Interlude: Criticism, Vulnerability and Care

As these will be the last days of this writing platform, and potentially my last work as a critic, I will allow myself a brief interlude of self-analysis.

I find that criticism is, far from the way it’s often perceived, a position of extreme vulnerability. There is little respect or understanding for the work, a proliferation of poor critical writing, and critical thought in general is fading from the public sphere and media - replaced with commodified clickbait and easy answers based entirely in positivism and rejection of dialectics. “They don’t read what I write: they buy what I write”, as a friend said to me recently. It’s a commonly rolled-out  narrative now: far from building communities that are capable of self-reflection, we are increasingly constructing ones which follow pre-held beliefs and biases, making it difficult for anyone who sees critical thought as an integral part of community-building, and making open conflict between ideologies inevitable. Opinion is the new criticism.

Faki Day 2 - Blackism (GER) and Sifiso Seleme (RSA)

I'm just going to be honest: having arrived at midnight and madly scrambled to finish of my remaining deadlines, Day 2 of Faki (my first day) was one where I chased my own tail and tried desperately to make up for lost time. Such is the nature of this year's festival - normally precarious, this year it's built around a set of circumstances of eviction and withdrawal that are not necessarily conducive to art - which sometimes functions better in conditions which are less improvised.

Inevitably, the art and artists shone through anyway, and if there's any pressure, it didn't show in the performances. The day began with Blackism Collective's Back To, partly coming out of a residency at the festival, moved on to Sifiso Seleme's Extra Ordinary, and finished with a forum, led (a bit shoddily) by myself, regarding the responses to the call out from the festival. More on the latter later.

Back to

New Berlin-based collective Blackism –consisting of performance artist Nasheeka Nedsreal and actress Adrian Blount and dedicated to ‘decolonizing our entirety and centering blackness’ - bring us Back To, the result of development at Faki festival, following months of research.

The performance sees the duo slide through various ‘modes’, proceeding through some key texts regarding black identity. Poet Langston Hughes’ Notes on a Commercial Theatre appears, as does rapper Wale’s Black is Beautiful and sections from playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs, as well as intersectional feminist and social activist bell hooks. Two white masks are employed by the performers, probably a representation of the white identity forced upon people of colour. This is reinforced with a clever reversal of the household phrase “do unto others as you would unto yourself”, spoken like a prayer by Blount behind the white mask, before its sudden removal and twisting of the phrase into an accusation on the repetition. It points at a particular truth – that, in the reality of race politics, 'do unto other' means something quite other to its literal interpretation.

The choice of dance shows a fascination with various styles – from schoolyard ‘clap games’ to ballet. Moving through the transitions leads the performers into fairly impossible singing positions, although I’m sure people in opera would be squirming in their seats. They carry it off incredibly, and I don’t think I’ve seen a note maintained quite so well while the torso is twisted at 90˚.

Blackness, and Faki Festival 2017, 23-27 May

***This writing platform is temporarily revived over the next week, for Faki Festival 2017***

In closing this writing platform last year, I partly acknowledged that my voice - and as this is largely a personal project, it is my voice - is not the best one to do the work that needs to be done. That situation has not changed, and poring over South African black rights activist Steve Biko's writings, part of this year's festival theme of 'Blackness', only reinforces this sense of doubt that my own position is of any value to public discourse at the moment. This quote, for example: "Nowhere is the arrogance of the liberal ideology demonstrated so well as in their insistence that the problems of the country can only be solved by a bilateral approach between black and white" affronts me with the impossibility of my own position -  in this case, invited to moderate discussion and interviews at Faki Festival 2017.

To put it in plain terms: Just how, following what I view as two major race-hate events in the United Kingdom and United States in 2016, am I able to lead discussion regarding a topic such as Blackness with any legitimacy? What possible answers can I discover? Is there even any productive position to find?

But let me (and I will let myself) get up off the floor, and attempt.

Statue of Steve Biko outside East London's City Hall, South Africa (Creative Commons)

Ironically, the controversy surrounding Faki Festival this year can be seen as a microcosm of where the world is at in terms of its economic and cultural pressures. Besieged by dramas, including the threatened closure by Zagreb City Council for not having 2 fire exits in every room (a specification almost none of the official buildings in Zagreb adhere to) and reeling under the departure of its long-term curator Irena Curik who planned much of the festival, not to mention tackling a difficult theme head-on in a country not known for its racial tolerance, it is clear that, whatever happens, Faki 2017 is going to take precarity to a whole new level.

The new wall is up: retirement, and thank-you

There was an attack on the marketplace in Charlottenburg, Berlin - I was not there, I extend my sympathy to the victims.

My primary critical guide, Australian critic Alison Croggon, used to periodically give kind of 'critical updates' where she would review her own critical position. To be honest, I always found reading these cringe-worthy as they seemed to be self-indulgent, somehow hopelessly ceding impartiality for the sake of communicating something that looked a lot like navel-gazing. Closer consideration revealed its true function: such updates make clear the criteria a critic is basing their responses upon, involves readers in a discussion of the principles of criticism - and their role in shaping that position. This promotes critical thought as an activity, and acknowledges and its key role in culture, and life. So I will attempt to follow suit here.

There are distinct differences between Croggon's project and my own - she has/had a fixed location, for example, writing for an audience that is relatively stable, and has comparatively fixed cultural assumptions from, I argue, a defined readership. In this project I frequently write from different locations and across audiences, locations, and artists with wildly diverse cultural histories and political contexts. This makes building any kind of stable readership almost impossible, and offers me a naturally different set of objectives. Further to this is the multidisciplinary nature of the writing - following a family tragedy which saw me spend the first half of the year in Australia, most of my 2016 seems to be occupied with presenting papers at conferences, or running workshops. I have barely had a chance to see any theatre in Berlin, nominally the home of the platform, and itself brazenly multi-everything. This is not a new development - since the beginning, this platform has taken me to Ukraine, Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Serbia, Croatia, the UK, Italy, and only sometimes Germany. Therefore, my critical position is formed out of a strange kind of 'floating' position - heavily involved in cross-cultural exchange, radically multi-disciplinary, somewhat representative of New World Anglosphere, and trying to shape some meaning from the global world order from a European perspective, albeit as an outsider to any one locality. On one hand, this makes it some kind of bellwether to pan-European discourse. On the other, it makes me prone to wild, often seemingly unjustifiable positions, evident only to myself, and shared by no-one.

Checkpoint 16

Navid Kermani’s Ausnahmezustände: Reisen in eine beunruhigte Welt (2013, in English approximately: State of Exception: Traveling in a Concerned World) is a travel narrative after the end of travel narratives. The core of the genre – the subjectivity of a writer traveling distant lands and mythologizing them for a culturally similar readership – is upended by, in Kermani’s terms, the condition of the world as it is today. Any feeling of novelty delivered from new global frontiers disappears in the wake of extreme universal precarity, and the promise of “look at this wonderful new world through my eyes” common to travel narratives, together with the relationship between the human being and the environment that this denotes, is replaced with something like “look what we’ve done”.

This reversal by Kermani is not only because of the un-shareability of his cultural subjectivity – being an Iranian/German this would be a somewhat specific audience – but because the object of his gaze equally occupies a shifting point of view. The definition of ‘state of exclusion’ as outlined by Agamben denotes precisely this: a temporary subversion of order, nominally justified by its maintenance. Like Australia’s torturous offshore detention centres, such measures were only ever meant to be temporary. Within cultural studies, there is increasing consensus that the ‘exception’ has become the rule – that displacement, authoritarianism and terrorism is evolving into the key defining point of the human condition, that rights are only ever temporary, and that governance is becoming less about servitude to the populace and increasingly a kind of enslavement via the creation of perpetual instability. For the travel writer, this fixed point of view– the writer as subject and exotic local as object - is subverted, replacing a fixed, stable subjectivity for both writer and object with a negation of both.

 

Checkpoint 16 not the first time actors Anders Carlsson and Judith van der Werff, and Vierte Welt’s Artistic Director Dirk Cieslak have worked with the text from Kermani, following 2013’s production of the same title, and in some ways this is a continuation of that work. Carlsson initially voices a monologue over some images about his initial meeting with a 13-year old Fadi, who lives in the Gaza Strip. He tells of his shadowing of Fadi, who’s routine was to sell olive plants at a market 6kms away to support his family, crossing a military checkpoint to do so. Fadi, we are told, had become the provider for his family at an early age, and had become as resourceful as he was cheeky – talking his way past the border guards, and learning English to attract foreigners like Carlsson. “I wanna be happy but it’s not so easy”, says Fadi, referring to life under the constant threat of military. The undeniable spectatorship undertaken by Carlsson leads him to certain questions, which he shares with us, such as “Die Frage ist nicht ‘Warum ein Israelischer Land?’, die Frage ist: “Warum so brutal ein Israelischer Land?” (The question is not ‘’why an Israeli state?”, the question is: “why an Israeli state so brutal?”). His own Europeanness becomes an indivisible wall between himself and Fadi, and as Fadi puts it somewhat bluntly: “how can it be that you and I are friends, and you can leave, and I am stuck here?”

Remake

‘The Collective’ are four actors well known to Melbourne’s theatre scene. Eloise Mignon is part of a lineage of experimental theatre, Gareth Davies and Thomas Henning are of anti-theatre Black Lung fame, whilst Eryn Jean Norvill has featured as, in her words “the tragic heroine” in various productions across Australia. I think there is also TV and film involved, but it’s in the former capacity that your correspondent recognizes them, today writing from a hiding place within a Hegel and Lacan performance conference Repetitions in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

To my knowledge, as suggested by the rather banal label for the group (evoking the worst of Soviet-era bureaucracy), they’ve never been on stage before together as a group. So I was looking forward to seeing what happened during Remake, the result of a few weeks development in Budapest.

The terrorizing elements of Henning and Davies’ Black Lung days are present from the beginning, with a hoax about a technical failure and sideswipes at the previous group's poorly executed bump-out, skillfully played to the back row of roaring Aussies by Davies. The actor claims that although he is sensitive to the fact that we are, no doubt, exhausted from sitting through 3 days of lectures about Hegel and Lacan - nevertheless he’s ‘proud to be the final lecture of the conference’ and appreciates our attention for ‘the next two or three hours’. Thankfully, Mignon pokes her head out the back and calls him like a dog - “here boy” - which he eventually responds to, ending the scene.

Academia in the End Times: Repetition/s Conference, Ljubljana

My time at the Repetition/s conference in Ljubljana was defined by frustration. I strive to be the first to admit I am an idiot - not only unqualified for academia, but barely qualified for contemporary life. Not only do I know that I know the Socretian nothing, but I also understand, with a growing sense of desperation, the consequences of that lack. I am occupied in a practice of attempting to concretely formulate our contemporary situation - but the building of this position is in many ways without firm ontological foundation, rendered flimsy by the sheer speed and elusiveness of life today - theory included. Metaphysical objects shift from feverish clarity to total uncertainty before I can grasp them - concrete will set, only to turn to straw, preceding the collapse of the entire house: the ignorance of the event just past colliding spectacularly with the impending disaster of the future.

So attending a conference on Performance Philosophy is in many ways my natural state of confusion. The combination of lecture, performance, and lecture-performance across the various locations of Ljubljana, the City Museum, the Filozofska Fakulteta and the Dance Theatre, provides a more than adequate complex layering of realities to complicate my subjective experience to the point of posthumanist nausea. There is something nicely comforting, in a violent way, about the over-saturation of information present at such an event, as well as the total ontological despair - as one academic expressed to me, 20 minutes is simply not enough time to formulate any concrete position in presenting a paper, a crisis which repeats itself through various arguments - each of them experiencing a kind of Freudian castration just at the crucial moment where they might actually say something.

Photo: Aufhebung/Repetition/s

But there are some points which, despite the slipperiness of my positions, acknowledged doubts and even self-branded idiocy, I will nevertheless claim. The whiteness and euro-centrism of the Repetition/s conference are two symptoms of, and causes of, the ongoing crisis of academia and public accountability. This should be protested against, I claim, as a means of taking responsibility through its concrete formulation and being rendered visible. The ripples heading through academia are particularly disturbing in our current context. Mingling among the safe, white intellectual community of Ljubljana, supported theoretically by its euro-centric psychoanalytic foundation, you would hardly think there was a mobility crisis occurring in Europe. You could forget, in the fantasy of specific details of Lacan and Hegel, that proto-fascist, and openly fascist groups are on the rise in Europe, the United States, the UK and Australia - that Austria may yet elect a president whose party was founded by the former Nazi Agriculture Minister. In the midst of just one paper engaging in post-colonial discourse, an absence of black perspectives, and an unwillingness to expose one's own positions to any counter-discourse, it is easy to see the failure of academia today, and its problems in public communication. The absence of encounter between ideas and people within the community bodes poorly for its ability to relate outside its sphere.