As Agamben indicates in the 1989 preface to the English translation of Infancy and History, the key question that unites his disparate explorations is that of what it means for language to exist, what it means that “I speak.” In taking up this question throughout his work, and most explicitly in texts such as Infancy and History, Language and Death, and most recently, The Open, Agamben reinvigorates consideration of philosophical anthropology through a critical questioning of the metaphysical presuppositions that inform it, and in particular, the claim that the defining essence of man is that of having language. In taking up this question, Agamben proposes the necessity of an “experimentum linguae” in which what is experienced is language itself, and the limits of language become apparent not in the relation of language to a referent outside of it, but in the experience of language as pure self-reference. … Infancy and History … attempts to grasp and articulate the implications of such an experience of language as such. Consisting of a series on interconnected essays on concepts such as history, temporality, play, and gesture, Infancy and History provides an importance entrance to Agamben’s later work on politics and ethics, particularly in the eponymous essay of the edition on the concept of infancy understood as an experiment of language as such. In this, Agamben argues that the contemporary age is marked by the destruction or loss of experience, in which the banality of everyday life cannot be experienced per se but only undergone, a condition which is in part brought about by the rise of modern science and the split between the subject of experience and of knowledge that it entails. Against this destruction of experience, which is also extended in modern philosophies of the subject such as Kant and Husserl, Agamben argues that the recuperation of experience entails a radical rethinking of experience as a question of language rather than of consciousness, since it is only in language that the subject has its site and origin. Infancy, then, conceptualizes an experience of being without language, not in a temporal or developmental sense of preceding the acquisition of language in childhood, but rather, as a condition of experience that precedes and continues to reside in any appropriation of language. (Mills; emphasis mine)

• Mills, Catherine (2005) Agamben, Giorgio [The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]. [Online]. Available from: http://www.iep.utm.edu/agamben/ [Accessed 27 March 2010].

1. Technology has meant that we are creating more, apparently ephemeral things, which take up less physical space, but more of our time (by their quantity).
2. Things always take up time – but it was time with a particular purpose. For example, we would make time to go to galleries, which would then be dedicated to experiencing art, art-time for art.
3. (Maybe we got frustrated if the art makes demands from outside of art. Somehow cheating us of our time).1
4. These thoughts arose from time spent browsing through my blog reader, and not having enough time in general, but this general tendency towards less physical things and experiences is a good thing, maybe one day we will end up with no trace outside of some digital signature, and THAT reminds me of Flusser:

… to write is structurally the gesture of a historical and scientific being-in-the-world. Should this gesture fall into disuse, (and there are many symptoms at present which would seem to suggest this), the universe of history and science will fall into oblivion, or at least it will cease to be the universe we live in. Because that universe is a “fiction”, (the result of the technique of writing), and materializes only in the form of surfaces covered by letters. Thus if the art of writing is lost, it will not be missed by future generations. But for us, who are programmed by it and for it, not to be able to write means that life is not worth living.2

1. [I ended up with too many "quoted" words which I converted to italics for a change. I always think words need further clarification, and putting them in quotes suffices to indicate this, and I somehow think this is then enough explanation.]
2. Flusser, Vilém, The Gesture of Writing. Retrieved 16 June, 2009, from http://www.flusserstudies.net/pag/08/the-gesture-of-writing.pdf

My work is about the body. My figures are never engaged in dramatic physical battles, it’s about the little gestures between bodies…The imaginary interests me. Eroticism is when something hasn’t yet happened…»

• Dumas, Marlene (1996), Marlene Dumas in dialogue with Gavin Jantjes 1996,
  Iniva – Institute of International Visual Arts. Retrieved 10 June, 2009, from http://www.iniva.org/publications_shop/voices_on_art_amp_culture/a_fruitful_incoherence/marlene_dumas_in_dialogue_with_gavin_jantjes

There were a couple of things which interested me that I’d like to write about. First I wanted to take a quick look at the last text in the book: Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers (Barthes, 1971, pp. 190–215), in which he lays out the distinct roles that these take in relation to the social production and activity of the Text.

I have to admit this text confused me a little, with its serial nature, its plethora of discrete sections. I found it difficult to grasp an overall meaning or direction to the piece (more on that later).

Barthes speakes here of an entity named the ‘writer,’ which he determines as sitting apart in some way from the other two entities mentioned, the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘teacher’ who are both distinguished by the fact that they speak. And the latter two are also joined through a “fundamental tie between teaching and speech,” traced back to Rhetoric. He feels this sequence of entities warrants further analysis because of a political crisis in teaching at that time (the article was published in 1971 and makes reference to the revolutionary atmosphere amongst the post-’68 student body), Lacanian analysis of (empty) speech, and the development of an “obvious” “opposition between speech and writing.” (p. 190)

To be clear, the writer is understood not as “a social value” (p. 193) but as a practice, and is contrasted to the teacher/speaker as one whose message cannot be summarized, this being “a condition the writer shares with the madman, the chatterbox and the mathematician but which precisely writing . . . has as its task to specify.” (p. 194)

Writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible (a word that can be understood in the sense it has when applied to a child). (p. 190)

Speech is presented as being irreversable, in contrast to writing: “it is ephemeral speech which is indelible, not monumental writing.” (p. 190) To be understood the spoken word must be clear and reductive of meaning, it must adhere to the “Law present in every act of speech” (p. 191) for its intelligibility. This adherance to the Law presents the speaker as Authority, with all the hierarchization implicit in the term, in Barthes’ examples specifically that between the teacher and the student (body).

Speech as such remains caught in this position of creating it’s own hierarchy by its own nature. The speaker finds that the act of speaking in itself actively subverts any value it might have as a revolutionary act.

Instead Barthes proposes writing as value, presenting this value as being “the materialist field par excellance” (p. 213) Materialism for Barthes is one of “the two great epistemes of modernity,” and he asks, and perhaps this is the main thrust of this essay, how can materialism, “the economy of relations of production,” and Freudian dialectics, “the economy of the subject,” be made to intersect? Inevitably this leads to the question: “what is the relation between class determination and the unconscious?” (p. 212)

He proposes that the answer is by language, by discourse. As I understand it, he is then saying that even if the proletariat lacks a language or a discourse, it is still through the unconscious of the speech of the bourgeois or the intellectual, as the Other of their discourses, that they are represented. I’m really not sure if I understand that correctly though, it’s a very confusing passage for me.

Barthes provides the following (perhaps) by way of an explanation, proposing a “mass gesture” available in writing alone. The final sentence seems to reflect the idea of the “explosion of meaning” which Barthes mentions in other essays and which has parallels with Deleuze, I think:

Though issuing from Marxism and psychoanalysis, the theory of writing tries to displace – without breaking with – that place of origin: on the one hand, it rejects the temptation of the signified, that is the deafness to language, to the excessive return of its effects; on the other, it is opposed to speech in that it is not transferrential and outplays – admittedly partially, in extremely narrow, particularist social limits even – the traps of ‘dialogue.’ There is in writing the beginnings of a mass gesture: against all discourses (modes of speech, instrumental writings, rituals, protocols, social symbolics), writing alone today, even if still in the form of luxury, makes of language something atopical, without place. It is this dispersion, this unsituation, which is materialist.

I also think there may be some connection between this and Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer, where it has become the writer’s responsibility to produce the conditions for the production of other writers amongst the proletariat. Benjamin’s text, although post-Freud, is pre-Lacan (it was originally published in 1934) and perhaps inevitably lacks a specific address to the unconscious which is central for Barthes:

What matters therefore is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, that is, readers or spectators into collaborators. (Benjamin, 1934)

end

Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers, as a whole, seems to lack consistency. The strategy of breaking it up into discrete chunks, while a typical stylistic trait of Barthes’, has the tendency to lead to a juddering of the arguments presented. Unlike, say, Foucault, rather than presenting a clear, continuous (unitary?) theory, one point leading to another by a deductive, logical process, Barthes presents the stages of his argument as so many anecdotes which come across almost as extended aphorisms, leading to a feeling of disjunction in the reading.

This is the point, I would assume. One could say his writing is attempting to exemplify the theory it expounds – this “dispersion,” this “unsituation” of writing.

• BARTHES, Roland (1971). Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers. First published as ‘Ecrivains, intellectuels, professeurs’, Tel Quel 47, Autumn 1971. Transl. Stephen Heath. In Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977. pp. 190–215.
• BENJAMIN, Walter (1934). The Author as Producer. Address delivered at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, 27 April 1934. In FRASCINA, Francis and HARRISON, Charles (eds.). Modern Art and Modernism. A Critical Anthology. London: Routledge, 1982.

• AGAMBEN, Giorgio (1991). Kommerell, or On Gesture. In Potentialities: Collected Essays on Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. pp. 77–85.
• AGAMBEN, Giorgio (1992). Notes on Gesture. In Means without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. pp. 48–59.
• ARISTOTLE (1976). The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Hugo Tredennick. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
• BISHOP, Claire (2005). No pictures, please: Claire Bishop on the art of Tino Sehgal. In Artforum International vol. XLIII, no. 9 (May).
• FRENZEL, Sebastian (2005). “Ceci n’est pas le vide” An encounter with the artist of transience. In signandsight.com [Internet] 9 June 2005. Available from <http://www.signandsight.com/features203.html>. [Last accessed 28 March 2007].
• GABRI, Rene (2003). Cramming It All In at the Venice Biennale. In 16beaver [Internet] 1 July 2003. Available from http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/ archives/000293.php. [Last accessed 23 April 2007].
• GRIFFIN, Tim (2005). Tino Sehgal: An interview. In Artforum International vol. XLIII, no. 9 (May).
• MOISDON, Stéphanie (2003). «moi je dis, moi je dis….». In Jan Mot Gallery newspaper [Internet] no. 36, March–April 2003. Available from <http://www.janmot.com/tino_sehgal/text.php>. [Last accessed 28 March 2007].
• SEHGAL, Tino (2002). Untitled statement. In I promise it’s political [Exhibition catalogue]. Cologne: Museum Ludwig.
• de SELBY (2006). Tino Sehgal versus a world full of objects. In Global Warming your cold heart [Internet] 6 July 2006. Available from <http://globalwarmingyourcoldheart.blogspot.com/2006/07/tino-sehgal-versus-world-full-of.html>. [Last accessed 28 March 2007].
• STEEDS, Lucy (2005). Exhibition Review: Tino Sehgal at the ICA. In Art Monthly no. 284 (March). pp. 28–29.

Sehgal’s pieces seem a good fit for Agamben’s gestic politics – they deliberately eschew a product or remnant of any kind, and implicate the audience in a perpetual game of the confusion of roles with the other participants of the piece. The pieces themselves do not live outside of memory and make the audience physically aware of their role within the institutional context of the gallery or museum and within the piece itself.

Returning to the original source of this reference to Agamben’s theory of gesture—Claire Bishop’s article in Artforum—she claims that ‘gesture’ is what is produced in these pieces, as opposed to the ‘deproduction’ of materiality (Bishop, 2005). However, I am not certain if understanding gesture in the realm of production/deproduction is correct, and I’d point to an understanding of the role of gesture as outside of any progress-oriented activity – something which production/deproduction still seems to cling to. To speak of gesture as a ‘production’ seems to deny its action to prevent production, leaving the audience and interpreter in a state of being-together in the formation of the work of art as forever being but not becoming.

My final question regarding gesture is: can it be seen as a positive or ‘worthwhile’ thing (by which I mean an act that is worth doing in the first place).

In itself the concept of positive or negative seems to have no place when discussing gesture, in the same way that production/deproduction suggests some kind of progress towards a good or bad state. Agamben sees the act of the pure gesture as the ultimate act of human beings allowing their actions to transcend any reading based on means and ends. He says that, in this state:

Consigned to their supreme gesture, works live on, like creatures bathed in the light of the Last Day, surviving the ruin of their formal garment and their conceptual meaning. (Agamben, 1991, p. 80)

As the supreme gesture of the pieces, we may see this activity as a process of actualising of those involved in the piece – not least the artist himself. Tino Sehgal actualises himself through the pieces at the same time as the interpreters, audience, reviewers, etc. As Aristotle says: “existence is to everyone an object of choice and love, and we exist through activity (because we exist by living and acting); and the maker of the work exists, in a sense, through his activity.” (Aristotle, 1976, 1168a6–9) Gesture can be seen to fulfil this requirement of existence.
-end-

The pieces themselves are often described as being somewhat alienating, ostensibly welcoming the audience into their systems of play but ultimately they only confirm the difference and separation between those taking part in the piece. Again, Agamben suggests that the gesture lives individually, not really creating connection but highlighting the fact that communication—rather than taking place—is purely a matter of the existence of communication:

The gesture is . . . communication of a communicability. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality. (Agamben, 1992, p. 58)

Any affect is, as it were, purely internal to the person experiencing it, not something that the piece transfers:

“However compelling it may be for an Other, gesture never exists only for him; indeed, only insofar as it also exists for itself can it be compelling for the Other.” (Kommerell, quote in Agamben, 1991, p. 78)

Claire Bishop calls on Agamben’s claims for a gestural politics—seen as the purest form of politics—as coterminent with the activities in Sehgal’s sculptures. Gesture—in general, or the gestures taking place in Sehgal’s works—and it’s remnant in memory—as the requirement for existence of these works—puts the responsibility onto both the audience and the institution for the transmission and evocation—the life—of the works in the future.

But for Sehgal, the site of the piece is still absolutely critical. He has said for instance: “my work belongs in a museum.” (Sehgal, quoted in Frenzhel, 2005) This is not however in the sense of site specificity, whereby the piece works in particular geographic location and no other, but in a more general sense of the institutional function taking place around the piece, represented by the piece itself and the audience. Rather than being a repository of material objects, the museum is, for Sehgal, a place where one may influence discourse in the future perfect tense: “This will have been the past.” (Bishop, 2005)

. . . continuous involvement of the present with the past in creating further presents instead of an orientation towards eternity, and simultaneity of production and deproduction instead of economics of growth. (Sehgal, 2002, quoted in Bishop, 2005)

I think Bishop’s connection of Agamben with Sehgal works well. She draws attention to the theatrical nature of the works, in the sense that although they exist at all times when the gallery is open (rather than at specific ‘performance’ times) they address each viewer with a “specific and intensely subjective encounter, a fact that is reflected in the writing on his work to date (for the most part descriptive anecdotes . . .) and in the work’s ability to generate orally disseminated narratives.” (Bishop, 2005) Thinking of the gesture in relation to writing would mean that the writing would continue the mediality of the work, would become an extension into the world of the work itself.

Overall, the refusal of documentation can be seen as a method of control over the reception of the artwork, enforcing a situation whereby the only way to experience the artwork is to physically attend a presentation and the only way to pass it on is verbally or textually, outside the regime of the gallery or museum. But what does this mean when reviewers or the ‘public’ are the only ones to write about the pieces and their writings become the only available documentation? There must be an important difference between documentation provided or allowed by the artist and that generated by the visitor.

In a similar point to the one made by Moisdon above, Bishop also suggests that the writing could be seen as denying the pieces: “the weakest link in this conceptual fortress would seem to be the critic who commits the work to paper.” (Bishop, 2005) but this would be to misunderstand the action of the pieces. The writings are potential or imminent to the work—another product of the “motor” that the work represents—in that they “stand for and encircle the objective of [Sehgal’s] practice” (Bishop, 2005).

Writers attempting to discuss Sehgal’s work find themselves placed in a difficult situation, because the artist deliberately eschews any record of the work, which would seem to be an implicit prohibition on others too. By denying documentation the artist could perhaps be seen to key into strategies of immateriality in conceptual art or of site-specificity, which puts into question any re-creation of the work in another medium.

This problematic has been described as “attempting to give them a title, to describe or to list them, that is, to enter into rivalry with the form of the work itself, which is the affirmation of what it is.” (Moisdon, 2003) This can be misunderstood as an impasse in the process of addressing the works, if by writing about the work one somehow subverts Sehgal’s own attempt to prevent documentation.

Moisdon suggests that the form of the work is also to title themselves, to be a description of their own state and that by doing the same in another venue, she is somehow performing an ‘anomalous’ activity. There is obviously an expectation here that is being thwarted through this anomaly – the expectation that the work of art presents itself as a complete thing-in-itself, something akin to an object (if not objectified). This would run counter to Sehgal’s aims with the works.

Sehgal himself makes clear that writing is a necessary part of the work, as part of its reception:

There was once a review of my work in your magazine in which the writer wondered if, in the very act of writing about my work, she was necessarily betraying it. That’s complete nonsense in my view. As with any other art, my work wants to communicate and is dependent on its reception. (Sehgal, quoted in Griffin, 2005)

[He] seems less concerned with subverting or challenging global capitalism, and the art institution, than with making them freshly visible, open to new possibility. (Steeds, 2005)

Recognising his interdependence with the system within which he works and revealing this interdependence to critical analysis serves as Sehgal’s method. The works do not try to get away from their embeddedness or pretend that they are autonomous within these structures, a choice that Sehgal sees as naive and misguided. Rather, they play with these structures, in an attempt to make them more obvious to the participants.

Play is an important subject for Sehgal. Taking as an example his last piece at the ICA, London, This Success or This Failure, the viewer is thrust into the world of a group of children using the gallery as their playground. The use of play allows Sehgal to engage his audience with the work on an unexpected level, catching them off guard and in the process completely enclosing them in the structure of the piece and making them a part of the action. This set up:

. . . render[s] the artist and viewer complicit . . . of the context in which they come about, of the place in which they are exhibited; of the mercantile system which will, in order to sell them, inevitably seek to extract them from the trap. (Moisdon, 2003)

Moisdon presents the works as being “a series of traps . . .” (Moisdon, 2003) which ensnare the visitor, forcing them to become complicit in their creation. For example the action of self-reflexivity and participation in The Objective of that Object, 2004 whereby the visitor is encouraged to generate the conversation that becomes the subject of the discussion and consequently the object of the work, this is described as a “tautological trap”: “the tautological trap snapped shut: the discussion had become the work, which had the goal of becoming the object of a discussion.” (Frenzhel, 2005)

The structures put in play by the “motor” of this piece encourage entry into a closed loop of signification, whereby the initial proposition by the actors becomes an invitation to the audience to solve the riddle of the piece by their participation.

This drawing in of the audience reveals the transformation of the viewer into participant – willing or unwilling, but unable to avoid the role cast for them by the piece itself.

This would seem to reflect the fact that the pieces themselves only really exist in the first place by virtue of their audience – there is a great reliance on interaction between the interpreters and the visitor in the making of the experience of the work. The artist creates a set of rules for the situation, which the interpreters are asked to follow and interpret as they see fit – the use of the word ‘interpreters’ by the artist to describe the people employed to make the piece is an indication of this aspect. These rules can be more or less proscriptive, depending on the piece. In some pieces they allow for a large amount of variation and improvisation on the part of the interpreters and leaving ample space for input by the audience to serve as a guide for the piece.

Sehgal relates the decision to avoid objects and documentation back to his early work in dance, where “one does something without any material product,” resulting in a ‘thing’ which can still be talked about or thought about. (Sehgal, quoted in Frenzhel, 2005) This choice is grounded in an critique of the methods of production at play in the world at large and the art-world in particular. Sehgal is firmly against the existing methods of production of objects, a process he sees as merely “affirm[ing] the highly problematic mode of production – the transformation of material.” (Moisdon, 2003)

Why is this a problem? Sehgal points to society’s attachment to technical progress:

. . . development means technology’s transformation of natural resources into ever more refined things. But we already have far more than we need, and the mode of production is not sustainable . . . (Frenzhel, 2005)

Sehgal positions as an ethical stance, his practice is a way to avoid adding more objects to the world, against our consumer society. To counter this he works to incorporate the activity of ‘deproduction’ in his work.

Deproduction represents “the possibility of simultaneously making and not making something.” (Bishop, 2005) Sehgal sees his work’s transient nature and lack of residue as a demonstration of this activity. But it’s important not to take the concept of deproduction in isolation – the activity is impossible without production itself and Sehgal points out that “’deproduction’ in itself isn’t of particular interest to me but the simultaneity of production and deproduction is.” This simultaneity reveals itself in the process of the “transforming of actions” (rather than the “transformation of material”) within his works:

If one does a movement or sings or speaks, then one is obviously producing something. But immediately as a note ends or the movement stops, it is gone: it deproduces itself. (Sehgal, quoted in Griffin, 2005)

Through his pieces Sehgal presents this simultaneity by the various actions that the interpreters are asked to enact and the relations these set up between them and the audience.

The lack of documentary evidence from this practice of production/deproduction can be seen as an effect of this work. They purposefully “evade documentation at all stages” through the construction of “a polished, impregnable closed system” which is described as a “motor” for this effect – some kind of active agent set up by Sehgal within the structure of the work:

The ostensible motor behind these deceptively simple works is the desire for a regime of total immateriality. (Bishop, 2005)