Parse journal #7 Speculation by anders wennerström

07 Issue

i ss u e e d i t o r s Dav e B e e c h A n d e r s H u lt qv i st Va l é r i e P i h e t

Speculation D av e B e e c h , D i d i e r D e b a i s e , Co sta s L a pav i sta s , Va l é r i e P i h e t, K at r i n S o h l dj u, J o na s Sta a l , Is a b e l l e St e ng e r s , Fa b r i z i o T e r r a nova , M i ng Ts ao, K r z y s z t o f Wod i c z k o

Platform for Artistic Research Sweden PARSE Journal Issue #7 Speculation Autumn 2017

PARSE Journal

Issue Editorial Team

Working Group

Dave Beech

Pia Ahnlund

Billes tryckeri

Anders Hultqvist

Dave Beech

Valérie Pihet

Publisher Erling Björgvinsson Kanchan Burathoki

University of Gothenburg

Editors-in-chief

Ingrid Elam

ISSN 2002-0511

Andrea Phillips

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

Online edition

Mick Wilson

Anders Hultqvist

www.parsejournal.com/journal

Markus Miessen

Front cover image: Rojava ambassador

Advisory Board

Andrea Phillips

Sînam Mohammed debates with fellow

Simon Critchley

Mick Wilson

panellists in the New World Embassy:

Darla Crispin

Rojava, 2016. Artists: Democratic Self-

Vinca Kruk

Project Managers

Administration and Studio Jonas Staal,

Bruno Latour

Pia Ahnlund

Photo: István Virág and Ernie Buts.

Kanchan Burathoki Valérie Pihet Henk Slager

Copy Edit

Gothenburg, the artists, the

Gerrie van Noord

photographers and the authors.

Layout Anders Wennerström, Spiro

Table of contents

Introduction

What Is Speculative Music Composition?

Dave Beech, Anders Hultqvist, ValĂŠrie Pihet

Ming Tsao

The Insistence of Possibles: Towards a Speculative Pragmatism

Speculative Narration: A Conversation with Didier Debaise, Katrin Solhdju and Fabrizio Terranova

Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers

ValĂŠrie Pihet

What is Speculation? Costas Lapavitsas interviewed by Dave Beech

The Speculative Art of Assemblism Jonas Staal

The Investigators Krzysztof Wodiczko

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Introduction Dave Beech

Valérie Pihet

Dave Beech is PARSE Professor of Art at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. He is the author of Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (2015), which was shortlisted for the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize. He is an artist in the collective Freee (with Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan), whose work has been exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial, the Liverpool Biennial, BAK (Utrecht), Wysing Arts, (Cambridge), SMART Project Space (Amsterdam), the ICA (London), the Collective Gallery (Edinburgh), International Project Space (Birmingham), and 1000000mph Gallery (London). He has written widely on the politics of art, including The Philistine Controversy (2002), co-authored with John Roberts. He is a founding co-editor of the journal Art and the Public Sphere (2011-). He curated the exhibition We Are Grammar at the Pratt Institute (New York, 2011) with co-curator Paul O’Neill, and edited a special edition of Third Text on “Art, Politics, Resistance?” (2010), as well as a special issue of Art and the Public Sphere with Simon Sheikh on the biennale (2016-2017). Forthcoming publications include a co-edited book on taste after Bourdieu, a Dictionarium of Art’s Social Turn, and a book called Art and Labour.

Valérie Pihet is developing independent research and consulting activities related to the coproduction of knowledge and articulation between arts, research and society. Since 2016, she is the coordinator for arts and research in PSL University Paris. She is also the co-founder of Dingdingdong—Institute of coproduction of knowledge on Huntington’s disease, with the writer Emilie Hermant. She is a member of the advisory board of the Mobile Lives Forum, research institute initiated by SNCF, and of the PARSE research group (Platform for Artistic Research Sweden). She is the president of The Council (art agency), directed by Sandra Terdjman and Gregory Castera. In the past, she co-founded and directed with the French philosopher Bruno Latour the Programme of experimentation in arts and politics (SPEAP) in Sciences Po Paris (2010 -2014). She has collaborated with Bruno Latour on a number of other projects, including the Iconoclash (ZKM, 2002) and Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy (ZKM, 2005) exhibitions, and the founding of the Sciences Po médialab in 2010.

Anders Hultqvist Anders Hultqvist is a composer, researcher and Professor of Composition at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. Besides writing for different orchestral, chamber music, electro-acoustic and sound art settings, he has since 2005 been involved in different artistic research projects concerning musical interpretation (“Towards an expanded field of art music”) and sound in city spaces. The research projects “Transmission, Urban experiments in sound art and sonic space” and “Into noise” were undertaken by the research group USIT—The Urban Sound Institute. Hultqvist is currently involved in the artistic research project “At the conceptual limits of composition: A shrinking emptiness—meaning, chaos and entropy”, which explores certain topics concerning the creation of meaning in musical and literary composition. Examples of publications are Sound and Other Spaces (with C. Dyrssen, S. Mossenmark and P. Sjösten, Bo Ejeby Förlag, 2014) and Musikens frihet och begränsning. 16 variationer på ett tema (ed. Magnus Haglund, Daidalos, 2012).

PARSE Journal

his issue of PARSE explores how and why

speculative futures, but is shaped by all those futures that are

speculative thinking and speculative activity

presently hoped for, invested in, banked on, planned for and

have obtained a new topicality, especially in

insured against. The future is not remote, but immanent in what

philosophy, culture and politics, in a condition

is done now in order to bring about change, maintain the

marked by the absence of certainty, the crisis of

status quo or surrender to fate.

the crisis of metaphysics, the dominance of finance capital and the re-emergence of utopianism in the absence of revolution.

All great emancipatory projects begin as speculative proposals

Philosophically the reassertion of speculation coincides with the

of alternative worlds or alternative ways of living. The demand

exploration of different practices of knowledge in the develop-

for equality presupposes the imaginative leap in which the

ment of critical, conceptual and pragmatic tools by which the

subaltern, the disenfranchised and dispossessed might be

contested past, present and future can be navigated. Economi-

considered equal in reality not just in principle. Indeed, we can

cally and politically, speculation represents both the incontro-

plot the trajectory of many social emancipatory programmes

vertible structuring principle of neoliberal capitalism and the

on an arc that begins as something utterly preposterous,

imaginative force that must be deployed against it.

becomes idealistic but unrealistic, until eventually it turns into a conservative defence of the existing condition. Utopias are

When we take a chance as individuals in everyday lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

scorned for being unrealistic, but when speculations about

quitting a job before youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve lined up something better, falling

emancipation become real, they lose their critical dimension.

in love, deciding to read this journal rather than going for a

But speculation is not merely a pragmatic operation; it is

walkâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;we establish a relationship to the future. We speculate.

an ideological and metaphysical conundrum. Which social

Speculation, therefore, is a necessary component of human

imaginaries deploy the tropes of speculation and why? What

agency. This is why the opponents of speculation appear to

is the myth of speculation as a danger to the individual, the

be captured by speculation insofar as they hope for a world

household and the local community? What is the romance of

after the reign of speculation. Utopias and dystopias are spec-

speculation? What are the rhetorics of speculation?

ulative designs that are rooted in the very world from which they exit. So, the empirical world is not cut off from numberless

Introduction

Between a debate on the specificity of the speculative and a

that each of them conveys a very different, even opposite,

survey of the particular forms in which speculation operates,

definition and usage of the word. Indeed, speculation itself

this issue of PARSE opts firmly for the latter. What is remarkable

must be recognised as a carrier of multiple outgrowths from a

about the topicality of speculation is that it has become a

contested heritage of prolonged etymological and epistemo-

prominent trope across disciplines without its currency being

logical complexity. Hence, each paper in this issue opens up

established by a dominant discursive framing. This leads

the question of speculation from within distinct but overlapping

to conjecture—one might say speculation—regarding such

disciplines and a range of discursive and ontological traditions,

coincidence. The issue thus invites us to think around the notion

but all raise solemn political questions about thought, the future,

of distributed cognition, perhaps, through which we can

structural transformation and the persistence of capitalism

see, among other things, that the arts, sciences and diverse

in relation to the deep ecological and societal crises we

other disciplines converge and transact without necessarily

encounter.

reaching consensus on the matters that connect them. Are the fears about the dangers of financial speculation related to

The two first articles provide a philosophical and economical

the suspicion of speculative thinking that links philosophy to

springboard to enter into a wider set of debates about

utopian politics? Speculation is always necessary for utopian

speculation against the prevailing tendency to dismiss specu-

politics, even if not reducible to it. Is a world without specula-

lation and the speculative in the history of philosophy as

tion impossible without abolishing the future, and, if so, what

modes of pure theory and abstraction, disconnected from

kind of temporal speculation do we need to keep the future

empirical experience. Both intervene in disciplinary conditions

alive? How can art practices unfold and generate their own

under which discussion of the notion of the speculative

experimental ontologies when speculating about and probing

has been muted in recent decades. It is in this context that

emerging futures? What is the democratic potential or danger

Isabelle Stengers, Didier Debaise and Donna Haraway—

of speculative aesthetic objects in the forming of publics?

drawing upon the work of William James and Alfred North Whitehead,among others—have reactivated the word “specu-

To address speculation seriously it is necessary to welcome

lative” and notions such as “speculative gesture”, “speculative

a battery of questions such as these, and to acknowledge

narration”, and ”speculative fabulation”. Speculation to them

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is related to the creation of possibles, rather than the abstract

Wodiczko confront these “shuffling times” (to quote Benedicte

logic of probables. If reviving the concept of speculation

Zitouni) of the contemporary condition, to construct futures

within philosophy is to defy the canon, the same is true of the

that refute the permanence of the present with experiments

economic field. In heterodox economics, “speculation” has

in the multiplicity of assembling.1 Staal meets the catastrophe

been suspect for its strong correlation with the logic of financial

of speculative capitalism with the creation of spaces for the

markets, the valorisation of unbridled risk and its alleged

constitution of new social assemblies in the form of “parallel

parasitism on production, but Costas Lapavitsas resituates the

parliaments, stateless embassies and transdemocratic unions”.

critique of speculation as essential to all capitalist enterprise

These hybrid, hopeful formats of assembly, Staal says, are the

rather than distinguishing sharply between the production of

“spaces in which we speculate in order to enact the possibility

commodities on the one hand and usury on the other. The

of new future forms of emancipatory governance”. Wodiczko

speculative logic of capital accumulation means that industrial

reflects on the processes by which he animates memorial

production, the service economy and finance are all bound by

statues and civic architecture as a site for speaking truth to

a single principle. Hence, the process of financialisation, which

power, a dialogical process for glimpsing social reconcilia-

defines contemporary capitalism, is not to be understood as

tion and to participate in memorialisation rather than merely

capitalism’s speculative turn, but as the gravitational pull of

witness it. Wodiczko thereby enjoins us to imagine new ways

finance, which results in commodity producing companies

of living with a past no longer conceived as something that

becoming more bank-like, and the extraction of financial profit

cannot be changed.

from individuals, the household, workers and consumers. With the two final articles, the exploration of the history of The following two contributions insert the problematic of

speculation in philosophy is closely linked with music and the

speculation not only within contemporary art and its specific

arts. Both papers try actively to inherit speculative thinking,

urgencies, but within a more general collective programme

each one in a different way, with its own tools, to find fruitful

for inventing unprecedented social relations. Beyond the

paths to nourish the necessary co-construction of creation and

social relations of the present which appear to be necessary,

knowledge in regards societal stakes. Challenging the pos-

inevitable, natural or fixed, Jonas Staal and Krzysztof

sibility of creating a totality for one self makes, for Ming Tsao,

1. Zitouni, Benedikte, Pihet, Valérie. “Shuffling Times”. PARSE 4: Times. Gothenburg. Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts. 2017.

Introduction

room “for new modes of perception to appear that resist

has adapted to this instrumentalisation of knowledge by

representation, conceptualisation, enframing, quantification

adopting the concept of research in place of the older, now

and instrumentalisation.” “Noise” is important in giving the

discredited, notions of originality, avant-gardism and shock.

situation at hand the sense of non-closure. Didier Debaise,

Speculation has been professionalised. But what if we see

Valerie Pihet, Katrin Sohldju and Fabrizio Terranova reflect

speculation as an act of putting artefacts and concepts

on the creation of a Master’s degree called “Speculative

in non-autonomous network relations in order to resist the

Narration” within an art school in Brussels, which is a very

reification of an “outsider” position? If it shows itself, specula-

fragile alliance between philosophy and art. Speculation

tive reasoning rises as an emergent property out of artistic

and narration, both of which are only just emerging from

strategies at hand, the artistic strategies that at that moment

a period of conceptual neglect, fruitfully contaminate each

coincide in a thickening of the present.

other in a provocative montage of unruly terminology. Their considered unpacking of the issues around both speculation

Sensing the possibilities—by not excluding the subjective

and narration allows a new seizing of speculative thinking

from the relevant objects and vice versa—allows us to

and its power within art education.

distinguish between the potential and mere illusions. By acting on chaotic sensations, coming out of different bodily

The future-oriented projections of speculation may be

formations of affective knowledge and put in motion by

exercises in profit-seeking; they may be idealistically alluring

artistic artefacts, projects and concepts, there is a possibility

escapisms or refusals of limitation. At the same time, specu-

to extend the field of enquiry through the emergence of

lation has become a mode of institutional restructuring. The

objects and exchanges not knowingly foreseen.

rise of research within the academy and university imprints the humanities with the dynamics of capital. Research, in market terms, refers to the innovation of the means of production and the invention of new commodities, and it is this model of research that could be said to have colonised universities during the neoliberal era. Cultural production

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Abstract This article strives to continue the lure of Whitehead’s call: that “Philosophy cannot exclude anything”. Thus speculative philosophy extends William James’s radical empiricism. Its task is to locate itself on the ground of experience in its multifariousness, and to preserve what experience makes important. But importance can never be reduced to a matter of fact. To make a situation important consists in intensifying the sense of the possible that it holds in itself and that insists in it, through struggles and claims for another way of making it exist.

The Insistence of Possibles:  Towards a Speculative Pragmatism Didier Debaise

Isabelle Stengers

Didier Debaise is a permanent researcher at the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) and the Director of the Centre of Philosophy at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), where he teaches contemporary philosophy. He is the co-founder, with Isabelle Stengers, of the Groupe d’Études Constructivistes (GECO). His main areas of research are contemporary forms of speculative philosophy, theories of events, and links between American pragmatism and French contemporary philosophy. He is director of a collection at Les presses du réel, member of the editorial board of the journals Multitudes and Inflexions. He wrote two books on Whitehead’s philosophy (Un empirisme spéculatif and Le vocabulaire de Whitehead), edited volumes on pragmatism (Vie et experimentation), on the history of contemporary metaphysics (Philosophie des possessions), and he wrote numerous papers on Bergson, Tarde, Souriau, Simondon, and Deleuze. He has just published a new book entitled L’appât des possibles which will shortly appear in English (Nature as event, Duke University Press, 2017).

Isabelle Stengers, Professor of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, has written numerous books, among which the following have been published in English translation: In Catastrophic Times (2015), Women who Make a Fuss (2014) with Vinciane Despret, Cosmopolitics I and II (2010 and 2011), Thinking with Whitehead (2011), Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (2011) with Philippe Pignarre, The Invention of Modern Science (2000), Power and Invention: Situating Science (1997), A History of Chemistry (1996) with Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, A Critique of Psychoanalytical Reason (1992) with Léon Chertok, and Order out of Chaos (1984) with Ilya Prigogine. Starting with the defense of the passionate adventure of physics against its enrolment as model of rationality and objectivity, she has developed the concept of an ecology of practices affirming a speculative constructivism in relation with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead and William James, and the anthropology of Bruno Latour.

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1. Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought. Toronto: Macmillan. 1966 [1938]. p. 2. 2. Danowski, Deborah and De Castro, Eduardo Viveiros. “L’Arrêt du monde”. In De l’univers clos au monde infini. Emilie Hache (ed.). Paris: Editions Dehors. 2014. 3. This was the title of the symposium which we organised at Cerisy in summer 2013, and which resulted in the publication Gestes spéculatifs. Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers (eds.). Dijon: Les presses du réel. 2015. 4. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Inc. 1929. p. 338. 5. See also on this subject Latour, Bruno. Enquête sur les modes d’existence: Une anthropologie des Modernes. Paris: La Découverte. 2012. 6. Souriau, Étienne. The Different Modes of Existence [1943]. Univocal. 2009. p. 131. (Paris; Presses Universitaires de France. 2009. pp. 110-111). 7. James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism Dover Publications. 2003 [1912]. 8. Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York, NY: Macmillan Company. 1938.

peculative thinking,

as we seek to inherit it, is expressed for the first time, with the greatest accuracy, in Alfred North Whitehead’s exhortation “Philosophy can exclude nothing”.1 A strange proposition, which, while appearing to be a description of philosophical activity in general, or of a kind of heuristic prudence, in effect denotes a deliberately polemical, violent position. The case is simple: modern philosophy has become bogged down in the forms of a purification, of a reverting to principles, of a criticism of what is merely appearance, seduction or alienation, which it believed was its own way of claiming to compete on at least equal, if not superior, ground with that of the experimental sciences. It believed, as in a belief one holds to in the face of all odds, that this was the condition of every possible experience, of all knowledge, of all political constitution. How ironic to note today, in the guise of new speculative proposals, clearly quite different from the one we will be invoking here, the same lure towards purification and sovereignty, the same formalist fascinations of all kinds, the same relation to demiurgic decision as those which laid down the motorways of modern thought. If speculative thinking today is undoubtedly gaining a new lease of life, it is important not to confuse Whitehead’s plea with formalist sacralisation, identifying speculation with purely formal and abstract decision-making, which governs an important part of philosophy today. How could we believe for one single moment that a break has occurred, when all underlying gestures fit so clearly into the context of continuity, and form a kind of new hyper-modernism? Perhaps,

as has been shown, inter alia by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Deborah Danowski, they are the last spasms of a reaction to catastrophes ahead.2 In this context, it seems to us essential to put forward a certain number of propositions, which do not in any way claim to describe, and in so doing, to pin down, a shifting scenario, but rather to highlight what could in our view make necessary that which we have called elsewhere “speculative gestures”.3 A proposition has no descriptive vocation, much less a normative one, but comes under what Whitehead called “Lure for Feelings”, a way of giving rise to possibles. The Pragmatic Constraint Let us return to Whitehead’s exhortation. If he states this as a requirement, determining a possible trajectory of speculative thinking, this is because there might be new dangers or temptations taking hold of philosophy, which he intends to resist. In a nutshell, we would express this danger as an immoderate taste for false problems, for drastic alternatives, for a kind of lazy thinking or stupidity arising “naturally” in every situation: belief or truth, experience or representation, facts or values, subjective or objective, etc. These alternatives, which appear so innocently theoretical, are in fact unstoppable war machines, spinning in a vacuum and producing a desertification of all modes of existence: reducing thinking to mere representations, fictions to imaginary realities, values to subjective projections onto nature. One might counter that philosophy has never ceased displaying

Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers

dualities of this kind, bifurcations, yet rarely are they so celebrated, dramatised, highlighted at all levels of experience as during the modern period. To all these alternatives, like any false problem, questions of a pragmatic nature should be addressed: what might their aim be? What are their effects? What is it on this occasion that we are attempting to disqualify? To exclude nothing means therefore resisting the terms of the alternatives that so inexorably seem to foist themselves upon us, leading to false choices. We are hence dealing with problems of a new kind, and Whitehead expresses this in a form, which, at first glance, appears cryptic. “Philosophy cannot neglect the multifariousness of the world—the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.”4 So speculative thinking calls on us to explore modes of existence in their own setting, in their mode of success, in their immanent demands.5 Faced with the drying up of modes of existence, Étienne Souriau makes a similar plea when he declares, as a true research programme, as a new philosophical input: At present, we must identify and study those different planes, those different modes of existence, without which there would be no existence at all— no more than there would be pure Art without statues, pictures, symphonies, and poems. For art is all the arts. And existence is each of the modes of existence. Each mode is an art of existing unto itself.6 Does this mean that speculative thinking is condemned to being a kind of neutral collection of a multiplicity of modes of existence that make up our experiences? Should we welcome them all indiscriminately? Does the plurality of modes of existence require preservation as discussed for living species in danger of disappearing? Should speculative thinking become so general that it could include everything, the multifarious modes of existence and the alternatives locking them into the major forms? This is certainly one of the temptations to be found

in a considerable part of contemporary speculative thinking. But Whitehead’s position, affirming that nothing must be excluded, does not for all that state that everything must be taken into consideration: it stipulates that we must reject the right to disqualify. Experience must create constraint. It is experience upon which philosophers must confer the power to make them think. This position places Whitehead’s speculative thinking in the extension of what William James called “radical empiricism” (pace all those who take school distinctions too seriously): “To be radical, empiricism must not admit in its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced”.7 The two parts of the proposition form a crucial double constraint. Firstly, to exclude nothing, to factor in the multiplicity of the dimensions, which make up an experience here and now, not taking anything away for a priori reasons, whatever disqualifications might apply to it. Then, not to allow a principle of judgement outside the situation, which would domesticate this multiplicity in terms of categories or requirements alien to it. Any thought is, from this viewpoint, absolutely located, embedded in the situation from which it emerges and which gives it meaning. It is a matter, we might say with Gilles Deleuze, of thinking through and by the milieu, of thinking, with everything an experience implies, enfolds within itself, and with no principle of critical sorting at work, tending to purify, isolate, make of it a self-sufficient “case”. Nothing of what is real is self-sufficient. There is no such thing as an isolated fact: “Connectedness is of the essence of all things and all types. It is of the essence of types that they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of the essential factor in the fact considered.”8 Hence any experience, however factual, is saturated with interpretations, ideas and multiple links. Whitehead’s exhortation therefore concurs with James’s radical empiricism in rejecting classical empiricism as epistemology dealing with conditions of knowledge in general. For Whitehead the tragedy

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9. Ibid. 10. “The lightweight dove, flying through the air, senses resistance, and might imagine that it would fly even better in a vacuum, with no air resistance. This is precisely how Plato came to leave the world of the senses since this world opposes too many various obstacles, and ventured out beyond, on the wings of ideas, in the vacuum of pure ideas.” Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. 1791 [German]. 11. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op.cit. 12. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, op.cit. 13. Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1925. 14. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, op.cit. 15. See Despret, Vinciane. “En finir avec l’innocence. Dialogue avec Isabelle Stengers et Donna Haraway”. In Elisa Dorlin and Eva Rodriguez (eds.). Penser avec Donna Haraway. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 2012. 16. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, op.cit. 17. See Debaise, Didier. Un empirisme spéculatif. Lecture de Procès et réalité d’A .N. Whitehead. Paris: Vrin. 2006.

of modern philosophy has been to replace the question “what do we know?” by the all-powerful, off-ground question, “what are we entitled to know?”9 The position Whitehead offers philosophy divests it of all sovereignty. It is itself located, and placed in relation to a task corresponding to no entitlement. If speculative thinking has been accused by Immanuel Kant of committing the same error as a dove imagining that it would fly better without the friction of air,10 Whitehead’s speculative thinking aims at maximising friction with experience, refusing the right every specialised thought grants itself: to explain, while eliminating anything that cannot be framed by the explanation. Making Important The very challenge of eliminating nothing runs through the early pages of Process and Reality (1929). Here the need to introduce into contemporary philosophical thinking the requirements of speculation is stated thus: “This course of lectures is designed as an essay in Speculative Philosophy. Its first task must be to define ‘speculative philosophy’ and to defend it as a method productive of important knowledge.”11 The crucial point is to be found at the end of this proposition: to produce important knowledge. It is surprising that the translators of Process and Reality suggested translating the English word “importance” with “de grande portée” [= far-reaching; translator’s note], and that, when the same word appears in the last sentence of the book, it is replaced by “emprise” [= sway, power: translator’s note]. This is all the more surprising since the appeal “this is important” is to

be found throughout Whitehead’s work. “The notion of importance is like nature itself: Expel it with a pitch-fork, and it ever returns”, he wrote.12 The translator’s difficulty no doubt stems from the fact that the use of this word indicates the strong link between Whitehead’s speculative thinking and the pragmatism of James, a pragmatism all too often reduced to a philosophy of utility, a businessman’s philosophy drawing no distinction between philosophy’s striving for the truth and blinkered common sense. Yet we should not underestimate the link between Whitehead and James. For Whitehead, it is James who ushers in a new period of philosophy just as Descartes inaugurated the modern period. Like Descartes in 1637, in his Discours de la Méthode, James, in his 1904 Does Consciousness Exist?, “clears the stage of all paraphernalia; or rather he entirely alters its lighting.”13 But the new broom sweeping clean is nothing if it does not convey the urgency of new questions. Rarely was the fact that ideas have practical consequences evoked with such force as by James, that the possibilities they introduce into an experience are that which verifies them. Thus, in The Dilemma of Determinism, James turns the calm way his colleagues can call themselves determinists into a matter of astonishment, without for a moment concerning themselves with the literally unbearable consequences of this doctrine which reduces to illusion everything of importance to us: even regret becomes irrational. James’s colleagues are in this sense worse than the Kantian dove, being convinced that the more they distance themselves from the fabric of our lives,

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the more faithful they are to the only thing important to them, the definition of a thinkable world in the light of what they call rationality. It would not be exaggerated to see in Whitehead’s philosophy a far-ranging attempt to preserve what an experience makes important. This is an eminently ethical, political matter: how to fit together the multiplicity of zones of importance, human and non-human, in a given situation? Thus he writes, in the form of a maxim: “Our action is moral if we have thereby safe-guarded the importance of experience so far as it depends on that concrete instance in the world’s history.”14 This means that morality implies what Donna Haraway calls “response-ability”, the capacity to be accountable for an action or an idea to those for whom the action or idea will have consequences. And the immoral idea par excellence then becomes the one that claims to be innocent, destroying nothing more than illusions. Morality, in Whitehead’s sense, therefore requires being open to the consequences. Whatever the reasons justifying it may be, no idea is innocent. This does not mean that it is guilty: it is the sense of non-innocence which is the first and the last word of any morality.15 But the philosophies of James and of Whitehead are also speculative insofar as they are committed, as they aim at making an impact, intervening in a landscape devastated by disqualifications and by chasing after illusions. James, in order to resist determinism, dramatised its consequences outside of the protected, non-specific area of epistemology. He stated and felt the vital nature of faith in our capacity to make a difference, even if we can never have guarantees as to the consequences of the difference we will have made. Whitehead made the blatant incoherence of the “bifurcation of nature”—between an “objective” nature, a nature existing without us, and an “apparent” nature, with its sounds, tastes, values, produced by human subjectivity—important. In both cases, what loses hold is the Kantian grip dissecting the experience

into what belongs to the subject (knowing) and to the object (knowable). But what also loses hold is the anthropocentrism. For the sense of importance cannot be a human privilege in the face of an indifferent world. This means we need to fully grasp the radical nature of Whitehead’s idea stating that “The sense of importance is embedded in the very being of animal experience.”16 If Whitehead draws more obviously speculative consequences regarding the demands made by the irreducibility of importance to whatever may be more general than James does, this is because he places himself “after” James, systematically ordering what James has assembled. That is also to say, constructing a “speculative reality” such that importance and values are its crucial characteristics, ones which human experience is not responsible for but only intensifies, and sometimes in an exaggerated manner. Like Jamesian emotion, such characteristics can never be attributable either to the subject or to the object. The question of knowing whether a performance is moving or whether it is I who, being moved, perceive it as such, will always be the wrong question because of its general nature. The critic might find this important, albeit at his own risk. Intensifying the Sense of the Possibles Whitehead’s plea can therefore be understood as dwelling on the plurality of modes of importance, which are part of the self-same reality in which we participate. This is at least the way in which we endeavour to inherit it. But importance can never be reduced to a de facto or given situation: it implies attachment to something in a disappearing world, dwelling on possible becomings, pressing for, insisting on, all those “might haves” or “could bes” implicit in situations.17 Making a situation, past or present, be of importance, means intensifying the sense of possibles it harbours, as expressed by the struggles and claims to another way of making it exist. This is why speculative thinking is so readily

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18. With Donna Haraway we would like to highlight the strong link between the “speculative” type of science-fiction pioneered by Ursula Le Guin in the early 1970s and the so-called second-wave feminism. For this feminism, science-fiction was an experimental field of thought which resists the reasons justifying why the world had to be the one we know and not a different one, that is, resisting the great modern narratives of progress and development. On this subject see also Russ, Johanna. To Write Like a Woman. Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 1995; and Hache, Emilie. “The Future Men Don’t See”. In Debaise and Isabelle Stengers. Gestes spéculatif, op.cit. 19. We can never be too prudent when faced with the risk of confusion between the sense of the possible and the reference to the probable, which must be distinguished as different in nature. By definition the probable has to do with a transposition or a rearrangement of what has already taken place or what is ongoing, as shown by the calculation of probabilities. The probable belongs to a logic of conformity: that which was important in the past, making it possible to characterise it, will preserve this importance in the future. The possible, however, makes important the possible eruption of other way of feeling, thinking, acting, which can only be envisaged in the form of an insistence, undermining the authority of the present as regards the definition of the future. 20. James, William. Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. 1907 21. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2010. pp. 12-13. See also Stengers, Isabelle. La Vierge et le neutrino. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/Le Seuil. 2006. Chapter I among other passages. 22. Deleuze, Gilles “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création ?” In Deux régimes de fous. Paris: Minuit. 2003. pp. 295-296. 23. The thought of living in the ruins was coined by Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2015.

found in stories and tales, which, like science fiction, explore other possible trajectories.18 We, however, believe that critical thinking does not support this kind of intensification. It confers upon the meaning of the possible the quasi-messianic grandeur of an expectation requiring fidelity, but more particularly rooting out imposture, condemning that which is not a legitimate pointer to what lies ahead. In Whitehead’s words, the sense of the possible to be activated always lies in the interstices of a situation, however incapable this situation may be of validating it. It means sensing the virtualities present within this situation, despite the weight of the judgements transforming its lack of guarantee into a matter of fact, tantamount to condemnation. It would appear as if our only choice today is between increased generality of the notion of the possible (messianic plea, utopian construction, political decisionism, non-situated possibles) leading to its loss of all effectiveness, and an across-the-board entrepreneurship of opportunities in a market selecting winners and losers. But these choices are part of a psycho-social symptomatic. Another way of characterising our epoch is to say that it is literally devoured by the exacerbated sense of a possible imperative—as if reality was of importance only from the viewpoint of what it makes possible. We could say with Whitehead that the possible, banished in the name of modern rationality based on facts claiming to impose themselves in the mode of authoritative statement, has returned like a bolt , unleashed by its official banishment. And that, as Karl Marx stated as early as 1847 in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, it has invaded, redefined everything and turned everything upside down. What we need to activate today is a thinking that commits to a possible, by means of resisting the probable19—fighting any interpretation subscribing to the irresistible nature of unbounded capitalism as if that were our immutable destiny, even the conduit conveying the message of progress and emancipation, whereas in fact it denotes the desertification of our worlds and our inability to think that what we care about might have a future. Speculative commitment therefore has little to do with what Kant denounced, i.e. abstract thinking, founding the world on one’s own theoretical principles or judging it in the light of one’s projections. It is all the more necessary to highlight this point since we find the same characteristics in the formalist trends of speculative thinking today. Perhaps we should recall at this point that etymologically the speculator was the one who observes, watches, cultivates the signs of a change in the situation, opening themselves to what, in this situation, might be of

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importance. Not dwelling on the critical question James had made into an undecidable—is this remarkable because I pay attention to it or am I being drawn to it by its remarkable nature?—this “speculator” knows that the question exposes them, but that there is no answer to it other than the speculator’s capacity to distinguish between a utopian chimera and virtuality. And in any case they will have to raise the pragmatic question par excellence: does the possible whose insistence I sense add or detract from the situation?20 They will have to accept that the way they answer is part of the situation, and that they will have to make themselves responseable, answerable for its consequences. It is in this sense that, as early as 1997, one of us had engaged with the adjective “speculative”. After the clash between scientists and critical thinkers that was labelled “wars of the sciences”, she proffered the diagnosis of a dead-end situation: critical, demystifying thinking, was “right” but this being “right” extended the desert, ratified capitalist appropriation, was an insult to that to which practitioners are attached, to what binds them. But diagnosing this dead-end is by no means performing an autopsy. It is, in Nietszche’s sense, making perceptible the becomings eluding it. She wrote: The diagnosis of becoming is not the starting point of a strategy but rather a speculative operation, a thought experiment. [It does not have] any role other than that of creating possibles, that is, of making visible the directives, evidences, and rejections that those possibles must question before they themselves can become perceptible. [It is] first and foremost a struggle against probabilities, a struggle wherein the actors must define themselves against probabilities. In other words, it is a question of creating words that are meaningful only when they bring about their own reinvention, words whose greatest ambition would be to become elements of histories that, without them, might have been slightly different.21

This is the aim we have since associated with “speculative gestures”, “idiotic” gestures, in the sense of the Deleuzian idiot who slows down when others speed up, not because he thinks they are mistaken but because he knows/feels that “there is something more urgent”, more urgent than to be right, or rather not to be duped, which, as James pointed out, is the main fear of the moderns.22 Only probabilities, which mobilise the past to provide categories for the future, provide the power to be right. Speculative gestures, plural by definition, have the truth of the relative, the truth of an always situated. One does not decide to perform a speculative gesture, one risks it in so far as one feels “bound” by a situation, bound to respond to virtualities made perceptible only by the way in which one is bound. To feel bound and to present oneself as such is the mark of minority thinking in a double sense: in not dreaming of thinking on behalf of others and in not seeking to follow at any price the postulates of one’s own inspiration. The situation which binds us and makes us think is that which unsettles or enrages any majority thinking. In one way or another, whether or not the worst is avoided, we know that the children of this century and of centuries to come will have to live in the ruins of a world where everything the moderns have taken for granted will have become precarious.23 Living in the ruins does not necessarily mean the triumph of a “freefor-all”, of “every man for himself and devil take the hindmost”, but it makes it crucial to drop any nostalgia for an era already over and done with. Perhaps this life in the ruins calls for the apparent unnatural marriage of the speculative, open to the insistence of the possibles, and of the pragmatic, as the art of response-ability. Originally published as Didier Bebaise and Isabelle Stengers, “L’insistance des possibles. Pour un pragmatisme spéculatif”, Multitudes, 2016/4 (n° 65), p. 82-89. Translated by Angela Brewer

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Abstract Costas Lapavitsas discusses issues around the economics and politics of speculation with Dave Beech. Marxist economic theory is deployed to clarify the difference between some of the vague and metaphorical ways in which the concept of speculation is applied to theories of art, capitalism, and the future-oriented accumulation of profit, rent and interest. Lapavitsas, whose book ‘Profiting Without Producing’ characterises our period as one of financialisation rather than neoliberalism, post-Fordism or globalisation, argues that capitalism has been financialised and it is urgent that the Left’s agenda includes definancialisation. Beech and Lapavitsas discuss the relationship between financialisation and fascism and how the cascading of financialisation into everyday life acts as a powerful mode of social control.

What is Speculation?

Costas Lapavitsas

Dave Beech

Costas Lapavitsas has taught economics at SOAS since 1990. In recent years his research has focused on Eurozone crisis, producing work that has had a considerable impact on European policy debate. His longer-term research interests, however, have been with the financialisation of capitalism, its characteristic trends, variable forms and manifold implications for contemporary society. Lapavitsas has published widely in the academic field, and writes frequently for the international and the Greek press. In 2015 he was elected as a Member of Parliament in Greece. His most recent books include Marxist Monetary Theory (Brill, 2016), Against the Troika: Crisis and Austerity in the Eurozone (with H. Flassbeck, Verso, 2015), Profiting Without Producing (Verso, 2013) and Crisis in the Eurozone (with several RMF researchers, Verso, 2012).

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Costas Lapavitsas interviewed by Dave Beech Social art historians have characterised the transition from the guild system to the art market by identifying the historical point at which artists no longer work for patrons but produce artworks speculatively, that is to say, making commodities for a market rather than making bespoke items for a patron. Would you agree with this emphasis on speculation within capitalist production, or is it a misperception? David Beech:

I find that kind of use of the term unhelpful. I think it’s actually quite confusing. There is speculation in capitalism. Speculation takes place through production and through trade and through finance, but that’s not the defining aspect of capitalism. Nor is it the type of speculation that you’ve just mentioned in regards to art. Assessing and estimating whether an art product will sell in the market and forming an opinion about its likely price or its likely demand is not speculation. Capitalist employment has clear determinants and the capitalist nature of art had very clear determinants and they are not what you have just mentioned.

Costas Lapavitsas:

DB: Isn’t it the case that capitalism is characterised by a form of circulation in which capital is invested in the hope of accumulation, and wouldn’t it be accurate to describe that series of transactions as a speculative process? CL: Capitalist practice has existed for a very long time. We can identify capitalist operations in the realm of money and finance going back millennia. In those practices, money would be made available with a view to extracting money profits from its use, almost irrespective of what that money would be used for, and that profit would be accrued at some time in the future and therefore the owner of money would have to form an expectation about that

return. In that sense, yes, it would be speculative. But that is a very loose use of the term. Capitalist profit could also come from being involved in commercial transactions, sometimes in connection with money capital, which I’ve just mentioned, and there you would produce and either sell directly or get involved in the trading of products in markets that are far away, and there, obviously, you would form an expectation of the price at which these goods would be sold in order to make commercial profit. That again is a kind of speculative activity, but not the defining aspect of what we mean by capitalism today. So these are confusions. Capitalism and capitalist profit are always about the future, always about forming an expectation about the future, but that doesn’t make it speculative in how we use the term to indicate a deficiency, a weakness or sickness in contemporary terms. The title of your book on financialisation, Profiting without Producing, has a relationship to a certain Marxist theory of finance as parasitical on the productive economy—contrasting active industrialists to idle financiers in its most caricatured version—but you reject this and say that finance is an integral part of the sustaining of accumulation. Why then did you call your book profiting without producing?

DB:

CL: I think it was quite accurate for what I wanted to say. Finance as a set of activities is not parasitical on the main body of capitalist production and trade. A lot of people get very confused about that. They think all finance is somehow parasitical. That’s not the case. Finance is integral to advanced capitalism and in fact capitalism became advanced by moving into production and beginning to organise production in a capitalistic way—by taking a view about the future and employing labour and using labour capitalistically to produce goods and sell them in the future—but that rested on, and its expansion presupposed the co-option of financial techniques and financial methods. Capitalistic production cannot be done systematically and across

Costas Lapavitsas and Dave Beech

society without co-opting financial techniques, financial methods and financial practices. Obviously, you have to estimate what’s going to happen ahead, you have to take steps to predict it, to position yourself accordingly to make a profit, and that means finance: that means borrowing, lending, obtaining goods without payment, selling goods without receiving payment immediately—in short, finance. Finance is an integral part of advanced capitalism. There is no advanced capitalism without finance. Finance services capitalism. And that’s what Karl Marx wrote about. The interesting thing about mature capitalism in the twentieth century, and even more so in the twenty-first, is not so much this, but something else. Capitalism co-opts and integrates financial methods, brings them within its productive methods and makes them subordinate to its productive needs, but finance predates industrial capitalism and maintains its autonomy and relative independence. It is co-opted by industrial capitalism and services it, but it never loses its autonomy and independence, something which we’ve seen manifest itself repeatedly in the twentieth century. Finance is a very ancient form of capitalism. It can make money profits from anything that moves (it doesn’t need to be attached to capitalist production)—it can make money profits from any monetary circuit and it retains that ability. Therefore, what we have today in what I think is accurately described as financialised capitalism, is the reassertion of that aspect of modern finance; its ability to make profits from non-productive activities, out of any money stock and out of any money flow, and this is exactly what I wanted to capture by talking about profiting without producing. The re-emergence and expansion and development of forms of capitalist profit-making, which are very widespread and that involve households, other social practices, without production. I think it is a very important part of contemporary capitalism. DB:

Finance predates capitalism…

CL:

Finance predates industrial capitalism.

… but then finance capital or finance capitalism—I’m thinking about Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin—is a later stage of capitalism than that analysed by Marx, but now we talk about financialisation as a new phase, maybe a post-1990s phase of contemporary capitalism. So even though finance has been consistently present throughout that long historical passage of time, something has changed fairly recently. Could you say something about that change? DB:

CL: The classic picture of advanced industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century, the picture that Karl Marx writes about in the context of Britain or some other small parts of Europe (this is where this model of capitalism comes from), is of the dominance of industrial capital that co-opts and subordinates financial capital. For example, banking is subordinated to industry, and that’s the standard way of approaching it. In the latenineteenth century and early-twentieth century, however, there was the reassertion of the autonomy of the financial components, the emergence of financial capitalists as a separate and powerful part of social formation, and their ability to turn the tables, to dictate terms to industrial capitalism. This is exactly what finance capital meant for Hilferding and for Lenin. They meant that banks emerged as monopoly outfits; industrial capitalists had become large monopoly outfits themselves; and these two types of monopoly became melded together, in which bankers had the upper hand. This was the new form of capitalism that emerged with bankers at the helm. This was the classic Marxist analysis of capitalism and Imperialism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. With World War II, this analysis became less relevant. What we saw, once the destruction had finished, was a different kind of capitalism emerging, dominated by the United States, in which these phenomena that I just summed up were not very prominent. However, from the late-1970s, 1980s and 1990s, what we’ve had is a gradual re-emergence of a situation in mature capitalism which is very reminiscent, but

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with differences from what Hilferding and Lenin wrote about. That’s financialisation. What we saw was the reassertion of the autonomous aspect of finance, the growth of finance, but this time it is not like Hilferding said, and it’s not like Lenin said, where you get industrial and finance capital amalgamating with banks having the upper hand. That’s not what’s happening today. What we get is financialisation. Of course we get powerful banks, but they are actually quite distant from industrial capital. What we get is industrial capital itself acquiring financial activities, financialising and becoming bank-like. What we also have is financial profit-making penetrating areas of social life, such as the household, the individual, the worker and in everyday material life. This is what we see in the mature capitalist countries. It is this complex set of events that I understand as financialisation. DB: Some contemporary theorists are looking at the same situation and proclaiming that contemporary capitalism is characterised more by debt and rent than it is by profit, and therefore they are concluding that Marxism is now unable to grasp the changed economic social condition. How would you characterise the current relationship between profit, rent, debt and the exploitation of labour?

Things have changed, but on the contrary, Marxism is an absolutely vital instrument. If your starting point is not Marxism then you will end up with all manner of confusions, but equally, if you expect to see exactly the same forms that Karl Marx talked about, you will again end up with confusion. My understanding is this: profits as a new fresh flow of value remain very much in production in the classical way that Marx talked about and the classical political economists before him, which is where he got the fundamentals of his analytical framework. Labour is the source of value. Labour is the source of profit as a fresh flow of value per period. That must be understood to be so in the developed countries, but also in the new countries that are joining advanced capitalism (China, India CL:

and so on) where the exploitation of labour is manifest in the classical Marxist way. But, of course, as you find in Karl Marx, the fresh flow of value, through the exploitation of labour, gets subdivided as it gets distributed across the capitalist class, so you get some becoming rent, some becoming interest and so on, and that is prevalent in developed countries but also developing countries. But what you also get, what is also interesting and different— and Marx hints at it—is the possibility of profit, not as a fresh flow of value but out of value transfers, out of essentially a zero sum game between different parts of society where the money stocks and the money flows of one group of society become the source of profit for another social group. Finance is in a pivotal position. Finance has long known how to make a profit out of precisely these transactions and it has found a natural terrain in contemporary capitalism. And what you get is what I have called financial expropriation, whereby the everyday life of large groups in society, including the working class, becomes a field of secondary exploitation for finance, and this can be substantial. Look at what the banks have been doing. This has to be recognised because it has implications for how the working classes live, for their understanding of the world, for their organisation and ability to fight back. This is a very important part of modern capitalism. If we don’t recognise it then it will be that much more difficult to oppose it politically and organisationally. DB: The current condition is variously named neoliberalism, post-Fordism, post-industrialism, globalisation, neo-imperialism. You prefer the term financialisation. Why is that?

Neoliberalism is a term that has now become established and it has a certain meaning with which I concur: it describes ideology and policy. It describes a shift away from the ideology and practices of the immediate post-war years to which I briefly referred previously, with controls and regulations and so on, to a state of ideology and policy that stresses the market and deregulation. This is characCL:

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teristic of contemporary capitalism. Neoliberal ideas are very powerful in international institutions, the mechanisms of state, the universities and what have you. That’s fine, but neoliberalism does not describe and doesn’t capture the social formation and transformation. It’s a confusion to think of neoliberal capitalism as somehow describing the fundamental transformation of capitalism. This is what happens at the level of ideology and practice. If we’re going to capture the transformation of capitalism itself, neoliberalism doesn’t do it. It is a mistake to think that it does. Similarly with globalisation. What does globalisation mean? It can mean the spread of capitalism globally, but it doesn’t tell you much about the underlying practices of capitalism. That is why I find the term financialisation more promising (although, obviously, we need to discuss it and expand it), because it tells you something about the way in which the basic agents of capitalist economies interact with one another. DB: What would you say to Nicos Poulantzas’s argument that fascism was historically connected to ‘the hegemony of a new class fraction within the power bloc: that of finance capital’?1 Is financialisation similarly connected to contemporary forms of right-wing populism and the so-called alt-right? Is there a similar relationship today to that which Poulantzas wrote about in the twentieth century?

There might be. That’s the lesson of the last few years. It is not something that was obvious in financialisation in the early 2000s, but in the early 2010s it became clearer and clearer. I don’t think we’re going to get a repetition of what we had in the interwar years. If we get fascism, it will be a twentyfirst-century fascism. Nonetheless, the question you’re asking me is to the point because it tries to look at the analogue. What we do see, economically, is that in the mature countries—in the United States and in Europe—there is a sustained inability of the new form of capitalism to create the conditions to raise incomes and high and secure employment. This is what financialised capitalism has meant.

CL:

1. Poulantzas, Nicos 1974, Fascism and Dictatorship, translated by Judith White, London: Verso, p. 72

And we see this kind of financialised capitalism also generating rising inequality. These are conditions of ingrained social instability. What we’ve also seen in the last decade or so (especially since the great crisis of 2007-2009), has been an inability of this kind of system to provide a secure or relatively secure environment for small and medium businesses, for the self-employed, for that kind of middling layer, which are close to the working class but not quite of it. Incredible pressure is applied to these economic layers, in Europe first of all, but also in the United States. So, these conditions—what some economists have called stagnation or permanent stagnation— are conditions that foster the social environment of fascism, or the new forms of fascism. What we’ve seen politically are developments that match that. We’ve seen the discrediting of parliamentary democracy (which has proceeded at a rate of knots in the eyes of the electorate in Europe and elsewhere), which is reminiscent of the 1930s, where politicians are perceived to be liars, dishonest, and the political system is perceived as not expressing the interests of working people and being impervious to their demands. This was a characteristic feature of the 1930s as well. That has gone hand in hand with the emergence of forms of political organisation and parties on the extreme right, which are openly against parliamentarianism, in the medium term, and which allow for the anger of the middle classes and the working classes to be expressed in certain aggressive and violent terms. Those political conditions are conducive to the emergence of political fascism. The last element here, which makes it a deadly mix, is the defeat of the left. Historically, fascism has emerged when the left was defeated and much of what fascism did to make itself an established political force was to attack the left, to defeat the left in the streets and dominate the streets using violence and then incorporate the language and the image of violence to dominate politics. This time it has not had to do that because the left, in a sense, is decamped. It has emptied the political space. It has done so because much of the left across the world doesn’t really believe in its own ideas. It

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doesn’t really believe it can change the world. It might say so, but it doesn’t really believe it. And that becomes very clear. People sense that. People see that. And much of the left, despite its criticisms of neoliberalism, actually when it comes to challenging the market head-on, and saying that ‘if the market doesn’t have that, so much the worse for the market’, (which is what the fascists are saying), the left says, ‘if the market doesn’t accept that, we’d better find another way’. And that’s the telling difference. Until and unless the left say again ‘if the market doesn’t like it, then we will sell the market out politically’, will it be able to command a persuasive challenge to the rising fascistisation of society. So, yes, the runes are not good right now, I’m sorry to say, and it’s about time we get our act together. DB: There’s an argument that financialisation has transformed our everyday lives, which you’ve already referred to, in a way that’s very different to how lives were transformed by industrial capitalism through Taylorism and so forth, in which the factory system came to inhabit our houses, our bodies and our subjectivities. Mortgages, pensions, credit cards, debt hook us into a system of finance. Do you think financialisation also functions as a political technique of social control?

There is no question at all that this is what happens. And it isn’t just political; it’s also ideological and social in the broadest sense. There is a myriad of ways in which the penetration of the private realm by finance ties us into the practices and mechanisms of financialised capitalism and affects the way we operate at work. Workers who are heavily indebted, workers who carry a lot of credit card debts, and so on, operate very differently in the workplace. Workers who don’t have pension rights behave very differently at work. People who are exposed to housing debts and housing price volatility behave very differently in everyday life. There are ways in which this has happened. Those at the top of the political tree understand this and use it consciously. It is about time we understood it too. CL:

We need to use appropriate language and appropriate messages, which must have to do with de-financialisation. We must de-financialise society. Is there a more direct relationship as well? What is the relationship between financialisation and precarity?

DB:

Evidence that I’ve seen from work done in developing countries would indicate so, more so than perhaps in developed capitalist countries, although there is room for more empirical work on this. It appears that in some middle-income countries that have emerged in the capitalist realm in the last couple of decades, places like Turkey or places like Mexico or South Africa, precarity of the environment goes hand in hand with financialisation of employment. The people who have the most precarious jobs are often most heavily exposed to credit card debt and other forms of debt to make ends meet, or live a month or two months in advance of receiving some payments. So there appears to be a connection, but we need a lot more work before we can speak with authority on this and we know what the implications are. CL:

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Abstract Exemplified by four of his collaborative artistic-political projects, here Jonas Staal claims that, despite the fact that we tend to understand it as a catastrophic logic underlying systemic economic crisisâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a maddening and criminal system of abuse and exploitation, a sadistic game played by few upon the lives of the manyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; speculation simultaneously might be part of the answer to this condition. Speculation is also part of what we can term the radical imaginary of both politics and art.

The Speculative Art of Assemblism

Jonas Staal Jonas Staal (1981) is artist and founder of the artistic and political organisation New World Summit (2012-ongoing) and the campaign New Unions (2016ongoing). Staal’s work includes interventions in public space, exhibitions, theatre plays, publications and lectures, focusing on the relationship between art, democracy and propaganda. Recent solo exhibitions include Art of the Stateless State (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 2015), New World Academy (Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2015) and After Europe (State of Concept, Athens, 2016). His projects have been exhibited widely including at the 7th Berlin Biennial (2012), the 31st Bienal de São Paulo (2014) and the Oslo Architecture Triennial (2016).

Recent books by Staal include Nosso Lar, Brasília (2014) and Stateless Democracy (2015), and he is a regular contributor to e-flux Journal. Currently, Staal is finalising a commission for the design and construction of a new public parliament assigned by the autonomous Rojava government (northern Syria), part of his long-term PhD research Propaganda Art in the 21st Century at the PhDArts programme of the University of Leiden.

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understand speculation as a catastrophic logic underlying systemic economic crisis: a maddening and criminal system of abuse and exploitation, a sadistic game played by the few impacting upon the lives of the many. Speculation as such has turned into a structural threat to our common systems of life support: we bail out the speculators while running several jobs, being evicted as a result of the subprime mortgage schemes, and trying to maintain some sense of solidarity with those who have even less than ourselves. oday, we tend to

But speculation simultaneously might be part of the answer to this very crisis; speculation as part of what we can term the radical imaginary of both politics and art. The first one and a half decades of the twenty-first century have not only marked the age of the War on Terror and the rise of a new authoritarian world order, but also a great variety of social movements throughout the world, all too often as a response from the class-in-the-making that we call the “precariat”. Assembled in squares throughout the world, those whose life supports have been threatened or simply destroyed assemble, and from this “assemblism” alternative speculative realities emerge: precarious infrastructures ranging from public parliaments of self-government, soup kitchens and food distribution centres, alternative media stations and public libraries, fuelled by alternative

experiments and growing conviction for the need for trans-democratic practices. These sites of assembly are not an answer to the crisis of speculation, but signs of the severe damage done by political and economic elites. A damage that forces us to articulate precarious alternative institutional models of survival; damage that forces us to speculate on—and practice—radical and necessary alternatives to these regimes of exploitation. Our collective speculation-in-practice opens a space for the popular imaginary: what if these speculative spaces actually form our only realistic alternatives? The works that I have developed over the past years, in collaboration with progressive political parties, stateless and autonomist political organisations, take these practices of assemblism as their departure point: the creation of spaces in which we perform the popular to compose our understanding of being a people differently. Spaces that emerge from deep and tangible crises, which similarly evoke radical speculative imaginaries towards their alternatives. That is how our “parallel parliaments”, our “stateless embassies” and our “trans-democratic unions” emerged, spaces in which we speculate in order to enact the possibility of new future forms of emancipatory governance: from speculation to emancipation.

Jonas Staal

Title: Beyond Allegories Year: 2014, Artists: Carolien Gehrels, Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal, Photos: Studio Jonas Staal

An assemblism realised in collaboration with the Amsterdam Labour councillor for art and culture Carolien Gehrels and artist Hans van Houwelingen in the municipal parliament of Amsterdam. For eight hours, progressive artists and politicians presented resolutions on the role of art in political governance,

mobilisation and action. The result of a speculative alternative composition of the parliament, including politicians, artists, journalists, students, activists, refugees, unions and transparency platforms.

Carolien Gehrels, Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal introduce Beyond Allegories.

Artist Ahmet Ögüt (Silent University) and activist Yoonis Osman Nuur (refugee collective We Are Here) present their resolution “Political Representation Beyond Citizenship”.

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Title: Congress of Utopia Year: 2016, Artists: Lara Staal and Studio Jonas Staal, Photo: Ernie Buts An assemblism realised in collaboration with curator Lara Staal in Frascati Theater Amsterdam on the occasion of the quincentenary of Thomas More’s Utopia. The installation is a 1:1 reconstruction of a fragment of Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon: a speculative future city model across

the planet, constructed on pillars, in which technology becomes socialised and traditional labour is abandoned. Rather than reflecting upon utopia, the space proposed to occupy Constant’s utopia as a space not of speculative imagination, but of speculative practice. Rotterdam-based collectives Freehouse and Leeszaal debate during the Congress of Utopia.

Artist Patricia Kaersenhout (left) performs her work Stitches of Power, Stitches of Sorrow with audience members of the Congress of Utopia.

Jonas Staal

Title: New World Embassy: Rojava Year: 2016, Artists: Democratic Self-Administration and Studio Jonas Staal, Photo: István Virág and Ernie Buts An assemblism realised in Oslo City Hall in collaboration with the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish-led government in northern Syria. Having rejected the model of the nation-state, the Rojavans introduced a model of “stateless democracy” as theorised by Kurdish revolutionary Abdullah Öcalan. This model, based on self-governance, gender

equality and communal economy, embodies what for decades has been a speculative reality of libertarian socialism, but is enacted “without approval”, in the words of Dilar Dirik, as the only possible realistic option in the context of the Kurdish revolutionary movement. The creation of a “stateless embassy” extends the practice of Rojavan assemblism into the domain of trans-democracy. New World Embassy: Rojava in Oslo City Hall.

Rojava ambassador Sînam Mohammed debates with fellow panellists in the New World Embassy: Rojava.

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Title: New Unions—Berlin Year: 2017, Artists: Studio Jonas Staal, Photo: Dorothea Tuch An assemblism realised in collaboration with a diversity of emancipatory political parties, platforms and movements that have emerged as radical counterparts to the current crisis of the European Union. A map picturing an alternative European constellation of trans-democratic organisations forms a speculative

New Unions assembly installation in HAU Theater, Berlin.

ideological mapping, based on which a variety of alternative scenarios for new future unions are proposed: a Feminist Union, a Stateless Union, a Communalist Union. The speculative space of the HAU Theater in Berlin turns into the stage of a series of “what-ifs” to fight the imaginary crisis of the present-day Union.

Jonas Staal

Mireia VehĂ and Quim Arrufat (Popular Unity Candidacy, Catalunya) present their scenario for a Communalist Union during the New Unions assembly, Berlin.

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Abstract Krzysztof Wodiczko’s project “The Investigators” is an interactive, public video projection installation which took place originally in Weimar over two days between the 26 and 28 August 2016. Projecting live images and voices of refugees onto the statues of Schiller and Goethe before an assembled public raised on platforms to counteract the plinths that raise the statues from the street, Wodiczko animates the monument for the living. Not only giving new meaning to the monument by dredging up the historical episode in which Goethe sheltered Schiller as a refugee, this work proposes a new model that considers for monuments as unfinished. Talking back to the monument, occupying its space and animating it in real time, is not just a technical feat but a political achievement.

The Investigators

Krzysztof Wodiczko Krzysztof Wodiczko is an artist, theorist, and educator; Professor in Residence of Art, Design, and the Public Domain at the Harvard Graduate School of Design; and a former director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. He is renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has realised more than eighty such public projections in Australia, Austria, Canada, the UK, Germany, Holland, Northern Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. Since the late 1980s, his projections have involved the active participation of marginalised and estranged city residents. Simultaneously, he has been designing and implementing a series of nomadic instruments and

vehicles with homeless, immigrant and war veteran operators for their survival and communication. Since 1985, he has held many retrospective exhibitions at international institutions, more recently at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea (2017). Among many awards, Wodiczko received the Hiroshima Prize in 1998 for his contribution as an artist to world peace. The Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, France, is a permanent public art project he developed in partnership with architect Julian Bonder which opened to the public in 2011. His major publications include Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews (MIT Press, 2003) and a comprehensive monograph Krzysztof Wodiczko (Black Dog, 2011).

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The following is an edited transcript of Wodiczko’s own words.

he statue represents the past that cannot be changed. We are all very much overwhelmed by the presence of monumental history. So, we need to learn how to enjoy our opportunity to make change, despite the fact that public space is barricaded by monuments. We must keep in mind that memorials are not only statues, but also the names of streets or plazas, subtitles written on buildings (quotations and so forth). Cities are themselves monuments. Why are European cities packed with war memorials and why do the names of various places, streets and plazas commemorate wars and war heroes, victories or even defeats? The city is one big memorial to war. All of our cities are constantly preparing us for another war. All the monuments that are war memorials are actually ideological war machines. Our textbooks, pedagogy, tourism, political speeches and events, mobilise these monuments to keep us ready for another war. Of course, if that’s the case, then there is another project for monuments, especially warrelated monuments: how to make use of them in a way that will undo their war-making operation without destroying them? Destroying them will do nothing, because we are all war memorials inside of ourselves.

My first projection took place in Krakow on the lonely, very tall tower of the City Hall, a fourteenthcentury structure with some additions from the seventeenth and the nineteenth century. People in Krakow were meeting next to the tower of the City Hall, because it is a very prominent, vertical, symbolic landmark. People identified with this tower. I asked a group of people to animate the tower, to become the tower, to inhabit it or wear it. The public already were in this tower, so the project asked them to accept an uninvited roommate, so

to speak, or to cohabit this tower symbolically and meet this other person. As such, the tower inside us was also inhabited by another person. This way, the project existed simultaneously on a huge scale and also on the scale of the individual, on the person scale. All my projections address the architecturalisation of our bodies and the embodification of architecture. The large scale of those people projected onto monuments and buildings was not simply to make them larger, to make them gigantic and monumental—the monumentalisation of those invisible and marginalised, oppressed people. No, for me, it is more important to make ourselves smaller. I mean, to feel it in our neck when you look up. In our body there is a memory of listening to parents, teachers, also the figures of authority, of course, who are always high up on balconies and podiums or whatever. Already this suggests that we can learn something from those people as an act of going back into a pedagogical position. In my works, on the other hand, there is a meeting through those monumental structures. I observed in a huge crowd during its first projection in Krakow (when mostly women who were tortured by their husbands were speaking, talking about domestic violence at night—it is a nightmare so to speak), the woman standing next to me without knowing that I was behind this project, said in Polish—it is difficult to translate because it is a play on words – she asked how it was possible that people don’t believe people but they believe the tower. In Polish it is much better because ‘believe’ and ‘tower’ is the same word. Why? Because most of the miracles take place in towers. That was my answer. But there are too many answers, of course, because people are those towers already. In the projections, those people were telling the truth through those towers. Something was maybe easier for them to say through the theatrical process of recording and rerecording in the studio and animating those towers.

Krzysztof Wodiczko

People speaking through the tower were attempting to speak many times in the film studio we had set up to record them. They were on a special pedestal in the studio, so the camera could film them from the same angle. They were in the process of becoming a speaking tower. They went through stages of smoking, listening, tearsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;when they could not say anything anymoreâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;starting to speak and then stopping, getting down, going back, calming down, speaking to others who also were wishing to speak. They went through a theatrical process that takes a long time, such as vocal preparations. They were learning how to speak with emotional charge about things for which there are normally no words. In this way, the mediating aspect of the body of architecture is very important: recording and learning how to speak and listening without too much fear, to stay there despite the rain and cold and listen to this more than once, maybe three times. The statue is animated and people are there. Some of them are passing by without noticing; others are watching it, standing for a long time, they see others not standing but passing by, but they take another perspective about themselves in relation to others, they communicate, discuss things with others (as Brecht would like) who come from a very different social stratum. So, in a way, this already is a pretty good use of those monuments. Those who are still in charge of parks and monuments, for example in New York city, they have to give permission for these projections. Before I acquired permission they were very reluctant, because those monuments are protected by monument associations. In London, for example, one of the most powerful monuments is actually private property: the Prince Albert Memorial opposite the Royal College of Art. So, the park department, the association of monuments, the police, park rangers, the city, they all seem to be nervous about animating or bringing those monuments to life, because they are afraid that there will be some scandal.

A memorial statue of a hero or civil leader invites the public to occupy a certain kind of space, the space of the civic public, a space set aside for good citizens. Memorials are tools that members of the public use to think of themselves as part of a state or a nation, or a society or a civilisation. My work offers a different kind of invitation. In a sense, I ask the participants who animate the statue to join the hero, to occupy the space of the hero, to become the thing that other people orient themselves around socially. It might be possible to say that the projections restructure our relationship to public memorialisation. I am interested in the significance of participating in memorialisation rather than simply witnessing it. I hope that is true. If this is true, then I would be happier with what I do. At the same time, there is one more step I managed to achieve in this direction in Weimar. This animation of statues involved a couple of historic figures in one moment. Goethe and Schiller together in front of the theatre building. In Weimar the theatre was placed where the Weimar Republic was formed, so it is a very important witness to the Weimar Republic, fascism, to events in the 1960s. So now Schiller and Goethe have an opportunity to be useful for a communication between refugees from Syria and Afghanistan and some other countries, and the residents of Weimar. The refugees were the ones who became Schillers and Goethes! In the theatre we created a special monument animation studio. Refugees could become Schiller and Goethe in real time, because of a very good team from various departments of the Bauhaus University. Alongside the use of prerecorded material, they created a mapping team that was so skilful that when refugees took the right position, more or less simulating the poses of Schiller and Goethe, parts of their bodies were immediately taken and organised so that it perfectly fitted Goethe and Schiller within maybe one or two minutes. In this way the rotation of more and more people could speak to the public as if they were Schiller and Goethe. But this was not everything.

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A special podium was built for the members of the public to stand up and raise themselves to the height of Schiller and Goethe, and speak back to the refugees or with them via the sculpture, because there were additional cameras, so the refugees could see interlocutors from the public on the screens. They could also see themselves, the way they looked like Goethe and Schiller. They had feedback. They could also start a conversation or ask people to move around so that they could see them better, and so on. There was not that much in-depth conversation, but it was a strangely powerful meeting moment between refugees who became new historic monuments and new philosophers and artists, and these residents who could actually establish contact with this monument. It was almost on a one-to-one basis. Why Schiller and Goethe? Schiller was a refugee at that time and in order to get to Weimar he had to cross two or three checkpoints. At that time there were various kingdoms and principalities in Germany, and he was a deserter from the army. He was a doctor in the army. He didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to be a doctor, so he escaped. He was eventually protected by Goethe. So, some of those Goethes were not refugees, but those who help refugees. Some people who spoke to the monument from the podium went inside the theatre and became, also, Goethes. This was the beginning of this type of use of the monuments of the past to see the future in a more complex way. Of course, those refugees didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really give a glorious picture of the future. They were seeing the danger. They arrived, fleeing the war; they were welcomed as refugees. At the same time, their arrival has created the potential for fear and danger of a civil war in the host country. It is hard to help monuments be useful for the living. We have to make the past useful for the future. We have to live with the past without being imprisoned by it. From the psychoanalytical point of view, or maybe the psychotherapeutic point of view, a monument, a statue especially, is similar to

our life in the past. The past cannot be changed. We cannot change those statues unless we do something radical to the culture. Or we cannot change the past we have in ourselves. But we can live with the past in a livelier, worth-living way. Maybe a creative and transformative way? In that sense, a person who is animating the statue in my projections must animate him- or herself first. Also, in an attempt to animate the statue, it helps to have an image for that process. One is integrating it, interiorising it, back. People are listening to me! The whole city is actually listening to me! The statue is part of a larger symbolic environment, which stands for the past.

Krzysztof Wodiczko

Images courtesy Krzysztof Wodiczko Studio.

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Krzysztof Wodiczko

Images courtesy Krzysztof Wodiczko Studio.

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Abstract One of the challenges of contemporary music composition is to speculate upon “possible worlds” as a counterpoint to our contemporary understanding of place, where the lyrical impulse in music is sensitive to relations between human impact and presence in the more-than-human world. Such sensitivity arises from a compositional superfluity where subjectivity is “dislocated presence” for new modes of perception to appear that resist representation, conceptualisation, enframing, quantification and instrumentalisation. Music composition today should ask listeners to listen beyond anthropocentric terms, including the ways in which the resistance of the world—its conflicting and dynamic materiality—exceeds both conceptual thought and technological control. This “speculative turn” in music composition is indeed not to excise music’s resemblance to language, and by extension music’s capacity for expression, but to decentre music’s humanised expression from its privileged position for the possibility of a music independent of from language, thought and intentions, where music’s materiality can exceed human agency. Such music would suggest a critical materialist sound—a sound world outside of consciousness rather than a sound world fully endowed with consciousness, thus placing the listener in a space where they are required to rethink their personhood within a larger domain of life.

What is Speculative Music Composition?

Ming Tsao Ming Tsao is Professor of Composition at Gothenburg University, and holds a PhD in Music Composition from the University of California, San Diego, an MA in Mathematics from the San Francisco State University, an MA in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, and a BM in Music Composition from the Berklee College of Music. Further studies have included logic and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also currently Visiting Professor of Composition at the Höschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hannover. Performance projects include the opera Die Geisterinsel for the Staatsoper Stuttgart in 2011, and his full realisation of Stockhausen’s Plus Minus successfully premiered in the Wittener Tage Festival 2013. His

compositions have been performed by ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet, ensemble recherche, ELISION Ensemble, Ensemble SurPlus and Ensemble Ascolta, in venues such as the Donaueschingen Musiktage Festival, Wien Modern, Wittener Tage Festival, Maerz Musik, and the Darmstadt New Music Courses. He is currently working on a new opera, titled Das Westzimmer, to be premiered in 2020, which speculates on the historical connections between fin-de-siècle Vienna and late-Tang-Dynasty China. Music by Ming Tsao can be found on the labels Kairos Music and Mode Records. Books by Ming Tsao include Abstract Musical Intervals: Group Theory for Composition and Analysis (2000). His music is published by Edition Peters.

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a speculative music is first to draw associations with the medieval category of a “musica speculativa”, that esoteric part of music theory that lies beyond the practical and theoretical aspects of musical composition to address existential questions of “why?”1 It was during this period when music was considered part of the quadrivium that included, besides music, the arts of number or proportion, geometry and cosmology.2 Mathematics was indeed always considered an essential aspect of a “musica speculativa” that bound the composition of music with a natural philosophy, which included a network of identities, relationships and correspondences so that what was abstract to the senses was given concrete form.3 The topics treated in a speculative music included “the harmonies of the angelic orders, the zodiac, and planetary spheres, the elements, the soul, and the human body; the hidden correspondences of nature; the secrets of number; the power of sound; and the moral responsibilities of a music that wields this power.”4 In other words, ideas inherent to a speculative music were considered metonymic: not thought as “evocative metaphors, sufficient to themselves, but as points of entry to a sophisticated network of meanings, which is called into play whenever its components are mentioned.”5 It is the latter concerns, “the hidden correspondences of nature; the secrets of number; the power of sound; and the moral responsibilities of a music that wields this power”, that merit a renewed consideration of what speculation in music composition means today.6 o compose

Such obscure and mystical ideas continued into the period of Johann Sebastian Bach, when the high art of musical counterpoint—the essence of composition in that cultural period— was viewed in relation to the effect of alchemical transformations and magical relations, where “the activity of associations, contiguities, carryings-over coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy.”7 The music was often inscribed graphically, as ciphers to be reflected upon by initiates (for the “magic” to be “squeezed out”) as many of the so-called “puzzle canons” demonstrated.8

Example 1. Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Hudemann” puzzle canon (1728) for four voices, where one must solve the correct time interval for the entrance of each voice.

This “sophisticated network of meanings” that is evident throughout Bach’s music is what the composer Helmut Lachenmann refers to as “aura”,9 i.e., “the history of the material in wider extramusical contexts, in all spheres of our social and cultural reality, of our conscious and subconscious awareness, our archetypal memory and magical predeterminations, both collective and individual.”10 Such aura is important for a speculative music in that it allows for the entire cultural world of the composing subject to be “registered in the nuances and hints of its detail—a reflection of the intense confinement in which that world is bound, and the accordingly magnified reverberations of the tiniest shift or tremor.”11 Such tremors are what composer Brian Ferneyhough describes in the music of the second Viennese School as “mnemonic triggers” that serve to “evoke much larger primal contexts” in the form of “a magic lantern show” that actively mobilises all sorts of “dimly realized, but nevertheless communal subconscious perceptions” in the imagination of the listener.12 Aura is essential to a composer’s materials and cannot be extirpated through a reduction to sound—in Pierre Schaeffer’s sense of an acousmatic listening where a sound’s sources, including its broader cultural and historical associations, are “bracketed out”.13 Indeed, music’s aura, as Lachenmann reminds us, is always dialectically mediated through the acoustic-physical

Ming Tsao

aspects of sound (the inherent resistances of the sound material as it is produced on instruments by performers), sound’s structuring (the local resistances imposed by the composer onto the materials) and tonality.14 Lachenmann expands upon the tonal aspect of material by including the rhetorical aspects of music—tension and relaxation, gesture, consonance and dissonance—or, what he would later call music’s “textual” dimension.15 “Nothing in music stands alone. Everything becomes what it is in memory and in expectation through its physical contiguity with its neighbor and its mental connection with what is distant from it.”16 No music is devoid of expressive elements and it is the “subject’s drive to expression” that animates music, whose content is “the profusion of things which obey the rules of musical grammar and syntax.”17 Speculative music composition cannot do away with music’s resemblance to language, since music’s most speculative reach happens through a system of interconnections whose tendencies “culminate and synergize, percolating by the reticular connections and antagonisms across the channels of prescribed signification so as to challenge and displace the whole fabric of interpretation but not at all to extirpate it.”18 Indeed, poet Jeremy Halvard Prynne’s comments could be extended to musical development where “the latent presence of these system links and connections is stored textually within a knowledge that belongs with the underlying base forms, not declared directly in the surface features but implicit in the motivated sound-structures and time-logic.”19 These underlying base forms in music are what Lachenmann refers to as “sound types” (Klangtypen), denoting a sound structure’s inner coherence and the time it takes for it to be appreciated by a listener (a sound-structure’s “timelogic” or Eigenzeit).20 The most important of these sound types is the Strukturklang (structure sound) where a strong material identity (with unpredictably rich, continually varying textural components and noise) is subjected to a grammatical syntax,

1. Godwin, Joscelyn. “Speculative Music: The Numbers Behind the Notes”. In A Compendium of Contemporary Musical Thought. London and New York, NY: Routledge. 1992. Vol. 1. p. 256. 2. Martineau, John (ed.). Quadrivium: The Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, Music & Cosmology. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. 2010. 3. Godwin, Joscelyn. Music and the Occult: French Musical Philosophies 1750-1950. New York, NY: University of Rochester Press. 1995. p. 4. 4. Ibid. 5. Reeve, Neil H. and Kerridge, Richard. Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 1995. p. 182. 6. Godwin, op. cit., p. 4. 7. Mellors, Anthony. Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2005. p. 129. 8. Yearsley, David. Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. p. 58. 9. Lachenmann, Helmut. “On Structuralism”. Contemporary Music Review. Vol. 12, Part 1. 1995. p. 98. 10. Lachenmann, Helmut. “Philosophy of Composition Is There Such a Thing?” In Identity and Difference: Essays on Music, Language and Time, Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute. Wieland Hoban (trans.). Leuven: University of Leuven Press. 2004. p. 58. 11. A quality that Prynne notes with respect to Chinese poetry, in Reeve and Kerridge, op. cit., p. 182. 12. Ferneyhough, Brian. “Schönberg’s String Trio”. Paper read at the Foundation Royaumont, France. 1995. Unpublished manuscript. p. 2.

13. Schaeffer, Pierre. “Acousmatics”. In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner (eds.). New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. 2004. p. 77. 14. Lachenmann, Helmut. “Bedingungen des Materials”. In Musik als existentielle Erfahrung existentielle Erfahrung: Schriften 1966-1995. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel. 1996. p. 35. 15. Heathcote, Abigail. “Sound Structures, Transformations, and Broken Magic: An Interview with Helmut Lachenmann”. In Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives. Max Paddison and Irène Deliège (eds.). Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited. 2010. p. 334. 16. Adorno, Theodor. “Music and Language: A Fragment”. In Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music. Rodney Livingstone (trans.). London: Verso. 1998. p. 5. 17. Ibid., p. 6. 18. Prynne, Jeremy Halvard. “A Letter to Steve McCaffery”. The Gig. No. 7. November 2000. p. 44. 19. Prynne, Jeremy Halvard. “Mental Ears and Poetic Work”. Chicago Review. Vol. 55. No. 1. 2010. p. 139. 20. Lachenmann, Helmut. “Klangtypen der Neuen Musik”. In Musik als existentielle Erfahrung existentielle Erfahrung: Schriften 1966-1995. pp. 1-20.

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often wrestling the material into tonal patterns of cadence, tension and relaxation, antecedent and consequent.21 By Strukturklang, “what is meant is a way of thinking which cannot just be aimed at the creation, stipulation or drawing of attention to musical structures, but focuses on where such structures emerge, take shape and foster awareness of themselves as a result of the direct and indirect confrontation with existing structures in the material derived from all areas of experience and existence, all realities, including those outside the realm of music.”22 The “speculative turn” in music composition today is indeed not to excise music’s resemblance to language, and by extension music’s capacity for expression, but to decentre music’s humanised expression from its privileged position for the possibility of a music independent of language, thought and intentions, where music’s materiality can exceed human agency.23 “Intentions are central to music… there is no music which is wholly devoid of expressive elements,” but music is more than intentionality by its “asserting that concepts are foreign to music.”24 Such music would suggest a critical materialist sound25—a sound world outside of consciousness rather than a sound world fully endowed with consciousness, thus placing the listener in a “space where we are required to rethink our personhood within a larger domain of life.”26 A critical materialist music has connections to Julia Kristeva’s notion that a truly radical form of expression must engage in a dialectic between the pre-symbolic mediums of experience, or semiotic, and symbolic discourses.27 The semiotic, for Kristeva, refers to the materiality of the symbolic, those “innumerable motivated echoes of nonarbitrary confirmation to the sense or idea”28 that can promote an expectance of connections between “sound and sense, where the noise that is a product of materiality becomes potentially significant.”29 A noise-bearing aesthetics of music composition is essential for interferences in the

“unidirectional data flow” where noise is coded back onto the level of sense, akin to Lachenmann’s musique concrète instrumentale. A musique concrète instrumentale brings to bear the conditions under which a sound—or noise—is physically produced, what materials and energies are involved and what resistances are encountered.30 Questions of noise and interference, or “waste” as that which remains resistant to conceptualisation, occupy Prynne, whose poetry dialectically repositions a lyrical subjectivity with respect to the complex materiality of language and serves as a model for my own compositional thinking. Waste signifies excess and “rubbish stands as a rebuke and challenge to instrumental systems… because rubbish is what is left when the operation of the system is complete and nothing should be left.”31 Rubbish, according to Kristeva, suggests that the expelled and used-up parts are in a constant process of dissolution and exchange with the world and thus resists its being enframed for use value by some manipulative power or as mere decoration within a commodifying culture.32 Waste also suggests an ecological concern where there is an “emergence of a new process of negotiation between different narratives and systems of cultural meaning” that collides with the “powerful instrumental discourses of the culture.”33 A critical materialism has as its basis resistance and difficulty. Material resistance comes into play when the object cannot be reduced to a conceptual, linguistic or practical determination of the subject. As Prynne states, “The concept of resistance may provide an alternative criterion of intelligibility; one which does not undermine the presence, actuality and existence of an object or person, but which makes accessible the fact of its existence without impairing its status as a substantial, independent entity.”34 And difficulty is the subjective counterpart to resistance: “I experience difficulty when I encounter resistance.”35 Speculative thinking can only exist when sufficient resistance is encountered and difficulty experienced in order to “meet the continuing demand for palpable texture in human

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affairs,” where this “priority of givenness over purposiveness seems to be a distinguishing feature of the creative imagination alone of the various capacities of man. It is the imagination’s peculiar function to admit, draw sustenance from, and celebrate the ontological priority of this outside world, by creating entities which subsequently become a part of this world, an addition to it.”36 A celebration of the “ontological priority of the outside world”, where a speculative music can place a listener’s position as not within the world but of the world, affirms the human as one part of the “more-than-human” world.37 In current music compositional trends there is little space for a speculative composing, an unfortunate disposition that began in the late 1960s, when the utopian attitude of serialism and experimentalism became reduced to its sonic effects (a Texturklang music that prioritises the ontology of sound over its possible relations). Such a reduction continued in what was later called “spectral music” (particularly in work by Tristan Murail and the orientation at IRCAM),38 whereby any imagination around the speculative potential of music was reduced and enframed by a technological fetishism for sonic manipulation dominated by over-humanised conceptualisation, commodification and control.39 Speculative composing requires resistance that is lost in much of the technological enframing of music that reduces music to mere sound. Speculative composing requires the energy gained from sounds’ material conditions of production as well as the pressures and resistances of sounds’ relations to one another once produced, since the energy of their production can be sustained in a constellation of soundstructures. Many composers today who explore—or perhaps fetishise—“new sounds” on instruments at the expense of sounds’ relation to syntax embrace an “encroaching narcissism of preoccupation” often promoting “unrecognized claims of endorsement from chance occurrence, locked into habits of procedure” and ultimately stifle speculation due to the isolation of a “self-interior.”40 This sound fetishism—or Geräusch Music (noise music)—is one of the negative effects of Lachenmann’s musique concrète instrumentale when divorced from the idea of a Strukturklang (and a dialectical engagement with both sound and structure). Lachenmann’s “textual dimension” requires that a listener be active and ever-engaged with the process of music so as not to elicit a passive listening through static sound textures that often appear in the absence of musical syntax.41 Equally problematic has been the “critical composition”

21. Lachenmann. “Bedingungen des Materials”. p. 17. 22. Lachenmann. “On Structuralism”. p. 100. 23. Bryant, Levi, Srnicek, Nick and Harman, Graham. “Towards a Speculative Philosophy”. In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.). Melbourne: re.press. 2011. p. 5. 24. Adorno. “Music and Language: A Fragment”. p. 1, p. 3 and p. 6. 25. The analogy is to filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub’s “materialist image”. Clark, George and Entwistle, Redmond. “We do everything for this art, but this art isn’t everything: Notes on Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub”. Vertigo Magazine. Vol. 3. Issue 6. Summer 2007. p. 2. For a discussion of “critical materialism”, see Cook, Deborah. Adorno on Nature. Durham: Acumen Publishing Limited. 2011. pp. 7-33. 26. Bristow, Tom. The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2015. p. 6. 27. Reeve and Kerridge, op. cit., p. 118. 28. Pope, Alexander. The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. Vol. V. London: Adamant Media Corporation. 2001. p. 61.

29. Solnick, Sam. Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, biology and technology in contemporary British and Irish poetry. London and New York, NY: Routledge. 2017. p. 165. 30. Heathcote, op. cit., p. 334. 31. Reeve and Kerridge in their discussion of Kristeva, op. cit., p. 10. 32. Ibid., p. 9. 33. Ibid., p. 9, p. 143. 34. Prynne, Jeremy Halvard. “Resistance and Difficulty”. Prospect. No. 5. Winter 1961. p. 27. 35. Ibid., p. 28. 36. Ibid., p. 30. 37. Bristow, op. cit., p. 2. 38. Murail, Tristan. “The Revolution of Complex Sounds”. Joshua Cody (trans.). Contemporary Music Review. Vol. 24. Nos. 2/3. 2005. pp. 121-135. 39. Ferneyhough, Brian. “Shaping Sound”. In Sound. Patricia Kruth and Henry Stobart (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. pp. 169-170. 40. Prynne, “Mental Ears and Poetic Work”, p. 127. 41. Lachenmann, “Klangtypen der Neuen Musik”, p. 14.

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(Kritisches Komponieren)42 of Mathias Spahlinger and Nicolaus A. Huber with an exorcising of any subject position in music through an impersonal production of sounds, where the resulting music has a monolithic object-status and the listener is often rendered passive.43 Such an orientation has developed into today’s conceptual music (die Konzeptmusik),44 which furthers the object-status of music as commodity and offers a full embrace of commercial culture in which concepts and “branding” are paramount for maximal exchange value and managing artistic (and financial) risk, musics that seem “every bit as restrictive in their ideological conformity as to satisfy the expectations of a predefined market.”45 Critical materialism—and the resistance and difficulty that accompanies it—is important for speculation to manifest itself. For Adorno, a speculative thinking is equivalent to a materialist thinking where “somatic contamination is merely not an impurity, but a condition of thinking’s possibility.”46 As with a musique concrète instrumentale, the bodily performative experience is allowed to speak and the body itself is seen as a “conduit for material and cultural forces passing through it.”47 The speculative moment, then, is that “which does not allow its law to be prescribed to it by the given facts”, yet transcends those facts in the closest contact with the objects’ material conditions and “in renunciation of any sacrosanct transcendence”.48 This critical aspect of materialism points to the internal contradictions of the object’s essence that are the forces of its appearance. Such a critical aspect is key in preventing materialism, as Patrice Haynes suggests, from lapsing into a “naïve realism”, where thought rests in sheer givens such as Being, Life, Sexual Difference, Matter, Vitality, which assume “access to a non-dialectical positivity” requiring a “leap out of all history” and to effect a false reconciliation between subject and object.49 Such materialism detaches material realities from “the matrix of social embodiment, thus lending a certain otherworldliness to these material

realities.”50 Indeed, it is the non-identity between thought and the material object that provides a basis for speculative thinking through the resistance materialism provides and subjective difficulty encountered therein. “By maintaining both subject and object in dialectical tension, Adorno is able to preserve the force-field between mind and matter which sustains both social criticism and objects in their sensuous particularity.”51 Speculative listening—the necessary complement to a speculative composing—requires, what Prynne calls “mental ears”. To paraphrase Prynne’s notion into the realm of music composition, “mental ears” permit reconstruction of sounds—or what Ferneyhough would call “vocables”,52 as sounds with a humanised agency—across preceding historical eras, so that the alert listener can “tune in” to earlier schedules of musical composition: “the percipient self re-locates so as to occupy a prior station already inflected by knowledge of successor historical conditions. Mental ears are thus evolutionary by retroflex recognizance, from the outcomes of experiment back to the experimental matrix itself and its shifting points of origin.”53 Prynne’s focus upon a phonological template for poetic language has great bearing on music composition, because “the sounds that poems make are not here treated as acoustic sonorities, but as semiabstract representations of relations and orderings between and across sounds.”54 Indeed, mental ears are “empowered by linkages of memory and retrospect, as reconstruction of what originally faced towards the undeclared future. Mental ears will hear in older sounds the then new sounds of making and marking a track into forward space: a future in the past.”55 Philosopher David Lewis saw speculation as a fundamental problem in philosophy—how to account for such modal statements as “possibly the case”?—and developed a modal realism for “possible worlds” to account for the infinite number of possibilities that are always present to us and run

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parallel to the “actual” world—of “how things are”—where our paths are often shaped by environmental, societal and economic pressures.56 Using Lewis’s proposal of a “transworld identity”,57 a speculative identity across possible worlds, I suggest that mental ears can re-hear earlier works and speculate on how a music’s identity and “authenticity” could have been otherwise, or, as Prynne notes, to recover song “across former generations, and the span of many layers and locations of practice, set out a format of provisional continuity.”58 Such speculation can ground the listening experience in this transworld identity through “linkages of memory and retrospect”, where multiple historical times, places and geographies are simultaneously present. The composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann has proposed the term Kugelgestalt der Zeit (spherical form of time) for such a transworld orientation, where an abrupt shift in scales for the listening experience can have the result of presenting the idea of totality as unattainable and implying something much larger of which all subjects and discourses are interpenetrative parts.59 “A symphony’s possibilities must be like the world and embrace everything,” Gustav Mahler once said to Jean Sibelius.60 Indeed, Mahler’s “deviational” orchestration, as a way of musical estrangement, projects an image of “nature” as all that is “other” to the discourse of music, essentially revealing that much of what is regarded as “nature” in music is “second nature” (the “norms” of a musical language that have come to suggest the illusion of “naturalness”).61 Such a revelation in the listening experience can open up a larger space in which the discourse of music is resituated in the complex variousness of the world, including humans, society and their environments. These “thetic” moments, to use a term of Julia Kristeva’s, as moments of “rupture and/or boundary” are the moments when the subject, as listener, is “repositioned in relation to new objects”, which might afford “moments of opportunity and overflow, moments when the symbolic dissolves into the semiotic, necessitating the intervention of new forms of the symbolic.”62 These moments of overflow also open up the musical experience to “mystery”, what John Keats referred to as “negative capability”—“capable of uncertainties, doubts, without any reaching after fact and reason”—where “mystery” is that which is ungraspable and is resistant to appropriation by the subject.63 This resistance is the reaffirmation of the actual world—“how things are”—a world that is much larger than its more-than-human dwelling place in which we reside. The challenge of contemporary music composition is indeed to

42. Huber, Nicolaus A. “Critical Music”. Petra Music and Philipp Blume (trans.). Contemporary Music Review. Vol. 27. No. 6. 2008. pp. 565-568; Spahlinger, Matthias. “Political implications of the material of new music”. Alistair Zaldua (trans.). Contemporary Music Review. Vol. 34. Nos. 2/3. 2015. pp. 127-166. 43. Reeve and Kerridge, op. cit., p. 109. 44. Lehmann, Harry. “Konzeptmusik. Katalysator der gehaltsästhetischen Wende in der Neuen Musik”. Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. No. 1. 2014. pp. 2225, pp. 30-35, pp. 40-43. 45. Prynne, “A Letter to Steve McCaffery”, p. 40. 46. Jarvis, Simon. “What is Speculative Thinking?” In Theodor W. Adorno: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Vol. III. London and New York: Routledge. 2007, p. 276. 47. Reeve and Kerridge, op. cit., p. 22. 48. Jarvis, op. cit., p. 274. 49. Haynes, Patrice. Immanent Transcendence: Reconfiguring Materialism in Continental Philosophy. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. 2012. p. 128. 50. Ibid., p. 127. 51. Ibid. 52. Ferneyhough, Brian. “Form – Figure – Style: An Intermediate Assessment”. In Collected Writings. Newark, NJ: Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH. 1995. p. 22.

53. Prynne, “Mental Ears and Poetic Work”, p. 129. 54. Ibid., p. 130. 55. Ibid., p. 133. 56. Lewis, David. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 1986. 57. Lewis, David. “Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic”. In The Possible and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality. Michael J. Loux (ed.) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1979. pp. 110-128. 58. Prynne, “Mental Ears and Poetic Work”, p. 128. 59. Zimmermann, Bernd Alois. Intervall und Zeit. Mainz: Edition Schott. 1974. p. 96. Zimmermann describes the Kugelgestalt der Zeit as where future, present and past are interchangeable. 60. Oestreich, James R. “Pursuing the Sublime in Mahler”. The New York Times. November 18, 1994. 61. Adorno, Theodor. Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. 1992. p. 16. 62. Reeve and Kerridge, op. cit., p. 120. 63. Keats, John. Complete Poems and Selected Letters. New York, NY: The Modern Library. 2001. p. 492.

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speculate upon “possible worlds as a counterpoint to our contemporary understanding of place” where the lyric in music is sensitive to relations between human impact and presence in the morethan-human world.64 Such sensitivity arises from a compositional superfluity, where subjectivity is “dislocated presence” for new modes of perception to appear that resist representation, conceptualisation, enframing, quantification and instrumentalisation.65 Music composition today should ask listeners to listen “beyond anthropocentric terms, including the ways in which the resistance of the world—its conflicting and dynamic materiality—exceeds both conceptual thought and technological control.”66

came about through the central dogma of genetic mapping—the model of “unidirectional data flow” of DNA onto RNA—which was then challenged by the phenomenon of reverse transcription (of RNA back onto DNA) where noise in the communication channel becomes part of the message and viruses can manifest.70

As a composer, I have been engaged in such an approach through a renewed sense of a “musica speculativa” by proposing “what if ” scenarios to re-hear the past in alternative contexts, as if the possibilities for history could have been otherwise. The sonic resonances of history are often suppressed and de-valued in the face of that which can be re-seen. But light travels faster than sound, meaning that the sonic resonances that still linger often tell far more about a history, people and their environments than the images that return to memorialise them. Indeed, to listen deeply and with enhanced attention to the sedimented products of an earlier era is, as Prynne notes, to “encounter the meaning of a cultural process, the intricate play of ethical agency and imaginative conjecture as composing a pedigree for full present-tense creative empowerment.”67 This intricate play of ethical agency and imaginative conjecture is at the essence of what I call “speculative composing”, or as Prynne writes: “to put under test by imagination as a screen of poetic conscience, to coax and hurl at finesse and judgment, and to set beliefs and principles on line, self-determining but nothing for its own sake merely, all under test of how things are.”68 Much of my material is derived from transcribing other music through the method of what biologists have called “reverse transcriptions”.69 Transcriptions

Example 2. DNA transcription where the RNA processing machinery is contained inside structures called “terminal knobs” in nascent RNA transcripts. Terminal knobs are visible in this electron micrograph of chromatin spreads from yeast (© 2002 Nature Publishing Group).

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The importance of organic networks such as genetic mapping is that they can suggest “a sense of language different to that of mammalian agency, one aware of the deposits and relationships” that comprises sounds before they are recruited into the “action of human agency”.71 Instead their “connected roots develop their own internal agency and activity”, which is part of the organic connection of the whole relation of music to world and to nature.72 Indeed speculative music composition induces “difficult grafts to grow” from these “deposits and relationships” of the world’s sounds and noises, where the “ludic syntax” of music’s intentionality gradually casts its “weights and shadows parasitically into the playing-fields”, suggesting a music whose resemblance to language exceeds anthropomorphic terms.73 Reverse transcriptions in my music conjure the sonic image of a polyphony between multiple musical figures and quotations that have been damaged and warped through the “ludic syntax” of polyrhythmic “weights and shadows” and, most importantly, structurally blended— as “difficult grafts”— with noise to create a dense Strukturklang, where moments of subjectivity and lyricism can be heard through the figural traces in the overall mass of sound. Strukturklang in my music is the rhythm where noise, waste and the materiality of sound production are “mapped onto determinations and coercions” that embody an interrogation of intentionality as the action of human agency in order to exceed such agency.74 Much of the “determinations and coercions” that embody an “interrogation of intentionality” is my working against

the “time-logic” of the Strukturklang by forcing it into metrical spaces that break open a chain of associations and decentre its “natural” modes of expression in order to suggest a sense of language that exceeds human agency. The noise that is a product of materiality becomes potentially significant: sense-generating engagements with sound can happen, from which the particularity of the sounding event resists the generalising logic of exchange value.75 Noise can tune into the accumulated layers of signification accrued through music’s evolution and reactivate past codes as the “contamination of damaged forms”.76 The capacity of reverse transcriptions to damage and wound the original flow of information, where new musical constructions can emerge from a degraded lexicon, imposes limitations on musical expression in order to decentre music’s capacity for lyricism, whereby the organic connection of the subject to the “unfathomable wilderness” on the other side of being is opened up and nourished.77 Music’s forms give rise to objects, such as gestures that convey subjective expression and intentionality, which are fundamentally “dielectric” in that they constitute a material “across which electric current acts but… does not itself conduct electricity, it is an insulator and therefore resistant to a current’s flow.”78 Musical objects can only display the type and quantity of energy applied to them, through the damage they present to us. But to regard musical objects as vibrant in themselves would perpetuate the “ideology of the transparency to expression of the single gesture”79 and make the “struggle of the fractured

64. Bristow, op. cit, p.4. 65. Bristow, op. cit.. 66. Solnick, op. cit., p. 190. 67. Prynne, “Mental Ears and Poetic Work”, p. 128. 68. Prynne, Jeremy Halvard. “Poetic Thought”. Textual Practice. Vol. 24. No. 4. 2010. p. 597. 69. Solnick, op. cit., pp. 164165, p. 167, p. 184. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., p. 171. 72. Ibid. 73. Prynne, “A Letter to Steve McCaffery”, p. 41. 74. Ibid. 75. Solnick, op. cit., p. 165. 76. Ibid., p. 172. 77. Celan, Paul. “Edgar Jené and The Dream About The Dream”. In Collected Prose. Rosmarie Waldrop (trans.). New York, NY: Routledge, 2003. p. 3. 78. Solnick, op. cit., p. 190; Prynne, Jeremy Halvard. Poems. Eastburn: Bloodaxe Books. 2015. p. 641. 79. Ferneyhough, Brian. “Interview with Richard Toop”. Collected Writings. p. 282.

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subject with itself superfluous”.80 Rather, they create that bridge between sound and the forces being applied. Ferneyhough’s idea of the figure is essential to the dielectric qualities—as “continuous jostlings of positive and negative charges”81—through which music acts as a seismograph that traces the lines of force applied to the central nervous system of highly pressurised materials. Such music is not a question of reproducing or inventing forms, but of harnessing forces.82 At the centre of a musical gesture is no nucleus of tangibility, but instead a system of relationships. What matters is what happens between gestures, between sounds, where the direction of energy is always outward and physical towards perceptions rather than ideas. Lines of force arise in the space between these objects—“not space as temporal lacuna, but at that moment of conceptual differentiation in which identity is born”83—and can generate figural energies established in the act of moving from one discrete musical gesture to another.84 Unlike a traditional musical gesture that rarely leaves its descriptive context, the figure congeals and dissolves into a field of processes as pure energy, where complexity arises from multiple “perspectival causal energies” that occur in the “momentary successive or overlapping chaotic vortices of perturbance”.85 The energy that is projected is automatically part of music’s content: insofar as music transmits energy it is also “about” that energy.86

A speculative compositional process projects its “content” as “perspectival energies” out into the world that forces one to “reperspectivise the world of everyday existence which confronts us beyond the limits of the work.”87 Thus poet Charles Olson’s dictum “form is never more than the extension of content”88 implies more than a determination of form by content (the credo of organic form), but that musical energy “literally extends the content, makes it grow, projects it outward into neighboring areas.”89 Indeed, the essence of contemporary reality is where “man and nature are revealed to be partners in a larger continuum which enfolds them both” and “song is the agent of this revelation.”90 Such “humilitas” is the essence of a more-than-human lyric that is a point of entry into the processes where one can gain a measure of the forces and energies deployed.91 Music’s damaged, violated integrity signals the opposition and resistance that certain lyric procedures meet or defy, where the “nature and power of the forces to which they are exposed need to be calculated with a view to gradual ‘weathering’, erosion, or their sudden omnidirectional ‘dematerialization’.”92 It is through reverse transcriptions that the “dialectric” qualities and materiality of music can be brought to bear.93 Electricity as energy, as well as noise, can be managed on many different levels.

Example 3. Ming Tsao, “Metric Scheme”, from “Fragments of a Compositional Methodology”, Search Journal for New Music and Culture, Winter 2008.

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Metre and rhythm in music create a rhythmic grid that can become aggressively irregular, placing intense pressure on the sounds in order to produce a tortured syntax and an intense compression of energy. Metre schemes can emphasise the alternation between the short and long durations, similar to poet Ezra Pound’s “weights and durations” in poetic metre,94 in order to create electric and magnetic fields of a “locus”, or “vortex”, that can emerge as “a work-internal assembly of forces” and a “virtual topology of possibilities.”95 In Example 3, the metric progression suggests a “vortex” (with a radiant node towards the centre) either through subtle additive movements (such as “+” or “–“ one beat) or through more drastic multiplicative movements (such as doubling or halving the beat unit). A composer’s metrical choices function as rules for the base structure that give shape and expression to the musical grammar, or, as Prynne would state with respect to language, to its “rational and evolutionary linguistic skeleton, which supports the productive inventiveness of textuality.”96 Metre and rhythm, as possible resistances to the violence of an over-humanised musical language with its “domesticated” categories of sensation (such as consonance, melody and pathos), can bring awareness to the forces of this violence in order to corrode, what Lachenmann has called, “the boundaries of the old, ruling idea of music”.97 Metre in particular can “disrupt a complaisant surface harmony by the head-on turns which generate energy of conception and conscience and bring discrepant aspects face to face.”98 Metre and rhythm can inscribe “new sets of sense-bearing differences upon the schedule of old ones”,99 where a “measure is not primarily a unit of emphasis, of agogic priorities, but a space, serving to delimit the field of operations or presence of specific sound qualities, of musical processes. The consistence of iterative impulses serves primarily to set off the limits, operative boundaries between one such space and another.”100 According to this principle, “degrees of compression, distortion, convergence or mutual interference are calculable in respect of the degree to which the sense of clock time is supported or subverted by the specific tactility of impulse density setting the ‘inner clock’ of a particular metric space. Expressions of ratio relationships and proportionally-related structures are, in essence, expressed by means of different categories of perceptual mechanism.”101

80. Lachenmann, Helmut. “Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze”. Jeffrey Stadelman (trans.). Perspectives of New Music,. Vol. 35. No. 2. Summer 1997. p. 191. 81. Prynne, Poems, p. 641. 82. Smith, Daniel W. “Introduction”. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Gilles Deleuze. Daniel W. Smith (trans.). Minnesota, MN: The University of Minnesota Press. 2002. p. xiii. 83. Ferneyhough, “Il Tempo della Figura”. Collected Writings. p. 35. 84. Ibid., pp. 37–38. 85. Ferneyhough. “Parallel Universes”. Collected Writings. p. 77. 86. Stein, Charles. The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum. New York, NY: Station Hill Press. 1987. p. 26. 87. Toop, Richard. “On Superscriptio: An Interview with Brian Ferneyhough, and an Analysis”. Contemporary Music Review. Vol. 13. Part I. 1995. p. 3. 88. Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse,” Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 240. 89. Waldrop, Rosmarie. “Charles Olson: Process and Relationship”. Twentieth Century Literature. Vol. 23. No. 4. 1977. p. 478. 90. Reeve and Kerridge, Nearly Too Much, p. 44. 91. Olson, “Projective Verse”, p. 247.

92. Ferneyhough. “Il Tempo della Figura”. p. 35. 93. Solnick. op. cit. p. 190. Solnick respells the word “dielectric” as “dialectric” to draw its relationship to dialectical thinking. 94. Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York, NY: New Directions. 1934. p. 199. 95. Ferneyhough, Brian. “Barbarians at the Gates”. Paper read at Goldsmiths College, London, 2002. Unpublished manuscript. p. 7. 96. Prynne, “Mental Ears and Poetic Work”, p. 131. 97. Lachenmann, “Philosophy of Composition Is There Such a Thing?”, p. 65. 98. Prynne, “Mental Ears and Poetic Work”, p. 141. 99. Prynne, Jeremy Halvard. Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words. The William Matthews Lectures 1992. London: Birkbeck College. 1993. p. 34. 100. Ferneyhough, “Duration and Rhythm as Compositional Resources”, p. 52. 101. Ibid.

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The uses of “irrational measure lengths”, whose denominators cannot be expressed as powers of two (such as 3/10 or 5/24), are useful as “local ‘dissonances’ serving to refocus attention and instantiate reassessment of the prevailing temporal perspective.”102 They can also act as “catastrophic” leaps that open faults and cleavages within the textual domain of music, where such an activation of a “system of discontinuities and breaks”, as Prynne notes, “interrupt the intrinsic cohesion and boundary profiles of its domain, so that there is constant leakage inwards and outwards across the connection with the larger world order.”103 This leakage “provides a challenge to the humanist paradigm and its place in the late-capitalist culture by imposing shifts of scale which immediately disrupt any sense of personal, unmediated perception.”104 What the textual domain of music opens up to is what Lachenmann calls “situations”,105 or what John Cage would refer to as “anarchic harmony”, where sound is freed from a human intentionality and reaches into the artlessness of nature.106 Yet in Lachenmann’s music, despite the materiality of sound through reverse transcriptions continually interfering with the flow of expression to create presence, the subject position of the lyric is always central, unmovable and dominates all other positions from disrupting the

discourse of meaning, which can reduce the lyrical impulse to a cultural nostalgia. When the “textual domain” of music becomes nostalgic, then the capacity for “situations” can be relegated to gardenlike spaces where freedom in the act of listening can lose its “sense of risk”107 and become dominated by an over-humanised lyricism. Conversely, in Ferneyhough’s music, despite the constantly shifting subject positions for a listener to inhabit that can ward off the tendency to reification, the absence of a reverse transcription back into the flow of expression—as musique concrète instrumentale— causes the free play of figural energies to be absent of a “ground” against which any listening will take place. Without the presence that a “ground” provides, the music can become merely abstract and reduced to a “play of surfaces”. Reverse transcriptions occasionally find their way into the music of Iannis Xenakis, who used mathematical methods in music composition to get closer to the conflicting and dynamic materiality of nature, to bring one “closer to the data”.108 What I find particularly relevant is the engagement with catastrophe theory of discontinuous behaviour arising from continuous underlying forces yielding a loss of stability in a dynamical system.109 A sequence of

Example 4. A cusp catastrophe, where the state of the topological surface is not “smooth” at every point and presents a catastrophic “sudden jump” along path A. (From E. C. Zeeman, “Catastrophe Theory”, in Scientific American, April 1976, pp. 65-83).

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proportional measures can create a morphogenetic field—as patterned rhythmic energy where short measures act as attractors—that draws energy towards its centre. The presence of “irrational” measures at the centre of each sequence is a (temporal) discontinuity that can cause a catastrophic jump. Any discontinuous transition can occur when a system has more than one stable state, or can diverge and follow more than one stable pathway of change (Example 4). A catastrophic change of a state mapped in a musical work brings to the surface the inherent sense of contradiction in the materials as divergent and even conflicting “lines of force”. Lines of force can promote the onward-flowing projection of multiple, ambiguous and even contradictory perspectives as “depth effect”.110 Such vertiginous, paradoxical perspectives can be represented in catastrophe theory by “the concept of multiple attractors—or multiple system equilibria—when operating in the range of the bifurcation set. Depending on the level of parametrization, the musical form modelled with catastrophe theory presents ‘gaps’ of behavior, creating zones of divergence from the established musical material; in these zones the uniformity, unanimity and stability of the musical structure is undermined by introducing conflicting elements into the form.”111 Irrational measures, as local “catastrophes”, enact the “constant slippage of what felt secure and underpin the engagement with a problematically intermediate position between stasis and permanent flow.”112 Mirandas Atemwende, the second act to my opera Die Geisterinsel, provides

an example of reverse transcription embedded with local catastrophes that mirror the “constant slippage” of the protagonist’s grasp on the effects of language. The first act, Die Geisterinsel, is based upon a late-eighteenth-century Singspiel with the same title by the German composer Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, and is an adaption of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Zumsteeg’s music is in the late-classical style of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn, and the libretto by Wilhelm Friedrich Gotter is characterised by its classically elevated German reminiscent of Goethe, which stands in sharp contrast to Shakespeare’s “late style” writing with its condensed information, use of vernacular and somewhat harsh and jagged rhythms. In my Die Geisterinsel, this late-classical musical style of Zumsteeg, its formal structures, harmonic language, etc., are reworked within my own noise-based aesthetics. After its premiere, I felt the need for a second act in order to somehow balance and enrich the main characters of Die Geisterinsel, where Caliban and Miranda and their respective relationship to Prospero introduce a more subtle critique of Prospero’s dominant position on the island where William Shakespeare’s Tempest takes place. Influenced by Prynne’s analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 (“They that Haue Powre to Hurt”), where he exhaustively excavates its highly condensed semantic structures, as well as poet Paul Celan’s energetic and soundfocused translations of the Shakespeare sonnets, I began to work with texts as materiality more than as a carrier of narrative meaning and ideas. In Mirandas Atemwende, only Miranda and Caliban remain as characters from Die Geisterinsel

102. Cody, Joshua. “Brian Ferneyhough in Conversation with Joshua Cody”. 1996. Unpublished interview. p. 2. 103. Prynne. “Mental Ears and Poetic Work”. pp. 126-127. 104 Reeve and Kerridge, op. cit., p. 4. 105. Heathcote, op. cit., p. 334. 106. Cage, John. Silence. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press. 1961. p. 64. 107. Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms, Richard Howard (trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1985. p. 256. 108. Xenakis, Iannis. Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition. Pendragon Revised Edition. New York, NY: Pendragon Press. 1992. 109. Thom, René. Structural Stability and Morphogenesis. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1989. pp. 320-321. 110. Ferneyhough, “Il Tempo della Figura”. p. 38. 111. Kosona, Fani and Hadjileontiadis, Leontios. “Catastrophe Theory: An Enhanced Structural and Ontological Space in Music Composition”. In Mathematics and Computation in Music. Carlos Agon, Moreno Andreatta, Gèrard Assayag, Emmanuel Amiot, Jean Bresson, John Mandereau (eds.). Berlin: SpringerVerlag. 2011. p. 359. 112. Reeve and Kerridge, op. cit., p. 64.

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who extend their resentment of Prospero’s authority over them to a more general critique of Prospero’s language and its implied relations of hierarchy and power. The first eight tableaus of Mirandas Atemwende focus on Miranda through a speculative reverse transcription of Arnold Schönberg’s monodrama Erwartung.

A sense of expectation for the possibilities of a radically new language—musical and poetic—away from Prospero’s influence—and in Schönberg’s case, from tonality—condition these tableaus. By quoting expressionist musical gestures rather than building upon a psychologically rooted expressionism, the music could be regarded as a documentary about expressionism, where expression is mediated through

Example 5. Arnold Schönberg, Erwartung mm. 37-41 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1909). Schönberg composed the expressionist monodrama Erwartung, with a libretto by Marie Pappenheim, for a dramatic voice who claims to be the lone shaper of her own expression and the sounds of the orchestra respond in turn to her inner psychological state.

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the lyric in music subjected to a stringent formal rigour, accompanied by the often delicate balance between extreme organisation and unfocused chaos. The libretto begins with syllabic fragments from Paul Celan’s translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 105 and concludes with poems taken from his collection Atemwende (Breathturn), where the very integrity of the German language is put into question. Celan’s

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translation of Shakespeare into German, with its particular emphasis on sound and the materiality of language, is a stepping stone into his own poetry in which poetic expression is clearly alienated, broken and bordering upon mute. Celan’s poetry as Miranda’s text, whose words are forged together from fundamentally different categories (such as Wortmond or Wundenspiegel), creates a metaphorical

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Example 6. Ming Tsao, Mirandas Atemwende, mm. 78-81 (Leipzig: Edition Peters, 2014-2015). A speculative reverse transcription of Example 4 from Arnold Schönberg’s Erwartung to invoke a sense of expectation (Erwartung) for the possibilities of a radically new language, musical and poetic, away from Prospero’s influence. In this new language, lyrical subjectivity is measured through Miranda’s place in the more-than-human sounds of the island.

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language that escapes Prospero’s garden of rational discourse and re-establishes a necessary relationship between fact and value in order to have a power of consequences, a sense of existential meaning and purpose that had been lost on the island. As Miranda discovers, “poetic language is the language of an originary thinking that is free from the representationalism of rational enquiry. Because it speaks to, rather than through, consciousness, poetic thinking is the ethical capability to simultaneously let-be and bring-forth with regard to being.”113 Miranda’s “Atemwende” symbolises a radical poetic reorientation and solstice of breath by means of which poetry (Miranda’s newly discovered language) is actualised. As Celan states in his Meridian speech: “The attention the poem tries to pay to everything it encounters, its sharper sense of detail, outline, structure, color, but also of the ‘tremors’ and ‘hints,’ all this is not, I believe, the achievement of an eye competing with (or emulating) ever more perfect instruments, but is rather a concentration that remains mindful of all our dates.”114 Miranda’s final lines from Gotter’s libretto of Die Geisterinsel, “Ich will alle meine Sinne anstrengen” [I want to exert all of my senses],115 mirror Celan’s sentiments, to become more “mindful of all our dates”, that is, to have a greater awareness of one’s sense of being, which Prospero’s more “perfect instruments” have reduced to an abstraction of numbers. Miranda recites Celan’s text “in order to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was, where I was going, to my reality.”116 As Celan notes: “A poem… may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the— not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed toward. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality.”117 Miranda’s poetic language becomes the place for such an encounter—a meeting that conquers the self-distance she has acquired through Prospero’s

education and her isolation on the island—from which she can construct an identity for herself. Miranda’s message, in a bottle cast away from Prospero’s island, is, throughout the opera, underway and her voice comes to symbolise fragility through this possibility of an unanswered poetic invocation. Miranda, through Celan’s poems, seeks communication, contact, connection outside of the island as the dwelling place of mankind: “there are / still songs to sing beyond / mankind.”118 Celan’s poems almost always have a “you” (dich) to whom the poems are addressed. “The poem wants to head toward some other, it needs this other, it needs a counterpart. Everything, each human being is, for the poem heading toward this other.”119 Miranda reaches for this other in the absence of Prospero, who is now gone, a counterpart to which she can be underway and headed towards. Indeed, Miranda embodies poetic discourse from the very beginning—the desire to forge Prospero’s words into a new language that cannot divide and classify, one that explores the very limits of consciousness and establishes a necessary relationship to truth. In this sense, Miranda becomes fully aware of her potential—as poetic discourse—for propelling and allowing action. Through Miranda, poetry and music become the necessary force to counter Prospero’s art by offering an alternative that is not dominated by instrumental reason and accepts the island as it is (and not to be cultivated into a garden as mankind’s dwelling), revealing a history far older than when Prospero arrived, whose stewardship Miranda now feels responsible for. The last third of Mirandas Atemwende, tableaus nine through twelve, focuses on Caliban. Tableaus nine and ten, in particular, reference a part from Mouvement (—vor der Erstarrung) by Lachenmann. Lachenmann’s idea by the time of composing in the early 1980s was to take the material of “noise” and to bring it into a compositional sound structure.120 Taking this as a metaphor for Caliban’s awareness of Prospero’s taming or colonising of the island through his art (or compositional “language”) and with poems

Ming Tsao

from The White Stones and Word Order by Prynne, Caliban’s consciousness is enriched so that he may “dissolve the bars to it and let run the hopes, that preserve the holy fruit on the tree”, that is, for Caliban to become more acutely aware of the material processes of the island from which Prospero’s language had alienated him.121 In these tableaus, Caliban attempts to address the wound inflicted by Prospero’s language, the wound that remains gaping through Celan’s poetry. Caliban uses Prynne’s poetry to express “the paradigmatic moment of impulsive feeling which escapes, or rather precedes, the conscious attempt to process and understand it”,122 an impulsive feeling that is then diagnosed in Mirandas Atemwende as “the moment of pain”. One can also hear faint echoes of Lachenmann’s “… zwei Gefühle…” when the wound is opened up by Caliban’s “two feelings” (represented by two separate actors) for the “threatening darkness” of Prospero’ garden and his own “desire to see with my own eyes” whatever wonderful things might be on the island in Prospero’s absence, in order to behold that “unfathomable wilderness” of the other side of being.123 Caliban, like Miranda, is wounded by Prospero’s enlightenment education and the desire to break up the continuum of time with ever more perfect instruments. Caliban’s response is to rediscover those natural processes of the island, “the unison of forms”, and to let them flow again: “If we arbitrarily break up the continuum of time into fixed intervals, upon which we then project hopes or expectations deferred from the present, we lose contact with natural processes.”124 Similar to Friedrich Hölderlin’s sentiments in his famous poem Hälfte des Lebens, “‘Fruit’ should not be declared ‘holy’, with the sense of being set apart, usually preserved on a tree. The fruit is a stage in the continuing cycle of the plant’s life, not just the final outcome. Whatever lives by continuous change and development, we distort by solidifying—unless we are able to ‘let run’ what at present we anxiously ‘rein in’.”125 Caliban’s words come from a renewed, heightened attention to the processes of the island, a vantage point where the final nail is driven into the coffin of Prospero’s art. The compression and intensification of verbal and musical language in Mirandas Atemwende are ways of engaging with a late-modernist form of expression that makes the connections between romanticism and formal rigour, extreme expressionistic abstraction and documentary “authenticity”. In

113. Mellors, op. cit., p. 171. 114. Celan, Paul. The Meridian: Final Version–Drafts–Materials. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull (eds.). Pierre Joris (trans.). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. p. 9. 115. Gotter, Friedrich Willhelm. Die Geisterinsel. Berlin: Berliner Ausgabe. 2013. p. 10. 116. Celan, Paul. “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen”. In Collected Prose, Rosmarie Waldrop (trans.). New York, NY: Routledge. 2003. p. 34. 117. Ibid., pp. 3435. 118. Celan, Paul. Breathturn. Pierre Joris (trans.). Los Angeles, CA: Green Integer. 2006. p. 97. 119. Celan, The Meridian: Final Version–Drafts– Materials, p. 9. 120. Tsao, Ming. “Helmut Lachenmann’s ‘Sound Types’”. Perspectives of New Music. Vol. 52. No. 1. Winter 2014. pp. 217- 238. 121. Prynne, Poems, p. 64. 122. Basu, Jay. “The Red Shift: Trekking J. H. Prynne’s Red D Gypsum”. The Cambridge Quarterly. Vol. 30. No. 1. 2001. p. 26. 123. The two feelings as “a fear of the threatening darkness of the cavern, but a desire to see with my own eyes what might be miraculous within it” from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel that Lachenmann quotes in the programme notes to “... zwei Gefühle…” From Williams, Alistair.

Music in Germany since 1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. p. 116. 124. Reeve and Kerridge, op. cit., p. 41. 125. Ibid.

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126. Schreiber, Stefan. “Mirandas Atemwende”. In Ming Tsao: Plus Minus. Vienna: Kairos Music. 2017. p. 4. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid.

working with expressionism as a way to let the material express itself, but without psychologising, is to renew the idea of the lyric in contemporary music that becomes in my music fractured, damaged, multi-perspective, complex and problematised in order to negotiate the complexities of the surrounding world. Lyrical subjectivity is ultimately placed in the musical sounds themselves rather than with a single consistent “speaker”, a sense of artistic expression that embraces the exteriority of the world rather than retreating from it. As Stefan Schreiber writes about Miranda’s singing in Mirandas Atemwende: “Miranda’s distinctive vocal technique stands in contrast to the complex poeticphilosophic language of Caliban. With a kind of documentary distance, Caliban’s actors develop a web of thoughts and images that separates itself lucidly from the instrumental sounds and noises, appearing to be wrested from the soundscape. At the same time, Miranda displays her new world of singing, which, nestled in these sounds, frequently coalesces with them.”126 In contrast, confronted with the effects of nature on her inner life, the dramatic voice in Erwartung claims to be the lone shaper of her own expression where the sounds of the orchestra respond in turn to her inner psychological state. Yet in Mirandas Atemwende, Miranda, as the “sensitive inventor of a new kind of singing”, begins to envision a different sort of lyrical subject who needs the wilderness beyond the garden, in order to find a way to this “new-other song”, consisting of “multifaceted nuances situated between precise-brittle tones and vocal noises produced by the sudden

turning of the in- and exhalation of the singing-breath.”127 Miranda’s aim is to reaffirm the world in its complexity and to account for our accounting of mankind’s place within this world. Indeed, Miranda’s Atemwende is to acknowledge that our garden is larger than the dwelling place that we have made it and extends through that “unfathomable wilderness” to the other side of being. The decentring of the lyric in the more-than-human world as the desire for a wounded and sometimes fragile expressiveness leads directly to Celan’s poetry. Miranda’s particular appropriation of Celan’s poetry emerges from the contradictory positions of Schönberg’s Sprechgesang—the technique’s origin in the excessive language of the monodrama and its critical turn towards the tone of cabaret—that is, “from the technique’s myriad expressive forces, it attains in the end the distance of documentary speech.”128 Retracting any sort of definite position in the distance of this kind of speech, a chain of disassociations and gaps—like a virus—begins to mobilise and infect the network of language. According to Schreiber, this chain ultimately “tears open and calls into question the internal cohesion of language along with the conception of its limits, in order to be able to hear, in a primal world beyond the garden, another voice and its continually new-other singing”129 —the “songs to sing beyond mankind”— which is the lyric of the anthropocene.

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Abstract In 2011 a Master’s programme called “Narrations spéculatives” was established at the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG). It arose from a meeting between teachers and practitioners (Fabrizio Terranova and Yvan Flasse) from the ERG, and of certain researchers (Didier Debaise and Katrin Solhdju ) of the Groupe d’Études Constructivistes de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles (GECO). The idea of connecting two notions as apparently seemingly disparate as “narration” and “speculative” thinking became clear to us at the end of a collective process. ERG’s need to give back to narration its deeply political dimension, to re-intensify it beyond exclusively human stories, found hitherto unused resources in the renewal of speculative thinking, which as it happened, the GECO was also attempting to do. Narrative practices reciprocally contributed to the redefining of the status of speculative propositions. It was therefore starting from two histories— narration and speculative thinking—with their different requirements, that this Master’s programme was established, incorporating both notions. The following interview focuses on that moment from the viewpoint of its main protagonists.

Valérie Pihet

Speculative Narration: A Conversation with Valérie Pihet, Didier Debaise, Katrin Solhdju and Fabrizio Terranova Valérie Pihet

Didier Debaise

Valérie Pihet is developing independent research and consulting activities related to the coproduction of knowledge and articulation between arts, research and society. Since 2016, she is the coordinator for arts and research in PSL University Paris. She is also the co-founder of Dingdingdong—Institute of coproduction of knowledge on Huntington’s disease, with the writer Emilie Hermant. She is a member of the advisory board of the Mobile Lives Forum, research institute initiated by SNCF, and of the PARSE research group (Platform for Artistic Research Sweden). She is the president of The Council (art agency), directed by Sandra Terdjman and Gregory Castera. In the past, she co-founded and directed with the French philosopher Bruno Latour the Programme of experimentation in arts and politics (SPEAP) at Sciences Po Paris (2010 -2014). She has collaborated with Bruno Latour on a number of other projects, including the Iconoclash (ZKM, 2002) and Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy (ZKM, 2005) exhibitions, and the founding of the Sciences Po médialab in 2010.

Didier Debaise is a permanent researcher at the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) and the director of the Center of Philosophy at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), where he teaches contemporary philosophy. He is the co-founder, with Isabelle Stengers, of the Groupe d’Études Constructivistes (GECO). His main areas of research are contemporary forms of speculative philosophy, theories of events, and links between American pragmatism and French contemporary philosophy. He is director of a collection at Les presses du réel, member of the editorial board of the journals Multitudes and Inflexions. He has written two books on Whitehead’s philosophy (Un empirisme spéculatif and Le vocabulaire de Whitehead), edited volumes on pragmatism (Vie et experimentation), on the history of contemporary metaphysics (Philosophie des possessions), and he has written numerous papers on Bergson, Tarde, Souriau, Simondon, and Deleuze. He has just published a new book entitled L’appât des possibles which will shortly appear in English (Nature as event, Duke University Press, 2017).

Katrin Solhdju

Fabrizio Terranova

Katrin Solhdju is a permanent researcher at the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) at the department for Sociology and Anthropology of the Université de Mons. Her research focuses on the history, philosophy and social implications of the life sciences. She is a member of the Groupe d’Études Constructivistes (GECO) at the Free University of Brussels, and a co-founder of the collective Dingdingdong, an institute for the co-production of knowledge about Huntington’s Disease. Since its inception, she has taught the main theory class of the Master’s programme “Narration Spéculative” at the École de Recherche Graphique, Brussels. She has published two books, L’Épreuve du savoir. Propositions pour une écologie du diagnostic (2015, to appear in German in 2017) and Selbstexperimente (2011). She has also written numerous articles on the history and philosophy of scientific and clinical practices and their epistemologies, and edited volumes on the practice of self-experimentation (Introspective Self-Rapports), the New Patrons (Faire art comme on fait société), and the moving frontiers between the living and the dead (Das Leben vom Tode her).

Fabrizio Terranova is a filmmaker, activist, dramaturge and teacher at the École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels, where he launched and co-runs the Master’s programme in Récits et Expérimentation/”Narration Spéculative”. He is also a founding member of Dingdingdong, an institute dedicated to raising awareness around Huntington’s disease. His 2010 experimental documentary film Josée Andrei: An Insane Portrait screened internationally and was adapted into a book published by Les Éditions du souffle. Terranova recently published the article “Les Enfants du compost” in Gestes spéculatifs (Les Presses du réel, 2015) and the film Donna Haraway, Story Telling for Earthly Survival.

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this collective adventure from the points of view of its main protagonists. Valérie Pihet: To start, I would like to return to the context in which the Master’s programme was set up, that of the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG) and the Groupe d’Études Constructiviste (GECO), but also that of your respective practices and disciplines.

I began teaching at the ERG in 2008, when I was asked to take on the particular challenge of breathing new life into the field of narration, which for some time had been flagging in the school. The ERG is a very young school in the landscape of art schools in Belgium, as it was established in 1972 at the initiative of two teachers who wanted to dissociate themselves from the School of Higher Arts of Saint-Luc, and more specifically from its politics.1 Saint-Luc wanted to create a new art school to be able to develop a long-term curriculum, but at that time the laws on education in Belgium did not allow for the establishment of a new art school. However, a loophole was found in cultural legislation which allowed for the authorisation for a school to be set up, as long as it was experimental. The two teachers in charge of the new school took advantage of the situation to create an alternative school, in contrast to the beaux-arts perspective. Saint-Luc was not entirely expecting things to develop this way. Thus this experimental dimension was initially expressed by a strong desire to break down the barriers between the different artistic disciplines, integrating other artistic categories, such as song and dance, that had been taught in the 1980s. Quite soon, a great importance was also given to narration, in the sense of telling stories, at that time largely despised in the art world. This was largely due to one of the people in charge of the school, Pierre Sterckx, a great fan of comic books, who opened up the ERG to popular arts and cultures. He expended narrative practices by going as far as introducing advertising into the curriculum, and opening the force of narration as Fabrizio Terranova:

Created by students of the 2014 seminar of Récits et experimentation, narration spéculative (speculative narration) Master’s programme at the École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels.

programme called “Récits et experimentation, narration spéculative” (speculative narration) was established at the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG) in Brussels. It arose from lively exchanges between practitioners (Fabrizio Terranova and Yvan Flasse) and of certain researchers (Didier Debaise and Katrin Solhdju) of the Groupe d’Études Constructivistes (GECO) at the Free University in Brussels, all of whom were at the time teaching at ERG. The idea of connecting two notions as seemingly disparate as “narration” and “speculative” thought was thus the result of a collective process. ERG’s need to give back to narration its deeply political dimension, to re-intensify its tasks beyond exclusively human stories, found hitherto unused resources in the renewal of speculative philosophy, which as it happened, GECO was attempting to cultivate. Speculative propositions contributed to redefining the status of narrative practices and vice versa. It was thus starting from two trajectories, narration and speculative thinking, with their different requirements, that this Master’s programme was established, incorporating both. The following interview retraces some crucial aspects of n 2011 a Master’s

Valérie Pihet

a way to tell stories which can make “possibles” exist. After Sterckx had left, it was far from easy to safeguard his legacy. As a student, I remember very clearly that the most disparaging attribute you could give to anything was to say that it was narrative. At the time, what was important was to create autonomous objects, stand-alone objects, things no longer connected via a whole string of attachments, and which above all were not supposed to tell a story. Today we feel that human being can no longer cope without their stories and those of the world they live in, which is why there has recently been such a revival of interest in questions of narration and/or speculation. I would like to add to this story from our perspective, because I believe that we can’t really dissociate the Master’s in “Speculative Narration” from the existence of a constructivist study group (GECO), which had been set up in Brussels on the initiative of four researchers in philosophy—Maria Puig, Isabelle Stengers, Nathalie Trussart and myself—more than fifteen years ago. Later on, besides Katrin, we were joined by other researchers, such as Vinciane Despret, David Jamar, Emilie Hache, Benedikte Zitouni and many others. The question of speculation began to arise, but very gradually, as we became interested in looking at the links between different practices of knowledge. We were working on philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, William James, Henri Bergson, Étienne Souriau and Alfred North Whitehead, and I would say that, apart from Whitehead, there was something which made them all—and us by extension—very uncomfortable in regards the term “speculation”.

Didier Debaise:

This term represented everything that needed to be rejected in contemporary philosophy, yet it interested us greatly. These philosophers who came before us, and whose thinking we were seeking to build on, had to avoid any temptation of speculation because it was so profoundly embedded in idealism, the very postKantian Hegelian idealism they were struggling against. In short, in postKantian idealism, thinking had become the foundation for experience; in other words, thinking had its own dynamic and would by itself lead us to discover experience, and not the other way around! This implied a kind of belittling of experience and the real, which certain philosophers, such as James and Bergson, were resisting. In contrast, they argued for expanding experience. What is at stake is not so much whether this picture of post-Kantian philosophy is correct or not, rather, what seems important to me is that we keep in mind what kind of approach had been rejected by a whole tradition of philosophers with which we were thinking and that were constitutive for GECO as a consequence. Was this philosophy called “speculative philosophy”?

VP:

DD: Yes, exactly. Historically, what is called speculative philosophy characterises this very special moment of post-Kantian philosophy (Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling and Georg Hegel). The term speculation, before this rehabilitation, was very often used pejoratively, applied to thinking that was not put to the test, to pure unrealities, to pie-in-the-sky. With Hegel, post-Kantianism returns to this negative nature of speculative thinking

1. The two teachers were Thierry de Duve and Jean Guiraud.

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to make it into a positive effect vector, leading the strength of this thinking to reside in the fact that it has not emerged from, and is therefore not dependent on, experience. A kind of radical idealism therefore arose in which the ideality of thinking is precisely its very condition of veracity and possibility. I think it’s very important to recall that the whole tradition that impacted upon us (e.g. pragmatist philosophy, Deleuze, Bruno Latour) and which constituted us, was absolutely anti-speculative in the sense of this post-Kantian radical idealism. Whitehead’s philosophy is a notable exception: it made us aware of the importance of another form speculative thinking, deeply linked to experience, in a total rupture with post-Kantian idealism. It did take on certain requirements of speculative philosophy: thinking beyond a purely human perspective or condition, taking into account the importance and irreducibility of abstractions, freeing the imagination from any exclusive ties to representations, intensifying the sense of possibles. But it did this without ever losing the pragmatic sense of experience. This return to speculative thinking, which found its justification in experience alone, was not a smooth process: quite the contrary. This call for speculative thinking met with major difficulties. Was it not running the risk of re-positioning philosophy and a certain abstract thinking in a position of authority? Was it not seeking a new foundation to the detriment of experience? The meaning of the term “speculation” was fluid and it was perhaps less understandable for us to make this move than for what we call today “speculative realism”, which emerged at about the same time. Its relationship to speculative thinking seemed easier to justify, since it embraces a very idealised version of speculation, which was the very thing we were attempting to break away from. We have still not forgotten the dangers of this term. Fabrizio, whom I had known already for several years, invited me to come to the ERG, in around 2008, a few years before the Master’s programme

was set up, in order take charge of a number of philosophy courses. In 2010 Katrin took over from me, but we continued lively joint discussions. Over time, the concept of speculation was insisted upon, but in a sense that was crucially nourished by the question of fabulation as it had been developed by Deleuze. In Deleuze’s Image-Temps Cinema 2 there is a magnificent passage which is very important to the question of speculative narration: “What cinema must grasp is not the identity of a character, whether real or fictional, through his objective and subjective aspects. It is the becoming of the real character when he himself starts to ‘make fiction’, when he enters into ‘the flagrant offence of making up legends’ and so contributes to the invention of his people.”2 The whole politics of fabulation is there already. But the question of stories and fabulation also further complicates the relationship with truth in our philosophical research. To quote Deleuze again: “What is opposed to fiction is not the real; it is not the truth which is always that of the masters or the colonisers; it is the fabulating function of the poor, in so far as it gives to the false the power which makes it into a memory, a legend, a monster.”3 ERG’s connection with narrative was obvious as soon as we began working together, but we were not yet ready to give it a name, because this act of identifying what is in the process of being set up only has consistency in the two weak spots of our trajectories: the one linked to narration and the other linked to speculation. Today the thought of abandoning the term “speculative” when it enabled us to identify a new relationship with imagination— and especially with abstraction, merely because it triggered a fashionable effect, with its enormous concomitant misunderstandings—is not necessarily the right solution; it might, however, become necessary.4 I joined GECO and ERG in 2010, the year when I moved from Berlin to Brussels, one year before the foundation of “Speculative Narration”. Although I was close to philosophy, I come from another discipline, cultural studies,

Katrin Solhdju:

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but with a strong focus on the history and epistemology of science and thus a practice in which conceptual and narrative work are necessarily intertwined. For us historians the question of narration arises more directly than for philosophy, because we are always wondering what is at stake when we set about narrating this or that story in this or that way. I was very well acquainted with the work of Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, but I approached them through the angle of constructivism rather than through that of speculation, a later arrival in their writings, and in my research for that matter. Two questions seem crucial to me. Firstly, as already mentioned by Didier: what does truth mean to us? What is knowledge? How is it constructed? Does it correspond above all to a reality which pre-exists and is exterior to it, or does it actively participate in constructing a reality while at the same time creating a truth with regard to this reality? And secondly, which stories are told, by whom, from which perspectives etc.? This second question is increasingly discussed in the historical discipline from the 1970s or so onwards, and takes on a particular importance in the field of the history of science, which, since the 1970s and 1980s, became more and more interested in those actors who have been “forgotten” by history all too long because they lost out in competition with their peers. Thereby such histories started to shed some light on the objects and forms of knowledge that were discarded in the course of the history of science, but that might very well have become of importance and thus remembered if things had been slightly different at this or that point. They thus

render us sensitive to the “what ifs” in the possible becomings of the stories that we tend to forget. Very early on I became interested in what Siegfried Kracauer had already described as “lost causes” in his theory of historical trade. Particularly in my research on self-experimentation, knowledge that was slightly marginalised as regards the sciences with a capital S, was central. I was a bit of an alien when I arrived at ERG, because my research was or at least seemed even further away from the problems posed by an art school than Didier’s, since philosophy was fairly widely taught in that context. As a member of the GECO I was, of course, familiar with the discussions around the notion of speculation, but when Fabrizio asked whether I’d be interested in being part of the Master’s Programme in “Speculative Narration”, I took this as a prompt to plunge further into the conceptual and philosophical traditions at stake, but also to explore the term in its etymological and historical dimensions. It turned out that the etymology of “speculation” leads not only to the verb “speculare” but also to the word “speculator”. In Ancient Rome, a speculator was a scout, a lookout, either in a tower observing the surrounding area, or sent ahead of an army. If we take this very literally, the speculator has a practical function that is very embedded in the real, in experience: to be on guard against approaching danger, to warn his comrades if necessary to prepare the city to defend itself, to prepare the soldiers to get into position etc. Later on, the term came to denote the stargazers, people looking far into the distance, equipped with apparatuses to observe the stars. We can see very

2. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1989. p. 150. 3. Ibid. Translation slightly modified. 4. We only have to look at the now very frequent use of “speculation” or even “speculative narration” in the art and design world (writings, exhibitions etc.).

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clearly how the term “speculator” came gradually to represent someone who looks further and further afield, hence finally the pejorative meaning of someone speaking of things whose existence escapes experience, an existence that cannot be proven. I found it really exciting to return to the primary sense of this term and to see what we could derive from it: “speculation” as a pragmatic function closely linked to the real. From the beginning, in the class entitled “Gestes spéculatifs” that I teach, I put great emphasis on the fact that the speculative, in the sense that interested us, is embedded in reality, including as it is applied to and in narration. It is at this point that a first distinction must be drawn with the question of utopia. I talk of the need of a distinction to be drawn, because we cannot give a precise definition of speculative narration despite the understandable expectations of students of this new Master’s programme. We did have some ideas, but we did not have, nor did we want to, a single definition. However, it did seem of interest to us to work with the distinctive practices of other genres. It became very clear early on that we could not set up a Master’s programme on the writings on utopias, since they ran the same risks as the philosophical (idealistic) abstractions that we mentioned earlier. Utopia is to be found far from an experimented reality of experience. It wipes the slate clean of what precedes it and of the world from which it is written. In this Master’s programme we are attempting to make the students aware of the importance of starting from a situation, from a given issue, without, however, depriving ourselves of fiction and of imagination; “staying with the trouble”, as Haraway proposed to call such an endeavour.5 In other words, we never ask them to be creative starting from a blank page. We also try to make them aware of any forms of denigrated, forgotten, marginal practices and knowledge, which constitutes another thread running through the outlines of “speculative narration”. The great care with which you describe these beginnings through your cross-referenced stories VP:

and encounters leads me to think that it is very difficult to “define” what we call multi-, trans- and/ or interdisciplinary. These terms become a kind of catch-all label, and yet rather surprisingly it is increasingly difficult to define what happens in experiments involving several fields of practice and knowledge without simply reducing it to the label “multidisciplinary”. Clearly this isn’t merely a matter of placing creation and philosophy side by side. Can you help me to put a little more energy into the term multidisciplinary? I think that this question forces us to enter into a little more detail about the positive features of speculation and narration. I believe that one of these features, indicating the difficulty of introducing the problem of speculation, is its absolutely pragmatic “embeddedness” contained in this sentence by James: “To be radical, empiricism must not admit in its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.”6 James’s twofold proposition is firstly hammering home that an experience is what forces us to think. We must here understand experience in the very broad sense of a situation that poses a problem and forces itself upon us. There is always a starting point, a problematic situation, an event: something happens. The second part of the proposition might appear enigmatic at first glance: “exclude no element that is directly experienced”. Yet this is an essential requirement. The means we use to attribute sense and importance to the situation we are dealing with must never become opportunities to disparage certain aspects. In this sense one might have the impression that speculative thinking is an almost liberal way of accommodating the multiplicity of beings and situations, whereas in fact, it is extremely stringent. Making a situation important is in itself a test, because it implies sifting through many things, and among these many things anything that might reduce its importance will be excluded. This is not a test of rigour, coherence, or the internal logic of speech or narration, but it is a question: “does this situation reach its full DD:

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amplitude, dignity and force?” We are beyond the question of interdisciplinarity, because disciplines presuppose relatively constituted knowledge. What is important to us is the very undermining of this knowledge, the point at which discipline loses its function even, since it has no stake in view of what is important and of what it might or might not amplify. KS: This brings Bruno Latour to mind, who wrote in Face à Gaia that given climate change, we can no longer remain on the sideline, we can no longer remain at a distance and observe what is happening, since we are out of necessity caught up in what is happening.7 I think it is possible for different disciplines to work together as long as there is a truly shared problem, and we manage to nourish it with our multiple competences while producing mutually reinforcing outcomes, rather than different ones. But without necessarily aiming at reaching a consensus, things can very well remain tense; it seems crucial to me to resist the risk inherent to many multi- or transdisciplinary projects of reducing or giving up on the exigencies and obligations that are proper to each scientific, artistic or thinking practice. Because if we allow for that, I think, we lose more—particularities, distinctions, contrasts—than what might be gained.

Echoing what has been said, firstly, what is decisive in this experience is having brought together practitioners of different disciplines who were already dealing with a series of similar issues in their own field. For me this is extremely important. We can feel that there is something “organic” (even if I FT:

don’t like the term) in the idea and the construct of this Master’s programme. Artists are not acting as philosophers, and philosophers are not claiming to know everything about art. It is crucial that there should be shared concerns to start with, and that each should respond from their own discipline. In the art field I see many experiments where the borders are much more blurred, leading to less interesting results. Secondly, if we feel that speculative narration’s time has now come, we also feel quite clearly that the mechanisms of the art and culture world that are at work, and that in a few years, or even a few months’ time, this will be the thing to avoid. I think we must be vigilant and consider the art world as part of the capitalist machine. The way in which the art world can latch on to anything that moves, chew it up and digest it, is something we need to look at. There is no reason to ascribe additional “soul” to art. Art is often seen as something to elevate our existence, yet art is caught up in the same capitalist dynamics as the rest. I believe that we are really suffering from this exceptional status granted to art, a status that plays tricks on us…; you can see two movements at work in the Master’s programme, specifically with regard to the term “speculative narration”—the art of constructing stories, certainly the oldest art there is, all the while stressing the non-innocence of this art, since stories produce effects. This reminds us of Haraway’s “avoid instructions at any cost”, the idea being to evaluate not the degree of speculation of the story at any cost, but rather to set up a sequence of actions that inhabit the stories and make us think about this act of telling stories. There is no programme to follow at the

5. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. 2016. 6. James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Dover Publications. 2003 [1912]. 7. Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2017.

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end of which you might say: “I am a speculative narrator”. Our students are much less daunted by the term speculation, because they experience it in their practice. What has been important for us is rather to define the characteristics that inhabit the act of creating a story, closely linked with the work done by Didier and Katrin. This particular creation is a very precious painstaking construction, far removed from any broad-brush instructions. The work of the students is not based on a set task in speculative narration as its starting point: what comes first is their personal project. On the basis of these individual projects we establish links with speculative philosophy. Here there were a series of features we considered essential, that is to say we relate to the world upon which our attention is set, we do not simply describe, condemn, or criticise it. The very act of producing art has since a long time been blended with critical thinking (the Situationists, Frankfurt School, etc.) We want to provoke a shift by working with authors like Stengers or Haraway, who are anything but critical. It is not a matter of saying “we will no longer criticise”, but rather of understanding that “this is not enough to give power to our stories”. Merely saying that this cannot be solely and uniquely description, criticism, dystopia, utopia, pure fiction or pure imaginary already makes the work extremely concrete and precise. In our practice with students, there are three movements we are very interested in, which we did not pre-define but discovered as we went along, and which provide extremely powerful guidelines: avoid anthropocentric stories, that is to say that man is no longer the only one at the centre of the story, enabling through this a whole constellation of elements to participate in non-hierarchical relationships. Another movement is the “struggle of possibles versus probables”, to use Stengers’s words.8 And then there is the creation of propositional forces, because, beyond criticism and condemnation, the story must make a proposition. We need to return to the idea of “possible”, which for me and for the students was one of the most complex notions to deal with in practice. With these

three movements, we find a very precise approach to working, yet it is one that is far from following a recipe. Together, these three movements provide a very specific handle to the art of the story, while at the same time remaining very broad and open. Could you come back briefly to the question of the students’ personal projects, because it might seem rather contradictory to invite them both to remain connected to the world and also to work collectively? You yourself are the first to say that we need to bring an end to autonomy in art, or, to put it another way, to put an end to the exceptional status of art, which, among other things, leads to artists turning inwards on themselves. VP:

Yes absolutely. The personal project is something the students can understand very quickly, because that’s the way we are made, but what we want to do is precisely to shake up this idea of the personal project. The idea is not to tell one’s own story, but to narrate the world on the basis of a local experience, from a given position. That’s where the subtle difference lies. And I would like to hear what Katrin and Didier have to say on this subject, because it is connected to this question of the probable and possible. The easiest connotation is to imagine that the role of the artist is to create a possible. Speculative narration commits us to understand the propositional act as something that is always connected to the real and therefore not to create a possible ex-nihilo, but to make a possible manifest that is already contained in the real. FT:

If I go back to the first of the three movements, which in effect gradually emerged as we went along in the course of our experience with the Master’s programme, I think we could say that we have inherited our way of placing ourselves with regards to the question of anthropocentrism from thinkers such as Whitehead, Latour and, in more general terms, from the history and philosophy of science. These are thinkers who lay great emphasis on the importance of beings other than humans. On the KS:

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other hand, seen from a more methodological angle, the anthropology of science has introduced the notion of symmetrical anthropology, which is based on the principle of considering humans and non-humans using the same tools, on one and the same level. For example, Latour wrote a book about Pasteur in which microbes become active agents in the process of knowledge production and so play a true role in history.9 It is a difficult challenge to present to the ERG students this tradition of thought, which caused many shock waves within the academic world. The second movement is closely linked to what Stengers started to develop in her book series Cosmopolitics in the late 1990s, and thus well before the Master’s came into existence. She epitomised her reflections in an article a number of years ago in claiming that the touchstone of speculation is the possible and not the probable. We have tried to work on this proposition inter alia by reading a chapter of Bergson’s The Creative Mind, called “The Possible and the Real”. Here is an excerpt: If we put the possible back into its proper place, evolution becomes something quite different from the realisation of a program: the gates of the future open wide; freedom is offered an unlimited field. The fault of those doctrines, - rare indeed in the history of philosophy, - which have succeeded in leaving room for indetermination and freedom in the world, is to have failed to see what their affirmation implied. When they spoke of indetermination, of freedom, they meant by indetermination a competi-

tion between possibles, by freedom a choice between possibles, - as if possibility was not created by freedom itself! As if any other hypothesis, by affirming an ideal pre-existence of the possible to the real, did not reduce the new to a mere rearrangement of former elements! As if it were not thus to be led sooner or later to regard that rearrangement as calculable and foreseeable! By accepting the premiss of the contrary theory one was letting the enemy in. We must resign ourselves to the inevitable: it is the real which makes itself possible, and not the possible which becomes real.10 In this text Bergson recounts that a journalist came to see him during World War I, when Bergson had just received the Nobel Prize for Literature, to ask how he envisaged the great dramatic work of tomorrow. Bergson answered: “If I knew, I would be writing it.”11 It is from there that his thinking on the possible arises, and also from there that his difficulties emerge as he tries to navigate between a notion of the possible that would precisely be a realisation of something already virtually or latently present in the actual, and a possible that would be purely utopian. He tries to ensure that it is neither the one nor the other. I think this was what made us hesitate a great deal. Of course it is really simple retrospectively, to claim that nothing stood in the way of the creation of something new in an oeuvre that is already there, and that it had thus been possible. It seems to me, however that it is often more interesting to pursue the question: what are the obstacles the realisation of a creative act has made surmountable in the first place, and how did it succeed in doing so? The

8. Stengers, Isabelle. ”Un engagement pour le possible” in: Cosmopolitiques No. 1 (2002), p. 27. 9. Latour, Bruno. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1988. 10. Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind. The Philosophical Library: New York, 1946. p. 122. 11. Ibid., p. 110.

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creation of a piece of art then cannot be reduced to or explained as the simple reorganisation of elements of reality that were already there. Rather, it has to be conceptualised as the realisation of something unforeseeable, non-calculable, an act of realisation that at once makes itself possible. If, however, the possible is characterised by being unpredictable, non-calculable, the opposition implied by Stengers, the opposition between the possible and the probable, starts to become graspable. The probable, then, is that which with respect to the real only lacks one single thing: existence. Apart from that, however, it can be described entirely with the help of those coordinates and within the conceptual framework that also helps us to understand the current and past state of affairs—it is an activity of (probabilistic and statistical) deduction. If Stengers insisted that the touchstone of speculation is the possible, and that means, as we might now say, the successful resistance to the probable, she does so in order to counteract the fatalism that comes with a conception of reality according to which everything is calculable and, consequently, defined unchangeably in advance. The plea for speculation in this sense takes on a political as well as moral necessity today, because in the face of catastrophic climate change and other humanitarian as well as ecological disasters, resigning to fatalism is almost as dramatic as denial—as it goes hand in hand with accepting that all we might hope for is to wait for barbarism to take over or rather to further radicalise. The third movement concerns the question of propositional force, in contrast to the tradition of criticism, which has become classical. From my perspective as a historian and philosopher mainly of medicine, I see the danger of transforming this question into an order to produce propositions and in so doing to lose rigour in our respective practices. It is essential to always ensure that the propositions we make are strongly connected to the given situation that they problematise in new, fruitful ways. In the continuity of pragmatist thinking, what is crucial is that these

three movements taken together should be part of the art of consequences, of attention given to the consequences of propositions made, which must be tested and prove themselves in the stream of concrete experiences. This is why pragmatism, besides Bergson, Deleuze, Stengers, Haraway etc., and particularly the philosophy of James, plays a central role in the theoretical courses given within the Master’s programme. Concerning the question of anthropocentrism, I would like to return to the anthropological project that was, for twentieth-century philosophy, a guarantee of immanence, one could almost say of positioned experience. The legitimacy of the discourse we can have about the world or about the real is concerned with anchoring, and we must let go of this anchor. The limit of this thinking arose because of the arrival of new elements. The very worst thing for thought is to become inadequate, yet a thought has no intrinsic reason to disappear. What really overturned and made inadequate a whole slew of philosophy—although this had to clearly emerge for us to become aware of it—were science studies, thanks to which we began to attribute value to non-human experiences because these experiences became more and more a part of our world. I would call this philosophical paradigm anthropological, since it consists of validating, justifying and legitimising propositions and statements by anchoring them solely in human experience. If there is a shared feature in all the trends of speculative philosophy today (realism, speculative philosophy, etc.), it lies in the rejection of a purely anthropological paradigm. It is not really so much a rejection of human beings as of imbuing mankind with a particular function and of introducing a continuity of all beings, human and nonhuman, in Haraway’s more precise terms, “more than human”.12 Today the question can be phrased as follows: “what does it mean to celebrate, intensify, make possible, and what enables this to happen?” Starting with Whitehead, the philosophers we are interested in who posit that abstraction do not begin with language, intentionality or DD:

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even awareness, but that it is contained within all beings. A reality, however basic, is already potential abstraction. For Whitehead, abstraction is the sense of the alternative, it is the “might have been”, the fact that there is a decision about existence that rejects other legacies, other influences, other elements of the milieu. It is what a being, human or non-human, might have integrated, but does not necessarily integrate: in other words, the choices made, are of importance. That is where the value of beings and their actions resides. This brings me to the second notion, the probable and the possible. The probable is a re-arrangement of the real, which takes the possible as its beacon. The possible arises from what was already there and which is re-arranged, this is what utopias do: take a given situation and amplify its characteristics, for example a human being who has become perfect, or a society which has become perfect. We think of the possible always as an image of the real: you simply change the way it is arranged, change the intensities of its qualities, but these are qualities with which we are familiar. Utopia is nostalgic thinking, because it is attached to the past; it cannot think beyond the past. Put simply, it projects the past and it says “this is the future”, because it has amplified certain of its qualities. This idea of utopia as nostalgia for the past seems to contradict the idea that we put forward earlier of utopia as starting from scratch… KS:

DD: I think we need to distinguish between utopia as it believes it functions, thinking to sweep away the past, and

utopia such as we might describe its almost symptomatic functioning, which in reality is a break with nothing at all. This is an extremely modernist act, because it is the means by which we are moving towards something better, yet this better is already there; it is simply following the logic of the probable which is already going in that direction. To return once again to Whitehead, a historical event is constituted by all the concomitant “might have beens” that are there, either in history or in our actions. He adds a second thing we have explored a little less, perhaps: the contemporary is the collection of events that have no influence upon one another and which can say nothing beyond themselves; that is to say, the future, the meanings of our actions, the meanings of what we do, we do not decide upon these outside of how we have inherited them from previous situations. It is future acts that will give them meaning. Whatever we do, we cannot determine how our acts will be inherited. The possible will emerge in the act that gives rise to it. The problem is that this is very difficult to pose from a methodological viewpoint. We can take the almost ironical example of speculation. The return to speculation that we are seeing today was not possible 40 years ago. It was not possible because all conditions were against it. But once all the operations, the experience, the multiplication of fields (ethology, etc.) have happened, taking us outside an anthropological project, this new reality will be able to be deployed in its past to make itself possible. So people will say: “But look, James already, Bergson, Deleuze already …” But no, that’s the point, the act was necessary for it to make itself possible. Bergson said

12. Haraway, Donna, op. cit.

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that the possible is a mirage of the present in the past; as soon as it appears, it projects onto its past the conditions which make it possible, so that we think that we are in a space of causality, at the risk of losing the act giving rise to the possible. The third movement is along these lines: a proposition is usually made in the form of a statement or judgement, that is to say that it must reflect a reality, or, in the case of a future proposition, arrange another; or again, re-arrange a past situation, as in the case of utopia for example. There too, Whitehead can help us with the idea that we must not leave the theory of propositions to logicians alone, but we should define propositions as “lures for feelings”. This idea gives back all its force to narration since it suggests using the lure as a tool. You do not lure just anything. Luring implies a certain sensitivity to the milieu hosting this or that proposition, that is to say, being aware of all the interests conveyed by this milieu. The proposition is not something that imagines a “real” where there is none; all the “real” is space for proposition, everything is propositional. This is pretty much what Haraway says: Everything is already a story. So the real is not that which exists independently of propositions, it is what exists, already articulated in a thousand propositions. This redress is very important, because the proposition adds to and re-articulates a “real” as soon as it takes place, which will be the support of new propositions. We could say that the possible is the redeployment of the real. This is very important, because it runs counter to the idea of a totally invented world that would come to our rescue. FT:

KS: Here we are going well beyond Bergson, because while he draws our attention to what the possible is not, he does not help us on the question of the practices of luring.

In conclusion, I would like to touch on the question of methodology. With regard to what has just been said, a possible response from our interlocutors would be: “What you say is all well and VP:

good, but where do we go from here?” Methodology is a strong temptation, in view of the discomfort of the experiment. We can agree to experiment, but we will always like to formulate a kind of recipe at some stage. You use the term “inhabit”, Fabrizio, which I find interesting. Could you explain a little more what you mean by that? I think there is a paradox worth underlining here. Repopulating the scene, rendering it collective swirls up our practices and thus radically changes the situation. This change has indeed become very tangible while working with the students over the past years. I think that the paradox resides in the fact that we cannot define what we’re doing, because that is not desirable, but it is not a leap into the unknown for all that. We know what we’re doing, equipped with a whole range of criteria and settings that are the result of a subtle, long drawn-out piece of work, which we are continually attempting to put to the test. The notions of setting and obligation become a provocation to the traditions of the art world, as it is more used to acting first and only looking later. This action is not determined, but it presupposes arrangements for work. At the risk of being somewhat pedagogical, I would still like to add that the term methodology has seen a true semantic shift. From a path we followed, methodology has become the path to follow. All modernity has retained the latter meaning, of a path to be followed. Communicating to someone the experience of a path followed has nothing normative about it.

FT:

KS: The problem today with methodology is that one thinks one can take it, shift it, and apply it elsewhere. Here again, turning to Whitehead is useful thing. Crucially, Whitehead defined speculative philosophy as a method. But for him, a former mathematician, the notion of method was not at all linked to the idea of application. A method is not a ready-made tool-box that might be transferred from one context to the other in order to gain insight and knowledge about some new (pre-existing) field of research. On the contrary, a method, for Whitehead

Valérie Pihet

is more than anything else an act of creativity, a creation. Such a creation (in mathematics), however, is never arbitrary; rather, its creation is only possible with respect to the precise construction of a well-defined situation of constraints. Stengers once added in her reading of Whitehead: “The mathematicianmethodologist is a creator for whom the ‘solution that needs to be constructed’, is what obliges him to his creation.”13

We would like this shift to be instantaneous, but we forget that it is the transformations of milieus that require learning, and much time. We cannot think of what we’re doing in terms of other milieus; each milieu requires us to work it out anew. DD:

Screen grab created by students of the 2014 seminar of Récits et experimentation, narration spéculative (speculative narration) Master’s programme at the École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels.

13. Stengers, Isabelle. Thinking with Whitehead. Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press. p. 27.

PARSE Journal

PARSE announces upcoming conference and changes EXCLUSION: 2nd Biennial PARSE Conference Dates: November 15-17, 2017 Venue: Gothenburg, Sweden Now fully booked. For reserve list: PARSE2017@meetagain.se

Invited speakers will talk within these strands. They include: • Ahmed Ansari, Decolonising Design, researcher, Carnegie Mellon University • Darla Crispin, pianist, Director of Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic Research, Norwegian Academy of Music • Ellie Ga, artist, researcher, Royal Academy of Arts

The 2017 biennial PARSE conference on EXCLUSION tackles very current questions of inequality, neocoloniality and legitimacy as they are expressed and produced through culture and cultures of artistic education.

Stockholm • Hagar Kotef, Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Comparative Politics, SOAS, University of London • Shannon Jackson, Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts and Design, and the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Chair in

The conference takes place over two and a half days in venues in central Gothenburg. Lunch, dinner, tea and coffee are provided for free for all delegates throughout and we encourage people to attend the whole event if possible, to engage with ideas and practices in a discursive environment.

the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley • Nicholas de Genova, scholar of migration, borders, citizenship, race and labor • Marina Grzinic, Institute of Philosophy at the Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts

TIMETABLE

• Ellen Nyman, actor, theatre director, performance artist

Wednesday 15 November

• Valérie Pihet, Co-founder, Dingdingdong

PhD Research Forum on Exclusion and contemporary practices

• Emily Roysden, artist, Professor of Art, Konstfack University

Dinner

of Arts, Craft and Design, Stockholm • Karen Salt, Assistant Professor, School of Cultures,

Thursday 16 November Three strands of research running in parallel throughout the

Languages and Area Studies, University of Nottingham • Craig Wilkins, architect, artist, academic and activist,

day:

Lecturer in Architecture, Taubman College of Architecture

• Exclusion and Education

and Urban Planning University of Michigan

• Exclusion and Decolonisation • Exclusion and Indigeneity

The conference will run 9.30 to 21.00 each day (14.00-21.00

Dinner

15 November) and will include panels, talks, performances and screening programmes.

Friday 17 November Three strands of research running in parallel throughout the day: • Vocabularies of Exclusion • Participation as Exclusion • Geographies of Exclusion Final panel: Exclusion and the Dead Dinner

PARSE FUTURES Following the publication of issue 7 of PARSE journal on Speculation in the autumn of 2017 and our conference on Exclusion (see facing page), PARSE will be changing format. Having published a physical journal and facilitated open access to this via the PARSE website 2015-2017, we now enter a phase in which PARSE will become a digital-first publishing and research platform. We will continue to print papers, books and special journal issues when physical publication is motivated by methodological, aesthetic and distributive logic. However, as we seek to widen and transnationalise our research community, the digital future of the platform will enable a more fluid and ambitious remit. As part of this, and in order to register solidarity with a growing community of publication platforms that are challenging the highly capitalised and homogenised direction of academic publishing, PARSE is currently exploring a number of avenues including multi-site collaborative productions and editorial processes, alternative citation indexing, open peer review formats and commons-based writing approaches. From 2018 onwards, rather than publishing ‘themed’ issues, we will be committing to a series of longer term research ‘arcs’ that reflect interests of our local community as they intersect with global intellectual and practice-based currencies. These will include: • Publishing futures and the politics of citation • Narrating and reformatting the economy • Exclusion – a continued investment • Intersectional engagements in politics and art As part of this we will be seeking collaborators in the form of satellite editorial teams. We will distribute details and launch our new approach in the spring of 2018. We thank our international community of contributors, reviewers and readers so far and look forward to working with you in the near future.

PARSE Journal

University of Gothenburg ISSN 2002-0511