Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno - Sobre las tareas del marxismo de posguerra (Dos fragmentos inéditos de 1946)

Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, “On the Tasks of Post-War Marxism (Two Unpublished Fragments)”, traducido del alemán al inglés por James Crane. Enlace a la versión del texto en inglés:

https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/HA_Fragments_1946/

Prólogo del traductor al inglés (James Crane)

Procedentes del Max-Horkheimer-Archiv (MHA), ambos fragmentos —“Sobre la relación entre los intelectuales críticos, el proletariado y el Partido Comunista” y “La maldición de escribir hoy en día”— se encuentran bajo el subtítulo “Manuscritos varios (1946)”,[1] archivados junto a tres (de los cuatro) manuscritos supervivientes de las “Conversaciones con Theodor W. Adorno” de Horkheimer, grabadas durante las dos primeras semanas de octubre de 1946, sobre la secuela prevista de «Dialéctica de la Ilustración». Estos Diskussionsprotokolle fueron publicados por primera vez póstumamente en el Volumen 12 de los Gesammelte Schriften de Horkheimer bajo el título: “Rettung der Aufklärung. Diskussionen über eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik”.[2] Además de estas discusiones, los últimos dos fragmentos bajo el mismo subtítulo también fueron seleccionados para su publicación en el mismo volumen de los Gesammelte Schriften de Horkheimer: “Hacia una crítica de las ciencias sociales estadounidenses” y “El destino de los movimientos revolucionarios”, cada uno de los cuales también está fechado en “octubre de 1946”.[3] Un posible motivo para la omisión de estos fragmentos en los Gesammelte Schriften de Horkheimer es la dificultad para determinar su autoría. A pesar de una serie de indicaciones en contra en el mismo texto de los fragmentos, los archivistas los atribuyen (tentativamente) sólo a Adorno —un enfoque problemático que los archivistas parecen haber adoptado también para varios otros fragmentos inéditos del archivo con autoría también indeterminada.[4] En términos de contenido, hay dos motivos para rechazar esta atribución.

Primero, cada uno de los fragmentos traducidos a continuación —“Sobre la relación entre los intelectuales críticos, el proletariado y el Partido Comunista” y “La maldición de escribir hoy en día”— está escrito en primera persona del plural (“nosotros”, “nuestro”, “nos”, etc.), y es esta voz la que reivindica la autoría conjunta de “Dialéctica de la Ilustración” en “La maldición de escribir hoy en día”: “El proceso de desmitologización, tal como lo hemos descrito en ‘Dialéctica de la Ilustración’, debería desarrollarse [en adelante] sobre la base del concepto de trabajo”. (En el otoño de 1946, “Dialéctica de la Ilustración” era sólo el título del primer capítulo del libro, pero no el libro en sí, que todavía se titulaba Philosophische Fragmente. Sólo más tarde el primer capítulo se retitularía “Concepto de la Ilustración”, y el libro en su conjunto Dialéctica de la Ilustración, ya durante el proceso de revisión del manuscrito para su publicación a finales de 1947).[5] Además, el mismo fragmento se refiere en broma a un hipotético respaldo del incesto escrito por “H” y “A”: “Hoy, si criticáramos el psicoanálisis y exhortáramos al incesto, el señor Schapiro le diría al señor Kohn: ¿Ha leído ya la interesante crítica de H y A?”. El otro fragmento, “Sobre la relación de los intelectuales críticos con el proletariado y el Partido Comunista”, también está escrito en primera persona del plural.

En segundo lugar, los fragmentos parecen referirse a los debates que Horkheimer y Adorno tenían con sus colaboradores sobre la relación correcta entre los intelectuales críticos y el partido comunista —en particular, la disputa de Horkheimer con Paul Massing y Leo Löwenthal. Como es evidente en la correspondencia de Horkheimer con Löwenthal entre julio y octubre de 1946, Löwenthal y Massing intentaron (en vano) convencer a Horkheimer y Adorno de que incluyeran críticas más fuertes a la URSS y atenuaran las críticas a las “democracias liberales” mientras el grupo finalizaba el borrador de la Tesis VII de “Elementos de antisemitismo”.[6] Dado que en dicha correspondencia Löwenthal expresa su consternación porque el “señor Eisler” —refiriéndose a Hans Eisler, partisano del movimiento comunista oficial y colaborador de Adorno— “no explotó” al leer los borradores de la Tesis VII, es razonable suponer que la observación en “Sobre la relación entre los intelectuales críticos, el proletariado y el Partido Comunista” que nombra explícitamente a Eisler y Massing como representantes de las posiciones dicotómicas hacia el partido comunista realmente existente criticado en el fragmento (“... no emularíamos ni a Eisler ni a Massing”) es una referencia directa a la continua disputa de Horkheimer y Adorno con Löwenthal y Massing en el otoño de 1946.

En suma, ambos motivos para objetar la atribución de estos fragmentos solamente a Adorno se desdoblan como razones para interpretarlos como intrínsecamente ligados al desarrollo de la “Teoría Crítica” hasta 1946, y posiblemente hasta fines de la década de 1940 en su conjunto.[7] La profesión de un comunismo revolucionario en abierto desafío a la URSS de Stalin y el rechazo del acuerdo reformista de posguerra en los Estados liberales-democráticos; el redespliegue cuasi-tercermundista del concepto de “naciones proletarias” contra la supremacía blanca hitleriana; y el desarrollo proyectado de la “dialéctica de la Ilustración” a través del medium de la “teoría del racket” en el esquema negativo de un nuevo internacionalismo, nada de esto puede divorciarse de la Dialéctica de la Ilustración de Horkheimer y Adorno sin traicionar el espíritu del marxismo radical y heterodoxo que todavía la anima, por más subterráneamente que sea.

 

 

Sobre las tareas del marxismo de posguerra

(Dos fragmentos inéditos)

 Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno

 

Sobre la relación entre los intelectuales críticos, el proletariado y el Partido Comunista

Los intelectuales, especialmente los más informados sociológicamente, están fundamentalmente convencidos de que la “revolución” se ha extinguido. Incluso mencionar su posibilidad suena ingenuo. Cualquier esperanza de un levantamiento armado se desvanece, no sólo al verse obligados a confrontar el atraso de las barricadas ante los avances en la tecnología armamentística moderna, sino también en vista del desarrollo más humano de las reformas sociales en Inglaterra e incluso Estados Unidos. Siempre que se habla de “revolución”, ni amigos ni enemigos se molestan en distinguir entre el comunismo y la patria rusa. El “marxismo” es la política de Stalin; la revuelta de la clase obrera, la invasión del Ejército Rojo. Con este pensamiento, se apacigua el temor de que pudiera existir algo más que lo que existe, de que pudiera haber algo más a lo que la acción histórica debiera apuntar; pues la lucha entre naciones y bloques de poder se desarrolla enteramente dentro del marco de la sociedad establecida. Sea cual sea el resultado, los ya poderosos se hacen aún más poderosos; los competidores más débiles pierden, como siempre. Lo que la política debería abolir se convierte en política por excelencia. Así, el mecanismo destinado a chupar todas las energías de la sociedad se ha vuelto hoy superfluo. Cuando el proceso vital de la sociedad aún era opaco para la mayoría de sus miembros, la política, como esfera escindida y especializada del comportamiento social, aún tenía una apariencia de sustancialidad; y su irracionalidad, sólo un índice de la supuesta ratio de quienes la controlan. Hoy, las fuerzas técnicas y humanas de producción se han desarrollado a tal grado que, en realidad, todos ya saben cómo funcionan, de qué se trata, qué es posible, cuál es realmente el objetivo; sólo que es precisamente este conocimiento el que no es consciente.

El “espíritu”, como designación para un sector de la división del trabajo, es, sin duda, una función cosificada; por otro lado, no se puede simplemente obviar la división del trabajo, sobre todo como hacen los rusos. Creen que, al conectarlo directamente con la política y la administración, la participación en asambleas de fábrica, etc., se puede abolir su aislamiento. Pero esto es falso, porque extingue la última chispa de autonomía que aún brillaba en ese sector, entregándosela al peor de los especialistas: el administrador. Para Marx, el espíritu, como momento del movimiento revolucionario que supuestamente irrumpiría en la sociedad cosificada, poseía la sustancialidad del ser humano no cosificado.

Nuestra dificultad es doble: no queremos volver a ser meras “terceras personas”.[8] Esto no significa que tengamos algo en contra de lo “parasítico”. Al contrario, la liberación respecto de la compulsión de la producción en la sociedad burguesa decadente iba de la mano con la supervivencia de la autonomía. Sin embargo, después de Marx, ya no se puede pretender entretener a la burguesía en el papel de la “tercera persona”, ni a través de la crítica ni de la glorificación. Debemos mantener nuestra claridad en este punto, aunque sabemos muy bien que nuestra ocupación espiritual-intelectual sigue siendo en realidad el modo natural de existencia para los hijos de padres ricos. Si fuéramos “filósofos existencialistas”, así es como reflexionaríamos sobre nuestra “existencia”.

La otra dificultad se relaciona con el concepto de práctica, como opuesto al espíritu fetichizado. Esto se deriva del estado del movimiento obrero. No creemos que nadie deba ser obligado a unirse a quienes aceptan la alternativa de estar “a favor” o “en contra” del partido comunista; no emularíamos ni a Eisler ni a Massing. Aceptar esta alternativa sin reservas implicaría reconocer que la revolución ha fracasado definitivamente. Por el contrario, creemos que esta misma dicotomía, y sobre todo el propio partido comunista, pertenece a ese mundo que debe ser superado mediante la revolución. Si es cierto que la tecnología está revolucionando el mundo entero, preparándolo para la creación de una sociedad humana, entonces los rusos, y sobre todo sus líderes, son objetivamente cómplices de frenar este desarrollo. A pesar de su papel propulsor en Asia, refuerzan el olvido de la sociedad que, hoy en día, correspondería al nivel de desarrollo de las fuerzas productivas a escala global. Por lo tanto, por muy reticentes que seamos, debemos criticar a las organizaciones internacionales como los mafiosos pobres y desbordados que son, como la caricatura de lo que podrían ser. Incluso ahora, sólo evidencian los intereses compartidos de las burocracias de diversas mafias nacionales. La oposición entre Rusia y Estados Unidos, en ambos países, ha servido en gran medida como excusa para que las masas reduzcan la rentabilidad de su trabajo invocando la amenaza del bloque de poder opuesto.

En lo que concierne al estado adecuado de la humanidad —ya posible hoy—, Marx lo definió esencialmente mediante el concepto de ocio. Debemos partir de este concepto, que, por cierto, está profundamente conectado con el de la “tercera persona”. Sin embargo, también debemos tener cuidado de no seguir al marxismo respaldando el proceso histórico en su conjunto simplemente porque conduciría a la armonía mediante la revolución, por ejemplo. La humanidad no puede alcanzar el paraíso con las manos ensangrentadas.

La estructura del concepto de deshumanización ha cambiado. Para Marx, significaba no participar en la cultura, brutalización; hoy, procede a través de la expansión total de la cultura, una realización irónica de la idea de Hegel de la identidad entre lo que el hombre es para sí mismo y su substancia social. Este desarrollo afecta al concepto de ocio. De hecho, el tiempo de trabajo ya se ha reducido bajo el capitalismo monopolista mediante la desmaterialización completa del trabajo. Pero esta descualificación del trabajo ha sido víctima de lo que, en la concepción de Marx, se suponía que humanizaría a los humanos en su ocio. El individuo que, según Hegel, sólo puede realizarse en las determinaciones sociales universales, se ha realizado así completamente a través de ellas, de modo que ya no hay nada que pueda considerarse realmente individual en él (Bloom, Flowerman). Esto implica, sin embargo, la dialéctica según la cual el individuo, tras haber alcanzado su esencia en el sentido hegeliano, pierde simultáneamente cualquier substancia anterior: para el individuo, la elección de su vocación, como ser jefe de policía, le resulta tan “externa” en el sentido hegeliano como la cuestión de si prefiere ternera asada o cordero asado. Cuanto menos necesita trabajar, más se convierte en un mero apéndice de la máquina en su tiempo libre.

En cierto sentido, la política ya no es relevante, pues de lo que trata, su verdadero objetivo, se ha vuelto evidente para casi todo el mundo. Lo que los trabajadores estadounidenses deben hacer es tan evidente que ya no se requiere ningún movimiento para ello. El partido comunista es tan impotente precisamente porque ya no está conectado con ningún objetivo revolucionario verdaderamente alcanzable; sólo se aferra ciegamente a una serie de elementos irracionales, como el liderazgo, la diferenciación salarial, el culto a la producción como tal, la hipóstasis de “la nación” y “el pueblo”, la fetichización de conceptos como organización y disciplina, el tipo del “organizador”. Pero a pesar de todo, toda la gente decente que aún permanece atrapada en el partido —los fieles incondicionales, si no son intelectuales ni malvados— son en su mayoría gente buena. El partido aún tiene una función progresista y política mundial, especialmente en Asia y los territorios europeos que han conquistado. La presión que surge del hecho de que hoy en día los seres humanos trabajan para camarillas temerosas de ser derrocadas en todo el mundo: esta presión debe ser abolida. Así como los consorcios corporativos no quieren que sus empleados asalariados actúen por iniciativa propia de forma espontánea y más allá de sus puestos asignados, el trabajador comunista debe apegarse a sus funciones asignadas en el trabajo del partido y, por el amor de Dios, no preocuparse por el panorama general. En nuestro Manifiesto debemos hacer justicia a la gente del partido, pero como revolucionarios,[9] y no a la manera de la crítica burguesa, que siempre defiende a las masas engañadas de aquellos que manejan los hilos [Drahtzieher]; todo lo contrario, el liderazgo mantiene los hilos. Uno sólo puede oponerse totalmente a lo que ha sucedido si dice que siempre tuvo que suceder así.

Considerar la revolución comunista como el desfile del Ejército Rojo por los países occidentales incluso tiene, al menos, un aura de alta traición para las masas proletarias de Europa y Asia; para el oprimido pueblo ruso, tal concepción no es más que Kadavergehorsam.[10] Los partidos comunistas fuera de [Rusia] son ​​quinta-columnas y, por supuesto, recuerdan de inmediato a todo impulso revolucionario dentro de Rusia que deben ser antipatrióticos. A su vez, esto repercute en el comunismo occidental, que, mediante el concepto de este patriotismo estrecho de miras, comparte una forma de comprensión con los reaccionarios de cada país y simplemente escribe un nombre diferente en el mismo esquema de categorías. Este esquematismo forma parte de la transformación del comunismo en un sistema delirante [Wahnsystem]. Fenómeno no es primariamente psicológico, sino de origen objetivo: surge de la separación del comunismo de la teoría y su identificación pragmática con Rusia. El poder se convierte en la panacea, y la conexión con él desconecta la conciencia y conduce a la ceguera en lugar de a un proceso dialéctico en el pensamiento y la práctica. Los rasgos paranoicos de sus seguidores corresponden a la fascistización del partido.

El contenido de esta sección debería determinar la acción política que, a nuestro entender, sería hoy el primer paso hacia la realización del orden correcto, y que sólo queda inconclusa debido al estupor de los seres humanos. Esta acción debería consistir en que los trabajadores estadounidenses exigieran a sus homólogos rusos, la única potencia mundial de igual rango, que enviaran a sus propios líderes, con todo el bagaje represivo de su administración, directamente al infierno. Entonces, los estadounidenses deberían decir que se asegurarían de detener toda producción industrial con fines bélicos. El motivo para esta acción: la cadena de producción del planeta entero se ve obstaculizada por el hecho de que, en los países decisivos, se dedican incontables horas de trabajo, en parte a los medios de destrucción, en parte a los medios de estupefacción. Esto último incluye la estafa de la diferenciación técnica (De Soto vesus Plymouth, y la competencia social que ésta promueve) y, por supuesto, la pseudo-producción [Scheinproduktion] como lo es la publicidad. Por lo tanto, se desperdician cada vez más horas de trabajo, mientras que innumerables inventos que ahorran mano de obra se dejan sin usar debido a los intereses capitalistas y gremiales, por no mencionar las fuerzas que yacen inactivas en el desempleo. Sólo una vez disipada esta tontería, que los gobernantes de ambos bandos emplean para inculcar la razón de lo existente en las masas mediante el miedo, podrán las masas de estos países, que hasta ahora han sido engañadas por ella, comenzar realmente a ayudar al resto del mundo. Entonces se hará evidente que no existe una oposición necesaria entre este “resto” que es mantenido en la miseria a pesar de la potencial “riqueza de las naciones”, y los trabajadores que se benefician de esta misma miseria sin ser conscientes de ello. La humanidad está madura para el socialismo.

Para demostrarlo, los trabajadores estadounidenses deben, por supuesto, ser serios. Un gesto como el descrito anteriormente presupone que están dispuestos, tras cambiar radicalmente las relaciones en su propio país, a declarar la guerra a Rusia si ésta se resiste. Que los trabajadores estadounidenses crean que el país más avanzado del planeta podría llevar a cabo una revolución sin asumir al mismo tiempo la responsabilidad del planeta entero es casi tan estrecho de miras como la idea del "socialismo en un solo país", o [la idea] de que la revolución consiste únicamente en impedir que los monopolistas estadounidenses —que, de hecho, se deleitan con la idea de hacer causa común con Stalin— declaren la guerra a Rusia.

La objeción de que los trabajadores estadounidenses están mejorando cada vez más, que no tienen una razón materialista para la revolución, no resiste el escrutinio. Los estratos más revolucionarios de la clase obrera europea solían ser los mejor pagados y, por lo tanto, los más avanzados y en posición de liderar al resto de la clase. Es producto del aparato de estupefacción [Verdummungsapparats] que tantos crean que la presión, la opresión y el peligro que pesa sobre el proletariado son menores hoy que en el siglo XIX. Es cierto que la corrupción tiene un mayor impacto social a través de la creación de distinciones internas en el proletariado, como la que existe entre los obreros mecánicos cualificados del Norte y los negros no cualificados del Sur. Las distinciones son más burdas y los corruptos, la mayoría; pero el valor de la adquisición de una vida higiénica por parte del trabajador moderno es extremadamente dudoso. Su diferencia con las autoridades de su propio bando, los jefes sindicales y los monopolistas, es inconmensurablemente grande; el sufrimiento de los estratos más oprimidos en su propio país, y aún más los del resto del mundo, es infinitamente grande; y la amenaza de una guerra total, gigantesca. En vista de la transposición de la lucha de clases al escenario internacional (que se abordará en otra parte del texto),[11] cuanto mejor se encuentre la clase obrera estadounidense, mejor será la vanguardia para los oprimidos de todos los países.

El concepto de Hitler de la “nación proletaria” debe ser retomado y examinado. Describe correctamente la tendencia de la lucha de clases a transformarse en conflictos a nivel internacional. Para Hitler, sin embargo, este concepto sólo cumple el papel de una ideología porque, por un lado, contribuía a encubrir los antagonismos de clase en su propio país y, por otro, fingía que, al hablar en nombre de la nación proletaria alemana, se había puesto del lado de los más débiles, cuando en realidad era precisamente del lado de los más fuertes —y con el fin de exhortar a Alemania a convertirse en el brazo fuerte de la supremacía de la raza blanca. El antisemitismo, junto con toda la teoría racial, probablemente deba entenderse en el sentido de tal concepción. El anhelo por la erradicación de los judíos exhibe el miedo inconsciente a perder su dominio ante los pueblos de color del mundo. Por lo tanto, en oposición a Hitler, debemos tomarnos en serio el concepto de nación proletaria. Para él, este concepto tiene exactamente la misma función que la palabra “socialismo” en el nombre de su partido en el frente interno.[12]

Que los proletarios de los países industrializados se sientan la vanguardia de los pueblos de color del mundo no significa que se hagan ilusiones sobre el posible imperialismo de estos últimos, como se ejemplifica en el caso de Japón. La emancipación en las zonas coloniales, desde Argentina hasta Pakistán, se está llevando a cabo de forma semi-fascista y es profundamente antisemita. Sin embargo, el imperialismo no tiene por qué convertirse en realidad si los proletarios realmente hacen su revolución. El paso que hemos descrito podría transformar verdaderamente el mundo. Eliminaría las bases mismas de dicho imperialismo. Con los trabajadores occidentales y rusos unidos, ni siquiera los malayos tendrían que repetir el juego de la burguesía ascendente. Del mismo modo, las capas atrasadas de los trabajadores de los países más avanzados no se verían obligadas a poner en práctica sus ideologías retrógradas después de la revolución. Una vez que la vanguardia, nacional o internacional, haya dado ese paso (precisamente lo que Lenin entendía originalmente por “dictadura”), la humanidad será comprendida en su esencia misma: ese es el significado de la teoría de Marx.

La maldición de escribir hoy en día

La maldición de la escritura actual reside en que, independientemente de su resultado, ya no irrita a nadie. El Manifiesto Comunista, en realidad, puso en marcha algo distinto. Presupone una sociedad no integrada: el proletariado aún no está completamente “dentro”, y en la medida en que no forma parte de la “humanidad” propiamente tal, esto le conviene incluso en su supuesta deshumanización. Hoy, si criticáramos el psicoanálisis y exhortáramos al lector al incesto, el señor Schapiro le diría al señor Kohn: “¿Ha leído ya la interesante crítica de H y A?”. Creemos que la relación entre lo escrito y el mundo debe, al ser co-decisiva para la verdad del asunto, incorporarse conscientemente a su formulación teórica. Sin embargo, es precisamente esta relación la que se nos ha vuelto cuestionable.

El único camino que vemos ante nosotros, en el que no nos quedaremos atrás de Marx, es aquel que toma sus categorías como punto de partida. Aquí, pensamos en conceptos como clase y trabajo. En cuanto a la clase, tenemos en mente una crítica cuyo objetivo es la disolución de la clase en mafias. Quizás nunca haya existido una “clase” en sentido estricto. El proceso de desmitologización, tal como lo hemos descrito en “Dialéctica de la Ilustración”, debería desarrollarse [en adelante] sobre la base del concepto de trabajo. La Ilustración significa la separación del trabajo de su materialidad. Hoy en día, este proceso está mediado esencialmente por los sindicatos. Estos separan cada vez más al trabajador de sus intereses objetivos. La tarea es desvelar la dialéctica de este proceso y, por ende, del movimiento obrero y el concepto de proletariado.

No podemos estar seguros de si la adopción de categorías marxistas garantiza alguna pertinencia para nuestra actividad teórica actual. Para empezar, sin embargo, nos parece que un ataque al papel represivo de las mafias (religiosas, políticas, militares, industriales, sindicalistas), que luchan entre sí en la superficie, pero en verdad están de acuerdo, podría impulsar aún más el movimiento. En este sentido, es fundamental tener presente que, si bien el ataque debe dirigirse a las mafias nacionales, la transposición de las relaciones de clase al escenario internacional debe tenerse en cuenta en lo que respecta al contenido. En la era de la transferencia de las relaciones de clase [intra]nacionales a la opresión de pueblos [Völker] enteros por otros pueblos, los líderes de los pueblos unen fuerzas con todos los gánsteres del mundo que están bajo la estrella de la celebridad, en una especie de sindicato internacional. Un exponente de esta unión es Harold Laski.

La creciente integración de la sociedad vuelve problemático el concepto mismo de inconformismo, en el sentido de que no se puede imaginar ninguna expresión teórica, ni siquiera práctica, que no esté ya atrapada, de una forma u otra, en las redes del sistema. Por consiguiente, es necesario desarrollar formas de resistencia distintas de las que presuponen algún tipo de trascendencia para la sociedad, como las de la época de Marx, cuando los pobres aún debían ser forzados a trabajar en las fábricas. Más bien, la tarea actual consiste en elevar a la consciencia esas tendencias que maduran ahora incluso dentro de la propia sociedad integral, las tendencias hacia su derrocamiento —y, de hecho, ayudarlas hasta el punto de que la derroquen. El proceso de alienación radical del trabajo, la dominación de la naturaleza llevada al extremo, significa la auto-alienación radical del ser humano y, por lo tanto, lo absolutamente negativo —a la vez que “casi utópico”. La sociedad plenamente cosificada se acerca infinitamente al concepto de humanidad. El hormiguero es una proyección de quienes lo preparan, pero lo reprimen de su conciencia. Su inducción consciente podría coincidir con su abolición.

Traducción del inglés al español por Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier.

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[1] “Zum Verhältnis der kritischen Intellektuellen zu Proletariat und kommunistischer Partei” y “Der Fluch des Schreibens”, en MHA Na 1 806, 107-118.

[2] Max Horkheimer y Theodor Adorno: “Rettung der Aufklärung. Diskussionen über eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik (1946)”, en Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 12, editado por Gunzelin Schmid Noerr y Alfred Schmidt (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 593-605.

[3] Véanse las traducciones de los siguientes textos de Max Horkheimer: “Towards a Critique of the American Social Sciences”; “The Fate of Revolutionary Movements“; y otro texto bajo el acápite “Miscellaneous Manuscripts (1946)”, “Notes: On Culture and Revolution”; en James Crane (ed.), “Max Horkheimer: Philosophical Parerga (1945-1949)”, en Substudies (blog), 5/29/2025.

[4] Este es el caso, por ejemplo, de los “Schemata” de 1942, de los que Adorno y Horkheimer son coautores, para el libro que se convertiría en Dialéctica de la Ilustración. En la nota introductoria a mi traducción de los “Esquemas”, sostengo que esta atribución es insostenible, dado tanto el contenido de los “Esquemas” como otras atribuciones realizadas por los propios archivistas. James Crane (ed.), “Revised Collection—Schemata for the ‘Dialectic’ (1939-1944)”, en Substudies (blog), 4/18/2025.

[5] James Crane (ed.), “Notes: Towards a Reconstruction of the ‘Dialectic,’ Part 2”, en Substudies (blog), 6/03/2025.

[6] Max Horkheimer y Leo Löwenthal, “II. Debating Thesis VII of the “Elements”: Democracy and Fascism; Liberalism or Communism (Summer-Fall 1946)”, en James Crane (ed.), “Collection: ‘First Must the Site Be Cleared’ (1945-1949),” Substudies (blog), 6/03/2025.

[7] Las similitudes entre estos fragmentos y las “Tesis” libertario-comunistas de Marcuse sobre la Teoría Crítica de la posguerra, de febrero de 1947, que fueron recibidas con entusiasmo por Horkheimer (y aparentemente también por Adorno), no pueden ser desatendidas. Herbert Marcuse, “I. Theses on Postwar Critical Theory: Part I (February 1947)”, en James Crane (ed.), “Herbert Marcuse: Theses on Postwar Critical Theory (1947)”, en Substudies (blog), 8/5/2025.

[8] (Nota del editor:) sobre el problema del intelectual como “tercera persona”, véase Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951), Parte II [1945], (§86) “El pequeño Hans”. “Sólo en el que hasta cierto punto se mantiene puro hay suficiente aversión, nervio, libertad y movilidad para oponerse al mundo; pero precisamente por esa ilusión de pureza —pues viven como una ‘tercera persona’— no ya sólo permite que el mundo triunfe fuera, sino incluso en lo más íntimo de sus pensamientos”. 

[9] (Nota del editor:) el plan de Adorno y Horkheimer de escribir un nuevo Manifiesto Comunista se remonta a sus conversaciones de 1939. Cfr. James Crane (ed.), “Translation: Adorno & Horkheimer’s 1939 Discussion on ‘The Temporal Core of Truth. Experience & Utopia in Dialectical Theory’”, en Substudies (blog), 1/13/2025.

[10] (Nota del editor:) palabra tomada de las Constituciones de San Ignacio de Loyola —que encomendaban al lector a la obediencia sin resistencia a lo divino, como si uno fuera un cadáver— por los críticos alemanes de la obediencia jesuita de principios del siglo XIX, posteriormente aplicada típicamente a la lealtad ciega del militarismo prusiano y, finalmente, a los propios nazis.

[11] (Nota del editor:) cfr. Horkheimer a Marcuse, 28/2/1948. MHGS, Vol. 17 (1996), 931-934: “Horkheimer—Letter: The Internationalization of Class Conflict (2/28/1948)”, en Substudies (blog) 6/3/2025.

[12] (Nota del editor:) cfr. Adorno a sus padres, 26/9/1943: “…pues hay tanta similitud entre el robo organizado por los opresores y el socialismo como entre el cielo y el infierno”, en Theodor W. Adorno, Letters to his Parents 1939-1951, editado por Christoph Gödde y Henri Lonitz, traducido por Wieland Hoban (Polity, 2006), p. 149.

Alberto Moreiras - La precariedad del trabajador crítico

El siguiente texto apareció originalmente el 12 de octubre de 2025 en el sitio electrónico Infraphilosophy, bajo el título "The Precariousness of the Critical Worker", he aquí el enlace:

https://infraphilosophy.com/2025/10/12/the-precariousness-of-the-critical-worker/

La precariedad del trabajador crítico 

Por Alberto Moreiras

 

Durante siglos, Occidente ha vivido bajo la ilusión de que la crítica era un derecho humano, que estaba bien ejercerla, que era el fundamento mismo de la vida intelectual. Pero el desmadre actual podría estar acabando con esa ilusión. “Esta universidad no te va a proteger”: ese se ha convertido en un mantra insistente que escuchamos de los administradores que supuestamente saben cómo va la cosa. Si te mandas una, te jodiste. Sólo depende de ti. Ya era bastante malo estar sometido a los rigores de la cultura de la cancelación de la izquierda, que nos convirtió a todos en miembros de una comunidad negativa, entendida como una comunidad de la que no querías ser excluido, incluso si pensabas que la inclusión era absurda. Ahora, las apuestas han subido y el riesgo de condena a la muerte social se ha disparado. La crítica ahora es subversiva y en cualquier momento puede ser condenada como terrorista. No estoy seguro de cómo esos mismos administradores entienden la tarea docente hoy en día, pero tiendo a creer que la enseñanza, la publicidad y la propaganda al servicio del status quo se han convertido en la misma cosa, al menos tendencialmente. Si te sales de esa norma, corres el riesgo de que algún estudiante se queje con algún senador estatal de que estás en desacuerdo con la religión de varios de ellos, y entonces estás perdido.

        «La logique totalitaire» de Jean Vioulac incluye una nota a pie de página (pp. 494-495) que merece un comentario. Vioulac cita a un tipo llamado Laurence Parisot, portavoz de algún gremio empresarial, diciendo: “La vida, la salud y el amor son precarios, ¿por qué el trabajo escaparía a esa misma ley?”. En efecto. La evaluación posterior a la titularidad ya era bastante nefasta. Ahora, la mera posibilidad de ser contratado, sobre todo si naciste en otro lugar, es cuestionable. Vioulac define el “terror” en esa nota a pie de página como “el ejercicio del poder de lo universal sobre lo particular, un poder que pretende abolir la particularidad”. Es sólo una definición parcial, sin duda, pero basta para hacernos comprender que cualquier forma de singularidad crítica nos convierte automáticamente en sospechosos en la medida en que nos volvemos inadecuados para lo Universal. Y el sospechoso es eminentemente precario y debe pasar su vida en una condición precaria. Los críticos se han convertido en perdedores y los perdedores están condenados a la depresión: “La depresión es la experiencia subjetiva propia de un individuo que no se juzga a sí mismo en relación con la ley —en términos de una falta—, sino en relación con la norma —en términos de insuficiencia. Si, por una parte, el terror político le otorga al individuo el estatus de sospechoso, lo amenaza con la ejecución y disuelve la interioridad misma del sujeto a través del miedo a la muerte, por otra, el terror económico le otorga al individuo un estatus de precariedad, lo amenaza constantemente con la exclusión y disuelve la interioridad del sujeto a través de la depresión: una forma insidiosa y difusa de terror, un terror de baja intensidad, sin embargo, cuya eficacia depende de las normas diseminadas por todo el cuerpo social”. Pero ¿qué son las normas? No podemos hacerlas explícitas. La precariedad aumenta porque ya no podemos estar seguros de qué podemos o no podemos decir en nuestras salas de clase. La religión no nos ayudará. Y el discurso universitario, visto durante mucho tiempo como una forma de conformidad, como una forma de no pensar a pesar de sus pretensiones, de repente también nos ha fallado. “Esta universidad no te va a proteger”, no lo olvides. 

12 de octubre de 2025.- 

Traducción del inglés al español por Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier.

Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier - The Star and the Eclipse. Remarks on "Forgotten Science" (by Salon’s Performance Collective / June 4th, 2025, UCR Arts100, Riverside, California)

 

The Star and the Eclipse. Remarks on Forgotten Science

(by Salon’s Performance Collective / June 4th, 2025, UCR Arts100, Riverside, California)

 

Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier

University of California Riverside

 

So, the writing becomes a translation of the dancing? / Well, obviously writing and dancing are profoundly different endeavors, and you can’t really translate the one into the other. But you can create a parity of status for each, so that the writing doesn’t ‘capture’ the dancing, and the dancing doesn’t elude the writing.
(Susan Leigh Foster)[1]

Murmur to the night
Hide her starry light
(…)
Weeping willow tree
Weeping sympathy
Bent your branches down along the ground and cover me

(Ann Ronell)[2]

On Wednesday, June 4th, 2025, at 8 p.m., at University of California, campus Riverside Arts100 Dance Studio, it took place the performance Forgotten Science, by Salon’s Performance Collective (Dimitris Chatziparaschis, Jorge P. Yánez, Jessica Maccaro, Jae M. Adams, Sasha Korotneva, and Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier) –a section of Salon Transdisciplinary Collective. Salon Transdisciplinary Collective is an experiment in the composition of bodies and ideas involving graduate students and researchers from different disciplinary areas of the university (arts and humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, formal sciences, medical sciences, and techno-engineering). The group meets weekly to discuss concepts and epistemes that cut across different disciplinary fields, not to reach a common language, but to destabilize the basic conceptualities that the bureaucratic tendencies of university departments tend to fossilize. Salon’s Performance Collective is a transnational (Greece, Ecuador, United States, Russia, Chile) and transdisciplinary (electric and computer engineering, dance and performance, biology and entomology, physics and mathematics, music, philosophy and translation studies) group. I am just one member of the collective, but I would like to share some reflections that also arise from the group’s collective intelligence, although I elaborate on them here from my perspective —from which I see the collective is played out as a singular-plural and anarchic entanglement, not as a community of faith. This reflection is not concerned with art criticism or technical issues related to the mounting of the piece, but rather with the epistemological, ethical, and political dimensions of this performance.[3]

THE AESTHETIC-POLITICAL QUESTION ABOUT THE PIT

There is an old motif, repeatedly taken up from antiquity, about the pit or separation invented by the Greeks between the stage and the audience (theater), and between knowledge and its subject matter (theory).[4] This later theological-Christian separation between the luminous ascending life of the spirit and the dark, cadenced nature of sensible life (the light of the stage, the shadows of the stalls; the light of knowledge, the shadows of its subject matter) would have been translated into its conventional Cartesian secular form in the European and American modernity of the technoscientific representation (subject-object, res cogitans et res extensa), the society of the spectacle, and the sovereign theater—fascism, monumental revolutions, neoliberal “democracy”, etc. Regarding the possibility of a “dance theory”, Susan Leigh Foster writes: “Seems like the whole idea of what a theory is—a hypothesis about what something is and how it works—implies that there is more than one. Aren’t there multiple theories about dance? I mean, hundreds or thousands? / But if the use of the singular is your only objection, can’t you just imagine ‘dance theory’ as the broader category that encompasses all theories? / Maybe. But now you’ve made me see another problem: To call it ‘dance theory’ cordons it off as its own thing, separate from and comparable to ‘dance history’ or ‘dance ethnography.’ And I can’t envision theory as operating at that kind of distance from either method or subject matter. / Wait. You’re saying theory is an integral part of research. / It’s woven into the entire creative-critical process. / Maybe we should call it ‘theorizing’ instead of theory? / Ahhh. The gerund is always so satisfying. But seriously, theorizing can happen throughout the process of conducting research, whether one is making a dance or writing an essay. Theorizing is instigated whenever one asks oneself, ‘What am I doing and why am I doing it?”’.[5] Leigh Foster, similarly to Kember and Zylinska, emphasizes the translative chiasmus between theory and dance-performance as an abolition of the “distance” (or “leveling of the pit”): performative theory / reflexive performance.[6] Leigh Foster: “(…) theory helps you discover new things. As an integral part of investigation, it provides a flexible corpus of assumptions that are always subject to change depending on what you uncover during your ongoing research. I guess I tend to stress the role of theory in research because the emphasis on objectivity in Western culture over the past three centuries has obscured this dialectical back and forth between theory and inquiry that constitutes the research process. / That whole objective/subjective debate? / Exactly. I don’t think there is such a thing as a neutral tool for looking at dance. Every checklist of movement features, every notation system devised, has values and preferences built into it that influence the resulting profile of the dance. (…). Even the ‘neutral’ notions of space and time are culturally specific. Is space some geometric grid into which bodies move? Or is it produced by the interaction between body and environment? Is time metric? Cyclical? Steady or in flux?”[7]

We thus observe a desire to abolish that ontological gap between the dancer and what is danced (or between praxis and theory), and often also between the stage and the audience: the separation between subject and object in the Western modern sense. An abolitionist tendency we often find, since the 20th century, both in “theater” and in “theory”, because both are born from the idea of ​​a gap or a distance between knowing and “what” is known, or between dancing and “what” is danced—in other words, both are outcomes from the passage from ritual to the Greek invention of theater and to the modern spectacle bearing exhibitive value. But a new ontology seems to emerge, according which the medium is the message, and the medium is metamorphic. In some ways, this idea can be linked to this other one: the obsolescence of the “museum” dispositive (artworks as untouchable objects of contemplation and representation; the lifeworld as an untouchable order to be contemplated and followed, but not transformed), in contemporary political aesthetics. And this can also be connected to the concepts of interruption (Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to”) and profanation (as in Agamben’s work, sacred, privatized or institutionalized forms or objects are returned to common use; a child, flouting adult surveillance, playing with sacred objects desacralizes them, reveals the potential to disrupt normative economies of meaning and power).

That interruption and/or profanation has to do with the relationship of each human being with the world (the order of words and things), and particularly with art and politics (the abolition of “distance” as an abolition of the museification of the world). But there is also the relationship between the stage and the audience in art (the abolition of “distance” as an abolition of the theater pit), and this has had a decisive impact on the configuration of Western political imaginaries. But in this direction the problem becomes more complicated when the gap of theatrical distance is leveled: it is another thing to understand this distance as a “critical distance” (in the sense that goes from Kant to phenomenology, among others, as contemplation and exposition of the predominant forces-discourses without subjecting to it) that is broken when the stage imposes itself on the audience or when the audience assaults the stage.[8] In a Benjaminian-Deleuzian entanglement, Willy Thayer, in his 2010 book «Technologies of Critique», ​​describes a series of technologies or ages of “criticism,” each linked to a single metaphor: 1) the organism: discernment of the ei\do~ (intelligible formal aspect) that, as an exceptional unity or e{tero~ ti (“something other”), articulates the pre-understanding and theorization of things and events, giving them unity and meaning, transcending the immanence of the material aggregatum; 2) the theater: exterior point of view with respect to the events, photological and judicative dimension, subject-object correlation); and 3) the singularity: unworking immanence, interruption of the theater of the organic totality; hylomorphism of immanence, undecidability and untranslatability. In his book, Thayer points out the traditional distinction between structure and aggregatum, which operates here as an old ontological assumption rooted in Aristotle: while structure is an organic, living totality, the aggregate is a mere combination of elements, a sum of parts. Structure, then, is more than the sum of its parts: it is a solidary whole whose elements and parts are in a relationship of reciprocal dependence. If we consider the formula “the whole is more than the sum of its parts,” this more (as plus ultra) is neither a mere part nor the sum of its parts, but something else. This “something else” (e{tero~ ti), one and indivisible (the glass can be broken, but not the idea-of-glass as a formal and teleological cause) is what Aristotle thinks of in terms of the “cause of being” (aijtiva tou` ei[naiv), as ontic “presence” and “for the sake of”, as ontological “stability” (oujsiva, substantia): a compound (suvnolon) of “matter” (u{lh) and “form” (morfhv) by virtue of which the form separable by intellectual perception (nou`~) as “formal aspect” (ei\do~) maintains something articulated in its constitutive multiplicity as a unitary organic presence. The old performance of the Greek lovgo~ as “that which gathers and weaves,” whose heritage is expressed in the ideas of centering and transcendent function, general principle of composition, teleology as rigid determinant, soul, etc.[9] Of the three “technologies of critique” (organism, theater, singularity) formalized by Thayer, the first two develop the idea of ​​criticism within the framework or according to the established rational framing (the figure of the art critic who knows the principles and rules of art and taste and who judges according to them); while the third one deploys a critique of the framing itself, questioning its exceptionality (anarchical or postfoundational criticism).

SINGULARITY AND INTERRUPTION OF ORGANIC THEATER

How does the performance Forgotten Science relate epistemologically to this set of ontological problems concerning art and politics? I insist that this corresponds to my view of the piece and the way I worked on it, and that the collective is not a community of faith (so I do not speak as a “representative” or “spokesperson” for the group). I think that, in line with the collective’s discussions on method before and during the process, we brought the third technology into play: singularity and interruption of organic theater. How did we play such an interruption? Let’s see. First, by avoiding the subordination of the action under a plot-and-director dispositive, and also the narratives woven from clear and distinct propositions, as well as diegetics in its classic Aristotelian structure. This involves the destruction of the archaeo-teleological narrative schemes which produce the standardization of perception (automatisms): the dislocation of the schematism of Aristotelian time—the reduction to the One brought about by the dihvghsi~ in the «Poetics». Or, to put it in Walter Benjamin’s words: the problem is the bourgeois conception of language as a “means of communication” of fetishized meanings[10]—by analogy to the trade of commodities, if we understand this in connection with the critique of commodity fetishism in the first book of Marx’s «Das Kapital» read in an aesthetic key—so that the recovery of the communicability of language would involve assuming that experience in its singularity resists its fixation in the ideal element of language and its spatio-temporal schematisms. What are these automatisms and how can performance “break” them? Thayer has observed the first elementary phenomenon: the position of the image under the word to articulate its meaning, “the image is resolved in the unity of the word, of the concept, the endless grammar of the cliché.”[11] This is a critical question, analogously to how John Cage states that, for him, the position of sound under the word, its cliché, was a critical question.

New music: new listening. Not an attempt to understand something that is being said, for, if something were being said, the sounds would be given the shapes of words. Just an attention to the activity of sounds. / (…) And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. (…). This [purposeless] play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living (…).[12]

 Automatisms would operate as standardization and redundancy in the cliché, and would pass through perception, judgment and spatial-temporal syntheses of experience—in the forms of cliché of perception (production of perceptual clichés), cliché of narrativization (from the Aristotelian diegesis to the Hollywood industrial one), and the consequent “entertainment” of the “objective spectator” who, in turn, is an “expected subject,” a type of subjectivity to be produced-and-reflected.

Clichés, clichés everywhere... It is the world of cliché-images, the world conceived as a vast production of the cliché-image. And clichés can be sound or optical: words, visual images. But they can also be interior or exterior. There are no fewer clichés in our heads than on the walls (…). What does that mean? That inside there is the same as outside, namely, clichés and nothing but clichés. And when they are in love it is as if they were telling another in the most stereotyped way in the world the feelings they experience, because the feelings they experience are themselves clichés. The cliché is in us. And our head is full of them, no less than our body.[13] 

              Images that are legible in advance, with the eyes elided from the trick: the question would be to expose the trick in order to undo the fetish. To discern and expose the grid of visibility, which determines vision, but which in itself is not visible while operating normally. “What else would the word-image or cliché be but the diversion of the eyes towards the unity of the concept to prevent them from becoming accustomed to looking closely at the workmanship, the external debris, the montage, the paste, the clay, the soil of the image, its material mediation?”[14] Automatism as a technology for capturing the living in “culture”—its imaginaries, public opinion, etc.—, against the entropy of bodies—of their desire as seeing and saying—and their coefficient of deviation from all standardization. Thayer points out the dimension of these automatisms as a “gigantic arsenal of imago-powers: painting, photography, cinema, rather than as fine arts, as artifacts of conquest, colonization and neocolonization, of imperial or national avant-garde propaganda, of naturalization and promotion of domination as culture.”[15] The concept of imago-power defines in Thayer the relationship between the production of automatism—standardization of the soul and its “correlative” world—and normative-governmental power: “the image as mise en scène of power, of the image as power, as an artifact of government and regulation of bodies.”[16]

There is no affirmative politics of the image if it is not by dismantling the varied and transversal governability exercised by the gigantic columbarium of cliché and slogan (…). The cliché must be dismantled by elaborating, against the grain of it, a visionary image that allows us to see through the cliché, not only its regime, but the multiplicity that said regime conceals.[17]

              And a few pages later, addressing Raúl Ruiz’s poetics of cinema:

(…) Ruiz’s poetics attempts to situate us in the becoming without genesis of what, in many ways, Ruiz finally calls a metamorphic image, not as a passage from one form or metaphor to another and another and another—because in this way one does not leave the synthetic narrative translation—, but as a variation of the quality without transport-of-something, a variation of the quality that is subtracted from the unity, identity and totality of the character, of the action, of the film; sheltered, at the same time, according to another sort of rigors, from a mere mishmash.[18]

              Ruiz’s writing of the image would therefore be, against the grain of that of the imago-power, a writing of the metamorphic image as a “variation of quality without transport-of-something”, which would allow “to see through the cliché, not only its regime, but the multiplicity that said regime conceals.”

              But why the insistence on the standardization—or total mobilization of the law of value—of perception as an articulation of “intentionality” (correlation of adequacy between perceiving and what is perceived, between wanting and what is wanted, between conceiving and what is conceived, etc.) with a certain diegesis? As we already know, the concept comes from Aristotle’s «Poetics», and we can translate it in a gloss as follows: dihvghsi~ (diegesis) is the way in which the event is narrated more or less unitarily and directedly, around a central conflict. The term is composed by the prepositional prefix dia; (‘through’) and hJgevomai (in Latin ducere, ‘to lead’), referring to a power of shepherding or government—​​hJgemoniva (hegemony) is, as we know, ‘leading’, and hJgemwn (hegemon), ‘the leader’ or ‘the leading’. But in Greek it refers not only to a power, but also to a knowledge: kavqhgevsi~ (catechesis), to e-ducate, to show the way; ejxhvghsi~ (exegesis), to explain the meaning, to guide seeing/thinking; ejxhghth`~ (exegete), interpreter (of sacred law), counselor, guide or conductor (as docente in Spanish, from Latin ducere); ejxhgevomai (exegéomai), to di-rect, to guide, to govern, to order. So, the function between knowledge and power is drawn here as that of teaching-and-commanding.[19]

              If we translate the narrative-industrial principle (narrative determines image) into the language of Aristotelian poetics: narration (dihvghsi~) subsumes the gaze (o[yi~), linking the eye to a spectacle. The diegetic articulation of the gaze passes through narration structured as a unitary and teleological composition, whose action revolves around a central conflict.[20] Such is the structure of the mise en scène: to mount (arrangement or disposition, separate form, formal entelechy) / the scene (metamorphic matter converted into spectacle, a narrativized cliché-vision). The “cultural battles”—whether around the global commodity-form or national-popular aestheticization—make it clear that there is no political and/or religious hegemony without narrative-interpretive hegemony (or “cultural” hegemony as it is called today). Thayer: “To the extent that one can speak of a diegesis of the life of the polis, in each case, the living populations would seem to be aestheticized daily in narrative software.”[21]

        Against the grain of the narrative-industrial paradigm, it would be a question of breaking down the intentional apparatus through an “unprepared potentiality” (Averroes), not teleologically organized, of imagination and image (potentiality of imagination versus the facticity of the “imaginaries” that capture it). If it is a question of a writing of the image that allows “to see through the cliché, not only its regime, but the multiplicity that said regime conceals”, then it will be the disarray of the intentional apparatus that leaves in view, at the same time, the regime of the gaze and what escapes of it. To this end, Ruiz will assume the postulate that, in his “writing of the image”, it is the image that determines the narration, at the same time it unworks the pre-given diegesis:

(…) it is the type of image produced what always determines the narrative and not the other way around. This suggests that the image not only fulfils, as it would dominantly do, a metaphorical, illustrative function, representing principles prior to it to a subsequent subject; it suggests that the image would not be reduced to being simply a medium through which a script, a message, a concept, is communicated, subordinating its movement and possibility to it. (…). Ruiz’s image would then defraud the traditional understanding of the image as a means of communication subordinated to a principle, to a prior intentionality. (…) / (…) always, in each case, in an unworking relationship with the pre-given hegemonic diegesis of the case, the device of prejudices or world, the factual a priori already arranged—a kind of genesis of the world, genesis of diegesis, in each case a former a posteriori of the world in its diegesis. But, far from suggesting a menu of possible diegetic games (…), it introduces us, each time, into the unworking of the pre-given diegesis. Hence the political character of its diegesis.[22]

            The hegemonic paradigm of industrial narration (narrative determines image) stabilizes the dispositive of intentionality—the “perceptive and narrativized cliché of the soul” to which we have pointed—that is, a certain order of the world as an order of words and things inseminated in the soul as pre-organized perceptive potency.[23] Ruiz, against the grain, not ceasing to narrate, lets the image determine the narration, eroding the narrative intentum itself. If the cliché and theological narrativization “authoritatively frame the multiplicity of the image,”[24] Ruiz’s cinema tries to get that neither the images nor the film stabilize in a representational unity.

(…) before the code and before the multiplicities, there would be the image, but as an immanence of multiplicities and code in a differential tension that, now breathes towards the becoming multiplicities, now suffocates towards the stabilizing code, always in a back-and-forth motion. The cliché image, the multiplicity that burdens it, the floating virtuality that over-enhance it, co-insist in a single immanence that goes from one to the other, shaping the flows of the image. (…) / The immanence of this double anteriority would then be the image: at the same time its code, at the same time the sensations that overflow it; at the same time the plot of the design, at the same time the complot of multiplicity; at the same time the death mask of representation, at the same time the fugues without contour; at the same time the stabilized quality, at the same time the metamorphic variation. (…). Before anything else there would be the image as co-belonging of multiplicities and code in differential tension. (…) / Ruiz’s image is not external to the narrative, it does not subsist outside of narrative dialectics. The cliché, the narrative articulation, is a necessary condition of the image. It is not, however, a sufficient condition. The image, according to Ruiz, takes place supplying the narrative dialectics and exceeding them at the same time, eroding them in that supply as far as possible. Janic face of the image as power and as potentiality; as containment and as multiplicity. It is in this destituent erosion in the midst of the tenacity of the instituted where the affirmative quality of the Ruician image resides. It is because of this affirmative potentiality of the image that unworks the cliché that Ruician poetics of the image is also a politics; a poetics-politics.[25]

 

           Here there is a key: the “image” is always before the “dispersive material multiplicities” and the “codes” that unify and contain them, as a differential tension between them—and not as a mold, model or formal entelechy that is only read as a dematerialized and authorizing code. In this sense, Thayer emphasizes that this cleavage can be understood as a differential between body and technique, or, put another way, between body and culture: such a differential will constitute the styleme or exote image—what Ruiz said allowed “living inside and outside of culture [grammar, logic, cliché] simultaneously, integrating and not integrating.”^[26] Thayer points this out in relation to the more “folkloric” aspect of Ruiz’s films:

 

[It is] an art that compiles the inapparent arts of daily life, gestures of popular hustle and bustle that, because they are adjusted to rules, constitute arts in themselves, “the art of climbing stairs, of sitting down, of looking out the window, filling a glass of wine, whistling, doing the math, recounting events, speaking (…)”, etc. / Ruiz does not refer with this to what was once called direct cinema, cinema in which the director and his team devoted themselves to recording “natural” events and actions, compiling them impartially in a supposedly disinterested record, without intention; a kind of cinematic historicism that would record life in its most authentic or autochthonous moment, to which certain avant-gardes adhered, seeking a native gesture against the endless horde of clichés, slogans, codes that the modernizing and governmental agendas of the body put in motion. That supposed native, pre-cultural or pre-technical gesture was, for Ruiz, long ago, always, submerged under some mode of production, some tekhné or culture. (…). / Ruiz refers rather to a vestibular zone in which body and art (tekhné), body and culture, do not end up accommodating themselves with each other, in a reciprocal dis-adjustment or mutual violence. Misalignment, resistance, mutual violence, from whose friction emerges less than a pose and more than a wiggle. Unstable gesture in which body and tekhné hesitate in mutual resistance and insistence. Insufficient resistance of the body to the tekhné and insufficient insistence of tekhné on the body, and vice versa. It is in this daily misalignment between body and culture, body and tekhné, where the style that a body singularly adopts when climbing a ladder, picking up a spoon, painting a chair, speaking a language becomes visible/producible for the camera. / (…) The stylematic image (…), halfway between the unconscious and the code, gesture and technique, would be the structural character of Ruiz’s so-called “Chilean films.” For Ruiz, the “Chilean” would be the stylematic as insufficient resistance of the body to culture and as insufficient efficiency of culture on the body. The styleme would be the differential of insufficient resistance to culture and deficient incorporation of culture. Stylemes constitute a catastrophic place. Catastrophic here does not mean the disaster of culture sinking into primarity or body, nor the disaster of the body suffocated by the code. It refers to a fold of instability (…). It is an abstract image that belongs to no one, neither to genus nor species, that is not stabilized in any identity or representation. It barely names the clash between power and body and the line without border that lives in that clash.[27] 
 
              And in «Imagen exote»:
 
Instead of being in a world and seeing through the world that arrays the eyes with which he/she sees, the exote becomes that which is worldless, which, without the eyes of the world, palpates, gropes between worlds, in a twilight, a fade, a continuum of transformations in which the passages do not establish borders. (…) / (…) these films propose singularizing images, a testification of the popular much more as an exote than as a utopia of the identitarian national and popular.[28]

My hypothesis for reading Thayer as a reader of Ruiz is that, in addition to bringing into play a concept of a metamorphic image (variation of quality without translation-transport), Ruiz brings into play in his poetics a multiplication of perspectives that seeks to destabilize the intentional apparatus until the place-without-place of all of them appears, a certain profane illumination that has nothing to do with the assumption of a theological meta-reader.

Metamorphic potentiality does not germinate if it does not permanently experience in its performance the rigors and inertia of the narrative diegesis that surrounds it everywhere. The potentiality of the metamorphic image does not take place if it is not eroding, in media res, the propagation of the narrative image that permanently besieges it. (…) / The produced image that determines the narration obeying figural rigors, so to speak, non-compositive, non-argumentative, non-causal, on the brink of experience, destabilizing in each plane its unity in qualitative variation. Each fragment of the puzzle or film will demand, in its dictation, to be inscribed in other—indefinite—compossible and incompossible puzzles between them, multiplying each puzzle and the referential film from each plane, raising in each image virtual films in parallel, as if each plane of a film of five hundred planes were converted into a main film, and the main one exploded into five hundred films.[29]

THE PLAY AND THE QUESTION ON EXPERIMENTALITY

We are now in a better condition to answer the question: How does the performance Forgotten Science relate epistemologically to this set of ontological problems concerning art and politics? In my view, it does it putting at play the technology of singularity and interruption of organic theater. How did we play such an interruption? First of all, regarding the problem of the pit: although we attempt to abolish the representational distance between performers and the performed (eliminating the classic separation and subordination of praxis to theory, and conceiving of theory in a performative and defective way),[30] with regard to the pit between stage and audience, things are a little more complicated: we are not trying to assault the audience by transmitting some instructive or edifying message, winning them over for some “cultural battle” (the work, in my view, has no pedagogical or pastoral intention, but rather seeks to destabilize the perceptual apparatus); nor do we invite the audience to assault the stage, in the sense that they might leap over the pit and occupy the stage to be invested with the spectacular brilliance of it (now everyone could be a “star” in that luminous, magically doubled world). None of that. The first abolition of the pit (the interruption of representational distance) determines that the stage is not a glowing, glorious, harmonious, and coherent representational space, but an opaque one, subject to accidentality, conflict, and ambiguity, where the event always exceeds my subjectivity and its glares with things and events, and with itself. That is to say, the abolition of the representational principle determines that the stage is a place of chiaroscuro and indeterminacy, just as life outside of it is, and just as the life of the members of the audience is as well. Then, on the one hand, following a Benjamin’s formula, we interrupted the operation of the bourgeois conception of language as a “means of communication” of fetishized meanings—by analogy to the trade of commodities—,[31] so that we tried to recover a communicability of language which would involve assuming that experience in its singularity resists its fixation in the ideal element of language and its categorial and spatio-temporal schematisms. For the same reason, we avoided the subordination of the action under a plot-and-director dispositive—the narrative woven from clear and distinct propositions, as well as diegetics in its classic Aristotelian structure. The absence of the centering-sovereign figure of “director”[32] was essential: for this performance we rehearsed practicing responsiveness in the absence of a central command, so that instead of coordinating behind the direction of a predetermined script (focused on the director’s organizing intelligence of the meta-narrative), what we did was exploring other ways of articulating our responsiveness as a group, following the anarchical and sympoietic figures of queerness and entanglement.

Regarding the diegesis, what we did was displace the causal-linear narrative, and rather to play with a kind of narrative collage. Each of our actions or subtractions plays with the others, like a sounding board, and something is generated that is greater than the sum of its parts (but that “something” emerges as a momentary effect, not as a cause). At first, you can’t see anything, but the results can be very interesting. During the rehearsal days, we talked about the “plan” that didn’t exist, or that in any case was an emergent property (the “emergent plan,” we called it). We told each other that, in between our daily businesses and daydreams, we had been imagining things for the performance. “The other day—I wrote on our chat—you were talking about nature and technique, technology and forms of relationship (symbiosis, devastation, etc.). For that, the sound section could offer field recordings processed by Sasha, which cover a spectrum from the everyday to the unfamiliar, in the sound of lab elements. With the MIDI controller, Sasha can deploy the sound clusters with great dynamics. In my case, I have some sections of electronic sounds (with a synthesizer connected to the circuit of knives, oranges, and my body), mixed with field recordings of flickering light bulbs and night singing crickets that I drew from an online sound library, and also the looped sound I recorded with my mobile phone of a jet of water from a sprinkler hitting the metal light post in front of the studio entrance. I am going to generate a more corrosive noise too, for a more devastating noise section, since the previous section is rather pleasant for electricity lovers. And finally, the plant’s sonification system is ready. Sasha, as a sound section, we can perform separately or together. The plant system might interact with Jae or with any of you who imagine or come up with something with it. I’m also imagining a bassline with the plant system in a mode where the synthesizer, in its translation, highlights more the electrical flow of the plant’s metabolism, which is more constant and mantric, achieving a more ambient feel with the addition of the basslines of the bass guitar. All this is emergent, so it will connect and mutate with your gestures.”

The piece also refers to the relation between identity and difference, through the question of replication, metamorphosis, and translation of subjects, things, and events. It is a simple and fundamental hypothesis: nothing and no one coincides with themselves. In the piece, this takes place in the changeability of roles both among performers (the entomologist who sings and dances, the dancer who makes music, the philosopher sonifying a plant through electronic transducers, the physicist who plays noise and clusters of field recordings, etc.) and among characters (in the dimension of the illusion of action: characters whose roles are not clearly discernible, whether they are scientists who become artists or vice versa, etc.). The piece radically derails the centrality of the person (my subjectivity, my identity, etc.) and its social function (my discipline, my work, etc.): everything is triggered in the dimension of relationality, its encounters and deviations. In the dimension of identification and function, the piece rather introduces decentering and disidentification, displacement and dislocation. In this sense,[33] despite the fact that at times there seemed to be a certain disconnection between the elements in play, “as if they were navigating through different channels,” a significant part of the performance’s opacity has to do with this interplay of connection/disconnection: as in “real communication” in everyday life, there is no absolute connection and harmony (the ideal of successful and functional communication which often coincides with a religious or functionalist idea of ​​the social “bond”), but rather ambiguity, blind spots, conflicts, and communication difficulties. A good example of the exploration of this coefficient of (dis)connection is the collaboration between John Cage’s music and Merce Cunningham’s dance.[34] Other times, connection and responsiveness occur through hidden channels, as is the case with Chatziparaschis’s character, who sometimes seems disconnected because he is focused on his laptop screen, while he is actually connected and responding, translating himself through the eyes of his robot, which he mathematically calibrates on his computer to adjust to variations in the performers’ distances in space and the lighting conditions in the room. An interesting observation concerns the low lighting in the room (a powerful archaic element of opacity) and the “multiple activities competing for attention,” all of which produced an “initial confusion” that was not equivalent to “lack of clarity” (“I took this to be intentional, meaning audience members had to decide for ourselves where to focus”). The piece, in effect, plays like a constellation of (dis)connected elements: people dancing, singing, and playing instruments (artists?); people working on computers and offering scientific explanations as if in a David Lynch dream (scientists?); people manipulating electrical circuits to produce layers of noise with distinct electrical textures (what kind of activity is that?); people interacting with a sonically expressing plant (dancing with it, studying it, etc.). There are layers of acoustic sound (singing, voices and short speeches, leather drum, steel drum, sounds from the audience and the street, a baby called Lucian Amaru suddenly crying), electroacoustic sound (bass guitar), electronic sound (plant sounds and the circuit of conductive objects translated by synthesizer), field recordings (clusters of lab noises organized by a software); in the dance, relationships are done and undone, “different solos, duets, trios, quartets, and the mutations between them that blend into each other.” Finally, an important key regarding the question of identity and difference: there is a moment when, in the middle of a passage describing experiments involving observing electrical signals between humans and plants, the character performed by Maccaro says the magic word “replication,” referring to the idea of ​​experimentation as repetition and reproducibility in the modern scientific method. The idea here is Deleuzian: repetition implies difference, miracle. And then the performers begin reproducing the movements they had done so far and change roles, unraveling the subject-object relation and the tautological idea of ​​repetition.

Dance, music, multiple sonic and bio-sonic layers, and the space of the robot’s visual projections constitute the metamorphic medium in which the responsiveness and translation between humans, a plant, machines and audience are played out. Regarding “the plant,” it is an important icon in the symbolic constellation of the piece. It appears in the handmade poster I made for the piece—a linocut engraving, in black and in red—which refers to the geminate life of the plant, oriented both towards the sky and the center of the Earth (heliotropism and geocentrism), and also to the human violence against Earth (exploited, devastated), of which technoscience allied to the power of capital is a part. Of course, beyond the human, it also refers to a dark ecology (involving non-human agency, beyond the human and its representational and operative sovereignty and enclosure). Not an animal, but a plant is the one interacting in this case with humans and machines. The plant, traditionally considered an inert ornament on the stage of the human-animal drama, indifferent to its environment and lost in a chemical dream, detached from any life of relationship, appears in the piece acting, expressing its own sensitivity, responsiveness and agency. To achieve this, I have “sonified” the plant by performing two translations: using an electronic transducer and electrodes, I have translated the plant’s electrical signals (its elemental metabolism and its responsiveness to the environment) into computer data, and then, using a MIDI controller, I have translated this computer data into synthesizer assigned sound. The result is that one can perceive the plant’s life and responsiveness through the sound of the regular electrical flow of its metabolism, as well as its responses in interaction with surrounding animals (through touch contact and, before and after that, in its perception and response to the electromagnetic field of our bodies and those of other animals around) and as a reaction to other environmental factors (ambient light, temperature and humidity levels, stress, receiving water, etc.). Through the electronic transducer (as a mechanical mediation), the plant can interact with humans, it can “dance” with them, and respond to their approaches and requests. In some ways, the system operates similarly to a theremin… except that the plant’s responses are not mechanical, but varied in timing, manner, and intensity, like those of all life forms. The plant, through machine mediation, interacts with human animals, and plants and humans interact with other machines—like the circuit of electrically conductive objects to produce noise with electricity coursing between my body, knives, and Riverside oranges; or like Chatziparaschis’s mathematically calibrated, real-time robot eyes, staring at us from the sides of the studio while, in the act, such a robotic vision is visually projected back onto us, with all those light beams being responded to, in addition, by the plant.

Forgotten Science is a piece that is more tactile than representational, more suggestive than propositional, more opaque than luminous, performed through the activation of involuntary memories and unexpected compositions of bodies and ideas. In the poetic process, responsiveness was in each case directed toward the singular and plural and its metamorphoses in relationality, and not toward a director nor a predetermined plot. During the creative process, as Chatziparaschis states in the travelogue of his post factum reflections, there was at the beginning a gray area of ​​searching and confusion that suddenly turned into encounters and connections: the way in which we found each other (and ourselves) in the middle of this play mimics life, which never begins with clarity, and community is always to come. But this sort of indetermined starting point is not about starting from a blank canvas, but rather about suspending intentionality in the poetic process—which is usually articulated through the concepts of author and work (anticipated as an intentional design to be materialized). What we put into circulation in the piece were nothing more than clichés, muscular, affective and representational memories (the “scientists”, the “bare-chested drummer”, the “queer people”, the “plant”, the “science”, the “dance”, etc.), but these were put into play in an ambiguous way, without the communicative clarity and distinction of contractual language (Benjamin): it is about to see through the cliché, not only its regime, but the multiplicity that said regime conceals, and then it will be the very disarray of the intentional apparatus what leaves in view, at the same time, the regime of the gaze and what escapes of it. The “image” is always before the “dispersive material multiplicities” and the “codes” that unify and contain them, as a differential tension between them—and not as a mold, model or formal entelechy that is only read as a dematerialized and authorizing code. It is about the differential between body and technique, or between body and culture that allows us to live “inside and outside of culture [grammar, logic, cliché] simultaneously, integrating and not integrating.”^[35]

In that direction, it seems to me that Forgotten Science experiments playing a game between concealment and unconcealment, and responsiveness at the existential level. In this sense, it seems to me that Forgotten Science experiments in a play between concealment and unconcealment, and responsiveness at the existential level, in the midst of a queer entanglement. This play, for example, with respect to science, can make visible the scientific habits of the subjects of actually existing science (critique of our scientific ideologies and violences through the expression of involuntary memories), and, at the same time, show forms of relationship and knowledge that, while they already always occur in everyday life (virtuality of popular imagination that escapes from power dispositives, unexpected compositions of bodies and ideas), we leave them aside because they do not coincide with the idea of ​​normal science and normal society. For that reason, and regarding the title of the piece, I think the “forgotten” science as one that “does not yet exist”: the counterintuitive formula is because what is forgotten is already there, concealed in the very relationality of existence. “Forgotten Science” is not that which once was, but one which is not yet: as the emergent event is always to come, it doesn't stop to arrive and has to do with the openness of imagination and affects, experience becoming experimentality, both in arts and sciences. The bureaucratic tendencies inside the university institution tends to forget the science that does not yet exist, in order to administer, reproduce and innovate in that which already exists. We assume that the science that does not yet exist is not just that of the innovations of present-day science (the innovations to come, but relying on the same logics and affects), but rather some kind of “strange or foreign” (strannyye, in Russian it simultaneously means “queer” and “strange”) science, a science that thinks differently, an unfamiliar science that remembers or pays attention to things that are imperceptible and forgotten for the science of today. It resonates with Salon’s discussions about queerness, entanglements, symbiosis and sympoiesis, khôratic spaces (climate, language, love, etc.), Gaïa and Gaya hypotheses (complexity-relational oriented and “gay science”), the relationship between mathematics and the untractability of matter, the measurable and the immeasurable, the attention to the (more or less uncontrollable) metaphoric nature of scientific language, experimental art and “intentionality”, the originary technicality of life and the becoming dispositive and war-machine of late modern technocapitalism, etc. A new idea of non-Cartesian science relying on queer entanglements?

In any case, Forgotten Science would propose a postfoundational form of “critique” understood as reflexive indocility and expressiveness, instead of the naive and/or comfortable ideological normalization, overprotection of one’s own subjectivity, obedience to and mimesis of normal (normalized) forms of subjectivity and sociality. The way of addressing the question of the “pit” would also imply a political positioning of non-alignment within the current war regime, that is, a position neither hegemonic nor anti-hegemonic, but post-hegemonic—the question of “positioning,” again… although the political right wing is always the party of the established order (while the “left” means interruption of that order, transformative popular imagination and performance), the question here would not be taking an “extreme left position”, but rather placing oneself to the left of any position (Thayer).

Finally, some reflections on “experimentality” both in the sciences and arts. Let me present three little scenes.

The first scene corresponds to the Ancient Greek definition of experience as “ecstasy.” Erin Graff Zivin[36] offers us a concept of exposure that can give us a clue to begin here: exposure, from the Latin exponere, “set forth, lay open.” It is a concept that allows us to think of a figure of the subject’s opening that goes against the grain of that of the “sovereign subject, to whom, according to Derrida, nothing ever happens.” It is a movement of departure, from the proper and familiar to the other, to the strange and unfamiliar. In the ancient Greek figure of ecstasy, the soul appears precisely as exposure, and the world as an excess (to put it in the style of the intentional analysis of phenomenology). Experience always exceeds experience, and what it discloses never fails to arrive—whether corresponding the sense of our projections, or on the contrary, as a countersense (a fire or an earthquake, or a war, etc.).

The second scene corresponds to a medieval concept of “experimentation”. Let us consider the concept of “potency” established in the Western philosophical and theological tradition: in the process of becoming, potency precedes the act in the subject that is brought from potency to act (in this sense, potency is understood as a praeparatio or preparation inherent in the subject of change). Contrary to this definition of a teleologically captured potency (that is, the potentia in the narrow sense that we have just mentioned), in Averroes we find a radical and anarchic idea of potentiality (what Averroes calls the possibilitas), a possibility that is expressed in the aneconomic effects of experience, thought and translation (effects that are not susceptible to transcendental control by the subject). This radical possibility is also expressed in as a potentiality of interrupting, deactivating, disarticulating, deposing, destituting or even derailing the archaeo-teleological machine, in order to open for other common and experimental uses of the imaginative flesh and the life of relation, that is, for profane uses beyond the consecrated ones. Potentia would work already inseminated as a formal a priori in the soul, while possibilitas would have to do with exposure, relationality and interruptibility, a radical potentiality not captured by intentionality—whose concept has become a dispositive for sovereign-pastoral power in its Aristotelian-Thomistic drift. The “material intellect” as a common and anarchic potentiality occurs in a space that is not reduced to a “geometrically objective space” or a “psychologically subjective” one, but is played out in a “relation of free and common use,” an “aneconomic place irreducible to any possible economy,” since it exceeds, in its possibility, both the phantasmatic ground of the “original” representationally fetishized and anthropologically inseminated, as well as the archaeoteleology of means-ends and their specific technical behaviors.

The third scene: the detour from experimental science to experimental art and politics. In Averroism we find an experimental concept of intentionality (that is, the soul as exposure, the world as excess). However, its drift in the late Middle Ages intersects with the transformations of modern epistemology; I am mainly thinking of the transition from the demonstrative science of Aristotle to the experimental or inductive science of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum. Instead of demonstrating the world without recourse to sensible experience, but only doing it from the attributes contained in the idea of ​​God, it was now a matter of opening up from the reflective closure of the mathematical cogito to experimentation with phenomena that we find in the openness of the natural world, in that field of perception that apart from being vast, never stops to arrive. But this experimental nature of science was quickly marked by the development of modern science as a humanistic and anthropocentric horizon of power and predictive control over nature (“knowledge is power”, says Bacon). It is against the grain of this modern epistemic-political horizon that, after the war catastrophes of the 20th century, art emerges in its “experimental” aspect: just as David Lynch said that there had to be room for wandering beyond the Aristotelian control of narrative, so we can also say that the expressiveness of experimental art suggests, in line with Benjamin’s idea of ​​the “death of intention”, that the world cannot be reduced to a home, nor psychic life to a subjectivity. Connecting with Korotneva’s concerns about the measurable and the immeasurable—and analogizing the methods of experimental sciences and experimental arts—, Maccaro said that, viewed from the perspective of the modern scientific method, perhaps while science was the research of the knowable, art would rather be a search of the unknowable, that which escapes and cannot be controlled in the categories and fixed in the tongue of modern science.

That is why it seems to me that Forgotten Science is a performance in which the spectator who is installed in the comfortable habit of the narrative-industrial diegesis “does not find the subject” and “does not see where it is all going,” sometimes even “missing what is happening.” The intentional structures of recognition and empathy are broken—and a “dimension of strangeness” or “enigmatic corpus” breaks in, and one experiences a “constellation of signs that conspires against plain reading.”[37]   

 

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[1] Susan Leigh Foster, “Dance Theory?”, in Judith Chazin-Bennahum (ed.), «Teaching Dance Studies», Routledge, New York and London, ¹2005, p. 31.

[2] Ann Ronell, “Willow Weep for Me”, World Artists, United States, 1932.

[3] Within and beyond our performative cell, in addition to each of the performers of the piece, I thank Jorge P. Yánez, Cinthia Durán, Marielys Burgos, and Mallory Peterson for the chance to think about dance and performance through dance and performance. To Jorge, especially, for the creative struggles around the ethics and politics of the method at play (the “green star” and the “eclipse”).

[4] For example, Sarah Kember & Joanna Zylinska, «Life after New Media. Mediation as a Vital Process», MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014; although Kember and Zylinska turn to the etymological relation between theater and theory, not so much to consider how theater and theory install a “pit” (which later will be translated into the modern subject-object separation-correlation), but to argue that theory and theater are analogous (theory as theater, theater as theory), given that both are performative and can operate within different medialities. “We are making a claim —write Kember and Zylinska—for the status of theory as theater (…), or for the performativity of all theory—in media, arts and sciences; in written and spoken forms. We are also highlighting the ongoing possibilities of re-mediation across all media and all forms of communication. From this perspective, theater does not take place—and never did—only ‘at the theater’, just as literature was never confined just to the book, or the pursuit of knowledge to the academy. What is particularly intriguing for us at the current media conjuncture is the ever-increasing possibility for the arts and sciences to perform each other, more often than not in different media contexts”. But the problem of the “pit” remains unaddressed in this approach to the medial translatability of arts and sciences.

[5] Leigh Foster, opus cit., pp. 19-34.

[6] “Seems like dance studies is often repressed within the academy. / Yes, well, dance as an activity or as a subject in any form had a very rough time getting accepted into the university. I remember as an under graduate going to the provost of my college and requesting credit for a dance class. He responded, ‘Dance is a noncognitive activity, and has no place in the university curriculum.’ / I’ve never experienced that kind of attitude, but it’s true that dance is always sneaking in through the back door of physical education or theater arts, or sometimes music. Dance teachers manage to argue for its validity based on the idea that dancing offers a unique way of knowing the world—which is really a wonderful proposition. / (…) I think what’s interesting about those kinds of statements [‘dance is a noncognitive activity’, and similar] is the organic relationship they presume between dance and other fields of inquiry. Instead of imagining that every kind of inquiry cultivates the mind, the heart, the body, and the spirit, they partition the person into symbolic segments, such as mind, heart, or body” (Leigh Foster, opus cit., pp. 24-25).

[7] Ibidem, pp. 22-23.

[8] The theater (qevatron) metaphor refers to a voyeuristic doubling, reflection (distancing itself from itself and turning back on itself) and repetition (from the “action” to the “spectacle” as its representational repetition, as the aestheticized double of the event). The theater thus inaugurates the spectacle with an exhibition value, distinct from the ritual (immanent cult without distance from itself; in ritual there is no spectacle or spectator, no point of view, no distance, no discernment—that is, no “critique”—, but only faithful, initiated, devoted, belonging, and obedient individuals). In theater, the spectacle takes reflexive distance from the action; in the ritual, there is pure action without spectacle or reflexive distance. The theater pit marks the critical distance and the “autonomy” of the spheres of the stage (action, life, actors) and the audience (spectacle, reflection, spectators: representation of the event, event as representation). Contrary to this idea of autonomy of spheres as a condition of critical distance, the dynamics of the abolition of distance appear in the splintered figure of invasion: the “totalitarian assault by the stalls on the stage” (monumental revolutionary avant-garde, revolution of the “People” against the old scene of the dominators, with a bloc of leadership and reproduction of the sovereign form), and the “totalitarian assault by the stage on the stalls” (conservative avant-garde, total mobilization of fascism, aestheticization in a ritual in which the masses merge with the sovereign, expanding the scene as a total spectacle and choreography). In short, the imposition of a universal from the audience (vanguardism) or from the scene (fascism); see Willy Thayer, «Technologies of Critique», translated from Spanish into English by John Kraniauskas, Fordham University Press, New York, ¹2020, p. 49 ff.

[9] Ibidem, p. 10 ff.

[10] Cf. Walter Benjamin, «Sobre el lenguaje en general y sobre el lenguaje de los humanos», in “Iluminaciones IV. Para una crítica de la violencia y otros ensayos”, translated from German into Spanish by Roberto Blatt, Ediciones Taurus, Madrid, ²1998, pp. 59-74.

[11] Willy Thayer, “Raúl Ruiz. Imagen estilema”, in Revista Otro Siglo, vol. 1, nº2 (2017), p. 5.

[12] John Cage, “Experimental music”, in «Silence (50^th Anniversary Edition)», Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, ¹⁰2013, pp. 10 and 12.

[13] Gilles Deleuze, «Cine 1. Bergson y las imágenes», translated from French into Spanish by Sebastián Puente and Pablo Ires, Editorial Cactus, Buenos Aires, ¹2009, pp. 489-490. Thayer, for his part, speaks of “highly incorporated clichés by virtue of which we know and recognize the everyday life, clichés in which we redound; clichés that exist before us, that speak through us, and that will continue to exist after us” (Thayer, “Raúl Ruiz. Imagen estilema”, p. 7). 

[14] Thayer, “Raúl Ruiz. Imagen estilema”, p. 6.

[15] Ibidem, p. 7.

[16] Ibidem.

[17] Ibidem, p. 6.

[18] Ibidem, p. 27.

[19] Thayer quotes Ruiz, apropos of the pastoral notions of hegemony and institution, unity and teleology (Providence) around a central conflict (civitas Dei versus civitas diaboli), illustrated in the ecclesiastical dispositive: “The Church ‘constitutes the institution par excellence. To speak of the Church (...) is to speak of bureaucracy and dogmatism (...), not only for the simple fact that every decision depends on another (...) in perpetual ongoing, but also because (...) the untouchable dogmas by definition (...) engender that appearance of democracy that constitutes the permanent debate of ‘interpretation’ (...); the Church is, then, the totalitarian system par excellence, since it is not based on police violence, but on the free acceptance of its members (empathy). The Church is, perhaps, the most accomplished expression of the ‘fascination with totalitarianism’, which explains its two ‘sources of pleasure’: (...) discipline, (...) power’ (Ruiz). Its mission was to ‘transform the world (...) and to the extent that it achieved this, we are no longer even aware that its effect is absolute. It has been assimilated (...), I was very impressed when I read Gramsci for the first time and discovered that he compared the Party to the Church, and recommended the Jesuit model as an example to follow. And then there are naturally all the American theories of institutions. But what none of these theories express, and which from my point of view is an essential element in all institutional behavior, is the symptomatic bad faith produced by the fascination with the perfection of the institution itself, apart from any interest in the deep reasons for its existence’ (Ruiz), reasons that the Church administers on the deep surface of its earthly estate” (Thayer, “Raúl Ruiz. Imagen estilema”, pp. 17-18).

[20] Ruiz: “There are always conflicts. The problem is when a conflict hegemonizes other conflicts and makes disappear the extremely rich image—the tensions of an image—by centralizing these conflicts in one” (quoted by Thayer in «Imagen exote», Editorial Palinodia, Santiago de Chile, ¹2019 p. 68). This is what happens when the discourse of bellicose nationalism erases the class struggle on the “internal front”, or when the discourse of geopolitics overcodes and makes local conflicts disappear.

[21] Thayer, “Raúl Ruiz. Imagen estilema”, p. 11.

[22] Ibidem, pp. 14 and 17.

[23] Thayer: “In this direction, Ruiz’s poetics of cinema, much more than a treatise on film practice, constitutes a set of writings that, from its diversity of supports, attempts to disarray the Western understanding of the image as representation, as an expanded and dominant narrative diegesis” (ibidem, p. 21).

[24] Ibidem, p. 19.

[25] Ibidem, p. 20.

^[26] Ibidem, p. 6.

[27] Ibidem, pp. 41-43.

[28] Willy Thayer, «Imagen exote», Editorial Palinodia, Santiago de Chile, ¹2019, pp. 11 and 17.

[29] Thayer, “Raúl Ruiz. Imagen estilema”, p. 27; see also Thayer, «Imagen exote», p. 16 ff.

[30] Jacques Lezra, «On the Nature of Marx’s Things. Translation as Necrophilology», Fordham University Press, New York, ¹2018.

[31] Although, in addition to the capitalized language of commerce as a master analogy, one can also point to the fetishization of the languages ​​of dance and music, as Leigh Foster does: “Condillac thought that language was preceded by a kind of primitive song/dance. When people were afraid, or excited, or in need, they would spontaneously gesture and cry out. He contends that eventually people realized that these gestures were very helpful in signaling, say, the approach of a wild animal, so that everyone would know it was coming, and, even though they hadn’t seen it themselves, they could see the gesture of the one who had and therefore protect themselves. Both speech and dance, he argues, grew out of this protolanguage. / So, it’s natural to gesture/cry spontaneously in response to danger. And then speech grows out of this primal responsiveness, as the thing that it is not. That makes speech logical and contractual. (…) Condillac is perhaps the first philosopher to think about language in relation to the body this way. But what’s also interesting about him is that he spent a fair amount of time discussing how dance, like speech, evolved into a standardized set of conventional signs that people use to express themselves. Like language, dance developed into a contractual system of signification”; “So, where does music fit into that model, and what about music theory? That’s a wonderful question. I never thought about music theory in relation to the kinds of cultural and critical theories we’ve been discussing. Why not? Well, music theory is the study of a given composition’s harmonic and rhythmic structure. It examines the underlying principles of the scale, melody, and tonal progression and the structures of meter and tempo that are generating the composition. And it looks at forms the composition as a whole can take, such as a sonata or a fugue. So, the equivalent in dance would look at the basic vocabulary of a given piece, how the moves are related to one another, and then also how they are sequenced. And then also how a given composition develops through the use of theme and variation, or ABA, or story line. That’s where the analogy breaks down. Music theory has focused exclusively on the internal structure of a given work with little or no reference to what it might mean or how it might signify something in the world. In fact, only recently have scholars who call themselves musicologists begun to forge connections between musical structure and structures of feeling, or even gender, and narrative. (…). I suppose you could have a theory that the meaning of a dance was complete within its use of variation, rhythmic phrasing, repetition, and reiteration, etc. But the body always signifies so much more than that kind of formalist analysis would allow” (Leigh Foster, opus cit., pp. 30, 25-26).

[32] The general orientation of the creative process involved, of course, the specific orientation of different aspects according to each individual’s disciplinary background: although throughout the piece the performers interchange roles (between dancers, musicians, and operators of bio/sonic machines and robotic visual organ projections), Yánez guided the expressive openness and choreographies of the non-professional dancers, just as the bio-sonic, field recording, and musical sections were supervised by Korotneva and Díaz-Letelier, the singing section and surreal scientific scenes were led by Maccaro, and the real-time mathematically operated robotic organ section by Chatziparaschis. As a piece of integrated arts and technologies, none of them has an exceptional or predominant role over the others (the music is not subordinated to the dance, nor the machines to the music, etc.). 

[33] I am grateful here for the valuable comments and suggestions to us by André Carrington (UCR Department of English / Speculative Fiction and Science Cultures), Sage Ni’Ja Whitson (UCR Department of Black Study), and Jacques Lezra (UCR Department of Hispanic Studies), who attended the presentation on June 4, 2025.

[34] Merce Cunningham Dance Company & John Cage, “Beach Birds for Camera” (New York, 1993).

^[35] Thayer, “Raúl Ruiz. Imagen estilema”, p. 6. In this regard, Leigh Foster writes: “Well, the problem with the theory that dance reflects culture is that it makes dance a kind of passive byproduct or imprint of other more dominant cultural forces. But couldn’t you also think about dance as producing culture, as generating cultural values through the ways in which it cultivates the body and brings people together?” (Leigh Foster, opus cit., p. 22).

[36] Erin Graff Zivin, “Exposure”, en Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, April 29, 2024, link:

https://www.politicalconcepts.org/exposure-erin-graff-zivin/ 

[37] Thayer, «Imagen exote», p. 55.