Exhibition Prosthetics VII:
Intersubjectivity/Interdependence: Witness/Spectator
I began my first teaching position this semester, and one of the things I was most excited about (and made sure to take advantage of no matter what) was that I was allowed to take a class for free. By some stroke of luck—perhaps even divine intervention—there was a spot open in Joseph Grigely’s class titled Exhibition Prosthetics. This series of writings will be reflections from the week prior on talks I have gone too, virtual exhibitions I see (since I am taking this class during a pandemic I cannot in good conscience visit in person ones), as well as the readings assigned to me by Joseph, and any conversations we have together in the interim through email or instagram. We’ll see how it goes.
This week’s post is the current state of the first chapter of the book. I hope you enjoy it, and I’d love to hear your feedback.
If you find yourself reading an older text you will more often than not come across he or him or some other variation of the “male” pronoun as the base of operations from which subjectivity is manifested. However, there are also certain conventions which allow for the use of the forward slash (/) as a joiner for pronouns replacing or/and/per in order to connect the pronouns more definitively. Alternatively, it can join together two things in order to manifest a strong connection in the space between them. Examples abound (what follows are not exhaustive of the variety within the text the / is contained within). In a writing by Critical Art Ensemble titled Flesh Machine they stylize a more expansive set of pronouns as he/rself and he/r. In The Fives Sexes: Why Male and Female are Not Enough Anne Fausto-Sterling when writing about Levi Suydam states, “Western culture is deeply committed to the idea that there are only two sexes. Even language refuses other possibilities; thus to write about Levi Suydam I have had to invent conventions—s/he and his/her—to denote someone who is clearly neither male nor female or who is perhaps both sexes at once.”1 While not a pronoun itself there is an example in Becoming intelligible woman: Gender, disability and resistance at the border zone of youth written by Jen Slater, Embla Ágústsdóttir, and Freyja Haraldsdóttir where they write in a footnote, “When we use dis/ability (with a forward slash) we are acknowledging the co-constituted relationship between “ability” and “disability” – troubling the binary, yet hierarchical, relationship between the two (the prioritisation of “ability”), and highlighting that both are terms constructed by unequal societies which, through ableism and disablism, prioritise certain ways of being and doing…”2
/ becomes a negotiator, the joiner, the mitigator of gender and more broadly the construction of meaning in identity. It is used when we list out pronouns in bios or email footers to neatly package the variations (although in most pronoun situations I find it odd when people list all of the variations on a pronoun such as he/him/his, as if the recipient of this knowledge doesn’t already know3) and is almost a mundanity at this point (or at least that is the hope acknowledged by those who champion it to create a situation in which pronoun usage in bios is not a whistle to TERFs and transphobes who could see that as a sign of transness in order to more easily target trans people). But in texts the / is acknowledged by some as inadequate at times due to the effect it has on readability. In the gender-inclusive language guidelines published by UN Women they write, “Because this [the use of /] strategy has a negative impact on readability, it is advisable not to overuse it…Generally, the use of this strategy should be avoided in public information products such as web features, press releases, or narrative texts.”4 Which to me seems like an odd point to make in regard to how something like the / which is itself a punctuation mark would effect readability. The / was used in place of commas in medieval manuscripts, and is generally accepted as indicating a line break when reproducing or quoting lines of verse/poetry.
In many ways the / allows difference to proliferate. If we think of the / as a space between these words that it joins, there are a plethora of possibilities that could occur in that small space of extrapolation. And importantly while the / allows for more explicit difference in the listing off of possible pronouns, or in the case of dis/ability allowing for a discourse to take place in the stylization of the word, I am more interested in what it does for difference in its opacity. Especially if we consider that space of / as being intersubjective and inspiring interdependence.
While punctuation has its various duties to the text that it resides in, we can find certain digressions that the punctuation can take in its creative use. Whether that be in ASCII text art which uses text to create image more explicitly than simple description, or our use of punctuation to create text emojis such as :) >:( and :/, as well as simple vernacular use in text messaging to portray something more simply. What I am attempting to → towards is that perhaps the frustration of readability in the use of erratic punctuation is not itself to be discouraged, but rather has creative ramifications in our disruptions of the text. Take for example this small intervention I have placed in the form of a directional arrow. While you may be able to understand that it most explicitly means point, the symbolic form it takes expands possibility for interpretation. Here it points toward towards, but also towards the margin, toward the outside of the book. Symbols, glyphs, and punctuation always do more behind them than one would expect. They are icons of extratextular meaning, operating in the margins of our meaning-making. And in particular I am interested in the / and its ability to craft a theoretical space in between words where we can think more deeply about the intertwined realities of how meaning is constructed.
To return to this notion of the possibility difference in its opacity, we can turn to Edouard Glissant. In his chapter For Opacity found in his book Poetics of Relation he argues for a more opaque vision of difference. Not as something to be reduced and subsumed, to only accept the Other through our understanding of the Other, but in our recognition that it is difference that allows for a more expansive (and not so western centric) worldview. (We can return quickly to the Tower of Babel. It was a dominative similarity that G*d saw as ruinous, which in his decision to craft linguistic difference he shattered that similarity through the opacity that would come from the linguistic differentiation which is remediated through the gift of tongues allowing a kind of recognition in spite of—and bolstered by—this difference. “Accepting differences does, of course, upset the hierarchy of this scale. I understand your difference, or in other words, without creating a hierarchy, 1 relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system. I create you afresh.—But perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale. Displace aIl reduction. / Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity.”5 Glissant finds in opacity a poetic force for forms of relation that do not rely on certain scientific worldviews which see absolute knowledge as the driving force of progress. It’s to (as he puts it) give up desires to see what’s at the very bottom of natures. It is in opacity that we find a renewed transparency of this relation. Like the /’s ability to manifest discourse between words (or even within words bisected) we look towards that intermediate relation for our engagement with others, not in a probing desire for knowledge.
If we remember Moten’s note about the pathological—which he acquires from Frantz Fanon—it is in that acknowledgment of the pathological we can reorient our scientific view, away from differential “morbid bodies” and towards what Fanon calls a morbid universe of which we attempt to perform a complete lysis (related to—as we will see—Donna Haraway’s consideration of the denatured body) in our pathological demands against transparency. If we consider that for Fanon what was pathological in one instance was the determination of the subject to “speak good French” which in his formulation was a black pathology brought on by a white pathology, we can see certain medical realities determined by linguistic/epistemological constructions. To again quote Moten, “Fanon’s concern with the pathological desire to speak good French, seen in its relation to the normal desire to be spoken to in good faith, understands the speaker’s being absolutely for the other to imply reciprocity within the shared possession of a language. Speech in bad faith moves in the wake of not listening, of neither acknowledging nor recognizing the speaker’s capacity to be for or with the one to whom he or she speaks.”6 This double edged, pathological sword (or /) which dictates in what ways opacity is even possible. If we return to pronoun discourse and that most visible form of gender diversity we can look towards gender discourse on Tik Tok which oscillates between the irreducible realities of gender complexity and the reinstatement of at once absurd yet scarily reductionist notions of what reinforces one’s gender. A desire to speak good French becomes a desire to present gender explicitly.
During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic many have noticed an uptick in the use of “they” pronouns, culminating in (especially) a rise in combo pronouns (she/they or he/they, again the slash). And it was due to the distance from social and cultural norms that allowed for this exploration of gender possibility, and in many cases a refutation of what was always given as gender possibility. However, what is particularly concerning are certain ways that the humorous (humoral perhaps?) aspects of gender binary jokes begin to reinforce the now trinity of gender he/she/they and what constitutes each. One Tik Tok video has captions which include “*rolls fist in anxious pansexual* and “*points in bisexual*” and yes, these are themselves jokes, however it’s important to consider the ways in which jokes reinforce ideas about our realities. This is itself not an isolated incident, and is also among many including a recent trend which uses an audio from Spongebob in which the character Patrick says, “Saying you’re a kid? It’s like saying I’m a kid.” which usually has corresponding text remarking on some thing that happened to you followed by a character saying, “Here’s your goober meal, sir.” which has corresponding text saying some trait from the thing (often traumatic), which is then often followed by “Hey I’m supposed to get a toy with this.” then something is thrown at the head with something like bisexual, genderqueer, she/they, she/they questioning, etc and then Patrick saying”thanks”. One has the three being “starts wearing eyeliner and gets very into astrology” “bisexual” “she/they questioning”. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these aspects of the Tik Tok trends, and in many cases it is younger people who are figuring out their gender, and so certain things are overlayed onto the exploration in order to better make sense of the confusion that comes from working against ingrained gender models. What is worrisome to me and gets at my general concerns in this larger book, are the ways in which our construction of meaning mirrors the dominant society, and through the neoliberal bents that come from apps like these which profit off of trends, an expansion and subsumption of alternate gender formations eliminates the possibilities for expanded and differentiated meanings which allow for opacity, uncertainty, and multiplicity within oneself.
As I’m sure you have noticed, while I began by discussing gender I also brought in concerns of disability and sexuality as well as the writing of Glissant who comes from a background of Caribbean thought and certain understandings of linguistic and pathological differentiation in blackness and immigration. This is because these concerns are all necessarily intertwined. All get at concerns of the relationship between self and other. And it is to remember that the legal scholarship done by Kimberle Crenshaw around intersectionality should continually be applied in how we construct our understandings of identity and difference. An intersubjective reality that is always intertwined within every individual. To think structurally it is the understanding that unmarked terms are just that. It’s not that they don’t have any bearing, but rather that it is easy to overlook them: whiteness, able-bodied, male, straight, all of those subject positions which are seen as a given as opposed to deviation from the norm. In her essay The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse Donna Haraway charts the understanding of the immune system as a discursive space of meaning making as it relates to our understanding of the self and other dichotomy. She writes at the beginning, “My thesis is that the immune system is an elaborate icon for principal systems of symbolic and material ‘difference’ in late capitalism. Preeminently a twentieth-century object, the immune system is a map drawn to guide recognition and misrecognition of self and other in the dialectics of Western biopolitics.”7 And if we follow Jorge Luis Borges I would go so far as to say this is a map which has exceeded its territory, even as Western biomedicine seeks to wrangle said immune system in a way which utopically strives towards domination of it, and as the consequences are themselves dystopic. For example, the over reliance of antibiotics, which has resulted in the concern with bacteria which have themselves become immune to our medicines we use to boost the immune system.8 This is a crisis of imagination, as well as a crisis exacerbated by border ideology. “When is a self enough of a self that its boundaries become central to entire institutionalized discourses in medicine, war, and business? Immunity and invulnerability are intersecting concepts, a matter of consequence in a nuclear culture unable to accommodate the experience of death and finitude within liberal discourse on the collective and personal individual. Life is a window of vulnerability. It seems a mistake to close it.”9 [emphasis mine] The immune system becomes a master text which guides our understandings of the body as object-text and reinforces western myths of independence.
What I mean here is that the immune system functions based on an ability to recognize the other (a biologically foreign invader) and build up its defenses against it. An absolute immune system cannot tolerate an outside, it cannot tolerate difference. A nation-state cannot accommodate that which does not assimilate or die within its borders. This opens the door for austerity policies and implicit eugenic ideologies. In understanding the hostility to difference, it’s almost easy to course correct towards perhaps an autoimmune system, but unfortunately that is our current state. There is no absolute opposition to the immune system within the autoimmune as an alternative structuring ideology, because what we are experiencing as we continue to see an uptick in autoimmune diseases, is a concurrently self-destructive body politic ravaged by climate disasters, global pandemics, economic uncertainties, and vast class disparities and racialized and gendered hate crimes. Perhaps it’s to begin to think through Glissant’t opacity as constitutive of the immune system, which is itself replete with difference. Our bodies are not solely our own; 2001’s Osmosis Jones begins to elucidate that multiplicity, but it’s far greater than it even it images. Called the human microbiota we are host to million of tiny living organisms, constituting upwards of 10,000 different species. While the ideological immune system is perfect for the reaffirmation of borders, the actual realities of our bodies are that we are in constant interface with the world around us. The greater problem is what Paula Treichler calls the “epidemics of signification” (in her situation it is in regard to the AIDS crisis), and when considering what Haraway refers to as the “lumpy discourses of immunology” which both figures and represses the problematically multiple postmodern selves, it is in an embrace of difference both in body and in discipline that we begin to combat this aversion to difference. “Immunity can also be conceived in terms of shared specificities; of the semi-permeable self able to engage with others (human and non-human, inner and outer), but always with finite consequences; of situated possibilities and impossibilities of individuation and identification; and of partial fusions and dangers.”10
It’s an inversion of the dominant mode. A reworking of our understanding of difference, and its operations. A new imaginative perspective. In 1988 Laurie Parson’s had her first “full-gallery” exhibition at Lorence-Monk Gallery in which she showed 29 works which were themselves fully contingent upon each other. These works were titled V, tree with wire, hanging things, suitcase, black log, bicycle seat, double poles, black carrier, bunch of dogwood, green cushion, twin things, black mat, tree stump, black + red top, rope, bench, white cloth, tar block, umbrella, preacher’s rock, branches, knotted string, bag, dirty log, stone, charcoal, broken container, yellow rope, pile of stones.11 This is an interdependent art exhibition. Only one of the works hung on the wall, the others leaned or lay down. As Graham described these works as having endured to be in this space of the exhibition we could think of this space as a necessary rest for these objects. It is as much this interdependence as the manifestation of difference that constructs the meaning within these works. Objects that depend on their context and relation to exist as they do. Haraway discusses the work Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores did around computing and representation as it relates to her discussions of immunological discourses. Specifically the importance they place on the “interdependence between interpreter and interpreted” and Winograd writes, “Interpretation, that is, arises as a necessary consequence of the structure of biological beings.” Haraway goes on to write,
Winograd conceives the coupling of the inner and outer worlds of organisms and ecosystems, of organisms with each other, or of organic and technical structures in terms of metaphors of language, communication, and construction-but not in terms of a rationalist doctrine of mind and language or a disembodied instrumentalism. Linguistic acts involve shared acts of interpretation, and they are fundamentally tied to engaged location in a structured world. Context is a fundamental matter, not as surrounding 'information', but as co-structure or co-text. Cognition, engagement, and situation-dependence are linked concepts for Winograd, technically and philosophically. Language is not about description, but about commitment. The point applies to 'natural' language and to 'built' language.12
Parsons exhibition here becomes a situation in which we can think more deeply through these elements of context in the understanding of relation. Parson’s objects are that text which begins with the artist as reader, and imparts the experience to the exhibition goer as reader. It is as much about the aesthetic values of this work and what they impart in terms of visual knowledge to the reader to then understand these relations of time, use, entropy, engagement, etc. Maybe more accurately we could say Parsons allows for the spectator to become witness.
Gregg Bordowitz starts his lecture-performance Gimme Danger by evoking the AIDS activist practice of not just bearing but giving witness where one person would say I am a person living with AIDS and then ask (with the caveat that one should not risk their safety or security) if there was anyone else there who is also living with HIV/AIDS. This is a bearing witness which finds similarities in the stigmatized. Stigmata being those holy wounds that appear to bear witness to one’s holiness. A solidarity in difference. Gimme Danger addresses the dual positions of violence and love which are so intertwined in their realities. They are relational positions of damage and healing, and are not easily pulled apart. The liebstodt is the German word for the love-death, beauty in the possibility of dying together. Bordowitz does not resolve this problematic duality as it manifested in punk and the AIDS activist movement; one pulling from those Romantic and Decadent histories, the other stigmatized for assumed decadence in “some aspects of a shared lifestyle” and witnessing the deaths of friends and lovers due to neglect. It is that very “epidemic of signification” that binary of self and other that is traversed through sex, one aspect of its violence embedded in sexually transmitted diseases. The vector as traitor, as saboteur. The vector becoming the ostracized like the pharmakos of Athens society who were tolerated until they were expelled in order to avoid famine, invasion, or plague, these pharmakos were either “slaves, cripples, or criminals”. Those whose difference could be pointed to. In bearing witness one’s position as a possible vector of disease no longer had to be bore alone.
Theoria was the name for those who bore witness to certain displays in order to confirm that something did in fact occur. They were not just spectators, but active participants in the manifestation of meaning which came from an event. An other who could give you the outside perspective necessary to be understood. Theory derives its meaning from this greek base of theoria which also means to contemplate (to bear witness, to operate as spectator, here spectator being the base form necessary to become witness). That is to say theory is nothing if not the ability for people to be witness to each other and say yes. A bridge between self and other across linguistic gaps.
The ties that bind the immunological ideologies of self and other are vast and often inscrutable. Each generation produces its pharmakos; neoliberalism uses integration as a form of compromise to avoid this fate (and those who choose this should not be cut out, but challenged). In the medical/epistemological theater that produces these plays of self and other, meaning is constructed in the possibilities of understanding and dissection of difference. When transparency is not freely given, it is forcibly created. When we look at Parson’s objects we can only know that they have endured, we do not know how or why. We have to be ok with that. Desires for understanding operate in a simultaneous state of love and violence. Consensual relation becomes the name of the game; respect for opacity, obscurity, and multiplicity is what can allow us to find navigations of this border dominating immunological state of self and other; a recognition that we are ourselves always microbiotically communal. Perhaps the most explicit form of this is to make out with another person. You obscure their face with your’s and they your’s with their’s, and you exchange non-reproductive bodily fluids. There is only one function and that is the manifestation of non-productive pleasure in the absolute opacity of the facial-ethical space of subjective recognition.
To return to the /, that space which cannot be grasped in any definitively perceptual way, but can be felt as something full of possibility. The slash’s name comes from its visual connotation of cutting through, and in many ways that’s what it does, it makes multiple, makes possible in it’s cutting through. One last artistic detour to the work of Bruce Nauman, specifically his work John Coltrane Piece. It consists of an aluminum slab that lies down and only stands a few inches tall. The bottom surface is polished to a mirror sheen, but its ability to function productively is completely removed in this opaque action of lying quite literally “face” down. This isn’t an antisocial act as many have described it after having viewed Nauman’s work, it simply asks you to try a little harder to imagine. Quite like talking to someone who for one reason or another is not good at making eye contact with you. For some recognition and acknowledgment work a bit differently. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is an “autistic” artwork, but I put that formulation in words forward to consider what it would mean to think things a bit more neurodivergently. Rethinking what the mirror does for us as self and other at the same time.
“Regarding identity, things have changed. There’s an acronym. LGBT. The B still doesn’t get much cred, though it’s recognized and not so shameful. Let’s not get into who suffers more among the alphabet. Let’s just say that at fifty-three years old, the awareness of being dirty and tainted, sexual and promiscuous all mixed with the confusion of sex and death stirs a cocktail that sometimes sends me into a rage. Sometimes it leaves me melancholy, and still, still somehow “it” sets me apart from the bodies closest, literally closest to me. The disease, my infection, even gets between different versions of myself—no longer avoiding mirrors, getting my haircut in a shop like everyone else …
Gregg”13
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. "The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough." The
Sciences, March & April 1993, 20-24. http://capone.mtsu.edu/phollowa/5sexes.html.
Slater, Jen, Embla Ágústsdóttir, and Freyja Haraldsdóttir. “Becoming Intelligible Woman:
Gender, Disability and Resistance at the Border Zone of Youth.” Feminism & Psychology
28, no. 3 (August 2018): 409–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353518769947.
I would assume it is a crossover from the use of non-normative pronouns such as ze/hir/hirs
https://www.unwomen.org/-/media/headquarters/attachments/sections/library/gender-inclusive%20language/guidelines-on-gender-inclusive-language-en.pdf?la=en&vs=2129
Glissant, Edouard. "For Opacity." In Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing, 189-94. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. p 190
Moten, Fred. Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh). South Atlantic Quarterly 1 October 2013; 112 (4): 737–780. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2345261
Haraway, Donna. "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse." Edited by Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze. In Biopoltics: A Reader, 274-309. Duke University Press. p 275
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324479
Haraway, Donna. "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse." Edited by Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze. In Biopoltics: A Reader, 274-309. Duke University Press. p 275
Ibid.
This listing comes from Maxwell Graham’s essay It is hard to find the meaning of a work of art. It is hard to find the work of art. He goes on to describe the works as such, “Every work of art was worn and weathered and worked. There is barely a trace of color beyond grays and browns and dulled blacks and bruised whites. green cushion is faded. black and red top is more rust than paint. Even the works presumed natural are all wrought. pile of stones contains glass and metal. charcoal contains metal and plastic. The dirt on dirty log is more dirty than dirt. branches are sawed off. tree stump is sawed off. preachers rock is concrete. bunch of dogwood is bound together with a string. black log is milled lumber. tree with wire is knotted with telephone wire and rooted in a plastic trash bin with the labels facing forward. Most of the other work are meant to hold to contain to cover and to carry. hanging things is a display rack holding a display rack holding a display rack holding a bundle of metal foil. yellow rope, rope, knotted string are actually all knotted and all been tied before. suitcase, bag, broken container are all soiled from their cargo. black carrier is a hand truck. black and red top, twin things are lids. bench, green cushion, bicycle seat have been sat on many times and black mat has been stood on many times. V is a special piece. V is the first work of art in the exhibition and is apart from the others. V is the only work that is capitalized. V is a used bedframe.
Not one of these objects had been meant for distanced beholding or viewing. Everything has been used. Their appearance in the exhibition as works of art is not the result of having been discarded but as having endured.”
Haraway, Donna. "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse." Edited by Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze. In Biopoltics: A Reader, 274-309. Duke University Press. p. 286
The collection of poems and letters can be found here https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/wake-to-dread
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