The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes

John Paul Ricco is associate professor in the Department of Visual Studies and Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-71777-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-11337-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226113371.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ricco, John Paul, author.

The decision between us : art and ethics in the time of scenes / John Paul Ricco.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-71777-7 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-11337-1 (e-book)    1. Arts and morals.    2. Aporia.    3. Art—Philosophy.    4. Art—History and criticism.    I. Title.

NX180.E8R53 2014

700.1—dc23

2013036680

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

The Decision Between Us

ART AND ETHICS IN THE TIME OF SCENES

John Paul Ricco

University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

To Bill Haver, for his writing and friendship, and

for Jeff Reinhart, who remains right next to me, shoulder to shoulder, as we face out in the same direction—an outside infinitely shared between us, in the intimacy of its distance.

Writing passes through the book, accomplishing itself there even as it disappears there; we do not write for the book. The book: a ruse by which writing goes toward the absence of the book.

MAURICE BLANCHOT, The Infinite Conversation

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

INTRODCTION

Part I. Name No One

1: Name No One Man

2: Name No One Name

Part II. Naked

3: Naked Sharing

4: Naked Image

Part III. Neutral and Unbecoming

5: Neutral Mourning

6: Unbecoming Community

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Gallery

Acknowledgments

In the course of writing this book, I greatly benefited from conversations with many friends, colleagues, and students. Along with various public and academic audiences and readers, they have granted me what I—perhaps like any other thinker and writer—am most grateful for: insight and feedback truly grounded in the most generous and empathetic listening and reading. This has been one of the principal sources that continues to motivate me to push further with my ideas and arguments and to hone and reshape my thinking’s written expression.

The following acknowledgments no doubt constitute an incomplete list of those who have played a role in the shaping of this book, and I apologize up front if I have overlooked anyone who deserves to be named here. Indeed, I am well aware not only of the ways in which this project has developed under the auspices of academic institutions and cultural organizations where I have taught and/or presented my work in progress, and the excellent people I have encountered there, but also the ways in which it has materialized for me along a whole series of more brief and less easily recognized, sanctioned, and perhaps even remembered contexts and occasions, which are no less important or indeed auspicious due to their small scale—quite the contrary, in fact.

I want to thank the following lecture and conference organizers for their invitations to present early versions of this work, and those who took the time to attend and engage with me. Lorelei Stewart at Gallery 400 at the University of Chicago; Beth Hinderliter and the Collectivity and Collaboration lecture series at Buffalo State University; the organizers of the Feeling Photography conference at the University of Toronto; my colleagues Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak and the Visual Studies Pro-Seminar at the University of Toronto; Lauren Berlant and Condace Vogler and their colloquium series Sex & Ethics in the Classroom at the University of Chicago; Connie Cortez, Brian Steele, and Joe Arredondo, who invited me back to the School of Art at Texas Tech University to present two chapters of this project; and many of my former colleagues and students who attended those events and so warmly welcomed me back. And finally I would like to thank John David Rhodes, Brian Price, Meghan Sutherland, Sorin Cucu, and Olga Pyrozhenko for their invitation to participate as guest faculty in their 2011 Open Society Summer Seminar on Philosophy and Media in Bodrum, Turkey.

For the past eight years I have had the great fortune to teach at the University of Toronto, and to be a part of an intellectual and scholarly community of colleagues and students that inspires me every day. First I want to thank my colleagues in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga (UTM), where I hold my undergraduate teaching appointment, who have read or heard portions of this project at various points in its development: Jill Caskey, Kajri Jain, Louis Kaplan, Evonne Levy, Christof Migone, Brian Price, Meghan Sutherland, and Alison Syme. In addition I am grateful for the support of my former and current graduate chairs: Elizabeth Legge, in the Department of Art, and Neil ten Kortenaar, in the Centre for Comparative Literature.

Several undergraduate research assistants have provided invaluable help at various stages of the project: Steve Kahn and Ricardo Segura with their bibliographic research, and Deena Alreefy with her assistance in managing the task of acquiring images and reproduction rights. I thank them for their dedication to the project and their enthusiasm.

At the University of Toronto I am also fortunate to work with some of the most intelligent, sophisticated, and critically imaginative of graduate students. The work of Irmgard Emmelhainz in film and contemporary art, Etienne Turpin in architecture and political philosophy, Tyler Kowalchuk in contemporary continental philosophy and aesthetics, and Tenzan Eaghill in religion and continental philosophy has been and continues to remain a source of inspiration, and with each of them I share what is nothing less than intellectual friendship. It has been wonderful to discuss my work with them, and each has offered useful insight and perspective. I also want to acknowledge how much I have learned from all of the students in my graduate seminars Queer Theory, Sexuality, and Visuality; Jean-Luc Nancy: Retreating the Aesthetic; and Late Barthes: Photography, Neutral, Mourning.

I am honored to have Susan Bielstein as my editor, and to retain my affiliation with the University of Chicago Press. This book has benefited so much from her impeccable judgment, and I am indebted to her support over these past several years. Susan and the Press are simply the best in the business. In addition, I want to thank Anthony Burton at the Press, whose guidance and assurance have been indispensable, and who has made the task of assembling this project into a book so much easier. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Susan Cohan for her impeccable copyediting of the manuscript, and for her patience, thoroughness, and sense of humor throughout the entire process. Finally, I want to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, both of whom read it with great care and wrote thorough, precise, and meaningful reports that guided me throughout the revision of my writing.

Finally, I am extremely fortunate to have a group of friends here in Toronto (my acolouthia, as Roland Barthes would say) who sustain me intellectually and emotionally to a depth and degree that they might not even realize or imagine. They have made my expatriated life here in Canada feel like home, and in a whole myriad of innumerable ways this book would not have been possible without their unwavering faith in me and in it. They have been patient and understanding every time this project drew me into the quiet and solitude of my writing, and they have been there to help me celebrate at those times when it felt as if the words might be worth keeping (and reading). To Ritu Birla, Art Blake, Elspeth Brown, Nicholas Brinckman, Blair Chivers, and Christine Shaw, here is a big arms-open-wide thanks for making me laugh, for dancing with me, and for your unbeatable style, taste, and grace.

This book is dedicated to Bill Haver, from whom I have learned the most about the thrill and risk of thinking. The chapters of this book cannot approximate the essay form that he has perfected. Not so long ago I discovered that I share with the contemporary American short story writer George Saunders the same two simple yet not always easy to come by things that evidently we both need in order to write: a quiet place of solitude, and being happy. This book, then, is also for Jeff Reinhart, with whom I share a life (and more) and who over the past year has made it possible for me to write, by making me happy every day.

Introduction

SHARED-SEPARATION (DECISION, BETWEEN, US)

Separation is the spacing of existence, and is, by definition, never solitary but always shared. It is what affirms that for anything to exist, there must be more than one thing, each one separated from each other one, together partaking in the spacing between that is opened up by separation. Existence, therefore, is relational and shared, and hence is always to be understood as coexistence. Not the coming together of solitary and autonomous beings, but existence as sharing or partaking in separation as the there is of existence—the spacing (there) of being (is) together. If separation is the spacing of existence, and if existence is always relational and shared, then sharing in separation is the praxis of coexistence—of being-together.

Any reader familiar with contemporary continental philosophy will no doubt recognize these to be some of the principal terms in which French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has conceptualized the sense of existence, and in particular, his emphatic use of the French verb partager, meaning to share and to divide (or separate). This single word holds together and in tension sharing and dividing and thereby semantically affirms their mutual resonance, which for Nancy, and for us here, in the reading of his work and in the accompaniment of his thought, is the resonance of a syncopated rhythm of the spacing and sense of existence that is sustained by art, aesthetics, and ethics.

In being shared, separation is also the spacing of decision. Nancy stated this most clearly when he wrote as part of a comment on Heidegger’s thrownness: "The separation, the stepping-out-of-one-another, is at the same time, Entscheidung, decision: it is the decision of Being, the decision of nothing into being or to being . . . the whole of existence as an ensemble or partition of singular decisions."¹ Which is not only to say that existence consists of singular decisions, shared (an ensemble) and separated (partition[ed]), but that each singular decision, as Nancy has also noted, is the decision of existence and further that in its singularity, it is the decision of existence not once and for all, but each time, in and as the finite singularity of existence infinitely open in its decision.

Yet further and in a way that underlines the entire study to follow, to the extent that existence is separated in its spacing, and decision is always the decision of shared existence, then the decision of existence is always the decision of shared-separated spacing, and shared-separation is the very spacing and praxis of decision (again, not decision itself but here, now in each singular decision). This study is dedicated to thinking decision as a space, specifically as the spacing of shared-separation that is sustained in and as ethical and aesthetic exposition and presentation, or what I will refer to as the scene.

By theorizing the ethics and aesthetics of being-together as scene of shared-separation, this book not only asserts that the sense of coexistence lies in its spacing and decision, but this theorization also has the potential and intended effect of displacing the binary terms of sameness and difference that continue to prevail as the most dominant modes for theorizing sociality and relationality (including in much queer theory and cultural studies today). In other words, this study professes to be neither an ontology nor phenomenology of existence nor a philosophy of decision and its event.

The semantic resonance of shared-separation is to be heard, read, thought, and felt in each of the three principal words that make up the title of this book, and that the book sets out to deconstruct. Decision, between, and us: shared-separation is the source of the sense of each of these terms and all that they might mean, as well as the relations between and among them. The contention is that the secret of our ethical sociality is our sharing in the separated spacing between us, including in the sense that the Latin for secret translates as separation and dissociation, which is also to say, distance and exteriority.

Separation, then, is the word that can be said to be secretly kept and passed between us, as the very password, passage, place, and sense of being-together. Or as Nancy put it, "The between-us is, very precisely, the place of the sense of sense, passage in every sense of the term: transmission and transgression, the step from one to the other as well as the step from the other beyond the one."² Passage and step meaning that what separates us and that we share is the outside, such that our coexistence is always a coexposure. Being-with is always being with-out, in which the hyphenation writes the scene of being-together as the sharing-with of sharing-out in the separated spacing (hyphen) between us. In a word: decision.

The exposure that we share to the outside is not the partaking in a common ground, substance, or exchangeable object (i.e., community, communion, or commodity), but corresponds, if you will, to the extra of partes extra partes (parts outside of any parts of a greater whole or totality). Such that the spacing of the extra is the part that is not a part (e.g., a fragment), and it is this extra-spacing—its excessivity—that lies no place other than just between us.

Following Maurice Blanchot, death is the name given to this shared separation and exposure, precisely in terms of its immeasurable distance and proximity—the name for our common incommensurability.

When I speak, death speaks in me. My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition of all understanding.³

The scenes discussed in this book are scenes of being-together to the precise extent that they have been staged through various forms of retreat and withdrawal via the force of finitude: erasure, intrusion, erotics and sex, neutral, offering, and death. It is argued that these scenes do not represent but rather present, exhibit, and performatively open up and stage the distance that separates us, but . . . also . . . prevents us from being separated. While we might stop short of stating that these scenes contain the condition of all understanding, I do want to argue that they operate as ethical and aesthetic sustainings of the spacing of separation that is shared as the decision between us.

As in my previous and in my next book, the principal locus for my thinking here continues to concern a sociality of a shared sense of—and non-traumatic relation to—withdrawal, retreat, loss, and death. An infinite sharing right up to the limit of what can be shared, an exposure to finitude that remains absolutely inappropriable (death, my own and that of every other one), and where thereby is maintained the incommensurable as our common measure—a sociality of finitude, and of existence as being-with-out.⁴

Art and Ethics

In this study, I argue that separation is the archi-spatiality or spaciousness of existence; the aesthetic is the technique and praxis of standing in this groundless ground, or as Nancy has put it: the art of standing, what permits in general having or maintaining a standing in, including and especially, where there is no longer any support or firm basis for whatever stance there is;⁵ and the ethical is the decision of this stance, of taking and suspending the step that in its separation is the scene and decision of existence. Art and ethics are two principal measures of our incommensurability.

As originary spacing of existence and sense, separation is the deconstruction of the origin, the Kantian a priori of space, and other metaphysical ways of conceiving the spatiality of the fore-. This might even be evidenced in the etymology of the word, given that the prefix se- means without or apart; and parāre means to make ready or to prepare. I think we can draw at least three theoretical inferences from this: (1) to separate is to act without or apart from preparation; (2) to prepare is to make ready prior to, or apart from, making ready; or (3) which is sort of a combination of the first two, and is the one that I am inclined to favor: that without, apart (se) is the spacing by which any preparation is not a matter of making ready or of being ready-made, but is already unmade. Where preparation and beginning anew would now consist of withdrawal and retreat, as when John Cage, in speaking of his close friend Robert Rauschenberg, said that in order for the artist to begin again, he erased the de Kooning drawing (see chapter 1). Or when the scene as fore- (yet perhaps without being primal or principal) means that the bed is already-unmade (see chapters 3, 4, and 5), the sheet of paper is already the scene of erasure (chapters 1, 2, and 6), the scene of sexuality is already unconsummated (chapters 3 and 5), and the ellipsis is the punctuated end, already extended out (chapter 5).

Which also means that separation-as-preparation would, in its own right, put the prefix pre of preparation under-erasure, to the extent that separation, now conceived as the archi-spacing and force of the fore-, is not simply preliminary as though initial and that which is necessarily to be overcome or eclipsed, but rather is the spacing that needs to be sustained. As the spacing of being-together, separation is what needs to be sustained by being shared-out. So we might name and define that thing called existence as neither res cogitans (thinking thing) nor res extensa (extended thing), but res sēparāre—separated thing.

Inheriting the double valence of the French word retrait, each of the scenes in this book is the retracing of retreating and withdrawing and, as such, is taken to be various ways of posing the question that Nancy asked nearly twenty years ago, in his seminal essay Being Singular Plural:

The retreat of the political and the religious, or of the theologico-political, means the retreat of every space, form or screen into which or onto which a figure of community could be projected. At the right time, then, the question has to be posed as to whether being-together can do without a figure and, as a result, without an identification, if the whole of its substance consists only in its spacing.⁶

The anonymous, someone(s), the intruder and the stranger, retreating aesthetics, already-unmade, naked sharing and naked image, neutral mourning, the invitation and the offering: these are some of the figures and phrasings that are taken up in this book and that might begin to serve as various responses to Nancy’s question, providing us with a series of scenes and senses as to what it might look like, but also how we might partake and participate in being-together without figure, identification, representation, project and projection, destination or enclosure.

What Nancy was asking after, and what his work remains committed to thinking and enabling to remain open, is a praxis of sense and existence in which neither are given, revealed, or represented (poiesis), but remain to be created, invented, and decided, through a praxis that is also technē and ars. Yet a technique or an art that in the retracing of its retreating, and the retreating of its retracing, is an aesthetics of the already-unmade (which then is also the retreat and withdrawal of the given and the readymade).

An already-unmade (or retreating) aesthetics is not the poietic production of being or becoming, but the inoperative praxis (Nancy) and worklessness (Blanchot’s désoeuvrement) that is unbecoming, and thus offers the sense of existence and its place, neither as ready-made (yesterday, in the past) nor as yet-to-be-made (tomorrow, in the future), but as already-unmade here and now at every decisive moment. On the largest and yet most singular scale, it is not only a matter of making the world, but of unmaking it as well, and therein lie the political, ethical, and aesthetic questions of existence.

The Time of Scenes

With Scene: An Exchange of Letters (1996),⁷ longtime collaborators Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy published a series of letters written to each other in which they resume an ongoing debate regarding their respective readings of Aristotle’s Poetics, and in particular the issue of the proper translation and understanding of the notion of opsis as: scene, presentation (Nancy), or spectacle (Lacoue-Labarthe) in the ancient Stagirite’s theory of drama and stage production. The theoretical discussion and debate between the two philosophers primarily concerns a question centered around the issue of the figure, figuration, and figurality, one that Nancy summarized as follows: if there is a scene, is there, then, always a figure, and vice versa, if there is a figure, is there, then, always a scene/stage? It is an extremely engaging and important discussion, and one that within the context of this introduction cannot receive the kind of detailed analysis that it deserves. For our purposes, it might serve us well simply to note that Lacoue-Labarthe privileges enunciation and recitation (reading aloud) of the dramatic script, and largely abhors, in his words, the rest—props, costumes, even lighting, not to mention acting, often pitiable or grotesque, of the actors—singers, all of which seemed to [him] accessory.⁸ Contained in this resistance is Lacoue-Labarthe’s commitment to a poetics and aesthetics of defiguration, and in its anti-spectacular/sensational critical perspective, his position is closely aligned with Aristotle’s own famously discreet and one might say Apollonian poetics of aesthetic restraint.

Nancy, on the other hand, while also not endorsing the spectacular, nonetheless will insist that where there is enunciation, there is always a body, writing, and performance—i.e., staging and mise-en-scène—going so far as to write at one point: "‘Body,’ meaning already a stage."⁹ For Nancy, the principal question is the stage itself, which is to say, the spacing of performance and the performative, and further and more precisely, as the opening of the exterior as such, of ‘outside’ as ‘outside.’¹⁰ The exposure to this opening, exterior, and outside is the very exposure that, as we noted above, is shared in the separated spacing (the with) of our being-together. Nancy envisions this in terms of an extremely complex line of division . . . the line of the ‘body,’ the outline of the ‘figure,’ the delimitation, as well, of the ‘stage.’ One could well show how such a line organizes everywhere an intimate division and synthesis of all our identities and individualities.¹¹ For Nancy at the time, this was a scene of ontological figurality that he had already presented just a few years earlier, in his book Le sens du monde (1993),¹² in which he speaks of a

sort of configuration of space [that] would not be the equivalent of a political figuration. . . . It would trace the form of being-to-ward in being-together without identifying the traits of the toward-what or toward-whom, without identifying or verifying the to what end of the sense of being-in-common. . . . Of being-in-common, it would operate a transitivity, not a substantiality. But still there would remain something of the figure, something of the outline.¹³

As we have already encountered in the second section of this introduction, three years after the publication of The Sense of the World, Nancy will go further and, without exactly asking it, will present the question as to whether being-together can do without a figure, and, as a result, without an identification, if the whole of its ‘substance’ consists only in its spacing. If the figure or outline had been understood to be the remnant, vestige, and trace of the retreating that the body performs and stages in its finite singularity among, between, and around other bodies, then scene might be the name for the spacing and transitivity of being-together (the to or toward of shared

exposure), which perhaps even does without a figure and identification or any other substance, including the subject (and intersubjectivity). As Lacoue-Labarthe notes, there are two stages, of which one is assuredly the stage of the exhibition of figures and the other, which I do not know how to name, is in withdrawal of the exhibition. I want to suggest that what I outlined above begins to describe this other stage, and in this book I propose naked image of naked sharing as the name for this scene of withdrawal and retreat of figures and partaking in this exposure to the outside.¹⁴

As Nancy makes clear, beyond or other than representation, presentation is not the presentation of but simply is the there is of existence in and as its opening to the outside. This is the archi-spatiality briefly discussed above, and what in chapter 4 I theorize, along with Nancy and Freud, as the fore-scene, in which the archi-/fore- is the originary spacing of sense/existence as division and separation, ensemble and partition. Further, it is an opening to the outside, an exteriority that in the distance of its proximity can be said to lie right around, and thereby allow us to say that the spacing of the fore-scene is at once archi- (originary) and peri- (around).

In our thinking of each decision between us as a scene of aesthetic and ethical exposure, we replace formalism with the performative and, taking our cue from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, more specifically with the peri-performative, as that which lies prior to, around, and in lieu of the performative utterance, enunciation, exposition, or presentation.¹⁵ In doing so, it is as though we have joined Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of the scene in Aristotle’s Poetics with our reading of Aristotle’s Peri Psuches, his treatise on, or literally around (peri-), the soul, which, as I discuss in chapter 3 on Nancy’s writing on a posthumously published note by Freud, enables us to think of the soul or force of life and death as the extension and exposure of the body—its opening around and to the outside.

In its three-part division and in the most schematic of terms, this book begins with anonymous scenes of drawing and erasing, intrusion and encounter (part 1: Name No One), moves to naked images and scenes staged by (as) outstretched and extended bodies in their shared naked exposure (part 2: Naked), and then to scenes of exposure to the anteriority of loss, withdrawal, and retreat in photography and among the offering of and partaking in the infinite expenditure of readymade things (part 3: Neutral and Unbecoming).

Inspired and informed by Derrida’s early essay Freud and the Scene of Writing, chapter 1, Name No One Man, is an extended theoretical meditation on Robert Rauschenberg’s famous work Erased de Kooning Drawing, from 1953. I argue that by withdrawing drawing by drawing with erasers, Rauschenberg not only performs the scene of drawing as scene of erasing, but through this very workless technique and praxis draws the with of shared-separation, such that it can be said that in this work, drawing and erasing, Rauschenberg and de Kooning are incommensurably drawn together, and the spacing of decision is sustained. Following Derrida’s deconstruction of the trace, erasure is archi-writing/drawing’s originary force of intrusion and interruption, in which the seemingly blank sheet of paper and its non-evidentiary and non-signatory traces are here theorized as the fore-scene of being-together.

In the contemporary era of hyper-securitization via identification and its technological verification, we also need to think about paper as a space of exile and of disappearance, along the various axes of these systems of surveillance and documentation. Omnipresent and ordinary substrate and material support of the trace, we know that paper is, nonetheless, something more than simply a nominally ephemeral medium (just a piece of paper), while at the same time it tends to be overlooked and made nearly invisible, something like a fore-surface that infinitely recedes into its ground. It is in this way that paper marks the shift from modernity and things, to scenes, including scenes of writing, erasing, and other modes of shared-separation, such that what we are calling the decision between us might be further understood as the paper (non-contractual or otherwise) between us. Paper is a body and can come to constitute a corpus, and with this comes the notion of paper, its body, being sacrificed in order to become pure medium. But