assumed enclosed, autonomous area of judgment and principle which criticism and critique are based on and instead to be critical ‘operating from an uncertain ground of actual embededness.’ According to her, this criticality has a stronger transformative power than criticism or critique as it inhabits and occupies the space where your critical objects are lived with the subject. Perhaps the fact that both common room and ifau +Jesko Fezer are also involved in many projects and enterprises beyond the design of spaces, which includes the organi-sation of exhibitions, editing, writing, teaching, can be seen in light of this understanding of criticality?

common room: An ‘expanded practice’ has become the famil-iar term to describe the activities of architects beyond de-signing spaces. We recognise that our practice is among the several offices and institutions exploring this idea. Howev-er, we would like to consider that common room is trying to re-form architecture practice. This means redefining the way architecture is understood as a discipline by the public and by architects. We don’t want to ‘expand’ the boundaries of the current discipline (conventional or critical). Expanded practice creates a bigger footprint. This leaves conventional values in place and tacks on a few more. Re-forming means re-learning. Or as educators being involved in the re-learn-ing of what architecture is. It is a form of resistance to the

between an analysis that rejects the ruling conditions and a practice that works with them. Any transformative perspec-tive, even on a micro-political level, is bound to the need to formulate an intention based on an interpretation of the sta-tus quo. If this is anything more than an affirmative ‘yes’ it can be called critical, I would say.

ifau – CS: Jesko, I agree with your skeptical perception of the post-criticality debate, even if you especially focus on the implication of the operational aspect of pragmatism. You de-scribe this architectural discourse as a popular architecture theory phenomenon. I would also take into account that the North American discussion has especially adopted post-modern approaches or earlier critique on functionalism, such as advocacy planning or considerations inherent in

each design concern – between abstract representation (sign, symbol, commenting) and common interests (negotiation, appropriation, performance). The problem with it is a sub-stantial reduction of architectural production to an only ‘perception based’ control of architectural concerns. Terms like immersion, atmosphere and presence enhance the af-firmative impact of architecture on the hegemony of neolib-eralism. I am reminded of the multidisciplinary and cross-cultural ANY conferences on the condition of architecture between 1991 and 2000.

Since we are using the term ‘criticality’ it might be useful to note the differentiation Irit Rogoff made between

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external network of finance and power and to the internal autonomy of professional discourse. This is the motivation behind writing, editing, teaching and curating.

Jesko Fezer: Our demand no. 11: ‘Minimise design activities. Work with immaterial interventions’ can be interpreted from this perspective. Part of our personal and collective experi-ences is that some of our approaches, interests or projects do not make that much sense in the context of the usual ar-chitectural discourse. However, we feel the necessity to think, discuss and work on those issues kept outside of ar-chitecture for pragmatic or political reasons. By minimising design activities we produce space (budget and time) for oth-er activities, maybe more related to other disciplines, but in the end essential elements of a critical architectural practice.

This shift between formats and disciplines obviously often produces gaps between different projects. A more radically politicised text on socio-spatial issues for example could even contradict a small design project for an art institution in relation to the issue of gentrification. So non-dogmatism is something we learned to live with, and which is certainly also produced by the necessities of our multi-disciplinary working methods. Sometimes I wish for a relaxed dogma-tism that is able to formulate a position more precisely and avoids certain relativisms that we are used to dealing with. To imagine something ‘other’ or ‘different’, clarity about what it shouldn’t be, could be helpful and even open up a path to an open and constructive dialogue…

Aldo van Eyck and the

City as Playground

MerijnOudenampsen

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rushed and economised implementation of the prewar ideals of the modernist movement grouped around the CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne), identified with the work of modernist architects such as Le C o r b u s i e r and Gro-pius and critic and his-t o - rian Giedion. In

Amsterdam, Cor-nelis van Eesteren, long

time president of the CIAM, implemented his General Ex-

tension Plan (Algemeen Uitbrei-dingsplan – AUP) of 1934, one of the

first modern urban master plans to be based on extensive statistical forecasts of de-

mographic and transport developments.1 His plan embraced the ideal of functional separation, meaning

that housing; work, traffic and recreation would be func-tionally separated and integrally planned. This was the basic premise for the large scale construction of new postwar neighbourhoods in the 1950s such as Buitenveldert and the Westelijke Tuinsteden, resulting in the open housing blocks with large amounts of light, air, greenery, and monotony.

The agenda of functional separation also concluded that Amsterdam’s economic centre, the CBD, had to be expanded and the old city had to be ‘opened up’ for traffic. This vision was radicalised in the 1960s when the entire city clogged up due to the explosive rise of car traffic, city planners intro-duced a scheme for an entire network of metro lines and highways cutting through the old fabric of the city. A tabula rasa makeover of Amsterdam’s 19th century ring of popular and derelict neighbourhoods – the Jordaan, Nieuwmarkt, Oostelijke Eilanden, Weesperbuurt and the Pijp2 – was on

In 1947 architect Aldo van Eyck built his first playground, it was located at the Bertelmanplein in Amsterdam; hundreds more followed in a spatial experiment that has since (posi-tively) marked the childhood of an entire generation growing up in Amsterdam. Though largely removed, defunct or for-gotten today, these playgrounds represent an emblematic ar-chitectural intervention at a pivotal time: the shift from a top-down organisation of space by modern functionalist ar-chitects, towards a bottom-up architecture that literally aimed to give space for imagination.

Immediately after the Second World War, Dutch cities were in a state of dereliction. The housing stock was falling dramatically short – both quantitatively and qualitatively – which, combined with a dysfunctional infrastructure, pre-sented planners with an outright emergency. On top of that, this ravaged urban context was confronted by the postwar baby boom despite there being little or no space available for children, neither inside nor outside the house. At that time, some playgrounds existed in the city, but almost all of them were private in nature, thus only a fortunate few had membership. Van Eyck’s playgrounds, initially built on tem-porarily unused plots of land, can therefore be seen as an emergency measure, but they came to have significance far beyond that of a crea-tive solution in a time of need.

THE FUNCTIONAL-IST CITY

Postwar urban planning in the Netherlands consisted mainly of a

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mote social interaction’.6 In 1959 the group was in charge of the organisa-tion of the 11th CIAM conference in the Dutch town of Otterlo, where they did nothing short of declaring CIAM dead.7 Out of those who o r -ganised the c o n f e r -ence in Otterlo a new plat- form emerged,

Team X. The influen-tial Dutch members, van

Eyck and Bakema replaced the old rationalist and function-

alist approach for a new, modular, and participative architecture under

the label of ‘structuralism’.8 When we look back, we can trace the ingredients of this shift

in the playgrounds.Between 1947 and 1978 van Eyck designed hun-

dreds of playgrounds, first as part of the Department of Urban Design and from 1952 for both the municipality and his own office. In the first eight years he designed 60 play-grounds, the most recent examples were designed almost in batches for the newly developed postwar districts – of the 700 built, 90 survive today in their original layout. The first playground designed for Bertelmanplein was a test case. Van Eyck designed a sandpit bordered by a wide rim, in it he placed four round stones and a structure of tumbling bars. The pit was placed in the north corner of the square, diago-nally across from three tumbling bars, bordering the square were trees and five benches. The playground was a success. Many designs followed, and, depending on the site, van Eyck deployed a number of compositional techniques. For him, the playgrounds were an opportunity to test out his ideas about architecture, relativity and imagination. Relativity in

the agenda in the 1960s. A wholesale urban modernisation wave formed a 20th century version of the hitherto unreal-ised ‘Hausmannisation’3 of Amsterdam; much like Robert Moses famously implemented parkways and causeways in New York. The Dutch planners, however, never got that far. They were soon to meet with a huge protest movement that effectively poured sand into the machine, and finally defeated what was then called the ‘urban bulldozer’.4 Aldo van Eyck played an important role in defining what would follow.

THE BREAK WITH CIAM

Van Eyck’s path and that of the functional modernist school were initially one and the same. When he started working on the playgrounds, Aldo van Eyck worked directly under Cor-nelis van Eesteren, who was in charge of Amsterdam’s urban development department until 1959. He also began to par-ticipate actively in the CIAM conferences.5 However, the perspective on urban space that van Eyck developed through his playgrounds would lead him to become one of the most fervent critics of the functionalist tendency that dominated the CIAM move-ment at that time. In 1953 a group of crit-ical young architects formed within the CIAM and van Eyck was one of their most vocal members. ‘Functionalism has killed creativity’, van Eyck stated in an article in the Dutch m a g -azine Fo- rum, ‘it leads to a cold tech-n o c - racy, in which

the human aspect is forgotten. A building is

more than the sum of it’s functions; architecture has to

facilitate human activity and pro-

3 Georges-E

ugène Haussmann, also known as Baron Haussmann, w

as respon-

sible for th

e extensive 19th century m

odernisation of P

aris under Napoleon II

I: wide

boulevards were created, c

utting th

rough the old populous, m

edieval neighbour-

hoods. Consequently

his name is a synonym fo

r urban modernisatio

n. Due to

financial c

onstraints and the absence of a

strong government in

19th century

Amsterdam such modernisatio

n only occurred on a very insignific

ant scale, th

e

Sarphatistraat is

an example.

4 Bergh and Keers, ‘D

e Binnenstad als Vrijetijd

scentrum’ in W

onen TA/BK, nr

19, October 19

81, pp. 2

-18.

5 Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, A

ldo van Eyck, Humanist R

ebel.

Inbetweening in

a Postwar World, R

otterdam: 0

10 publishers, 19

99

6 Aldo van Eyck, ‘H

et Verhaal v

an een Andere Gedachte’ (T

he Story of

Another Thought) in Forum 7, 19

59

7 Louis K

ahn, ‘Talk at th

e conclusion of the O

tterlo

Congress’ in ed. J

ürgen

Joedicke, Oscar Newman, N

ew Frontiers in

Architecture, C

IAM ‘59 in Otte

rlo, New

122 123Mariniersplein, Amsterdam, 1958. Photo J.M. Arsath Ro’is

125124

the playgrounds. The design of the play-grounds was aimed at interaction with the surrounding urban tissue. Temporality of the interven-tion was part of this ‘in-between’ nature, re-creating space through incre-m e n t a l a d a p t a -t i o n instead of the t a b - ula rasa modern-

ist approach, where the designs had an

autonomy that was based on abstract data and statistics. Of

course, the use of empty plots was also a tactical solution; the Site Prepa-

ration Service of the Department of City Development, working together with local

associations, wanted to give every neighbourhood its own playground, which often meant they had to be

placed in vacant, derelict sites. The focus on how space could be appropriated stood in

clear opposition to the prevailing modernist conception of space in architecture. This was most famously formulated by Giedion in his classic Space, Time and Architecture where he defines the essence of modernist architecture as the merger of space and time, creating the experience of movement.10 Van Eyck’s concerns were of a completely different nature: ‘whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion.’11 The question raised was not the emulation of movement towards some unknown horizon, the archetypical uprootedness of the experience of moder-nity,12 but exactly the opposite: how can people make space their own and create a subjective ‘sense of place’? How can one feel at home in the modern city, this machine of mass

the sense that connections between elements are determined by their mutual relationships rather than by a central hierar-chical ordering principle. Instead, all elements are equal: the playgrounds designed by van Eyck were exercises in non-hierarchical composition.9 Van Eyck also designed the play-ground equipment himself, including the tumbling bars, chutes and hemispheric jungle gyms, and his children tested them. To him, play equipment was an integral part of the commission; its purpose was to stimulate the minds of chil-dren. The hemispherical jungle gym was not just something to climb, it was a place to talk and a lookout post; covered with a rug, it became a hut. These sandpits, tumbling bars and steppingstones were placed in playgrounds throughout the Netherlands.

Different elements of the playgrounds represented a break with the past. First and foremost the playgrounds pro-posed a different conception of space. Van Eyck consciously designed the equipment in a decidedly minimalist way to stimulate the imagination of the users (the children), the idea being that they could appropriate the space through its openness to interpretation. The second aspect was the modular char-acter of the playgrounds. The basic elements – sandpits, tumbling bars, stepping stones, chutes and hemispheric jungle gyms – could be end-lessly recombined in differ- i n g polycentric composi-t i o n s d e p e n d i n g o n the requirements

of the local environ-ment. The third aspect

was the relationship with the surrounding, the ‘in-

between’ or ‘interstitial’ nature of

York: Universe Books, 19

61

8 W. J.

van Heuvel, Structuralism in

Dutch Architecture, R

otterdam: 0

10

Publishers, 19

92

9 Lianne Lefaivre and In

geborg de Roode, Aldo van Eyck. P

laygrounds, Rotte

r-

dam: NAi P

ublishers, 2

002

10 Siegfried G

iedion, Space, Tim

e and Architecture. The Growth of a

New Tradition,

Cambridge: MIT

Press, 1941/1980

11 Aldo van Eyck, 19

59

12 Marshall B

erman, All T

hat Is Solid

Melts in

to Air. The Experience of M

odernity,

New York: Sim

on & Schuster, 1

982

126 127Grote Wittenburgerstraat 23–29, Amsterdam, 1969. Photo J.M. Arsath Ro’is

129128

group dissolved only three years after it was founded, but its members Con-stant Nieuwenhuys and Asger Jorn remerged on the stage as co-founders of the Situa-tionist International in 1958.

In this c o n -text, the notion of p l a y also gained

symbolic impor-tance. In 1938 the

Dutch historian Huiz-inga wrote ‘Homo Ludens’,15

a book on the historical impor-tance of the element of play in cul-

ture; Nieuwenhuys used this idea as the basis for his critique on urbanism. Much

like van Eyck, he was deeply critical of the postwar functionalist architecture. Together with

Guy Debord he wrote the now famous tract on Uni-tary Urbanism that proclaimed the advent of a society of

mass creativity. Nieuwenhuys believed that due to mechani-sation, homo ludens, the playful or creative man, in post-industrial society would replace homo faber, the traditional workingman of industrial society.16 The Situationists took this element of play and developed it into one of their core notions, as Debord would state: ‘due to its marginal exist-ence in relation to the oppressive reality of work, play is often regarded as fictitious. But the work of the Situationists is precisely the preparation of ludic possibilities to come.’17 The Situationists, whose themes came to play an important role in the rebellion of 1968, developed the notion of play into a subversive strategy to rebel against modern capitalism and modernist architecture; Le Corbusier’s authoritarian architecture was seen as a form of fascism. With psychoge-ography and the famous dérive, they changed focus from

rationalisation? The transitory playground was ‘place’ and ‘occasion’ combined.

THE PLAYGROUND AS CULTURAL CRITIQUEThe playgrounds were not isolated architectural interven-tions. Somehow the playground is a powerful synthesis, a distillation of some of the most interesting motives that res-onated amongst the avant garde as modernism came under heavy fire and the general disillusionment of the postmod-ernist era was nowhere yet in sight. In itself, a playground seems a rather sweet and uncontroversial undertaking, but at the time it served as a condensation point of cultural cri-tique.

In 1949 van Eyck played host to the first exhibition of the CoBrA group – a shortly lived but influential avant garde art movement – in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The CoBrA group drew their inspiration in particular from chil-dren’s drawings. They believed that the spontaneity of the child’s imagination, untainted by modern proto-col, was one of the privileged sites of authenticity in a society where man lived ‘in a morbid atmosphere of artificiality, lies and bar-renness’.13 Van Eyck’s close relation-ship with the artists from the CoBrA current suggests that it is probable that much of his early inspiration for the playgrounds derived from them: ‘on the mar-gins of a t t e n t i o n there is always the art-

ist, essential com-panion to the child. His

function is too decorative’, van Eyck stated during CIAM

X in Dubrovnic 1956.14 The CoBrA

13 CoBrA #4, 19

49 as cited in

W. S

tokvis, CoBrA. G

eschiedenis, voorspel en

betekenis van een beweging in de kunst v

an na de tweede wereldoorlog, A

msterdam: De

Bezige Bij, 1980

14 Aldo van Eyck, 19

59

15 Johan Huizinga, H

omo Ludens. Proeve eener bepalin

g van het spelelement der

cultuur [

Homo Ludens. A study of th

e play element in cultu

re] , Haarle

m: Tjeenk

Willink, 19

38/1952

16 Mark W

igley ed. Constant’s New Babylon. The hyper-a

rchitecture of d

esire,

Rotterdam: 0

10 Publishers, 19

98

17 Guy D

ebord, Contributio

n to Situ

ationist D

efinition of P

lay, Internatio

nale

Situatio

nniste #1, June 19

58

130 131Frans Bastiaansestraat, Amsterdam

133132

ro line was finished but the highway was stopped, and all other metro plans were taken off the agenda. The new left came to power; the Nieuwmarkt was saved and became an inspira-tion for anti-mod-e r n i s a t i o n strug-gles else- where in t h e country. A n e w model for urban

d e v e l o p m e n t emerged, bouwen voor

de buurt (building for the neighbourhood) that was to re-

place large scale modernist inter-vention with small scale participative

projects in the neighbourhoods. The ‘struc-turalist’ architectural philosophy of van Eyck

and the group around the magazine Forum became a template for a decade to come. One of the first, and

most symbolic, of these projects was the redevelopment of the Nieuwmarkt itself, and maybe not surprisingly, Aldo van Eyck was appointed architect. Here, his ideas on inter-stitial space, non-hierarchical composition, and participa-tive planning led to an architecture that could easily mould into the existing tissue of the neighbourhood. ‘Play’, as Hu-izinga once said, ‘is a serious matter’.

All photos courtesy of Amsterdam City Archives

‘streets, buildings and businesses’ to how ‘people inhabit the city and the collective psychic ambiances they project’, much in parallel with van Eyck’s stress on place and occasion.

After leaving the Situationists, Nieuwenhuys played a role in the Dutch spirit of 1968. In his later utopian architec-ture work New Babylon (van Eyck assisted him when he started making scale models) Nieuwenhuys created an explicit metaphor for the advent of a creative society. He saw his ideas about mass creativity materialised in the youth cul-ture of the 1960s when they were picked up by the ‘Dutch yippies’18 and ‘the provos’, two groups who brought the authoritarian spirit of the Dutch 1950s to its knees19 through playfulness and endless provocation.

END BATTLEIn the Netherlands, modernist urban planning and the grow-ing anti-modernist spirit of revolt had a final faceoff in the Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood in Amsterdam. This was the site where the first of the metro lines – with a four-lane inner city highway on top – was to be constructed, cutting right through one of the oldest and most popular neighbourhoods of the city. Hundreds of students, art-ists and activists moved into the empty buildings of the neigh-bourhood, where ‘provos’ together with a mix of residents and activ-ists founded Ak- t i e -groep Nieu- wmarkt. Years of spirited re-

sistance, and a conclusive violent

riot in 1975 resulted in the final surrender of the

modernist planners and the politicians who led them: the met-

18 The Yippies w

ere a radical countercultu

ral offs

hoot of th

e American antiwar

movement of th

e 1960s. T

hey employed theatrical g

estures – such as promoting a

pig, Pigasus th

e Immortal, f

or presidential c

andidacy in th

e 1968 electio

ns – to m

ock

the social status quo. See: h

ttp://en.w

ikipedia.org/wiki/Yippies.

19 Richard Kempton, P

rovo. Amsterdam’s Anarchist R

evolt, New York: A

utonome-

dia, 2007

Rietveld Schröder

House in Use

as a Montessori

School (c. 1930)

Ruth Buchanan(captions)

136 137

‘Despite the stillness, it was not resting’. Or: ‘A tele-phone based on good weather and mirrors.’

138 139

Crisis and structure. In an icon of St Barbara a serene face is depicted in the foreground whilst in the back-ground a castle is seen ablaze; golden yellow flames lick-ing up the side of the turrets as small bodies tumble to

the ground. It is no surprise to discover that St Barbara (whose definitive existence is rather shaky) is the patron saint of architects, builders and fire fighters with the ad-ditional power to ward against sudden death.

140 141

Crisis and structure. These figures, crisis and structure, are certainly at play in this house as well as at play in the way this house ‘perform’ today. Or rather the way in which this house is ‘asked’ to perform.* Rather than looking for an aesthetic approach such as ‘separate and define’ through categorisation, we could act towards a concise, and conscious inhabitation, a cacophony of mo-dalities.* The Rietveld Schröder House, built in Utrecht, 1924, designed by Gerrit Rietveld and Truus Schröder, is now a museum, each day a limited number of people can visit via a tight schedule of either guided or audio tours.

Absorbing and reflecting creates openings in which the definitions readily at hand no longer make sense. Ab-sorb, reflect, and open out as you slide, pull, lift, glide, lie, pace or bend. An arc, a curve that shuttles between the position of crisis to the moment of installing a struc-ture. A shuttle, a shuttling, a manner of communicating. Lie under tables, set things on fire – a speaking that is in tune with the wind. Despite a stillness it was not resting.

Imag

es c

ourt

esy

Cen

traa

l Mus

eum

, Rie

tvel

d Sc

hröd

erar

chie

f

142 143

A School is a Building

with a School in It

PaulElliman

144 145

[Image of a library in ruins during the London Blitz, a few readers still browsing

books within the crumbling building]

tion of what makes a school a school will always be chal-lenged, or countered by alternative approaches. Though I still find myself thinking, gloomily, that the best option would be not to go to school at all – to give up the peda-gogical ghost of an immoral economy just as one would abandon a contaminated or broken building.

I know that is not enough of an answer either. So I thought I would talk here about how a school could learn instead to shed some of its ‘school-ness’. Not necessarily by opening up the roof, or punching a few holes into the walls – even if interacting with the physical framework is one way to reveal the building itself as something less confined – but I mean to take school down from the inside, by learning from the ‘world-ness’ of its occupants and their areas of interest.

Here for example we have the school, and there, a bit further on, is the outside world, sealed off as if eve-rything exists as a competing or separate entity. But why so separate? Isn’t a school just a building with a school in it, as vulnerable, or as open to interpretive use (or destruction) as any other?

It doesn’t even have to be a building in the strictest sense.

The ‘school of hard knocks’ was always meant to refer to those tougher life lessons learnt outside the shelter-zone of formal education. Yet the very notion of school has be-come, in neoliberal terms, a concept for just another commercial product, forced to compete along with eve-rything and everyone else for a place in the market. At least this has made it clear, in taking up arms in the con-sumer warfare of our age, that the convincing ‘school-ness’ of a school is disingenuously more important than anything it might offer as a place or space of open curi-osity about the world.

Fortunately it is in the nature of learning that any overly-determined or, in our case, market-driven defini-

146 147

Price, who grew up in Staffordshire, would have been keen to extend the limits of provincial education.

Today, in a world made apparently both smaller and larger (held together and torn apart?) by its supposed wealth of mobile telecommunications, we are constantly reminded that the academy is everywhere. Not that the issue is now simply one of resisting the global campus, since there may already be no escape from it. But net-work resources can also be used to localise many of the features of education and to tailor programmes to indi-vidual needs.

Despite what the promotional rhetoric tells us, schools are not here to ‘create’ learning, but to provide a structure adaptable enough to support learning’s unpre-dictable requirements. Cedric Price had an instinct for

this: his projects, whether realised or not – mostly not – became architectural essays on flexibility, indetermi-nacy and impermanence. The Potteries Thinkbelt School came with inflatable lecture theatres; in another project, a plan for a Fun Palace involved spaces that could be reconfigured for different uses. The Inter-Action centre, a multipurpose community centre in London’s Kentish Town (1971), was finally a working example of Price’s interest in buildings that combined lightweight struc-ture, a fixed lifespan, in this case 30 years, and a function that had yet to be decided.

These are ideas that apply perfectly to the space of a school which, after all, is a kind of drop-in centre where

[Image, sketch for Potteries Thinkbelt School, Cedric Price]

The architect Cedric Price proposed a mobile school housed in train carriages. The trains were to run on dis-used tracks linking the English pottery towns of Staf-fordshire. It would have been part school, part commute to school, and part field-trip escape from it, all on the same return ticket.

The university of train carriages wasn’t meant as a gimmick but to keep places and places of learning acces-sible to each other, as well as on the move. Price had said: ‘Education, if it is to be a continuous human service run by the community, must be provided with the same lack of peculiarity as the supply of drinking water or free dental care.’ In those days (Britain in the 1960s and ’70s),

148 149

and ideas passing through it. Even so the image of a moving building, with its pas-

sengers and crew all moving together, is still useful. Ech-oing Cedric Price’s trains, Foucault refers to the con-stantly moving, floating space of the ship as a key example of heterotopian space, in which a community, fixed how-ever temporarily, is essential to its operations and move-ment as well as its meaning. Particularly, as Price implies in so many of his projects, a building in which meaning is constantly on the move.

Many artists, in or out of schools, have explored this floating signifier of the building itself.

individual commitment coexists within a more easy going social milieu of equally undecided functions.

On the other hand, if the logic of our world of con-stant movement and connection relies on a network of stops, airports, terminals and transfer points, there may be no need to re-conceive the school so literally as a mobile carriage moving from place to place.

In practice, a school is a hub of activity that more specifically mirrors the airports and bus or train stations than an actual transportation system – the kinds of places, characterised by their linkage to other places, that Michel Foucault famously defined as heterotopian space (Other Spaces, lecture by Michel Foucault, March 1967). Alongside his example of a transport centre, Fou-cault includes many other kinds of hubs and ports, such

as theatres and cinemas, hotels and even the cemetery, a terminal resting point though not perhaps spiritually or for the imagination.

Motivated by a connectivity to other places (not to mention other schools and trains of thought), the school is a provisional base from which to filter the world we live in or within in which we reorganise ourselves, a place to reflect on basic principles or to invent new ones. In this sense, the one thing that a school needs to main-tain above all else is its ability to maintain a hub or focal point, and by this I would equally imply a sense of its own community. A school is far less the building housing it than the hub of people that channel the information

[Images: I am thinking here of Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque (1969–72) – his ironic but also functionalist reading of a building as if it were moving back-

wards and forwards in time.]

150 151

Set in a factory, one of Mario Merz’s visualisations of the power of numbers could easily have taken place in a school canteen. In ‘Fibonacci Napoli’ (Factory Canteen), a sequence of images shows first one person, then two, then three, then five, then eight, and so on through the first nine numbers of the Fibonacci sequence. A throng of voices soon populates the empty tables and chairs as a lone person is transformed into a partisan crowd.

The exponential growth of a numbers series could be compared to an activity such as learning. And since Merz simply shows people coming together, this could just as well be a lunch or a party, a seminar or a strike meeting.

Thinking of that other, quieter school space, we must all have known schools that survived as such only

because of their libraries: even in smaller libraries, where a collection is still manageable and accessible, and more or less to the scale of the individual reader.

And of course there are plenty of other examples that ad-dress the special kind of pivotal energy or ‘hub-ness’ that should characterise a school, or make certain parts be-come momentarily more vital than others. I sometimes think, for example, that a library and a good canteen might be all that a school requires of its location: a place to meet and think and a place to meet and drink: or at times, to do both in both.

[Image of ‘Fibonacci Napoli’ (Factory Canteen), Mario Merz]

152 153

Then there are the lectures, which can always be held in a canteen or library, or anywhere, if the location is to be as useful as the lecture itself.

[Image of Martha Rosler in her library, installed in Liverpool]

Martha Rosler’s personal library of books (in this pic-ture we see the library installed at Liverpool’s John Moores University School of Art and Design, I also en-countered it in Berlin and at the Frankfurter Kunstver-ein) accumulated over more than 30 years of working and teaching, has sent that singular unit of a school’s ‘hub-ness’ into orbit around the world as a kind of rogue satellite of self-learning.

Rosler’s collection of almost ten thousand books is made available for public use, along with a catalogue of each item and a photocopy machine. Even the smallest, most independent workshops and courses can develop a library as a byproduct of their day-to-day momentum – or why not let that become the object of its activity?

[Image: Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s field-trip course Learn-ing From Las Vegas comes to mind as

the classroom and pop-art colloquium is ramped-up by a dazzling neon strip of gambling palaces, set in the Nevada

desert.]

154 155

Some of the best talks are when you forget that you are even attending one, or were never quite sure in the first place. Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque slide show is one of those ‘is-it-a?-lectures’, to which the body-pop-ping cultural anthropology of Adrian Piper’s Funk Les-sons provides the perfect ‘or-is-it-a-disco/dance-class?’ riposte.

But the most satisfying question of all might be: ‘Or is it even a school?’

When looking for resident artists to add to the gen-eral mix of the new experimental college at Black Moun-tain, John Andrew Rice was asked if it was to be an art school. His answer was no: ‘God, no. That’s the last thing I want. Schools are the most awful places in the world!’

Thankfully both of those terms, ‘art’ and ‘school’,

are made equally problematic. Yet Rice intended art to be at the centre of the Black Mountain curriculum because he saw it as one of few cultural forms equipped to dem-onstrate alternative approaches to institutionalised social life. Undermining the overly didactic by present-ing information using modes and methods that are both multi-layered and open-ended remains a driving force for contemporary art. And many examples come to mind of artists responding to an experience of school in ways that undermine the kind of narrow-band faith in curricu-lar orderliness that schools so often stand for.

[Image: Emma Kay’s extemporaneous history of the world told from her own

memory.]

If ever art itself has something to teach us, I wouldn’t as-sume it to happen directly through institutional critique à la Foucault, but more likely through a kind of raw in-tertextual drift that offers open ways of responding to the world. Not even a teacher needs to have answers to questions that don’t necessarily have answers: questions that are just as important a part of the process of explo-ration, or of research intended to illuminate a field of connections and not necessarily draw a conclusion or of-fer explanations.

Or that contribute to the lesson that we shouldn’t be afraid to work things out for ourselves.

What I remember most from reading Martin Duber-

156 157

man’s study of Black Mountain College is his description of Josef and Anni Albers finally consenting to the book’s publication. They simply encouraged its author to turn his immense research into a book about the impact that this new-found knowledge of Black Mountain was hav-ing on him.

Albers seemed to prefer the idea of the school to remain alive as an idea, or set of ideas, that could be continually invented through individual attempts to discover it or produce it. Hadn’t Mies van der Rohe claimed, back in those days, that the Bauhaus was not an institution but an idea? It can seem more like an institution every day, as the worlds of art and commerce somnolently fold the Bauhaus idea into endlessly perfected re-enactments. What we might retain in a sort of art-school memory-trace of Black Mountain is a learning process propelled forward more by an instinct for what a school, or social life for that matter, needn’t be, than what it should be – neither an institution or an idea, but something more open-minded than either of those.

The Bauhaus taught the lessons of engagement

through an awareness of materials and form. It still sounds like a foundation course, parts of which might even still be useful. But there are other ways of engaging with the world. And students need time to explore what they already know as people. We all do. Perhaps finding our own ways to engage is one of the key lessons of life anyway – including, as Cedric Price taught, ways of engaging with the very buildings that define us, often by confining us.

An artist friend once told me that he thought a cur-riculum could be entirely practical – lessons, for exam-ple, in desktop publishing, welding, or how to wire the electrics of a building: ‘Just show us how the thing works,

[Image of Josef and Anni kissing; a second image of them arm-in-arm at the

Black Mountain Friday-night dance]

158 159

how to put it together.’Another friend, also an artist, but who was actually

on an electrical engineering course, reminisces about her favourite lecturer: ‘He just had that way of describing things without fully explaining them; made you want to go off and figure the thing out for yourself.’ When I asked her what his specific subject was, she couldn’t remem-ber: ‘I’m not sure’, she said, ‘something to do with wave-theory, I think.’ It made me laugh. The most inspiring teacher of all and you almost don’t need to know what he’s talking about.

I’ll end back on another train, if only for the sense that we’re still moving. But also with a note that we are all always at our own physical and experiential, and even architectural, centre of a mobile world.

It seems to be the train’s buffet car: but like Adrian Piper’s dance class, the passengers aren’t sure if this is a nightclub or a public lecture. And the man singing (or is he lecturing?) doesn’t seem to care either.

[Film clip of Groucho performing Lydia the Tattooed Lady]

On the move, in the crowd, some older, some younger, studious and happy, attending images of cultural and po-litical history, flickering across the screen of a building or drawn by the agile body of a living person; all things ‘You can learn a lot from…’

A school is just a building with a school in it. It doesn’t even have to be a building in the strictest sense. Take some of the school part out and it might work even better.

Mutual Schools

Ann

e Q

uerr

ien

163162

Schools are supposed to be ‘generous’ structures. What do I mean? I am talking about the fact that education became compulsory for the poor. Teachers, trained in the public sector or from char-ities, tried to give poor children the means to get a job and thus reduce the level of poverty both within the individ-ual child’s family as well as the wider community. Since the 17th century fami-lies have received an allowance if they successfully forced their children to at-tend school – this system became com-monplace in many European countries over the course of several hundred years. In schools, young peasants and urban poor learnt to work; to obey orders, to pay attention to abstract forms and meanings, to prepare for the service of machines. This created a workforce of an amazing capability – everyone be-came a potentially ‘inexhaustible work-er’.1 In this structure of ‘generosity’ schools were supposed to expose young people to the ‘social game’, potentially resulting in a lower number of them en-tering the ‘popular elite’. However, many sociological studies have shown that the ‘popular elite’ is not the same as the ‘tra-ditional elite’: the ‘populare elite’ is of-fered a smaller range of choice by those ‘in it’ and thus many remain in a subal-tern position.2

THE STRAIGHT GAME OF NORMAL SCHOOLS

Teaching in a primary or secondary

school has always been a difficult experi-ence; the methods expounded within the training often meet with resistance when used in the classroom. The teacher feels him or herself in a double bind: to insist that the students obey the method and take the risk that half of them will fail, or, invent new methods that play against the normal approach, that open up the space for a new situation with less pre-dictable boundaries and outcomes.

Pierre Bourdieu3 (and others) shows us that schools reproduce the stratified structures of society. School, as a space where people spend time together, is organised in contrast to generosity: the supposed ‘teaching for all’ is shaped by inequalities, such as race, and conse-quently becomes competitive. This opposition produces a situation that is against creating openings in the fixed structures, against social playfulness; the possibility for these vivid qualities to emerge are thus pushed into the play-ground, and the playground becomes the ‘anti-school’ within the school walls. It creates the community, the group, with-out which it is impossible to teach. How-ever, the first objective of the school is to remove children from the street. The playground inside the school walls also takes the students to a ‘second life’, back to their social differences, and partly destroys the efforts made towards their learning.

The invention of the ‘modern school’ in the 17th century is the invention of

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t ra

ther

a s

truc

ture

or

mou

ld o

f ha

ving

bee

n

arou

nd th

e su

bjec

t. T

his

text

is fu

ncti

onin

g fo

r m

e as

the

note

s fo

r or t

ext o

f an

intr

oduc

tion

to a

sub

-je

ct a

roun

d w

hich

to p

oten

tial

ly d

o di

alog

ue.

Thi

s is

a s

et o

f not

es m

ade

in p

repa

rati

on fo

r a

pres

enta

tion

on

Will

iam

Jam

es’ P

ragm

atis

m: A

New

Nam

e Fo

r So

me

Old

Way

s Of T

hink

ing.

1 L

ion

Mur

ard

and

Patr

ich

Zyl

berm

an, L

e pe

tit t

rava

illeu

r in

fati

gabl

e, P

aris

: Edi

tion

s R

eche

rche

s, 2

00

3.2

Ala

in D

arbe

l and

Dom

iniq

ue S

chap

per,

Les

age

nts d

u sy

stèm

e ad

min

istr

atif,

Par

is: M

outo

n, 1

96

9.

3 P

ierr

e B

ourd

ieu,

Jea

n-C

laud

e Pa

sser

on, L

a re

prod

ucti

on,

Pari

s: E

diti

ons

de M

inui

t, 1

970

.

164 165

Again, playfulness is an illusion, the game can be resumed at the moment of mastering the rules and understanding the benefit of obeying them: ‘you should have read them before’, ‘you would have done better.’ Rules and play, life inside a geography: competition.

In the republican, or public, school the ways in which one can climb the social ladder is very limited. Most edu-cational games using new technologies only pretend to help students on the path to success, more often than not they have the same limitations as the strate-gies or games used in a traditional school. They help, on the one hand, to recuperate only those from the upper levels of education who have failed, and on the other, to enable those who are succeeding to deepen their advantage. Sport-oriented games help working class kids to master a specific and spec-tacular realm whilst role-playing games create a false hope of mastery. War-based games seem to be the only ones that are able to open up a big enough space between the real and the virtual to create room for playfulness. When play-ing with tin soldiers one imagines the table as Waterloo and themselves as Napoleon or Wellington. After all, most games place the player at the centre of the image and ask him or her to act as the master – arranging constraints and potentialities. Co-operation between actors and the possibility for them to act within the game is pre-defined and

teaching a group of students rather than teaching individuals. It proved to be much more efficient because the time spent by the students with both their eyes and minds concentrated on books, or on the blackboard, was longer. At the same time, a form of objective solidarity emerged between the students that is the main characteristic of the modern school. In that sense, the community of a classroom is an image of the republican ideal towards which the teacher directs the students.

The classroom is made up of habits, of experiences, of smells, of sounds. This is very different from the virtual community of, say, the ‘users’ of the same book, or of the same game, in which one teaches oneself whilst surrounded by the virtual experience and symbolic presence of other players. The modern classroom is a milieu in which the stu-dent develops, in either a good or bad way, methods of interaction with his or her classmates. Even if the social repro-duction, as described by Bourdieu, is commonly understood, there is a lot of uncertainty in this game – this situation is multidimensional, produced by numerous persons. In ‘educational games’ the author of the game usually lays out a path to be discovered by the player, but it is only the successful whose ‘play’ is recorded. The degree of uncer-tainty in games is low because all possi-ble scenarios should have been consid-ered during the games development.

167166

noted in ‘La distinction’4 in his descrip-tion of the main principle of ‘social game’ – I was only recognised in such a way as to be distinguished from them as better. This institutional structure created jeal-ousy rather than co-operation, when an atmosphere of co-operation would have pushed everyone upwards. This concern with ‘pushing everyone upwards’ does not ‘look’ like play perhaps but it ‘means’ play in the sense that the institution is supposed to produce something other than itself; to allow the fixed structure to accommodate movement; to play with itself and open a line of flight away from direct social reproduction.

THE OPEN PATH OF MUTUAL SCHOOLS

This play/game within institutions has been observed in places where it may not have been expected, psychiatric in-stitutions for instance. During the First World War the French government de-cided that the mentally ill would receive half the amount of food of normal peo-ple. In most hospitals they died of hun-ger but in some, doctors, nurses and lo-cal people, together with the patients, organised the growing of vegetables. Af-ter the war these doctors initiated a psy-chiatric reform movement called Psy-chothérapie institutionnelle, which pro-posed to reform hospitals, to open them up and prepare the mentally ill for a par-ticipatory life. It began with the desire to heal, but was seen by the Ministry of

directed in from the outside, as in a city or a factory. This structure replicates a system of domination that controls most of the teaching and learning. The game is organised around a desire that is thought to be normal; psychoanalysis teaches us that desire is a series of singularities and it is likely that the dominant desires do not operate alone. The game extracts from each of us an avatar; the real game for each of us is in the intimate space between oneself and that avatar, the game of controlling feelings and deeds toward success or failure, towards the realisation of personal features. The game mobilises our unconscious rela-tions with several areas of thinking, sev-eral universes of references, all of which have been considered during the making of the game. These universes of refer-ences are synthesised in a pursuit of images that differ very little from one another but, nonetheless, capture the singular desire of each. Learning is no longer learning to work, but learning to experience life beyond school where experimental sciences and dispositions have been limited to the repetition of normativised standards.

The hypothesis that other forms of play are possible within school’s occurred to me because I was a good student, and often felt frustrated that my ability to understand maths, for exam-ple, was not used to help my classmates. I got good marks but was not recognised as able to teach friends – as Bourdieu

4 P

ierr

e B

ourd

ieu,

La

dist

inct

ion,

Par

is: E

diti

ons

de M

inui

t,

1979

.

168 169

nation or repression more quickly than you can possibly think to react. Multiple desires are present in any instance of social innovation. The social is a situa-tion of interaction; the social actor is always collective and multiple, as has been shown by sociologist Bruno Latour.6 The level of interaction makes it very different from a game with fixed rules, where a set of hypothesises are incorporated that are able to deal with all possible situations proposed by an individual player. The game of chess between a human and a machine is per-haps the best representation of this line of flight – creating new situations from the same conditions. Repetition is the great secret of this kind of game and can be seen from two points of view: the repetition from one game to another, improving the performance or not, and the repetition in itself, searching for the point of novelty within all occurrences of the game, exploding the limits of the game. How can one overcome the game? Simulation concerns repetition, desire produces events. Memory is produced by the cut of an event in the flow of rep-etition; the appraisal of that cut comes from the player and cannot be foreseen by the system. This is one of the crucial issues for a teacher: he or she cannot teach if he or she is not learning while teaching. If he or she can learn some-thing from the students, this something will come from outside the prepared curriculum. The good ‘learning-teaching’

Health as the road to a less expensive psychiatry. I was involved in these activ-ities as a student union leader, searching for help for the mentally ill. I have al-ways been interested in playing with the institution, trying to create more effi-cient ways of learning, of healing and of integrating people into society. These is-sues of improvement cannot be shaped directly – when at an actions core is the wish to resist degradation, to change the normal way of management – but with uncertainty. The objectives of such expe-riences are always concrete, linked to blocked situations.

The learning situations in which I have either been involved or have studied are situated within the 20th century up to and including the 1960s. I was 20 years old in 1965 and feel little change has been made since then, at least in rela-tion to my aspirations. My life is not a long quiet river, as was mockingly stated in a French film about our hope of ending the social divide,5 but continues with research into openness, play, learning from others, and especially learning from those who are stigmatised, those who are supposed to be less able to teach us. This quest is a quest for equality, a human principle not yet realised even though it is recognised as a fundamental right.

My experience of ambivalence toward the desires invested by each per-son in a ‘common action’ showed me how collective deeds are played out in differ-ent directions and are captured by domi-

If t

he c

ow p

ath

that

lead

s st

arvi

ng J

ames

, los

t in

th

e w

oods

, to

a us

eful

hou

se…

If J

ames

, in

findi

ng a

hou

se, fi

nds

his

assu

mpt

ion

abou

t th

e pa

th t

rue

(tha

t it

wou

ld l

ead

him

to

a ho

use)

, the

n Ja

mes

is s

aved

from

dea

th b

y st

arva

-ti

on, a

ssum

ing

the

hous

e co

ntai

ns f

ood

(ano

ther

as

sum

ptio

n –

whi

ch,

star

ving

, he

mig

ht o

ver-

look

). T

his

is t

he w

ork

of h

is a

ssum

ptio

n. B

ut, i

t m

akes

no

diff

eren

ce to

Jam

es if

he

finds

the

hous

e,

beca

use

Jam

es d

ied

man

y ye

ars

ago,

and

is

no

long

er s

earc

hing

. L

ike

the

scen

ario

wit

h th

e de

flate

d so

ccer

bal

l, Ja

mes

, or

Ban

ks c

ould

, if

eith

er o

f th

em w

ere

still

aro

und,

find

som

ethi

ng

rese

mbl

ing

Bot

tleb

rush

in

any

plan

t. I

ts j

ust

as

reas

onab

le t

o as

sum

e th

at J

ames

has

for

gott

en

that

he’

s go

t an

ice

box

wit

h hi

m,

and

it h

as g

ot

plum

s in

it.

5 E

tien

ne C

hati

lliez

, La

vie

est u

n lo

ng fl

euve

tran

quill

e, f

ilm

fran

çais

, 19

88.

6

Bru

no L

atou

r, C

hang

er la

soci

été

– re

fair

e de

la so

ciol

ogie

, Pa

ris:

La

déco

uver

te, 2

00

6.

171170

expelled from her school and sent to an alternative school. The school welcomes young people with social problems and tries to help them recover from bad aca-demic results as well as to teach them psychological self-defence. The slogan of the school, ‘each one teach to each one’, is depicted in the film through mutual learning between the children, the teachers and social workers. The importance of learning for and from teaching is recognised.

This ‘brotherhood’ method is not very efficient when it remains between two persons and is not championed by collectives or institutions. The group, as a medium of teaching, was established in the 17th century when people were look-ing for economic ways to teach more than one person at a time. One can easily see that the playfulness of a group is more than that of a single student. The dynamics between the students them-selves pluralise the master-student rela-tion, building a collective platform on which the master can develop his or her own project, but also which can resist it, and perhaps lead to its collapse. This is why it’s important that the teachers also work within a group and are not left solely with the students; a group of teachers, with its own complexity, is able to deal with the multiplicity of desires of their students. Educative insti-tutions need to be thought of as assem-blages of co-operation.

The ‘efficiency’ of establishing

situations are situations in which every-body can recognise this, and thus every-body learns.

Learning hasn’t always been a com-mon practice in society and teaching is not always efficient. In order to rectify this a specific constellation had to be set up. Modern teaching relies on groups in which students are taught both to co-operate and to compete; the emphasis placed on the specific group varies between countries. Much discourse around teaching, however, continues to ignore the collective dimension and speaks instead about the relation between the master and the student as if we were still in the middle ages when learning was simply a matter of imitation. The privati-sation of education that is occurring all over the developing world for budgetary reasons, is shifting towards an individu-alised way of teaching that is accessible only for those who have the means, or for the very poor when charity organisa-tions become involved.

‘Generous’ donors and teachers have founded alternative schools in order to educate low-income people in a better way than public sector schools, where poor results produced despond-ency in teachers, students and the com-munity alike. There are many such schools all over the world that often go unrecognised by the public. An example of such an alternative school can be seen in the film Precious set in the United States. A young woman, pregnant, is

But

per

haps

this

test

s th

e id

ea th

at a

sen

se is

tr

ying

to b

e m

ade

here

.T

he d

ream

res

earc

her

Alla

n H

obso

n’s

view

tha

t th

e br

ain

is n

atur

ally

in

a ch

aoti

c st

ate

is n

ot

enti

rely

con

trar

y to

Fre

ud’s

con

cept

of d

ream

s as

de

nse

loca

tion

s of

info

rmat

ion,

mad

e up

of m

any

part

s, a

ll w

ith

sign

ifica

nce.

Whi

le H

obso

n sa

ys

that

rea

ding

int

o w

hat

he r

efer

s to

as

‘ran

dom

en

ergy

sig

nals

rea

chin

g th

e co

rtex

dur

ing

RE

M

slee

p’ is

non

-psy

chol

ogic

al, e

xpla

nati

on t

hrou

gh

narr

ativ

e fo

rms

of t

his

proc

ess

is a

com

mon

ly

used

way

of ‘

mak

ing

sens

e’ o

f the

m. T

he ‘r

emem

-

beri

ng’ a

nd d

ecod

ing

of th

ese

rand

om e

nerg

y si

g-na

ls is

all

that

we

can

poss

ibly

refe

r to

as

a dr

eam

, as

thes

e tr

ansl

atio

ns g

ive

the

expe

rien

ce th

e fo

rm

need

ed f

or i

t to

be

inte

lligi

ble

to o

urse

lves

and

ot

hers

, for

it to

be

rem

embe

red.

Wha

t we

refe

r to

,

172 173

This ‘normal’ learning situation was not able to offer opportunities to society, to stimulate the social change needed by the development of services and other innovations and the public began to speak of the school as a failure. Follow-ing this, two tendencies appeared: sepa-rate the bad students and label them as mentally deficient or change the meth-ods used, opening the floor to alternatives.

A minority of teachers developed new methods on a local level and linked with each other around these alterna-tives. These initiatives were led primar-ily by those teaching in working class areas where the number of students judged as deficient was especially high. From their experiments, as was seen in the mutual schools, it appeared that the ‘normal’ schools did not pay attention to the social diversity of the pupils, nor to their ability to learn in different ways. The mutual and alternative schools were able to teach in two years the contents taught in five years at the ‘normal’ schools because they activated the desire to learn and the desire to transmit the interesting things that were learnt to their class-mates. All reformers in education say that teaching is the best way to learn, which can also be seen in the Afro-Amer-ican scheme espoused by ‘each one teach to each one’; the pleasure of learning from others is the engine for teaching them. This slogan is sometimes trans-formed into ‘learn to learn’, apprendre à

groups of pupils was experienced in ‘Mutual Schools’ (écoles mutuelles) in the 19th century: they were created in France by the government in 1816 to dis-rupt the monopoly of the Catholic church over education and thereby create a basic non-religious form of teaching. In those schools the master created groups of 10 students in which specific subjects were learnt, giving good students the respon-sibility to teach their classmates. How-ever by 1836 the government returned to this monopoly because it appeared that those educated in mutual schools had become too active: organising strikes, trade unions and socialist parties. The mutual school was transformed from an economic governmental scheme into a militant leftist hub and was, finally, mar-ginalised. The teaching method of the Catholic church was declared the ‘nor-mal’ one because it obliged pupils to sit still, be quiet and prepared them to obey orders. Prosecution was made against teachers who used any methods other than the ‘normal’ one.

But this ‘normal’ method raised a lot of practical problems when the students were no longer condemned to become factory workers and consisted of many different social groups living in the same neighbourhood. The urban school group using the ‘normal’ Catholic method was divided into good students who were predicted to be able to successfully climb up the system and bad students who were usually held back in lower classes.

as a

dre

am –

the

cong

lom

erat

e of

imag

es, e

xper

i-en

ces,

and

fee

lings

– is

ext

erio

r to

wha

t Hob

son

says

the

dre

am i

s ca

used

by.

The

dre

am i

s co

n-st

ruct

ed d

urin

g ‘w

akin

g up

,’ a

proc

ess

of r

egai

n-in

g co

nsci

ousn

ess.

The

dre

am –

or

mor

e ac

cu-

rate

ly: o

ne’s

read

ing

into

of r

ando

m e

nerg

y si

gnal

s –

is a

met

hod

of s

ocia

lisin

g th

e ch

aos

of o

ne’s

m

ind,

a c

haos

bro

ught

to th

e fo

re in

rem

embe

ring

an

d pi

ecin

g to

geth

er d

ream

s. T

he la

ngua

ge w

ith

whi

ch I

soc

ialis

e th

is p

roce

ss i

s no

t th

e dr

eam

,

but t

he d

ream

is in

stea

d th

e re

fere

nces

to it

s ch

a-ot

ic b

irth

plac

e, lo

cati

ng th

e dr

eam

in th

is w

akin

g st

ate

rath

er th

an in

a s

ensi

ble

awak

e st

ate

or R

EM

sl

eep.

The

mat

eria

l of a

dre

am is

a v

ery

diff

eren

t m

ater

ial t

o w

hat

can

poss

ibly

sub

stan

tiat

e it

in a

way

tha

t is

dur

able

, or

resi

stan

t to

its

bein

g lo

st

or fo

rgot

ten.

A h

igh

stat

e is

rela

ted

to a

dre

am s

tate

in th

at b

oth

coul

d be

thou

ght o

f as

the

subj

ect f

or w

akin

g lif

e

175174

ment of 1936 he was called in to work with the minister and some legitimacy was given to his approach. There are still Freinet classrooms in France today and they continue to be identified with the extreme left because they claim that there is equality between students and teachers precisely through their differ-ent roles. However, governmental policy no longer recognises the usefulness of this method for ‘normal’ students and therefore assigns students with prob-lems of violence and illiteracy to these classrooms.

THE EXPANDING SPACE OF INNO-VATIVE SCHOOLS

Mutual learning situations have devel-oped in urban and rural planning as well as in activities devoted to managing com-mon pool resources with different social actors. Initially each actor will look at the resource from his or her own point of view but a common space of thinking has to be created to make the various strategies visible; games with actors ex-changing their roles may help to estab-lish a shared sense of the situation. There are many collective experiences that have moved or worked in that direction, those that occur in public are often made by artists.7

Flying Carpet (‘Tapis volant, jeu de cartes’) is an exemplary case, made by artists collective Name Diffusion, (Mar-ion Baruch, Arben Iljazi, Myriam

apprendre. This version of the slogan is an acceptance of the view that the non-literate have nothing to teach others and cannot enter this knowledge exchange because they lack the first step, which in their view, is knowing how to learn. However, this position should be recog-nised as offering a specific approach to teaching. People rejected from the circle ‘each teach to each’ will never be able to access education and illiteracy may rise.

Another attempt to modify the classroom and rely on the knowledge of its students was made after the First World War by a teacher called Célestin Freinet. Freinet had been affected by gas during the war and could no longer shout to obtain silence from his stu-dents. As he didn’t want to resign he was obliged to create another method. Each day he asked one of his students to share something that was important to him or her; he then created reading material from those stories by writing them on the blackboard. The group of students listened with an attention that could not be produced by working with the books given by the Ministry of Education and he himself learnt a lot from what was shared by his students. He gave them equipment with which they could print their stories and create their own books. The students responded so strongly to this method that they began to speak out against people in positions of power, which resulted in the forced resignation of Freinet. During the socialist govern-

refle

ctio

n on

one

’s in

tern

al c

haos

. A h

igh

indu

ced

by in

gest

ing

the

oils

from

the

leav

es o

f a p

lant

, for

in

stan

ce.

Wha

t is

exp

licat

ed,

the

drea

m o

r th

e hi

gh, i

s co

nstr

ucte

d th

roug

h ex

plic

atio

n in

wak

-in

g lif

e. T

he h

igh

stat

e is

a s

emi-

cons

ciou

s st

ate,

whi

ch a

llow

s fo

r un

cons

ciou

s be

havi

our

to m

eld

wit

h th

e co

nsci

ous

cons

ider

atio

n of

it, a

kin

d of

ou

t-of

-bod

y ex

peri

ence

. Con

scio

us is

wha

t I

am

clai

min

g to

be

whi

le I

wri

te th

is. I

am

con

scio

us.

The

dre

am-s

ubst

ance

, if

it

can

be t

houg

ht o

f as

such

bei

ng a

s im

mat

eria

l as

it is

, defi

es c

onsc

ious

ra

tion

alis

atio

n, a

nd s

o ot

her

liken

esse

s ar

e dr

awn

up in

a li

min

al w

akin

g st

ate

to p

oint

to

the

inac

-ce

ssib

le e

xpla

nati

on o

f w

hat

are

esse

ntia

lly t

he

chem

ical

hap

peni

ngs

of o

ne’s

bod

y.

Thi

s re

-mem

beri

ng a

s a

mod

e of

pie

cing

toge

ther

so

me

‘thi

ng’,

whi

ch i

s in

the

vie

w o

f th

e th

ing

bein

g go

ne a

nd i

n or

der

for

it t

o ha

ve a

cur

rent

pr

esen

ce it

mus

t be

brou

ght t

oget

her

– it

s pi

eces

re

join

ed. I

sis

is f

amili

ar w

ith

Set’s

bod

y; s

he h

as

7 M

aste

r 2

prof

essi

onne

l Pro

jets

Cul

ture

ls d

ans

l’Esp

ace

Pub

lic, w

ww

.mas

terp

cep.

over

-blo

g.co

m.

176 177

not take the participants to the foreign countries from which they all come, but brings the languages of those countries to the fore, both on the cards and in a public space. Local stories can be told to young people, intercultural relations are transformed by the game at a local scale.

Mutual learning schemes cannot be accommodated by existing spaces; they need specific spaces, new spaces, to be open towards unknown desires. The mutual schools demanded new rooms, wide enough to accommodate different groups of students and facilitate the exchange of students following each subject. Mutual learning does not repro-duce ordinary lessons and thus should not be confused with private-tutoring that takes place, for example, in the home; it is an invention of a new way of assembling learning desires, a way that should be symbolised by the new spaces in which it happens. Thinking new rela-tions between students and teachers also asked the thinking of a new space in which those relations could expand; the new space may be an architectural space, but it could equally be the synthetic image of space within game devices. The end of mutual schools can be linked with this very specific demand for space. Directly following Napoleonic times when churches were still public prop-erty they could be used for schools, how-ever, when the Catholic church recov-ered these churches it became impossible to use them for non-Catholic activities

Ramnach) to organise exchanges around language between migrants and others. This initiative received funding from both the Ministry of Culture and from the Paris region. It was housed in the Museum for History of Saint Denis, a city with important migrant communi-ties, mostly from Africa. Over-sized cards prepared by the artists were dis-played in a meeting place where people were invited to present their language to others and learn their language from them; a pair fill out a card, one with a sentence coming from a migrant lan-guage and its translation into French, and the other with a standard French sentence that is supposed to say the same thing. The game was played between African migrants and French speaking inhabitants of Saint Denis. The size of the cards gave a public and artis-tic dimension to the game. What was learnt during this play was less the Afri-can languages than the capability for migrants to translate their languages into an old-fashioned French no longer used today. French has become an obsta-cle for those who have been taught to believe in these old forms. French com-monalities and differences with African languages became the object of this col-lective study by migrants and new friends: how to translate African prov-erbs into contemporary French expres-sions? Commonly used French avoids images and animals, tending to give orders or actions. Flying Carpet does

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ising spaces for experiencing and enlarg-ing reciprocity.

In games there are many opportuni-ties to experience both minor roles and positions of domination, too often the design of the mechanic game runs under the hypothesis that domination is the only position desired, when clinical practice shows everyday that, in fact, real desires are quite divergent. The machine could explore the space between effective deeds and the norm rather than focusing on the game space in its entirety. The ‘normal’ school is in the same posi-tion, arguing – just as the machine does – that the student wants to succeed, to be better than his or her classmates. This functional social space excludes many behaviours, with a peculiar violence to those who ‘act’ as obeying the norm but are inhabited internally by a strong feel-ing in another direction. Schizophrenia is the new mental illness of well-man-aged institutions, with the consequences already documented in many films: vio-lence against others and against oneself.

The multiplicity of directions of desires has to be recognised and open spaces to be created to welcome the expression of such diversity. This is a matter of play, in the sense that play is the space between the normal course of things and the actual course of things. Could this interplay be modelled to become a matter of game?

and, as usual, there was no money to support these new demands. It soon became clear that there was no space for the mutual schools within the model proposed by the government. What remains of mutual schools is the idea of reciprocity in learning which is able to appear in a variety of contexts.

APART FROM COMPULSORY PRACTICES

This reciprocity of roles cannot be played in a mechanic or electronic de-vice that asks you to choose your role, even if you can play all roles in succes-sive events. The game-player is in a space of struggle, in which he fights for a way out or for a way to win. Designers of such games are responsible for the open-ness of the different spaces in which the game takes place. It is difficult to be in-novative and imaginative whilst staying within the framework of the game. A game is an industrialised and economic product; in recent years it has been shown that private money legitimises the repetition of well-known situations and landscapes. Previously, public money was used to support such innovation – in contents, rather than in forms – but cur-rently public institutions, for instance schools, are less in favour of pleasure than of rational demonstrations. I think that the way games are developed ought to receive attention and research from the field of education as it engages with the shaping of interactions and in organ-

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I would like to write about something that I am cur-rently researching, that is, Jikken Kobo (Experimen-tal Workshop), as well, I will write about some of my past performances and their method of organisa-tion. Some kind of connec-tion might be there. Jikken Kobo is an art group that formed in Japan in the 1950s. They were a collab-orative group of visual art-ists, composers, and thea-tre designers who worked together in Tokyo for roughly six years and were active under the guidance of the prominent Japanese Surrealist literature critic, Shozo Takiguchi. Howev-er, information on Jikken Kobo is scarce; most of my English source material comes from an unpub-lished PhD dissertation by New York based art histo-rian Miwako Tezuka. For those of you who are inter-ested in Jikken Kobo after reading these notes please look at Miwako Tezuka’s detailed work, available online from Colombia University for about $20.

[1] Clip: Hurt Locker Instruments

# Audience = City = Social Space = Bodies

# X wavering expecta-tions (what they want)

# Exclusions/Inclusions, Non-administrative:

# Non-service# Position of audience

(spectators, partici-pants, being deceived, cheated, lied to)

# Position of objects (such as momentary force, movement, weight of materials)

# Position in context (social meaning of art, painting, history)

# Unfixed Architecture/Constellation (han-dling hierarchy)

# Bodies/Movement# Music/Sound (?)# Objects (the media

through which we make contact)

# Image# Text (magazines, or

other meaning productions)

[2] A scan of an advertise-ment from frieze magazine

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[3] Grand Openings

There has been a wave of avant garde performance groups in modern Japa-nese art since the 1920s.1 Some of its leaders were educated in a foreign coun-try, or had had first hand experience of the avant garde in Germany and France. For instance, an-other of my favourite art groups is MAVO who initi-ated the Futurist-Con-structivist movement in prewar Japan after spend-ing 11 months in Berlin around 1922 engaging with local artists such as chore-ographer Mary Wigman. The leaders of MAVO ap-propriated what they had experienced in Europe and translated it into their own practice when they re-turned to Japan. This ap-propriation, however, de-veloped different narra-tive structures than those of the continental art movements; this was due to the cultural and politi-cal circumstances as well as the notion of individual-ism particular to Japan. Traditionally, Japanese so-

1 See ‘Nihon no Dada 1920–1970’ [Dada in Japan], ed. Shirakawa Yoshio, Tokyo: Hakuba Shobo and Kazenobara, 1988, republished Tokyo: Suisei-sha, 2005/2006

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# Subjectivity and In-ter-subjectivity

# To draw attention away from the indi-vidual performer/art-ist, or to redistribute it between two or more performers.

# The relationship be-tween myself and the other members of the performance.

# How do power rela-tions exist? Co-de-pendency?

# My own contributions as well as those made in response to other members’ contribu-tions.

# Do not direct too much, rely on each member’s improvised decisions during the performance.

# Criteria of grouping# Fixed members or

not?# The notion of ‘Insider’

and ‘Outsider’ and how that changes dur-ing the course of the production.

# Artists and non-Artist members

# Specific community

ciety was structured pri-marily around concepts of collectivism; the notion of individualism is an import from the west, which has been internalised by mod-ern Japanese society. Since 2004 – as I am almost al-ways working as part of a group – I have been inter-ested in how those groups, and specifically those that are Japanese, formed and then eventually dissolved throughout history. I am interested in the adminis-tration of group activities and in how group dynam-ics are produced.

Shown here is a Yoga-like performance made together with Karl Hol-mqvist. We moved our bodies in response to the notion of ‘united’ or ‘untied’. Sometimes the movements were in response to a word as Karl Holmqvist read from his own poetry, appropriating the song, United by Throb-bing Gristle.

[4] Clip: A BODY LETTER PHYSIQUE

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group’s mentor Jiro Yoshi-hara who continued to dis-tribute their self-pub-lished magazines outside Japan. Jackson Pollock, Allan Kaprow and Simone Forti are just a few of the artists who were informed about Gutai’s practice through their magazines, if not by experiencing one of their performances.

A turning point came for Gutai in 1957 when they connected with the French painting move-ment, Informel, when the critic Michel Tapie visited or rather ‘escaped to Japan’ after the movement began to fade in France. Gutai was introduced to Tapie in order to reinvigorate the Informel. To me, this was unfortunate because it meant that Gutai began to shift their production toward wall-object pro-ductions in response to market interests. This could be due to the way Gutai worked with a struc-ture of mentoring. Their activities were always heavily dependent on both the leadership and spon-sorship of Jiro Yoshihara,

(not a universal body)Some of you may already know about Gutai, an art group that formed in Ja-pan in the 1950s. Gutai were recently represented at both the Venice Biennale and in Documenta 12. Their works are widely recognised, held in several public collections outside Japan and later this year their artist made maga-zines, originally produced in the 1950s, will be re-is-sued.

Many Japanese artists in the early to mid 20th century belonged to an association; this is partic-ular to Japan’s art system and stems from the craft associations of pre-mod-ern times. Gutai also seemed, at least in the beginning, to be more of a formalised artists’ associa-tion rather than a contem-porary art group whose formation often appears as fluid and organic. Yet Gutai’s activity was not confined to the formal boundaries of an associa-tion and they were able to remain fluid. This was especially true of the

191190

western institutions. This might be an incentive for the current ‘Jikken Kobo campaign’; galleries seem to be ‘re-discovering’ Jik-ken Kobo. At Art Basel 2010 Taka Ishii Gallery from Japan screened some of Jikken Kobo’s films (in which I was also involved), in 2009 Annely Juda Fine Art in London showed some of Jikken Kobo’s art-ists and that was followed by another small show at Mayerei in Karlsruhe. There was also a section of Jikken Kobo’s work in the Gwangju Biennale 2010. I am hoping that this inter-est from within the art market and institutions will help to increase understanding of the wave of performance art groups that came out of Japan, otherwise this wave will exist merely as incidental fragments of history, that somehow disappear with-out a trace…Mavo, Jikken Kobo, Gutai, High Red Center, Neo Dada Organ-izers, Zero Jigen, and most recently, Dumb Type…

[6] A flyer

who owned a large cook-ing oil company in Japan. Gutai continued to prac-tice up until 1972, although some of its original mem-bers became disillusioned and decided to leave the group much earlier. On the day of Jiro Yoshihara’s death Gutai will cease its activities. I am sorry that the way I write this sug-gests that I am skeptical of Gutai.

[5] Rehearsal at the museum

As a comparison to Gutai, Jikken Kobo (founded in 1951) was a mystery. This is probably because of the short lifespan of the group. They collaborated on thea-tre productions (similar to Gutai) and sometimes they made commercially com-missioned films – their work was often driven by the latest technology avail-able following the end of the Second World War.

At this moment there is a renewed interest in, or re-evaluation of, perfor-mance art from the recent past, especially within

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synchronised tape re-corder), September 1953

# Arnold Schönberg Concert in 1954

# Experimental Ballet Theatre, March 1955

# Theatre: Pierrot Lu-naire in December 1955

# Cafe Fugetsudo in Shinjuku, Summer 1956

# Film: Silver Wheel in May 1956

# Cafe Fugetsudo in Shinjuku, Summer 1957

[8] An image of Jikken Kobo found online.

According to Miwako Te-zuka, ‘Jikken Kobo has been in existence in the field, paradoxically, as an absence (…) Indeed, the group has been thought of as an urban myth, some-thing plausible but not de-finitive. The Kobo – “the workshop” – existed in Tokyo, the capital of art and politics, but only as a creative movement and not as a physical institu-tion.’ This is quoted from

In relation to the historic-ity of performance I re-cently made a work at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Above is an image of the flyer. The University of Michigan is famous for its football team, with the iconic blue or yellow ‘M’. For this per-formance, commissioned by the art history confer-ence PoNJA GenKon, I collaborated with histori-ans of post-1945 Japanese art and collected a list of significant ‘M’ subjects in that field. The university’s logo was adopted as part of the performance.

[7] Clip: M for Mavoists (…and so on)

Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop)# Ballet: The Joy of Life

(ikiru yorokobi), No-vember 16 1951

# Relief: A Passage To Another Dimension (ijigen eno michi), Feb-ruary 1952

# The Fifth Presentation (an automatic slide projector with

Image overleaf

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during the summer of 1948, leading to the for-mation of ongoing infor-mal meetings. Eventually they connected with Sho-zo Takiguchi, who was something like Jikken Kobo’s ‘modest’ mentor. It was Takiguchi who sug-gested that a group of art-ists should collaborate on producing a ballet for a commission from the news company. This may sound opportunistic, but in Ja-pan art production often comes out of the commer-cial sector due to the na-ture of the traditional role of ‘artist’ in society. More-over, Shozo Takiguchi, who was also a literature critic, always provided a form of guidance for their creative dignity, and al-though he was never the official patron of the group it was he who suggested the name Jikken Kobo. Perhaps he functioned more like a guardian than, say, a leader (which was the case with Jiro Yoshiha-ra’s role in Gutai).

Jikken Kobo usually consisted of 14 main mem-bers during their six years

page 26 of the text I noted previously.

Often they referred to their activity as a ‘presen-tation’ rather than an ‘exhi-bition’, this is probably because Jikken Kobo had two main ‘departments’– visual art and music. Their first presentation was a ballet commissioned in relation to a major Picasso retrospective in Japan. The ballet was called The Joy of Life (‘Ikiru Yorokobi’) after Picasso’s painting of the same title seen here.

[9] The Joy of Life

I like that the first occasion for the group to act was commissioned from out-side the group, instead of having a manifestation that emphasised their autono-mous status. The ballet was sponsored by ‘Yomi-uri’ newspaper in Japan who were eager to gain readership by supporting liberal cultural events in the period immediately af-ter the war. Some of Jik-ken Kobo’s earliest mem-bers met at a workshop or-ganised by an art school

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[10] The fifth presentation program

[11] PS1

Grand Openings is the art-ists collective I am part of. We organised a perfor-mance in Vienna in 2008 and for this performance Vienna born artist Josef Strau helped to comple-ment our performance. Below is a text borrowed from Josef that was used in this Grand Openings performance:

[12] Text by Josef Strau

Grand Openings has so far focused on group activity with fixed members. It is a performance collective that consists of five differ-ent ‘commitments’; a per-formance artist (myself); a painter/musician/writer (Jutta Koether); a galler-ist/artist/singer (Emily Sundblad); a curator (Jay Sanders); and a composer (Stefan Tcherepnin). We have been working collab-oratively since 2005 and our most recent perfor-mance was in Sweden

of activity. Shozo Kitadai, Hideko Fukushima and Katsuhiro Yamaguchi rep-resented the ‘visual art department’, while the ‘music department’ was often represented by Toru Takemitsu, Joji Yuasa, and also the poet, Kuniharu Akiyama (in fact, after Stravinsky’s visit to Japan in 1958, Toru Takemitsu became known interna-tionally through this con-tact). Throughout these six years they consistently made ‘presentations’ and also maintained ties with their sponsors for both theatre and ballet commis-sions. Jikken Kobo’s music department organised an Arnold Schönberg concert as part of a presentation in 1954, this was the earliest of its kind in Japan. For one of the Jikken Kobo presentations in 1953 they collaborated with Tokyo Telecommunications Engi-neering Company, which was later to become Sony, the company provided them with an automatic slide projector and a syn-chronised tape recorder.

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Shultz, Sam Lewitt, Henning Bohl, Merlin Carpenter, Continu-ous Project, and Etc.

[14] Space Space

The image on the left is Shozo Kitadai, and the im-age on the right is a photo-graphic artwork by Kiyoshi Otsuji. Katsuhiro Yamaguchi created the construction in this photo-graph solely for the photo shoot. In 1956 Jikken Kobo made a promotional film commissioned by the bicycle industry, it was called Silver Wheel (‘Gin-rin’), the sound was creat-ed by Toru Takemitsu. The film was a sort of theatre commercial, but it is very theatrical, funny, and sur-real. The image of the mov-ing bicycle parts seemed eerie yet at the same time light hearted.

[caption] Clip: Silver Wheel in May 1956 (not al-lowed for re-print)

# Dance Like Movement# Anxiety to stay in one place?

where Emily Sundblad comes from originally.

[13] Clip: Grand Openings Carrier Waves

# What is Scenario?# Design/Planning/Or-

ganising impulse (Time Restraints)

# Often without rehears-als (although this is not always on purpose)

# Design that aims to re-move itself, and that continues to shift in form throughout the performance and post-performance.

# CHAOTIC, and yet it is a struggle to produce meaning

# Some brief scenarios, to-do lists, not an over-view

# New York/Brooklyn:# Localised Group? Out

of Reena Spaulings Fine Art

# Public/Commercial# Friends/Admirers/In-

fluences (mostly friends in New York)

# Jutta Koether, Ber-nardette Corporation, Reena Spaulings, Nora

Images overleaf

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materials, acknowledge those who invited me, and do a performance. The ma-jority of the work is made in cities in Europe or in New York (and sometimes other parts of the USA), more recently I have worked in Tokyo and Seoul.

In 1955 Jikken Kobo was involved in two thea-tre works. The image seen in the Taka Ishii gallery advertisement in frieze magazine shows a photo-graph of a robot like struc-ture that was used in the performance called The Experimental Ballet Thea-tre by Jikken Kobo, from March 1955. They also performed their experi-mental form of Noh thea-tre called Pierrot Lunaire (tsuki ni tsukareta piero) in this structure in Decem-ber 1955 after Arnold Schönberg.

[16] Some stage materials from Pierrot Lunaire

Their final activity as a group seems to have been the installation of a Bau-haus style Café Fugetsudo

# Everything must move?

# How does ‘this make use of a circuit of ener-gy that is neither inside or outside, before or after the event?’

# How is this ‘never real-ly owned by any one participant but passed around as the specific spatial concept of the performance?’

# Production time?# Design Problem# Fear of being organ-

ised?# Regulations, freedom,

or both

[15] Mari Mukai is a friend, and self-taught carpenter

When I do a performance I often construct temporary buildings throughout the duration. These are built with the help of several collaborators, such as Mari Mukai. Usually I fly to the place of the perfor-mance four or five days in advance, sometimes just two days, and try to source

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specific)

[19] An Exchange with Yuming

Here is a photo taken in Japan in 2008. During this half-hour performance I reconstructed the archi-tecture from memory. I had experienced this space as a teenager. It evoked a utopian fantasy although it related to commercial pop culture. I was part of a fan club for Yuming, a singer, for 10 years, and went to see her in concert in this space every year. The majority of people at her concerts were women; it was a very feminine space, one in which I felt very comfortable. During the concerts there was an opportunity for someone to sing with her on the stage, lots of fans raise their hands so she could pick someone. I raised my hand as well. Then she told me from the stage, ‘You must be gay as I see the way you raising hand!’ (Al-though she didn’t use the word gay, she implied it). This singer was among the

in both 1956 and 1957. Here they gave concerts and poetry readings that related to the installation. Jikken Kobo naturally dis-persed in 1957 and mem-bers shifted into primarily solo activities, although many carried on collabo-rating afterwards as well.

[16] Café Fugetsudo

[17] Clip: Sky, Horse and Death

Or

[18] Clip: I am an employ-ee of United

# I said, a Sort of a Scare-crow = Someone mis-heard, Social Scare-crows

# Scarecrows = audience = architecture?

# Group Comedy# Attention to the specif-

ic moment/situation, power relations

# How to vary the power relations?

# What can I offer, in re-lation to the city (Not necessarily site-

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audience at the perfor-mance in 2008: she came to my performance. The performance also included a large print out of my in-terview with the producer of this singer. The perfor-mance created a reciprocal experience.

Mar

git R

osen

The Delights That

Twentieth Century

Technology Owes Us

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‘Do you enjoy routine?’‘Do you enjoy disaster?’ ‘Do you hate the neigh-

bours, your own family?’‘Do you suffer from

boredom, overwork, loneli-ness, overcrowding?’1

The Fun Palace was con-ceived in the early 1960s for those citizens who could an-swer these questions in the affirmative. The British thea-tre activist Joan Littlewood – who conceived the idea in 1962 – and the architect Ce-dric Price planned a gigantic ‘plaything’ in London Vaux-Vaux-hall Gardens, where those unhappy citizens could ‘learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery’, or just listen to their favourite tune; where they could dance, talk or watch other people make things work; where they could ‘try starting a riot or beginning a painting or just lie back and stare at the sky.’2 In order for them to escape alienation and apathy, both of which were believed to have been caused by the edu-cational system and the auto-mated processes of industry and public administration, the Fun Palace (that was ulti-

1 Joan Littlewood, question-naire, [no date], Fun Palace document folio DR 1995:0l88:526, Cedric Price Archives, Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal. Quoted in Stanley Mathews, An Architecture for the New Britain: The Social Vision of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt, PhD thesis, New York: Columbia University, 2003, p.134.2 ‘Joan Littlewood presents the First Giant Space Mobile in the World it moves in light, turns winter into summer…toy…’, information brochure, [no date], [1964], Gordon Pask Archive, Institut für Zeitge-schichte, Vienna University.

mately never built) sought to offer ‘the possibilities and the delights that a 20th cen-tury city environment owes us’.3 Citizens who suffered because of both conforming to the structures of the com-panies and institutions that employed them, and adjust-ing to the machines they served, were given a ‘cyber-netic’ environment which would adapt itself to them, both on the level of events and architecture. The walls, floors, stairs and roof mod-ules could be mobilised with-in the steel structure of the building; this movement was controlled by computing-machines that were able to monitor people’s behaviour and transform the architec-ture according to their needs.

At the Fun Palace, leftist activism and cybernetics formed an alliance. 200 years prior, the advocates of the Enlightenment had relied on science and technology to help build a civilisation beyond the laws of nature: an unnatural, egalitarian soci-ety. The Fun Palace was meant as an experiment in exploring the latest informa-tion technologies and

3 Ibid.

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Gordon Pask, Lecture at the second congress of the Associa-tion Internationale de Cyberné-

tique, Namur, Belgium, 1958On the far right: Ross Ashby.

Gordon Pask, Robin McKinnon-Wood, Musicolour, 1952–1957

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meant to increase personal happiness by widening the scope of individual agency and in doing so, rescue 20th century man from intellec-tual boredom and atrophy.

The Fun Palace has been chosen as the introduction to this essay on Gordon Pask as it was his most spectacular project in terms of scale. In order to understand Pask’s technophile world vision, his ideas of conversation, play and learning, as well as his concept of ‘aesthetically potent environments’, that still inspire architects and artists to this day,4 it is nec-essary to look at the lesser known concepts and machin-ery he developed in 1950s and 1960s whilst moving restlessly between the fields of theatre, music, electronic teaching, ergonomics, mili-tary training, fine arts and architecture.

GORDON PASK – A BIO-GRAPHICAL NOTE

Photographs show a physi-cally frail man; born in Der-by in 1928, Gordon Pask lived until the age of 67. In the course of his intense life, one that followed the rhythm

whether these technologies could be used to create an environment that emanci-pated its citizens. However, in the 1950s these technolo-gies were already suspected of being just a replacement of the ferocious insensibility of nature with an even cru-eler system of profit maximi-sation, and to reinforce the power of men over men.

The British psycholo-gist, scientist, and cyberneti-cian, Gordon Pask, who was called on by Littlewood and Price to develop and imple-ment the cybernetic struc-ture of the Fun Palace, would never have described it in these terms. In the early 1950s, uninterested in his-torical or classical political argument, Pask began to conceive a world in which men and machines – as well as men and men, and machines and machines – would not simply communi-cate, but rather conduct ‘con-versations’. This implied that they would learn from each other and, as a result, both the human and mechanical actors would change. His world of adaptive learning machines and buildings was

4 See, for example, Pask Present, an exhibition of experimental art and design influenced by Gordon Pask’s cybernetic theory and practice, curated by Richard Brown, Stephen Gage and Ranulph Glanville, Atelier Färbergasse, Vienna, 2008

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Urbana, Champaign in 1959 – described him as a genius. His capacity to see ‘opera-tional, functional, semantic etc., relational structures at an arbitrary depth’, was a faculty for which von Foer-ster himself had ‘no organs, no sense, no language.’5 Although Pask would dedi-cate these talents to science, his first love was for theatre and music and the buildings that housed these activities. These locations were to become the initial laborato-ries for his cybernetic exper-iments and the birthplace of a new technical environment for mankind.

MAN IS A SYSTEM THAT NEEDS TO LEARN

Pask considered the human being to be a system that had the tendency to ceaselessly explore its environment for novelty and that, as a result, had to learn to control the unknown. To learn meant to reduce the uncertainty of events, and this applied to both human and machine en-vironments. Pask stressed that we cannot make predic-tions about the ‘real world’, only about simplified ab-

of a 36-hour day, Pask wrote more than 270 articles and six books, gave countless seminars and lectures, and built a large number of cy-bernetic machines. Having studied geology and mining, chemistry, biology, medicine and psychology, Pask held a PhD in psychology and an-other in cybernetics. By his early 30s he was considered to be one of the most impor-tant British representatives of cybernetics, a science that had not originally been syn-onymous with computing science, but that signified a system of description and construction. Cybernetics emerged in the 1940s and linked the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineer-ing, logic modelling, evolu-tionary biology and neuro-science. As a pioneer in the field of adaptive teaching machines, Pask achieved in-ternational fame from the mid-1950s onwards.

Heinz von Foerster, another major protagonist from the field of cybernetics – who, having invited Pask to the legendary Biological Computer Laboratory in

5 Heinz von Foerster, ‘On Gordon Pask’, Systems Research, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1993, pp. 35–42, p. 40.

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Joan Littlewood presents the FIRST GIANT SPACE MOBILE IN THE WORLD it

moves in light turns winter into summer... toy...EVERYBODY’S what is it?,

information brochure about the Fun Palace, 1964

222 223

his companion. Just as in conversation, this ‘non-triv-ial’ machine considered the progress of the exchange. Surprisingly, if we are to believe contemporary accounts, the operators seemed to enjoy conversa-tion with this capricious mechanical ‘other’, and were completely immersed in this exchange of sound and light. The musicians were subject to the machine’s ‘aversion’ to repetition, but still they were granted a little technical sup-port in this friendly quarrel: they could impose certain and specific preferences for the translation of music into light by means of a pedal. Thereby an individual ‘lan-guage’ emerged between each operator and the machine.

Musicolour, noted Pask, was the ‘performer’s partner in conversation’, and the per-formance ‘was the conversa-tion itself.’9 While Sigmund Freud reified psychological processes using metaphors taken from mechanics, elec-trodynamics, chemistry, and hydraulics – such as ‘mecha-nism’, ‘resistance’, ‘neutrali-sation’, or ‘repression’ – Pask

stractions. These private im-pressions allow us to cope with the environment and to make decisions.6 Pask as-sumed that building these conceptual frameworks was a pleasant activity.

In 1952–53, together with Robin McKinnon-Wood, Pask built a machine that did not enable the oper-ator to easily reduce uncer-tainty, or more specifically, that did not allow for the ready development of a model of the machine’s behaviour, but quite the con-trary: they constructed a machine that was ‘moody’. Musicolour was an electro-mechanical system based on an ‘electronic computor (sic) of revolutionary design’,7 that translated sound into light projections. Pask had formulated the machine so that when a musician played it, it would suddenly refuse to respond to a sound out of ‘boredom’.8 The machine would ‘consider’ the rhythm and spectrum of sound to be too monotonous. In its refusal to co-operate, Musi-colour forced the musician to vary his musical expression if he did not want to lose it as

6 See Gordon Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics, London: Hutchinson, 1961, pp. 18–22.7 Gordon Pask, ‘Moon-Music and Musicolour: Explanatory Notes’, Moon Music, theatre club programme, Trayton Gardens, South Kensington, 12–27 January, 19548 Gordon Pask, ‘A Comment, a case history, a plan’ in ed. Jasia Reichardt, Cybernetics, Art and Ideas, London: Studio Vista, 1971, pp. 76–98, p. 90.

9 Gordon Pask, ‘The Purpose and Functioning of the System’, typescript 25, August 1954, Box 4.43.2, Gordon Pask Archive, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Vienna University.

224 225

anthropomorphised the man-machine relation by using a term that derives from the Latin con-versatio, ‘to live with’ or ‘keep com-pany with’. This was a term used to describe a highly coded form of communica-tion within the aristocratic salons of 17th century France, that eventually came to mean a pleasant, ideally aimless, exchange of words. Pask had transformed these machines that had once belonged to a silent society of material things, ignorant to our excitements and moods, into actors that no longer prom-ised either permanence or stability, but that actively provoked change.

Images © Gordon-Pask-Archive, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Vienna University, except image opposite, © Jasia Reichardt

Gordon Pask, The Colloquy of Mobiles, installation view of the exhibition Cybernetic Serendip-

ity, 1968, ICA, London

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Everything is in Everything

Everything is in

Everything

David Reinfurt

228 229

thing’, plus the economy of these words forming a com-plete pedagogy. A room full of maybe four year old school children, separately engaged yet in com-mon proximity, sit on the floor, at desks, and work with cards, letters, models, and sticks. Montessori teaching empha-sises the self-direction of children in the classroom, particularly through the intuitive de-velopment of the sens-es. The teacher in the classroom acts less as an in-

I found this picture the other day…

…together with its caption: Montessori School classroom. ‘A framework that supports autodidactic activities, operat-ing under the assumption that everything is in every-thing.’

The image was on page 5 of Common Circular 4, a tabloid newspaper published in early 2010 by common room architects, New York City. I’d read the paper when it was published and was even quoted in it. However, this time the image struck me a fresh – almost cer-tainly it was the line ‘every-thing is in every-

230 231

structor than a guide or host, facilitating a child’s free devel-opment and removing obstacles that might get in the way of that. These methods are based on the research and experi-ences of Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori at the beginning of the 20th century.

About 60 years before, Friedrich Fröbel had developed a compatible approach to early childhood education in Ger-many that centred on a set of sensory toys, or gifts, and was called Kindergarten. In a 2002 article from Cabinet maga-zine, Norman Brosterman offers a concise account of Frö-bel’s methods:

‘The life forms were tangible: chairs, trees, people; the knowledge forms mathematical: 2 # 4 = 8, 4 + 4 = 8; the beauty forms were usually symmetrical patterns as Frö-bel felt symmetry was most comprehensible as beauty to little children. Equivalency was kindergarten’s foun-dation and it was expressed in all things and at all times. For four, five, and six year olds, transforming the very same materials into something new each day, as the class shifted from gift to gift and from realm to realm, the ultimate lesson of kindergarten was straightfor-ward. In slightly different guise, the world, math-ematics, and art were interchangeable, and their perceived borders were misleading, artificial constructs. A chair might become numbers, numbers art, and art either or both. With extremely simple means, former crystallogra-pher Fröbel effec-tively assembled all the com-ponents of the

universe into his training program for infants. Chil-dren could make anything they saw, perceived, or imagined, and in doing so would enter the world – and it would enter them.’

At home later that night, I picked up Hypergraphics, Visualizing Com-plex Relationships in Art, Sci-ence and Technology. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with this peculiar collection of s e m i - a c a -d e m i c p a -

(Prag-matism,

With a Bottlebrush

Plant in the Room)

C. S. Peirce’s ‘public’ – or the public that proceeds, on

which his ‘truth’ depends, is a body with varied ideas of truth. That

there is the possibility for a ‘specific’ group to be or become united – a group

within this concept of ‘public’ I don’t think is what Peirce is suggesting, but this is an exciting

prospect. When talking about this public, we must say that this public is ‘a’ public, and in doing so, unknowingly

it would seem, Pierce refers to a conception of public that is perfectly appropriate for his ‘truth’ to be its audience. In this way, Pierce sets the stage for a problem: a pragmatic truth is a truth in so far as it is self aware of its arbitrary nature. James’ critique or reforming of Peirce’s pragmatism points out how Peirce’s conception of ‘public’ is dependent on an intellectual notion of ‘truth’ being absolute. For Peirce, truth comes from knowing what one thinks, to be a master of one’s own meaning and then to find its justice in the world – for James then to first know that he thinks he is starving and lost, and then to find a method for meeting his needs only after he has identified the problem. This may be true, but this, like the true statement made in response to an unrelated question, is not a way to summarise clarity in absolute terms. The unclear idea – dream, high, Bottlebrush plant – can be brought into clarity, but it does not start out as being true, or having some definite known nature or some totally under-stood meaning or body. To say as much is to discredit Peirce as a pragmatist, and to suggest that the dream is not chaotic

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pers published in 1978 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and this time, the book opened it-self on page 25:

‘Everything, every “thing”, takes meaning only by inter-action with something else. Indeed its existence cannot be known without such interaction. The inside of fig.1 represents this, though its boundary is joined to the rest of the world. Both physically and conceptually the qual-ities of things are discernible only through the response of an external probe interacting with their internal structure. The real units of the world are not particles – atoms, in whatever sense one uses the word – but con-nections, and a connection must be between two things.’

Cyril Stanley Smith, Institute Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology* continues in his article ‘Dimensionality, Valence and Aggrega-tion’ to describe the relationship of these dy-namic connections to a ‘thing’. He says of finding a ‘thing’ in the world that ‘it is all a question of what connections are actually established at the time of observation.’ If the connections change, the ‘thing’ changes. He follows this a r g u m e n t a n d

*

‘When consulted

by the Massachusetts

Institute of Technol-ogy as the best way to

infuse their technologically heavy curriculum with art,

[American designers Charles and Ray] Eames rejected the idea of

additional art courses or fine arts programs as “an aesthetic vitamin concentrate.” Instead

[they] designed an alternative situation, a program for enriching the student’s (and the university’s)

communicative possibilities to the point where they could experience the aesthetic possibilities of their own discipline. In

the proposal [the] Eames’ would have each student near the end of his M.I.T. career join one or two other students in teaching something

of their major specialty to an elementary school class for a semester. The teaching could take the form of films, exhibits, lectures, games, models

– whatever the team needed to make what they knew and understood meaningful to children.”… If the M.I.T. student is going to learn anything about art,” [the] Eames’ argued, “he will learn it here”.’ (Ralph Caplan, ‘Making Connections: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames’, UCLA, 1976, as reprinted in Re-Connections: The Work of the Eames Office, New Haven: Yale University School of Architec-ture, 1999)

and does not rely on interpretation and remembering. Thought is only one of the many systems employable by an individual. Regardless of whether or not the recollection of the dream is true, the recollection is what subsists.

This is a set of notes on William James’ ‘pragmatism’ made with a Bottlebrush plant in the room.

If I have a Bottlebrush in the room with me – would you be able to tell? And what difference might it make. When I started writing this I did not have one in the room with me. Periodically I work on this without the plant in the room: I take it into the bathroom to water it, periodically, and leave it in the tub to drain. Am I, pragmatically speaking, talking

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makes the kind of assertions for which a retired academic is particularly forgiven. His next section is titled by the radical assertion:

‘Polyhedra Don’t Exist’

and continues: ‘There has been much speculation as to why the world in which we live seems to be three-dimensional. Our experience as children learning by moving and poking and acquiring a sense of inside, outside, flexibility and solidity makes us think of dimensionality in terms of points, polygons and polyhedra, the things so beauti-fully related by Euler’s Law. I contend that polygons and polyhedral do not exist but only what Arthur Loeb in private conversation has called “polyvertices”. Poly-gons and polyhedra mark the negation of connections, and their seeming reality is a mere construct of the human senses responding to gradients of density of ver-tices with one-dimensional interconnections. Both pol-ygons and polyhedra can be shrunk to points with-out any change in external connections. Whether or not they appear is entirely a matter of choice, of the scale or resolution of the means of observation.’

Professor Smith marks a pro-nounced skepticism in what he sees, and by the end of his paper he has more or less done away with ‘things’ altogeth-er. In their place, he offers a

fluid, contingent world, defined by connections and manifest ONLY in the moment of perception:

‘Whether or not a connection between two vertices is actually made is a question of time – of perhaps more properly the inverse, that time is the sequence of connections. The changing present is a sort of moiré pat-t e r n

about Bott le-

b r u s h ? When the Bot-

tlebrush plant is not in the room?When I say ‘Bottle-

brush’ I mean to refer to the idea of the plant, and when I say

‘Callistemon’ I mean to refer to the plant exactly. By exactly, I mean the 36

different species of Callistemon and all the others which are also referred to as ‘Bottle-

brush’, but I

suppose I refer mostly in

my mind to what is known as Callistemon

splendens, as that is the one growing in the room – but the

possibility of this ‘referring to’ is exactly what’s at issue here.The notation attached to Bottlebrush

might as well be a truth. The plant is resilient, might as well be, and the notion is not. Are we

thinking of the plant? Do you know what it looks like? Do you see it? I didn’t prune it, I gave it next to no

attention and most of the leaves fell off. The experiences I have of the plant are not absolute at

any point other than in themselves. My conception of these experiences is too far removed for them to contribute to the world’s experience (and in turn the world is getting closer to an absolute truth) or any singular conception other than my own. The allowance for differentiation between today’s truth and tomorrow’s is not accurate enough. The truth of any moment is only absolute in its being of a precise context. We live forwards, and understand backwards, but when we understand it’s already too late. What does remain as far as remaining is possible, is the understanding, and distinctly as an understanding – the idea of that which has been lived. The property which is truth remains immutable and in tact, as it must. ‘Truth doesn’t exist, it holds, it contains.’

Commonly sensible – that is what this plant that is in the room will be when someone else is here too. What suffices? While it ‘works’ to assume anything – to assume that Japan

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formed between the structures of past and future.’Earlier this spring, I picked up a paperback from a street vendor on upper Broadway. The cover was marked by a cas-cade of two names, an image, and a category:

HUMEA. J. Ayer (portrait of David Hume)PAST-MASTERS

The slim volume was a synthesis and analysis of David Hume’s thought compiled by Oxford University Professor of Logic, Alfred Jules Ayer. I’d finally read Hume’s major work, A Treatise of Human Nature, last summer after intending to do so for the past 10 years.

The cover of Ayer’s book has a picture of David Hume, an oil painting of unidentified provenance that looks as if it has been run through the filters of an early Paintbox com-puter graphics program to realise this exaggerated pixel-portrait:

I couldn’t believe my eyes (Hume, arch-skeptic of the senses would say that is precisely the point) – the cover image viscerally flipped back and forth in my brain between being a portrait of David Hume, 18th century Scottish Enlighten-ment philosopher, and being simply surface, the pure sensation of its infra-thin Paintbox pixelation effect.

exists even though I’ve never been there – it also may just as easily not work. For something to work is rather arbitrary for James. But what does ‘not working’ look like? It does not work for the elephant to assume that it can’t pull itself away from the stake that it has been tied to, even in the event of a fire. It is ‘used as’ a clock, but by whom? And who is using the stake? This is a useful question to ask of Bottlebrush, governance, and the problem of shorthand.

‘Beliefs verified concretely by ‘somebody’ are the posts of the whole superstructure.’ The posts, as with the elephant,

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No sooner do you decide for yourself that it is one, it flips back again to the other.

David Hume provides a fundamental category distinc-tion that describes this split. He begins Part I, Section I of A Treatise of Human Nature by describing exactly two ways of knowing the world:

‘All the perceptions of the mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call “impressions” and “ideas”.’

Impressions are first-hand sense reports – ‘those percep-tions that enter with most force and violence.’ Ideas, on the other hand, are noisy signals from the past, impressions that have been churned and reordered in the mind – ‘faint images of these [impressions] in thinking and reasoning.’ For Hume, direct sensory perception and its resulting impressions are always primary.

A. J. Ayer helpfully places Hume in the framework of British Empiricism; a fundamental philosophical position that claims all knowledge arrives directly from sense experi-ence. Empiricism relies on a step-by-step sensory con-struction of the world and sits in direct opposition to Rationalism, which imagines the world as com-plete and total, waiting to be described.

Ayer begins his Empiricist line with John Locke. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke first concretely described our understanding of the world as coming only from sense percep-tions. He then divided this sense data i n t o

two categories: ideas of primary and ideas of secondary qualities. Primary qualities resemble the object that they describe, such as the solidity of a table, or the extension of a broom handle. Secondary qualities are then reduced to surface treatments and therefore subject to change. These include colour or taste, and as Ayer describes Locke describing these, they are:

are there

for no i n h e r e n t

verifiable neces-sity, but as fallible

and arbitrary, non-reflexive, rigid and false. I

mean to say that circles don’t exist. And James’ truth is totally

intellectualistic and not pragmatic at all. The symbols by which an item is recog-

nised are not always present with the item as

sym-b o l s .

They are just as ephem-

eral and meta-physical as the ideas

that rely on them to unite an item with meaning. It may

be the habit of a symbol to be present but it is just a habit when

that symbol is not exercised. In this way the ‘true’ meaning occurs as a habit of

some ideas, notable as truth in the intervals of a symbol being actively produced in relation to its

subject. A habit being that which forms a sustained linkage between the perception of a symbol with its sub-

ject, and the residue of that: the memory or recalling of it.

The notation, an outline, of Bottlebrush is not meagre, it is substantial, it ‘is’ a substance, and ‘has’ Bottlebrush, but not Bottlebrush’s substance, but rather a shape or mould of it. This notation or mould must be made in order to feel that the item exists.

Through suggestion, the notation allots and constructs an access to the item, a belief of the item. The notation is a flat building, but a building whose entire intelligible body can be drawn out, as much as a building can compensate for its material being moulded, and meticulously planned, as much as plans must be elastic.

I have a particular inclination to make superficial asso-ciations between Bottlebrush and other items, ones that are indirectly logical. For example, the woodiness of the mate-rial of Callistemons and that of Herbert Spencer’s system, and the material of dreams or semi-conscious states of mind, those that are built up or supplied as diagrams. Is my opera-

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Nothing more than effects.**

In Locke’s estimation, and in order to make his philosophy square up with Sir Isaac Newton’s contemporary scientific theories, objects themselves contain these qualities that are in turn sensed by people as we move through the world.

Next in line according to Ayer is George Berkeley, the Anglo-Irish philosopher and bishop who, at the beginning of the 18th century, ‘demolished [Locke’s] theory of percep-tion.’ Following Locke, Berkeley agreed that we only know the world through direct sensory experience but then traced this to its logical end. If we only know something through direct experience then we cannot say anything about exter-nal objects separate from our sensible perception of them. Bishop Berkeley continues by suggesting that a mind is required to order these sensations and to construct these objects through a series of sensations. Therefore Locke’s dis-tinction between primary and secondary qualities as located in an object was patently false. Berkeley’s account instead relied on God to originate the sensations and to make them known in a mind. According to the bishop, Locke ‘had no warrant, on his premises, for believing in the existence of physical objects at all, that is, so long as physical objects are conceived…as existing independently of our perception of them.’

Ayer places David Hume directly in this arc. Hume reduces the Empirical argument to its almost absurd essence. Ayer, again:

‘Berkeley had elimi-nated matter, but left m i n d s

intact. Hume, an avowed skeptic, showed that this favouritism was unjustified. We had as little rea-son for believing in the existence of minds, as beings that maintain their identity through time, as we had for believing in the existence of material sub-stances . . . All that remains then, is a series of fleeting “perceptions” with no external object, no enduring sub-ject to w h o m they

tion h e r e

to flatten Bottlebrush,

or to flesh it out? James says

Spencer’s principles are skin and bone, but that the

meat of his books is moulded around a highly specific world. I am, as James is, opposed to a

‘flat’ outline in favour of a ‘fat’ one. What am I doing if I am not interested in

a surplus of excitement that can be generated

**

‘WHAT, AFTER

ALL, IS AN “EFFECT”? The

word is familiar enough. According to the

Oxford English Dictionary, its earliest appearance, just anteced-

ent to Chaucerian times, denoted either a “result” or “goods, moveable

property.” Other applications would soon arise, however, including a pair that seem

directional opposites along a single axis of causality, pertaining to “a mode or degree of operation on an

object” and, conversely, “the physical result of an action of force.” Here the significance and usage, one imagines, were

determined by context – by the grammar of a given situation. Yet all these different meanings are germane and even possess a kind of

simultaneity today, when it comes to digital effects bought and sold in filter packages ranging from Adobe Premiere to Final Cut Pro. Indeed, they are

tightly interwoven, production and product, dynamic and object, catalyst and consequence. For at stake in this specific contemporary context – where the effect is understood as “a visual or acoustic device used to convey atmosphere or the illusion of reality” – is an impression of naturalistic action or behavior rendered in what is, in fact, inanimate form. Put another way, as a simulation device, the “effect” posits a kind of chronology where there is none – suggesting some precipitant action responsible for the visual and aural phenomena taking place before the eye and ear. The “effect” creates nothing so much as a rhetorical hole in time, but only in order to fill that hole in advance with some false history or phantom memory for the individual viewer (so that he or she encounters the world intact, and also anew). In this way, while the above examples of Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro are relevant, most aptly named is no doubt Adobe After Effects. “After what?” one might reasonably ask, uncertain of what could possibly constitute a “before”.’ (Tim Griffin, ‘The Personal Effects of Seth Price’, Artforum, June 2009)

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‘An Abstract of a Book Lately Published; Entitled, A Treatise of Human Nature, &c. Wherein the Chief Argument of that Book is farther Illustrated and Explained’, and sending this review together with the Treatise, unsolicited, to book-sellers. In my edition, ‘the abstract’ is even incorporated back into the work as an appendix, as a kind of useful auto-summary provided in advance.

‘The abstract’s’ authorship is d i s p u t e d . O n e story

could belong, and not themselves even bound to one another.’

This parade of perceptions, Hume argues, actually produces the mind and knowledge is constructed only through the se-quence of sensory experiences. Hume’s words now: ‘I say compose the mind, not belong to it. The mind is not a sub-stance, in which the perceptions inhere.’ He follows this ar-gument to its end, wrestling with the fundamental philo-sophical problem of cause and effect. Hume arrives at the radical conclusion that no such relationship can be shown to exist only through direct sense experience. Or, as Ayer says, ‘There could be no necessary connection between distinct events.’ But, I am clearly getting ahead of myself.

Last May while spending a month in Edinburgh, I picked up a copy of A Treatise of Human Nature (Book 1) and spent the summer reading it. I’d meant to read Hume for about the past 10 years, or at least since I had first seen the words ‘Pure Sensation’ attributed to him. In the meantime, I got to know many of Hume’s ideas second hand, finding my way through his arguments was tough. First published in 1739, Hume knew that A Treatise of Human Nature was a difficult book and would likely find an equally difficult reception. It did.

On publication, the Treatise solicited a mostly critical silence, save one medi-ocre and misguided article in the London based Review of Works of the Learned. Hume had anticipated this effect by printing an anony-mous review or ‘abstract’ of the book, t i t l e d

(entirely generated

with other things in mind)

about a building, let’s say a boat. Even though I

don’t and may never know the material of the boat or that

of the Bottlebrush, I do have total access to the Bottlebrush and the Boat.

I have access to ‘the Bottlebrush’ in that it is something to point at a plant with. This is in

opposition to what I was saying before.

T h e e x p e r i -

ences I have of the plant are

not absolute at any point other than in

themselves. My conception of these experiences is too far

removed for them to contribute to the world’s experience (and in turn

the world is getting closer to an absolute truth) or any singular conception other than

my own. The allowance for differentiation between today’s truth and tomorrow’s is not accu-

rate enough. The truth of any moment is only absolute in its being within a precise context. We live forwards, and

understand backwards, but when we understand it’s already too late. What does remain as far as remaining is possible, is the understanding, and distinctly as an understanding – the idea of that which has been lived. The property which is truth remains immutable and in tact, as it must. ‘Truth doesn’t exist, it holds, it contains.’

Of course: what is concrete? And is drawing this into ques-tion exactly that which destabilises the structure and func-tion of language so that it can contain and include objects and selves. I want an ‘itself ’ of an object to be revealed to me, to believe that the object exists, to believe that I have expe-rienced the dream – in terms of natural sciences, in social sciences, and ‘anthropology’. Pragmatically it makes no dif-ference if an ‘itself ’ of an object is intelligible or receptive to this interest. Pragmatism instead locates, as Jean-Luc Nancy does, meaning production in-between people and items, between the conductors. How an ‘itself ’ is substantiated is so

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ence in the base unit of the impression, then he is unable to sense any quality directly of either the first mov-ing billiard ball or the second billiard ball that would ‘admit’ of the former’s motion in pro-ducing the motion of the latter. There is nothing that can be directly sensed ei-ther from the motion of the first or the motion of the second that can account for a cause and effect relationship be-tween the two. He continues then to suggest, if we can-n o t

holds that Hume himself attempted to write a condensation of the Treatise in 1737, two years before its publication, and failed. Then, in 1739 Francis Hutcheson, Professor of Phi-losophy at Glasgow as well as Hume’s friend and colleague, gave the assignment of summarising the book to his star 17 year old student Adam Smith, soon to be political econo-mist, Scottish Enlightenment figure and author of The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s summary was sent to Hume who liked it so much that he had it printed with minor corrections. Another story maintains simply that David Hume wrote the summary anonymously in the hopes of inciting a more favourable response to his book.

‘The abstract’s’ author begins: ‘My expectations in this small performance may seem somewhat extraordinary, when I declare that my intentions are to render a larger work more intelligible to ordinary capacities, by abridging it.’ The author then proceeds to offer the essence of the argument in a lan-guage both more compact and more convincing. Still, the trickiest part of Hume’s book lies in his interrogation and refusal of a productive relationship between cause and effect:

‘Here is a billiard ball laying on the table, and another ball moving towards it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball, which was formerly at rest, now acquires a motion. This is as perfect an instance of the relation of cause and effect as any we know, either by sensation or reflection. Let us therefore examine it.’

According to Hume, since all perception comes only through sen-sible ex-p e r i -

much ‘ m a d e’

by the one who describes

it. This attempted repetition always

makes the non-repeata-bility, and specificity of an

item perfectly apparent. Names ‘hold’ things, but do not

grant or provide power over the thing referred to, as James suggests, but rather

they grant the human conception of them (the ‘item’) some kind of definition and therefore point

of ref-

e re n c e and social

intelligibility. The words ‘hold’

bearing on the sociali-sation of the object. If we

are talking of power being that which has purchase over

one’s ability to communicate with many people, then power with words is

not over their subject but over their utility.Language is to be used, nothing else can

be. And in saying ‘language’ I refer to something that has no ‘itself ’, but has been made (by people) as a

means. Bringing objects into ‘communication’ – as an aes-thetic trope – is therefore very complex, and of course prob-lematises this statement.

It is possible, as Habermas points out, to utter, with out employing sentences, and competency and communication are still on the table, still ‘applied’ concepts.

Can you hear me Callistemon plant? – I am making assumptions about you to guide or propose guidance for our linguistic exchange; competent reader, I am making assump-tions about you in order to guide or propose guidance for our linguistic exchange. I feel I must assume in order to cul-tivate the potential for not assuming, with you. (The ambigu-ity here of who ‘you’ are – reader or plant, is intentional).

This month, July 2010, New Caledonia adopted the Kanak flag, alongside the existing French Tricolor, as the dual official national flags of the territory, becoming one of the few countries or territories with two official national flags. The Kanak flag depicts, on its tri-colour background and yellow sun disk a spear used in battle, stuck through

246 247

sense anything directly to account for this relationship, that our expectation of the second ball moving as a consequence of the first striking it is founded on absolutely nothing be-yond previous experience. According to Hume, there is no fundamental connection between cause and effect. And fur-ther, ‘we are determined by custom alone to suppose the fu-ture conformable to the past.’

Returning to Ayer summarising Hume, ‘it would never be possible’ to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first.’ If . . . we infer a contrary conclusion, it is because we are making projections from our past experience. So far as logic is concerned,

‘anything may produce anything.’

Already a near heretical suggestion, Hume follows his catho-lic logic one step further: ‘When I see a billiard ball moving towards another, my mind is immediately carried by habit to the usual effect, and anticipates my sight by conceiving the second ball in motion. But is this all? Do I do nothing but conceive the motion of the second ball? No surely. I also be-lieve that it will move.’ Hume follows the billiard balls of cause and effect straight into the realm of belief, as-serting that ‘It is not, therefore, reason that is the guide of life, but custom.’ And that custom, or in Hume’s words, ‘habit’, repeated again and again, hardens into belief.

This is the line that American philosopher William James picked up 150 years later in his book, The Principles of Psy-c h o l o g y (1890).

tutut (conch)

shells.

‘The term “energy” doesn’t

even pretend to stand for anything “objective”.’‘Truth is made in the course

of experience.’ Each quote in this text is directly from William James’

Pragmatism unless otherwise specified.

In waking life I am confronted with a lack of the

expected results of the activities in my dream, and I assume the event to have been dreamt because of that. Just as it is with hallucinations: I see a cat disappear behind the pillow on my bed, but, even though there is a cat in the house, because there is no space behind the pillow for a cat, I assume I’ve imagined it; I don’t even need to verify this in order to be totally convinced of it. My ‘experience’ allows me to pro-ceed with that essentially new experience as though it is not new, as though I know the results of looking, as though the scenario played out in my head is without a doubt true.

Pragmatism’s ‘truth’ as James puts it: ‘Grant an idea or belief to be true, what concrete difference will it make in anyone’s actual life.’ This view overlooks relative relations to various ideas of truth; this is an issue that I expect pragmatism to consider differently from the way that analytic or absolutist philosophies function. The construction of Bottlebrush is similar to the construction of truth in that it is essentially, in pragmatic terms, semantic. What difference does it make to

248 249

ber becomes friable, or plaster “sets”.’

And, finally, he describes this transubstantiation of one form to another:

‘Plasticity, then, in the wider sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield a l l

Just last week, I finished working together with Stuart Bai-ley on a small book for an exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art called The Curse of Bigness. As it turns out, it is com-posed of five texts intercut by their own abstracts as partial summaries. One of these is an essay from The Principles of Psychology called ‘Habit’ that fits quite tidily with Hume, even leaning on his terminology. James begins the essay:

‘When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strikes us is that they are bundles of habits.’

And continues:

‘The moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led to the fundamental properties of matter…The habits of an elementary particle of matter cannot change (on the principles of the atomistic philosophy), because the particle is itself an unchangeable thing; but those of a compound mass of matter can change, because they are in the last instance due to the structure of the com-pound, and either outward forces or inward tensions can, from one hour to the next, turn that struc-ture into something different to what it was before.’

Offering the example of:

‘a bar of iron becomes mag-netic or crystalline through the action of certain out-ward causes, or India r u b -

call t h e

p l a n t ‘ B o t t l e -

brush’ rather than Callistemon

lanceolatus, or haw-thorn? The associative col-

loquial name is suggestive of this process of attaching a nota-

tion to an object. We refer to the thing, bottlebrush shrub, as a bottlebrush,

while of course it is not a bottle brush at all. ‘The pragmatist treats the word “agree-

ment” in a

large loose way – he lets it

cover any process of conduction from

present idea to a future terminus, provided only it run

prosperously.’‘We must find a theory that will

‘work’…it must derange common sense and previous belief as little as possible, and

it must lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly.’

I would like to provide more information here about plants in poetry, but not necessarily about Bottlebrush specifically. I have thus far not been able to find any poems or fiction about Bottlebrush. The first species brought to the UK and into plant-kingdom classification were the Callistemon citri-nus and Callistemon viminalis, both endemic to Australia, with the former cultivated in London’s Kew Gardens in 1789 by the botanist and naturalist Joseph Banks. Along with Daniel Solander, Banks collected nearly 800 specimens, but this includes only two of the 34 Callistemon species and none of the 21 Beaufortia species, now known as Bottlebrush. These are now the two most common species cultivated in Australia and internationally. The classification ‘Callistemon’ is in the process of being merged into the Melaleuca classification.

I’d like to insert Bottlebrush into poems about linden, myrrh and oak trees, – particularly poems about Bottle-brush that have myth-like or illusive qualities. Bottlebrush is the tree that loves only the waters of the Nile – according to The Book of Dead, twin Bottlebrush shrubs stand at the gates

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Synergetics, Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975) is a catalogue of Buckminster’s numbered thoughts offered as provisional theorems, se-quenced and assembled by E. J. Applewhite. Synergetics has been described as a li-brary of ‘science cartoons’ or scenar-ios, each of which uses accessible metaphors in place of mathe-matical equations to de-scribe complex ideas. Number 530.03 states:

at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.’

In this, William James echoes Hume’s argument that any-thing may become anything else and that cause and effect are essentially discrete, ordered by habit and belief. James then adds a qualifier: the rate of change must be slow enough and the subject of that change strong enough that the resulting migration – movement from one form to the next – does not completely obliterate the original. He calls this particular re-sistant flexibility ‘plasticity’, and details how beliefs are written permanently into our character through habit sug-gesting that:

‘It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of 30, the character has set like plaster, and will never sof-ten again.’

Comprehensive design scientist R. Buckminster Fuller would suggest that this hardening happens quite a bit sooner.

of

heaven f r o m

which Ra, the sun god, emerges

every morning. Bot-tlebrush wood is often

used to build coffins as it is thought to return the dead to the

womb of the tree goddess, and the wood is still used for building under-

ground. Bottlebrush sheltered Osiris’s body after he was killed, and many tombs in

Egypt have groves of Bottlebrush growing around them, as though to grow from the dead. A special

expedition to Punt, on the Red Sea, was organised to col-lect the Bottlebrush shrubs in order to recreate the legend-ary homeland of the gods. Bottlebrush are said to have been a principle feature in the hanging gardens of Babylon. Bot-tlebrush flowers and leaves are used in rites of passage cer-emonies by various tribes in North America, and its power-ful hallucinogenic (and fatal) properties are thought to challenge boys in the development of their spiritual wellbe-ing. Bottlebrush leaves, when sucked, are thought to assist in telling the future – the toxicity levels of the Bottlebrush plant vary depending on the age of the plant, where it is growing and the local weather conditions.

Bottlebrush is the central hub for a gamete of meanings. The name refers not to the plant itself but to what the plant refers to – a bottle brush – for the cylindrical, brush-like flowers, which could not withstand being used to clean bot-tles. This example of a common name being linked to over 55 species describes a cultural phenomenon where plants have or ‘hold’ meanings that are alien to them. Another example: about 80 different species of plants are named after Joseph

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needed to get Fuller’s less than conventional collection of musings published. Nine Chains to the Moon was even subtitled An Adventure Story of Thought by its publisher Lippincott, and prepared with science-fiction-fantasy cover art, in order to locate the strange book for an im-agined audience. Anyway, Chris-topher Morley’s full poem be-gins:

‘The parents tell the child he cannot have both the sun and the moon in the picture at the same time. The child says that you can. The child has the ability to co-ordi-nate non-simultaneity. The parents have lost the ability to co-ordinate non-simultaneity. One of our great limi-tations is our tendency to look only at the static picture, the one confrontation.’

Bucky had a persistent belief in the inductive, empirical powers of children he describes:

‘Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and re-experience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences – “which is the mostest? Which is the leastest?” They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smooth-ness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.’

In his first mass published book, Nine Chains to the Moon (1938), Bucky offers the dedication to his two daughters, one living and one not, as:

‘To Alexandra and Alegra:“Your strange divinity still kept”.’

The dedication is a line excerpted from the poem ‘To A Child’, by Christopher Morley. As Bucky’s close friend and drinking buddy, Morley made the necessary in-t r o d u c -t i o n s

Banks, a n d

while the classif ications

of many plants do describe recurring fea-

tures, there are many cases where the plant is named after

certain elements within an indi-rectly related anthropocentric envi-

ronment. With regards its colloquial name, Bottlebrush is a vessel for or nexus of

associated narratives. Being a species primarily

prop-a g a t e d

through its flowers (or sta-

men, to be more specific), Bottlebrush

coincidentally can func-tion as a model for looking at

the significance of a plants’ pro-liferation as achieved by human

effort, rather than the plant’s own. The plant is attractive to an Italian landscape

architect; not only do they build it into their plans for gardens in Italy but the feature is then

translated into a southern Californian Riviera land-scape design for houses in the Pacific Palisades, the garden

of the Eames’ House, planted in the early 1900s in Pershing Square; and Bottlebrush proliferates on ground that it could not have reached alone.

I am continuing to mythologise or attach narratives to the plant, even though its species is imbued with many already. The plant already has connotations that suggest it functions in a way that I am asking it to here. It already acts as a container: the flower resembles a man-made tool for cleaning bottles, and with that the flower is now likened to the saturated context of bottle brushes. The plant in my room becomes linked to Duchamp’s Tu m’, (1918) – it asks for a glass vessel, the space of my room is penetrated by the multi-phallic Bottlerack (1914), I am, and we are, uterine in shape, as Duchamp was, or wanted us to be. The plant in my room has 12 flowers, and each flower suggests the possible pres-ence of a bottle, the anticipation of containment.

How does Bottlebrush ‘have’ inherent ‘meaning’ (if meaning is anthropocentrically understood)? Is it not impos-sible? Its species-wide ‘meaning’ is open for anyone to do

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tion of poetry as language subordinated by or trans-ferred into form. Through the short course of this poem Christopher Morley equates that form (poetry) with living (‘When you were Poetry itself!’)

The greatest poem ever knownIs one all poets have outgrown:The poetry, innate, untold,Of being only four years old.

Still young enough to be a partOf Nature’s great impulsive heart,Born comrade of bird, beast, and treeAnd unselfconscious as the bee –

And yet with lovely reason skilledEach day new paradise to build;Elate explorer of each sense,Without dismay, without pretense!

In your unstained transparent eyesThere is no conscience, no surprise:Life’s queer conundrums you accept,Your strange divinity still kept.

Being, that now absorbs you, allHarmonious, unit, integral,Will shred into perplexing bits, –Oh, contradictions of the wits!

And Life, that sets all things in rhyme,May make you poet, too, in time –But there were days, O tender

elf,When you were Poetry

itself!

I’d offer now a horribly re-duced de-scrip-

what t h e y

want with – any plant

and any person. The ‘meaning’ of Bot-

tlebrush is local not to the plant but to the people

who make a point of being local to the plant. Blindness to others: the supposed

inaccessibility of an item to the allotment, placement and investment of ‘value’ from oth-

ers, on their life choices and their basic being-in-

the-world. One can see that the values of others differ from their own, but no further than that. This kind of blindness that James describes, while being rather reductive, lends a hand to the unpacking or illumination of the term ‘opaque artefact’, as used by Jan Verwoert. This kind of division breaks an item into two strata: that of the socially accessible and that which is socially inaccessible, without destroying the opacity of the item’s ‘surface’. Bottlebrush is, of course, one such item. To personify is to project a not-necessarily-consensual view of an item onto an interaction with that item. But this mode of speaking is doing exactly this projec-tion: How can consensus be reached between a plant and

256 257

All of this suggests a chicken-and-egg problem of the most viscous circularity: which comes first, the forms or the thinking (that renders them (into forms))? Hume’s logic suggests an answer to this eternal riddle, as so:

Q: Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

A: Both.

If the only way to know the world is through d i r e c t s e n -

French art historian Henri Focillon would agree. In his book ‘Vie des formes’ (1934), he says as much:

‘To assume consciousness at once is to assume form. Even at levels far below the zone of definition and clar-ity, forms, measures, and relationships exist. The chief characteristic of the mind is to be CEASELESSLY DESCRIBING ITSELF. Forms mingle with the life from whence they come; they translate into space certain movements of the mind.’

Focillon then returns us to David Hume, by making the case that thinking makes itself felt in the world ONLY through forms. Hume suggests that these forms are actually CON-STRUCTED by our direct sensory impressions, and articu-lated by the connections that they make from one to another and through time. According to Hume, objects are little more than bundles of perceptions, temporary and contingent – living made concrete as form.

myself? Between

‘this’ plant and myself? I

want to understand the grain of its wood

without cutting into it. What would that look like? I

have not seen the wood of a Callistemon.

Contrary to James’ description of truth, his pragmatic logic may very well lead someone,

myself particularly, to think of truth as that intersec-tion precisely, where the idea meets with and becomes

adjusted to its subject. Anything other than this would not be pragmatic. This is especially the case if we agree that the advent of the subject as such is the verification of its signifi-cance. I’d like to locate pragmatic truth in the verification. The truths decided to be such before their verification will inevitably transform through verification, or will lead James nowhere, or else render false a steadfast truth.

258 259

sory experience, and objects are collections of sense impres-sions, and the mind is constructed from this series of fleeting perceptions, then it follows that thinking and form are one. Thinking (the chicken) and Form (the egg) are indivisibly codependent and integrally coincidental.

Earlier I described David Hume’s ‘catholic’ logic (with a lower-case ‘c’.) I’ve noticed this word recently, and was unclear precisely of its definition, though I generally under-stood it to mean something like very diverse, universal, all embracing. Thinking for a moment and tracing the word back to its upper-case precedent, ‘Catholic’ religion lies on the fundamental proposition of transubstantiation and is reinstated each week around the ritual of Communion. Here, the bread you take is the body of Christ and wine you drink, the blood. And this is no metaphor: taken on faith, the bread IS the actual body and drinking the wine IS the actual blood of Christ. Much of which sounds very much like the propo-sition that began this text and relies on a similarly productive faith:

Everything is in everything. ***

*** ‘My

pointing out that

Callahan’s recordings SOUND

LIKE WHAT THEY’RE ABOUT is just an easier,

more immediate way of talking about something I’d reasonably

want to try and put across as a design teacher: of FORM AND CONTENT

INFORMING EACH OTHER, of SYMBIOSIS. This is distinct from the simple cause and effect of

the more famous catchphrase FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION, not least because in Callahan’s case it seems

as likely that the music preceded the words as the other way round . . . By now it should be blindingly apparent that everyone

else has examples that are as pertinent for them as Callahan is for me, but perhaps less so that this personal pertinence is precisely what

turns them into a tool for teaching, because realised deeply enough – or “felt” – to be passed on with conviction. The teaching of Jacques Rancière’s

Ignorant Schoolmaster is founded on the single principle that EVERYTHING IS IN EVERYTHING. A set of footprints on a beach are a language: their shape is the same as your own feet, therefore they must be human; their size and the distance between them relative to your own suggests that particular human’s approximate age; their placement reveals their direction, and so on. Any thing can be taken as a starting point, which automatically becomes a talking (or thinking) point; by talking (or thinking) you relate that thing to other things, and by relating to other things you gain insight; you learn. In the words of the Ignorant Schoolmaster, “The problem is to reveal an intelligence to itself. ANYTHING can be used ... a prayer or a song that the child or the ignorant one knows by heart. There is always something the ignorant one knows that can be used as a point of compari-son, something to which a new thing to be learned can be related”.’ (from ‘IT IS THE OUTSIDEDNESS FLAVOR OF IT’, a lecture delivered by Stuart Bailey at Stand Up Comedy, Portland, Oregon, 16th May, 2010)

Nam June Paik

Symphony for

20 Rooms

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Mattin

Managerial Authorship: Appropriating Living Labour

266 267

When working with noise and improvisation in the context of concert and performance situations, I am interested in the division of labour between performer and audience. Histor-ically, this division assumed a relationship between these two positions as either ‘active’ or ‘passive’. In contemporary capitalism, this division is problematised through the restor-ing of leisure time and the valorisation of what seems to be unproductive labour. In an attempt to mirror this expansive tendency in capitalism, more and more artists are using au-dience interaction as material for their work, blurring the boundaries between producer and consumer. This way of working – whereby the artist appropriates the intellectual contributions made by others, but where the interaction is still framed as his or her own – has a strong relationship to the logic of management as it has developed from the divi-sion of labour into an organisational theory of business. In this text I will explore several artistic methods, through an

examination into Karl Marx’s concepts of living labour and the general intellect that I propose is a form of managerial authorship.

MANAGERIAL LOGIC, LIVING LABOUR AND THE GENERAL INTELLECT

Management guru Peter Drucker identified two characteris-tics of management: innovation and marketing. Innovation does not necessarily reside with the manager, but he or she is the one who must make sure that it can be marketed. As we can see with intellectual property, innovation needs to be readily defined and given a value in order to be marketed. In capitalism, value can only be attributed to that which is measurable or countable. As Alan Badiou has said of today’s formation of the world as a global market:

(Pragmatism, With a Bottlebrush Plant in the Room)

This is a piece of writing about William James’ pragmatism, written with a Bottlebrush plant in the room, which I will present to a class of undergraduate students as a proposal for a conversation about‘pragmatism’ (the plant that is).

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‘Everything that circulates falls under the unity of the count, while inversely, only what lets itself be counted in this way can circulate. Moreover, this is the norm that illuminates a paradox few have pointed out: in the hour of generalized circulation and the phantasm of instanta-neous cultural communication, laws and regulations forbidding the circulation of persons are being multi-plied everywhere.’1

Marx’s concept of living labour goes against the idea of countability and generalised circulation. By living labour, Marx meant our potential for creativity; that capacity for la-bour that is not yet tamed, measured and framed by capital-ism. Living labour is that subjective ‘flame’ which capital, in order to accumulate surplus labour, seeks to objectify through exchange. However, from today’s perspective it is clear that capitalism’s perpetual ambition has found multiple

ways in which to frame what Marx understood as living la-bour. Within the post-Fordist condition, that centres on a re-gime of creativity and flexibility, this expansion is better un-derstood in relation to another Marxist concept: the general intellect.

In ‘Fragment on Machines’ Marx discusses how, with the development of technology, workers would have increasing access to leisure time within which to develop and educate themselves. Since machines would be capable of producing the work that was previously done by the workers, the work-ers would gain the time to generate social knowledge, referred to by Marx as the ‘general intellect’. This general intellect would then be stored in the machines owned by the capitalists and defined as ‘fixed capital’. By fixed capital Marx meant the capital that is not in circulation, that which is constantly present in the form of means of production such as tools, land, buildings, and vehicles.

1 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, (Trans. Ray Brassier), California: Stanford University Press, 2003, p.10.

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able to give to ourselves would have to do both: coordi-nate and keep a distance to the process of a radical break; it would have to reject the romantic tradition, by not equating the political with the living and a common to be produced.’2

Nevertheless, we can agree with Paulo Virno when he argues that Marx was wrong to see the general intellect as fixed cap-ital, since humans are now increasingly becoming machines themselves, the general intellect is not fixed capital but living labour before objectification. The general intellect is not val-ue itself but the potential to produce value:

‘They are not units of measure; they constitute the immeasurable presupposition of heterogeneous effec-tive possibilities.’3

There has been a lot of talk around the notion of the gen-eral intellect, mostly by the ‘autonomia’ or ‘post-autonomia’ thinkers such as Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Maurizo Lazzarato. For the autonomist, the general intellect bears some of the quali-ties of living labour; it is self-reflexive, affective, co-opera-tive, communicative and creative. For them these qualities can also be applied to politics, and can therefore produce self-organisation in opposition to capital. In her essay ‘Liv-ing Labour, Form-Giving Fire’, Katja Diefenbach points out some of the problems of romanticising living labour; it not only involves our creative capacity but also makes it intrinsi-cally political:

‘Thus, an effect of the political can dangerously consist of subordinating revolt and dream to the economic pri-macy of effective doing. The organisation that we are

2 Katja Diefenbach, ‘Living Labour. Form-Giving Fire’ in ed. Gal Kirn, Post-Fordism and its Discontents, Berlin: b books and Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2010, p. xx.3 Paolo Virno, ‘The General Intellect’, is available online at: http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno10.htm.

In consideration of James’ ‘extra truths’: When James does not look for the house along the cow path, it is not incorpo-rated into the truth, and there is then no incentive to think of James being lost. It is a candidate for truth in as much as a situation is tested. James’ cow path is only such in relation to the function of it being a cow path possibly leading James to a house, making it identifiable as a cow path, and identifiable as a figure within the logic of considering or judging truth. But I have no way of knowing if James was lost and looking for a cow path when he wrote this. The cow path is not a cow path at all once it has another purpose. When I say ‘cow path’ here I am trying to ‘use’ it in a similar way to how James was using it – we are not – nor am I, nor is James – on a cow path.

‘We have to live today by what truth we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.’

The ‘we’ here troubles me, but the notion of always being ready to look for the potential better truth (or belief) to be established later, possibly to be established someday abso-lutely, rectifies the troublesome ‘we’ of truth searching – in that the notion of an always ‘to come’ absolute truth opens everything, all ‘truths’, up to a collaborative ‘argumentative’ negotiation.

James said ‘truth’, but can a ‘we’ say ‘truth’ – can truth be said or confirmed commonly? While the idea of truth is one dependant on these consensus, or justification, the actu-ality of that is not so easily reached. How can we share something?

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vidualised production. Nonetheless, the key form of appro-priation is that which the capitalist exacts upon the worker in appropriating his or her labour capacity.

In some instances, the two forms of appropriation are combined. As a critique of authorship, and as a way of ques-tioning the passive condition of the audience, the managerial artist appropriates the audiences’ general intellect by evok-ing a sense of possession of a certain subjective agency (liv-ing labour that is yet to be objectified). However, beyond this appearance of agency, the artist’s framing of the situation generates surplus value for his or herself – in the form of cul-tural capital etc. – which far exceeds any benefit to the audience.

Here is an early proto-example of this managerial authorship: when David Tudor performed John Cage’s 4’33’’ for the first time on the 29th of August 1952 at a concert recital in Woodstock, New York, all the sounds produced in

As human creativity is more variable and heterogeneous than a machine, the framing of it, and the production of val-ue within it, is more complex. The manager appropriates life processes that he or she might not be able to evaluate imme-diately, but when the potential of our living labour is realised he or she knows how to define, measure and market it.

THE MANAGERIAL ARTIST I have absolutely nothing against appropriation or plagia-rism, especially if it helps us to counter notions of author-ship, copyright and individual creativity. As Comte de Lau-tréamont wrote: ‘Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it.’4 But there are different types of appropriation: appropri-ation of works of art and music can help to counter estab-lished notions of originality, ontological conceptions of the artwork and what it means to be an artist. In other words, it can help to challenge notions of quality, taste, craft and indi-

4 It is interesting to note that even if Guy Debord often cited this quote, he terminated his relationship with Henri Lefebvre having acused him of plagiaris-ing the essay ‘Thesis on the Paris Commune’ which Debord co-wrote with Kotanyi & Vaneigem.

is never useful, it is always relevant and always something to be contended with.

‘Primarily, and on the commonsense level, the truth of a state of mind means that this function of a leading that is worth while’ – to suggest that within the state of mind, where the idea of something is applied to its referent…A true state of mind is one in which the mind applies ideas to its referent but in order for the referent to refer, its correlating idea must adjust to and make sense of its new context. The application is only considerable as such to the point where its transpar-ency is confronted with the contours of the, albeit, surface of its subject. At this intersection the cow path meets grass and dirt and makes the situation into an increasingly com-plex pile of abstractions.

‘Justice is ideal, solely an ideal’, ‘Reason conceives that it ought to exist, but experience shows that it cannot’, ‘Truth

While James is considering the out-of-use consideration of a cow path for example an ‘extra’ truth, in that it is not imme-diately being tested or considered, he positions other truths as being local to a situation, but not local to their being that-which-tests a situation’s comparability to remembered abstractions of how one has experienced things. Extra-truths are what make up any truth. All truths are extra: in practice a truth is tested and rather than being a truth, it is a candidate for one, and when not in practice, these so-called dormant truths are in anticipation of their being applied, and, pragmatically speaking are rather inactive, if not inac-cessible, if not non-existent. The cow path is always relevant but never useful. The idea of it is useful, but the thing that stuffs the idea of ‘cow path,’ or is pointed at with ‘cow path,’

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and workshops organised by people such as Martha Rosler, Maria Lind, Liam Gillick, Tirdad Zolghadr, Paul Chan, Nata-sha Sadr Haghighian and Raqs Media Collective. Later in Museum as Hub: Six Degrees, a group show held at the New Museum, Vidokle presented an installation called Night School (2008–09)5 that was comprised of a monitor, a DVD player, and a book case that housed various DVD recordings of the lectures and workshops that had taken place at the night school. Due to this process of documentation, all of the content that had been produced throughout these presenta-tions and workshops, and in the name of education, sud-denly became Anton Vidokle’s artwork. To what extent can one appropriate someone else’s activities? For what rea-sons? What does it produce?

In This Progress, a work by Tino Seghal that was staged at the ICA in London in 2006, one entered the gallery only to be confronted by a little girl asking you to reply to the

the room were proclaimed to be equally as valid as the music. Nevertheless, most of the audience did not realise they were making music. By controlling the conceptual discourse that underpins a project, the managerial artist can make sure that everything is incorporated into his or her work in a way that can only be valuable to his or her own artistic career. This does not mean however that the audience gets nothing out of it – of course one can learn a lot by participating in these types of situations – but contrary to the liberating appear-ance of these events the division of labour between artist and audience remains unchanged.

Today we see artists like Anton Vidokle and Tino Sehgal working according to a managerial logic, albeit in very dif-ferent ways. Between 2008 and 2009 Vidokle produced Night School, a temporary school at The New Museum in New York. The project involved a diverse audience of artists, writers, and curators with various presentations, lectures

5 For further details see: http://museumashub.org/node/48.

ference and render a similar effect. A situation doesn’t war-rant a cat to be behind my pillow, and while there may be a cat there, the situation where that experience occurred might as well have been warranted a genuine experience of a cat, but in that context it was dismissed as false.

The Bottlebrush plant in the room has now lost all its bottle brush-like features and looks like a more common shrub.

which ought to be, cannot be’, ‘Reason is deformed by expe-rience’ – these are set up to make a villain of pragmatic per-spectives. Here, pragmatism is the most clearly definable and useful, in its efforts to cast light on the situation of justice, reason and truth, being only such in that they are properties of experience which may be contended with socially. They are finite terms with finite meaning, but this meaning only occurs in its being applied, and is subject to dialogue as is experience – a situation that will knowingly transform and build these notions and the incorporation of the reality that the notions must contend with.

But how does ‘reality’ contend with notions? Is it not my contention with these social notions that these abstractions are brought into contention with my experience and with others ‘in’ the world?

If a truth is presented out of context (the example of James’ address being given to someone when they ask for the time) it might as well be a falsehood, it would make no dif-

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Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Both Guy Debord’s dream and worst nightmare have come true: spectators are becom-ing emancipated from their passive condition, but at the price of feeling empowered by a system that produces, on the one hand, the feeling of self-agency and on the other the pro-ductive power that appears to be living labour. It is as if we are in a hamster wheel pushing capitalism forward. Some-where, under all these layers of networks, someone is trans-lating these activities into exchange value. In a brilliant paper titled ‘Forking Free Software’ delivered at the Make Art Fes-tival in Poitiers last December, Simon Yuill explained how the free software community was being co-opted by neolib-eral logic. Yuill quoted Charles Leadbeater, British futurolo-gist, management consultant, and one-time adviser to the Tony Blair government:

‘The avant garde imagined that spectatorship would

question: ‘What do you think progress is?’ As you walked through the succession of exhibition rooms, various people, and of increasing age, put a series of related questions to you. By positioning the spectator in a tightly constructed sit-uation, with little room left for transformative interaction, Sehgal evoked the sense of being part of an assembly line of knowledge production. Contrary to Vidokle, Sehgal does not allow his work to be documented, placing the emphasis instead on the moment of experience. This shows that unique and individual experience is not only produced by the work but more importantly ‘produces’ the work. Taking Comte de Lautrémont’s quote about plagiarism to a new level, This Progress shows us how the general intellect can be used artis-tically: real life processes constitute the artwork.

This management of creativity, ideas, personal tastes and lives, is similar to what we see happening within social networks, where people express themselves through using

The lady in the garden centre where I bought the plant said that it would have been sold in the UK since the 1980s, hav-ing been imported from Italy. I thought of ’80s suburban houses, which sort of look like the one where the car crash happens in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) – modern houses with curtain glass windows all around, opening onto a patio and a sloping garden, dense with sycamore, dogwood, euca-lyptus and pine trees – with massive, alien-looking succu-lents sat on black marble floors, tiger skins and woven rugs from New Mexico. The light is dim, its dark in some areas, but there are no shadows, everything is hazy, and absorbs the light. There are tan shag-carpeted stairs leading down from the common area to the garage or the laundry room on the ground floor. But other sources tell me the first time Cal-listemon were cultivated in the UK was in 1789 shortly after Joseph Banks returned from an excursion with Captain Cook.

The distinction between Callistemon and Melaleuca

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distance reproduces the relationships as they stand; the au-dience is reproduced as an audience once-removed from the means of the artwork’s production.

While it is true that as an audience we may be able to express our living labour capacity (not yet objectified and certainly not remunerated), at the same time we are also pro-ductive labour. We produce the work of an artist, and at the same time we produce ourselves as an innovative audience, dependent on living labour capacity. This achieves the val-orisation of the artist, the institution in which the artwork is takes place, as well as its funders. Marx explains what he means by ‘productive labour’: ‘a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus value. To be a productive labourer is, there-fore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.’7 In order for this to occur, a division of labour is necessary.

By being productive labour we are also producing sur-

give way to participation permitting people to become more social and collaborative, egalitarian and engaged with one another, to borrow and share ideas…Mass participation, Debord’s antidote to the society of the spectacle, has turned into YouTube and social-network-ing sites on which we can all make a spectacle of ourselves.’6

We have to be clear about the relationships that are being put to work within the production of the managerial artwork, as well as on the social network websites. What for us, as the audience, appears to be the expression of living labour, for the managerial artist becomes productive labour. Concep-tual framing is the means of production: the audience/work-er is distanced from the bigger picture, i.e. the knowledge, connections and conditions that allow the work to happen and the distribution of its effects. The maintenance of this

6 From Simon Yuill’s public talk at the Festival in 2009. 7 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin Classics, 1976/1990 p. 644.

classified Bottlebrush plants is just that the Callistemon sta-mens grow individually, while those of the Melaleuca grow in small bundles. Some argue that this is not sufficient enough to warrant their separation and want to merge all Callis-temon Bottlebrush into Melaleuca classification. While the four Callistemon Bottlebrush species native to New Caledo-nia were converted to the Melaleuca classification in 1998, and the Queensland Herbarium has already recognised the change, the Council Heads of the Australian Herbaria have not.

Now look more at Jürgen Habermas, John Dewey, and Ivan Illich.

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itself from its product. As long as we persist as an audience, we will reproduce the division of labour in which it is the art-ist, and not us, who has the final decision of how the activity might be represented overall. The artist who applies the managerial logic of framing, as described, produces this re-alisation.

What is left of our own subjective agency if our experi-ences have been appropriated by capitalism at the most sophisticated level? Where are the capacities for our living labour today? What creative act can exceed this commodifi-cation of experience? It seems too optimistic to invest faith in living labour, while the current flow of capital is already creating new and flexible regimes of subjectivity and an accu-mulative future for those who are able to invest in these new kinds of creative capital, while the rest of us are sinking into oblivion. What feels like a unique moment for one is for another just a link in the chain of a post-Fordist assembly

plus labour. In the ‘Grundrisse’ Marx explained how this surplus labour under capitalism is constantly split in two:8

1. The objective conditions that can allow for a new real-isation of labour for its own self-preservation and self-reproduction2. Living labour in the realisation process is estranged from itself as it is reproducing the conditions that makes it alien. Surplus labour reproduces the conditions for the future extraction of surplus labour.

By constantly recreating the conditions for the accumulation of surplus labour we not only recreate the conditions of our self-preservation but also the self-preservation of capital. The flame of living labour necessitates the capitalist material conditions for its realisation (technological, artistic context, musical context), but in doing so, this living labour alienates

8 Karl Marx, ‘Grundrisse’, (Trans. by Martin Nicolaus), London: Penguin Books, 1973, p. 454.

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as if walking blindly within the conceptual parameters of the managerial logic, thinking that we are heading for our own individual liberation rather than constantly reproducing the distance between our actions and our control over the con-ditions of our context. Liberation does not come from this type of process, but from a distorted process of self-realisa-tion that goes against our own conditions and even our own subjectivity, producing instead an ‘anti-self ’. The anti-self destroys its own position by nullifying the attributes of accu-mulation that shape our subjectivity today such as confi-dence, contacts, recognition, and attention. Being no one, being nowhere, being nobody, definitely not an artist, cer-tainly not an audience, producing nothing that separates us from our objective condition, having nothing to exchange because there is nothing countable for someone to frame.

line, where every little interaction adds ‘something’. What-ever this ‘something’ is, it has already fulfilled its first pur-pose: to keep the ball of innovation and activity rolling through exchanging ideas, knowledge and experiences. Eventually it will be decoded again and if more value can be extracted, then all the better.

Unless this accumulative chain is disrupted, the surplus labour will be continuously reproduced, and so too our own penury. Experience has been commodified, and it seeems impossible to combat this fact either with ideology, or dis-course, and not least by self-aggrandising our potential liv-ing labour. Instead, what seems essential, is to create situa-tions for ourselves that challenge the very notion of production, and consequently the ways in which we produce subjectivity. There is no return to an essence of self and of pure subjectivity. We seem to be facing the inevitable, dis-turbed and damaged forever, alientating ourselves further,

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we experience the realisation of our living labour in any giv-en context, the potential of our subjectivity, of our intellec-tual and affective capacity, we feel empowered; we feel that we can be and that we are a constituent part of that context. We cannot be granted an overview as we are simply within it.

As we said before, this feeling of self-empowerment is used by capitalism to create a framework within which to valorise whichever activity occurs at different locations at different times. While we gain access to unique experiences and momentarily feel happy about ourselves, a capitalist logic roots itself deeper and deeper within our subjectivity.

In his text, ‘Genre is Obsolete’, Ray Brassier has pointed out that the commodification of experience has not only hap-pened at an ideological level but at a neuro-physiological level.10 The production of aesthetic experiences therefore does not seem to be enough for us to challenge and under-

NOISE AND THE DESTRUCTION OF MANAGERIAL LOGIC

‘Noise exacerbates the rift between knowing and feeling by splitting experience, forcing conception against sen-sation. Some recent philosophers have evinced an inter-est in subjectless experiences; I am rather more inter-ested in experience-less subjects. Another name for this would be ‘nemocentrism’ (a term coined by neurophi-losopher Thomas Metzinger): the objectification of experience would generate self-less subjects that under-stand themselves to be no-one and no-where. This casts an interesting new light on the possibility of a ‘commu-nist’ subjectivity.’9

There is a growing emphasis in contemporary capitalism on individual experience in production and consumption. When

9 Ray Brassier, ‘Against Aesthetics of Noise’, available online at: http://www.ny-web.be/transitzone/against-aesthetics-noise.html.

10 Ray Brassier, ‘Genre is Obsolete’ in eds. Mattin & Anthony Iles, Noise & Capitalism, Donostia/San Sebastián: Audiolab-Arteleku, 2009, available online at: http://www.arteleku.net/audiolab/noise_capitalism.pdf.

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musical genre and many people can predict what a noise con-cert might be like. In noise concerts the performer/audience division is reproduced as it is elsewhere, and musicians rarely deal with it. Rather than trying to perpetuate noise as a musical genre, I would like to think about how noise that carries qualities such as chaos, density, saturation, preci-sion, and intelligibility can be executed in order to dismantle the frameworks that so often shape the way we behave and how we relate to each other. Perhaps by putting ourselves through the grind of noise we can destroy our internalised managerial logic.

Thanks to Anthony Iles & Lisa Rosendahl Anti-copyright

stand our contemporary condition. Noise does not work well at the level of either aesthetics or experience; in fact its qualities radically challenge both of these notions. Rather than trying to reconcile ‘knowing’ and ‘feeling’, noise can help us to dissociate the notion of living labour with subjec-tivity in a sense that exceeds the logic of framing by either being too much, too complex, too dense and difficult to decode, or too chaotic to be measured. One cannot have mastery over it, it is a useless general intellect that suspends value judgements such as good or bad or right or wrong. To think of it in moral or ethical terms seems ridiculous. Noise, with its epistemic violence, counters the division between activity and passivity. By making us aware of our impossibil-ity to decipher it, noise alienates us. We are no one in front of it. We cannot be reassured of our position (as either audi-ence or performer).

Unfortunately, in practice noise has become just another

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Mask Operations

Hwayeon Nam

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THE FIRST PHASE:SOLID, FORMULATION

It might be helpful for you to imagine yourself transformed into a kind of molecular model in order to participate in the activity of a mask. The dynamics between you and a mask are formulated by the different possibilities of the structure of molecules. Molecules should be arranged carefully and test-ed in a variety of divergent compositions. You will be able to achieve this solid state by establishing a molecular structure.

Examples of molecules: words, information, images, the body, movement, a diagram, space, sound, location etc.

The composition – or in other words, the process of solidification – changes continuously because the molecules do not remain static and new molecules may similarly par-ticipate in this process of reordering. Molecules become reactive to one another in varying degrees, ranging from moderate to marked. Molecular movement and the compel-ling forces between molecules can accelerate the dynamics

‘Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your vari-ous roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan?’— Alfred Hitchcock, North by Northwest (1959)

You may think that all you need to do is simply wear a mask – a misunderstanding that is easily made because you have ‘seen’ numerous masks throughout your life. If you are think-ing of a mask that can be bought at a souvenir or party shop, or one that your child made, or you yourself made when you were young, then you are seriously mistaken. On the surface a mask is nothing more than an object to be worn. However, it is in fact a state to be explored, an activity to be performed, and a chemistry to be practiced; the mask is a state rather than simply an object.

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in motion’: the direction and velocity of these movements will be determined by the density of the dynamics. As the dy-namics become more energetic you will move further away from your initial co-ordinates towards new ones. You will re-act to the moves of others just as the molecules react to one another. This scenario is similar to the way in which stars within constellations constantly change their shape.

Ultimately, you will come to a halt at your new co-ordi-nates in an altered state. Translocation creates a trace, or a distance. Think of a snail emitting mucus as it moves, the trace left by the snail indicates its past location, its trajec-tory, and its current location. You will witness the distance covered – vis-à-vis your co-ordinates – at this new location, at the same time you will be able to confirm a reciprocal shift in location. This new sense of ‘the geometry of place’ can be perceived due to the noticeable shift in your own co-ordi-nates, the co-ordinates of the others, and the distance between the two. Arriving at these new co-ordinates you will

between you and a mask, resulting in an adaptation in shape; meaning that you will undergo processes of metamorphosis. At some point the molecules will initiate a state of transfor-mation – from solid to liquid – as the dynamics are activated. However, in the first phase you, the wearer of the mask will remain in the intermediate state between solid and liquid. The interesting thing about the mechanisms of a mask is that it involves you in continuous activity, in a state of transition, whether autonomously or arbitrarily. You will be alienated from your beginnings by this active state of transition. From this point on you will be able to perceive the reality of chemistry.

THE SECOND PHASE:LIQUID, THE MOVE

In the second phase the dynamics at play, between you and a mask, will prompt tactical moves from your own co-ordi-nates. In other words, you will experience ‘metamorphosis

(Pragmatism, With a Bottlebrush Plant in the Room)

In order to illustrate this I will use as a diagram the Robert Lewis Stevenson fable of the bird whose song makes days into moments: The bird’s song functioning as the Bottle-brush flowers do, the song positions the listener in a non-sensical temporality/diegesis.

Is ‘fascination’ with an object not so much to do with the object as a subject – the particulars of the object at hand – but more to do with the way that the presence of an object can draw out ones ability to be fascinated by and become high from the ability to not just look at but to see, read into, and attach meaning to objects, to be ‘with’ objects, and ‘within’ ‘the world’, a common world, alongside the object within the same world. The bird’s song brings a lens over the world like a rose-coloured one, or like the insight into the

future brought on by Bottlebrush leaves. The failures and quirks that Freudian psychoanalysis is

accused of absurdly making sense of, and offering scape-goats for, are the results of these terms being attached to actions which can be looked back upon: psychoanalysis offers the possibility for these ‘quirks’ and ‘failures’ to be re-framed simply as signifiers, plot points which do just that: point, rather than being the grunt of some emotional trauma or impeding issue, problem or disorder.

‘Spencer’s whole system wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked Hemlock boards.’

Sometimes James has no use for the house – and then it is no use if his assumption about it being found along the path is true or not.

Just as a healthy man need not always be doing the things which are recognised as making him healthy, so too Bottle-brush may not always be doing the things which substantiate

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a guide to the true meaning of why such chemistry is worth practising. Having returned to your initial co-ordinates you may try to play with a geometry of your own by activating dynamics with this experience as the focal point of your re-ality. Through this practice you are now aware that a mask is not simple, the geometry of place is not definite, and the or-der of disorder is not impracticable.

find yourself in the liquid state. Molecules become increas-ingly disordered during this second phase, and you will no longer be able to obtain the structural substance of the mech-anisms of a mask.

THE THIRD PHASE: GAS, TRAJECTORY

In the third phase, you soon realise that these new co-ordi-nates are temporary and unsustainable. After all, this shift in co-ordinates cannot be maintained; thereby playing a mask cannot continue. The molecular structure will be in complete disorder, and you will reach the gaseous state. At which time you will return to your original co-ordinates via the same route you originally moved through. The velocity will not be the same as in the second phase, and the trajectory you marked is your only clue. The path back may be as alienating as it is tedious. Nevertheless, the feelings caused by this backward movement should not be overlooked as they offer

its being referred to as Bottlebrush – for instance when the plant is not flowering, the reference to bottle brushes is totally lost.

I’d like to show you a Bottlebrush plant as a proposal for a conversation about ‘pragmatism’.

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August Boal (excerpt)

Games for Actors

and Non-Actors

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body does it. Stop. Ask them to do a cross with their left hand. Even easier. Everyone gets there. Stop. Ask them to do both at the same time. It’s almost impossible. In a group of 30 people sometimes one person manages it, almost never two. Three is the record!

Divide up the movement2

Break down any continuous movement into its constituent parts. For instance, walking – first extend one leg, place it on the ground, pause, then the other leg, and so on.

Slow motion3

The winner is the last person home. Once the race has begun, the actors must never stop moving and every movement should be executed as slowly as possible. Each ‘runner’ should take the largest step forward she is capable of on eve-ry stride. When one foot is being moved in front of the other, it must pass above knee-level. In the process of moving the

I FEELING WHAT WE TOUCH

(RESTRUCTURING MUSCULAR RELATIONS)

The cross and the circle1

We start with the exercise that is theoretically the easiest to do and yet, because of our psychological and physical mech-anisations, is actually extremely difficult to achieve in prac-tice. The participants in a workshop or a forum session can try it sitting down or standing up, on a chair, on a table, or on the ground. As there is no need for preparation, non-ac-tors have no fear of throwing themselves into it. As they are warned that it is almost impossible to do well, they aren’t ashamed of not succeeding. As there is no compulsion to succeed, they feel free to give it a try.

The participants are asked to describe a circle with their right hand. Large or small, as they please. It’s easy, every-

[Eds.] Games for Actors and Non-actors is a book by August Boal first published in English in 1992. The book introduces his methods for the Theatre of the Oppressed that aim to transform theatre into a democratic arena whereby the spec-tator becomes the ‘spect-actor’ – contributing ideas, playing roles and confronting social and political problems. It is also a handbook of methods, techniques, games, and exercises that prepare the actor and non-actor to ‘play’ their own lives.

From chapter 3, ‘The Arsenal of Theatre of the Oppressed’, pp. 48–174:

1 First series: general exercises-1, p.50.2 First series: general exercises-17, p.70.3 Second series: walks-1 p.71.

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IILISTENING TO WHAT WE HEAR

The orchestra and the conductor4

Each actor or group of several actors utters a rhythmic or melodic sound. The conductor listens to them. They must produce the same sound whenever the conductor asks them with a gesture of hand or baton. They must be quiet when she does not require their sound. In this manner, the conductor can compose her own piece of music. Everyone can have a turn at being the conductor.

Rhythm dialogues in teams5

Two teams are formed, each with a leader. The game begins: one leader requires a rhythm four times, directing it towards the opposing leader as if taking to him. The actors of the first leader’s group take up the rhythm and repeat it three times. The opposing lead in turn answers with another rhythm; im-

foot forwards, the actors must stretch their bodies right out, so that in this movement the foot will break the equilibrium, and every centimetre it moves, a new muscular structure will appear instinctively, activating certain ‘dormant’ muscles. When the foot falls, the sound should be audible. This exer-cise, which requires considerable equilibrium, stimulates all the muscles of the body. Another rule – both feet must never be on the ground at the same time: the moment the right foot lands, the left must rise and vice versa. Always with only one foot on the ground.

4 First series: rhythm-14, pp. 101–102.5 First series: rhythm-15, p.102.

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III DYNAMISING SEVERAL SENSES

One blind line, one sighted line7

Two lines of actors, facing each other. In one, the actors have their eyes closed; with their hands, they try to feel the face and hands of the actor facing them. Then the sighted actors separate and shuffle themselves, and each ‘blind person’ has to find the person who was facing them, by touching hands and faces.

Draw your own body8

…All the participants lie on the floor and think about their body as a totality, and also about each of its constituent parts: fingers, head, mouth, tongue, legs, sex organs, eyes, hair belly button, neck, elbows, shoulders, vertebrae. They try to move the part of the body they are thinking about, whenever possible.

mediately the members of his team, as if replying to the mem-bers of the other team, repeat what he’s done three times. The rhythms and the movements should be used as a dia-logue, as if the groups were really talking to each other. Each musical phrase can be as long or short, as simple or complex, as people want.

A, E, I, O, U6

All the actors cluster in a group, and one person comes and stands in front of them. The group must make sounds, using the letters A, E, I, O and U, changing the volume according to how near or far away the single actor is. When the ‘volume control’ actor is far away, the group gets louder and when he is close, they get quieter. The actor can move anywhere he likes around the room. The individual actors who make up the group should be trying to communicate a thought or emotion to the actor, not just making noise.

6 Fourth series: the rhythm of respiration-15, p.113.7 The blind series-5, p.118.8 The blind series-15, p.123.

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This exercise can greatly sensitise the group: first eve-ryone is thinking about their own body, about each individ-ual part of their body; then, when everyone is trying to reproduce by hand what they felt; lastly, after the exercise, then they pay much greater attention to themselves, to their movements, their way of sitting, their way of approaching other people, etc. The exercise makes the participants extremely conscious that we each of us are, first and fore-most, a body – before we have a name, we inhabit a body! And we rarely think of our body as the fundamental source of all pleasures and all pains, of all knowledge and all research, of everything!..

After a few minutes of concentration, the Joker* gives each person a sheet of paper (the sheets of paper must all be the same size) and a pencil or a felt pen (all the same colour if possible, or else don’t let the participants see what colour it is). The Joker asks each actor to draw their own body on the paper, with eyes firmly closed. Once this is done, the Joker asks the participants to write their names on the back of their drawings, still with their eyes closed. She then col-lects up the drawings, arrange them on the floor in any order, and tells everyone to open their eyes and come and look at this impromptu exhibition. She asks them what strikes them most about the drawings – are the bodies, naked or clothed, lying down or standing up, resting or working, in a relation-ship with objects or on their own, do they contain important details, such as the eyes or the sex organs or only general outlines? Finally, the Joker invites them to try to identify their own drawing.

* In August Boal’s Forum Theatre, the Joker functions ‘to ensure the smooth running of the game and teach the audience the rules; however, the Joker can be replaced if the ‘spect-actors’ do not think he or she is doing a fair job, and virtually any of the ‘rules’ of the game can be changed if the audience wants.’

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able to tell who was leading and who was following. All movements should be slow (so the ‘image’ may be able to reproduce and even anticipate them) and each movement should follow on naturally from the last. It is equally impor-tant that the participants be attentive to the smallest detail, whether of bodily or facial expression.

Ball games10

Football, basketball, volleyball, etc. two teams play a match without using a ball, but acting as if there was one A referee must check to see if the imaginary movements of the ball cor-respond closely enough to the real movements of the actors, and should correct them if necessary. A kind of collective sport can be played for this kind of exercise – ping-pong, tennis, etc.

One person we fear, one person is our protector11

All the participants must be scattered around the room.

IVSEEING WHAT WE LOOK AT

The plain mirror9

Two lines of participants, each person looking directly into the eyes of the person facing them. Those in line A are the ‘subjects’, the people; those in line B, are the ‘images’. The exercise begins. Each subject undertakes a series of move-ments and changes of expression, which his ‘image’ must copy, right down to the smallest detail.

The ‘subject’ should not be the enemy of his ‘image’ – the exercise is a not a competition, nor is the idea to make sharp movements which are impossible to follow; on the contrary, the idea is to seek a perfect synchronisation of movement, so that the ‘image’ may reproduce the ‘subject’s’ gestures as exactly as possible. The degree of accuracy and synchronisa-tion should be such that an outside observer would not be

9 The mirrors sequence-1, p.130.10 Image games-2, p.140.11 Image games -4, p.141.

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worker is not adequate for the mechanical work he has to achieve; thus the less human the worker, the more efficient he is and the more he turns into an automat. The actor makes his body do the movements that the worker normally does, the mask gradually gains the upper hand, till the worker ‘dies’. For example, the seamstress who ends up sewing up her own body, the priest for whom the righteousness pre-scribed by the rituals of the cloth ends up transforming him into an angel of the middle ages, of the pre-Renaissance pe-riod, without a sex, without individuality, without any per-sonal physiognomy; the prostitute who is just a moving body, etc.

Space and territory13

Space is infinite; my body is finite. But around my body is my territory, which is subjective. A woman is sitting on a crowd-ed subway. All the seats are taken, except for one seat beside her, which is empty. A man boards the carriage and sits be-

Without saying anything each person must think of a person in the room who frightens him (for the purposes of the game only). Everyone moves around the room, trying to keep as far away from the person who frightens them as possible, but also not letting that person be aware of the fact that they have chosen them as the one they fear. After a short time, the Joker asks everyone to think of another person who is their protector (who should also not be able to tell that he has been chosen as such). Now everyone must freeze where they are – then the players find out who has succeeded in evading the one they fear.

Making the mask all-encompassing12

The mask superimposes itself on the human being, but under the mask life goes on. This exercise consists of making the mask invade the whole human being, to the point of eliminat-ing all other signs of life. The ‘human’ component of the 12 Games of mask and ritual-15, p.155.

13 The invention of space and the special structures of power-1, p.162.

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V THE MEMORY OF THE SENSES

Memory: remembering yesterday14

The actors must be sitting quietly on chairs, completely re-laxed. They must slowly move each part of their body in suc-cession, concentrating solely on that part, in isolation. Eyes closed. Then the Joker starts encouraging them to recall eve-rything that happened the previous evening, before they want to bed. Each detail must be accompanied by bodily sen-sations – taste, smell, tactile sensations, shapes, colours, outlines, depth, sounds, tone, tune, noise, etc. The actor must make a special effort to remember his bodily sensations and try to re-experience them. To make the operation easier, he should repeat the movement of the relevant part of his body; if he is thinking about a shower he’s taken, he moves his body, the skin that was in contact with the water; if he thinks about a walk he took, he moves the muscles of his

side her – her territory has not been invaded. The same woman is sitting in the same seat, and the whole carriage is empty. The same man comes and sits by her: her territory is invaded…

14 Reconnecting memory, emotion and imagination-1, p.171.

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objects are there in the room? Open your eyes. Compare.

Reading newspapers15

The reading aloud and discussion of newspaper articles on political and social events, the demystification of the bour-geois press, the presentation of information not contained in the newspapers, by people with special knowledge.

Lessons16

Depending on the nature of the group and its awareness of historical events, lessons or explanations can be a useful sti-mulant: for instance, explaining the theory of surplus value.

Reconnaissance17

A single actor does all the actions and says all the lines, not in the present – there and then – but in a vision of what she will think in the future: ‘I will say this, then I’ll do that, but not now.’ First we reconnoiter the paths to be trod; we do nothing, we simply identify what we are going to do.

legs, his feet. After this, the Joker continues the probing, now pushing the actors to recall what happened to them that morning. How did they wake up? With an alarm clock? Did someone wake them? The sound of the alarm, the person’s voice – what were these things like? They are asked to give the most minutely detailed description of the face of the first person they saw. All the details of the room they slept in, of the room they breakfasted in. Then, the means of transport they used. Their travelling companions? Underground, bus, car? The sound of the door closing, etc. Always searching for the details, the most minute details the body impressions, and always with the small movements of the relevant part of the body, which must accompany the memory. Finally, their arrival in the room they are in. Whom did they see first? Which voice did they hear first? A sensory description of the room, with as much detail as possible. Now – where are they? Next to the room? How is everyone else dressed? What

15 Ideological warm-up p. 225.16 Ideological warm-up p. 226.17 Ideological warm-up p. 234.

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Beatrice Gibson,

Will Holder, John Tilbury

Always Play the Music When You Get Stuck

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about those things – and about the score in particular – as a kind of paradigm for my own production.

‘So I just want to read this quote that Cornelius Cardew writes:

“Notation is a way of making people move. If you lack others like aggression or persuasion, the notation should do it. This is the most rewarding aspect of a work on notation. The trouble is, just as you find your sounds are too alien, intended for a different culture, you make the same discovery about your beautiful notation. No one is willing to understand it. No one moves.”

‘So, it’s in relation to this idea of movement that I’ve invited John and Will to have a conversation and what we thought we’d try and do was a close reading of a score by Cornelius Cardew called The Tiger’s Mind.’

‘Lately I’ve been trying to think about making films as an ex-ercise in making people move. I’ve been trying to think this idea of making people move through the medium of film; and more specifically through the medium of the script. So the way I think of the script – just to be clear – is not as the re-sult of a single person’s labour but as a much wider thing, a sort of methodology in and of itself, that has something to do with, or that participates in and instigates this “poetics of activation”.

‘Essentially, my work draws on, and references, many of the ideas in experimental music practices of the ’60s and ’70s, and specifically, ideas around collective authorship and what I would call a kind of “poetics of activation”. To be more specific: within experimental music there is a focus on, a kind of rethinking of the hierarchy between performer and composer or rather composer and performer, and an essen-tial part of that was the proposal of more democratic and egalitarian models of production. So I’ve been thinking

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ries when the performer was encouraged to improvise and was given a good deal more freedom.

‘(This of course started way back in the 19th century. The scores of Mahler, for example, were extremely prescrip-tive and then it went on until you got to the really extreme cases of the music of Stockhausen and Boulez, in particular). So this was really a reaction against that. Many of us per-formers should be and are eternally grateful for this turn of events.

‘We talked about the poetics of motivation, something similar to the poetics of activation, and that’s where we come to notation: How do you get people to move, how do you get people to assume responsibility? Freedom comes or should come with extra responsibilities and that of course is what you have here with Treatise: the performer is not told what to do.

‘The Tiger’s Mind was written in 1967. Cardew was very involved with improvisation at the time. This was the only piece or score he produced in 1967. Going back a bit further: what had happened (certainly in Europe in contemporary music in the ’50s and early ’60s) was that the scores had become very prescriptive. In other words: the performers were carrying out orders, carrying out a sequence of com-mands. He – or she – was told precisely what do to and when to do it. So the performer had basically become a technocrat with no (or very little) artistic input. So it was like playing in a straightjacket and this was no fun for any of us.

‘There was reaction to that by the composers them-selves – in particular Cardew – who wanted to put the per-former back at the centre, the hub of music making, where the performer was actually invited to make a creative input into the music. The performer would have a say even so far as determining the form of the piece of music. So it became much more collaborative, as it had been in previous centu-

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which various objects – bolts rubber plastic – are inserted between the strings, creating a complete change in the sound of the piano.) So that could be the feature of the circles that are instantly recognisable.

‘And of course you have to do this for every single sym-bol, of which they are probably about 80, so the mind is really taxed and even more than the mind, the imagination is taxed as to what you do. It’s already quite a challenge.

‘The next question is of course the question of consist-ency. So if on page nine a circle makes an appearance, then you must do something that links it with the circles of the following pages. Then of course the question arises of the difference between circles: how to actually mark that, how do you show that? How do you perform that? What’s the dif-ference between a large black and a small black circle? Or a large white circle and a small white circle? Or come to that: what about circles which are not circles, which are half cir-

‘This is a score of 192 pages of an astonishing variety of sym-bols, and was originally printed without any instructions at all. It was just delivered – you read the 192 pages. What you can see from a pretty cursory look at it is that certain sym-bols feature during certain sections of the score. So for ex-ample, the very obvious one here, on page 131 and the pre-ceding six or seven pages and following, you’ve got a section in which circles feature. Then you would have another sec-tion where squares feature; or freehand diagrams of some description; or even the five lines stave features; or numbers feature. What the performer has to do is to assign sounds to these symbols. So the performer has to decide what kind of sounds are suggested or prescribed by say the symbol of the circle.

‘For example, if I’m playing the piano I might decide in the circle section, or the section which features circles, that I will use the prepared piano. (The prepared piano is a piano into

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The tiger sleeps in the tree. High wind. Amy climbs the tree, which groans in the wind and succumbs.The tiger burns.

NightpieceThe tiger burns and sniffs the wind for news. He storms at the circle; if inside to get out, if outside to get in. Amy sleeps while the tiger hunts. She dreams of the wind, which then comes and wakes her. The tree trips Amy in the dark and in her fall she recognizes her mind. The mind, rocked by the wind tittering in the leaves of the tree,

cles or quarter circles? So it becomes a real can of worms.’

‘The Tiger’s Mind is not a graphic score, it is a verbal score and I think that this is one of the key distinctions that we want to unpack.’

‘THE TIGER’S MINDSEXTET

CORNELIUS CARDEW

DaypieceThe tiger fights the mind that loves the circle that traps the tiger. The circle is perfect and outside time. The wind blows dust in Tigers’ eyes. Amy reflects, relaxes with her mind, which puts out buds. (emulates the tree). Amy jumps through the circle and comforts the tiger.

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tion. This was The Tiger’s Mind…I wrote the piece with AMM1 musicians in mind, [the score] consists solely of words. THE ABILITY TO TALK is almost universal, and the faculties of reading and writing are much more widespread than draughtsmanship or musicianship. The merit of The Tiger’s Mind is that it demands no musical education and no visual education; all it requires is a willingness to understand English and a desire to play (in the widest sense of the word).”

‘So when John introduced The Tiger’s Mind to this conversa-tion…at least that’s the way I see it: that this conversation is another of a series of conversations that we are having. And we are looking at how the conversations are going to be transposed into a book form. So how they are going to be transposed, or represented, or stimulated by way of the printed page. So by way of printed matter, words on the

and strangled by the circle, goes on the nod. The circle is trying to teach its secrets to the tree. The tree laughs at the mind and at the tiger fighting it.

‘I want to read a piece that Cardew wrote later about the re-lationship between, or about the transition from Treatise to The Tiger’s Mind. He was in Buffalo finishing Treatise, in 1967, when he wrote The Tiger’s Mind and he speaks of the difficulty of getting musicians – and especially for his prefer-ence, non-musicians – to be able to play a score like Treatise as clearly it becomes quite a complex affair. He talks about people’s literacy, and about the fact that (he says) 90 percent of musicians are visually illiterate and find it extremely dif-ficult to transpose this score into music. And he says it’s usu-ally mathematicians and graphic artists that find it a lot eas-ier to produce music using this score.

‘He says “depressing considerations of this kind led me to my next experiment in the direction of guided improvisa-

1 AMM are a British free improvisation group, founded in London, 1965, its current members include John Tilbury and Eddie Prevost.

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graphic or visual notation in relation to what Cardew calls “the natural context”. How, lets say, that recorder is picking up what we’re saying and we’ll be able to transcribe that into words but in relation to everything else that happens in a conversation and how that could be either motivated, stimu-lated, directed, scored or notated in relation to the printed page. That’s the question.’

‘What The Tiger’s Mind does very effectively, unlike Treatise, is to be more a notation of feeling between people, based on the relationships amongst AMM, and I find that intriguing. When John put this score on the table I was enticed by it be-cause I’m not as familiar with verbal scores as I am with graphic scores. What’s amazing for me about this score is that it’s both a document [of the relations] and a set of in-structions. It’s a paradox: a score for improvisation. I think – from a layperson or from an artist’s perspective – I under-

page or symbols on the page – or let’s just say ink on paper…When John brought this text to the table, as it were, I was extremely provoked. Or extremely happy, because I knew of this work, but I hadn’t really looked at it closely; and what Cardew writes there about this idea of, let’s say: the democ-ratising effect of the English language on these relations; or let’s say: the relations he has, whereby he chooses the Eng-lish language because [the players] all speak English; but let’s say language as a motivating force; or: the language – as we have now said – that incorporates in itself this poetics of activation.

‘What is this difference between the graphic score and the language-driven score? We’ve been looking at the score of The Future’s Getting Old Like The Rest Of Us: it’s just text, it’s flat; the text is not articulated in any graphic way (in the way that making certain words bold or italic might do). Why was that decision made, or could we imagine parts of the texts or an accompaniment to the text as being more of a

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‘About the idea of text versus graphic or visual instruction: When George Clark and I were editing the script or the score for the film [The Future’s Getting Old Like The Rest Of Us], we had this day when we put the entire score on the wall and instinctively responded to it visually.

‘We stood back and said “well page two looks really black so we should shift a bit over there” and it wasn’t really about content, it was more about moving graphic shapes. So that was one way in which the page – or the graphic – started to play a really important role in relation to text.’

‘The different models of authorship that these two things propose; or the way that authorship is distributed dif-ferently within the graphic and within the textual are radi-cally different. With Treatise, you have symbols that ulti-mately have to represent something, not necessarily a sound but an action of some kind. Dancers have actually performed

stand what kind of social model the graphic score is propos-ing in terms of the performer’s freedom of interpretation. But this, The Tiger’s Mind, I just find mind-blowingly open and exciting; and I also find it quite confronting in relation to my own film making, because I think it’s a very different thing to put this in front of a bunch of extremely experienced musicians and to require them to move, than it is to work with, say, the residents of an old people’s home.

So when I do work with, let’s say: laypersons’ commu-nities, I do in fact end up constructing open situations of which they are able to author parts. But they are highly com-posed and structured and my role as author is very explicit in some ways, so they are a contradiction. They are both open situations but extremely authored open situations and I find this score both enticing and terrifying in terms of the different level of freedom that it proposes. 4

. . . . . . . . ..

Hhhhhmmmmmmm

Tennis. 14 days of total boredom. We all have our tastes. I suppose. . . . I’d do anything to get away from it.

!e . . . TV doesn’t work.

What I do love and it must come back I think. On the slow train. John Betjeman. Must have been around that time. It was set to music. And.... !ey closed down. What was it. Forty odd stations. And now they are bringing them back again. Well that’s their intention. !ats the salvation of the nation.

Mustn’t it.

!ey talked about it a lot after. Oh yes. . . Oh . . . yes.

Two sugars please.

!e moon? . . . . I wouldn’t mind.

Me

I can’t remember the de-tails of the landing, I just remember that somebody did land, they’re still talk-ing about it now, so that’s boring too, everythings bloody boring. !e soviets and the Americans were in competition, they are always in compeition those two. I used to discuss it with my colleague at work, he was more pro-Ameriacn than me, I was more pro-Russian, so we could never agree, he was more pro-American and I was more pro-Russian so we used to argue the whole time, it wouldn’t have mat-ter who landed "rst anyway, I’m more interested in what Obamas doing than landing on the moon.

I don’t mind the tube.

!e advance of technology and all the things that go with actually landing

Tea?

Its Progress. It’s something that we should be interested in really. While we’re still alive. !e way its going on we wont be around when it time to go up and have a holiday on the moon.

Its an interesting subject really. It’s fascinating really to think that its possible that people will be going on holiday on the moon. !e way transport is today.

Actually when you think you go on holiday now and you sit on the train and your on it for hours anyway, trying to get to Southend or somewhere for a holiday, it would be just the same as going to the moon

We own the moon.

Well there’s an old saying. Its one step at a time. Its got to be on step at a time ... !ere’s no other time. One step at a time. A psychological truth...

You’re not meant to do, no you’re not meant to, human beings are meant to be on the ground, on the ground.

Its not as simple as it looks is it. Its not as simple as it looks. We’re meant to be here. We were born on earth. We were born here. Not in space. We weren’t born on space we were born on earth, but I must say, some good things come o# of it and that was the main thing, the frying pan. It was, it was non-sticky. You could fry things on there and they wouldn’t stick. !ey got it out of the rocks, they discovered that they were non-sticky, when you used it, it wasn’t sticky. !e old pan became ... ob ... obsolete. Di#erent wayyyys of... di#erent way of working.

We were meant to be on this earth, we were born on earth.

It must be fascinating

Tea ? No no I . . . . don’t.

If I went, . . . I would want to make sure that the atmosphere was similar to ours. I don’t want to go somewhere I can’t take a breath.

I can’t quite understand that.

Isn’t that rather far o#. I’d like to keep it in my imagination as long as possible. If I was to be sent I wouldn’t go. I’d run for it.

I would like to have seen that. . . It must be fascinating to see it.

!ere was a woman who died. A Russian astronaut. . .

3

. . . . . . . . .INT, Wellesley Road Care home, Camden.

Voice A

Scene One, Space(Footage of moon landing)

INT, Wellesley Road Care home, Camden.

Voice B

Scene One, Space(Footage of moon landing)

INT, Wellesley Road Care home, Camden.

Voice D

Scene One, Space(Footage of moon landing)

I can’t hear…… I can’thear . . . . I don’t know what their talking about.

!ere’s somebody talking. I’m deaf.

INT, Wellesley Road Care home, Camden.

Voice C

Scene One, Space(Footage of moon landing)

Look at that. What’s that. !ere’s a big black beetle. Running. Across the "oor.

By his left foot. Left foot. Right foot.

May I say something. I can’t say its been a life changing event. I just. . . recall seeing it . . .I saw it . . in black and white. After that there were so many B-movies made. Made with directors and so on. I became totally bored. Bored. I put it out my mind.

Yes Yes

I’ ll try anything once.

!e thing is . . .

I was in Germany, dancing

Germany

!ere were all the plastic balloons. And they were "oating up and down in space as it were, weren’t they? (Cough. Cough)

INT, Wellesley Road Care home, Camden.

Voice E

Scene One, Space(Footage of moon landing)

INT, Wellesley Road Care home, Camden.

Voice F

Scene One, Space(Footage of moon landing)

INT, Wellesley Road Care home, Camden.

Voice G

Scene One, Space(Footage of moon landing)

INT, Wellesley Road Care home, Camden.

Voice H

Scene One, Space(Footage of moon landing)

!at’s amazing. I remember that.

I never found out what happened but there was a man who went and walked on it wasn’t there?

It’s amazing that we actually were able to get up there.

Germans. He didn’t go to Germany.

!e man who was walking on the moon. 1969.

!ey never went again because there was that much going on down here. Murders every ten seconds of the day or drugs and all the rest of it.

It takes . . . . courage,

Unrealistic it seemed. It was almost like a vision in a dream, I felt, that I couldn’t quite make it reality, it took me some time to do so, when it was talked on the radio and on television, when they enlarged on it, then I was able to grasp, step by step what went on because the landing itself and ... people like myself didn’t know what to make of it and how they got there.

!e best thing to come out of that was the frying pan. !e non-sticky frying pan. You put your eggs in. You put your, your, er lard whatever it may be and it never stuck to the pan. It never stuck to the pan. !ey invented that from the moon. !ey, got it from the stones of the moon.

Yes . . .

I would have liked to have gone up there. It must be fascinating. We should be able to get up there. We seem to "y around. We’re so advanced now compared to what we were years ago. I would love to go.

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notating it. But Cornelius – being the person he is – actually comes up with a notation, a kind of verbal notation of what happens.’

‘He was once commissioned to write a piece for a choir and again – being Cornelius – he didn’t write any choral material at all, he just gave them two stones and asked them to bang them together.’

‘He got them to improvise with whistles.’ ‘But this is a more serious philosophical attempt to try

and describe what actually happens during improvisation (which is totally free). But there are these relationships between the players that are psychologically very complex. For example, let’s take a very crude example that occurs: supposing somebody is doing something that you find utterly distasteful, what do you do? Do you go up to the person and say “excuse me I can’t stand what you’re playing” (I’m talk-ing about the players amongst themselves, not the audience)

this, using it as the basis for choreography. Nevertheless it’s representational: these symbols have to be dealt with in some way. With The Tiger’s Mind, there are no such symbols. What you have are two elements: abstract thought processes and relationships between the characters, which are abso-lutely key. If you read it through you find that the characters are interacting with each other, and of course that comes from the music. The music was improvised. Apart from Cardew himself, AMM weren’t readers, they couldn’t and wouldn’t read music. They weren’t interested in reading music, they just made music. In fact if you put a score in front of them, even Treatise, even The Tiger’s Mind, if you put a score in front of a bunch of improvisers, its like showing a red rag to a bull: they wanted to rip it, tear it up and devour it or throw it away. So you don’t talk about scores. Christian Wolff once said that notation – in relation to how AMM plays – and what it produces is unimaginable, or words to that effect. It would impossible to notate it, to find any way of

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thought. You say, shall I do that again, shall I actually play that motif again or shall I not do it? Shall I move on and do something else? There is, if you like, a pressure on you to be very alert. You have to be intensely aware of everything that’s happening outside and inside, and inside yourself, outside in the audience, outside in the environment, inside in the music and so forth. You have to be aware of that and it’s how you deal with a situation which makes it – dare I say it – which makes it good or bad music. Which – as my daughter would say – makes it worthwhile to get out of bed to come to hear you play. “Dad, is it worth my while getting out of bed to come and here you play?” I say “Of course it is, but it’s not always worth your while getting out of bed for other people.”

‘Such is my arrogance, but if you can’t be arrogant at 74, when can you be arrogant?

Or do you try – metaphorically as it were – to guide them by the hand somewhere else?

‘You try and change a situation by playing.

‘And another less dramatic one: suppose you’re into a certain kind of texture let’s say, a certain mood even. How long does that mood go on for? How long do you continue that texture? When does it seem the right time to change it? And, of course, people will decide that at different moments. Some-body might say, “this is the time to change”, and begin to shift, whereas the other four want to stay where they are.

‘So you get all kinds of tensions and that’s exactly what Cornelius managed to depict in that wonderful text. And when you read on, it’s very interesting when he talks about the characters themselves. The way he describes the mind and the circle, it’s something that borders on the pyscho-philosophical. It’s a mixture of psychology and philosophy, which is what happens when you play: you get into cognitive

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ery rhymes. It’s so much embedded in real life, even going back to the nursery. So you get the juxtaposition of the ab-stract with the very simple and the naturalistic. You know, The House That Jack Built?

The tiger fights the mindthat loves the circlethat traps the tigerthat made the house that jack built.

I won’t say anymore, you take over.’

‘One more thing: I mentioned the stream of abstract thoughts in this text. What I like about it is when it kind of slips into kind of naturalistic images, like for example,

The tiger is fighting Amy jumps through the circleThe tiger sleepsShe comforts the tiger

These are all ordinary things that are quite naturalistic,

The tree burns The tiger groans The tiger sniffs The tiger hunting She dreams

And there is also a very strong connection with English nurs-

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Planning Games

Axel Wieder (captions)

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