The vocal chords of a young tenor, December 2014, Voices of Ascension choir, New York.
Contemporary labor has introjected into itself many characteristics which originally marked the experience of politics…Politics, according to Hannah Arendt, has taken to imitating labor. The politics of the twentieth century, in her judgement, has become a sort of fabrication of new objects: the State, the political party, history, etc.
A Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno, 2004 [all bold type throughout; somewhat tweaked].
I maintain that things have gone in the opposite direction from what Arendt seems to believe: it is not that politics has conformed to labor; it is rather that labor has acquired the traditional features of political action…I maintain that it is in the world of contemporary labor that we find the “being in the presence of others,” the relationship with the presence of others, the beginning of new processes, and the constitutive familiarity with contingency, the unforeseen and the possible — those talents and qualifications which, according to a secular tradition, had more to do with political action, but are brought into play by post-Fordist labor.
…this explains the crisis of politics, the sense of scorn surrounding political praxis today, the disrepute into which action has fallen. In fact, political action now seems, in a disastrous way, like some superfluous duplication of the experience of labor, since the latter experience, even if in a deformed and despotic manner, has subsumed into itself certain structural characteristics of political action.
The sphere of politics follows closely the procedures and stylistic elements that define the current state of labor; but let us note: it follows them closely while offering a poorer, cruder and more simplistic version of these procedures and stylistic elements. Politics offers a network of communication and a cognitive content of a more wretched variety than what is carried out in the current productive process. While less complex than labor and yet too similar to it, political action seems, all the same, like something not very desirable at all.
The inclusion of certain structural features of political praxis in contemporary production help us to understand why the post-Ford multitude might be seen today as a de-politicized multitude. There is already too much politics in the world of wage labor (in as much as it is wage labor) in order for politics as such to continue to enjoy an autonomous dignity.
The subsumation into the labor process of what formerly guaranteed an indisputable physiognomy for public Action can be clarified by means of an ancient, but by no means ineffective, category: virtuosity—defined as the special capabilities of a performing artist, the activity that finds its fulfillment in itself and exists only in the presence of an audience, without an end product or object which survives the performance,.
One could say that every political action is virtuosic—shares with virtuosity a sense of contingency and the absence of a “finished product,” the immediate and unavoidable presence of others. On the other hand, all virtuosity is intrinsically political. Think about the case of Glenn Gould.
This great pianist paradoxically hated the distinctive characteristics of his activity as a performing artist; to put it another way, he detested public exhibition. Throughout his life he fought against the “political dimension” intrinsic to his profession…declared that he wanted to abandon the “active life,” the act of being exposed to the eyes of others. (note: “active life” is the traditional name for politics.)
In order to make his own virtuosity non-political, he sought to bring his activity as a performing artist as close as possible to the idea of labor, which leaves behind products. This meant closing himself inside a recording studio, passing off the production of records as an “end product.” In order to avoid the public-political dimension ingrained in virtuosity, he had to pretend that his masterly performances produced a defined object independent of the performance itself.
Where there is an end product, there is labor, no longer virtuosity…But in post-Fordism, labor requires a “publicly organized space” and resembles a virtuosic performance (without end product).
And now, to complicate matters further, there is Miim—both product and virtuosic factory of sound and movement. Happy new year, readers!
What questions arose in deciding how to re-stage something that depended on improvised enactment of brief directives tied to a temporal structure, re-staged from a time when “happenings” resonated to a current moment when they don’t at all? What survived of the original and what didn’t? More importantly, what should have survived? Might a more “authentic” re-staging have involved some sort of reproduction of the original, based on extant documentation, rather than an updating? Would a “dated” reconstruction have actually been more “true” to the original? Or does the improvisational aspect of the work preclude the option of a “vintage” re-staging?
The physical staging at Judson Church in 1964 seems to have been less organized, more amorphous. In fact, the stage at Judson is occupied fully by part of the audience. Not having witnessed the original Cologne staging, it’s hard to say whether this is a deviation from the original, but the symmetrical distribution of the four stages at The Kitchen seemed to be a strangely rigid spatial organization at odds with the music and ideas behind the project . Even though the “actors” left the stages periodically to rove around the central setting of musical instruments and musicians and amongst the audience, usually replaced by others on the stages, those four stages rigidly anchored the space and rendered symmetrical the movement and placement of the audience. That one staging decision set the tone for spectatorial perception in general. Among other things, it seemed to privilege panoptic visibility.
And what was accomplished in the recent re-staging by allowing spectators anywhere in the space to view on the elevated screens almost every action taking place on every stage in a given moment? This is in contrast to the Judson Church setting, where multiple vantage points were offered by the vertically layered space, in addition to the use of various ad-hoc “vertical” stages, and a greater use of the floor as a “stage.” A small TV monitor showing mostly abstract bands can be seen in the Moore film, as well as a brief projection of a montaged film, but these mediums don’t overwhelm other activities.
Although there is one working clock in the Judson space, on which the film camera lingers, there is nothing in the documentation of the early productions to indicate that the audience was to be made aware at all times of the exact minute and second of the duration of the production, which in this instance were continuously registered on the screens, so that the possibility of a distorted or open-ended perception of time was foreclosed. From what the Moore film shows, the clock could act as a reference for spectators, or not. At The Kitchen, it was overbearingly present.
Oddly enough, my most resilient memory of the “counter-cultural” in the late 60s was that of a transgressive attitude toward time—the experience of time without the enforcement of schedule, plan, or goal produced a visceral feeling of inhabiting the fringes of the normative world.
Giving a re-staging, 50 years after the fact, a contemporary “look” is not equivalent to giving a work contemporary value. It’s clear that the attempt was to avoid a fly-in-amber approach to a work composed decades ago. Hence the transposition of “characters” and spectatorial activity into generally more contemporary images and imaginaries, such as the trans quality of a lot of the characters – human or animal, gender-amorphous. And transposition is an interesting strategy for a temporal re-staging, if the logic goes something like “how do we transpose the fringes of 1964 into the present when such historical fringes no longer have any relevance?”
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