Begging — Love — to Differ — as an Artistic Terrorist

Begging — Love — to Differ — as an Artistic Terrorist

The commonality of Le Petit Mort and 11th September 2001 is that they represent the idiom of two sides of the same coin — between their respective antagonisms relative to each other — or the Lacanian topology of the mobius strip. Lacan’s ‘point de captione’ or ‘quilting point’ refers to the nodal point of convergence. In Le Petit Mort this ‘spatializing device’ is literally that of the live performer which situates retroactively and prospectively the signifiers. By this “quilting” or “stitching” in the particular signifying chain, a sense of experience and recognition situates and structures meaning for the subject — as audience-participant. However, the composition of framing the audience in-the-round allows for a sensation of perception like ‘watching a performance of a person watching a performance’ or a ‘seeing-self-seeing’. This circumambiency emphasises the complex layering that occurs in the work, whilst situating the audience as points themselves pertaining to meaning-making. These series of encounters might demonstrate by their pure contingency, the process symbolization depends, defined by a ‘vicious circle of differentiality’ and whose elemental identity is over-determined in their articulation. Between these points, the still ‘free-floating’ mass of meanings ‘circulating’, represents the Lacanian logic of “not-all” — what is not signified in the performance — and begs the question ‘when something is happening, what isn’t happening? — when something is happening?’

The audience is presented with an alternative in either deciding to fortify their alienating ‘invisible’ sphere, or risk stepping out of their isolating comfort zone, toward approaching an-other — the live performer. Within a fucking serious play between excess and a lack of power, Le Petit Mort aspires towards a commitment to a being-in-the-world-for-others-itself in the performance and an acknowledgment of learning to accept a sense of vulnerability.

Not merely an ‘exhilarating confrontation’ imposed on behalf of the live performer akin to a form of audience torture, Le Petit Mort intended to fulfil a ‘sad duty’, evoked by artistic director Tim Etchells from performance group ‘Forced Entertainment’ . Notions of — “it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it” — might then become a ‘shared responsibility’ as contextualised within the performance. In the presentation of Le Petit Mort, both positions might be adopted, simultaneously, by resorting to a dialectical totality — analogous to the mobius strip. Le Petit Mort attempts to make explicit the falsity of each side of the performance divide as being only one sided — i.e. the pretence of the audience being at the ‘controlling’ live performer’s mercy — like little lamb’s to the slaughter. The field of desire in Le Petit Mort suggests otherwise, the two are not opposed in an excess of (un)freedom, that is, the unity of one self and an-other as live performer and audience-participant. Together, we are compromised in a guilty notion that is comprised of the Frankensteinian monster created in the live performance. The audience become complicit by what Zizek refers to as “Hegel’s well-known dictum that Evil resides (also) in the innocent gaze itself which perceives Evil all around” (56, Zizek 2002). The notion of universal “evil eye” manifests itself in Hegel because Evil is a part of God’s creation, evoking Artaud’s Gnostic tendencies. This ‘evil eye’ and its endowment of a fundamental power to separate is the essence of the alienating gaze (114, Zizek 1991).

Without a driving force of difference, there would be no humanity, and as the world is produced by ‘God’, so the divine idea always forms the foundation of what the world as a whole is. ‘God’ creates the world and humanity within it, not of free choice, but because he has to as an Act which is a leap of faith. ‘God’ needs this creation for without it, ‘God’ is not ‘God’, and without our consciousness, ‘God’ is not self-consciousness and therefore doesn’t even fucking exist. The truth of ‘God’ is revealed himself through a mysticism in our belief-s or as per the German Dominican monk Meister Johann Eckhardt’s “Divine knowledge is the negation of negation”.

Hegel quotes from a passage passed on by the German mystic philosopher Franz Xavier von Baader which turns out to be a Hadith saying much loved by the Sufi’s:-

The eye with which God sees me is
The eye with which I see Him,
My eye and His eye are the same…
If He did not exist, nor would I;
If I did not exist, nor would He (218, Hegel 1942).

This is the relation at work within the framework of the performance Le Petit Mort and following the mystic Lutheran shoemaker Jakob Boheme in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy:-

“Nothing can be revealed to itself without opposition. For if there is nothing that opposes it, then it always goes out of itself and never returns to itself again. If it does not return into itself, as into that form which it originated, then it knows nothing of its origin”. (203, Hegel 1955)

In reference to 11th September 2001, the “predominant point of view is that of an innocent gaze confronting unspeakable Evil which struck from the Outside” (56, Zizek 2002) might be applied to the live performer in Le Petit Mort, in its provocation of a passive audience to become active.

Marcelle Marini’s book Jacques Lacan testifies to Lacan’s rejection of the ideal “primum vivere – first, to live” and declaration of the medical precept “primum non nocere – first, no harm” as inane, for the —

“cautiousness of the ‘not to act’ would prevent him from ‘finding, in the very dead end of the situation, the intense strength of the [redeeming] intervention … [A]ny act entails unavoidable risks, for the other and for oneself, all the more so when what is at stake is an operation of truth … access to the desire for (unconscious) knowledge. ‘All knowledge is instituted in a horror that cannot be overcome and concerns the place that hides the secret of sex’, a secret linked to death”. (84-5, Marini 1992).

For one must “pay with his person”, that is “To love thy neighbour as yourself” in Lacanian terms is to recognize in him, as in oneself, the Thing in all its horror — flesh i.e. mortality. We are all subject to being the ‘objet a’ — the cause of the others desire — or in an expression interpreted through a long theological tradition from the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger — a “being-for-death” — separating one from “‘the herd’. The initiated in turn initiates.” (84-5, Marini 1992).

The aim of the masochist is not to generate jouissance in the other but anxiety. The live performer in Le Petit Mort, whilst serving the other by being “tortured” by the “evil” eye of their gaze, defines the rules of servitude and discloses one’s own desire to the other. The object of the anxiety is then, the (over) proximity of the other’s desire and, it is this disclosure which is found to be repulsive (21-2, Zizek 2002).

In Le Petit Mort, the ambiguous relation of its content might be read as a desire to be ‘god’, or “in love”, or have a ‘sexual relation’ — “He wants to fuck himself as his own creation! — or worse still … — me!!! — an audience- participant”. Such is this the extent, that the subject — the live performer — might be identified as a ‘misogynist’, ‘rapist’, or wishes in fact, not to be alive, but dead, or actually believe in these propositions. A certain excess discloses the relevance of live performance in situ, and pity becomes repulsion.

The kinship of Le Petit Mort to 11th September 2001 and such tragedies is that they might be considered the result of an “obscure god who demands human sacrifices” (140, ibid). The live performer plays both ‘God’ and a ‘subject to be sacrificed’, yet also desires an investment of an-other-audience-participant as body and ‘guilty’ flesh, through ‘witnessing as self-sacrifice’. In contemplating Le Petit Mort, one might attribute to this ‘Other’ of the live performer, a naïve, fixed belief as a subject that is “supposed to believe” like a terrorist on a suicide mission, whose reward is so many virgins in the after-life once dead. Zizek beseeches that such transpositions might be in ignorance, for by killing oneself, the subject posits the possibility of the act as a means of verifiable proof, in actu, of resolving the deadlock of doubt (72, ibid). In enacting Le Petit Mort, analogous to following this argument, the live performance ascertains whether :-

1. I am an idea of my being — mortal condition — ontology — (non)existence
2. am I really a ‘god' or is he dead (or am I just a ‘fuck up’ trapped in the past) Or
3. a vague notion of spirituality resides within.

The positing of an audience confirms for the live performer — and therefore a so-called ‘God’ — that both indeed, actually exist, and are not dead. On the contrary ‘we’ are very much alive — albeit in a perverted guise — whilst alluding to ‘God’ and ‘I’-‘me’-‘Craig Darryl Peade’ as live performer is as if being one and the same thing. Unless, however, like Freud’s father — “He who did not know that he was dead” — neither of ‘us’ know that ‘we’ are actually dead!!! Lacan refers to Freud’s ‘dead father’ figure as a ghost returning, surviving “only by virtue of the fact that one does not tell him the truth of which he is unaware” and then proffers “what, then, is to be said of the I, on which this survival depends?” For Lacan, the father’s knowledge of his death posits ‘I’ as dead, by a discourse in which it is “death that sustains existence” (300, Lacan). Le Petit Mort renders its ontology as a ‘problematic history’ and is ‘anchored’ to an inherent doubt of mutual existence between the ‘I’ of ‘me-Craig-Darryl Peade’ and an-Other, particularly those explicitly absent from attending the live performance. This might then constitute “love” in performance, by the ‘will-ingness to be-ing together’ of Le Petit Mort, whose physical presence enacted an ontological affirmation, juxtaposed with absent others who did not attend. This begs the question — “if ‘an-other’ such as ‘you’ were not in attendance, who is it that might not exist? Is it ‘I’-‘me’-‘Craig Darryl Peade’? ‘You’? Or is it both of ‘us’?” For Lacan, this is how “I get there, there where it was: who knew, then, that I was dead?” and proposes that “[W]e cannot ask this question of the subject as ‘I’” because one would lack “everything needed to know the answer”, since it would not be known that one — the subject — were dead and therefore not know that an Other was alive (300, ibid).

Zizek refers to the “infinite task of translation, a constant reworking of one’s own particular position” (66, Zizek 2002), in that relations to an-other(s) consist of one having to relate to oneself and our complicity in perception, first and foremost. Le Petit Mort is paradoxically explicit here, in its attempts to be ambiguous of “who is speaking, and to whom?” — is that ‘Him’, ‘God’, ‘Craig Darryl Peade’, ‘a deluded madman’, ‘his lover — imagined or not’ and “is he really talking to me or addressing some unapprehended ‘other’ of himself or absent-persons — fictional or otherwise — through my presence here, now rendered absent in the performance?”

For Zizek, the appearance of a “violent experience” in the Lacanian Act is when distance between borders (ethical and political) collapse — which was literally the case 11th September 2001. An unbearable tension emanates from the presence of an invisible-absent barrier between live performer and audience in Le Petit Mort, demarcating the “actual universality” of our existence as being that “we share the same antagonism” (66, ibid – my emphasis).The ‘menacing proximity’ in Le Petit Mort is enacted by interventions into the spheres of physical intimacy that might render these ‘invisible barriers’ as ‘present’ and the live performer as ‘superhuman’, by such ‘absences of prohibition’ that seemingly permit ‘anything and everything’. Objective distance is seized by this ‘little piece of the Lacanian ‘Real’ in Le Petit Mort and an-other as audience-participant is attempted to be drawn into this breach by the live performer.

The inherent tension of the internal struggle in Le Petit Mort and its own excess undermines the reliance of a subject’s — namely the audience-participant — un-readiness or inability to confront desire’s consequences by way of satisfaction in the pleasure principle. The insistence to go beyond the reality principle and participate in the performance with an ‘Act’ per se, confers that precisely in moments of such apparent clarity of choice, mystification is total when it comes to the inter-relations ‘between things’. An emerging discourse that questions the dominant relations is induced by such actions, suspending assumed ‘knowledge’ and only acquires import retroactively through the negotiation. In Le Petit Mort, the notion of the live performer as being solely active — ‘in control’ of a ‘passive’ audience is what is at stake. Ultimately, this is the ‘monstrosity of the Act’ in Le Petit Mort and what makes it so ‘catastrophically traumatic’ or ‘Other’, and defined within the limitations of the site-specific-photographic studio — absolutely claustrophobic. The symbolic context conditioning recognition is suspended, disturbed and transformed in each of the subject’s existent relations and alters their relative terms. Notions of what is permissible might become troubling in unpredictable ways and induces a symptomatic anxiety — explicitly demonstrated in subjects averse to the live performance space — physical or otherwise — and fear of Le Petit Mort i.e. terror.

Citing Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Zizek refers to the fanatic who “wrecks the world for love of the other” (84, Zizek 2002), that is, those who act as terrorists, do their will, not out of hatred, but what Zizek cites as Novalis’ “perspicuous observation that what an evil man hates is not the good — he hates evil excessively (the world which he considers evil), and therefore tries to hurt and destroy it as much as possible” (142, ibid). Le Petit Mort is situated in this ‘terrorist’ model, in that it destroys the ‘reality of the world’ and the excessive evil it detests for “love of the other”, by means of an Aristotlean poetics that re-creates the world not necessarily as it is, but as is it ‘ought to be’. Le Petit Mort posits that the contemporary era’s pathology ‘clings to the image’. This scopophilia asserts ‘seeing-vision’ as an ‘alienated knowledge’ inherited from ‘The Fall’, and summed up in the sophistry of Bishop George Berkeley’s famous principle — “esse est percipi” — ‘to be is to be perceived’. Live performance in its necessary proximity to ‘an-other-audience-participant’, yields ‘something beyond’ pure optics by a constitutive force of proprioception. The anonymity of a gaze that objectifies an-other initiates a subject as simultaneously ‘Master-Slave’ in the voyeuristic act. Le Petit Mort plays out the fucking seriously, playful, threat and fears of an-other — not necessarily physically present, but absent — representing this dialectic relation. As opposed to the knowledge that a passive image has no real ability to affect a judgment upon the ‘taboo’ of looking, the subjects of Le Petit Mort — whether live performer or not — become aware that they are being judged, as they themselves judge. As opposed to the relative anonymity of conventional frameworks of collective seeing, — that is, in darkness, — the conspicuous space of the site-specific photographic studio implies a responsibility by the ‘looking act’. This constitutes both the ‘frisson and love’ of Le Petit Mort in the complicity of the work, positing all in attendance as omnipotent, all-seeing ‘God’.

Zizek warns that in ‘approaching limits’, one must be aware of the need to respect the “Other’s radical Otherness” as not simply a being, reduced to the “bearer” of a projected “false knowledge” (67, ibid). For Zizek, the application of “Christ’s famous words about how he has come to bring the sword and division, not unity and peace: out of our very love for humanity” (68, ibid – emphasis in original) is the “line of reasoning”, as there is “the Absolute impenetrable abyss” at the heart of the “Other’s radical Otherness” (67-68, ibid). In Le Petit Mort, an-other is not the same but each similar in their difference, as might be demonstrated by subjective experiences akin to chaotic physics in quantum mechanics’ theory, where no single interpretive perception exists (45-7, Zizek 1991) . This ‘many minds interpretation’, of ‘many parallel worlds’, accords performance with an experimental, ‘scientific consciousness’ and, ultimately, aligns both as spiritual practice of faith in choice — i.e. free(dom-)will.