PLURIPOTENTIAL

Edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath

And Warren Neidich
CONTENTS

Hans Ulrich Obrist/David Deutsch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Francesco Spampinato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Antje Majewski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Barry Schwabsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Bernard Andrieu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Clarissa Tossin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Brindalyn Webster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Chloe Piene. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Daniel Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Kader Attia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Elena Bajo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Laura Stein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Éric Alliez Translated by Eric Anglès. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Lindsay Benedict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Gemma Sharpe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
T. Kelly Mason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Krysten Cunningham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Lee Welch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
James Yeary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Linda Quinlan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
Michele Masucci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Nicholas Chase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Patricia Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Zoe Crosher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
Seth Nehil. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Tyler Stallings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Seth Cluett. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Susanne Neubauer/Silva Reichwein. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Warren Neidich. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Yevgeniy Fiks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Sreshta Rit Premnath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Olav Westphalen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
Dan Levenson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Amy Sillman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BACK COVER
 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Hans Ulrich Obrist/David Deutsch 
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Hans Ulrich Obrist Interview with David Deutsch

HUO: Your book, The Fabric of Reality [1997], had a real

influence on the art and architecture fields. Philippe Parreno
wants to ask you this question: “Can reality be produced?”
DD: I think the deepest answer is that we don’t know yet. But I believe
the best answer available is “no.” The whole of reality including the
multiverse and all the “production”—all the creation—that has happened
and will ever happen within the multiverse is in some sense already
there. The trouble is that that answer doesn’t explain the fact that
there is a vital distinction between knowledge that was already there
but was merely transformed, and new knowledge being created. For
fundamental reasons we know that there must be a difference between
them. One of the symptoms of the fact that there is something missing in
our philosophical understanding of knowledge creation is that we have
so far been unable to produce artificial evolution. I know there are a lot
of people in various fields of computer science who would plaintively
reply that they are doing artificial evolution every day and that it’s
already produced lots of useful results. But I don’t think so. I think that
what is called artificial evolution today is nothing more than exploring
a given landscape for the best its best features, rather than creating a
new landscape. Real creativity is creating a new landscape. I went to
a lecture a couple of years ago about making robots that learn to walk.
When these robots start out, they’ve got no program for walking. All they
do is wave their legs. You vary their program randomly and you measure
how far each of them walked. From there you take the one that walked
the furthest, which initially might be just one inch, and vary it. And
eventually you find that, remarkably, just by these random variations and
selections, the robot walks along quite well. At the end, they think that’s
artificial evolution.
Learning…
Learning, perhaps, in that any useful change can be considered learning.
But it is not artificial evolution. I think that all the learning and creation
of new knowledge in the robot happened in the mind of the graduate
student that created the evolution program. And the token that that’s the
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case is that once it has walked as well as I described, it never walks any
better. That particular program will never, for instance, learn to walk up stairs.
It’s not because the hardware can’t do it; it could be programmed to do so.
It’s just that the evolutionary system can’t reach that particular knowledge.
And that’s a token of the fact that our present conception of computation,
knowledge, evolution and physics, is missing something. Thus, I think there
must be such a thing as genuine creation. Whether you call that “creating
reality” doesn’t matter much. The important thing is that there is such a thing
as the genuine creation of knowledge, ex nihilo.
It leads to the question of what is missing in the “theory
of everything.” You wrote in the Fabric of Reality that it
summarizes a theory of “everything that is known” and that it
does not mean “all the knowledge in terms of data.” That’s a
very important distinction. We often have this idea that we can’t
actually grasp the complexity of so much knowledge being
around. You don’t necessarily agree with that.
I don’t agree with that because what has increased is merely the complexity
of data, information. But since the Enlightenment, the complexity of
knowledge, of understanding, has actually gone down over the centuries, just
as its content has gone up. That is thanks to the great unifications that have
happened—physics with chemistry, biochemistry with biology, or more subtle
unifications, like the unification of the theory of evolution with evolutionary
theories of knowledge, or the unification of computation and physics. As
a result, understanding all that is understood requires less complexity than
it used to. I think that the process will continue, so that when we start to
understand new things, like the real nature of knowledge and consciousness
for instance, it won’t be an extra thing that you have to learn. It won’t mean
that instead of doing a three-year university course you have to do a four-
year course or anything like that. The course will be the same length, but
the amount of truth, the amount of understanding you gain per day, will be
higher.
That is what we mean when we say that “depth” is growing?
Yes.
In the theory of everything you have basically four main
strands of knowledge: quantum physics, epistemology, theory
of computation and theory of evolution. Could you explain
those four elements a little bit? Also to what extent is your
theory of everything different from those espoused by Edward
Witten or Stephen Wolfram?
Let me answer the second part of your question first because it’s easier: the
theory of everything in the sense I use the term in my book is not only the
Hans Ulrich Obrist/David Deutsch 
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theory of physics. Out of those four strands, only one is reductionist:
that’s the quantum physics strand. It tells us how large things are made
up of small things, what the laws of nature are according to which the
small things behave, and what kinds of small things exist in the first
place. I say “small things,” but of course it includes also universes—
parallel universes and so on. Now, theories like superstring theory, and
theories of everything as they are known within elementary particle
physics, are not actually theories of everything. They are simply attempts
to give a complete theory of subatomic particles and forces, everything
that is reductionistically fundamental. But in my view, that’s not the
only way that a piece of knowledge can be fundamental. I think, for
instance, that epistemology is also a completely fundamental field, even
though from the point of view of physics it is the study of the behavior
of very, very complex objects like the brain. Nevertheless, the fact that
we can have a theory of epistemology shows that complexity resolves
itself into a simplicity at the higher level, about which we can have
knowledge that we cannot express with the form of knowledge about
the lower level. Even if we could express it, it wouldn’t be explanatory.
In my book I give the example: how do you explain the presence of a
particular copper atom at the tip of the nose of the statue of Churchill in
Parliament Square? Even if you could write down the entire history of
all the forces acting on that atom starting from when it was created in a
supernova and how it was then put into a seam below the earth and then
mined and so on, that still wouldn’t explain why it is there, because the
explanation should include concepts such as “this was put up to honor a
human being because of certain things that he did.” And that is, in one
sense, already in the description about the atoms, and in another sense
isn’t there at all. So to understand all that is understood, we need higher-
level concepts.
So it is the opposite of inductive reasoning.
Inductive reasoning is invalid, but more importantly, it can’t take place at
all. It’s an illusion. It’s just a description that people gave to the scientific
process when it wasn’t understood very well. We now know that science
is conjectural and creative, as creative as any human activity. The same
is true with evolution. Before the time of Darwin, there was a mystery:
how did the animals get their adaptive complexity? If you look at the
eye, for example, it looks very much like a camera. We know the
camera was designed, what about the eye? There was a religious way of
answering that question, namely that the eye was designed too. But once
reason became more established it was realized that this answer was
no answer because it just says that a piece of complexity arose from a
different piece of complexity, namely God, which by definition does not
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have an explanation. But if you’re going to accept that, you might as well say
that animals don’t have an explanation in the first place and be done with it.
On the other hand, a no-nonsense realist could have said, say in 1800, that
an animal is composed of atoms, that atoms obey laws of nature and that’s
the explanation. But he would have been wrong too, for although that would
be a true statement, it is not an explanation. The explanation was Darwin’s
theory of evolution, and you can’t express that literally as a statement about
atoms. Of course, it underlies the whole theory that animals are made of
atoms and don’t have immortal souls (or at least that they are not relevant to
the evolution). But that doesn’t explain it. This difference between description
or prediction on the one hand, and explanation on the other is central to my
view of the world. And it’s why you need all four strands to understand the
world, because to understand you need to explain what is actually there and
how things relate to each other. You simply can’t do that entirely at the level
of fundamental physics.
You need the four components: quantum physics, epistemology,
theory of computation and theory of evolution?
Yes. And three of those four are emergent properties. But as I also say in the
book, even that is a kind of biased way of putting it. You could say that any
one of the four is emergent with respect to the other three. You could regard
any one of them as being the basis of everything. Indeed, in all four cases
there are people who insist that this particular strand is the real underlying
truth and that the others are built on top of it. For instance Stephen Wolfram
is one of those who believe that the computational strand alone is the real
underlying truth.
There is a huge polemic against superstring theory at the
moment. Peter Woit wrote a book called Not Even Wrong1
which makes an incredible full frontal attack. The tide seems to
be turning against the string theory and its speculative attempts
to produce a theory of everything. How do you place yourself
in this polemic?
I never joined in the enthusiasm about superstring theory. My personal
thought was that it was unlikely to work because it was not motivated
by trying to solve a problem within theoretical physics. It’s very rare for
foundational problems in physics to be solved by first wishing you had a
theory with a given property. Instead it’s nearly always the case that there
is some problem within physics. For instance, Einstein’s general theory of
relativity was trying to reconcile things like the constancy of the speed of light
on the one hand with the existence of gravity on the other. And the answer
1 “Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law”, 2006
Hans Ulrich Obrist/David Deutsch 
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was first conceptual and only later mathematical. Einstein was trying to
get relativity to work for several years after he had the basic explanatory
idea of what the solution was. He once gave a lecture that was attended
by the great mathematician David Hilbert. The story is that Hilbert went
home after Einstein’s lecture and wrote down Einstein’s field equations.
Just like that, because to him, as a mathematician, it wasn’t that hard. To
him, Einstein had already done the hard part, the physics part.
Einstein was unaware of what Hilbert had done and it took him, I think,
another two years.
It could have been a shortcut.
It would have been a shortcut if they had got together at that point. In
fact some people afterwards even tried to say, “Hilbert discovered it
first!” but Hilbert said himself that he didn’t discover what the equations
he had obtained meant. He was a pure mathematician, one of the
greatest of the twentieth century. Einstein was by common consent the
greatest physicist, and the two disciplines needed each other, but, it
almost never happens that an advance in physics is made by just looking
for a piece of mathematics and seeing what application it has. So that’s
why superstring theory is a worthwhile thing to explore but unlikely
to work. And if people are beginning to see it won’t work, I’m not let
down. Through it, we’ve understood a whole slew of things about how
fundamental physics can be put together, how it can’t be put together,
what kind of ideas can or can’t work. It is progress even if it’s not the
answer.
What about Wolfram?
You might think since I’m so keen on unifying computation with physics
that I would be keen on Wolfram’s idea but I’m not. There are two
reasons. One of them is simply that his type of computation is classical
not quantum, and I think it’s a great mistake to think that there is anything
fundamental about classical computation. It’s just an accident of history
from the way we discovered things, and the accident of our own physical
constitution that we can’t easily detect quantum interference. So we are
tempted to think that the particular subset of possible computations that
we call classical computations and which our present day computers can
do, has a fundamental significance, that it sort of stands outside physics
as a preferred set of operations in terms of which you can then try to
build physics. I think the relationship is entirely the other way around:
which operations we can and cannot perform, such as computations,
depends on what the laws of physics are.
One of the elements of The Fabric of Reality that the art
world has particularly found resonance with is the idea of
multiverse.
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Well the first thing to say is that the multiverse theory is only a minority
opinion amongst my physics colleagues. Perhaps no more than ten percent
of physicists would endorse what I am about to say. In my opinion the
evidence is overwhelming that the reality we see around us—the stars, the
galaxy, each other—is only one slice of a bigger reality which contains many
entities of that type: the type that we call universe. So the whole collection of
those entities, we call the multiverse. But as I said, many colleagues would
disagree. Now, if you say artists are interested, there are two points I would
like to make. One is that it is in my opinion hopeless to try to look outside the
laboratory, for phenomena directly caused by the multiverse. People often
ask me if dreams might give us a window into other universes, or if artistic
inspiration comes from a collaboration of different instances of oneself in
different universes. The answer to that is no, because the laws of quantum
mechanics itself, the very theory from which we know that these things exist
in the first place, says that this kind of collaboration between universes is not
possible. So that’s the bad news. The good news is that the kind of reality in
which we are, is one in which alternatives to the events we experience really
do happen. Now, why is that important if they can’t physically affect us?
My best metaphor or parable to explain why is to go back again 150
years to the time before Darwin’s theory of evolution was discovered. At
that time, there was a problem: Why do giraffes have long necks? So that
they can eat the leaves. But is that providential? Is it divine providence that
lengthened their necks or is there some other explanation? The thing is that
for most of human history, we didn’t have the conceptual framework that
Darwin had to answer that question, because all theories, including theories
of astronomy and so on, were about the end result. They were teleological
theories, saying that the giraffe had a long neck so that it could eat the leaves
or so that God would be pleased or so that it would stay alive. Similarly,
even in astronomy and the other hard sciences where they had real scientific
theories, they were still in the form of predicting outcome and not predicting
the process. For instance, [Johannes] Kepler’s most famous law was that the
planets move in ellipses with the sun at one focus. He was saying that ellipses
are the answer—not circles, not parabolas, but ellipses, with the sun not at
the center but at the focus. So that’s how the world is. Now starting with
Galileo or Newton, the character of scientific theories changed. Instead of
wanting merely descriptive theories about what the end result is, we wanted
explanatory theories about what produces that result. Newton’s theory,
which likewise predicts ellipses, doesn’t mention ellipses. The word doesn’t
appear in Newton’s laws at all, nor does the word “planets.” Nor does the
word “sun.” None of that appears. It’s a general theory, not about outcomes
but about forces, momentum and so on. It’s about the thing that causes the
outcome. Now we can go back to Darwin. His key philosophical innovation,
Hans Ulrich Obrist/David Deutsch 11
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the thing that distinguishes him from all previous attempts, including
all previous theories of evolution like [Jean-Baptiste] Lamarck’s, is that
Darwin is all about the laws under which giraffes get their long neck.
Again, Darwin’s theory doesn’t mention “giraffes,” “necks,” “trees,”
anything like that. It’s a general theory stating what kind of a world
makes a long-necked giraffe explicable, without a divine being having to
create it by fiat.
That’s a toolbox.
Yes. The worldview of Newton’s physics was a toolbox that opened the
door to Darwin understanding the theory of evolution. Now in the same
way, I believe that the unsolved problems of the present day—such as
the nature of consciousness and creativity—can only be solved within the
worldview of the parallel universes. It can only be solved by somebody
who knows that there are parallel copies of them, that they’re all doing
different things, that the world is all connected together, just as Darwin
needed the Newtonian worldview in order to understand giraffes. Note
that Darwin never needed to use Newton’s actual laws of motion. He
never needed to write down the formulae, the equations of Newtonian
mechanics. Similarly, I don’t believe that philosophers —whatever
philosophers or scientists solve the problem of consciousness — will need
to use the equation of quantum mechanics. What they will need is the
worldview that quantum mechanics tells us.
The concept?
Yes. The explanation. If you think in those terms you can be on the
path to the answer just as Darwin had to think in terms of a Newtonian
universe. If he had thought in terms of a Keplerian universe he could
never have understood evolution. And if we think in terms of a classical
single universe cosmology like that before quantum theory, we will not
be able to understand things like consciousness and knowledge. There
are some examples in The Fabric of Reality of what different things such
as genes, knowledge or brains look like when you look at them from a
multiverse point of view. For instance, although a gene is a microscopic
object in any one universe, it is a gigantic object in the multiverse.
Because a gene is one of those very rare types of objects that get error-
corrected back to their original form if they change or mutate. So if you
have a population with a certain genome and a mutation happens, a
few of them have a variant. Then if you go on through the generations,
the original form will be restored because the ones with the wrong form
won’t reproduce as well. That means it will get set back to the way it was
in most universes.
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In the multiverse there can be change of scale: something small
can suddenly be very big.
Absolutely. And the things which are big in the multiverse are the ones that
contain a lot of knowledge or a lot of evolution.
Another key idea for the art and architecture fields is your
conception of time. You said that the common-sense view on
time as a flow is nonsense. Could you explain your notion of
time played out in The Fabric of Reality?
In science we often find that common sense is wrong, but we very rarely
find that common sense is nonsense. But in the case of the flow of time,
common sense is nonsense. It contains an internal contradiction: time can’t
possibly flow because the concept of flow presupposes an externally existing
time against which something is flowing. So the quantum concept of time is
that other times like yesterday and tomorrow are just special cases of other
universes. If you think about it, there are parallel universes in which you and
I are sitting at a different place in the room and other universes in which we
even fail to meet today and so on. There are also universes where we did
meet, but on different dates. If you think about universes that just resemble
ours, there are universes where we are sitting just a millimeter displacement
from where we are in this universe. There are ones that are very like ours,
there are some that are genuinely like ours but have significant differences.
Now if you think about it, that’s exactly the same as in the flow of time,
because a minute ago this room was in many ways just the same way as it is
now, but we were sitting in a slightly different position and the contexts of our
brain were slightly different.
It wasn’t dark behind you but blue.
Exactly. So different times have a striking resemblance to other universes.
And philosophically, just as with other universes, people often ask, when
they’re trying to get their heads around these concepts: “Ok, if there are all
these different instances of me in other universes, which one is the real me?”
This problem has arisen in regard to time since time immemorial. People
have wondered if the version of them who did reckless things in their youth
was really them. For instance, if we’re thinking of crime and punishment: If
a criminal has truly repented at a later time, is it worth punishing him? Is it
still the same person? And even more, suppose the criminal has had brain
damage since he committed the crime and can’t even remember doing it or
why he did it, is he still the same person? So the issue of where, along this
continuum of different versions of this entity that are continuously related to
each other, you stop being the same person, arises in regard to time and
parallel universes in the same way. And it turns out that this isn’t just an
analogy. The physicists Don Page and Bill Wootters analyzed time in the
quantum framework.
Hans Ulrich Obrist/David Deutsch 13
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Is this recent?
No, this is quite an old paper published in the 1980’s.2 It turns out from
their work that the different universes and the different times just are
special cases of the same thing. Think of the multiverse as a collection
of snapshots. For simplicity, just consider the multiverse in regard to this
room, all the configurations of this room in all universes at all times, and
let’s forget about the ones where this room doesn’t exist at all. Well,
some of those are other universes at this time, some of them are other
times in this universe, and some of them just can’t be described like
that—they are just elsewhere in the multiverse.
But they’re all snapshots.
Yes, and they’re all treated uniformly in quantum theory.
In your book you say it is a universe at a particular time.
I call that a snapshot. Although this metaphor connotes just a visual
thing, I’m talking about everything: where all the atoms are and so on.
To a good approximation the multiverse consists of a collection of such
snapshots which are related to each other in different ways. Some of
them are related because different objects in the different parts of the
multiverse are part of a same bigger object, like a gene. The gene really
extends throughout many parallel universes. Another kind of relation is
that the laws of physics sometimes determine what is in one snapshot if
you know what is in another, and those snapshots are called the past
and future of each other. Those are only two kinds of the relationships
that can exist between snapshots; the multiverse allows other more
complex relationships where again it’s not really meaningful to say
whether it’s past or future or another universe or a part of the same
object and so on. We don’t really have the language to describe it.
What about time travel?
I’ve worked on time travel almost entirely from the point of view of quantum
theory, and quantum theory doesn’t tell you whether time travel is actually
possible or not. The issue of time travel in physics resolves itself into two
almost completely separate questions. One of them: “Can you build a time
machine?” The other one: “If you could, what would happen?”
It’s a “what if” scenario?
That’s right. Those are two different questions. And remarkably, the first
question is dealt with almost entirely by the theory of relativity whereas
the second one is dealt with almost entirely by quantum physics. And it’s
2 “Evolution without Evolution: Dynamics Described by Stationary Observables,” 1983
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______________________________________________ Hans Ulrich Obrist/David Deutsch 15
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the latter one that I’ve been concerned with. Most people are more interested
in the first question: Could you build one and if so, how? But I haven’t worked
in that direction. Basically the answer is it’s simply too complicated. For a
while the experts were saying, “Yes, it is possible,” and then they slowly
started changing their minds and saying that maybe it isn’t possible. We don’t
know. The other question, the one that I worked on is pretty well worked out:
If you had a time machine, what would happen? The answer is if you used
it to go into the past, you would go into the past of another universe. Which
other universe? Well, obviously the one in which you appeared in the past at
that moment. That’s the answer.
That simple?
It’s that simple. But I just would like to point out that it’s not a matter of saying,
“how can we resolve the paradox? Oh look, it’s resolved if there are parallel
universes.” It’s not like that. What happens is you take the equations of
quantum mechanics and you work out what they say will happen and it says
that the time travel will happen. That’s equivalent to saying that the initial
premise (that a time machine could exist at all) is consistent. But it could
have said otherwise. We don’t have the freedom to tell the parallel universes
what to do. The laws of physics already tell them what to do. And they either
permit or don’t permit time travel. It turns out that they do permit it. But we
don’t know whether general relativity provides a mechanism for actually
doing it.
The possibility of an impossibility.
Yes, if something is forbidden by the laws of physics, then it definitely is
impossible.
That’s not the case.
We don’t know if that’s the case yet. But if it’s not forbidden by the laws of
physics then it’s just a matter of knowing how.
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______________________________________________ Francesco Spampinato 17
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You will be able to create mental pictures that represent you

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______________________________________________ Francesco Spampinato 19
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Make sure that the indicator

is illuminated
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______________________________________________ Francesco Spampinato 21
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______________________________________________ Francesco Spampinato 23
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Let your body go

excerpts from Experiencing Hypnotism, 2009

published by Atomic Activity Books
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______________________________________________ Antje Majewski 25
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ENTITY: REPORT ON A VISIT TO THE DIDACTIC BRANCH

OF THE MUSEUM FOR APPLIED HERMENEUTICS,
BIELEFELD, GERMANY, AUGUST 11, 2117
We are led into a large hall with comfortable seating. A young, noticeably
longhaired staff member takes over the introduction. The following is an
account of our impressions and excerpts from our recordings.
SPEAKER: “Though we see ourselves as following completely in the
tradition of the Annales School, a narrative account of one individual’s
experience Can be useful in so far as it is symptomatic of the full sequence
of events. As you surely already know, we supplement Oral history with
Visual history. The abundance of cameras installed in the public and
private spheres at the start of the century has provided us with material
that can be edited into a film-like montage depicting past events. The film I
am about to present is one of these films. While watching, please take into
consideration that a) the material has been edited together by us, b) the
image and sound quality is very poor at times and c) supplementary films
are in the works that, for example, will show what was done in the Entity’s
Pavilion under Yusuf Etiman.”
Each of us had to share a visor between two. As unaccustomed as we were
to seeing 2D images without smell and taste, we quickly got used to it.
(2024)
We see a dark-haired, middle-aged woman asleep
in bed. Subtitles inform us that what we are seeing
took place on the 30th floor of the (unfortunately
now destroyed) Friendship Tower. The woman’s
name is “Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis.” Sunlight
streams through the windows, her dimming system
is apparently defunct. She opens her eyes and
casts a worried glance over the objects on the
walls and in the room, now bathed in bright
sunlight. Among them: a woodcut by K. Utamaro
(Beautiful Woman Cleans Her Pipe, 1805). On
a small table, we see a miniature version of A.
Jodorowsky’s orgasm machine that nods with tiny flags and opens at the
slightest touch (after Montaña Sacra, 1973) across from The Meeting of
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (ca. 1455) by P. della Francesca.
26 PLURIPOTENTIAL
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Finally, her gaze settles on a framed, first sketch of the Entity by Antje
Majewski.
NOTE
These subtitled artifacts, the images of which were inserted into the film in a far
better quality than the rest of the material, are clearly reproductions of objects
from the collection of the Museum for Applied Hermeneutics and could in fact
obscure other objects in the space. On the
other hand, other sources reveal that such
artifacts were often kept in apartments, where
their keepers saw to their preservation.
Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis goes into the
bathroom and brushes her teeth. She then
chooses her clothes for the day, a white
Salvar Kameez, fixes herself and looks for
her handbag. She tosses her mobile phone in
it and leaves the apartment. In the elevator,
she talks on the phone (in Farsi). The sound quality is very bad here, we can
only make out that she is worried about traffic and the possibility that she will
be late. Maybe she would be better off taking the chute.
She picks up her car from the underground garage and drives over the
highway. We can hear the radio. She speaks briefly on the telephone again.
During the drive, we see historically very interesting shots of DD.
Antje Majewski 27
______________________________________________
She arrives at Jan Wellem Maktum bin Buti Hall, where DD’s “art
collections” are kept. A valet parks her car, and she follows another
server to a pavilion hidden in the greenery. It is a magnificent structure
made of Lebanon cedar, the biomorphic walls of which are partially
covered in malachite tiles. As soon as she reaches the door, she is
greeted in English by a youthful-looking man in a very impressive coat
(note: Tajik handiwork, ca. 1930) as “Mr. Pflugfelder”. She enters a
hall where four small groups of people have already gathered and are
sipping alcohol-free beverages around several bistro tables. A buffet
is waiting off to the side. The hall is tastefully decorated with flowers.
Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis gives a friendly nod to several acquaintances
before approaching a bearded man that we have identified as the
legendary Yusuf Etiman, the first director of the Pavilion of the Entity. He
immediately begins his speech.
(In English)
Yusuf Etiman says a few general words about his delight that this
day has finally come. He thanks Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis for her
extremely generous financial donation, without which neither the Entity’s
development nor the erection of the pavilion would not been possible,
and gives her the word.
Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis thanks him on her own behalf, emphasizing
that her contribution is only a small part, and extends her most heartfelt
thanks to Dubai Düsseldorf for its trust in donating the building plot and
associating the Pavilion of the Entity with the “art collections.”
“What role will art play in the future?”
she asks the audience. “Many science
fiction scenarios reflect the fear of a
world designed to the last detail, one
in which human beings are degraded
to the level of will-less consumers in an
aseptic, artificial paradise – a scenario
not unlike the possible future of Dubai.
The will to humanity in these stories is
often in the guise of a desire for the
damaging, such as alcoholic excesses
and cigarettes; or also, as in P. K.
Dick, in the form of Wilbur Mercer,
who is endlessly, painfully pummeled with stones and therefore keeps the
feeling of empathy alive among humans.
28 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Antje Majewski 29
______________________________________________
Time and again, the Western museum has supported
artists willing to serve a cathartic function and
exemplarily make the suppressed “other” visible
- Joseph Beuys, for example, in Düsseldorf.
In the future, there will be a demand for abstract art
focusing on non-consumable or applicable knowledge:
repulsive, organic objects incorporating transience,
death and perversion, similar to the technological
reliquaries by Paul Thek.
And now I would like to
introduce the artist Antje
Majewski who, in cooperation
with the biotechnology
company MEL, has developed a
completely novel work of art.”
Antje Majewski also thanks the
collector on her own behalf
for the financial support for
her project: “What is unique
about this new life form Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis reaches inside a plastic box and pulls out
that we have created is that a round object. Its surface shines in twinkling green to orange colors.
it possesses neither sense She hands the object to Yusuf Etiman who carefully, lovingly takes it.
organs, nor reproductive organs, nor means of transport or a nervous system. A few people standing around the object, mostly other contributors or
The organism is life in the abstract sense; it has such low energy consumption assistants, lean toward it with interest, then quickly pull back in disgust.
that its metabolism is extremely slow. It can neither take in food nor eliminate Everyone present begins to clap.
waste and lives by self-consumption until his insides are completely eaten
End of the film.
away, leaving only a dry shell. The artwork succeeds in complete self-
referentiality, something that has always been desired in Concrete Art. It is At first it was hard for us to understand the onlookers’ reaction, but then
acceptable to the Muslim community because it doesn’t depict anything - it a Museum for Applied Hermeneutics employee explains that numerous,
just is. At the same time, it introduces organic waste into the sterile world of concurrent historical sources show that the object emitted an almost
the museum, something that people - like sexual organs or digestive waste intolerable smell.
- don’t care to see because especially in terms of its smell, it remains very He continued to explain, occasionally punctuating his presentation with
foreign and therefore unattractive. At the same time, its only activity is slow Vidisnaps as a visual aid.
self-digestion and therefore extremely slow death.”
SPEAKER: “We would be over our time limit, if I wanted to present the
Taking the word once more, Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis explains what she following events in just as much detail. Unfortunately we do not own
finds so fascinating about the project: “The artwork of the future reminds any documents about Antje Majewski from the time in which the Entity
us of transience, and evokes empathy after initial disgust. It can therefore was developed, nor do we have those from the MEL biotechnology firm.
be ethically effective as an artwork across different cultures and religions.
We do hope, however, to have given you better insight into the original
In the Kantian sense, it forces us to reflect on ourselves as human beings, intention of those responsible for the Entity’s creation and presentation.
encouraging a social bond by awakening new enthusiasm for our natural
physical and mental abilities, admittedly limited as they are.”
30 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Antje Majewski 31
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We highly recommend a visit to the Museum of Applied Hermeneutics. It
evoked powerful, but also cathartic feelings within us and we extend our
deepest gratitude to the Museum for its historical investigations.
***

SPECIAL THANKS of Leonardo da Vinci, Mortars with

(2056)
Here we have a picture from the year 2056 (Vidisnap). Having developed
far from the Entity pavilion’s early, idyllic beginnings, using plans developed
by architects, Pflugfelder and Miessen, Dubai and Düsseldorf have built
identical Kunsthallen allowing for the Entity’s cult-like worship. Long ago, the
organism (now shriveled and wrinkled) (Vidisnap), ceased to encourage self-
reflection and awaken abstract empathy. Instead, it stirs only state-controlled,
nationalistic sentiment, since Dubai and Düsseldorf are the only two places
that own the Entity. More than a few openly submit themselves in prayer to the
object and try to touch the shrine with a corner of their clothing. (Vidisnap)
(2101)
After the catastrophic events at the turn of the
century, the Dubai and Düsseldorf Kunsthallen
were destroyed.
This Vidisnap is from the year 2101. A tourist took
it by chance at a vegetable shop where the owner
happened to have participated in the looting of
the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. The disk is an element
that once decorated the entrance to the shrine.
The surface is dirty, but still glows with the Entity’s
colors. Behind that, we see a glass cube on the
floor that contains a small, round thing, similar
in appearance to a shriveled fruit. It is the dead
Entity, having consumed itself into a mummy.”
At this point, several of us felt the urge to vomit
and began looking for the nearest restroom.
Others wept.
Models: Mathieu Malouf, Ralf
Pflugfelder, Heji Shin, Oliver Helbig,
Yusuf Etiman, Solmaz Shahbazi, Jana
Petersen, Delia Gonzalez, Michael
Waller, Julia Majewski, Zille Homma
Hamid; Costumes: Antje Majewski,
Ayzit Bostan; Architecture design: Ralf
Pflugfelder / Noffice; Assistant: Katrin
Vellrath
IMAGES
Kitagawa Utamaro, Beautiful Woman
Cleans Her Pipe, from: Meishofukei,
Bijinjuni (Famous Places and Twelve
Kinds of Beautiful Women), woodcut,
1805
Alejandro Jodorowsky, La Montana
Sacra, Mexiko / USA 1973
Anchor Bay/Starz Home Entertainment
Piero della Francesca, The Meeting
of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
Fresco, San Francesco, Arezzo, um
1455
Antje Majewski, Sketch for the outer
form of the Entity (2009), making use
Explosive Projectiles, from the Codex
Atlanticus, 1478 –1519. Permanent
ink print on paper, 10 x 10 cm, 2009
Noffice, Dubai, 2009
Philip K. Dick
Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures
to a Dead Hare, 1965
Paul Thek, Excursion (from the
“Technological Reliquaries” series),
1964
Antje Majewski, The Donation (2024).
Oil on canvas, 290 x 355 cm, 2009
Ralf Pflugfelder und Markus Miessen /
Noffice, Kunsthalle Dubai, 2009
Antje Majewski, Decorative element
that once adorned a passage leading
to the shrine (2101) / Oil on Wood, Ø
200 cm, 2009
Entity (2101). Glass cube, 35 x 35 cm
and organic remains, 2009
ALL IMAGES BY ANTJE MAJEWSKI‚ ©
ANTJE MAJEWSKI AND JENS ZIEHE
32 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Barry Schwabsky 33
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From the Abandoned Poems project

I asked fellow poets to give me their “failed” or abandoned poems to work on.

Poem
To set this timber straight:
The eyelid of art shuts slowly
a tear keeps the orb from getting stuck
no punch lines. Genius loves conspiracy.
Mondrian straightens out his branches,
saying, “You’ve got to dream the lie
before you live it,” then ducks
to avoid an oncoming sparrow.
“You’ve got to twist it to get it straight.”
He’s leaving all the lines but none
of the edges. Still the tree gets darker
at night so take your opportunity.
“Why date my works?” he keeps on thinking,
apropos of nothing. “I hardly feel I paint them.”
after Geoffrey Young
34 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Barry Schwabsky 35
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Poem Poem
How many breathless You know this has all been done before
in the age of monster trucks
at the tiny golden flecks
when shapes were as close as the objects of love
like sunlight sticking onto my back & tongue finding love at the bottom of a bag and their shadows would genuflect
as they backed off, a cause
of personally-pan-fried parmesan & potato chips & fraught
from which language has resigned
with eyes wetting the grass
you know
the sun made me hazy this has all been done as a formal reduction
with respect to the limits of the picture plane
knowing nothing of women
—its unassuming spirit, inherently graceful
except in this poem & contented with shady places and I take great pleasure, however cheaply,
death once removed, in it.

fleeing all others, myself too after Richard Hell

this woman alive showing in that view of me

the limestone flower
she comes always before me, a man befriended by
KFC boneless even on High Holy Days —a lover by name at least
nothing less.

after Tim Atkins (after Petrarch)

36 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Bernard Andrieu 37
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Toward a Pluripotent Hybridity:

A new body agency of self?

A performative context
The development of new biology has opened up new possibilities for the
question of what defines the nature of humanity and the risk of biopower,
to explore and develop endogenous capacities of the body. With the
discovery of embryonic pluripotent stem cells, nanotech and prosthesis
the old definition of the mechanical body was no longer sufficient for
describing the plasticity and the reconfiguration of body agency. By body
agency, we not only mean a human enhancement, but also the activation
of the pluripotential body through its biotechnological performance.
The matter of the body is the result, as Judith Butler has noted, of our
performative action on it by our technological expertise. If the paradigm
of technics was always based on the passive model of the stimulation
of immunologic defenses like Koch and Pasteur had demonstrated, this
conception of the body was related to a respect for the notion of cellular
integrity resulting from an exploitation of mechanism. The reactive model
is different from the performative model: the enhancement of the body,
even if a new body-shop appears, is not the same project of post-human
disembodiment because pluripotentiality implies and supposes not only the
deconstruction of the body but also its reconfiguration. Enhancing me is a
hybrid solution and not a new eugenics for the production of better people.

 Bernard Andrieu, 2007, Embodying the Chimera: Biotechnology & Subjectivity, in Edouardo
Kac ed., Signs of Life, MIT Press, p. 57-68.
P
 aul Jersild, 2009, The Nature of Our Humanity: Ethical Issues in Genetics and
Biotechnology, Augsburg Fortress.
 Jurgen Altmann, 2005, Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications And Preventive
Arms Control, Routledge. Antoinette Rouvroy, 2007, Human Genes and Neoliberal
Governance: A Foucauldian Critique, Routledge Cavendish.
N
 igel Cameron, M. Ellen Mitchell eds., 2007, Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the
Nano Century, John Wiley & Sons Inc.
 Julian Savulescu, Nick Bostrom eds., 2009, Human Enhancement , Oxford University Press.
 Tony Santella, 2005, Body Enhancement Products, Chelsea House Publishers
 Bert Gordijn, Ruth F. Chadwick, eds., 2008, Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity,
Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
P
 ete Moore, 2008, Enhancing Me: The Hope and the Hype of Human Enhancement,
Wiley-Blackwell.
 Matti Havry, 2010, Rationality and the Genetic Challenge: Making People Better?,
38 PLURIPOTENTIAL
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The hybrid frontier
The disintegration of body defines a hybrid frontier at the intersection of
biotechnology and nanotechnology. In the context of late industrial culture,
Ballard’s Crash-Body is a critique of “the old organic model of the body”10:
behind the surface of the skin, the speeding machine becomes the prosthesis
of the flesh. Against Cartesian mechanism, the prosthesis is an alternative
of disembodiment with the possibility to neuromute the conception of the
living and the composition of body. The distinction between the body and
embodiment disappears in the condition of the constant engagement of our
embodied interactions with the environment.
The body agency in pluripotentiality affirms that the boundaries are illusory,
because “ the body resurfaces as a discrete entity as it articulates a new
space, a revitalized subject”11. The subject uses his body to mediate
the embodiment of his interiority. The neuromutation is at the same time
a dynamic for thinking about the plasticity and the mobility of biologic
matter and the technological process for transforming the condition of
life. Neuromutation is a conceptual and practical possibility because
the development of life sciences authorizes now, with the epigenist
development of genetic modification in vitro, and brain visualization, a new
representation12 and action on the body; one which is active at the interface
of brain-body-mind.
For Bernadette Wegenstein, in the context of new biotechnology, “the holistic
discovery of the body as constitutive mediation has converged with an age
of mediatic proliferation, such that what we are in fact witnessing in the
apparent continuing fragmentation of the body is the work of the body itself
as mediation”13.
The neuromutation is described by a new step in technological evolution
for the representation and the action of body motor schema. Without this
incorporation of technology in the body, the neuromutation cannot not realize
the critique of dualism. Being miniaturized and biocompatible, technology
lands on the body by implantation.
The Cyborg14, without the hybridological interaction is still used to argue for
Cambridge University Press.
10 Paul Youngquist, Paul, 2000, Ballard’s Crash-Body, Postmodern Culture, Volume 11, Number 1,
September
11Allison Fraiberg,1991, Of Aids, Cyborgs and Other Indiscretions. Resurfacing the Body in the
Postmodernity, Postmodern Culture, v.1 n.3 May, p.21-27, p. 25.
12 L ock M. 1997, “Decentering the Natural Body : Making Difference Matter”, Configurations
5.2 : 267-292.
13 Bernadette Wegenstein, 2006, Getting Under the Skin, Body and Media Theory, MIT Press., 158.
14 Jean François Chassay, Elaine Desprès eds., 2010, Humain ou presque. Quand science et
littérature brouillent la frontière, Figura, n°22, ed UQAM.
Bernard Andrieu 39
______________________________________________
the mechanization and the dehumanization of the living. The biological
body is repaired, dissected and implanted. Hybrids exist, they are among,
with and in us, with our pace makers, our transplants, our hip prosthesis,
our cochlear implants, our glasses, our wheelchairs... Professionals are
trained for this and the ethical foundations of their practices are linked
to bioethics: charity, non-malfeasance, common good, social justice and
responsibility in the respect of human dignity.
Far from replacing mankind in a posthumanism15 and disembodying
the subject, the world and the technique co-construct the constitution of
a hybridizing body.16 Whereas miscegenation and melting modify the
social body, hybridization integrates the technical modification in the
professionals’ daily gesture. Technique is no longer an alienating and
dehumanizing adversity, it obliges the medical and the social worker to
become each other; adapting rules and converting its functions to limits
which are always beyond the other’s bio-corporality. The inequalities in
the access to knowledge related to these new technologies of electronic
surveillance, self-health and biocontrol has to be described through the
meeting between social imaginaries and individual representations.
Denouncing human mechanization, the dominant ideology does not
conceive technique as a positive and constitutive interaction of a new
identity.
Pluripotentiality & Reversibility
Natural reversibility depends on contextual interaction. The ecological
underworld and corporal culture incorporate information likely to destroy
or to divert endogenous abilities. To become another, physiological
hybridity has to stand solidly behind the biological program. After the
plasticity period, the hybridization by the underworld and the culture
of neurons, cells and genes will be possible only with respect to certain
temporalities. The organism protects itself with the help of the immune
system. The separation between the self and this non-self, which protects the
organism from foreign bodies fluctuates between the potential self and the
actual self. During physiological hybridization, in the case of a transplant,
the actual self has to call upon its plastic potential in order to actualize
new configurations. Thus, progenitor cells specialize by hybridizing the
functional context of their implantation. The body’s plasticity triggers a
recalibration as a result of hybridization by incorporation environmental
information.
15 A
 ntoine Robitaille, 2008, Le nouvel homme nouveau. Voyages dans les utopies de la post-
humanité, Paris, Boréal.
16 Hauser J., Ed., 2008, Sk-interfaces: Exploding Borders – Creating Membranes in Art,
Technology and Society. An art and text book, Fact & Liverpool University Press.
40 PLURIPOTENTIAL
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Technique doesn’t just inspect nature any more, but also diverts the course of
natural selection into human amelioration. The new pluripotentiality does not
result in becoming inorganic17 but rather a biosubject.
The performative doesn’t have the same logic as the performance. Performing
one’s potentiality through the process of living uses a similar methodology as
found in gender studies and the queer movement: shedding the representation
of a body-machine to allow forms to emerge that are as yet unknown. The
performance looks for overproduction within liveable limits, to reproduce the
living in vitro and in creating species and beings that do not exist in nature.
The performance tires out the living and denaturalizes it completely up to
the point where its introduction into culture produces artificial beings, such
as GMO and clones. The performative and the biological performance both
entail that there is no definitive soul for the living, but for the performative the
essentialist refusal lies in the living plastic recalibration as in the conatus. The
living perseveres in its being through developmental biology and then the
performative uses perfectibility as a biological conatus.
To improve the body implies a bionic performativity that comes from
modifying the concept of disability in a transbiocultural18 specification. This
ex-utero living produces not so much bodies without organs as organs without
bodies; each organ might be used outside its original body and might be
re-implanted into another body thus reconstituting personal identity. How
to modify one’s body has become classical breviary, from body piercing to
implants. Perfecting one’s body will prompt a refusal to die. While it is a
living actualization, it is also an environmentalization through the interaction
of techniques within it. Should the body only overcome its environment,
disease and pollution without forcing back death’s limits?
It is less a post-mortal society than a trans-living community that uses
technobiologies for actualizing new living potentialities. The “regenerated”
rather than the degenerated, pulls them apart from predictable death by
encouraging living reorganization. In addition vaccination and hygiene have
extended life expectancy, in the same way hybridization brings forward the
average quality of life. If everything became repairable and each body part
could be modified, then to preserve a natural organ would condemn the
subject to its entropy. Everything would become a handicap following an
extensive generalization of weakness research: through a permanent “auto-
diagnostic” everyone would likely practice auto-health, which will never end
through the incorporation of new prostheses. Couldn’t there be self-improving
ethics for the self-body within auto-health?
17 Laurentis T. de 2003, “Becoming Inorganic”,Critical Inquiry, 28 : 547-565.
18 Kapchan D.A., Turner Strong P., 1999, Theorizing the Hybrid, The Journal of American Folklore,
vol. 112, n°445, pp. 239-253.
Bernard Andrieu 41
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Somatechnics and Biosubjectivity
This urge to rethink the mechanical reconfiguration of almost all
aspects of technical practice, as well as modes of communication and
interaction, through smooth and unbroken articulation with intelligent
machines is the transformation of the human into a new construction
called the Somatechnic19.
The somatechnic implies in his principle the hybridization of technic in
or on the body to constitute a new possibility of perception and action.
The body is not only natural or strictly reducible to a culture datum. The
problem is the combination of nature and culture in the flesh and the
consequences for the lived body. The difficulty for the implementation
of new technics is the resistance to the transformation through habits
and roles: the old constitution of body is composed of norms, which
perpetuate habits. These limits can be an obstacle to subjectivation.
Nikki Sullivan uses the term somatechnics “to think through the varied
and complex ways in which bodily-being is shaped not only by the
surgeon’s knife but also by the discourses that justify and contextualize
the use of such instruments”20.
The innovation with Nikki Sullivan is the performativity of technic in the
process of the gender enfleshment of the self:
“Hearkening to Zoe Sofia’s claim that “every technology is a
reproductive technology”, Haraway acknowledges the potency of
myth-making, the fact that what is at stake are ways of life (1992: 299),
modes of enfleshment, somatechnologies if you like. Consequently, unlike
the feminist theorists discussed in the previous section, Haraway refuses
the ((re)productionist) single vision which reiterates the same old story
of technology as either good or bad, liberatory or oppressive. Instead
Haraway deploys a “double vision”, a seeing “from both perspectives
at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities
unimaginable from the other vantage point” (1991/1998: 439)”21.
Somatotechnologies are not only oppressive or repressive because this
interpretation limits the power of trans-formation of the self by its new
embodiment. If gender should be constituted as a restrictive condition for
the use of somatechnology, we could return to the situation described in
19 B. Andrieu, 1999, Médecin de son corps, Paris, P.U.F.
20 N
 . Sullivan, 2009, The Somatechnic of intersexuality, CLQ, A Journal of lesbian and gay
studies, 15: 2 , p. 313-327, ici p. 314.
21 N
 ikki Sullivan, 2006, Somatechnics or Monstruosity Unbound, Scan, Journal of media arts
culture, n° Technological interventions eds. Nicole Anderson & Nikki Sullivan, Vol.3, n°3.
cf Sullivan, Nikki (2005) “Somatechnics, or, The Social Inscription of Bodies and Selves”,
Australian Feminist Studies, 20:48. Sullivan, Nikki and Murray, Samantha. (2009).
Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies. Ashgate: London.
42 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Bernard Andrieu 43
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“The Technology of Orgasm” by Rachel Maines;22 of an instrumentalization
of body, in for example the uterus of women. This ambivalence towards
somatechnologies, as differences of somatechnics which are internalized by
the subject, is founded on the possibility of biopower taking control of the
body in the name of safety and security.

An ontological pluripotentiality
After Bernadette Wegenstein’s “Getting Under the Skin,” where the
transformation of body subjectivity was studied through three perspectives
– the deconstruction of body image, the existence of a lived body, and the
modification of skin under the appearance and the surface of subjectivity
- the new hybrid project is the continuation of ontological pluripotentiality in
an epistemic pluridisciplinarity within techno-science studies, the history of
medical technologies and new media studies. The core of the new problem is
the relation between the possibility of technology in the medical entertainment
complex and the evolution of the representation of body image in a mediatic
society. For the modern subject the importance of the body’s image is
first a condition for the constitution of corporeal schema and second the
incorporation of a body norm in society.
The study of the cosmetic gaze establishes an intersection between the first and
second points. The “make over” provides a possibility for the materialization
of the ideal body’s image by the hybridization of natural matter with technical
biodesign. Becoming hybrid23 induces a new ontological body agency. The
patient becomes an agent of her self-health. This biosubjective norm is in
conflict with bioethical advice because the body agent always hopes to find
a technological solution for a better life. The redefinition of a conception of
the disabled will be realized only if the pluripotential condition is a common
reference point for the technical use of the self.

22 Rachel Maines,2001, The technology of orgasm. Hysteria, the vibrator and women’s sexual
satisfaction, The Johns Hopkins University Press
23 Bernard Andrieu, 2008, Devenir hybride, P.U. Nancy.
44 Brasilia by Foot
______________________________________________ Clarissa Tossin 45
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46 Brasilia by Foot
______________________________________________ Clarissa Tossin 47
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48 Brasilia by Foot
______________________________________________ Clarissa Tossin 49
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50 Brasilia by Foot
______________________________________________ Clarissa Tossin 51
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52 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Brindalyn Webster 53
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MASS VENTRILOQUISM

AUTHOR’S NOTE
MASS VENTRILOQUISM was originally read on February 7, 2009 in
San Francisco, California at Southern Exposure. The author approached
newly acquired friends from Portland State University, Otis College of Art
and Design, old friends from California College of the Arts and strangers
hanging out after their participation in SFMOMA’s “Social Practice West”
panel discussion.
“Would you like to read a part in this play for the 2 Minute Presentation
Series*? The part is less than a page and you don’t have to act. Just
read the words as you understand them to sound in your head.”
The play was cast in under an hour.
MASS VENTRILOQUISM premiered when the panelists reconvened for
the 2 Minute Presentation Series at Southern Exposure.
The script for MASS VENTRILOQUISM was handed out to one man and
fourteen women. The parts were spot read in front of a small audience.
The portraits of AUGUST WILHELM MALM and CAROLINA (as shown on
last page of the script) were projected on a wall. The readers stood in a
semicircle in front of the projection, facing the audience. The play was
read in roughly two minutes.

DIRECTION
The script for MASS VENTRILOQUISM should be handed out to people
who are strangers or recently acquainted. Parts should be spot read,
out loud, and never rehearsed. There should be no direction other than,
‘read this out loud, un-theatrically, likeas words that you are first coming
across for the first time’.
COSTUME PLOT: No costumes should be worn other than the clothes that
the readers wear upon arrival.

*Everyone who attended the 2 Minute Presentation Series was invited to put on a very brief
presentation of one of their own projects, an idea, an activity, a thing they happen to have
in their pocket, or something they were just not so sure about.
54 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Brindalyn Webster 55
______________________________________________
assist, and to repeat some of the words I spoke to thousands of spectators:
this equally wonderful, colossal animal may not only be the single most
CASTING: Ideally, all parts but AUGUST WILHELM MALM should be read by
precious adornment of our museum; it is, if all goes well, to be a pride for
female readers.
our town, not to say our whole nation, Whereas, if I know, no museum in
SETTING: An additional audience is not required, but in the case that there the world can produce anything in the way, or value to compare with as
is an additional audience the photos on the last page of the script should be this can to behold.”
projected on a wall behind the readers.
NARRATOR #2: Aware of the responsibility that came with her approval,
BLOCKING: The readers should stand in a semicircle in front of the wall Carolina did her best to serve her nation.
being projected on.
Made herself utterly available to her people. Went to lengths to see that
CHARACTERS they were comfortable. Furnished a salon with benches and tapestries for
their visits.
NARRATOR #1: The town adopts a whale
AUGUST WILHELM MALM: It is with great honor and pride In the summer of 1866, Carolina traveled to Stockholm. There she attended
NARRATOR #2: The traveling host the Industrial Exposition, where she hosted over 36,000 visitors. Hamburg
NARRATOR #3: You give a centimeter they take a kilometer and Berlin followed.
NARRATOR #4: A much needed hiatus In 1923, she moved into a new hall built specifically for her in Slottskogen.
NARRATOR #5: Some super-imposed character development
BARBARA JOHNSON: Thoughts on muteness envy She continued her role as a public host. Entertaining visitors; serving
NARRATOR #6: Incredible shrinking women coffee. Punch.
NARRATOR #7: Speak when you are spoken through NARRATOR #3: It was some time later that Carolina had to close down her
FOOTNOTE #1: Homonyms doors and retreat to a more private life.
FOOTNOTE #2: One hundred thirty-two million, five hundred eighty This was due to the indiscretion of some visitors who confused her hall for a
thousand, ninety-six hideout.
FOOTNOTE #3: Role reversal
FOOTNOTE #4: Whales > dinos (Carolina’s place was later referred to as “... a hideout for loving couples,
FOOTNOTE #5: Long distance singers and then a special couple were surprised in a too intimate situation.”)
FOOTNOTE #6: An ending Carolina could no longer host. She became publicly inactive.
NARRATOR #1: There is a quiet whale in Sweden. NARRATOR #4: The transition was a pleasant one. It provided her the quiet
They call her Carolina. contemplative time that her youth was lacking.

She was named after the wife of a wealthy quartermaster, August Wilhelm
Malm.
At a young age, she was taken from her home at the Isthmus of Askim Bay
and was brought to Gothenburg.
Two gentlemen, Carl Hansson and Olof Larsson escorted her with three
steamboats.
In a trade magazine dated August 13, 1892, Malm was quoted as saying,
AUGUST WILHELM MALM: “Everything, everything I have thus put at stake...
Everything has gone on my risk. But now, thanks to Providence!, I also arrived
at the truly great goal. Victory is mine. I share the honor with all the arms,
She was no longer a public servant.
NARRATOR #5: In her seclusion, she became a bit of a mystery.
BARBARA JOHNSON: “Women with expensive and artsy tastes can, of
course, be idealized, but probably only if they project an image of graceful
muteness. One has only to think of the outpouring of feeling around the
death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to realize the genius of the adoption of
the role of silent image from the moment of the assassination onward. Prior
to that time, the woman with a taste for French cooking, redecoration, and
Oscar Wilde was a far less idealized figure in the American press. And the
contrast between Jackie O’s muteness and Hillary Clinton’s outspokenness
only served to give cultural reinforcement to the notion that grace, dignity,
56 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Brindalyn Webster 57
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and class could only be embodied by a woman who remains silent.”
NARRATOR #6: In the same camp as Jane Wyman, Holly Hunter, and
Samantha Morton, Carolina’s role as a mute should have brought her
an Oscar.
But civic duty made her an exception.
And although she was only acting as a medium, the fact that she wasis vocal
at all disqualified her from the award.
NARRATOR #7: Carolina is silent and inaccessible for every day except
election day. And on that day a small voting booth is erected inside of her
and citizens come to cast their vote.
Sweden speaks through her.
FOOTNOTE #1: From Swedish, the word “valen” can be translated twice. It
can be translated to mean ‘whale’ and it can be translated to mean ‘election’.
Both words speak of enormity.
FOOTNOTE #2: In the 2008 U.S. General Election, 132,580,096 voters left
their house to voice their opinion in public.
FOOTNOTE #3: “In Book II, Chapter 2 of his book ‘The Spirit of Laws’,
Montesquieu states that in the case of elections in either a republic or a
democracy, voters alternate between being the rulers of the country and
being the subjects of the government. By the act of voting, the people
operate in a sovereign (or ruling) capacity, acting as “masters” to select their August Wilhelm Malm Carolina
government’s “servants.””
FOOTNOTE #4: The blue whale is the largest creature that has ever existed
on earth. It is bigger than 25 elephants; bigger than a Brontosaurus and a
Tyrannosaurus rex combined. A blue whale calf is about 7 m (23’) long at
birth.
FOOTNOTE #5: The sounds a blue whale makes can travel thousands of
miles in deep water, leading to speculation that the whales may be able to
communicate across oceans.
FOOTNOTE #6: Whales have long been a source of food, oil, and crafts’
material. A famous Japanese Proverb quotes: “There’s nothing to throw away
from a whale except its voice.”
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_____________________________________________ Chloe Piene 59
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1
The clasping and unclasping hands near the pubis on the stone slab
Then rest
Near the thighs, near the crotch
White moonlight filtering in
The woman never has a face – but – she has a pubis
He says – clasping and unclasping “like the rhythym of a heart”
It is the only time the heart appears – but no face
A great story

2
Moments, time, world, punctuated by
O n .
And then more. On. And so on. On.
There is no dissolve – all stops – nothing between – a distinction made by
darkness. Real jet black – that you can feel. Darkness – maybe – under
the sea? What is it? Head buried in a hole. The hole is already too solid.
The sky is too thin. Amniotic fluid. Ectoplasm. Hemoglobin. Fascia. Oil. Black
bogs. Silt water. The trickle of blood in the movie version of Death in Venice
– is jet black, not brown, not red.
3
The hymen breaking
The hymen is ethereal and never felt only an idea no real barrier only a
marker for the farrier a means of marriage proposal the possibility of staying
near the Shide island and painting the irish landscape for the rest of time
60 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Daniel Miller 61
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Pornography

*
They agreed to begin a collaborative project. They had nothing but
their good looks. They would make a pornographic movie. DO YOU
WANT TO EAT MY HEART They each had different motives. But they all
converged A SWEET DREAM. IN ONE BODY It would play in every
theater. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME THERE MUST BE SOMETHING
WRONG WITH ME There was no plot. A trailing red silk dress. A
trailing fingernail. In real time. SHE IS BREATHING HARD EXHAUSTED
CRAWLING ON THE FLOOR Demand, demand, demand. WHITE WALL
AND BLACK HOLE A list of names. Call and response. A list of numbers.
YOU BE HIM AND I’LL BE HER Machine BROTHER AND SISTER.
Menstrual pain SLIPS OF THE TONGUE A bee sting. WHO ARE YOU/
WHAT DO YOU WANT? Cracked mirror. STRIP SHOW you hate him
and I’ll hate her. SHE BITES HER NAILS AGE NAME LOCATION SEX The
moment in DENIAL. DO YOU WANT TO LICK MY WOUNDS please pay
attention. FILMSET CAMERAS ACTORS They walked through the nursery.
DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR FIRST OBJECT no. A series. THE DIRECTOR
FUCK YOUR GAZE take off your mask. Trash. SHORT-CIRCUIT. Line.
SPEED. Gas. INVADER FUCK MY CUNT I FEEL disgusted.
PICTURE IN THE PAPER tick-tick-tick. THE WAY THINGS ARE THE WAY
THEY MADE THEM bones. ON TELEVISION: ALGORITHIMS: ted is
in love with alice, jeff OTHER DESIRES systems people LIES GAMES
SCARS TATOOES who the fuck are you? ON GREYSCALE TELEVISION
twister CIRCE sorceress WAR MAKES THE STATE MAKES WAR
DISSENTING CHORUS white black rainbow SHE TIES HIS HANDS
WITH ELECTRICIAN’S TAPE JERICHO ROSE LA. SHE IS HAVING A
BABY cologne HER BELLY IS SWELLING She is playing with matches
HAMBURG SALZBURG HEIDELBERG A hotel bathroom.
**
A PRODUCTION OFFICE SOMEWHERE He is talking on the phone. AN
ACID CITY X THREADS THROUGH THE SCENE the silence you don’t
know BLACK HOLE WHITE WALL wire rose YOUR THIRST FOR LOVE
62 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Daniel Miller 63
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YOUR BLACK AND BLUE MOODS your finger on my pulse. A.Z.T.E.K.
WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES tracing lines IN LONDON from
the river to the clock DIAMOND DOGS writhing in pleasure and pain she’s
wanted NOW WE SHOOT ANOTHER ANGLE screaming birds INTO THE
NIGHT laws of the market laws of pleasure A CD theatre, flashing lights bel
canto CRAWLING-DRIVES Snow falling gently DRUNKEN ANGEL staring at
the ceiling MOVING minotaur-machine. ‘’WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME he felt
like such a FUCKING ASSHOLE!’’ Sheer imbalance.
**
SHE BEGINS KEEPING A DOSSIER ON HERSELF the radio
KRRKzzkrksskrrrkkszzkrrkrr. A CRACK A flash of lightning. Some bored stars.
She wakes up. She stares into space. AMOK.
64 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Kader Attia 65
______________________________________________

While alphabets were invented after words, words have always been
projections of thought. Now, when I speak with somebody, when I write
this sentence, when you read it, this act is always separated from the
thought. A temporal gap between the production of this sentence, the
thought, and its articulation as a sign.
Using a letter, added by a simple gesture with black spray paint, I
blurred this distance, creating a series of words that exist both as
pronunciation and representation.
Some years ago I was in an English-speaking place for the first time, lost
in the reality of the fluently spoken, fast and locally accented language.
It was my first trip across England, from London to Glasgow, through
Manchester and Sheffield. I was discovering, with difficulty, the different
accents of all these areas. The sounds of the words I heard during this
trip were so different from the ones produced in my head, reading
the dictionary. I was always wondering why the words I heard looked
different when written.
I started to write words the way I used to hear them, phonetically. It
became a mixture of languages, out of which came a poetry .
The word “poletical” doesn’t exist, except in the minds of billions of
people who start learning to speak English, without writing or reading it.
It is a “mise en abîme”, of how much politics and poetry have to do with
each other: politics as a way to live together despite what we sometimes
call Otherness.
66 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Elena Bajo 67
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Nothing more than a theatre of fluctuating ideas

and echoes of future moments
(A New Refutation of Time)

Performing a text, Reading a sculpture, Playing some thoughts

ONE
You should start your act now.
I am timing it.
It should last 15 minutes.
No more than that.
We are all busy.
We like things that are fluid and to the point.
15 minutes is enough
If it was enough for Andy Warhol, it has to be enough for you.
It is enough.
Friend, this is enough.
Should you wish to read more.
Go and yourself become the writing, yourself the essence.
(Music playing)…
TWO
Introduction.
This is a book which I have made no plans for
This is a book that is written as it goes
This is a book about thinking
This is a book about making no sense
This is a book about putting things in perspective
This is a book that tells me about what I should be doing next
Is this a book or it is a book that became part of a performance and a
sculpture and then became musical notes and then I have to recover it
again as the printed page?
DON’T FORGET YOU HAVE JUST 15 MINUTES
(PIANO MUSIC PLAYING)…around 15-20 secs
68 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Elena Bajo 69
______________________________________________

THREE SIX
I have been warned, this words I am reading now will leave me soon to NOTES ON
become music, when I think I have them they will leave me to become PUBLIC
more ethereal, more free, I will try to grasp them and they will not be there SITUATIONS,
anymore PHILOSOPHICAL
MODELS
This is happening as I speak, chance is of essence, time is of essence Keine Macht für
Niemand (No Power for
When I want to recall them they will not be there, remember you have 15 min Nobody), Berlin, 2008
(PIANO MUSIC PLAYS) FOR AROUND 60 SECS BEAR With BEAR
WITH ME
FOUR It was her walking what I
There is an appointed time (zman) for everything. And there is a time (’êth) heard, and I heard it like
for every event under heaven– a silent
A time (’êth) to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to Moan,
uproot what is planted. It was her eyes beating,
A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to tear down, and a time to build up. that made me stop,
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance. To look, to see more
her circular movement
A time to throw stones, and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, and a
transformed into a clock
time to shun embracing.
Day after day I came
A time to search, and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep, and a time to back
throw away. Step after a step run
A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together; A time to be silent, and a eternal circles without
time to speak. weariness or fainting
A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace. Time became a cage
– Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 Remember 15 minutes is enough
DON’T FORGET YOU HAVE JUST 15 MINUTES SEVEN
And yet,
(Piano Music Plays) 40-49 secs and yet . . .
Don’t forget you have just 15 minutes “To deny temporal succession,
to deny the self,
Five
to deny the astronomical universe,
I have been warned, these words I am reading now will leave me soon appear to be acts of desperation and are secret consolations.
to become music, when I think I have them they will leave me to become
Our destiny (unlike the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan
more ethereal, more free, I will try to grasp them and they will not be there
mythology)
anymore is not terrifying because it is unreal;
This is happening as I speak, chance is of essence, time is of essence it is terrifying because it is irreversible and iron-bound.
Time is the substance of which I am made.
When I want to recall them they will not be there, remember you have 15 min Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river;
it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger;
it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, I am Borges.”
—JL Borges, A New Refutation of Time
15 mins is all you have
70 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Elena Bajo 71
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EIGHT Ten
NOMADOLOGY, Dear Andrew.
NOMADIC Dear Andrew.
RESISTANCE AS Dear Andrew.
production of space you are the best! it is so interesting how our communication paths are
“Social space is a social always intertwined, and how we are so receptive to each other’s work,
product - the space the last time I saw your work this year, I thought, well you have it all,
produced in a certain just the world is waiting for the right moment to embrace you, when that
manner serves as a tool happens the time will get compressed in one glimpse and all your life will
of thought and action. become an image for you and for the rest of humanity. I always thought
of production but also we have to work together, like we can produce together more or different
a means of control, and work, the work that we can’t produce in solitary, it is good what we did
hence of domination/ with writing and I would like to continue it, I don’t know how, though.
power.” Henri Lefebvre I am preparing a project that I came up with about multi-level writing,
“The Production of it is about presenting non-linear narratives incorporated in what it seems
Space” a simple narrative, so it becomes a text full of fragments, ideas that
have been rejected and that they talk about rejected spaces, rejected
NINE
buildings, rejected people and where they inhabit, abandoned spaces,
BEAR’S
in different parts of the world with different voices, not only in text but
CONSPIRACY:
in images, every time I start, it is so much the information I have to
Backwards Walk
incorporate that i stop for a while because a get a lost in the maze, it is
Last sunday two bears deeply Borgessian.
who live in the Bear
Eleven
Pit (Bärenzwinger) in
“The form of the appearance of the will is only the present,
the Koellnische Park
not the past or the future;
started to walk in
the latter do not exist except in the concept and by the linking of the
circles and backwards.
consciousness,
After what it seemed an
so far as it follows the principle of reason.
isolated event, similar
No man has ever lived in the past,
situations have been
and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life,
reported happening in
and is a possession that no misfortune can take away. . . . We might
other cities of the world.
compare time to an infinitely revolving circle: the half that is always
Sociologists, scientists
sinking would be the past, that which is always rising would be the
and Architects are
future; but the indivisible point at the top which the tangent touches,
trying to decipher this
would be the present. Motionless like the tangent, that extensionless
mysterious behavior
present marks the point of contact of the object, whose form is time,
are bears performing a
with the subject, which has no form because it does not belong to the
secret ritual? without any
knowable but is the precondition of all knowledge.”
purpose?
—JL Borges, A New Refutation of Time
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______________________________________________ Elena Bajo 73
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TWELVE Fourteen
I might reflect on things that I have done in the past looking at them through Some time later:
the present tense
Phobias (from Wikipedia)
In reality I will not be speaking about the past since I am but expressing what
The following is a collection of Phobia words, words that end in -
I feel about that past, how I see that past activity in relation to how I would
phobia, from the Greek for fear or hatred. A phobia is an excessive,
like to see it, in reality I am talking in a future voice, in the voice of a possible
unreasonable or irrational fear of an object, place or situation. Phobias
future, I would contemplate just some possibilities among the thousands,
are extremely common, and anyone, no matter how well adjusted they
millions of possibilities
are, can fall prey to them. Sometimes they start in childhood for no
I can say I would like to investigate about the process itself, for whatever apparent reason; sometimes they emerge after a traumatic event; and
reason I feel very free writing anything that comes to my mind, text as a sometimes they develop from an attempt to make sense of an unexpected
medium to improvise and intense anxiety or panic. Alarmingly, for just about every object or
situation imaginable there seems to be an associated phobia; though
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in
fortunately, in most circumstances they are easily cured.
having new eyes” —Marcel Proust
However, the object of this page is reference and entertainment, not
Are thoughts processes the intangible part of objects? Is music the essence of
medical. Neither is it in any way meant to poke fun at or ridicule those
words?
unfortunate enough to suffer such a problem. The following (long) list is
If so, could a thought be played? I propose to focus on this merely intended to catalogue the often weird and wonderful names given
to phobias and their attendant (sometimes surprising) fears.
THIRTEEN
I am calling my sister in New York, today is mother’s day, the 11th of May, (To see the opposite of phobias, go to manias.)
amazing weather in Berlin, 25 degrees centigrades, i can feel the global
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
warming, as anybody can see i am totally obsessed with environmental
worries, OH NOW I REMEMBER I HAVE MADE NOTES OF A LIST OF ~A~
MANIAS AND THEIR NAMES. I HAVE KEPT THE LIST IN ONE EMAIL I HAVE Abibliophobia. Fear of running out of reading material.
SENT TO MYSELF… Achluophobia. Fear of darkness.
Acousticophobia. Fear of noise or sound.
WHY? I CAN NEVER FIND ANYTHING WHEN I NEED IT, IT TAKES ME A
Agoraphobia. Fear of open places.
WHILE, I WILL GO TO LOOK FOR IT…
Agyiophobia. Fear of streets or of crossing the street.
BE RIGHT BACK Algophobia. Fear of pain.
Algrophobia. Fear of opinions or beliefs
GONE FISHING…!~
Allodoxaphobia. Fear of criticism.
Alophobia. Fear of speech.
Amathophobia. Fear of dust.
Ambulophobia. Fear of walking.
Amnesiphobia. Fear of amnesia.
Anthropophobia Fear of people
Apeirophobia Fear of infinity
Chromophobia Fear of colours
Chronomentrophobia Fear of clocks
Chronophobia Fear of time

Hypophobia Absence of fear, IT SHOULD NOT BE IN

THE LIST?
74 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Elena Bajo 75
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FIFTEEN
Dromomaniac, the irresistible impulse to leave, This is not in the list because is
not a phobia , but I am definitely a dromomaniac
HERE IS A LIST OF MANIAS ( From Wikipedia)
Manias
The following is a collection of mania words, words formed by root words
from Latin or Greek with the added suffix -mania. A mania is: (1) A specific
mental disorder or obsessive preoccupation with something; a madness,
frenzy; obsession, fascination, or an abnormal desire for or with something
or someone, or (2) Excessive enthusiasm or fondness for something that could
be related to a variety of psychiatric disorders; such as frenzy, hysteria and
delirium. In other words, an abnormal attraction or obsession.
Note that this, as with phobias, is simply a catalogue of intriguing words, not
a medical reference.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
chronomania Obsession with time
dromomania Uncontrollable impulse to wander or travel
verbomania Excessive fondness for words
chronomania Obsession with time
dromomania Uncontrollable impulse to wander or travel
verbomania Excessive fondness for words
chronomania Obsession with time
dromomania Uncontrollable impulse to wander or travel
verbomania Excessive fondness for words
(PIANO MUSIC PLAYS)… 30 SECS
/// The End of Script for a total of 20 min 01 sec Performance ///
76 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Laura Stein 77
______________________________________________

Mic=macaw
Macaw=photographer
Mic lives at the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus Ohio.
She was taught to take pictures. She took these.
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______________________________________________ Laura Stein 79
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______________________________________________ Laura Stein 83
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______________________________________________ Eric Alliez 85
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The Cause of the Guattari Effect*

“Guattari’s an amazing philosopher, particularly when he’s talking about politics,
or about music.”—Gilles Deleuze (Negotiations, p. 26)

(“Is there a hope for philosophy, which for a long time has been an official,
referential genre? Let us profit from this moment in which antiphilosophy is trying
to be a language of power.”) —Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari (Kafka, p. 27)

In a slightly modified form, I am taking up once again a title that had

come to me naturally during a two-day study workshop I had organized
in London in April 2008 at the Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy (Middlesex University). I was uneasy with the Colloquium-
Form and had wished to think matters through the operative concept of
the “collective assemblage of enunciation.” How successful this was,
I am not sure. But the idea was to argue for the interest of studying
the Guattarian body of writing for its own sake, all the while avoiding
an exegetic practice that would simply reequilibrate the prevailing
Deleuzology with a new commemorative (or worse, patrimonial)
discourse of “schizo-analysis.”
Today I wish to add that by celebrating too hastily a militant exit from
philosophy, such a discourse would inevitably miss something that is of
a quite different nature and which should in fact found it, from the point
of view of an early Guattari Effect of/within the Deleuzo-Guattarian
adventure. Such an Effect, as effect, is the necessary starting point: a
critique and clinic of philosophical discourse undertaken as a theoretical
practice of transversalization—“on the absolute horizon of all creative
processes” where political experimentation as such originates, from a
Guattarian perspective that gives it a radical new meaning. That is to
say: experimentation as the politics—and ultimately, to employ a phrase
used by Deleuze in order to specify the alterity of Anti-Oedipus, as the
political philosophy—of a theory-practice whose reality principle breaks
with the philosophical Idea according to which “to think is always to

* L ecture delivered on 11 January 2010 at the University of Bochum’s Institut Für

Medienwissenschaft, upon the invitation of Erich Hörl. Text translated by Eric Anglès.

 Most of the conference’s papers were published in French in “L’Effet-Guattari” (“The

Guattari-Effect”), a special section of Multitudes 34, 2008.
86 PLURIPOTENTIAL
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interpret.” For if Deleuze sees Guattari as putting an end to his own long-
term project of expanding philosophy and intensifying its interpretive regime
so as to penetrate it with its own outside (which forces it to think), it is
because Guattari brings along an altogether different potentiality which by
1968 is felt to be urgently lacking. Namely: to make philosophy exit itself by
means of a project of decoding that realizes its textual capacity and its logic
of meaning by investing the destruction of codes, a destruction whose process
capitalism presents in a historical narrative inseparable from the semiotic
machination of the subject. The Guattari Effect would engage in a becoming-
political of philosophy, exited from its own self so as to acquire an absolute
power of decoding within the social field, and whose first effect would be to
undo the image of philosophical thought by cracking the codes of its material-
ideal form of interiority. So it is no longer a matter of suggesting another form
of expression and a new style for the book “of philosophy” (in accordance
with the famous warning in the Foreword of Difference and Repetition: “The
time is coming when it will hardly be possible to write a book of philosophy
as it has been done for so long...”), but rather of opposing to it an other
regime of production that incorporates it into the material milieu by plugging
it into the machinic reality conditions of the most exterior and the most interior
forces.
Machine-Book, flow-book, a book that schizophrenizes philosophy by
plunging it into a general semiotics impelled by the schizophrenization of the
field of the unconscious that is coextensive with the social field. For this “new
kind of book” is required in order to break with the “style of philosophy,”
insofar—as Deleuze explains in 1972 in a Nietzschean intervention updated
to the anti-interpretive tenor of Anti-Oedipus—as in it “the relation to the
exterior is always mediated and dissolved by an interior, in an interior”
that calls for a hermeneutic reading casually commingling the codings that
may have informed the book: sacred, bourgeois-contractual, institutional...
Deleuze continues: “Hooking up thought to the outside is, strictly speaking,
what philosophers have never done, even when they were talking about
politics, even when they were talking about taking a walk or fresh air. It
is not enough to talk about fresh air, to talk about the exterior if you want
to hook thought up directly and immediately to the outside.” There are
distant echoes here of the philosopher’s earlier observations in The Logic of
Sense on the “ridiculousness of the thinker” who, ensnared in the meshes
of the structuralist logic of a psychoanalysis of meaning, discovers that no
manner of serial game will hold up any longer to the schizophrenic reality
 Gilles Deleuze, translated by Richard Howard, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, Minneapolis,
University of Minneapolis Press, 2000 (original: 1964), p. 97.
 Gilles Deleuze, translated by Michael Taormina, “Nomadic Thought,” Nietzsche aujourd’hui
conference (1972), in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, New York, Semiotext(e), 2004
(original: 2002), p. 255.
Eric Alliez 87
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of the Body-without-Organs that materializes all forces—beginning with
words, which become physicalized and burst through the surface of
meaning, swept into the depth of this “vital body” whose every intensity
Artaud succeeded in introducing into “literature” (The Logic of Sense,
Thirteenth and Twenty-Second Series). The “ridiculousness of the thinker”
is that he does not know how to do philosophy in the present without a
structuralist logic of meaning, even though he suspects he will have to
renounce it if it is to cease being “abstract,” if he is to attain a “politics,”
a “full guerilla warfare” (the quoted italics are Deleuze’s, in “Porcelain
and Volcano,” The Logic of Sense, Twenty-Second Series, p. 158) that
are no longer beholden to a “practice in relation to the products that
[structuralism] interprets” (for the symbolic, the first tell-tale criterion of
structuralism, is “the source, inseparably, of living interpretation and
creation:” structural interpretation)... One takes full measure here, in
the negative, of the contingent necessity of the Guattari Effect, because
no other “book” will emerge from the Body-without-Organs without an
operative principle of “a writing inscribed on the very surface of the
Real” that prizes open the bolt of structure and offers up a radically
political alternative to the serial games. This, in Guattari’s trajectory,
would mean the machinic development of transversality, which conforms
to the distribution of the unconscious within the entire social body by
implementing a new pragmatics of the knowledges that deterritorializes
philosophy as much as it incorporates it into an artificial communism of
ontological production whose radically post-Nietzschean openness is
properly Guattarian. To quote Guattari, from one of his working notes
sent to Deleuze in July 1970 under the heading “Power Signs”: “The sign
is the site of the metabolism of power. [...] If Nietzsche’s force constitutes
a structural field, the machinic will to power sign constitutes discontinuous
artificiality [Deleuze underlines the entire sentence]. The eternal return of
the ‘machinic’ is not the mechanical repetition of the same in the same
but an eternal return to machinism, as the being of production and the
production of being, as the artifice of being and the irreducible character
of the fabrication of being.” “So, merger between the most artificial kind
of modernism and the naturing nature of desire.” And elsewhere: “the
real is the artificial—and not (as Lacan says) the impossible.”
Such would be the thunderbolt of the first paragraph of Anti-Oedipus,
G
 illes Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” (1972 – but written in 1967), in
Desert Islands, op. cit., pp. 191, 173. Note that Deleuze’s article ends with the observation
that criteria leading from the subject—subjected to structure—to praxis are “the most
obscure—the criteria of the future,” a future dependent in every way on a mysterious
“structuralist hero.”
 F élix Guattari, translated by Kélina Gotman, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, New York,
Semiotext(e), 2006 (original: 2004), p. 224.
 Ibid., pp. 99, 149.
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which begins by turning thought into a war machine against the order of
philosophical discourse in its “essential relation to the law, the institution, and
the contract.” All academic codes are shattered so as to untune philosophy
to the machinic disorder of the it (“It is at work everywhere. It breathes, it
heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. [...] Everywhere it is machines—real ones,
not figurative ones. [...] Hence we are all handymen: each with his little
machines”). This is also why the theme of desiring production—defined
by the fact that “production as process overtakes all idealistic categories
and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent
principle”—de-structures the Book-Form to sweep the reader into a machine-
book in which “there are not two planes of expression and content but
one single plane of consistency (= plane of machinic filiation),” according
to the Guattarian leitmotiv, in which we are called upon to produce our
own transversal connective and disjunctive syntheses. For if “we cannot
accept the idealist category of ‘expression’ as a satisfactory of sufficient
explanation,” it is also because the reader must be integrated/disintegrated
into a “machine of a machine” movement of that nature, a “law of the
production of production” in which, “far from being the opposite of
continuity, the break or interruption conditions this continuity: it presupposes
or defines what it cuts into as an ideal continuity.”10 It is in such a way
that the intensive and energetic writing of Anti-Oedipus shifts the entire
unconscious production process onto the reader-editor of a “writing inscribed
on the very surface of the Real: a strangely polyvocal kind of writing, never
a biunivocalized, linearized one; a transcursive system of writing, never
a discursive one...”11 This helps explain why Deleuze, in his “Letter to a
Harsh Critic” (1973), where he reflects at length on his conception of an
other reading (an “intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside
the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a
series of experiments...”) whose only question is “Does it work, and how
does it work?” (the very first sentence of Anti-Oedipus declares so, that it
is at work!), with a reader knowing to approach the book as “a little non-
signifying machine” (that is to say, a reader seized by the Guattari Effect
relayed here by Deleuze)—this helps explain, that is, why Deleuze chooses to
describe his encounter with Guattari by means of a succinct but unequivocal:
“Out of that came Anti-Oedipus.”12 This is what triggered the second period
 Gilles Deleuze, “Nomadic Thought,” op. cit., p. 259.
G
 illes Deleuze, Félix Guattari, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane,
Anti-Oedipus, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1977 (Tenth printing 2000) (original:
1972), pp. 1, 5.
 Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, op. cit., p. 207.
10 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, op. cit., pp. 6, 36.
11 Ibid., p. 39.
12 Gilles Deleuze, translated by Martin Joughin, Negotiations, New York, Columbia University
Press, 1995 (original: 1990), p. 7.
Eric Alliez 89
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in Deleuze’s biography, when it became a matter no longer of doing
philosophy (from an overdetermined relation to its history—however
much Difference and Repetition did indeed turn the history of philosophy
inside out), but of producing a critique and clinic of philosophy in which
the assertion of the univocity of the real is measured by “pure reality
breaking through” (68 is the Number of the Beast) whose principle is
that there is something flowing, that there are break-flow effects that
link up all the while unbinding (an immanent disjunctive synthesis) and
demand a new definition of the activity we call thinking that effectively
conjugates machine and desire. Deleuze summarizes this materialist
revolution in thought concisely, with a strange singular: “A philosophy
amounted for me, then, to a sort of second period that would never
have begun or got anywhere without Félix.”13 That is to say, a political
philosophy of a new kind, dependent in every way on a schizo-analysis
of philosophy whose experimental protocol would be drawn up in the
anti-genealogical terms of the rhizome-book, as a three-step operation:
first Kafka displacing Proust (“How can we enter into Kafka’s work? This
work is a rhizome, a burrow:” such are the first lines of Kafka: Toward a
Minor Literature (1975), “a Kafka experimentation without interpretation
or significance”); then the rhizome itself standing as a Pop-philosophical
manifesto with its principles of connectivity and heterogeneity, of a-
signifying rupture and mapping of real multiplicities (Rhizome (1976));
before being taken up again, in modified form, in the opening to A
Thousand Plateaus (1980) where philosophy is predominantly defined
as a “logic of multiplicities.” And What Is Philosophy?—a question that
can only be asked once the “desire to do philosophy” has passed, and
whose association with Guattari’s name might indeed have surprised —,
Deleuze and Guattari’s last book, seems no anomaly in this regard, its
rich rhizomatic writing very much put into the service of a geophysics
of the constructivist concept of a plane of non-philosophical, chaosmotic
immanence, a concept into which thought plunges in order to borrow
“from the chaos [of] determinations with which it makes its infinite
movements or its diagrammatic features.”14 Schizophilosophy.
Having reached this point of crystallization at lightning speed,
we have to slow down. Indeed we are going to have to rummage
through the toolbox of the man Deleuze introduces in 1972—the very
year Anti-Oedipus was published, in his Preface to Psychanalyse et
transversalité—as the encounter, in an “Anti-Self” with “schizophrenic
powers,” of a political activist and a psychoanalyst: Pierre and Félix,
Pierre-Félix Guattari. These powers, Deleuze emphasizes in order to
13 Ibid., pp. 144-145, pp. 136-137.
14 G
 illes Deleuze, Félix Guattari, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, What
Is Philosophy?, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994 (original: 1991), pp. 1, 50.
90 PLURIPOTENTIAL
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immediately show how this turns psychoanalysis on its head, are put into in Desert Islands, the title does not appear): “D’un signe à l’autre,” that
the service of an effort to reevaluate psychosis, in an analysis of desire and could be literally translated as “From One Sign to Another.”15
the unconscious whose latency is coextensive to the social field, “entailing
It is important to remember here that the development that leads Deleuze
ruptures in causality and the emergence of singularities, sticking points as
from Proust and Signs (first published in 1964), in which interpretation
well as leaks.” It is in such manner that the Guattarian appropriation of Lacan
rules as the forced master of the figure of thought, to The Logic of Sense
(primacy of psychosis, the object “a” that Guattari cuts from its function
(1969), where it is brought back into serial play, is in part owing to
of symbol of lack and its relation to the law in order to liberate a form of
a coefficient of generation; a generational transference marked by
“group” machinic subjectivity whose stake is the “subjective consistency” of
structuralism, which Guattari dodges, politically, by means of the
“social enunciation” geared towards “revolutionary rupture”) disappears
“coefficient of transversality” that institutional psychotherapy brought
in favor of “the difference here with Reich,” which precipitates (again I
him to posit as the “object” of the endeavor of a “subject group” (as
quote Deleuze) “the transformation of psychoanalysis into schizo-analysis.”
opposed to Sartre’s “subjected group”) and “of an analytic process”
A reader of Psychanalyse et transversalité, looking through Deleuzian
able to break with the “unconscious control of our fate” (“Transversality,”
tinted spectacles, cannot but be struck by the coupling effect thus produced
1964) tying the latter to an eternal symbolic order.16 A new starting
in relation to Anti-Oedipus, whose archeology (archeology, as Foucault
point is necessary: “the definition of the subject as unconscious subject,
explains, allows for the analysis of “the very forms of problematization”) and
or rather as collective agent of enunciation [my emphasis]” in order to
genealogy (which is geared towards how “they arise from practices”) are
avoid “reifying the institution, and for that matter society as a whole,
here rendered in practice and in real time (both books were published the
as a structure”—which is what an unconscious said to be “structured
same year). As though the genealogical dimension produced from Guattari’s
as a language” threatens to do (“La psychothérapie institutionnelle,”
analytical-political practices, to which Deleuze devotes the substance of his
1962-1963; to be found in the same article, in passing but very much
preface (the encounter between a political activist and a psychoanalyst),
of its essence, is a critique of a Heideggerian philosophy founded on
allowed for the analysis of the medial formation of Anti-Oedipus on the very
a “biunivocal correspondence between being and language [...] that
level of this unity of a plane of expression and content that propels their
makes the investigation drift towards a series of articulations posited
machinery (the archeological dimension) by the sheer fact that “political
as fundamental, like fencing ‘cuts’ aimed at the very possibilities of
economy and libidinal economy are one and the same.” It is therefore all the
expression.” More generally, Guattari speculates a little further on in
more important to acknowledge that “legitimized schizo-flow” which, Deleuze
the text: “Doesn’t postulating the existence of a social subjectivity and
argues, never ceased to propel Guattari and which Guattari managed
institutional objects, as we are doing, lead straight to the question of the
to elevate to a “metaphysical or transcendental point of view” whose
nature of the philosophical object?” (“Réflexions pour des philosophes
transversality (between “pure theoretical critique” and “concrete analytical
au sujet de la psychothérapie institutionnelle,” 1966). And it is precisely
activity”) amounts to a “machine of desire, in other words, a war-machine, an
in this schizo-text of ours (“From One Sign to Another,” published in
analyser.” And Deleuze concludes (we are quite ready for this) that the book,
1966, but whose argument, according to Guattari, was sent to Lacan
consequently, “must be taken in bits and pieces, like a montage or installation
in 1961) that structure, or “being-for-structure,” whose internal logic is
of the cogs and wheels of a machine. Sometimes the cogs are small,
not of the same nature as the desire that lies at the “root of subjectivity,”
miniscule, but disorderly, and thus all the more indispensable [my emphasis].”
is opposed on this very question to the machine and to a “being-for-
He then points to—at the very end of his preface—the particular importance
the-sign” irreducible to the internal logic of signifying chains. Far from
of two texts from Psychanalyse et transversalité: “a theoretical text, where the
the “inexorable signifying battery” ordaining everything down to
very principle of a machine is distinguished from the hypothesis of structure
“the finest poetic subtleties,” the latter would include the brute, non-
and detached from structural ties (‘Machine and Structure’), and a schizo-text
signifying materiality of the sign in “a one-of-a-kind sign prototype that
where the notions of ‘sign-point’ and ‘sign-blot’ are freed from the obstacle
would alone account for the entirety of creation...” So Guattari, in a
of the signifier.” Where it is literally given to read that the semiotic critique
process of continual negotiation with the Lacan of “The Purloined Letter,”
of structuralism attacked at its linguistic core (signified/signifier) machines
understands the signifying break as a subjective break of the signifier
the problematization of Anti-Oedipus by placing the Deleuze / Guattari
encounter under the very heading of this schizo-text, whose wording is as 15 Gilles Deleuze, “Three Group-Related Problems,” in Desert Islands, op. cit., pp. 193-203.
though stolen by the pen of Deleuze (you can check the English translation 16 F élix Guattari, translated by Rosemary Sheed, in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and
Politics, 1984 (original: 1972), London, Penguin, pp. 11-23.
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that no longer depends on a-historical “linguistic effects” (this would help
break out of the “structuralist dead-end” and the “Althusser operation”),
because it is clear that “it can just as easily be played on a tom-tom, or
written with one’s feet, as in the expression ‘voting with one’s feet’ when,
say, choosing to walk out the door of a conference.”* Which, as Guattari
immediately emphasizes in a side note to another 1966 intervention (“History
and the Signifying Determination,” republished under the broader title
“Causality, Subjectivity and History”), means “an idea of the sign closer
to Hjelmslev’s ‘glossématique’ than to [the] syntagmatics” of Saussure and
Jakobson.17 This is important since it is through Hjelmslev that Guattari would
manage to definitively break free from Lacan (and break Deleuze free from
Lacan), the Lacan of whom he would later say that he “flattened everything
by choosing to work with really bad linguistics.”18 Indeed, Hjelmslevian
glossematics sets forth a distinction between the planes of expression and
content that is not reducible to the gap between signifier and signified, insofar
as the sign is at once and the same time the sign of a substance of content
and the sign of a substance of expression. A flow-substance adapted to the
deterritorialized nature of both capitalist and schizophrenic flows. Hence the
principle of a semiotization of matter and a materialization of the sign which
eliminates any form of dualism between form and substance, in a double
deterritorialization that machinates language in an a-signifying direction
“that works flush with the real” [in English in the original! Translator’s note]
(Bruno Bosteels). Guattari would develop this semiotic machine further in
his “metamodelizations,” as a micropolitical relation between the form
of expression and the form of content, but that already at this early stage
lays down its plane of immanence as the reality condition of those strange
Guattarian figures, which are, to borrow from Anti-Oedipus, “no longer
effects of a signifier, but schizzes, points-signs or flows-breaks that collapse
the wall of the signifier, pass through and continue on beyond.”19 This also
helps us understand why Deleuze chose to invert the order of presentation
of the two texts highlighted at the end of his preface. For the solution of
machinic destructuration suggested to Deleuze by Guattari in “Machine
and Structure” in order to break out of the aporias of The Logic of Sense
(“to relate exclusively to the order of the machine” the differentiator of
the heterogeneous series used by structure as its principle of emission of
singularities: The Logic of Sense, Eighth Series: “Of Structure”), namely
* T ranslator’s note: the term “coupure” that Eric Alliez uses here (coupure signifiante and coupure
subjective du signifiant) is central to the Anti-Oedipus project and has been variously translated as
“cut,” “break,” “rupture,” “breach,” “interruption...” and otherwise still. After much deliberation
we opted for “break,” which is flawed but the most consistent with the standard English-language
translations referenced here.
17 Félix Guattari, in Molecular Revolution, op. cit., p. 181.
18 Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, op. cit., p. 152.
19 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, op. cit., p. 242.
Eric Alliez 93
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to place the machine at the heart of desire thereby establishing the
subjective break as “the distinctive trait of every order of production”
(whereas structure’s representative mode is an anti-production system
here equated with Marxist theory’s “production relations”), goes hand in
hand with the “opening up of a pure signifying space where the machine
would represent the subject for another machine.” That is to say, we are
still caught within a machinic interpretation of the Lacanian objet “a”—
which threatens to “break into the structural equilibrium [...] like some
infernal machine” (we encounter that expression echoed in Anti-Oedipus,
p. 83)—that enlists representation to ultimately summon back the “purest”
signifier in a manner of Lacano-Marxism pushed, here and there, to its
limits. With the difference that this signifier, broken off from the symbolic
order of structure, has no “possible written form” in history as a site of
the unconscious or marker of “the class struggle at the very centre of
unconscious desire.”20 Hence once more the importance of the warning
with which Guattari’s presentation begins and which would become the
matrix of his work with Deleuze: that this proposed distinction between
machine and structure “is based solely on the way we use the words.”
That being said, the fullest possible use of this distinction—following
Guattari himself—ultimately demonstrates the impossibility of locating a
Guattari Effect outside the Deleuzo-Guattarian—or Guattaro-Deleuzian—
adventure. Here are Guattari’s own words, from a long conversation with
Michel Butel in 1985:
“The miracle for me at that point was the encounter with Deleuze. It
was working madness of a kind I had never experienced before.
It was a learned and prudent, but also radical and systematic
endeavor of demolition of Lacanianism and of all of my previous
references, and an effort to cleanse the concepts that I had
“tested out” but had not been able to fully extend because they
remained too bound up with it. A certain “deterritorialization” was
needed, of my relation to the social, to La Borde, to conjugality,
to psychoanalysis, to [my group from] the FGERI [Federation of
Institutional Study and Research Groups], so concepts such as,
for instance, the “machine” would acquire their full effect... [...]
The philosophical bracing, and especially my long-term work
with Deleuze gave an entirely new efficacy to my first attempts at
theorizing.”21
Thus the “encounter with Deleuze” became the agent of and condition
for the theoretical deployment of deterritorialization as formulated by
Guattari... whose transversality had as most immediate result to make
20 Félix Guattari, in Molecular Revolution, op. cit., pp. 111-119.
21 F élix Guattari, Les Années d’hiver (1980-1985), Paris, Bernard Barrault, 1986, pp. 85-86.
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both men “exit” psychoanalysis, so as to better schizophrenize philosophy
and have it come unhinged! In this double deterritorialization, or if one
prefers this cross-capturing of the wasp and the orchid, any distinction
between code and flow vanishes. Here is what Guattari writes in his
Introduction to L’Inconscient machinique: Essais de schizo-analyse (1979),
which lays out the substance of the Pragmatics that would be developed in A
Thousand Plateaus (a politics of language): “Even though I wrote them alone,
these essays are inseparable from the work that Gilles Deleuze and I have
been carrying out together for years. That is why, when I shall be speaking in
the first person, it will be indifferently in the singular or the plural. [...] Here
again, it is entirely a matter of ‘collective assemblage’.”22
It remains that the collective assemblage, a conspicuous case of multiplicity
transformed into a theoretical-practical concept opposed to structure, is
a concept signed Guattari, given how directly its genealogy echoes his
“group-subjects” and the collective agent of enunciation we saw emerge
with its “coefficient of transversality” (in a violently anti-structuralist context,
as we shall remember, which Guattari would time and time again call back
to attention and intensify, because the driving characteristic of structuralist
formalization is to cut off the production of statements from their collective
assemblages23). It might in fact be interesting to develop the Guattari of
the Guattari Effect, on the basis of this operating concept to which he
relentlessly returned, in a sustained articulation with the concept of “desiring
machine” (which for its part would vanish from the writings signed Deleuze
and Guattari following Anti-Oedipus, replaced precisely with the concept
of “assemblage”). It is for that matter worth noting that in the immediate
aftermath of Anti-Oedipus, the Deleuze and Guattari writing machine
would shift its efforts toward an initial exposition of the various aspects of
the concept of assemblage around which the entire book on Kafka and
minor literature would be constructed. This is because “an assemblage, the
perfect object for the novel, has two sides: it is a collective assemblage of
enunciation; it is a machinic assemblage of desire. Not only is Kafka the first
to dismantle these two sides, but the combination that he makes of them is
a sort of signature that all readers will necessarily recognize” (last chapter:
“What Is an Assemblage?”). Kafka, Guattari’s favorite author, would thereby
offer him a pretext to develop an intensive politics of deterritorialization
of language and its markers of power, mapping onto the micropolitical
question of enunciation the constitutive articulation of Anti-Oedipus between
machine and desire, which submitted philosophy to a constructivist regime
of permanent experimentation (and social experimentation). For there is “no
machinic assemblage that is not a social assemblage of desire, no social
assemblage of desire that is not a collective assemblage of enunciation.”
22 Félix Guattari, L’inconscient machinique: Essais de schizo-analyse, Paris, Recherches, 1979, p. 15.
23 Ibid., p. 24.
Eric Alliez 95
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The statements produced by such an assemblage would serve as its
cogwheels; its proliferating singularity on a plane of immanence yet to
be built would be able to preempt the collective conditions of enunciation
by shattering forms, by marking ruptures and new junctures. In other
words, “an expression machine capable of disorganizing its own forms
[starting with the philosophical form! Author’s note], and of disorganizing
its forms of contents, in order to liberate pure contents that mix with
expressions in a single intense matter”24—into which an assemblage can
plug itself, plug its becomings-revolutionary.
The claim here is that the Guattari Effect depends in every respect on
this expression machine which he would never cease to bear witness
to (in his analysis practice as well as in his polyphonic immersion
in a multitude of group-subjects) and to scrutinize in a speculative
signesthesia whose experimental protocols (in terms of the micropolitics
of its semiotic assemblages) are revealed by his schizoanalytical
cartographies (within and beyond the work that carries that title). For
the “miracle” of capitalism is the production of a capitalistic subjectivity,
whose contemporary semio-mediatic subjugation is ample evidence
that it has managed to “pilot language, as it is spoken, as it is taught,
as it is televised, dreamt, and so on, in such a way that it remains
perfectly adapted to its own evolution.”25 Thereby becoming, from an
economic perspective, the miracle of Integrated World Capitalism and
its sign-producing structures, which constitute its primary production
because in them the mode of production relates directly—that is to say:
machinically—to the relations of production (the machinic subjugation of
the media era replaces ideo-semiological subjection).
Hence the pressing urgency of what Guattari called a “mental ecology”
in his Three Ecologies, tying it to a “logic of intensities, or eco-logic.” In
capsule form, this would mean promoting a reappropriation of the means
of subjectivity production by first decentering the question of enunciation
from its linguistic structuration (exiting Language) and orienting it instead
toward the heterogeneous expressive materials (Hjelmslev’s “non-
semiotically formed matter”) that found the operators of discursivity, all
the while minimizing the machinic interfaces of this “abstract material of
the possible.” A unique exercise of cartography of assemblages would
ensue, in which the external point of view gives way to a heterogenesis
of the existent that equates the abstract-concrete machinic exploration
of otherness, at its point of maximal precariousness and possibility,
with the destruction of the entropy of significational equivalences that
24 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, translated by Dana Polan, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986 (original: 1975), pp. 81, 82, 28.
25 Félix Guattari, L’inconscient machinique, op. cit., p. 28.
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characterizes the capitalistic Universe. “The emphasis is no longer placed
on Being—as general ontological equivalent, which, in the same way other
equivalents do (Capital, Energy, Information, the Signifier), envelops, encloses
and desingularizes the process—it is placed on the manner of being, the
machination producing the existent, the generative praxes of heterogeneity
and complexity.”26 The genesis of enunciation is itself caught up in this
movement of processual creation. And now, addressing philosophers (and
Deleuze): “Being does not precede machinic essence; the process precedes
the heterogenesis of being.”27 Guattari-Deleuze had warned us: the machine
is not a metaphorical figure. But now we must make do with this Guattari
Effect, with the a-disciplinary politics of the concept updated to the era of the
molecular revolution of Machine-Thought.
The very late Guattari, as we know, called out for a new aesthetic
paradigm. A call he would always immediately amend, proto-aesthetically,
by foregrounding its processual and transversalist dimension. Thus usefully
pointing out a few dead-ends.28
—Translated by Eric Anglès

26 Félix Guattari, translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic
paradigm, Paris, Galilée, 1995 (original: 1992), pp. 24, 109.
27 Ibid., p. 108.
28 About a Guattari Counter-Effect (i.e.: an Anti-Guattari-Effect), see for instance my “Post-scriptum
sur l’Esthétique relationnelle,” Multitudes 34, 2008. 
Lindsay Benedict 99
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______________________________________________ Gemma Sharpe 101
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‘Is this the helmet of Mambrino?’

The professor smells slightly and meetings in his office should therefore
be avoided. He smells because he always wears the same sweater.
Impeded by his own body he must force himself into the range of the
microphone and towards us. The lectern creaks. So we listen to him
– pens hovering over pages – waiting for the nuggets of truth that he will
give to us about this painting, that monument in Rome, or this particular
year of significance on the historical map.
We are waiting for his answers without recognising that there is an
over-assurance and maybe a childish haughtiness in finding answers.
“Why” is the child’s favourite question: we were born full of questions
and seek constantly to answer them. Yet if the child were to look up from
their chair to Maurice Blanchot for answers (in the impossible case that
he could be there), he would suggest to that child that an answer is their
question’s adversity – its misfortune. For the question unseals a void, giving
us a wondrous version of the ‘thing’ we seek before it is terminated by a
realisation in its answer: ‘Through the question we give ourselves the thing
and we give ourselves the void that permits us not to have it yet, or to
have it as desire.’1 Thus to receive that beautiful semblance of the ‘thing’,
the petulant desire in us to search and find must be willingly curtailed. Yet
stability is razed by the question and the desire ‘to have and to hold’ an
answer can overcome us. (It is this apparently satisfied desire that makes
our art history professor appear smug and indignant as he looks out at his
crowd of expectant faces and reads answers from his book.)
The void that Blanchot’s vision of the question creates might be like Kant’s
Muzzumil Ruheel vision of the sublime, for they both share a shaky kind of wonder in the
Please read it carefully, 2008
moments before their conclusion. For Kant, the aesthetic judgment we
Ink on paper, 80x62cm
Collection Ayaz Jokhio, Lahore yield over something that is beautiful (as opposed to sublime) is bound
to the immediate form of that thing we acknowledge before us in its
beauty.2 Yet when faced with the sublime prospect, we falter. Reason
and imagination must play out within our experience of the sublime and
this transaction will not come immediately, it will arrive only after some
duration. The duration is the time that it takes for us to recognise our
place in relation to that sublime vista. One must become attuned to it and
102 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Gemma Sharpe 103
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for a moment – like the duration before an answer terminates the desires of Perhaps we shift our paradigms (as deep-rooted and unconscious as they
the question – its possibilities are terrifying in their magnitude. may be), away from the blueprints of writing that my art history professor
has presented to us, towards one that Don Quixote might conjure. To a
Laid gently on my table once was an image I did not ‘understand’. The artist
mode of art writing that is open to non-understanding as an ingredient
who built it suggested that I apply some words to it nevertheless, knowing that
of the whole, an ingredient that keeps open its essential questions at the
I would not manage to read the Urdu script of its calligraphic abstractions. A
same time as it explicates, describes, and critically pays attention to any
British writer engaging with an artwork from contemporary Pakistan, I was
work under address. To claim to ‘answer’ an artwork, or to obscure one’s
released from ‘proper understanding’ of the kind our professor would advocate.
possible uncertainties about it in a piece of writing, is to be like a cat
So I wrote a story, a script, and a once-upon-a-time about that image. In giving
covering crap – pretending that something inevitable was never there in
me the permission to not understand, the artist knew that the writing could have
the first place.
been anything. The work I would produce was never expected to be an answer
that might haughtily aspire to terminate his image, for within my marriage of In a return to Blanchot: if he were here he might tell us that in Don
an ‘understanding’ and a uniquely-enabled sense of imagination, in this text Quixote’s reply to Sancho, the errant knight gave an answer that, ‘in
there could follow new questions alongside new revelations. In a Kantian sense, answering… takes up within itself the essence of the question, which
the attunement came when imagination was able to play itself upon the image is not extinguished by what answers it.’ He maintained all possibilities
along with a liberated kind of understanding. whilst making absolutely clear the nature and uncertainty of his own.
Once upon a time, the famous Don Quixote and his squire Sancho had a
particular tryst of words on their escapades-errant. Don Quixote had clumsily
attacked a barber wandering the road, to obtain for himself the bowl that the
barber was carrying. It was the kind of bowl a barber in those olden’ days
would have used as a guide to cut even-and-straight the hair around their
customer’s head. To Don Quixote however, this particular basin was worthy
of a more noble employment.
Yet Sancho, sick with travelling, was exasperated: “If anyone heard your
grace calling a barber’s basin the helmet of Mambrino without realising the
error after more than four days, what could he think but that whoever says
and claims such a thing must be out of his mind?”3 In his agitation Sancho
shouted such words at his master. Don Quixote meanwhile, happily wearing
that barber’s basin upon his head as if it were in fact the mystical and
legendary helmet of Mambrino, responded to his faithful squire: “Is it possible
in all the time you have travelled with me you have not yet noticed that all
things having to do with knights errant appear to be chimerical, foolish,
senseless, and turned inside out?” He looked down on his squire from his seat
on the armoured donkey. “What seems to you a barber’s basin seems to me
the helmet of Mambrino, and will seem another thing to someone else.”
Artworks-in-hand for the writer or the viewer, are much like that object Don
Quixote wore on his head. He might have been a great art writer had he
1 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Most Profound Question’, The Infinite Conversation, (1969).
lived in a ‘real life’ beyond Cervantes’ masterpiece. Don Quixote allowed University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota and London, 2008. p12.
himself the hazard of imagination. He understood the ‘falter of knowing’
that Kant talks about in the experience of the sublime and he showed noble 2S
 ee Immanuel Kant, ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ in Critique of Judgment, (1790). Trans. Werner
S. Pluhar. Hackett Publishing Company: Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1987. pp97-140.
patience and sympathy for Sancho’s reservations, however certain as he was
of the basin’s mystical powers. 3 Cervantes, Don Quixote, (1605). Trans. Edith Grossman. Vintage: London, 2005. p195.
104 PLURIPOTENTIAL
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______________________________________________ 117
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(previous) (following)

T. Kelly Mason Krysten Cunningham

More Bones (Breton Bones) “3 to 4” (Work in Progress)
Dye Transfer Prints 12.5” x 19” 2009 HD video 2010
4 Bones (Breton Bones)
Dye Transfer Prints 10” x 14” 2009
3 Bones (Breton Bones)
Dye Transfer Prints 10” x 14” 2009
Breton Immobilier
Dye Transfer Prints, 3 pieces, 19” x 25” 2009
 Krysten Cunningham 118
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120 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Lee Welch 121
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Being and Acting

INT. STUDIO – DAY

Two men on stage sitting on chairs with a table
between them.
 I.
I don’t think I could play the role you play now.
 II.
But this is me I am letting it all hang out.
I.
No, it’s not you.
I.
This ain’t me?
II.
I mean, I think you’re thinking of sixty things
at once.
I.
True.
II.
How is it going? Is it getting dull?
Is he upset and distressed and articulate?
Is he bored? Is he offended?
Yeah, here’s a good time for a joke? We haven’t
got much time.
You’re thinking about nine million things and
reacting to what I say and how is that gonna
be, is that gonna be offensive, no that’s dumb,
so you’re doing this editing at an insane rate
and I mean you have to do that, and that’s your
job. And you have this demeanor of levity and
lightness and amusement and zest and it’s easy to
ascertain that finally that isn’t what goes on in
your mind or your feelings at all.
122 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Lee Welch 123
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I.
I just feel like all my clothes have been taken off.
II.
No, but that’s something I couldn’t do. I couldn’t do
what you do and that’s a different kind of acting,
you’re playing a different kind of role. But anyway,
we’ve done enough, we made enough concessions...
II. interrupting; fiddling with object
I.
What are you doing there?
II.
Oh nothing. I just have a commercial to do. And you
say you couldn’t do it. Let’s see if you’re any good
at it. All you do is look up and read off the uh...
As they say in commercials “Have fun with it.”
II. offering the object to I.
I.
No, I won’t do it.
II. holding the object up
How long since you tried a new shade of eye shadow?
There are 25 beautiful colors. Super rich shadow by
Revlon. Ohh I am good.
FADE OUT
II.
You have made me even more self-conscious now. I feel
like a kid whose uh...
I. subtly interrupting; dropping an object
II.
What is it?
I. picks up the object
Stevie Wonder gave me this on the airplane today. And
it was very nice. He took it off his wrist, and said
“I want you to have this.” And it was very, very nice
of him, very kind of him.
124 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ James Yeary 125
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on “words nd ends from ez”/Dawn’s Erasure

Had lost faith in the poem. Or in myself, in my sight as it spewed

sentences, one after the other, like sheep I was counting, & never
enough.

Studied Pound for a year or more. & his tropes, his failures. The
Language poets too, tho the opacity of their work mirrored Pound’s,
their coldness regarding the object suggested their having been burned,
you know, by objects. How had they read Stein & Zukofsky? What,
in the poetry of the forerunners of the Language moment, was not
autobiographical? To their credit, the poetries of Bernstein, Coolidge,
& Silliman are constantly invoking pleasure, & often across layers of
meaning. But I don’t think I understood, or saw, this then, as I was, & in
spite of myself still am, looking for an author.

& this is perhaps why a section of the avant-garde chose to really erase
themselves from their work, or erase some sense of the self, in an attempt
at grasping the lack, of the former. & to what pleasure.

The avant-garde tendency, to be bound in sandpaper, is present in

the selection techniques of reading used by Jackson Mac Low, which,
even in tribute, produced books “of” Emily Dickinson, Pound, & Kurt
Schwitters’ language, that are set, if not in Dewey Decimal, on the mind’s
shelf next to those of the original authors. There they are ground away, &
facets of the original language are exposed as a beautiful dust.

Mac Low took (away) not only the first line of Pound’s Cantos

And then went down to the ships

but the rest of the first page, leaving only the

(e)n

in “then”. It took him pages of selective reading to produce the first line
of his “tribute”:
126 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ James Yeary 127
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En nZe eaRing ory Arms,

over the course of three years to erase 90% of the Cantos, producing an
88-page poem that acts as a “topographical map of the features of a work
otherwise obscured by its narrative thrusts” (Bernstein). The poem is reduced
to a textual surface, an alphabet, & then an enhancement of certain variants
within that surface.
from “Dawn’s Erasure”:

I began reading (into) Mac Low’s selection-tribute to Pound, Words nd

Ends from Ez (WNEFE), toward the end of June 2009, finding Mac Low’s III
selections of Pound’s Pisan Cantos in the Mac Low anthology Thing of Beauty,
& shortly thereafter decided to use WNEFE as source material, to which Even conservative buddhism encourages the digital record
I could a apply a flexible constraint that was a mix of free association & the pure binary essence reborn biologically
homophonic translation. The process of “translating” WNEFE then took on hunted & infused by our descendents
the form of a Rorschach, a non-representational blot that nonetheless began scrolls diffuse light to rest of silicon valley
to resemble images of my past in blurred fragments, & present, where it curiously dustin left portland’s
appeared as the faces of my friends surrounded by literal, textual, auras. collectives of pop
in basement shows
Tho I undeniably was using this avant-garde text (of Mac Low’s) as a to keep rare & a little drier
sounding board for my own egoic-world picture, what excited me more than the alphabetic self projected in secular metals
the feigned correlation between our works was the possibility of doubling these tantric pretenders
Mac Low’s. Most of WNEFE I transcribed, some by hand, some by typewriter, wld let gresham in
& I did this for aesthetic as well as practical reasons. I wrote Words nd & stay long enough to see it.
Ends from Ez, and I wrote it with semantic & emotional content. I married Incentive:
my text to Mac Low’s, breaking its form composing the actual matter of my sex.
subconscious, & fitting it around WNEFE, turning WNEFE into a mnemonic Arizona’s gold
score. &, while much of my poem, which I called “Dawn’s Erasure,” was is last/in paper
composed of objects bearing the features of my friends present & past, it -s of July, go to the show
also stank of place, from the beginning, which probably could have been but go to the best show.
“Genesis:” I instead translated “En nZe eaRing ory Arms,” into
My sister never pretended to be a buddhist
Genessee, even here, whoring our missus[.] but while claiming big sky
crossed me.

Now my only chance at seeing her

Deeper than name, the surface is familiar, or familiarized. Opacity & secret
is in a hot place
betray surface. A circle is not about anything, we have only inscribed upon
and that’s about summing it
on it, eye, flower, & planet.
since 2000.
Spicer said “the edges of mirrors have their own song to sing.” Even a rap show
can’t beat the heat
Every edge is a mirror. Let us return to mirror as a creative kind of failure.
-the urban suburban detail-
Full (fool) circle. bumping the alphabet
128 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ James Yeary 129
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-s digital art
ninjaz.
The yak gleaming at me thru the golden piano Don’t blame me or my lingo
A dozen states redden as we pray to Sabbath for gestalt operatics
ap missles shake for the hunnies
going off everywhere even if they ain’t hunnies
but Whitney’s like straight up “whatever” thrice I soaked my pants
black ops, whatever before Mrs. Free started checking me
Mt. Erie sucks
Intellectual profit
the asshole
above
fucked my day up
this new deck
counting cars
atomic-magnetic
as the clang from the bluffs
gateway
pitch determines what the cars are doing drug
& remember the asshole’s fireworks tried & finished
every year, competing my time in the desert
w/ this.
haggling over Chris’ complete erotic cs lewis
holiday in the grey states Where Brad forgot Nate
poverty visited by rock
tastier, & Nate’s punk domestica
Franco-buddhists & Hassid-buddhist terrifies
piss digital
& earn Whitney’s ire Sister, get lost in the atom
which spills over European port cities
& Brad thinks
and is against liberty
a purer form of entertainment
Seneca believed in a theographic economy wld have a million names for itself
spun the omnia patria bullshit
it grammars
believed in the divine right of kings
& that gutenberg projéct
proved the lutheran
so natural scansion
& then folded
offends even
abasement us!
is mutual
Whose boat is a natural reaction
little angel,
vagina dentata Bloatie give here
you have to forge my name on the lease
as the gears emerge from the schematic & I’ll do my best to copy the landlord’s
so will my river shoes find their engine
This isn’t shakespeare
but sarsparilla
insured as if it were
130 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ James Yeary 131
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The look of Galactus makes me sick Dan’s first tat or nut

Heliocentric (or the opposite) for whom darkness is light

& mewing in his stain & dawn extends the erasure
I’m allergic to this tree by the door
& noone to complain to but Tried to quote the whole thing
you, Whitney, & the sky before winter set in
that & the neighbors know just what we’re doing Morgan picked me of all people
& condemn us for it. to drink pine needle tea
& sleep in the snow w/ our axes
But the coldlab is golden Jesus deliver
see here a canard
comes Travis second-rate
my sister flew after all
for a nogood the singing.
in the age of terror
our fight
is water
on skates
an aphrodisiac PDX > “Denver” 7.19.09
set to kick tunes

the water rose

from under Arizona
& bloomed

speech a rat cast in gold

& spun to pop memorials
here & queer
three Idaho Gem shirts
confirm my existence
spake my lady

It made us look better or ruined the show

when Brad gave him the mic

I bought a jacket w/ what I didn’t give my sister

we toked at the cathedral
& I almost threw cummings in the seine

Andy you’ve killed me

go spread it on the back of some farm or wall street
132 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Linda Quinlan 133
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MOVE ME
MERCURY
MIMETIC
MINERALOGY
SHAKE
AGITATE
MOVE ME.
MOVE ME
MAKE ME
FORMED IN
A FRENZY
IGNITE
UNHINGE
SAPPHIRE
SINGE.
OPAL EYES
ARCHIVE
IRON ORE
OUTPOUR
Iron Ore Outpour ENTER
Collage 2010 THE NEW
MINERAL.
134 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Michele Masucci 135
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CLOSE YOUR EYES

SEE
SHUT YOUR MOUTH
TALK
PLUG YOUR EARS
HEAR
BLOCK YOUR SENSES
TOUCH
STOP THINKING
THINK
STOP MAKING SENSE
REASON
STOP FEELING
FEEL
REFUSE YOURSELF
136 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ nicholas Chase 137
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______________________________________________ nicholas Chase 139
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______________________________________________ nicholas Chase 141
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______________________________________________ nicholas Chase 143
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excerpts from 7th Sense

for solo bass with electronics, 2005
144 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Patricia Reed 145
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Potentiality and the Politics of Indistinctive Equality

It is symptomatic of the current plight of concept of ‘potentiality’ that

one requires the prefix ‘pluri’ to denote an understanding of a highly
diversified notion of the term. The dichotomous relationship that has been
instantiated between the ‘potential’ and the ‘actual’ is an unfortunate
simplification, in which potentiality is reduced to a state of waiting for
a catalytic event in order to render it productive, to render it actual, to
render it other. This dichotomous relationship between the potential and
the actual is inferred by such general statements as a “child has the
potential to know”, signifying that the child “…must suffer an alteration
(a becoming other) through learning”. Potentiality, as expounded upon
by Aristotle, goes beyond such a generic example. He addresses those
who already possess ‘knowledge’, and are therefore not obliged to
undergo an ‘alteration’, but rather by ‘having’ that knowledge, can both
bring it and not bring it into actuality. A more complex understanding of
potentiality is not merely a trivial matter to be taken up in the sheltered
journals of academia, but acts as a foundational concept in grasping the
presuppositions that go into the ontological partitioning of places, bodies
and roles, and their legitimation therein. As Giorgio Agamben notes:
“[u]ntil a new and coherent ontology of potentiality […] has replaced
the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality and its relation to
potentiality, a political theory freed from the aporias of sovereignty
remains unthinkable.”

The “I Can”
The verb “can” is central to a more complex understanding of the notion
of potentiality, and it is the verb that Agamben has gone so far as to
declare the singular term denoting his entire body of philosophical
enquiry. The verb ‘can’, in all of its troubling ambiguity, is a liminal

A
 gamben, Giorgio (1999). “On Potentiality” in Potentialities, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel,
Stanford University Press. P.177-184
 Ibid
A
 gamben, Giorgio. trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 p. 44
 gamben, Giorgio (1999). “On Potentiality” in Potentialities, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel,
A
Stanford University Press. P.177-184
146 PLURIPOTENTIAL
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verb insofar as to say “I can” signifies that one has the capacity to do
something, but this capacity or faculty does not necessarily entail a moment
of actualization. True potentiality, which Agamben postulates as the ‘existence
of potentiality’, is precisely when one possesses the capacity at hand and
must negotiate ethically with oneself regarding its actualization or non-
actualization. We all know the bad, adolescent joke, which, in essence,
embodies the profound depth of potentiality, when as teenagers, our parents
would say “can you clean your room?” and one replies “yes I can”, but of
course never actualizes this gesture of cleaning, never raises a finger, since
“can you clean your room” is not an imperative order but rather a question as
to the existence of one’s capacity to clean.
The existence of potentiality, which Agamben frames as the basis for life
itself, lies in this zone of indistinction where a coincidence of two, seemingly
opposed systems, the capacity to act and the capacity not to act, meet
and produce an unknown, un-named topology. It is within these indistinct
zones, that the need for ethics arises, since, again, like our lazy adolescent,
there is no mere task that must be fulfilled, no moral imperative, but
rather an ongoing negotiation of one’s capacity (and the inherent inverse,
incapacity) that constitutes the seat of ethical being. Rather than formulating
a notion of potentiality that is forever bundled with the productive capacity
of actualizing, we are instead confronted with the troubling position of a
radical inoperativeness situated within the notion of capacity itself and the
fullness of its meaning. Agamben calls on various examples of people who
fulfil their incapacity as potentiality, like the poet who does not write and
the much discussed Bartelby, the Scrivener, who instead of refuting his job,
simply ‘prefers not to’, to the bafflement of his employer. These figures exist in
potentiality, for they actively contemplate the relation between their capacity
to-act and their incapacity not-to-act. By engaging the capacity of incapacity
in dialogic-thought, potentiality is not something that ‘grinds-to-a-halt’ when
actualized, it is rather a form of potentiality that ‘gives itself to itself’, that
‘preserves itself ’ in actuality and perpetuates its very existence.
From the Dichotomous to the Di-Polar
The zones of indistinction, exemplified in the existence of potentiality shift
away from the dichotomous disposition of the term in it’s potential / actual
configuration, but rather, point to what Agamben calls “di-polarities”, not as
“substantial”, but as “tensional”. The inclination to frame this as a dialectical
 Agamben, Giorgio (trans. Hardt, Michael) (1993). The Coming Community. University of
Minnesota Press. p. 43
 Ibid
 Gilson, Erinn Cunniff. “Zones Of Indiscernibility: The Life Of A Concept From Deleuze To
Agamben”. In: Philosophy Today, 2007, vol. 51, pp. 98-106.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7696/is_200701/ai_n32231355/?tag=content;col1
(Retrieved Feb 22, 2010)
Patricia Reed 147
______________________________________________
state, should be carefully considered insofar as it would be a forever
incomplete dialectics, since the very thing at stake in this conception of
potentiality is the maintenance of tensionality that produces indistinction,
as such, it is purely anti-synthetical. The di-polarity that constitutes the
seat of potentiality in its complexity, could better be imagined as a Moiré
pattern of sorts – where two categories of shape meet and produce a
visual interference. The interference pattern is not a result of an emergent
synthesis, but rather the result of the optical tensions of overlapping systems
of pattern. Important in this example is that the different categories (those
of opposing shape) must interfere and overlap to produce the optical
illusion – the categories of difference do not cancel each other out in their
overlapping, but coincide as a result of the tension between different forms.
The existence of potentiality, in it’s tensional, capacity-incapacity ‘dipolarity’
is the underlying crux of the more overtly political argument posited by
Agamben in his perhaps most well known character Homo Sacer. Above
all, Homo Sacer, as a sacred being who can be “…killed and yet not
sacrificed, [who is] outside both human and divine law…” , he is reduced
to bare-life and banished from the polis, outside the jurisdiction of ‘normal’
law. Homo Sacer’s existence opens up a zone of indistinction insofar as
he is simultaneously a being who can be killed, (and not sacrificed as in
a godly order), yet if he is killed, he can be killed with impunity. Homo
Sacer’s situation as a marginalized, banished object reduces life to its
most basic biological function (in Greek ‘zoe’, which is the domain of
life associated with all living things, kings, gods, animals). The ‘bios’ (in
Greek there are two words for ‘life’, ‘zoe’ described above and ‘bios’ the
domain of political life enjoyed by citizens of the polis) of Homo Sacer
has been stripped foregoing the status of the ‘citizen-subject’ of the polis,
who has a political (and therefore juridical) status. Homo Sacer, however,
does not merely get pushed outside of the ‘bounds’, or live outside of
political citizenship, but remains included in a relation to the sphere of
legislative decision making, of juridical distinction making due to his
‘passing-through’ of the exceptional juridical order. It is however important
to recognize that the exclusive inclusiveness involved in the designation of
‘bare life’, of banishment and marginalization, are not restricted to those
blatant examples of Nazi camps or Guantánamo Bay, but constitute “…the
decisive event of modernity [that] signals a radical transformation of the
political-philosophical categories of political thought”10 where ‘zoe’ enters
the sphere of the polis, and bare-life itself becomes a political object, and
naked life is wholly desubjectivized.
A
 gamben, Giorgio. trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998
 Ibid
10 Ibid
148 PLURIPOTENTIAL
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The existence of potentiality and its inherent zones of indistinction,
exemplified by a diverse set of characters, from the lazy adolescent, to
Bartelby the Scrivener, to Homo Sacer, is a testament to its liminal ethical
status. After all, where else could one situate and write about such drastically
different figures as pertaining to a common order. The zone of indistinction
is neither good nor evil as such, but exists as a conceptual topology in the
understanding that such indistinctions underlie the articulation and enactment
of all distinctions, and orders of partitioning drawn out on places, bodies and
roles. It is the recognition of the existence of potentiality, the un-named and
undelineated foundation of indistinctiveness that calls out for an ethics of such
an order. The in-between state of potentiality, the state before distinctions are
carved out or actualized, is the seat of such an ‘indistinct’ ethics, and points
to notions of equality elaborated by Jacques Rancière which can help us to
better formulate a politics of indistinction, a politics of potentiality.
Equality and Potentiality
In the existence of potentiality outlined by Agamben, there is a fundamental
equality between the states of acting and non-acting. This notion of equality
is at the core of politics outlined by Rancière in Disagreement: Politics and
Philosophy (1998). Here we can trace a parallel between different terms
employed by each thinker which point in a similar direction: for Agamben
the term ‘indistinction’ can be tied to Rancière’s ‘equality’ for it is as-of-yet
undifferentiated; whereas his inequality can be tied to Agamben’s ‘distinction-
making’, since it is the instantiation of difference, of the partitioning of roles,
places and bodies. Rancière sets up his description of a radicalized notion of
equality, by firstly outlining the plight symptomatic of any social order: “The
foundation of politics is not in fact more a matter of convention than of nature:
it is the lack of foundation, the sheer contingency of any social order. Politics
exists simply because no social order is based on nature, no divine law
regulates human society.”11 After pointing out the “sheer contingency” upon
which any social order rests, Rancière goes on to say: “Before the logos [an
argument of reason] that deals with the useful and the harmful, there is the
logos that orders and bestows the right to order. But this initial logos is tainted
with a primary contradiction. There is order in society because some people
command and others obey, but in order to obey an order at least two things
are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that
you must obey it. And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person
who is ordering you. It is this equality that gnaws away at any natural order.
Doubtless inferiors obey 99 percent of the time; it remains that the social
order is reduced thereby to its ultimate contingency. In the final analysis,
inequality is only possible through equality.”12
11 Rancière, Jacques. trans. Julie Rose. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998. (p. 16)
12 Ibid
Patricia Reed 149
______________________________________________
The foundational ‘equality’ that Rancière addresses in his conception of
politics, speaks to the indistinctive zone insofar are those who ‘obey’
must have the equal capacity of understanding what to obey and
that they should obey; they have the capacity to “recognise” power
(aesthesis) “but not […] to possess it (hexis)”13 Every social order rests
on this elementary potentiality of equality, every system of power and
hierarchy rests on this fundamental indistinction before the operations
of actualization take over and parcel out roles, delineate bodies and
map out places. The equal capacity presupposed by any social system
is that of an aesthetic order, for it is precisely the equal capacity to
perceive and recognise the distribution of inequality, of power, vis-à-
vis the inequality in the possession of power. The unpossess-ability of
aesthetics is where the shared equality of comprehension is manifest, in
the appearance of that which cannot be apprehended. “The problem
is not to accentuate the difference between the existing equality and all
that belies it. It is not to contradict appearances but, on the contrary,
to confirm them. Wherever the part of those who have no part is
inscribed, however fragile and fleeting these inscriptions may be, a
sphere of appearance of the demos is created […] the power of the
people exists.14” The domain of aesthetics is where one can recapture
the existence of potentiality and release it from its restricted twinning with
perpetual actualization.
Like Agamben, Rancière sets up an ‘exclusive/inclusive’ paradigm
of sorts, in his outlining of social structures, describing two distinct
categories, the ‘police’ and ‘politics’ which imply one another
in their referentiality. Rancière uses the term ‘police’ (in a non-
pejorative fashion) to delineate, “… the set of procedures whereby the
aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization
of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems of
distribution and legitimizing this distribution.”15 Politics, for Rancière
is, rather, “antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the tangible
configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by
a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration
– that of the part of those who have no part.”16 The ‘police’ is the
actualized domain of social operativeness, as the collection of institutions
and conventions that carve out the partitioning of places, peoples and
roles, inscribing inequality and distinctions amongst its constituent parts.
Politics, on the other hand, is wholly unactualized, it is the existence of
13 Ibid
14 Ibid
15 Ibid
16 Ibid
150 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Patricia Reed 151
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potentiality reasserting itself, reappropriating the indistinction of equality at
the contingent core of social structuration.

The Ethos of Indistinction

The ethos of politics proper, is not the calling out, or pointing to the existent
‘actualized’ order of roles, people and places, but rather the ongoing
excavation of the fundamental equality grounding any social system and
the legitimating apparatuses of that system. Re-inscribing potentiality where
only actuality appears, is an effort to intervene in the core processes of
demarcation and partitioning, of releasing the imposition of actuality from
the generic notion of potentiality. The operativeness of the actual, the distinct
and the unequal are held in di-polar relation to the inoperativeness of the
existence of potentiality, the zone of indistinction of fundamental equality.
The ethical relationship implied by the inoperativeness of the existence of
potentiality (for Agamben, life itself) is one of openness and confrontation
with one’s impotential – it is a grasping and ongoing witnessing of one’s
incapacity, an ethics before actualization and distinction-making. Potentiality,
in all of its richness of political signification, is nothing less than a movement
of de-actualization, an unravelling of the thresholds that delineate the
instantiation of inequality and modes of distinction-making. Potentiality is the
reinstating and constant verification of the presupposition of equality, the
zone of indistinction that constitutes the root of all forms of social organization
- it is the very faculty of non-consensus which both can and can-not, (and
recognises itself with this relation of di-polarity), instigate the appearance
of other worlds and other constellations of what is at stake in the politics of
being as such.
152 Waiting With Me
______________________________________________ Zoe Crosher 153
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154 Waiting With Me
______________________________________________ Zoe Crosher 155
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156 Waiting With Me
______________________________________________ Zoe Crosher 157
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158 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Seth Nehil 159
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Children’s Games (after Breugel):

a growth for mimicry and variation

Play, even if it appears without sense,

contains a whole world therein;
the world and its complete structure
is nothing but a children’s game”
- Jacob Cats, 1622

Parts may overlap or be shown in any order.

Part One
Construct a literary story based on the NY Times book review of
Neverland by Piers Dudgeon, entitled “For Starters, a Satanic Svengali”
(by Janet Maslin, Oct. 26, 2009). The story should attempt to convey, in
unadorned style, the content of any scenes or interactions or occurrences
which are described in the review. No attempt should be made to force
these scenes into sequence, or to invent connections between them.
Using the collection of fragmentary literary moments as a basic structure,
collaborate with another author to produce a script (with staging
directions) for an elementary-age theater production. Each described
moment should exist as a separate “Act”, without connective material.
They may be re-ordered in any sequence.
Using available resources and adult participants, create the necessary
costumes, sets and props to perform the script. Rehearse and perform
the play using adult actors on the stage of a classic elementary school
auditorium with a proscenium stage and curtains.
Videotape the performance using four cameras on tripods at distinct
vantage points, controlled by separate operators. Editing these tapes,
create a four-screen video projection.
160 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Seth Nehil 161
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Part Two
Choose scenes from a children’s movie that contains horrific or disturbing
Janet Maslin
(book reviewer) elements (for example, the Wicked Stepmother character in Disney’s
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, 1937). Look particularly for
moments that display grotesque or distorted vocal sonorities and
“Peter Ibbetson”
exaggerated characterizations. Extract an audio-only recording of
Neverland chosen scenes and apply editing procedures - cutting, duplicating
and erasing fragments of the language to realize a collage of silence,
“Kicky”
grouped or single phonemes, and short vocal gestures derived from the
original source.
George du Maurier Svengali
Arrange performers to listen on headphones that dampen any hearing
Piers Dudgeon of outside sounds. Record several attempts to imitate the fragments as
(author) “Trilby”
closely as possible.
inherited Modus Operandi
psychic gift Using multi-track software, create a multi-voice (at least 8) arrangement
of the imitations. Selected groups of tracks may be considered as
Gerald du Maurier
brother/sister
Sylvia du Maurier representing individual members of a choir, for which this composition
Arthur Llewelyn will act as a performance score, in real time.
Davies
father/daughter incest Export each track grouping to a separate stereo audio file, maintaining
the overall time structure. Along with the vocal sounds, include a
Daphne du Maurier drone or white-noise masking tone to additionally isolate the hearing
5 Comely Sons of individual performers. This tone should be loud enough to mask the
Unseen Diary
outside sounds, but not so loud that hearing the score becomes overly
difficult.
“The Blue Lenses” When performing the piece, each vocalist is to wear headphones
“Rebecca“
connected to a separate audio playback device containing their score,
and all begin their respective devices at the same time (within average
David tolerance). While listening to each phrase, performers attempt to repeat
Creative use of (dead brother)
dreaming
it as closely as possible, without additional inflections.
J.M. Barrie During performance, additional vocalists accumulate in close proximity
to the headphone-wearing group. These performers may move around
“Uncle Jim“ the first group and intermingle with them. Each performer in the second
group is free to mimic, after a pause, the voice of any other performer.
Alfred Hitchcock
Part Three
“Peter Pan“
Excerpt scenes containing the “Captain Hook” character from live-
action interpretations of J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan”. After removing any
Devil audio content, create a collage of body gestures by editing them into
sequences of single movements, each separated by a short blank pause.
Emphasize looped and repeating phrases, alternating with new material.
Slow each movement to a rate that facilitates observation and mimicry.
162 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Seth Nehil 163
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Using this collage as a score, rehearse a movement performer to mimic the
gestures as closely as possible. Produce a video recording of the performer
against a neutral background. From tape number one, rehearse and
videotape performer number two. Continue this process until there are four
video recordings.
Without any internal editing of individual video recordings, produce a four-
screen projection.

Part Four
Produce a collage of non-linguistic vocal sounds produced by the main female
character in the film “Suspiria” (Dario Argento, 1977). Use this collage to
instigate vocal mimicry from several performers wearing headphones, in
separate recording sessions.
Using editing techniques, produce a stereo file consisting of a distinct
sequence of vocal fragments, to act as a score for a single performer for
video.
Arrange a vocal performer with headphones connected to an audio playback
device that contains the score. The performer holds a black umbrella and
walks constantly and at a steady rate toward the video camera, while the
camera person walks backwards (led by an additional guide), holding the
frame as a steady medium-length head-and-shoulders shot. Attached to the
umbrella will be two lavalier microphones, pointing inward, recording both
the sound of rain and the voice of the performer.
Videotape the performer reacting to the score four separate times in four
locations (all raining).
Without internal editing, use the four video recordings to produce a four-
screen projection, with sound.

Part Four B
Live performers use one of the four video recordings from Part Four as a
score, and perform the vocal sequence in tight unison.

Part Five
Over a duration of 20 minutes, arrange 8 vocalists to perform the sounds of
Grimm’s law of linguistic drift, in sequence:
Bh -> b -> p -> f, etc.
164 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Tyler Stallings 165
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Behaving

University of California, Riverside’s Sweeney Art Gallery presented

Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art during fall 2009 and winter 2010.
This was group exhibition of twenty international artists exploring
human interaction with animals through provocative video installations,
photographs, paintings, and sculptures. It was co-curated by myself
and Los Angeles-based artist and independent curator Rachel Mayeri.
Intelligent Design came on the heels of several exhibitions and
conferences in the UK in 2009 that explored the topic of interspecies
interactions in light of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.
During the run of the exhibition, I kept being reminded that different
species will never know the consciousness of the other. However, one can
say the same for two humans as well. For the most part, the exhibition
was a representation of the well intentioned possibility of collaboration
and/or communication between species. But I’ve wondered if there might
be some way to represent the unseen gap between two beings, that
seems to be full of gestures, attempts, and desires to communicate. I’ve
always believed that visual art is one of the best ways to represent this
“gap” as it is a process, object, or event that often attempts to create a
platform for questions, intentionally avoiding answers. With this “cut-
up” text, Id like to create openings between “mountains” and partial
absences between “words.” Maybe my cat and I will better understand
our disparity.
166 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Tyler Stallings 167
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Cut-up Cat-Up Catch-up

remember that cats are not roll leave purpose are not the witch’s familiar nor
with him evil or fur if when eat a certain color of unlucky cats are people-
friendly pets and they disobedient personalities your their own a run own a
will or two, watch be they act do they you around a lot do much several a
lot do they purr a this do left generally act happy are sad or find in between
all of these angry what how answered through simple observation cats time
love you how they or will usually with was an expression on several that
they have pleased looks, miffed looks, annoyed interact satisfied looks and
of course, questions a as well something out how him particular cat reacts
look certain stimuli, for example, cat nip he she not on it and its with it
they you it, learning does he mythical around in it for sleep minutes and
then ignore upon this, from the frenzy cat if perfectly normal behavior or
you is your to you no before not to can and have done for him they may
your necessarily wish to possess the nip, but they will show you how happy
they are your receive it the same is true of toys that you give them even is
it with equivalent something the cat wants startle when with at the will she
by still at i’m nudge it are her nose to it paw place let you know towards
she finally the gift and accepts it observe how you a reacts just to ignore
is her does your cat appear to be sleeping but when you touch him there’s
behaves person he’s faking being dislikes and wants you find on if you are
there they pet him it curled to he will pout it later do not is to pet a when if
cat if genuinely asleep he and to play you wake him suddenly lot is chances
game demonstrating cat when play or reassure himself into you 6 him way
are fascinated moment their humans you will sit and stare lovingly that your
eyes for the longest hours is you stare back, your household he will to we’re
other way this is how does defers the leadership role to eating know how
all cat a when how leave the house perspective, are, he will simply spend
his alone time curled up asleep and it is not uncommon for ones person to
creatures likes and return their will you to find the cat looks, up asleep in
the same to and nearly the same position he just in of faces reaction they
as your arrival however, home back the cat is liable to go into a sudden
cat’s of activity, nearly killing himself bouncing off the walls this stop the
whimsies of a child saying, have acknowledges that on a long road trip
what the cat is saying is, least so glad you’re finally home he will react
this cats if you are gone love hours or 16 minutes the length will time is
irrelevant when spend time with your cat feeling, learn its moods and he
find out play home and asleep and you are well out your cats to or your
cat’s tell language and you, the human of the course, appreciates cat loves
he there misses you they you are gone and will act the on they just to
get pounce attention way are clever at getting attention and single-minded
of purpose about getting if just enjoy of cat and it cat enjoy you as well
168 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Seth Cluett 169
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170 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Susanne Neubauer/Silva Reichwein 171
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SHIFTING POSITIONS

physical surface and intellectual depth

visuality and non-visual seeing
abstraction within the picture shifts towards the straight-lined quotidian field
images which do not demand or give an explanation
to erode mind, interpretation, thinking and cognition
they are islands to leave during the act of seeing
if the reality of the picture is more real than reality
painting as a site of presence
illusion disillusioned
space within the format limitless, incalculable
the power of a line and yet non-linear, undirected
controlled spontaneity
ligation or value of color yet sovereignty, exclusiveness of a single color
precisely vague, concisely in its transparency and clarity
energy, undersigned aimless, present
painting is interesting for me before interpretation starts
I understand individuality as experimental, changing
no hierarchy and yet precise, exact, exclusively
structure and atmosphere coexistently
complexity, on the verge of not losing everything
balance of asymmetries and disparities
abstract painting

Susanne Neubauer to Silva Reichwein (a sort of self-portrait) Silva Reichwein back to Susanne Neubauer (a sort of self-portrait)
Pencil on paper, 8.27 x 11.69 inch
172 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Warren Neidich 173
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Sculpting the Brain, and I don’t mean like Rodin

An excerpt from Neuropower

Part 1.
“…The most extensive modification to take place in human brain evolution
- the disproportionate expansion of the cerebral cortex, and specifically of
the prefrontal cortex - reflects the evolutionary adaptation to this intensive
working memory processing demand imposed by symbol learning. So
the very nature of symbolic reference, and its unusual cognitive demands
when compared to non-symbolic forms of reference, is a selection force
working on those neurological resources most critical to supporting it.
In the context of a society heavily dependent on symbol use-as is any
conceivable human society, but no nonhuman societies-brains would have
been under intense selection to adapt to these needs. …This, then, is a
case of selection pressure affecting the evolution of a biological substrate
(the brain) and yet which is imposed, not by the physical environment, but
ultimately from a purely semiotic realm.” 
“From the perspective of distributed cognition, this sort of individual
learning is seen as the propagation of a particular sort of pattern
through a community. Cultural practices assemble agencies into
working assemblages and put the assemblages to work. Some of these
assemblages may be entirely contained in an individual, and some may
span several individuals and material artifacts.” 
Today more then ever it is culture that has replaced nature as the primary
force of epigenesis. Epigenesis is defined as the means by which the
unfolding of the genetically prescribed formation of the brain is altered by
its interaction with the environment. When one considers brain function in
this context the term neural plasticity is used. Neural plasticity refers to the
ability of the components of neurons, their axons, dendrites and synapses
plus their extended forms as neural network systems, to be modified by
experience. The neurobiologist Marcus Jacobson defined neural plasticity
as a process through which the nervous system adjusts to changes in the
internal and external milieu. Adjustments in the internal milieu can occur

 Multilevel Selection and Language Evolution, Terrence Deacon in Bruce H. Weber

and David J. Depew, eds., Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered,
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003)
 Edwin Hutchins, Distributed Cognition, IEBS Distributed Cognition, page 5
174 PLURIPOTENTIAL
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after brain injuries. For instance, a child is able to recover function of language
production and reception after trauma or stroke to the left language hemisphere
of the brain. The right hemisphere, not normally an active part of that system,
is capable of being modified so as to assume these language functions with
little deficit if the onset of left hemisphere dysfunction occurs at an early enough
age. Adjustments can also be in response to changes in the external milieu.
During the unfolding of the genetically determined neurobiological time table
there are critical periods of development in which certain regions and systems
of the neurobiological substrate are extremely sensitive to various conditions
including the linguistic-cultural milieu, which predispose it to language
acquisition during a particular window of time. But the bigger question then
becomes what language. The child’s brain has the potential to learn any of the
thousands of languages in the world. Which one is learned is dependent upon
the close coupling of the childs brain-mind to his or her linguistic field. As we
will see in what follows, it is this condition of neural plasticity that will be key
in understanding the rapprochement of Rancière’s distribution of the sensible
and its concomitant regulation of the pluripotentiality of the brain’s neural
plasticity. I will argue that the “institutional stabilization” of the distribution of
sensibility – which, through the policing of that field defines the new conditions
of power – fulfills the necessary conditions to restrict the potential heterogeneity
implicit in the pluripotent character of the neurobiological substrate resulting in
the production of a people. When we focus our attention on the micro-cultural
context of the work place and understand it as a form of restricted distribution
of sensibility, as a controlled space to perceive in action, we begin understand
its historical effect on neuromodulation.
As we advance historically from primary economies of extraction to those
described as secondary, involved with manufacturing, to those involved in
services defined as tertiary we also move through different assemblages
of sensational fields. When the conditions of the information economy
predominate, as they do in Northern European countries and the United
States, and the emergent forms of general intelligence that result are expressed
as conditions of networked and distributed systems defined as intensive, the
possibility for intensive neural sculpting is great. Let us look deeper into the
reasons why.
Two conditions have implications for how we might understand the idea of
general intelligence. In the Fragments on Machines, Marx understands the
 Marcus Jacobson, Developmental Neurobiology, (New York: Plenum Press, 1991) page 26.
 lva Noe, Action in Perception, Bradford Book, MIT Press, 2004, page,1.
A
“I argue that all perception is touch-touch like in this way: Perceptual experience acquires content
thanks to our possession of bodily skills. What we perceive is determined by what we do…”
 .R. Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, Harvard University Press, 1976
A
“It seems surprising that the science of psychology has avoided the idea that many mental
processes are social and historical in origin, or that important manifestations of human
consciousness have been directly shaped by the basic practices of human activity and the actual
forms of culture.”
Warren Neidich 175
______________________________________________
idea of general intelligence as machine intelligence. In the transition from
artisanship to mechanized production of the assembly line the unitary
consciousness necessary for the crafting of the unique object is now
linearly distributed throughout an assemblage of laborers who function in
concert to produce the replicated object now reproduced ad infinitum. This
is extensive labor as it produces a similar product over and over again.
The laborer is simply a cog in the wheel of production and is subsumed
by the machine as simply conscious linkages between the machine’s
mechanical organs. “But once adopted into the production process of
capital, the means of labor passes through different metamorphoses,
whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of
machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most
complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a
system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself;
this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs,
so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.”
Their labor is fetishized into a series of partial acts that together produce
the object and the machine is what binds all their minds together ###and
synchronously. Together, as a single entity, they produce similar objects as
long as the machine functions correctly. However things can go wrong as
comically dramatized in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, where, while
working on an assembly line he becomes accidentally consumed by the
machine. In the transition to a post-Fordist condition this assemblage of
individuals and the architecture that reflects it breaks up and is dispersed
horizontally, distributed across multiple times and spaces and the products
that emerge are singular and unique. The reflective machine intelligence is
therefore of a different kind; it is intensive. Today the general intelligence,
the machines and apparatuses that bind people together and the social
processes thus engendered are invisible, non-hierarchical and distributed,
and the information they produce reflect the conditions of this production.
Hence, the collectivity of the human intellect is ultimately also evident
in the machine. Machines “are organs of the human brain, created by
the human hand; the power of knowledge objectified. The development
of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has
become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the
conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control
of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To
what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not
only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social
practice, of the real life process.” As we will see in the age of information
h
 ttp://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundisse/ch13.htm-page 692)
quoted in Gerald Raunig, A Few Fragments on Machines,
http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/raunig/en)
 Ibid., Raunig, 2005, page 3
176 PLURIPOTENTIAL
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and mass intellectuality, it is,in fact information itself that sculpts neural
plasticity. General intelligence here is defined as information produced by
those mutating conditions of labor accessible to any population, which are
also the new conditions of neuromodulation. These conditions of distributed
information are powerful attractors that can act as powerful regulators of
attention and memory and thus are sites of what Maurizio Lazzarato calls
Noo-power. This Noo-power is what forms the basis for Neuropower in which
the brain’s neural plasticity and its pluripotentiality to become, are the sites of
power’s interrogation. It is in this context, through assemblages of trajectories
of attention, subsumed in the regulatory patterns of built space, with its implicit
temporality and representational and presentational rationality that the sculpting
of neural plasticity can occur. Whereas Noo-power concerns people in the
present, Neuropower concerns the production of people in the future.
In the conditions of intensive culture the representation of an object as something
real is substituted by its branded value where what determines its nature are
the stories that orbit around it and the complex conditions of its brand equity.
The cereal in a box of cereal is not what creates its value but rather the way
that the information on the box design excites a concomitant “considered”
neural architecture sculpted over time by a complex assemblage of a previously
designed context that the individual has experienced and into which the box is
inserted. The cereal box is reinstalled ad infinitum into a system of recategorical
memory that creates an active site for its infinite retrieval in the minds eye as
both real and imaginary. Rather than linear equivalence that organized and
delineated the ecology of objects in an artisan economy and began to dissolve
in a Fordist one, what defines the post-Fordist landscape of cultural objects is a
non-linear condition of value that is formulated by conditions of communicative
labor as it functions along the distribution channels of media and hypermedia.
As we will see shortly, general intelligence according to the model I would like to
develop is a condition of the ratio between the apparatuses of Cognitive Capital
and Cultural Capital. Different cultural contexts allow different expressions
of each, which then have implications for the production of a people or a
multiplicity. Cognitive Capital being defined as that “information distribution
and production system” centered on knowledge and utilized by sovereignty and
the conditions of the administration of normalcy which produces a system of
homogenized thinking. Cultural Capital, was first designated by Pierre Bourdieu,
but is used here in the context of the ways and means through which artists using
their own materials, practices, histories, apparatuses, critiques, performances,
spaces and non-spaces produce objects, non-objects and activities which, when
assembled in the cultural landscape, mutate the conditions of that landscape and
produce resistant paradigms. It is at the intersection of these mutating conditions
expressed as a resultant cultural referendum, that the brain and mind are called
 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Life and the Living in the Societies of Control,” in Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier
Sorensen, eds., Deleuze and the Social, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) page 186
Warren Neidich 177
______________________________________________
out to by different attentional concoctions activating different attentional
neurologic toolboxes. Thus the relationship between Cognitive Capitalism
and Cultural Capitalism has implications for how the brain itself will be
formed and I would like to suggest its possibilities for thought. It is at the
crossroads of competition and cooperation - between these two systems of
abstract knowledge production - that the brain-mind is produced.
Part 2.
There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal.
But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had
whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making
was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody
who wants to murder your grandmother? Or — more exactly — with
somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants
to murder their grandmother? I’ve been on a soapbox for months now
about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes
supporters — but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations
and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for
representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead…
­—Tobin Harshaw, Can ‘No’ Revive the Republicans, nytimes.com,
3/26/2010
But how is the development of brain and mind linked to the history of
objects, abstract knowledge and to the production of the subject in the
context of Neo-liberal capitalism with its emphasis on immaterial labor
and knowledge industries? In order to formulate a theory of resistance one
must address the conditions of this all-pervasive system. In what follows, I
use ideas from The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection as formulated by
Gerald Edelman as well as Neural Constructivism, formulated by Steven
R. Quartz a1 and Terrence J. Sejnowski. 10 11 The basic question that
these two theories ask is what are the determinants of neural development.
Is it, as Neural Darwinism would suggest, an unfolding of a prescribed
neurobiological process, in which a stochastic exuberant growth of neural
elements is followed by a period of pruning and regression that through
a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest regime becomes sculpted by various
environmental contingencies into a finely tuned sensorial-perceptual-
G
 erald Edelman, The Remembered Present, (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1989)10. Jean-
Pierre Changeux and Stanilslas Dehaene, “Neuronal Models of Cognitive Functions,” in
Mark H. Johnson, ed., Brain Development and Cognition, (New York: Blackwell, 1993)
pages 363-403
10 Jean-Pierre Changeux and Stanilslas Dehaene, “Neuronal Models of Cognitive Functions,”
in Mark H. Johnson, ed., Brain Development and Cognition, (New York: Blackwell, 1993)
pages 363-403
11 S
 teven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski, “The Neural Basis of Cognitive Development:
A Constructivist Manifesto,” Brain Sciences 20(4) , 1997, page 6
178 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Warren Neidich 179
______________________________________________
cognitive machine? This theory has the benefit of parsimony and mimics in planned trajectories of thought. Along with the sculpted internal cognitive
certain ways the concrete genetic and immunological systems already in place. loops to which they are coupled, the cultural external circuits complete the
Alternately, according to Neural Constructivism, instead of simply a regression organic-inorganic assembled network. These are the building blocks of a
of neural elements, development is rather “a progressive increase in the complex field of such loops. When these loops are tethered together, a
structures underlying representational complexity” and these changes depend hundred or thousand fold, as a result of their proximity and overlap they
on an “interaction with a structured environment to guide development.”12 form assemblages and their dynamic and emergent intensive conditions
Furthermore “dendritic development fulfills important requirements for a non- begin to be realized.
stationary learning mechanism, suggesting how dendritic development under
It matters little whether one takes Neural Darwinism or Neural Constructivism
the influence of environmentally derived activity conforms to cognitive schemes
as the model in the argument laid out here. For both in the end rely on the
for the construction of mental representations.”13 My argument is that each
conditions of epigenesis, and in this case cultural epigenesis, to produce or
theory provides a theoretical foundation for us to understand how nature or
sculpt the neurobiological substrate into neurobiological architecture – to
designed space, might play an important role in the production of the neural
change the skin of brain into the flesh of mind.
architecture to be used in thought.
“Plastic human brains may nonetheless learn to factor the operation and
As we saw above, while Neural Darwinism uses Darwinian paradigms of
information-bearing role of such external props and artifacts deep into
selection in the face of niche contingencies, Neural Constructivism recounts
their own problem-solvng routines, creating hybrid cognitive circuits that
the ways and means by which age related cognitive improvements are the
are themselves the physical mechanisms underlying specific problem-
result of neural networks becoming increasingly inter-connected, functionally
solving performances. We thus come to what is arguably the most radical
more specialized and sometimes progressively complex through the brain’s
contemporary take on the potential cognitive role of non-biological props
relationship with the stimulating conditions of complex representational
and structures: the idea that, under certain conditions, such props and
matrices. In this way Neural Constructivism is more Bergsonian.14 15 16
structures might count as proper parts of extended cognitive processes”17
For our purposes here, both theories and perhaps the two together operate
As you will see I view Neural Selectionism as the dominating force early
well as a heuristic model, as well as being compatible with a post-structural
on and Neural Constructivism more important later, keeping in mind that
theoretical model I would like to elucidate. Cultural conditions are continuously
Darwinian forces may still play a role. All agree that a phenomenon of
evolving and producing veracity and verification. The subunits of culture may
excessive growth of neurons in the early years of life is characteristically
evolve together or separately and these bound and synchronized cultural
followed by a reactionary depletion. What happens after that is an answer
conditions produce and sculpt conditions of mind and brain with which they
that Neural Constructivism attempts to answer.18
become coupled. These assemblages or props are historically derived and are
embedded in the distributions of sensibility as cognitive gestalts hybridized to The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, the hallmark of Neural
Darwinism, is made up of three components. Simply stated there is the
12 Ibid. Quartz and All, 1997, page 6 Primary Repertoire that is a product of Developmental Selection, the
13 Ibid. Quartz and All, 1997, page 6 Secondary Repertoire that is produced by Experiential Selection and Re-
14 Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson, Dover, 1998, page 102.
“Just so as regards the evolution of life and the circumstances through which it passes-with this
17 Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind, Oxford, 2008. Pg. 68
difference, that evolution does not mark out a solitary route, that it takes directions without
aiming at ends and that it remains inventive even in its adaptations.” 18 Ibid, Quartz and Sejnowski, 1997, pg. 36
“The evidence we have examined demonstrates that the popular view of development as
15 Ibid, Bergson, Dover, page 104.
largely a regressive event must be reconsidered. We suggest that regressive events are
“Evolution is not only a movement forward; in many cases we observe a marking-time, and still
simply the consequence of reduced neural specificity, as indicated by the counterevidence
more often a deviation or turning back. It must be so, as we shall show further on, and the same
to Sperry’s chemoaffinity hypothesis. Any theory, whether selectionist or constructivist, that
causes that divide the evolution movement often cause life to be diverted from itself, hypnotized
rejects a strong view of neural specificity will thus need to posit regressive events. If cells
by the form it has just brought forth. Thence results an increasing diorder. No doubt there is
do not bear nearly unique molecular addresses, then stochastic sampling mechanisms
progress, if progress means a continual advance in the general direction determined by a first
must be posited. These will by their very nature introduce some structure into a system that
impulsion; but this progress is accomplished only on the two or three great lines of evolution on
will later be eliminated. Neural constructivism allows these sampling mechanisms to be
which forms ever more and more complex, ever more and more high, appear; between these
directed, but they are still stochastic. Structural elimination, or error-correction, are likewise
lines run a crowd of minor paths in which, on the contrary, deviations, arrests, and set-backs,
required, but this does not mean that error-correcting processes are the only developmental
are multiplied.”
mechanisms, or that developmental selection occurs only among intrinsically generated
16 The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Francisco J. Varelan, Evan T. structures. Rather, selection is only one kind of process in a dynamic interaction between
Thompson, MIT Press, 1991 environmentally derived activity and the neural growth mechanisms that activity regulates.)
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entry, which stabilizes and elaborates upon the Secondary Repertoire. I will
cover Developmental and Experiential Selection now, leaving Re-entry for later.
This Primary Repertoire describes the condition of the initial variability
of the anatomy of the brain at birth that is produced by a process called
Developmental Selection. First it relates to the variation that results from the
combination of the DNA contributed by the father’s sperm and the mother’s
egg as two very diverse genetic heritages. Secondly it relates to the history
of the species itself in its evolutionary journey and the conditions of the genes
that reflect that history. Finally it is the result of events that take place during the
pregnancy. For example the effects of smoking, drinking or cocaine use on the
condition of the developing fetus’s brain are well known. The combined effect
of these three processes is the production of the Neurobiologic Common from
which the brain/mind emerges through its engagement with culture.
I would like to call attention to the Primary Repertoire as the site of what is
referred to as neural biodiversity and what I would like to refer to as the
Neurobiologic Common or Neurozoon. The Neurozoon embodies the full extent
of the possibilities that a human brain can become and awaits the moment of
its unfolding not as a nativist series of heterochronous events emblazoned in the
codon of the genome but rather an unfolding or becoming in the context of a
duet between itself as the inherent structural conditions and apparatic conditions
of brain in the context of nature or as I am arguing today, designed culture. This
Neurozoon emerges as a subset of the Zoe, which is then sampled to become the
Neurobios. The Neurobios is the secondary repertoire.
“Biodiversity is a composite term used to embrace the variety of types, forms,
spatial arrangements, processes, and interactions of biological systems at all
scales and levels of organization from genes to species to ecosystems, along
with the evolutionary history that led to their existence.”19 Neural biodiversity
by analogy is first of all a species-specific condition that delineates the
specific a priori variability of neural elements, including their physical and
chemical idiosyncrasies, and the neurobiological apparatus that allow for the
neuroplastic potentiality to express itself. It is a condition of the evolutionary
history of that species and contains therein its complete history of the
neurobiological adaptations.
I would like to contend that Neuropower is in fact directed towards this neural
biodiversity, attempting to limit its potential. In other words, just as global
biodiversity is currently under siege by various factors affecting the conditions
of global capitalism including, pollution, over-fishing and the encroachment
of habitat, effecting as it does the diversity of flora and fauna, so too do
other conditions of this same world system, those that strangle difference to
19 R.J. Scholes et al., “Toward a Global Biodiversity Observing System,” Science, Volume 321,
page 1044
Warren Neidich 181
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produce a homogenization of the cultural field and limit epigenetic neural
biodiversity. For instance it is feared that in a century, half of the six
thousand seven hundred languages that are now active on our earth will
be lost. Furthermore design culture affects not only the early depletions
and pruning of neural arborizations like a topiarist who clips the branches
of thick bushes to produce fantastic shapes, but also choreographs
and guides the regrowth of the branches along prescribed pathways
to produce specific forms. Neural Darwinism would be the topiarist but
Neural Constructivism, the choreographer. Further on I will show how the
homogenization of the cultural field by the international style or franchise
architecture both conditions the global economy and restricts variation. As
a result it produces a crisis of neural network diversification leading to a
crisis of the imagination. Neuropower, therefore, is not simply about past
evolutionary history but rather, of its history in the future.
The Secondary Repertoire is a result of epigenesis and neural plasticity
during a process called Experiential Selection. The word repertoire is
very often related to musical performance and designates the full scope
of a performer’s abilities. In fact, Gerald Edelman, one of the founders of
Neural Darwinism, is himself a musician as well. The obvious connection
to new labor as a virtuoso performance and its association with a
number of possible activities that link labor and politics and which have
repercussions for the material of memory interests us here.20 One could
say that this term could also be used in a Neural Constructivist account.
However instead of being the result of a regression and deletion of
neural elements the secondary repertoire in this account is the product
of a productive complexification and intensification. Epigenesis refers to
the process by which the environment affects the patterns of stimulation
and communication in the neurons and neural networks of the Primary
Repertoire. Hebbian theory, which states that neurons that fire together
wire together preferentially, is operative in the Primary Repertoire where
spontaneous electrical activity stimulates genetically prescribed a priori
networks.21 In the Secondary Repertoire that electrical activity is joined
20 P
 aolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude, page 70. In this idea of Neuropower the
virtuoso performance does leave a materialist residue. Rather then a formed product
it leaves memory traces which have the potential to mutate the conditions of the
neurobiologic architecture.
21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory
Hebbian theory concerns how neurons might connect themselves to become engrams.
Hebb’s theories on the form and function of cell assemblies can be understood from the
following: “The general idea is an old one, that any two cells or systems of cells that are
repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become ‘associated’, so that activity in one
facilitates activity in the other.”
“When one cell repeatedly assists in firing another, the axon of the first cell develops synaptic
knobs (or enlarges them if they already exist) in contact with the soma of the second cell.”
Gordon Allport posits additional ideas regarding cell assembly theory and its role in
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by that which is generated by objects and object relations in the world both
real and abstract and, in the case of our world, the conditions of information
and its distribution as dynamic codes in the real-imaginary-virtual interface
(RIVI).22 In an intensive culture it is these dynamic codes that have become most
important. Hebbian Dynamics and Neural Darwinism state that those neurons
most intensely stimulated develop firing potentials that are selectively reinforcing
where as those not as stimulated undergo a process termed apoptosis and
die out or manage to form connections with networks that are favored.
Consequently, in the battle for limited neural space the stimulated neurons and
their networked condition replace those that have receded.
The development of ocular dominance columns of layer IV of the primary
visual cortex is a case in point. Ocular dominance columns are anatomical
structures that appear like columns in microscopic examination found in the
visual cortex and are anatomically defined regions of input from one eye or
the other. They contain a number of different cell types that utilize different
strategies for the processing of visual information like simple, complex and
hypercomplex cells, which all share a common visual field. As a unit they are
important in processing visual information and are driven by one eye or the
other. In experiments by Hubel and Weisel, enucleation of one or the other eye
created disruptions in the normal columnar structure with those neural elements
coding for the non-enucleated eye displacing those cells formerly driven by the
now enucleated eye. “As Antoni and Stryker note, two hypothesis regarding
their development have been suggested. One, conforming to selectionism,
emphasizes two phases in the right eye development: a period of exuberant
growth followed by selective axonal pruning. The other, more constructivist,
hypothesis emphasizes the general expansion of axon collaterals alongside
selective pruning.”23 This theory promotes neural development as a system,
which is said to be regressive and subtractive. Neural Constructivism interprets
this Hebbian Mechanism as favorably exciting those neurons most apt to be
stimulated, thus promoting their further development and producing increased
forming engrams, along the lines of the concept of auto-association, described as follows: “If
the inputs to a system cause the same pattern of activity to occur repeatedly, the set of active
elements constituting that pattern will become increasingly strongly interassociated. That is,
each element will tend to turn on every other element and (with negative weights) to turn off the
elements that do not form part of the pattern. To put it another way, the pattern as a whole will
become ‘auto-associated’. We may call a learned (auto-associated) pattern an engram.”
22 Wolf Singer, “Coherence as an Organizing Principle of Cortical Functions,” in Olaf Sporns
and Giulio Tononi, eds., Selectionism and the Brain, (San Diego: Academic Press,1994) page
158.“The probability that neurons synchronize their responses both within a particular area and
across areas should reflect some of the Gestalt criteria used for perceptual grouping… Individual
cells must be able to change rapidly the partners with which they synchronize their responses if
stimulus configurations change and require new associations…If more then one object is present
in a scene, several distinct assemblies should form. Cells belonging to the same assembly should
exhibit synchronous response episodes whereas no consistent temporal relations should exist
between the discharges of neurons belonging to different assemblies.”
23 Ibid, Quartz and Sejnoazki, 1997, page 17
Warren Neidich 183
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synaptic numbers and dendritic spines. Where “representational features
of the cortex are built from the dynamic interaction between neural growth
mechanisms and environmentally derived neural activity…. and that this
growth is a progressive increase in the representational properties of the
cortex.”24
Again the mechanism is important to consider in order to understand the
brain’s development, but for our purposes an immature neurobiological
substrate in both cases is transformed into a more finely tuned
environmentally and contextually driven machine. What then is the
effect of living in a networked society with the internet, cell phones, face
book and twitter? We are all spending more and more time in linked
environments and these linked social anatomies are finding expression
in the modifications of designed built space. The Alishan Tourist Routes
of Reiser and Umemoto, Toyo Ito’s Taichung Metroploitan Opera House
and The Island City Central Park Gringrin, and Zaha Hadid’s Hungerburg
Funicular are cases in point. What then is the effect of these new spatial
and temporal contingencies on experiential selection? What then of the
perceptual and cognitive habits, which they elaborate? Although we have
defined the Primary Repertoire and the Secondary Repertoire separately,
they are part of the same overlapping and interdependent process. The
genetic instructions continue to unfold throughout life and this learning
changes the conditions of the brain itself. Learning a language changes
the conditions of interacting with the world and what becomes relevant
changes. What we pay attention to is key to what we learn and what
neural networks will be activated and amplified.
Experiential Selection does not, like natural selection in evolution, occur
as a result of differential reproduction, but rather differential amplification
of certain neuronal populations. Those neurons, neural networks and
distributed neural mappings that are most frequently and intensely
stimulated by, for instance, advertised toys that appear and reappear
in real and televised environments or movie stars whose images adorn
multiple platforms synchronously on billboards, lap tops, movie screens
and televisions, will develop more efficient firing patterns or become
progressively more phase locked – synchronously tethered together
– giving them selective advantage over those that are not. Let us examine
this relationship more deeply.
Recently an image of a Pepsi Cola can occurred recurrently all over
New York City on billboards of different sizes placed strategically for
maximum visibility. The advert, not surprisingly, was effectively designed
for maximum and rapid perception by both a pedestrian and auto driven
public. (Traffic jams slow automobile traffic to a crawl.) The color and
24 Ibid, Quartz and Sejnoazki, 1997, abstract
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design of the advert interestingly used strategies first found in the pop paintings
of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Indiana. The advert was designed
with a specific context in mind in which other products advertised and within the
same visual milieu reverberated together producing a network of stimulation. In
other words the advert itself and its relation to other similarly designed adverts
in combination produced an intense effect upon the viewer. It is these individual
forms and their combined effect in the network in which they are embedded that
produces correlational learning resulting in temporal coincidence at pre and
post-synaptic membranes in local and global cortical mappings that strengthen
synapses in the brain. But this advert also occurred on multiple platforms
distributed repeatedly on television screens, computer laptops throughout the
planet simultaneously. In other words we, as members of the planet earth are
stimulated by the same franchised sensations that know no national boundaries.
These new contingencies provide the new affordances of the planetary urban
environment, to use a Gibsonian term. Those neurons that code for these newly
engineered affordances are coupled with these intense stimuli and are therefore
more apt to be favored over other neurons and neuronal networks in future
encounters with those stimuli. These conditions of Neoliberal Capitalism make
future encounters probable!
These stimuli can also be grouped together into larger ensembles of stimulation
that are persistently aligned in the environment and thus are always coded
together as a form of cultural mappings. Cultural mappings are intensive,
delineated by a multiplicity of immanent social, historical, psychological,
economic and psychic relations that are collaged together forming a
superstructure though which they can produce understanding. Architecture and
designed space, understood as both the physical conditions of built space and
the immaterial virtual spaces of the internet, house and support these elaborate
amalgamations tethering them to learned activity trajectories, whether they are in
the form of walking or driving or surfing the web.
There is an ecological logic to the forms of immanent distributions that are
produced.25 Branded environments are one such example where through
corporate agreements Nike Shoes, Post Grape Nuts, Hertz Rent Car, Airberlin,
and Sony Music appear together in the commercial landscape of billboards and
airline magazines. The Institutional Understanding and sovereignty for which it
does its bidding is empowered by this network of cultural signifiers. What Paul
Virilio had formerly referred to in the representational and extensive era as Phatic
Signifiers today become Fields of Phatic Signifiers embedded in the intensive
logics of emerging meaning produced by the new apparatus of global culture.
25 Giulio Tononi, “Reentry and Cortical Integration,” in Olaf Sporns and Giulo Tononi, eds.,
Selectionsim in the Brain, (San Diego: Academic Press 1994) page 129.
“Two of the main tenets of this theory are that neurons act together in local collectives called
neuronal groups and that they communicate with each other and correlate their activity by a
process called reentry.”
Warren Neidich 185
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Part 3.
Each brand is made up of its brand equity and its externalities that
together compete with other assemblages for the attention of the market
place.26 Brand equity is explicit; it is a real entity that can be quantified
based on market studies, while externalities are implicit and in the process
of becoming. They are ineffable and incalculable.
Externalities can under certain conditions become explicit. Vans shoes
were originally just tennis shoes to be worn all day. Their appropriation
by skate boarders and their resultant popularity could never have been
imagined. It was a result of a burgeoning skate culture in Southern
California that added to its explicit brand equity when later they were
understood and advertised as skating shoes.
They are overlaid or superimposed or embedded in already existing
networks of cultural signifiers and as such inflect upon diagrams of
attentional flow. They form selective pressures, which are coupled to
analogous selective pressures in the brain/mind. The conditions of cultural
intensivity integrate dynamic flows of hierarchical distributions together
with folded rhizomatic distributions of sensibility that these branded
environments are instrumental in producing.
Already existing oscillatory potentials, important for the production of the
dynamic environment of the brain, transmitting information throughout it,
are piggy backed by dynamic gestalts and rhythms at play in the cultural
environment and onto which branded equities are imbricated. It is these
dynamic potentialities as they are phase locked in ensembles synchronously
and diachronously that create intense branded networks. These stimulate
networks in the brain/mind that first pay attention to them and then memorize
them as a result of registering them preferentially, in the end having affects on
the overall architecture of the brain/mind. In the competition for neural space
during critical periods of development, neural networks selected for by these
branded environments will out-compete those that are not selected for, which
either wither away or are incorporated in other assemblages where they can
continue to play a role and be stimulated.
Branded networks work directly and indirectly on the child’s mind,
which is especially malleable. Directly through sophisticated marketing
techniques in which advertisements specifically engineered with the child’s
mind in mind are transmitted cross-culturally during Saturday morning
cartoons. These specially designed advertisements are analogous to
26 I was first introduced to the idea of externalities and their relationship to Cognitive
Capitalism in a lecture by Yann Moulier Boutang given at the conference I helped
organize with Deborah Hauptmann called “The Mind in Architecture” at TU Delft School
of Architecture in 2008. A related text will be published in Cognitive Architecture: From
Biopolitics to Noo-power, 010 Press, 2010.
186 PLURIPOTENTIAL
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“babyese,” in which parents prolong and exaggerate certain key phonetic
distinctions coupled to the child’s immature brain. The same is true of childhood
advertisement. Bright colors, fantastic talking cartoon animals, speaking in
“babyese,” which the child already knows from Saturday morning cartoon
programs, create an indistinguishable set of signifiers in a child who is as yet
unable to distinguish himself/herself from others. This is where the Society of
Control really begins in the inside/outside of the child’s mind.
But there is another way that the conditions of capitalism are transmitted to
the child and that is indirectly, through the parents.  As I mentioned in the
introduction, Neuropower is focused on the planning and attention capacities
of the frontal lobe. Adults assist children in the routines of their daily life that
are beyond the capabilities of their immature brain. At first through such
activities as pointing, adults are indispensible in the early process of learning
and language formation. Later, when these activities involve planned action,
for instance, parents extend their children’s abilities by acting as and being
agents of their frontal lobe.27 They are there to help them plan beyond the
here-and-now. This coupling of adult and child is a necessary condition
of the early neural sculpting of Neuropower. The parent is at the service
of institutional understanding, acting as its agent of neuromodulation.  But
perhaps in the future with more sophisticated computer interfaces and software
agents, the parent won t even be necessary as the following quote from Andy
Clarks Mindware suggests. “Imagine that you begin using the web at age 4.
Dedicated software agents track and adapt to your emerging interests and
random explorations. They then help direct your attention to new ideas, web
pages and products. Over the next 70 years you and your software agents
are locked in a complex dance of co-evolutionary change and learning,
each influencing and being influenced by the other. In such a case, in a very
real sense, the software entities look less like part of your problem-solving
environment than a part of you.  The intelligent system that now confronts the
wider world is biological-you-plus-the-software-agents. These external bundles
of code are contributing rather like the various sub-personal cognitive functions
active in your brain.”28

27 Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture, page 108-9.

“Given the prolonged postnatal physical maturation of these structures in human beings, lasting
until or beyond puberty, it is not surprising that adults must provide these functions if they are to
be present in the behavior of infants and children. Essentially, then, the frontal lobes of parents
are functionally linked with the lower brain centers and the sensory, motor and association
cortices of their infants and children. While the child’s frontal lobes are developing, the parents’
brains provide frontal lobe functions for the child.”
28 Andy Clark, Mindware, Oxford, 2001, pg. 115
188 American Communists in Moscow
______________________________________________ Yevgeniy Fiks 189
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190 American Communists in Moscow
______________________________________________
1. American writer and Communist John Reed’s house, where he lived in
1920.
2. Red Square, where Communist Party USA Chairwoman Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn was given state funeral in 1964.
3. Kremlin Wall, where John Reed and Charles Ruthenberg, one of the
founders of the American Communist Party were buried.
4. The Comintern (“Communist International”, also known as the Third
International), an international Communist organization founded in
Moscow in March 1919.
5. Moscow State University, where the founder of the American Communist
Party Charles Ruthenberg studied in 1921-1924 and where in 1979
American Communist activist Angela Davis was made an honorary
professor.
6. “National” Hotel, where American singer Paul Robeson lived during his
visits to the Soviet Union.
7. Column Hall of the House of the Trade Unions, where James Cannon,
the first chairman of the American Communist Party, attended the Sixth
Congress of the Comintern in 1928.
8. Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, where the General Secretary of the
Communist Party USA Gus Hall studied in 1931-1933;
9. “Lux” Hotel, where most of the international Communist rank and file
coming to Moscow lived starting 1920s, including Bill Haywood and
Gus Hall.
10. Communist University of the Toilers of the East, where African-American
Communist Haywood Hall studied in the 1920 and who later became
vice-chairman of the Negro subcommittee of the Comintern.
Yevgeniy Fiks 191
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2. Red Square.
U.S. Communist Party chairwoman Elizabeth Gurley Flynn dies of
pulmonary aneurism in Moscow on September 5, 1964 at age 74. After
a state funeral in Red Square with over 25,000 people attending, a
half of Flynn’s remains were placed in the Kremlin Wall, the others were
returned to the U.S. to be buried in Wladheim Cemetery near the graves
of Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, and the Haymarket Martyrs of 1886.
F lynn was born in New Hampshire in 1890. The family moved to New
York in 1900, and Flynn was educated at the local public schools. Her
parents introduced her to socialism. When she was only 16 she gave
her first speech, “What Socialism Will Do for Women”, at the Harlem
Socialist Club. As a result of her political activities, Flynn was expelled
from high school.
F lynn was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a
visible proponent of women’s rights, birth control, and women’s suffrage.
In 1936, Flynn joined the U.S. Communist Party and wrote a feminist
column for its journal, the Daily Worker. Two years later, she was elected
to the national committee.
In July 1948, 12 leaders of the Communist Party were arrested and
accused of violating the Smith Act by advocating the overthrow of the
U.S. government by force and violence. Flynn launched a campaign for
their release, but in June 1951, was herself arrested in the second wave
of arrests and prosecuted under the Smith Act.
 fter a nine-month trial, she was found guilty and served two years in
A
the women’s penitentiary at Alderson, West Virginia. She later wrote an
account of her prison experiences in The Alderson Story: My Life as a
Political Prisoner.
 fter her release from prison, Flynn resumed her activities for leftist and
A
Communist causes. She became national chairperson of the Communist
Party of the United States in 1961.
192 American Communists in Moscow
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9. “Lux” Hotel.
Most of the international Communist rank and file coming to Moscow, starting
1920s, including Bill Haywood, lived here.
William Haywood (February 4, 1869 – May 18, 1928), better known as
Big Bill Haywood, was a prominent figure in the American labor movement.
Haywood was a leader of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), a
founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
and a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America.
During the first two decades of the 20th century, he was involved in several
important labor battles, including the Colorado Labor Wars, the Lawrence
textile strike, and other textile strikes in Massachusetts and New Jersey.
In 1918, he was one of 101 IWW members convicted of violating the
Espionage Act of 1917. While out of prison during an appeal of his conviction,
Haywood fled to Russia, where he spent the remaining years of his life.
In Russia, Haywood became a labor advisor to Lenin’s Bolshevik government,
but Lenin’s illness and death and Stalin’s rise to power ended his role as an
advisor to the Soviet labor movement in 1923. Various visitors to Haywood’s
small Moscow apartment in later years recalled that he was lonely and
depressed, and expressed a desire to return to the United States.
In 1926 he took a Russian wife, though the two had to communicate in sign
language, as neither spoke the other’s language. At the invitation of CPUSA
member Gus Hall, Idaho newspaper reporter John Chapple traveled to
Moscow in late 1927 in an attempt to interview Haywood, only to find him
barely coherent and suffering from advanced diabetes.
On May 18, 1928, Haywood died in a Moscow hospital from a stroke
brought on by alcoholism and diabetes. Half of his ashes were buried in
the Kremlin wall; an urn containing the other half of his ashes was sent to
Chicago and buried near the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument.
Yevgeniy Fiks 193
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10. The Communist University of the Toilers of the East
or KUTV (also known as the Far East University) was established April
21, 1921, in Moscow by the Communist International (Comintern) as a
training college for communist cadres in the colonial world. The school
officially opened on October 21, 1921. It performed a similar function
to the International Lenin School, which mainly accepted students from
Europe and the Americas. It was headed in its initial years by Karl
Radek, who was later purged from the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union. The curriculum included both theoretical and practical matters,
including Marxist theory, party organization and propaganda, law and
administration, theory and tactics of proletarian revolution, problems of
socialist construction, and trade union organization. KUTV had regional
branches in Baku (in Azerbaijan), Irkutsk, and Tashkent (in Uzbekistan).
The University published Revolutionary East. KUTV was closed in the
late 1930s. Its tasks were transferred to smaller, local institutions in the
various Soviet republics.
T he African-American layer and communist William L. Patterson lived in
Russia from 1927-1930 and studied at Communist University of the Toilers
of the East. Patterson married a Russian woman with whom he had two
daughters. In Russia he experienced an exhilarating lack of racism: “it is
as if one had suffered with a painful affliction for many years and had
suddenly awakened to discover that the pain had gone”. The African
American Brothers Otto and Haywood Hall, who became Communists
after 1917 revolution, went to the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s and also
studied at Communist University of the Toilers of the East. Haywood Hall
visited Stalin in Kremlin in 1927 and became vice-chairman of the Negro
subcommittee of the Comintern. He returned to the United States in 1930
to continue his Communist organizational work.
194 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Sreshta Rit Premnath 195
______________________________________________

Extract from Francisco de Miranda’s destroyed

manuscript, A Catalogue of Curls:

“A seaman told me of a letter the persian alchemist Jaˉ bir ibn Hayya ˉ n sent
his lover, the obscene poet Abˉ
u -Nuwa ˉ s, the “master of curls”. The older
Jabir instructed Nuwas to reply with a love letter composed thus:
 on waking up in in the middle of the night in a sweat from a
…
dream about our lovemaking, arise carefully from your bed. Be careful
not to disturb the sheets. In the light of the moon or your flickering oil
lamp observe the shifting shadows of your fallen pubic hairs that lie
trembling on your sheets. Copy these curls as closely as you can with
black ink on a piece of parchment. Take great care to maintain the
proportions of distance and scale between the hairs while copying this
script. These relationships are as essential as the shape of each hair. If
a wind were to blow while you were writing and disturb the placement
of these characters, please stop immediately. If the bark of alarmed
dogs or the sudden morning wail of the Mullah were to jerk your hand
paint this out and correct your mistake. This is essential. We will have
to try and interpret what we have. As we have discussed, language is
too abstract to express our intimacy and I feel this may provide us with
a key, a trace, a clue. A window through which I may enter you.
What is unclear is whether this methodology – these instructions conveyed
from poet to alchemist, were actually carried out. Were these chance
scripts carried by the beduin across boiling deserts? Did they find their
destination? Did Jabir attempt to translate them? Were these translations
within his known corpus or are they yet to be found? Perhaps the
translations were never written down, only spoken or thought. Some claim
that he ate the artifacts so they may act upon him from within, others claim
that he burnt them and dissolved the ashes in Sal Ammoniac, combining
the solution with his own hair to create a new substance. Still others suggest
that any attempt to translate these poems would have been to mistake their
very function.”
 k
j f
d o
u

v k ih vj
g n
c n
b v

l
f g
u s
b
z
l
3 4
dv
v b
v
7i
f5

j0 s
4 d
6u h
hj

l2

9 8
3 g
yw
5 6
 hb

vc
y n
m h
a
x
d
kl
p v

j f
f h
x o
h l

excerpt from ‘Alif

a 2010

8
202 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Olav Westphalen 203
______________________________________________

Lighting in general:

make it softish good for face and close ups

Cameras: very slow movements. The reading

should always be foregrounded

Desert Dreams - Cock and Awe

by
Olav Westphalen

Fade up

ca 7 minutes slide projection

Olav walks to table

Lights to normal

Begin reading
204 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Olav Westphalen 205
______________________________________________

2.

“DESERT DREAMS - COCK AND AWE” INSPECTOR 2

Hey guys, looks like we got some
A fragmented screenplay by work!
OLAV WESTPHALEN As he turns to present the bottle it slips and crashes on the
cement floor.

EXT. AL TAQQADUM DESERT, IRAQ - DAY
Long shot of desert landscape. The sun is high, the air is
flittering with heat. A white SUV comes into view, dragging a
long trail of dust. We follow its distant crawl across the
plain until it pulls up in front of a low concrete structure,
an abandoned Iraqi bunker. On the side of the car, big blue
letters spell “UN.” Two armed peacekeepers, a man and a
woman, step out. They secure the area, rifles at ready and
take up guard positions at either side of the bunker’s
entrance. Three UN-Inspectors climb out of the back of the
car. They wear white Hazmat-suits with gas masks and maneuver
several pieces of technical equipment.
INSPECTOR 2 (CONT’D)
Uh-Oh! Sorry.
INSPECTOR 1
Don’t worry. It's probably nothing.
It’s never anything.
They look at the broken glass and liquid at their feet. Pink
fumes are rising from the spilled substance and form a
rapidly growing cloud. The vapors waft about the room,
accompanied by a ghostly sound effect (S.E.) of harp chords.
Inspector 1, unfazed, opens a small stainless steel container
and produces a live canary from it. He sets it on the ground
next to the spill. The bird hesitates for a second, then
begins to flutter around happily.

INT. CONCRETE BUNKER - DAY INSPECTOR 1 (CONT’D)

I told you, it's nothing.
The UN-Inspectors enter a dimly lit, underground room. It is
an abandoned biochemical lab. The room is empty except for a INSPECTOR 3
few random pieces of lab equipment strewn about and a steel (points to his crotch)
locker in the corner of the room. The locker is marked with a I feel a little funny... down
red heart over crossbones. there. Do you guys feel that too?
INSPECTOR 1 INSPECTOR 1
(Swedish accent) Now that you say it, I feel a bit
OK, Guys. Here we go again. Check of an itch. It must be that cheap
everything, find nothing, so we can curd-soap they give us.
go back to de hotel and watch
“Twentyfour” with Kiefer INSPECTOR 3
Sutherland. Haw-haw! Kurd soap. In Iraq. that’s
funny. I never thought of that.
INSPECTOR 2
(Danish accent) He scratches his crotch, walks out still laughing. Inspectors
Okey Dokey, boss. 1 and 2 stay behind for a moment watching the pink cloud
spread out.
INSPECTOR 3
(Norwegian accent) INSPECTOR 1
You got it. (shrugs)
Whatever.
They move around awkwardly, bumping into each other, uttering
muffled, Nordic curses through their masks. Eventually, They leave. The camera scans the empty room and comes to rest
Inspector 2 opens the locker and pulls out an unmarked bottle on two mice fucking in a corner. The canary skips over to
of bright red liquid. them, jumps on, and humps along chirping happily.
206 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Olav Westphalen 207
______________________________________________

3. 4.

EXT. OUTSIDE THE BUNKER - DAY several fighters join him. They look out over the desert
towards the evening sun, alert and defiant. They form a
The UN-inspectors walk to the SUV. In the background pink fog romantic tableau with their improvised uniforms, wide variety
escapes from the bunker. The peacekeepers guarding the of weapons, and stylish head scarves. By now, the cloud
entrance are soon engulfed in it. The inspectors remove their covers a large part of the horizon.
gas masks, load their tools into the car, and start getting
in. INSURGENT 1 (CONT’D)
(Arabic, English
INSPECTOR 1 subtitles)
Alright kids, let’s get out of They are painting our homeland the
here. color of the sickeningly tight-
fitting, satanically revealing, and
He turns to look for the peacekeepers, his face drops. The diabolically easy-to-remove tube-
two young soldiers are kissing passionately. top of Barbie-Doll, that nipple-
less, smooth-crotched, American
MUSIC FADES IN harlot, that ruin of innocent
youths on all five continents
They begin to tear at each others’ clothes, run their hands (stops to think)... except maybe
over each others’ bodies. The male peacekeeper squeezes his Antarctica.
partner’s breasts. He kisses and licks them. The woman pulls
off his camouflage briefs and kneads his buttocks with both A second Insurgent, turns to him , with a disgusted look on
hands. Her fingers are searching for his asshole. She has his face.
long, curved fingernails, with “French Dip” nail polish in
mocca and cream colors. In an extreme close up we see her INSURGENT 2
index finger disappear inside his rectum. Sunlight bounces (Arabic, English
off a sizeable solitaire diamont engagement ring. subtitled)
Where’d you learn to talk like
EXT. US MILITARY POST - DAY that?

Two GIs on an observation tower are scanning the landscape INSURGENT 1

with high-powered binoculars. One of them nudges his partner (Arabic, English
and silently points out over the desert. They both look in subtitled)
the same direction with stern expressions. They look like a I picked it up from Iznogud, you
WWII propaganda poster, an image of readiness and strength. like it?
Somewhere over the desert, a small patch of bright pink
shows. It is undulating and seems to be growing.
EXT. INSURGENT MILITIA CAMP, IRAQI DESERT - DAY EXT. PILE OF SMOLDERING RUBBLE, NORTHERN BAGHDAD - DAY

An armed insurgent smokes a cigarette in a dug-out covered
with camouflage netting. He looks out over the landscape.
Suddenly, he perks up. He jumps out of his trench to see
better.
INSURGENT 1
(Arabic, English
subtitles)
By God, Brothers! Come and look
what the imperialist sons of flea-
ridden mut-bitches in heat with
leaky teats who open their scrawny
legs to every mangy, salivating,
fagot-dog in town are doing now!
A news team is setting up for a life transmission. Among them
CNN Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour.
They are reviewing some takes on a small monitor. Whenever
Christiane is shown a text banner floats in front of her. It
reads:
Christiane Amanpour
CNN Chief Intl. Correspondent
live from Baghdad
As she moves around the scene, the banner moves with her as
if it was invisibly attached to her chest. When she turns
away from the camera, the banner moves accordingly: we see it
behind her, partly obstructed by her, and in reverse.
208 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________
5.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR
No, no, no, no! That’s not
acceptable. It has to look
dangerous. We’re at the front line.
We’re under fire. The earth we
stand on is practically on fire.
That’s what they want to see.
This looks like a fucking Club-Med
commercial. Can someone get rid of
that palm tree there, please?
ASSISTANT 1
(O.S.)
I’m on it
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR
And what’s the deal with the smoke?
It looks like incense sticks. We
need a putrid, sulphurous mess, I
am talking the gaping, reeking
mouth of hell, here, not some
hippie sing-along.
ASSISTANT 2
Don’t worry, Christiane, it’ll be
good for the live-feed. We’re
dousing the whole hill in diesel
again. It’ll be plenty putrid.
Cut to the small monitor. We see a bulldozer plow over a palm
in the distance. Christiane turns to address a US-soldier,
their security detail, sitting at a distance smoking a fat
joint.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR
Hey you, come over here!
The soldier looks at her wide-eyed with a dreamy smile and
doesn’t move. She walks over briskly, snatches the helmet off
his head.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR (CONT’D)
Gimme that, dopehead. You’re not
going to feel any difference, if
they put a hole in your head.
She looks at the helmet turns it, then takes the soldier’s
sidearm and shoots a hole in the helmet.
Olav Westphalen 209
______________________________________________
6.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR (CONT’D)
Now that’s what I call “Frontline
News.”
She puts the helmet on, poses in front of the camera.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR (CONT’D)
How’s that for drama? I am ready.
Let’s roll.
CAMERA MAN
(looking through camera)
Uhm, Boss?
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR
What is it now? I want to get the
fuck back to the hotel.
“Twentyfour” is on in half an hour.
CAMERA MAN
(points at sky behind
Amanpour)
There’s something funny going on.
She turns around to look at the sky. It is bright pink, like
the most fantastic L.A. sunset. Silently and in awe they take
in the spectacle. Close up on Christiane’s face, bathed in
rosy light.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR
It’s... beautiful. I’ve never seen
anything like it.
EXT. CAMP DOGWOOD, AL ISKANDARIYAH, IRAQ - DAY
A group of five US-Soldiers is lined up in front of their
tank. They stand at attention. At the far end of the line
stands Private Scofield, scrawny, slumped over, unshaven, his
uniform in disarray. Facing him, the bills of their caps
nearly touching, is sergeant Klutz, a big, fleshy man. He
yells at the top of his lungs.
SGT. KLUTZ
You look like a pig! You act like a
pig! You’ll be slaughtered like a
pig out there! We are at war,
soldier! There is no room for
error. God and country rely on you.
What do you look like?
210 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Olav Westphalen 211
______________________________________________

7. 8.

SCOFIELD SCOFIELD
(Confused) I’d like that. I’d really like that
Huh? Sarge.
SGT., KLUTZ MUSIC FADES IN
You look like a pig! What do you
look like? Scofield gently strokes Klutz’s cheek. They gaze into each
others eyes and move in for a kiss. They kiss for a long time
SCOFIELD savoring every moment of it. There is a lot of slow, deep
(lights up as he gets it, tongue movement. They undress each other.
shouts) Klutz goes down on Scofield. Scofield returns the favor. Then
Like a pig, Sir! Klutz probes Scofield’s ass with his tongue while he
masturbates him. They blow each other simultaneously. They
SGT. KLUTZ put condoms on each other. Klutz penetrates Scofield’s
Do you deserve to be punished? asshole, pulls out before he comes, removes the condom and
ejaculates on Scofield’s buttocks. Scofield penetrates Klutz.
SCOFIELD He then pulls out and uses a tank-gun shell to penetrate
Yes, Sir, I deserve to be punished. Klutz again. He masturbates over Klutz’ buttocks, still
stimulating him with the gun shell, while Klutz masturbates
SGT. KLUTZ himself to a second climax. They come together. The other
Give me fifty pushups, Soldier! soldiers watch them closely and respectfully. After all,
Klutz is their superior officer. They softly utter
SCOFIELD appreciative sounds and encouraging comments. We don’t focus
(whiny) on them, but can tell that they are loosing their inhibitions
Fifty? That’s really a lot of and begin to make out and masturbate each other through their
pushups. Can I do five now, and uniforms.
During this scene the light could change from one side to the other to mark a different level
then some later? A couple more on
of identification. Movement should be slow, not too abrupt and obvious....
the weekend...

Klutz is furious. He grabs Scofield by the lapels and shakes
him. He looks like he is either going to snap Scofield in
half or have a heart attack on the spot. The veins on his
neck pop out like eels. several wispy tentacles of pink fog
appear behind him. They wrap around the two men for a moment
then disappear.
SGT. KLUTZ
(Enraged)
This is insubordination! Worse! You
are disgracing God and Country!
This is treason, blasphemy, it’s
terrorism! I will teach to
disrespect me!
As he inhales the rosy vapors, a sudden change comes over
Klutz (S.E. harp chords). His face softens, he smiles at
Scofield, loosens his grip on his lapels and slides his hands
into a tentative embrace.
SGT. KLUTZ (CONT’D)
I’ll teach you a lot of things, if
you want me to.
INT. PRIVATE APARTMENT, BAGHDAD - EARLY MORNING
Close-up of an old TV-set playing an Al-Jazeera news-
broadcast: images of US-troops moving through Iraq, talking
heads of Muslim clerics. The camera pans away from the TV
across the interior of a pleasant, but sparsely-furnished,
apartment. It looks lived-in, like a home. It’s the kind of
place that can be photographed either way, as the modest home
of struggling, decent people, or as the run-down hide-out of
outlaws. In the kitchen are Nura and Hafeez a middle-aged,
married couple. Soft early morning light comes through the
open window. He is wearing boxer shorts and a ribbed tank-
top. She is wearing a full-length Burka, no head-scarf. They
are helping each other into home-made bomb-belts. Slowly and
carefully Nura connects the final ignition wire to Hafeez’s
belt. Then she steps back and looks at her work, satisfied.
HAFEEZ
I guess now all we have to do is...
do it...
212 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________ Dan Levenson 213
______________________________________________

A Note on the Type

When I was first confronted with the typeface in which this publication
is set I felt as though I were in an elevator that was falling without
resistance from a great height. It was a clear June day and I had
gone to meet a friend in order to hand him an essay entitled “Modern
Typography and the Hermeneutic Circle,” which I had begun writing the
previous autumn and had completed only that morning. My friend was
spending the afternoon at a local printing house of great reputation run
by an old friend of his. When I entered the long sunlit hall with its rows
of black presses and its smell of metal and grease and ink the two men
were so engrossed in their discussion that neither greeted me or even
took notice of my arrival.
They stood over a small oak table on which lay a single sheet of paper
in the standard size that was then coming into use. The page was printed
with a block of type asymmetrically placed in the right two thirds of the
page and which had skillfully been set in the form of a rectangle echoing
the silver ratio of the page in which it was contained. Above the text was
a heavy black rule, and above this in larger, heavier letters the title: Die
Schrift unserer Zeit. From my vantage I could not read the body of the
text, but I apprehended in an instant the totality of its significance. The
form of the letters both announced and demonstrated their achievement.
The debate concerning typography had recently engulfed not only
specialists such as me, but everyone concerned with the fate of culture
and, increasingly, those involved in international affairs and domestic
politics. The right championed the gothic script which had long ago
been abandoned in other countries. For these people, broken script
spoke to the greatness of our culture. To bolster their arguments they
invoked the inviolable names of Goethe, Schiller and even Martin
Luther. More internationally-minded voices advocated the roman
lettering which was already in wide use and which was the dominant
writing in the rest of Europe, and they ridiculed the conservatives as
lederhosen wearing provincials.
214 PLURIPOTENTIAL
______________________________________________
A radical few, mostly artists, had attempted to devise a writing devoid
of historical association, fit for the machine age which they believed
would free us from the old social order. To create this they made use of
only the most basic geometric forms. What they created, while noble
in intention, was as practical as the latest fashions from Paris, and
about as likely to stand the test of time. I had seen printed in a journal
a paragraph set in letters made only of rectangles, with no curves or
diagonals. The effect, while stunning in its lack of compromise, had all
the charm and legibility of cuneiform. Just as cuneiform was enslaved to
the reed with which it was created, so these dogmatic experiments were
bound to the compass and ruler.
For the past seven years I had worked in secret on a project which I
believed to be of great importance. What I hoped to achieve was a
definitive typeface for the modern age. It would be as eternal as the
geometry of Euclid, as noble as the inscription on a Roman pediment,
as elementally constructed as a child’s writing exercise, and as
transparent as an architecture of pure glass. Text rendered in this type
would be to the reader as pure thought unadorned by decoration,
unmediated by style, unfettered by history. In achieving this I planned to
poach the best ideas of the avant-gardists while avoiding their mistakes.
The problem was that actual geometry was unfit for actual writing. In
their zeal to leave history behind, the idealists who built their alphabets
with only rectangles had perilously ignored the millennia of minute
technologies which have accreted to the art of lettering.
Just as the mind seeks meaning, the eye seeks pattern and will find this
even where it is not intended. When assembled into anything more
than a few words, purely geometric type begins to form channels of
white paper interrupted by clumsy areas of black. A well-formed printed
script, when viewed from a distance, will appear as neutral gray.
Undistracted by form the mind becomes attuned to the meaning of the
word and not its shape. In order to achieve this balance I had to embed
all the wisdom of the scribes of Charlemagne in letters which were
purely geometric in appearance only. Too much color and my letters
would become mere imitations of historical forms, too little and I would
once again be lost in the muddy plains of Sumeria. The solution lay
somewhere in the gap between the truth of pure form and its imperfect
reception by the senses. It was here that I had struggled fruitlessly for
seven years.
Behind me now was the small press from which the momentous leaf had
just emerged. The type was arranged in a block and was still wet with
ink. Turning back to the table I saw the perfect realization of everything
I had failed to achieve. The artist had devised letters which seemed the
Dan Levenson 215
______________________________________________
embodiment of pure geometry. The capital “D” was a half-circle perfectly
joined to a vertical. The following lowercase “i” was simply a rectangle
topped by a square of equal width, the lowercase “e” another elemental
compound of perfect circle perfectly bisected. But on close inspection I
could see that all of this appearance was artifice. Each new letter was a
minutely engineered wonder of subtlety. What seemed only a circle and
a rectangle was in actuality an ingenious compound of varying widths
and curves perfectly calibrated to the vicissitudes of the human eye. The
proof was in the block of text below the headline. Taken in its totality it
appeared as grey and still as a bolt of silk woven with alternating black
and white threads. The three of us fell silent.
My friend picked up the paper and handed it to me with a smile, asking
for my thoughts on the design. I feigned indifference, and summoned
a dispassionate comment, but my mind was a tempest of jealousy
and bewilderment. Walking out of the printing house the summer sun
felt as cold as if it were January. I wandered through the garden city
without pleasure or direction. I could see my drafting table next to the
small press, purchased at great expense with my meagre savings, and
the hundreds of drawings of variants of the lowercase “g” and the
uppercase “W” which filled my cramped studio. I had no reason ever
to return. Standing on a footbridge I realized that I still held in my hand
the essay whose completion had only that morning brought me such
pleasure. It had been intended as a sly prelude to the masterpiece which
I hoped soon to reveal, and which I had fantasized would secure my
reputation in the new age to come, but revealed itself now as a mere
vanity which burned in my hand. I let it go and watched without feeling
as it was carried over the rocks in the clear current.
 Shifter Magazine
April 2010
www.shifter-magazine.com

Cover design and layout: Dan Levenson

Back cover: Amy Sillman, The Other One,

12” x 17”, guache on paper, 2005