Method Quarterly #1

METHOD QUARTERLY no ONE

Role Critique I. Presentation of the Subject Matter II. Intention, Aporia III. The Function of Commentary IV. Artistic Figuration and Critical Discourse V. Event, Historicity VI. The Question of the Employer Is and Will Remain in its Meaninglessness Banned VII. Artistic Form, Figuration and Critical Discourse VIII. Risk Stumbling so that the Question of the Origin Is and Remains in its Meaninglessness Banned IX. Editorial Aesthetics and Other Stumblings X. Role Critique, Bureaucratic Institutional Critique Editors: Fredrik Ehlin Andjeas Ejiksson Oscar Mangione Layout: Andjeas Ejiksson Contact: Method Quarterly Nya Kontoret Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, 4th floor 114 34 Stockholm Sweden ISSN: 2000-2602

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I. Presentation of the Subject Matter Two documents form the basis for our discussion about the publishing and artistic project Geist: a March 10th, 2009 letter from one of Geist’s editors to Jonatan Habib Engqvist, a curator at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, concerning a project on cultural journals [Moderna Museet, dnr MM 2009-180-204], and the essay “Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, Fourth Floor,” published in Oei, issues 37–38 (2008). These texts were chosen because they can in different ways be seen as representative of Geist’s operations, partly because they appear in contexts outside of the journal that is Geist’s primary home, and partly because these appearances seem to have impelled Geist to answer questions about what Geist is. Otherwise, Geist is a journal that prefers not to answer such questions, a tendency that is apparent in the vague description on their homepage: “Geist uses the journal medium as a form for artistic expression and moves between art and essay writing through stagings and variations on themes and figures. Every issue is published as a free-standing project which means that both the journal’s form and the disposition of its content shift with each staging.”

Before we move on to a deeper discussion we want to give a few points that anchor our argument. We note that Geist attempts to question both established discourses about the public sphere and the conventions that regulate textbased practices. Geist’s ambition consists of the following: 1) To challenge public discourse using concepts of theatricality and a notion of the journal as a stage or theatrical instance, and 2) to establish a critique of mixed forms in which theatrical concepts and the penetrative power of criticism merge, thus bridging the opposition between discourse and artistic practice that regulates the relationship between artist and critic.

This is the practice we will call “role critique.”

II. Intention, Aporia Geist’s program is comprehensive, but its foundational ideas are often provisional and incomplete.

Geist has chosen to see its practice within “a field of gestures and gesturations that overlap and imitate each other in a context that can be thought

of as a stage,” contexts in which the practice must remain indeterminate and has a critical effect by undermining the established limits of the public sphere. It is these undermining activities that will take shape through the way Geist plays roles on the stage of publishing, but it is unclear what “role” means in this context and how it is established. What we can say for sure is that the role—for example, the role of the editor—is related to a critical reflexivity, an intentionality in which the object pole’s meaning stratum is pulled into a figuration which undermines the opposition between object and subject. In other words, the intentionality of the critical figuration finds its origins in the absence of the subject that catches the object by staking out methods and boundaries. In short this is nothing other than a phenomenological reduction that has abolished the reflexive subject’s privilege as the source of meaning-generating activities, and that instead lets the role in diminishing absence appear between subject and object, between and through their respective becomings. But the role does not derive strictly from absence; it is also created within a social, everyday field: Geist is produced in the room at Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, in connection with other rooms and stages, in the break between the invention of order, the order’s temporary stability and the loss of order that it points toward.

Roles and figurations are rooted in the everyday both as capitulation to and invention of the intersection of a sociality whose immense multiplicity of relations seems continually invested in loss and the creation of order. The “break” between the different incarnations of the order here appears to be connected to chance, as if the role existed in a context of pure coincidence.

At the same time, it is in the contact between chance and the social field (or more correctly, between chance and intentionality and the piece of everyday life that ties them together) and in the contact between fact and fiction that Geist seeks to find a space that is both an actual room (for example an office room or a gathering hall) and a stage for a performance. In this space Geist’s critique tries to avoid a simple causality that assumes a well-defined position. This tactic, to escape from causality, bases the performance in aporia—the impossibility of determining the basis, the lack of a necessary direction to follow—and maybe we can say that it is the experience of by chance finding oneself in a certain situation that Geist tries to keep alive as diminishing absence or the event of becoming: the indeterminacy expresses the aporia that serves as an assumption

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but which is never given a distinct form without thus getting lost, since the aporia also includes the possibility that something becomes.

The transition from intentionless beginnings to the characterizing and critical intentions of the various projects remains uninvestigated. Put in a drastic way: Geist’s practice masks an acute confusion—that it consists of a multiplicity of projects that have nothing more in common than a name. For the reader the risk is always that there is not much to relate to other than a withdrawal that multiplies, that creates a complicated and ungraspable fabric of doublings and displacements which add up to nothing more than gestures that point everywhere and nowhere. But in line with the significance of chance to Geist’s practice and remembering that Geist apparently tries to maintain chance in its intentions, we should perhaps understand this complicated web as figuration as much as confusion, or understand confusion not in opposition to the figuration’s intentionality but rather see confusion and figuration as two modi connected in the gestures of the role, that figuration comes out of confusion and confusion out of figuration as two symptomatic forms of each other.

III. The Function of Commentary Method Quarterly is a commenting operation. We approach our topic through demarcations and exclusions. Our work addresses something that has already happened and is mainly about regulating institutions and discourses. Out of a maybe unregulatable discourse multiplicity—for example the issue of how “Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, Fourth Floor” is apparently a montage of many texts or a contradictory multiplicity of events that haphazardly take the shape of a text—we forge a new direction that foregrounds and ends in our commentary. This commentary construes itself as the critical discourse’s fate and goal, as if the commenting text enclosed a continuity that simply remains present and visible through criticism. In this sense it is a procedure that always serves an exclusionary system, a power apparatus.

These self-reflections intersect with Michel Foucault’s critical arguments about commenting practices, a critique he returns to in many of his texts. In Discourse of Language, Foucault emphasizes that the difference between a commented-

upon and commenting text makes it possible to continually generate new discourses, and that it is impossible to erase this difference in one absolute commentary. Such a commentary can only be found in the play of fiction, for example by repeating word-by-word the text that has been commented upon, or by being “a work of criticism talking endlessly about a work that does not exist” and thus transforming oneself into that which is commented upon. The absolute commentary can only come into being based on the premise that every other commentary is projected through one and the same fiction that abolishes the difference that makes it possible. It is thus part of utopian thinking, “a lyrical dream of talk reborn, utterly afresh and innocent”, a thinking that is also the totalitarian idea of the eradication of the Other. Where lack of distinction and the abundance of distinction intersect and the smallest statement shows itself as “a veil concealing an inexhaustible wealth of meaning” that can be “broadcast[ed], rebegun, commented upon indefinitely” the commentary begins to mystify itself. Such a commentary seeks its own end—the permanence in a point where the question of its own existence cannot be articulated.

But before that, the commentary’s only activity is to maintain this existence, “to say finally, what has silently been articulated deep down”, that is, to submit to the paradox that to “say, for the first time, what has already been said, and repeat tirelessly what was, nevertheless, never said.”

In our relationship to the commented-upon text, we reveal that which already existed to be read at the first reading. This is the commentator’s tragedy, the tragedy which, according to Foucault, consists of us adding our critical insights “on the condition that it is the text itself which is uttered and, in some ways, finalised.” Method Quarterly doubts, however, that the commentary is in any way final: stylistic and rhetorical forms will remain as material for another commentary.

What we know is that right now we are adding that which for some reason was missing. We are engaged with a historicity, but that does not mean that we hope to recover a lost origin or reach a definite endpoint. For Foucault, the new is found not in what is said, but in the actual event that it has been repeated. The reader should thus focus not just on that which is said in Method Quarterly but also on the event of the commentary coming into existence. The most important question concerns our actuality—that we write commentary—and we should ask ourselves: what is this “now” or “today” that we belong to.

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Method Quarterly owns its specific rationality.

Our program is clarity and stringency, we arrange the matter and let it return.

IV. Artistic Figuration and Critical Discourse For Geist the opposition between artistic figuration and critical discourse is always embedded in the interaction between artistic, theoretical and publishing practices and institutions. However, the opposition is rarely if ever directly articulated, but is preserved with the support of something that can be called “the typologies of the public sphere and art,” that is to say the more or less explicit rules of inclusion and exclusion that, in either field, determines if something is qualified as one or the other. The opposition in question is distributed on many different points of conflict, politically loaded and not limited to a discursive, analyzable problem. A theoretic critique of this opposition does not seem to be enough for Geist and with its affirmation of the indeterminate aporia they try to couple critical reflection with fiction’s figurations and narratives. We can say that according to Geist the opposition between artistic figurations and critical discourse can be bridged when it is articulated in gestures, that questions concerning these conflicts will get their imagined “answers” as figuration and that the criticism will be actualized in staging.

V. Event, Historicity In order to understand the significance of the opposition between artistic practice and critical discourse we have to pay attention to the fact that those situations with which Geist interacts are crossed by the history of modernity, and that typologies of art and the public realm are connected to that history. Even if role critique functions beyond the stability that modernity and its enlightenment project assumes, the mere fact that Geist is involved with a critical project (that among other things is concerned with the issue of the limits of the public sphere) shows that Geist takes a positive stance toward the issues and problems of modernity. In other words, Geist can hardly argue that the hybridization of public realm and field of art that Geist wants to contribute to has advanced so far that the modern paradigm no longer has any influence,

or that the questions of modernity have somehow become irrelevant or impossible to pose. Oppositions such as the one between artistic figuration and critical discourse are seldom posed directly, although they are problematized as the fields of inquiry multiply, become more complicated and unstable. This does not mean that the questions provoked by this paradigm are lost in a cultural twilight or that they should be underestimated.

(The entire letter to Engqvist is saturated by a feeling that much remains to be done and that the problems provoked by contemporary transformations suggest instead possibilities and challenges rather than impossible difficulties. Perhaps that is precisely what the curator wants to hear.) Rather, Geist believes that the problematics of the enlightenment tradition are best actualized by affirming them in hybridizing and fragmenting ways.

In the letter, Geist refers to art’s break with the enlightenment’s specific form of rationality as one example of how the art field has opened up and made art more ambiguous, something Geist claims to be able to make use of by transferring this ambiguity to the format of the print journal, which can then “be used as a platform or stage for aesthetic and conceptual initiatives and which can then participate as a part or result of an artistic process.” At the same time, Geist views its activities in relation to contemporaneity not as entirely determined by historicity but as a cluster of events through which a bit of contemporaneity is constituted. It is in this meeting between the transcendental historic form and the event—what is sometimes clumsily called empirical data—that one can make note of how the role is used in Geist’s practice.

The everyday constantly challenges the concept and allows the critical approach to lose its hypothetical purity. When we follow Geist to an unnamable space between fact and fiction where “Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, Fourth Floor” takes place (really an extension of intertwining of circumstances of the working process that achieves concrete results in Geist issues 11, 12, 14 and the staging of the investigative authorities through which this issue appears), we also follow them to the highly determinable space that is the journal Oei, issues 37–38, pages 121–124, the lower spread (this issue, which is dedicated to editorial aesthetics, is laid out so that most of the pages are split into two parallel text tracks, so that every page contains two open pages; above Geist’s article there is a passage from Oei editor Jonas (J) Magnusson’s several hundred-pages-long investigation about editorial aesthetics). Likewise we

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follow Geist into an editorial room, situated at the address that coincides with the title of the text.

After short descriptions of the room’s inventories, weather, office environment and atmosphere, Geist’s editors arrive one by one at the writing desk and sit down: “The production of the latest issue has been delayed.”

This is Geist’s editorial room—presented as a theater stage figurated in text, ensnared in the delayed production of the journal issue in which the editorial staff has become part of the investigative authority GOU: By organizing a working group for the purpose of investigating the implications and position of method in artistic practice and by approaching various problematics, the editorial staff is now taking on this form. The inquiry, which is not yet completed, investigates how methodologies arise, are developed and used in artistic practices. The working group will soon present its findings to serve as the foundation for future decisions or further investigations.

To what extent fiction represents reality is hard to determine and demands another kind of commentary than this one. Nevertheless, as a partial answer we can say that Method Quarterly is one of the results of this inquiry; that is to say, Method Quarterly is an efflux of the desire for further investigations. Here we will focus on what ways and with whom the editorial institutions are installed and employed. “Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, Fourth Floor” gives a very specific answer with the following maxim: “The question of the employer is and will remain in its meaninglessness banned.”

VI. The Question of the Employer Is and Will Remain in its Meaninglessness Banned If Geist could ever be accused of political naiveté, poor satire, or fruitless nihilism that uses selfirony like make-up, it would be in this maxim.

When the organization posits a confidential relationship at the heart of its operations it uses a very different motivation: although the question of the employer is and remains meaningless, it is easy to understand that the employer is precisely Geist. It would thus be meaningless to ask for Geist, just as it would be meaningless to ask if Geist is the launching pad and test site for the investigative practice of GOU. In the name of this meaninglessness, in the name of Geist, all

statements would then fall back on an inscrutable smile: “We mean nothing special, our words, thoughts and actions only want to pass time, get it to continue passing, feed ourselves with the imminent and noble state of delay and postponement. Thereby we maintain our power by leaving every origin empty and at a spiritual pace circulate around it.” In such a reading, the address “Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, Fourth Floor” would be the imaginary place where a onedimensional and compounded power is at home and the interpretations made by GOU would not be more than a way to pass time, a power fantasy that trivializes everything except Geist.

The maxim would thus signify a forced forgetfulness of contexts aimed at maintaining a hidden unity in the project Geist. But that would be a reductive reading, a tin-eared commentary, which could not hear what “employer” wants to mean.

It is already apparent that social contexts and its contingencies have a large significance for Geist’s project, as chance and the social are intertwined with each other in the events that make up the project’s inception. To disregard context and trivialize relations to the other is also not in line with the interest in the typological configurations that characterize social and artistic fields. The maxim’s formulation may still appear crude, not because Geist would like to neglect its context but because “employer” demands to personify something that cannot be personified, something that the word “origin” catches. If we exchange “employer” for “origin” we get: the question of the origin is and will remain in its meaninglessness banned.

Because a meaninglessness cannot forbid anything, it has to be something else, something that time after time insists that the question about the origin is meaningless. And maybe we just named it—the beginning of the Geist project as a breaking through chaosmos, a cloud of chance within which Geist, from the pressure of observation, seems to suddenly find itself existing somewhere, a situation whose difficulties must be warded off and whose potential must be seized in flight. It is this situation or event that forbids. Because the meaninglessness of the origin reflects the imminence of the situation, that which the maxim expresses is closer to an ethos than a ban. That Geist does not spell out the interpretation we have excavated and that the word choice emphasizes “employer” and “banned”, must be understood in relation to the fiction and reality with which the “ban” is announced in “Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, Fourth Floor”; that is to say, in relation to the bureaucracy which Geist assumes by playing an

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authority which de facto investigates the relationship between artistic practice and methodology.

We gradually return to this performance of authority and conclude that we have now given a kind of answer to the question of what bans the question of origins: that origin is driven only by chance, that the beginning of every event implies a becoming which develops in a socially contingent context, a contingency we believe Geist experiences as “the absence of all absolute sources for the meaning of the social,” borrowing a phrase from Rosalyn Deutsche. For Deutsche this phrase signifies a “democratic public space” which is— as we have already noted—also what, to a large extent, the phrase means to Geist: to be a public operation and an artistic practice that “renews the public’s dialogic forms and re-tests its boundaries, something which ultimately seems to mean to constantly un-define the dialogues’ boundaries and to establish a productive insecurity in the question of how these will be determined.” The origin is foreclosed, the continuation is diversified and distributed with the motility and speeds of contemporaneity. It appears to be in order to approach this situation that Geist’s critical practice cannot be satisfied with generating abstract forms that sets limits on the possible, but instead allows criticism to form in the gestures of figuration.

VII. Artistic Form, Figuration and Critical Discourse Following this charitable reading we can develop the question about contemporaneity as a double belonging: on one hand with modernity’s discourse, and on the other with its hybridizing practices that break down its paradigmatic formation. As a result of this double belonging, Geist cannot free itself from the question of historicity, but all the same “the event” is privileged, that which we associated with the stumble out of chaos, this non-teleological pointing everywhere and nowhere which has no other direction than what is part of regaining one’s balance. As we have seen, the event is intimately linked to the question of one’s own actualities and, as we suggested in the introduction, we should perhaps take note of the directionless pointing as a possibility for Geist and not as a problem. In such a case we can also ask if Geist is not too invested in the conflicts that form the patterns of tradition and which—upon close examination of the actual situation where the Geist project is established—

appear to be the petrified remains of a lost era. Is not this interest in typologies, in the emblematic phrases that culture and the politics of the public sphere use to differentiate one from the other, an increasingly distant horizon and an almost fossilized life, something which should not to a very large extent interest those who in the name of contemporaneity believe that the attempt to recall the silence of the origin is irrelevant?

Concerning the conflict between the discursive and artistic practices, we can note that within the field of contemporary art it is all but clear-cut. To begin with, there are far more sophisticated forms of art criticism than those that professes their own and the art work’s autonomy and considers the opposition (or rather antithesis) between art and criticism as an exchange between the artists who through their mute works show truth and the critics who through their judgments about the work break the silence and tell the truth.

Secondly, there is a well-established tradition of journal art, text experiment and other practices, more or less related to conceptual art, which bring discursive and textual forms into the artistic field. Thirdly, there is a comprehensive narrative discourse included in most artworks. Here we should also remember that the journal and other text-based media, like letters and leaflets, were the most important channel for creating and communicating ideas generated by both the modernist avant-garde and American minimalism. In other words, it is doubtful that there has been such a conflict between art and discourse for others than those who—in the name of tradition—have wanted to defend a privileged and non-discursive position. In reference to this contemporary situation it would be simple for Geist to conclude that the conflict between artistic and discursive practices is exaggerated. In addition, they could claim that the most progressive form of criticism can be found in the practices in which the forms of criticism and art interact freely: context-specific interventions in the institutional worlds of art, politics, judicial systems, media and corporations.

That is precisely what Geist does argue—that the most progressive contemporary criticism is articulated in the shape of artistic figurations. But at the same time, Geist cannot exclude a more theoretical stance, in which discourse analysis and theoretical statements are prescribed by the process that leads to figuration. The letter to Engqvist (which we have to read for what it is, an attempt to dialogically communicate and thus maybe say too much or say it too simply) at times makes it sound like most of what we have said

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about Geist so far is wrong, that Geist does not follow any kind of escapist strategies but is almost possessed by the desire to explain itself. More than anything, it sounds as if Geist is primarily a theoretical practice. Perhaps the reason for this is that in the letter, although the addressee is a curator at a museum, Geist expresses itself in relation to the practitioners of the publishing field. In comparison to artistic practitioners, publishing practitioners stand much closer to a relatively intact difference between critical discourse and artistic practice. The interaction between publishing and artistic contexts seems, in either case, to generate a schizoid implication at the heart of Geist, this split becoming most apparent when Geist observes itself through publishing contexts.

Geist articulates itself on two planes, and the difference between them appears to reproduce the difference between, on one side, the critical and descriptive practice that relates in a problematizing and analytical way to the material, and, on the other, to an artistic practice whose desire for criticism is primarily manifested as more or less ephemeral gestures that question and change the signification relations and open alternative perspectives within established discourses and institutions. At least that’s the way it would be if art remained theory’s Other, the way it has been discursivity’s Other—perhaps not mute and merely sensory, but an underprivileged or at least incomplete speech whose critical potential always must wait for theory to fill in, explain and actualize it. We would then have a theoretical practice which would use the power of knowledge to set up boundaries and explain the order of things, and which would have the publishing discourse as its forum where certain determinations and explanations would be given dialogic form and enter into a conversation. But we would also have artistic practices with critical potential only appearing as a semiotically loaded surface on which the sign’s arbitrariness shows that their interest in dialogue and, in the long run, “enlightening didactics” is minimal or just a misguided hope.

VIII. Risk Stumbling so that the Question of the Origin Is and Remains in its Meaninglessness Banned If this difference between artistic and critical practice exists, burdened by numerous clichés

and simplifications, and if it is a difference that Geist reproduces, it is also what Geist’s “role critique” tries to disarm by exploiting displacement between artistic figuration and discursive practices. We have not yet said much about this criticism, and in order to do so more directly we will return to a term that we tend to repeat—“the stumbling”—and claim that the precondition for Geist being able to create a gestural practice that is also profoundly critical, is that they take the risk of stumbling when they assume their roles and stagings. Furthermore, the intentionalities involved in staging can only be critical if they contain a risk of stumbling that is generated in figuration. Yes, the maxim that we found in “Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, Fourth Floor” should perhaps be rephrased: “Risk stumbling so that the question of the origin is and remains in its meaninglessness banned.”

This does not, however, give a satisfactory answer to what “the risk of stumbling” means. There are in addition several different stumblings to keep track of. To begin with, we must ask in what way Geist actually risks stumbling if the stumbling is a stumbling which takes place by chance in a certain context. The kind of stumbling that happens accidentally and still cannot serve as the indeterminate of a calculation or a stylistic is on the whole incompatible with intentionality. The question is in other words how one can risk being included in an event whose only foundation is the absence of every possible system and figuration, causality and intentionality? Geist’s answer can be said to be: by expecting that this event of becoming will always break through and show itself as something chance-based and that therefore it cannot be controlled with the systematics of analysis or through the narrative of figuration; the only thing possible to do is to redirect the effects of the imbalance, to try once again to regain one’s footing and at the same time maintain the possibility that this non-predictable event may happen again. To “risk stumbling” would thus be an equilibristics shaped under the pressure of constant risk of stumbling.

IX. Editorial Aesthetics and Other Stumblings At the same time as we say this we have to realize that it is hard to make the distinction between a genuine and a not-quite-so-genuine stumbling. Certain passages of “Birger Jarlsgatan 18A,

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Fourth Floor” have the gleam of mockery and are reminiscent of farce or satire, for example when Geist positions GOU in an office environment (even though they claim to want to do the opposite) and exploits stereotypes about bureaucracy and puts ridiculous hats on the investigative heads by associating GOU with the Chinese Empire’s clerks, and calling the investigative work Chinoiserie. These mockeries could also be called stumblings, but if that is the case they are highly staged, a kind of stumbling art that at its height thematizes the event of becoming as an accidental stumbling. The only risk involved in such a stumbling seems to be the risk of being ridiculed by the reader.

The stumbling we are after must be found elsewhere, certainly in the proximity of these mild provocations, but at a level where intentionality interacts with non-intentionality, a level which will at first have to be discussed as style. As we have already pointed out, “Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, Fourth Floor” is in an obvious way an unsutured montage of texts, a quilt with many halfsewn seams. The essay limps noticeably, but the limping is not Beckettian and does not suggest a future breakdown with a thought-out finale of stuttering disconnected phases. It seems instead to be the result of a too-strong compression, an attempt to get different discussions, different topics, tonal ranges and humor to interact without investing the space for pliant or easeful interaction. Between reasonably objective discussions and a nearly surrealistic image is the balancing act of a body that is trying to regain footing in the midst of a fall: The editor’s role, like all roles, is in constant deviation in relationship to the positions where it would be completely determinable as identity, and the text written out of the role’s position tries instead to make the editorial accessible as experiences of multiplicities of singularity. The editor must position him or herself—as role—in the communal and discover that all cracks that run through its surface are interconnected with the sun, and also that the sun is torn through: that sun is suns, solar systems, constellations. The editorial aesthetic, the ideas and expressions that are used and sought out in practice, already entails a regime that widens the imaginary’s standing within the practice, which rather produces further symptoms than cures and improvements and that transforms its discoveries into provisional methods.

To the logician it may sound like a series of slippages, to others like a stylistic failure. That is what it is: a somewhat delayed beat, a number of unexplained concepts that are linked by a

rhetoric which at first reading appears to aim at avoid giving the editor and the editorial aesthetic a distinct meaning. It is such a reading that we have maintained when we have stated that Geist’s practice—at least “Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, Fourth Floor”—avoids answering the question of what Geist is, the kind of answer that the phrase “editorial aesthetic” could be imagined to provide.

The editorial aesthetic is of course a concept that could be eternally complicated by multiplying the discourse with other discourses. Whether that happens or not, we can say that the simplest definition of the editorial aesthetic is something like “the shape of an editorial sensibility,” or simpler still, “shape of an editorial vision.” It could be precisely that kind of discussion of an editorial vision that Geist does not want to apply to its practice and which causes them to childishly but playfully escape into an ungovernable tangle of arguments, to stumble, to fall forward and scrape their knees. If we listen carefully enough we will be able to make out the crying. But maybe it is the kind of stumbling that postpones the discourse’s expectations of itself that Geist has to risk?

If Geist believes that it is problematic to begin with a theoretical discussion that reveals the editorial, that may be because Geist cannot see how the forms of the editorial sensibility could be collected in one unified constellation of formal devices, that is to say in what way such a theory would reflect the editorial work’s process and perspective. If we maintain our reading that Geist by chance stumbles into the world, finds and erects stages in an attempt to recapture their balance and at the same time—by maintaining an openness, to the risk of once again stumbling and to the possibility of getting involved in unexpected turns within the continuity that the figuration’s narrative prepares—preserve and extend something of the instability that characterizes the stumbling of becoming, yes, then perhaps we can actually understand this objection.

This could be one meaning of making “the editorial accessible as experiences of multiplicities of singularity”; the editorial aesthetic can at best be seen as a performance of actions in relation to a situation and the problems that it offers. The editorial would thus not first and foremost be an instance that has autonomy in relationship to the fields with which the editorial staff interacts, but a collection partly of singular experiences that are generated from the fact that Geist happens to be just there, partly of the actions and figurational tactics that Geist’s interpretation of these experi-

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ences gives rise to. Rather than a view of itself and others, Geist wants to prioritize its practice in terms of existence, event and action. To come into existence with a stumbling means to be born with problems and born as problem. The stumbling means problems, it is a problem and those who stumble stumble over problems. It is with this primarily existential problematic that Geist’s artistic and publishing practice tries to work. The question is only wether it needs to be carried out so clumsily as in the quoted passage above.

Or: Is it really so clumsy? We have already pointed out that the claim “the editorial [becomes] accessible as experiences of multiplicities of singularity” has an intricate meaning. And if we also add the commentator’s necessary sense of paradox there is even more to extract. For example, if “the editorial”, in line with the theater metaphors Geist applies to its practice, always creates a scene for a staging in which different experiences of the stumbling of becoming are given a figural direction, this implies that the editor exposes him or herself “as a role.” This “as” expresses the instability and ambiguity Geist strives for, something which becomes most clear when “as” is transformed into the possessive phrase “the editor’s role” in the very beginning of the quote above: to be an editor is to play “the editor’s role,” but it is also to be an editor who can take on other roles.

We have to keep in mind that this ambiguity concerns all specifications when we read that “for the editor it is essential to position him or herself—as role—in the communal” and we must realize that even if this “to position him or herself ” also means “to find him or herself,” Geist do not find themselves where they position themselves and they do not position themselves where they find themselves. Once again the aporia shines forth—here as the impossibility of positioning and finding one’s identity in relation to common ground—and it is with this experience that there can be play and that we can recognize the stumbling, its problem, attitude and the maxim it conveys.

But what in language does Geist exploit when they confess the role’s instance as a necessary position for its figurations? It is allegory, that of all narrative functions which to the largest extent can maintain the instability of a project by letting a sign get written in as just a sign, that is to say, as representative of something else. Perhaps we can thus also understand the link between Geist’s style and the theater metaphors of its practice, that is, as a relationship analogous to the intimate

connection between allegory and theater: that both the theatrical expression and the stage—the play site for a theater piece—relate to themselves through an allegorical relationship to that which they portray. The stage can therefore never ever be made equivalent with a natural place. Translated to the journal, this would mean that Geist and its material existence as a complication of paper and writing, edited and designed writing, exists outside as much as inside that which the category journal usually includes, that is to say, that which the category journal tries to hold as something self-evident.

Here we must slow down: “the journal” as an irreducible becoming beyond every material limit would perhaps be very desirable for Geist, but in the same moment we see this desire we cannot ignore that this is hardly the case. Geist’s practice is displayed as a journal, its material existence, just as the name Geist, makes up that which Geist can position itself toward, that which Geist is.

This materiality and this name is something that continues no matter how much Geist changes its form, varies its expressions and themes, publishes unaffiliated writers or artists, or no matter how it intensifies the merger with the sociality of which Geist is already part.

X. Role Critique, Bureaucratic Institutional Critique Such ambivalence concerning materiality shows up in another way as well, when the role is allowed embodiment, agency and critical reflexivity.

This suggests real problems, in any case, if we understand it literally, as if the role in itself were a living entity with characteristics and not merely a possible position through which allegorical relations can be expressed in figuration. If the role is a life then it has the characteristics of signs, a living sign, a mysterious incarnation on the journal’s pages that could, for example, go out on wanderings and trade places with other living signs. Then we would actually be able to reject Geist as too naive.

Geist tends to recognize a living existence within theatrical processes. This is expressed in, among other ways, their references to the Russian theater theoretician Nikolai Evreinov and his idea of merging theater and life, making the theatrical into a kind of instinct of becoming (the “will to be something else”). This reference to the person

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of the historical avant-garde who perhaps more than any other tried to realize the utopian dream of uniting art and life is no coincidence. However, Geist does not portray Evreinov’s practice as an ideal, but rather sympathizes with the way that the problematics that Evreinov’s struggled with are articulated as affirmation rather than negation—the problematic that exists in the relationship between the theatrical play and everyday life’s social play, or, in a wider sense, between theatricality and governmentality, between theatricality’s “make-believe” and “as play” and the reigning rational modus as it is expressed through political and judicial institutions.

It is in any case in this political direction that Geist leads the discussion about the theatrical when they invoke Evreinov. We note that Geist’s relationship to the public sphere, their interest in hybridizing processes and their claim to undefine certain boundaries (such as those typologically determined in relationship to a political hegemony), do not take into account the difficult manoeuvre of the interaction between theatricality and social life, treating it as something conclusive that one cannot position oneself outside of, through rationality or by cutting away the theatrical through other means. In other words, while Evreinov wanted to create the merger between art and life, Geist tries to intensify the same relationship as a tense binary in which contemporaneity is reflected.

Geist tries to maintain something of the avantgardistic impulse, something that becomes even more apparent in Geist’s somewhat unique institutional critique. To begin with, the critique does not refer to the autonomy of the creative act in relationship to the institutional and is therefore not a romantically tinged institutional critique.

Secondly, it does not refer to a rationality whose science would position it outside the ideological and economic forms that it sees as having saturated the institutional. As we already know, Geist instead on one hand constructs their own bureaucratic institution (GOU) in between the actual investigative practice and its results, and stage this institution on the editorial stage where it appears in an allegorical relation to clichés about the institutional.

Geist carries out its institutional critique through an institutionl double, as it partially works toward forming itself and telling its own story, and partially is subjugated to a working procedure of investigative and hardly controversial art that on the whole strives to carry out a mapping of

the relationships between artistic practice and methodology. To this in-between space we must add another, the relationship between chance and intentionality braided together in the social field.

We would argue that Geist seems to think of the role, or rather the role’s position, as the chiasm between these two relationships. Their idea of the chiasm is as a virtual instance through which the text works, thus generating meaning, and which is maintained by these two relationships: chance and intentionality, factual room and fictive room.

The role appears as an allegorical sign and thus as a disjunctive and indeterminate signification, once again raising the question of how this role’s position can be critical. In the Kantian sense, the position is definitely not critical; we made that clear already in the beginning of this essay when we found the role’s position to be aporetic, oscillating between subject and object. Nor does Geist ever claim to define critical boundaries. Rather, the critical claims have the effect of un-defining boundaries—to generate allegorical gesturation that can destabilize definitions.

Considering how writing and its medium are so different from theater’s event and its medium, it remains difficult for Geist to explain how the journal Geist could be theater. However, we can note that Geist, like the theater, tries to maintain a transformability with which one can assume the other’s position; at the same time as the production of meaning and the role’s appearance do not just take place through the actors’ actions and in the public’s mind but also in between these, as if there were a third position for the role that signified the breaking through of the theatrical event. Writing out of the position of the role should therefore mean writing out of the role’s positions, in the direction of the reader but also in the direction of that which is writing’s gestures, writing’s essential tropes and such forms that they imprint on the specific situation and textual narrative. But it should also mean to write in “the direction of ” the event of writing, that is to say, in “the direction” where the stumbling’s power is maintained, where the text can break through as an unexpected gesture.

In addition, if we maintain our analysis that the role’s position breaks through in the virtual chiasm between chance and intentionality, between an actual and a fictive room, then we can say that we find the reader, the gestures of writing and the event of writing as the risk of stumbling only to the extent that we can maintain regard for all four poles (just as we must realize

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that this is something that ultimately Geist can do little to control). The gesture plays with the difference between that which we, for lack of a better term, call the factual and the fictive—it is always heading somewhere else. The event of writing breaks through as an attempt to, out of the stumbling, through the figuration, regain balance and at the same time maintain the risk of stumbling. And the reader? The reader is only related to these events to the extent to which he or she shares the possibilities of the role.

This chiasm and this resorting to the sign’s arbitrariness means that we can accuse Geist of wanting to take a minimally epistemological responsibility. That is to say, Geist reasons as if the fictive and the factual room were separable, but, at the same time, they disregard how this difference is possible. Obviously it would be easier to imagine that the role’s constitution only belongs to fictional intentionality and thus save the actual rationality and the reality that fiction and theater, according to science, lose in their games.

But Geist insists on not posing such questions, at least not toward themselves. And perhaps we have here seen—however much we would prefer not to, considering that Method Quarterly is dedicated to methodological and epistemological issues—how such questions can never be fully justified for Geist, not the least because to do so would be to throw oneself into the question of origins which is and remains impossible as long as Geist maintain its maxim, its reflection of the relationship to contemporaneity, to its own actuality and to the baselessness of social life. Perhaps we can add that Geist possibly sees no need to rescue the factual as they believe that social life and its institutions are created in theatrical, rhetorical and mythologizing processes, as if Geist is dealing with a gestural public, not a public that can be derived from the truth of law.

Let us suppose that this is the case and let us repeat that the role’s position can be recovered in the intersection of two tension-relationships, the link between chance and intentionality and the link between fact and fiction—which in themselves supply paradoxes—and that the role’s position there works as allegory. This allegorizing function is critical by un-defining boundaries, that is to say, by carrying them back to the play of forces that they were created in order to restrain.

In other words, the allegory catches something that already contains its indeterminacy, and Geist seems to think they use the indeterminacies of the publishing and artistic fields as a way, from within the institutional, to transform institutions

and at the same time show how these institutions in themselves already comprise a play.

That is why for Geist the conflict between freedom and determination is not expressed in the binary between non-institution and institution, but belongs to the institutional as represented both in factual procedures and in fiction. It is also there that the potential freedom of action must be sought. With GOU, Geist has chosen to carry out this search as a bureaucratic institution, and that choice is not arbitrary. It is after all easy to understand the bureaucratic as a relay between the political power and the law on one side and the social life and its theatricality on the other.

Bureaucracy can in other words be seen as the mediating instance between law and the social; it assumes citizens’ whims and playfulness, distributes the order of law and power, makes sure that it is followed and serves and supplements power and law with investigations into the citizens’ (and non-citizens’) disordered lives. This politics distributes power via different organized relationships and bureaucratic institutions, for example by supplying representative and legislative organizations—the sovereign of democracy—with executive power. Time after time the social field, which politics is supposed to rule, shows itself to be impossible to rule or, more correctly, impossible to completely rule. For example, the representative democracy must completely believe in the truth of representation’s formal relation; it must maintain the belief that its functions are even in practice ideal. Only in this way can it maintain the fundamental idea about the impossible justice and the impossible sovereign that it wants to be. Or as Geist writes: “The sovereign is the one who can institutionalize any anomalies and at the same time keep the ideological form constant as the frame of its own self-portrait.”

This means roughly that power establishes an ideological form and a number of typologies and evaluative forms for the normal that function as the mirror in which the sovereign views its own reflection; perhaps to adjust to new conditions and its own exceeding the ideological norms, the sovereign power must gradually transform the anomaly to the norm and thus prepare the institutional space for anomalies in the shape of norms. It is here that the bureaucratic institution GOU makes its entrance—born in a stumbling out of chance on the public stage, an institution that is a role and that like all roles “is in constant deviation from the positions where it would be completely determinable as identity.”

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It may be worth noting that the institution as anomaly does not signify an outsider position, but that it is looking for something much more common: that something is generated by chance and due to its freedom is understood and classified as deviant or a mistake. If Geist in any way mythologizes anything, it is the initial confusion and misrecognition that the entrance out of chance implies. As we have seen, Geist try to affirm this confusion by getting involved in a project, in this case GOU. When they do this, they take note not only of the sovereign’s impossibility but also that the politics that replaces the sovereign— that which power becomes because it is unable to become itself—is the constellations of power that proliferates through the dethroned sovereign politics we have just described. To this Geist adds that this distribution of power creates spaces for exceptions where the bureaucratic institutions (with or without a sovereign) erect hierarchies that “regulate to what extent anomalies can be brought into the system.”

Of course these statements are about Geist as GOU, but they are also statements about Geist’s fantasies about their own interaction with the political. The narrative which, in a more developed form than presented in “Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, Fourth Floor,” says roughly that Geist’s editorial room, on the basis of also being GOU’s editorial room, is a room outside of the order of power, a room that has been set up by an already established institution (this banned employer) whose job it is to reign in and neutralize anomalous phenomena and the conflicts that they generate in relation to the reigning order of hierarchy and its norms. This narrative reads roughly like this: GOU comes into existence through a stumbling, Geist finds the stumbling strange (“an institution that wants to investigate the relationship between artistic practice and methodology, why and how?”) but still sets up a room for this exception and negotiates a construction for it in relation to existing norms. We could say that Geist neutralizes GOU in relation to its hierarchy of knowledge and power by giving GOU a special function within it. However, GOU in this way becomes an institution and is given power, though it uses this power in ways its employer perhaps did not expect.

This narrative about the becoming of GOU is one of many possible narratives, naturally, but it illustrates very clearly how we think Geist views its critical capacity—to be trapped as an exception in an established hierarchy but to transform or let oneself be transformed into an institution

with power to establish exceptions with the help of the role’s allegorical games. This hardly means some kind of full-blown revolution against the power hierarchy, nor some kind of paradigm shift, but despite everything it means access to a transformative capacity—if you will, a minimal freedom. However, there is nothing to prevent the constant threat that the sovereign, or images of the sovereign, will install its totalitarian programs in Geist and GOU space. Meanwhile, Geist works on, plays the “Chinese bureaucracy” that is always subordinated to the urgency of making a decision but is constantly dragged into changing goals and a kind of fluid, instable time.

And maybe it is to these delays, combined with the projects’ urgent decisions, that we must trace the power of allegory: it delays by bringing up something else—a sense of time that in opposition to the common idea of bureaucracy and institution is the imaginary’s fluid time.

We would thus recover Geist’s notion about agency and criticism as balanced precisely where almost all artistic practices are rooted, in the imaginary, where the imagination is privileged.

We remember Geist’s belief that their editorial aesthetic means “a regime that widens the imaginary’s standing within a practice, which rather produces further symptoms than cures and improvements and that transforms its discoveries into provisional method,” which is as far as Geist wants to go in defining its editorial aesthetic. It is certainly possible to understand this as yet another evasion—a regressive, almost hypochondriac evasion (as if we stood in front of someone sick, who has tasted the nectar and the violence of the diagnosis, and who in guilty pleasure continues to come up with new symptoms for his or her “disease”), but that would go against something that Geist holds true: the fundamentality of the imagination as a critical practice.

With this symptom production we can actually differentiate between two types of critical practices: on the one hand a practice which believes itself to occupy an all-powerful normativity with the help of which it rounds up anomalies; on the other hand a practice which because it finds itself as an anomaly in the situation it has stumbled into, generates new symptoms with the help of the imagination—not its own symptoms but the symptoms of itself in relation to the normative power that has defined it precisely as anomaly or pushed it aside as irrelevant. The aim of Geist’s critique would in that case be to provoke the deviancy to speak, the divergence that is visible between the role and that which it allegorically

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imitates. The power of imagination (and we should add: complemented by knowledge about the conditions with which it grapples) is thus the regime that can modify the forms of law and power that Geist meets in its contemporaneity.

A regime in a collection of regimes, an institution among institutions that assumes power through intensifying the imaginary of the political.

Do we dare to ask if we find the imaginary of the political at Birger Jarlsgatan 18 A, 4th floor?

Text: Fredrik Ehlin, Andjeas Ejiksson, Oscar Mangione Translation: Johannes Gรถransson & Joyelle McSweeney