thomas keenan pan to the sky

7/28/2019 Thomas Keenan Pan to the sky

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Page 2. THOMAS KEENAN.

CALL MISSED.In Iraq and elsewhere, insurgent ghrs have used mobile phones astriggers on roadside bombs and other so-called Improvised ExplosiveDevices. When the phone receives the call, it does not ring but rathertransfers the electrical impulse to the bombs detonator, causing it toexplode. Sometimes the transmission fails. 1

LETRS.Many years ago, the philosopher Jacques Derrida nod rather cauicallyto the psychoanaly and theori Jacques Lacan that a letr canalways not arrive at its deination. 2 He insied that this possibility ofmisdirection, of going aray, of divisibility and fragmentation, does notmark the failure of the communicative ructure but rather conitus itscondition of possibility. A communication that could take the possibilityof its success for grand would not really be a communication. Not thatthe letr never arrives at its deination, Derrida continued, but it belongsto the ructure of the letr to be capable, always, of not arriving. Andwithout this threat , the circuit of the letr would not even have begun.Without the possibility of non-arrival, there would be no letr in ther place. e letr, and in general the communicative event for whichit serves here as a metonymy, depends on the chance of it not reachingits addressee.

Typically, letrs of all sorts from whispers to spoken words to emailsand levision images come and go unproblematically, ofn even in real-time. e ease and speed with which they ow, and sometimes circula,nd to make the process by which they do so become less and lessobvious. e possibility of diurbance, of inrruption, remains prior to any transmission but it is increasingly difcult to grasp.

Derrida reminds us of all that is at ake, for a theory of the subject andof truth among other things, in forgetting or denying this ructuralpossibility of raying. at is important, regardless of what happensto any particular communication.

But sometimes letrs do actually go aray and then other possibilitiescan open up. e more readily we can communica, the harder it is torecognise and read the rules that govern those communications, ructurewhat counts as speaking, and regula what sorts of communications

can happen and how they travel. When letrs get lo, or remarks fail toreach their innded audience, the spaces and subjects dened by thosecommunicative rules can be exposed and exposed to change.

In that sense, inrruptions can be helpful. Heidegger famously nodin section 16 ofBeing and Time, apropos of broken tools: When itsunusability is thus discovered, equipment becomes conspicuous. 3

PAN TOTHE SKYIF ANYTHING

UNEXPECDOCCURS.

01 Call Missed, 3 March 2005.Failed phone detonator for IED, Iraq.

www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=14925_01_Call_Missed


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TRANSMISIUNEDIRECT.Sometimes this happens in real-life and on levision.

On 21 December 1989, mo of Romania watched asPresident Nicolae Ceausescu spoke to a va crowd inthe Piata Republicii from the balcony of the CentralCommite building in Buchare. He had hurriedlyreturned from a visit to Iran in an atmpt to reasserthis authority and control the damage from a revolt thathad begun days earlier in Timisoara.

A minu and a half afr he began to speak he wasinrrupd, r by noise and movement within thecrowd assembled before him, and ortly thereafr

by the controllers of the live broadca. Makingthemselves heard, rumbling from the background andgathering volume and vigour, other voices emerged,

taking advantage of the ofcial medium to asserttheir challenge.

e inrruption itself became visible and audiblewithin the space of the speech. Fir it was regiered,acknowledged, veried by Ceausescu, who sloweddown his words, then paused in mid-sennce, with alook of uncomprehending disorientation on his face.A low roar had emerged from the crowd and turnedinto something like suained screaming, and thecamera ook, then suered from a bur of atic, andturned away. Within half a minu, the director of thelive broadca marked the disruption as well, takingthe live feed from the Plaza ofine altogether andreplacing it with a red card reading TRANSMISIUNEDIRECT (live broadca).

Filmmakers Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica ow thetapes of these few moments, as they were broadcaand also as they were recorded by the a levisionTVR, and analyse them in their 1992 Videograms ofa Revolution. As the screen goes to the red card,the narrator says:

At this point the [live] levision [image from theplaza] went o the air. Electromagnetic recordingcontinued in the broadcaing van and documendthis. [Images of a building, crowd noise, andthe sound of Ceausescus voice.] Commandcommunication from the ruler to the people hadbroken down, and as if there were a diurbancein the line, Ceausescu oud [alo, alo, alo ].

[Image ifts to the top of buildings and the sky.]e cameraman had received inructions to pan tothe sky if anything unexpecd occurred. [Ceausescucontinues to out.] At this point the levision cameback on the air, at r without audio. [View froma dierent camera of crowd and sky. Ceausescucontinues to out, then resumes speech.] At thispoint, the sound came back on. 4

With order somewhat reored (Farocki and Ujicaow the police presence that was required for this

to happen), Ceausescu managed to ni a ortspeech, but the damage was done. e next day heed Buchare and within days he had been execud. 5

Farocki and Ujicas narration underlines that therevolution took place within the space of the image aswell as within the public square, and that the damagewas the fact of the inrruption itself, the disruptionor the breakdown in communicative authority.e transmission, both speech and broadca,ructured the political space of Ceausescusdictatorip, and the unexpecd occurrence itselfwas the marker of the coming apart of that space.e pan to the sky, and the red card, however muchthey concealed, nonetheless left something to be seen

and heard.Sociologi Jerey Goldfarb describes what happenedthat day as evidence of the dynamic of the denitionof the situation. It was not merely a matr of thepeople in the back of the crowd nally getting their say.e situation was dened, ructured, as one that

excluded them. ey did not exi in it as politicalagents, but only as props. at situation itself hadto change, and it did change, as did the one on thelevision screen. We could call it a transformationin the conditions of communication, and with that,in the denition of a political or speaking subject.It became apparent, Goldfarb wris, through alevised denition of the situation, that things had

changed. [A] demonration that was meant tobeow legitimacy on the regime rapidly withdrew it.e authority of the dictator could visibly be observedmelting away. 6

thinking, is this a bad thing?ere is a hint of violence inthe act of inrruption and thepossibility that what is inrrupdmay never be resumed and, evenif it is resumed the conversationre-ard, the broadca carriedon, the machinery of everyday life

re-commenced the mporarycessation and its memory willalways be there. e act ofinrruption breaks the continuityof time and space, separating whathappened in the pa from what willhappen in the future.An inrruption creas an inrvalthat frequently elicits the desirefor the narrative to be maintainedand at the same time provokes thepossibility that things may notcarry on in the same way as theyhave done before. e artis inTransmission Inrrupdinrvenein dierent ways in the conant

ream around us the unyieldingrhetoric of politicians, the changing,ort-lived preoccupations ofthe news media, the fa-movingrhythm of modern life openingup spaces that diurb the course ofeveryday life and reframe the wayin which we see and underandthe world. e artworks inTransmission Inrrupdarelike inrjections, breaking theow of a discussion and, in doingso, changing the direction of theconversation, re-routing it intodierent rritory. But while thereis a politic embedded in theseworks in the archaic sense of therm, that is, a concern with howwe conduct our lives they resithe political in a liral or didacticsense, preferring inead to openup a space of inrruption whichis by turns, poetic, lyrical andunexpecd.

I INRJECTION.

Jimmie Durham describes hisfavouri political act as JeanGenets report of the 1968 ChicagoConvention where he fantasises

about being arreed and longsfor the hairy legs of the atndantpolicemen. Overturning the usualdemarcation line between policeand proers, Genet transgressesthe traditional battle-line betweenthem and us by rendering thepolicemen as objects of desire,subject to the same human impulsesas the demonrators that theyhave been inrucd to control.e image that Genet conjuresin our mind inrjects into ourusual way of picturing relationsof power; it breaks into thetraditional trajectory of oppressor

and oppressed, sowing the seedfor a dierent way of seeing ourrelationip with those we haveassumed have power over us.

Jimmie Durhams artworks can alsobe seen as inrjections of a kind,diurbing the unbroken narrativeof modernism and modernity.

(Continues p.5)

HARUN FAROCKI AND ANDREI UJICA.Videograms of a Revolution, 1992.

Film, 107 mins.


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Page 4. THOMAS KEENAN.

EMERGENCE.How do new agents enr the political eld? How do unheard voices cometo be heard, or, even more basically, be underood as voices in the rplace? How do new subjects come to be seen, not recognised but r of allregiered as faces? How do ideas and their bearers r become readable,

plausible, writable and speakable? What are the conditions under whichpolitical emergence or irruption can occur, or rather, what has to happento the exiing conditions for this to happen?

Many discussions about conmporary art practices over the la decadeor so have addressed this queion, or versions of it, by worrying about thedivide between expressions of identity and claims to universality. e splitseems intractable, and the worrying inrminable, in large part because thearguments on both sides appear qui compelling.

e metaphysics of universality were one of the primary targets of thedeconructive critique of weern thought, but the mo careful of thosecritics always emphasised that theirs was precisely a deconruction andnot a simple rejection of the universal, and certainly not a rejection of itin the name of some particular identity.

e assertion of marginalised identities and knowledges, on the otherhand, played a forceful role, whether we call it identity politics ormulticulturalism, in opening up canons and challenging false claims tototalisation or inclusiveness. But the aim of those challenges, at lea whenthey were made by careful critics, was never simply to assert an identityand leave it alone, isolad and insular, trapped in a prison of woundedself-identity, but rather to make claims on a larger community forrecognition and inclusion.

Faced, then, with powerful arguments in both directions, too manydiscussions have seemed merely to ip back and forth across the divide,sometimes because they are not conducd withmuch care and sometimes because they ferventlywi to have it both ways.

One way of trying to have it both ways is calledliberalism. Although it is not the mo inreingway, it is rather important. It is a programme forthe identication, absorption, assimilation andempowerment of previously unrecognised politicalsubjects. It aspires to acknowledge or legitimiseparticularity within the frame of a universal project,to defend particular inres by allowing them to beexpressed in universal rms.

Liberalism imagines an extremely open politicalspace, one from which people are excluded only byaccident. Sometimes those accidents are inntional,the result of discrimination or prejudice or theplay of power, but from the point of view of thepolitical syem they are not essential indeed, those

exclusions are errors to be correcd. If you happento be among the excluded, you need only presentyourself, make a case that you are a political subject too, agree to followthe very minimal rules of the political sphere, and you can be recognisedas a member of the community as well. Although the inres of exiingmembers of the community may work again expanding the memberip,in principle the political sphere is designedto admit all worthy applicants.

e lrs for admission ought be extremely minimal: you mu, in a sense,simply speak the language of politics, which is to say, commit yourselfto speaking rather than to ghting, and be able to demonra that youare that language with other members of the community to which youseek admission. (Exclusion can only be juied on the grounds that theapplicant has violad a fundamental, conitutive rule of the community.)e formula for such a claim goes something like: I am [name ofexcluded particular] and I am also [name of community]. is demandfor inclusion in the community typies the rhetoric of ruggles for allkinds of civil rights. 7

At a higher or more general level, these claims or pros are ofn posedin rms of humanity. We are human beings too, or are we not human?ey depend on the notion that the current non-recognition of theirspeakers as human is incidental, inessential, and that the utrance ofthe ament or queion is sufcient to communica its truth as well.

Perhaps the mo eloquent example of this is the motif which AdamHochschild calls the r widespread use of a logo designed for a politicalcause, the seal which became the icon of the movement to aboli the slavetrade in England in 1788: [Josiah] Wedgwood asked one of his craftsmento design a seal for amping the wax used to close envelopes. It owed akneeling African in chains, lifting his hands beseechingly, encircled by the

words Am I Not a Man and a Brother? 8

Sealing wax may have disappeared, but the rhetorical ragy of theslogan is persient. Consider this r-person account from Gaza City in

January 2009, poed at the al-Jazeera websi: What is the inrnationalcommunity waiting for to see even more dismembered people andfamilies erased before they act? Time is ticking by and the numbers of deadand injured are increasing. What are they waiting for? What is happeningis again humanity, are we not human? 9

No matr how self-evident this ament and its expecd answer seem,the fact that it needs to be made at all ould give us pause.

PERFORMATIVE /CONSTATIVE.Liberalism treats these queions and assertions as claims of fact,conative utrances in the rm of speech act theory, and the politicalsphere it imagines is ructured to facilita the making, reception andevaluation of such aments. It rives, by denition, to reduce barriers tomaking and hearing them in fact, the mainnance of open access wouldbe its mo essential project.

ere are two ways of assessing the limitsof this underanding of how the our edgesof the political sphere work, of how new actorsor agents can enr the space and time of

the political.

Fir, it misunderands what kinds of amentsthese are. Although they look like simple claimsto truth, they also have what Auin called aperformative ructure: they make somethinghappen, like a promise or an oath. 10 ey havea hidden hereby embedded in them, rhetoricallyspeaking. e words aspire to be 'operational'.

When I make a claim for my civic or humanatus, in other words, the ament is not self-evident. It seeks to change the situation, to makeitself come true. I am not currently cound as amember of this group, and yet I am one. Statingmy identity, or the wound that I have suered,

or the rights to which I am entitled, is insufcient.I mu r of all be recognised as a speaker

capable of making those claims and it is precisely that atus which I amdenied which is why I need to make the claim. e claim is not juproviding some information about me; it seeks to eabli, conitu,inall me as a speaker who can make claims, who is visible and audibleon the eld where, or in the time which, such claims are made.

If we think we already know what a speaker is, what they look like andhow they sound, i.e. what kinds of marks and sounds they can make,then anything new in the realm of possible speakers is largely, andautomatically, excluded. If the task of the political sphere is simply toregier and transla claims made by speakers that it need only recognise,then nothing new can ever appear in that eld. In this sense, no matrhow powerfully and honely the public sphere seeks to make and keepitself open, it is incapable of thinking about the conditions by whichspeakers are conitud in the r place.

is leads us to the second limit. When I say something like I am human,I am not ju talking about myself. Indeed, essential to that sort of speechact is the recognition by my audience that they too are human whichmeans that I am saying something about them and not ju about me.eir counrsignature is required for my claim and they will not simplybe verifying my atus. ey will be ating to their own as well.My ament puts something at ake for them. If I do not look or sound


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like them, if the words I say or wri do not make senseor even seem like words actually spoken by another oneof them, then something more complicad than merelydeciding whether I am lling the truth is going on.

INFINILYNEW CONXTS.at is why transmissions need to be inrrupd.Making a claim like this one is not about successfulcommunication or transmission at all, but ratherabout disrupting the rms by which the participants insuch an exchange are dened and conitud, and thenrewriting them. For that, inrruptions are required.

Jacques Rancire wris that politics exis whereverthe count of parts and parties of society is diurbed bythe inscription of a part of those who have no part. 11ere is no formula for making this inscription comeabout, obviously. But what we can say is that, whenit happens, the community has not simply expanded.It has changed, because the inclusion of somethingpreviously uncound and uncountable forces theexiing members of the community to change whatthey thought they were. When I say I am X, and I amAmerican, or human, too, then whaver you oncethought it meant to be American or human, which isto say, what you thought you were, has to changealong with it. You are now something that is like me.

So when I say, I am human, I am also saying and youare not what you thought you were, or and humanis not what it used to be.

New words are not being invend here. Old ones,the things they name and dene, and the circuits or

chains that link them together, are being inrrupd,transformed. Every sign, Derrida wro in Signature,Event, Conxt, linguiic or non-linguiic, spoken orwritn (in the usual sense of the opposition), as a smallor a large unity, can be cid, put between quotationmarks; thereby it can break with every given conxtand engender innily new conxts in an absolulynonsaturable faion. 12

is is another way of saying that letrs can alwaysnot reach their deinations. e drift to which they aresubject, Derrida poind out, is not simply a matr oftheir being open to several possible dierent readingsor inrpretations, of their falling into other handsand being made to say something somewhat dierentin another conxt. e letr (mark, sign, concept,ament, event) does not ju wander from oneexiing conxt to another. Nor is this a queion of theinvention, somehow ex nihilo, of complely new ideasor subjects, as the revolutionary dream might haveit. It announces, rather, the radical disruption of theexiing horizon of meaning, the force de rupture or ofbreaking with conxt and already-conitud elds and of engendering new ones.

In other words, pan to the sky if somethingunexpecd occurs.

(Continues p.7)

Ofn utilising the leftoversof modern life broken glass,discarded snake-skins, unwandscraps of fabric, ca-o piecesof wood Durham pues theseremnants into the arena ofconmporary art like uninvidgues at an exclusive dinner.

ey queion the logic ofinexorable progress that seducesus into thinking that democracyand development have resolved anyoutanding queions. For bothGenet and Durham, the possibilityof violence is triggered by thesuppression of dierence, by themainnance of the atus quo, bythe desire to suain the continuityof liberal democracy and economicdevelopment. eir inrjectionsde-rail us; they force us o thetracks of conventional thinkingand re-rou us onto an altogetherdierent path.

In earlier photographic works,Yto Barrada has explored theStrait of Gibraltar as a si ofrupture and violence. As the maingaway for illegal immigrantsfrom the south, bound for thenorth, Tangier has become a cityof transition creating a conditionof conant departure withoutactually going anywhere, a spaceof inrruption where people havebeen abandoned by the a andtheir presence obscured in a cityfull of holes. In the Iris Tingitanaseries (20072009), Barrada mapsout another kind of ambivalentspace, suspended between presentand future. Vaniing owers likeIris Tingitana are to be found inabandoned or forgotn spacesin the city, in the cracks betweenmodern urban development and thehiorical archicture of Tangier.ey are, as Barrada describesthem, the canaries in the coalmine, warning of the perils ofurbanisation and its suppression ofindigenous life, but they are alsooots of resiance, inrcedingin the path of modernisation

and inrrupting its unhamperedprogress and claim to control theenvironment. It is as if, for Barrada,the incidental blooming of thesefragile owers carries with it thedeant possibility of refusal andchallenge that might slow down,overturn or even halt the prevailingforces of modernisation. In anunexpecd artiic turn, Barradainils this disappearing speciesof iris native to Morocco with thepower to sabotage the trajectoryof economic development.

Michael Rakowitzs inallation

e invisible enemy ould not exi(recovered, missing, olen series),(2007) makes visible objects thathave already (probably irretrievably)disappeared or, more accuraly,been olen from the NationalMuseum in Baghdad in the wakeof the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

NOS

1. This image was poed under the heading 01Call Missed, at Little Green Footballs on 3March 2005; see: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=14925_01_Call_Missed

The r such image I can nd appeared asIED Trigger on 19 October 2004 at:http://www.blackve.net/main/2004/10/photo_of_the_we_2.html

See Michael Yons dispatch of 10 Augu2005, Jungle Law, for an account ofanother such missed communication:http://www.michaelyon-online.com/jungle-

law.htm

2. Jacques Derrida, Le Facur de la Veri,in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader,Columbia University Press, New York,1991, p.469.

3. Marti n Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. JohnMacquarie and Edward Robinson, Harperand Row, New York, 1962, pp.10273.

4. Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, dir.,Videograms of a Revolution, Germany 1992.Farocki wris about the events and the lmin Subandard, in Susanne Gaeneimer(ed.), Nachdruck/Imprint, Lukas andSrnberg, New York, 2001, pp.24863.For a superb reading of the lm,see Benjamin Young, On Media andDemocratic Politics, in Thomas Elsaesser(ed.), Harun Farocki: Working on the

Sightlines, Amerdam University Press,Amerdam, 2004, pp.24560.

5. The full video of the speech, along with adiscussion of its circumances, is availableonline at the websi of a former RomanianTV employee called Alex: http://www.cinemarts.net/2008/10/26/ultimul-discurs-al-lui-ceausescu/

6. Jerey C. Goldfarb, 1989 and the creativityof the political, Social Research 68, no. 4,winr 2001, pp.9931010.

7. For inance, the words of Detroit civil rightscampaigner Herschel Richey in 1943: Iam an American, too despi the fact that

my skin is dark, despi the fact that myforefathers were slaves who came over inchains swelring in the iing, muy holdof some ip (see Elaine Latzman Moon(ed.), Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, WayneSta University Press, Detroit, 1994, p.243).

8. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains,Houghton Mifin, Boon and New York,2005, p.128. Lynn Hunt oers a compellingaccount of the inner logic by which theinvocation of abract cagories likehuman can lead in unexpecd directionsin Inventing Human Rights, W.W. Norton,New York and London, 2007, esp. p.150.

9. Mohammed Ali, Gaza diary: Are we nothuman?, Al-Jazeera Engli, 15 January2007: http://engli.aljazeera.net/focus/war_on_gaza/2009/01/200917111341829322.html

or Are we not human beings?.... We areborn to be gypsies, it is in our blood whetherwe live in caravans or cales, have millionsof pounds or nothing at all. We are proudbut we dont want to be on top of the world,we ju want to be recognized as being partof it, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/are-we-not-human-beings-1114311.html

I have tried to examine some aspects of thisin Where are human rights ?, in MichelFeher (ed.), Nongovernmental Politics,Zone Books, New York, 2007, pp.5671.

10. See J.L Auin, Performative Utrances, inPhilosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson andG. J. Warnock, Clarendon Press, Oxford,1961, pp. 220239.

11. Jacques Rancire, Dis-agreement, Universityof Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1999,p.123.

12. Jacques Derrida, Signature, Event, Conxt,in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader,Columbia University Press, New York, 1991,p.97. I have tried to analyse some similarructures and events in Drift: Politics andthe Simulation of Real Life, Grey Room 21,fall 2005, pp.94111.

JOSIAH WEDGWOOD.Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, 1787.Anti-slavery medallion, 3.2 x 2.9 cm.

thomas keenan pan to the sky

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