Guerrilla Tactics: Adrian Parr
...the life of homo sacer (sacred man)... may be killed and yet not sacrificed ... Giorgio Agamben [1] If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface of volume...Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people. Gilles Deleuze [2] As a recent addition to American society I was amazed when I arrived here at how many cars displayed the bruised I ♥ NY logo two years after 9/11 had occurred and it is now one year later and yet, the logo still frequently pops up. Then, as I happened to sit down and begin writing this paper I glanced over my desk and my eye was caught by the following slogans appearing on the last two editions of Time magazine: 'The Struggle Within Islam' and 'America's Border: Even After 9/11 It's Outrageously Easy to Sneak In'.[3] Both titles are accompanied by the following images. The first, a young Muslim boy with hand on his heart and head slightly lowered so his eyes look seductively up at the viewer. The second, a pair of hands rips through the red and white stripes of the American flag revealing the blue sky of the ideal land that lies beyond. The combination of image and slogan tearing across the front pages of Time certainly smack of the self-contained character of privilege. Privilege left unchallenged or unchecked ultimately ends up territorializing the social field. Yet the key problem of how privilege works is a sticky one when it comes to art. Postmodern art, in all its irony, pastiche and frivolity seems to play directly into and at times prop up how social privilege works. Seriously, how far did the light-hearted oversized puppy of Jeff Koons standing outside the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1995 in Sydney exacerbate popular culture's complicity in social privilege? The artist's intention may have been to communicate 'love, warmth and happiness' but quite frankly this sort of kitsch is really a naïve and even sentimental response to many of the issues plaguing contemporary society. In this regard I would describe this sort of art as irresponsible and socially innocuous. Sociologically speaking privilege and the abandonment this produces operate on many levels across the globe: refugees are incarcerated in isolated detention centers in remote areas without adequate access to legal counsel, others die from curable diseases because the medicine they need is not available or simply unaffordable, and the economies of the undeveloped world are gagging on interest payments for loans given to them by the developing nations which paradoxically were designed to help revive their local economies, meanwhile multinational corporations disguise market expansion and exploitation under the rubric of social policy. For instance, Nestle's expansion of its baby food market into the Third World, introducing breast-milk substitutes in a context where an absence of clean water raises the risk of serious disease in babies especially when breast-milk itself is a natural immunizer.[4] These situations are all effects of power that are not natural. As Foucault has insisted 'public health, or social medicine, must be written back into the general framework of a "biopolitics"; the latter tends to treat the "population" as a mass of living and coexisting beings who present particular biological and pathological traits and who thus come under specific knowledge and technologies.'[5] In all these instances privilege secures in place an especially irresponsible social field that scrambles for ways in which to challenge the dominant logic of abandonment marking the contemporary sociopolitical arena. How can culture work through the marks borne by privilege? Further, culturally speaking, how do we come to terms with this situation? Unfortunately, as I see it a great deal of contemporary culture, and here the recent headlines in Time and the postmodern aesthetic of say a Koons, actually facilitates the stalemate at the heart of this very problem: this constitutes a logic of abandonment. And in this respect, it seems crucial that culture can find a way to begin rejecting outright the logic of abandonment driving the social field and focus more on the question of how culture itself can be marked by the inconsistencies this logic poses. Postmodern art's love affair with popular culture has quite simply made art into an accomplice of privilege. Moreover, the call to a 'politics of difference' ends up being another way of saying 'capitalism'. Capitalism thrives off individualism: the pastiche of tastes, the passing fads of an ironic fashion industry revamping the gaunt 'look' of a heroine addict whilst parading Calvin Klein, the playfulness of youth culture stamping its feet like a spoilt brat if it doesn't get the latest 'Gucci' backpack or Nike sneakers, that is until they graduate and grow-up, at which point they enter la famiglia of corporate life. Even worse than all this, as Thomas Frank reports the once rebellious youth culture engages in 'cultural consensus'. [6] One example Frank gives is of Nike's objective to pitch its market toward skateboarders, who were well renowned for their animosity towards everything Nike stood for: a wealthy, powerful corporation buying up sportsmanship. The mission of the Nike advertising planners was as followers: [T]he objective for the advertising was not to reach a certain sales goal but rather it had a more basic, grassroots task, which was that it needed to begin to start a relationship between Nike and skateboarders, and make skateboarders think that it wasn't such a bad thing that Nike was going to get involved.[7] Clearly transforming Nike from a skater's enemy into an ally, the advertising agency screened a series of ads that queried what it would be like if other athletes were fined in the way that skaters are. Culture vultures pull from hip-hop, punks, rappers and so forth, hungrily consuming their sources (baggy pants, ripped jeans, twisted baseball caps) to the point where what was once radical enters the high priced racks of Macy's department stores. The expressive force of the 'original' - dare I use that word - and the body that brought into being such power is entirely lost in this process of conversion. As Deleuze said: 'Marketing is now the instrument of social control and produces the arrogant breed who are our masters.'[8] So, once again, can you remind me: how do the postmodern strategies of pastiche, irony and play work as art? Popular culture's problem is the problem of individualism and if art is going to have any kind of critical edge in this context it cannot share in the same problem, it needs to shift the problem of individualism onto one of autonomy: the autonomous force of art. How can art assert its autonomy from popular culture without also invoking the authoritarian and absolute nature of modernist aesthetics? How can art take upon itself the full weight of the social without loosing 'the art' in the process? To help us examine these issues we will consider the way in which the Australian contemporary artist Mike Parr brings to life an ethical milieu in his performances - Close the Concentration Camps (2002). Correspondingly, it will be argued that Parr fractures the insides and outsides of culture to expose a social fault line. In this series of performances he performed the principles and aesthetics of modernity to crumbling point. Agitating the principle of progress, all the while referencing the autonomy of modernist aesthetics, Parr problematized modernity. What emerged was a disorganized modernity, what might be described as modernity's shadowy accomplice, leaving the overly organized and autonomous modern fractured to incomprehension; yet still never succumbing to the self-referential popular aesthetic of postmodernism. Parr's performances construct an ethical milieu for culture that brings into stark relief the following proposition: the moment life is reduced to logical constructs and all those who nomadically avert its order are denied representation, their civic life is automatically stripped down to its bare life, turning some into not just non-citizens but non-persons as well. And it is through struggle, frustration, and desire that the problem of abandonment becomes the ethical milieu of Parr's performances. He re-inhabits the ban suffered by countless minorities to expose a much deeper problem of how nomos (law) and physis (materiality) have become infused in one another. I Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben claims modernity saw the entry of zoe (bare life) into the area of the polis (political life). In support of this claim he offers us the following analysis, beginning with an important philosophical distinction formed between zoe and bios . The more general concept of 'life' as it is used today was non-existent in the language (or philosophy) of ancient Greece. Zoe for the Greeks was biological life, or the life we experience in common: animals, plants, humans and so forth. Bios , was that kind of life specific to human beings and more significantly it was an organized way of life, such as the political life of humans. Agamben explains how the Greeks argued zoe needs to be excluded in order to found a polis , but zoe nevertheless persists even in the polis in so far as a human being is also a living being. Thus, bare life exists as a state of exception within political existence. As bare life is excluded it is simultaneously captured by the political order, becoming 'both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it.'[9] You might be wondering how the state of exception is decided though? To answer this Agamben turns to the definition of sovereignty Carl Schmitt espoused: 'Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.'[10] The structure of exception Schmitt formulates is that the sovereign holds a paradoxical position. The sovereign is both 'outside and inside the juridical order'.[11] Schmitt's point is that the sovereign enjoys a monopoly over the law and can also suspend the very legitimacy of the law whilst still acting inside the legal framework. Using Schmitt in this manner, Agamben argues that the state of exception is born out of law suspending itself, a law that continues in relation to the state of exception announced by the sovereign. It is not that the exception is included through interdiction in that which includes it (law); rather it is 'included solely through its exclusion' - to which Agamben coins the phrase: ' relation of exception .'[12] Hence, the exception is neither a fact nor a juridical case since it came into being only because of a suspension of the law. Here the crucial point is that the relation of exception is one of a 'ban.' Agamben says: 'He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside become indistinguishable.'[13] To theoretically assist him here, Agamben invokes the French philosopher (who studied with Deleuze) Alain Badiou's thesis, only to introduce a new theoretical possibility into it. The exception lies at the threshold between what Badiou called excresent (represented not presented) and the singular (presentation without representation).[14] As a paradoxical limit to what cannot be completely included in the membership it embodies, the exception also 'cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included.'[15] As such, the place of sovereignty is on the threshold between what lies both inside and outside the law: life. This now begins to sound like Agamben is arguing that the structure of sovereignty is a juridical category or a supreme power. Not exactly, for he proposes 'exception' is an originary structure where law exists by virtue of the exception it captures in itself - life - in the sense that life 'can in the last instance be implicated in the sphere of law only through the presupposition of its inclusive exclusion, only in an exceptio .'[16] Hence, we cannot definitively claim that the exception is either outside or inside the law. The exceptions, such as refugees or those interned in detention facilities have simply been abandoned: they are both inside and outside the law. This exception is Agamben's homo sacer . These people can be killed but the killing of them is neither a sacrifice, in the sense that they are not divine, nor murder, in that no law is broken. Why? Because they exist in the space between zoe and bios . II Australian performance artist, Mike Parr has recently responded to the cultural implications the logic of abandonment entails. In a thirty-hour long performance Malewitch [a political arm] held from 3 to 6 May 2002 at Sydney's Artspace Parr sat with his arm (he has one arm) nailed to the wall, and his eyes gaffer taped. Using the trope of 'modernism', referencing the famous White on White (1918) by the modernist painter Kasimir Malevich, in the side room Parr displayed a white on white print of the name Malevich repeated to the point of disintegration. The image gestured to the White Australia Policy that began with the rise of modernity during the 1850s and lingered on until 1978.[17] In response Parr placed the 763 blacked out pages of the Australian National Dictionary in a third room where a wall length statement 'Close the Concentration Camps' was displayed. The pure abstraction of Malevich brought into stark relief the abstract and arbitrary nature of Australia's immigration policies. As the white name 'Malevich' was repeated on a white surface a tension ensued between figure and ground. That being, white figure bleached by the ground of Australian history. Once again on 15 June 2002 at the Monash University Museum of Art in Melbourne, Parr in a five-hour performance Close the Concentration Camps sewed up his entire face - lips, nose, ears, cheeks, eyebrows, and eyelids - producing what he described as an 'anti-face.' On his thigh was branded the word 'Alien.' In the adjacent room was documentation of discussions between himself and Australian author/art theorist David Bromfield over the political nature of the piece. Projected on to the wall in the third space exerts from the Not the Hilton Parliamentary Report appeared, the language used was conspicuously cold, scientific and detached. Quotations supplied include the following: Physical security for the site is maintained by a perimeter wire mesh fence topped with razor which is floodlit at night. This is complemented by the siting of the facility on Department of Defence land, which requires a permit to enter. Detainees are briefed on the risks associated with venturing into the dry and hot isolation surrounding the centre. Because the centre was being established on a site previously used as a detention facility, there was ready access to power, water, and sewerage systems. In addition to the tent lines and an increasing number of transportable buildings, there was an administrative area and a small clinic. There was approximately one shower and toilet for every 12-15 people, and the Committee observed queues for both the men's and women's showers.[18] It is the bare life of the refugees that is monitored whilst in detention. The body is clearly used here as a piece of information that can be brought under government control. And it is this emphasis on the bare life of a human being that sheds light on the double negation refugees in detention endure. Their presence is felt across two poles, first, by virtue of the fact that they literally live on a geographical terrain - described as the Australian nation - and second, because they also occupy a place in the social psyche. Yet they are concomitantly denied access to the public spaces ordinary Australian's value. And this is where both these performances demonstrate a commitment to guerrilla culture, because in nailing his one arm to the wall and in the other sewing-up his entire face, Parr in effect brings to life his bare life within the context of public space. Parr does not appropriate the suffering of others as an aesthetic device, whereby he simply represents the issue in a one-on-one manner, which would suggest he domesticates the anxieties this issue gives rise to by presenting a fully coherent illustration of them. He did not simply represent the condition of bare life intrinsic to exiles in manageable form; moreover, he renders visible the uncomfortable fact that some life is believed to be without value. Further, it is misplaced to query, as his critics often do, how this could help the refugees? The performances are not a direct political action in the way that we might describe the Civil Rights movement but an indirect one. That is to say, it is not a matter of providing help, rather exacerbating the latent intolerance of subhuman categories used to separate human beings and communities. This is what constitutes guerrilla culture.[19] Effectively culture stumbles the moment it stops antagonizing the security of the social and the passive aggression such security produces. Likewise, the sociability of culture fails when it territorializes the social according to a fixed set of relations believed to encompass all possible relations and sociohistorical contexts. It is here between these two fault lines where I feel culture appears at its most radical - what will be referred to as 'guerrilla culture.' Guerrilla culture can smoke out vanguard sociopolitical expressions, producing experimental meanings without being fully caught up in the logic of abandonment driving the mainstream cultural economy. The logic under scrutiny here is the abandonment endemic to the formal exchange driving culture. Differences between cultures, one that multiculturalism embraces, can be regarded as subjective. However, the subjective nature of cultural difference in fact creates the selfsame objective criteria underpinning the combination - 'Culture'. It is the absolute character of Culture, in all its complicity with dominant ideologies and more importantly with the desires producing such ideologies that ends up sacrificing alternative modes of subjectivity. Under these circumstances how can culture possibly begin to interfere with what largely seems to be a repressive social organization when culture itself does not question its own involvement with such organizations? Perhaps the answer to this question lies in the cultural indistinguishability of the abstract and concrete, or nomos and physis that Agamben discusses. However, by mobilizing culture along different co-ordinates some cultural practices, such as Parr's performances, stimulate new social connections and in this way could be described in terms of a deterritorializing activity. At its most radical, culture can demonstrate a commitment to confounding the coherency of dominant ideologies by amplifying the desires productive of such socially oppressive systems. As Wilhelm Reich, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari have all argued, the masses are not simply fooled by ideology they actively produce it in its negative form.[20] Taking their hat off to Reich, Deleuze and Guattari announce: 'Desire can never be deceived. Interests can be deceived, unrecognized, or betrayed, but not desire.'[21] What we can learn from Deleuze and Guattari here is that cultural modes of production are not just economic they are particular expressions of desire. Therefore what is essentially productive is desire. Desire, for Deleuze and Guattari, is social and the subject emerges as the result of the investments desire takes. From this claim it follows that subjectivity is not an a priori given, it is more of an activity, a series of connections and expressions, all of which are irreducible to any fixed subjective position or meaning.
III In Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari argue that there are two irreducible yet related semiotic systems that constitute a subject. On the one hand we have the axes of signification: a white wall. It is on this wall that fixed determinate meanings for the flow of life and experience are imposed and ordered. It is important to note that for them, the process of meaning formation is not entirely a problem of language. Significance does not arise purely within a dominating order of signifiers and their signifieds (form and content). Meaning, for Deleuze and Guattari, is semiotic. The white wall functions as the limit to meaning, and in many respects it rigidifies desiring-production in the same way that the psychoanalytic Oedipal limit does. In their discussion of the Oedipus complex, Deleuze and Guattari argue Oedipus restricts and represses desire. Why? With this model all desire is fixed into an incestuous triangle consisting of mommy, daddy, and me. First of all, the problem with Oedipus and the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious is that it puts forward a representational framework for desire. Hence, psychoanalytic desire is reductive and essentialist. The unconscious, like any limit to meaning is ready-made; in psychoanalytic theory it is representative of all behavior and expression. In this way, Oedipus is a transcendent point of unity under which all conscious and unconscious activities fall: suffice it to say, the unconscious functions much like an original narrative.[22] According to Deleuze and Guattari though, there is no original narrative, narrative as a mode of storytelling takes place in time and as such it is an experience, or journey if you will, that emerges in the process of its own creation (what they otherwise call 'becoming'). They emphasize experience is affective, meaning you cannot abstract one unified experience out of the whole of experience. There are only intensities produced when desires and affects combine, these are internal to life as a whole. What this suggests is that not even documentary film, journalism, or Live Art represents reality although these can provisionally grasp the truth of reality and give rise to spontaneous meanings. Here we return to the white wall/black hole semiotic system once again. As the limit to meaning or the wall on which meaning 'inscribes its signs and redundancies' it is the wall where the signifier takes shape.[23] But where does this leave the other side of the equation: black holes? The axes of subjectification, and accordingly black holes, organize being. Deleuze and Guattari announce: 'subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passions and redundancies.'[24] In their combination, white walls and black holes are the abstract machine producing a face: faciality. The system of faciality creates social space because it 'performs the facialization of the entire body and all its surroundings and objects, and the landscapification of all worlds and milieus.'[25] Hence, the distinction here is between faciality and faces, bringing us to a deeper problem of organization. Deleuze and Guattari describe the face as a surface or map that is not part of the body in the way a head is. Put differently, 'the face is a horror story.'[26] But like all of their abstract machines the face can either be a system of transformation (deterritorialization) or over coding (territorialization). A good example of the latter would be the image of the young Muslim boy on the front of Time magazine whose face automatically becomes a site of interrogation simply because of the slogan accompanying the image. Another example would be the I?NY logo (originally designed by Milton Glaser) that was freely distributed to help bolster the New York tourism industry; after fifteen years the State of New York became the new owner of the logo and Glaser explains 'the state decided to trademark it and control its use.'[27] After September 11, Glaser bruised the heart and added the words 'more than ever' to the logo. The revised logo took off, appearing as a bumper sticker on people's cars and on the front and back covers of the New York Daily News , that is until the State of New York intervened, objecting that the logo could be 'interpreted as a sign of weakness.'[28] In this instance, the desires of the masses found repressive investment (nationalism and a fixed originary narrative point) and the force of that desire was further territorialized by the state. What this suggests is that life (social life) is the subject of biopolitics and 'the subject' is its object; raising the following question: how can life escape and avert this power? This issue is especially pertinent when we consider the problem of autonomy in the context of art production and reception, because autonomy comes from being able to enter into relationships with others as well as create new relationships with oneself. What the logo example illustrates is the way in which the potential of a body (as a desiring force) can be regulated outside of it (state, government, law, or sovereign). In this regard Deleuze and Guattari are highly critical of the metaphysical enterprise because it posits that the world we actually live in, and the experiences we have are only meaningful (signified) in so far as they are structured by a sign system outside of experience and beyond the worldly realm (signifier). The problem here is that transcendence plagues desiring-production with impossibility, reducing it to the Law of an incurable Oedipal desire and unfulfilled Lack. Immanence on the other hand, proposes alternatives, it is suggestive of new experiences; tempting desire with joy, immanence encourages discovery and spontaneity. In terms of a transcendent signification in the manner of the Oedipal limit, it is more akin to a unifying structure; hence it is quite the antithesis of experimental meaning. It is one that subjectifies as it signfies forming clear boundaries and distinct lines of communication and interpretation. Immanence is characteristically indeterminate, whereby reality and imagination continually re-create one another. And this is where the connection to faciality as a social modality reappears once more, because it too can also be repressive in so far as it produces a limit to meaning and a self-contained subject. In response to meaning formation and the process of subjectification, doesn't our cultural problem now turn into one of how culture can expand the possibilities of how meaning and subjectivity are produced, and perhaps even more pressing, how value is generated? IV Culture, at its most antagonistic, can expose the material and discursive conditions that produce sociopolitical value. In this regard, culture is inherently social. The objective categories we use to identify individuals and the communities they hold allegiances to also serve to demarcate social worth. And what Parr does is confound the categories of sociopolitical value by contextualizing them within a provisional construction that tests their reliability and authority (law), extracting the repression behind such value and presenting back to his audience their own 'horror story': we are faced with our own forsaken suffocated and gagged face or worse still, one that is sewn into incomprehensibility. Looking at his severely misshapen face the spectator is left asking: 'Who is that?' The face he presents is the black hole into which we invest all of our affective forces and desires. He doesn't allow us to be seduced by the power of the face; his is simply a face of pure affectivity: an eyesore, a mess, a dismembered head, and an abstraction. Presenting the spectator with what Parr describes as an incomprehensible 'anti-image' the subhuman behavior Australians, and many developed nations, attribute to refugees is exposed as a monstrosity. He exacerbates public discomfort in all its irrational vilification and deep-seated fear of difference, defacing the fascistic investment of desire that makes racism 'outrageously easy to sneak' into the social field. Parr believes that in order to overcome repression one has to increase it, and only art can effectively do this because when the arena of formal politics does it, it is no longer a political gesture but a coercive, authoritarian one. Much like the widely reported statement Ruddock gave in response to the occasion when the refugees sewed their lips together in protest against their lengthy incarceration. The Minister said: 'Lip sewing is a practice unknown in our culture', adding that it's 'something that offends the sensitivities of Australians. The protesters believe it might influence the way we might respond. It can't and it won't.'[29] In effect Ruddock announced Australians have refinements refugees cannot possibly understand and what is more their behavior threatens the so-called civilized values of ordinary Australians. Parr places the lucidity of these media sanctioned representations under extreme stress until their clarity is shattered. It is important to remember that Australia has always been anxious of being swamped by the Other whether they be the 'yellow peril', 'wogs', 'darkies', 'boongs', 'coons', or 'illegal entrants'. The representations ascribed to refugees are symptomatic of these fears and the fantasies they bring about. For example, in the Children Overboard scenario during the 2001 Australian national election, it was reported that refugees threw their children into the ocean. This incident was represented in the media and by government officials at the time as a perverse tactic of a barbaric people maliciously wanting to force their way into the country, the public quickly rallied around expressing similar dismay and disgust. Since the inquiry into the scandal it quickly became apparent that their boat was in fact sinking. In short, the very idea that refugees threw their children overboard to gain a sympathy vote was a political invention and more insidiously it was turned into another narrative link that split them off from the inner circle of modern societies. Parr's performances respond to the repressed anxieties inventions of this kind are symptomatic of by exposing their irrationality. How he achieves this is by discursively refracting physis (the very materiality of his body) within the logic of abandonment and the biopolitical milieu this reinforces. In the biopolitical milieu 'the whole social body is comprised by power's machine and developed in its virtuality...Power is thus expressed as a control that extends throughout the depths of the consciousnesses and bodies of the population - at the same time across the entirety of social relations.'[30] The salient feature of biopolitics is the power over life, otherwise understood to be the instrumental rationality behind the politics of life. Human suffering and the lives that such suffering holds in the balance are reduced to a mere statistic: an immigration category. Then again, as Bauman has so clearly argued in reference to the Holocaust in Modernity and the Holocaust , this is not an irregularity within modern society it is embedded in it.[31] Life now is not just an object of political processes but as Michel Foucault has noted in Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison it is produced via individual lives and the life of the social body.[32] That is, the value of individual life is determined through an inscription process that clearly identifies that body as alien or familiar to the superior life of the mother or fatherland. Here again lies the violence of Ruddock's dismissal of those refugees, who in desperation sewed their lips together, as exhibiting behavior 'unknown' to Australian culture. The state of exception underpinning the contemporary world that Agamben has so succinctly articulated has been carried to such extremes that Parr ultimately produces what Agamben also once described as a zone of indistinction.[33] The performances activate an exceptional space in order to use that space as a kind of guerrilla warfare, targeting the logic of abandonment and interfering with the ideological implications and desiring investments constitutive of cultural arrangements. In short, the abuse pitted against refugees in detention centres are exposed as the logical endpoint of the categorical no-mans-land they occupy: the space of the homo sacer between zoe and bios , neither completely one or the other. Refugees might be members of their host society and yet they are not citizens, worse still, they have now become non-persons. They try to find protection but are punished by the country they seek asylum from on the basis of border protection continuing to 'sneak in' as the Times headline called it in reference to American refugees. They are incarcerated as common criminals and banished from view and yet their presence is felt in all areas of social life (now even at the airport in the US), thus, the immanent threat they are presented as posing is reiterated by the inclusive exclusive position they hold. The state refuses to take full responsibility for the refugees comma nevertheless it still provides them with minimal levels of care in the form of detention centres. From behind the walls of high security facilities in the middle of nowhere refugees without a valid visa remain unseen and unheard: a nameless, unvoiced community whose only voice is mediated by the official language that is propped up by the media. When refugees do develop a new language in retaliation against this form of violence the sincerity they attempt to communicate ends up being appropriated by the punishing body as another example of their deceitfulness and worse still, as an act of violence against the country incarcerating them. Parr's performances work to produce static noise between nomos and physis in an effort to get a grip on the irrational nature of the logic of abandonment. This being a logic that converts the subjectivity of one group into an objective category (illegal immigrants, border protection, and national security) that in turn abandons the subject as is implied by the absolute criteria objectivity establishes. Parr uses this logic to produce an ethical milieu over and above moral law. The white wall Parr literally nails his arm to is no longer the screen that subjugates us to a transcendent law but a surface of intensity filled with material interference. V As Parr's daughter, I am the first to admit that these performances evoked mixed feelings in me. I remember entering the gallery on both instances 'mentally prepared' as I preferred to call it. But what, exactly, was the quality, taste, and sensibility I had prepared myself for? The answer to that I discovered was completely unpredictable. There is an irreducible difference between the logical preparations one makes as compared to the lived reality of the actual event. Confronted with the face my mother had sewn together I was affronted by the naked materiality of life. Whose face was this? Was this my mother's face? The face she had pieced together as she concomitantly pulled it apart? Was this his face? He, as my 'father', seemed utterly extraneous to me in this environment. Ownership: it all seemed so thorny, so completely impossible. The longer I lingered in the gallery the more I could and could not recognize him. He was at once my father and a foreign 'Other'. I remember feeling a profound sense of ambiguity: the pull of daughterly love to relieve the pain I felt was his, my mother's and mine at the same time and yet really none of us could fully lay claim to this pain - it was beyond any one of us specifically, it was a collective pain I discovered as I moved around the space and amongst other visitors to the gallery. Many people stayed all day long in a gesture of solidarity; therefore who is to say my pain was any greater in magnitude than the pain of anyone else? For Malevitch: a political arm , I especially made the trip from Melbourne to Sydney in order to attend the performance. Honestly, I felt better prepared that time around. I humorously recalled speaking to my father on the telephone hearing in the background his assistant - Gary - knocking a nail being into the wall in his studio for practice. Perhaps this was a banality on my behalf? I am the first to admit it. But the sound seemed to provide a ground of reference, or point of emotional orientation. Yet, when I entered the gallery seeing him with his only arm nailed to wall he was not merely vulnerable but the sense of extreme privation immediately uncovered a shared life; I was automatically reminded of my own lived reality, my own inner sense of difference that emerged collectively with others in the gallery. 'Yes, he is my father,' I thought, 'someone whom I know but can't know in his entirety regardless of our shared history.' In both performances I did not want to look away because my 'look' somehow became the only form of support I could offer. The gaze, that is, had been averted and yet it was still embraced. The 'look' not just as an ocular phenomenon but a material event was the only way anyone's presence could be felt in such a situation of radical abandonment. Anything less almost seemed abusive. Herein an ethic shrilled through the space disclosing new social connections and relations that were silently shared. For the audience to respond only in the 'abstract' would in fact only secure in the place the very logic that this ethical milieu sought to crack open. As Hardt and Negri argue, the biopolitical is the new context of the contemporary world, what they term the age of Empire. Alternative forces to those maintaining the biopolitical need to be produced 'not only between obedience and disobedience, or between formal political participation and refusal, but also along the entire range of life and death, wealth and poverty, production and social reproduction, and so forth.'[34] To recapitulate guerrilla culture draws its strength from exposing the logic of abandonment and the ideological investments these are productive of. In this way, vulnerabilities are not overcome, instead they are shared. And although culture may not necessarily accomplish a change in policy it can make a difference in how we imagine ourselves. In this sense, guerrilla culture is becoming an increasingly important avenue of social activity for it brings into relief not just who is included and excluded, but also how meaning and value are produced and the control mechanisms such production invokes. Guerrilla culture awakens the productive forces of a body in relation to other bodies and forces, in this way it mobilizes the autonomous force of art to make bodies and desires serve different ends: it is not the state, government, the education system, the health system, or the corporate sector who benefit from the work of guerrilla culture, instead it is sociability, and a sociability that inspires 'belief in the world' once more and eludes control.[35] In conclusion I will take the liberty of sharing with you a joke that humorously sums this situation up in a nutshell. At a college reunion four girlfriends are chatting, three Catholics and one Jew. The first Catholic, Christina, says: 'My son is now a Priest and when he walks into the room everyone calls him Father.' To which the second Catholic, Mary, retorts: 'My son is a Bishop and whenever anyone walks into the room they call him "Your Grace"'. The third Catholic, Magdalena, interjects: 'My son is a Cardinal. Whenever anyone walks into the room they call him "Your Eminence"'. The Jewish lady, Rivkah, sits there silently and the other three women look at her and together they say: 'Well...?' She replies: 'My son is 6'6", he has dark curly hair, tanned skin, a tight muscular body, is well dressed, intelligent, sensitive, and successful. Whenever he walks into the room the women gasp "Oh my god!"' The point being, the separation of the abstract and concrete and of physis and nomos , are merely formal conversions that are inherently arbitrary. The arbitrary conversion is fundamentally an ethical problem because this is what reduces some to the level of non-persons and in the context of cultural practices the ethical problem emerges when the formal conversion is rendered indistinct. i?ek once pointed out, the critical moment is when we realize this.[36] And in effect, cultural practices that engage guerrilla tactics produce such a critical moment. [1] Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 8.
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