Crisis of Presence in Times of Civil War

This embodied experience of war leads us to consider war less as a voluntarily waged battle than as a struggle fought at the heart of existence—a life marked by war. It is a war of this kind that Lazzarato and Alliez refer to when they highlight the destruction wreaked by capital accumulation since the colonization of the New World (and, via feedback effect, EuropeIbid. In citing Michel Foucault’s lecture “Society must be defended” (February 4, 1976), the authors remind us of the feedback effects of external colonization on power mechanisms in Europe. ) on “the material conditions of life, but also in terms of existential territories, universes of values, cosmology, and the mythologies at the foundation of the ‘subjective life’ of the colonized people and the poor of the so-called ‘civilized world.’”Ibid., 52. Thus, material and immaterial destruction still determines how biopower invests spiritual and biological life in the interest of maintaining the global capitalist machine. It is clear that wars of subjectivity form the matrix of colonial war. Ambra Pittoni & Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano The Air Talking Tutorial, captures vidéos | video stills, 2017.Photos : permission des artistes | courtesy of the artists The anonymous collective Tiqqun deepens this reflection on an existential plane while shifting the focus toward an ethic of civil war understood as a way of living and of putting one’s life at stake. Yet whatever the nature of civil war, it is important to recall that it affects everyone politically, regardless of one’s standpoint. For Tiqqun, it intensifies collective resistance. Published over twenty years ago, the political essays collected in Introduction to Civil War have lost none of their pertinence. Tiqqun highlights how biopower’s control systems engender a depoliticization of existence by cleaving a scission between bare life (the simple fact of living) and the way of life specific to an individual or group.This question is directly related to Giorgio Agamben, whose “form-of-life” concept, in the sense of “a life that can never be separated from its form,” runs through Tiqqun’s thought. This concept resonates and sometimes merges with the notion of presence in Tiqqun’s work. See Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Theory Out of Bounds) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 3–14. This ultimate separation is notably expressed through what Tiqqun, following anthropologist Ernesto de Martino, calls the “crisis of presence.” This transcultural phenomenon results in spiritual and affective poverty, sustained by devices that act on our bodies by mobilizing our presence (and its potential) to infinitely reproduce the energy consolidating capitalism’s predatory logic. With our presence in crisis, it is our ability to act that is eroded when we are kept isolated, as this quotation suggests: “Biopolitics has never had any other objective: to prevent the construction of worlds, techniques, shared dramas, magic in which the crisis of presence could be overcome, assumed, or become a field of energy, a machine of war.”Tiqqun, Contributions à la guerre en cours (Paris: La Fabrique, 2009), 119-120 (our translation). Recognizing our state of being in the world demands that we confront this crisis of presence—specifically the evisceration of that which fully animates our bodies. For it is in this place of vulnerability that we can recapture the essence of our “sensible effectivity.” How do artists confer coherence or a visibility-readability plan capable of activating infrapolitical resistanceThis term refers to the concept developed by anthropologist James C. Scott to evoke unobtrusive, yet no less effective, forms of resistance. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990),183–201. to this existential drama? Ana VazOccidente, captures vidéos | video stills, 2014.Photos : permission de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist The artist duo Ambra Pittoni and Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano addresses the crisis of presence in Air Talking, an experimental project begun in 2012 comprising lecture-performances, workshops, a manual, and a YouTube tutorial.Ambra Pittoni and Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano, “Air Talking Tutorial,” YouTube video, 9:48, June 30, 2017, ww.youtube.com/watch?vrGYegDw88rg. Echoing the well-known practice of air guitar, the miming of guitar playing without an instrument, Air Talking proposes a series of easily simulated gestures and postures inspired by body language commonly used in real-life situations. In this work, Pittoni and Enriquez-Sarano introduce the practice of “air talking” by describing, in turn, each gesture that the other performs. The eerie movements, reminiscent of Butoh “dances of darkness,” can be performed solo, in duos, or in groups, with the participation of the public. In the introduction to the illustrated manual, published in English in 2017,The original Italian version was published in 2016. the artists explain the origin of the practice: “During the mundane ritual, the body surrenders to the crisis of presence, which decays into absence and becomes a pure echo of the world. This makes the society situation similar to an out-of-body experience.”Ambra Pittoni and Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano, The Air Talking Manual (Turin: Friends Make Books, 2017); emphasis in original. This absence, generated by a rift in the body, jeopardizes our relationship with ourselves and the world. In the face of the discipline imposed on our bodies, even on our modes of socialization and self-representation, and the subjugation of identity implied within a regime of social representation, the obstruction of presence activated by this imposition on the body draws its resilience from passivity. The reactivation of gestures normally attributed to specific situations in other contexts implies experiencing a movement of abandonment. This opens up the possibility for desubjectivation, a renunciation comparative to the actor training technique developed by theatre director Eugenio Barba. In Comment sauver le commun du communisme?, Érik Bordeleau makes specific reference to Barba and his “anti-representational approach to theatre centred on performative bodily presence”Érik Bordeleau, Comment sauver le commun du communisme? (Montreal: Le Quartanier (QR), 2014), 144 (our translation). to produce a rapport between anonymity and quality of presence, like the one played out in Air Talking. For both Bordeleau and Tiqqun, the experience of anonymity corresponds to a fugitive mode of political resistance, to an imperceptible potential through which we can escape the privatization of existence and access common experience. Presence should never be taken for granted; it is always in danger depending on the environment and situation. There is the danger of losing one’s self, of the absence of the conditions necessary for reintegrating the presence from which we have been separated. Artist Ana Vaz dramatizes this danger and its potential in the film-poem Occidente (2015). Shot in Lisbon, this experimental short, free of narrative structure, manifests biopower’s dark and persistent forces, based on the colonial legacy between Brazil and Portugal. Occidente immerses us in a stressful, even frightening world, conceived as a field of tensions that is revealed through the dynamics of human and non-human agents: a surfer in the trough of a giant wave; fish wriggling on the shore; a set of kitschy fish-shaped tableware; the Square of Commerce and the Rua Augusta Arch; a tiger camouflaged behind grasses. The disturbing atmosphere is further amplified by the aesthetic. Miscellaneous asynchronous sounds, persistent close-ups, uncontrolled camera movements, and the use of multiple formats (16 mm, HD, composite images from Google Street View) continually destabilize the viewer’s perception. Presence should never be taken for granted; it is always in danger depending on the environment and situation. There is the danger of losing one’s self, of the absence of the conditions necessary for reintegrating the presence from which we have been separated. One scene in the middle of the film introduces a decisive twist. Sitting around a table, people eat, talk, and make toasts. Although they ignore the camera, the Brazilian housemaid serving them glances in our direction and smiles hesitantly. In a broad sense, the scene undoubtedly questions the continuance of domestication in the context of decolonization. Even more significant perhaps is how the housemaid’s hesitancy conveys both a presence fragilized by her environment and a sense of becoming-Other. As Vaz explained in an interview, “Lis seems to be the only character trapped in the anxious feeling of a double alliance: Is she to protect herself or her patron? To perform her Otherness or to admit to the ridicule of the celebration? To eat or to be eaten?”Interview between Ana Vaz and Olivier Marb&oelig;uf: “Ana Vaz: Occidente,” Vdrome, www.vdrome.org/ana-vaz-occidente. This ambivalence allows presence to be captured through the becoming-Other of the housemaid, “the tiger in the maid, the cacti in the hands, thin spikes to protect from predation, domestication.” Ibid. Lis’s gaze subverts the mechanisms of image capture. In this way, a shift is set in motion, through which emerges a cosmological and profoundly organic vision of the world that furthers the process of decolonization. Although very different in terms of context and critical reach, the speculative gestures of Pittoni and Enriquez-Sarano, and Vaz share an interest in “existence as presence,”Ernesto de Martino, Le monde magique (Paris: Institut d’édition Sanofi-Synthélabo (Les empêcheurs de penser en rond), 1999), 99 (our translation). a phenomenon that circulates within and between beings and things. These gestures unfold immanently, giving rise to singularities—particularly an awareness of “a present in which something or someone presents itself: the present of an arrival, an approach.” Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 38. In this case, the speculative gesture refers to any affective, relational, or bodily movement that activates possibility by inhabiting forms of infrapolitical resistance to act within the framework of affective and organic life. As the description offered by De Martino in 1948 suggests, establishing the consistency of the crisis of presence thus activates a process sensitive to a possibly magic world: “The simple erasure of presence ... represents only one of two poles of magical drama; the other pole consists of the moment when the present that yearns to be in the world is redeemed ... It is in the concrete relationship between the two moments, in the opposition and conflict arising from it, that the magical world manifests itself as movement and growth.”De Martino, Le monde magique, 96 (our translation). The being in times of war experiences the magical world, for, constantly in danger and vulnerable to its environment, this presence also recognizes its co-involvement in the fragility of the world and of history. Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft Ambra Pittoni, Ana Vaz, Mirna Abiad-Boyadjian, Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano

Crisis of Presence in Times of Civil War

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