Martí Peran: Awareness of Fatigue as Element of Emancipation

O crítico e curador espanhol Martí Peran

Martí Peran, the Spanish critic and art curator, has been pondering for six years on the feeling of fatigue that permeates contemporary life, but his project on this matter remained in a preliminary stage. Now, however, he will have to articulate with greater consistency the ideas and arguments that came to him over this time, because he will be organizing an exhibition on fatigue that will premiere in Barcelona in May 2015.

On September 8, Peran was at the IEA, invited by the Permanent Forum Research Group: The Cultural System between the Public and the Private, to talk about this project. The title of his lecture was “How to Convert Fatigue into an Art Exhibition?” The meeting was moderated by Martin Grossmann, IEA’s director and coordinator of the research group.

Before delving into the importance of fatigue today, Peran drew a picture of what he considers to be the shortcomings of contemporaneity, because “one of the most consensual ways to define the contemporary world is to acknowledge as contemporary that which focuses on the wounds of our time.”

DEMONS

In keeping with this conviction, Peran believes that the issues that should concern contemporary culture and art may be identified, in general terms, with three aspects, the “three demons of our time.” The first is the dissociation of reality, which “has escaped from our hands and been displaced by simulacra, camouflaged by the semblance of technological revolution, which is undoubtedly the only accredited, legitimized and certifiably viable revolution today – a biotechnological, rather than merely technological revolution.”

To fight this “demon,” it is imperative we try to enable tools that will “get us back to being in the real world, finding reality through documental practices that allow us to focus on these usually neglected zones of reality and to build devices for reality to finally speak out, after being silenced for so long by the stridency of the conventional discourse of the media and of politics.”

The second “demon” to be faced is a dearth of future expectations, especially in Europe, stresses Peran. For him, we live in a dictatorship of the present imposed by many lines of force: “We’ve been told that all the utopias have failed and that attempting another one is inconceivable; likewise, whenever we wish to think about the future, Hollywood gives us the key: the future can only be thought of in apocalyptic terms, because there is no alternative to the current model and any and every futurology is dystopian.”

Presentification is also related to consumption, according Peran because our “technological prostheses” have to be constantly updated, and the “logic of credit/consumption/planned obsolescence condemns us to a horizon where false needs have to be permanently updated as well.” We find a reflection of this in the emotional sphere and its “floating, mutant and flexible relationships.”

The need for flexibility during this constant updating and adaptation prevents us from “understanding life as a project, a notion that was crucial to modernity, when it was possible to dream, to have expectations, to aspire to destination points.” Thus, the second imperative that imposes itself is “creating apertures that allow us to dream the future.”

The third of today’s “demons” listed by Peran is the absence of a critique of everyday life. “It is in everyday life that exploitation is engendered; therefore, if we wish to conceive means of emancipation we must critically examine where exploitation occurs, insisting on that path opened by the Marxism of the 1960s.” According to Peran, it is in this analysis of everyday life that fatigue may be detected. “To be sure, what leads me to advocate a reflection on fatigue is, first and quite naturally, its evidence, its materiality: I feel tired. But when examined under the prisms provided by analyses of everyday life, this feeling of fatigue becomes revealing.”

STARTING POINT

Peran believes we must begin with the distinction between the modus operandi of Fordist and post-Fordist capitalism. “The former generated value, surplus value, through goods, through the quantity and quality of the results of the assembly line; the latter, however, is a process that progressively assigns surplus value to immaterial value, to the production of subjectivity. It is a capitalism that manufactures induced subjectivity, a capitalism of trends, basically.”

Then again, Peran argues that many sources allow us to state that post-Fordist capitalism has been superseded by an “afterpop” capitalism, a concept he borrows from the notion of “afterpop culture,” by Spanish writer Eloy Fernández Porta. “‘Afterpop’ capitalism distinguishes itself by a relatively recent development, albeit one with exponential growth, namely, self-exploration, by which individuals are asked to take upon themselves the production of subjectivity.”

Peran asserts that in countries in crisis, such as his native Spain, self-exploration is on everyone’s agenda and has been “translated into an advocacy of entrepreneurship: ‘Be an entrepreneur, build yourself, take the initiative, invent something, establish yourself in the marketplace, find your niche. It’s your responsibility. Put yourself to work, put your whole life to work.’” For him, this type of restlessness generates surplus value, much like capital does, and only “works smoothly if it’s relentless, unstoppable, to avoid collapse.”

In his view, this interpretation is sanctioned by thinkers who are celebrated for their analyses of contemporaneity. One of them is Giorgio Agamben, who uses the expression “bare life” [la vita nuda] to christen current-day existence: “He addresses the problem from a political perspective, in the hard meaning of the word: we live in a permanent state of exception, which leads to a chronic suspension rights. And a life without rights is a bare and barren life.”

Peran believes the term “corrosion of character” is closer match to his argument, as used by philosopher Richard Sennett. “Obviously, this phenomenology of a permanent state of nerves and hyperactivity corrodes character. We are always on the defensive, even when talking about community processes.”

AWAKENING

“Be that as it may, as Antonin Artaud once said, there is no worse crime than curing the disease,” adds Peran, for whom this idea of the French poet and dramatist bears certain similarities with the reflections of philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno, according to whom “if God exists, it can only be a God who relishes not on healing wounds, but on rubbing salt on them, ensuring that the wounds will always receive their doses of salt, because the possibility of awareness lies in pain.”

The next step in Peran’s argument is to cogitate about fatigue as a means toward awareness: “Rethinking fatigue not as something that must be repaired, but rather as the possibility of awakening consciousness, turning fatigue into what writer Peter Handke called ‘capable tiredness’.”

THE EXHIBITION

How does one translate these reflections on fatigue when an opportunity arises for a project of artistic display? And why hold this exhibition at all? To the second question, Peran answers that organizing an exhibition is a chance to mature and formalize one’s thoughts on the subject. As to the form, he sees three options. The first is trying to say everything through works, “Attempting to illustrate, in the good sense, this reflection; I’m now at this stage, seeing and stumbling on the drawbacks.”

A second possible mode of action, “as common as the first,” is to identify the arguments on fatigue in artistic and cultural terms, siding with “the vast tradition of the oeuvreless artist, of the apology of whiteness, of silence, of disengagement, of inaction. It would be an absolutely vast and dilated report, associated with modernity, appealing to this tradition and preparing an exhibition of the ‘I’d rather not do it’ type.” However, Peran does not feel this is a satisfactory option, “because it does not do justice to the arguments and to their political potential.” The third option is to simply forgo the exhibition, that is, an exhibition that consists of not exhibiting.

However, cautions Peran, even an elementary Google search shows us that this has all been done, from concerns with hyperactivity to exhibitions that consist of not exhibiting. “At the end, a certain pragmatism imposes itself and I suppose the May 2015 exhibition will be a mixture of these three possible narratives. One must put these three lines of flight into the arena to see what composition they engender.”

ILLUSTRATION

Opening the debate after the conference, Martin Grossmann observed that some dangers in the expository act need to be considered. He noted that he was completely unmoved by an exhibition on melancholy by Jean Clair in Paris last decade, “basically because of a problem that expository volition is prone to: illustration.” The exhibition “illustrated a very reductionist concept of melancholy and did not expand its questioning into a discussion of contemporaneity; rather, it confined itself to a historical narration of the concept of melancholy, the spirit of the time.” After this observation, Grossmann asked Peran why he did not include performance as one of the kinds of work to be shown at the exhibition.

Peran said that the exhibition will have an undeniable performing nature, ensured by a collective (“Espacio en Blanco”) that will help to turn the event into a meeting place, a venue of discussion and experimentation, because its members are not artists, but political activists.

Regarding the risks of the expository act, Peran said that the problems of converting his arguments into an exhibition are perhaps due not only to the limitations of the exhibition format, but also to the impoverishment of the artistic practices themselves, “unable to speak of the historical imperatives to which they should honestly be committed.”

With regard to this commitment, he mentioned a text by Marina Garcés, from the Universidad de Zaragoza, called “Honesty with the Real,”[1], in which she says, according Peran, that “dealing honestly with the real is not talking about the real, is not documenting it, is not even the alleged activism that attempts to transform it, but rather it is feeling affected by the real to the point of being able to transform oneself through this affection.”

For him, art is what makes someone constantly rethink their political, ethical and aesthetic values: “Art is what shakes up these values and allow us to recast and rethink them all the time, so that our system of political, ethical and aesthetic values does become settled or accommodated. But is contemporary art fulfilling this function?”

CONFLICT

Sérgio Franco, a doctoral student in sociology, asked Peran’s opinion on the “anti-institutional” act of Brazilian graffiti artist Cripta Djean, who threw paint on Artur Zmijewski, curator of the 2012 Berlin Biennale, when he questioned the attitude of Djean and other taggers who made an unauthorized painting in St. Elisabeth's Church, one of the spaces of the Biennale.

Peran replied that all the great events of recent years have spawned conflicts, which are repetitions, with different profiles, of the same underlying conflict, that of credibility, “the effectiveness or not of converting an event into a space of political debate where ideas are shared and knowledge is produced, barring it from becoming just another event that disables the very same initiatives it claims to summon.” Peran believes that we should not seek debates in these directions, which are “dead ends.” For him, the important thing is to remember that “the capital of art is above all symbolic capital; furthermore, its transformative power lies in its symbolic capital, and it is with this capital that we can fight real capital.”

PRESENT AND FUTURE

Julia de Cayses, a doctoral student in history and theory of art, asked Peran to make some considerations on the present and the future. For her, what has been canceled is the present, not the future: “The future is a modern idea and it is apocalyptic. Yet, capital is always in the future, capital is always generating a surplus value that lies in the future, not in the present. Capital is infinite and resources are finite and our hours in the world are finite, because we will die.”

Peran countered by saying that “Of course, the future is a modern idea, but modernity was essentially the promise of a future; that is, it is not that the future is structurally modern, but rather that modernity was futuristic. This we have overcome.” Modernity was futuristic because “it promised things, greater material and personal well-being, a liberation of the spirit (in Hegelian terms), a proletarian revolution (in Marxist terms).” As for the future not having been canceled because it is as infinite as cumulative capital, Peran agrees, but warns that the problem here is that the entire space of future possibilities is now occupied by this logic of capital accumulation, “while reveries [i.e., deep musing or wakeful dreaming], a vital instinct, have been canceled, because we are obliged to resolve our precariousness in real time.”

With regard to the present, he said he agreed with the Julia’s stance: “Have they stolen the present? Yes, of course. The truth is that we have so much present that it has become impoverished; we have an absolute indigence of experience and so many things in our hyperactivity that we get an insufficiency of the present. So many experiences and so little actual density. That is why one of the imperatives is to rediscover reality, real experience, and to do it honestly, that is, by allowing it to affect us.”

Photo: Sandra Codo/IEA

[1] Cf. <http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/view/18820/22956>.