The question, asked within an art world context and relating to the signifying possibilities of some travelling artwork, suddenly seemed very dated. When, I wondered, had we stopped worrying about whether works from "over there" might or might not be able to fully communicate themselves "over here" or vice versa? When did we begin to assume a fluidity of circulating meanings in which not only is the signifier detached from the signified, but in which the enunciative had also taken over from the interpretative? When had such a shift occurred between meaning anchored in contexts and representational strategies and the circular operations of singularities and cross-cultural translations?
Within the art world, in both curatorial and artistic practice, there has been an obvious movement towards a global, fluid form of circulation. At the same time, this circulation has not taken on a simple-minded formula that everything is in motion in relation to everything else. Instead there has been in evidence a process which complicates all of those old questions regarding local contexts, places and positions from which we speak.
At the same time that this seeming shift has been taking place in the precise articulation of where we speak from, we have also had experience of numerous international exhibitions such as Documenta XI, the Istanbul Biennale (2003) or Manifesta 5 (2004) to name only a prominent few, which have foregrounded an art practice that informs in a seemingly factual way, but at a slight remove from reportage. We could say that this shift has moved away from supplying various information about a place or a site and instead plays with our consciousness regarding the very nature of having a direct and uncomplicated relation to these. Here we can recognise an art practice that focuses our attention on something that we need to know but have the ability to see or the proximity or access to observe or the cunning or wit to discern. An art practice that obliquely and poetically pulls together conjunctions and patterns that form the interlinked webs of commerce, circulation, mobility and belonging. And yet for all of their supposedly informative capacities, these contemporary arts practices are not historically or materially specific as they were of old for they do not rely on "context" for their embedded meaning. Instead we have around us numerous works whose capacity for observation and for ferreting out all kinds of unexpected conjunctions of information is put towards the task of articulating newly imagined realities rather than towards describing the conditions of realities we have long been able to name and to label.
In the process a concept of "location" - a defined entity in relation to which we would instantly know how to position ourselves - has greatly eroded. The "where of now" of my title refers to the fact that location is increasingly a slippery construct of conjunctions between virtuality, materiality and the vicissitudes of circulating signs. In RAQS Media Collective's video, text and sound installation A/S/L (2003) workers at a call center in India "living between an online and an offline world in time zones on the outer reaches of cyberia" are taught to sound and be able to introduce references familiar to the inhabitants of the culture they are making calls to (on behalf of some multinational company employing data outsourcing). According to Ursula Biemann, A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location) "maps the time geography of shifting identities in a new economy, where call centres employees who are physically located in India answer customers in Minneapolis in a Midwestern accent". (1)
A/S/L confronts us with a slippery location which can only be understood temporally. Situated neither in India nor in the American Midwest, we find the production of a corporate location within a fibre-optics network which redefines many elements including the location of the work and the location of the communication. In this process of redefinition, the work confounds everyone's certainty that it is possible to know who you are talking to. The new digital proletariat that operates these call centres around the globe embodies the "where of now" being simultaneously materially located and virtually dislocated. As such, this proletariat produces a performative alternative to the polarity of such opposites in earlier discourses, which often confused identifiable location with understanding. And that of course is the point, the Enlightenment legacy, so central to the constitution of geography as knowledge, holds that to be able to name and to locate automatically leads to being able to know.
In contrast, many contemporary art works operate on producing somewhat oblique lines of identifying location. In Tate's 2004 exhibition Timezones much of the work has an elusive and double-edged relation to the encoding and decoding of its geographical emplacement. In Anri Salaa's Blindfold the glistening vacant billboards holding all the promise of "soon-to-be-available" globally circulating commodities co-exist on screen with lumbering workers and municipal buses, with soulless housing projects in Tirana and Velora redolent of an earlier Socialist vocabulary. Neither defining nor contradicting each other these two vocabularies provide a double occupation that fractures synchronic time, the old time of history. Instead, as Eric Alliez says, "wild temporality characteristic of capitalism has historically effected subjectivity and the movement of thought".(2) The "wild temporality" in this case has to do with the fact that neither vocabulary has replaced one another in triumph of one so-called ideology replacing an earlier one. Instead they enact "examples of disjunctures produced by globalisation": media flows across national boundaries that produce images of well being that cannot be satisfied by national standards of living and consumer capabilities".(3) Rather than factual knowledge, Salaa's work produces a subjectivity that is split between contradictory signs and is accepting of it, not attributing it historically, ideologically or geographically. It is a subjectivity characterised not by any identifiable characteristics, properties or tropes of place but by what Giorgio Agamben has called "whatever singularity".
"The coming community is whatever being... The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common property (to a concept, for example; being red, being French, being Muslim) but only in its being such as it is. Singularity is thus freed from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal." (4)
Imagining the subjectivity of "whatever singularity" does not have to do with digging for the truth behind the images, nor in invention of new visual tropes that would be more truthful than previous ones but in their evacuation from old assumptions and mobilisations. In a previous formation there was a necessary alliance between identity ("being Red, being French, being Muslim") and the placing of that identity within a national, regional or cultural location (being Turkish, being Northern European, being of the art world). In the current moment however the mutual dependence of those two categories has been loosening in intriguing ways.
Location, Location, Location
It would seem that only in the hyperbolic speech of the property market is location still ascertainable with such simple clarity, or can be determined in relation to value, of a proximity to some notion of a "centre". Equally, only in the world of privately owned property and of urban development and gentrification can place and location be defined by boundaries that allow it to neighbour simultaneously and separately both less and more desireable areas and to confer identity by proxy.
In all other aspects of our lives we have long abandoned notions of clear, coherent and located identities. The trials and tribulations of identities on the move that test the limits of containment enacted by national boundaries and the inclusions and exclusions of citizenship and belonging, have shown up the degree to which the containment and division practiced by borders have failed to do just that. Instead of bureaucratically regulated divisions we have the constitution of extra-territorial spaces for the containment of "illegal immigrants" such as camps and centres for refugees and asylum seekers. Other formations are made up of the entanglements and mixings of vast populations of those who inhabit the grey zones of unsanctioned but necessary labour in reluctant host cultures.
"Where do I belong?" seems to be the question that plagues so many of the discussions I participate in. As a constant lament it refers to dislocations felt by displaced subjects towards disrupted histories and to shifting and transient national identities. Equally, it refers to university departments and orders of knowledge, to exhibiting institutions and market places and, not least, to the ability to live out complex and reflexive identities which acknowledge language, knowledge, gender and race as modes of self positioning.
It is one of those misguided questions that nevertheless serve a useful purpose, for while it may naively assume that there might conceivably be some coherent site of absolute belonging, it also floats the constant presence of a politics of location in the making. This very act of constant, plaintive, articulation serves to alert us to the processes by which identity comes into being and is permanently in flux. As a quest(ion) It brings to mind a lovely sentence from Salman Rushdie's "Outside the Whale" in which he advocates taking issue with George Orwell's assumption that there is an inside in which to be passively swallowed up. "In place of Jonah's womb, I am recommending the ancient tradition of making as big a fuss, as noisy a complaint about the world as is humanly possible. Where Orwell wished quietism, let there be rowdyism; in place of the Whale, the protesting wail."(5) Therefore the positioned location I am examining, so totally outside the whale, is the geography of keening and wailing, of location as a form of criticality, of trying to find both articulation and signification for that constant unease between efforts at self-positioning and the languages and knowledges available for us to write these into culture. It is an unease inscribed with both a sense of loss of that earlier seamless emplacement we might have thought we had as well as with the insecurity of not yet having a coherent alternative to inhabit.
Location then is by definition the site of performativity and of criticality rather than a set of naturalised relations between subjects and places. How then within this shift can we address issues of a necessary and critical cultural location; of the place from which we speak, in which we ground our positionality, from which we understand meaning and in which we might be able to foresee an effect. How in short, can we begin the task of understanding "the Where of Now" as another formation of location, the location of singularity rather than of specificity.
Critical Singularities
I take up these questions and these observations in the footsteps of Jean Luc Nancy's recent and exciting work in "Being Singular Plural", a body of thought that has done much to enable us to detach 'singularity' from individuality and the politics of autonomous selves. (6) Although Nancy's starting point is quite different from the one being rehearsed here -- he is not concerned with rewriting the notion of location for contemporary arts practices but rather with taking up a 20th century philosophical discussion of 'being', a modern interpretative process of what Plato had called the 'dialogue of the soul with itself'. Nevertheless In his argument, his contribution to this ongoing debate Nancy breaks down the 'with' of with itself to another, less inward, more plural set of links. He is doing so in the names of a complex and very contemporary politics which he produces as an almost syncopated litany of what he calls "the places, groups, or authorities (Bosnia-Hezogovina, Chechnya, Rwanda, Bosnian Serbs, Tutsis, Hutus, Tamil Tigers, Krajina Serbs,Casamance, Chiapas, Islamic Jihad, Bangaladesh, The Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia...ETA Militia, Kurds (UPK/PDK), Montataire, The Movement of Self-determination...Roma gypsies of Slovenia...) that constitute the theatre of bloody conflicts among identities, as well as what is at stake in these conflicts. These days it is not always possible to say with any assurance whether these identities are international, infranational, or transnational; whether they are 'cultural' , 'religious' , 'ethnic' , or 'historical' : whether they are legitimate or not - not to mention the question about which law would provide such legitimation: whether they are real, mythical, or imaginary; whether they are independent or 'instrumentalised' by other groups who wield political, economic, and ideological power... This is the 'earth' we are supposed to 'inhabit' today."
In the work of Serbian artist Milica Tomic, her own body that bears the marks of these split identifications and these awkward relations to place. In a photographic billboard done for the Vienna Secession (2000) the artist is dressed in a military uniform reminiscent of the Partisan armies of the Second World War, next to her is her colleague Roza El-Hassan wearing something very Western and fashionable and both are being driven around in a Porsche by an affluent and hapless looking Austrian. The text next to the photograph states: "Milica Tomic and Roza El-Hassan Driving in the Porsche and thinking about Over-population". The women embody the recent conflict in the Balkans and the benign and puzzled incomprehension with which the auto-destruction of Yugoslavia was greeted by its Western neighbours. Looking like cheerful and delighted tourists they bear the internal contradictions of their tortured location with an ease that does much to complicate the simple-minded binarity of ethnic politics that was the media's characterisation of that political conflict. In "I am Milica Tomic", the serene and beautiful artist in a white evening gown circles in front of the camera, uttering her own name and a different country of origin and a different language, at each turn. As she turns bloody cuts appear on her body, the embodied price of this enforced linkage between a proper name and its supposedly coherent identity. (7) Tomic and her cohort perform singularity as do Nancy's lists, they have a relation to place but not one of identity or belonging, they enact the impossibility of those simple relations and their replacement by oblique conjunctions. They inhabit that "wild temporality" in which the tortured legacies of WWII Partisan histories and of later ethnic hybridities ride around in a convertible with the comfortable circumstances of Western European prosperity, and everyone smiles.
Earlier, I quoted Nancy at such length because of the litany of names and places he puts forward, the importance of the act of listing them, the burden it enforces of trying to understand their contradictory logic. Not only do these lists of emergent distinctions inhabiting the same terrain constitute the "theatre of bloody conflicts among identities", Nancy claims, but they also constitute a counter logic to named location. They give dramatic effect to the somewhat blander discourses of globalisation which have been trying to problematise the vision of a world fundamentally characterised by objects in motion. "To say that globalisation is somehow about things in motion somewhat understates the point. The various flows we see - of objects, persons, images, and discourses - are not coeval, convergent, isomorphic or spatially consistent. They have what I have elsewhere called relations of disjuncture. By this I mean that the paths or vectors taken by these kinds of things have different speeds, axes, points of origin and termination and varied relationships to institutional structures in different regions, nations, or societies". (8)
I want to take up the notion of "singularity" in relation to place, location and globalisation because it seems to enable the kind of fractured conjunction that Tomic's images and Nancy's parade of unacknowledged identities manage to produce, at times in a comic at times in a tragic, vein. "Singularity" is being that is not inscribed with identity, is not in a relation of legible identification with other beings but nevertheless performs some form of collectivity or mutuality.
It is possible to juxtapose the grounded specificity of conventional geographical locations with the emergent logic of singularity. While the specific is true to a logic of its contexts , the singular it true to a logic of its own internal self organisation. "The singular and the specific", says Peter Hallward in "Absolutely Postcolonial", "divide most obviously, most naively, in their tolerance of positioned interests and "worldliness" in the most general sense. According to the singular-immediate logic, in order to grasp the truth of the created world, you first have to step outside of it... The specific on the other hand implies a situation, a past, an intelligibility constrained by inherited conditions.. Within the world, the specific relates subject to subject and subject to other; the singular dissolves both in one beyond-subject." (9)
In Francis Alys's Zocalo, a flag-pole located in a central square in Mexico City marks the process of an endless spatial sub division of the square itself. People finding shade in its shadow, arbitrary and inexplicit military formations, ad hoc festivities, hawkers and idlers continuously rewrite what is generally perceived as a space of exemplary civic pride and a defining urban public space into a ramshackle unfolding of numerous mundane moments. The long duration of the piece, the continuous spatial habitations that flow one into the other and the flat light that illuminates its sprawling surface, work to refuse a translation from one urban myth, that of architectural and civic achievement, into another urban myth so prevalent in the accounts of "other modernities" - namely that of a chaotic crowd whose urban roamings follow a seemingly incomprehensible logic. Alys has managed to take a named location and dissolve it into "one beyond subject", unframing it from any attempt at local characterisation. Viewed from high above the square he eschews an organising gaze "under whose reign everything can be taken in by a single glance from the mental eye which illuminates whatever it contemplates".(10) Instead, people come and go, inhabiting the space for a moment or two, inhabiting it through duration rather than through the identity they are assumed to represent.
Double Horizons
To evolve the vocabulary we need in order to establish a temporal subjectivity within a global circulation we might follow Homi Bhabha towards the "double horizon" in which temporality and spatiality goad one another into a different set of political and cultural relations. "It was through my interest in the 'intermediary life' of the global experience... that "Third Space" somewhere between the old and the new - that I became aware of a kind of contiguous , double horizon that hovered over the global discourse. It was a shuttling back and forth between continuity and contiguity the tension of the "New World Order" surviving in the dogged persistence of the "National" and the fragile future of the Transnational / International Civil Society. (11)
It would be so simple to refer to "globalisation" (as everyone around us seems to do all the time) for some schema of the movement of everything in relation to everything else. But it seems that on the whole, globalisation is juxtaposed with location or locality in the binary structure of negative differentiation in which the one intimates an explicit "somewhere" while the other intimates a "nowhere" or "everywhere". As Arjun Appadurai has written:
"It has now become something of a truism that we live in a world characterised by objects in motion. These objects include ideas and ideologies, people and goods, images and messages, technologies and techniques... It is also a world of structures, organisations and other stable social forms. But the apparent stabilities that we see, are under close examination, usually our devices for handling objects characterised by motion." (12)
As Appadurai rightly claims, the Nation-state which occupies the claim to stability proves to be as much "in motion" as the forces of globalisation which are deemed to counter it. This motion can be usefully taken up when the fixity of place as bounded, internally defined and named is suspended and replaced with a different understanding of location as fluent conjunctions of space and time, space and time related to one another through the constitution that a "double horizon" of continuity and contiguity that Bhabha speaks of.
In contemporary arts practices we have recently seen the rise of works that explore and investigate the course of oceans, rivers and waterways, of cargo and shipping and leisure and migration that makes its way across bodies of water and of the lives of ships that glide through them or sink to their bottom. Michel Foucault famously declared:
"The boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilisation.. the greatest instrument of economic development...but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence." (13)
Considering works such as Allan Sekula's Fish Story (1995), Multiplicty's Solid Sea (2002) and The World (2002) (set on a floating residential ship) , Laura Horelli's Unititled (2004), about works on cruise ships, or Matthew Buckingham's new world elegy on the Hudson River (2004), we once again glean the "wild temporality" coined by Alliez. (14) All of these works lay out great swaths of previously unconnected spheres; between ports and cargos and longshoremen, between shipyards, engineers and the leisure cruise industry, between illegal immigration attempts via ships that end in tragedy and the intricate state bureaucracies that deny their ever having existed. But beyond the detailed explorations of how all of these watery surfaces and economies produce elaborate connections between labour, commerce, mobility, governability and desire, they also undermine the seamless spatio-temporal order imposed by the idea of a coherent and located national organisation. (15) It is the degree to which nothing coheres that is so interesting about these works and their ability to rehearse contradictions so seamlessly merged in previous narrative tropes of life at sea. In Laura Horelli's two-channel video work on a cruise ship , the employees of the liner, workers in a kind of permanent carnival of entertainments , are asked to wear badges which identify them by name and by their many countries of origin. At the same time they are only allowed to speak in English while on board, the one manifestation cancelling out the meaning of the other. Difference is performed and sameness is imposed within a leisure industry that pursues the production of a floating, neutral "nowhere" and counters the very possibility of any curiosity or discovery as part of the experience of a voyage. The fact that the crew also express no interest in any of the places they are visiting nor do they seem to explore the ship's home base in San Juan, speaking instead about their earning capacities and their longing to return to their homes, further locates them in capital rather than in any geographical specificity.
All the protagonists of these different works come at the dominant temporality of the world from an "elsewhere" that is not locatable in a stable and fixed notion of space. Although a notion of a "solid sea" as an obstacle course traversed at different levels and registers by the differently privileged actors in the forms of tourists, merchants or refugees has been coined by ‘Multiplicity’ for their project, it is at some level shared by many of these projects. This "solidity" counters the illusion of seamlessness and transparency , reintroducing obstacles and illuminating hidden structures that negate any fantasy of freedom that may be popularly inherent in the narratives of the sea. No longer an adventurous "in-between" in Foucault's previously quoted and somewhat romantic terms, the ships in these art practices exemplify heterotopias at the edge of the world which are nevertheless deeply imbricated within capital production and circulation but at a different temporal register.
Should we be asking where she was shipping her work from, or where she was shipping it to, would it help us to locate her question in a more empathetic manner if we understood the direction of this movement, if there was a margins and a centre to this story, to this question?
The Edge of the World
But is the edge of the world a place from which one can produce a critical gaze or is it a tragic marginality?
Achille Mbembe in his analytical writings has placed Africa "at the edge of the world" not as a marginal space but actually as one from which it might be possible to read new forms of emergent territorialities and unexpected forms of locality. In an exceptional reading he argues against the overriding convention that posits African struggles of self location at the feet of arbitrary colonial divisions of territories that cut across languages, cultures, landscapes and tribal affiliations. But equally he argues that "the regional integration that is seemingly taking place through socio-cultural solidarities and interstate commercial networks" are not exclusively local.
"If at the centre of the discussion on globalisation we place the three problems of spatiality, calculability, and temporality in their relations with representation, we find ourselves brought back to two points usually ignored in contemporary discourses. The first has to do with temporal pluralities, and, we might add, with the subjectivity that makes these temporalities possible and meaningful... that temporalities overlap and interlace. Fitted within one another, they relay each other; sometimes they cancel each other out; and sometimes their effects are multiplied." (16)
In conclusion, Mbembe, in tandem with so many of the arts practices circulating around us, insists that it is the positioned viewer, the epistemological place from which we see and know that is the major problem. "Interpreted from what is wrongly considered the margins of the world, globalisation sanctions the entry into an order where space and time, far from being opposed to one another, tend to form a single configuration." (17)
The co-joining of space and time seems abstract and difficult to entertain. But often it does not take the form of a grand enterprise but rather one of a level and therefore unsettling gaze.
Similarly in de Rijke and de Rooje's video Untitled, which focuses on a graveyard surrounded by high rise buildings in Djakarta, we find the level and steady gaze which turns the tables on the supposed tumultuousness by which most often an "elsewhere" is perceived and brought into vision. So often a conventional western gaze is overwhelmed by what it observes to be a chaotic or irrational logic of the elsewhere. As in Mbembe's positioning of Africa in his argument, here too it is not the choice of what is being exhibited that has changed but the formation of the viewing gaze. Equally it is the recognition that there are necessarily multiple temporalities and that the inscription of the globe into one temporal order in which everything is synchronic is an inherited violence. For as Negri says "Time is not only a horizon.. it is also a measure". (18) Duration then, horizon, the level and steady gaze which unsettles conventional perceptions of how we look elsewhere, are all the critical tools by which we can turn other locations and other modernities into "edges" from which we can turn perception inside out.
Bio/power - Bio/time - New political spaces
I want to try and bring them all together; spatial temporalities and singularities, notions of duration and of bodies which, by performing their "being" are actually intervening critically. I want to plot out how what might seem diffuse is actually a productive intensity and how the level gaze of considerable duration is producing a new space rather than a new statement. I wonder if this conjunction might propose a visual culture of bio/power ?
What is constantly being referred to as "biopower" is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior rather than from its exterior; following it, interpreting it, absorbing it and articulating it. As a term, what it might allow us to do in the present context is to make tangible conjunctions of space and time at the level of the body, of their embodiment.
The performative bodies which inhabit all of the works touched on throughout this discussion are not illustrative of ideas or actions taking place outside themselves, not characteristic of any particular cultures nor do they illuminate particular historical moments. The fleeting ways in which they inhabit the screen; oblique, fragmented and arbitrary ensures that they cannot become frontal actors in some historical drama but instead function as singularities in a spatial temporality.
Biopwer too occupies a spatial temporality in which work is no longer reducible to a measure based upon the time of use-value, but brought into relation with the new organization of social temporality on a bio political baseline. In Antonio Negri's Time For Revolution the richness of the "The Constitution of Time" consists simply in its being the compression and crystallization of Negri's thinking on the transformation of the time of exploitation. Time here has been conceived of as the quantitative measure of exploitation; now it can be thought of as the qualitative of the alternative and of change. (19)
The deep entanglements of cross cultural translation and circulation and their manifestations within contemporary arts practices in which it is subjectivities that both produce and manifest bio/power make for a much more hospitable context for the understandings of a "multitude". "Multitude" is what Negri and Hardt contrast with juridical structure and constituted power. This multitude is the "plural multitude of productive creative subjectivities of globalisation that have learned to sail this enormous sea. They are in perpetual motion and they form constellations of singularities and events that impose continual global reconfigurations on the system." (20)
What drives Empire as a book, what drives so many of the arts practices that are taking up, consciously or not, the terms suggested here is the tension between the ways in which the old formations (empire) constantly remake themselves, adapting and absorbing all challenges and the possible new figures and spaces for political struggle in the form of new subjectivities, new modes of "expressive democracy". As they state: "New figures of struggle and new subjectivities are produced in the conjuncture of events, in the universal nomadism, in the general mixture and miscegenation of individuals and populations and in the technological metamorphoses of the imperial biopolitical machine." (21)
But how are these flexible multitudes, trading on their intellect rather than their capital, to create this new "expressive democracy" ?
Philosophers and artists have of late been telling us of crowds and multitudes who are "just there", that do not make specific demands nor carry particular banners, they resist an order through their sheer being.
Negri says: "The protesters at Seattle are not unsympathetic. They don't stand for anything. They don't have a programme. But what is important is that they have found a space for a different politics - a global politics." (22) And Agamben claims that the fury that the authorities unleashed in Tianamen Square was directly related to the fact that the protestors had no particular demands, demands which they might negate or condemn or negotiate with. "What the state cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that singularities form a community without affirming an identity." (23)
Oliver Ressler's films patiently follow the shifting population of anti-globalisation protestors from Genoa to Salzburg to Gothenburg, charting the waters of a fluid and non-centralised emergent politics that responds to the moment rather than builds political structures.
Like the performative politics of the multitude, constituting new spaces and occupying old one s with new meanings, the steady gaze of the camera evacuates spaces from their conventional signification and allows them to be temporally suspended as the newly coined "non-subjects" of singularity.
Did she ever get an answer to her concern for whether that work might signify "over there"? Probably not, as it was obviously never the right question. Will she be able to produce a modality between places without trying so hard? We'll see.
(Essay, Time Zones (Tate Modern), October 2004.)
