Abandoned Practices and Endangered Uses

 

Image: Title

Here is where I work in London:

Image: King’s

Here is a sign of what used to stand where I work in London

Image: Astrologer’s House

Here is the Anatomy Museum that was abandoned where I work, as surplus to need

Image: Anatomy Museum

Here is the shed above the Anatomy Museum, on the roof of King’s where Frederick Appleton kept his chickens while working on the ionosphere

Image: Shed

Here is the sign that marks his invention of radar and his Nobel Prize for that discovery

Image: Appleton Nobel

Here is the abandoned Chemistry Laboratories where I work in London

Image: Labs

Here is the sign of one thing they did in those laboratories

Image: DNA Nobel

Here are the Physics Laboratories that are now empty

Image: Physics

Here are the seed beds where James Black nurtured plants that gave rise to Beta Blockers

Image: Plant Beds

For which James Black won the Nobel Prize just as where I work were closing down his research centre

Image: Plant Sciences

And here is a sequence of images from a project last year in which the artists and theatre makers Forster & Heighes rebuilt the abandoned Plant Sciences glass houses in the Inigo Rooms spaces

We recovered these spaces from the abandoned tax offices in Somerset House next to King’s:

Image: Somerset House East Wing

So we occupied spaces where taxation for war was invented in 1789, the first purpose built Public offices in the country, to recover practices such as Pharmacognosy with pressing contemporary relevance:

Plant Sciences:

And that, you will have noticed, is just the chequered career of a few of our sciences.

Image:

If I talk to you this evening for half an hour about Abandoned Practices then rest assured I am as deeply implicated in the profession of abandonment as any, the 21^stCentury University is my employer at the moment, though I have spent far less time working within the University than without.

Image: Winnowing Apparatus From Deller

The contemporary University that once protected pluralism is now, threatened by rampant privatization, a winnowing machine, an apparatus of autocratic authority that stands to be reminded at every turn of the unpredictability of wonder and discovery. Which is why I jumped at the chance to come here, to look at this wondrous show and to talk with you and Paul this evening.

Image: Deller

There is something wholly in keeping with the idea of ‘abandoned practices’ as far as I understand it to be an idea at all, that it should be able simultaneously to contain the index of abandoned practices, broadly scientific ones, that I have identified already, and the temporary utopian thinking of Marvin Gaye Chetwynd with respect to traditions such as Mumming, and this destitute device of the industrial revolution as figured by Jeremy Deller, and currently on show at the Nottingham castle. It would appear to me, and I think Paul, that artists if we want to deploy that curious name for a while, are actively encouraging us to recognize those practices.

Image: deller

I am allergic to the misguided practice of applying theoretical frames to works as diverse as those on show here, they are as perfect as they can be what was available to the artists who made them, rather working homeopathically I am interested in approaches to thinking and practice that do some justice to the complexity of contexts within work is made. In this respect the Abandoned Practices and Endangered Uses of my title this evening, might offer another way to come to this work, or perhaps more accurately, a manner through which to leavethis work. To leave it well, alone, in a sense while figuring out a way not to abandon it.

The very concept of abandoned practices swings at one instant towards the ineffable, to an imagined set of practices that one might have once thought critical to the conduct of our lives, at the other to the utterly inefficient, at the point when one suspects such diversity of practices had to be subject to the spurious advances of rationality or become destined to irrelevance. But thinking about abandoned practices questions precisely whose instrumental efficiency is being served by the current genocide of ways of conduct, the widespread death of gesture, whose reliability, such apparatuses are intended to answer to, whose beliefs, whose commitments such aspirations are likely to foster.

Image: Wrestling

What is Abandoned?

It is not of course that abandonment should come as a surprise to, however secure one might imagine anyone who found there way here might apparently be. For to be abandoned as the French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy has repeatedly reminded us, is the inevitable condition within which we all find ourselves. To have been born is perhaps the only decision none of us are able to do anything whatsoever about, and, having been born, we are exposed to the inevitability of abandonment. I happen to be a posthumous child, born after my father’s death, a condition I share with Bill Clinton. But that loss, if you can lose something you never knew, has nothing to do with abandonment. This abandonment has nothing to do with popular imagery of exile, of desert or sea say, it is certainly not ‘nothingness’, or a ‘void’, it is abundantin that it must have come from somewhere very strong. Abandonment is an active state.

Image: Wrestling

I wrote a novel about this last year called The White Estuary and I thought I would read a short section from that work:

Another word for that strongmight be something like ‘love’. It is love alone that abandons for what is not lovecan do the following things but cannot do abandonment. ‘Not love’ can: reject, desert, forget, dismiss, discharge. Now, none of these inferior terms rise to the power nor effect of abandonment. It is of course only because we can be abandoned that we know love in the first place, otherwise it would just be unalloyed comfort, uninterrupted care.

When Marvin Gaye speaks about her love for the amateur, as she does in the care she takes with amateur acts, she describes a ‘double love’, for amateur is simply the word for doing something solely for love. And it is capital’s complex relations with the amateur that require it to be abandoned at all costs. It is the amateur after all that pays no heed nor respect to Capitalisms’s charge.

Image: Banner

And indeed it is the amateur that Jeremy Deller would appear to have some affection, if not love for, amongst those banner bearers, those battle re-stagers, those brass-banders who occupy the centre of almost all his larger scale works.

Image: Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement

A statement of Bertolt Brecht’s has the importance of a paradigm in this respect: “If it is said the theatre came forth from the realm of ritual, what is meant is that it became theatre when it left that realm.” In abandoning its contract with the efficacy of ritual, the promise of practical effect that ritual offered, theatre gestures back continuously to this root in a hopeless endeavour to magically effect by contagion some usefulness, political, social or otherwise. The recognition of this abandonment, for me in my book Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement,is precisely stated in the form of a necessary abandonmentof the political claims of theatre. My intention was to immobilize theatres political dialectic whose mantra has been: “the one that abandons nothing, ever, the one that endlessly joins, resumes, recovers.” It was this remorseless dialectic that I took to be obscuring some inconvenient truths regarding the palpable political inefficiency of theatre, its social ineptitude, and hence my clumsy attempts to forestall its workings.

Image: Clocks

When does abandonment happen?

The time of abandonment is neither the future nor the past, this is certainly not conceived as a way of thinking that should bear any solace for heritage lovers nor heritage’s inevitable symmetry with the recovery of pasts’ powers. I do not think Marvin Gaye’s work has anything at all to do with the logistics of heritage recovery. Abandoned Practices is not a Trojan Horse for Nostalgia, nor indeed anything to do with the past per se. The time of abandonment is rather time itself.Time is a series of instantly abandoned instants, time itself abandons itself, we are abandoned in time,just as time abandons us. So there is no permanence to any abandoned state, though each instant waits to be charged afresh from a sequence that Walter Benjamin suggested requires us to face the past like Paul Klee’s angel of history, as we are blown into the future if history.

Image: Lasso

There may be no presumption that the abandoned is a figure of the past but one could say perhaps, without risk of immediate contradiction, that the commonest myth was always one of abandonment.Myth is always about abandonment. We have no idea, no memory, no presentiment of a world that does not abandon us, and our stories, including the ones Marvin Gaye and Jeremy Deller are playing with here over these weeks in Nottingham, insist on this.

Image: Rules

Where does abandonment come from?

The origin of abandonment is ‘a putting at bandon’.Bandon is an order, a prescription, a decree, a permission, and the power that holds these freely at its disposal. To abandon is to remit, entrust, or turn over to such a sovereign power and to remit, entrust, or turn over to its ban, that is to its proclaiming, to its convening, and to its sentencing. One always abandons to a law. Not just to turn up at court, but to appear absolutely under the law. Abandonment has regard for the law, not optically but in its whole being. One abandons to a law, which is to say, always to a voice. The voice constitutes the law, to the extent that it orders; and to that extent, the law is the voice. There is a man with a beard who is always onto this, with a sweet name: his name is Alan Sugar. He routinely abandons on television with the words: “You’re Fired!” He points to the door and the hopeless, hapless apprentice leaves in a taxi with a small bag in a shameless parody of a refugee from capitalism.

Does he always point at us? Surely abandonment creeps up from behind?

Abandonment turns its back – not to perceive itself, but to receive itself.

Back Story

Image: Degas Back

For David Wills, a human who turns, who articulates the movement of a limb, has in this process of articulation admitted something technological to themselves. I would add that in this process they have abandoned something of that which was not previously machinic about themselves. This turn is a prostheticarticulation. In this figure technology does not lie somewhere in advance of, or in front of the body, but behind it.

This turn is just as evident in what passes for a forward walk, the turning out at each step, the limping, realignment of gravity called walking, the walker turns from their path to walk. And here humans always turn towards their back however minimally, every deviation is a form of retroversion. Apparent linearity always thus makes reference to what lies behind and this calls for a thinking of what is behind, a thinking of the back that David Wills calls Dorsalityafter our dorsal fin that has become a vertebral column that in the vertical human allows for turning.

Image: Magritte Back

Against presumptions of progress we should maintain the dorsal chance, of what cannot be foreseen, the surprise or accident that comes from behind, from beyond our range of vision, not in the acute angle of our walking forward, that is about 45 degrees,

Image: Transhumance

not in the obtuse angle that I wrote about recently with regards to the Transhumance of sheep that expands our sense of what might be included,

Image: Reflex Angle

but rather in the reflex angle that begins to either side of the 45 degree angle and circuits our backs as we move forward taking space with us. You cannot see what comes from behind by definition, but you can turn, as those pedestrian dancers showed us long ago. Meanwhile, the theatre is still, not always but perhaps too often for maintaining an adequate suppleness, a matter of a face off.

Image:

What do I mean by the Dorsal Chance?

Let’s take the idea we are exploring this evening as an example.

Most research into practices, such as that conducted in theatre itself, but also much more widely across the material and social sciences, has been disproportionately interested in those practices which have ‘survived’, continued or been successful in impacting upon contemporary operational modes. This is understandable given one of the principal interests of historical recovery is the better understanding of how such pasts shape our presents. Such enquiry informs the vast majority of current research across disciplines, especially in areas of ‘practice as research’ (such as theatre studies) for whom the re-invigoration of art forms now is a declared intention of many of the best and most relevant researchers in the field.

Image:

My dorsal regard here seeks to identify, recover and examine examples of those practices which have been abandoned for economic, political or disciplinary reason. Rather than privilege those practices that ‘endure’, the interest for me at the moment is settling more often on those practices that are eliminated. By shifting attention in this way to a dynamics of the differences between lost, the redundant and the marginalized, the initiation of an alternative history of practices will be possible – one that will throw a properly critical light on those practices that have temporarily won their place in the pantheon at the expense of others. The objective here will be to gauge what has been gained in the rejection of what has been lost and to measure what would be gained in recovering what has been abandoned.

Image:

Why do this and not something else?

The hunch that underpins this work is that there is some civic profit to be made from a diversification of divergent practices rather than a reduction of practical approaches to shared problems. The objective of the work is to put performance at the service of such a process of radical inclusivity. Instead of treating ‘widening participation’ as a numerical problem of individual access this research proposes that attention be trained upon the diversity of practices available and the means to protect that pluralism. In this respect the project takes issue with Giorgio Agamben when he writes in his recent work Profanations: “The creation of new use is possible only by deactivating an old use, rendering it inoperative.”

Image:

What might the dangerously expansive  ‘Abandoned Practices’ include?

These are some of the practices that have been proposed to us to work on in the coming few years in that Anatomy Museum space that was once abandoned that has now been recovered for this purpose. I am not sure they all equally constitute ‘abandoned practices’ but that is the point, we are going to find out:

Image:

• From a disciplinary perspective: the excision of ‘suspect’ practices (astrology, phrenology, ethology) from academic disciplinary development in European universities between the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries; the diminishing practices of ‘eloquence’, ‘rhetoric’ or ‘sophistry’ and the relevance of their erosion to western political democracies; the accelerating marginalization of laboratory sciences and languages in UK higher education and the loss of vocabularies of practice that each fosters; the separation and cordoning of hypnotic practices from psychoanalysis in its establishment as an ‘empirical’ discipline in the 1890s.

Image:

• From an ethnographic perspective: abandoned agrarian practices such as the Dromoise ‘transhumance’ reconsidered within contemporary ecological concerns; the disappearance of the Samoan ‘palaver’ or cross-cultural negotiation between traders and its implications for the spatial dynamics of speaking to unfamiliar others; the demise of the ‘potlatch’ for the Northwest Coast peoples of Canada and its restored appearance in tourist staging; the loss of the Catalan ‘corre foc’ (fire run) from the rural hinterland of Barcelona and its reemergence in the urban realm under the jurisdiction of the Adjuntamente.

Image:

• From an economic perspective: the degrading of the earliest parliamentary democracy, the Icelandic al-thing, and its representational relevance to recent economic collapse; the ‘deregulation’ of western industrial financial services in the 1980s and subsequent failure of the banking system in the US and UK in 2009; the abandonment of the ‘banal ovens’ and the practice of ‘collective baking’ in the Provencal villages of the nineteenth century and the implications for community barter and exchange.

Image:

 

• From a political perspective: the practices of non-parliamentary peoples such as the Achuar Indians and the gradual loss of cross-species inclusivity once prominent in their self governance; the abandonment of the euphemistically titled ‘water cure’ following its century long practice in US ‘protectorates’ from the Philippines to Guantanamo Bay; the withdrawal of western ‘diplomacy’ in Iran, Palestine and North Korea and the consequences for international relations.

 

Image:

Whose idea is this, as if an idea could be anyones?

The idea is located at the convergence of two strands of European thought and practice, indeed thought about practice: histories of ‘eliminated practices’ and philosophies of ‘endangered uses’. While a diversity of theorists and cultural practitioners from a variety of fields across the arts and sciences have privileged these problems recently, for the sake of brevity two contributions in this arena could be taken as paradigmatic: the work of the historian of science Isabelle Stengers and the philosophy of play of the writer and actor Giorgio Agamben (about whom Paul might say something more in a moment)..

Image:

First: Abandoned Practices

On the one hand, Isabelle Stengers, (Free University of Brussels) as a historian of science and particularly of chemistry within the context of what she calls ‘the invention of modern science’ has drawn our attention to the elimination of practices in the name of scientific ‘progress’. Stengers, along with a number of historians and philosophers of science, including Bruno Latour and Lorraine Daston, have redrawn the map of what matters about the material, how ‘things’ operate within a laboratory setting, and the politics that inscribe any scientific procedure in its claim to become Science (with an upper case S). The ‘eliminativist’ principle, as Stengers puts it rather more polemically than my own term, is one that has fuelled the establishment of Science over competing claims to knowledge through five centuries. Stengers is concerned about the terms on which these operations have been conducted and with what effects for practices that are eliminated in the wake of the ‘advances’ of scientific rationality. An unforeseen irony for Stengers’ own historical field of enquiry is the simple yet harrowing example for the contemporary University in the UK: the accelerating loss of chemistry departments and the laboratory practices that were common to them.

For Isabelle Stengers science is a practice “like any other” (a contention that has caused something of a furor in the European academic scientific community). This catholic inclusiveness is one that can be reciprocally acknowledged from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences by admitting that the orthodox disciplinary boundaries between the arts and sciences deserve further troubling and transgression. This common call to interdisciplinary arms is here backed up by a substantial and serious locus of precise, evidential engagement. The ‘Abandoned Practices’ aspect of this research project will seek to take into account the knowledge associated with those practices that are in the process of being degraded and destroyed in the name of what Stengers (ironically) calls ‘progress’ and to examine the conditions of elimination in a diverse range of such practices. The aim of this research will be an attempt to reconsider the dynamics, pace and character of this process in a limited number of case studies. For Stengers the landscape is one ‘ghosted by the spirit of past practices’. As she puts it: “We live in a cemetery of already destroyed practices”.

To locate a project in a ‘graveyard of abandoned practices’ would be serious enough but would leave unattended the pressing, civic question that arises in such a place. The historical and philosophical merit of such an exercise would be unquestionable, but a performance matrix introduces another imperative to this proposal.

The second project which inevitably arises then engages with practice itself. That is the means to recover and retool practices whose relevance to pressing contemporary dilemmas demands attention. While the first explorations identify loss of practice, the second examines the potential for the reactivation of previously excluded practices.

Image:

Hence my term: Endangered Uses

If on the one hand there is such a thing as ‘Abandoned Practices’, as this project attests, then it should not go without saying in this age of affects and audience responsiveness that there will, with abandonment, be a parallel set of practices to consider, that of endangered uses. If a practice of productivism is lost then it implies a plurality of previous use is reduced. Once again, and against the vague prognoses of successive theoretical frames from postmodernity to supermodernity, diversity is threatened by conformity. For the Italian philosopher and film actor Giorgio Agamben, in a corollary to Stengers’ identification of the political impulse to abandoned practices, there is a religious dimension to the manner in which things, practices, subjects get moved away from, and out of use.

What might this religious domain imply for such a performance oriented research project? In his writing on the concept of ‘profanation’ Agamben talks of the way in which a sacralised object that has been made separate can be profaned back into use though ‘play’. Taking the root Latinate term of sacrare seriously, those things that are sacred for Agamben are distinguished by being made separate. While this might appear to be the obverse of the abandonment of a practice, through a lack of investment, not a surplus of critical interest, in Stengers’ view the forces and imperatives of capital (and by implication the economies characterized by their investment in the market forces associated with Capitalism) are the equivalent of just such a religious belief system and shares the eliminativist tendencies of all other religions. Those things that are removed from common use are effectively consecrated, they are taken from the operations of human law (economy, education, the public realm) and placed beyond reach. It is in this shared dynamics of exclusion that disciplinary diversity is threatened in the interests of a less conflictual orthodoxy – one that can be ‘believed in’ for the purposes of economic and social stability. Such an eliminativist ideology does not, as the late twentieth century abandonment of financial practices of ‘regulation’ attests, necessarily, in the longer term and under changing global circumstances, always afford the best protection to those it was meant to represent in the interests of the ‘free’ market.

But to profane such separated objects of interest, according to Agamben, is to return those things to “the free use of men” (sic). For Agamben ‘use’ is not something natural, use value is never to be presumed, but always to be worked upon – a proposition that performance with its repetitive regime of restored behaviours and paradigms of rehearsal would have no quarrel with. The theoretical arena that Agamben is drawing upon here is that of the twentieth century anthropologists of sacrifice such as Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille. In their work sacrifice was once the thing that removed things from the sphere of the profane to the sacred, from human to divine. Usefully for performance, theatricality and its interest in liminal processes and shifts, Agamben notes that the threshold is what is important in this context. The threshold across which the practice, the object (or in religious terms the victim) must cross is one which is often only discernable through the performances that occur there. For instance, the simplest form of profanation is that of the gesture of touch, in ethnographic terms a contagion, that returns something from one sphere to another across a strictly marked threshold. Touching here disenchants and alleviates the petrification of the thing in its sacred passage back to human use. There are few mechanisms as gesturally sensitive available for the interpretation of such tactility, such haptic concerns, as performance study and research.

But while this ethnographic emphasis announces a common cause with much recent performance research Agamben shifts attention from the ethnographic and anthropological sphere and redirects his analysis in a further, helpful performative direction, when he announces: “The passage from the sacred to the profane can, in fact, also come about by means of an entirely inappropriate use (or, rather, reuse) of the sacred: namely play.” For Agamben play, somewhat problematically but enthusiastically for those of us engaged with performance questions that circulate around such discredited objects, becomes the privileged figure of reactivation. In a short series of epithets in his work in his book Profanations Agamben situates his astonishing faith in the possibilities of play leaving no doubt as to either the seriousness of the subject at hand nor the consequences of ignoring its continued trivialisation: “[…] play frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without simply abolishing it […] the powers of economics, law, and politics, deactivated in play, can become the gateways to a new happiness […]”. Meanwhile Agamben, to further accentuate the seriousness of the stakes, heralds the threat to this realm of meta-practice: “Play as an organ of profanation is in decline everywhere […] To return to play its purely political vocation is a political task.” Thus Agamben in legitimizing the often-infantilized realm of ‘play’ provides a hinge between the previously tense realms of performance research and theatre studies, where play can operate as a mediating mechanism between two, apparently sundered disciplines.

Image:

The Worst Case Scenario

Is abandoned hope the worst abandonment you can imagine? Augusto Monterroso imagined ‘Abandoned Faith’ in a book of short stories. The story Monterroso wrote is called:

Faith and Mountains

In the beginning, Faith only moved mountains when this was absolutely necessary, as a result of which the scenery remained the same for millennia at a time.

But when Faith started spreading and people began to be amused by the idea of moving mountains, these did nothing but change place, and it became more and more difficult to find them in the spot where they had been left the night before, which of course created more difficulties than it resolved.

From this point on, decent people chose to abandon Faith, and now for the most part mountains stay put.

Whenever there is a landslide on the road and a number of passengers die beneath the rocks, this means that someone, nearby or faraway, has had a glimmer of Faith.

Thank you for listening.

Paul will respond with some further thoughts and then we will open up for conversation.

 

References:

“Faith and Mountains”, in The Black Sheep and Other Fables, Augusto Monterroso, Tadworth: Acorn Book Company, 2005

‘Diderot’s egg’, Isabelle Stengers, p. 7, Radical Philosophy144, July/August 2007

‘In Praise of Profanation’, Giorgio Agamben, pp. 73 – 92, Profanations (New York: Zone, 2006).

“Abandoned Being”, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes, California: Stanford University Press, 1993, p.36.