Biographical Chronicle of Industrial Production

I haven't put together a live performance work since Habeas Corpus in 2008, and the theme hasn't really changed, but the approach and scale have. On Sunday in Berlin, with up to 100 performers we will present the "Biographical Chronicle of Industrial Production", a labour model of the creation of the building we will be performing in front of.

 No lights, no speakers, no microphones, only a small mass of humanity, a few instructions 5 or 6 analogue clocks and handfulls of ballpoint pens. Come and join in (arrive around 1pm) or come just to watch (arrive at 3pm).

 Here's an introduction in German (with thanks to Ruth and Christine)
 “Biographische Entstehungschronik” von Baruch Gottlieb
 für das “Oral Syndicate”
produziert von Francesca Ciardi

Eine Performance-Veranstaltung für 100 Darsteller Die Performance beschäftigt sich mit der uns umgebenden und von uns geschaffenen Wirklichkeit. Den Ausgangspunkt bildet ein beliebiges Industrieprodukt - in diesem Falle ein Gebäude - und 100 Menschen, die durch ihren Arbeitseinsatz an dessen Entstehung beteiligt waren. Die Bühnenauftritte der einzelnen Darsteller bemessen sich proportional zu der geleisteten Arbeit ihrer darzustellenden Figur und variieren zwischen drei Sekunden und drei Minuten. Dabei wird der individuelle Arbeitseinsatz durch Gesten, Töne oder rein pantomimisch auf der Bühne dargestellt. Die übrigen Darsteller erzeugen hinter der Bühne eine kontinuierliche Geräuschkulisse indem sie einzelne Töne singen, sprechen, mit den Füssen scharren, aufstampfen oder auf der Stelle treten.

 Die Performance soll eine Erkundung der (Entstehungs)Geschichte eines industriellen Erzeugnisses sein, welches wir normalerweise nur in seiner physischen und gewöhnlichen Form wahrnehmen. Sie soll die gesamte Komplexität eines Enstehungsprozesses vermitteln, d.h. das Unermessliche, das Ungelöste, das Verstrickte: Beziehungsgeflechte verschiedener Individuen, deren Anstrengungen und gemeinsames Streben.

 Here is the English call as seen on FB:

 Baruch Gottlieb and Francesca Romana Ciardi are looking for 100 people interested in becoming a part of a unique site-specific and monumental performance, manifesting the living history of industrial architecture. Set in the unusual and suggestive setting of exRotaprint, a former printer factory in Wedding, the Biographical Chronicle of Industrial Production retraces the stories of the people who produced the world we live in today. Using a model of the construction of the ExRotaprint factory, participants will re-present the workers originally involved in the construction of the building over 60 years ago by appearing 'on stage' for a time proportional to the the historical person they are representing. This time 'on stage' will generally be quite short, on the average 5 seconds at a time...The rest of the participants, when not on stage or getting ready to go on stage, will produce background sounds 'back stage' for the performance. The sounds will consist of physical sounds like shuffling feet and vocal sounds like whispering, murmuring and humming. The performance will take place on the outdoor grounds of ExRotaprint in Wedding, on May 27th 2012 at 3pm and will finish at approximately 330pm.

Participants are requested to arrive on location two hours before the showing, at 1pm, for a run through. No previous performance experience necessary but a genuine desire to be part of a unique project that daringly traces the collective histories and memories of people and their labour. If you want to be part of Biographical Chronicle of Industrial Production please follow this link and fill out the online form on that page: 

Holocaust by Design

Hamlet on the Holotaph

Central to my inquiry into the materiality of the digital image is the discovery of the human fact of this materiality, one aspect of which is the ongoing global tragedy of the so-called 'Conflict Minerals' Trade.

Last year, a bill was introduced to the US Congress which has the intention of mitigating, and hopefully ending this tragedy. Though the provisions in the bill for auditing companies doing the secondary processing of conflict minerals, transforming them into the alloys and other refined materials used in the electronics industry could easily be abused, the bill itself, especially Section 2, is valuable in that it officially acknowledges the scope of the problem in some painful detail.

One of the consultants on the bill was Danish documentary filmmaker Frank Poulsen who managed to personally visit and even film in one of the mines and come back to tell about it.

His film project still needs funding and support. The problem, however, is deeper and more intractable than one film will be able to solve.

There is something endemic to our globalist economic system built on ever increasing debt which necessitates permanent economic growth. We are blackmailing ourselves into the future. And the the over-hurried, harried material result of this is not only bad design, which is obsolete with in a couple of years, but a design philosophy which does not take into account where the materials that must be mined to create the design on a globalized scale will come from, and what potential disruptions this new sourcing paradigm may cause on the local level.

What we see in North Kivu province of the Congo was partially caused by an 2004 EU declaration that solder used in electronics should no longer contain lead. Though this was ostensibly a good idea, the legislators far away in Brussels did not consider that the sudden jump in value of the suggested replacement material, cassiterite, was mostly to be found in a desperately poor and unstable part of the world, and that the gold rush there might have terrible consequences. According to US Congress figures over 6,000,000 people have died as result of the conflict minerals trade. When we look at the materiality of the digital image, we have a holocaust at our fingertips.

Or, rather, to be precise, because, here, out of respect for the murdered, we should be as precise as possible, the term holocaust is not accurate. 'holo' means 'all', 'caust' means 'burnt' which also means that the word holocaust is not entirely accurate to describe the nazi institutional genocide. And the murdered of the Congo were not burned, but were, at least, one would expect, buried, so perhaps a construction such as holotaph be fitting. We have a holotaph at our fingertips.

When it comes to mass-production on the global scale, good, conscientious design is a moral imperative. Bruce Sterling put a damper on the techno-giddy audience at his talk at a Vodaphone MoMo Mobile Monday event in November 2008. In his trademark sneer he cut to the core of the matter, design matters, but waste is good for business.

I have treated the issue of conflict minerals periodically previously on this blog.

On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the opening of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, on the site of the former Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin, let us also remember the millions whose lives and bodies have been sacrificed for the imagineered idealisms of today's globalist social networks.

The Spectres of Messianic Justice (Derrida's SOM part 2!)

It has been months since I wrote the auspiciously subtitled Part 1 of my reflections on Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx. When I first bought the book I thought I knew what the spectres of Marx would turn out to be, but of course, first I had to finish the whole book¹ and ascertain to what degree Derrida and I were on the same track. This, some of you familiar with Derrida's work will understand, took some time. And then other urgencies intervened, and vacillation began its orbits.

The spectres of Marx appear for Derrida in the first sentence of the Communist manifesto. “A spectre is haunting Europe, it is the spectre of Communism”.²

Derrida asks about this spectrality, right at the outset of one of the most influential documents of the 19th & 20th centuries. Are these spectres the spectral beings traversing Marx and his oeuvre, or, are they the spectral legacy of Marx and his oeuvre, the legacy of a certain manifestation of the worker which built for us this technological age?

Derrida explores both of these interpretations, spending much more time on the Messianic implications of transcendental haunting invoked by Marx's use of the word spectre. “Can one conceive of an atheological heritage of the messianic?” (p.211). The atheological messianic notion of a justice to come “beyond right and law”(p.220), central to this book, remains so through his subsequent writings, which he comes to call Messianicity.³

Thus Derrida likes one French translation of spectre: 'revenant' (the returning/returner), and works at length to articulate how the inexorable revenant may lose its ominousness and become more of a companion, eventually pleading with Marcellus in the first act of Hamlet “thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio.”

The inevitable revolutionary rhythmicity of the revenant builds up resonance, a murmuring echo in the psyche of the subject. It is not memory of lived experience, it is an experience which transcends our time and is not totally 'of it'. As implied, the revenant is returning for justice. Can we say that, upon its visitation, we, who cannot provide such justice feel guilty? Is it possible to describe a haunting which traumatizes all people, and is it possible to speak to this?

“if right or law stems from vengeance, as Hamlet seems to complain that it does – before Nietzsche, before Heidegger, before Benjamin – can one not yearn for a justice that one day, a day belonging no longer to history, a quasi-messianic day, would finally be removed from the fatality of vengeance?”(p.25)

Are Derrida's revenants the resonance of things we have actually encountered, i.e. there was a time then the revenant was not merely returning (echoing) but actually together, gathering us, 'with us' in time and space? Ensemble, French for together, has the root for resemble, semblable, similar. Can we say that the revenant is like us living today, that it was once an actual person who lived? Is the spectral here the combined resonances of people's lives lived in the world?

What is the notion of justice but that of the wronged revenant?

The ineluctable spectral resonance builds up an awful, stultifying wallah which threatens even the Marxist ego. Derrida dedicates the last chapter to Marx's (and comparing Stirner's) efforts to expunge the ghosts haunting them. Marx's unwillingness to cohabit with the spectral may explain why he so categorically denied any sort of meaning an industrialized worker may have in his work.

"Labour to earn a living involves: 1) estrangement and fortuitous connection between labour and the subject who labours; 2) estrangement and fortuitous connection between labour and the object of labour; 3) that the worker's role is determined by social needs which, however, are alien to him and a compulsion to which he submits out of egoistic need and necessity, and which have for him only the significance of a means of satisfying his dire need, just as for them he exists only as a slave of their needs; 4) that to the worker the maintenance of his individual existence appears to be the purpose of his activity and what he actually does is regarded by him only as a means; that he carries on his life's activity in order to earn means of subsistence." - Karl Marx 1844 Comments on James Mill, Éléments D’économie Politique

Marx is himself too haunted, has not learned how to speak to the ghost which coalesces before his criticism. Perhaps most frightening is that these ghosts may be perceived lacking the very thing which made them useful (to Marx, and to Capitalism) in the first place, their bodies.

Everyone knows there is nothing so terrifying as a nobody, but it is precisely this persistence of the spectral body of the worker, individual and inexorably part of the revenant, which resonated most strongly in the capitalism. Capitalism, Marx is rightly canonized for being the first to painstakingly and incontrovertibly point out, accumulates wealth by institutionally alienating workers from the value they create. But this notion of alienation is merely economic and, unacknowledged by Marx, the worker cannot help but invest, even if only slightly, with human sensibility and care, in the actual carrying out of his work.

The body experience of the worker is recorded in the object of his labour, and this object will continues to serve as a resonance of the worker who made it's spectrality as long as it exists. If, conversely, technology is the skills and knowledge necessary to produce the technological object then, technology is also stored in the worker's body.

Marx takes the Cartesian (after de la Mettrie) man-is-a-machine hyperbole and hyper-industrializes it. But if we extrapolate from Chomsky's principle of the innate faculty of language and turn the man-machine hyperbole around, we can say that a machine always has something human-like about it and that this humanity in the machine is in part a residue of the body labour and body knowledge that went into producing it, and not just ideas and instructions.

If we can see the industrialized world, not only as dominated by alienating principles and processes but rather as persistently inhabited by sentient bodies, we will begin to recognize another spectrality, that of the physical body resonance of past generations which bequeathed to us the surfaces of modernity. When we thus return to the spectral its acoustic dimension, we may begin to consider the problem not to be that the ghosts appear, but that they leave too quickly before we can echo them detectably.

Disconcerting is not that we, in industrialized convenience, traverse (and are traversed by) a realm of discorporate human spectrality, but rather that the spectres we come across retain their individual integrity with faces and bodies. This is the experience of modernity as a traversal of myriad minute instances of integral, resonant, individual spectral remains, swirling around us like innumerable snowflakes in the shapes of human beings, each an autonomous revenant.

But here, Zizek would allow, Derrida and I are both mis-appropriating Marx, and Engels, for they spoke not of spectrality or of spectres but of THE spectre of Communism.

In English, this spectre is a looming thing, like the "spectre of unemployment". In current usage, the spectre is usually a bogey man summoned when fear is required. In that it is destined always to return again, it is a Derridian messianistic revenant, yet this spectre's return is always invoked, it returns on call and retires until called again.

This means the spectre of communism is always immanent, and, as Marx and Engels affirm, the revenant will soon be here to stay. But we have seen that even Marx and (real existing) Communism are haunted by spectres, “untimely spectres that one must not chase away, but sort out, critique, keep close by and allow to come back” (p.109)

1Slavoj Zizek nimbly danced around a tricky question at his recent lecture in Helsinki “What does it mean to be a Communist Today” when asked how familiar he really was with das Kapital. His response was. “ To really believe ideology you shouldn't know too much about it.”, giving examples such as Stalin, who certainly hardly read and never read Lenin or Marx, or Marx himself who misunderstood Hegel, who in, turn misinterpreted large parts of Kant. Zizek's disconcerting response shows that misappropriation, purposeful or otherwise may be far more politically effective (and interesting) than strict knowledge of and adherence to a text, if indeed this is even possible.

2 In German it is „Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa – das Gespenst des Kommunismus“. The word Gespenst has a wonderful craftsman-related connotation from its root in the verb 'to span' as in to span cloth over a hoarding. It harks back(or forward) nicely to Marx's famous 'length of cloth' example in Capital. So we have a spectrality which spans Europe goes through it an also goes around it, defining it.

3 an interesting article which integrates some thorough exploration of Derrida's notion of the messianic is in Prof. Dr. Lieven De Cauters The Tyrant as Messiah

For further Reference: (for those who speak French or Italian, unless someone wants to prevail upon me to translate this) Here is an interview of Derrida by Enrico Ghezzi in which he elaborates on the various notions of spectrality in his book 'Spectres of Marx'.