Biennale Gherdëina 7

Worldmaking
by Adam Budak

Worlds, like words, multiply in the narrative of lives we conduct. One after another, and the one next to it, they proliferate in an organic process of symbiosis and growth. American philosopher Nelson Goodman underlines the world’s collective self-referentiality, its interdependency, and plurality:

“If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference; but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say?”

Nelson sees the world as a fabric of interwoven narratives; our role is to retell those narratives. To find the strategy—the way to do it—is what constitutes and determines our task:

*”We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world or of worlds. (…) The many stuffs—matter, energy, waves, phenomena—that worlds are made of are made along with the worlds. But made from what? Not from nothing, after all, but from other worlds. Worldmaking, as we know it, always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is remaking.”*¹

Such is a paramount premise of the 7th Biennale Gherdëina: to research and challenge our ability to contribute to an active process of the world’s continuous (re)making while the world we inhabit finds itself at its apparent limit—in a critical, precarious moment of sociopolitical turmoil, ethical vacuum, and immunological crisis. The principle of responsibility and care, as well as civic responsiveness and the humility linked to it, come forth as agencies of our daily poiesis, defining the urgency to act and engage.

“We are in this together,” a chant frequently uttered during the recent months of the pandemic limbo, reminds the founding statement of philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s politics of affirmation. We are this world’s participants, its tender narrators² and the passerby³, listening to the poets—the Shelleyan “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Ultimately, we are the interpreters of this world and its vast fields of land and thought, both real and imaginary. In this together.

The 7th Biennale Gherdëina’s main title —a breath?—a name? embraces a line from a poet of “the world’s unreadability,” one of the most important German-language authors of his time, Paul Celan (1920–1970).⁴ French philosopher Jacques Derrida analyses the poet’s poetics and politics of witnessing, describing Celan as a poet of singularity, of solitude, and of a secret encounter. The poet bears witness and

*”the poem speaks, even if none of its references is intelligible, none apart from the Other, the one to whom the poem addresses itself and to whom it speaks in saying that it speaks to it. Even if it does not reach the Other, at least it calls to it. Address takes place.”*⁵

The act of address, of naming, sets up an ethical stance. Derrida voices the call to responsibility on Celan’s line: The world is gone. I must carry you (Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen), following French philosopher Maurice Blanchot’s elaboration of responsibility as a paradox of subjectivity, which involves withdrawal and accountability:

*”My responsibility for the Other presupposes an overturning such that it can only be marked by a change in the status of ‘me,’ a change in time and perhaps in language. Responsibility, which withdraws me from my order—perhaps from all orders and from order itself—responsibility, which separates me from myself (from the ‘me’ that is mastery and power, from the free, speaking subject) and reveals the other in place of me, requires that I answer for absence, for passivity. It requires, that is to say, that I answer for the impossibility of being responsible—to which it has always already consigned me by holding me accountable and also discounting me altogether.”*⁶

In their discussion on dispossession as the indication of the performative in the political, philosopher Judith Butler and anthropologist Athena Athanasiou emphasize the Derridean claim that responsibility requires responsiveness, and consider self-poiesis as an (ethical) relational category which embraces self-care and self-crafting.⁷

“Responsibility itself is a scene of political contestation,” the authors note, contextualizing the social situation of a responsive self and framing a question of ethical relation. *”The politics of performativity entails an avowal of the power relations it contests and depends on; it encompasses ‘bearing responsibility,’ as it were, for the power configurations in which and through which we respond to each other.”*⁸

Linking dispossession—a troubling concept which constitutes the processes of subjection—with disposition, as a presumed readiness towards the other, Butler and Athanasiou reflect on what makes political and ethical responsiveness possible:

*”The condition of dispossession—as exposure and disposition to others, experience of loss and grief, or susceptibility to norms and violences that remain indifferent to us—is the source of our responsiveness and responsibility to others. Performativity attends to precarity, then. It works to heed the claim of precarious life, through responsiveness, understood as a disposition toward others. In fact, ‘disposition’—with all its implications of affective engagement, address, risk, excitement, exposure, and unpredictability—is what brings performativity and precarity together.”*⁹

Disposition in a world of decline becomes a moral obligation, a duty; it too constitutes an act of resistance in precarious life on the search for collectivity and belonging. The world is gone. I must carry you.

Paul Celan suggests “a breath” and “a name” as formative gestures of the world we are responsible for; the elemental acts of breathing and naming indicate a genuine political stance of subjects and communities. Naming raises questions of identity, legitimacy, matters of inheritance, and signature. Breathing—a breath: the first one and the last one, and their continuous unfolding; the beginning and the end, and the in-between, life itself, and death, its companion. A resistance, an endurance, a resilience.

“We embraced each other by our names,” thus the philosopher of the French Renaissance Montaigne defines friendship in his legendary essays. In a study on naming in Jacques Derrida’s and Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy, theorist Christian Moraru argues that

*”names are […] no longer ‘metonymies’: they do not just ‘stand for’ what they name, for particular identities. Names constitute, ultimately are identities. The name has become its own, living referent, flesh and blood, body.”*¹⁰

Naming is reinforcing; it is an instrument of both coercion (marking the destinies of the characters) and freedom (providing new possibilities for liberation). Derrida thoroughly analyses the paradoxes of naming, pointing out the traditional “name of the father” being perceived as the epitome of oppression, as well as considering the naming’s ability to exceed language and disrupt hegemony—a bold act of making a name for oneself, like the builders of the Tower of Babel. Similar ambiguity concerns Derrida’s understanding of a name as a gift. Analyzing the act of nomination in Jean Genet’s writing, the philosopher observes that

“when Genet gives names, he both baptizes and denounces. (…) There is no purer present, no generosity more inaugural” in offering somebody the gift of a name. Giving somebody a name is giving them *“nothing, no thing, yet such a gift appropriates itself violently, harpoons, ‘arraigns’ [arraisonne] what it seems to engender, penetrates and paralyzes with one stroke [coup] the recipient thus consecrated.”*¹¹

Naming gains an ethical performative stance. In another text, Derrida realizes that the gift of name(s) can be corrupted; a name can make the person disappear, it can make them *“drowned in the waters of his name, in which everything is engulfed.”*¹² He concludes in Glas:

*”to give a name is always, like any birth (certificate), to sublimate a singularity and to inform against it, to hand it over to the police.”*¹³

As such, with its polyvalent nature, naming is considered a powerful weapon as a political category of visibility which contributes to the politics of recognition. Butler and Athanasiou appreciate recognition as an empowerment and a transformative condition that enables constant reinvention of new forms of political subjectivity. The authors emphasize:

*”One of the most crucial challenges that we face today, both theoretically and politically, is to think and put forward a politics of recognition that addresses, questions, and unsettles the common perception of the state or other apparatuses that monopolize power as a natural mechanism of recognition.”*¹⁴

In The Meridian¹⁵ Paul Celan defines poetry as “a turn-of-breath.”

*”Who knows, perhaps poetry travels its path—which is also the path of art—for the sake of such a breath turning?”*¹⁶ the poet adds. A spinning weal of breath is the cycle of life and death, its necessary “accessory.” Derrida points out the breath’s primacy:

*”Without breath there would be neither speech nor speaking, but before speech and in speech, at the beginning of speech, there is breath.”*¹⁷

Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi confirms this thesis. For him, breath and our contemporary condition of breathlessness consider the metaphor of poetry as the only line of escape from suffocation.¹⁸ Poetry, understood as “the excess of semiotic exchange,” has the power to reactivate breathing, thus to emancipate and self-empower. Bifo’s wordplay of in-spiration, re-spiration, and con-spiration, concluding with expiration, foregrounds breathing’s lifelong master narrative, its poetical rhythm (after Hölderlin), as well as its political tempo that orchestrates the breathing’s scope between spasm, suffocation, and death—the ultimate gesture of living.

A devastating cry for help, *“I can’t breathe,”*¹⁹ uttered by a victim of police brutality and extreme violence, became a massive chant of resistance and protest, enacted by millions of demonstrators worldwide. The impossibility to breathe—the breathlessness—began to signify oppression and injustice, the uttermost abuse of power and aggression.

The political turmoil overlaps with the current pandemic crisis, which affects our immunological system and respiratory condition, exposing vulnerability in our organisms. Restrictions necessary to prevent the spread of a deadly virus impact individual and collective behavior, raising social responsibility as well as awareness of the natural environment.

We are in this together, as elemental gestures of breathing and touching become potential threats. The frailty of nature has been drastically uncovered; in such times of uncertainty, resilience appears as a way to challenge precariousness and test basic solidarity, necessary to obey the “new normal” of communal practice. Social distancing and isolation impose new laws of social relation, and the ecology of others receives a renewed meaning.

In a recent conversation, Franco “Bifo” Berardi links the pandemic with unrest in America, suggesting that insurrection may act as a form of societal respiration and liberation.²⁰

Elaborated at a moment of unprecedented crisis, the 7th Biennale Gherdëina asserts itself as a force appropriating “insurrective” affirmation as a strategy to deal with uncertainty. Rosi Braidotti states:

*”We need to borrow the energy from the future to overturn the conditions of the present. It’s called love of the world. (…) Picture what you don’t have yet; anticipate what we want to become. We need to empower people to will, to want, to desire a different world.”*²¹

Affirmation is a situated and relational practice, ethically grounded, based on collective responsibility and the belief that negative effects can be transformed. It ignores dualisms between self and other and all binary oppositions, including nature/culture and human/non-human. We face all of this together, the philosopher reminds us, for her approach assumes a global relationality and proposes a more egalitarian relationship with and among species. Developed along the vectors of affirmation, Braidotti’s Spinozist political economy is a therapeutic tool for posthuman and post-anthropocentric times, with a zoo-geo-technical connection, ecologically grounded and technologically mediated.

With regard to ecological politics and the drive to decolonize nature in art, activism, and environmental studies, art historian and cultural critic T. J. Demos²² recognizes the influence of these ideas on contemporary art and activism: “For Braidotti, this movement of a ‘return to the earth’ offers a new transversal alliance between species and posthuman subjects, opening unexpected possibilities for the recomposition of communities, for the very idea of humanity, and for ethical forms of belonging.” These activist-artistic practices also take shape as forms of social engagement, collective mobilization in public space, and ambitious proposals for a different natural-cultural world, as well as for the reinvention of contemporary art.

The alarming state of emergency in our world drives humanity out of any safe zone and requires urgent global action. The Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe²³ defines the real task: “If Covid-19 is the most spectacular expression of the planetary impasse in which humanity finds itself today, then it is nothing less than the task of rebuilding a habitable Planet Earth, to restore to all of us the breath of life. We must reclaim the lungs of our world in order to forge new ground. Humanity and the biosphere are one. Isolated, humanity has no future. Are we able to rediscover that each of us belongs to the same species, that we have an indivisible connection with the entire vital force? Perhaps this is the last question to ask ourselves before exhaling the final breath.”

¹ Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Harvester Press, 1978, pp. 3–6.
² Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2018.
³ Achille Mbembe, Ethics of the Passerby, in: Necropolitics, Duke University Press, 2019.
⁴ Paul Celan, Die Niemandsrose, 1963.
⁵ Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, Fordham University Press, 2005, p. 33.
⁶ Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, University of Nebraska Press, 1986, p. 25.
⁷ Judith Butler & Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Polity Press, 2013, p. 66.
⁸ Ibid., p. 104.
⁹ Ibid., p. 105.
¹⁰ Christian Moraru, We Embraced Each Other by Our Names, Names 48, no.1, 2000, pp. 49–58.
¹¹ Jacques Derrida, Glas, University of Nebraska Press, 1986, p. 6.
¹² Jacques Derrida, Pas, p. 98.
¹³ Derrida, Glas, p. 7.
¹⁴ Butler & Athanasiou, op. cit., p. 83.
¹⁵ Paul Celan, The Meridian, 1961.
¹⁶ Celan, The Meridian, p. 180.
¹⁷ Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, p. 110.
¹⁸ Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Breathing. Chaos and Poetry, semiotext(e), 2018.
¹⁹ Eric Garner (2014) / George Floyd (2020).
²⁰ Franco “Bifo” Berardi, conversation with Deja Crnović, 22 June 2020.
²¹ Rosi Braidotti, Borrowed Energy, Frieze 165, 12 Aug 2014.
²² T.J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature, Sternberg Press, 2016.
²³ Achille Mbembe, The Universal Right to Breathe, Critical Inquiry, 13 April 2020