Fluxus : The Practice of Non-Duality [1 ed.] 9789401210942, 9789042038516

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Fluxus The Practice of Non-Duality

Consciousness Liter ture the Arts

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41 General Editor:

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe Editorial Board:

Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers, William S. Haney II, Amy Ione, Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis, Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow Jade Rosina McCutcheon

Fluxus The Practice of Non-Duality

Natasha Lushetich

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Photography cover by the author. Cover design by Aart Jan Bergshoeff. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3851-6 ISSN: 1573-2193 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1094-2 E-book ISSN: 1879-6044 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014 Printed in the Netherlands

Table of Contents Preface and Acknowledgements ......................................................................xi Chapter One: Introduction ................................................................................ 1

What X Fluxus............................................................................................. 1 XXX is The Two World Theory .............................................................................. 3 A Retrospective Glance............................................................................... 8 Blind Tactics and De-centered Play .......................................................... 11 Living Labour and the Production of Social Life ..................................... 14 Interexpressive Aesthetics......................................................................... 18 Structure and Organisation ....................................................................... 22

Chapter Two: Language ................................................................................. 29

Exploding the Playing Field ...................................................................... 30 The Intermedial Genesis of the Event Score ............................................. 41 Gameness .................................................................................................. 47 Creative-contemplative Interpellation....................................................... 57 Pervasiveness ............................................................................................ 63 Concluding Thoughts ................................................................................ 69

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Chapter Three: Temporality............................................................................ 71

Temporality and Musicality ...................................................................... 72 The Transference of Deep Listening to Vertical Time ............................. 76 The Process of Time and Time as Process................................................ 80 The Production of Lived Time in Fluxfilms ............................................. 86 The Continuity of Discontinuity ............................................................... 95 The Braiding of Lived and Phenomenal Time in Durational Performance .............................................................................................. 99 Concluding Thoughts .............................................................................. 102

Chapter Four: The Sensorium ....................................................................... 105

Interexpressive Aesthetics....................................................................... 106 Excavating Elemental Intertwinings and Reversibility........................... 116 Attunement and the Production of Lived Meaning................................. 124 Modifying the Phenomenological Vector ............................................... 133 Intercorporeity ......................................................................................... 137 Concluding Thoughts .............................................................................. 142

Chapter Five: Social Rites and Rituals ......................................................... 145

Deconstructing Ideal Egalitarianism ....................................................... 146 Towards a Ludic-Concretist Game Model .............................................. 153 Blurring the Magical Division ................................................................ 160 Identity as Alterity................................................................................... 167

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Anomalous Communitas ......................................................................... 174 Concluding Thoughts .............................................................................. 182

Chapter Six: Systems of Economic Exchange ............................................. 185

The Problem of Value ............................................................................. 186 Entelecheic or Living Value ................................................................... 192 The Relational Economics of George Maciunas .................................... 199 Intermediality as a Form of Biopolitical Production .............................. 209 Soliciting Excessive Expenditure............................................................ 214 Concluding Thoughts .............................................................................. 219

Chapter Seven: Conclusion: The Logic and Legacy of Fluxing ................. 223

Refracting the Frame ............................................................................... 228 Expanding the Frame .............................................................................. 229 The Frame as a Protean Activity ............................................................. 231 Fluxing the Pillars of Consciousness ...................................................... 232 The Legacy of Fluxing in Art, Life and Theory ..................................... 237

Bibliography ................................................................................................. 243 Index ............................................................................................................. 267

List of Illustrations Fig. 1. Nam June Paik Zen forHead ............................................................. 53 Fig. 2. Nam June Paik One For Violin Solo .................................................. 81 Fig. 3. Mieko Shiomi Disappearing Music for Face ................................... 89 Fig. 4. Alison Knowles Identical Lunch ....................................................... 99 Fig. 5. Robert Watts’ Time Kit.................................................................... 107 Fig. 6. Ay-O Finger Box ............................................................................. 120 Fig. 7. Larry Miller Orifice Plugs ............................................................... 127 Fig. 8. George Maciunas Fluxorgan ........................................................... 132 Fig. 9. Takako Saito Smell Chess ................................................................. 136 Fig. 10. Ken Friedman Flux Clippings ......................................................... 139 Fig. 11. George Maciunas Corrugated Paddle............................................. 157 Fig. 12. George Maciunas Hole-in-the-Middle Paddle ................................ 158 Fig. 13. George Maciunas Can-of-Water Paddle ......................................... 158 Fig. 14. Flux-Feast 1970.............................................................................. 161 Fig. 15. George Maciunas Transparent Meal ............................................... 162 Fig. 16. Per Kikerby Four Flux Drinks ........................................................ 163 Fig. 17. George Maciunas and Billie Hutching Black and White ................ 171 Fig. 18. The Fluxshop ................................................................................... 196

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Fig. 19. Robert Watts Crossed Legs Table Top ............................................ 204 Fig. 20. Roberts Watts Light Switch Plate with Fingerprints ...................... 205 Fig. 21. Joe Jones Cage Music...................................................................... 211

Preface This book traces the manifold points of connection between intermediality and the practical philosophy of co-constitutivity. The three operative words in this sentence: “intermediality”, “practical philosophy” and “coconstitutivity” all form part of many different debates and belong to the intellectual ferment of the past two decades. Historically associated with the interaction between the expressive means and the aesthetic conventions of two or more artistic media, intermediality is in this day and age seen as so ubiquitous and pervasive as to be termed “ontological” (Schröter 2011). Although this phrasing does, of course, remain debatable, the palpable need for an all-encompassing term denotes not only a plurality of (theoretical) positions but also a plurality of medial combinations. Indeed, there seem to be as many – if not more – forms of intermediality as there are media. There is intermediality as transposition which refers to adaptation, such as adapting a novel for the screen or a film for the theatre. There is intermediality as fusion, of which the Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork, is an example. There is intermediality as re-presentation where one medium – a painting, a sculpture or an installation – is presented in another, a film, for example. There is also intermediality as remediation, a term popularised by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin to denote the tendency of newer media to refashion older media with the aim of achieving greater immediacy (Bolter and Grusin 2000). Analogue photography thus remediated painting by creating a greater verisimilitude between the object of perception – a tree or an apple – and its medial depiction. Likewise, digital photography remediated analogue photography, much like Skype remediated real-time televising as well as telephony. Finally, there is what might be termed über intermediality – the possibility of digital simulation of any medium or any number of media in virtual space. Equally rich is the notion of practical philosophy, of thinking by doing, of performance as a means of generating knowledge. Stemming from the per-

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formative turn of the 1970s in anthropology, linguistics and sociology, the preference for performance as a method of enquiry is best understood, in the performance scholar Dwight Conquergood’s words, as a “shift from mimesis to kinesis” (Conquergood 1989: 83, emphasis original). Mimesis here refers to representational systems of knowledge based on the assumption that there exists a fixed and stable reality in the intangible world of ideas and that this reality exists a priori, before all human experience. The only way to capture or re-present this reality is through imitation or mimicry. In this sense, mimesis is a set of signs, symbols, movements and actions which act as stand-ins for the fixed and stable reality that exists elsewhere. Seen from this point of view, performance is only a temporary enactment, a reference or an incantation. Seen from the kinetic point of view, however, performance is that which creates and instigates, rather than imitates. This sea change is related to two important theories: the theory of linguistic performativity developed by J.L. Austin who famously suggested that words do not state facts about a preexisting reality, but, instead, inaugurate new realities, such as when a judge pronounces a defendant guilty and thereby changes the defendant’s present and future position in life (1955), and the theory of gender performativity, developed by Judith Butler, for whom gender is not a stable category but a performance, constituted in time and through interaction with others (1990). Closely related to perpetual performance, and thus change, is the most prominent theory of co-constitutivity, the actor-network theory. In a nutshell, this theory focuses on co-constitutive processes by which actants – human and non-human actors – perform together to create networks, modes of interaction and entire relational systems. In illuminating this co-dependence, the actor-network theory also illuminates the fact that humans, things and matter are not fixed but continuously constituted and reconstituted on the basis of material and cultural relations (Latour 2005). Intermediality, performance and co-constitutivity all have one thing in common: they posit the world as a process of incessant becoming and mixing. One of the reasons for writing this book is to show that there existed a group of artists-researchers who articulated a practical – and, importantly, practicable – philosophy of co-constitutivity as early as the 1960s. But theorising the under-theorised yet landmark phenomenon of non-duality is not the only purpose of this book. In discussing Fluxus intermedia and their interactive tendencies, this book also serves as a companion to performative thinking, an embodied, actional and multi-sensorial form of thinking. In preparing for the

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task of writing Fluxus The Practice of Non-Duality I re-made and performed most of the works under discussion in this volume. Although this remains a theoretical investigation its method of enquiry is performative, which is both sedimented in the book and explicitly articulated. This is the reason why this book can be read in two ways. For those interested in a cumulative argument detailing how and why Fluxus operates as a practice of co-constitutivity by systematically deconstructing dualisms in the five main areas of human experience – language, temporality, the sensorium, social rites and rituals and systems of economic exchange – I suggest the cover to cover approach. For those interested in how Fluxus works operate in a particular domain – the senses or social rites and rituals, for example – I suggest the intuitive approach. In keeping with the theme of this book, the chapters are both ordered and not ordered, depending on the point of view and the reader’s intention. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the master of unresolved contradictoriness puts it: “[t]wo and two make four is an excellent thing, but two and two make five is a very fine thing, too. It sounds just as beautiful” ([1918] 1967: 40). To assist the intuitive reader, however, each chapter begins with a short summary of the previous chapter’s main findings and each chapter offers a mini conclusion at the end. Acknowledgements In writing this book I have incurred a great debt to many friends and colleagues who gave generously of their time and advice. My deepest thanks go to the Fluxus artists Ken Friedman, Geoffrey Hendricks, Alison Knowles, Larry Miller, Willem de Ridder and Mieko Shiomi, and to the Fluxus theorists Jon Hendricks and Hannah Higgins for their interviews, astute comments, and, above all, their ceaseless encouragement. Thanks are also due to Billie Maciunas whose help and illuminating comments have proven invaluable in the last phases of this work. As this journey initially began as a doctoral dissertation I would like to express my gratitude to Nick Kaye for his expert guidance and his thought-provoking insights. I am equally grateful to my examiners Andrew Quick and Stephen Hodge for their helpful comments and their encouragement to develop the doctoral dissertation into a book. I would also like to offer my thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the initial stages of this research as well as for financing my visits to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art Fluxus Collection in New York City, the Sohm Archive in

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Stuttgart, the MAPACA conference in Alexandria, VA, where I presented a paper entitled “Flux-Food: Negotiating the Magical Divide” in October 2010, and The Limits of Performance Conference at the Villanova University, Philadelphia. The paper presented at this conference in January 2010 entitled “The Production of Lived Time in Fluxus Intermedia” later appeared in TDR, Vol.55, and No.4 in winter 2011 under a slightly different title: “The Performance of Time in Fluxus Intermedia”. I am thankful to the editor, Mariellen Sandford for her insightful comments and to the MIT Press for granting me permission to reprint parts of the article in this book. I would also like to thank Taylor and Francis for letting me reprint parts of “Ludus Populi: The Practice of Nonsense” which appeared in Theatre Journal, Vol.63, No.1 in March 2011 and which forms part of chapter five. My heartfelt thanks go to the Theatre Journal editor Catherine A. Schuler for her immensely helpful advice. Thanks are also due to the wonderful staff of the Getty Research Institute, the Museum of Modern Art Fluxus Collection in New York City and the British Library for their help, concern and expertise. Last but not least, a big thank you to Sally Kawamura, Josip Lizatovic and Kelli Melson for commenting intelligently on various aspects of this work as well as to Shane Brennan for keeping my spirits up.

Chapter 1 Introduction The master asked Nan-ch’uan (Nansen) “where does a person who knows all there is to know go?” Nan-chu’an said: “They go to be a water buffalo at the house of a lay person at the foot of the mountain”. (Nan-ch’uan cited in Zhaozhou (Shi) 1998: 12)

What is Fluxus? XXX X Variously characterised as “the most radical art and experimental movement of the sixties” (Ruhé 1979: 1), “a singularly strange phenomenon in the history of the arts of the twentieth century” (Doris 1998: 91) and “an active philosophy of experience that only sometimes takes the form of art” (Friedman 1998: ix), Fluxus has persistently eluded definition, classification and compartmentalisation. There are several reasons for this. First, its prolific and multi-locational activity, which spans the period of almost five decades, includes artists from America, Asia and Europe, and consists of concerts, films, objects, gadgets, instruments, games, sports, books, newspapers, postal stamps, flags, banners, weddings, divorces, funerals, religious rituals, shops and mail order centers, mobile clinics, housing cooperatives, sight-seeing tours and educational initiatives, cannot be subsumed under any one category. Second, the rhizomaticity of its development remains difficult to survey to this day. Initially intended by George Maciunas – Fluxus artist and principal organiser – as a magazine in which the work of young experimental New York artists

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gathered around John Cage, such as Yoko Ono, was to be published, Fluxus soon became an organisational platform for concerts and performances in a number of European cities. Here the work of a diverse group of artists such as George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Ben Patterson and Wolf Vostell, was shown. Despite this diversity, however, a manifesto was presented at the Festum Fluxorum in Düsseldorf in 1963 reading: PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art … PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, promote living art, promote NON-ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals … FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries onto united front and action (Maciunas 1963: np; emphasis original).

But contrary to what one might expect, this manifesto, which was written by Maciunas, was not a portentous philosophical statement. Instead, it was produced in response to the organiser’s, Joseph Beuys’s last-minute request that some sort of manifesto be presented at the performance. Not only was the manifesto not a carefully crafted philosophical statement in the Futurist or the Dadaist vein but as Dick Higgins who was present at the Festum Fluxorum quips: “[n]obody was willing to sign the thing” ([1982]1999: 219). The comical discrepancy between the exclamatory tone of the manifesto, the manifesto’s improvised nature and its subsequent failure to launch is in many ways characteristic of Fluxus. In fact, the genesis of what is today known as Fluxus – although a number of Fluxus artists, such as George Brecht, insist that there can be no general, but only “individual understanding of a specific Fluxus work” (Brecht 1964:1) – is of a distinctly bricoleur brand. Habitually used to refer to improvisatory tactics and the use of the means at hand, bricolage is often employed in contradistinction to engineering which functions as a clearly delineated strategy. The difference between the bricoleur and the engineer is one of procedure as well as one of logical operator; while the bricoleur proceeds from the specifics of a given situation without any notion of the whole and in this way resists generalisation, the engineer proceeds from the specifics-governing master plan or projected whole. Both the heterogeneity of Fluxus activity and its bricoleur tendency are directly related to the third reason why Fluxus eludes definition five decades after its inception: Fluxus is, quite simply, not a discursive phenomenon. This fact, however, is

Introduction

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not new. For the Fluxus artist Emmett Williams, the similarity between the masters of Zen and the masters of Fluxus – as he calls them – lies in the “extreme difficulty of explaining to the outside world what exactly they are the masters of” (Williams 1992: 163). For Elisabeth Armstrong, the curator of the 1993 Walker Art Center exhibition In the Spirit of Fluxus, “Fluxus has been notoriously difficult to discuss” because the appropriate “terminology has yet to be found and agreed upon” (1993: 14). The simple truth is that Fluxus defies discursivity because it questions the very logic in which discursivity is embedded. It questions the propositional, deeply dualistic logic which separates the method of analysis from that which is being analysed. This is at the same time the reason why a question like “What is Fluxus?” has to be placed under erasure (sous rature). Frequently employed by Jacques Derrida, although initially developed by Martin Heidegger, sous rature is a strategic philosophical device for indicating that a notion is simultaneously inadequate, even redundant, and necessary; or, rather, that it is necessary despite being redundant. Both Heidegger and Derrida employ sous rature in their discussion of “Being” albeit for different reasons. Both contest the supremacy of this notion in Western philosophy, but since this critical maneouvre necessitates the use of the very notion which it contests, “Being” is placed under erasure. Within the present context sous rature has two functions. On the one hand, it marks the necessity of delineating the phenomenon under discussion. On the other, it marks the phenomenon’s fundamental irreducibility to the binary logic which defines “what is” against the background of “what is not”. The “is” and “is not” logic, which entails a host of binary oppositions – such as those between plenitude and emptiness, the relevant and the irrelevant, foreground and background, centre and periphery, ends and means, to mention but a few – arises from what the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani has aptly termed the “two world theory” (1991: 77). The Two World Theory Essentially, the “two world theory” is the cornerstone of the Western metaphysical tradition. It is rooted in the emanation theory which originated with Plotinus and has significantly influenced Judeo-Christian theology as well as philosophy. The emanation theory postulates that finite human beings are created from a primordial emanation, from the One, the source of all being. The existence of the One further entails a hierarchical separation of the world

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of essence, infinity and eternity from the world of appearance and finitude. Within the Christian framework this occurs through three successive separations; the separation of the intellectual realm of ideas from other forms of existence, the separation of the realm of souls from the realm of ideas and from other forms of existence, and the separation of the realm of material and corporeal existence (seen as “mere” appearance) from the realm of ideas and the realm of the soul. Each successive stage is more remote from the source of all being and to that extent suffers from a greater degree of imperfection. The difference between the world of the One and the world of earthly, material and corporeal existence is therefore definite and irreconcilable; the hierarchically superior world of essence is atemporal and eternal; the hierarchically inferior world of appearance is temporal and perishable. Not only does this difference mark the degree of separation from the source of all being, it also institutes the logic of parts and wholes. Having been severed from the One, the world of essence and eternity, every finite being – or individual, the word in-dividu referring to an atom that cannot be further divided – yearns for a reunion with the One. A whole is thus a superior term because it denotes plenitude (the presence of all parts); a part is an inferior term because it denotes incompleteness. Various metaphysicians, beginning with the Scholastics of the late Middle Ages and continuing to the twentieth century, have, of course, adapted and transformed the emanation theory in significant ways. A case in point is the elimination of references to a personal God and anthropomorphic features attributed to the One by such thinkers as St. Augustine, as is, indeed, the abandonment of the tripartite mind-soul-body division in the post-Enlightenment period. However, despite all this, the separation of parts from the whole as the ground of the separation between “being” (the primordial source) and “nonbeing” (all that is removed from the primordial source) has remained. Indeed, the binary logic of “is” and “is not” (the logic of “being” versus “non-being”) and its corresponding separation of ideas from material processes, mind from body, subject from object, centre from periphery, persists in a variety of guises to this very day. One of the most obvious examples of its pervasive nature is our current logico-linguistic structure. This structure allows only for dualist conceptions, such as affirmation, negation, and sublation by a higher unifying category. In other words, it allows only for the following possibilities:

Introduction

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1. A is A (affirmation), 2. A is not A (negation), 3. A is both A and not A (affirmative sublation), 4. A is neither A nor not A (negative sublation). Not only does this structure thrive on hierarchical opposition as well as separation, it also thrives on purity. In order to be entirely identical with itself a category has to be not-its-other. In order for A to be fully and completely A, it has to be not-at-all B. “True white” thus cannot contain as much as a trace of beige or grey, not to mention any other colour in the spectrum. Likewise, the most “masculine man” is the furthest removed from all forms of femininity; the “most feminine woman” is, correspondingly, the least “contaminated” by masculinity, much like the most central part of an area – the epicenter – is the furthest removed from periphery. Although it may seem that these categories no longer apply in the twenty-first century, which is the age of hybridity, they appear in new disguises. The most progressive environment is thus the most technologically advanced and the most globalised environment; the environment the furthest removed from non-networked, technologically remote places, in the spatial, temporal, and cultural sense of the word. The persistent existence of the dualistic logic is thus not only a philosophical problem; it is also a very concrete bio-social, political and ethical problem. As Derrida points out in Writing and Difference this problem is further aggravated by the fact that our main form of communication, language, is indissolubly welded to the history of Western metaphysics: “[w]e have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” ([2001] 2008: 354). But, given this state of affairs, one might well ask: why insist on treating a non-discursive phenomenon discursively? Why not, having detailed the potential discussion topics in the table of contents, leave the rest of the 274 pages empty? (which, admittedly, would be a far more Fluxus thing to do). There are two interrelated answers to this question. First, by virtue of being nondiscursive Fluxus has remained under-represented, not only in terms of its vast and multi-faceted activity, but, far more importantly, in terms of its practical-philosophical orientation. The art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto could not be more right when he says that Fluxus was “too obscure to have registered on philosophical, let alone ordinary consciousness” in the first few

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decades of its existence but should nevertheless “be regarded as a significant conceptual revolution” (Danto 2002: 23). The second reason is that Fluxus questions the very frames as well as the logic of framing produced by the manifold ramifications of the “two world theory”, and does so at three levels: by dismantling the discursive scaffolding which upholds these ramifications; by critiquing the practices produced by, and, which, in turn, produce the selfsame discursive scaffolding; and, by proposing a different logic – via practice. My theorisation of this process is the next step in the loop of interconnected-ness between theory and practice; it is a form of gathering, a crystallisation and a condensation. Inspired by Emmett Williams’s ludico-cryptic statement, “Fluxus is what Fluxus does, but no one knows whodunit” (Williams cited in Friedman 1998: viii), this book sets out to explore the “doing” of Fluxus in its multiple intermedial and interactive forms. Important to note, however, is that the word intermediality is here used in a very specific sense, given to it by Dick Higgins. It refers to works that fall conceptually between media – such as visual poetry or action music – as well as between the “general area of art media and those of life media” – such as the ready-made ([1966] 2001: 49). Interactivity is conceptualised interstitially and hinges on Umberto Eco’s famous concept of the “open work” which sidesteps the binary logic of passive reception and active participation in which every contemplation or enjoyment of a work of art represents a “private form of performance” (1989: 251). It also hinges on Dick Higgins’s suggestion that the Fluxus work is a “matrix”, a structure provided by the artist but further developed, or even entirely transformed by the interactant (1976: 6). Intermediality and interactivity both form part of relationality, which, to borrow from Heidegger once again, is the “abyssal ground” of this volume, as it were. Understood as the formless, undifferentiated substratum from which separate forms – relationships – emerge, relationality is comparable to gravity in so far as it is diffuse and ungraspable but nevertheless “pulls” all the time. It is a perpetually acting force which does not privilege stable entities over their processes of creation or disassembly, but which in constituting relationships between entities constitutes and reconstitutes the entities within these relationships. This further means two things. First, that the “what” of any given constitution – of what a constitution is – a thing, a phenomenon or a logical category, is inextricably intertwined with the “how” of that constitu-

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tion – its processes of coming into being. Second that the “what” and the “how” do not stand in a hierarchical relationship, as they do within the substance- and presence-privileging logic of duality, but relate equivalently. It is in these dynamic and interdependent terms that the central thesis of this project ought to be understood: Fluxus is a practical philosophy, a deconstructive-integrative practice, at once aesthetic, psychophysical, social, economic and political. It is deconstructive because it deconstructs the (hierarchical) mechanisms of otherisation; it is integrative because it creates nondualist modes of interaction and interexpression. To be more precise, the practice of Fluxus effectuates a change from the dualist conception of the world which segregates knower from known, subject from object, producer from consumer, to a non-dualist modality of being-knowing. In other words, it creates – or certainly has the potential to create – a shift in consciousness. Consciousness is, of course, a highly relevant concept in many different domains. In view of the title of this series, however, I will limit my attention to the inextricable connection between consciousness and the arts in two senses of the word. First, in the explicitly ideological sense, which is that of consciousness-raising, characteristic of the feminist and, more generally, political art of the 1970s, whose motto “personal is political” (Hanisch: 1969 np) was poised to create an awareness of crucially important but hitherto neglected issues. Second, in the implicitly ideological sense of the word, which is closer to the notion of hegemony – hegemony being, according to Antonio Gramsci, a set of diffuse behaviours which range from self-evident explanations to assignments of energy that operate by “continually dissolving the regulatory mechanisms of the dominant group into the commonsense appearance of daily life” (Gramsci [1971] 1998:12). It is in this diffuse field that the difference between “positional” and “non-positional” consciousness comes into play. As human beings living in a highly ideologically saturated universe which dictates the continuous consumption of commodities, locations, experiences and relations, we are socio-culturally formatted to perceive ourselves as separate from the world, separate from others and separate from the objects of our attention, perception and consumption. In other words, we take an ego-logical position vis-à-vis the world in which the cogito appears as the centre of observation and engagement with the self. Non-positional consciousness, on the other hand, is that of a non-formatted, or, indeed, enlightened, samadhic awareness. According to the Zen scholar Thomas Kasulis,

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such an awareness is devoid of a centre; it does not cling to any particular vantage point, structure or order and often results from sustained practice (Kasulis 1981: 73). Within the present context, however, the relationship between positionality and non-positionality is of a far more modest caliber; it signifies a movement away from the socio-culturally ingrained or naturalised position towards non-positionality via multipositionality or the simultaneous existence of different positions. Important to stress is also the fact that much like non-positionality does not refer to the mystical unity of all things, unextended in space and time, nonduality does not signify one-ness. It is not a negative sublation of the “neither-nor” order. Rather, non-duality is a dynamic process, a perpetual mutual structuration and a cross-pollination of numerous forces and factors. However, in order for the phrase “perpetual mutual structuration and crosspollination of numerous forces and factors” to make sense – that is to say, in order for it to gain the status of clarity within the linguistico-logical structure that equates clarity with division, and, conversely, any lack of division with vagueness – it will be necessary to say a few more words about the operative word: practice. A Retrospective Glance Despite the fact that Fluxus activity begins in the early 1960s, the present conceptualisation of Fluxus as a deconstructive-integrative practice owes much to the communicational developments of the past two decades. Caused largely by the advent of the new media, the last decade of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of de-centralised communication networks where interaction occurs horizontally, so to speak, facilitated by peer-to-peer, group-to-group, and individual-to-group interaction. This type of spatiotemporally independent participation, which allows the participant to join the network in his/her own space and time, has profoundly altered the notion of interactive artistic practice.Where the notion of interactive practice afforded by the 1960s Happenings, for example – participatory, communal, durational art projects which sought to erase the boundary between art and life, artist and audience – differs from that afforded by the hybrid virtual, socioaesthetic, ludico-activist projects of the past two decades, is their spatiotemporal centered-ness, and, conversely, de-centered-ness. A Happening re-

Introduction

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lies on the coming together of a number of participants in a specific place and at a specific time. It relies on the unity of time, place and action, and is, in this sense, spatio-temporally centralised. The hybrid virtual, socio-aesthetic, ludico-activist projects such as those staged by The Yes Men, for example, a group of culture-jamming activists who create fake organisations with the aid of thousands of virtual interactants, or, Blast Theory, who make durational projects with game-like structures involving hundreds of participants, are spatio-temporally de-centralised in the sense that the participants interact individually as well as in groups in their own chosen spaces and at chosen times. This intensifies not only the frequency of interaction but also its pervasiveness. The combination of these two elements lends the notion of interactive practice – understood specifically as an art-and-life-boundary-eroding as well as an artist-and-audienceboundary-eroding practice – a new autonomy. Despite the fact that George Maciunas rightly proclaimed Fluxus “rear-garde” on account of its lack of “pretention or urge to participate in the competition of “one-upmanship” with the avant-garde” (Maciunas cited in Hendricks 1995: 135), a number of Fluxus intermedia, such as the event score (a four-dimensional performative ready-made), or, the Fluxkit (a portable case containing multiple objectactivities), could, in fact, be termed avant-garde with regard to the autonomous practice they afford. But this is not all. The entire Fluxus opus, which privileges dynamic relationship-formation over object-hood, interactivity and thus performative multiplicity over authorial singularity, mass production of works over their uniqueness, the use of innovative venues (the street, the shop window) and innovative distributions systems (Fluxshops and Mail Order Centers) over established art institutions, seems much more at home in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s than in the 1960s and 1970s, although, clearly, the cultural climate of the last two and a half decades is in many ways the product of the 1960s and 1970s. In this sense, Fluxus is both rear-garde and “accidentally” avant-garde, despite the fact that it is technically and art-historically incorrect to name a post World War II art movement or a group of artists, avant-garde. The reason for this is that the 1950s and 1960s art movements incorporated into their practice the very techniques and procedures – collage, montage and chance operations – which the historical avant-garde, namely Dadaism, Futurism and

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Fluxus The Practice of Non-Duality

Surrealism, used to abolish the category of art as defined by the sociocultural framework of their time. In other words, as one of the foremost theorists of the avant-garde, Peter Bürger suggests, it is by “institutionalizing the avant-garde as art” that the post-war movements effectively came to negate “genuinely avant-gardiste intentions” (1984: 58; emphasis original). Bürger’s contention is that in order to be avant-garde an art movement has to propose not only a radically new agenda, but also an objectively realisable one – or, at least, one that has not already proven to be unrealisable – which was the case with the historical avant-garde. Given that the post-war art practices invariably depart from positions that have already “failed” in their historical intention, they cannot be termed avant-garde, claims Bürger (1984: 57). For Dick Higgins, however, avant-garde is not a historically fixed term, but a term in flux, one that refers to repeatable cycles of knowledge-production. While these cycles tend to constitute a “temporary elite” because they require a high degree of familiarity with the latest developments in a given field, all such developments soon become common knowledge making the “non-elite” into the “elite” (Higgins 1997: xv). That notwithstanding Maciunas had very concrete reasons for advancing notions of rear-gardism: his vision of Fluxus was that of a social laboratory. In a 1964 letter to the Fluxus artist Tomas Schmitt, Maciunas asserts: “fluxus objectives are social (not aesthetic)” (Maciunas [1964] 1983: 166; emphasis original). Indeed, it is precisely for reasons of this paradoxical and unresolved rear-gardism-avant-gardism that the 1990s and 2000s mark an upsurge of scholarly and institutional interest in Fluxus. As the art historian Craig Saper notes, Fluxus is and always has been “more than a way to organize information”, it has been “a way to organize social networks, networks of people learning” (Saper [1998] 1999: 139). This is the reason why the “rediscovery” of Fluxus coincides with the emergence of the networked society. Equally pertinent in this respect is the question posed by Andreas Huyssen: “[i]s Fluxus … the forgotten and hidden … origin of later art movements? The master-code, as it were, of what has come to be called postmodernism?” (Huyssen 1993:150). Although it is not my purpose here to ascertain whether or not Fluxus was “the master-code of postmodernism”, as Huyssen ironically puts it, the reasons for this speculation are nonetheless important since they stem from the non-hierarchical heterogeneity of Fluxus, its unsubsumability under any one category, its tendency to bricolage, and its emphasis on performativity and interactivity. This is at the same time the reason why this

Introduction

11

volume “runs” on multiple theoretical tracks, tracks parallel with (proto) Fluxus tendencies and divisible into three main categories: Blind Tactics and De-centered Play; Living Labour and the Production of Social Life; and Interexpressive Aesthetics. Blind Tactics and De-centered Play The notion of de-centered play is synonymous with deconstruction, a critical strategy developed by Jacques Derrida to dethrone the self-identical nature of the dominant category of the Western episteme – being. Based on the logic of différance, which resonates with two simultaneous meanings; to differ – to be different from, and, to defer – to postpone or delay, this strategy seeks to demonstrate how any category of being, presence or identity can be deconstructed into a play of differences. Différance is thus a rupture in the linguistico-logical structure, which, by exposing the play and the proliferation of differences, prevents reduction to a fixed and stable meaning. This is why the strategy of deconstruction is also a strategy of de-centering, since a “centre” is any sign or category conceptualised as having absolute self-identity. As Derrida notes in Writing and Difference, the entire history of Western metaphysics is a “series of substitutions of center for center” such as God, essence, substance, subject, energy, ego and consciousness ([2002] 2008: 353). These centres further engender centrisms; theocentrism, logocentrism, anthropocentrism and phallocentrism, among others. Ultimately, each and every centre, a fixed point of origin that “governs the structurality of structure” (2008: 352), points to the transcendental signified and the other-wordly realm of ideality, which is both hierarchically superior and entirely divorced from the realm of materiality and corporeality. Not unlike in the “two world” theory mentioned above, each and every centre is an echo of “the source of all being” and is, as such, both fixed and unquestionable. In the “Afterword” to Limited Inc., Derrida suggests that metaphysics is, in fact, no more than a science of the origin: The enterprise of returning … to an origin or to a priority thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one met-

12

Fluxus The Practice of Non-Duality aphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent” (Derrida 1988a: 236).

The abandonment of the notion of centre as origin is thus simultaneously the abandonment of the dualist paradigm. The concept of structure and the structure-governing telos is here replaced by the concept of play, which is “a unity of chance and necessity” (Derrida 1982: 7). No longer governed by a unified logic or totalising structure the de-centered playing field extends without bounds. As there is no telos, strategy is no longer a viable modus operandi and is replaced by what Derrida terms “blind tactics” (1982: 7), a playful and processual negotiation among a multiplicity of factors. Fluxus work deconstructs a number of totalising centrisms, a tendency already present in the work of the Dadaists, most notably Marcel Duchamp. For the Dadaists, who rejected the deterministic and logocentric worldview which privileged ratio over experience and substance over process, and in its stead propagated dynamism, change and the need for new, non-object-based, performative art forms, art had become an institutional extension of a highly hierarchised, bourgeois form of rationalism. In the Dada Manifesto, Tristan Tzara makes an argument against the logical-structure-locked means of making sense of the world: There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, he has demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of these opinions? (Tzara [1918] 1971:17-8).

What the Dadaists are protesting against here is the “overestimation of reason” (Tzara 1971: 18) which shapes the overall interpretative horizon and dictates the production of “useless and cumbersome accessories” (1971: 18). In other words, it dictates the production of fetishised art objects whose market value and institutional circulation further reinforce the self-same, logicalstructure-locked, object-privileging worldview. In marked contrast to this, the Dadaists call for the chaos of “contradictions [and] inconsistencies: LIFE’ (1971: 20; emphasis original). This turning away entailed a deconstruction of the hitherto accepted notions of taste, artistic material, artistic procedure and the resulting artistic product. Among the pioneers of what were later to be-

Introduction

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come known as chance procedures, in which the artist foregoes his/her personal taste, or, indeed, any notion of teleological, product-orientated creation, were Tristan Tzara and Marcel Duchamp. Tzara’s 1920 Dadaist Poem consisted of instructions for making chance poetry from newspaper cutouts. Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914) entailed creating a “standard” measurement by letting three, one-metre-long pieces of string fall and in this way create a variety of shapes determined by wind and gravity. Equally, Duchamp’s famous Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-1923) was created by a series of chance operations involving a toy cannon which shot paint-dipped matches at the glass and in this way determined the positions of the malic molds. As George Brecht points out in his seminal essay Chance-Imagery, Duchamp’s “mechanical” chance operations differ radically from the Surrealist practice of automatism which derives images from the “deeper-thanconscious levels of [the artist’s] mind” ([1957] 1966: 3). While automatism remains linked to the artist’s persona as well as personality, Duchamp’s mechanical operations serve to dethrone the notion of artist as creator altogether. Famous are Ducahmp’s words: “[f]undamentally, I don’t believe in the creative function of the artist. He’s a man like any other. It’s his job to do certain things, but the businessman does certain things also … everyone makes something” (Duchamp [1967] 1987: 16). This denial of the artist’s exclusive rights to creative production or poiesis further led Duchamp to dispense with the notion of art-making altogether and introduce pre-manufactured objects of non-artistic provenance or readymades. This deconstructive logic resulted in the dismantlement of a number of anthropocentric, theocentric and logocentric “truths”– the artist’s exclusive right to creativity, his/her subjectivity as the source of this creativity, and the art object’s privileged position in relation to other, “non-artistic” objects. Although there are certainly differences between Duchamp and Fluxus, since, as Dick Higgins notes, “it was always his [Duchamp’s] effort to make life visually elegant” ([1982] 1999: 222) whereas the Fluxus artists “chose to leave life alone ... and watch it come and recede again” (1999: 222), Duchamp’s de-centering legacy is paradigmatic to Fluxus. Indeed, as George Brecht observes in an interview with Henry Martin, “’the Duchampian paradigm’ marks a point of departure from the modernist notion of structure and linearity to that of non-linearity and dispersion … Duchamp’s works are like

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points scattered off into many different directions” (1979: 41). They do not follow or even attempt to create a style or a form of expression, but, like the Fluxus works after them, serve as a method of enquiry which functions deconstructively because it questions the very ontological-epistemic premises that constitute it. Living Labour and the Production of Social Life Fluxus emerged in the era of the so-called affluent society marked by unprecedented prosperity in the Western world and the Cold War between the US and the USSR. The affluent society paradigm can be described as stemming from the exponential expansion of two causally related phenomena: productivism and consumerism. For Antonio Gramsci, whose thinking marked a radical departure from Karl Marx’s mechanistic determinism in so far as it postulated the human condition as essentially processual, rather than irrevocably determined by a set of materialist positions, productivism is that which breaks the “old psycho-physical nexus of work”, defined as “a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative” ([1971] 1998: 302). In replacing the polyvalent notion of work with the reductionist one, productivism transforms the producer’s time and effort into value and surplus. By way of reciprocal working, it turns the producer into a means of commodityproduction. The counterpart to the productivist regime is the proliferation of leisure industries where fun and pleasure are consumed in a predominantly passive manner. This is to say that in place of an active, responsible participation which relates to the world creatively and in this way fosters creativeproductive social bonds, productivism induces consumerism, a programmatic and systematic form of consumption. In keeping with the dualist paradigm of the productivist-consumerist regime, leisure time is entirely devoid of work and centers on distraction, instead. Worth noting here is that it is precisely at this historical moment that the predominantly passive consumption of culture was becoming an issue. While in the 1950 only 9 % of households in the US owned a television set, this number rose to 87% in 1960 and to 95% in 1967. By the late 1960s, suggests the cultural historian Lisa Phillips, the average American citizen spent as much time in front of the TV as at work (Phillips 1999: 27). Leisure industries were created as a polar counterpart to the onedimensional logic of productivism, which is the reason why they further perpetuate bipolarity as well as one-dimensionality. In this sense, both productivism and consumerism produce subjectivities whose primary function is to

Introduction

15

enhance economic development. In arguing for the need to replace this alienating duality with a creative-productive unity of poiesis and praxis, Gramsci articulates the notion of living labour which mediates “the relations between the social and the natural orders” and provides a basis for “the development of a dialectical conception of the world, which understands movement and change” (1998: 34). Understanding “movement and change” is directly related to his notion of processuality as entwined with potentiality. A question like: “what is man [sic]?” (Gramsci 1957: 45) is not an abstract philosophical question but bears directly on the “modalities of becoming as well as creating life”, which is why Gramsci goes on to conclude that “man is a process, the process of his [sic] activities” (1957: 45). Fluxus emerged in the 1960s, a period marked by the refusal of the disciplinary regime and the affirmation of new collective practices situated in the domain of non-work, which is to say non-productivist work. Examples of such practices which mediate between the natural and the social world and create new forms of life, both interpersonal and intra-personal, and can, for this reason, be defined as living labour, are the already mentioned Happenings – ritual communal performances. However, where the Fluxus works extend the social-life-producing notion of living labour beyond the Happenings is in their proliferation of interactive practices predicated on massproduced object-activities distributed via the already-mentioned Fluxhops and Mail Order Centers. Despite the fact that Maciunas’s project for a global distribution network selling mass-produced artworks or, rather, “matrixes” or “structures” for Do-It-Yourself interaction remained largely in the realm of potentiality, his various initiatives form a prescient attempt to create cultural counter-strategies to those employed by the society of control. The transition from disciplinary society to society of control occurs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Marxian philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri provide a useful distinction here. According to the authors of Empire, disciplinary society is a society in which “social command is constructed through a diffuse network of apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits and productive practices” (2000: 23). By contrast, the mechanisms of command employed by the society of control are “more democratic” and “more immanent to the social field” (2000: 23). In other words, the society of control engages the social, economic and communicational struc-

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tures in the production of “needs, social relations, bodies and minds”, which is to say that it “produces producers” (2000: 32). It is the reciprocity of the system that progressively blurs the distinction between what in Gramscian, Marx-derived terms are “structure” and “superstructure”. Structure refers to the material, socio-economic organisation of human life while superstructure refers to human will and subjectivity. Since the society of control renders the distinction between the former and the latter indistinguishable, a gradual modification of their interdependent relationship seems like the only path to a non-hegemonic form of sociality. This gradual educational and cultural configuration of structure and superstructure is what Gramsci terms “passive revolution” (1979: 11). Although it was predominantly George Maciunas, variously called the Fluxus “chairman” (Ken Friedman), “founder” (Owen Smith) and “impresario” (Alison Knowles), who formulated clear “revolutionary” positions in the socio-cultural as well as economic sense of the word, the sum total of Fluxus activity can, as the art theorist Owen F. Smith rightly suggests, be described as a “nonprogrammatic means of education” (1993: 34). This notion refers to the original meaning of the word to educate, derived from e-ducere – which means to bring out, to deploy, rather than to put in. Despite the fact that Fluxus activity remains difficult to classify, it resembles a heterogeneous form of “passive revolution” because it proposes important structural-superstructural modifications. That is to say that it provides both a philosophy of action, predicated on living labour, and the ways and means of implementing this philosophy, such as a chain of shops and mail order centers where living-labour-practiceproducing objects can be purchased. From the very beginning Maciunas’s aim was “social and not aesthetic” (Maciunas [1964] 1983: 166) calling for a “gradual elimination of the fine arts” and their use to “more socially constructive ends” (1983: 166). His orientation was distinctly leftist, and, underlying his activities was a revolutionary attitude which he favoured over the individualistic spirit. He saw Fluxus as being “against [the] art-object as a non-functional commodity” and having a temporary “pedagogical function of teaching people the needlessness of art” (1983: 166). As Maciunas states himself, his vision of Fluxus was very close in attitude to the NOVYI LEF (Novyi Levyi Front Iskusstv – New Left Front of the Arts) group of the late 1920s in the Soviet Union. The group was formed in the decade after the 1918 October Revolution and its programme

Introduction

17

centered on practices of leftist art, which fostered communal creation and collaboration among artists from different disciplines. An important part of the group’s programme was also the socialisation of art, the notion that art should not only be made for all but also by all which delegates the role of facilitator, organiser and teacher to the artist, rather than creator. The influence of this line of thinking can be seen in Maciunas’s manifesto entitled “Fluxus Art-Amusement” in which he states that: art must be simple, amusing, concerned with insignificances … [it must]… have no commodity or institutional value. The value of art amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, mass-produced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all ([1965] 1988: 14).

Maciunas’s aim was thus to engage the wider public in poiesis-praxis or living labour by means of a de-commodified practice. The same line of thinking could also be found in his repeated efforts to organise Fluxus into what he referred to as the “common front”, loosely based on the model of the communist party (Maciunas cited in Hendricks in Kellein 1995: 124). Although many of the Fluxus artists failed to take Maciunas’s leftist and collectivist convictions seriously, they nevertheless responded to his initiatives and contributed to the numerous editions of Fluxkits, as well as to the Fluxshops and Mail Order Centres. It can only be speculated whether or not the dislike of any form of mention of or association with communism had anything to do with the-not-so-distant era of McCarthyism, more precisely the Second Red Scare which lasted from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and was characterised by paranoid fears of communist infiltration in US institutions, fabricated largely by the senator Joseph McCarthy and his administration. By the same token, it can only be speculated whether or not Maciunas used the communist paradigm as the only readily available alternative to productivismconsumerism. As is well known, not even the greatest thinkers – which is to say paradigm-shifters – have been able to see beyond some of the paradigmatic conceptions of their times. Plato was oblivious to the fact that a large proportion of the population, namely slaves, remained excluded from his category of democracy – the power (kratos) of the people (demos). Likewise, in his early writings Derrida disregards the fact that “the subject” refers both to males and females and consistently uses the male personal pronoun. This is why I would suggest that although Maciunas’s references remain bound by the bipolar Cold War paradigm, his sustained efforts at creating multiple networks of socio-aesthetic and economico-symbolic interaction, operate

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along distinctly activist-educational lines. This is why they may be associated with the Gramscian paradigm of “passive revolution” predicated on the production of living labour and new forms of social life. Interexpressive Aesthetics Interexpression is the term on which non-duality, seen as a form of permanently oscillating relationality, hinges. The term was extensively used by the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida, one of the foremost proponents of meontology – the study of non-being. Nishida’s philosophical paradigm echoes the Zen Buddhist tradition by way of paradoxical articulation, which preserves the thesis and antithesis in tension and in this way creates a biconditional relation in place of an opposition. Citing a famous passage from the Diamond Sutra – a paradigmatic Buddhist text which teaches the avoidance of attachment – in his Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious View Nishida points to the transpositional, thus mutually dependent framing of the following statements: Because all dharmas [constituents of experience] are not all dharmas Therefore they are called all dharmas Because there is no Buddha, there is Buddha Because there are no sentient beings, there are sentient beings ([1987] 1993:70).

The transpositional framing indicates that the polar opposites, in this case the absolute (Buddha) and the relative (sentient beings), are co-implicative and not separate. The dynamism of this relation means that they are always correlative, rather than separate. Sentient beings are not a manifestation (or incarnation) of the absolute but are its very condition of existence and vice versa. Nishida explains: Creation does not mean that being arises from nonbeing. Creating in that sense would be merely accidental and arbitrary. Nor does it signify that being merely arises from being either. Creation in that sense would merely be a necessary result a form of causal determinism. Creation, real creativity, entails that the world … expresses itself within itself (1993: 71).

The term “world”, as Nishida points out himself, does not signify “that which stands over against the self” but “the concrete world that has the logical form

Introduction

19

of a self-transforming matrix” (1993: 73). In a similar vein, his use of the term “expression” does not refer to the bringing out of an inner core but to the “structure of biconditional, interexpressive, mutual revealment of self and other” (1993: 49), where “other” refers to all other things, beings, occurrences and phenomena alike. Interexpression is thus a relational paradigm which transcends the system of binary oppositions without sublation; that is to say without imposing a unifying function. It posits that every existent cooriginates interdependently with other existents, since coming into being is always related to other, external causes, which is why no existent can be said to originate independently. This further means that the individual polarities of human experience, such as self and other, subjective and objective are mutually interdependent and that this interdependence is also an existential relatedness. This permanent mutual structuring of all things is what Nishida terms a “metaphysical society”. In Fundamental Problems of Philosophy Nishida writes: there must be an I-Thou relation between individual and individual. In the concrete world there must be the relation of I and Thou between thing and thing. That which stands over against the I must always be a Thou….When there is a mutual experiencing separated by absolute negation in which the self exists in the state of absolute negation-qua-affirmation, everything which stands opposed to the self – even the mountains, rivers, trees, and stones – is a Thou. In such a sense, the concrete world becomes a metaphysical society (1970: 29).

It is important to note two things here. First, the Thou-ness of the mountains and the rivers does not refer to a form of animism but to the bilateral mediation of all beings, things and phenomena. Second, the notion of the metaphysical does not refer to that which is not physical, thus other-wordly and trans-temporal as in the Western metaphysical tradition. On the contrary, it refers to the interrelation of transcendence and immanence. The two notions form an interdependent structure which has no organisational gravity and bypasses both the deterministic worldview which prioritises the past over the future and objectivity over subjectivity, and the teleological worldview, which prioritises the future over the past and subjectivity over objectivity. Instead, it places the emphasis on the present moment as a dynamically tensional structure in which co-determination occurs. For Nishida, this is inseparable from the notion of the “continuity of discontinuity”, which is rooted in the idea of the world as action and refers to motion in time. That the world is

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motion and action, rather than a set of predetermined static relationships, means that the particular not only determines and is determined by other particulars – such as the colour grey being determined and determining other colours in the spectrum, most notably white and black – but that the universal “colour” is always and only determined by particulars. The notion “colour” does not exist as an independent idea or abstract entity but is only conceivable in terms of a particular colour. This further means that there is no universal without the particular and that “the transcendent determines itself immanently” (1970: 5; emphasis mine). This is why action – understood as perpetual mutual determination – underlies interexpression and comprises personal action or “action-intuition”, based on the I-and-Thou relationship where the opposition between subject and object, whether material or object of consciousness, is both “transcended and grounded” (1970: 92). Action-intuition or koiteki chokkan (1970: 92) is thus an auto-productive activity situated at the interstice of the acting subject and the acted-upon-object in which perception (understood as passive sensorial impregnation), action (understood as sensori-motor exertion), knowing (understood as cogitation) and intuition (understood as sudden, non-deductive apprehension) intertwine to overcome the subjective positionality of the actor/observer and incorporate the existential dimension of the world as action. It is a state of reciprocity in which there is no positionality. This is why Nishida refers to Zen practice whose preoccupation with the everyday and the insignificant is the locus in which action-intuition is simultaneously applied and produced. It is partly because of its consistent preoccupation with the insignificant and the everyday that Fluxus is often compared to Zen. This fascination with non-positional modalities of being-knowing, with “life as it is” was also shared by John Cage whose influence on Fluxus, as a number of artists (Dick Higgins, Ben Vautier, George Maciunas) acknowledge, is seminal. To Cage, “everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration [art], when we become aware of it” (Cage in Kirby and Schechner 1965: 65). As Higgins points out in his reflections on Cage’s class in Experimental Composition which Cage taught at the New School for Social Research in New York in the late 1950s and which a number of Fluxus artists attended, this notion further bifurcates into two concepts crucially important to Cage’s practice: suchness and the “autonomous behavior of simultaneous events” (Higgins cited in Smith 1998: 23).

Introduction

21

These concepts are derived from Zen Buddhism and are related to interexpression and “action-intuition”. Suchness is that which resists cogitation and interpretation. Suchness is concrete existence understood as the perpetual codetermination of universal and particular, transcendence and immanence. As such, it is directly related to the ‘autonomous behavior of simultaneous events’ where multiplicity and plurality exist precisely because there is no hierarchical ordering of interpretation. This is why Cage’s compositions, such as his seminal 1952 Untitled Piece, a composition for three speakers, piano, dancer, gramophone, radios, films and slide projectors, engage the percipient in a plurisensorial multiplicity of foci and place him/her amidst the world of perpetual becoming, which is to say the world of action. Because such and similar works sidestep positionality and interpretation, their production is necessarily paradoxical. As Cage notes: “what is the purpose of writing Music?... the answer must take the form of a paradox; a purposeful purposelessness … not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in nature, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living” (1966: 8). In a similar fashion, suggests Higgins in A Dialectic of Centuries, Fluxus works seek to present “process as process, accepting reality as a found object, enfolding it by the edges, so to speak, without trying to distort it (artistically or otherwise) in its depiction” (1976: 6). It is the legacy of Cage’s paradoxical creation-non-creation whose chief “purposeless purpose” is to sensitise the percipient/interactant to the processuality of interexpression that the Fluxus works seek to perpetuate. This processual, non-positional sensitisation where “action-intuition” is both applied and produced is the cornerstone of the interexpressive aesthetics. Structure and Organisation The proposition of this volume is thus that Fluxus creates alternative relational paradigms in what I consider to be the five main relational systems that constitute human experience. These are: language, temporality, the sensorium, social rites and rituals, and systems of economic exchange. The dualist paradigm postulates a difference of category between content (meaning) and form (words) in the sphere of language; between subjective (internal) and objective (external) time in the sphere of temporality; between rational (abstract) knowledge and corporeal (concrete) experience in the sphere of the

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Fluxus The Practice of Non-Duality

senses; between social reality (valid social rituals) and non-reality (mere play) in the sphere of sociality; and between (active) production and (passive) consumption in the sphere of economic relations. The sum total of these hierarchical relations is a disenfranchised, experientially impoverished, and, essentially, lacking subject, exiled to the realm of abstraction, outside the world, outside of time and outside of its own body. This book argues that the Fluxus works operate in each of the five spheres to dismantle the elaborate systems of otherisation by which duality is held in place and to create alternative relational systems. The order in which these five spheres appear is, for this reason, based on the degree of saturation with the repercussions of the “two world” theory. Chapter two starts with the most pervasive remnant of the “two-world” theory, the notion of a fixed meaning as an invariable relatum, which dwells in the world beyond. This notion, which is deeply logocentric, privileges the meaning-assigning cogito while denigrating bodies, objects, shapes, sounds, smells, actions and interactions on account of their irrelevance to the process of meaning-production. Focusing on the event score, a “fragment of scored reality” (Brecht), simultaneously a verbal pictogram and a performance instruction, this chapter shows how Fluxus deconstructs the dualist conception of language through transitive grammatical programming, thus articulating the possibility of a “world-comprehensive” grammar (Derrida). Deriving from the Greek word grammé, which means to write, inscribe and define, grammar pro-grammes relationships between things and beings. In traditional linguistic terms, this programming is done by means of noun declensions and verb conjugations. If we borrow an example from Latin, since English has no noun declensions, we will see that in a simple phrase like “amor vincit omnia” meaning “love conquers all”, the word “amor” retains its nominative form while the word “omnia” appropriates the accusative form. This alteration of form configures or pro-grammes the relationship between the two words, designating the former as agent and the latter as patient. Once programmed this relationship is fixed, which is to say that any word appearing in the nominative case will always and without exception act on any word appearing in the accusative case and not the other way around. I argue that the event score is a grammatical function whose agency is not confined to noun declensions and verb conjugations, but operates transitively and extends across categories to include glances, gestures, movements, songs, actions, objects, measurements and complex situations. This function replaces the

Introduction

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unimodality of cogitational interpretation with the process of crosscategorical structuration. Chapter three focuses on the next most significant ramification of the “two world” theory, derived from the notions of fixedness and reification in the world beyond, and that is – staticity. Within the dualist paradigm time is conceptualised as an organising principle or container in which events occur. This idea is both created by and, in turn, creates positional consciousness of a very specific kind: that which places the subject outside of time. Applying the processualist logic of multilateral structuration developed in the previous stage, this chapter demonstrates that Fluxus compositions, film and durational performance operate through pervasive temporalised musicalisation to sensitise the percipient-interactant to lived time, to perpetuate the dialectical interplay of continuity and discontinuity (Nishida), and, to subvert the dualistic notion of external (objective) time. The main argument, which is that Fluxus compositions, films and durational performances perform and thus produce time, departs from the concept of time as an expressive activity of any given thing, being or phenomenon. This expressive activity does not occur in time but produces time in its occurrence. This means that time cannot be statically measured as a progression from a static point A to a static point B, only grasped as a process of continuous change, differentiation and mutation. Although difficult to understand as well as perceive, continuous change can be likened to the process of aging as opposed to that of growing. Whilst the process of growing is marked by a clear beginning and an approximate end, the process of aging has neither a beginning nor an end as it is not a passage from a fixed point in one’s youth to a fixed point in one’s old age, but a gradual process of continuous change whose starting point cannot be determined and which continues well after one’s death in the form of decomposition. This process, rendered imperceptible to the aging subject by the very gradualness of change, encompasses change on all fronts; it is not only the colour of one’s hair that changes but also the posture, smile, voice, the texture of one’s skin, and, not least of all – one’s consciousness. In this stage I show how the process of pervasive musicalised temporalisation produces continuous change and in doing so sensitises the percipient-interactant to the existence of heterogeneous temporalities. This further articulates the structuring relationship between the actual and the virtual, the present and the absent, the lived and the phenomenal, continuity and discontinuity.

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Chapter four focuses on the ramifications of the “two world” theory derived from the thus-far-mentioned notions of fixedness, staticity and externality, namely occularcentrism. Building on the notion of inseparability between the self and temporality established in the previous stage I turn to the sensorium and the investigation of intersensorial relationality. Intersensorial relationality is an existential relatedness between “subject” and “object”, and implicitly, between identity and alterity, afforded by the distinctly multisensorial experiential agenda of the Fluxkit. A portable performative score in the form of objects, thus simultaneously an event and an object, the Fluxkit is both a poignant critique of the occularcentric regime and a matrix for a dehierachisation of the sensorium. Vision owes its century-long, cumulative supremacy in the first place to the Aristotelian, Platonian and medieval Christian association of vision with the powers of cognition and the workings of the soul, and, in the second place, to the quest for measurement, striated organisation, territory-appropriation and progressive technologisation, which begun with the Enlightenment and continues to this day. Vision thus presupposes a vantage point from which the autonomous sovereign subject observes the world in a supposedly objective manner and perceives it as an agglomeration of “things” separate from itself. In this sense, vision is coextensive with positional consciousness which represents “objects of consciousness” to a remote “centre”, the cogito, situated in the realm of ideality. This chapter demonstrates that the practice of the Fluxkit offers a number of epistemological-ontological alternatives to such a sensorially impoverished system of knowledge-production. These alternatives in turn produce “lived meaning”, which is based on intercorporeity and forms a network of continuously proliferating, non-sublatable, inter-corporeal micro relationships. Chapter five explores the next significant ramification of the “two world” theory derived from the accumulation of fixedness, staticity, externality and detachment, namely the dualistic social order. This order is based on the assumption that apart from real social institutions there are also ideal social institutions. Applying the logic of non-sublatable, inter-corporeal microrelationships to social rituals, in other words, performed social institutions, this chapter demonstrates how Flux-Rites (interventions into established social rituals: Flux Sports, Fluxfeasts, Flux Wedding, Flux-Divorce and Flux Funeral) operate to dismantle the legitimised principle of division which determines what qualifies as social reality and what does not. Essentially, this principle determines what is real by determining what is serious and im-

Introduction

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portant and by separating it from the nonsensical and the frivolous. This quintessential division further bifurcates into that which serves to uphold the ideological formatting of the social reality in question and that which threatens to abolish it. This, in turn, bifurcates into the “done” and “not done”, right-wrong, edible-inedible, beautiful-ugly and permeates all domains of social life, behavioural patterns, tastes and judgments. This chapter articulates the ways in which the ludic-concretist and the symbolic-concretist approach employed by Fluxus destabilises emergent vectors of signification, which, when repeatedly reinstated through performance, form ossified positions and subsequently a homogenised system or a social reality. I argue that Flux-Rites inaugurate the principle of a kaleidoscopic reality in which a number of different governing principles appear simultaneously and that this principle prevents reduction to a homogenised and thereby also hegemonic system. Chapter six examines the next ramification of the “two world” theory derived from the accumulation of fixedness, staticity, objectivity, detachment and homogeneity, and that is consumerism. Building on the ludic-concretist and symbolic-concretist approaches developed in the previous stage, this chapter focuses on the ways in which the Fluxus distribution systems deconstruct the hegemony of positional economy produced by the 1960s and 1970s affluent society. Defined by the social thinker Gary Cross as an “emulativemanipulative economy of status goods and services” (1993: 196), “positional economy” is an abstract construct rooted in the theory of marginal utility which views value in terms of subjective utility, relative to the satisfaction of competing scarce goods. This further means that no goods possess intrinsic or material value but that their value is positionally construed in the ebb and flow of supply and demand and the forever-shifting and out-of-reachremaining horizon of human desire. “Positional economy” can thus be seen as yet another construct of the above-mentioned thetic or positional consciousness, implicated in creating a “single sign system” (Cross) in which consumers become “fused” with the goods they possess as it is no longer their activities but, instead, their commodities which communicate (purchased) messages of status and/or personality. My purpose in this chapter is to demonstrate that the Fluxus systems of exchange operate within a distinctly Gramscian framework, concerned with a gradual parallel modification of the economic and the socio-cultural. Fluxus economics, which is metamorphic and relational, is shown to be an interexpression of two mutually exclu-

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sive economic logics: the logic of abundance, generosity and unaccountable expenditure which favours “unconditional investment”, based on the notion of transformation, and the logic of scarcity and the optimal use of available resources, which favours calculated investment, based on the teleological notion of development and progress. I argue that the parallel and irreducible employment of these two logics creates an expansive economic model which operates to accommodate interdependent corporeal-material-temporal networks, governed by lived, specific and non-generalisable relationships. The final chapter of this book formulates a theory of dynamic coconstitutivity based on the practice of Fluxus intermedia: the event score, Fluxfilms, the Fluxkit, Flux-Rites, Fluxshops and Mail Order Centers. Examining the relationship between the frame, the logic of framing, the privileged agent of framing and the intermedial logic of fluxing, which operates to refract, expand and disperse the frame, this chapter traces the shift from a hegemonic experentiality based on the ramifications of the “two world theory” to the experientiality produced by dynamic co-constitutivity. The chapter then moves on to examine the legacy of Fluxus, which, I argue, lies in the logic of fluxing. Despite the fact that Fluxus emerged at a specific historical moment, the logic of fluxing is applicable to all epochs; it is also practicable by all. I have to add, however, that there are areas of hegemonic experientiality where Fluxus may be said to operate as a practice of non-duality but which are not included in this book. Examples of this are gender and ethnicity. In the 1960s the Fluxus group comprised an – for that time – unprecedented mix of artists of Caucasian, Oriental and African American origin, as well as a large proportion of women. This diversity created a platform for voicing concerns about racial as well as gender polarisation, which invariably classifies the white heterosexual male as a universal human being and relegates the rest to the domain of its less worthy “other”. Despite the fact that there are works which thematise these issues in a poignant manner, their inclusion in a study such as this would require a very different set of criteria, namely those that define the notion of “practice” as something the artist does, rather than something that can be changed and modified by the percipient-interactant. Another area that cannot be included in this volume, due to its limited scope, is a fully-fledged analysis of the relevance of humour to the practice of nonduality. I address the role of humour as a différant mechanism and a form of

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biopolitical production. However, an in-depth discussion of the different brands of Fluxus humour – and there are many – will have to take place in a different venue. Similarly, the material under discussion is necessarily selective. It is with the “jeweler’s eye” that I have chosen the most representative works. Although most of the works fall within the category of the so-called historical Fluxus, which spans from 1961 to 1978 – the year of Maciunas’s death – and includes only those works which Maciunas identified as Fluxus and the Fluxus scholar Jon Hendricks subsequently compiled into an exhaustive collection of Fluxus works entitled Fluxus Codex, I have also chosen a number of works that do not fall into this category. In keeping with the main purpose of this study my selection criteria is based on the works’ intermedial “doing”, their performativity, and, most importantly, their practicability.

Chapter 2 Language Within the dualist paradigm language is conceptualised as a tool of expression. That language is a tool of expression means that it serves both as a container and a conveyer of the inner workings of human consciousness. Within the privileged realm of internality – the realm of res cogitans – immaterial ideas take shape. These ideas, which originate in the world of transcendence, are then ex-pressed and in-jected into words whose purpose is to disseminate the immaterial content of these ideas in the material world of immanence. The process of dissemination is thus also a process of externalisation and this process is distinctly unilateral. In order to keep the unilateral relationship in place, grammatical (thus relationship-determining) rules are applied exclusively to spoken and written signs at the expense of all other forms of linguistic relationality such as gestures, movements, actions, objects, songs and silences. The result of this fixed, unilateral and exclusionary relationship is a definite frame within which the subject’s chosen content is expressed and which separates this content from non-content. When an artist or a poet “uses” spoken or written signs, he or she does so not only to express his/her own chosen content, but also to disseminate the “fruit” of divine inspiration. The resulting text or poem is thus a privileged site of interpretation where the listener/viewer/reader is invited to perform the work of deciphering “the message”. My contention in what follows is that Fluxus, or, to be more precise, the event score dismantles this dualist construct by exploding the “playing field” of signification, by emphasising the gameness as well as the pervasiveness of language, and, by harnessing the interpellative powers of language.

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Exploding the Playing Field

THREE GAP EVENTS

- missing-letter sign - between two sounds - meeting again George Brecht 1961

RAIN EVENT

By subscription only

Robert Watts 1963

In an article entitled “Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the “Event” Score” the art historian Liz Kotz suggests that the event score, of which Three Gap Events and Rain Event are examples, “utilizes language as its material” (Kotz 2001: 61). This statement, which is representative of the aforementioned dualistic tendencies, points to three problematic areas. The first is the instrumental and teleological orientation suggested by the word “utilize”. The second is the existence of a higher “purpose” to which language is subordinated, implied in the instrumental-teleological orientation. The third is the synecdochal nature of the statement which substitutes the effect for the cause, the event score for the artist, the agent implied in the instrumental relationship. Lurking in the background of this statement is the expressive paradigm, which operates as a hierarchically organised “artist-content-form” structure, itself an echo of the logocentric, and, in fact, theocentric structure. Despite the fact that the tradi-

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tional notion of language is, indeed, that of a means of expression, and Kotz’ statement, in fact, embedded in a broader discussion of the event score’s intermedial function, which will be discussed below, it is important to clarify that Fluxus work – and the event score is no exception in this respect – does not function along instrumental-teleological lines. The reason for this is that, as Dick Higgins suggests in “Theory and Reception”, Fluxus work “does not attempt to express a vision of a world transformed by imagination or feeling” nor does it “attempt to express the artist emotionally or intellectually” (Higgins [1982] 1999: 228), and can, for this reason, not be called “expressive in the normal meaning of the term” (1999: 228). An empirical proof of this statement can be obtained within seconds if we try to determine the content of the above event scores by asking questions such as “what is being expressed here?”, or “what content or meaning is being communicated?” A quick application of these questions to Brecht’s Three Gap Events will hardly reveal much more than the fact that the title points to a seeming contradiction in terms; according to the Oxford Dictionary (1964), a gap is “an unfilled space or interval, a blank, a gorge, a pass, a break in continuity” (Fowler 1964: 503) while an event is “an occurrence, a thing that happens, a fact of a thing’s happening” (1964: 418). A gap is thus a spatio-temporal disruption of the hitherto existent continuity of force, matter and/or phenomena; an event is a spatio-temporal irruption of force, matter and/or phenomena into the hitherto continuous nonexistence of the same. This makes the combination of the two words oxymoronic and settles their apparent irreconcilability while simultaneously indicating a semantic slipperiness, if not a semantic vacuum. If we continue with the same line of investigation we will come up against three disparate categories of sign, sound and action, namely “missing-letter sign”, “between two sounds”, and “meeting again”. Apart from detecting a certain progression in complexity from a written sign (an object) to an acoustic occurrence (a performance), and, finally, to a situation which may include both objects and performances, the quest to determine the content or the meaning of Three Gap Events – and subsequently judge the appropriateness, beauty or effectiveness of the form used to express this meaning – will most likely not get us very far. A glance at Watt’s Rain Event will confirm the same diagnosis, namely that a paradox, akin to the paradox operating in Three Gap Events is at work in Watts’s score, too, only operating along a different axis, that of nature and culture,

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since rain is generally seen as a natural phenomenon, subscription as a culturally created phenomenon. Higgins is once again instructive when he says that “meaning is not the point in a Fluxpiece” and that “the conveyors of meaning are often so incidental as to make the semiotics of a Fluxpiece problematic or even irrelevant” (1999: 229). But, there is more at play here than the incidental suspension of semiosis. The quest for meaning is also a quest for stabilisation, for anchoring and a determination of a centre. As Jacques Derrida notes, the function of a centre is not only to “orient, balance, and organize the structure … but above all to make sure that the organizing principle would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form” (Derrida [2001] 2008: 352; emphasis original). While the play of semiosis allows for a plurality of interpretations, its structure, its “total form” (which is what determines the scope of play), is itself predetermined by the governing principle to which semiosis is subordinated. This is why an attempt to determine the meaning of a word, a sentence, or a text is, in fact, an attempt to delineate the “fundamental ground” where play is constituted on the basis of a “fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude which itself is beyond the reach of play” (2008: 352). What I would like to suggest is that instead of operating on the basis of a “reassuring certitude” and a centre which remains “beyond the reach of play”, the event score de-centers the playing field and in doing so explodes the very structurality of structure. How this is done can, once again, be empirically established. If instead of the “what” questions, we approach the above scores with a “how” question, Brecht’s and Watts’s scores will begin to unfold in an altogether different light – as a path, an activity, a process and a modus operandi. Applying the “how” question to Three Gap Events and asking “how does this work?” will reveal two parallel structuring processes – spacing and temporisation. Although intertwined, these processes can, for clarity’s sake, be described as spatio-temporal extensions of gap-ness and event-ness respectively. On the one hand, there is the process of withdrawing, of dropping into a temporary caesura and absence. On the other, there is the process of perpetuating or amplifying the duration of a thing’s happening. Thus seen, the first of Brecht’s Three Gap Events – “missing letter” – functions as an ongoing structuring activity of eventful suspension of that which once occupied (or

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might have occupied) the place of the missing letter sign. “Eventful suspension” is in this case comparable to the movement of ascending a descending staircase where motion may appear “arrested” from the point of view of linear progression, but is, in fact, minutely structured in spatio-temporal terms. The second gap event – “between two sounds” – operates through a similarly minutely structured, expectant suspension of audible sensations and is, in this sense, pregnant with sound whose absence it articulates. The third gap event – “meeting again” – unfolds as an eventful suspension of physical, visual, aural, tactile and olfactory contact between human beings, objects and/or animals, thus making the act of “meeting again” pregnant with the volume of being apart, so to speak. Seen in this way, each of the three contexts constituting the playing field of Three Gap Events appears as a vibrant nexus of perpetual spatio-temporal structuring, happening and event-hood. Brecht, who was the first to articulate the term “event score”, but who was also a practising chemist, would invariably have been familiar with the definition of events often used in physics, such as that articulated by the physicist Wim Rietdijk. For Rietdijk, an event is, quite simply, “a point taken from three-dimensions to four-dimensions” (Rietdijk 1966: 12). “Three-dimensions” does not have an explicitly articulated temporal dimension – in other words, it does not involve an action performed in time – but “four-dimensions” does. A light switch is thus a threedimensional situation, but the switching on of light a four-dimensional one. Like any other four-dimensional situation, a simple event like the switching on of light is prone to felicitous as well as infelicitous occurrences. This further indicates the event’s essentially unstable, and, to a large extent, unpredictable nature. In Mémoire pour Paul de Man, Derrida suggests that an event is “nothing of which it might be possible to say: ‘this is’ (with any complement of being) in the way that Hegel was able to say ‘this is an oak in which we discern the development of an acorn” (Derrida 1988b: 152). Rather, it is “the evaporation (échéance) of any variety of acorns … [an event] is unique and unforeseeable, free of ulterior expectations and in no way subject to teleological maturation: an oak that has nothing to do with any acorn” (1988b: 152). The fact that an event cannot easily be anchored to a teleological structure is crucial to understanding why the event score resists closure and how it explodes the playing field. If, while reading:

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THREE GAP EVENTS

-

missing-letter sign

-

between two sounds

-

meeting again George Brecht 1961

we are sensitised to sound and discern the sound of a crying baby emerging from the sea of traffic coming through the window, we might focus on it, tune into its density, follow its crescendo or decrescendo and notice when it stops. The sudden withdrawal of this particular sound may make us focus on other sounds with expectant attention. During this state of suspension, while trying to discern whether the sound of the crying baby is likely to resurface, we might notice that an empty paper coffee cup is lying on the desk. While focusing on the dense fabric of sound as well as expecting the sound of the crying baby to reappear at any moment, we might also walk over to the rubbish bin and throw the coffee cup in the bin. During the period of time which started with the sound of the crying baby and ended with our walking back from the bin, the playing field of the score would have included auditory, visual, kinaesthetic and tactile events. An obvious objection to this argument is, of course, that we could have engaged in exactly the same activity or focused on the same sensory data while reading any other text or poem and that this does not necessarily indicate an expanded playing field. The reason why this is not the case is that if instead of reading Three Gap Events we read a lyrical poem such as I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, whose form is expressive and which communicates the poet’s feelings about the beauty of nature, aroused by the sight of golden daffodils “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (Wordsworth 1857: 5), we could, indeed, engage in exactly the same activities and focus on the same sounds while inhabiting the imaginary world of fluttering daffodils, but these activities and sounds would be incidental. By evoking the world of daffodils that “stretch in never-ending

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line … continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the milky way” (1857: 6), Wordsworth’s poem creates a very specific frame to which the reader’s attention is drawn and which makes any occurrences outside the frame incidental, secondary or even inconsequential. In other words, despite the fact that we may throw a coffee cup in the rubbish bin while simultaneously inhabiting Wordsworth’s world of golden daffodils we are highly unlikely to think of the poem as “framing” golden daffodils, coffee cups and rubbish bins in equal measure. The reason why Three Gap Events explode the playing field is precisely because the event of the crying baby or of throwing the coffee cup in the rubbish bin is as much a part of the “frame” as anything else. The absence of any particular content (and thereby also “frame” which separates this content from non-content) in Three Gap Events thematises and renders equally relevant all events constitutive of the percipient’s-interactant’s environment. Since in the field of de-centered play there is no segregation between “content” and “non-content”, there is no limit on the variety of occurrences, performances, imaginings and/or recollections that may become the “content” of the event. Equally, there is no limit on how, or how often the “categorical demarcations” of this “content” may change – sound, movement, smell, colour, action – since the event score’s essential frameless-ness substitutes the process of cross-categorical “mixing” for the centralised structure of interpretation in which the plurality of interpretations remains bound by the unifying logic of the “frame”. This process, which is the condition of transitive grammatical programming, is based on the Derridian différance. Although différance has already been mentioned in the previous chapter, a more in-depth explanation is needed here in order better to understand how the event score operates in language and why this particular operation may be said to thematise the operationality of language at large. “[N]either a word nor a concept” (Derrida 1982: 7), différance is in its original version, in French, an audibly imperceptible composite of two intertwined word-concepts: to defer – “to temporize, take recourse, consciously or unconsciously in the temporal and temporizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of ‘desire’ or ‘will’ and equally effects this suspension in a mode that annuls and tempers its own effect” and, to differ – “to be not identical, to be other” (1982: 8). Derrida derives this notion from two very different but equally important accounts of language,

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Ferdinand Saussure’s jeu de langage as defined in his Course in General Lingusitics, and, Edmund Husserl’s expressive theory of meaning, as defined in his Logical Investigations. For Saussure, le jeu de langage (the play of language) is governed by the arbitrary conventional as well as differential aspects of signs that define language as systematic: The conceptual side of value is made solely of relations and differences with respect to the other terms of language, and the same can be said of its material side […] in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up: but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual or phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it (Saussure cited in Derrida 1982: 10–11).

It is clear that for Saussure, linguistic meaning functions independently of its reference. The system of language consists of the totality of linguistic signs and each sign consists of signified (the meaning) and signifier (the word). The meaning of a sign thus resides in its differential opposition, or, in other words, in its articulated distance from the rest of the signs in the system. Following Saussure, Derrida suggests that because the linguistic sign is both generated by the system and exists only with reference to other signs within the same system, it enters the movement of signification and begins to function significantly in le jeu de langage solely on account of its difference from the other signs not presently in use. The meaning of a word is thus decentred from the very start, argues Derrida. It does not derive from an animated “expressive core” as suggested by Edmund Husserl, but, indeed, only from the differential position any given word holds in relation to the totality of all other signs which constitute the semantic universe. Of crucial importance here is that for Derrida, unlike for Husserl, the notion of the semantic universe is not restricted to signs of the same order – in this case, words – but is comprehensive of all other occurrences and phenomena. In Speech and Phenomena Derrida opposes Husserl’s concept of expression and its division into formal signs or phonemes: the sense-giving act performed by the subject (Sinngebung); and, the ensuing meaning (Sinn, Bedeutung), which is understood as resulting solely from the subject’s process of sense-giving, his/her “internal” or “silent monologue”, as Husserl terms it (1973: 41–42). Derrida objects to

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this dissociation of the sign as a mere “form”, from the ideality of the sign’s meaning and argues that there can be no purely “inner” or “outer” sphere since the inner sphere, occurring in the subject’s imagination, is always already tainted by the subject’s inter-subjective, inter-corporeal and intercorporeal-material contact with the world. It is for this reason that there can be no purely “internal”, “silent monologue”, or process of Sinngebung (1973: 42–43). Derrida goes on to argue against Husserl’s disqualification of the entire empirical realm as belonging to the category of purely incidental signs such as spoken or written words, facial expressions, speech patterns, gestures and bodily movements, for the simple reason that they are unintended by the subject, removed from the subject’s process of Sinngebung, and thus irrelevant (1973: 43). Elaborating the notion of hierarchisation, Derrida demonstrates how the Husserlian distinction between the realm of meaning and the empirical realm of purely incidental signs entails an entire system of hierarchical oppositions such as those between intelligible and sensible, subject and object, inner and outer. Furthermore, he shows that these oppositions form not only the ontological as well as the epistemological cornerstone of Western thought, but are also unavoidably inscribed, grammatically configured in all Indo-European languages. Another consequence of this line of reasoning is that grammar is perceived as belonging to the thinking subject only. Not only that, it is perceived as belonging to spoken and written language only, which disqualifies all other categories, activities and operations and thereby denies their grammatical, in other words configuring influence on human behaviour. In contrast to this, Derrida argues for a concept of language as always already comprehensive of the world with all its forces and phenomena in which différance operates as a perpetual process of mutual articulation, structuration and configuration, in a wide variety of contexts and modalities of exchange. This perpetually structuring process operates both without a final goal and a governing agent, because it is, in Derrida’s words, “strategic and adventurous” (1982: 7). It is strategic because there is no intervention from the outside, and it is adventurous “because this strategy is not a simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics to a final goal [but is] what might be called blind tactics… the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end” (1982: 7).

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Fluxus The Practice of Non-Duality

Suffice it to look at Watts’s

RAIN EVENT

By subscription only

Robert Watts 1963

to see how différance operates. In the first place, the particular structuring activity present in Rain Event is that of culture and nature different and deferred. This structuring activity, which has no definitive result, is permanently différant in the sense that it is not self-identical and not definitively different. The two poles are presented as a juxtaposition of the acculturated notion of an event – seen as a four dimensional occurrence whose taking place can be anticipated – and the un-acculturated notion of an event – seen as nonanticipatable and non-programmable. Derrida terms the former category le futur – a foreseeable and programmable pattern of repetition and the latter l’avenir (Derrida in Kirby 2005: np). While le futur is “programmed to come” (2005: np) and can be influenced by human behaviour, such as the act of subscribing to a magazine, for example, which can be expected to result in a periodical delivery of the same, l’avenir surpasses human understanding and thus also programmability. An example of this is rain. L’avenir could be said to operate in the “different” category of nature and le futur could be said to operate in the “different” category of culture. However, one of the possible adventurous-strategic grammatical paths is to repeatedly perform the act of subscribing to a rain event, which may seem absurd, but only from the point of view of a definite difference between the two “opposing poles” – nature and culture. For many non-Western cultures, such as that of the Navajo Indians, it is possible to come close to “subscribing” to a rain event. This is done by performing sacrificial rituals whose performance efficacy – performance efficacy being the capacity of ritual to inaugurate a new reality – is aimed at creating what might be called a “contractual” bond with the divinity / divinities in question. Seen from this point of

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view, it is through the process of acculturation that l’avenir becomes le futur. This structuring process reveals that notions such as “nature”, “culture”, “accident” and “purpose” are perspectivally construed. Not only that, it also reveals that performance plays a crucial, reiterative role in the constitution of concepts. Being enmeshed in performance, concepts cannot be said to belong to a different order, but, rather, to a process of perpetual mutual configuration. Another aspect of différance inherent in Rain Event is that of joke-like category subversion. The most basic joke structure can be summed up thus: 1. Premise; 2. Antithesis, as can be seen from the following two examples from Woody Allen: “The great roe is a mythological beast with the head of a lion and the body of a lion, though not the same lion”. “Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime” (www.standupcomedyportal.com/Woody-Allen). Rather than proceeding from a premise to a (logical) synthesis, a joke subverts and overrules the very categorisation it introduces in its initial premise. The space-time in which human beings react with laughter is the zone of différance and this zone consists of the culturally operative convention, or the present social reality, and of potentiality, or of the imaginable but currently non-operative convention or social reality. In the case of Rain Event (as well as numerous other event scores), humour, with its pertaining physical accompaniment of laughter which occurs as a reaction to the state of cognitive shock caused by the act of category subversion, derives from exposing the structuring activity of différance, in other words, the simultaneous but constantly reversing perception that it is both possible and impossible to subscribe to a rain event. Like Three Gap Events, Rain Event operates configurationally, by exposing and altering relationships. This mutually structuring configuration – or grammaticality – which eludes the division into agent and patient, and which, as Derrida suggests, is “by rights anterior to all one calls sign (signified/signifier, content/expression), concept or operation, motor or sensory” (1976: 62), is also referred to as trac-

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ing. Important in Derrida’s use of the word “trace”, however, is that, in French, the word trace refers not only to a faint remnant but also to a track, a footprint and an imprint. The French word thus implies inscription, or programming, as derived from the Greek word grammé. The English word, however, does not conjure up connotations of permanence and invariance of the “inscribe” or “engrave” kind, but, rather, those of faintness and semipermanence. While Derrida speaks of tracing as of the “formation of form” and the “being imprinted of the imprint” (1976: 63), I have opted for the phrase “grammatical programming”, rather than “tracing” in order to avoid the implication of lightness and non-consequentiality produced by the English word “trace”. Although, strictly speaking, “grammatical programming” is a tautology, the word “grammatical” is here used as a counterpoint to the extreme teleological orientation the word “programming” has acquired in the recent decades. However, in keeping with the working of différance, “grammatical programming” does not refer to fixation and invariance but functions transitively in two senses of the word. The first sense is “to cross”, which, in this case, refers to the crossing of category boundaries so deeply ingrained in thought, language and behaviour as to appear “logical” and “natural”. The second sense is “to be mutual and reciprocal” and can be found in transitive verbs – “to like each other”, for example. Both of these aspects are crucial to understanding how the event score thematises the cross-categorical operationality of language. Moreover, they are inextricably intertwined with the event score’s intermedial provenance.

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The Intermedial Genesis of the Event Score The early 1960s witnessed the appearance of short, poetic, quasi-telegraphic textual notations:

COMPOSITION 1960 No. 10

Draw a straight line and follow it

October 1960 La Monte Young

DANGER MUSIC NUMBER FIFTEEN (For the Dance)

Work with butter and eggs for a time

May 1962 Dick Higgins

Partly originating in John Cage’s 1958–59 class in Experimental Composition at the New School for Social Research in New York, these textual notations, situated at the interstice of visual art, poetry, music and performance, emerged from a transitive sense of medium. As Higgins points out in his “Statement on Intermedia”, the transitive sense of medium – or intermedium – arose in the latter part of the 1950s in response to the advent of what were then the new media: television and radio. In Higgins’s view, it was at this

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point that the traditional divisions between the media became “arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical but also poetry” (Higgins in Armstrong and Rothfuss [1966] 1993: 172). In other words, the conventional media had “become merely puristic points of reference…the intermedial approach [was] to emphasize the dialectic between the media” (19933: 172). Higgins traces this “dialectic between the media” to the Duchampian readymade, but the same, dialectical and transitive thinking can also be found in John Cage’s work of the 1950s, in many ways influenced by D.T. Suzuki’s Zen-derived philosophy. As has already been mentioned, Suzuki, whose classes at Columbia University Cage attended from 1949 – 1951, is responsible for introducing Cage to some of the key concepts of Zen Buddhism such as the interpretation of all things and the non-linearity of cause and effect. As Cage recounts: Suzuki said that there was a difference between oriental thinking and European thinking, that in European thinking things are seen as causing one another and having effects, whereas in oriental thinking this seeing of cause and effect is not emphasized but instead one makes an identification with what is here and now. He then spoke of two qualities: unimpededness and interpenetration. Now this unimpededness is seeing that in all of time each thing and each human being is at the center and furthermore that each thing and each human being is at the center is the most honored of all. Interpenetration means that each one of these most honored ones of all is moving out in all directions penetrating and being penetrated by every other one no matter what the time and the space. So that when one says that there is no cause and effect, what this means is that there are an incalculable infinity of cause and effects and that in fact each and every thing in all of time and space is related to each and every thing in all of time and space (Cage 1968: 46).

Interpenetration thus means that there is no single or centralised structure but that a plurality of continuous, parallel processes of centralisation and decentralisation are in operation instead. It is on account of such and similar ideas that Cage took the legacy of Anton Webern’s serial music, which consisted of new interpretations of the traditional syntax of pitch, rhythm and form, in a very different direction. In contrast to the more rational “integral serialism” of Webern’s European heirs, such as Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Cage was of the opinion that:

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Webern’s later music suggested the application of serial methods to other aspects of sound than frequency. Thus concerning himself not only with the ordering of pitch but with the control, too, of diverse characteristics of amplitude and duration, Karlheinz Stockhausen assumes a responsibility toward the problem of unification of disparate elements. But, Webern’s music also suggests autonomy of sound in time-space and the possibility of making a music non dependent upon linear continuity means. The American works, setting out from this essentially non-dualistic point, proceed variously (Cage in Kostelanetz 1993: 81).

Rather than striving for a linear unity of disparate elements and confining the process of composition to the homogeneity and intransitivity of music as a medium – which can be compared to the liner and sequential logic of cause and effect – Cage departs from the unity of “all events in soundspace” (Cage cited in Brecht 1958: 4). In doing so he expands the notion of musical composition to include not only acoustic but all multi-sensorially perceptible events in time-space without exception. Cage’s influential 4’33”, reads: I TACET II TACET III TACET 1952

Here, the word “tacet” refers to the section during which an instrument is not required to play, directing the performer to remain silent during three movements. As Kotz notes in “Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the “Event” Score” Cage’s 4’33” “replaces conventional notation with a condensed set of typewritten numbers and words [and in doing so] effectively inaugurates the model of the score as an independent graphic/textual object, inseparably words to be read

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and actions to be performed” (Kotz 2001: 57). Although Kotz very rightly suggests that Cage employs the musical score “as a kind of temporal container, one that can be potentially filled with any material” (2001: 70; emphasis original), she extends the logic of containing to the event score, without taking into account the crucial differences between the event score and the Cagean score. As Brecht, who attended Cage’s class together with many other Fluxus artists, among whom Dick Higgins, Al Hansen, Jackson Mac Low and La Monte Young, and who was, indeed, the first to start sending out individual event scores such as: TWO DURATIONS

-

Red Green 1961

reveals in an interview with Irmeline Leeber: Cage was “a great liberator … but he remained a musician, a composer … life is much larger than music” (Brecht in Martin 1973: 83). “Afterwards I tried to develop the ideas that I’d had during Cage’s course and that’s where my “events” came from …Events are an extension of music” (1973: 84). Clearly, what Brecht sought was a more overt and more expansive form of transitivity. Much like Higgins’s above-mentioned Danger Music No 15 (Work with butter and eggs for a while), Brecht’s own Two Durations trigger an explicit “intermedial dialectic” by applying the perceptual lens traditionally associated with music to “properties” traditionally associated with other media: colour in the case of painting; shape, texture, movement and colour in the case of sculpture; movement, rhythm, form and composition in the case of dance. The result is the dissolution of the “medium-inherent” properties into a web of mutually structuring relationships.

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Events like Bengt af Klintberg’s No 8 from Twenty-Five Orange Events expand this intermedial dialectic beyond the limits of what are conventionally thought to be art media to include taste and olfaction.

NUMBER 8 (For Pi Lind) Eat an orange as if it were an apple. (Hold it, unpeeled, between forefinger, middle finger and thumb, bite big mouthfuls, etc.)

1963

By juxtaposing immediate sensorial experiences to received and ingrained knowledge af Klintberg’s score initiates the process of intermedial structuration in which known ways of eating an orange are permeated by new, apple-like ways of eating an orange. Biting into an orange as if it were an apple causes a small sensorial shock on two levels: the much stronger rush of vitamin C appears to have an acidy taste, and the unexpectedly juicy consistency of the orange makes one dribble. If one persists with apple-size bites, the juice begins to run down one’s chin and neck acting as a reminder that an orange is not quite an apple. However, once we have projected an imaginary apple-ness on to the orange, it is no longer quite an orange, either. What we experience instead is the interplay of différance. Eating an apple as if it were an orange is very different from eating an apriplum or a plumcot, for example, apriplums and plumcots being genetically modified fruit derived from the crossbreeding of apricots and plums. An apriplum is, of course, not quite an apricot and not quite a plum, or, one could say, an apriplum is both an apricot and a plum. In either case, the hybridity of the apriplum is unified and smooth. Af Klintberg’s proposition, by contrast, creates a tensional relationship between the actual fruit one is trying to eat, the mental picture one has of oranges and apples and the ingrained, second-nature ways of eating them. At every point of the experience, the eater is surprised again and again and this surprise resembles the surprise caused by optical illusions, such as Rubin’s

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vase. Usually depicted as a black and white drawing, this bi-stable figure, developed by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin, first appears as a stable image of a single vase, only to turn into two, inward-facing human profiles a moment later. Just as we have aligned our cognitive faculties with the visual cues, the two human profiles turn into a vase yet once again. Like Rubin’s vase, af Klintberg’s score mobilises undecidability and expands it beyond the sense of sight to include taste, olfaction and touch. The obvious difference between the Cagean score and the event score is thus the scope of its transitivity. Whereas the Cagean score acts as a temporal framing device for all events in time-space, the event score acts as a perceptual-performative instruction which initiates the process of multi-directional structuration. Although both are transitive, the former hinges on the structural logic of a single medium – music – while the latter engages a variety of media and thereby also a variety of perceptual and cognitive modalities. Comparable to Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, blank panels of white oil on canvas, which are, as Cage aptly notes “not only objects but ways of seeing … airports for shadows and for dust … mirrors of the air” (Cage cited in Frieling et al 2008: 82), the reflective time-space provided by 4’33’’ is framed by the notion of music as much as the reflective time-space of White Paintings is framed by the notion of painting. While the Cagean score uses language as a vehicle of perceptual transition from one medium to another/others, the event score assimilates the very grammaticality of language with all its notion-formulating, world-making, behaviour-enticing and subject-interpellating functions. In other words, it is through its multi-directional transitivity that the event score thematises the operationality of language. This is accomplished through three different but interrelated processes: gameness, creative-contemplative interpellation and pervasiveness. Gameness refers to the mode of interaction by means of which the event score circulates and acts as a notion-formulating, behaviour-enticing device. Creativecontemplative interpellation denotes the event score’s interpellative, thus subject-constituting and status-conferring power, in other words the “pull” the event score exercises on percipients-interactants. Pervasiveness refers to the event score’s persistent temporal working which sediments specific experiences, or, more generally, experientiality over time and in this way creates durable perceptual arrangements. These three paradigms intertwine to delineate the event score’s inter-subjective, inter-objective and inter-temporal

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working and dissemination, all of which form part of transitive grammatical programming. Gameness Defined by George Brecht as “the smallest unit of a situation” (Brecht in Sohm 1970: np) the event score, such as his

WORD EVENT

- Exit 1961 typically consists of as well as invokes simple, quotidian, almost imperceptible occurrences and actions. It “brings into evidence” (Brecht in Martin 1973: 67) as well as “scores” small segments of lived reality and in doing so displays what might be defined, after J.R. Searle, as a “dual direction of fit” (Searle 1979: 3). In Expression and Meaning Searle differentiates between the “word-toworld direction of fit” and the “world-to-word direction of fit” (1979: 4). Important to note, however, is that for Searle, these concepts remain inextricably intertwined with the intentionality of the speaker/writer, since the “word-to-world direction of fit” implies the use of assertives by means of which the speaker/writer tells the listener/reader how things are in the world. The “world-to-word direction of fit” implies the use of directives by means of which the speaker/writer prompts the listener/reader to do things in the world. The example provided by Searle is that of a man who having been given a shopping list by his wife goes to the supermarket to purchase the required items but is followed by a detective who notes down all his actions and makes a separate list of the purchased items (1979: 3). Although the two lists are exactly the same, the shopper’s list represents the “world-to-word direc-

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tion of fit”, because it prompts the shopper to match the world to the words, while the detective’s list represents the “word-to-world direction of fit” because it matches the words to the world. But unlike Brecht’s Word Event, where the word “exit” both states the existence of an exit and prompts the percipient/interactant to perform the action of exiting, thus suggesting a simultaneous world-to-word- and word-to-world direction of fit, the “dual direction of fit” Searle is referring to belongs to a very specific category of illocutionary acts. This category of illocutionary acts – speech acts which in saying do what they say – is the category of declarations. The notion of a speech act, first formulated by J.L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words, marks a departure from the notion of language as a tool for making truth statements about the world to the notion of language as a tool for doing things in the world, for impacting and changing the world. In other words, it marks a shift from the objectivist account of language to a subjectivist one. For Searle, who is generally recognised as Austin’s “heir” in terms of his continuation as well as further development of Austin’s theories, declarations are highly dependent not only on the intention of the speaker but also on what Searle, after J. L. Austin, terms “extra-linguistic institutions” (1979: 17). In a sentence such as “[y]our employment is (hereby) terminated”, which asserts on the basis of an assumedly successful directive, or, to borrow Searle’s definition, “bring[s] about some alteration in the status or condition of the referred to object or objects solely in virtue of the fact that the declaration has been successfully performed” (1979: 17), the illocutionary force of the sentence – the speaker’s/writer’s intention is secured through an extra-linguistic institution, that is to say social convention. In order to make the declaration efficacious, the speaker/writer has to be in a position of authority, itself a sedimentation of past intentions. Searle’s use of the term “dual direction of fit” thus refers to a double form of intentionality – the intentionality of the speaker/writer and the “ossified” intentionality of the social convention in which the speaker’s/writer’s declaration is embedded. It is precisely because of this double, present and past intentionality that the declaration has the power to control the future, since it, in fact, informs the listener/reader of an “already existing” state of affairs while the same state of affairs is still in the process of being established. The “dual direction of fit” exhibited by the event score, however, is an altogether different matter. Here the simultaneity of the world-to-word and the word-to-world “direction of fit” exposes the permanently oscillating undecidability between the subjectiv-

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ist and the objectivist accounts of language and thus also the impossibility of a single governing principle. For Derrida, who engaged in an extensive analysis of Austin’s speech act theory, and, in a prolonged (as well as heated) debate with Searle on the subject of intentionality, documented in Limited Inc., the speech act does not and cannot depend on the intention of the speaker/writer. Instead, it is produced by iterability or citationality. Using the example of his own signature, Derrida suggests that all forms of speaking and writing are “divided and multiple”, and that there is no clear intention or “original event” (Derrida 1988a: 33). “I imitate and reproduce my ‘own’ signature incessantly. This signature is imitable in its essence” (1988a: 34). What this means is that every repetition, whether vocal or written, is also a transformation. This is not to say that the category of intention disappears altogether, but that it no longer governs the entire field. Citation and iterability are thus both the effect of intentionality, and, its cause. Rather than providing a governing principle which subsumes the relationship between the word and the world under the category of the sovereign subject, and, by extension, the sovereign social institution, the event score exposes the interpenetrative, permanently changing nature of cause and effect. This is nowhere more evident than in Brecht’s

TWO ELIMINATION EVENTS

Empty vessel Empty vessel 1961

Simultaneously a “directive” in which the word “empty” refers to the action of emptying the vessel, and an “assertive” in which the word “empty” functions as an adjective describing the state of the vessel, Two Elimination Events can be seen as a repeated urging to empty the vessel, a repeated assertion that the vessel is empty, a description of a sequence of events in which

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the action of emptying the vessel has resulted in the vessel being empty, and as a prescription which informs the listener/reader that in order to be empty, the vessel has to be emptied. The same undecidability is also evident in the title which can be understood to refer to two different occasions on which the vessel was emptied, to a repeated action of emptying the vessel which engages the question: “if an action is repeated is it the same or is it different, is it a single action or is it two actions?”, and, to a direct transposition of the twosided descriptive-instructive function of the words “empty vessel” to two very different actions, or, indeed, an action and a “non-action” in which the vessel is emptied and subsequently observed as empty. This essential unsettledness, which apart from exposing the working of différance also exposes the multiplicity and the variability of context, brings to the fore that the Derridian citationality is, in fact, an “extension of music” (Brecht). Citationality is comparable to the working of the musical perpetuum mobile, a piece of music played repeatedly, often at a quick tempo and an indefinite number of times. In discussing the principle of immersion and the dissolution of boundaries separating the work from both its surroundings and the viewer in “Boredom and Danger”, Higgins makes a reference to Erik Satie’s Vexations, played 840 times in a concert lasting twenty-four hours. Higgins writes: “[b]y the time the piece is over the silence is absolutely numbing, so much of an environment has the piece become” (Higgins 1968: np). This means that Satie’s perpetuum mobile dismantles the separation between the categories “work”, “viewer/listener” and “the world” while remaining processually operative (1968: np). Neither reducible to a clearly defined “work” nor to a definite “non-work”, the perpetuum mobile is in a permanent state of transition, which implies a simultaneity of change and stasis, variability and invariability. In much the same way, the event score keeps “moving” on account of its différant, temporalised structure, a feature which makes for unexpected patterns of emergence and disappearance. The essential unpredictability of these patterns, which amplifies the event-hood of both the perpetuum mobile and the event score, “brings into evidence” the processual, movedependent structuration inherent in language, in other words – its gameness. The “gameness” of language was first advocated by Ludwig Wittgenstein whose Philosophical Investigations marked a radical departure from the twodimensional model of language – conceptualised as an assemblage of images – to a four-dimensional model based on interaction, a polymorphous series of

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“language games” (Wittgenstein 1958: 5). In a famous example of building a house in which the words “slab”, “brick” and “pillar” (1958: 4) do not stand for an ostensive definition but form part of a “language game” which unfolds as a move-dependent interaction of people, objects, actions as well as accidental, felicitous and infelicitous occurrences, Wittgenstein argues for what might be called a do-it-yourself view of language. On this view, language is similar to a labyrinth, a system lacking a beginning and an end, with no first teaching from without, no arché which explains the various sets of rules arising from and operating within the various contexts (1958: 149, 203). Like a passage through a labyrinth consisting of forever new and provisional rules, language is, for Wittgenstein, also a rite of passage. The major difference between Searle and Wittgenstein is that, for Wittgenstein, language cannot be subsumed under a single governing principle but remains heterogeneous, disorderly and unpredictable. This is why Wittgenstein does not offer a theory of language as such but emphasises its playfulness instead. The playfulness of language derives from nothing being fixed and given once for all, but changing and expanding all the time (1958: 11). The latter is at the same time the reason why Wittgenstein’s approach may be termed a “DIY”, or, a learning process-orientated approach, where word, deed, object, rule and accidental occurrence, all form part of the “movement” of language. Although Wittgenstein’s notion of the “language game” is in many ways comparable to Derrida’s jeu de langage based on différance and although Wittgenstein, not dissimilarly to Derrida’s notion of the worldcomprehensive grammar, terms “seeing”, “moving” “singing catches” and “guessing riddles” “grammatical remarks” (1958: 11), Wittgenstein’s model of the “language game” is more appropriate at this point because of its focus on practical linguistic operationality. While Derrida illuminates the rupture with the signified-signifier, content-form, speaker’s intention-objective situation, cause-and-effect dualism, Wittgenstein’s model of the language game articulates the trajectory of gameness. In broad terms, language games proliferate like “family resemblances” which is to say that they are in a continuous process of alteration, manifested in a complicated network of similarities such as those of “build … colour of eyes, gait” (1958: 31). Like “family resemblances”, which Wittgenstein further compares to a “continuous overlapping of fibres that runs through the whole thread” (1958: 31), language games keep “moving”, and it is this movement that weaves the labyrinthine network of language.

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The event score’s simultaneous “word to world” and “world to word direction of fit” places it in the category of descriptive-instructive language games, the tendency of which is to proliferate “family resemblances” by continually expanding the playing field as well as the number of players. A culinary recipe, which is simultaneously a notation and a performative instruction (and as such, both descriptive and instructive), is a good example of this particular language game. Once encountered in its olfacto-gustatory form, a culinary recipe is often “scored” again for the benefit of those who enjoyed the dish so much as to want to make it themselves and further share it with those who may, in turn, wish to score it again and so on ad infinitum. However, while expanding the playing field and multiplying the number of players like a culinary recipe, the event score performs another function and that is the configuration of the game itself. It does so by creating new moves in the game, in other words by disseminating “family resemblances”. Nam June Paik’s move in the game proposed by La Monte Young’s abovementioned Composition No 10 (Draw a Straight Line and Follow It) entitled Zen for Head consisted in Paik dipping his head in a bucket of ink and painting a straight line on a sheet of paper extended on the floor. Paik’s move in the game thus resulted in two new relational configurations, manifested in two different “traits” – the action and the resulting object, now part of the permanent collection at the Museum Wiesbaden in Germany (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1. Nam June Paik Zen for Head, Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuster Musik, Wiesbaden, 1962. © PA Images. Courtesy of PA Images.

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Equally, George Brecht’s PIANO PIECE

Center

1962 inspired different performative responses and created new moves in the game. While Brecht himself reports the following: “[w]ith my two index fingers I began to play the notes of the piano starting from the two ends until I found the note in the centre” (Brecht in Martin 1973: 85), the journalist Irmeline Lebeer reports “pushing the piano into the centre of the room” (Lebeer in Brecht 1973: 85) Similarly, Takehisa Kosugi’s

CHIRONOMY 1

Put out a hand from a window for a long time

1965

resulted in a number of new moves of which two are particularly interesting – the one created by Kosugi himself and the one created by the art historian David T. Doris. Kosugi’s move was performed in an outdoor space equipped with a stage and an auditorium: [a]t the rear of the stage was a backdrop, a wall and a door. I just slightly opened the door and put my hand out….the hand was exposed to the audience, and this part, my body, was behind the wall….. So from the audience side, they can only see my hand, I cannot see my hand. But as a total reality, they are the same thing….take this chair as an example. Maybe it has another

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part and it is exposed to another dimension, but we cannot see it. But everything is together. On the physical stage, it’s just a chair (Kosugi cited in Doris 1999: 103-4).

In contrast to Kosugi’s move, which operates along the visible-invisible and physical-metaphysical axis, David T. Doris’s move was that of sheer endurance. Doris reports: After quite a few minutes of maintaining the gesture, I felt a slight pain in my forearm, a slow throb that worked its way up to my shoulder and the base of my neck. In the face of this pain I became more determined to maintain the gesture, and soon it seemed clear that the piece, for me, was no longer one of formal duration – that is, was no longer concerned with the simple passing of time but of endurance, of a body situated within a shifting, temporal network of physical and mental phenomena (Doris [1998] 1999: 103; emphasis original).

Despite the fact that Doris does not provide any information about whether or not there were any reactions to this act of endurance, a re-enactment of Doris’s performance will easily demonstrate how the “continuous overlapping of fibres” proliferates new variations. If we put an arm out of a first or second floor window giving on to a busy street and hold it there for a substantial period of time, thirty minutes or more, we will notice that this gesture produces a variety of reactions in the passersby. Ranging from waving and imitating the action of throwing a ball – presumably for the outstretched hand to catch – to shouting “hello” and “is there anybody there?”, as was the case during my re-enactment or citation of Doris’s performance, these reactions configure the game by altering the initial gesture. Judging from what might be called a “second degree” passersby reaction, the reaction to the action of imitating throwing a ball – itself a reaction to my re-enactment of Doris’s performance – which was that of commotion, of turning around to determine what was happening, whether a ball was indeed being thrown, and, if so, in what direction, the chain of dissemination operates at a very rapid pace and is entirely synonymous with continuous alteration. It can, of course, only be speculated whether the passersby who reacted to one of the “first degree passerby reactions” to my gesture, that of pretending to play handball, will further disseminate this gesture either by enacting it or mentioning it in conversation to others, but the potential for such dissemination is certainly there. In this sense, Kosugi’s Chironomy – which does, of course, refer to the movement of hands in oratory, a gestural “alphabet” consisting of fixed ges-

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tures for command, supplication, sorrow, surprise, to name but a few – is, indeed, a game which thematises the gameness of language while simultaneously making a new move in the language game traditionally played by art. In this sense, it resembles numerous other event scores. The language game traditionally played by art pertains to the already mentioned tripartite division of artistic function derived from the sovereign subject paradigm in which the artist (as the privileged source of knowledge and inspiration) ex-presses a particular content in a chosen form. Supported by a variety of extra-linguistic institutions – the museum, the art market, the art historian – the artist “speaks” from a position comparable to that of the Searlian declaration, which inaugurates a new reality by means of the illocutionary force emanating from the artist’s intention and position. The effect is simultaneously the fortification of the self-same position and the reinstatement of the divide between the expresser’s position and the receiver’s nonposition. In contrast to this unidirectional and non-expansive model in which the receiver receives but does not respond, the event score’s heterogeneous descriptive–instructive variant expands not only bi-directionally, but as a multi-directional game of relay. Because the event score is essentially a small segment of “scored” reality, often performed unwittingly, and, quite likely, by a multitude of people worldwide, such as Brecht’s Word Event, it is in perpetual circulation. Each time an unwitting performance is observed, or a witting one executed, a new move in the game is created. This means that the event score operates both explicitly and implicitly. While dismantling the uni-directionality, intentionality and sovereignty inherent in the artist-artwork-recipient convention, the event score retains an echo of this convention and thereby an echo of the convention’s pertaining language game, precisely because it operates as its disarticulation. In other words, it is the artist’s disarticulated voice – if I may use such an expression – “corrupted” by multi-contextual citationality and, in this sense, merged with the “voice” of the world, itself woven of numerous repetitions and imitations (which is to say alterations), that addresses the percipient-interactant. In soliciting their response, it lures them into the game. The continually expanding game is thus dependent on the players’ participation. This mutual dependence of gameness on participation is produced by the event score’s creative-contemplative interpellation which shapes both the player’s sense of self and their ensuing engagement with the game.

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Creative-contemplative Interpellation One of the most lucid delineations of the interpellative function of language is found in Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. In reference to Toni Morrison, Butler suggests: “language is partly a system, partly a living thing over which one has control” but “mostly agency – an extended doing, a performance with effects” (Butler 1997: 6). She also adds that the critique of sovereignty, implicit in attributing agency to language, should not be mistaken for the demolition of agency, since “agency begins where the sovereignty wanes” (1997: 16). This further means that the one who acts, “acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset” (1997:16; emphasis mine). For Butler, language is a mysterious operation with a distinctly corporeal dimension, irreducible to a binary opposition. In discussing the constitutive and materialising processes of language she juxtaposes J.L. Austin’s theory of linguistic performativity, which is identical to Searle’s in one crucial aspect: in granting precedence to the speaking subject over the speech act, and Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation which posits that the subject is formed as a consequence of interpellation. Althusser’s concept of interpellation forms part of a larger theory of ideology whose main function is to maintain the relations of the prevailing order by continuously producing itself in the form of rituals, in all domains of human life. For Althusser, ritual, which is a prescribed way of carrying something out, does not result from a pre-existent belief in a pre-existent idea but is that which produces beliefs and ideas. In order to explicate this, Butler cites two famous examples from Althusser. The first concerns the relationship between ritual and ideology, or action and belief, where the following is suggested: “kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe” (Althusser cited in Butler 1997: 25). The second concerns the relation between the subject and the act of interpellation and suggests that when “the policeman hails the passerby with “hey you there … the one who recognizes himself and turns around (nearly everyone) to answer the call does not, strictly speaking, preexist the call” (1997: 3). In this case, the obedient, lawabiding, or, indeed, simply, the citizen, comes into being as a result of the policeman’s hailing, which is thus not an act of recognition but an act of constitution. Furthermore, the hailing and the responding, much like the ritual and the idea are not, strictly speaking, separate. Rather, the response evokes the call in much the same way the ritual evokes the idea, which makes the

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“opposed” categories of call and response, action and thought, dynamically related. The consequences of this constitutive power of language are twofold. First, the subject is constituted in a particular role through the address of the other. This address is not necessarily that of an ideological apparatus but could be that of a parent attempting to elicit responsible behaviour from his/her child by saying “you are a big boy/girl now” and in this way providing a clear cue as to the role the child is expected to adopt. Second, the constitutive working of language as a relational force “pulling” on the subject is both pervasively operational and anterior to the subject’s realisation of its operationality, his or her appropriation of a clear position. The clearly instructive form found in numerous event scores, such as Yoko Ono’s

LIGHTING PIECE

Light a match and watch it till it goes out

1965 or Ken Friedman’s UNIFINISHED SYMPHONY

Find something. Carry it out to its logical conclusion.

1967 is interpellative, although, clearly, not in the ideological, but in the creative and the contemplative sense of the word. This is due to the fact that these event scores, like many others, inaugurate the creative-contemplative role in the percipient-interactant by providing two key parameters: an activity to perform and a perceptual lens to apply to the performance of this activity.

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By giving the simple action of lighting a match, which many percipientinteractants have most likely performed many times in their lives, a specific name – Lighting Piece – Ono inaugurates a new relationship between the percipient-interactant and the action of lighting a match. This relationship is one of aesthetic temporalisation. Regardless of whether the percipientinteractant performs the action, is reminded of an occasion when he/she unwittingly performed the action, observes other people’s unwitting performances of the action, or, provides an entirely new performative realisation, he/she has entered into a multi-directional relationship with the score, the fragment of reality scored, the unwitting performances of the score in his/her immediate surroundings, as well as his/her own intentional performances. In short, the percipient-interactant has become a distinct player in the language game proposed by the score. In this sense, the event score acts cohesively and in doing so acquires agency – it assembles past experiences, confers spatio-temporal coordinates and creates new realities in which it acts. Once inaugurated by means of creativecontemplative interpellation, the relationship between the creativecontemplative subject and the score will become mutually reiterative. The fact that he/she has observed and/or performed the action of lighting a match with an expanded aesthetic sense – observing the cadence and rhythm of the flame, its colour, the crescendo and decrescendo of the flame’s glow – will in turn reiterate the score’s interpellative power and vice versa. This mutually reiterative process will have the effect of sedimenting experientiality over time, or in other words, of reiterating the role ascribed to the subject by the parameters of the interpellation. This reiterative force or “radiation” of the score will be even more pronounced in the case of Friedman’s Unfinished Symphony which applies musical aesthetic parameters to an entirely arbitrary activity or a series of activities of indeterminate duration. In this case, the combination of gameness and interpellation makes the event score’s operationality not only heterogeneous but also temporally transitive. If, for example, we were to apply the aesthetic parameters provided by the score to a long-term activity, such as building a house, the score would most likely branch out into other activities, which, although initially triggered by the score, such as talking to our new neighbours in a musical manner for example, may well acquire a life of their own and continue for decades after the generative activity (building a house) has ended. In this sense, Friedman’s score thematises the movement of language as produced by gameness and

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creative-contemplative interpellation, both of which trigger new moves in the game and create new situations. Within the deployment of the specifically subject-constituting power of language, however, another form of agency is revealed, that which confers agency to the subject by directing the agency of language to objectconstituting purposes. Things, phenomena and occurrences are turned into objects of perception when they are given names, in other words conceptual and/or operational limitations. As Butler notes “a name tends to fix, freeze, delimit, render substantial … a name is not the same as an undifferentiated temporal process or the complex convergence of relations that go under the rubric of ‘a situation’” (1997: 35).In addition to interpellating and constituting the creative-contemplative subject, Alison Knowles’ score entitled Performance Piece No 8 illuminates this delimiting and value-bestowing function of naming. Divide a variety of objects into two groups. Each group is labeled “everything”. These groups may include several people. There is a third division of the stage, empty of objects, labeled “nothing”. Each of the objects is “something”. One performer combines and activates the objects as follows for any desired duration of time:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Something with everything Something with nothing Something with something Everything with everything Everything with nothing Nothing with nothing

1965 In this score, initially created for the stage, the three denominative words – “nothing”, “something”, “everything” – exercise not only a delimiting but also a discriminative agency. As various groups of people, objects and spaces are assembled, disassembled and reassembled, their processes of assembly and reassembly “bring into evidence” the perspectival constitution of their

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meaning and value. Each new pairing of word, space, object and or/person demonstrates a new set of hierarchical combinations. If a group of objects/people labeled “everything” is placed in the space labeled “nothing”, as prescribed by movement no. 5 of the score, the question of the ruling view arises. If the Western logical tradition rooted in ontology is followed, “being” or “entity” will be privileged over “non-being” or nothingness. In this sense, all objects/people bearing the label “everything” will simply “fill” the space labeled “nothing”, which is to say that “everything” will envelop or sublate “nothing”. If, however, precedence is given to the Eastern logical tradition, rooted in meontology or the study of non-being, then “nothingness” will be seen as the undifferentiated stratum from which both “something” and “everything” arise as temporary and finite “condensations’” of the undifferentiated. In this case, the group of objects and/or people labeled “everything” characterised chiefly by spatial and temporal delimitation or finiteness, will not envelop or sublate the space labeled “nothing”, characterised by a far lesser degree of limitation and finiteness, but will merge with it. Knowles’ score is thus both a performance of naming and an exposition of naming as performance – of inaugurating a reality in which conceptual, but also material and corporeal divisions come into effect. In a manner similar to Knowles’s Performance Piece No. 8, Larry Miller’s

LIKE / DON’T LIKE PIECE

Something liked Something not liked

1981 exposes the process of sedimenting positionality. This is achieved through the mutual relationship of the “naming subject” and the “named objects”, whether these objects be material or objects of consciousness. As soon as the percipient-interactant invents, remembers, describes, performs or in any other way delimits, thus names an object, this object acquires the reciprocal agency of delimiting or “naming” the subject. The creation and enumeration of

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“liked items” set against the background of those “not liked” and vice versa will create a “relief” of the subject, in other words his/her personality. For example, a person who likes order, clearly enunciated words, unwavering opinions and crisply ironed shirts but dislikes emotion, messy hairstyles and piano concertos will probably come across as decisive or even militant. The liked and disliked objects will thus create the subject, much like the subject creates likeable and dislikeable objects. In this sense, Miller’s score “brings into evidence” the reciprocal process of subject-object-formation as well as the constantly operating constitutivity of language. The interpellative aspect of the event score reveals that human beings are incorporated into the fabric of language by virtue of being constituted by language. This corporeal and visceral, almost umbilical connection means that the question of language cannot be separated from the question of power. The interpellative address, which is always a form of naming, both in the enabling, inaugurative sense and in the constraining, delimiting sense, is, as Butler notes, “one of the influential rituals by which subjects are formed and reformulated” (1997: 160). By echoing the above-mentioned “lapsed” convention of the artwork as an illocutionary act, displaced from the unidirectional expressive-receptive language game, and placed in the multidirectional as well as non-hierarchical descriptive-instructive game, the event score also exposes the politics inherent in the playing field of language. By deflecting and dispersing the agency accrued in ossified positions of authority, which makes the ritual dimension of the illocutionary act “a condensed historicity” that exceeds itself “in past and future directions” (1997: 3), the event score this vulnerability and exposes all actual and potential, intersubjective as well as inter-subject-objective relationships as constitutive and thus politically relevant. Inextricably interrelated with the formation of subjects as well as objects is another aspect of linguistic constitutivity and that is pervasiveness, the cumulative temporal working that sediments experientiality over time. Like the chemical process of fermentation in which carbohydrates turn into acids if exposed to certain conditions over a period of time, the temporal pervasiveness of language mediates not only the constitution of subjects but also the constitution of values and discriminating principles which further shape the subject’s operative reality.

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Pervasiveness As has already been mentioned in the previous chapter, Fluxus work has often been compared to Zen – by the Fluxus artists themselves, among whom Ken Friedman, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono and Emmett Williams – as well as by the Fluxus theorists, such as David T. Doris and Craig Saper. This comparison has much to do with the way Fluxus relates to language. Both Zen and Fluxus have sought to bypass the purely ideational and discursive, in other words non-corporeal and non-material aspect of language, aptly summed up by Higgins in A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts as: “[w]e can talk about a thing but we cannot talk a thing. It is always something else” (Higgins 1976: 102-103). Similarly, Zen’s pronounced awareness of the impossibility of “talking a thing” is thought to have originated as early as the sixth century BCE, with Shakyamuni’s – the historical Buddha’s – response to his disciples’ request to explain the nature of ultimate reality, as it appears in enlightenment. Shakyamuni held up a single lotus blossom in silence, thus denoting both the coexistence of ultimate reality and everyday reality, and, the tendency of discursivity to obfuscate this fact. Like the Zen practitioners’, the Fluxus artists’ engagement with language probes the agency language exercises in framing reality. It is therefore little surprise that Victor Musgrave, the curator of the 1962 Festival of Misfits at Gallery One and the ICA in London (during which a large number of event scores were exhibited and performed) suggests that events scores constitute “significant equivalents to the bandaged, all-seeing ambiguities of Zen’s marvelous koan” (Musgrave 1972: 12). In Zen, the koan is a pedagogical tool habitually used to provoke a shift in the Zen practitioner’s perception of reality and thus consciousness. Indeed, George Brecht’s visual work exhibited at the Reuben Gallery in New York in 1959, entitled Koan, not only testifies to his familiarity with the concept but also aptly demonstrates the relationship between language and the understanding of reality. Brecht’s Koan consists of three vertically arranged wooden frames. The upper frame contains twenty-five multi-coloured wooden letters as well as numbers, arranged in rows of five by five; the middle frame consists of twenty-five white wooden squares, of which seventeen are blank and only eight have barely distinguishable, white letters written on them; the lower frame is empty of letters and wooden squares, which is to say that it frames emptiness. Looking at the frames in a top-to-bottom sequence, which

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is the sequence of reading, the composition exposes the dissolution of language in non-discursive, embodied thought. This dissolving tendency is the reason why I would suggest that the event score not only constitutes “the equivalent of the koan” but, in fact, is the koan. The Japanese word koan is derived from the Chinese kung-an, which originally meant “a legal case without a precedent”. In its less archaic usage the word refers to the Zen practitioner’s very own experiential realisation of the pedagogical question – or notion – put forth by the master, the roshi. In this sense, the word signifies a personal experiential path without a precedent. Typically, Zen koans are enigmatic and telegraphic statements such as: “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”; “does sound come to the ear, or does ear go to the sound?”; “the Eastern hill keeps running on the water; or – “Mu”, meaning emptiness. The practice or the work on the koan is called kanna. Kan means “viewing” and na means “topic”. A sentence such as “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” is given to the practitioner for what both the Zen master Katsuki Sekida and D.T. Suzuki have termed “existential, experiential and concrete thinking” (Sekida 1975: 105; Suzuki 1972: 26). “Experiential thinking” is a psychophysical, creative as well as intuitive process, which differs from the habitual discursive thinking in so far as it is not produced by abstract cogitation but is rooted in contemplative and performative experience the koan seeks to trigger. This is why, like the event score, the koan exhibits a simultaneous, “word-to-world” and “world-toword direction of fit” and is both descriptive and instructive. It is descriptive in the sense that it is communicated from the state of consciousness it has inaugurated – which, in Zen, is that of category-subversion where the dualistic paradigm, such as the polar opposition between permanence and impermanence, solid matter and fluidity as exemplified by the koan “the Eastern hill keeps running on the water” – is overcome. It is instructive in the sense that it seeks to trigger the same state of consciousness in the practitioner. Important to stress, however, is that, as Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Isshu Miura point out in The Zen Koan: “[t]he koan is not a conundrum to be solved by a nimble wit … a verbal psychiatric device for shocking the disintegrated ego of a student into some kind of stability” nor is it “a paradoxical statement except to those who view it from the outside” (Sasaki and Miura 1965: xixii). Rather, it is a “simple and clear statement made from the state of consciousness which it has helped awaken” (1965: xii).

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Since, as Higgins suggests in “Theory and Reception”, the event score is “depersonalized to the point of becoming transpersonal” (Higgins [1982] 1999: 228), it illuminates the state of consciousness from which it was made. This is the reason why once the score has been experienced and performed by the percipient-interactant, it begins to act as a vehicle for perceptivecognitive change. This means that the state of consciousness produced by the koan continues to operate in the bodymind of the practitioner. Event scores like Brecht’s

THREE AQUEOUS EVENTS

-

ice water steam

1961

could not have been created, or, rather, scored, had the artist not been exposed to the state of consciousness which illuminates impermanence and codependent origination, in which phenomena arise and cease because of arising and cessation of other phenomena. It is thus not on account of thematic similarity (notions of impermanence) or formal similarity (austerity of means, enigmatic and telegraphic form) that the event score resembles the koan. Rather, it is on account of its pervasive, experiential and performative structuration – its perpetuum mobile-like “movement” – that the event score operates in precisely the same way the Zen koan does. In his procedural description of kanna, Sekida draws attention to the way in which cognitive action intertwines and interlocks with muscular, respiratory and vocal action. In intentional koan practice (as opposed to the unintentional practice, about which more will be said below) the koan is often broken into syllables for the purposes of detailed vocal, respiratory, muscular and cognitive “savouring”. The reason for this is, as Sekida notes, that when a word or a phrase is savoured in this way for a certain length of time, “without being mixed with

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other ingredients, it infiltrates every part of the mind” (Sekida 1975: 99). The repeated respiratory, vocal, muscular and cognitive feedbacks impregnate the mind with a single “thought impulse” or ichi-nen, nen meaning thought impulse and ichi one or single. Ichi-nen, which is a crucial aspect of “experiential thinking”, differs from discursive thinking in so far as it remains at the level of the first, undivided and unprocessed thought impulse. According to Sekida, the usual pattern of thinking consists of three nen. The first is outward orientated and registers that it is sunny today. The second is semiinward and semi-outward orientated and notices that a thought like “it’s sunny today” has arisen. The second nen starts a discursive process of comparing this particular day to other such days. The third nen illuminates the activity of the second nen, is inward-orientated and identifies the thinking subject, in other words “I know I noticed I had been thinking “it’s sunny today””. The speed at which the three nen unfold in everyday life makes it impossible to differentiate between the first, second and third nen. What kanna attempts to achieve is ichi nen or utmost absorption in as small a fragment of reality as possible. This intentional, concentrated practice is complimented by another, timereleased and non-intentional “practice”, which is of equal importance. When a state of ichi nen is achieved and held for longer periods of time it infiltrates the mind (as well as the body) and begins to “ferment” there. This process of “fermentation” means that even when the practitioner’s intentional absorption in a particular ichi-nen is broken off and remains broken off for days or weeks, the residual working of the koan continues. This is why the realisation of the koan, or the awakening to a different level of consciousness, which is essentially a different way of seeing, most often occurs outside of intentional practice. This new state of consciousness is none other than the practitioner’s (intentional as well as non-intentional) practice-matured receptivity to the world. In this sense, the event score is the koan because it is a simple statement made from the state of consciousness it has inaugurated; because it engages the percipient/interactant in “experiential thinking” and focuses on ichi-nen, and, because it infiltrates the bodymind and continues its residual, time-released working there. Brecht’s

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THREE LAMP EVENTS

-

On. Off Lamp Off. On

1961 are a perfect example of this. They bring into focus a very small unit of reality, an action most of us perform mechanically on a daily basis. However, if we approach the nearest lamp and perform the action fairly neutrally and with evenly abiding attention, that is to say without privileging any particular aspect of the score such as musicality – rhythm or syncopation, choreography or contemplation (although, the freedom to do so is, of course, inherent in the score) – we might find it working as a device which alters our habitual perceptual flow. This alteration operates at several simultaneous levels. First of all, we are more likely than not to take a good look at the lamp in question. This look, or this way of looking – slow, concentrated, detailed, receptive and attentive – is of ichi-nen order and it is likely to give the lamp a very different sort of lamp-ness. This difference in perception can be compared to looking out of the window to see whether it is raining, for example, and looking out of the window because we have decided, or have been asked to draw the view, perform it or sing it. In the case of an instrumental intention – looking out of the window to see whether it is raining, the view is not particularly relevant. When framed by a creative focus, it becomes “alive” and we notice a multitude of rhythmical patterns, shapes and colours. For a moment our engagement with the view is spontaneously existential on account of both the creative intention and the full attention. Our absorption in the lamp, inspired by a creative intention and full, generous attention, is in itself enough to impregnate the mind, but there is more at play. The second level of perceptionalteration occurs at the level of proprioception (the body’ sense of balance), musicality and spatial coordination. Our intention to approach the lamp and turn it on will result in the space “separating us from the lamp” becoming

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“alive” thus inclusive of both ourselves and the lamp and not just a measure of distance. Second, our attentional framing will also result in a heightened muscular and respiratory tension as we come into a projected relationship with the lamp and the space around it. The latter is added in kanna but occurs naturally in performance. The third level of perception-alteration occurs when the event of switching the light on and then off takes place. When a lamp is switched on the luminosity emanating from the bulb changes both its contours and the shape of the space around it; when it is switched off the nature of its relationship to the surrounding space changes. What appears to be the nature of the “perceptual object” in either of these cases is in fact the difference between the perceptual quality of the lamp – its luminosity or darkness, the hardness or softness of its edges – and the surrounding perceptual field. The lamp could therefore take on a myriad different forms depending on the point of view from which its differentiation from the surrounding space is observed. In this sense, the lamp acquires sculpting agency and creates different spatial compositions. The fourth level of perception-alteration occurs gradually over time and consists of the event score’s time-released working. Whatever the specifics of any given performative approach to Three Lamp Events or any other event score, the percipient-interactant’s existential engagement, supported by muscular-respiratory as well as propriocentric attention, and ichi-nen, begins to shape a new way of relating to the world. Every time the percipient-interactant performs this action in daily life, sees anybody else perform it, sees it in a film or reads about it, a residue of the previous creative intention and full attention is rekindled. In this way the event score, like the koan, operates as a focal point from which reality appears as a field of incessant interpenetration of a variety of factors. Furthermore, it operates cumulatively and begins to leak into other, seemingly unrelated areas of life. The latter aspect, which refers to the event score’s as well as the koan’s continuous operationality and which unfolds entirely independently of the percipient-interactant’s intention or even attention, reveals the permanent constitutive operationality of language.

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Concluding Thoughts The Fluxus approach to language dismantles positional logocentrism, which, in perpetually longing for a centre, a regulatory source of authority, produces and disseminates hierarchical oppositions where the inferior term (body, matter and form) serves to define the superior term (spirit, thought and meaning). The logocentric construct which governs the structurality of structure while keeping the governing agent “beyond the reach of play” (Derrida), is invariably reductive. That the logocentric construct is reductive means that it relegates language to the domain of instrumentality where the play of language remains limited to the game of interpretation, in other words locked in the unidirectional signifier-signified relationship. Based on différence, the Fluxus approach mobilises transitive grammatical programming and explodes the playing field by proliferating cross-categorical frames of exchange. Within these frames, words, sounds, movements and objects, but also silence and stillness, action and non-action, relate and interact equivalently. In so doing they “bring into evidence” the agency of language, its constitutive, relationship-forging capacities. This further means that the event score acts as a “transparent” or “degree zero” device which thematises language as a “life form” (Wittgenstein), and is “world-comprehensive” (Derrida). In this sense, the “transparency” of the event score is comparable to the “transparency” of Cage’s 4’33’’ as it brings to the fore the full spectrum of event-hood inherent in language, its gameness, reality-inaugurating and temporally pervasive working. By being multidirectionally transitive the event score operates not only across the traditionally divided categories of music, painting, sculpture, dance and drama, as well as across the traditionally divided categories of art and life, but also across perceptual and cognitive categories at large. Although the idea of eroding the boundaries between art and life, in other words creating a différant, artistic-non-artistic practice, was one of the most popular and widely spread ideas in the 1960s – while Pop refused the distinction between everyday, commercial products and art, Minimalists made art of everyday materials such as plywood, Styrofoam and plate glass – the particularity of the event score lies precisely in the multi-directional expansion of the “transparent” working of the Cagean score. This makes the event score into a matrix (Higgins) and a principle which has a durable and pervasive effect on witting and unwitting percipients-interactants. Being disseminated through language

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games in which new rules are continually being established as well as old rules reiterated, the event score functions repercussively in the sense that it both “plays off” the lapsed convention of the expressive-receptive language game – the game traditionally played by art – and creates new relationships as part of the descriptive-instructive language game. The two kinds of repercussion, the “mutated” repercussion of convention, and the repercussion caused by the event score’s interactive orientation thematise the relationality of language which dismantles the dualistic partitioning of reality into a set of binary, “word-world”, “speaker-listener”, “writer-reader”, “intentionaccident”, “idea-performance” oppositions.

Chapter 3 Temporality Having discussed the movement of différance within the event score, which embodies the constitutivity of language by virtue of being temporalised, I now turn to the investigation of temporality. The reason for this is simple. If temporalisation is, indeed, the decisive factor which unmakes the substantialist construct of language, the obvious question is: does it also function deconstructively in the realm of temporality? And, if so, how? Like language, time is conceptualised dualistically in the Western metaphysical tradition. As Derrida notes in the Margins of Philosophy, the idea of time produced by this tradition is that of a frozen, unchangeable and eternal eidos, a transcendental given whose “derivative” earthly variant is a teleologically orientated flowing substance which operates in the field of immanence, but is entirely separate from the realm of transcendence (Derrida 1982: 65). On this view, time is a linear, externally observable and externally measurable phenomenon, a “container” in which events occur. Although Ken Friedman, in articulating the crucial importance of temporality in Fluxus, does say that Fluxus works “take place in time” (Friedman [1998]1999: 250; emphasis original) this does not indicate a dualistic orientation where events exist separately from the medium they are occurring in – space and time – as well as separately from the human observer. Rather, as Friedman elaborates, this statement indicates a complex interplay of process and impermanence found in musical compositions and in “performances as well as art works that grow and evolve” (1999: 250). Implicit in Friedman’s suggestion is the notion of temporality as perpetual processuality rather than as homogeneous, statically measurable duration. This further suggests that time is always already temporalised as well as temporalising, or that time is the expressive activity of any given thing, being or phenomenon. The term “expressive” is here used in Kitaro Nishida’s sense of the word and does not refer to the externalisation of an “inner core”, but, quite simply, to the gradual unfolding of a thing’s, being’s or phenomenon’s

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existence. This also means that things, beings and phenomena generate time. The principal concern of this chapter is, then, to identify the ways in which the intertwined relationship between temporality, impermanence and musicality operates in intermedial Fluxus compositions, films and durational performance to dismantle the notion of time as an external phenomenon, a “measure” of performance. Otherwise put, it is to establish the ways in which Fluxus works operate to perform and produce time. Temporality and Musicality

Composition 1960 #7

To be held for a long time

La Monte Young

July 1960

Despite the fact that temporality and musicality appear as inextricably intertwined in Fluxus, it would be wrong to presume that musicality and musicalisation function as a mere extension of temporality and temporalisation, since music stands in an ambiguous, much debated relationship to time. In The Time of Music the musicologist J.D. Kramer engages with the philosopher Susanne Langer’s notion that “[m]usic makes time audible” (Langer cited in Kramer 1988: 1), which could be interpreted to mean that music generates time in its expressive, thus temporalising activity. However, this statement refers to a particular species of time, operative in the segregated realm of ideality, since, as Langer suggests “music…. suspends ordinary time and offers itself as an ideal substitute and equivalent” (1988: 3). Kramer affirms this distinction and defines “musical time” as “the time the piece evokes” and

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“ordinary time” as “the time the piece takes” (1988: 7; emphasis original). He also suggests that the category of “deep listening” gives primacy to musical time over ordinary time. Although Kramer does not offer an explicit definition of “deep listening” but instead refers to T. S. Eliot who describes it as “music heard so deeply that … you are the music” (Eliot in Kramer 1988: 7), “deep listening” could be defined as an attentional configuration of heightened auditory susceptibility caused by a high degree of concentration and the corresponding emotional involvement, the combination of which allows the listener to transcend the time the piece takes and enter the time the piece evokes. The term has also received much exposure through the work of the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros whose investigations into the awareness-heightening powers of sound began in the early 1970s. In Deep Listening A Composer’s Sound Practice Oliveros defines “deep listening” as an art in itself, a composer’s as well as meditational practice “intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible” (Oliveros 2005: xxiii). Although in many ways concomitant with Oliveros’s, my use of the term does not refer to a sustained, intentional practice but remains concerned solely with attentional configuration. One of the reasons why this particular attentional configuration may be said to have the capacity to “suspend ordinary time”, as Langer claims, is its attunement to the nature of the medium, which tends to solicit an extremely temporalised mode of attention, since music is never given all-at-once but is in a continuous process of disappearing. Indeed, in “Structure and Experiential Time” Karlheinz Stockhausen, a figure of considerable influence on a number of Fluxus artists, among whom Nam June Paik, defines the relationship between music and time along the axis of perpetual disappearance: [i]f we realise, at the end of a piece of music – quite irrespective of how long it lasted, whether it was played fast or slowly and whether there were very many or very few notes – that we have ‘lost all sense of time’ then we have in fact been experiencing time most strongly (Stockhausen 1959: 65).

This sort of listener involvement comes from the interplay of direct perception, memory and pattern recognition, related, according to Kramer, mostly although not solely to musical linearity and tonality as exemplified by the western cultural tradition (Kramer 1988: 25) which is predominantly “goal-

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orientated”. The main characteristic of such music is that it involves the listener in the pacing, timing and articulation of an intricate variety of shaped musical events, ranging from the large-scale rhythmical pulsations to the smaller motifs, which create what could be termed “temporal content”. Within this tradition, the quantity and density of musical events transports the listener to a different dimension or the “ideal substitute”, as Langer terms it. However, as David Epstein elucidates in “Tempo Relations”, “musical time” does not necessarily refer to an intricate layering of themes and sub-themes but is defined against its dual temporal composition which consists of chronometric and integral time. Chronometric time is “evenly spaced and in large part evenly articulated”, and provides measurements and “convenient periodizations” (Epstein 1985: 58). “Integral time”, on the other hand, refers to “unique organizations of time intrinsic to an individual piece: time enriched and qualified by the particular experience within which it is framed” (1985: 58). It is thus through the intertwining of chronometric time, the measured, “objective” time, and the experientially configured, composition-specific time, that the interplay of beat, rhythm, pulse and movement is created. And it is this interplay that involves the listener in “deep listening”. But regardless of its interdependent temporal structures, it is clear that “musical time” is seen as occupying a privileged position in regards to listener engagement when compared to the supposedly less engaging “ordinary time”. Musical time is seen as having “content”; ordinary time is seen as “empty of content”. Lurking behind this distinction is, of course, the familiar hierarchical divide between the content- and presence-privileging realm of ideality and the correspondingly “empty” and therefore “insignificant” realm of materiality. This is why it is crucially important to understand that musicalisation, as used in Fluxus, does not refer to an attempt to implant a “musical”, thus teleologically driven, temporal “content” in a non-musical medium and in so doing “elevate” the work to the realm of ideality by suspending it from the realm of ordinariness and materiality. On the contrary, musicalisation in Fluxus is related to the percipient-interactant’s very corporeal and “lived”, thus temporalised and temporalising mode of attention configured by the aforementioned “adventurous strategy” of non-intentionality (Derrida) which does not segregate the work from its surroundings. In “Boredom and Oblivion” and in reference to the already mentioned Dick Higgins’s essay “Boredom and

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Danger” which proposes a non-divisionary and non-teleological approach to both the production and reception of art, the art theorist Ina Blom examines the Cagean practice of musicalising the realm of the “ordinary” by simply letting the ordinary deploy its musicality, as exemplified by Cage’s 4’33’’. She concludes that listener/viewer disengagement caused by unfulfilled expectations, in other words, boredom, “destroys the boundaries that keep the surge of intensities within the fenced-off time-space of the work” (Blom [1998] 1999: 65). According to Blom, this surge of intensities does not disappear but begins to “move along different lines” (1999: 65), to include the work’s surroundings. One of the consequences of such expectational disengagement is “disappearance on two different levels which must be experienced as reciprocal: the work will disappear into the surroundings, and the spectator will disappear into the work” (1999: 66). In other words, what will happen is an experiential, thus not nominal de-categorisation of the supposedly separate categories of “work”, “subject”, and “irrelevant background”. Although the word “boredom” is, indeed, used by Higgins as well as Nam June Paik to denote a high level of listener/viewer disengagement caused by the work’s lack of “content”, teleological structure or progression (while Higgins makes a reference to Erik Satie’s Vexations played 840 times in a row with no intentional alteration, Paik warns his Music – Electronic Television audience “[i]n the beginning it is (probably) interesting, then later on it is boring – don’t give up!” (Paik cited in Blom: 77), I would suggest that it is the musicalising effect of “deep listening” that makes possible the dissolution of the frame, or, as Blom puts it, “the fenced-off time-space”, not boredom. Boredom denotes an affective disposition in which time is experienced as an unnecessary surplus which “hangs on one’s hands”. Whereas boredom has an immobilising, and in a sense, de-temporalising effect, “deep listening” renders time performative. Indeed, as Kramer states after a detailed discussion of the relationship between music and time, “time….. can (be made to) move [in or by music], or refuse to move…..not an objective time out there, beyond ourselves, but the very personal time created within us as we listen deeply to music” (Kramer 1988: 6; emphasis original). I will therefore use the term musicalisation in conjunction with a number of Fluxus works to denote their capacity to “move” the percipient-interactant’s lived time, the time experienced by the body which manifests its “past” and “future” in its perpetually changing rela-

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tionship to its ambiance and surroundings, attentionally configured by “deep listening”. The Transference of Deep Listening to Vertical Time In sharp contrast to the variable interplay of beat, rhythm and movement previously defined as the necessary component of “musical time” which stands in a binary opposition to “ordinary time”, La Monte Young’s above Composition No. 7 operates within and with very different notions of temporality. In the first place, the composition is monostructural and consists of a single uninterrupted sound and a single movement, neither of which present a variable development. By foregoing a structured temporal edifice, based on tonal and/or rhythmical variability, the composition fails to engage the percipient in a dual temporal structuring characteristic of “musical time” as defined by Epstein. In an attempt to provide a common denominator for such and similar pieces which lack phrases, progression, goal direction, movement and contrasting rates of motion and are temporally undifferentiated in their entirety, Kramer proposes the notion of verticality. For Kramer, [a] vertically conceived piece…does not exhibit …closure. It does not begin but merely starts. It does not purposefully set up internal expectations, does not seek to fulfill any expectations that might arise accidentally, does not build or release tension, and does not end but simply ceases… No event depends on any other event. Or, to put it another way, an entire composition is just one large event (1988: 55).

Clearly, the lack of tension-building or tension-releasing progression, or, indeed, any variation at all in Composition No.7 is highly unlikely to have a captivating effect on the listener and “transport” him/her to a different world. However, it would be inaccurate to say that the composition does not alter the configuration of the listener’s attention, since it allows for numerous other developments precisely on account of its monostructural consistency and “one-event-ness”. As Young (1960/1995) points out himself: “[w]hen the sounds are very long….it can be easier to get inside them….I began to see how each sound [is] its own world and that this world [is] similar to our world in that we experience it through our bodies, that is, in our own terms” (Young in Sandford [1960] 1995: 79). What Young is referring to here could

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be termed embodied monostructural attention. Unlike the fine-tuned aural attention usually active in deep listening, which, due to its one-pointed concentration allows the listener to hear the full array of countless tonal and rhythmical multiplicities, monostructural attention accommodates for a varied sensing of tonal and rhythmical singularities. The reason for this multisensorial sensitisation – or attentional texturisation – is that instead of soliciting the listener’s undivided attention Composition No.7 engages the listener, or indeed percipient-interactant, in a participatory structuring of temporality. Such listener engagement can be compared to the spatial experience of viewing a sculpture, which, apart from being visual, is also deeply kinesthetic, possibly tactile and even olfactory. When viewing a sculpture our body negotiates the pacing of the experience, we walk around the sculpture, draw closer to it to inspect a particular detail, walk away, come back to take in the whole space, the coming and going of other visitors, the billowing of the curtains, the smell of coffee coming from the cafeteria. In contrast to viewing a small painting which confines the circumference of our attention, viewing a sculpture expands and “texturises” it. Likewise, the experience of listening to minimally varied, “monolithic” compositions amplifies the temporalities inherent in the environment. If an obvious objection to the development of this argument might be that Composition No.7 involves the listener in a different but equally dualistically divided response, that which segregates the trans-like realm of sacred time from its counterpart, profane time, that is not the case. As the anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1984) suggests, the notion of “sacred time”, often used in reference to religious ceremonies and rituals, signifies “repeatable and reversible time”, time that “does not change” (Hall 1984: 25). It solicits trancelike listener or participant engagement the purpose of which is to remove the participant from the realm of “profane time” which refers to daily life and the “explicit, talked about and formulated part of life” (1984: 26). While the concept of “profane time” reflects succession, partiality and incompleteness, the concept of “sacred time” reflects totality and wholeness. Because their relationship is defined in terms of a binary opposition, their existence is seen as mutually exclusive. The participant in a religious ceremony or ritual enters the realm of “sacred time” in much the same way he/she enters a dream, or a trance, by becoming oblivious to the waking world and abandoning the realm of “profane time”.

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Despite the fact that Young’s Composition No. 7 could be seen as timeless – although only from a perspective that equates change with progression – it would nevertheless be incorrect to say that the composition unfolds in “sacred time”. The reason for this is that the latter explicitly excludes “profane” time and in doing so approaches the dualistic division into “musical time” and “ordinary time”. Quite to the contrary and much like numerous other Fluxus compositions such as Takehisa Kosugi’s 1964 pieces South No.1 to Anthony Cox which instructs that the word “south” should be pronounced for a “predetermined or indetermined duration” (Kosugi in Armstrong and Rothfuss 1995: 107) and South No. 2 to Nam June Paik which instructs that the word “south” should be pronounced for a minimum of fifteen minutes (1995: 107), Young’s Composition No.7 collapses the binary opposition. It makes “musical time” performative within and from the realm of the “ordinary”, “corporeal” and “material” time. Rather than engaging the listener in a onepointed and captivating but often environment-oblivious mode of deep listening, Young and Kosugi extend the notion of deep listening to include a multisensorial perception of heterogeneous musical and rhythmical developments in all things, actions and occurrences, as all things, actions and occurrences produce time. This notion is made even more explicit in works such as Kosugi’s Theatre Music: “Keep walking intently”, or, his Music For a Revolution: “Scoop out one of your eyes 5 years from now and do the same with the other eye 5 years later” (Kosugi in Nyman 1974: 68). Equally pertinent are Young’s Composition No. 2 “Build a fire in front of an audience”, and his Composition No. 5 “Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area” (Young in Nyman 1974: 70). Apart from emphasising extended duration as well as the multisensorially perceptible musicality of natural processes, found in the burning of fire or the flight of butterflies, these pieces point to another element, crucial to the transference of deep listening from the segregated time-space of a musical composition to that of the world around it, namely concretism. Although usually associated with the more “violent” Fluxus compositions such as Nam June Paik’s 1961 One for Violin Solo in which a violin is raised in a distended movement lasting several minutes, then suddenly released downwards and smashed to pieces, or, George Maciunas’s 1964 Piano Piece No.13 for Nam June Paik, in which piano keys are nailed with a hammer, concretism plays an important part in dissociating music from ideality and associating it with corporeality, materi-

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ality and concrete reality. In his 1962 essay “Neo-Dada in Music, Theatre, Poetry, Art” Maciunas asserts: [a] material or concrete sound is considered one that has close affinity to the sound producing material – thus a note sounded on a piano keyboard or a belcanto voice is largely immaterial, abstract and artificial since the sound does not clearly indicate its true source or material reality – common action of string, wood, metal, felt, voice, lips, tongue, mouth, etc. A sound, for instance, produced by striking the same piano itself with a hammer or kicking its underside is more material and concrete since it indicates in a much clearer manner the hardness of hammer, hollowness of the piano sound box and resonance of string (Maciunas [1962] in Hendricks and Phillpot 1988: 27).

Apparent in the practice of concretism is, once again, the Derridian différance and the ensuing “blind tactics” – a unity of chance and necessity, law and contingency – which seeks to overcome the duality inherent in the purely instrumental, teleologically governed use of musical instruments as a “mere means” to a hierarchically superior end. The “adventurous”, de-dualising strategy of “blind tactics” is present in a vast number of Fluxus compositions, such as George Brecht’s Incidental Music. This composition consists of five piano pieces, “playable successively or simultaneously, in any order or combination” (Brecht in Nyman 1974: 18), such as No. 2: “Wooden blocks. A single block is placed inside the piano. A block is placed upon this block, then a third upon the second, and so forth, singly, until at least one block falls from the column” (1974:18) or, No. 4: “Three dried peas or beans are dropped, one after another, onto the keyboard. Each such seed remaining on the keyboard is attached to the key or keys nearest it with a single piece of pressure-sensitive tape” (1974: 18). As Brecht himself suggests in an interview with Michael Nyman: “[w]hat you’re trying to do is attach the beans to the keys with nothing else in mind….so that way any sound is incidental … It has absolutely nothing to do with the thing whether you play an A or C, or C and a C sharp while you’re attaching the beans. The important thing is that you are attaching the beans to the keys with the tape” (Brecht in Martin 1973: 105). What both Brecht’s score and his comments emphasise is not only the indeterminacy of the process but also the processuality of this indeterminacy. Effectuated through the mutual configuration of different but equivalent components such as the piano, the wooden blocks, the peas, the performer and the performer’s actions, it is the processuality of change – which is also

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time – that leads to the production of sound and not the instrumentalised, teleologically governed, thus component-subordinating use of the same. The Process of Time and Time as Process This way of approaching a musical instrument as a “total configuration”, to borrow Michel Nyman’s expression, can be traced to John Cage, among other techniques, his prepared piano, which he began experimenting with in the early 1940s and which consisted of inserting a variety of objects between the piano strings. As Nyman points out in Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, this practice exploited an instrument not as a “means of making sounds in the accepted fashion, but as a total configuration – the difference between “playing the piano” and the “piano as sound source’” (Nyman 1974: 17). In this way this practice extended not only the traditional function of the piano but also that of the performer. However, where pieces like Paik’s One for Violin Solo (Fig. 2) and Maciunas’s Piano Piece No. 13 differ profoundly from Cage’s is that they perform the most elusive and yet most essential quality of “ordinary” or “corporeal”, “material” time, not to be found in the “ideal” and “sacred” species of time, both of which are repeatable and changeable, and that is – irreversibility.

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Fig. 2. Nam June Paik One For Violin Solo, Neo-Dada in der Musik, Düsseldorf, 1962. Photo by George Maciunas. © Billie Maciunas. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.

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As Paik aptly points out: “[o]nce you break an expensive piano, it cannot be put together. Once you throw water on the ground, you cannot scoop it back up” (Paik cited in Kaye 2007: 41). While touching on the only uncontested point in a wide array of mostly mutually exclusive theories of time, Paik’s and Maciunas’s pieces both embody and afford the experience of time as process, in other words its quiddity, and, the process of time, in other words, its additivity. In doing so the two pieces embody as well as offer for experiential contemplation – or, indeed, enactment – the paradox of time as evidenced by the parallel but mutually exclusive existence of two contrasting theories of time, aptly named the A-theory and the B-theory. As the time theorist Heather Dyke elucidates in “McTaggart and the Truth about Time” on the A-theory, or the so-called “tensed” theory of time, time is a real feature of the world. Despite the fact that the past and the future can only be accessed through the present moment, which is in perpetual motion and thus in a continual process of passing, the present moment is nevertheless a real “location” in the world. On the B-theory, time is not a real existent. Events in space occur tenselessly, unrelated to the notion of “present”, “past” and “future” and can only be spoken of in relational terms, such as “earlier than”, “simultaneous with” or “later than” (Dyke 2002: 137-139). As opposed to the A-theorists, B-theorists regard these purely relational designations as objective and any notion of “present”, “past” and “future”, as well as “coming into being” as a construct of the mind. Another important difference is that whereas on the A-theory different events have a continually changeable relationship to the time coordinate, their future becoming their present and their present becoming their past, on the B-theory events are not related to time but are in time and of time, whereby time is a relational concept used to describe change. The relationship between events is fixed and unchangeable; once an event has been designated as a “later than” in relation to another event, it can never become an “earlier than” or a “simultaneous with”. In an attempt to reconcile the relativistic with the ontological approach, Quentin Smith proposes a theory of “degree presentism” and suggests that: [b]eing temporally present is the highest degree of existence. Being past and being future by a merely infinitesimal amount is the second highest degree of existence. Being past by one hour and being future by one hour are lower degrees of existence, and being past by 5 billion years and being future by 5 bilion years are still lower degrees of existence. The degree to which an item exists is proportional to its temporal distance from the present; the present,

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which has zero-temporal distance from the present has the highest (logically) possible degree of existence (Smith 2002: 119-120; emphasis original).

In proposing a difference of degree and not kind between what is present and not-yet-present or no-longer-present, Smith’s theory differentiates between “maximal existents”, which exist in the present moment, and the less-thanmaximal existents, which are constituted in terms of relational properties. The property of being past is a relational property because it is defined in relation to the present. By being both of time and being time, One for Violin Solo embodies all three of these views and engages the percipient-interactant in an experiential contemplation of the multi-facetted paradox of time. As the performer raises the violin in a tempo slow enough to make the movement almost imperceptible, thus producing “moments in space” or marking “sequential instants in time”, the condition of degree presentism, the violin’s maximal existence at each of these points and its permanently changing relationship to the less-thanmaximal variants of existence can be clearly observed and experienced. Moreover, due to the fact that One for Violin Solo disrobes “ideal” time of its melodically-created multi-dimensionality and confines it to “corporeal” time, in other words, the uni-dimensionality and uni-directionality of a moving body in space, it simultaneously inhabits the zone of the A- as well as the Btheory. Once the violin has reached the point above the performer’s head and is on the verge of beginning its journey downwards, the temporal experience can be separated into three different categories. The present as formed and informed by the past, an accumulation of past-presents congealed into a concrete form, the violin raised and held in an axe-like position, which gives it its spatial direction while simultaneously forming the notion of the future as a prospective addition of not-yet-presents, in other words the violin’s downward journey. The moment the violin reaches the end of its journey and is smashed to pieces is the point at which the mutually reinforcing conditions of additivity and congruence, which form the progression or the process of time, have been brought to a logical conclusion with regard to the initial arrangement of the violin’s component parts. It could thus be concluded that Paik’s One for Violin Solo embodies the tripartite division of time into distinct temporal aggregates, since the state of the violin at the end of the composition is radically different from the state of the violin at the beginning of the composition.

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However, apart from revealing the additive aspect of time, or in other words its manner of unfolding, its processuality, the same composition also reveals and engages the percipient-interactant in an experiential contemplation of time as process. In this regard, the arrangement of the violin’s constituent parts at the “end” of the composition will be different enough to mark a category shift from the notion “violin” to the notion “no-longer-violin” or “nonviolin” (in other words from the category of being to the category of nonbeing), only if change is seen as a purely transient alteration in the spatial distribution of essential traits. Such a notion presupposes that the world is essentially passive and inert and that change is a passage from one inert state to another. If, however, change is seen as a continuum and not just a rearrangement of essential traits causing an object to become a non-object the moment it loses its “stable identity”, then the passage from the state of violinness or violin-wholeness to the state of non-violin-ness or violin-smithereens is revealed to be heavily dependent on the frame of reference. If framed by a human observer, the process of change will be seen as corresponding to the notions of past, present and future only on account of the triadic composition of human perception consisting of memory, direct perception and expectation. As Saint Augustine, who wrote many centuries ago but who is still a figure of authority in time theory suggests: It is abundantly clear that neither the future nor the past exist, and therefore it is not strictly correct to say that there are three times, past, present and future. It might be correct to say that there are three times, present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things. Some such different times do exist in the mind, but nowhere else that I can see. The present of past things is the memory; the present of present things is direct perception; and the present of future things is expectation (St. Augustine cited in Young 1988: 10).

By the same token, the category of violin-wholeness will be seen as radically different from that of violin-smithereens only if framed by a cultural taboo which sets apart musical instruments as culturally valued objects and bits of wood and string, which are seen as both musically and culturally valueless. The moment this frame is removed, the smithereens-condition of the violin is revealed as no more than a relational coordinate, a “later than” if compared to the “earlier than” of the wholeness-condition of the violin. Seen from this point of view, the composition is not a cycle but an interval and has no beginning or end but merely starts and ceases. But, regardless of the qualitative

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difference in the percipient-interactant’s temporal experience of One for Violin Solo, the composition reveals the one undisputed sine qua non of time and that is irreversibility. For, whether regarded through the perceptual lens provided by the A-theory, the B-theory or degree presentism, there is only one temporal direction accessible to our perception within the sphere of lived, material reality, the reverse is not. This temporal uni-directionality of lived corporeality and materiality, which, unlike the reversible temporal structure of “musical time”, cannot be experienced from a different angle, in other words, externally, testifies to the fact that as living beings we are internal to time as are all other things, phenomena and occurrences. The experiential appropriation of the notion that we are always already involved in the processual transition called time, but which could equally be called existence, and which, unlike “musical time” cannot be stopped, rewound or re-started at will, has profound implications. Not only does it collapse the binary opposition between “musical time” or ideal time on the one hand, and “ordinary” or material time on the other, but as Paik’s, La Monte Young’s, Maciunas’s and Kosugi’s compositions aptly demonstrate, exposes the impossibility of the very notion of ideality since ideality hinges on purity, the unattainable state of untainted-ness by things material and corporeal. Like the continuous interweaving of the Derridian différance discussed in the previous chapter, the process of musicalisation, which, in fact, is the transference of “deep listening” to the realm of concrete reality, makes the participant-interactant’s existential apprehension of time as expressive activity and thus time as existence possible. However, this work of pervasive musicalised temporalisation, which renders concrete, corporeal and material time performative, is not only operative in musical or music-based compositions but can also be found in a medium whose relationship to “external” or “objective” time is considered to be much more rigorously determined, and that is film. While a musical composition can be variously temporally interpreted by the musician/performer, however slight this variance of interpretation in relation to the prescribed tempo may be, film is so predetermined by “objective” time on account of its mechanistic nature as to seem entirely contained by it. However, in Fluxfilms, the dualistically and teleologically orientated “objective” time is “undone” in and by the very medium which seems so irrevocably determined by “external” duration. As is the case with all Fluxus works mentioned thus far, this “undoing” is carried out relationally, in the interac-

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tion between the work’s performative temporality and the percipientinteractant’s lived time. The Production of Lived Time in Fluxfilms In Time and Free Will as well as Creative Evolution Henri Bergson likens scientific, objective, that is to say “externalised” and “spatialised” time to cinematographic time (Bergson 1960: 81; Bergson 1911: 329). The reason for this is the illusion of continuity created by the rapid succession of static frames only 1 /24 of a second long, which, although static cannot be discerned as such by the naked human eye but are mistakenly perceived as a single, uninterrupted and continuous image. Bergson’s reference is not directed solely at the cinematographic projection but encompasses the entire cinematic procedure in which movement is filmed as continuous in real life, then mechanically broken down into a series of static single frames and subsequently projected as an illusion of continuity, imitative of the original continuous motion. In Creative Evolution Bergson compares this “contrivance of the cinematograph” (1911: 332) to that of scientific and “objective” knowledge in general and “objective” notions of time in particular, which place the observing subject outside the phenomena or processes observed: “[i]nstead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality” (1911: 332). In contrast to the notion of divisibility into discrete and equal units or instants, exemplified by the succession of static frames whereby “cinematographic time” is understood to mean time placed at the service of the mechanics of the cinematic narrative, the Bergsonian concept of time is that of indivisible duration without extensity. Variously called duration, pure duration and true duration (la durée) time is for Bergson a non-quantifiable multiplicity, inseparable from its multiple states by an “imaginary instant” (1960: 218). It is a permanent flux of qualitative change and, as such, permanently pregnant with creative potential. It is also characterised by interpenetration, or endosmosis – the inward flow of a fluid through a permeable membrane toward a fluid of greater concentration – of the different states of consciousness in which the past becomes immanent in the present, memory flows into perception, fantasy into reality and the virtual into the actual. This is also the reason why

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time cannot be objectively conceptualised, externalised, divided into a series of smaller units of equal or equivalent magnitude whose divided state veils the continuous inner process of endosmosis. Like the “successive notes of a tune” (1960: 104) which both succeed one another and are perceived “in one another” (1960: 100), a comparison frequently used by Bergson as a way of avoiding spatial metaphors, pure duration is an inextensive multiplicity, “a succession of qualitative changes which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another” (1960: 104). Although both Bergson’s absolutistic terminology and his notions of spatial perception remain firmly bound by the early 20th century zeitgeist, as not yet marked by phenomenology and its experiential self’s concern-orientated conceptualisation of space where an object an individual is looking at can be described as closer than the glasses he or she is using to look at the object, Bergson’s notion of the spatialisation of time denotes a fixed and ordered arrangement of clearly delineated units, reminiscent of a closed circuit. Thus visualised, spatialised time, of which cinematographic time is a variant, is “closed”, static, mechanistic and teleological. To borrow a metaphor from Creative Evolution, it resembles a picture puzzle, which, does not offer any change of content regardless of how many times it is assembled and reassembled. Granted, there will be a change in experience accompanying the varying degree of speed and proficiency in composing the puzzle but the time permeating this action will remain incidental, or in Bergson’s words, “an accessory” (1911: 369). To contrast this notion of time reduced to mere “time-length” (1911: 372) with that of pure duration which is creative and productive and thus elevated to “time-invention” (1911: 372), Bergson uses the example of an artist and a blank canvas where “time is no longer an accessory … it is not an interval that may be lengthened or shortened without the content being altered” (1911: 370). The reason why cinematographic time is “inert”, according to Bergson, is because it does not produce pure duration by which is meant an unpredictable interpenetration of images, but instead presents a mere succession. Despite the fact that Bergson’s views on cinematography, which could be seen as lacking in breadth, were shaped by the early cinema’s lack of formal complexity, whereas the evolution of the cinema was to take place through montage and the elevation of the shot to a temporal category, Bergson’s point

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still has some validity. For although operative in the intertwining and permanently changing zone of the viewer’s lived and phenomenal time, film as a medium nevertheless remains “contained” in and by objective time, comparable to Bergson’s puzzle. The notions of “lived” and “phenomenal” time are derived from two different sources: the phenomenological accounts of temporality, such as those articulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the Zen Buddhist views, as formulated by the Zen master Dogen and Kitaro Nishida. In Beyond Personal Identity, a comparative study of the phenomenology of no-self, Gereon Kopf articulates the notion of phenomenal time in the following way: “phenomenal time is posited by the experiential “I” who acknowledges its own temporality” (Kopf 2001: 171). In other words, phenomenal time is constituted as the subject’s external continuity, marked by the notion of finitude within which the subject relates to its past as to its factuality and perceives its future as its possibility. Lived time, by contrast, is the time “established by the creative activity of the self” (2001: 173) and refers primarily to the body. It is time experienced somatically which manifests its “past” and “future” by continually changing its relationship to its surroundings. However, while both phenomenal and lived time could be said to be “in” the subject, objective time, most often conceptualised as a linear temporal progression from the past to the future, is placed outside the subject, or rather, the subject is placed outside of objective time. This means that while with each respective viewing a film may manifest or give rise to an entirely different phenomenal and lived temporality, depending on the viewer’s psychosomatic disposition and engagement, there still remains an element of unchanged objective time, fixed and made inert by the film’s length, tempo and structure of its internal, content-determining relationships. In the cinematic production propelled by the cinematic narrative it is also the objective temporal relationship between the speed of recording and the speed of projection that remains unchanged. The most striking feature of a number of Fluxfilms is the fact that they temporalise the otherwise fixed, static and inert ratios between the recording and the projecting speed. In distorting one of the constituting factors of objective cinematographic time, the Fluxus films redefine the relationship between the different cinematic temporalities, namely the objective, the phenomenal and the lived and in doing so effectively subvert the very notion of objective time. Disappearing Music for Face (Fig. 3) based on a score by

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Mieko Shiomi which reads: “Performers begin the piece with a smile and during the duration of the piece change the smile very gradually to no-smile” (Shiomi in Friedman 1990: 49) was performed by Yoko Ono using a highspeed slow motion camera. The effect of this was that Ono’s disappearing smile, which was filmed eight seconds of real time, resulted in eleven minutes of screen time when projected at normal speed.

Fig. 3. Mieko Shiomi Disappearing Music for Face, 1966. Photo by Peter Moore. © Vaga Rights. Courtesy of Vaga Rights.

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Because of the colossal disproportion between the duration of the action performed in real time and its highly temporally extended transposition to projection time (the proportion being 1: 82), as well as the extreme close up which frames Ono’s lips, chin and cheeks in a way that temporalises the spatial dimension of the shot by magnifying it, thus creating a temporal “stretch”, Disappearing Music for Face manifests extreme “temporal thickness”. Frequently used by time theorists, among whom Charles M. Sherover, the term “temporal thickness” refers to the rich texture of the temporal dimension that contains “multiple antecedents and consequents” (Sherover 2001: 94), in turn composed of “complete specious presents” (2001: 94). The term “specious present”, which could be described as a qualitative unit of “temporal thickness” was first used by William James to denote a certain amount of temporal “spread” that allows for the perceptual awareness of change within the present. To use a familiar example, it is the sort of perception afforded by the movement of the second hand of a watch as opposed to that of the hour hand, whose change of position we cannot perceive directly but can only report on by resorting to memory. The condition for this direct perception is the simultaneous awareness of the “just-past” as well as the “not-quite-yetfuture”. Referring to St. Augustine’s much quoted notion of the instant as a knife-edge, James famously contends in The Principles of Psychology that the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit and from which we look in two directions in time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were – a rearward- and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end then feel the other after it, and from the perception of succession infer an interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it. The experience is from the outset a synthetic datum, not a simple one; and to sensible perception its elements are inseparable (James 1950: 609).

What this signifies is not only that, like Bergson, James perceives duration as an indivisible and heterogeneous multiplicity, but that the notion of the specious present points to an interrelation with a particular mode of attention as well as to a particular mode of spatial perception since it contains both the

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continually changing retention of occurrences just past and the continually changing anticipation of occurrences about to come. It is on account of this multiple and multidimensional “streaming” that the spatial perception of objects in the specious present both isolates and magnifies them in the sense of “ bringing them closer” to the observer. This spatio-temporal “closeness” is precisely the quality exemplified by Disappearing Music for Face. As the art historian Midori Yoshimoto points out in Into Performance, the original intention of Shiomi’s score was “to visualize a diminuendo of music by human action” (Yoshimoto 2005: 145). In other words, Shiomi’s intention was to transpose the gradual nearing of the threshold of audibility, often accompanied by the minute tuning of the listener’s aural attention to the subtleties of liminal sound to a simple movement human beings perform on a daily basis. In the film version of Disappearing Music for Face this diminuendo is effectuated through two intertwined cinematic elements: a tempo just quick enough for the movement of a disappearing smile to remain discernible throughout the film and a shot just long (far) enough for the shapes in the shot to remain discernible as belonging to a human face. Both the fact that the movement of the disappearing smile is almost imperceptible but never quite perceived as static, and that the features of the lower part of Ono’s face appear abstract but never melt entirely into an abstract, non-figurative composition, point to a threshold phenomenon, a sort of permanently unstable, but perpetually stabilising balance. The structural elements at play in Disappearing Music for Face are thus employed in such a way as to enhance the perception of the specious present. Enhancing the perception of the specious present does not in this case mean accentuating or energising the perception already present but initiating a creative production of time by cumulatively expanding somatic temporal perception and in this way producing cumulatively greater “temporal thickness”, or in other words, doing precisely what Bergson accused cinematographic time of not being able to do. This work of temporalised and temporalising attunement is none other than the previously mentioned process of musicalisation. In “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness”, an extensive discussion of James’s and Edmund Husserl’s theories of temporality, Francisco Varela describes the multiple activities occurring in the specious present as a three-part temporality. Although Varela resorts to a

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spatial metaphor, that of a field with a centre representative of the “now moment”, bounded by a “horizon or fringe” (Varela 1997: np.) of what has just past and the horizon or fringe of what is about to happen, also referred to as “protention”, he insists on the mobility of these horizons, the texture of the movement and the integration of the different frameworks of temporal perception. These frameworks are divided into three scales, the scale on which “elementary events” are perceived in milliseconds, a duration which marks the “minimum distance needed for two stimuli to be perceived as nonsimultaneous”; the scale of “relaxation time for larger scale integration”, measured in hundreds of milliseconds which refers to the “sinking in” of sensations; and the scale of “descriptive-narrative assessments”, measured in seconds in which the “imprint” left by the perceptual object is temporally extended in a process of neuro-cognitive interpretation (Varela 1997: np). What Varela calls the “temporal fringe” is thus an ongoing integrative as well as mutually structuring activity of the different scales of neuro-cognitive perception. The retentive-protentive temporal integration produced by the specious present is a permanently oscillating, permanently “slipping” process. Whilst retention retains phases of the perceptual act by causing a progressive slowing down of the velocity of perception or a “slippage” (Varela 1997: np), protention links this “slippage” into affection. The parallel working of retention and protention thus slows down the velocity of perception while producing an affective colouring which feeds back into retention and in this way produces a cumulative deceleration, a gradually distending distension. By distorting the ratio between recording time and projection time Disappearing Music for Face introduces what could be called a “creative warp” into objective cinematographic time within which the affectively coloured – mellower, softer, “looser” – distension of the specious present occurs. The colossal discrepancy between the average duration of a disappearing smile in real life and eleven minutes of cinematic duration causes a progressive “temporal swelling” and alters the viewer’s sense of lived time by slowing down his/her breathing and bodily movement. The relationship between the objective cinematographic time and the lived time of the viewing subject is thus placed off balance, if by balance we understand an approximate experiential ability to filter publicly agreed notions of time, adequately “translated” into the subject’s lived time.

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The effects of the magnified retentional-protentional “streaming” of Ono’s slow-moving mouth, cheeks and chin on the viewing subject’s lived time will gradually become manifest in the slowing down of the viewer’s breathing and bodily movement. This manner of somatically altered, “meditative” or “contemplative” viewing in which the gaze lingers has been much discussed in film theory. However, comparisons of such “slow” and “contemplative” viewing to the Buddhist meditation practice called one-pointedness which requires undivided but relaxed concentration on a single point, as expounded by the film critic Philip Lopate (Lopate 1998: 78), are mostly related to films which, apart from the “meditative” sequences also contain other cinematic tempi. Since there is no contrast or variation in tempo in Disappearing Music for Face the “slow” viewing distends the lingering gaze and the viewer’s somatic tempo even further and in this way accommodates for an extradistended reception of the already distended micro-movements of Ono’s face, the micro-movements of light and the grain of the celluloid. The richness of texture or “temporal thickness” is thus in a proportionate as well as mutually augmentative relationship to the amount of visual detail, the thicker the time the more detailed the visual field and vice versa. The texture of temporal thickness will also be morphed by another factor impacting on the viewing subject’s perception of phenomenal as well as lived time, namely the intervening “distractions”. Referring to a different Buddhist meditation practice in his analysis of contemplative viewing, one in which the arising and subsiding of thoughts is the very material of the meditation and where the practitioner is advised not to brush aside what may seem like daily preoccupations, memories and associations but is instead encouraged to follow their flow, Lopate suggests that when such “distractions” occur during cinematic viewing, they help to create a multidimensional temporal as well as personally meaningful experience. The reason for this is that the viewer keeps coming back to the events onscreen with “a refreshed consciousness and a deeper level of feeling” (1998: 79). These trips to other temporal dimensions sedimented in the viewer’s perception of his/her personal continuity, in other words his/her phenomenal past, as well as virtuality – potential phenomenal future – add a different, distinctly personal texture to the temporality produced by Disappearing Music for Face. The mutually configuring relationship between the different “streamings”, that of the specious present, the distended-distending lived time and the

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morphologically oscillating phenomenal time, thus perpetuate the production of time. In contrast to the uninterrupted “continuity” of slow motion in Disappearing Music for Face, Eyeblink disrupts the notion of objective temporal continuity, as based on the objective, inter-subjectively agreed “actuality”. Consisting of a single movement – the blinking of an eye – Eyeblink is, as Bruce Jenkins aptly points out in “Fluxfilms in Three False Starts”, “the ultimate monomorphic act” (Jenkins 1993: 128). By transgressing “the longstanding cinematic taboo” (1993: 128), that of the viewed looking at the externally positioned voyeuristic viewer and in this way depriving the voyeuristic viewer of his/her immunity to the penetrating force of the gaze, traditionally granted to this role, Eyeblink implicates the viewer in a mirror image of his/her own “actual” temporal discontinuity. Performed by Ono and shot by Peter Moore with the same high-speed slow motion camera as Disappearing Music for Face, although authorially unattributed, Eyeblink starts and ends with Ono staring into the camera, and thereby also the viewer, interrupted by a single, brief blink. Within the context of the specious present afforded by the film, Ono’s blink disrupts the “actual” now as the privileged temporal aggregate. Within the wider context of temporal continuity, as rooted in the subject’s presence in the actual now, which is then re-presented to the subject by the function of memory, and which, in this way ascertains the subject’s perception of his/her continuous presence through time, the blink disrupts the privilege of the present and the actualised over the nonpresent and the non-actualised. Theorised by Jacques Derrida in his critique of the privilege of presence as “the alterity” which is the very “condition for presence, presentation and thus Vorstellung in general” (Derrida 1973: 65), the blink is a regular momentary absence, a “leaning away” so to speak, a retreat from the present and from being present into the temporal alterity of the unconscious. Although the blink splits the present, or, rather, shows the present to be self-splitting, it is not atemporal. It has duration. On the Bergsonian view, which could be seen as anticipatory of Derrida’s deconstruction of the privilege of presence, this temporal alterity, based in the unconscious and psychosomatic memory, is intertwined with the temporality of the present. Indeed, the very concept of Bergsonian duration is rooted in this simultaneous notion of duration; the actual – momentarily unfolding perception and the virtual – qualitatively

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different duration shaped both by memory and the unconscious. Bergson designates the relationship between the two as that between the object and its mirror image. Whereas the former “can be touched as well as seen, it can act on us and we can act on it, it is pregnant with possible actions” (Bergson 1919: 136), the latter is “incapable of doing what the object does” (1919: 136), but is not atemporal. Along similar lines, Derrida argues that “time is a part of non-Being, potentiality and incompletion” (Derrida 1982: 62). When our gaze meets Ono’s in Eyeblink, a distended recording of a real time gaze at the camera, through which the cameraman returns the gaze and whose gaze Ono’s gaze reflects, we enter a web of multiple temporalities, each mirroring the other, both in terms of accompanying the actual and reflecting the virtual. This interpenetrated but by no means parallel or symmetrical duration is at the heart of the paradox of time, which, in altering becomes alter to itself. Indeed, it is precisely this temporal alterity that Eyeblink produces. First, the gaze which was present at the time of recording and which anticipated our gaze as futural is revealed to our gaze as present, but is “in fact” past. Second, all three modes of “presence in time”, as the blink of Ono’s eye reminds us, are conditioned by absence, a leaning away into the potential, the “incomplete”, the inner and the non-manifest. While Ono’s dual actualvirtual, present-absent, outer-inner temporality is actualised onscreen, it is also simultaneously split and virtualised by our own actual-virtual temporality, in which we are both present in the sense of beholding the actual image and absent in the sense of “leaning away” into a non-manifest potentiality. The film thus invites the viewer into the zone of actual-virtual temporal “streaming” as initiated by the blink of Ono’s eye, which, by leaning away from presence into non-presence and returning once again to presence engages the viewer in a relationship of mutually present-absent holding which produces or performs the Derridian temporality of non-being, simultaneously a part of and the condition for being. The Continuity of Discontinuity In a similar fashion, Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film, which, unlike Disappearing Music for Face and Eyeblink does not belong to the category of “slow” films engages the viewer, in the production of time as a simultaneously continuous and discontinuous phenomenon. Consisting of a roll of 16 mm film, a clear leader whose “objective” or “closed” running time

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is approximately thirty minutes, Paik’s Zen for Film exposes the cinematic medium – the blank celluloid and the projection apparatus to the cinematic gaze, devoid of any recorded material or any cinematic narrative-created temporal content. Instead, the film discloses what Paik has termed “abstract time: time without contents” (Paik in Kaye 2007: 52). This notion, as the film theorist Bruce Jenkins points out, is not only in sharp contrast to “the pastness of filmic representation, with its indexical claims to capturing actual, pre-existing phenomena” (Jenkins 1993: 137) but also “posits a concrete present in its moving-image tale of the celluloid’s journey through the transport mechanism of the projector … a tale unique in each telling as Zen for Film was visibly changed by each viewing and maintained on its celluloid surface a record of those observations and screenings in the form of accumulated scratches, dust, dirt, rips and splices” (1993: 137). Paradoxically, the temporal structure of Zen for Film seems to be both continuous and discontinuous. This structure is best understood through the prism of Kitaro Nishida’s notion of the “continuity of discontinuity” (Nishida 1970: 6), part of his Zen- as well as Bergson-influenced theory of temporality. This theory is rooted in the “logic of basho” whereby basho means “that in which” and is permanently engaged in a dialectical relationship with “that which” or in other words, the content of basho. The present is, according to Nishida, “the basho of time” and so is the self (1970: 6-7). Continuous time, flowing from the past to the future is both determined by discontinuity and is “located” in discontinuity, discontinuity being the basho of continuity. In other words, every new moment is different from the previous precisely because it is discontinuous. Each “present” is severed from the “past present” by a non-present, which means that continuous time disappears and is determined again in the next present. This discontinuous time is located in something Nishida calls the “eternal present”: “[t]he past flows while turning to the present, whereas the future flows while turning to the present. Our world comes from the present and returns to the present” (1970: 117). The notion of the “eternal present” as the basho of time, or “that in which time turns” ought to be understood in the context of the Zen tradition where the word “eternal” does not refer to transcendence. Not coming from the “two world” heritage in which immanent time is a linear construct, a sequential progression of instants, while eternity is placed entirely outside time, Nishida’s “eternal present” is a dialectical concept rooted in the Zen Buddhist notion of momentariness and impermanence. This notion suggests that all existents without exception are non-substantive and

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non-permanent events, which, instead of moving in time, are temporal in nature. All existents thus last only a moment – they come into existence and go out of existence immediately afterwards. If a perceptual object m changes and from m mutates to m*, the state of m-ness will be destroyed and replaced by the state of m*-ness, which will in turn be destroyed and replaced by the state of m+-ness and so on ad infinitum. The rapid succession as well as gradual variation in structure will make the states of m, m* and m+ appear identical and continuous and each present moment or existent will both determine the percipient’s mode of perception and determine the next moment or existent. It is this processual dialectics of the “eternal present” or the continuity of discontinuity that Zen for Film brings into focus. In revealing a vast amount of flickering visual detail Zen for Film resembles a microscopic view of a surface normally thought to be homogenous and temporally persistent in its monolithic identity – if observed by the naked human eye – but which turns into a flux of swarming micro life, full of incessant biological transactions, when magnified. From the perspective of the Zen Buddhist notion of momentariness the static film frames are moments or existents. Each subtly different from the next, their succession is “translated” into continuity by the working of the projecting apparatus, much like the momentariness of non-continuous existents is “translated” into continuous time by the working of the human brain. Because of the deteriorating nature of the material – the celluloid – as well as the numerous textural alterations inflicted by multiple projections, Zen for Film will, in fact, reveal the discontinuous, permanently changing nature of continuity if viewed several times in a row. If, however, viewed several times over a longer period of time, such as a few years or a decade, the representational function of memory, which tends to “freeze” and archive the most essential features (the reason why we remember the smallness of a child we have not seen for ten years, rather than the colour of his or her eyes, and are invariably surprised by the fact that this “essential feature” has been replaced by another, contradictory feature, that of bigness), might make the film seem unchanged. This is due to the unifying nature of the subject’s sense of phenomenal time, which has the power to “thingify” occurrences, processes and phenomena experienced in order to turn them into “milestones” within the subject’s perception of its own deployment in time as a temporally persistent, continuous entity. The temporal position from which Zen for Film will appear unchanged, thus itself also a continuous and temporally persistent entity, is that of a perspectivally con-

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strued continuity, which testifies to the possibility of alterity, namely discontinuity. As regards the immediate temporal experience of watching Zen for Film, it, too, shows itself to be woven entirely of the threads generated by the viewer’s perception, whether his/her retentive-protentive or associative mode of attention. Because the film has no cinematic content and because the only content is indeed the viewer’s own virtual content, the temporal dimension of Zen for Film is inherently performative. This is to say that, unlike the films with a cinematic content, whose tempo and narrative temporality operate along a mirror-like actual –virtual axis, involving the actual images and the viewer’s interpretative processing of these images; Zen for Film unfolds entirely in the arena the viewer’s virtuality thus making his/her inner temporality performative. The relationship between the percipient’ performance of his/her virtual content and what Paik has termed the “abstract time” of the blank celluloid reflects one of the primary postulates of Zen, which, as Nishida suggests in reference to numerous Zen masters, is that “form is emptiness and emptiness form” (Nishida 1993: 103). Zen for Film is a processual interaction between form and emptiness – the form given to emptiness by the viewing subject, which, while becoming the object of the subject’s contemplation reciprocally “gives form” to the viewing subject. This dialectical determination is the “eternal present” whose paradoxical formulation indicates that whilst the fleeting existents can only appear as momentary configurations of emptiness, emptiness can in turn only “appear” in and as existents. By creating pervasive musicalised temporalisation, whether by means of the cumulative expansion of “temporal thickness” and the weaving of multiple as well as heterogeneous, actual-virtual, present-absent and outer-inner temporalities, or, indeed, by configuring continuity within discontinuity and configuring form within emptiness, Fluxus films perform time. The effect of this is somatic and impacts, as well as alters, the percipient-interactant’s lived time. It sensitises the percipient-interactant to duration (Bergson); in so doing it not only perpetuates but also produces lived time by means of elaboration and differentiation. It is within their elaborate, “magnified” and minutely differentiating temporalisations that these films engage the percipientinteractant in what might be termed a “somatic contemplation” of the alterity of time, as related to the fact that in altering, time also becomes alter to itself. This continuous process of bifurcation is not only something the percipientinteractant is made to feel but also perform in the simultaneous flow of virtuality and actuality, as is the case in Zen for Film where the only actuality is

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form given to emptiness by the percipient-interactant’s own virtual content. It is on account of this mutually reinforcing production of time, as exemplified by the “slow” films where the distension of the film further distends the percipient-interactant’s sense of lived time, which, distended, further distends the film, that the so-called objective, measured, external time is subverted, in other words, experientially deconstructed. This process of experiential deconstruction of the various forms of “external” and “objective” time also appears in Fluxus durational performance where it brings into focus the externality of the notion of the percipient-interactant’s personal continuity. The Braiding of Lived and Phenomenal Time in Durational Performance The continuous mutual configuration between form and emptiness, between the already-existing and the not-yet-existing, “created in the present activity as a movement from the present to the present and from the created to the creating” (Nishida 1993: 108), is further deployed on two different but mutually configuring time scales – that of the lived and phenomenal time – in Fluxus durational performance, most notably Alison Knowles’s The Identical Lunch (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4 Alison Knowles, The Identical Lunch, Barton, Vermont, 1967. A residual object. © Alison Knowles. Photo courtesy of the artist

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Described by Knowles as her “noonday meditation” (Knowles in Corner 1973: 1), The Identical Lunch was first discovered as a temporal objet trouvé (an action Knowles performed every day), by her fellow artist Philip Corner and subsequently “elevated into a formal score” (1973: 1). The formal score read: “a tunafish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and a glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup” (1973: 1). From the moment of its formal inception in February 1969, Knowles performed the score for a period of over a year, at exactly the same place, the Riss Restaurant in New York, and approximately the same time of day. Numerous other performers have also performed the score since then, at the Riss and elsewhere. As Jim Maya puts it in the Journal of the Identical Lunch, Knowles’s collection of her own and other performers’ observations: “[t]he identical lunch food demands little or no thought: the surrounding activities take all your thought: The waitress, her hair, her lips, the napkins, [t]heir embossments or lack of embossments, the stools, the chairs, the heat. When you’ve finished – You hardly know you’ve eaten” (Maya in Knowles 1971: np). This view, essentially expounding the transparency of habit, which, once practice-ingrained and sequence-locked, no longer requires the performer’s full attention and frees it up for the unforeseen, the marginal and the accidental, is shared by numerous other performers, among whom also Lynn Londier: I pour waitress spilled coffee in the saucer back in the cup put in milk watch clouds rise. I glance over at a man with a bad cough seated one stool away from Pauline regain nausea I’m aware of wrinkled flesh puckering from the waitress’s arms there doesn’t seem to be any hair on them (1971: 2).

Knowles’s own entries reflect her engagement with time as a process of becoming – a continuous elaboration through differentiation – and range from observations about the varying quality of the fish: “tunafish is very watery; it is mid-week” (1971:11); the shape of the sandwich: “for the first time the sandwich comes uncut” (1971:12); the difference in staff who serve her: “L is young and Greek” (1971: 13) to the impact she has on others, such as when a burn on her cheek makes those sitting opposite her “eat hurriedly and leave” (1971: 16). By thematising the continuous emergence of continuously proliferating differentiations, The Identical Lunch renders “palpable” the Nishidian notion of the “eternal present” in which continuity, in this case the phenomenal continuity of the noonday-lunch-situation, part of the perform-

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er’s own continuity and thus history as well as narrative identity, is determined always anew in the discontinuity of “disparate moments” of which the performer’s lived time consists – his or her physical disposition, the smell of the soup coming from the kitchen, the sogginess of the sandwich or the absence of napkins. Although determined by the performer’s past experiences, his/her perceptual frame is manifested in the present, and it is in the present that the prospective framing of futural events occurs. Every past and every future is in this sense manifested in the present and occurs always and only in the present. This means that the performer’s phenomenal continuity cannot be a preexperiential given but that it becomes apparent – or, is constituted – only in situations which frame the disparate sequence of events as continuity. Both situational continuity and personal continuity are very closely linked to what might be called “experiential velocity”, the speed with which we process experiences and relegate them to the rank of “sameness” or “usualness”. In perceptual terms, this rank equals –– background. Much like Cage’s 1952 4’33’’ draws attention to all events in time-space framed by this duration; The Identical Lunch draws attention to the fact that there is no silence and no “background”. In this sense, The Identical Lunch can also be compared to Cage’s 1963 0’00’’ (4’33’’ No. 2) which, in Cage’s own words, “is nothing but the continuation of one’s daily work, whatever it is … done with contact microphones, without any notion of concert or theater or the public, but simply continuing one’s daily work, now coming out through loudspeakers” (Cage cited in Kostelanetz, 1988: 69-70). Like 0’00’’ which thematises the transparency of time, The Identical Lunch amplifies the transparency of habitualisation, which, paradoxically, is only felt when disrupted by an irregularity in turn giving rise to a change in affective colouring. In this sense, the score initiates the durational performer in a de-transparentisation of the process of habitualisation by collapsing the opposition between lived and phenomenal time. In contrast to lived time, which is essentially an interaction between the environment and the somatic self expressive of past habitualisations and futural anticipations, phenomenal time is constituted as an “externally” viewed, larger scale amalgamation of the same habitualisations and anticipations. Phenomenal time forms the horizon of the subject’s past and future within which the subject’s narrative identity is produced. It is within this horizon that the subject comes to view itself “externally”, as a coherent whole, a person who “always fights injustice” or “laughs in the face of life”.

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If, however, phenomenal continuity is viewed from the perspective of lived experience which temporalises and unifies past-and-future inside the present (Nishida), phenomenal time is always already part of the ongoing temporalisation and cannot posit the subject’s past and future as some sort of “external other”. Habit formation is in this sense the structuring activity of temporalisation in which the past configures the present and the present simultaneously configures the future, thus creating new perceptual matrixes and consolidating old ones. In this sense, The Identical Lunch performs the “braiding” of lived and phenomenal time, which, like the continuity of discontinuity, does not denote two opposed processes or species of time, but exemplifies unification through perpetual differentiation. In involving the performer in a close examination of emergent affective tonalities which constitute his/her lived temporality as well as further leads to the formation of attitudes and personality; The Identical Lunch sensitises the performer to the process of personal becoming. This process relates to phenomenal continuity in the same way that temporalisation relates to time. Much like time is temporalisation and not its externally viewed and atemporal “other”, phenomenal continuity is personal becoming – the formation and differentiation of likes, dislikes, emotional and cognitive habits – and not a congealed “whole”, personality or identity. It is thus not only the elaboration and differentiation of the world around the performer that takes place within the durational temporal activity of Knowles’s score, but also his/her own individuation. Concluding Thoughts The blind tactics or “adventurous strategy” of pervasive, musicalising temporalisation operates in a wide variety of Fluxus works, regardless of the medium or intermedium. Its path is that of a processual, experiential deconstruction of the deeply alienating dualistic conception of time as separated from existence. The derivative notion of time in which temporality is seen as a temporarily animated, flowing substance –– rather like a river –– both external to the experiencer and possessing the power to subjugate him/her by the overwhelming speed of its passage, which the experiencer “escapes” by inhabiting a different, more “ideal” world, such as that of “musical” time, is revealed as both stemming from and creating positional consciousness. In this case, positional consciousness is the consciousness that steps outside its

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own existence to assume a standpoint outside of time temporality. It perpetuates positional notions, such as those of “objective” time, homogeneous continuity or the hierarchical separation between the various “species of time” –– “musical” and “sacred” as opposed to “ordinary” and “profane” time, for example. In marked contrast, pervasive musicalised temporalisation sensitises the percepient-interactant to “the eternal present”, not as a privileged site of presence which excludes other possible “presences” and “presents”, but as a dialectical process of continuous mutual configuration which bypasses binary oppositions. Since time is the expressive activity always already underway in any given thing, being or phenomena, the experience of time cannot be separated from the production of time. The adventurous strategy of pervasive musicalised temporalisation thus consists in the percipient-interactant’s existential engagement with a wide range of processual transitions, such as those found in his/her sensorial field, environment, ambiance, mood, weather conditions and/or season, as well as those inhabiting the percipient-interactant’s virtual realm. In this way, time is experienced as inseparable from existence. Much like one cannot enter, leave and re-enter existence, one cannot enter, leave and re-enter the corporeal, material, lived time produced by Paik’s One for Violin Solo, Zen for Film or Knowles’ Identical Lunch. This is to say that these and other Fluxus works do not offer themselves as “fenced-off timespace (s)” (Blom), to object-orientated contemplation separate from the world but are temporalised and thus also temporalising in nature, which means that they constitute a path to a possible immersion in existence, rather than in “musical time”.

Chapter 4 The Sensorium The dissolution of boundaries between time and temporalisation, continuity and discontinuity, and the substitution of heterogeneous, creative duration (Bergson) for its homogenous, “objective” and positional variant is here further extended to the exploration of the tripartite relationship between eventhood, object-hood and subject-hood. Focusing on the Fluxkit, a portable performative score in the form of objects, mostly objets trouvés, this chapter seeks to understand the ways in which Fluxus works operate to dethrone the sacrosanct object-hood of the art object. Borne of the century-long privileging of the sense of sight, which goes hand in hand not only with the stultification of the proximity senses but also with ownership, and, by extension, with the fetishisation of the object, this sacrosanct status suggests a substantialist, fossilised view of the object. Moreover, fetishisation implies that the object is separate from the processes of its production, in other words, the interactional subjectifying-objectifying structures. When shaping an object or working on the object in any other way, the subject “subjectifies” the object, so to speak, and is simultaneously “objectified” by the object. The separation of subject and object thus means not only that the subject is separated from the world of things but also from the world as such. This increasingly distancing and alienating relationship between the object, the subject and the subject’s supposedly “objective” position outside the world, which the Fluxus artists address both at the epistemological and the ontological level, was poignantly articulated by the cultural critic Robert Romanyshyn. In Technology as Symptom and Dream Romanyshyn comments on Leone Battista Alberti’s famous 16th century invention of the linear perspective grid which facilitated the structuring of linear, thus logico-geometrical perspective in the following way: “what originated with Alberti and his times as a metaphor – look at the world through this grid and it looks like a geometrical pattern – has become for us a map. The grid-like structure of the window and even the window

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itself, have become invisible, and all that remains is the reproduction which we now take for the world itself” (Romanyshyn 1989: 82). This further means three things: that the self has become a distanced spectator; that the world has become a spectacle; and that the body has become a mere instrument of the cogito. Taking into account the historical position of Fluxus within a distinctly occularcentric and disembodied culture, the Fluxkit proposes an interexpressive, multisensorial, epistemological-ontological practice which operates deconstructively both in terms of the mind-body dualism and the subject-object dualism. This makes the Fluxkit resonate in two parallel registers: the visceral, biological and intercorporeal, and, the socio-political. Interexpressive Aesthetics Consisting of rubber lumps and bands of varying sizes and elasticity, miniature spinning wheels, balloons, catapults, zips, grains, tape measures and stopwatches, Robert Watts’s Time Kit (Fig. 5) prompts the percipientinteractant to a haptic and kinaesthetic exploration of time as change. This exploration occurs in the physical deployment of the enclosed objects which act as performative scores for a variety of actions: unrolling the tape measure, zipping and unzipping the zipper, inflating the balloon, squeezing the compact lump of rubber. Without exception, these actions cause a transformation in the shape and the circumference of the object. They also cause a physiological change in the percipient-interactant, which why it may be said that they prompt interexpression.

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Fig. 5. Robert Watts’ Time Kit Design and Photo by George Maciunas. © Billie Maciunas. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.

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For Kitaro Nishida, interexpression is a “dialectic mutual negation and affirmation of self and other, subject and object” afforded by inter-action (Nishida [1987] 1993: 49). Inter-action means that no thing or being is ever “merely moved by another”, nor is it ‘something merely acted upon [but] must equally move the other through itself, and be active from itself” (1993: 49). The “movement” of which Nishida speaks is conceptualised as a selfproducing positing act, which cannot be presupposed, only created in the coming together of action and organicity – the agglomeration of processes that is the world. This is at the same time the reason why it may be said that the Fluxkit hovers between being and non-being, between the already manifest, the actualised, and the pregnant-with-possibility and still-in-the-processof-being-manifested. Although somewhat difficult to pinpoint due to the dualistic nature of language, this is by no means a mysterious category. Suffice it to look at writing as a self-producing positing act. Writing does not start with the action of typing words on a computer screen. The movement of writing starts with reading, thinking, walking, at times talking to others and jotting down nascent thoughts on whatever one has at hand. Typing words on a screen is only a particular phase of this movement. Equally, the fact that the interexpression is a simultaneous affirmation through negation and a simultaneous negation through affirmation of both subject and object means that the identity of the subject as well as the identity of the object are produced in their tensional articulation. Not having a higher synthesis – or sublation – but pointing to an existential, albeit indefinable relationality, which, like the formlessness of form discussed in the previous chapter, exists prior to any division into “subject” and “object”, tensional articulation is what makes it possible for the subject to be “in” the object and vice versa. Important to stress, however, is that the phrase “prior existence”, when used in conjunction with Nishida’s thought, does not imply a solid and immutable a priori given but refers to a multi-dimensional and reticular ontology which can only be conceptualised in interexpressive terms. In other words, the logic operative in interexpression is that of a multitude of “positions” and this multitude suggests that the paradigm of contradictory identity is not confined to reciprocity, but operates multilaterally. As Nishida explains: That I am consciously active means that I determine myself by expressing the world in myself. I am an expressive monad of the world. I transform the world into my own subjectivity. The world that, in its objectivity, opposes me is

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transformed and grasped symbolically in the forms of my own subjectivity. But this transactional logic of contradictory identity signifies as well that it is the world that is expressing itself in me. The world creates its own space-time character by taking each monadic act of consciousness as a unique position in the calculus of its own existential transformation (1993: 52).

The multitude of such “unique positions” which affect “the calculus of the world’s existential transformation” further means that although the relationship between subject and object can, for clarity’s sake, be conceptualised as that between two stable positions – position A and position B – both the Aness of the A position and the B-ness of the B position are in a perpetual process of transformation. Not only are they in relationship with each other, but also with numerous other “positions”. This perpetual transformation of all positions is the reason why contradictory identity hinges on the notion of movement and action implicit in the concept of the grammatical predicate: A expresses B in itself, as something expressed by A. That is, taking B as grammatical subject, A predicates of B; alternatively taking B as object, A predicates of B. But the converse is also true. It can equally be said that A is expressed in B, becomes a perspective of B’s own expression. To bring out this logic of contradictory identity … I have often used the formula we think by becoming things, and we act by becoming things (1993: 55).

In other words, it is the texture, resistance and elasticity of the rubber lump that is brought out in the action – the grammatical predicate – of squeezing; it is the full circumference of the balloon that is brought out in the action of inflating the balloon. The action is the locus of the tensional articulation of the grammatical subject and the grammatical object. While exerting pressure on the rubber lump, or “working” the rubber lump the grammatical subject – or, in other words, the percipient-interactant – is simultaneously “worked on” by the rubber lump, which produces the tightening of the muscles and initiates the flow of milk acids in the arm. The muscles in the subject’s arm respond to the texture of the rubber lump in a textural and actional manner. Equally, while inflating or “working” the balloon, the percipient-interactant is simultaneously “worked on” by the balloon which expands his/her lungs. The percipient-interactant’s lungs thus “become” the balloon. Interexpression occurs in the movement of the grammatical predicate, in the “squeezing” of “I am squeezing” as well as in the “squeezed” of “the lump is being squeezed”. But this action is not homogenous. It “swarms” with micro interexpressions –

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the humidity of the air caused by the season, the resulting dampness of the percipient-interactant’s hand, the strange sound damp rubber makes when squeezed. Despite the fact that Watts’s Time Kit prompts primarily haptic and kinaesthetic engagement, the latticing of interexpression makes it into a multisensorial event. In this sense, Time Kit brings to the fore the perpetual transformability of all “positions”, famously formulated by John Cage as: “[y]ou say: the real, the world as it is. But it is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes!...you are getting closer to this reality when you say… it ’presents itself’: that means that it is not there, existing as an object. The world, the real is not an object – it is a process” (Cage 1981: 80). It also brings to the fore the multisensorial dimension of actional aesthetic engagement. The notion of actional aesthetics – which is the aesthetics of interexpression and which forms part of the longstanding tradition of everyday aesthetics practised in Japan – is crucial to understanding the Fluxkit. A score in the form of objects, assembled in cases usually no larger than a briefcase or a shoebox – the mass-production of which George Maciunas initiated in 1962 – the Fluxkit can be traced to George Brecht’s boxes and cabinets such as his famous Repository made in 1961. Commenting on the simultaneous appearance of Repository and his first event scores, Brecht articulates the relationship between the two in the following way: “[e]very object is an event… and every event has an objectlike quality” (Brecht in Martin 1978: 106). A wall cabinet housing a large number of disparate items – word puzzles, playing cards, toothbrushes, light bulbs and thermostats – Repository was influenced in equal measure by Joseph Cornell’s boxed assemblages created from objets trouvés and Marcel Duchamp’s boîte en valise. Produced in the period between 1935 and 1940, Duchamp’s boîte en valise is a portable museum of miniature artworks. In contrast to the purely visual engagement proposed by Duchamp’s assemblages, Joseph Cornell’s works, eclectic and poetic combinations of inanimate and once-animate objects, such as feathers, hair, hay, broken clocks and gas masks, usually housed in simple wooden boxes with a glass front pane, solicited a multi-sensorial engagement; they were meant to be handled. An important difference between boîte en valise and Repository as well as the Fluxkit in general, however, is that whilst boîte en valise is a collection of miniature artist-made copies of artist-assembled ready-mades, the Fluxkit is entirely devoid of “artistic production”, the only exception being Takako

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Saito’s Fluxchess series. Not only are Fluxkits composed solely of objets trouvés, a feature which de-centers the art object’s privileged status but their manner of production is also authorially de-centered. In many cases, an artist would simply suggest an idea to Maciunas who would then assemble the proposed objets trouvés and design the Fluxkit. This twofold de-centering is related to two important aspects of Maciunas’s thinking. First, the notion of “non-art”, as articulated in his 1962 “Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry, Art”: “[r]ainfall is anti-art, a babble of a crowd is anti-art, a sneeze is anti-art, a flight of a butterfly, or movements of microbes are anti-art…If man could experience the world, the concrete world surrounding him … in the same way he experiences art, there would be no need for art [or] artists” (Maciunas in Armstrong and Rothfuss 1993: 157). And, second, the notion of “non-art” as an egalitarian, interactive and experienceenriching practice, unencumbered by the artist’s “tastes, professionalism” and/or “egotism’” (Maciunas [1964] in Hendricks 1983: 166), which served only as “educational means to convert the audiences to such non-art experiences in their daily lives” (Maciunas [1963] in Hendricks 1983: 165). The first of Maciunas’ s prerogatives bears a strong similarity to actional aesthetics, articulated in contradistinction to what Yuriko Saito, the author of Everyday Aesthetics, terms “paradigmatic art” (Saito 2007: 18). “Paradigmatic art”, which, as the very word suggests, is a paradigm unto itself, is characterised by definite object-hood, a clear frame, identifiable authorship, the spectator’s non-literal engagement, the privileging of the higher senses – sight and hearing – and, the object’s non-permissibility of modification (Saito 2007: 18-23). By contrast, the so-called non-artistic experiences, which form part of everyday aesthetics, are characterised by the absence of definite object-hood and authorship, the participant’s literal as well as multisensorial engagement, ordinariness and impermanence of the object. Saito’s use of the phrase “paradigmatic art” corresponds to the long tradition of Eastern aesthetics which associates art with sacrosanct object-hood and ownership that many of the artistic (or non-artistic) practices of the 1960s – Fluxus, Happenings, Performance Art and Conceptual Art – sought to dethrone. Furthermore, Saito’s use of the word “literal” corresponds to Maciunas’s use of the word “concrete” discussed in the previous chapter in so far as it includes all aspects of the object’s as well as the activity’s suchness. To explicate the notion of “literal engagement” which presupposes an actional dimen-

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sion Saito provides the example of cha-no-yu, the Japanese tea ceremony. Although cha-no-yu is often associated with a high degree of stylisation, the latter is neither a prerequisite nor is it common practice. Saito writes: First, its boundaries are not definite….[the possible elements] include the weather condition, bird’s chirping, the sound of rain hitting the thatched roof of the hut, the spontaneous conversation between the host and the guest, the bodily movement of the host making tea, the smell and taste of the tea and snack, the tactile sensation of the tea bowl and warmth of tea conveyed to the palm, gentle movement of the swishing inside the bowl and the slurping sound when we take our last sip from the bowl (2007: 34).

Apart from thematising interexpression and soliciting a distinctly multisensorial engagement from the participant, the multifaceted event-hood of the Japanese tea ceremony has two other important aspects which resonate strongly with the Fluxkit. It celebrates impermanence – succinctly summed up by its motto “ichigo ichie” (one time, one meeting), (2007: 34), and, it consists of the most mundane activity most of us engage in every day – drinking tea and eating food. In much the same way, as Watts’s Time Kit shows, the Fluxkit presents the percipient-interactant with a variety of “mundane” objects and actions that solicit his/her concrete, multi-sensorial engagement. The combination of the objects’ “mundane-ness” and the multisensorial engagement they solicit from the percipient-interactant makes for a dynamic interpenetration of sensing and understanding, acting and knowing. This dynamic interpenetration forms crucial part of actional aesthetics, which, as Saito reiterates in relation to the Japanese tea ceremony, integrates “aesthetic, practical moral and social concerns” (2007: 35). The inseparability of aesthetic, practical, moral and social concerns is echoed in Nishida’s thought, too, since following the logic of interexpression, knowledge can never transcend experience. Rather, knowledge is derived from “actingintuiting” or koiteki chokan, an embodied as well as aesthetic form of “becoming”, in which the subject “becomes” the object and, likewise, the object “becomes” the subject through the working of the grammatical predicate (Nishida 1993: 84-85). What the interexpressive working of the grammatical predicate means in this context is that epistemology is inseparable from ontology. Indeed, in dissolving the boundaries of “paradigmatic art”, the interexpressive propensity of the Fluxkit touches on the historical question of knowledge production, situated specifically in the post-war Europe and the United States and thus invariably entwined both with industrialisation and

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progressive occularcentrism, a question much debated by many Fluxus scholars. In reference to Henry Martin’s description of Fluxus as an “unremitting research into the relationship between sensing and knowing”, the purpose of which is “to contribute to a sense of integrity and fullness” (Martin cited in Higgins 2002: 31), Hannah Higgins argues for a de-distanciating effect of the Fluxkit. According to Higgins, the Fluxkit “problematizes the Western metaphysics” in so far as it makes “an experience for the handler that is the sensation contained in it, it [the Fluxkit] is not about sensation” (Higgins 2002: 36, emphasis original). The crucial difference between the two is that between “primary experience – the experience derived through the senses, and “secondary experience” – formed by mental concepts about the experience derived through the senses (2002: 36). Higgins’s distinction is closely linked to Edward S. Reed’s differentiation between “ecological information”, the information “human beings acquire from their environment by looking, listening, feeling, sniffing, and tasting”, which, importantly, “allows us to experience things for ourselves” and “processed information”, which is secondary (Reed cited in Higgins 2002: 33). Reed’s division of information into “ecological information” and “processed information” and Higgins’s differentiation between “primary” and “secondary” experience have two important implications. First, they establish the difference between the embodied or integrated perspective on the world in which the subject forms an integral part of the world – in Nishidian terms, this means that the subject and the world function interexpressively – and the disembodied perspective, created by positional consciousness, which places the “sovereign subject’ in a supposedly “objective” position, outside the world. Second, it establishes the difference between the intimate perspective and the standardised, formulaic one. It is in relation to these two perspectives that the art critic Gino Di Maggio makes an important observation. He terms the emergence of Fluxus art in the historical context of the 1960s “a private from of subversion” suggesting that Fluxus art “arises as a reaction, as renunciation and as rejection of a reality that is the reality of superstandardization, superexploitation, superconsumerism” (Di Maggio in Oliva 1990: 41). In reference to Fedele D’Amico’s claim that some forms of art offer insights into “new facets and real possibilities of man that other forms of knowledge overlook” (D’Amico cited in Di Maggio in Oliva 1990: 41), Di Maggio asserts that Fluxus art “demonstrates the discovery of these facets and at the same time the existing possibility of affirming them” (1990: 41). This state-

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ment points to another crucial aspect of the Fluxkit, which, in problematising the divide between res cogitans and res extensa, affects the socio-political formation of the senses. In Fluxus: The History of an Attitude, Owen F. Smith rightly suggests that the everyday-ness, dispensability and multisensoriality of the Fluxkit derived from Maciunas’s “political thinking” (Smith 1998: 170). According to this view, the purpose of the Fluxkit is to “stimulate a new awareness in the audience, [which] for Maciunas, was like the Marxist notion of the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’, necessary for a time but ultimately dispensable after they had served their purpose” (1998: 170). Maciunas’s rapprochement of Fluxus to essentially Marxist views – such as the temporary role of socialism, the purpose of which is to pave the way to communism – are amply evident in his already-mentioned 1964 letter to Tomas Schmitt. Here Maciunas emphatically states that Fluxus objectives are “connected to the group of LEF … ideologically” (Maciunas [1964] 1983: 166). This means that the Fluxus objectives are concerned with the gradual elimination of the arts as well as “motivated by [the] desire to stop the waste of material and human resources … and divert it to socially constructive ends. Fluxus is definitely against [the] art object as [a] non-functional commodity – to be sold and to make a livelihood for the artist. It could temporarily have the pedagogical function of teaching people the needlessness of art including the eventual needlessness of itself. It should not be therefore permanent” (Maciunas [1964] 1983: 166, emphasis original). The choreographer Simone Forti who, like Anna Halprin, was concerned with the value of dance and took part in numerous Fluxus activities, suggests that in the context of this social, anti-aesthetic project, Fluxus work does not have any value as an object. In other words, the work has no “paradigmatic”, institutional or monetary value; its value resides in the relationships and forms of practice the work transmits to the percipient-interactant. Forti even suggests that “when the work has passed out of their [the producers] possession, it is the responsibility of the new owner to restore it or possibly even to remake it. The idea of the work is part of the work here, and the idea has been transferred along with the ownership of the object that embodies it” (Forti 1974: 45). The object thus transmits not only a particular practice but also ways of caring for this practice.

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Despite the fact that, as has already been mentioned in chapter one, many of the Fluxus artists found Maciunas’s political convictions too extreme, it is nevertheless clear, as many art theorists and sporadic participants in Fluxus activities suggest, that apart from functioning interexpressively, the Fluxkit also functions within the bio-socially, and thus also culturally and politically modifying framework proposed by Antonio Gramsci. This is to say that the practice of the Fluxkit proposes a rehabilitation of human potential by uniting praxis and poiesis as formulated by Gramsci but which can, in fact, be traced to Karl Marx’s notion of “sensorial appropriation”: [M]an appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of this individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality (Marx and Engels 1975, Vol.1: 299-300; emphasis original).

Where Gramsci’s thought reaches beyond Marx’s is in its emphasis on the interdependence of the objectifying and subjectifying processes. For Gramsci it is the practical sensory activity that fashions the object and not the projected rational intention; but, it is also the practical sensory activity, and, by extension, the subject-hood formed by such and similar practical activities, that is fashioned by the object. The activity and the object are in a permanent state of mutual conditioning and mutual configuration, which means that the subjectiftying and objectifying processes are in a permanent flux thus making human beings “a process, the process of [their] activities” (Gramsci 1957: 45). That the subjectifying and the objectifying processes are interconnected means that all praxis is creative and that the very act of putting into practice is simultaneously an act of creating new perceptual and actional parameters, an act of breaking a new path. This is at the same time the reason why the practice of the Fluxkit resonates in two parallel registers: the epistemologicalontological and the socio-political. While operating interexpressively, the Fluxkit effectively de-centers occularcentrism and does so in three distinct ways. First, it excavates the field of elemental intertwinings and reversibilities, characteristic of the very early stages of human development. Second, it

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prompts “somatic attunement” which sensitises the percipient-interactant to the “living ambiance” and in doing so initiates the production of “lived meaning”. The result of this combination – the archeological, excavating approach, and the lived body’s attunement to its lived ambiance – is the modification of the “phenomenological vector” – a phrase coined by the phenomenologist Drew Leder to describe “the culturally formatted structure of experience” (Leder 1990: 150). Last but not least, the Fluxkit discloses intercorporeity, which is to say that it renders palpable the working of the Nishidian, multi-positionally functioning grammatical predicate. This, in turn, reveals the perpetual interexpression of all things, beings and phenomena. Excavating Elemental Intertwinings and Reversibilities George Brecht’s Valoche/A Flux Travel Aid (first assembled in the late 1960s) is a wooden box that contains twenty-six differently shaped and textured balls ranging from the egg-shaped, string-coated and perforated balls to table tennis, snooker and bouncy rubber balls as well as yo-yos, badminton shuttlecocks, spinning tops, fluffy toys, bowling pins, chess figurines, disparate scrabble letters and a skipping rope. Signifying a small suitcase or bag, Valoche resembles a selection of favourite toys a child might take on a journey in order to transport the familiar world to a new location. Valoche is thus a travel aid in two senses of the word: in the sense of prompting the percipient-interactant to create a traveling event by spilling, pushing, dropping, rolling, throwing, rotating, spinning or catapulting the various kinetic objects provided (or by prompting an action that operates as a Nishidian grammatical predicate). It is also a traveling event in the sense of transporting the percipient-interactant to a much earlier phase of his/her existence, characterised by a greater haptic, olfactory and kinaesthetic closeness to the world. Like Watts’s Time Kit, Valoche proposes a re-immersion in the “thickness” of experience afforded by the proximity senses in early childhood. In this sense, the literal (Saito) or concrete (Maciunas) engagement with Valoche is of a simultaneously aesthetic and archeological bent because it affords a number of actional schemes, which, in turn, disclose the body’s sensorial sedimentations. A case in point is rope skipping. By performing the action of rope skipping the percipient-interactant ‘excavates’ the cross-armed, cross-legged, intermittent and/or one-legged jumps and the ensuing sensation of tight springiness and elated exhaustion, caused by the rhythmical cadence of the rope’s swinging

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and falling. This excavation is achieved through the postural retrieval of what might be termed the rope-skipping matrix, usually formed in early childhood. In The Body’ Recollection of Being, the phenomenologist David Michael Levin proposes the notion of “recollection”. This Heideggerian concept refers to the retrieval or repetition of a form of acting or being in the world. Levin proposes recollection as a method for overcoming what he terms “the metaphysical misunderstanding of the being of the human body” (Levin 1985: 56) and argues that in order to overcome the “metaphysical misunderstanding”: we must retrieve the ontological body. We must actually let go of our dualistic, propositional way of ‘thinking’. Metaphysical thinking takes place only in the theoretical ‘mind’, and is always an ‘I think (= represent to myself) that…’ Ontological thinking is radically different: it engages us in the opening wholeness of our being, and ‘takes place’ as much in the life of our feet [as it does in our] hands and eyes’ (1985: 56).

Working simultaneously with the Heideggerian idea of retrieving the ontological self where each and every form of everyday being is simultaneously a palpably felt form of Being, Karl Marx’s statement that “the cultivation of the senses is the work of all previous history” (Marx cited in Levin 1985: 31), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “flesh” – conceived as an element of being, akin to water, air, earth and fire, thus intrinsically relational as well as transformational – Levin articulates a method for a non-propositional form of knowledge production. This method, which in seeking to be nonpropositional also seeks to be non-positional and which he, after Heidegger, terms “ontological thinking”, is, in fact, integrative, as it combines the ontological with the epistemological modality. The reason why it is relevant in the context of the Fluxkit is because it departs from the disembodied subject. Unlike the Nishidian paradigm, Levin’s method takes the deeply “standardised”, occularcentric subject (di Maggio) as an unfortunate, but nevertheless historical given. The postural impregnations that “ontological thinking” seeks to retrieve are those that precede the socialised and politicised body, in other words the unavoidable gender, class, cultural, professional, and, in some cases, religious “formatting”. The difference between the pre-formatted sensorial relationship to the world and the formatted one lies not only in the fact that a child will, for example, appreciate a pile of autumn leaves by jumping into it while an adult will, most likely, appreciate it by saying “Oh, the colours are

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so rich!”. It also lies in the child’s momentary transubstantiation into a pile of soft, rustling leaves, which will capture its textural, aural and olfactory “imprint”. Transubstantiation means that the child’s body will momentarily “become” the pile of leaves thus establishing an intersensorial relation with the matter it comes into contact with. Furthermore, it means that in the case of the child the action of jumping will be a grammatical predicate, which will have a configuring, modifying effect on both the child and the pile of leaves, whereas in the case of the adult the aesthetic appreciation will take the distanciated and static form. In a similar fashion, the bouncy ball contained in Valoche affords intersensorial relationality and thus also transubstantiation, since the resistance and the “jovial stubbornness” of the ball teases out an alert, springy and “stubborn” response from the percipient-interactant. Equally, the cross-legged and/or cross-armed jumps afforded by the skipping rope tease out a form of spatial relationality that operates musically. The notion of musicality was first formulated by Merleau-Ponty in The Primacy of Perception and is related to the postural schema, itself a sedimentation of past postural impregnations: We grasp space through our bodily situation. A ‘corporeal or postural schema ‘gives us at every moment a global, practical, and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things, of our hold on them. A system of possible movements, or “motor projects”, radiates from us to our environment. Our body is not in space like things…. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 26).

A hand applies itself to an instrument with alertness and sensitivity and remains responsive throughout the contact. The music produced in the coming together of the hand and the instrument is an audible “materialisation” of the continuous sensory and even sensuous negotiation underhand. An actional structure such as rope skipping is a similar form of sensory negotiation between the length, the thickness and the texture of the rope, the surface the action is performed on – grass, concrete, carpet – the surrounding ambiance – cold, heat, humidity, light, darkness, time of day – and the performer’s postural schema. The transubstantive intersensoriality afforded by this action, which is none other than the interexpressive “becoming” theorised by Nishida, and can be found in numerous other actions afforded by Valoche, seeks a rapprochement with what might be termed “thick” experientiality.

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Levin terms this openness to transubstantiation and thus also intersensoriality, after Merleau-Ponty, the “field of elemental intertwinings and reversibilities” (Levin 1985: 66). This notion, which is linked to the above-mentioned concept of the “flesh” erodes the dichotomy of the perceiver and the perceived since the ‘flesh” does not stand apart from the world, but is, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, “caught in the fabric of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 163). It follows that the “field of elemental intertwining and reversibilities” unifies all forms of perception, the seer with the seen and the visible, the hearer with the heard and the audible, that which touches with the touched and the tangible. But unlike the senses of seeing and hearing which have the corresponding agents of action, “the seer” and “the hearer”, the sense of touch or the action of touching do not have an agent, there is no “toucher”. This is not because the sense of touch is a proximity sense, since the sense of taste does have an agent – the taster. It is because the sense of touch has no localised sense organ. Indeed, it has no sense organ at all and cannot in any way be isolated from the rest of the body. Rather, embodiment itself is the “organ” of touch. .

As Ay-O’s 1964 Finger Box shows, it is this agent-less ambiguity, or rather the ambiguity that occurs in the coming together of the “agent” and the tactile surface which de-centers or even “engulfs” the “agent”, that an inkling of the elemental intertwining and reversibilities is given. Packed in a leather case, Finger Box (Fig. 6) consists of the total of fifteen square blocks of wood arranged in rows of three by five. Each wooden block has a hole in the centre which makes the composition reminiscent of the old fashioned chemists’ drawers where medication is stored in neatly separated wooden units. Upon seeing such an ordered arrangement of fifteen identical squares with an equal number of equidistant holes, our sense of sight makes us half expect that by pulling out the blocks we will come across an equally ordered subdivision of smaller units of whatever these boxes may contain.

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Fig. 6. Ay-O Finger Box Set (No. 26) 1964. Wood, vinyl, metal, rubber, plastic adhesive label tape 12" h x 17-3/4" w x 3-3/4" d overall. T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1991. © Walker Arts Center.

However, when we put a finger in one of the holes our expectations are thwarted by a diametrical reversal of positions. Instead of being in control of the way and the order in which we examine the contents of the Finger Box, we are “engulfed” by an orifice of seemingly negligent proportions. The reason for this is the overwhelming conflict of cues which generally occurs when the information is available to more than one perceptual system and when two or more sets of information are contradictory. In everyday life the optical and haptic perception are usually mutually complementing; while optical perception helps us to determine the size of the object in relation to our body, haptic perception helps us sense, understand – or “grasp” – the weight of the object, its elasticity, rigidity, viscosity, hardness or softness. Ay-O’s Finger Box creates a striking dissonance between these two senses by, in the first place, suggesting a grid-like illusion of order which prompts us to anticipate that the objects contained in the separate units are of a similar size, volume and weight. Second, it does so by not even allowing for haptic

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perception proper, but limiting our “grasping” scope mostly to cutaneous perception instead. As the sense of touch is both sensory and motorperformatory, unlike the senses of hearing and speaking, where the receiving part of perception takes place in the ear while the performatory part takes place in the mouth, the distinction between cutaneous and haptic touch designates the difference between the skin and the deeper tissue, or what in terms of the human body is “the flesh”. The deeper tissue can be stimulated without the movement of joints and muscles or with the movement of joints and muscles, through what might be termed the exploratory touch. This specific form of touch permits the grasping of an object as well as the grasping of its “purpose”. When we put a finger in one of the holes in Finger Box (or two or three fingers in two or three separate holes) we can prod, press, rub or palpate but we cannot grasp anything. The privileged ability of the higher primates to manipulate objects by means of the separate functions of the thumb and the rest of the fingers is here denied. This is why we invariably feel touched, or even invaded by the contents of Finger Box. Human skin can be described as a boundary between the organism and its environment, a membrane designating the limit of the body and separating it from the world. But this membrane is also extremely porous since when we come into a cutaneous contact with a piece of silk, for example, its silkiness crosses this membrane with speed and ease and finds its way to the “inside” of the body. The silk touches the flesh. The same happens when we stick one of our fingers into one of the Finger Box holes and are prodded by what seem like sharp nails. The nails’ prickliness and their irritating insistence on prickliness spill over the boundary of the skin and into the “inside” of the body. This is not to be compared with accidentally treading on, say, a nail protruding from the floorboards. Whereas in the case of the latter, it is only the sharpness of the nails and the accompanying pain that invade the body, in the case of the former it is the invasion of something unknown and unsettling. Because of the fact that we can neither grasp nor see, nor for that matter clearly visualise the exact shape and position of the nails hidden in Ay-O’s Finger Box, we cannot penetrate the opaqueness of the situation and are instead penetrated by it. Through as small a part of the body’s tactile surface as the index finger an alarming opaqueness of meaning enters our body and we feel “contaminated” by it.

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The haptic theorist Laura U. Marks characterises this experience as a “loss of depth” (Marks 2002: xvi). She suggests that while the optical relationship to the world “requires distance and a center, the viewer acting like a pinhole camera” (2002: xvi), in the tactile relationship to the world “our self rushes up to the surface to interact with another surface. When this happens there is a concomitant loss of depth – we become amoebalike, lacking a center, changing as the surface to which we cling changes” (2002: xvi). What is at work in the percipient-interactant’s relationship to Ay-O’s Finger Box is a similar mimicry and “mixing”. This mixing cannot be characterised as a relationship between the sovereign subject and an object, which, by its very formulation denotes separateness and juxtaposition, but, rather, as that of a decentered “intertwining”. The de-centered “intertwining” is equally present in the less “engulfing” finger holes, such as that containing some form of velvety-furry softness which instantaneously turns one’s touch into a caress. The stroking of the velvety-furriness renders one minutely attentive to the tiny folds and the minuscule differences in texture. This tender touching transubstantiates in the body as warmth, smoothness and even slight trepidation. It is much more than the shape or the texture that is disclosed in the contact of our finger/s and the content of any of the finger boxes; it is a particular modality of co-existence. Because the finger/s stuck in the holes of Ay-O’s Finger Box are temporarily unavailable for viewing and therefore identification as “objects of perception”, a temporary loss of positionality occurs in which the sensing (our finger/s) and the sensed (velvety-furry softness) are unified by a particular modality of co-existence, that of intertwining, as manifested in the tender touch. The intertwining occurs at an elemental, one could even say pre-personal level, precisely because we cannot see what we are touching and what is touching us. The result is the inability to form an opinion or come to a definite conclusion about “the object” inside. This difference is tantamount to the difference between an infant in a pre-ego-logical stage of development (in which the differentiation between the child’s own body and the world has not yet taken place), coming into contact with a prickly surface and being overcome by fear and horror, and an adult, who may initially be prompted to a similar reaction but can identify, that is to say objectify and gain control over the source of prickliness as soon as he/she is able to see it. This tendency of the body to merge with that which it touches, or is touched by, has also been noted in the case of blind adults, thus signifying that the tactile intertwining

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between the sensing and the sensed is not related solely to the very early stages of infant development, but to the association of sight with objectification. In “Uncommon Touch” Constance Classen reports the case John Hull, a blind man who describes his body as “an ensemble of patterns” rather than a “delineated uniformed form” (Hull cited in Classen 2005: 307). Hull recounts that at times, such as when it is raining, his body does not feel as a unified form but appears to merge into the surrounding environment (2005: 307). What is at work here, like in the percipient-interactant’s contact with Ay-O’s Finger Box, is the process of transubstantiation or interexpression, in which the body, permeated by what in positional terms is an ‘external’ texture, force or substance, both incorporates that texture, force or substance and becomes it. At this point, externality and internality are sensorially and corporeally comprehended as a form of intersensorial relationality which has its ebb and flow as well as its permutations, but can at no point be separated into two distinct categories. The binary opposition between the self as the privileged site of internality and the object as the hierarchically inferior site of externality is here undermined and dismantled. By creating a discrepancy between the seen and the felt and by placing the percipient-interactant in an experiential situation comparable to that encountered in the pre-personal or pre-ego-logical stages of human development, Ay-O’s Finger Box offers a temporary reversal of positions ingrained in an occularcentric sensorial mapping. It denies the position of control, habitually granted to the sense of sight, and opens on to a nonpositional, or multi-positional mode of being-knowing, which arises from transubstantiation and “becoming”; in other words, from the assimilation of “externality” and “otherness” into “internality” and “self-hood”.

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Attunement and the Production of Lived Meaning Another important function of the Fluxkit in dismantling the binary opposition between “externality” and “internality”, “sameness” and “otherness”, exemplified by, among numerous other kits, Larry Miller’s Orifice Flux Plugs and Shikego Kubota’s Flux Medicine, is that of “attunement through the body”. Drawing on the mind-body philosophies of Hiroshi Ichikawa and Yasuo Yuasa, as well as on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Shigenori Nagatomo’s theory of attunement proposes a processual reorientation from the propositional modality of meaning and knowledge production to the existential modality of meaning production predicated on the living ambience. In Attunement Through the Body Nagatomo defines “attunement” as “engagement that obtains actionally as well as epistemologically between a person and his/her living ambience” (Nagatomo 1992: 179), where the word “person” refers to an “entity of psycho-physical integration” (1992: 179) and the phrase “living ambience” to “the totality of shaped things, either animate or inanimate” (1992:179). Important to note here is that the “living ambiance” encompasses not only climactic and atmospheric conditions, but includes objects, phenomena, animals as well as people. The process of attunement is that of the sedimentation of “affective residue”, achieved through the “experiential momentum” (1992: 198), in other words, through repeated engagement in particular somatic structures which impregnate the body posturally and sensorially thus configuring the person’s future engagement with the living ambiance. This continuous creation of a variety of somatic-affective paths stems from Nagatomo’s interpretation of Ichikawa’s concept of seishin toshite no shintai, which means “body as spirit” (1992: 5). Like in western phenomenology, there are two modalities of the body – shukan shintai or the “subject-body” (although Nagatomo warns that the English word “subject” implies disembodiment on account of its association with rationality and is, in fact, an inadequate translation of shutai which implies being embodied as well as being the centre of consciousness), which could be described as the body we are, and kyakutai toshite no shintai or the “object-body”, which could be described as the body we have (1992: 6). Shukun shintai is lived from within and consists of a multitude of different horizons, ranging from the “bright horizon of consciousness” to the “obscure,

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hazy horizon” (Ichikawa cited in Nagatomo 1992: 6). The reference to the various degrees of discernibility and opaqueness signifies a range of existential modalities, from clearly formed intentions which presuppose a distance between the “subject-body” or shukun shintai and the object of its intention, (identified negatively as that which is not the “subject-body”), to opaque moods or feelings in which the “subject body” merges with the stimuli and where there is no object of consciousness. In this sense, the subject-body is a continuum in a continuous dialogue between what is actual and what is possible and is, as such, the basis of voluntary and involuntary actions. All dialogues with what are usually called “perceptual objects” are done by way of negotiation between the outer horizon, such as the surface touched by the hand or the sound heard, and the inner horizon, the momentary interoceptive, visceral and humoural disposition. This dialogic form is also extended to the “object-body”, albeit in a different sense. As a clearly delineated shape which affords access to other shaped things, such as gauging the distance between the hand and the doorknob for example, in grasping other “objects” or shaped things, the “object-body” is also informed of its own qualities. Nagatomo stresses the importance of this dialogue which accords neither the role of the active, meaning-constituting agent to the “object-body” nor the passive, purely receptive quality. This particular distinction is important because it replaces the active-passive polarity with a form of dialectical ambiguity, a concept already present in Merleau-Ponty but further elaborated by Nagatomo. In order for an intimacy to occur – the process of familiarisation resulting in the sense of knowing – a mutual configuration between the object-body and another shaped object has to take place. These dialogical positions are crucial to understanding the reversibility of positions with which the notion of the “body as spirit” is imbued. The example Nagatomo provides, after Ichikawa, is that of double sensation. If we touch our foot, we can feel both our hand touching the foot and the foot being touched. Double sensation thus: involves a subject that is touching an object that is being touched, when both the subject and object pertain to one and the same body … This will provide an occasion for reflection, for reflection requires precisely that which does the reflecting and that which is reflected upon. Moreover, it can be seen as an ‘externalized reflection’ because the subject-object dichotomy takes place on the surface of the clearly delineated physical boundary of the body (1992: 21).

In other words, it is in the sensation of the foot which is being touched by the hand that the “externalized reflection” occurs. However, this externality is

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subsequently reversed and the reflection is internalised, since after reflecting on the fact that it is our hand touching our foot we also note that it is us realising that it is our hand touching our foot. At this point the “I” realising the “I” touching” occurs at a level not fully available to clear or transparent consciousness, as transparent consciousness requires an intentional distanciation from the object of its contemplation. Moreover, what appears in this state of not-entirely-transparent consciousness is the interchangeability of the “externalised” and “internalised” positions. This is to say that the “I” feeling myself touching my foot and the “I” feeling my foot being touched are exactly the same. Nagatomo calls this the “interfusion” of the subject-body and the object-body (1992: 23). “Interfusion” thus unifies selfhood and mine-ness and arises from the “hazy horizon of consciousness” (1992: 26). Larry Miller’s 1974 kit entitled Orifice Flux Plugs (Fig. 7), which is an exploration of what might be termed the “living body’s” hidden somaticity, elucidates this “hidden” process of interfusion and its passage from the hazy to the clear horizon of consciousness. Packed in a 9 x 12 inch transparent plastic box, Orifice Flux Plugs consists of earplugs, nose plugs, a mouth plug (a cork-like object of about two and a half inches in diameter), pacifiers, tampons, condoms, the different forms of anus plugs varying from fingershaped objects to old fashioned thermometers, a blindfold and a few tiny statuettes that may fit into any of the aforementioned orifices. Interoception, as opposed to exteroception, which opens our body up to the external world, includes all sensations of the “internal world”, the viscera such as hunger, thirst, pain, temperature, “air hunger” (the body’s need for a sufficient amount of oxygen) and vasomotor activity. Due to the fact that the main interoceptive function is to motivate behaviours needed for the maintenance of homeostasis, we are mostly unaware of its existence. In The Absent Body, a phenomenological study of the paradoxical absence of the body from thematic experience, since the body “constitutes a null point in the world I inhabit” (Leder 1990: 13), Drew Leder offers a lucid example of the secrecy of interoception as compared to exteroception. An apple, which can be seen, smelled, touched and tasted, once swallowed, not only disappears from the field of exteroceptive experience, but disappears altogether, unless a digestive disturbance occurs (1990: 39).

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Fig. 7. Larry Miller Orifice Plugs, 1974. Design by George Maciunas. © Larry Miller. Courtesy of Larry Miller.

In other words, the moment the external world becomes a constituent part of the body it is lost to its experiential field. Miller’s score offers an exploration of this recessive dimension, which, in Nagatomo’s terminology, corresponds to the hazy horizon of consciousness. The plugs can either be used selectively and consecutively, or, all at once. However, if we insert only the ear plugs – since, as Hannah Higgins rightly notes, the question that arises in conjunction with Miller’s Orifice Plugs is invariably: “[w]hat if this is used?” (Higgins 2002: 34) – and if close our eyes, we will suddenly be able to hear the inside of our body – the clicking of the jaw or the shoulder blade as we set it in motion, the opening and the closing or the larynx when swallowing saliva, the incessant workings of the stomach and the intestines. We will also be able to feel the expansion and the maximum circumference of our lungs as we inhale and a mixture of pressure and release as we exhale. If we begin to move parts of the body even the tinniest movement will feel enormous because there is no exteroceptive reference to spatial coordinates. Generally, in this state of temporary “exemptness” from the world, that is to say from exteroceptive

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participation in it, and lacking the usual “cues”, our body will feel much larger. The longer we spend in this state the more we will be able to discern even the tinniest events in the body, such as an itching palette or a twitch in the calf. We will even be able to feel the incessant motion of our body – the beating of the heart, the circulation of the blood, the movement of food through the digestive tract, the movement of fluids and lipids through the lymphic system. The more finely tuned our interoception, the richer the event will be. If we spend a while longer in this state we will even be able to feel the position and movement of some of the less “noisy” organs, such as the kidneys. Miller’s score is in many ways a continuation of Cage’s 0’00’’ which replaces what Cage has termed “old music”, the music that has to do with “conceptions and their communication” (Cage cited in Nyman 1974: 20, emphasis original) with “new music, which has to do with perception and the arousing of it in us” (1974: 20). In this sense, Miller’s score not only thematises the imperceptible “background”, or null-point-ness of the body, to use Leder’s expression, it also draws the percipient-interactant’s attention to the very processuality – the perpetually changing nature, that is – of perception denoted by Nagatomo’s concept of “interfusion”, which, essentially, is the passage from the “hazy” to the “clear horizon of consciousness”. The more attentive we are to the workings of the recessive body and the “hazy horizon of consciousness”, the more aware of the variety of produced events we become. The more qualitatively and quantitatively aware of the full variety of our internal event-hood we are, the lesser the opaqueness and the greater the discernibility of the “hazy horizon of consciousness”. In this sense, the exploration afforded by Miller’s score breaks open a new attentional path, which, once established, cannot be erased. Once our perception has reached the “clear horizon of consciousness”, capable of distancing itself from the “object” of its perception, or, once we have become fully conscious of something and know it, we cannot “unknow” it. The difference between this form of knowledge derived from “interfusion” in which self-hood and mine-ness are integrated, rather than that derived from, say, medical journals depicting the internal workings of the human body (as a way of representing to remote consciousness that which is not readily available to exteroceptive perception) is the difference of concern. What the qualitative transformation of attention proposed by Miller’s score further indicates is a shift in the “null point-ness” of the body, which is no

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longer seen as unrelated to our sense of self and therefore not a matter of concern or care, unless provoked by a malfunctioning or disturbance. Sensing and knowing, being implicated and being concerned with the inner workings of the body means being concerned with an unfamiliar territory, a field of “otherness”, which is nevertheless a part of mine-ness and self-hood. Paradoxically, that which is the least accessible to “clear consciousness” permeates it through and through and is, in fact, its condition of possibility. The fluidity of the boundary between this “otherness” and integrated self-hood and mine-ness is equivalent to the inseparable connected-ness of the “hazy” and the “clear horizons of consciousness”. This means that “knowing” is imbued with “not knowing’ and that, conversely, “not knowing” is always already imbued with ‘knowing”. The same enmeshed-ness can be seen in the constant “conversion’ of the so-called “sensory data” into moods. The state of temporary retreat or exempt-ness from the world, afforded by Miller’s score and caused by the closure of some, most or all exteroceptive paths, is quite likely to give rise to a sense of physical confinement. This might, in turn, result in a sense of dejectedness. Or, the insistent presence of the orifice plugs inside one‘s body might produce a growing sense of being encroached upon, which will more likely than not give rise to a mood change and “colour” the percipient-interactant’s initial attentiveness with resentment or irritability. Whatever the case, the interconnected-ness between interoception and mood formation and the gradation of change between the hazy and the clear horizon of consciousness will become somatically discernible. In many ways Shikego Kubota’s Flux Medicine Kit, consisting of a couple of dozen different pills, takes this exploration even further and extends the interconnectedness beyond the zone of “orientational directionality”, that is to say the “unconscious” humoural events, into that of “intentional directionality” (Nagatomo 1992: 29). Intentional directionality, as theorised by Nagatomo, includes orientational directionality but belongs to the transparent or clear part of consciousness related to intentions. In this context, orientational directionality, which belongs to the hazy horizon of consciousness, can be seen as a preparatory ground for intentional directionality. Whereas interoceptive sensations, such as thirst, hunger or exhaustion as well as their accompanying moods belong to orientational directionality, emotions arising from moods belong to intentional directionality, as they are created in the felicitous or infelicitous interactions between the person’s intentions and the

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living ambience. Despite the fact that the Flux Medicine Kit was created in the 1960s, the time when Timothy Leary’s theories of individual freedom as obtainable through the use of psychedelic drugs were steadily gaining more ground in both the popular and scientific spheres, Kubota’s score is decidedly non-psychedelic in nature. Comprising largely randomly chosen “bathroom cabinet” medications such as pain killers, antibiotics and sleeping pills, Flux Medicine Kit entices the percipient-interactant to an exploration of randomly chosen psychosomatic dispositions. It is also possible that, as Jon Hendricks) points out in Fluxus Codex, “the remains from the medicines George Maciunas [who was asthmatic] was taking at the time” (Hendricks [1988] 1995: 306), were used to supplement the collection as much as it is possible that some of the medications were placebos. However, by ingesting these pills (which, admittedly, might take some courage), placebos or not, the percipient-interactant will begin the process of thematising the humoural “null point”, in other words, his/her “usual” disposition, which, in fact, is a sedimentation of past affectivities. The percipient-interactant’s relationship to the living ambiance – the climactic and atmospheric conditions, the appearance, sound, texture and movement of things animate and inanimate – will be changed by the very fact that this ambiance is thematised. If the percipient-interactant continues to act in the environment, move, speak, eat, drink, touch and pick up things, the environment will either appear different – which will, in turn, produce the emotion of fulfilled expectation or animated anticipation of “something happening” – or, it will not appear different which may give rise to a sense of disappointment. The possibilities are, of course, endless, but whatever the case, the process of meaning production, dependent on the intertwining of orientational and intentional directionality, as both caused and produced by the living ambiance, will be underway. For example, an emotion such as disappointment “colours” one’s environment with prosaic sameness and banality. The hitherto vibrant potential of some or all the constituents of one’s environment is deflated in disappointment and things begin to appear uninteresting or even odious. At the same time, however, the smallest change in the environment, such as the sound of familiar footsteps or the smell of coffee might radically alter the formation of meaning. It is this continuous oscillation and intertwining of multiple factors that produces “lived meaning”. This meaning, as Nagatomo

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reiterates in reference to Ichikawa, is “that which the living body bestows upon its ambience, and at the same time meaning that is given to the living body by the ambience” which further suggests that “the meaning that is generated … is dependent upon both the living body and the ambience, and therefore is ambiguous” (Nagatomo 1992: 30, emphasis original). It is through “somatic” affectivity, created in the intero-exteroceptive engagement with the lived ambiance that the connectedness between the lived body and its lived ambiance is created. The ambiguity of the meaning produced further indicates that the lived body and the living ambience are inseparable correlates. “Lived meaning” is thus always processual, it is not externally, cogitationally assigned, but produced in the specifics of the interaction between the lived body and its ambience. However, “lived meaning” is not produced only in situations which disclose the interconnected-ness of interoception, exteroception, mood- and emotionformation but can be observed in the process of interaction with any Fluxkit, such as George Maciunas’s Fluxorgan (Fig. 8). Fluxorgan consists of fifteen black horns, resembling those usually found on bicycles, which, when squeezed, produce the total of twelve different sounds. The action of rhythmical squeezing and the accompanying cacophony of horn-like sounds produce a distinct affectivity, is a source of animation for the person. Whether one laughs, is overcome by an adrenaline rush, gives oneself over to a Chaplinesque musical improvisation or makes an effort to reproduce a well-known tune on the Fluxorgan, one is animated by the interaction and a process of “lived meaning-production” is set in motion.

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Fig. 8. George Maciunas Fluxorgan. © Billie Maciunas. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.

In Nagatomo’s theory of attunement it is the engagement with such actional structures, as well as their repetition that cultivates a relatedness with the living ambience. Repeated engagement sediments as “affective residue”, which, in turn, informs new actional structures. Because it is produced through the lived body, which, to reiterate, is the “interfusion” of the subjectbody and the object-body and which engages with its lived ambiance viscerally, the sedimentation of affectivity accrued as “affective residue” destabilises the accrued positionality of the cogito. The process of attunement through the “lived body” and the corresponding production of “lived meaning” is thus not only a process of general sensitisation which acquaints the percipient-interactant with new paths of knowledge acquisition and knowledge production, but also a process that effectuates a palpable change and modifies the phenomenological vector.

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Modifying the Phenomenological Vector By being both a score for an actional structure and a portable “locus”, which serves as its focus, the Fluxkit affords repeated interactions between the percipient-interactant and his/her lived ambiance. Made primarily of found objects, available elsewhere in the environment and easily replaceable in the case of loss or damage, the Fluxkit has the potential for altering the structure of one’s phenomenological vector and sensorial mapping. This potential is predicated on the process of cultivating “lived meaning”, which has two important aspects. First, the phenomenal world, experienced by positional consciousness as consisting of external phenomenal objects, merges with the lived world in which the lived body comes into an inter-sensorial contact with the object-as-lived-ambiance and incorporates it into its actional and affective structures. Second, the actional structure of the present moment opens up to what might be called the “deep sedimentations” of past actional and affective structures and integrates them into new configurations. Potentially, the two modifications can have significant bearing on the phenomenological vector, defined by Leder as the culturally created “structure of experience that makes possible and encourages the subject in certain practical or interpretative directions” (Leder 1990: 150). The first modification occurs in the passage from an “in-order-to”, thus teleological and predetermined actional structure which relates to objects as to tools, to an open, not predetermined structure. The two structures are best understood in terms of Heidegger’s famous categorisation in which predetermined actional structures appear under the name “readiness-to-hand” (Zuhandensien), a mode of manifestation which points to the realm of functional possibilities and interactions (Heidegger 1962: 96). The nonpredetermined structure belongs to the category of “sheer extantness” (Vorhandensien) (1962: 134), and is a mode of manifestation in which instrumentality, or even usefulness, are superseded by a much more open set of relationships unrelated to intentionality or predictability. The fact that a number of bicycle horns can be used as an organ, or that a paper clip, a piece of rope and a stopwatch can be used to create a performance of duration (Watts’s Time Kit), creates a different relational Gestalt in the percipientinteractant and makes it possible for other objects to be perceived as “sheer extantness”. An important element of “sheer extantness” as opposed to “readiness-to-hand” is that it is continuously pregnant with new possibilities rather

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than reduced to optimal (defined and frozen) usage, which is why it opens on to a field of innumerable actional structures. These actional structures are in turn pregnant with affectivity, which creates further actional-epistemic shifts through sedimentation. In other words, because the objects found in the Fluxkit are ready-mades and thus readily available in the percipientinteractant’s environment, it is possible for the relationship created by the actional and affective structures arising from the interaction with the Fluxkit to spread to other areas of life where these and similar objects are encountered. The second modification occurs in the re-organisation of the sensorium as proposed by a number of Fluxkits, such as Yoshimasa Wada’s Smoke Fluxkit. Consisting of rubber, leather, bits of tattered rope, incense scones, orange peel and cereal flakes, Smoke Fluxkit creates a visible passage from one sort of objecthood – leather, rope, orange peel – to another (ashes) via event-hood (the process of burning). Despite the fact that, as Leder suggests, the phenomenological vector has some “existential/biological invariants that shape human experience in general” (Leder 1990: 150), it is mostly created from “an ambiguous set of possibilities and tendencies that take on definite shape only within a cultural context” (1990: 151). One of the prime shaping factors of any cultural context is the culturespecific organisation of the sensorium. An occularcentric culture whose understanding of the world rests on logical thinking, divisibility and calculability divides the senses into separate categories and privileges the most “detached” sense while stultifying others, particularly those which threaten its neat categorisation with “contamination”, such as the senses of touch and smell. A culture whose understanding of the world rests on the ontological continuum, for example, has a very different sensorial organisation. A case in point is the southern Togo and the southern Nigeria Anlo-Ewe worldview anchored in seselelame, which, according to the anthropologist Kathryn Linn Geurts, means “feeling in the body”, or, literally, “feel-feel-at flesh-inside” (Geurts in Howes 1991: 175). Seselelame is a multi-modal sense consisting of kinaesthesia, proprioception, the haptic senses, and even a person’s character, suggests Geurts (1991: 175). Although it is impossible to effectuate a complete re-organisation of the sensorium and in this sense significantly alter the phenomenological vector, it is possible to initiate new attentional paths by calling upon, in the first place, the under-used senses, such as the sense of

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smell, and in the second, by soliciting a multi-modal, rather than a monomodal sensorial engagement. Ben Patterson’s Wash Your Face – a bar of soap wrapped in an envelope and enclosed in a large number of “communal” Fluxkits, those comprising the work of several artists – and, Takako Saito’s Smell Chess (Fig. 9) propose such modifications. If the percipient-interactant is familiar with the scent of soap in Wash Your Face it is probable that the performance of this particular score will lead not only to a tactile and kinaesthetic engagement, but also to a multilayered emotional reaction. Unparalleled by any other sense, smell has the power to generate intense intimate experiences resembling an internal “film”. The moment we come into contact with a familiar but perhaps for some time un-encountered scent, it catapults us back to the spatio-temporal dimension of our last or most memorable encounter with it. It even seems to reconstruct “scenes” from daily life which we never thought we had stored in our memory. The anthropologist David Howes suggests that the explanation for this lies in the “anatomy of smell” (Howes 1991 b: 132): “[o]lfactory signals are transmitted directly via the tiny hairlike cilia at the ends of the olfactory neurons into the limbic region of the brain, the core of emotions and memory. The limbic system, by virtue of its control over the hypothalamus, activates the endocrine (hormone) and autonomic nervous systems” (1991b: 132). This means that olfaction enjoys a direct connection to the parts of the limbic system which generate emotion and that, because of this privileged connection, smell not only activates but also “stores” or encodes memory. Although the action of washing one’s face is a coming together of the lived body and the lived ambiance, it also opens on to another dimension, that of the percipientinteractant’s stored affectivity. But even if the soap enclosed in Wash Your Face does not explode personal memories, it will nevertheless create ‘affective colouring’ due to the humoural or emotional response it solicits. Indeed, smell stands in stark contrast to the occularcentric propensity for overviews, clarity and divisibility, since, as Howes suggests, it activates our “uninhibited (untrained) perception [which] recognizes a continuum […] we are taught to impose a ‘discriminating grid’ upon’, a grid ‘which serves to distinguish the world as being composed of a ‘large number of separate things, each labeled with a name” (1991b: 140).

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Smell resists compartmentalisation and opens on to cross-categorical relationality, where the processes of knowledge and meaning production come unhinged from the socially shared frames of reference thus creating an intermingling of divergent temporal frames as well as a particularly intimate brand of “lived meaning”. Smell, much like taste and touch, has the power to pervade and invade the body. But while it is possible to get away from touch and even (although to a lesser degree) get rid of an unpleasant taste, smell lingers and gets into one’s hair, clothes, curtains, carpets, furniture, it even gets into human skin. Smell defies all forms of control while retaining a powerful and profoundly idiosyncratic “grip” on the percipient-interactant which mobilises a wide array of psychosomatic responses. Takako Saito’s Smell Chess explores precisely this zone of sensorial reversibility and proposes a re-mapping of the sensorium. Chess, as it is usually played, on a checkered board with sixty-four squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid with sixteen pieces whose mutual relationship is that of extreme hierarchy, ranging from the king, the queen, two rooks and two knights to eight pawns; is a game whose object – to checkmate the opponent’s king – is carried out through a series of strategic, mathematico-logical maneuvers.

Fig. 9. Takako Saito Smell Chess. Photo by George Maciunas. © Billie Maciunas. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.

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The hierarchy of the pieces is indicated by their shape, size, position on the board and assigned directionality of movement. While following the same rules, Saito’s Smell Chess is made of identically shaped transparent vials filled with different spices and a board of transparent plastic. As Jon Hendricks specifies in Fluxus Codex, the white pawns are made of cinnamon, white rooks of nutmeg, white knights of ginger, white bishops of clove (Hendricks [1988] 1995: 459). The white king is cardamom and the white queen is anise while the black pawns are made of black pepper, the black rooks of coriander, black knights of turmeric, black bishops of cumin, the black king of asafoetida and the black queen of cayenne pepper (1995: 459). Saito’s Smell Chess denies the sort of perception that corresponds to the game’s requirement for logical and hierarchical manageability and in its place proposes olfactory perception, which, contrarily to the game’s purpose, erases “discrete” spatio-temporal units and confuses boundaries. Once three or more vials have been opened, their respective smells fuse and hang in the air creating an undifferentiated continuum which makes it next to impossible to identify the figures. It also makes it impossible to decide on the position the figures should occupy on the board, or even remember their previous positions. In reconfiguring past habitualisations and proposing new ones – which, like all habitualisations, have the potential of becoming second nature – Saito’s Smell Chess opens on to new forms of sensorial relationality. It could thus be concluded that by introducing the relational possibility of “sheer extantness” instead of “readiness-to-hand”, by mobilising the neglected senses, such as the sense of smell, and by creating multimodal habitualisations the Fluxkit contributes to modification of the percipient-interactant’s phenomenological vector. Intercorporeity Without a doubt, it could be argued that by proposing a non-hierarchical, multi-modal sensorial organisation in which the proximity senses, as well as interoception, play an important part, the Fluxkit opens on to what Nagatomo has termed the “intercorporeal world” (Nagatomo 1992: 99). In the intercorporeal world, the lived body extends beyond the boundaries of the “object body” and the “subject body” to integrate what to positional thinking are “external objects”. This process of integration is none other than the process of multimodal attentional “appropriation” which leads to a psychosomatic un-

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derstanding of the processes of continuous transformation. As Nagatomo points out, the notion of the “intercorporeal world” is derived from traditional Buddhist thinking which holds that the human body is in its constitution inseparable from nature, the world and other bodies (1992: 81). This further means that the human body is a gateway to the “intercorporeal world”, that it forms part of a larger framework which implies not only a philosophy of being, but also a system of values. One could therefore say that appearing in the socio-economic climate of the 1960s and 1970s, which was that of productivism-consumerism where the body was viewed as an instrument of labour and a tool of production, the experiential agenda of the Fluxus works is of a purely valuational, prescriptive character. That the experiential agenda of the Fluxus works proposes the cultivation of intersensorial relationality as a mode of “liberation through the body”, and is, in this sense, yet another teleologically motivated ideology. Despite the fact that, as has been noted at the beginning of this chapter, the Fluxkit forms part of the Gramscian praxicpoietic framework because it proposes a multimodal and non-standardised epistemological-ontological alternative, it would be wrong to assume that the Fluxkit merely nurtures intercorporeity, it also discloses it. A case in point is Ken Friedman’s Flux Clippings (Fig. 10). Although originally planned as a box of press clippings Flux Clippings turned into a collection of toenail clippings, bunions and calluses through the intervention of George Maciunas who also designed the cover – a Medieval beheading. The difference between bunions and calluses is that while bunions are, strictly speaking, boney outgrowths on the big toe caused mostly by arthritis or injury, calluses are bits of toughened skin which appear on hands as well as feet as a result of repeated pressure or irritation. Both are, however, associated with sweat, injury, pain, infection and uncleanliness. Presented in the same format as many other Fluxkits, a 4 ¾ x 4 ¾ inch plastic box and offered for tactile and kinaesthetic exploration, Flux Clippings is, with the exception of Maciunas’ Excreta Fluxorum – a neatly packaged collection of twenty-four different sorts of excrement – probably the only untouchable Fluxkit. The reason why it is untouchable can be attributed to the fact that, to borrow Jacques Derrida’s phrase, “it already touches too much” (Derrida 2005: 53). Before proceeding any further, however, it will be necessary to say a few words about what, at first, may seem like an eclectic combination of sources. As is well known, Derrida’s relationship to phenomenology is complex and ambiguous. Derrida’s chief problem is the phenome-

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nology’s emphasis on the immediacy of experience, which he considers to be yet another transcendental illusion or a metaphysics because of its reliance on the notion of indivisible self-presence and the actual, undivided and undeferred present, argues Derrida (1973; 62-63). However, it is also important to add that his contention lies mainly with Husserl and Heidegger. MerleauPonty, for example, as well as the phenomenologists influenced by him, such as Leder and Levin, form a far more ambiguous (as well as paradoxical) position, a position in which the visible is entwined with the invisible and perpetually structured by the invisible, with no resolution or sublation, as posited in Merleau-Ponty’s last and unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible. Although vastly different from Derrida’s thought, one of the chief characteristics of this work is the notion of a continuous weaving of all facets of the world, without fusion and with no organisational hierarchies (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 123-125). As will become clear from the discussion to follow, Derrida’s thinking on touch has at least some similarities with the co-constitutive, ambiguous positions of the more recent western phenomenology as well as of its eastern variant and theories of the body, such as those developed by Nagatomo.

Fig. 10. Ken Friedman Flux Clippings. Design by George Maciunas. © Billie Maciunas. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.

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Drawing on Aristotle’s much-quoted statement that “both the tangible and the intangible are the objects of touch” in On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy (Derrida 2005: 18), Derrida elaborates the notion of the law of non-touching – the law of tact – which, in his view, takes precedence over “all ritual prohibitions this or that religion or culture may impose on touch” (2005: 66). This is because it is the law of the law commanding all living things not to “touch and tamper with that which in touching forbids touching” (2005: 66). In other words, it is that which already touches, at a level different from the sensory level, precisely because it discloses that it has already been touched too much, that should not be touched. Calluses are often caused by repeated encounters between rough or ill-fitting surfaces or objects and human hands. They can also be caused by a number of infelicitous interactions between the climactic conditions, such as heat or humidity, the timing of the action performed, which may have gone on for too long or was performed too abruptly, and the disposition of the person/lived body performing the action, such as that of tiredness or ill health. In other words, calluses are a material manifestation of a number of different factors which form part of both the lived body and its lived ambiance, and testify to their infelicitous interaction/s. Derrida attributes the status of the law of all laws to the law which stipulates that that which has been touched too much must be kept at a distance by a gaze, in order to watch out carefully, to guard (2005: 67) so as to prevent contamination by things that have been touched too frequently or too roughly in the past. The reason for this is, suggests Derrida, that to live means to touch and to be touched: “[w]e can live without seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling, but we cannot survive one instant without being in contact, and in touch […] That is where, for a finite living being […] touching means ‘being in the world’” (2005: 140). Touching is thus the underlying paradigm of the living being’s relationship to its living ambiance – both the direct, sensorial sort of touch and the touch that is once, twice or more times removed from sensorial contact but nevertheless touches because it discloses the frequency or infelicity of past sensorial contacts, or in other words, its sequence of “mixing”. The untouchability of Friedman’s Flux Clippings further bifurcates into two, in some areas convergent but in many ways different categories that point to incorporeity – disgust and uncleanliness. Disgust, although to a large extent culturally fashioned, can be brought down to the common denominator of

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“core disgust” present in all cultures. This sort of disgust is characterised by edibility – the disgusting object is something that could (although not necessarily would) be eaten by a human being; it is characterised by contamination – the disgusting object is something that has the power to make other things disgusting in however distant a way; and the disgusting object is in some way alive in the sense that it belongs or has at some point belonged to a living being. Another reason why Friedman’s Flux Clippings may appear disgusting is because of the presumed uncleanliness of calluses and bunions. Uncleanliness, as caused by dirt, bodily discharges or illness is alarming, because it is, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas suggests, “matter out of place” (Douglas [1966] 1978: 52). “Matter out of place” has the power to upset the prevalent pattern of order as well as to violate the “individual wholeness of being” (1978: 53). The law that Douglas claims to be operating in all societies, independent of their culture, is the law of the unity of being. This law stipulates that parts of a person’s body should not be found in places other than those occupied by the person and bears, in particular, on the state of illness and decay when detached parts of the body, such as dead flakes of skin in the case of skin conditions, impair the unity of two or more beings, that is to say the bearer of the illness and the person/persons who could be contaminated by it. Friedman’s Clippings are unclean because they are associated with the illness and decay of another “whole being” and because by touching them we risk entering the liminal state of illness, where the boundaries between life and death are blurred. By being presented in a tactile form Friedman’s score prompts the event of “tactful” and distant contemplation of that which “touches” by its very presence. However, the fact that it invades and contaminates on several levels at once indicates the existence of an intercorporeal continuum, which is invariably recognised on the psychosomatic level. Whether we feel touched by disgust, fear of uncleanliness, contamination or illness, we are touched by the disclosure of an intercorporeal interconnectedness between the human body and its environment in the widest sense of the word, all its sedimented actional structures included. The reason why we will, most likely, refrain from touching the calluses that have already been “touched too much”, in the sense of being mistreated by the infelicitous interactions with the living ambiance, could also be described as a form of so-

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matic sympathy, a feeling-with. The sight of something that has been mistreated (and bears evidence to this fact) hurts because it projects both its inherent vulnerability, which is the vulnerability of all sentient beings, and because it projects the possibility of the same happening to onlookers. In this sense, the “intercorporeal world” is not proposed, suggested or prescribed as a system of values by the Fluxkit, but is, quite literally, disclosed. Concluding Thoughts The multi-sensorial experiential agenda of the Fluxus works in general and the Fluxkit in particular presents the percipient-interactant with a number of epistemological-ontological alternatives to the detached, occularcentric position and its pertaining hierarchy. The merit of this experiential agenda lies not only in providing closeness as opposed to detachment, or multi-modality as opposed to uni-modality, but in reinstating the sensorium as a source of integrated knowledge and a medium for expanding human potential (Gramsci) while simultaneously creating a living network of intercorporeal relationships, social as well as biological. All this has profound ethical implications. Integrated knowledge is the knowledge derived from the interaction of the lived body, which is “interfused”, both body and spirit, and the living body’s living ambience in which “lived meaning” is created. The difference between this meaning and its positionally assigned abstract variant is that “lived meaning” is visceral, and, as such, implicates all its constituent relational variants in a visceral way. This sort of meaning is also unstable and impermanent and cannot be reproduced or replicated – thus standardised – but only produced anew. The living network of intercorporeal relationships is a network created through the processuality of interexpression in which there is no definite object-hood or event-hood, as each “object” is also an event because it radiates “sheer extantness” and proliferates actional as well as affective structures. These structures, in turn, sediment as affectivity, habitualisation and finally – subject-hood. The living network also de-objectifies the body, which, in positional terms, is seen as an object that stands between the subject and other objects in the world. Moreover, it de-nullifies the “null point” of the body, so to speak, and discloses the process of continuous communication between the hazy and the clear horizon of consciousness; much like it brings to the fore the transformation of the so-called “somatic” sensations into moods, emotions, attitudes and ideas. Within this network, the lived

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body is an uninterrupted continuum which is always already its own other. In this sense, the body is both the locus of the continuous interplay of knowing and not knowing, “sameness” and “otherness”, and, a gateway to a larger domain of “otherness” – the surrounding world. This means that the living network dissolves binary oppositions on several levels. Through the continuous process of multisensorial and actional integration of the “external world” a “somatically felt” interconnected-ness between a myriad things is thematised. Essentially, this sort of interconnected-ness implies responsibility. Not a selective, positionally determined responsibility, but a responsibility for that which one has not chosen to be responsible for. The discussed paths of attunement sensitise the percipient-interactant to the existence of a number of reversibilities in which responsibility arises from ambiguity and uncertainty, rather than from a clear “position”. Equally, the proposed re-organisation of the sensorium does not seek to provide a different perceptual angle, thus a new position, but to introduce the percipient-interactant to very concrete modalities of co-existence with the lived ambiance. In this sense, the practice of the Fluxkit aids the formation of multi-positionality by employing the lived body’s full potential for interaction (in the Nishidian sense of the word), which, like the interexpressive aesthetics, implies practical, moral and social concerns in equal measure.

Chapter 5 Social Rites and Rituals The previous chapter has shown that by dismantling the definite object-hood of the art object – itself a fossilisation of the occularcentric culture of distanciation – and, in its place, introducing interexpression, Fluxus works contest the separation of knowing and being in a pronouncedly visceral way. Continuing the investigation of embodied practices, such as sport and eating – Flux-Sports and Flux Food – and moving into the area of conspicuous social constitutivity, habitually achieved by means of ritual, or, to be more precise, the ritual’s performance efficacy, found in weddings, funerals and other rites of passage (in this case Flux Wedding, Flux Funeral, FluxLux and Flux Divorce), this chapter examines the ways in which Fluxus interventions into well-established social rituals utilise the ritual’s dramaturgical structure to destabilise the principles that structure hegemonic social reality. The notion of performance efficacy is here used in the sense given to it by Richard Schechner and serves to differentiate between ritual performance and performance as entertainment or theatre. While ritual “actualises that which it symbolizes” (Schechner [1978] 2003: 127), in other words affects social relationships and inaugurates new realities, and can, for this reason, be compared to the illocutionary act discussed in chapter two, performance as entertainment is bereft of a socially constitutive working because of its lack of authority. This is at the same time the reason why it is relegated to the hierarchically inferior realm of “mere” play. Although Schechner explicitly states that the two categories, performance as ritual and performance as entertainment, “form the poles of a continuum” (2003: 130), my focus here is on social reality as a supposedly legitimate principle of division. Separating the “foreground” from “background” – the serious and the important from the frivolous and the unimportant, the done from the not done, right from wrong, edible from inedible – this principle is

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produced by a profoundly dualist and discriminatory logic, which it also produces. What this logic does is to posit the positivity of the dominant category by demarcating the negativity of the dominated category. This further means two things. First, that all other variants – candidates for a multi-framed model of social reality in which several frames might intermingle simultaneously – are turned into an amorphous “other” category of non-reality: mere play, a practical joke, a dream, an illusion, a non-viable social proposition. Second, that these “other” categories are instrumentalised, which is to say placed at the service of upholding the “legitimate” frame. Echoing Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on the structurality of the linguistico-logical structure in which the governing principle remains beyond the scope of play, which is invariably also the structurality of social reality, this chapter sets out to answer the following question: how do Fluxus rites disrupt the welded signifier-signified relationship in order to disrupt the social rituals’ targeted performance efficacy? And, further: how do these disruptions affect social practices, and, by extension, the formation of social reality/realities? Deconstructing Ideal Egalitarianism For Richard Schechner, games and sports are “the social counterparts to individual fantasy”, a communal form of play, “the pleasure principle institutionalized” (Schechner 2003: 14). For the game theorist and cultural historian Johan Huizinga, however, play, which is essentially freedom from restraint, can hardly be found in modern games and sports, because of their increasing subjection to systematisation and rationalisation (Huizinga 1955: 197-8). A similar view is held by a number of game and sport sociologists. John Hargreaves draws attention to the fact that although sport has “very close semantic and institutionalized associations with ‘play’, ‘diversion’ and ‘amusement’” (Hargreaves in Hargreaves 1982: 32), it has come to represent ideal versions of the projected, but in reality non-existent social order. Sport is, according to Hargreaves, the domain where the average citizen is “supposed to experience the comradeship, ‘fair play’ [and] justice” (1982: 32) propagated by, but absent from the society he/she lives in. In a more recent account, Richard Giulianotti compares sport practice with the logic of capitalism based on notions of individualism, goal-orientated action, the work ethic and the pairing of achieved results with success and of success with virtue (Giulianotti 2005: 4). This suggests a vision of sport as a result-driven, goaloriented, time-efficient, laborious-thus-virtuous, body-shaping (or body-

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building) activity, far removed from any notion of playfulness. The conceptpractice of ludus populi, which underlies the production of Flux-Games, such as Flux Chess, and the organisation of Flux-Sports, goes some way towards surmounting this divide. On the on hand, ludus populi is inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s famous notion of art as a game, and, conversely, games as art, exemplified both by his 1911 series of portraits of chess players depicting the players’ inner processes, and by his retirement from art at the height of his career to become a professional chess player. On the other hand, it is inspired by Henry Flint’s concept of “just-likings” which stands for taking pleasure in doing just what one likes to do. This was described by Flynt in “Down with Art” as, quite simply: “[y]ou just like it as you do it” (Flynt in Celant [1968] 1975: 64). According to George Maciunas, ludus populi follows in the tradition of “art-amusement”, which is a “fusion of Spike Jones, Vaudeville, gag, children’s games and Duchamp” (Maciunas [1964] 1983: 165). What this description indicates that the primary purpose of “art-amusement” is to dismantle the binary opposition between art and participatory entertainment in the form of games and sports, which is, in fact, none other than the opposition between transcendence and ideality on the one hand, and corporeality and materiality, on the other, or, indeed, the opposition between meaningfulness and meaninglessness. Although notions of art as an “ideal transcendental standard”, such as those voiced by Immanuel Kant (Kant cited in Bernstein 1992: 54), no longer held sway in the 1960s and 1970s, art was nevertheless seen as having a cultivating function in so far as it provided the viewer with new insights while games and sport were – and still are – seen as having a tension-releasing function in so far as they provide the participant with relaxation and distraction. The prerequisite for art is originality and innovation, the prerequisite for games and sports traditionalism and imitation. Art is unique, created by a qualified and gifted professional, games and sports are a general matrix, practicable by all. Most importantly, art offers durable aesthetic as well as intellectual satisfaction because it triggers (a) lasting shift/s in consciousness, games and sports offer predominantly sensorial enjoyment and thus no more than instant gratification. Ludus populi dissolves the structuruality of this structure and supplants it with the logic of “blind tactics” – which, according to Jacques Derrida, is a playful and processual negotiation among a multiplicity of factors which (1982: 7). Instead of producing transcendental insights, ludus populi involves the participant in the forging of a corporeal socio-aesthetic practice.

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Organised for the first time at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in 1970, Flux-Sports consist of a variety of athletic disciplines and ball games such as Larry Miller’s 100 Yard Run (in which runners proceed to the 50th yard taking 3 steps forward and 2 steps backward and from the 50th yard mark 3 steps backward and 2 forward); 220 Yard Candle Dash (in which each runner carries a lighted candle and is obliged to stop to light it if it goes out); and 220 Yard Balloon Dash (in which the contestants run with as many inflated balloons as possible attached to their body). Among other contributors were Bici Forbes Hendricks (also known as Nye Ffarrabas) with her Stilt Soccer (soccer played on stilts) and Maciunas with a variety of disciplines ranging from Team Ski Run (in which four runners have their left foot tied to one ski-like board and their right foot to another) and Boxing (performed with giant inflated musical gloves) to Blow Soccer (played with a ping pong ball and long tubes). Although initially planned by Maciunas as a regular event to be held every few years, there have been only two follow-ups to the first Flux-Sport tournament, both organised by Larry Miller; the 2003 Rutgers Flux-Sport event and the 2008 Flux Olympiad at Tate Modern in London Without exception, Flux-Sports are paradoxical activities, which, in the words of the art theorist Kristine Stiles, “perplex the player and confound the body requiring its realignment with conceptually implausible behavior” (Stiles in Armstrong and Rothfuss 1993: 86). Modeled on and bearing a clear reference to wellknown sports whose rules are common physically ingrained knowledge, Flux-Sports engage the player in a clash of opposites by asking him/her to pursue the goal of the game in ways and by means that are either nonsensical or entirely counterproductive. In doing so Flux-Sports disrupt the hierarchical divide between the means of the game – the boxing gloves, the ball – and its ends – knocking’s one’s opponent out or scoring a goal. Although Stilt Soccer is a game just like ordinary soccer in so far as it consists of a set of rules by which the players agree to abide for the duration of the game as well as of clearly defined roles, it proposes a structural reconfiguration of the relationships inherent in the game. According to the game theorist’s Roger Caillois’s classification of games which differentiates between agon, alea, mimicry and ilinx, in other words between competition, chance, simulation and vertigo, football, much like chess, boxing, jousting, or, indeed, a 100 yard race – in short, all those games whose dramaturgical structures Flux-Sports utilise as ready-mades – belongs primarily to the category of agon (Caillois in Dunning [1961] 1971: 17-18).

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Agon denotes competition and rivalry and requires an artificial equality of chances and resources at the start of the game so that any prospective advancement may be attributed solely to the adversaries’ or teams’ strength, speed, skill, stamina or strategy. In contrast to this, alea designates chance and is deployed independently of the players’ strength, skill or indeed any decision-making process whatsoever. The category of mimicry refers to children’s play, imitation and acting. In this sort of play, the pleasure is derived largely from pretending to be or do that which one clearly is not or cannot do, and relies on the participants’ suspension of disbelief. The last category, ilinx, is defined by Caillois as rooted in the pursuit of vertigo, chaos and tumult and attempting to “momentarily destroy the stability of perception” (1971: 26). Ilinx is found in physical activities which provoke the sensations of disequilibrium, falling or vertigo, such as whirling or trampoline-jumping. The main difference between ordinary football and Stilt Soccer is that while ordinary football relies mainly on agon, although it comprises occasional, as well as proportionately smaller elements of alea and ilinx, Stilt Soccer mobilises all four categories of play in equal measure without privileging any single one, in other words, without allowing a single governing principle to emerge. Much like other Flux-Sports, Stilt Soccer is rooted in ‘blind tactics’ and de-centered play, which means that it substitutes the signifier-signified, or game move-expected-strategic-effect relationship for an equivalent interplay of an indefinite number of signifiers and signifieds and their respective combinations Stilt Soccer mobilises agon because it adheres to the habitual rules of scoring goals as a means of realising the meta-goal, that of winning the game; it mobilises alea on account of the players’ lack of skill, since running on stilts is a demanding task for the unaccustomed player, not to mention trying to hit the ball without losing one’s balance. It mobilises mimicry since the players pretend to be playing a game they both understand and know how to play – the game of football – and, it creates ilinx because of the disequilibrium, dizziness, momentary panic and the accompanying thrill caused by chasing the ball on stilts. Because of this varied interplay, the game produces an unpredictable interchange between ludus and paidia, which, in Caillois’s classification represents the two poles of the axis of play. While ludus refers to the rule-bound pole, paidia refers to improvisation, the “elementary need for disturbance and tumult” (1971: 30).

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In Stilt Soccer ludus and paidia structure the game in a paradoxical way, since in order to keep to the rules of the game the players are forced to continually improvise and look for new ways of covering the field, hitting the ball and cooperating with other players. At the same time, however, attempts at strategic organisation are perpetually thwarted by the use of stilts, which creates euphoric and panicked tumult. That said, the tumult never quite takes over as it is precisely amidst the shrieking and the falling on top of each other that the players discover a new strategically useful move, such as holding on to each other for balance while attempting to hit the ball. In doing so the game explodes the full gamut of the play elements and their pertaining modes of interaction – none of which prevail for sufficiently long to constitute a stable frame of reference and make Stilt Soccer solely into a childish make-believe game, a communal dance-like improvisation on stilts’ or, a competitive game in which winners and losers are determined. This permanently oscillating undecidability echoes Marcel Duchamp’s, John Cage’s as well as numerous Fluxus artists’ chance operations. A case in point is George Brecht’s Incidental Music discussed in Chapter Three in which rules were used with the explicit intention of maximising the aleatory potential of the situation. The crucial difference between these practices and FluxSports, however, is that while Duchamp’s, Cage’s and Brecht’s chance operations engage the interplay of chance and structure in a consecutive manner, Flux-Sports do so in a simultaneous manner, which further amplifies the working of “blind tactics”. Because of this, Stilt Soccer disrupts the “structure” of football as a testing ground where skill, strength or speed can be shown and measured, which is to say that it disrupts the “structure” of ideal egalitarianism. Unless one is a trained stilt walker, it is impossible to predict one’s own behaviour on the field, let alone that of other players. This further means that it is impossible to form any idea of the development of the game prior to becoming involved in it and that the only useful tactics is, indeed, the non-strategic, “blind” kind. As the sport sociologist C. E. Ashworth points out in “Sport as Symbolic Dialogue”, the notion of the artificially created egalitarianism, which is supposed to reflect ideal values, serves two purposes: that of a temporary but therapeutic catalyst for social tension, and that of an epistemological support for deriving supposedly “objective” truths about what things are “really” like from comparison (Ashworth in Dunning 1971: 43). The latter is obtainable

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by experimentation which means that sport practice, like science, attempts to create a set of controlled, objective, or ideal conditions in order to determine the ‘truth’ about what an individual player or team is “really like”. In this sense, it echoes the logic of the disembodied, purely cogitational knowledge production discussed in the previous chapter. Every game based primarily in competitiveness, such as football, is therefore a platform for “objective” experimentation where strengths and weaknesses can be shown, seen and formulated. Ashworth stresses the fact that there was a time when sports were not “experiments in the scientific, positivistic sense” (1971: 44) but were primarily playful in nature. Ashworth writes: In feudal Europe, two villages would play “football” against each other even though the terrain over which they played consistently “favored” one side against the other. For example, one village might have been uphill vis à vis the other, or have had more horses to ride upon. Nor would the contestants have “minded” this fact. Only modern Western man abstracts himself from his social setting and from the conditions that have made up his life in order to see what “he is really like” (1971: 45).

Like many other Flux-Sports, such as Miller’s 100 Yard Candle Dash or Balloon Dash, Stilt Soccer restores playfulness to sport and subverts its objectification. It does so by inverting the logic of objectivity and proposing a highly regulated as well as spatio-temporally quantifiable competition while simultaneously providing not only “inadequate” but purposefully counterproductive means with which to achieve the desired ends. Such a situation not only makes the derivation of any form of “objective truth” impossible, it also reveals the “stand-in” role of sport in relation to other social institutions. In this sense, sport perpetuates the idea that apart from real forms of social life, there are also ideal forms of social life. Not only does the “stand-in” role of sport practice perpetuate the illusion of this transcendental ideality, “temporarily absent” from the realm of reality, but further consolidates the power relations which uphold this illusion. Much like One for Violin Solo or Piano Piece No.13 (discussed in chapter three) deconstruct the abstract ideality of sound, Flux-Sports offer a performative, player-interactive deconstruction of ideal egalitarianism which lurks behind the notion of sport as an essentially recreational activity. In doing so Flux-Sports effectively dismantle the

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instrumentality ingrained in hegemonic sport practice and engage the player in an exploration of the carnivalesque and the transgressive. Traditionally, carnivals have provided a platform for the inversion and transgression of hierarchies and have made much use of the power of laughter. To try and run a race while being lifted off the ground by dozens of large inflated balloons provokes uncontrollable fits of laughter, in the runners and the audience alike, and in this way disrupts as well as temporarily annihilates the goal-orientated, time-efficient logic of meritorious achievement which features as “common sense” in the habitual practice of running. But this is not all. Flux Sports expand the notion of the carnivalesque beyond the simple inversion of categories. Strictly speaking, the word “carnival” refers to the period of feasting before Lent, such as Mardi Gras in France or Shrove Tide in England. As the anthropologist Victor Turner reveals in “Frame, Flow and Reflection”, the popular etymological derivation, namely “carne vale” meaning “flesh, farewell” is coextensive with the main function of the carnival which is to bring “all things of the flesh … to the fore of social attention, the pleasurable to be indulged in and the politically and legally unjust to be given a long hard look” (Turner in Benamou and Caramello 1977: 39-40). The traditional carnival thus allows the pauper to become the king or the queen for a day and in doing so mirror the social injustices produced by the rule of the latter, but this inversion, while criticising the dominant order, nevertheless affirms it. The reason for this is that it remains spatio-temporally framed and does not leak into other spheres of life. It is not a model for a practice, only a temporary respite, a pre-calculated effect, so to speak, which does not in any way subvert the dominant order but only inverts it, and, for a very short time at that. Despite the fact that the presence of Flux-Sports at Rutgers University may, at first glance, be interpreted as carnivalesque in the traditional sense of the term – as an inversion of the logic of university education which aims to provide students with useful, realistically applicable knowledge – I am suggesting that Flux-Sports operate beyond the dichotomous logic of inversion. In the first place, they embroil the difference between the logical, in other words the currently operative cultural convention – or reality – and the illogical, potential, but currently inoperative cultural convention, without creating a binary opposition or resorting to definite differences. Rather, they expand the permanently structuring and undecidable process of différance. Second, Flux-Sports propose an embodied practice,

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which resembles the practice of the Fluxkit in the sense that it cannot be forgotten once it has been incorporated. Once our body has grown to know Stilt Soccer or a 100 Yard Balloon Dash, it cannot “unknow” it. It is thus by creating a shift in perception, that is to say a shift in the physical, social and cognitive habits, that Flux-Sports expand the notion of the carnivalesque and move beyond the binary parameters to create an irreducible, move-dependent and simultaneous (rather than consecutive) interplay of structure and nonstructure, sense and nonsense. Towards a Ludic-Concretist Game Model In the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the move-dependent structuration characteristic of game playing is seen the locus of social relations-formation. Bodily practices are of crucial importance here, because culture shapes social existence as a product of embodied action. That is to say that, for Bourdieu, culture is constituted in the specifics of practical actions as well as interactions; it is from these specific interactions that preferences, tastes and rules of conduct arise. Bodily practices, such as sport practice and eating practices are relevant because they shape the body’s “practical sense”. As Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant suggest in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, the body’s “practical sense” is that which “constitutes the world as meaningful by spontaneously anticipating its immanent tendencies in the manner of the ball player … who, caught in the heat of the action, instantaneously intuits the moves of his opponents and teammates, acts and reacts … without the benefit of hindsight and calculative reason” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 20-1). Bourdieu’s conceptual tools in formulating this move-based relational theory of social reality are habitus, “field”, “capital” and “practice”. Elsewhere Bourdieu defines habitus as “a system of general dispositions integrating past experiences, which functions at every moment in a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions” (Bourdieu 1977: 83). As much as it is a generative matrix in the sense that it produces attitudes, affective dispositions and interpretations, habitus is also continuously modified in and by every new interaction. This is in many ways similar to Nagatomo’s “residual affectivity” discussed in the previous chapter, only related predominantly to the domain of sociality albeit arising from as well as remaining entwined with physicality. It is this

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interpenetration that makes all corporeal practices relevant since they not only reinforce the already-existing habitus (as in the case of blood sports, fox hunting, for example, which reinforce the upper class habitus in Britain) but also modify it (as in the case of Flux-Sports). The deployment and modification of the habitus is closely linked to Bourdieu’s notion of “field” – an agglomeration of past practices ossified as “positions”. The relationship between habitus and “field” is a mutually structuring one – fields can only exist if social agents possess the habitus to maintain them, and conversely, by participating in the field social agents incorporate into their habitus the specific rules that allow them to constitute the field in question. To each “field” belongs a field-specific doxa, an ingrained and self-explanatory, “commonsense” way of doing things which is unquestioningly internalised by the players. It is in the production of its doxa that the field becomes hegemonised and further perpetuates hegemony. Flux-Sports are paradoxical activities not because they perplex the mind but because they redefine the field doxa. Or, rather, they juxtapose the field doxa and its antithesis, thus influencing the players’ “practical sense”. By asking the participants in Team Ski Run to run, in the first place collectively, that is to say with their legs tied to the legs of other runners, and, in the second, to run while their left leg is tied to one group of runners and their right leg to another, Maciunas proposes a practical revision of the field doxa which presents individualism, independence and the efficient use of spatio-temporal and corporeal resources as “commonsense”. By subverting the runners’ corporeal resources, since, clearly, splayed legs are not likely to be of much use to anyone trying to move fast, Team Ski Run also questions the notion of “capital”. Bourdieu’s use of the word refers to “accrued advantage” which lies in reserve awaiting mobilisation and includes a wide body of resources that have an exchange value in one or more fields. One’s “physical capital” thus comprises one’s suppleness, muscle power and stamina, which, when invested in a given sport, procure, or are at least capable of procuring, a “profit” – conferring the status of a winner to the player. Once this form of capital has produced the status of recognition, honour and prestige, however, it is transformed into a different sort of capital, namely symbolic capital, which consists of the resources available to individuals on the basis of recognition, honour and prestige. In much the same way, one’s cultural capital, which is the sum total of one’s educational and intellectual resources, will, when invested in a number of social situations to promote

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social mobility, be transformed into social, or even economic capital. One of the foremost characteristics of capital is evidently transformability. As the performance theorist Mike Sell notes in reference to the art and nonart practices of the 1960s and 1970s, it is the swift and mercurial transformability of capital characteristic of the affluent society that made capital into a simultaneously oppressive and liberating force (Sell [2005] 2008: 178-80). In a comprehensive account of the performative turn of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ practices, among which also Fluxus, Sell draws attention to the highly ambivalent position in which these practices found themselves and which they simultaneously sought to articulate. In a reference to Andreas Huyssen, Sell suggests that the artists active in the 1960s and 1970s faced a much bigger challenge than the Dadaists, for example, during whose time capitalism had not yet entered the mercurial, ubiquitous and ambivalent stage which “had mastered the high art of integrating, diffusing, and marketing the most serious challenges” (Huyssen cited in Sell 2008: 178). Sell’s contention is therefore that the sheer force and power of capital, having penetrated all spheres of life by the 1970s, made any form of opposition, rebellion or counteraction, such as that practiced by the Dadaists, next to impossible. This is why Sell suggests that the Fluxus artists both used the ambivalent force of capitalism and subverted it in a manner of the “judo throw” (Sell 2008: 212). The “judo throw” is a martial arts move, which, instead of blocking the opponent’s attack or launching a counterattack, utilises the impetus of the opponent’s attack to its own advantage. Importantly, Sell relates the “judo throw” to the slippery and diffused manner in which capital operates to place the whole society at the disposal of profit. The “judo throw” is thus both “the product and the doom of capitalism” (2008: 212). This mutually structuring, irreducible dialectics of action and counteraction features very prominently in Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the “dual perspective”. Developed with the intention of dissolving the dichotomy of the rulers and the ruled, the oppressors and the oppressed, Gramsci’s “dual perspective’ encompasses apparent opposites – force as well as consent, authority as well as hegemony, tactics as well as strategy (Gramsci [1971] 1998: 170). Furthermore, it is defined in reference to Niccolò Machiavelli’s seminal work on political leadership entitled The Prince. In order to explicate the non-dichotomous, active-counteractive approach, Gramsci cites the following passage from Machiavelli’s Prince in the section of the Prison Notebooks entitled “The Modern Prince”:

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Appropriating the logic of the Machiavellian Prince and applying it to the struggle of the oppressed, Gramsci argues that in order to fight against the “law”, which, by definition, is created by the ruling and not the ruled, the ruled need to have an operative knowledge of both the law and of all that which the law defines as unlawful, unlawful strategies and tactics included. In other words, for Gramsci, the successful counter-tactic operates like the “judo throw”, by both incorporating the dominant strategy, and, by opposing it. What Team Ski Run reveals is precisely this complex dialectical situation by simultaneously sabotaging “capital” – in this case embodied, physical capital – an agglomeration of useful resources awaiting mobilisation, and, by compelling the player to adapt to the vertiginous speed with which useful resources, or capital, change guise and adopt contradictory positions. Similarly, the Fluxus version of Boxing played with giant musical gloves introduces a fundamental uncertainty into the very object of the game – should one try to win the game by boxing or boxing-glove-playing? Since in relational terms, music playing is diametrically opposed to boxing – serenading someone being, indeed, very different from hitting them – the fluctuation of the two systems of value, and, importantly, their interpenetration, critiques the speedy transformability of any form of capital whilst simultaneously providing an embodied practice based on the selfsame reversibility of positions. A similar irreducibility, and, by extension, relationality features in Bourdieu’s use of the word “capital”. For Bourdieu, the three notions – habitus, “capital” and “field” – acquire full significance only when dynamically interrelated, since it is the interrelation that configures the player’s “feel for the game”, which is to say – social practice. The dynamism of this interrela-

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tion is nowhere more evident than in Maciunas’ Prepared Ping Pong which consists of prepared tables (with huge holes or geometrically cut out shapes in the middle, such as triangles and rhomboids) and prepared paddles (ranging from the ‘hole in the centre’ (Fig. 11)”concave” or “convex” paddle to the soft-surfaced, “corrugated” (Fig. 12) and the “can of water” paddle (Fig.13)

Fig. 11. George Maciunas Corrugated Paddle. © Billie Maciunas. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.

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Fig. 12. George Maciunas Hole-in-the-Middle Paddle. © Billie Maciunas. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.

Fig. 13. George Maciunas Can-of-Water Paddle. © Billie Maciunas. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.

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The concretism introduced into the operative game elements – the tables and the paddles – dissolves not only the hierarchy inherent in the field but also the field’s boundaries. The latter are dissolved in so far as playing with the “can of water” paddle, for example, makes not only for spilt water and a slippery running surface but also for a playing area at least three times bigger than that used in conventional table tennis. The players’ relationship to the field as well as to the field doxa is here radically changed because the new factors demand a re-configuration of the players’ proprioceptive ability (the body’s sense of balance) to tell apart the designated object from its context, otherwise also termed field independence. That which helps us play conventional table tennis is a clear recognition of the relevant (operative) perceived object/s on the one hand – the ball, the paddle, the table, the net – and, their context or background on the other. When we see a table tennis ball coming our way we position the paddle in the same way we would position our hand if we did not have a paddle. The obvious advantage of the paddle over the hand is the flatness and hardness of its surface, but in essence, the paddle is an extension of the hand. When playing on a slippery floor and continually struggling to maintain the upright position, however, as well as playing with a paddle which is a veritable obstacle rather than an extension of the player’s hand, all sense of field independence is lost. The hierarchical differentiation between foreground and background – between the “relevant” and the “irrelevant” – is obliterated since all elements – the convex surface of the paddle, the ball, the can of water, the table with a hole in it, the slippery floor and the players’ frantic effort to hit the ball – are equally thematised and equally relevant. In this sense Prepared Ping Pong operates as a dynamic extension of Cage’s 4’33’’, which, instead of engaging the percipient in a receptive appreciation of the usually un-thematised “background”, engages the player in an active and performative relationship with it. Regardless of whether the players cooperate creatively to invent new rules in order to accommodate for the emergence of new and unpredictable elements, or proceed without a matrix and simply improvise, they are involved in the process of forging new relational coordinates, which is to say – practice. It is on account of this interrelation that Bourdieu equates game playing with social practice. In the case of Flux-Sports this practice is both predicated on and further perpetuates the participant’s willingness to engage in “nonsensical activities” in which the supremacy of competitiveness and goalorientated action dissipates into chance and tumult, and in which the logic of

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the playing field and its operative doxa gives way to the aleatorics of improvisation guided by “blind tactics”. It is thus by altering the players’ attitude to all components of the game – “capital”, “field” and field doxa – that the player’s “feel for the game” is altered. In turn, the newly acquired “feel for the game” effectuates a change in the player’s habitus. The durable value of Flux-Sports lies in their embodied re-valorisation of the forms of social interaction habitually organised along the “relevant-irrelevant, valuableuseless, ends-means” axis. Instead of these hierarchical oppositions, FluxSports propose de-centered play whose chief characteristic is quick and frequent reality reversal, which embroils all known game elements equivalently, thus creating a kaleidoscopic reality in which a number of different governing principles appear simultaneously. Rather than juxtaposing a homogenous system – that of structure, logic and order – to a heterogeneous process – that of chance, illogic and chaos – in a consecutive manner, as is the case in Brecht’s chance operations, Flux-Sports function as a process of simultaneous structuration of homogeneity and heterogeneity, systematicity and disruption. It is on account of this perpetual as well as material-corporeal processuality that the practice of Flux-Sports initiates what Kristine Stiles has termed a “deep, rich and responsible engagement with the social world” (Stiles in Armstrong and Rothfuss 1993: 65) in which every element, every move, every reaction, however small, texturises the player’s actions, his or her interactions with other players, and, by extension, wider interpersonal relations. In this sense, Flux-Sports function as a matrix for a non-hegemonic structuring of social reality without ever proposing a single and thus definitely different reality. Rather, they expose the fact that the very notion of social reality is a “frame”, a principle of division which determines the “real”, the serious, the important and the binding by segregating it from the “non-real” – the nonsensical, the unimportant and the frivolous. This dependence of the operative reality on its “other” is also explored in another domain which mediates between the body and the social world and that is – eating. Blurring the “Magical Division” Although the Fluxus practice of banquets and festschriften such as the 1970 New Year’s Flux-Feast (Fig. 14) – which instructed its participants to contribute food and drink of their own invention and boasted a menu of Flux Eggs (emptied egg shells filled with shaving cream) and Transparent Meal (Fig. 15) by Maciunas, Turkey with Concrete Filling by Milan Knížák and

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Black Meal (comprising black drink (coffee), black beans, black meat and black sauce) by Bici Hendricks – followed in the Futurist tradition, its implications were pronouncedly more social. Whereas the Futurists were concerned primarily with elevating the visual, olfactory, tactile, masticatory and digestive experience to the level of art, and, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes in “Playing to the Senses”, created recipes for ‘”one-man shows” on the internal walls of the stomach consisting of free-form arabesques of whipped cream sprinkled with lime-tree charcoal which treated the stomach as a “surface to paint, not a vessel to fill” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1999:16), the Fluxus approach is simultaneously an extension of intermediality, and, as Kristine Stiles has noted, an intervention into the very “syntax of interactive social relations” (Stiles in Armstrong and Rothfuss 1993: 90).

Fig. 14. Flux-Feast 1970. Photo by Larry Miller. © Larry Miller. Courtesy of Larry Miller.

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Fig. 15. George Maciunas Transparent Meal 1969. Photo by Larry Miller. © Larry Miller. Courtesy of Larry Miller.

At a practical level, this was made possible by the fact that the consumption of intermedial culinary artifacts was not confined to the Fluxus group, their friends and/or acquaintances only, as was the case with the Futurists, but was made available to the wider public via the Food Center advertised in the Flux Newsletter. Catering for a range of occasions, from tea parties to banquets, Food Center offered a variety of foods and drinks such as Per Kikerby’s 4 Flux Drinks (Fig. 16) teabags filled with ground aspirin, salt, citric acid and sugar (Maciunas in Hendricks 1982: 199), Geoff Hendricks’s Ten Flavors of Mashed Potatoes, which, apart from the more traditional flavours such as garlic also included cinnamon-, coriander-, sweet orange blossom- and rose water-flavoured mashed potatoes (Hendricks 2010: np), and, Maciunas’s Fish-Meal which consisted of a clear fish drink, fish jello, fish bread (made from fish bone flour), fish pudding and fish ice cream (Maciunas in Hendricks 1982: 199).

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Fig. 16. Per Kikerby Four Flux Drinks Design by George Maciunas. © Billie Maciunas. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.

The Fluxus artists approached food as a distinctly social field of action, a medium in which categorisations become manifest in a variety of eating practices and their pertaining behavioural and dramaturgical requirements. Larry Miller’s Flux Museum Meal thus consists of a plexiglas box, which, when placed over the eater’s plate and place settings makes the eater (and presumably, the gathered company) focus on the choreography required to get the food from the plate to the eater’s mouth via the arm and mouth holes provided for that purpose. In doing so Flux Museum Meal articulates the strictures imposed on the feeding body in public. As Miller notes with regard to the 1993 Flux Fest at the Chicago Art Club where Flux Museum Meal was presented “[p]eople were served a complete meal “under glass” … the diners carefully fed themselves through the entry holes and actually spoke with each other. So the space within the vitrine became not only an area which confined the food from the outside-in, but the inner space of the vitrine became a “chamber for conversation”” (Miller 2010: np). Clearly, Flux Museum Meal

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highlights the existence of a deeply ingrained mental scheme which differentiates between the “right” and “proper” way of eating – as well as conversing while eating – and its less desirable variants which range from “clumsy” to “downright disgusting”. Unlike a breach of conventions in a different sphere of social interaction, the greeting ritual, for example, which can be seen as impolite or possibly offensive, a breach of conventions in the eating ritual is perceived as repulsive, disgusting, even potentially contaminating. Since food both creates and manifests relationships between the body and the social world, it is inseparable from eating practices, which are in turn inseparable from judgment as such. It is therefore hardly an accident that in most IndoEuropean languages the word “taste” refers both to the capacity to discern flavours and to judge aesthetic as well as, implicitly, moral values, both of which are regarded as innate or intuitive. However, as Bourdieu reveals in Distinction, taste, which is relationally produced in the interaction of habitus and “field”, is a socially derived category, one that further perpetuates social, class and gender divisions. Bourdieu writes: Taste classifies and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classification, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar … And statistical analysis does indeed show that oppositions in cultural practices also appear in eating habits. The antithesis between quantity and quality, substance and form, corresponds to the opposition – linked to different distances from necessity- between the taste of necessity, which favours the most ‘filling’ and the most economical foods, and the taste of liberty – or luxury – which shifts the emphasis to the manner (of presenting, serving, eating, etc.) and tends to use stylized forms to deny function’ (Bourdieu 1984: 6).

What Bourdieu is talking about here is the very fabric of which the social existence is woven and which, in turn, “weaves” a number of other socially shared attitudes about what is “good” or “bad”, “done” or “not done”. This is the reason why Bourdieu insists that this physical-aesthetic-moral differentiation is a “magical division”. Moreover, for Bourdieu, “[c]ultural consecration does indeed confer on objects, persons and situations it touches, a sort of ontological promotion akin to a transubstantiation” (1984: 6). Importantly, this magical division, which functions in much the same way the logic of totem and taboo does, operates to a large extent through food. Food is the

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primary need of human beings but also a pleasure, which is why ideas about which types of food should not be eaten or mixed and why are almost as powerful as the incest taboo, despite the fact that the former are explicitly stated as such only in orthodox religious communities. The Fluxus approach to food and eating practices engages the symbolic nature of this “magical division” as well as its social repercussions. Bici Hendricks’s Black Meal is not only a textural exploration of black, an olfactory-gustatory equivalent of Kasimir Malevich’s Black Painting but is a meal that touches on the cultural taboo which associates blackness with death and decay. The reason why black foods, such as caviar or black (calamari) risotto, are eaten in small quantities is that incorporating large quantities of black food into one’s body is synonymous with incorporating illness, evident, among other things, in the effect that black-risotto-stained teeth have on those who have not eaten the same dish and who usually wince or recoil at the sight – the obvious association being with rotten teeth. The idea of incorporating “unwholesome foods” is further associated with “becoming unwholesome”, in other words becoming contaminating and thus dangerous, which is the reason why eating practices have often been used to entice inter-racial or inter-cultural hatred. In a similar manner, Maciunas’s Fish Meal, which is a theme variation of a different kind, but which, like Bici Hendricks’ Black Meal, Kikerby’s 4 Flux Teas, and Geoff Hendricks’s Ten Flavors of Mashed Potatoes, retains a connection with the monomorphic nature of the event score, implies two opposed modes of sociality – the frugal and rustic world of bygone times in which meals often consisted of endless variations on the few food items in plentiful supply, and, the medicinal world in which the various fish derivates, most notably fish oil, are used for the purpose of fortification and/or cure. Another factor that blurs the “magical division” is the unpleasant smell usually associated with fish which tends to transgress as well as confuse boundaries and is the reason why foods with pungent smells, such as blue cheese, are used as basic ingredients for very few dishes, rather than as endless variations on a theme. If the Fish Meal were a rice meal, for example, its variation in terms of form, aggregate states and texture would remain well within the categorisation prescribed by the “magical division”.

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The Fish Meal, however, remains elusive as well as transgressive, since it is simultaneously wholesome and unwholesome, nutritious, medicinal and disgusting. Geoff Hendricks’s Ten Flavors of Mashed Potatoes, which retains the same atypical differentiation between sameness and difference as Black Meal and Fish Meal in so far as it differentiates within sameness and vice versa, without producing a definite difference by creating a definite sameness, is doubly paradoxical in terms of the “magical division”, since apart from disrupting the sameness-difference polarity, it also disrupts the commonnesssophistication polarity. Within the social field of taste, mashed potatoes are usually seen as a wholesome but undistinguished dish on account of its cheapness as well as amorphousness. As Bourdieu suggests, a taste for cheap and nutritious foods, such as potatoes, which are filling and can be eaten in “whole-hearted gulps and mouthfuls” (1984: 190), without any nibbling or fiddling, both betray and help shape a distinct class habitus. Since taste in food is “an incorporated principle of classification” which chooses and modifies “what the body digests and assimilates, physiologically and psychologically” (1984:190), it invariably influences ideas about the body – its volume, shape, health and beauty, ways of caring for it and presenting it in public – which, in turn, solicits a certain type of reaction from one’s environment. Reciprocally, class and cultural identity prescribes what should be eaten, how and why. Potatoes, which require no connoisseur skill in cooking, serving or eating but are nutritious as well as filling, are generally seen as constitutive of healthy and resilient bodies. As Bourdieu notes, the eating of such and similar food is also homologous with a certain way of talking, “with the whole mouth or the back of the mouth” (1984: 191), which bears relation to a clear and sufficiently loud way of “speaking one’s mind”, a scheme echoed in the rest of the body in the form of unabashed gestures and movements. Pertaining to this body scheme are also value judgments which demand that things be clear, simple, straightforward and unpretentious (1984: 193). Contrary to such ideas, Geoff Hendricks’s Ten Flavors of Mashed Potatoes requires a complicated eating routine, comparable to wine or tea tasting, which, in order to discern the subtle differences in taste, requires an extremely concentrated savouring of small and clearly segregated quantities of food. The subtlety of variation implicit in Ten Flavors of Mashed Potatoes, reminiscent of the colour spectrum or musical scale, transforms the eating prac-

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tice habitually associated with such amorphous foods and lends it “distinction”. Again, the “magical division” which segregates lobster or snails from mashed potatoes, which is a class distinction, not in terms of price but in terms of the habitus and the social aptitude “required” for their consumption, is here disrupted in a humorous way. While highlighting the relationship between food and judgment, Hendricks’s Ten Flavors of Mashed Potatoes, like Black Meal and Fish Meal, suggests a different system of differentiation which is spectrum-like, and, essentially, inclusive. What this system proposes is a difference in nuance rather than a difference in kind. Although it may be impossible to entirely circumvent the hierachical dualism inherent in the “magical division” – a good example being Maciunas’s “fish ice-cream”, which may be both nutritious and delicious but will nevertheless, more likely than not, be perceived as disgusting, since these structures are deep buried and implicit, Flux Food and Flux Feasts point to the possibility of a nonexclusive articulation, which, instead of seeking differential positions, seeks to articulate difference within sameness and sameness within difference. Identity as Alterity A similar form of spectrum-like differentiation, which questions the process of social-identity-formation and, in particular, cultural and gender identityformation, as derived from polarisation – and, inevitably, otherisation – is also found in Flux Wedding. The latter, which took place on February 25th 1978 and united Maciunas and Billie Hutching in matrimony, intervened in a ceremony which is a vehicle for the performance, and thus also constitution of cultural and gender identity. While the wedding ceremony makes a public commitment to continuing the cultural tradition it represents, the performatively displayed intentions of the protagonists – the bride and the groom – form a constitutive element of their future relationship. With the exception of the more recent institution of gender-neutral and same-sex marriage, the traditional wedding ceremony is both the prime site of gender polarisation and a vehicle for its production since the ritual creates a social unit within which two “opposed” sexes produce legitimate offspring. This binary unit is created by means of the wedding ritual’s performance efficacy, a combination of authoritative or, simply public utterance in other words, the illocutionary act, the use of symbols and a reliance on a predetermined dramaturgical structure. The constitutivity of ritual – its already mentioned ability to “actualise that which it symbolizes” (Schechner 2003: 127) and thus affect social relation-

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ships – derives from its adherence to a special ordering of time and a particular use of symbols. In this sense, every ritual is in the first place a declaration against indeterminacy in so far as it seeks to state that the cosmos and the social world, or, at least, some part of it, is ordered, regulated and fully explicable. The purpose of props and costumes and their pertaining dramaturgical and choreographic requirements is thus to “format” the reality targeted by the ritual’s performance efficacy. Although Flux Wedding was a “white wedding” in so far as it adhered to the traditional costumes as well as props, dramaturgy and choreography, the protagonists took a spectrum-like attitude to their roles and thus also the gender reality inaugurated by the ritual. Maciunas, the groom, much like Billie Hutching, the bride, wore a bridal gown and veil; Larry Miller, the bridesmaid, wore a long dress, a wig and a tiara, while Alison Knowles combined the roles of the best man and the flower girl and wore the costume of the former but used the props of the latter. Cross-dressing in the private spheres of life was a popular way of rebelling against the prevalent “gender regime” in the 1960s and 1970s. The transference of cross-dressing to the wedding ceremony, however, which is an initiation, not only because of its format but also because it takes place before a collectivity of others, has constitutive connotations. Indeed, in many nonwestern cultures, such as that of the native Indian Mohave, as noted by the sociologist Michael S. Kimmel in The Gendered Society, it is the initiation rite that confers gender. According to Kimmel, the Mohave recognise four genders: male, female, alypha and hwame. “A boy who showed preferences for feminine clothing or toys would undergo a different initiation at puberty and become an alypha…he would adopt a female name, paint his face as a woman, perform female roles, and marry a man” (Kimmel 2008: 69). Equally,”[i]f a Mohave female wanted to cross genders, she would undergo an initiation ceremony to become a hwame”… further living a man’s life, hunting, farming, as well as assuming “paternal responsibility for children” (2008: 69-70). In addition to this example, which delineates gender as a distinctly performative category, Kimmel provides another which points to the fluidity and interchangeability of gender roles. The middle-eastern Omani gender category of xanith refers to biological males whose social identity is predominantly female but who can also adopt male identity at any given point in their life for a longer or shorter period of time and subsequently revert to female identity (2008: 70). The suggested notion of gender is that of

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event-hood, a variable and processual category, coextensive with Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity. Following closely in Jacques Derrida’s footsteps, Butler deconstructs the very structurality of gender structure by bringing into question the gender-sex binary and its pertaining signifiersignified relationship. Arguing against the welded relation of sex to gender in which gender is merely a manifestation of sex and, as such, always already predetermined, Butler explodes the playing field by claiming that man and masculine signify a female body just as much as they signify a male one, and that, conversely, woman and feminine signify a male body as much as a female one (Butler 1990: 6). Rejecting all notions of apriority Butler asserts that both sex and gender are, in fact, constructed which is what makes the process of signification both equivalent and unpredictable. In this sense, Flux Wedding resembles the decentered play characteristic of the Flux-Sports which includes the players, the playing field, and the game elements in equal measure. What Maciunas’s construction of femininity within the marriage ceremony brings to the fore is the breadth of signifying possibilities afforded by this de-centered play. By taking on the role of the bride Maciunas could be said to perform the absence or the lack of identity traditionally associated with this role whose primary purpose is to reaffirm patriarchal male identity. He, just like Hutching, is dressed in a white bridal gown, a colour habitually associated with purity, innocence and virginity, but which can also be seen as referring to blankness on which patriarchal identity is inscribed. By appropriating the role of the bride, while, not unimportantly, being the only one in the bridal couple to cross genders, thus avoiding binary closure, Maciunas projects ambiguity. Important to stress, however, is that this ambiguity is not only related to the ritual constitution of gender but also to the nature of this particular ritual – Flux Wedding – and the temporal direction of its performance efficacy. At the time of the wedding, Maciunas was terminally ill and aware of the fact that he only had a few months to live. The wedding was thus also an attempt to make Hutching, who later took the name Maciunas his legal heir. In “Selections from an Interview with Billie Maciunas” conducted in 1996, Susan Jarosi suggests that George Maciunas’s choice of role and costume may have been related to the ‘folk tradition known as the wedding of the dead – where if a girl dies before she is married, the community gives her both a wedding and a funeral’ (Jarosi in Friedman 1999: 206). To Jarosi’s suggestion that the

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wedding “might have represented a special rite of passage that needed to be fulfilled before he [Maciunas] died” (1999: 206), Billie Hutching (now Billie Maciunas) replies that it seemed to her that the idea of death represented as a bride was “very much a subtext going on at the wedding” (1999: 206). In this sense, the de-centered play of Flux Wedding intersects two diametrically opposed forms of performance efficacy, the performance efficacy that institutes a new way of life – the life of a married couple – and that which eases the passage to death, habitually relegated to the domain of the last sacraments. In doing so Flux Wedding disrupts not only the sex-gender chain of signification, but further embroils the interplay of signifiers and signifieds by means of a “prehumously” performed posthumous sacrament. Both the notion of gender as event-hood and the passage from life to death were subsequently elaborated in Maciunas’s and Hutching Maciunas’s performance Black and White (Fig. 17) which took place within the Flux Cabaret on the day of their marriage. As Billie Hutching (now Maciunas) states in a more recent interview: “[t]he Flux Wedding and the Black and White piece are two different manifestations of the same ritual. In the wedding, both George and I dressed as brides in white dresses. In the Black and White piece, George ended up dressed in a white dress, and I ended up dressed in the groom’s black tux … It is as if the wedding gave the groom permission to reveal the process of becoming female … our marriage by the Justice of the Peace was in effect practice for the more emotionally real Flux Wedding, much as Flux Wedding was the “practice” for the Black and White piece. Thus, there were three stages to the production of the feminine in George’s transition. The ritual is emphasized by three occurrences, each time more symbolic of gender transition” (Maciunas 2013: np). In Black and White George Maciunas appeared on the stage dressed in a tuxedo, Hutching in a long white dress, wearing a wig and high heels. With ritualistic care and precision of movement effectuated in an impeccable legato, they removed their garments then proceeded to put on their partner’s.

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Fig. 17. George Maciunas and Billie Hutching Black and White, Flux Cabaret, New York City, 1978. Photo by Hollis Melton. © Hollis Melton. Courtesy of the artist.

Once a complete reversal of the starting positions had been achieved, once white had become black and vice versa, they left the stage. What this simple action does is to present gender identity as a process of continuous transformation which is relational and situational, in as much as it is, like cultural identity, created in response to another as well as before and for a collectivity of others. As Billie Maciunas notes, however, when “George ended up with the white dress, basically he was going into death and I was staying behind … and taking on a lot more than I started out with, a lot more baggage” (1999: 206). What Billie Maciunas, who was in her early twenties when she married the forty seven-year old George Maciunas, is referring to is not only the legal, but also experiential inheritance younger people acquire from older ones, whether in the form of the parent-child, teacher-pupil or older friendyounger friend relationship relating to the wider framework of generational interchange, and, by extension, to the cycles of life and death. As Black and White aptly shows, any opposition is in fact only a “frozen frame”, part of a larger processual and interactional configuration.

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In Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness Kitaro Nishida suggests that since nothing is permanent or static, nothing can be permanently opposed, which means that any opposition is only a temporary expression of the process of perpetual transformation, as is indeed non-opposition or unity. Pertaining to the realm of the “absolute contradictory self-identity or unity of opposites” (Nishida 1958: 163), the social, just like the sensorial world unfolds as “expression” beyond any notion of either constancy or distinct separation in the sense that “[t]he I understands the thou by expressing the thou” which means that “the other is in the self and the self in the other” (1958: 163). The self being in the other while at the same time being the self, while the other remains the other, means that there is a continuous process of mutual structuring or mutual determination at work. However, in Nishidian terms, in order for anything to enter the process of mutual determination, it has to pass through the process of mutual opposing and vice versa. What this reveals is that, in the social world, much like in the physical world, any given state of affairs is always already in the process of becoming its “other”. Black is only a certain temporalised distance away from white and vice versa, but blackness is neither stable nor permanent, nor is whiteness. Equally, the gendered self is constructed and constituted in its self-presentation, thus communication with the rest of the world, but which might also be called contagion, since it refers to the perpetually structuring process of mutual affected-ness. The mutually determining relations between maleness and femaleness, or masculinity and femininity, could therefore be seen as temporary states of “predominant maleness and slight femaleness” always already in the process of becoming “evenly spread maleness and femaleness” or “slightly more pronounced femaleness than maleness”. Like in Hendricks’s Ten Flavors of Mashed Potatoes, the operative logic here is that of a spectrum or musical scale. The wider implications of this process are that the self is “expressive” not only of its selfness but also of the other’s otherness as well as the I-and-Thou relationship which resides in the “contradictory self-identity” or the “unity of opposites”. For Nishida, there is no alterity or intersubjectivity which would imply the dichotomy of objectivisation and subjectivisation by referring to the facticity of the other. The other is not objectified as that which negates the identity of the self and thus affirms it by not being black, white, male, female, young or old, nor is the relationship between self and other that of an intersubjective community, or discursive understanding. Rather, the I-and-

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Thou relationship functions as a bi-conditional articulation in which the self is simultaneously identical and alter, simultaneously individual and social. In other words, instead of taking a positional and substantive attitude to the other – which “freezes” the other and in which the self’s identity is affirmed by negating the identity of the other – the self is in-relationship. People behave in particular ways in the company of particular people because the latter call forth particular forms of behaviour, which is a co-relation between the occasion, the environment and the interactional dynamics of all those present. The self is social in so far as it expresses communal content, which is always a sedimentation of otherness. To the question:”[w]hat is the personal?” (Nishida 1970: 8) Nishida offers the following answer: the exterior becomes interior in the self-determination of the personal self. For example, without a desire for water there is no self, and without the self there is no desire for water. Moreover, desire opposes the self. When the self obeys desire the self is lost. Desire is born to die and dies to be reborn. Such a thing is a self-contradiction. … it is the continuity of discontinuity in the sense of the determination of the indeterminate. Likewise, personality cannot be unique. Personality can only be conceived in relation to other personalities, in the sense of seeing the ‘Thou’ in the depths of the ‘I’ and the ‘I’ in the depths of the ‘Thou’ (1970: 8-9).

What this essentially means is that the individual self is a transition and a flow, not only in terms of its relationship to the “Thou” but also its own self. “The personal unity of the individual self is established as the ‘I’ of the present [which] regards the ‘I’ of yesterday as a ‘Thou’ and also the ‘I’ of tomorrow as a ‘Thou’” (1970: 10-11). For Nishida, the self of the present moment both determines the “self” of the past as well the self of the future and is simultaneously determined by it. The present moment, which Nishida terms the ‘eternal present’ and which was discussed in chapter three, is thus also the moment in which the individual “lives by dying” (1970: 11; emphasis mine). This process is related equally to the individual’s relationship to itself and to the particular collectivity of others with which the self shares the epoch it lives in. In other words, it is related to the mutual configuration of the particular and the universal, the individual human being and the human race in general. This mutual configuration operates on the basis of a perpetual renewal of individuals and thus also per-

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petual dying. Since, for Nishida, there is no definite identity or alterity, precisely because the particular – or the individual – is always involved in the determination of the universal and vice versa, there is also no definite individuality or communality. The individual is always in the process of structuring the communal content as well as in the process of being structured by it. Important to note, however, is that the individual-communal interpenetration characteristic of Nishida’s thought was not entirely absent from the social environment Nishida was living in – the pre-war Japan – while this cannot be said of the increasingly industrialised, striated and fragmented society of the 1960s and 1970s Europe and the United States. Indeed, it seems that the decentering of the art object and the corresponding shift to performance as well as actional aesthetics discussed in the previous chapter marked not only an attempt to break with the instituted relationships of power based on ownership and occularcentrism, but, equally, a pronounced need for what Richard Schechner, after Mircea Eliade, terms “actualizing” (Schechner [1968] 2003: 32). Although the term does not refer to the process of individual-communal structuration in the Nishidian sense of the word, it refers to individualcommunal structuration in general and serves as a useful differential delineator in discussing the Fluxus tendency to create an anomalous, irregular and non-definite communitas. Anomalous Communitas “Actualizing” is a special “kind of behaving, thinking, relating and doing”, as well as “handling experience and jumping the gaps between past and present, individual and group, outer and inner” that highlights “overlaps, exchanges and transformations” (Schechner 2003: 32). “Actualizing” stands in marked contrast to the hierachisation and segregation of experience characteristic of industrialised societies. Instead of perpetuating dichotomies between the private and the public, individual and group, subject and object, process and product, actualising operates as a simultaneously integrative and transformational force and is often found in rituals, although the ordered and repeatable form that most rituals take is not a prerequisite. Schechner refers to actualising as to a process which attains and expresses a certain “wholeness”, defined, after Cassier, as “an indelible solidarity of life that bridges the multiplicity and variety of its single forms” (2003: 36, emphasis original). It frequently refers to the metaphysical unity of all things.

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Although a number of Fluxus rites, such as Flux-Divorce, which took place on June 24th 1971 and marked the divorce between Bici Forbes Hendricks and Geoff Hendricks, Flux Funeral, the funeral of George Maciunas’, which took place on May 13th 1978 in New York City and FluxLux, Robert Watts’s funeral, which took place on October 17th 1988, function as actualisations, they do not attempt to create, attain or express any manner of “wholeness”. Rather, they articulate the impossibility of unified wholeness while resisting its opposite – fragmentation. Both Flux Divorce and FluxLux mark a profound change; indeed, the latter marks the most profound change a human being can undergo and a collectivity of others can witness, the passage from life to death. However, despite the gravity usually associated with these rituals, Flux Divorce, Flux Funeral and FluxLux were executed in a symbolicconcretist and thus also absurdist manner. The principle of the absurd, often present in Zen, is, as Nishida points out in Last Writings and the Religious Worldview “not merely irrational… [i]t is a form of the contradictory identity of universal and particular, of knowing and acting” (Nishida [1987]1993: 108). Absurdity arises as a result of a dynamic interexpression of transcendence and immanence in which the vectors of signification perform something akin to a U turn in so far as they collapse the universal in the particular and vice versa. This makes the two categories simultaneously cohesive and dispersive. The difference between concretist symbolism and symbolism proper is the difference between the Derridian différance and the hierarchical segregation between signifier and signified. In imbuing ordinary objects with special value, symbolism, particularly the symbolism used in ritual, temporarily suspends the objects’ existence in the realm of concrete immanence and employs these objects to signify or to point to the realm of transcendence. As Victor Turner notes in “Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors”, ritual symbols act as carriers of “many references, uniting them in a single cognitive and affective field” (Turner in Schechner 1976: 117-8). Furthermore, ritual symbols “polarize between the physiological phenomena and normative values”, which is to say ideology (1976: 118). This is the reason why the performance efficacy of any given ritual remains proportionate to the density of its ideological saturation. A good example of disrupting this hierarchical relationship in a systematically deconstructive manner is Flux-Mass. Organised by Maciunas at the Rutgers University chapel, which was in regular use in its functional capacity, as a place of worship, in February 1970, and aptly christened a “ritual ready-made” by the Flux-Mass participant Larry Miller

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on account of its “found” nature (Miller cited in Higgins in Hendricks 2003: 120), Flux-Mass was an event of almost operatic proportions which intervened into the symbolism of the Catholic Mass. For this reason, Flux-Mass adhered impeccably to the ritual parameters of the Mass and included offertory, canon, the breaking of the bread and communion. As Geoff Hendricks (2003) reports: [t]he priest’s assistants wore gorilla costumes, and the front of the priest’s vestments changed from images of Napoleon to the Venus de Milo to George Washington…. Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Larry Miller and I [Hendricks] were all gorilla acolytes. The sacramental wine was in a plasma tank with hose. Wafers were laxative and blue urine cookies. The consecration of the bread, a giant loaf filled with sawdust, was done by a mechanical dove (Holy Spirit) made by Joe Jones which moved across overhead on a wire and dropped mud from a can onto the loaf. Antiphonal ‘chanting’ consisted of sounds such as barking dogs and locomotives. In another instance bird calls were answered by gun shots from the priest. The Lord’s prayer was said in a dozen languages … Smoke bombs became candles. An inflated Superman filled with wine was ‘bled’ (Hendricks in Hendricks 2003: 130).

The disruption of symbolism was carried out largely by means of concretism, manifested, among other things, in the host. In Catholic terms the host is the body of Christ and the taking of the host unites the congregant’s physical body, his/her mortal existence with the immortal body of Christ. This symbolic action is simultaneously a promise of individual immortality and a reassertion of the immortality of the Christian soul. The host used in Flux-Mass, however, unbeknownst to those who took it, contained laxatives and a substance that turned the congregants’ urine blue, which, instead of performing the act of metaphysical unification, provoked a distinctly physical, unpredictable, and possibly even alarming reaction. In so doing, it exposed the host as a malfunctioning dramaturgical device which turns the eschatological into the scatological. In contrast to Flux-Mass and its deconstructive approach, which, in introducing a variety of trigger mechanisms and random structures (such as the mud-dropping dove (Holy Spirit), or the priest’s gunned response to occasional birdsong) articulated the disorder which is at the heart of every ritual, Flux Divorce exposed the interexpression of the contradictory identity of transcendence and immanence.

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Bici Forbes Hendricks and Geoff Hendricks’s Flux Divorce, which took place on June the 24th 1971 and consisted in the sawing and chopping in half of a number of household objects and pieces of furniture, alongside which the divorcants also cut their wedding documents in half (Johnston in Hendricks 2003: 168-9), was an actualisation that both symbolised a transformation and was transformational in a concrete manner. Since as Jill Johnston points out in “In the Meantime, Art was Happening”, both Bici and Geoff Hendricks planned “to resume life with same-sex partners” (2003: 169) after the ceremony, the sawing and the chopping of furniture operated as a symbolic action which chopped in half the naturalised institution of obligatory heterosexual marriage that treated males and females as two parts of an “organic whole”, comparable to the left and right side of a wardrobe or a chair. Indeed, the same notion of “organic wholeness” was explored by Geoff Hendricks in his 1975 piece Cut Chair, shown at the Kunstverein, München in which the two vertically cut sides of a chair were tied together “the other way around” so that the right side became the left and vice versa. Unlike Cut Chair, however, which was a static exhibit and for this reason functioned as a different sort of “whole” – because it was stable – the sawing and the chopping in half of furniture in Flux Divorce rendered the furniture unusable. In this sense, the chopping and sawing functioned at a purely concrete level – as a destruction of communal property. The principle of the absurd comes into play in the palpably jarring coexistence of the two levels of symbolic content in which the signifier is supposed to point to a clearly delineated signified, but, instead, subverts the existence of this very signified. In Flux Divorce, the dissolution of the socially naturalised “organic whole”, the marriage of a man and a woman, is expressed in terms that dissolve the dissolution, so to speak as a chair, a bathtub or an electrical appliance chopped in half, thus rendered functionally useless, only serve to reinstate the “mundane” concreteness of these objects, not some transcendental meaning. In other words, they reinstate precisely that which the symbolism of the action seeks to erase or rewrite. If Flux Divorce were a ritual which sought to inaugurate a new reality – of there being other ways of creating “wholes” than the ones hitherto practised – the projected efficacy would fall flat on its face because bathtubs and electrical appliances cut in half do not work as metaphors for a “different kind of wholeness” but rather as a lack thereof. At the same time, however, the chopped in half furniture makes the dissolution of Bici Forbes Hendricks’s and Geoff Hendricks’s marriage more emotionally intelligible than

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any amount of symbolism, precisely because the furniture is rendered useless. Both the absurdity and the emotional effect of Flux Divorce were potentialised by the fact that the participants in the ceremony – friends and family – were asked to perform specific actions. As Geoff Hendricks notes the “invitation designed by Maciunas was sent out in two parts, so one had to have both parts and put them together to see when and where it [the ceremony] was taking place. The most direct participatory part was in the “Separation” where Bici [aka Nye Farrabas, the name she later adopted] and I [Geoff Hendricks] in our winter coats sewn back to back had ropes tied around our waists, and in the backyard and going up the steps, the men all pulled on the rope around me and the women on the rope around Bici, and in that way we were “separated”’ (Hendricks 2010: np). At work here is the contradictory identity of interexpression as the ritual reveals the processual manner in which symbolism and concretism converge while simultaneously drifting apart. And, it is this contradictory presence/absence that creates an anomalous sort of communitas. Anomaly is an apt expression Kristine Stiles employs to describe the way Fluxus relates to the normative by “attending to the commonplace” (Stiles in Hendricks 2003: 61). Interestingly, she situates the meaning of the word “anomalous” between “odd”, “bumpy”, “incomparable”, “unparalleled” and “unsurpassed” (2003: 61) which makes the reference to Fluxus performance simultaneously expansive, divergent and deflating. Communitas is related to the above-mentioned notion of “wholeness” and the “fundamental solidarity of life”. For Victor Turner, communitas is “society experienced as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals” (Turner in Schechner 1976: 113-4). In other words, communitas is a “mode of coactivity” (1976: 113) between “concrete, historical, idiosyncratic individuals” which is associated with freedom and spontaneity and opposed to social structure, associated with “obligation, jurality, law, constraint” (1976: 114). However, communitas, which is based on a non-discursive understanding of an unspecified communal content, and implies compassion as well as rapprochement, can gain “vertical structure” over time. Although it is initially spontaneous, unlike the horizontal social structure which links individuals through a strict system of categorisations – gender, ethnic origin, education, profession, class – communitas is nurtured through ritual. As

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Turner notes, any previous existence of communitas makes its subsequent materialisations more likely (1976: 114). It is this “non-structured” structure or cross-categorical wholeness that a lot of the 1970s actualisations, such as the more ritualistic Happenings, sought to evoke. Undoubtedly, there was a therapeutic dimension to these performances in so far as they made individual existences “resonate” within a larger “whole”, much like choral singing makes one’s voice resonate in the collectivity of other voices. Where the communitas created in Flux Divorce differs, is that it does not allow for a sense of monolithic togetherness or “definite belonging”, precisely because the performed actions oscillate between “flatness” and “multi-dimensionality”, between meaningfulness and meaninglessness, emotional content and absurdism. Although the Fluxus artists can certainly be seen as a community – not only because of their frequent collaborations but also their friendship – communitas created in Fluxus actualisations remains an anomalous and elusive category, which does not set out to manufacture togetherness but, instead, manifests irregular communal-individual structurations. This is nowhere more evident than in Flux Funeral – George Maciunas’s funeral – which consisted of a videotaped Lecture on Bananas by George Maciunas, funeral procession, invocation, service, the viewing of the body – also called “the search for George” which adhered to the following script: each pallbearer was to look into his box and utter “he’s not here”. When the last pallbearer – Yoshimasa Wada opened his box there was an explosion of flash powder (Maciunas 1979: 11). This was followed by a telegram from George Maciunas entitled In Memoriam of Adriano Olivetti – a performance score Maciunas had created in 1962 as a eulogy to the Italian inventor of typewriters. Performed for the first time during the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuster Musik, which took place in the Stadtiches Museum in Wiesbaden in 1962, the score required formal attire and hats and consisted of performers unfurling miniature rolls of paper, used tapes from Olivetti’s adding machines, and reading the tabulations. In the Flux Funeral version, the performers were to choose a favourite word from a psalm and when their number came up, say the word and raise their hat. This was followed by the Fluxfeast, which consisted of black, white and purple foods, after which offerings were made into Flaming Toilet/Flux Offertory. The same symbolic-absurdist spirit was also evident in the tribute to George Maciunas which appeared in the Fluxus newspaper V TRE, and

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which offered a concise summary of Maciunas’s somatic achievements and production, his somatic-environmental interactions and the traces his existence had left on the world.

GEORGE MACIUNAS LIFE SPAN DATA CONSUMPTION Lemons: 4524 Eggs: 12, 480 Bread: 2691 Ibs. Cereal: 2301 Ibs. Apples: 12,857 Beets: 3214 Meat: 1607 Ibs. Milk: 6420 qts. Water: 17.72 tons Total Food Intake at Smorgasbord Restaurants: 2.85 tons. Total Food: 21.62. tons ELIMINATION Feces. 8.12 tons Urine: 10.68 tons Perspiration: PRODUCTION: Hair: 118.7 miles Nails: 11.75 sq.ft Words Spoken: 3.07 x 10 Lines Drawn and Words Written: 62.14 miles Characters Typed: 2.53 x 10 (stretched out length: 47.8 miles) Distance Traveled: 14,829 miles (foot) Distance Traveled: 256,000 miles (mechanical) OBSERVATION: Total Observed Distance: 8.88 x 10 ft. (16,830,000 miles) Total Objects Seen: 9.6 x 10 (add 10/10 all stars in galaxy)

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Total Sounds Heard: 3.14 x 10 Robert Watts May 12, 1978 (Watts in Maciunas 979: 2)

Robert Watts’s own funeral, entitled FluxLux had the non-structured structure of a party and was, in keeping with Watts’s wishes, a festive occasion with “music and dancing … good food and drink” (Watts cited in Johnston 1989: 43). The festivities took place behind Watts’s house in Bangor, Pennsylvania, where a vast array of announced and unannounced events were performed all day long. Apart from Watts’s friends and collaborators, a large group of students and ex-students from Rutgers University, where Watts had taught for almost two decades, was also present. The occasion had no clear dramaturgy and the unannounced events – such as Milan Knížák Blue Lips Prints, following the instructions for which a number of people painted their lips blue and walked around all day kissing other people, trees and inanimate objects – were interspersed with the announced events. Among the latter was the scattering of Watts’ ashes in the pond behind the house by means of a radio-controlled boat. Fabricated by Joe Jones and Ben Patterson the radiocontrolled boat was designed to scatter Watts’s ashes in the middle of the pond, but as Alison Knowles recalls, had bouts of malfunctioning in the form of erratic movement which caused fits of laughter (Knowles in Millman 1992: 103). Towards the end of the day a 21-gun salute was executed in which guns from Watts’s own collection were used, such as those that shot out plastic balls, flags with the word “bang” written on them, and, firecrackers (Johnston 1989: 47). As this action clearly suggests, not only was no effort made to create the communitas typical of funerals – that of the monolithic “wholeness”, or “us-ness”, which unites the living in the face of the ultimate common denominator underlying all forms of communitas, which is death – but the occasions that may have led to it, such as the scattering of the ashes or the last salute, seem to have been purposefully subverted. What this indicates is an approach, which, while encouraging the interpenetration of the individual and the communal content remains wary of the edifying power of togetherness borne of a community’s communion with its dead members. As is well known, many of the most atrocious crimes in history have been committed by the wounded “blood and soil” communities who drew heavily on the unity of the living and the dead, the physical and the metaphysical but

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whose efforts to rectify past wrongs produced catastrophes of a much larger scale. Since neither Flux Divorce nor FluxLux achieved any manner of “wholeness”, there was no catharsis, resolution, redemption or re-absorption of grief and/or tension into a “higher” order. In other words, there was no sublation into a metaphysical wholeness, which relates to the individual as to a particle of the communal. Rather, the above mentioned rites “actualised’’ interexpression and the accompanying biconditional articulation which preserves the two poles – the symbolic-concrete, universal-particular, communalindividual – in an unresolved antithesis. These practices thus functioned as structuring processes which manifest, poetise and problematise experience in a non-rational and cross-categorical way. Important to stress, however, is that they neither seek to create, nor “give into” any form of structure, be that structure horizontal or vertical. Concluding Thoughts Flux Sports, Flux Feasts, Flux Wedding, Flux-Mass, Flux Divorce, Flux Funeral and FluxLux, all of which intervene into the well-established social (and religious) rites and rituals by utilising their dramaturgical structure as a ready-made, reintroduce indeterminacy into the “rules of the game”. They destabilise the ritual’s performance efficacy and disrupt the formation of homogeneous systems of signification. By continuously proliferating heterogeneous and antithetical micro-relationships, these interventions thwart the emergent lines of force and vectors of signification, which, when repeatedly reinstated, either through performance or tacit acquiescence, form ossified positions, which go by the name of “social reality”. Despite the fact that the contours of the habitual, the “done”, the “right”, the “proper”, the “tasteful” are defined in binary terms against the “strange”, the “not done”, the “wrong”, the “improper” and the “tasteless”, the processes which bring these divisions into being are often imperceptible. In the disciplinary society overt agents of socio-ideological formatting – the church, the legislative-military apparatus and the school – impose the “legitimate” principles of division. The structures of domination operative in the society of control, however, which was steadily gaining more ground in the 1960 and 1970s, are far more diffuse as well as more “immanent to the social field”

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(Hardt and Negri 2000: 23). This meant that the mechanisms of control became synonymous with hegemony, the mutual structuring of ossified positions and the social agents’ physical and mental dispositions. The “rules of the game” prescribing what is expected, allowed and valued in any given situation become indistinguishable from the normative discourse. Although ritual may, at first glance, be seen as opposed to hegemony because it is conspicuously constitutive while hegemony functions in a diffused way by continually dissolving the regulatory mechanisms of the dominant group – which range from self-evident explanations to assignments of energy – into the commonsense appearance of daily life (Gramsci 1998: 12), ritual and hegemony form part of the same continuum. The traditional wedding ceremony thus both constitutes polarised gender roles as part of its performance efficacy and perpetuates the hegemony of the polarised gender roles by the sheer fact of its century-long existence. This indissoluble interdependence is at the heart of all Fluxus rites, which do not attempt to inaugurate a definitely different reality, but expose the principles and the processes by which reality is constituted, instead. They use the triadic interplay of role, script and performance, responsible for creating instituted ways of doing things – or social institutions – to create a simultaneous multiplicity of realities. The very existence of simultaneous multiple realities brings into question the validity of the currently operative social reality. The equivalent interpenetration of disparate, and often incongruous elements, which embroil all notions of hierarchy and order by mixing the “logically separate” categories of “paddle” (instrument), “player” (subject and acting agent), “playing field” (space) and other unrelated occurrences, as in Prepared Ping Pong, or by mixing the “magically divided” categories of edible and medicinal, delicious and disgusting, as in Fish Meal, or, indeed, by intersecting life and death rituals, as in Flux Wedding, dismantles the principle of division operative in the habitual sport and eating practices, weddings, divorces and funerals. Moreover, it clearly suggests that the social reality these practices inaugurate and perpetrate is only a “frozen frame”, part of a much more complex and continuously changing process of interexpression. What this continuous proliferation of multiple realities further shows is that there can be no hierarchical dichotomy between social reality and ‘mere’ play as play is not a variation, interpretation or representation of reality, nor is it its carnivalesque inversion. Rather than being a side product of reality, play is that which produces reality, or, to be more precise, that which produces a

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multiplicity of realities, of which the currently operative reality is an ossified position, held in place by the interplay of ritual and hegemony.

Chapter 6 Systems of Economic Exchange Having established the possibility a non-dualist mode of social realityproduction in which social rites do not function as performative reinstatements of a definite “frame” which entail elaborate systems of otherisation, but operate in a multifaceted, ludic-serious, concrete-symbolic manner to create identity within alterity and communitas within individuality, it now seems appropriate to turn to the sphere of the economic. Like ideal egalitarianism, created solely in the signifying processes of games and sports based on agon, the economic sphere of the affluent society, of which the art market was and still is a prime example, functions as an idealist practice. This means that the functioning of the affluent society is rooted in mathematisation and predictive organisation and that this forms part of a closed circuit of ideal values. These ideal values are further divorced from the sphere of concrete reality and the lived, bio-social, inter-corporeal and inter-material relationships, much like the occularcentric subject is divorced from its (sensorially impoverished) body. Having evolved as a theory of the equilibrium among the parts of a whole – the economic whole of the production, reproduction and distribution of wealth, which arose as a form of emancipation from the corruption of religious institutions in the 19th century, but retained the exact same logic, that of a single organising principle which governs the entire world – the economic logic freezes, homogenises and generalises lived relationships. How is this done? The processes of mathematisation and predictive organisation incorporate the heterogeneous principles of exchange, which are, essentially, those of ceaseless bio-social and cultural-political transformation into a method that guarantees conformity and insulates the strictly economic from all other spheres. The result of this “insulation” is a disciplinary practice par excellence, albeit of a subliminal kind, which dominates all other spheres of life by imposing a dichotomous structure. Within this structure, one part of the binary functions to alleviate the strictures of the other, as

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in the case of the work-leisure binary where leisure alleviates the strictures of work. But this binary only reinforces the inescapability of the imposed structure whilst simultaneously proliferating other dichotomies: useful versus useless, public versus private, necessity versus freedom. The task of this chapter is, then, to delineate the ways in which Fluxus systems of exchange operate not only to de-commodify the artist and the artwork, that is to say extract the artist and the art work from the vortex of abstraction that is the art market, but to erode these dichotomies. Moreover, it is to re-establish the sphere of the economic as a sphere of inter-temporal, inter-corporeal and inter-material relationality. The Problem of Value In an article entitled “George Maciunas and Fluxus”, published in Flash Art in 1978, Nam June Paik sums up George Maciunas’s FluxShop and Mail Order Warehouse project which consisted of Fluxus North (Fig. 20), located in Amsterdam and run by Willem de Ridder, Fluxus West, a fixed as well as on-the-road venture housed in Ken Friedman’s Fluxmobile, Fluxus South, situated in Nice and run by Ben Vautier, and, Fluxus East, situated in Prague and run by Milan Knížák); in the following way: Marx gave much thought about the dialectics of the production and the production medium. He had thought rather simply that if workers (producers) OWNED the production’s medium, everything would be fine. He did not give creative room to the DISTRIBUTION system. The problem of the art world in the ‘60s and ‘70s is that although the artist owns the production’s medium, such as paint or brush, even sometimes a printing press, they are excluded from the highly centralized DISTRIBUTION system of the art world. George Maciunas’ Genius is the early detection of this post-Marxistic situation and he tried to seize not only the production’s medium but also the DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM of the art world (Paik 1978: 48; emphasis original).

The reason why Paik compares Maciunas’s distribution system to the problematic outlined in Karl Marx’s Capital in which the commodification of the worker – his/her instrumentalisation in the process of production – is shown to be inextricably entwined with the capitalist’s ownership of the means of production, is that in the art world, the commodification of the artist as well as the art work occurs in the distribution system.

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Both processes are related to the production of value. Like the classical economists before him, David Ricardo and Adam Smith, Marx differentiated between the use value and the exchange value, both of which, he thought, derived exclusively from human labour. The difference between the two is simple. Use value is a qualitative expression of inter-subjective, inter-objective and inter-subject-objective relations involved in the process of production, such as the materials used and the methods applied in manufacturing a product. Use value thus has a “metabolic relationship” with the temporal and qualitative dimensions of human labour (Marx 1990: 130). Exchange value, on the other hand, is a quantitative expression, a “form of appearance of a content distinguishable from itself” (1990: 127), which is to say abstract labour, an ideal category that bears no relation to any specific labour but acts as a generalised equivalent commensurable with all specific labours. In contrast to use value, which reciprocates the materiality and the corporeality invested in it, exchange value appears as a signifier of abstract labour, which is the “substance of value” (1990: 131). Because of the repressive conditions in which it is produced, this abstract “substance” – or surplus value – dictates the various forms of its “appearance”, in other words exchange values, which, in turn, dictate the future conditions of production. This is why, for Marx, value is not only an ideal concept that can never be fully incarnated, only signified, like all ideal forms, but also a highly compromised concept which arises from the exploitatively extracted labour time. The fact that it is an invisible condensation of past social relations lends it a “gravitational pull” which creates commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is thus created by the “mysterious character the commodity form assumes” as it distorts the specific, complex, social characteristics of labour and turns them into “objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, [their] socionatural properties” (1990: 164-5). In other words, commodity fetishism, much like value, is produced in the process of exploitative extraction of the workers’ labour time and, more generally, life energies. In a similar manner, the art market creates highly abstract value by commodifying and fetishising the artwork as well as the artist. The value of an artwork bears no temporal, material or social relation to the specificities of its process of production but is “produced” entirely in and by the distribution system. Mediated by connoisseur professionals guided by economic expediency, the art market operates on the basis of a number of pre-established economic networks and network-generated rules, such as the gallery owner’s reputa-

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tion, the real estate value of the gallery’s location, the commercial value of the artist’s name and the social prestige the possession of an absolutely unique – high-in-demand, non-existent-in-supply – object generates. In other words, the value of an artwork is determined by a host of relationships external both to the artist and the artwork and internal only to the art distribution system and its constituent economic networks, the aim of which is to increase the profits and accrue prestige. Moreover, the structure of the artist-artworkart market equilibrium compels the artist to satisfy the demands of the market place, which, conversely, selects only those products capable of sustaining systematic profit for agents who invest capital in them. The reason why Fluxus “intentionally positioned itself outside art institutions”, as Elizabeth Armstrong rightly observes in “Fluxus and the Museum” (Armstrong in Armstrong and Rothfuss 1993: 16), and, instead, initiated innovative systems of distribution, is that the Fluxus artists sought to unmake the artist-artwork-art market construct by de-commodifying the artist, the process of production, the artistic “product”, and, finally, the artistic “product’s” distribution. Apart from the already mentioned chain of Fluxshops and Mail Order Centers there was also Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press which published Fluxus event scores and games in books and sold them through the book market at standard book prices, and Ken Friedman’s practice of “professional services”. “Professional services”, as outlined in Friedman’s Aesthetics, granted the artist the status of a “professional” who did not sell art works, but, instead, provided “services” (Friedman 1972: 51). Unmaking the artist-artwork-art market construct meant that in keeping with the logic of interexpression and its emphasis on interactive actional schemes derived from one’s everyday environment, the objects and the gadgets sold through the Fluxshop and Mail Order Centers had the status of everyday objects. Much like the events, games and puzzles sold through Higgins’s Something Else Press, these objects resembled the product lines characteristic of mass manufacturing far more than they did artifacts, not only because their reproducibility was unlimited, but because of the specificity of the channels through which they were sold. Where such product lines differed drastically from other consumer goods – whose logic, it is important to stress, they emulated only as a counterpoint to the art object’s unique market status – was their emphasis on event-hood and performativity, both in terms of the buyerobject relationship and the buyer-seller relationship. As Willem de Ridder notes in an interview for Fokus 03 in reference to Fluxkits sold through his

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Amsterdam Fluxshop branch, it is not enough to “show the object. You have actually to bring a bunch of people together and perform it. Because all those boxes were full of performances! … if you display it, it becomes dead” (de Ridder 2003: np). In a more recent interview de Ridder elaborates the intrinsically social nature of the Fluxus object and states that “the manner in which the Flux object is sold is inseparable from the relationships it seeks to produce” (de Ridder 2008: np). The same line of thinking is present in Maciunas’s description of the optimal Fluxshop, formulated in response to the possibility of a major financial backing for a Manhattan Fluxshop in 1966, outlined in a letter to Milan Knížák: We plan to make the FLUXSHOP as a continuous event mechanism. Cash register keys would be connected electrically to all kinds of events; sounds of all kinds of movements, such as falling artificial snow, or shutting off lights, etc… Every time a sale is made and appropriate keys pushed, some different combination of events would occur … we would try to display all the Fluxus objects (about 100 different objects) in some funny way (Maciunas cited in Smith 1998: 183).

It is clear that the purpose of this “expanded shop”, as Owen F. Smith aptly christens it, planned as “a single collective composition” (Smith 1998: 183), was, indeed, to engage the prospective buyers and/or shop visitors in an expanded exchange, where not only goods but also affects, actional schemes and modes of social coexistence could be exchanged. Similarly, Ken Friedman’s practice of “professional services” pioneered the event-hood- and performance-orientated approach and consisted of two dimensions: the employers could either hire Friedman’s services, which included “consulting, administrative and teaching jobs”, or, indeed, “any job taking place over a determined span of time” (Friedman 1972: 51). They could also purchase “a limited amount of service, a lecture, consultation, or a work of art’ (1972: 51), for which a fee calculated on an hourly basis was charged. As Friedman explicitly states, charges were made “only for time expended and material used’, not for the ‘”artistic” value of the work itself” (1972: 51). What the Fluxshop and Mail Order Centers, Something Else Press and Friedman’s “professional services” have in common is an outright rejection of “positionally” created value that engenders not only artwork fetishism but

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commodity fetishism at large, and is, indeed, the hallmark of “positional economy”. Defined by the social thinker Gary Cross in Time and Money after the economist Fred Hirsch as the “emulative-manipulative economy of status goods and services” (Cross 1993: 196-7), “positional economy” is articulated against the background of the subsistence economy of physical needs. The subsistence economy of physical needs, now existent only in nonindustrial societies with a non-market orientation, is an economy in which relations between human beings are not produced by object relations. The distribution of goods and services is not motivated by financial gain nor is the incentive to work derived from the desire to accumulate goods and in this way ensure financial security and/or further one’s social position. This means that there is no “overarching objective”, no “teleological construct” other than the satisfaction of concrete human needs such as food, shelter, clothing, existentially useful tools and convivial social relations. Positional economy, on the other hand, is the culmination of abstraction. Arising from a high level of productivity and conspicuous consumption – seen as a statement of freedom from the debilitating constraints of poverty – the economy of the affluent society is an abstract construct rooted in the theory of marginal utility. This theory, which is concomitant with the logic of the sovereign subject, the sovereign social institution and the sovereign state, operates on the assumption that all human actions are sovereign expressions of individual human will, unrelated to objective living conditions and unmediated by the existing social relations. One the one hand, the theory of marginal utility was formulated in response to the classical economic problem – the problem of high exchangeability and low utility as manifested in the fact that nothing is more useful than water and yet it has a low exchange value, while, conversely, the use value of diamonds is limited, but their exchange value enormous. On the other hand, it was formulated in response to Marx’s objectivist theory of value. In contrast to the classical economists, who, much like Marx after them, differentiated between use value and exchange value, the theory of marginal utility claims that what determines value is not what is in the commodity but how the individual consumer evaluates it. Value is thus defined in terms of subjective utility, relative to the satisfaction of competing scarce goods. While the demand for any given good diminishes with each additional or marginal unit, there is no limit on either the variety or

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quantity of goods that may be desired by any given individual. This further means that no goods possess intrinsic or material value but that their value is positionally construed in the ebb and flow of supply and demand and the forever-shifting and out-of-reach-remaining horizon of human desire. The resulting theory of consumer demand, which serves as a justification for limitless production, claims that desires originate in the personality of the consumer since it cannot be proven that the consumer’s desire for a particular commodity did not originate in his/her imagination but was induced by advertising. Despite the fact that the wants for progressively more sophisticated objects of desire have to be contrived from the consumer and are, indeed, satisfied by the very same mechanism that creates them, the logic of consumer demand and its pertaining economy of perpetual growth were seen as legitimate in the era of the affluent society. The triumph of consumerism over any other alternative – “democratic leisure”, for example – which, as Cross notes, proposed participatory and socially enriching uses of time instead of goodsaccumulation (1993: 5) – also meant that consumers became “fused” with the goods they possessed (1993: 5), thus creating a single sign system. It was no longer the activities of individuals but, instead, their commodities that communicated (purchased) messages of status and personality. The rationale for this “fused” culture functioned in a circular fashion, just like the logic of marginal utility; it was both the antidote and the reason for the continuously increasing levels of productivity. This served only to enhance the “incestuous” system of positional values, which allows for value relationships to be created only between the constituent elements of the self-same system. Apart from functioning as a practical critique of the artist-artwork-art market equilibrium, the Fluxus distribution systems also function as a vehement critique of the hegemony of “positional” logic, which echoes the logic of the disembodied subject, placed outside time and outside the world, as discussed in chapters three and four. Given that economic practices are, indeed, also cultural practices which feed back into society through the mediation of symbolic systems, Maciunas’s, Higgins’s and Friedman’s exchange systems operate with the explicit intention of thematising the multiplicity and multidimensionality of these processes. Owen Smith is once again instructive when he says that “[t]he concern with distribution systems was consistent with a general cognizance by Fluxus of a need for social praxis, particularly social education” (Smith 1998: 231). It therefore comes as no surprise that Friedman and Maciunas, but also Higgins and Robert Filliou, who was a

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trained economist, gave extensive thought to economics, not as a disciplinary science, but as an expansive relational modality which mediates between the biological, the political and the socio-cultural. Entelecheic or Living Value In Avant-Garde Performance & the Limits of Criticism mentioned in the previous chapter, Mike Sell suggests that the 1960s’ shift to performance was a strategy which “enabled a form of communication that engaged and diverted the exploitative demands of an intensive capitalist market” (Sell 2008: 173; emphasis mine). The logic of performance as diversion is based on the twofold role of performance: performance is both a doing and a judgment. As such, it relies on being seen and appraised by others which is the reason it may be said that performance marks the “possibility of a rupture in a community’s value structure” (2008:179). Its capacity to create a shift in the valuing and appraising practices is due to the fact that it functions as an interactional scheme and has almost unlimited possibilities of dissemination. Important to stress, however, is that the 1970s marked the beginning of the shift from the “goods” to the “service” economy, which effectuated the dematerialisation of the object and the turn to performativity in ways not entirely dissimilar to the 1960s’ art and non-art practices. The reason why it could be said that Friedman’s “professional services” perform the “judo throw” (2008: 212), like the Flux-Sports discussed in the previous chapter, is that they use performance as dematerialisation, as behaviour, and as communication. They use performance as an actional scheme which instigates reciprocity, without losing sight of the performative parameters delineated by the service economy. In other words, Friedman’s “professional services” use the very matrix of the service economy while simultaneously diverting its profit-orientated logic to the production of entelecheic or living value. This is particularly relevant when related to the fact that, as the economist Alexander Dolgin points out in The Economics of Symbolic Exchange (a book whose title refers to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “symbolic exchange’ about which more will be said below) and, in reference to the contemporary example of music downloadable free of charge, the value of an artistic product, no matter how widely distributed, or how intangible, is nevertheless a sedimentation of past socio-economic practices and their underlying socio-economic networks. These networks stipulate that in order to have

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value, the artistic product has to “reveal something new, that is, something which does not already exist in the art archive” (Dolgin 2007: 110). This further means that the experiential value of the artistic product or service remains mediated by past socio-economic relations and continues to operate within the parameters of “accrued value”, even if its commercial value, value acquired through the monopolised distribution networks, does not. Dolgin therefore argues that although the distribution of artistic products through the democratised distribution channels in which the law of supply and demand does not apply – such as the internet – liberates the exchange between the “producer” and the “consumer” by making it independent of other economic factors, it nevertheless remains bound by the same logic of artistic, socioeconomically and historically accrued value. In so doing it retains the divide between the producer and the consumer. What Friedman proposes is an approach, which, while relying on money as the universal equivalent of relative values, seeks to create a living reciprocity of labour which generates processual, entelecheic value. This value, deriving from the Greek word entelecheia, refers to the process of actualising the potential. It comprises, but is not limited to use value, and is, as such, closely linked to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of living labour. For Gramsci, living labour is a mediational concept in several senses of the word. As he elucidates in The Prison Notebooks, it is a “vital action” (Gramsci [1971] 1998: 127) which mediates between human subjectivity or the superstructural domain, and the existing socio-economic environment, or the structural domain. Seen as the subject-object antinomy, it is that which modifies the object of labour (whether material or immaterial) by subjectifying it. This means that it changes the object according to the labourer’s will, skill and process while it simultaneously objectifies the subject by modifying the subject’s actional and cognitive schemes, triggered by the use of labourspecific tools and processes. In broader terms, it is also that which mediates between theory and practice, generality and specificity, as well as between what are traditionally seen as different and separate arenas of human existence: the socio-economic, cultural, political, personal and emotional. Economic life is, for Gramsci, the organic terrain of social connectivity which brings into play “emotions and aspirations in whose incandescent atmosphere even calculations involving individual human life itself obey those different from individual profit” (1998: 139-40). It is a form of sociality which creates as well as diffuses cultures, and, as such, also a form of perpetual exchange

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and learning. Worth noting here is that the agogi in the word “pedagogy” means “a manner of life”, “a direction”, an “organisational structure”, while the nomia in the word “economy” refers to the “optimal organisational structure” or management, and that both categories are, in fact, primarily those of exchange. Living labour, which, in contradistinction to productivist labour, is creative as well as productive in the sense that it creates new organisational structures while simultaneously reproducing the already existing ones, is at once a social, economic and cultural category. Since Gramsci considers the very notion of production to be inextricably entwined with the logic of capitalism, which freezes the vitality of living labour by foreclosing its mediational capacity and converting it to surplus value, living labour is conceptualised as both productive and unproductive. Its simultaneously productive and unproductive nature means that there need be no palpable outcome, no “product” and that an exchange of glances between two or more individuals is no less a “vital action” than building a house, or formulating a new philosophical theory. This makes living labour a cross-categorical modus operandi which does not yield to the “work-leisure, public-private, necessity-freedom” binary, but is a form of corporeal-material engagement with the world. Friedman’s “professional services”, in which there is no differentiation between the creative and the non-creative, productorientated and non-product orientated work, propose a continuum as well as a reciprocity of living labour. They propose a temporalised interactional structure which resembles that of the event score in so far as it exhibits a game-ofrelay-like form of dissemination (inherent in consultation and educational services); creative interpellation in the sense that it “hails” the participants to a particular form of participation; and, a pervasive working, as at least some of the relayed epistemic modalities are likely to “ferment” in the participants. In this sense, the practice of “professional services” is an extension of the process of exchange inherent in the event score, which Friedman, after Robert Filliou, terms “poetic economy” (Friedman 2009: 1). Including exchanges of energy, insights, knowledge, actional as well as social patterns, this economy resonates with numerous other systems of exchange which generate entelecheic or living value. One such system, as Friedman elucidates in his 2009 article “Do It Yourself”, is the ‘”invisible college” that constitutes a scientific community’ (2009: 3) in which opinions, consultations and information are perpetually exchanged on a formal as well as informal basis and which functions as a generative mechanism for new ideas and methodologies.

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The other two examples provided by Friedman are the “”community of practice”’ that typifies a guild or a profession” and “the cultural community that generates a folk tradition with the memory practices and transmission practices of folklore” (2009: 3). In all three of these cases, the exchange systems generate “rich cycles of interaction” and “shape cultures through behavior, enactment, and shared social patterns” (2009: 4). They create pervasive cognitive and actional structures, ways of being, knowing and acting, which have agency and further disseminate agency by continually creating new agents. Although each of these three systems generates exchange value, since each scientific theorem, professional technique or folk song can be exchanged for something else, the use value they generate is constantly expanded. Every time a theorem, a technique, or a folk song is used by a new participant in the chain, the entelecheic process is re-activated and a new, different particularisation of the given principle created. Comparable to the perpetuum mobile which always generates more energy than it consumes, which is why it remains in perpetual motion as well as triggers motion in other objects it comes into contact with, the temporalised interactional structure of living labour acts to expand ontological as well as epistemic modalities. Like the dynamism of the perpetuum mobile, the value generated by living labour is created from within, not added or produced by an external referential structure. Friedman’s “professional services” are in this sense a generative matrix whose energy is produced through temporalised reciprocity, which has the “intermedial consistency” of a relationship (Friedman 1972: 2). Although a relationship can be a fixed given between two or more entities, it changes with the changing configuration of the situation that created it. This makes its consistency heterogeneous. A relationship persists through time because it changes, not because it remains the same. What is thematised in this processual actualisation of the potential is not only a different form of aesthetico-economic exchange, one that collapses the usual channels between the “viewer (subject) and the work (object)” or “between the artist (subject) and viewer-as-object” (1972: 2). Rather, what is thematised is the multidimensional process of exchange produced by living labour which sets in motion the mutually converging attentional, epistemic and poetic economies. Although the Fluxshop and Mail Order Warehouse catalogues list many interactional structures which explicitly thematise the multi-dimensional process of exchange by means of simultaneous reciprocity, such as Willem de Ridder’s Invitation to Dinner, or Visit in which the artist invites the ‘service

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purchaser’ to join him for dinner or pays him/her a visit, the processuality of exchange is inherent even in those that do not, such as George Brecht’s Suitcase Ready for Traveling. Brecht’s Suitcase Ready for Traveling, a regular size suitcase offered for the price of $50 is an extension of both the Fluxkit, such as Brecht’s own Valoche, discussed in Chapter Four, and the event score, in the sense that it is a three-dimensional performative instruction. As all items listed in the Fluxshop catalogues are performative instructions, they prompt the production of entelecheic or living value (Fig. 18).

Fig. 18. Fluxus Mail Order Center Designed by George Maciunas. © Billie Maciunas. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.

This process is either simultaneously reciprocal, such as de Ridder’s Invitation to Dinner, or consecutively reciprocal such as Brecht’s Suitcase Ready for Traveling where the traveler is given the option of sending a postcard to the suitcase provider. Of particular interest is the price of the Suitcase Ready for Traveling since $50 in the 1960s would have been the equivalent of $400 – $450 today, a price much higher than that of many other items listed in the

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Mail Order Warehouse catalogues, and which could easily be the price of a trip or a holiday. The idea of traveling, of going on a holiday and escaping the everyday, became particularly popular in the productivist-consumerist era. As Gary Cross notes in Time and Money, the holiday was a form of “transcendence” (Cross 1993: 76), an escape from the systematisation and bureaucratisation of industrial productivism, which is why it was imperative that the release from these strictures occur elsewhere, in a paradisiacal world of “otherness”. For the same reason, the transition to and from the holiday required ritual markers – needlessly elaborate preparations, tensions, unaccustomed behaviour and an “obsessive” collection of souvenirs (1993: 76) in order to further mark the separation between the world of necessity and the world of freedom. At same time, however, great efforts were made to “capture” the flavour of this paradisiacal world in the form of photographs and souvenirs for the purpose of secondary consumption at home and among members of one’s social circle. It is for reasons of maximising the experience of ‘otherness’ that holidays required meticulous organisation. What Brecht’s Suitcase Ready for Traveling proposes is an aleatoric approach in which the holiday/traveling experience of “otherness” is not achieved through a “pilgrimage” to a paradisiacal destination but is determined by the contents of the suitcase. In this sense, much like other chance operations described in Brecht’s Chance Imagery, Suitcase Ready for Traveling “provides a means of escaping the biases engraved in … our culture” (Brecht 1966: 14). Instead of following prescribed cultural scenarios which perpetuate the production of increasingly more abstract worlds of consumption, Brecht’s Suitcase Ready for Traveling, just like other products/performative instructions listed in the Mail Order catalogues, “experientialises” “ordinary”, everyday objects and situations. Although it might at first seem that these and similar practices resemble the contemporary experience economy on account of their tendency to experientialise objects in everyday use, that is not the case. The experience economy, as theorised by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in the eponymous book, treats experience as a “genre of economic output’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999: ix), a logical sequitur in the progression from the commodity to the service economy, and finally, the experience economy. Within this framework, experience economy is defined in the following way: “when [a consumer] buys an experience, he pays to spend time

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enjoying a series of memorable events that a company stages – as in a theatrical play – to engage him in a personal way” (1999: 2). This is done by “inging the thing” or “experientializing the goods” (1999: 23-4), which refers to selling the experience and at the action of roller skating, for example, instead of the object – the roller skates; it refers to branding the prospective buyer’s experience. The branded experience, which seeks to achieve active participation, multi-sensorial interaction and total immersion, is geared towards creating a fictitious world woven of four different elements: entertainment, aesthetics, escapism and learning, the combination of which, argue the authors of The Experience Economy, makes for an optimally rich and thus optimally competitive experience (1999: 30-7). The socially productive capacity of these experiences, which, in contradistinction to Fluxus, do not render ordinary experiences extraordinary by revealing them as extraordinary, but by elaborately staging them as such in order to increase the profits, is certainly not lost on the companies that stage these experiences as they also organise “clubs” in which experience consumers are further socialised into a branded way of life. Clearly, the experience economy is an extension of the hegemony of positional economy, which, guided solely by financial gain, perpetuates the progressive colonisation of the human subject by the objects of its consumption, be these objects tangible or temporal. Although it is worth considering the logic of experiential sedimentation and its inherent power to mediate the production of social life in the context of the broadly based, accessible networks, such as those created by the experience economy (numerous shops and outlets) as well as those created by Maciunas (Fluxshops and Mail Order Warehouses, which used an already existing broadly based network – the postal system), it is important to understand the crucial difference between the two. While the former makes extensive use of escapism in an attempt to create ever-new ways of securing financial profit and in this way further perpetuates the production of abstract consumerist worlds, the latter resorts to functionalism and concretism in an attempt to secure a socio-cultural “profit”. The Relational Economics of George Maciunas The primary function of design and construction is, then, to create clear and rich interactional structures by presupposing the full scope of event-hood inherent in the object. This implies an economy of thought, understood not

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only as an output-maximising, input-minimising concept but also as a dynamic and relational concept which engages existing epistemic modalities and creates new ones by establishing intertemporal social relations, and, importantly, connecting the fields of aesthetics, education and industry. Seen as a relational structure, economy is a concept crucial to Maciunas’s rationale because it mediates between the limitlessness of potentiality, human desire included, and the responsible use of available resources. The latter is particularly relevant in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, the times of overstimulated consumerism, and is, indeed, one of the leitmotifs of Maciunas’s relational economy of needs. Among other examples, this is evident in his 1963 letters to Nam June Paik and Robert Watts in which he explains the reason why Higgins’s Danger Music No. 15 (work with butter and eggs for a while) was never performed after Wiesbaden. Maciunas found it “immoral to destroy food” (Maciunas in Hendricks 1983: 150, emphasis original). A line of thinking much closer to the concerns of classical, moral economy, on the one hand, and the contemporary postmaterialist economy of “needs and limits” on the other, such as that formulated by Frank Rotering, Maciunas’s reasoning relies on the humanist notion of universal values. These values can be summed up in a simple formula: “attainment of greater value for less”, which, in Maciunas’s own words refers to the expenditure of “time, money, energy, ability [and] materials” (Maciunas 1964: np). The Fluxshop and Mail Order Warehouse distribution network forms part of a Gramscian project of economic, social and cultural change Maciunas sought to effectuate by applying the logic of functionalism, which he understood to be very much like concretism, to all spheres of life. Maciunas defined concretism in contradistinction to illusionism and escapism, as a “reaction against the artificial forms”, “patterns” and “meaningfulness” in general (Maciunas in Armstrong and Rothuss 1993: 157). Functionalism, the cognizance of which Maciunas derived from his training as an architect, was understood to mean “an inherent connection” between form and content (Maciunas in Miller 1978: np). This is otherwise also known in functionalist architectural terms as the connection between the object’s function-dictating essence and its appearance. As one of the main proponents of functionalism in modernist architecture, Walter Gropius suggests in “Bauhausbauten Dessau”, “[e]very object is determined by its essence; in order to construct it so that it functions properly, one must ascertain what the essence is, for we must make it serve its purpose

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perfectly, i.e. fulfill its practical function and be durable, cheap and beautiful” (Gropius in Kfruft 1994: 8-9). Gropius’s emphasis on what might be termed the object’s suchness, its intrinsic material behaviour, which is also a form of beauty, unmediated by abstract aesthetic considerations, is also an attempt to avoid aesthetic as well as social alienation. In this sense, objects are to be aesthetically enjoyed and liked for their intrinsic suchness – or essence, to use Gropius’s word – not for abstract design which has nothing to do with the object’s essence or function. Indeed, as Ken Friedman notes in Rethinking Fluxus, design cannot, and should not be understood as “surface gloss” but has a far more responsible social function. Friedman writes: Some design goods planned for the large scale markets require more work, production and detailing than better goods in the luxury line. Manufacturers develop product programs with planned flaws in order to distinguish between the good taste of the wealthy, the lesser taste of the middle class and the bad taste of the lower class. Products are designed to fall apart or to wear out at a certain rate. Designers work to create products that will make consumers feel second-rate as part of a social structure encourages displays of wealth in the effort to gain esteem. Responsible attention to design can often create better products for less money (Friedman 1989: 16)

Here design becomes a form of responsible sociality. Although notions of value put forth by classical economy, such as the rational use of free time, or those put forth by the economy of “needs and limits”, namely “intrinsic value”, which, as Rotering suggests in “Ecology, Value, Marx” refers to the “ontological equality of human and non-human life” (Rotering 2006: 1), differ from those identified by Maciunas, their frame of reference is communitarian, not individualist. This means that instead of purposefully separating the human subject from the rest of the world as well as other subjects, which is the logic of the emulative-manipulative positional economy, the communitarian framework is in the first place social, and, in the second, intertemporal, as it engages not only present but also past and future social relations. Expressed in the context of Maciunas’s 1964 critique of Mies van de Rohe’s and Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural achievements entitled “The Grand Frauds of Architecture”, which, as the art historian Cuahtémoc Medina suggests in his article “Architecture and Efficiency”, was only “a starting point for an exposition of Maciunas’ axiology” (Medina 2004: 273), Maciunas’s system of values has no hierarchy.

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It consists of “four universal values” which correspond to the four “universal” human desires: “the value of experience and beauty (found in art), the value of productivity (found in industry), the value of knowledge (found in science) and the value of money (found in finance)” (Maciunas 1964: np). The latter three are defined as “progressive” or “developmental” in that they serve to ameliorate the human condition, while beauty is seen as a hindrance unless coupled with functionality (np). The overarching functionalist logic suggests that the most efficient products or services are those which have the largest possible proportion of all four values. Effective examples of this logic can be found in some of the more complex collaborative Fluxus projects, which, although never fully realised due to a lack of funding, feature as relevant conceptual frameworks for Maciunas’s relational economics. If the phrase “relevant economic plans that remained unrealised due to a lack of funding” sounds slightly odd, it is important to note, once again, that the economic logic discussed here is not profit-driven. Indeed, as Ken Friedman points out in his article “Working Together” “Fluxus boxes [Fluxkits] were designed to sell in the 1960s for prices between $2 and $10 each. Counting real costs, including labor, overhead, rent, telephone, and shipping, the boxes cost between $40 and $80 each to manufacture and distribute” (Friedman 2007: 4). Thus although financial value is mentioned on Maciunas’s list of values, it is clear from his extensive correspondence with other Fluxus artists that he regarded money as a means of attaining a greater socio-cultural output and that his own investment was of an unconditional, generous and excessive kind. Jean Baudrillard’s earlier-mentioned notion of “symbolic exchange”, first articulated in The Mirror of Production, which marks a radical departure from his previous Marxist positions, is of crucial importance here. Symbolic exchange is entwined with and, in part, derived from George Bataille’s concept of “sacrificial economy” (Bataille cited in Baudrillard 1975: 43) which opposes all forms of political economy, Marx’s theory included. In contrast to political economy’s rationalist and teleological frame, sacrificial economy suggests that expenditure, sacrifice and unaccountable discharge are more fundamental to human life than production and utility. Departing from these positions, Baudrillard critiques the underlying premises of Marx’s thought – production and labour – and argues against the problematisation of abstract labour versus concrete labour, as related to exchange value versus use value.

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His contention is that concrete labour relies on the same rationalist concept as abstract labour. Baudrillard writes: Marxist labour is defined in the absolute order of natural necessity and its dialectical overcoming as rational activity producing value. The social wealth produced is material; it has nothing to do with symbolic wealth, which, mocking natural necessity, comes conversely from the deconstruction of value, transgression or discharge … The ‘discharge’ of human power Marx speaks of is not a symbolic discharge in Bataille’s sense (1975: 42-43).

Here Baudrillard is referring to Bataille’s idea of exchange characteristic of pre-capitalist and non-industrial societies in which exchange occurs between the natural phenomena, human beings, animals and inanimate matter, the living as well as the dead, and forms part of the permanent circulation of a superabundance of energy, symbolised by the sun. In contrast to this, the discharge of which Marx speaks “is still a useful discharge, an investment, not a gratuitous and festive energizing of the body’s powers” (1975: 43-44). Baudrillard’s proposition refers to an indivisible and incalculable ‘mixing’ of all things in which symbolic exchange refers to a discharge of generosity and excess, rather than to investment. In Baudrillard’s own words, symbolic exchange is not “a putting into value” but a “putting into play” (1975: 44, emphasis original). It is a form of exchange which instantiates fluxes and affects, which, in turn, produce numerous other fluxes and affects. This concept of a perpetually transformative, non-homogeneous and thus, essentially, playful circulation is, indeed, present in a number of Fluxus intermedia – the event score, Flux-Sports, the Fluxkit – all of which initiate a metamorphic economics by thematising the cycles of transformation of energy and matter, object and performance, subject and object, thought, word and action. Another conspicuous similarity between Baudrillard’s Bataillederived logic of unaccountable discharge and excessive expenditure and the Fluxus modus operandi is Maciunas’ as well as numerous other artists’ investment of energy, which remains unaccountable because it does not form part of the economic whole of artistic production. Rather, it retains a nondivisible, metabolic relationship to the world. As George Brecht notes in regards to the event score, “[t]he event [is]… an individual focusing … [which is] “performed”, or better-said, “realized” by anyone, anywhere, coincidentally, all the time” (Brecht cited in Smith 1998: 233). Or, as Maciunas shows by placing the event scores by various artists in a 1967 catalogue enti-

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tled Fluxfest Sale which states that the listed scores can be performed “anytime, anyplace by anyone without payment to Fluxus” (Maciunas cited in Smith 1998: 193), and which simultaneously refers to festivity and sale. In standard economic terms the word “sale” refers to a downgrading of goods which have “fallen behind” the projected economic parameters, either because they have been used and/or damaged, or are no longer fashionable. In the context of Fluxus, this notion refers to the fact that there is no clear-cut relationship between the artist, the artist’s investment of time and energy and the artistic product. Paradoxically, the artistic product – the event score, Flux-Sports or the Fluxkit – each of which is a ready-made, whether of a perceptual, actional or material kind – and in this sense always already “used” – is simultaneously an optimal economic product because it achieves maximal gain with the minimum investment of energy, time and resources, and, a discharge in Baudrillard’s sense of the word, a surplus which is “simply there” as part of a larger process of exchange, unsubsumable by the logic of divisibility, production and calculation. An important project in the elucidation of Maciunas’s rational-irrational, frugal-excessive economics is the elaborate plan for a Flux Amusement Center, which he co-authored with Robert Watts. The plan proposes a “unique entertainment and game environment” with “a built-in flexibility for experiment and change” including a “multi-level discotheque” and “specialty shops and concessions” (Maciunas and Watts in Hendricks 1995: 44). The “budget product line” (1995: 44) on offer in the shops includes household objects – vinyl aprons, place mats and tablecloths – such as Watts’s aprons featuring naked life-size male and female bodies. All these objects follow the functionalist-concretist logic in so far as they forgo decorations unrelated to the object’s purpose – that of covering the body – while simultaneously thematising the scope of event-hood inherent in the covering-uncovering, dressingundressing function. Likewise, Daniel Spoerri’s tablecloths, which are photographs of his 1964 work 31 Variations on a Meal created for the exhibition at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York, consisted of several consecutive meals eaten by various art personalities such as Marcel Duchamp and Ben Patterson. Apart from thematising the event-hood inherent in the object, such an approach de-generalises the object and the social relations inherent in it. It does

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so by “displaying” the relationship between the specific tablecloth and another, “past” specific tablecloth, that on which the meals were eaten during the exhibition and which features in the photograph printed on the “present” tablecloth. Another important characteristic of these objects is that they “display” the relationship between the producers of the “present” tablecloth – the eaters of the meal – and the photographer. In this respect, the functionalistconcretist orientation de-commodifies the object by revealing rather than concealing the social relations inherent in its production. In a similar fashion, the “budget line” furniture included in the proposal, such as Watts’s laminated-top tables with photographs of under-the-table sitting situations depicting crossed legs (Fig. 19), or, his light switches which come with the producers’ fingerprints (Fig. 20), connect the present sitter to the sitter who took part in the production of the table, or the present user of the light switch to the producer of the light switch. In this sense, they function simultaneously as aesthetic, functional, epistemic and intertemporally relational objects.

Fig. 19. Robert Watts Crossed Legs Table Top. Photo by George Maciunas. © Billie Maciunas. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.

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Fig. 20. Robert Watts Light Switch Plate with Fingerprints. Photo by George Maciunas. © Billie Maciunas. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.

Significant in this respect is also Maciunas’s proposition, which features in the Mail Order Warehouse catalogues, that Mieko Shiomi’s Spatial Poem be exchanged for objects, not money. As will be seen from numerous other examples, it is this re-contextualisation of the object which lends it an entirely new relational dimension created by its implication in the instituted system of economic exchange – a mail order catalogue, symbol of consumer good supply – much like its placement in a gallery creates an instituted form of aesthetic exchange. Shiomi’s Spatial Poem is a generic title for a series of textsobjects-actions which she created by sending letters to potential participants and inviting them to perform one or more event score/s, document their actions and send her the documentation. Responses to the event scores which enticed participants to “make wind or disturb the natural wind which surrounds this globe” (Shiomi quoted in Stiles in Armstrong and Rothfuss 1993: 94) or “open something and close it” (1993: 178) were then charted on to a map of the world, either in the form of flags on a board or printed text and

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photographs. What Maciunas’s proposition to exchange Shiomi’s Spatial Poem – a nexus of intertemporal social relations woven of words, actions and objects – for objects, does is to emphasise the relation of social reciprocity which is always already present in any given good, object or “thing”. That which is masked by the generalised equivalent or money, is the “pull” exercised by social relationality. Much like a gift initiates a social obligation which has a specific temporality as well as materiality, and which, in this way, creates a very specific bond between the recipient and the giver, the barter system within which Shiomi’s Spatial Poem is framed demands a thoughtful choice of the prospective “purchaser’s”, or rather, “partner’s in exchange”, means of exchange. To reciprocate a gift, a box of chocolates for example, with an exact same box of chocolates would be considered rude in most cultures on account of the conspicuous lack of appreciation for the specificity, quality, feel and meaning of the gift received. To return a gift with a far more “generalised” gift, such as to return a delicious five-course dinner one’s host spent all day preparing with a McDonald’s takeaway, would be equally rude because it would fail to “honour” the time, effort, eagerness and expertise expended. The McDonald’s takeaway, although by no means bereft of social relations, would fail to reciprocate the specificity and the qualitative complexity of the relational “pull” which emanates from such a gift. In his seminal analysis of the forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies entitled The Gift (from which Baudrillard’s concept of symbolic exchange is partly derived), Marcel Mauss suggests that “the very condition of our system of property, alienation and exchange” comes from the fundamental distinction between things and persons (Mauss 1980: 46). For Mauss, this distinction is purely formal since “[t]hings are not the inert objects which the laws of Justinian and ourselves imply” (1980: 48) but were formerly considered a part of the family, prior to the institution of these laws: “the Roman familia comprises the res as well as the personae” (1980: 48). In Mauss’ analysis all things are partly people which is why gifts mobilise social obligations and why barter exchange requires a thorough consideration of the temporal, material and social processes involved in producing any given good, in other words, the quality of its “relational pull”. By framing Shiomi’s Spatial Poem within the standard (monetary) system of economic exchange but reverting to an archaic one, Maciunas not only accentuates the action-hood,

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temporality and person-hood already implied in the object but thematises the bio-social “mixing” inherent in all things and objects, which are placed on the market as inanimate objects. This frame thus opens on to a broader frame of relationality, such as that encouraged in the various meditation practices in which contemplating a table includes contemplating the trees, the soil, the climactic conditions, the lumberjacks, the carpenters, the means of transport, tools and techniques which/who form part of the object’s so-called inanimate nature. This contemplation is a form of spatio-temporal as well as materialcorporeal condensation. It provides the practitioner with an insight into the complex nexuses of interdependence and is, in fact, afforded by all forms of exchange which do not utilise money. Money is in this sense comparable to positional consciousness, which places the subject outside the world and outside its own body, in so far as it places the buyer outside the world of interdependence and necessity. Buying an object for money “releases” the buyer from the obligation to consider the specific conditions of its production as there is no obligation to reciprocate in kind. It is, however, precisely the binding obligation to reciprocate, thematised by Maciunas’s framing of Shiomi’s Spatial Poem that engages the “purchaser” or “partner in exchange” existentially. As in the example mentioned in chapter two, that of the difference between looking out of the window to see whether it is raining – an instrumental intention in which the view is an accidental and essentially irrelevant backdrop – and looking out of the window because we have been asked to draw or perform the view, in which the view comes to life in all its dynamic dimensions, including colour, movement, composition and texture, monetary exchange makes the interdependent network in which the object is embedded into an “irrelevant backdrop”. Barter exchange, on the other hand, brings the nexus of interdependence to life by existentially engaging the “partner in exchange”. The abstract freedom from any corporeal-material implication that money grants the purchasing subject is here turned into a concrete freedom, bound by the complex network of interdependence, in other words, necessity. The binary division between necessity and freedom has, as André Gorz explains in Critique of Economic Reason, formed part of economic rationality since the Greeks and is narrowly related to the binary division between body and mind. In ancient Greece, the labour necessary to satisfy basic human needs was considered a ‘servile occupation incompatible with citizenship’ (Gorz 1989: 14) or participation in public affairs.

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The domain of the social, an extension of the domain of the mental, was seen as vastly superior to the domain of the physical; to labour meant to be enslaved by physical necessity which, in turn, resulted in a convenient circular argument suggesting that “only those who, like slaves, had chosen to live rather than be free – thus proving their servile nature – could accept enslavement” (1989: 14; emphasis mine). The free refused the enslavement of necessity thus relating the realm of liberty to a more “advanced” stage of human development, beyond the realm of physical needs. It was thought that the human subject was capable of free choice only when its actions ceased to be environment-dependent, in other words susceptible to the “relational pull” exercised by the corporeal-material network of interdependence in which the subject lives and in which it is unavoidably implicated. What Maciunas’s entire functionalist-concretist project sought to achieve was to reinstate this corporeal-material network of interdependence, in other words, to collapse the divide between necessity and freedom. This is made abundantly clear in Maciunas’s housing projects, such as his prefabricated building system, which he designed in 1965 and which consisted of nine mass-produced components, to be made of cheap and durable materials. Apart from the “service cubicle” which integrated the kitchen, the bathroom and the heating facilities, the system was multi-functional and catered for maximum flexibility; it could expand as well as contract to cover anything from 50 to 500 square meters (Maciunas in Hendricks 1983: 38-43). This meant that the same space could be used as a private home, an office, a library, a restaurant and/or exhibition or performance space, thus creating a convergence of physical necessity – sleeping, showering and eating – and social freedom – taking in a performance or exhibition. What this style of architecture does is to explicitly thematise the socio-physical nexus of human relations by providing a spatial configuration that encourages a shared and multivalent, public-private and physical-social use. Similarly, Maciunas’s Fluxhouse project, which, as he states in a 1966 letter to Ben Vautier, was to have a “Fluxshop, Fluxtheater and 5 floors for us [the Fluxus artists] to occupy for living studios” (Maciunas in Smith 1998: 189), combined the culturally separate segments of performance venues, commercial outlets, living and working spaces. This sort of “mixing” which thematises relationality as a continuous process of cross-categorical transactions, which is comparable to Baudrillard’s notion of perpetual circulation, but which remains firmly anchored in economic rationality – the (teleological) imperative of achieving

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more with less – was encouraged by Maciunas in all other spheres of Fluxus activity as well as “areas of consumption” for which the Fluxshops and Mail Order Warehouses catered. The purpose of this “mixing”, a form of cultural intermediality, was to anchor the highly abstract practices of social emulation and identity construction in interdependent, corporeal-material interactional structures. An example of this is Maciunas’s re-contextualisation of Joe Jones’s intermedial objects within the Fluxshop and Mail Order Warehouses where Jones’s gadgets-instruments, such as his grinder-cum-music box with an inbuilt crank, his radio hat – simultaneously a gadget and a fashion item – and his violin in a bird cage – a musical instrument, pet and aesthetic object, were placed in the category of domestic goods. Intermediality as a Form of Biopolitical Production Domestic consumer goods held a particular place in the positional economy of the affluent society, as they were symbols of a comfortable life, which was, in turn, a symbol of sovereignty and autonomy, denied by the heteronomy of industrial productivism. As Gorz suggests, heteronomy is the “totality of specialized activities which individuals have to accomplish as functions co-ordinated from outside by a pre-established organization” (Gorz 1989: 32). Heteronomy deprives individuals of coordinating their own activities as well as of forming self-regulated cooperative relationships with others. The working individual is thus deprived of social integration borne of consensual cooperation and is, instead, forced into “systemic integration”, which refers to the “steering of non-subjectively co-ordinated decisions” (1989: 33). This form of obligatory, predetermined communality, which belongs to the world of work and thus necessity, calls for compensation, which, in a dualist system can only take place in a haven of strictly individual and private happiness, seen as the space of freedom. This is why the consumption of domestic goods and fashion items, those consumed in the privacy of one’s home or worn on one’s body, has a particularly compensatory function. It therefore comes as no surprise that the advertising strategies employed to sell these products regularly designate the purchaser as a “privileged person”, a person different from the masses, thus creating a sense of complicity and suggesting that both the seller and the purchaser are pursuing their private

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advantage in a way that excludes the rest of the world. It is also abundantly clear that these strategies represent yet another form of “systemic integration”, although of a subliminal kind, since the blatant superfluity or luxury of the products consumed in one’s home, or worn on one’s body, does not actually produce radically different relationships. Instead, it merely stands for the consumer’s privileged escape from the universe of ‘systemic integration’ to that of private sovereignty, much like sport practice stands for the sphere of ideal egalitarianism, as discussed in the previous chapter. In this sense, a radio, a coffee grinder or a hat are bought as much, if not more, for their stateof-the-art design, their socially emulative and personal-identity-edifying value, as they are for their use value. The practice of social emulation and abstract identity construction, which is what makes consumerism viral, is, as Jean Baudrillard points out, a strictly “idealist practice” (Baudrillard 1988: 24-5). It is a practice in which ideas or signifieds, and not their signifiers – material objects – are consumed. Rather than purchasing fashionable objects to express who they are, consumers create a sense of who they are through their purchases. This further means that socialised consumers are socialised by virtue of belonging to the same, market-dictated brand of identityproduction, in other words “systemic integration”. Selling Joe Jones’s intermedial objects via mail order catalogues, advertised as domestic goods, is a notable intervention in this context. In the first place, the coffee-grinder-cum-music-box, which is the result of an autonomous activity, or Jones’s auto-poiesis, since it was made as an end in itself, not produced with the intention of being sold, further disseminates its autonomous origination. It does so through the deployment of its intermedial use value, as a coffee grinder and a music box, which procures two intertwined kinds of satisfaction. The satisfaction that results from a successful completion of a desired action – grinding coffee – and the satisfaction derived from the amusing sound produced by the toy-like mechanics of the gadget. This combination resembles the semi-useful and semi-playful category of the hobby, characterised by auto-poiesis in which satisfaction is derived equally from the finished product – grinding coffee – as it is from the pleasure created by the process itself. The common characteristic of all hobbies is that they restore the existentiality inherent in work as an autonomous activity and integrate production and consumption.

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Jones’s caged violin, humorously christened Cage Music, which refers both to John Cage and to an encolure with bars and/or wires (Fig. 21), is a similarly poietic object as it affords a poietic activity as well as a poietic sociality, produced equally by mechanical violin-playing and the association of the violin with a bird and thus a pet, which lends it an animistic quality.

Fig. 21. Joe Jones Cage Music. c. 1965. Metal birdcage containing violin and batterypowered motor with striker. Overall: 15 3/4 x13 x 13". Publisher: Fluxus Editions, 1965. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. Acc. no.: FC1899. © 2014. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

Jones’s hat-cum-radio is another example of such a socially integrative, culturally overlapping function as it brings individuals into a direct and visceral, rather than abstractly mediated contact. A hat is a fashion item usually worn outside, in the public sphere where apart from serving the obvious purpose of covering the head, it also presents the individual to other individuals present in the public sphere. As Baudrillard notes, fashion is similar to the market ‘where all products come into play as equivalents’ (Baudrillard 1995: 92) in the sense that it is “a universalisable sign system which takes possession of all others, just as the market eliminates all other modes of exchange” (1995: 92). What Baudrillard is referring to here is the already-mentioned process of generalisation in which the quality of any given good, its specific use value is turned into a

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quantity, commensurable with the quantities of other abstracted qualities. But unlike the market which retains a general equivalent, money or gold, fashion is itself “the form of general equivalence” (1995: 92). This is because fashion items are always and only reproduced from a model, which functions exclusively in the realm of the signified, since it is never made from anything existing. This makes fashion its own system of reference and a “flotation of signs” (1995: 92), which, whilst diverging radically from the economic, in the sense of the calculating and the restrictive, it is in fact its “crowning achievement” (1995: 93). In an ostentatious manner, fashion glorifies the preoccupation with the irrational and the insignificant creating a “passion for the artificial” (1995: 94). But while fashion undoubtedly procures enjoyment, it does not institute new modes of communication. Rather than communicating, it displays communication because it remains enclosed within its own system of reference which further perpetuates referentiality. Jones’s radio hat interferes in the system of fashion by grounding it in communication. Although the importance of the radio diminished considerably with the advent of the television, the radio was still an important medium of mass communication in the 1960s. This means that appearing with a news-disseminating communication medium on one’s head in public would undoubtedly have caused an upsurge of interest resulting in an exchange of affects and impressions, possibly even a listening practice. Like the coffee grinder with an inbuilt crank or the caged violin, the radio hat proposes a novel form of personal and inter-personal poiesis, borne of the object’s intermediality. If these objects were bought from a gallery rather than a mail order catalogue they would have what Kristine Stiles has termed, after the anthropologist Robert Plant Armstrong, “affective presence” (Stiles in Armstrong and Rothfuss 1993: 85). “Affective presence” is the quality an object “acquires” as a result of the way it has been treated. As Stiles notes, “all societies attribute unique qualities to selected objects … [i]n Western culture such objects are associated with the abstract concept of “art”” (1993: 85). Important in this context is the fact that once an object has acquired an “affective presence” through the mediation of decisive socio-economic factors, it has the power to further assert its “affective presence”, in other words “command” the sort of treatment appropriate for an object of “affective presence”. Similarly, a stateof-the-art consumer good confers the desired social status to its proprietor and further commands treatment appropriate for a person of such status from others. An owner of a “latest scream” Lamborghini may thus appear virile,

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fast and decisive; a man who knows what he wants and knows how to get it. The more he is treated as such, the more he believes himself to be the virile, fast and decisive owner of a car that suits his “personality” so well. In both the case of the art object or consumer good, the performative power exercised by the object is embedded in a predetermined system and functions only within that system. By removing Jones’s objects from the art world system of “affective presence”-creation and placing them in the consumer good system of “affective presence”-creation – where they fail to qualify as they are neither new nor fashionable – Maciunas effectively subverts both of these systems. Instead, he introduces what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have termed biopolitical production. Although this term was first used by Michel Foucault to denote governmental and institutional alliances in the production of biosocial normativity, and thus a form of politics, part of the power discourse, for the authors of Multitude biopolitical production refers to the proliferation of new communicational practices which entail “affective relations” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 146). Hardt and Negri’s notion of biopolitical production is thus closely related to the inscription of the socio-political on the body, its subsequent assimilation and further reproduction in the form of habits and behavioural gestalts. In this sense, it is a positive rather than a negative term which nevertheless implies the performative constitution of subjectivities in the public sphere and has the power to reformulate ossified positions through performance. The political significance of such new communicational practices arises from their capacity to create a “common social image bank” (2004: 200). Jones’s objects – the grinder-cum-music box, the caged violin, the radio-hat – all contribute to the creation of the common social image bank as they produce new forms of lived experience and thus new relationships, affects and modes of communication. By creating new forms of social poiesis, they also create a new praxis. As Stiles aptly points out, Fluxus object-events “collapse poiesis and praxis into a new historical paradigm that the term intermedia marks” (Stiles in Armstrong and Rothfuss 1993: 93). Her argument is based on the fact that apart from referring to action and doing, praxis also implies “the therapeutic practice of a specific system or agency” which “has the capacity to redress’ and is in this sense restorative (1993: 93). It is through the recontextualisation of Jones’s as well as many other artists’ intermedial objects

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that a form of poiesis-praxis is created and that produces new ways of “having in common” as well as “being in common”. Hardt’s and Negri’s concept of biopolitical production operates at the interstice of poiesis and praxis since it is both predicated on the common and produces the common, where the common is understood as a performative category and does not refer to the traditional, monolithic notions of community. A very important factor in this performative process of biopolitical production is humour, the most contagious and viral form of affective economy, which is not a byproduct in Fluxus, but as Owen Smith suggests in “Art, Life and the Fluxus Attitude” is its “underlying philosophy connected to indeterminacy and flux”, which “celebrates” “the wild disorder of the non-rationalised world” (Owen in Hapgood 1991: 56-57). I would argue that in Fluxus, humour not only celebrates the disorder of the non-rationalised world but, in fact, produces excess and disequilibrium in all its modes of exchange. This bears similarity to some of the pre-capitalist economies on which Baudrillard’s notion of “symbolic exchange” is based, such as the potlatch where the process of exchange consists of a festive annihilation of goods, accompanied by an excessive expenditure of energy in the form of singing, dancing and laugher, the sum total of which binds the parties involved in the process. Crucial to understanding potlatch is that it creates contractual relationships through excess expenditure, not through mutual gain. Although Fluxus practices bear little resemblance to the ostentatious and destructive display of generosity characteristic of the potlatch, they nevertheless solicit an excessive expenditure of energy which forms part of the biopolitical production. Soliciting Excessive Expenditure All Fluxus product catalogues are adorned with old-fashioned engravings in this case advertising a strangely disparate assortment of goods, games, machines, bottles, suitcases, kits, cans and boxes. The nostalgic style effectively conjures up bygone market strategies while unmasking their ideological underpinnings. The goods themselves are depicted by means of old-fashioned drawings which have a comic strip-like quality. Most of the goods come off the page as both curiously useful and highly humorous, such as Robert Watts’s Eggkit, a large suitcase containing “egg making tools and materials” (Maciunas in Armstrong and Rothfuss 1993: 32). The important distinction to be made here is the distinction between an object of humorous appearance, an object to be looked at or talked about, and an object that triggers or pro-

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duces a humorous activity while simultaneously fulfilling its functional purpose. As Thomas Kellein points out in “I Make Jokes!”, Maciunas considered laughter to be the only form of human expression which transforms the whole body into “”an apparatus of expression’” (Maciunas quoted in Kellein 1995: 18), a form of corporeal concretism. “Toto corpore” laughter (1995: 18), which makes a person tremble, shake, shriek and cry, can, in this sense, be compared to a concrete “composition” such as Maciunas’s Piano Piece No. 13 (discussed in chapter three) because it “makes use” of the body’s “material components” and concrete capacities – voice, movement and tears. Like concretist compositions which dissolve the purely instrumental relationship between the musical instrument and the ideal sounds produced by it, laughter is a form of exchange which shatters abstract meaning. The reason why it is a form of exchange and not just a form of expression is that it is the only physiological manifestation which, apart from yawning, causes an involuntary reaction in those present, unrelated to whether they know what the person they have seen or heard laugh is laughing at or not. Much like a joke subverts the abstract production of meaning by failing to produce the required synthesis; laughter dissolves the structure of social division. In the industrial and post-industrial world this structure stipulates that people who do not know each other do not communicate in public places, the obvious exception being accidents which result in exasperating or comical situations. However, unlike an exasperating situation such as being confined to an airport departure lounge for three days because of a delayed flight, in which inter-passenger communication is fuelled by the common predicament, the sociality arising from a comical situation requires no common frame of reference, no common “topic”. The cohesive effect humour and laughter have on the rapprochement of individuals, who, as the word “in-dividu-al” indicates, are indivisible units in social and legal terms, separate from other indivisible units, is similar to the cohesive effect humour and laughter have on the dualistically divided notions of mind and body. Even Immanuel Kant, the most notable proponent of idealist philosophy thought that laughter and humour acted as a sort of bridge between the mental and the corporeal. For Kant, laughter was a sudden liquidation of meaning expressed in physical agitation – an excessive expenditure of energy (Kant 1951: 332). A good joke, whether physical or verbal, constructs a false semantic plenitude then suddenly contrasts it with vacuity, thus making the mind bounce

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successively to and fro, which is what produces the excessive expenditure of energy – a “rapid succession of tension and relaxation” (1951: 333). In other words, it is the mind’s superfluous, thus excessive wandering between the thought’s plenitude and its vacuity, created by the absence of the projected meaning, that is mirrored in an equally superfluous and excessive physical reaction. An intellectual disappointment is thus turned into a corporeal joy, which spills over the boundaries of the “host body” and contaminates other bodies. In this sense, laughter is an involuntary expenditure of energy and simultaneously a concretist use of the “body’s resources” which solicits similar expenditures from other individuals and in this way creates a sort of “communion” in which a great sense of proximity can be produced without a common frame of reference. Whereas other forms of rapprochement or fraternisation bear relation to the projected “whole” or social body – the football supporters, the churchgoers, the classical music lovers – laughter is a form of communication that fuses the opposed categories of “stranger” and “acquaintance” without resorting to the “parts of a whole” logic. Notions of the individual, the social body, the masses and/or people, are all predicated on the logic of division and unification and/or sublation. Much like the individual is one, the social body or the masses are also one. “The common” of the social body or the masses is predetermined by a pre-existent frame of reference, it is not produced. What the production of a non-presupposed form of in-common-ness, such as that afforded by laughter, entails, is not a fixed relationship but a form of living relationality, which, for Hardt and Negri, oscillates between “singularity” and “multitude”. Singularity is a “social subject whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 99), not even the sameness of “indivisibility”. Equally, the multitude is not unified, like the masses or the people, but remains plural and multiple. Unlike the masses, whose differences collapse into “the indifference of the whole” (2004: 100), the multitude designates an internally different, active social subject whose constitution and whose actions are not based on identity, unity or indifference but are always in the process of transformation. That is to say that singularities do not become subsumed by the multitude. On the contrary, they transform its identity. In this sense the multitude is always a qualitative process and neither a fixed entity nor a fixed relationship. Laughter is a form of biopolitical production because it creates social cohesion of a non-unified as well as non-unifiable kind, but it is also an economic factor which creates a

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disequilibrium, an excess of both energy and proximity, without abandoning the logic of productivity and use-value-maximisation, since it employs the body’s resources in a concretist manner. For Maciunas, laughter is that which creates affective relationships with “concrete reality” imbuing this reality with fascination and beauty, the affective textures characteristic of aesthetic experiences. Indeed, Maciunas was very appreciative of Henry Flynt’s concept of veramusement which referred to an entirely idiosyncratic form of fun, and which formed part of Henry Flynt’s aesthetic theory. In “My New Concept of General Acognitive Culture” Flynt argued against any form of systemic integration, whether work-, commercial entertainment-, consumer good- or art-induced (Flynt cited in Medina 2005: 191) since all of these systems imposed “artifacts built outside of, separated from oneself” (2005: 191). In contrast to this, Flynt’s “general acognitive culture” proposed “doing things just for fun”, because “one likes to do them” (2005: 191). In a written response to Flynt’s theory, Maciunas compares his “acognitive culture” to the different ways of “stimulating the ‘”art” experience by non-art objects, events & ideas” which form part of “concrete reality” (Maciunas cited in Medina 2005: 191). However, “fun” and humour, seen as “aesthetic factors” derived from concrete reality were, for Maciunas, in contrast to Flynt, a distinctly productive category. In fact, I would argue that his muchquoted statement, that the purpose of Fluxus is “not aesthetic but social” (Maciunas [1964] in Hendricks 1983: 165) refers to the transference of the expansive sense of warmth and excitement, caused by the sensorial and cognitive stimulation characteristic of the aesthetic experience, to the social dimension. In an extensive analysis of Ken Friedman’s work entitled Ken Friedman: The World That Is, The World That is to Be, the anthropologist Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz approaches aesthetics from an anthropological perspective and proposes that the “perceptual mechanism and processes” at work in aesthetic and non-aesthetic experiences are, in fact, the same (Ravicz 1976: 10-11). Although Ravicz focuses specifically on Friedman’s work and not Maciunas’s or the work of other Fluxus artists, she frames art performatively, as a “way of doing” (1976: 2), a definition applicable to most, if not all Fluxus work. For Ravicz, aesthetic situations, much like many non-aesthetic situations, among which laughter, contain “structural characteristics which have an intrinsically pleasurable effect on the nervous system” (1976: 12) because they

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include factors such as “novelty, surprise and ambiguity” which “incite arousal” (1976: 12) and are, for this reason, inherently expansive. She goes on to argue that such situations also arouse awareness and create a shift in consciousness. According to Ravicz, Friedman’s work has an aesthetic dimension, because it “rests on the innovative manipulation of the most familiar symbols, the most common social situations, or of well-known technological devices” (1976: 15) This “dialectical juxtaposition of the familiar with the novel” (1976: 15) which causes arousal on account of incongruity, is exactly the same as that which provokes laughter, the only difference being that laughter has an added expansive dimension because it is physically viral. In this sense, both the aesthetic experience and laughter produce arousal as well as exhilaration and can for this reason be compared to the gift, seen as an unexpected but welcome addition to one’s already-existing possessions and social relations, which initiates new relational structures. Laughter is a particularly socially expansive form of relationality with a paradoxical economy: in soliciting an excessive expenditure of energy, it acts as a productive category par excellence in so far as it produces ‘the common’ and further disseminates its performativity by means of synergy. This is why most of the “products” sold through Mail Order Warehouses have a distinctly socially transformative dimension. Among the numerous examples are Willem de Ridder’s instructions for daily life which involve Table Setting: “[a]s you set the table for dinner you change the traditional table setting completely” (de Ridder in Blok 1983: 140), Shower: [s]tand all dressed under the shower and ask bystanders to open the tap” (1983: 140) or Arrows, a set of instructions for receiving one’s guests in a treasure hunt manner and directing them to unlikely places, actions and interactions (1983: 140). All of these activities are aimed at creating an integrated socio-aesthetic and bio-political economics where “the common’ is an abundant, expansive resource, a form of wealth which cannot be owned, only used, produced and disseminated. The crucially important factor in the employment of laughter within the Fluxus systems of exchange is its simultaneously viral, excess-producing and economising function which fuses and expands both the aesthetic and the social by imbuing the latter with the superabundant generosity of the former and in this way instituting inter-personal and intrapersonal poiesis as a praxis.

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Concluding Thoughts Like Cage’s 4’33’’ which thematises all that has been made imperceptible by normative cultural prescriptions, both in terms of the foreground-background relationship and in terms of the separation between the different media, the Fluxus systems of exchange thematise the socio-cultural and bio-political multidimensionality and interpenetration always already present in any form of economic exchange. They de-transparentise that which the hegemony of positional economy – the culmination of abstraction created by pure economic reason – has relegated to the “irrelevant background”: the intrinsic value of any object’s, being’s or phenomenon’s suchness; the corporeal-material processes of its transformation (whether in the form of circulation or production), the social and intertemporal relations involved in the production of objects; and, the sedimentary effect inter-subject-objective poiesis has on the production of social life. This de-transparentisation is the result of a structuring process effectuated by two mutually exclusive economic logics, the logic of abundance, generosity and unaccountable expenditure which favours “unconditional investment” such as that found in all auto-poietic activities, and which is based on the notion of transformation; and, the logic of scarcity and the optimal use of available resources, which favours calculated investment, such as that found in functionalism and concretism, and which is based on the teleological notion of development and progress. The parallel and irreducible employment of these two logics creates an expansive socio-culturaleconomic model which operates to accommodate a number of interdependent corporeal-material-temporal networks, governed by lived, specific and nongeneralisable relationships. Although, as Ken Friedman notes in “The Wealth and Poverty of Networks”, the Fluxus distribution systems failed to “develop the productive capacity”, in other words “the sustainability and resiliency that one might wish of a social agency that proposes socially innovative strategies” (Friedman 2005: 418) due to a lack of human as well and material resources – and did not, for this reason, expand enough to become a truly large-scale, supermarket-like distribution system – the Fluxus model nevertheless serves as a workable micro alternative to the disciplinary colonisation of life imposed by pure economic reason. Based on the fictitious totality of the equilibrium, economic reason formalises specific relationships by incorporating them into a conformist method in which the accumulation of wealth is used as the proof of

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the accuracy of the calculation, which, in turn, requires indefinite confirmation through the reinvestment of the profits obtained by this very calculation. Unsurprisingly, the socio-cultural practices which result from this vortex of abstraction, but which are conveniently left out of the initial (strictly economic) calculation, produce similarly self-referential systems which operate entirely in the domain of the signified and further proliferate idealist practices based on ownership. The Fluxus distribution systems were formulated in part as a reaction against the artist-artwork-art market equilibrium, which the entire Fluxus attitude defied in every way, by dissociating the artist from the process of artistic production proper, by creating work which mirrored the process of change and “failed” to produce a stable identity, and which, in evading definition also evaded appropriation and thus also distribution via the art market. In part, they were created as a reaction against the logic of ownership as such. This logic, which is indissolubly welded to the problematic of the disembodied subject, perpetually haunted by self-appropriation and, by extension, appropriation of all other things, is the logic of lack. The lacking subject, propelled by the imperative to appropriate, acquire and accumulate, is both responsible for the phenomenology of objects produced by the consumerist paradigm and is in turn produced by it. This circular problematic is inextricably intertwined with the freedom-necessity dualism, borne of the mind-body dualism, the idea that the subject cannot be free while “enslaved” by physical necessity, and, for this reason, needs an ever-growing quantity of possessions in order not to feel threatened by this very prospect – the enslavement of necessity. By thematising the processuality of exchange as well as change, the Fluxus model incorporates a much larger framework than that implied in the static and reductive concept of ownership. Without subscribing to the idea of a totality, whether epistemic, social, or economic, in other words the unity of the universe, the people or the system of equation, this framework facilitates inter-categorical “commerce” for the simple reason that it operates performatively and perpetuates biopolitical production. Like Gramsci’s concept of living labour, this form of bio-political production mediates between the general and the specific, between subject and object, subject and subject; in so doing it produces new ontological and epistemic modalities. In this context, appropriation is the appropriation of a performative and epistemic wealth, which, as exemplified by Jones’ intermedial objects, engenders

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new intermedial practices, or, as in the case of Maciunas’ placement of Shiomi’s Spatial Poem in the Fluxshop and Mail Order catalogue, detransparentises the intricate networks of corporeal-material interdependence. It could thus be concluded that the Fluxus model effectuates a reversal of positions created by the logic of ownership because its metamorphic economics provides the means and the ways of transforming not only the object or the practice of exchange but also the agents involved in this exchange. Otherwise put, the metamorphic economic model channels creativity into social action via the economic and in this way creates a Gramscian, mutuallyaffecting structural-superstructural configuration.

Chapter 7 Conclusion: The Logic of Fluxing This book has journeyed through a range of events, activities, objects, rites, rituals and systems of exchange in order to show how Fluxus operates as a practice of non-duality. Its most striking feature is perhaps the “discrepancy” between simplicity and complexity – the fact that astoundingly simple works are discussed in complex ways. But this is only so from the point of view which segregates “simple” from “complex” and treats them as fixed and impermeable positions. As we have seen Fluxus does not operate on the basis of fixed and impermeable positions; it operates on the basis of dynamism and permeability, which implies a mutually constitutive rather than an antagonistic relationship between any given “opposites”, simplicity and complexity included. There are three reasons why Fluxus may be termed a cultural practice which dismantles the discursive scaffolding upholding the numerous ramifications of the “two world” theory, critiques the practices produced by (and, which, in turn produce) the self-same discursive scaffolding, and proposes a different logic – the logic of dynamic non-duality. The first reason is that Fluxus interrogates each and every frame of reference in a vast range of contexts. It interrogates the logic of framing and the privileged agent of framing by refracting the frame and showing its endless spiraling movement. Second, Fluxus exposes the hegemonic functioning of the frame’s repressed co-constitutivity, its diffuse but nevertheless elaborate systems of otherisation. It does so by expanding the frame. Third, Fluxus proposes an alternative to the manifold ramifications of the “two world theory” by establishing the logic of a single world, which is the logic of the one and the many (Nishida), suggesting that the frame is, in fact, a protean activity.

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This is what is meant by the phrase “incessant cross-pollination of a multiplicity of forces and factors”. It must not be forgotten, however, that interrogating the frame (interrogating the culturally operative and significant) by exposing the frame’s other (the inoperative and the insignificant) – a feature Fluxus shares both with deconstruction and Zen – was very much in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s. Famous is Alan Watts’s (Alan Watts was one of the main disseminators of Zen in Europe and the United States of Western origin) complaint about “the Western artists avowedly using Zen to justify the indiscriminate framing of simply anything ... torn up bits of paper dropped on a board and stuck where they fall, or dense masses of mangled wire” (Watts in Ross 1960: 336). Watts’s contention is that although “it is, indeed, the basic intuition of Zen that there is an ultimate standpoint from which “anything goes” [the standpoint of no governing principle], this standpoint does not exclude and is not hostile towards the distinction between right and wrong at other levels and in more limited frames of reference” (1960: 336). Watts’s point is that there is a difference between frameless-ness and the art of framing, which, in Zen, is the art of including the non-framed in the frame, as exemplified by the sumi painting, haiku or koto music. In the sumi painting the blankness of the white rice paper is not an irrelevant background, but an indispensable partner in the dialectic interplay of form and formlessness, trace and traceless-ness. Koto music is pervaded by silence and the sounds the musicians produce are only sporadic interruptions in the subtly woven fabric of silence. Haiku is a 5-5-7 syllable poem which captures the most “insignificant”, everyday occurrences, the leap of a frog into a pond or the rustling of autumn leaves with a “slenderness of mind” (Saito), and a poverty of means. Without a doubt, the Fluxus activities, objects, rites and exchange systems exhibit an exquisite art of framing where form and formlessness, action and non-action, sound and silence, solidity and ephemerality interexpress in a palpably felt, visceral way. Examples of this are Brecht’s Three Gap Events, Ono’s Lighting Piece, Paik’s One for Violin Solo and Shiomi’s Disappearing Music for Face. But their interrogation of the frame goes much further than the art of framing. Indeed, the Fluxus works are bio-political, socio-economic and performatively philosophical processes that articulate the insufficiently articulated possibilities of interexpression in the five crucial spheres of experience production: language, temporality, sensoriality, sociality and economic

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relations. As such, the activities, performances, films, objects, gadgets, games, furniture, clothes, portable kits, weddings, funerals, shops and mail order centers that are these processes do not merely capture dynamic nonduality, they produce it. This is due to the fact that, to paraphrase Duchamp, the task of the percipient-interactant (when faced with a Fluxus work) is not to “complete the work” but to work the work and to be worked by the work. This feature, which is crucial to the production of dynamic non-duality, is simultaneously a feature that cuts to the heart of the art-non-art debate. Typical of those who avowedly admire the closure-resistant spirit of Fluxus but nevertheless wish to “ground”, define and evaluate its numerous, variable and unclassifiable activities are statements like the one voiced by art historian Estera Millman in an article entitled “Fluxus and the Democratization of Art”: While we can not help but applaud their [the Fluxus artists’] efforts to democratize the art experience we can not but be somewhat aware that concepts such as “democratization” and “the arts” may well be mutually exclusive. As was the case for the Dadaists, so was it for the participants in Fluxus; art making carried with it the unspoken assumption that the artist’s own transaction of an everyday experience was somehow more intense, more valuable as an occurrence, than anyone else’s relationship with the everyday. It is an assumption shared by both the art maker and his or her public, a reciprocal agreement, as it were (Millman 1988: 13).

Clearly, Millman’s logic is rooted in the staticity of the “frozen frame”. Not unlike Bürger’s logic mentioned in the introduction, which claims that an art movement cannot be considered avant-garde if it contains elements that have already “failed” in their avant-garde intentions, Millman’s notion of the democratisation of art is an “either/or” demarcation. It is a “realistic” rebuttal of a naïve belief in sudden and complete reversals and implies that the “democratisation of art” denotes the “emptying” of art into its opposite. In many ways, this is similar to Marx’s reversal of Hegel’s idealist logic, in which the status of the highest essence – the ground of all appearance – is withdrawn from God and placed in the opposite camp, that of human beings (thus making God into a mere appearance) but which relies on the exact same logic. In a similar manner, Millman’s statement seems to imply the use of precisely those parameters the Fluxus artists sought to undermine: the dualist logic of (definite) differences.

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The cornerstone of Millman’s argument is the assumption that art is a process of making special, a particular form of mediation, carried out by a designated “mediator”, whether or not on behalf of a wider public. Although this mediator need not necessarily be skilled, the mutual constitutivity of the notions “mediator” and “mediation” will result in the strengthening of both terms. The more the “mediator” mediates, the more the “mediation” becomes mediated by a “skilled”, or even “recognised”, mediator. The more skilled or recognised the mediator, the more “mediated” the mediation, even if this mediation consists of a “mere” re-contextualisation of an “ordinary” object or event. A case in point is Tracey Emin’s famous 1998 work My Bed, exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1999 and shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Consisting of everyday objects such as cigarette butts but also condoms and menstrualblood-stained underwear, this work is a frozen frame of a four-dimensional situation – the artist’s life. Despite the fact that the work has both a present and a past, is both a residual object and a four-dimensional situation, since there have, in fact, been attempts at viewer interaction by performance artists Yuan Chai and Hian Jun Xi who jumped on the bed with bare torsos, its semantic potential is very clearly framed – I would even say frozen – by its placement in a gallery. Like Duchamp’s Fountain, My Bed is ostentatiously mediated – or made “special” – by the vary virtue of being placed in an established exhibition space. If the same logic were applied to the Fluxus ready-mades – the event score, the Fluxkit, Flux-Sports, Fluxshops and Mail Order Centers – it would imply that these works are “special” on account of being re-purposed, named or re-named by the artist. But the problem is that these works are not semantically static and do not fit into the logic of fixed “special” and “ordinary” frames. As the discussions so far have demonstrated, Fluxus ready-mades do not operate in easily objectifiable ways. Rather, they operate by exposing the processes of mutual constitutivity, which run deep and permeate every grain of the notion “special” and every grain of the notion “ordinary”, much like they permeate every other binary opposition: mind-body, idea-action, objectevent, self-other, production-consumption. As Larry Miller reiterates in reference to George Maciunas’s genealogy of Fluxus: “Duchamp applied his readymade concept to objects, Cage extended it even further to music/sound/noise, and George Brecht (and others) in Fluxus extended it further to everyday actions and gestures” (Miller 2010: np). This extension – or “fluxing” as Miller terms it (np) – which relates to all actions, objects, per-

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ceptible phenomena, epistemic, social and economic structures cannot be readily compared to the gesture of placing one’s bed in a gallery, which is an art-historical gesture par excellence, albeit one which brings new concerns – those of gender – to the old arena of defining and re-defining the art object. Nor can it be compared to any other existing (Western) practice. It does, however, bear some similarity to the Japanese aesthetic-epistemic notion of dō which signifies “the way”. Do as found in the traditional, century-old aesthetic-epistemic practices such as shodō or calligraphy, shinkendō or swordfighting, kadō or flower-arranging, in other words the way of the brush, the way of the sword or the way of the flower, but which, in the contemporary world refers to any number of ordinary objects: wrapping paper, brooms, computers or motorcycles. The do practices are essentially psychophysical and bio-social methods of enquiry into the nature of cross-pollination and coconstitutivity between the object of practice – invariably both an object of consciousness based on notions of rhythm, strategy, harmony, interpenetration, counterbalance and beauty, and a physical object; the practitioner/s involved in the practice, the space-time and the environmental conditions in which the practice occurs. A provisional formulation of the Fluxus approach to eroding the boundaries between art and life – as well as those between production and consumption, contemplation and action, knowing and being – would be that Fluxus offers a variety of “ready-made-dō s”, where the word “dō” refers to a sporadic, or even single session practice ranging from any degree of contemplation to any degree of performance. By thematising mutual constitutivity between all manner of “frozen frames”, the ready-made-dō – which, I have to stress, is a provisional formulation denoting a direction, a movement towards as well as a movement away from, the operative word here being movement – reconstitutes the very logic that separates “special” from “ordinary”. The fact that some Fluxus works, the Fluxkits for example, are now being shown in musea and have acquired the status of collectors’ items does not indicate – as Millman seems to suggest – the utopian nature of Fluxus. On the contrary, it shows just how deeply entrenched the object- and staticityprivileging, permanent-value-assigning logic of dualism is. This makes the Fluxus “efforts” (as Millman calls them) all the more significant, particularly in light of the fact that their bricoleur tendencies have, indeed, produced a coherent practice, the main tendencies of which can be summed up under the

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following three headings: refracting the frame, expanding the frame, and, understanding the frame as a protean activity. Refracting the Frame Fluxus works, which are, in fact, processes, show that any frame entails a spiraling refraction of other frames. Particularly representative of this tendency are the “degree zero” or transparent works, such as Knowles’s Identical Lunch, Brecht’s Word Event (Exit), Paik’s Zen for Film, or Miller’s Orifice Plugs. Without exception, these works function as a series of refractions of a number of frames. This relation, which is the relation of the triple, quadruple, and, potentially, endlessly spiraling genitive – in other words an of-ofof relation – is a relation in which each notion is both subject and object, both constitutive and constituted. In the case of The Identical Lunch, it is the performer’s experience of the lunch they had at the Riss Restaurant, itself a performance of the scored version of an originally “ordinary” event. The experience in question is a residue of a mediated mediation. There are two levels of constitutivity (or of-of-of relation) at work here. The first emerges from The Identical Lunch being an ordinary event despite being an art event and vice versa, or, to put it differently, being an ordinary event – and yet – an art event and vice versa. This indicates the unavoidable dynamic, thus changing interdependence between the two notions and thereby the impossibility of a frozen “either/or” demarcation. The second level of constitutivity emerges from the fact that The Identical Lunch operates as a habitualisation and an affective sedimentation, which, in changing the experiencer changes the experienced and vice versa. In a similar fashion, Paik’s Zen for Film is a series of “of-of-of relationships”, a spiraling frame refraction between the actual and the virtual – the content of the film is dependent on the content on the viewer’s mind which is, in turn, dependent on the viewer’s personal history as well as memory, both of which are configured, and thus changed, in every single moment, which also includes the moment/s of watching Zen for Film. Likewise, the content of Miller’s Orifice Plugs is highly dependent on the quality of the percipient/interactant’s concentration and attention. The “what” of the event is thus invariably constituted by the “how” of the event.

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In this sense, the degree zero works focus the percipient-interactant’s attention on the mobile constellations of forces that co-constitute perspectives, appearances and impressions, the working of which dispels the very possibility of a stable and permanent reality and thereby also the “is” and “is not” logic. They “bring into evidence” (Brecht) the possibility of a relationality without fixed and permanent entities or identities. They illuminate that a constitution’s kind – what a constitution is – is provisional, unstable and ephemeral because of the way a constitution comes into being, be that constitution art, life, subject, object, event or process. In other words, these works illuminate the functioning of relationality as a continual mixing and interpenetration of cross-pollinating factors, with no reductive merging of difference. Sporadically, the relationships produced by this relationality form temporary condensations: objects, events, ideas, special or ordinary, but these condensations should not be mistaken for static, fixed and durable relata since the dynamism of relationality upsets the frame of any hypostatised identity. Expanding the Frame Inextricably related to the of-of-of constitutivity in which the inside and the outside of the dynamic processes are permeable to inner as well as outer influences is the category of Fluxus works (processes) which expand the frame. Representative of this category are Knowles’s Performance Piece No. 8, Maciunas’s and Hutching’s Black and White and Watts’s Crossed Legs Table Top. Performance Piece No. 8 proposes a mixing of “nothing”, “something”, “everything” with “objects”, “people” and “space” thus “bringing into evidence” these very notions’ and categories’ internal-external permeability whilst simultaneously weaving a visible and immensely complex net of interdependent relationships. Black and White shows the process of genderconstitution to be the process of simultaneous approximation and distanciation from the gender’s other. Watts’s Crossed Legs Table Top expands the frame by showing that a manufactured object is a spatio-temporal distance between two or more people and their accompanying subjectifyingobjectifying processes. By expanding the frame and showing the before and after, the above and the below, the left and right of the frame, as it were, these works show that elaborate but diffuse systems of otherisation come into being as a result of division and separation.

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They illuminate the fact that, essentially, hegemony is co-constitutivity severed from the dominant “content” of the frame by the very virtue of the frame’s dominance, or, to put it differently, by the tyranny of the frame. Equally, or perhaps more importantly, they show that severed coconstitutivity continues to function as a hidden operation “behind the scenes”. Within the dualist logic, which operates by way of separation and permanent as well as definite differentiation, the co-constitutivity of “something and nothing”, “black and white”, “male and female”, “human being and table” – is placed off balance by the reification of the “positive” term, in other words the frame. When seen as a frozen frame, the relation which in Black and White is shown as a step-by-step constitutivity traditionally hypostatises the male as the positive term and the female as the negative term despite the fact that the positivity of the former is produced exclusively by the “negative” constitutivity of its “other”. In other words, the essential equivalence of the of-of-of constitution in which every item is both subject and object, both agent and patient, both constitutive and constituted, is here hierarchised into the “is” and “is not”. Constitutivity thus operates to strengthen both terms. The more the operative term “is”, the more the otherised term “is not”. Conversely, the more the otherised term “is not”, the more the operative term “is”. In a similar fashion, albeit in a different form, Watts’s Crossed Legs Table Top shows the co-constitutivity of the subjectifying-objectifying processes which are removed from the object-orientated tendencies of the productivistconsumerist regime but nevertheless continue to operate “behind the scenes” in the form of commodity fetishism. Hegemony is, in this sense, no more than an of-of-of relation placed at the service of the frame. Given that coconstitutivity is, by definition, negated by the frame, its operation is seen as diffuse and unfathomable. By expanding the frame in all directions, the Fluxus works illuminate this diffuse process.

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The Frame as a Protean Activity The third category is the category in which a bi-conditional relationship is created between two opposing notions, opposed in two different ways. A frame is static, linear and external in terms of the situation it frames. It is also singular. A protean activity is dynamic, multidirectional and polymorphous, with no distinction between internal and external. Like the ancient Greek sea god, Proteus, from which it derives its name, it is both the sea and (all) the waves. It is thus both singular and plural. In Fluxus terms, this category functions by introducing an unpredictable element into a complex situation – a candle into Miller’s 220 Yard Candle Dash, stilts into Bici Hendricks’s Stilt Soccer, convex, concave and can-of-water paddles into Maciunas’s Prepared Ping Pong – and in this way thematises the structuring principle of the one and the many. By thematising the incessant weaving and co-constitution of the numerous forces and factors of which the fabric of any activity, and, by extension, life is made, these works reveal the inseparability of any given individual thing and the totality of its environment. The mutual configuration of the individual thing and its environment – itself a complex, continuously changing structure – operates by way of co-related and yet independent determination. The selfdetermination of the individual thing (or process) is produced by the selfdetermination of its environment. The individual thing is therefore independent only by virtue of being co-related. For example, in Stilt Soccer a strategically useful move arises from the havoc and tumult caused by the use of stilts. It does not arise from a series of correctly executed, pre-determined actions resulting from a premeditated strategy imposed on the game as its governing principle. Rather, the “strategic move’ becomes the governing principle – albeit only for a brief moment – because it structures, aligns and organises all other elements. In this sense the “strategic move” becomes “detached”, that is to say discernible from all other elements by virtue of having temporary inner unity. The temporary unity comes into being as a result of the strategic move’s friction with all other moves and elements of the game. This particular move is thus “sculpted” as independent through the process of friction with all other elements present in the environment. In other words, the individual strategic move is independent and discontinuous only as part of a mutually determining relationship be-

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tween all other elements as well as processes present in the environment. At the same time, however, the individual move forms a connective continuity with its environment in its very individuality, its very independence. This continuity is thus also a discontinuity, which is why the relationship of the one and the many is also a relationship of the continuity of discontinuity (Nishida). What Stilt Soccer and all other Flux-Sports – as well as numerous other Fluxus works – “bring into evidence” is the structuring principle of a single world, which is movement and action. It is a world with no externally imposed governing principles that point to a forever-out-of-reach-remaining world “beyond” by which the lived world remains subjugated. Rather, it is a world which structures itself internally. As a practice of dynamic non-duality, which is simultaneously deconstructive and integrative, Fluxus is also a revolutionary practice in the sense that it renaturalises the de-naturalised. This does not mean that it reinstates some long-lost primordiality. It means, quite simply, that in unmaking a large number of dualist constructs Fluxus unmakes the logic of duality which separates, reifies and otherises. By dismantling this logic Fluxus brings to the fore the repressed logic of coconstitutivity, which is indeterminate and unpredictable, but nevertheless clear. Like the above model of the one and the many, which is, in fact, the model of “one-in-many and many-in-one”, Fluxus proposes a model where opposites function as co-constituents, a model whose perpetual interexpression illuminates the fact that, as Hannah Higgins aptly put it, reality is woven of a “million liquid threads” (Higgins 2010: np). Fluxing the Pillars of Consciousness But having gained an understanding and/or experience of Fluxus as a comprehensive and multifaceted life practice, we may pose the bigger-picture question: what is the relevance such an experiential methodology or practical philosophy? Is reality – understood as a cogent relation to one’s psychophysical, socio-cultural and epoch-specific environment – not always already multiplicitous? Are there not an infinite number of orders of reality, each equally real if attended to, if attentionally invested in? As a socio-culturally shared consensus and thus also a governing principle, reality consists of many different semantic fields; the field of childhood, the field of play, the

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field of sleep and dreams, the field of sport, the field of productive work, the field of politics, the field of posthumous rituals, the list is endless. To each of these fields belongs a specific set of experiences as well as a specific experiential style. Each of the experiential styles is further characterised by a specific attentional texture, a situation-appropriate suspension of doubt or disbelief, a specific form of intersubjectivity and a specific time perspective. Knowing which semantic field the action I am witnessing belongs to makes is legible for me; it cues known forms of behaviour. If, for example, on my way back to the hotel one night in an unknown city I see two huge boxer-like figures running in my direction me shouting “I’ll dash your brains out”, I will most likely begin to feel apprehensive, if not downright scared. If, however, a second later 5000 watt lights come up and I hear a voice shouting “Cut!”, I will probably sigh a sigh of relief. The new semantic definition will turn a life-threatening situation into an amusing misunderstanding in which a film scene was taken for everyday life. This indicates the malleability of reality, the coexistence of numerous semantic fields, and therefore, one could argue, the need for clear semantic cues. Depending on how the semantic cues are keyed, different situations spring into relief producing significantly different denouements, much like a musical score played in a different key produces an entirely different melody. The formal structure of the melody may remain the same – the life-threatening situation having the same constituent sub-events as the film scene – but its perceptual given-ness, its psychosomatic intelligibility will change entirely. As human beings we spend a significant amount of time mastering the rules of the various semantic fields precisely so as to gain fluency in discerning the smallest differences in cues and keys. Despite the fact that this mastery invariably involves semantic closure an argument could be made for a parallel but separate and fixed, rather than the liquid, mobile and interpenetrative existence of the manifold threads of reality. Indeed, one could say with the phenomenologist Alphonso Lingis that the reason for seeking an ordered, stable and standardised reality is that the perceptual, emotional and nervous capacity of human beings does not allow for a complete absorption of the ichi-nen order (Sekida) in the newness of every single situation one encounters. This is why, for Lingis: one arranges one’s home and one’s situation and one’s work-day in such a way that those once-in-a-lifetime situations which would require all of one’s forces, forces that may prove wanting, do not occur. … One avoids going to

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While it is certainly true that a part of life has to become second nature in order to make room for new skills and experiences, it is also true that the semantic streamlining of performed actions – and thus also consciousness, which is, of course, not a “surveyor” of the semantic field, but always already part of it – gives experientiality a specific shape as well as a specific range. The main problem here, however, is not the implied limitation or dogmatism; it is habitualisation itself, or, to be more precise, its presumed neutrality. Every passage to the second-nature ease with which a particular semantic field – or a set of semantic fields – is negotiated contains imperceptible presuppositions whose intangible concreteness could be compared to the intangible concreteness of shadows. Much like a shadow is always attached to a physical existent with mass and weight and cannot exist without it, the imperceptible pre-suppositions do not exist as an articulated governing principle, explicitly stated on a prior occasion and subsequently appearing in a habitualised, “taken for granted” way. Rather, they exist only as embodied constructs, constructed in and through performance. And yet, it is on account of these invisible pillars of reality that matters are never “simply so”. Rather, they are so because it is right or wrong that they are so. In other words, one prepares a meal, goes about one’s work, plays music, walks, talks, thinks and acts in a particular way and not another, because it is implicitly right to do so; one sleeps in one’s own bed, or in the bed of one’s lover, but does not knock on the neighbours’ doors every night to ask if one might sleep in their bed. It is this repeated enactment of a myriad of supposedly neutral but implicitly “right” patterns that promotes a particular form of performativity into “life as it is”. This further creates not only a culture and a lifeworld but an orbit of consciousness, too. It is in this orbit that the multipositionality, changeability and slipperiness of the “million liquid threads” is transposed into a series of fixed positions which serve as points of departure and points of return for every modification of the world of daily life that is achieved in play, dreaming, art, sport, engineering, politics or scientific theorising. This is at the same time the reason why these standardised and standardising positions are

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impossible to circumvent. When repeatedly reenacted through performance liquid threads turn into iron rods and iron rods turn into pillars, of reality and consciousness alike. This mutual co-constitutivity means that a particular brand of reality is possible because it rests on particular pillars of consciousness; conversely, particular pillars of consciousness are put in place by a particular brand of reality. Despite the fact that the world has, of course, changed since the inception of Fluxus, the direction of its various hegemonic developments has not changed. Instead of the affluent society and the late capitalism of the 1960s and 1970s, we now have communicational capitalism. Having evolved from its informational variant, communicational capitalism proliferates cultural memes globally with astounding velocity. Although allegedly thriving on novel forms of communication, fusion, re-combination and multiplicity, this particular form of capitalism engenders highly standardised and teleologically orientated forms of homogeneity with great efficiency. The polygon for these developments are everyday practices, which have long since entered the circuit of market relations, and which potentialise technological and bureaucratic rationality, consistency and cohesion in behaviour, stereotyped representations, repetitive tasks and their programmed distribution in time. More recently, they also potentialise the viral velocity with which these patterns spread through such media as the internet and mobile computing. The disenfranchised subject of the 1960s and 1970s is in this day and age more disenfranchised than ever; interpellated into running its life as a wellorganised enterprise, availing itself constantly of as many experiences as possible while simultaneously developing new needs and new modalities of enjoyment, the subject is chased by time, removed from embodied experience and socialised into a laborious production of multiple but standardised identities. Whereas language was far removed from the world-comprehensive grammar in the 1960s and 1970s in the more recent times it has become synonymous with linguistic performativity of a very specific kind: the simulacric one. Based solely on graphic signs circulated in online transactions, the inaugurative capacity of written language has attained the status of an efficient manufacturer of desired but ultimately disposable realities. The reason for this is the nature of the medium; one can always disengage or unhook oneself from a given online community and create an entirely different (desired) reality elsewhere. One could therefore say, with Marshall McLuhan, that it is the

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medium itself, not its content that creates and disseminates attitudes (McLuhan 1967). Time is perceived as the scarcest of commodities and is, for this reason, supposed to be owned. In a manner similar to Max Weber’s famous theorisation of the early capitalist work ethic as inextricably entwined with the Protestant notion of virtue, in which the ostentatious amassment of wordly goods is transubstantiated into a religious calling (Weber: 1992), the subject performs as many (simultaneous) activities as possible in a frantic attempt to amass time. The profitable obsession with over-amplifying the sense-appeal of all commodities, be they cars, holidays or reality shows has resulted in the overstimulation of the impoverished sensorium, which is doubly alienating. Drowned in the generic smells of Lush or Costa whose global presence is ineluctable, the sensorium is both standardised and further impoverished. In the field of sociality the mysterious law of political correctness has replaced the traditional laws, much like the various forms of participatory surveillance and online tracking have replaced the more overt forms of surveillance. Games have entered the circulation of the steadily more diffuse disciplinary mechanisms since they are now available on all mobile computing devices. Despite the wide-spread use of oxymorons such as “eco-friendly capitalism” and despite the bursting of the bubble of financial abstraction in 2008 which caused a world-wide market crash, the “economic imperative” is stronger than ever. The reason for these developments and not others is the directionality of habitualisation, the performative weaving of imperceptible pre-suppositions and behavioural patterns, which, although diffuse, nevertheless have a stronghold in the cultural, scientific, political and economic representations that function like vital nodes in chemical warfare. In chemical warfare, the often-targeted goal is the pollution of the enemy’s entire water supply because water is the sine qua non ingredient of human life. In hegemony – in which there are no defined enemies, no discernible strategies, goals or targets, no discernible “others” and no intentionality – it is consciousness that takes the place of water. Like water, of which the human body is made, consciousness comprises an entire range of existential modalities (Nagatomo) and permeates the human body through and through. What this means is that there is no distance and no position of no concern. It means that everything that occurs, occurs in the here and now, on the fly; everything is unavoidably close and often incomprehensible but nevertheless solicits one’s immediate

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attention and involvement, tugging on the umbilical cord of relationality, as it were. It is in this inextricable intertwinement of consciousness, relationality, hegemony and the performative forging of reality that the crucial relevance of the intermedium resides. Operating in the space between the life media, the habitualised and standardised ways of doing things and their corresponding (fossilised) attitudes, the intermedium thwarts the directionality of habitualisation and makes the perception as well as incorporation of multipositional co-constitutivity possible. By negating unipositionality the intermedium also reasserts that there is no position of neutrality outside of duality. It is only within the dualistic system that the “no man’s land of no concern” comes into play. Outside of this system, everything is always already in the process of becoming a part of oneself much like one’s very own self is always already in the process of becoming a multiplicity of others. The relevance of the practice of fluxing thus lies in the continuous shaking of the pillars of consciousness. This further means that it cannot be confined to a specific group of people, to a specific moment in history or to specific modalities of fluxing. The Legacy of Fluxing in Life, Art and Theory The Fluxus artists – Geoffrey Hendricks, Alison Knowles, Larry Miller, Willem de Ridder, Mieko Shiomi, Shikego Kubota – do, of course, continue to practice. Moreover, the recent years have seen a wealth of exhibitions, the Maya Stendhal Gallery’s 2008 From Fluxus to Media Art in New York, the 2009 Dream of Fluxus at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, United Kingdom, the Hood Museum of Art’s 2011 Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life held in Hanover, New Hampshire, the Cooper Gallery’s Anything Can Substitute art: Maciunas in Soho which took place in 2012 in New York. Apart from providing the general public with the firsthand experience of Fluxus, these efforts compensate for the lack of institutional interest in Fluxus at the time of its inception and during what were arguably its most productive years, the 1960s and 1970s. But the legacy of fluxing does not lie in museums and collections. It lies in examining the hegemonic strongholds at the intersections of epistemological, sensorial and communicational modalities, in practically reflecting on the processes through which representations are legitimised and canonised and the process-

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es through which a sense of identity is established in and through representations. Such an orientation can be clearly discerned in the work of the Chinese artist Song Dong, which operates by way of paradoxical articulation, as can be seen from Writing the Time with Water. First staged in 2000, this work consists in Song Dong writing the present time with a calligraphic brush dipped in water. The piece has been performed across the space-time network of the global time-keeping system in locations as different as London, Beijing, Sydney and Venice and illuminates the relationship between the abstract point of reference and the physical medium, in this case water, whose evaporation time is highly variable and depends on the specificity of the given location, its climactic and metereological conditions. Indeed, Writing the Time with Water suggests that the experience of clock time in our global technosphere, technically supported by the smallest inscription of time possible, involves not only a confluence of heterogeneous temporalities and durations, but also a confluence of heterogeneous measures and scales. The contrast between the smallest technical inscription of time (the clock time embodiment of a precise instant of one thousandth of a second), the time it takes Song to write the sign for that instant, the duration given to that instant by the mediation of water-writing and the time it takes for the water to evaporate in the varying time-spaces across the globe, amplifies the unruliness of time and the slippage of the frame of reference. Existing in the form of a matrix, thus practicable by all, this work illuminates the fact that the universal can only exist in the particular and is continually modified by it in a myriad ways. Equally multilayered as well as paradoxical, albeit vastly different is the ludic-activist practice of the US-based Yes Men. Operating chiefly through hactivism and the inauguration of new realities The Yes Men practice “identity correction” which consists in impersonating representatives of sociopolitically and economically highly relevant organisations, such as the World Trade Organisation and Dow Chemicals at conferences and on television. The Post Consumer Waste Recycling Program in which the Yes Men posed as representatives of the WTO, first performed in 2006, thus pioneered the eco-friendly distribution of recycled hamburgers – hamburgers that had been once, twice or more times recycled, which is to say eaten and excreted by “first world” citizens and placed on the market in the “third world”. A similar performative inauguration of an already existent or almost already existent

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reality was employed in Bhopal, the Yes Men’s 2007 CNN appearance in which they impersonated Dow Chemical executives promising a significant financial compensation to all those who suffered irreparable damage in the Bhopal gas leak tragedy. The Bhopal tragedy occurred in 1984 at the pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madya Pradesh, India, when over 500, 000 people were exposed to methyl isocyanate, a highly toxic substance which caused death and/or permanent injury to all those who were exposed to it but for which Dow Chemical had not taken responsibility. These reality-inaugurating performances regularly cause a media uproar thus forcing the organisations in question to account for their actions publically. Equally important is the fact that The Yes Men’s website acts as a platform for putting hegemonysabotaging ideas into operation. Here, anyone can propose an idea and find world-wide collaborators. No less relevant in the context of creating new practices is the UK-based collective Blast Theory. Famous for technological advancement in the medium of multi-player intermedial games, this interdisciplinary collective continually creates new forms of interaction based on ambiguity and emergent behaviour. Starting with their 2000 Desert Rain, a performative-ludological hybrid, at once an installation, a film set, a computer game and a performance which problematises socio-political representations of warfare, Blast Theory investigate the relationship between representation and reality in a variety of ways. A case in point is Day of the Figurines. Created in 2005 and performed ever since Day of the Figurines a pervasive game whose temporal extension spreads over a period of twenty-four days. Played on an actualvirtual model of a city in which the players participate through the medium of a miniature figurine which they name and place on the board in the physical space, usually a gallery, and which subsequently moves around the city as a result of the player’s responses to the stimuli received through text messaging, Day of the Figurines examines the interpenetration of explicit and implicit rules. As new situations, interpretations of situations, and new social scripts arise all the time, the game sheds experiential light on the relationship between performativity and cohesion by engaging the percipient-interactant in the forging of new social realities. Equally interactively minded is the US-based Critical Art Ensemble, a collective of tactical medial practitioners whose works address the deeply entrenched (as well as the deeply disturbing) socio-political and politico-

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scientific discourses in a wide range of intermedia. Apart from the poignant and highly humorous online projects such as Diseases of Consciousness, in which fashion models seek advice for such malaises as the “irritable brain syndrome”, the “dysfunctional reality lobe”, “premature conceptual secretions” and “cancer of the will” (www.critical-art.net/tacticalmedia) which problmatise not only the current stage of the experience economy where the consumer features as a walking and talking commodity, but also the therapy culture in which social responsibility is conveniently shifted to the domain of the individual. Here, incompetent organisation, systematic overpricing and corporate dictatorship are taken out of the equation and the consumer is accused of “trolley rage” or “airport rage” and handed over to the (profitable) therapy industry. Indeed, Critical Art Ensemble’s work hinges on counter-hegemonic practices as can be seen from their 2001-2003 project GenTerra. A live exploration of the transgenics discourse, GenTerra takes the form of a traveling laboratory in which participants manipulate transgenic bacteria and enter into a dialogue with other participants. In other words, the project engages the percipientinteractant in an experiential apprehension of the invisible and often negated co-constitutivity of science, politics and technology and is, indeed, the practical equivalent of Bruno Latour’s theory of co-production, developed in his influential We have Never been Modern. Here Latour argues that the natureculture divide is a construed duality (Latour 1993). Like Critical At Ensemble, he draws attention to the role of material objects and human institutions in assigning hybrids to one or the other of these two constitutional domains and proposes that nature is the result, not the cause of solving social controversies; that material objects and artifacts do not incorporate but produce social norms, that the big social institutions – capitalism or the market – are built on the same representational mechanisms that are used in scientific representations of the universe. In all of these practices and conceptual systems, representation, which is what holds the hegemonic duality in place, is addressed at three levels: as discourse, technology and materiality; in other words, as a linguistic, bio-social, medial and thus invariably economic and political constituent. This is why it may be said that although Fluxus was a moment in history, the practice of fluxing knows no spatio-temporal, cultural or categorical boundaries and, in fact, subverts the very notion of history as a linear, semantically

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cemented meta narrative. This tendency is, of course, evident in its very name, which, in its Latin origin, refers to the act of flowing and a state of flux and is, thus, both a name and a non-name. It is a name because it delimits and separates a phenomenon from other phenomena. In this sense, the act of flowing is not a dog or a cat. But “Fluxus” is also a non-name because the phenomena it attempts to delimit and separate are shown to be un-delimitable and inseparable which subverts both the act of naming and the purpose of naming. Given this state of affairs, who is to say that Fluxus is not a dog or a cat?

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265

Index A-theory 82, 85 action-intuition 20, 21, 224 actualisation 175, 177, 179, 195 aesthetics 7, 10, 16, 21, 30, 43, 59, 110-112, 116, 118,147, 164, 174, 188, 198-200, 204, 205, 209, 217, 218 interexpressive 11,18, 21,106,143 socio-aesthetics 8, 9, 17, 147, 218 alea 148, 149 aleatorics 150, 160, 197 Armstrong, Elizabeth 3, 42, 78, 111, 148, 160, 161, 188, 199, 205, 212214, art-amusement 17, 147 attunement 91, 116, 124, 132, 143, 259 Augustine, St. 4, 84, 90 Austin, J.L. xii, 48, 49, 57, avant-garde 9, 10, 192, 225, Ay-O 119, 121-123 Fingerbox 119-123 B-theory 82, 83, 85 basho 96 Bataille, George 201, 202 Baudrillard, Jean 192, 201-206, 208, 210, 211, 214, Bergson, Henri 86-88, 90, 91, 94-98, 105 bi-conditional relation 18, 19, 173, 182, 231 biopolitical production 27, 209, 213, 214, 216, 218-220 Blast Theory 239 blind tactics 5, 11, 12, 37, 79, 102, 147, 149 Blom, Ina 75, 103, 244

bodymind 65, 66, 261 object-body 124, 125, 126, 132 subject-body 124, 125, 126, 132 Bolter, Jay David xi Boulez, Pierre 42 Bourdieu, Pierre 153-156, 159, 164, 166 Brecht, George 2, 13, 22, 43, 44, 4750, 54, 56, 63- 66, 79, 110, 116, 150, 160, 196, 197, 202, 224, 226-229 Incidental Music 79, 150 Koan 63 Piano Piece 54, 78 Repository 110 Suitcase Ready for Traveling 196, 197 Three Aqueous Events 65 Three Gap Events 30-35, 39, 224 Two Durations 44 Two Elimination Events 49, 50 Valoche 116, 118, 196 Word Event 47, 48, 56, 228 bricolage 2, 10, 227 Buddhism 18, 21, 42, 88, 93, 96, 97, 138 Butler, Judith xii, 57, 60-62, 169 Bürger, Peter 10, 225, 245 Cage, John 2, 20, 21, 41-46, 69, 75, 80, 101, 110, 128, 150, 159, 209, 211, 219, 226 Caillois, Roger 148, 149, 246 cha-no-yu 112 chance operations 9, 12, 13, 37, 79, 148, 149, 150, 159, 160, 197 Classen, Constance 123, 246, 263 co-constitutivity xii, 26, 139, 223, 227, 230-232, 235, 237, 240

268 co-determination 19, 21 commodity fetishism, 187, 190, 230 communitas 174, 178, 179, 181, 185 concretism 78, 79, 159, 175-178, 198, 199, 215, 216, 219 Conquergood, Dwight xii consciousness 5, 7, 11, 20-25, 29, 61, 63-66, 73, 86, 91, 93, 102, 109, 113, 124-129, 133, 142, 147, 207, 218, 227-237 positional consciousness 23, 24, 25, 102, 113, 133, 207 Cornell, Joseph 110 corporeality 4, 11, 22, 26, 57, 61, 62, 74, 78, 80-85, 103, 118, 147, 154, 187, 194, 207-209, 215-219, 221 Critical Art Ensemble 239, 240 cross-categorical 23, 35, 40, 69, 136, 179, 182, 194, 208 culture-jamming activism 9 Dada 2, 9, 12, 13, 155, 225 Neo-Dada 79, 81, 111 Danto, Arthur, C. 5, 6 de-centered play 11, 12, 35, 149, 160, 169, 170 deconstruction 7, 11, 12, 13, 22, 25, 94, 99, 102, 106, 146, 151, 169, 175, 176, 202, 224, 232 dematerialisation of the object 192 democratisation of art 225 Derrida, Jacques 3, 5, 11, 12, 17, 22, 32-40, 49-51, 69, 71, 74, 79, 85, 94, 95, 138-140, 146, 147, 169, 175 Dogen 88 Dolgin, Alexander 192, 193 Doris, David 1, 54, 55, 63 Douglas, Mary 141 dualism 3-7, 12, 14, 21-24, 29, 30, 51, 64, 70, 71, 77, 78, 85, 102, 106, 108, 117, 146, 167, 209, 215, 220, 225, 227, 230, 232, 237

Index duality 15, 22, 27, 79, 240 Duchamp, Marcel 12, 13, 42, 110, 147, 150, 203, 225, 226 duration (la durée) 86, 87, 98, 105 Dyke, Heather 82 D’Amico, Fedele 113 Eco, Umberto 6 economics 25, 192, 198, 201, 203, 218, 247 metamorphic 202, 221 relational 199, 206 economy 190, 200, 240 experience 197, 198, 240 emulative-manipulative 25, 190, 200 positional 25, 190, 191, 198, 200, 209, 219 Eliade, Mircea 174 emanation theory 3, 4 embodiment 64, 77, 112, 113, 119, 124, 145, 152-156, 160, 234, 235, 238 entelecheia 192, 193, 194, 195, 196 Epstein, David 74, 76, 248 event 30-35, 43-49, 63-68, 71, 74, 82, 92, 93, 97, 101, 128, 129, 181-189, 198, 217, 223, 224, 229 event-hood 33, 50, 69, 105, 112, 128, 134, 142, 169, 170, 188, 189, 198, 203 score 9, 22, 24-35, 39-52, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61-71, 79, 88, 91-102, 105, 106, 110, 127-130, 133, 135, 141, 165, 179, 188, 194, 196, 202-205, 226, 233, 251 existential 19, 20, 24, 64-68, 85, 103, 108, 109, 124, 125, 134, 210, 236 extantness, sheer (Vorhandensien) 133, 137, 142 exteroception 126-129, 131

Index Flux-Divorce 24, 175 Flux-Feast 24,160, 161, 179 Flux-Games 147 Flux-Mass 175, 176, 182, 251 Flux-Rites 24-26 Flux-sports 145-154, 159, 160, 169, 192, 202, 203, 226, 232 Fluxchess 111 Fluxfest 203, 258 Fluxfilm 26, 85, 86, 88, 94, 253, 265 Fluxhop 9, 15, 17, 26, 186, 188, 189, 195, 196, 198, 199, 208, 209, 221, 226 fluxing 26, 223-229, 231-233, 235, 237, 239-241 Fluxkit 9, 17, 24, 26, 105, 106, 108, 110-117, 124, 131-138, 142, 143, 153, 188, 196, 201-203, 226, 227 Flux Lux 145, 175, 181, 182 Fluxmobile 186 Fluxorgan 131, 132 Fluxorum Festum 2, 138 Fluxtheater 208 Flynt, Henry 147, 217 Fort, Simone 114 frame 6, 26, 29, 35, 69, 75, 86, 90, 97, 101, 111, 136, 146, 150, 160, 171, 183-185, 201, 207, 215-217, 223-231, 234 Friedman, Ken 1, 6, 16, 58, 59, 63, 71, 89, 138-141, 169, 186-189, 191195, 200, 201, 217-219 Flux Clippings 138-141 Unfinished Symphony 58, 59 functionalism 198-201, 204, 208, 219 Futurism 2, 9, 161, 162, 249 gameness 29, 46, 47, 50, 51, 56, 59, 69 gender, constitution of 164-172, 183, 227, 229, 254 gestalt 133, 213

269 Giulianotti, Richard 146 Gorz, André 207, 209, 249 grammar, world-comprehensive 22, 51, 69, 235 Gramsci, Antonio 7, 14-16, 18, 25, 115, 138, 142, 155, 156, 183, 193, 194, 199, 220, 221 Gropius, Walter 199, 200 Grusin, Richard xi habitualisation 101, 137, 142, 228, 234, 236, 237 hactivism 238 haiku 224 Happening 8, 15, 111, 179 haptics 106, 110, 116, 120-122, 134 Hardt, Michael 15, 183, 213, 216 Hargreaves, John 146 Hegel, G.W.F. 33, 225 hegemony 7, 25, 26, 145, 152-155, 183, 184, 191, 198, 219, 223, 230, 235-240 Heidegger, Martin 3, 6, 117, 133, 139 Hendricks, Bici, 148, 161, 165, 175, 177, 231 Black Meal 161, 165, 167 Stilt Soccer 148-152, 231, 232 Hendricks, Geoffrey 162-167, 172178, 237 Cut Chair 177 10 Flavors of Mashed Potatoes 163, 165-167, 172 Hendricks, Jon 9, 17, 27, 79, 111, 130, 137, 148, 161, 162, 199, 203, 208, 217 hierarchisation 3, 5, 7, 12, 21, 22, 37, 61, 69, 74, 103, 137, 148, 159, 160, 167, 174, 175, 183, 230 Higgins, Dick 2, 6, 10, 13, 20, 21, 31, 32, 41-44, 50, 63, 65, 69, 74, 75, 188, 191, 199 Danger Music No.15 41, 44, 199

270 Higgins, Hannah 113, 127, 176, 232 Huizinga, Johan 146 Husserl, Edmund 11, 36, 37, 91, 139 Hutching, Billie 167-171, 229 Huyssen, Andreas 10, 155 I-and-Thou relation 19, 20, 172 ichi-nen 66, 67, 68, 233 Ichikawa, Hiroshi 124, 125, 131 ideality 11, 24, 37, 72, 74, 78, 85 identity 11, 24, 84, 88, 97, 101, 102, 108, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 173, 174, 185, 209, 210, 216, 220, 229, 238 contradictory 109, 172, 175, 176 ideology 7, 25, 57, 58, 138, 175, 214 ilinx 148, 149 illocutionary act 48, 56, 62, 145, 167 immanence 15, 19-21, 29, 71, 86, 96, 153, 175, 176, 182 impermanence 64, 65, 71, 72, 96, 111, 112, 142 indeterminacy 79, 168, 173, 182, 214 intentionality 47, 48, 49, 56, 133, 236 interaction 6-9, 15, 17, 22, 46, 50, 51, 70, 98, 101, 105, 111, 129-134, 140, 141-143, 150, 153, 160-164, 171, 173, 180, 188, 194-198, 209, 218, 226, 239 interactivity 6, 9, 10 intercorporeity 24, 106, 116, 137, 138, 141, 142 interdependence 7, 16, 19, 26, 74, 115, 183, 207-209, 219, 221, 228, 229 interexpression 7, 18-21, 26, 106, 108-116, 118, 123, 142, 145-176, 178, 182, 183, 188, 224, 232 interfusion 126, 128, 132, 142 intermedia 9, 26, 31, 41, 102, 202, 213, 237, 240 intermediality xi, 6, 26, 27, 40-45, 72,

Index 161, 162, 195, 209-213, 220, 221, 239 interoception 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 137 interpellation 29, 46, 56-59, 60, 62, 194, 235 interpenetration 42, 49, 68, 86, 87, 95, 112, 154, 156, 174, 181, 183, 219, 227, 229, 233, 239 intersensoriality 24, 118, 119, 123, 138 intersubjectivity 172, 233 intertwining 74, 88, 115, 116, 119, 122, 130 James, William 90, 91 Jarosi, Susan 169 Johnston, Jill 177, 181 Jones, Joe 176, 181, 209-213, 220 Cage Music 211 judo throw 155, 156, 192 just-likings 147 kaleidoscopic reality 25, 160 kanna 64-66, 68 Kant, Immanuel 147, 215 Kasulis, Thomas 7, 8 Kellein, Thomas 17, 214, 215 Kikerby, Per 162, 163, 165 Four Flux Drinks 163 kinaesthesia 34, 77, 106, 110, 116, 134, 135, 138 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 161, 254 Klintberg af, Bengt 2, 45, 46 Knowles, Alison 2, 16, 60-63, 99, 100-103, 168, 176, 181, 228, 229, 237 Performance Piece No.8 60, 61, 229 The identical Lunch 99-103, 228

Index Knížák, Milan 160, 176, 181, 186, 189 Blue Lips 181 Turkey with Concrete Filling 160 koan 63-66, 68 koiteki chokkan 20, 112 Kopf, Gereon 88 Kostelanetz, Richard 43, 101 Kosugi, Takehisa 54, 55, 78, 85 Theatre Music 78 Music for a Revolution 78 Kotz, Liz 30, 31, 43, 255 Kramer, J.D. 72-76 Kubota, Shikego 124, 129, 130, 237 Flux Medicine Kit 124, 129, 130 labour 138, 187, 193, 194, 201, 202, 207, 208, 220 entelecheic (living) labour 11,1418, 193-195, 220 Langer, Susanne 72-74 language 22, 29-37, 40, 46, 48-51, 57-60, 62-64, 68-71, 108, 235 extra-linguistic institution 48, 56 jeu de langage 36, 51 game 52, 56, 59, 62, 70 Latour, Bruno xii, 240 Leary, Timothy 130 Leder, Drew 116, 126, 128, 133, 134, 139 Levin, David Michael 117, 119, 139 Lingis, Alphonso 233, 234 logocentrism 11-13, 22, 30, 69 ludus populi 147-149 Mac Low, Jackson 44 Machiavelli, Niccolò 155, 156 Maciunas, Billie 170, 171 Maciunas, George 1, 2, 9, 10, 15-20, 27, 63, 78-82, 85, 107, 110-116, 127, 130-132, 136-139, 147, 148, 154, 157-160, 162-171, 175, 178-181, 186,

271 189, 191, 196, 198, 199, 200-209, 213-217, 221, 226, 229, 231, 237 Black and White 170, 171, 229, 230 Blow Soccer 148 Boxing 148 Can-of-Water Paddle 158 Corrugated Paddle 157 Fish Meal 165, 166.184 Hole-in-the-Middle Paddle 158 Fluxorgan 131, 132 In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti 179 Piano Piece No.13 78, 79, 80, 151, 215 Prepared Ping Pong 157-159, 183, 231 Team Ski Run 148 Transparent Meal 160, 162 magical division 160, 164-167 Maggio di, Gino 113, 117 Malevich, Kasimir 165 manifesto 2, 17 Dada manifesto 12 Martin, Henry 13, 79, 110, 113 Marx, Karl 14, 15, 16, 114-117, 186, 187, 190, 200-202, 225 Mauss, Marcel 206 Maya, Jim 100 McCarthyism 17 Mcluhan, Marshall 235, 236 McTaggart, J.M.E. 82 meaning 11, 21, 22, 31, 32-37, 47, 61, 69, 121-125, 136, 177, 178, 206, 215, 216 lived meaning 24, 116, 130-133, 136, 142 mediation 19, 35, 62, 160, 19-193, 199, 211, 212, 220, 226, 228, 238 Medina, Cuahtémoc 200, 217 medium 41-46, 71-74, 85, 88, 96, 102, 142, 163, 186, 212, 235-239

272 of production 186 meontology 61 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 88, 117-119, 124, 125, 139 metaphysics 3, 5, 11, 12, 19, 71, 113, 117, 139, 174, 176, 181, 182 Miller, Larry 61, 62, 124-129, 148, 151, 163, 168, 175, 176, 199, 226, 228, 231, 237 Flux Orifice Plugs 124-127, 228 Flux Museum Meal 163 100 Balloon Dash 153 100 Yard Run 148, 151 Like/Don’t Like Piece 61, 62 200 Yard Candle Dash 148, 231 Millman, Estera 181, 225-227 musicalisation 23, 74, 75, 85, 91, 98, 102, 103 Nagatomo, Shigenori 124-132, 137139, 153, 236 naming 60-62, 241 Nan-ch’uan 1 Negri, Antonio 15, 183, 213, 216 Nishida, Kitaro 18-20, 23, 71, 88, 96, 98-100, 102, 108, 112, 113, 116-118, 143, 172-175, 223, 232 Nishitani, Keiji 3 no-self 255 non-art 2, 13, 111, 155, 192, 217 non-duality 7, 8, 18, 26, 43, 185, 223, 225, 232 normativity 175, 178, 183, 213, 219 Novyi LEF 16 null-point-ness 126, 128, 130, 142 Nyman, Michael 78-80, 128 objet trouvé 100, 105, 110, 111 occularcentrism 24, 106, 113, 115, 117, 123, 134, 135, 142, 145, 174, 185 of-of-of relation 228-230

Index olfaction 33, 45, 46, 52, 77, 116, 118, 135, 137, 161, 165 Oliveros, Pauline 73 Ono, Yoko 2, 58, 59, 63, 89-95, 224 Eyeblink 94, 95 Lighting Piece 58, 59, 224 ontology 61, 108, 112, 134 ownership 105, 111, 114, 174, 186, 220, 221 paidia 149, 150 Paik, Nam June 2, 52, 53, 73, 75, 78, 80, 81-85, 95-98, 103, 186, 199, 224, 228 One for Violin Solo 78, 80, 81, 83, 85, 103, 224 Zen for Film 95, 103, 228 Zen for Head 52, 53 paradigmatic art 111, 112, 114 paradoxical articulation 18, 21, 64, 98, 238 Patterson, Ben 2, 135, 181, 203 Wash Your Face 135 performance efficacy 38, 145, 146, 167, 168, 169, 170, 175, 177, 182, 183 performativity 10, 27, 57, 169, 188, 192, 217, 218, 224, 234, 235, 239 perpetuum mobile 50, 65, 195 perspectival constitution 39, 60, 97 phenomenology 87, 88, 124, 126, 132, 134, 138, 139, 220 phenomenological vector 116, 132-134, 137 Plato 11, 17, 24 Plotinus 3 poiesis 13, 15, 115, 211, 212, 213, 218, 219 poiesis-praxis 17, 138, 213 position, ossified 25, 48, 62, 154, 182-184, 213

Index positionality 7, 8, 20, 21, 61, 69, 103, 105, 122, 123, 132, 137, 142, 143, 173, 189 multipositionality 116, 123, 143 practical sense 153, 154 presence 4, 7, 11, 74, 94, 95, 103, 129, 141, 152, 178, 212, 213 present, specious 90-94 presentism, degree 82, 83, 85 processuality 12-15, 21, 50, 71, 79, 84, 85, 97, 98, 102, 103, 124, 128, 131, 142, 147, 160, 169, 171, 178, 195, 196, 220 productivism-consumerism 14, 17, 138, 197, 209, 230 proprioception 67, 68, 134, 159 protean activity 223, 228, 231 Rauschenberg, Robert 46 Ravicz, Marilyn Ekdahl 217, 218 re-contextualisation 205, 209, 213, 226 read-iness-to-hand (Zuhandensien) 133, 137 ready-made 6, 9, 13, 42, 110, 134, 148, 175, 182, 203, 226 dō 237 performative 9, 52, 59, 68, 75, 106, 151, 155, 196, 197 rear-garde 9, 10 reciprocity 16, 20, 108, 192, 193, 194, 195, 206 reduction 11, 14, 25, 69, 220, 229 Reed, Edward S. 113 relationality 6, 18, 19, 21-26, 29, 52, 58, 70, 82-85, 108, 117, 118, 123, 133-138, 142, 153, 156, 159, 164, 171, 186, 192, 198, 199, 205-208, 216, 218, 229, 237 remediation xi representation 96, 97, 117, 146, 183, 235-240

273 residual 66, 99, 153, 226 retention 91, 92 retentive-protentive 92, 93, 98 reversibility 77, 85, 115, 116, 119, 125, 136, 143, 156 Ricardo, David 187 Ridder de, Willem 186-189, 195, 196, 218, 237 Invitation to Dinner 196 Visit Rietdijk, Wim 33 ritual 1, 21, 22, 24, 38, 57, 62, 77, 145-147, 164, 167-170, 174-178, 182-184, 197, 223, 233 Romanyshyn, Robert 105, 106, 260 Rothfuss, Joan 42, 78, 111, 148, 160, 161, 188, 199, 205, 212-214 Rubin, Edgar 45, 46 Ruhé, Harry 1 Saito, Takako 111, 135-137 Fluxchess (Smell Chess) 111, 135-137 Saito, Yuriko 111, 112, 116, 224 Sasaki, Ruth Fuller 64 Satie, Erik 50, 75 Saussure, Ferdinand 36 Schechner, Richard 20, 145, 146, 167, 174, 175, 178 Schmitt, Tomas 10, 114 Schröter, Jens, xi Searle, J.R. 47, 48, 49, 51, 56, 57 sedimentation 46, 48- 62, 93, 116, 118, 124, 130-134, 141, 173, 192, 198, 228 Sekida, Katsuki 64-66, 233 Sell, Mike 155, 188, 192, 201, 209 semantics 31, 36, 146, 215, 226, 232234 semiosis 32 sinngebung 36, 37

274 sensoriality 24, 123, 124, 134, 136, 142, 143, 185, 224, 236 serialism, integral 42 Shakyamuni 63 Sherover, Charles M. 90 Shiomi, Mieko Disappearing Music for Face 8895, 224 Spatial Poem 205-207, 221 Smith, Adam 187 Smith, Owen F. 16, 20, 114, 189, 191, 202, 203, 208, 214 Smith, Quentin 82, 83 Song Dong 238 sovereignty 24, 49, 56, 57, 113, 122, 190, 209, 210 Spoerri Daniel 203, 204 31 Variations on a Meal 203 staticity 23, 24, 25, 225, 227 Stiles, Kristine 148, 160, 161, 178, 205, 212, 213 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 42, 43, 73 suchness 20, 21, 111, 200, 219 superstructure 16 Surrealism 10, 13 Suzuki, D.T. 42, 64 symbolic exchange 192, 201, 202, 206, 214 teleology 13, 19, 26, 30, 33, 40, 7180, 85, 87, 133, 138, 190, 201, 208, 219, 235 temporal thickness 90, 91, 93, 98 temporalisation 23, 50, 59, 71-74, 85, 88, 90, 91, 98, 102-105, 172, 194, 195 temporality 21, 24, 71, 72, 76, 77, 86, 88, 91-98, 102, 103, 206, 207, 224 tracing 40, 224 transubstantiation 118, 119, 122, 123, 164, 236 Tzara, Tristan 12, 13

Index unidirectionality 56, 83, 85 unimpededness 42 unsubsumability 10, 203 value 12, 14, 17, 25, 36, 61, 62, 114, 138, 142, 150, 156, 160, 164, 166, 175, 185-195, 199, 201, 202, 210, 211 entelecheic (living) 192, 194, 196 exchange 154, 190, 195 intrinsic 200, 219 use 190, 195 Varela, Francisco 91, 92, 264 veramusement 217 Vostell, Wolf 2 Wacquant, Loic 153, 244 Wada, Yoshimasa 134, 179 Smoke Kit 134 Watts, Alan 224 Watts, Robert 30, 31, 32, 38, 106, 107, 110, 112, 116, 133, 175, 181, 199, 203, 204, 205, 214, 224, 229, 230 Rain Event 30, 31, 32, 38, 39 Time Kit 106-110, 113, 133 Weber, Max 236 Webern, Anton 42, 43 Williams, Emmett 3, 6, 63, 264 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 50, 51, 69, 264 Wordsworth, William 34, 35 Yoshimoto, Midori 91 Young, La Monte 41, 44, 52, 72, 76, 78, 85 Composition No #2 78 Composition 1960 No #7 72, 7678 Yuasa, Yasuo 124 Zen 3, 7, 18, 20, 21, 42, 52, 53, 6365, 88, 95-98, 103, 175, 224, 228