“ But will it signify ”, she asked worriedly, “ will it signify over there? “

The question asked within an art world context and relating to the signifying possibilities of some travelling artwork, suddenly seemed very dated. When, I wondered, had we stopped worrying about whether works from ‘over there’ might or might not be able to fully communicate themselves ‘over here’ or vice versa. When did we begin to assume a fluidity of circulating meanings in which not only is the signifier detached from the signified, but in which the enunciative had also taken over from the interpretative. When had such a shift occurred between meaning anchored in contexts and representational strategies and the circular operations of singularities and cross-cultural translations?

Logics of Enmity

This uneasy moment, this moment of The War Against Terrorism, hardly seems an auspicious one to wade into the attempt at an imaginative discussion of the theoretical potentiality that counters the polarity of the state vs. terror. Even less so for an argument which would like to base its practice on an alternative reading strategy of terror and would like to try and think it as an alternative geography, as a counter cartography of subversion. One can just see heads shaking, murmurs of concern about the need to condemn these terrible acts, one remembers the incredulous responses to KarlHeinz Stockhausen’s somewhat frivolous remarks about acts of terrorism functioning as great avant garde works and one also remembers with discomfort the sight of jubilant responses from those who thought the attacks justified. This uneasy moment it seems, calls only for condemnation, for moral judgement, for the repudiation of possible justification. The languages of this moment are those of negation, of security, of closure, of enmity. That other moment of possibility in which we might rethink the relations of global power, the moment that seemed so necessary in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 seems to have been passed by without return, has hardened into the current mournful topography of unavoidable enmity with all those so easily homogenised under the aegis of ‘terrorists’.

undone

A theorist is one who has been undone by theory.

Rather than the accumulation of theoretical tools and materials, models of analysis, perspectives and positions, the work of theory is to unravel the very ground on which it stands. To introduce questions and uncertainties in those places where formerly there was some seeming consensus about what one did and how one went about it.

In the context of a question regarding what an artist might be, I would want to raise the question of what a theorist might be, to signal how inextricably linked these existences and practices might be. The old boundaries between making and theorising, historicizing and displaying, criticising and affirming have long been eroded.