the political pragmatics of nonappearance in china

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Department of Visual Cultures Examiner AssignmentReport

Student Number: 33044270

Degree Programme: MAGA

Course: Dissertation

Assignment title: The Political Pragmatics of Non-Appearance in China

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The Political Pragmatics of Non-Appearance in China

Introduction

How does one practice and/or address a practice where non-appearance has been adopted as a

methodology (or is a factor) due to choice or necessity? In this text I will address a ‘view’ or

understanding of non-appearance as a productive practice, a practice which may be seen to manifest

itself (in an institutionalised fashion) in relation to the artworld, but which (more broadly) encompasses

socially-aware activity. I will be addressing such concerns within the specific situation in Mainland

China.

I propose that such a methodology and such practices reflect socio-political realities of working in China.

In my approach to these practices I will highlight aspects of Western post-structuralism that develop an

idea of the presence and absence of the author-figure, and of the spatially-productive work of the act of

an author. The production of community is already a problematic issue within the Chinese context, as

non-state-sanctioned groupings are treated with suspicion if not repression, and is central in the

understanding of appearance or non-appearance. A self-imposed restriction on the appearance of

community may in this way be seen to create previously unavailable spaces for creative production that

subvert restrictions that are imposed on visible manifestations of community from outside.

I must stress, though, that this is not a proposal of another form of ‘revolutionary’ practice that such a

withdrawal from apparently hopeless of co-opted dissent might appear to be. These practices may work

surreptitiously, but they do not necessarily aim for change in so radical way. They aim, in their way, to

exist and address real situations and problems in ways which do not lead to their immediate extinction.

The event

Why is this event significant?

I want to describe a situation in which nothing happened. I will mark this as an entry point to understand

the general argument of this text around this event that—I believe—exemplifies some of the features of

practicing in China. The description of this event embodies reactions to the kind of situation that I want

to address both as a researcher and as a participant. From this event certain “truths” can be drawn



Student Number: 33044270 2

regarding practice in society, specifically Chinese society. The text that describes the situation must be

prefaced as follows:

[Imagine that this story is being told by someone living and working in China. This story exists

as a file on a computer, a file that will potentially be emailed through a network, and printed by

a printer, both located in that country. In that situation certain restrictions must apply.]

This text goes on to describe and contextualize an event that took place in China in February 2011. This

event was related to the Jasmine Spring demonstrations that were taking place in other parts of the

world at that time. Some of those began by informal gatherings to express grievances specific to the

various locations. In relation to the situation in China there was an anonymous call for a protest, to take

place in a number of Chinese cities on a certain day and time. The form of protest that was called for

was specifically tailored to the Chinese situation, a form which was deliberately low-key, if not invisible:

the call was for people to simply stroll through a particular pedestrian shopping area at a particular time.

This format recognised certain realities of the situation in China, as gatherings, marches, protests of any

sort are highly regulated.

There is a popular pedestrianized shopping street in the capital city of this country. The

pedestrian street is full of people. People are in police uniforms. People are in plain clothes.

People are journalists, camera operators and presenters, recording pieces for news

programmes. People are workers performing street maintenance. One or two other people

have flowers. Some others order a particular set meal in an American fast-food restaurant on

one side of the road. There may or may not be some other people. Today, the workers have

hastily dug up the street outside the restaurant such that people cannot easily walk through the

area. Small cleaning trucks are traveling up and down the other side of the street spraying

water on the road. It is too wet for people to walk there. Another set of people is comprised of

what appear to be tourists and shoppers. The street is close to the centre of the city. The

centre of city is the location of the centre of government. The city plan is designed around this

centre, although the plan predates this particular government. The centre holds the highest

religious and secular significance. Prior registration of organized gatherings of people must be

submitted and approved by the local public security bureau. Informal gatherings of people will

be broken up if such an action is deemed necessary. A few days earlier, an anonymous call

was published on a website hosted in another country calling for people to go for a walk in

various places in various cities. Websites hosted on servers in other countries load more slowly




for people inside the country than those hosted internally. Some websites are inaccessible.

Social media is popular, however not all messages can be posted to social media. It might

appear to the writer that their message has been posted to social media, yet they are the only

people for whom it is visible. This can be predictable. And unpredictable. There is a ritual to

access inaccessible websites. Rituals must be renewed periodically. Slowness, indirection, and

rituals are subtle mechanisms. These subtle mechanisms affect the choices that are made and

present them as if they are natural.

While that is a lot of words to describe a situation, perhaps such a density of information is necessary to

balance its necessary non-specificity. Could one claim that this method is performative of the act of

protest being described? Does that prove anything about the act of protest, or does it merely reflect a

hopelessness embodied in the protest?

The author in this situation seems slippery. In this text I will address issues related to the act of

authorship, beginning in language and then as act and then as expressed in the notion of “everyday

life”.

I should begin with this “everyday life”. In China, in particular, everyday life has an ideological role to

play in the self-positioning of political bodies, i.e. it is seen as closer to a “truth” that is embodied in value

through hard labour and nationalist feelings of being close to the land. In reaction to such a enforced

ideological reading, in recent years such allusions to everyday life have caused a certain reaction that

has favoured avoiding such interpretations and a tiredness with overly proscriptive political interpretation

of such things.

With a positive or negative interpretation, “everyday life” is inevitably seen as a factor in social practice.

In the case of my research I have focused on social practice that is an act (or series of acts), which may

or may not be related to artistic practice, but which specifically addresses the world outside of an

autonomous art practice and an autonomous art system.

By leaving the space of the art practice and art system, the lives and practices that I am addressing

through this dissertation leave one apparatus and enter another. A number of thinkers have speculated

on the apparatus as an arrangement of power relationships that in their formation are indicative of

society. An apparatus is fluid and ephemeral, and partake of any aspect of the relationships, but may be

sketched in any situation of social life. It must be recognised that these apparatus are impossible to

define in a way that might make them clearly circumscribable. However, reversing the viewpoint, certain




attributes of the situations may be pointed out that reveal the apparatus, by ‘social practice’ I refer to

creative acts within the social space of the apparatus.

One function of the apparatus, as it is understood by Giorgio Agamben, is the production of

subjectivities, and in this way it marks the act of power as a productive and organising principle of

discrete and manageable members of a socio-political situation:

Apparatus . . . is first of all a machine that produces subjectifications, and only as such is it also

a machine of governance. (Agamben 2009, 20)

But such subjectifications may be created by any number of apparatus, under the control of many

participants, and adapted to many uses within the same situation. This dissertation argues that if

apparatus are a given and their subjectifications are inevitable productions of such arrangements, these

arrangements can be put to uses that do not necessarily become governmental or overpowering.

Indeed, practices may exploit the spaces made available within apparatus to create regions which serve

their specific purposes without triggering a reaction by the governmental apparatus, or it may be

possible to see these spaces as serving a balancing or counter-acting purpose within a controlling

society.

Effectiveness?

How do we judge effectiveness in these situations? Effectiveness is a red herring, as it always institutes

a regime of value judgement to what should be seen as an open practice (in the context I am

addressing). It will be assumed throughout the progress of this dissertation that “success” and “failure” in

their various contexts of appearance are difficult to locate by nature of the methodology, and simple

definitions and expectations of such results may be impossible and irrelevant in this way of thinking of

the act.

I start with the assumption that the social space of the apparatus implicitly divides acts into those that

are allowed and those that are disallowed. This is the field of the possible for those acts and within

which participants act. And, vice versa, the particular expression of this field of possibility can be seen

as the realization of the potential available within an apparatus.

I am proposing that in this context a visibility of practice becomes marked as unproductive, and hence

non-visibility becomes a possibility of an “effective” practice (perhaps theory in itself marks just such an

invisible practice and marks out other practices where they cannot do so themselves).




. . . political commitment, however revolutionary it may seem, functions in a counter-

revolutionary way so long as the writer experiences his solidarity with the proletariat only in the

mind and not as a producer. (Benjamin 1998, 91)

This man, says Döblin, should find his place at the side of the proletariat. But what sort of place

is that? The place of a well-wisher, an ideological patron. An impossible place. . . . the place of

the intellectual in the class struggle can only be determined, or better still chosen, on the basis

of his position within the production process. (Benjamin 1998, 93)

It must be noted, however, that Benjamin later cautions that “the proletarianization of the intellectual

hardly ever makes him a proletarian.” (Benjamin 1998, 102)

Such a concern with positioning comes to the fore in theories of marginalised groups, particularly in

(Western) Feminist theory. Judith Butler radically resituates science as acts of rhetoric and as

expressing relations of power rather than urges to truth. She posits instead a “feminist objectivity” that

focuses on partial, but accountable, perspectives on knowledge.

Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence

and splitting of subject and object. In this way we might be answerable for what we learn how

to see. (Haraway 1991, 190)

This “situated knowledge” reflects a concern with positioning which may be seen to relate to Henri

Lefebvre theories of social situations, a point I pick up later in this essay.

Like [Katie] King’s objects called ‘poems’, which are sites of literary production where language

also is an actor independent of intentions and authors, bodies as objects of knowledge are

material-semiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries materialize in social interaction.

Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; ‘objects’ do not pre-exist as such. Objects are

boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What

boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies. Siting

(sighting) boundaries is a risky practice. (Haraway 1991, 201)

Haraway’s vision is of an “objectivity as a positioned rationality” that bring together the “partial views and

halting voices into a collective subject position” whose promise is of “ongoing finite embodiment, of living

within limits and contradictions, i.e., of views from somewhere.” (Haraway 1991, 196)




These arguments are made in relation to sex and gender but I also see them as applicable for

addressing the Chinese situation I am concerned with. Without wishing to appropriate these arguments

into resources that would merely perpetuate a logic of domination, I see such a way of thinking as being

applicable to the situation of practitioners in the state of control that pertains in China

The stress of “responsibility”—this ethical dimension of the consideration of knowledge—strikes me as

central to an understanding of my own position, as researcher, in relation to my subjects. As foreigner,

as visibly non-Asian, I do not “fit in”, and therefore my relation with the subjects—as I describe them—

must be taken into consideration to (hopefully) avoid (or at least to recognise) exploitation or

manipulation – a possibly impossible task, but at least laying all this information out in the open will

allow the reader to read in complicity with my writing and understand something of the balance of power

in the research process.

China as a situation

What is the presence of the state apparatus in China within the social and geographical landscape? It

appears “evidence” is difficult to define, and as such exists as an in-definition. While the state apparatus

in China can be discerned via the acts of the public security bureau’s officials, the army’s visbility at a

lower threshold of social organisation, and the quasi-authoritarian over-arching presence of the Party

and its membership, and these elements’ presence and insertion into daily life can be pointed to at

times, there is also an element of uncertainty, where the form and realisation of these as apparatus is in

constant flux. This flux leads to nuances and consequences that are unpredictable. In that way it is left

open to possibilities, on the state side, but also for the subject of the state apparatus.

It goes without saying that the state (in this case, as embodied by the Party) aspires to be omni-present.

Its power is effectively distributed into a massively hierarchical organization of groups and officials, from

central government down the smallest local cadre. In what can be seen to be a result of China’s

unstable recent history, as well as through ideological construction and repressive techniques, there is a

high ideological investment in the Party as maintainer of social harmony. The Party has put in place

extensive educational and legal (or – para-educational and para-legal) systems that support that

ideology, and a proactive process of censorship is part of the process of maintaining this.

As Andrew J. Nathan says, while China is still a party-state—“a centralized, unitary system in which

power at low levels derives from grants by the center”—interference from the top has markedly lessened

than was the case under Mao and Deng: “the [Chinese] regime is pragmatic.” Since the events of 1989




in China, “the separation of responsibilities and spheres of authority—which Max Weber saw as

definitive characteristics of the modern state—has gradually increased. What belongs to a given agency

to handle is usually handled by that agency not only without interference, but with a growing sense that

interference would be illegitimate.” (Nathan 2003)

Such a social arrangement of responsibility also has the added benefit of creating a psychological

friction preventing perceived injustices from transferring up the hierarchy:

. . . expressions of dissatisfaction, including widely reported worker and peasant

demonstrations, are usually directed at lower level authorities, while the regime as a whole

continues to enjoy high levels of acceptance. (Nathan 2003)

These channels of demand- and complaint-making have two common features. One is that

they encourage individual rather than group-based inputs, the latter of which are viewed as

threatening by the regime. The other is that they focus complaints against specific local-level

agencies or officials, diffusing possible aggression against the Chinese party-state generally.

Accordingly, they enable citizens to pursue grievances without creating the potential to threaten

the regime as a whole. (Nathan 2003)

Such a regime displays a degree of flexibility and pragmatism that Nathan suggests is the reason for its

on-going success, and why organised contention that has marked activism in other parts of the world

over the past few years has been unable to take hold here.

The event described above is an instance where an apparatus can apparently be read in quite clear

terms. It demonstrates the movement into and out of focus that takes place as acts of state practice and

resistance occur, and the various needs of both the state and the practitioners that are productively

expressed in the space of the apparatus.

The act

The following represents a cursory sketch of the act and its significance to the situation in China and to

the practices there that I am addressing.

In order to analyse this event and from that the practices in China, I want to begin with the notion of the

act. Before notions of practice, before intervention, before community, before any of the results that we

see out there , I want to bring my thinking back to an idea of the act and build back up from there.




Act and authorship

The act (in this case) is understood as the stage for subjectification and the related understanding of

authorship, and the consequences that arise from the absence pointed at in the author-function, as

Foucault describes it in the text What is an author? (Foucault 1977) and which is developed by

Agamben who proposes the gesture as the authoring principle in Author as Gesture.

Foucault develops a theory of the author that incorporates the reader as creator of that subject.

Ultimately he sees an actual author as being a social construction, and any subject behind this author as

disappearing behind it:

In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within

language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the subject constantly

disappears. (Foucault 1977, 102)

Building on this understanding, Agamben attends to this lack of the subject within the author-function:

An author-subject does exist, and yet he is attested to only through the traces of his absence.

(Agamben 2007, 64–65)

The expression of this absence as inexpressibility Agamben calls the gesture, a figure that he places

great emphasis on as a pure-political act of politics by the subject. The gesture is an act around which

society and politics forms around, but which exists before such a formation and which benefits from the

freedoms that that entails:

If we call ‘gesture’ what remains unexpressed in each expressive act, we can say that . . . the

author is present in the text only as a gesture that makes expression possible precisely by

establishing a central emptiness within this expression. (Agamben 2007, 66)

For Agamben this gesture is the possible for expression, the potential from which the author is

constructed around.

Potentiality

Tian’anmen

In the context of my text, it is significant to note that Agamben develops the concept of the gesture with

a view the events that took place in China in 1989. This text is one of a series of expositions that

Agamben has made on the nature of potentiality, or (as he refers to it in this text) the “potentiality to not-




be.“ He suggests that to use the term ‘potentiality’ still expects an object for the act, or a “determinate

activity” as he puts it. This is then problematic as such a determination becomes available to being co-

opted by a state apparatus, at which point the suggestion is that it would lose any possibility of being

transformative. Agamben then posits the idea of the “potentiality to not-be” which I believe reflects the

act of the non-appearance of the actor. (Agamben 1993, 85–86)

Bartleby

In the same collection of essays that Tian’anmen is published in, Agamben addresses the character of

Bartleby, a character who originally appeared in the titular short story by Herman Melville. Bartleby, for

Agamben, expresses the potential to be and not-be that is so important for a politics distinct from the

state:

Bartleby, a scribe who does not simply cease writing but ‘prefers not to,’ is the extreme image

of this angel that writes nothing but its potentiality to not-write. (Agamben 1993, 37)

Of Bartleby, Agamben describes his “unfathomable potentiality” through his “perfect act of writing”:

Only a power that is capable of both power and impotence, then, is the supreme power. . . .

The perfect act of writing comes not from a power to write, but from an impotence that turns

back on itself and in this way comes to itself as a pure act (which Aristotle calls agent intellect).

(Agamben 1993, 36–37)

There is here described an immobility that exists to occupy space as a means to expression of an

expression that can have no form. It seems that Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is the immovable within

a system that demands movement, by which it can—as it is said of the perception of cats—distinguish

objects only by their movement against a background.

The potentiality to “not-be”

I believe it is possible to see this “potentiality to not-be” as still evident some 22 years after the events in

Beijing. Agamben sees the state struggling against the non-state, the latter he labels as “humanity” or

the “whatever singularity”:

Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language,

and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the

State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be

a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear. (Agamben 1993, 87)




There were no tanks in the more recent event I described above, only sanitation trucks and road-works,

so maybe that is what is called ‘progress’. Nevertheless there was threat to occupy space, and a

reaction to that threat which appeared as a pre-emptive pre-occupation of that same space.

Absence and the act

An absence-which-produces is significant. The question for Foucault, Agamben, and other writers is

also how can we then recognise the institution? What constitutes the work as a kind of institution?

How do we recognise the work?

Speaking in terms of language, when we recognise a work as a work, and when we recognise an act as

an act it is afforded a certain privilege of putting statements together, and this construction of statements

is recognizable. What is an authorized text? Is it the work of an author? – Not entirely. The author is

often merely invoked as provenance.

I believe Foucault suggests—in this case in relation to the authorisation of the texts of the bible—this is

the point at which an inspired language becomes a state language. What we understand by an “author”

is a discursive phenomenon, a work of statecraft. What statements have become authorized and which

not?

Blanchot’s désoeuvrement

Within this argument I will also mention Blanchot’s désoeuvrement . (Blanchot 1988, xxiii–xxiv) which

can be translated as ‘unworking’, or in a more poetic vein, ‘to think on the threshold’. Blanchot suggests

a position where the work is only recognizable through its removal from that state-inspired architecture

of writing. Jean Luc Nancy explains it in this way:

Community necessarily takes place in what Blanchot has called ‘unworking,’ referring to that

which, before or beyond the work, withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do

either with production or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension.

Community is made of the interruption of singularities, or of the suspension that singular beings

are . (Nancy 1991, 31)

For Nancy it is in this process that community “takes place” and which in my view is the source of all

potentiality for thinking the other.




The spatial

Acts in space

An act opens up a space. For Henri Lefebvre there is a transaction involved in challenging one kind of

production of space with another. This can be seen as a criticality of space itself, which becomes

changed through the nature of this act.

Lefebvre’s concern is with the effective movement between “the theoretical (epistemological) realm and

the practical one,” a movement that he feels structuralism has failed to effectively enable. For Lefebvre

this is the transition to the space of practice, a practice that makes the social space, and “where

language becomes practice.” (Lefebvre 1991, 4–5) This primacy of the practice or act of social space is

reflected in Lefebvre’s attempts to counter the lapse into mere discourse of our knowledge of the lived

experience of social space, or language about space, being “the deadly tendency of discourse towards

abstraction.” (Lefebvre 1991, 195) An example of this tendency is the reduction of phenomena to

textuality, particularly as laid out by structuralism and particularly (for Lefebvre) in the writings of

Foucault.

Lefebvre relates abstraction to power, “Abstract space . . . is the tool of domination”. (Lefebvre 1991,

370) It can lead to a bourgeois-inflected space of power relations, through the settlement and

stabilisation of structures that serve to fix hegemonic relations in place. Abstraction can lead to

domination that precludes what Lefebvre refers to as ‘appropriation.’ Appropriation is an act that in his

view incorporates the possibility for the creation of a new, ‘differential’ space. Taking the example of

mimesis in nature, Lefebvre sees mimesis playing a “function in the domination of space” by “seemingly”

reproducing nature to only produce the “signs of nature.”

But a ‘differential space’ seems to be an inherent product of the contradictions of abstract space for

Lefebvre:

Thus, despite – or rather because of – its negativity, abstract space carries within itself the

seeds of a new kind of space. I shall call that new space ‘differential space’, because,

inasmuch as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing

differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates

differences. (Lefebvre 1991, 52)




Towards the end of The Production of Space , in the last of a series of summary categories that Lefebvre

uses to describe social space, he explicitly joins artistic production with the creation of possibilities

within social space:

6. [Social space] contains potentialities – of works and of reappropriation – existing to begin with in

the artistic sphere but responding above all to the demands of a body ‘transported’ outside itself in

space, a body which by putting up resistance inaugurates the project of a different space (either the

space of a counter-culture, or a counter-space in the sense of an initially utopian alternative to

actually existing ‘real’ space). (Lefebvre 1991, 349)

Here the significant act of the body is “resistance” to the existing space into which it has been

‘transported,’ by which a new project can be begun. ‘Abstract space’ potentially leads to sameness,

social space potentially leads to difference. Then the utopian, the alternative, counter-cultures – all

these ways of thinking space have the potential to move beyond dominated spaces into different ones.

For Lefebvre the “artistic sphere” is a privileged space where such potential can be realised.

Returning to Nancy’s linking of space with community, he draws on Bataille to make a similar claim for

space as the “modern experience of community”,

In this sense, Bataille is without doubt the one who experienced first, or most acutely, the

modern experience of community as neither a work to be produced, nor a lost communion, but

rather as space itself, and the spacing of the experience of the outside, of the outside-of-self.

(Nancy 1991, 19)

Everyday Life

Spatial practice has been linked to a yearning for an everyday life, into which the practice can locate

itself and from which it can gain legitimacy and effectiveness. But what is “everyday life”? How can we

locate it outside of an individual experience into a community experience, without it becoming abstracted

(in Lefebvre’s use of the term)? Would an understanding of everyday life as some kind of community

experience be productive, or too easily fall into abstraction?

Lefebvre refers to “everyday life” on a number of occasions in The Production of Space , seeing it as a

thing that has the possibility to be produced outside of (or perhaps despite ) institutionalized or abstract

spaces. “Everyday life” is a space of production; as with other aspects of Lefebvre’s schema, it is not

fundamentally (or, at least, fatally) tied to power: while there is no romanticized denial of power relations




existing within everyday life, Lefebvre sees it as being a space where the contradictions of power

are/can be made apparent. This forces the participant to take account of these contradictions – at the

very least to recognise them as acting around them. In this way, the powers that display these

contradictions are inherently pushed to collapse through their appearance:

In this same space there are, however, other forces on the boil, because the rationality of the

state, of its techniques, plans and programs, provokes opposition. The violence of power is

answered by the violence of subversion . . . State-imposed normality makes permanent

transgression inevitable. (Lefebvre 1991, 23)

I believe Lefebvre’s understanding of everyday life informs the work of Michel de Certeau. In de

Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life , we find a direct address of such a space of activity. In one

example de Certeau mentions the indigenous people’s of the Americas and their necessarily subtle

responses to the violently imposed laws and religion of the Spanish colonizers after the 16th Century:

“their use of the dominant social order deflected its power, which they lacked the means to challenge;

they escaped it without leaving it.” (de Certeau 1984, xiii) He later speaks of their response to the

imposed spaces of power as “making it possible to live in them by reintroducing into them the plural

mobility of goals and desires – an art of manipulating and enjoying.” (de Certeau 1984, xxii)

de Certeau favours the acts of an “everyman” who exists below a certain threshold of social awareness,

a body amongst many bodies with aims and goals that remain non-evident or non-specific, who (as de

Certeau puts it) “practices” everyday life within space:

The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility

begins . . . the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is

only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible. (de Certeau 1984, 93)

In this sense these bodies and their acts-as-bodies are as if spectres in relation to the apparatus of

society. The spectral form is a ghostly presence that says as much about the fears and paranoiac

visions of the one that notices it out of the corner of their eye, as it does about the relation between a

‘real’ body and the space. The spectral form is a mode of thought. It passes through the osmotic tissue

of spaces; perturbing (but not breaking) the smooth surfaces of the imposed social spaces.

But if a society or a social space restricts the ability of a body (or bodies) to make an appearance and in

that way make good their potential resistances, then can we posit an “appearance” of the body that does

not rely on appearance? For instance, can a non-appearance successfully embody simply the threat of




the body appearing? If the body merely threatens to appear, and by doing so initiates a reaction to that

threat, does this reaction represent the spectral appearance of this body without a body? Can this

spectral appearance in itself be said to be productive of friction within social space that slows down the

flows of abstracted space such that their apparatus becomes at least partially visible?

In relation to the event I describe above, what does it mean when the author is disavowed? It can be

argued that the state apparatus denies its presence, but as a result and in reaction to this, the actor

voluntarily removes themselves into a sort of productive-denial of their own activity.

Deliberate withdrawal from space and visibility

A practice of withdrawal has a long history amongst the intellectual elites in China. Such elites played an

important role in the infrastructure of empire, particularly within the highly codified spaces of court

culture. In these spaces they developed a privileged position whereby it was tolerated that they should

openly criticise the emperor with (hypothetically) little fear of retribution. This position was

institutionalized as an important part of the court system to counter the arbitrary whims of an absolute

power personified in the single deified emperor, or (at lower levels of the hierarchy), in the princes and

aristocracy that governed by imperial fiat, or as independent figures maintaining absolute power. An

important aspect of this privileged position—to present unmediated opinions on the emperor’s activity—

was the option to withdraw themselves and their opinions without impunity, by requesting to leave the

emperor’s service. Within the institutional structure, such a loss would be seen as a disastrous

weakening of the emperor’s ability to function effectively, and hence—as an important part in controlling

the regent’s activities by playing on his sense shame, a sense of responsibility towards his role, and his

retinue’s loyalty to him as unquestionable power—the threat of such an act was one of the few actual

powers that the scholars retained.

Scholar Zhang Xudong sees the current situation as taking on such modes of thought as a form of

critical engagement:

Facing the bustling secular world of consumption, the hegemony of mass culture, and a

popular nationalist sentiment, the ‘high culture’ of the intellectual elite is experiencing dramatic

internal transformations and differentiations. This process, in its own evasive and ambivalent

terms, may dialectically—that is, through its own self-critique—set up a platform for a critical

engagement with mass culture, nationalism, and social change. (Zhang 1998, 110)




In terms of culture, the act of withdrawal itself retains its power as commentary on the situation at hand.

Curator and writer Gao Minglu organised many of the seminal exhibitions of Chinese art both within and

outside of China from the 1990s on. Gao coined the term “Apartment Art” to describe the artistic

practices that withdrew from the highly visible and mainstream Political Pop and Cynical Realism styles

that dominated the Chinese and the international art world’s understanding of avant-garde Chinese art

in the 1990s. Gao has recently written that Apartment Art took on an aspect of “silence”, which he claims

represented the unique characteristics of this section of the Chinese avant-garde art of the time:

The value of the works lay in their continuation of the spirit of the 1980s in the form of silence.

They were not supported or funded by any private or government organizations, but were

produced independently by artists who exhibited their works privately in apartments or houses.

These artists did not make art for the market or for public exhibition. The low-key nature of

Apartment Art was partly a response to the suppressed art ecology in China after 4 June 1989,

and partly a self-questioning and criticizing of the purity of modernism itself. (Gao 2012, 212)

While Gao claims that Apartment Art died out by the end of the 1990s, the concerns of artists as to their

relation to the state and the market are on-going. A certain position of autonomy from these forces has

been seen to be an important attribute for art practice, becoming a dominant tenet in the last decade

amongst the current generation of practitioners who associate themselves with an understanding of a

critical (if not avant-garde, in the Chinese sense) practice.

Criticism 1: Resistance in space

In Gayatri Spivak’s critique of Foucault, she sees his own critique of Marxism as “invoking geographical

discontinuity”, not solely due to the “international division of labor” but as an argument that allows

Foucault to “distinguish between exploitation (extraction and appropriation of surplus value; read, the

field of Marxist analysis) and domination (‘power’ studies) and to suggest the latter’s greater potential for

resistance based on alliance politics.” (Spivak 1988, 289) Foucault places a struggle against power as a

struggle that arises from the personal situation and location of those who struggle (as cited in Spivak

1988, 289–290)

But if it is against power that one struggles, then all those who acknowledge it as intolerable

can begin the struggle wherever they find themselves and in terms of their own activity (or

passivity). In engaging this struggle that is their own , whose objectives they clearly understand




and whose methods they can determine, they enter into the revolutionary process. (Foucault

1977, 216)

But such an argument in itself must be clearly placed within the context from which it comes and from

which such a production of resistance in space can even become possible to be developed. Spivak

points to Foucault’s argument as being “geopolitically specific to the First World.” warning against a

universalization of such an outlook.

Yet if its situation is universalized, it accommodates unacknowledged privileging of the subject.

Without the theory of ideology, it can lead to a dangerous utopianism. (Spivak 1988, 290)

The awareness of the place of the speaker is—as I have argued above—an important consideration, if

one is to avoid such universalism. As Spivak says when writing her critique of Julia Kristeva’s 1977 text

About Chinese Women , “a deliberate application of French High ‘Feminism’ to a different situation of

political specificity might backfire. If, however, International Feminism is defined within a Western

European context, the heterogeneity becomes manageable.” (Spivak 1981, 164) It is this specificity of

the space of the critique that saves it from disappearing into the critique and its contingency being

forgotten.

For Spivak, it is necessary to critically locate within the text the place of the intellectual in relation to the

subject they choose to analyze. Her thinking draws on Foucault in this respect, with the addition of her

own, personal background in the development of what would become known as post-colonial theory.

She says,

It is the slippage from rendering visible the mechanism to rendering vocal the individual, both

avoiding ‘any kind of analysis of [the subject] whether psychological, psychoanalytical or

linguistic,’ that is consistently troublesome. (Spivak 1988, 285)

Spivak focuses on how an act like an “insurgency” can be understood by the receiver of such a word,

such that its elaboration, “does not freeze into an ‘object of investigation,’ or, worse yet, a model for

imitation.” The intellectual’s approach to extricate the insurgent subject from the texts on insurgency

says more about the “narrative sanctions granted to the colonial subject in the dominant groups” than

about any connection to such a “collectively intended social act”. This position that the intellectual

occupies displaced from the act, is their “loss”, but it is a ‘silence’ – “what the work does not say” as

Spivak says quoting Pierre Macherey: “because there the elaboration of the utterance is carried out, in a

sort of journey into silence.” (Spivak 1988)




Criticism 2: Impossibility of Dissidence

How does one think this non-appearance in terms of historical precursors and specifically in terms the

case of China? It has been suggested that this grappling with the indirect, which occurs in Western

theory and practice, is also a feature for Chinese thinkers and practitioners. François Jullien has written

a series of works highlighting this factor by placing Western and Chinese thinking in a critical

conjunction. In the book Detour and Access Jullien outlines the problematic relationship between

intellectual elites and the absolute powers that they served in China and in Greece, for China that being

the princes or emperors of the period of the life of Confucius, from which much of the information about

social mores of this period comes from. In this way Jullien makes parallels with modern-day China,

which while representing a very different political and social situation, displays similar modes of thought

and practice:

Under the cover of riddles and by resorting to enigmas, they did not set off the prince’s

touchiness; under the guise of amusing, they expressed a political opinion. This was the

ultimate way, the historian suggests, of retaining one’s independent spirit while remaining

tolerated by the authorities. (Jullien 2000, 132)

Ultimately, Jullien is sceptical of the results of such pragmatism, worrying whether the “discreet,

artistically veiled whisper of protest did not ultimately disarm the man of letters more than it protected

him.” (Jullien 2000, 117) The inadvertent result of a habit of dissimulation is endless suspicion on the

part of the authorities:

The compromise between the literati and the authorities, which one might think was balanced,

proves one-sided, for as soon as the interlocutor expects insinuations, all formulations, even

the most well intentioned, become suspicious, and no discourse can be innocuous. (Jullien

2000, 135)

Where such practices still occur in modern times, Jullien suggests the results are the same.

The relevance of such historical mores would seem to be in the continued presence of an absolutist

power, whose actions are at once capricious in their application and unyielding once triggered. The

result of such a combination is an uncertainty on the part of the subject of such power, the subject being

the population that exists within its remit; within the social psyche, an ingrained paranoia and self-

censorship are the results.




There is the counter-argument that such an invisible practice marks a point of collusion by non-

involvement in the situation. While such a practice may be seen to be withdrawing from active

engagement in politics and social problems, and such a withdrawal may be interpreted as a failure, such

an interpretation would be held within the already co-opted discourses of power that this practice acts

within.

In relation to mainstream artistic practices in China, critic Robin Peckham has proposed that a practice

of criticality can be recognised within artists’ self-understanding as being complicit with the system that

is in place. This he sees as a meaningful approach to analyse certain strands of artistic practice on the

Mainland.

. . . a position of criticality suggests that the artist has acknowledged that he or she is already a

compromised component of a compromised system. . . . Even if any critique launched via this

social position can only be understood as at least partially ‘guilty’ criticality is certainly

understood as preferable to the utopian or activist in its recognition of this system of social role

playing through the mechanisms of aesthetics. (Peckham 2012, 252–253)

Here it appears that the critical functions of contemporary cultural practice can act as signifiers

– or at least hints – of a certain political awareness, as the subtle gesture becomes a tool able

to pry open a window onto further layers of reading and reception. In several important ways

this strategy . . . is notable for its discursive weakness, particularly insofar as it is not

necessarily one chosen by the artist but rather by his audience. By reading backwards, the

slightest references to real-world phenomena become delicate quotations of political agendas

only just so far removed from the commonsensical link between institutional critique and an

understanding of the utilitarian value of cultural work in the world at large. (Peckham 2012,

259)

Such an argument seems to key into a historical understanding of the role of the intellectual as

privileged to criticise authority, but only in ways designed to be so subtle and demanding of

interpretation that any potentially threatening reaction for the proposer is blunted through that process.

Within this I see aspects of pragmatism in a practice, and while “activist” practices could have only

short-term effectiveness, they have a very short life-span within the state system, Peckham’s other

denigrated option of “the utopian” may have more chances for success (which I will return to later in

relation to the writing of Fredric Jameson).




Returning to the apparatus

Agamben sees in this era a social body that is “docile and cowardly”. These attributes, rather than

sustaining the apparatus of governance, induces a “peculiar uneasiness of power”, a paranoia such that:

. . . the harmless citizen of postindustrial democracies . . . who readily does everything that he

is asked to do, inasmuch as he leaves his everyday gestures and health, his amusements and

his occupations, his diet and his desires, to be commanded and controlled in the smallest

details by apparatuses, is also considered by power—perhaps precisely because of this—as a

potential terrorist. (Agamben 2009, 22–23)

My argument here, is that Agamben posits that through the realization of government power there will

be created the potential terrorist in every member of the population, and such a subjectification occurs

as much in China as in the West. Agamben sees this as an “elusive element” in governed society,

“which seems to evade its grasp the more it docilely submits to it.” (Agamben 2009, 23)

For Agamben, within such an environment there is still potential and, for Lefebvre, there is still space.

And with practices that aim to be pragmatic, revolutionary or society-wide changes will not be their aim

or intention. However on a basic level every practice at the very least aims to exist within their chosen

social environment (even if sustainability is not always seen to be necessary).

Practices in China

Urban spaces

The practices of a number of arts-related organisations in the capital city of Beijing, enters the small

neighbourhoods in the narrow streets known as hutongs .

Hutongs are an urban residential environment, largely specific to Northern China, and historically made

up of walled compounds for palace complexes and gardens arranged along alleyways. As such hutong

represent the lowest level of the administrative geographical divisions within a city in ancient China. In

Beijing they were constructed in the immediate vicinity of the Imperial Palace and often feature a

housing type known as a siheyuan , a type of courtyard residence with residential buildings on three

sides, the gateway being on the fourth. As such, the hutong provides two basic types of space, the first,

which opens directly onto the narrow streets and is usually used as a commercial space, the second,

being an enclosed and private area behind a gateway, which is a residential space.




To choose to locate practices in the hutongs may be based on considerations of relevance for those

practices activities to a local community, and/or because of the pragmatic concerns of lower rents,

availability or properties, proximity to tourist areas for a potential audience. It may also be a

consideration that these locations being somewhat off the beaten track, they avoid undue official

attention.

HomeShop

The HomeShop may be said to be an example of the former type, setting up the practice in a couple of

rooms that face directly onto the street.

Hong Kong/US artist Elaine W. Ho set up HomeShop in Beijing in 2008. The original site was a small

commercial space in a hutong that the artist used as a living and working space. Not being a local nor

having grown up in such an environment, before establishing the HomeShop as a practicing entity in the

space of the hutong Ho lived in the space for one year as a means to establish her presence and ‘right’

and ability to work within there.

In 2010, Ho moved out of the first space and re-opened HomeShop in collaboration with a group of other

practitioners in a nearby hutong, in a much larger structure. This second space is indefinable as either

street-front space or enclosed courtyard, combining as it does aspects of both. The building was

originally built in the 1960s as a danwei (a work unit usually attached to a State-Owned Enterprise)

dormitory. As the HomeShop, this single-story building built on three sides of a small courtyard included

a room looking out onto the street used for events and exhibitions, a communal kitchen, toilet, and

shower room, several small live-in studio rooms, and another larger room converted into a co-working

space as a means of income for the HomeShop as a whole. Prior to its closure in December 2013,

HomeShop developed a community that encompassed stable and unstable elements, including the

organisers and semi-permanent residents of the space, members of the local community, the more

dispersed creative community in Beijing, and hosting temporary visitors from other parts of China and

the world.

The development and demise of HomeShop raises many issues about practices that attempt to engage

with an everyday life around them. From the very beginning, Ho’s original choice was to move into the

hutong neighbourhood, looking for an everyday life as a way to create and maintain a legitimate socially-

related practice. However, in doing so, HomeShop inevitably affected that everyday life through its

presence.




Ho is herself a writer on the subject of community and subjectification within artistic practices and

acutely aware of this apparent paradox. As she points out in her own text reviewing groups in China

(and specifically here in a discussion of the Lijiang Studio mentioned below) these groups’ presence can

lead to problematic relationships with their adopted neighbourhood:

On one hand, there is the conscientiousness of a possibly neo-colonialist tint on the

relationship, but the insistence upon artistic labor in service of the community is an attempt to

counter that. (Ho 2014)

ShanAV Studio

The choice to locate in the hutong may reflect a romantic notion of the historical meaning and everyday

value of these areas, as the pragmatic considerations of such an area (mentioned above) may be

equally well served in the more modern apartment blocks that also exist in these areas. However the

community-dynamic in such blocks is different, and reflects the changes local communities experience

in urban areas where there has been a change, in this case from low-rise/low density to mid- to high-

rise/high density residential structures. In central Beijing (within the 2nd Ring Road where these hutongs

typically are located) when these low-density hutong neighbourhoods were demolished in the ‘70s

onwards, medium-density blocks were typically what were built in the place.

There are examples of organisations that make use of these apartment blocks, and inevitably they

maintain a different type of practice from those in the hutongs (by design and by necessity). Such a

practice must be (or becomes) one that is not so dependent on an accessible community of passing

traffic on their doorstep. ShanAV Studio, founded by the artist and musician Sheng Jie, was a workshop

and residency space active from 2009 to 2011 operating out of her apartment in a mid-rise block just

around the corner from the HomeShop. The participants and audience for ShanAV Studio were those

directly involved in the arts community, and as such it acted more like a specialist commercial

organisation with a specific audience that does not depend on the local community.

One pragmatic result of this situation was Sheng Jie’s institution of the Gigonline series of concerts.

These events were designed to showcase the residency artists and visiting practitioners. Under normal

circumstances these would be merely concerts in a room with an audience, but the residential setting

made the collection of large groups of people and loud noise inadvisable. To address these restrictions,

Gigonline was characterised by the artists in general using digital equipment that allowed them to

perform in near-silence in the room, while the sonic (and visual in some cases) part of their activity was




immediately broadcast online to a dispersed audience on the internet where the restrictions did not

apply.

Non-Urban spaces

Lijiang Studio

For the non-profit arts organisation Lijiang Studio, founded in 2005 by Jay Brown, their activities take

place in a village away from major metropolitan centres.

In such a locale rules and regulation become more relaxed, and negotiations take place at a low level of

participants, rather than being caught up in official bureaucracy. The “Mural Painting Project” organised

by artist Li Lisha and conducted between 2008 and 2010, was inspired by an advert for the national

telecommunications organisation being painted on a local wall without the owner’s knowledge or

permission. Such adverts are a familiar sight throughout the country areas, and Li Lisha appropriated

these unofficial sites of publicity as the basis for a programme of artists’ residencies, in which the artists

would work with local families to create their own murals, as a communal undertaking directly reflecting

the combined wishes of the family and artist. It is the specific nature of the countryside that it maintains

a certain autonomy in relation to power, leaving space for the self-creation of possible practices.

Other spaces

‘A Diaodui’ Group

Of course, many practices do not rely on fixed spaces and adopt practices that adapt to wherever they

may find themselves. The group named A Diaodui maintains a practice characterised by humour and

has no settled form, but appears as installations and performance events. In one of their actions, they

visit temples in China and set up small tents made from mosquito netting, in which they take short naps,

recording these with photographs. What is the meaning of this activity? The group do not explicitly

explain their actions, simply presenting them as they are with no further comment.

Although A Diaodui group work in relation to the art world—they are practicing artists in the usual

manner, producing objects that fit easily into such an environment—their informality in relation to it is

significant. Humour, a certain level of disrespect, all play a part in their practice. They are going about

their business, whatever that might be, neglecting to form themselves strongly as part of the art world or

even in any other world.




Elaine W. Ho, in her own practice—partly as expressed through the HomeShop, but also in relation to

other groups in China she has come into contact with—expresses a potential reaction by critical cultural

practitioners to existing within the modern world of mass culture and consumption, which can so easily

co-opt even the most radical of socio-political positions. As soon as their position contra to their chosen

issues is stated, that statement becomes a product and commodity that inevitably draws these

individuals and groups back into the situations that they are expressly attempting to provide an

alternative to the potential “. . . that these minor forms of artistic and creative autonomy will be

subsumed by their narration into a commodified discourse of resistance.” (Ho 2014)

Ho here articulates the concern that not only have most artistic practices always already been

commodified into the capitalist market system of objects, but attempts to extricate practice from such a

fate are by no means effective or safe from re-absorption. Attempts to maintain an autonomy, to practice

in a way that is socially relevant (and—perhaps—unable to be objectified, if this is seen as a solution),

or nevertheless can be accommodated into such a system through being framed within a narrative that

effectively and/or inadvertently essentializes that practice, in the process removing its pertinence and

effectivity by creating a distance between the subject from the activity itself, in a process of Lefebvrian

abstraction. Ho suggests that “perhaps it is only within the confines of ephemerality that any kind of

autonomy can exist.” These thoughts key into the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)

produced by theorist and activist Hakim Bey. (Bey 1991)

The act of removing these practices from major centres of attention, in this context the first-tier cities in

China where a certain level of art system has already been established, has been one approach to

avoiding the subsumption of practice into staid art discourses, and ideally to maintain some kind of

social relevance.

In the case of the anarchist community, Womenjia Youth Autonomy Lab in Wuhan, Ho has observed

that they have chosen to take the route of withdrawal from visibility in order to counter this threat of

commodification:

Womenjia’s observation of such trends validates the further peripheralizing of itself as a TAZ

and explains the decreasing amount of visible activity in the space. (Ho 2014)

“Practice”, in these cases must then be seen to incorporate a self-defensive manoeuvring within its

workings. This manoeuvring attempts to maintain the relevance of the practice to its chosen subjects,

subjects that the art world may—with the best will in the world—work to undo by the potted narratives




While I am hesitant to make any claims that art can step in and provide a solution to the impasse

between visibility and effectivity, I will note that Jacques Rancière sees a certain “political art” as holding

a possibility:

Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect:

the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely,

by the uncanny, by that which resists signification. (Rancière 2004)

I believe the practices I have discussed above are not examples of a naïve “political art”, in the sense of

a practice that comes from outside and tries to engage with an issue or situation (as Benjamin warned

against), but are practices that are engendered by the situations themselves and act in a certain level in

concert with the given circumstances; they then become political by virtue of what they do. Or, as artist

Hito Steyerl puts it, “A standard way of relating politics to art assumes that art represents political issues

in one way or another. But there is a much more interesting perspective: the politics of the field of art as

a place of work. Simply look at what it does—not what it shows.” (Steyerl 2010) Beyond a misplaced

expectation of “political” activity, there then remains a (non-specific) potentiality that there will be a (non-

specific) effect, which is a radically “open” and “relevant” effectivity that bides its time and awaits its

moment, without such a moment being a constituent part of its raison d'être .

Options for opposition

Practices may cloak themselves in invisibility and indirection to avoid official scrutiny or co-optation, and

by so doing open up a small space of potential for themselves. How, then, can one approach such

practices in a critical way? By framing these (apparently innocuous) practices in a cloak of radicality,

does one undo them?

How the researcher approaches the phenomena affects what possibilities can be derived from it. If we

restrict ourselves to banal discussions around activism, seeing its reason for being to effect highly

visible and radical change (or revolution), then important and effective practices will be missed and

ignored. It can be argued that revolution is no longer a practical approach to change in China; it would

not be a pragmatic approach, as it did not match the socio-political reality. The valuation of a practice

that might be said to be “active” in this sense, over what might be referred to as “passive” leads down a

line of thinking that simply reinforces the state apparatus of control and power by repeating the modes of

address that the apparatus builds itself around, by forming proposals for “alternative” practices that




simply exist in distinction from them. If we limit our thinking in this way I believe we will miss the

possibilities available to activity in the situations I am addressing.

For instance, much writing about political change in China is restricted to expectations of political reform

leading to “democracy”. The authors of the article “Authoritarianism and Contestation” question the

options available to political action in China:

. . . exposing the limits of what repression can do is not the same as forming an organized

political opposition capable of systematically confronting the regime. What are the prospects

that such an opposition will emerge? (Su, Zhao and He 2013, 31)

This article focuses on the reactive formation of organization by forces of contention, yet these seem

ineffective within the authoritarian state system, because these organisations will have no place to act

sustainably within that political system, and cannot even be recognised by it. The attempts at formation

for these organisations also leaves them open to being located and targeted by the state’s apparatus of

security. This might be compared to the way arts organisations can be co-opted by the apparatus of the

arts, the arts being an adjunct of the state in this case. In both cases their effectivity is potentially

neutered or destroyed. The authors nevertheless point to what they believe are various germinal

developments of such groupings in China. Within the growing implementation of the rule of law in China,

informal citizens’ rights organisations are becoming adopted as a means by which special interest

groups make their voices heard, “True, there is as yet no single unified rights-defence organization, but

many weiquan ‘micro-ecologies’ have germinated and are showing potential.” When it comes to

individual dissidents within China, they “lack identifiable organizations, but they make political claims.” In

general, the authors recognise that “Under current authoritarian conditions, contentious activities remain

scattered. But various contentious forces have managed to stay connected both online and on the

ground, thereby establishing a contentious network with explicitly political views.” The artist and

dissident Ai Weiwei is mentioned as taking advantage of such online mobilization techniques, as well as

another incident where other activists with a common concern, “organized ‘tours’ of Hubei Province’s

Badong County out of concern over possible state manipulation of a local murder case in which the

victim was an official. (With formal rallies and demonstrations normally banned, activists opted to go as

tourists.) [emphasis mine]” (Su, Zhao and He 2013)

That last bracketed sentence is highly significant for my concern with the visibility of the act. When

presented in particular ways, activities gain possibilities not available when their political aims are




presented directly. Su, Zhao and He refer to this as an “emerging network of contention” characterized

by “decentralization and ‘flatness’” that prevents authorities shutting them down, which would be

possible if they could target a central figurehead. This sentiment of an action that pretends to be

something else relates back to the event that I described at the beginning of this essay.

Such arguments flirt with the alternatives to evident and visible gatherings and protests, yet do not

consider or propose any other approach besides them. There seems a limitation in this viewpoint as

these practices have proven ineffective and, as the event I described suggests, have already resulted in

the alternative forms of protest that act in ways to circumvent such limitations. ‘Occupy’ is such example

of a protest that works within a new paradigm of activity. Despite its apparent shortcomings when judged

according to traditional criteria of protest, the methodology of Occupy—if it can be called such a thing—

allows for a practice that works to prevent co-option by the forces that the protest acts in opposition to.

This movement away from traditional forms of protest has proven difficult to quantify and locate in terms

of its aims and meanings. This is perhaps part of its meaning – in this way preventing the practice from

merely becoming a textbook example to be followed elsewhere. These practices have radically

contingent circumstances and forms, but in all cases their nebulousness has left room open for

possibilities that are impossible within the status quo of social practice.

But, as researcher, analysis of these practices may be said to be problematic. Analysis would be seen

to be part of the social co-option that the forces that are being opposed use to manage the practice, and

so an effort to prevent this must be part of the practice itself. However, the consequence of this is that it

is perhaps impossible to directly engage with the practices in traditional terms.

Addressability

How then does one address the practices that might be seen to inhabit such a problematic, non-

traditional environment of non-appearance? Is there a profound inability to specifically address aspects

of them, because those aspects are precisely the ones that would be under duress within this

environment?

“Sensitive” words, in the context of the Chinese internet and social media, are a continually updated set

of words, phrases, and images which are set aside by the state internet apparatus as being restricted.

The state internet apparatus is a set of automated and manual processes for managing the information

appearing online. These words, etc. raise flags within the system, causing a reaction, which can lead to




deletion of the specified content, the suspension of an online account, reactions which escalate

depending on the context and user.

“Sensitive” is an interesting word in this context. It refers not to an absolute—the sensitivity of the

subject itself—but to the potential of that subject to cause a reaction – a wager on the future of this

word. The practices I am addressing may also be said to be “sensitive”, and must maintain a state of

non-appearance to avoid setting off a reaction, a reaction that would establish an antagonistic relation to

power. In this case addressing the practices, either in reality or within the framework of this essay, is

also in itself a “sensitive” task.

While these practices can be described and enumerated to a greater or lesser extent, what necessarily

remains latent within those descriptions would be a full account of the socio-political possibilities of the

practice. Therefore a certain lateral interpretative stance must be taken in relation to them. The relation

of these practices to the socio-political situation is not initially one of antagonism, but one of an attempt

to create possibilities for existence within a situation. ‘Sustainability’ requires they go about their daily

business without putting themselves in the line of fire.

But there is an argument that within a society of contradictions, where the ‘rule of man’ remains

dominant over the ‘rule of law’, even going about daily business can put the practitioner in difficult

situations. There is a practice that by simply existing provokes the consequences. Simply progressing

with your existence and investigating the consequences can be seen to be material for an artistic

practice, a way to reveal the topography of these contradictions.

Through Foucault, Agamben, and Lefebvre, the aims and spaces that such practices might instantiate

could be expressed as the evolution of a new space, a space of potentiality. For Foucault the author-

function serves in a positive way to actively limit the “cancerous and dangerous proliferation of

significations within a world”. Perhaps within times of peril (or simply precarity ), an unknown figure

separated from ideological constructions of the author, a repressed or invisible author with active

potential embodied in that work, can have a revolutionary potential within society. In the “anonymity of a

murmur”, says Foucault, is a use-potential for discourses of the future. (Foucault 1977, 118)

Conclusion

The original questions that I posed: “How does one practice and address a practice where non-

appearance is a methodology?” raises the twin issues of practice and of appearance. I have suggested

that it is in the nature of these practices that their activities should be difficult to address, as I have




argued that these practices work to avoid drawing attention to themselves by entities of power. It must

be recognised that these practices are then—effectively by choice—limited in their audiences and

everyday/immediate effects.

If the practices enter general circulation within society, they draw attention to themselves in a way that

may prevent their on-going activity. If they enter the general circulation of the art world, they may lose

their particular located-ness that gives them their meaning and effectiveness, such as it is. Where they

are effective, we may say that such practices “know their place”; and they lose meaning and effectivity

when they lose or are removed from that place.

As a response to these arguments, aesthetic practices moved away from the art system for reasons of

perceived effectiveness; by distinguishing themselves from the art system the practices (re-)gain

meaning. If the art system lacks relevance to an everyday, then the practices may choose to leave the

art system and try to establish more meaningful links to this aspect of society.

If by leaving the art system the art practices aim to gain a “better” relation with everyday life, then

everyday life provides circumstances that create their own difficulties for the practices. In the case of

China, norms and practices protected (or at least institutionally tolerated) within the defined sphere of

the artworld, become problematic and exposed once taken into everyday life. Such practices are

common – finding a new audience who will have a more unmediated reaction to the artists’ practices,

exploiting the shock and naiveté that will be involved with such audiences in order to effect a result that

may involve real change in perceptions, a change impossible in the trained minds of the art world

residents.

In situations where research is being done on such practices, or when they become focused upon as

important practices within the art world, or society, these practices are pushed into situations beyond

their immediate locations of activity. The question can then be posed: does undertaking research on

such practices become problematic?

As a researcher, I also have my own place. That is a place in relation to the practices I talk about in this

essay. The relation may coincide at certain points, and be non-coincident at others. My understanding of

these practices relates to the arrangement of coincident and non-coincident relations, which I express

here in this writing. All these practices and activities have multiple audiences, which change according

to their spacial and temporal aspects. I exist in relation to these practices and activities sometimes




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