What Parts of Us Can Do with Parts of Each Other (and When): Some parts of this text

Abstract

An egalitarian understanding of the artist as somebody else than the very one who enables participation, requires us to re-think time in the theory and practice of performance. We must seek ways of entrusting the present of collectivity to the collectives: of socialising (in the Marxist sense) the definition and regulation of time. The article presents ideas to meet such a challenge: I argue that performers should address the people in their audiences as co-professionals, as people who know how to perform and how to self-organize in various collectivities and communities. Along these lines, I offer a re-interpretation of Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre and learning play (Lehrstück) model where the playwright caters to the players, delivering a script they can use for the purposes of (political) practice. With the step from Debord's Society of the Spectacle to the performance society and its post-Fordist cultures of work-life, reclaiming the political implications of service becomes a task for performance art: How to offer ways of participating that do not simply adopt the ideologies of ‘prosumerism’ but develop a different notion of doing something for others, one that supports their ways of doing? How to activate the democratic potential of participation without getting absorbed in governmental strategies that reimburse the alienated citizens of nation states with moderate quanta of power in exchange for their performative compliance with what will happen anyway? Taking up some thoughts by Irit Rogoff, I am proposing a concept of synchronization as an occasional, transitory dynamics of mutual attuning that takes the divisibility of every individual as its point of departure: the fact that our attention is always divided, simultaneously attached to various people, things or events, which at every moment connects us to more than one collective, and forever keeps us from becoming the integral part of one.

PART 1

[…] As long as people occupy the position of the artist who conceives of, plans, arranges, directs and possibly controls participation in performance, participation will start and end with imagined collectives and their imagined behaviours. Reality will be what will have happened in-between the imagined and the imagined. […] The artist's powerful imagination, hitherto a valuable asset in the co-competitive adventure called art, suddenly becomes an obstacle because it is always ready, indeed greedy, to take possession of the present of participation. One crucial task for a critical analysis of participatory dynamics in art would thus be to reassess the value system that reveres vision, creativity, originality, challenge, daring etc. That does not necessarily mean to ‘think out the artist’, as Jan Ritsema proposed in a panel discussion at a Berlin conference in April 2011. Rather, on a slightly different scale, we – a ‘we’ that welcomes artists – should allow the artist to be thought of as somebody else than the one who enables participation. Re-thinking time in the theory and practice of performance, we should seek ways of entrusting the present of collectivity to the collectives: of socializing (in a sense of that word not far from the Marxist) the definition and regulation of time. […]

If being an artist requires you to have an idea of the collective that might be your audience and eventually turn into something other than an audience, wouldn't it be a better idea to address the people as performers – i.e., to address them as your co-professionals, as people who know how to perform and who know how to organize themselves in the course of a performance? Dana Gooley makes an interesting observation as he investigates the history of jam sessions in jazz from the 1930s to the 1950s. The ‘porous’ collective of jamming musicians where everybody can ‘sit in’, where leading and supporting roles change, where playing is based on listening and responding to the others, and where decisions are made in improvisational interactions building on spontaneous alliances, has repeatedly been praised as a model of the democratic political process. But did jamming cultivate such democratic virtues, it could, Gooley argues, because the musicians did not play for an audience. The performers themselves took the place of the audience – they were playing for each other and their like, and their knowing that the others both on-and off-stage all knew how to perform on a roughly similar level, allowed them to let loose, to let the collective organize itself and let participation happen. This aristocratic subculture was interrupted when jam sessions became popular and started to draw bigger audiences. […]

A contempt for the too-many, rooted deep in our history, may advise us to see this as one more piece of evidence that equality is only possible among a chosen few. […] I want to advocate a different interpretation of performer-toperformer equality […] that inverts the exclusive setting of the jazz jam session, turning the circle inside-out, as it were: Instead of tolerating newcomers only on condition that their display of performing skills convince the performers who already inhabit the venue, performers could make it their job (and part of their performance) to find out about the performing skills of all who come to join them or happen to be around. Instead of occupying the place of the audience, they could become aware of what's being performed among those who are in the audience. Instead of acting on a given definition of what skills count and what counts as skills, the performers' collective could be willing to accommodate the definition of the art to every new participant, allowing for his or her knowledge and skills to influence what ‘performance’ means in their case. […] While people agree to become the audience they are already organizing themselves in a multiplicity of collective forms, continue to do so during the event and continue to do so in their respective ways when the event is over. If ‘the performance’ names a relation, or relationality, of organized events and selforganized processes of participation, calling something by this name should cue artists to develop a sensorium for those more or less latent or manifest collectivities. The maxim then would be: Becoming the audience so the audience can stop having to play the audience with everything its members perform.

PART 2

[…] People today are practiced performers in many respects. They are work performers and social performers – socio-economic performers in fact, since ‘performance’ has proved most operative as a ‘stratum of power and knowledge’ (McKenzie 2001: 18) where it synthesizes economic and social values, introduces joint measures for profiteering and inter-subjective esteem. […] Convinced of epic theatre's potential to transform the theatre-goers into ‘Fachmänner’, experts by virtue of audience practice, like soccer fans, [Bertolt] Brecht expected spectators whose marvel would be founded on know-how. Understanding that collective emotions were the dimension of living where political intelligence was most needed (and where it would be most efficacious, if in effect), he fathomed response from an audience whose members followed the performance with a certain professional attitude could replace the emotional reflex to being overwhelmed by something of an irrational and superior power with the respectful recognition and celebration of equals' strengths and weaknesses. […] Brecht's approach to audience and performers gains new plausibility today because the transformation of the audience into a collective of co-professionals is actually taking place – albeit not because a theatrical avant-garde successfully imposes it upon its visitors, but as a broad social and economic process that has altered the very constitution of professionalism and thereby put art into a position different from what Guy Debord envisioned in this Society of the Spectacle. Although we certainly have not left behind the system outlined by Debord, where communication, the most general human activity, is subjected to specialist authority (the mass media, the managers and consultants, the analysts and therapists …), a shift from the society of the spectacle to the performance society […] occurs through a change within the principle of dividing labour: In post-Fordist cultures of work-life, the division of labour turns inward on itself, as it were. By conceiving of work as essentially performative, post-Fordism steers production towards a producing without proper product that could be separated from the communication process, according to Paolo Virno (1996: 189–212). […] Focusing on exploitation of a performative-communicational ‘General Intellect’,1 a set of commonplaces of how to interact with others so as to be judged competent for what one does, post-Fordism has rendered the lines that divide professions as permeable as never before in the history of capitalism.

For professional performing artists and performance artists, this does not only mean that their collaborative techniques and presentation skills are being scanned by organization theorists who eagerly transfer concepts like ‘jamming’ from the art world to the company workplace. It also opens up chances for reappropriations of the economic-turned-on-thesocial. Reclaiming the political implications of service in art, may be one of them: […] [Q]uite a number of artists have started to ask themselves how they can perform in a manner the selforganized collectives within the audience will find helpful. How does one assist people to organize themselves in a way they want to – in a way they do organize, i.e., that conveys a want, a wish, a will? How does one support their effective ways of living, acting, working, communicating with each other, without pretending one isn't an artist and simply happens to be there as one of them?

‘Whatever you do, don't do it yourself’ went the chorus of German pop band Tocotronic's 2010 single Macht es nicht selbst. The attack songwriter Dirk von Lowtzow rides against social capitalism's strategies to engage customers through offers of participation in the lyrics is interesting not least because the opposition against ‘prosumerism’ leads to a rediscovery of service's liberating forces. This leaves theory and practice with the task to distinguish the liberating from the dulling in service – a task that is not so much difficult as we are unaccustomed to it, having granted capitalist economy and Religion the right to split the monopoly on making things easier for others between them. […] In [Brecht's] notes on the learning play […] we encounter an author who is basically a service provider. The playwright caters to the players, delivering a script they can use to practice. Brecht wanted the learning play to be a tool for practising political thinking and acting through ‘exercises in suppleness of dialectics’.2 Performances were not necessarily to happen in front of an audience, though he declared spectators' reactions could be ‘utilized’ (see Brecht 1993: 351-2). The disparity between, say, Rirkrit Tiravanija's gastronomic maintenance in art venues and Brecht's learning play writer illustrates two radically different artistic approaches to service: One artist does the work of a cook and a social worker in an environment that obliges visitors to think of the service he provides as art. The other does the work of an artist and invites the players he serves with his play to think of art as a service to political praxis. One does things for others they could do just as well, while the choice of location tacitly communicates that being art, these things come with an added-value […]. The other does things for others they could not do as he can, since he is a professional author, somebody who has spent a considerable amount of time and industry on learning how to work with language until now he understands how to make text work for the purposes of practice.

The players for whom learning plays are scripted shall be amateurs in acting. However, they do not enter the stage or practice room as non-professionals but carry with them their particular biographies, including their social and job-related proficiencies. By excluding the profession of the actor, Brecht's learning play eliminates the X which in bourgeoiscapitalist culture is the shifting signifier of labour division: the profession that devises the competence to represent, imitate, ironize, and hence render amiable, every other work profile because it incorporates from a professional activity only […] what is key to perform the performing. Writing for non-actors only, Brecht subtracts from the spectre of professions the one that allows the division of labour to totalize itself and advance to the unquestionable state of a universal structure. […] Brecht did not anticipate the post-Fordist turn towards performance as the general par excellence. But he did formulate and test a dramatic art which, by canvassing performing into a reality determined by the division of labour, divests performance of its econo-metaphysical transcendence and makes the social and political effects of that division available to the players.

[…] While artists are not wrong to probe what they can do for the people, they should be on guard that they don't do it in their place – even, or especially, where this ‘in their place’ implies that said people are requested to move in and participate in what the artists have initiated. Performance art can be a laboratory or practicing ground for forms of collective acting; and the status ‘art’ can come to the help of political and social undertakings. But it would be a grave mistake if we expected art to shoulder the load of political action or social exchange like a sherpa, to offer this as a service for those of us who can't get their shit together or find it too burdensome to do something for real. The lightness and easiness art can pass on to political action and social behaviour is of a different kind than filling in for people who have forgotten, or pretend they don't remember, how to act.

PART 3

How far is participatory art from the […] endeavours to reimburse the citizen with moderate quanta of power in exchange for performative compliance with what will happen? Before art theory could suitably meditate this question, governmental institutions had already given an answer: Communes started to hire artists, paying them with money from funds for social and education projects. […] Governance discovers the potential of performing to generate trust, because trust in artistic performance seems one of the few things people from opposite ends of the social stratum have in common. Do the economically successful practice how to work like jazz virtuosos, the ghettoists rap no less passionately, devising counter-virtuosities in their enclaves of street-cultural challenging, which are ready (just maybe a little reluctant at first) to be connected to the socio-economic mainstream. Its equidistance from ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture’ recommends performance art for the position of the great mediator.

[…] [T]he even more perplexing question artists face today is if participation does not represent a hope to compensate an alienation similar to that from State politics, on art's own proper territory: an alienation instituted by the ontological split between artistic producing and other forms of production in what Jacques Rancière has labelled the ‘aesthetic regime’. […] Kant, Schiller and later Hannah Arendt deduced a political pedagogic from th[e] egalitarian potential inherent in aesthetic pleasure, putting strong hopes on the unsociable socializing that evolves from aesthetic judgement: […] The collectives incited by a shared passion for art works would create environments for individuals to internalize democratic virtues. Unlike ideologically biased educational programmes embedded in whatever the State controls, they would emancipate people by addressing them as emancipated – by making them become familiar with an anybody-ness ingrained in subjectivity, an in-difference of subjective self-appreciation against its outside where the I appears as one more example of a human being. The subject of aesthetic experience is, as Rancière explains, ‘not the population in its entirety, the intermingling of all classes, but a subject without particular identity, whose name is “anybody”’ (Rancière 2006: 78). […]

Aesthetics sets up collectivity by providing a symbolic economy that enables, and eventually motivates, individuals to imagine themselves as belonging to a community of art appreciators. It does not manage crowds. From its beginnings in Speculative Idealism to the Frankfurt School's analyses of twentieth-century mass culture, aesthetic theory has always found it hard to come to terms with the multitudes that were really there where an aesthetic community was supposed to be in coming. […] Herbert Blau touched the core of this problem when in The Audience he noticed a growing discrepancy between two imperatives theatre had adopted in modernity: the aesthetic imperative never to think of the recipient when you make a work of art, and the relational imperative to think of theatre, and all performing, as something that only is because it is perceived by an audience (see Blau 1991: 36). […]

Where performers pulled people from their bourgeois audience out of what they thought was passivity, coercing spectators into joining the onstage spectacle in the 1970s and 1980s wave of ‘participatory theatre’, theory and practice showed little sense for the complications of such a moment when a being is ripped from the present of aesthetic perception and cast into that of performing. Exposed to the remaining audience members, the participants had to doff the silhouette of the ‘anybody’ and display their shapes of somebodies in full nakedness. […] The brutality of this moment introduces us to a radical break between aesthetics and participation practice: I cannot participate as anybody. Who wants me to participate (or wants to let someone like me participate) may address me in every way except as a subject of aesthetic experience. There is, strictly speaking, no participation in an aesthetic event. […] The present of participation needs to be reflected in respect to organization and its political implications because it refuses to process the indifference of aesthetic subjectivity. Without an option to organize in a collective way that helps me stay in my place as a particular equal, I may be hailed into ideological subjectivity at the threshold from aesthetic perception to participation, exactly like Althusser described it in his example of the policeman who shouts, ‘Hey, you —!’ […]

Rancière […] maintains that only by abstinence from speculation about personal or collective effects will the creator of an artwork be able to keep clear the place of the recipient to host the ‘anybody’-Me of aesthetico-political equality. In practice, this dragoons the producer to inhabit that place himself. […] The work will continue to be revisited by its producer in his identity as a recipient-Other for all of the time I, a(n other) recipient, am experiencing it. […] Every constellation of collectivity that unfolds in the evolution of aesthetic experience originates from this intimacy of recipient-subject and artist-as-recipient-subject. Where I happen to come across someone else who has read the same book, looked at the same painting, revolved around the same sculpture or attended the same performance, I cannot help but feel that the two of us (can) know each other only because, and to the extent that, every one of us has been with this intimate companion. Turned ‘recipient’ – i.e., turned ghost, haunting the site of his work's presentation – the artist always comes between us. […] What Derrida wrote on the Politics of Friendship applies here: Under the spell of aesthetic experience, the other visitors to a work and me are doomed to be like brothers, kin to an absent who, eternally returning, forces us to be the best friends and the worst enemies with nothing this side of either extreme, for all the apparent peacefulness of disinterested pleasure. […]

Strongly though its versions may differ, the concept of aesthetic experience posits that a work of art deserves a virtually infinite quantity and/or intensity of attention. Once it's been decided that an object may be perceived as art, it is worth spending my life on exploring it. […] Infinity must be implied in finite gestures. The whole cultural architecture that has been constructed around the cherished (non-)act of aesthetic perception is designed to enable this implication. Participation gets in the way of implying my faith to infinity in finite doses of attention, as it insists on a fidelity of the finite to the finite. Participation is demanding, the way a casual acquaintance can be who refuses to be treated too confidentially but also doesn't agree to remain a nameless stranger. It demands of me to nurture a respect for the fact that you are there, around the time-space of the same occasion, without an author's ghost as our host (while the artist may be there too, or you or I may be the artist). It demands that I invest the pleasures occasioned by an art presentation into a practice of living together, the stress on living. […] It charges me to be less than singular-plural: to give less than myself when paying attention, and to expect less in return than the community of those who have none, incorporated into an event.

[…] Participation impels us to acknowledge attention economy in art. Which is not to say that it forces us to accept a given definition of what ‘economy’ means in regard to attention (a competitive zero-sum game driven by scarcity etc.). Quite the contrary, experiments with participation in art will allow us to test what grades of sufficiency or affluence ways to relate finite attention to finite attention can achieve on a collective level. To participate … describes a disposition where the limitations of living come to assist people in doing something worthwhile. As it scales down the existential drama of encounter to a polyphonic tale of odd proximities, and thus dodges the embodiment of infinity into the random communities that evolve à propos art, participation provokes us to ask what kind of freedom may be inherent in that finiteness […]: a freedom that is not a temporary relief from finiteness, suspending the real of the now so I can delve into the possible and aggrandize the instant, make its volatility more precious by accumulating possibilities – but an effect of the very reality of randomness: a freedom to (be) like this, for the number of us whose rhythms of doing what we do synchronize in the most terminable, but also loosest, of presents.

PART 4

[…] Irit Rogoff […] proposes to exchange the privileged moment of an encounter when the duration of social interactions is condensed into the focused, and unfathomably ‘deep’, instantaneousness of revelation through art, for the ‘experience of the lived multiplicity of positionings’.3 […] The ‘origin’ of a collectivity that opens up the realm of aesthetic perception to participation, without shouting ‘Hey, you —!’ to people in the crowd, may not be in the artist's creative decisions, the curator's decisions on selection, hanging and installation, or the performers' decision on how much co-activity or co-producing of the event they grant their audience. It may be in the very diversion of an art show visitor's attention. There is a multiplicity genuine to perception that comes from my indisposition, or rather disinclination, to focus entirely, as one, on one entire object. And every collective constellation that arises around a timespace permeated by the possibility of aesthetic pleasure invites moves to realize this multiplicity in a form of collectivity that lives up diversion. […] Rogoff adopts Agamben's term ‘whatever being’ to distinguish this (in-)disposition of collectivity from ideas and ideals of the community art discourse conventionally imposes on the real situation when a writer uses ‘we’ in a review: […]. Do I follow the alignment of my distraction, let my attention be divided and divide […] – then the distribution of those who are present in a state of detached spatiotemporal proximity, moving around the art objects, past them, in-between them on their distinct, incidentally similar paths, will irrupt into the constitution of art. Every object, be it art objects, people or whatever happens to appear in the space of appearance of this ‘around’, will only get a part of the attention, because the senses and the sense are no longer gravitating towards a mighty work but roam about, scattering equally, i.e., in random odd measures. Where participating distributes whateverness, imparting it to whomever comes along whoever's way, being a participant in art re-defines itself as the performance of ‘whatever being’. This performance still calls for techniques and terminologies to be explored. […]

In Rogoff's example (2005: 117–34) conversation (communication in a state of light distraction) helps to work whatever being as the organizational principle of a collective. […] Participation in collective states of whatever being includes all activities or ways of conduct that have something of that ‘man with a cigar in the stalls of a Shakespeare performance’ who, Brecht said, could ‘initiate the breakdown of occidental art’.4 Activities like smoking, which pleasurably divide attention, allow the ‘divisibility of the individual’ to have an actual effect on a situation. They accentuate the individual's synchronous ‘belonging to several collectives’.5 Brecht's stress on the continuous coincidence of several collectives in an individual's bearing (‘several’ indicating a finite and real plurality) is an important clue to understanding the nature of what I have called performative freedom: The freedom participation hands to the individual is of a different kind than that of a subject-I's imaginary resistance against the social reality of living (which aesthetic experience then transposes to a community of higher, lighter order). The performative freedom of participating consists in nothing more prestigious than the liberties I take when I follow my diverse inclinations, admitting to the division of belonging itself.

[…] An approach to collectivity that does the reality of participation justice should not project the performativity of dividing onto a structure of part-and-whole. Participatory communication means communicating in parts. In contrast to situations of being-involved or being-immersed, on a scene of participation there is no whole for two reasons, the relation of which, I think, can help us to specify the participatory: There is no integral collective whose part I become (neither in respect to a whole identified in terms of representation, like ‘the group’, ‘the party’ or ‘the audience’ nor to a performative whole like ‘the exhibition’, ‘the performance’, ‘the spectacle’, ‘the community of experience’). There is only an around, a mutual dynamics of revolving that keeps centres of attention at variance. And there is no I who wholly indulges itself. Modifying a famous phrase by Heinrich von Kleist, one might say: It is not I who participate with a part of my attention, but rather a certain partition of my attention that performs participation. If to participate means to participate in something, the allocation of power in processes of participation concerns the definition of this ‘in’. Divided attention performatively claims access to (co-)defining the network of relations the ‘in’ encompasses. […]

PART 5

[…] Meditating on the spatio-temporal identity of theatre in the twenty-first century, Samuel Weber quotes Pierre Lévy's proposition that today we live in a world where ‘synchronization substitutes the unity of place, where interconnections supersede the unity of time’. In such a world, Weber adds, places and times by no means become ‘indeterminate and blurred, but determined in a different way’ (Weber 1998: 33, my translation). What, then, is synchronization? […]

[…] (see Pikovsky et al. 2003) […] Synchronization is a process of attuning different rhythms of movement or action, which is mutual and can never be traced back to a single origin (unlike one-way forms of influence, like resonance). It happens betweens ‘oscillators’, i.e., between agents that each generate individual rhythms. It requires a medium that transmits information in all directions between all parties involved. […] Whereas in its conventional use the word ‘synchronicity’ refers to an idea of timelines' exact matching, […] self-induced synchronization never leads to perfect uniformity but always retains a difference between the rhythms, although these differences can be fine and below the threshold of our perception. Collective rhythmoi, spatio-temporal forms achieved through synchronization, may be stable for a certain time, acquiring a pattern-like quality, but as synchronization processes do not establish an entity on a higher level, which could eventually sublate the synchronized agents and convert them into parts of a whole that is more than its parts, any collective constellation that evolves from such processes will be transitory and reversible.

[…] Synchronization is effected through the transmission of information, not of energy (Pikovsky et al. 2003: 8ff). The mutual influences between movements or actions in synchronization processes do not create bonds between the agents, that is to say. The undeniable fact that participants of a performance or art event affect each other, and that those influences have the potential to instantiate strong alterations in their ways of feeling, thinking and behaving, shall not mislead us into assuming a substantial connectedness (as the popular metaphor of ‘energy flowing’ between performers and audience in ‘live’ performance situations implies). Synchronization requires and verifies that the people are separated and energetically independent, or the economy of their interdependence in terms of energy does not control their collective organization. The mutual attuning is an effect of dispersed separateness, and will cease where dispersal collapses into stickum. […]

The concept of synchronization acquaints us with a present […] of reactions-to-reactions that turns out to be a loose, casual, even somewhat sloppy present. No strict punctual presence compelling individuals to be co-present with their entire bodies and minds should they want to have anything to do with each other, but a presence relatively unperturbed by urgency, which tolerates a considerable measure of delay among those who communicate in its state. This comes with an offer to liberate our thinking of the instant from the mighty metaphor of the flash (the rhetorical stronghold of making time serve the imaginary by embrangling its experience in imagined energy equations). A tradition in occidental philosophy and poetics has us equate volatility with an extreme, quasi-infinite velocity of time. As every one of us must hasten in order to catch up with a fugitive present forever ahead, living together appears difficult, bordering on impossible: It seems to require additional concentration, a great deal of self-discipline, in spending time with others no less than in saving it from or for them. Deviating from this line of metaphysics […], we might start to ask what ‘present’ means if, for attuning rhythms of action, it is sufficient to react in a state of diverted attention: to react a little later and from a more peripheral position. Maybe even later and more off-centre. […] The dynamics of synchronized collectives […] show us a portrait of the moment we never get to see unless we stop conceiving of the collective on the assumptions of what an egocentric philosophy claims to know about time, and apprehend the present from the collective organization it hosts.

[…] Although, or precisely because, synchronized collectivity organizes largely by the powers of pleasure, taking on penchants for decisive turns, it would be euphemistic to depict the collective constellations that arise as exclusively innocent, beautiful and creative, in the fashion Toni Negri and Michael Hardt praise the multitude. Quite the contrary […]. The happiness of such collective undertakings comes from a lightness and easiness that has, or is, a sense of direction. But that does not mean that people are headed for a Utopian better. The better is there, then, to be discerned.

The struggling for equality takes an unfamiliar direction where artists and art theorists are brave enough to expose their work, their methods and techniques of governing the possible, to the reality of synchronization. […] Bill Dietz argues that composing must not ignore, or look down on, the ‘quasi-autonomous’ practices that have evolved from listeners self-organizing in various collective formations. Yet he also notices a problem here: ‘For all the innovation of listeners' usages of the musical, the temporal, social and situational boundedness of listening tends to reinscribe listeners into precisely the order from which it promised to be an escape.’ At the other end of every move away from standards […], there enters a revenant of Mme Bovary's pleasure in hearing a singer who ‘bravely attacked her cavatina in G major’: The dire factuality of normalization is always ready to fill the void created by an absence of norms. The critical difference that tells equality from an unanimous subjection to normality in self-organized forms of distributing value is one between pleasure and pleasure. It is a critique of pleasure, if we accept that the critical in respect to collectivity is not about standing apart from the collective, commenting on the flaws of its organization from the spot of an impartial observer, but consists in differentiating, in bringing in differences through participation: ‘überlegtes Andersspielen’ – deliberate playing-it-differently, to quote Brecht one last time (1993: 351). […]

Notes

¹ A term by Marx that Virno interprets in a new fashion (see Virno 1996: 194–5).

² ‘Geschmeidigkeitsübungen in Dialektik’ (see Brecht 1972: 261).

³ My quote[ ] [is] taken from a recording of a lecture on The Implicated Rogoff gave at the conference ‘Performing the Future’ at the House of World Cultures, Berlin, on 9 July 2010.

⁴ ‘Ich behaupte sogar, daß ein einziger Mann mit einer Zigarre im Parkett einer Shakespeare-Aufführung den Untergang der abendländischen Kunst herbeiführen könnte’ (Brecht 1992a: 134).

⁵ ‘Und am einzelnen ist gerade seine Teilbarkeit zu betonen (als Zugehörigkeit zu mehreren Kollektiven)’ (Brecht 1992b: 359).