- text by Bojana Kunst
- First published in the Catalogue of Hooman Sharifi Impure Company, February 2003.
Visit kunstbody.wordpress.com for updates.
One of the most fantastic depictions of our contemporary globalized reality, in which every move and every action seems doomed to recurring emptiness, triteness and simulation, is actually quite old. It has its roots in the Baroque obsession with a universality of connections, the sensibility of which resembles ours in many aspects. Searching for a universal image suited to represent an immaculate world of connections, the philosopher Leibniz came up with the following fantastic description: “The orderliness of things, as I understand it, quite resembles that of various orchestras and choirs; while playing their parts, they are located thus that they can not see or hear each other, and yet, each following its scores, they can play together in a perfect fashion. Thus, anyone present in any of the two choirs, could gather from it what the other choir is playing at that time, and could train oneself (especially if we presuppose that he can hear his choir without seeing it, and see the other choir without hearing it) so that his fantasy would further the unheard more and more, and that he would no longer think of the choir he himself stands in, but of the other. He would actually perceive his own choir as a sole echo of the other, prescribing himself but some particular intermezzos in which certain laws of harmony which could be deduced from the other choir, would not be visible; or he could ascribe melodic movements to his choir, such that, judging from his side, could follow a certain rule, and then – because of the internal connection in the art of music – think that the other choir takes over this same rule, although he does not know that the musicians from the other side play something suitable precisely because they follow their own scores.”
Isn’t that a perfect depiction of the contemporary globalized world? Let us see: what is the basic feature of this universal and absolute world of connections? Paradoxically, this buzzing and intolerably noisy world abounding in connections, the orderly and harmonic world of endless mirroring, is characterised by a complete absence of contact. The entire magnificence of playing has changed into the sheer connecting procedure; as every other procedure, it is passionately dedicated to endless transfers from the one choir to the other, to ceaseless listening and observation, with no one hearing or seeing anyone in all this inflated communication. Let us set ourselves the following question: doesn’t this image of the orchestra, in which the entire magnificence of playing has dwindled into that of the connecting procedure, resemble our form of global happiness? Despite the fantastic mirroring, transgression, constant communication, and attention even, what always escapes in this kind of connecting is our touch, the field in-between - or according to Slavoj Žižek, our “real Other”. Leibniz’s orchestra image can be viewed as a metaphor for our contemporary obsessions, political procedures of “world regulation”, globalisation mechanisms, popular stereotypes of multiculturalism – for all these meticulously devised procedures that weave the palimpsest networks of our contemporary life.
The networks of our contemporarity are indeed characterised by ceaselessly recombining various aspects of man’s being (imagination, artificiality, biology, nature, passion, society, mother, child, father, machine, soy, animals, sexuality, corn, body, city, etc.). Today, human as well as non-human identities are served together on the tables of palimpsest and multilayered contemporary cuisine. We taste them through disturbance and surprise, or catch them as dislocated – by means of humour, irony, timelessness, spacelessness, through the improvisation of playful networks. However, the omnipresent tendency toward being connected is a source of great tension in contemporary life. All in all, aren’t we connected only up to a point that can not be transgressed? No danger, but endless play; spicy, but not intolerably so; position, but no opposition; flesh, but no body; freedom, but no constitutional rights; perversity, but fear of intimacy? Doesn’t our Other, despite the contemporary openness and fluidity, remain a strictly limited, strictly “reduced Other”?
Contradictions, conflicts, disproportionate / displaced bodies, and dispersed identities are the basic features of our contemporary connections, but what is their legal position towards man? What happens in the course of our being with the Other? It is not about how I confront the Other; this would be an issue old as the history of modernity, showing as a symptom in the modern “excessive immobility of the body”. In modern confrontations with the Other, the body generally becomes immovable, with man becoming exactly as the confronted Other. The Other is thus always a sign of my own lacks, a field of my own demons, and the image that he shows me is my own. He is the interiorized Other that freezes my body by constantly revealing the excesses of my own rationality. Since the tragic experience from the history of modernity, especially since the rationality triumph in World War Two, today’s man has been used to carrying his own monstrous image inside of him, more even, to displaying it openly for everyone to see. The contemporary confrontations, however, bring about my constant living / being with the Other, the symptom of which is no longer my momentary immobility, but an “excessive endless simulation of the body”. Now, it is me who is an eternal indication of the lacks of the Other, a field of his demons, and the image that he shows to me is always an unadjusted image of himself. Therefore, I obsessively want to be faster than he is, more human (ethical dilemmas of multiculturalism), more dislocated, dispersed, and universal (globalization problems). But this is only a game that I play, a mirror that I show to him in order to outline and keep my own connection, as well as to forever preserve his being different, and make it transparent.
The image of the orchestra thus not only reveals the obsession with the order of the procedure, which makes these kinds of connections multiply. It primarily uncovers the traumatic history of quality or non-quality of connections, and here dwell the true invisibility and inaudibility that make this image scary. They namely testify to a basic connection, or better, to a basic invasion: we can not isolate and differentiate our being human because, deep inside, we are firmly intertwined with the non-human. Therefore, every image of an orchestra, as universal as it may be, every depiction of the complexity of connections, entails a profound break in hierarchy, a gap, a flaw which reveals that every harmony is deeply hierarchical. Especially interesting from this perspective is the fact that, today, the connection became one of our basic needs: the invisibility, break or absence of connection is recognised as deep fear. Being disconnected probably poses one of the biggest (economical, social, intimate, private, public) threats in today’s world. This fear emerges because the biggest problem of today is how to become legally connected with the Other, how to legitimize the non-human and give it (political) representation. We are still incapable of being with the connection – a fact to which the history of modern monsters can testify: consider the mechanical demonstrative connection with the body (which fascinated and attracted the Enlightenment), the demand for a connection with the family (father) and society (sought by Frankenstein’s creation in the Romanticism), the demand for an erotic, sexual, industrial connection with the living (which inspired a great deal of modernist art), and last but not least, the topical post-modern and post-human demand for political connection and representation. Something can be said with certainty: the last illusion of stability is being shattered. After the entropy experienced by our body, nature and interior, our I is the next in line, for I is only capable of finding the place through touching the Other, through numerous translations and discourses. Wouldn’t it be better not to search a new answer, a new image of the orchestra? Our current perspective of the contemporary world only enables us to string a number of trajectories, indicate the fields, establish strategies, and tell in what way we touch upon and are overwhelmed by things and our world, and in what sense we have lost the last bit of our innocence. “In the loneliness of human relations, I put objects together and see that they touch one another. My problem is how to place them all into the space, how to make room for all of them, and especially, how to be certain that they are really together.” (Louise Bourgeois)