Molly Nesbit
Light in Buffalo

Thank you. We can start the film. The title of my talk is “Light in Buffalo”. I am an art historian, so I’m showing you pictures. There will be light in Buffalo, but not before a bath of grey sky in Poughkeepsie. It is 1971. From the bath soon, now it is possible to speak of the concrete life of philosophy and the concrete life of art, which is to say the real time of concepts and images as someone might see them, in life, in reality, from the outside, philosophy and art standing separately in a same nameable landscape. Ideas and works of art will be taken now in my lecture in a succession of scenes. The space is shared.
Here it is in fact May Day 1971. Gordon Matta-Clark has proposed to live for a day in a tree—his work invited for an exhibition at Vassar College. “Originally,” he wrote, “to be a survival exercise wanted a paid vacation in a tree. Nipped in the bud—a dance. The climbing body keeps going up its movements conquer living space. Waiting-wrapped-suspended in canvas bags climbers relaxing in the wind. And the seasons go on dance at the end of it string will hoist aloft a growth module filled with migrating weeds another explosive spring.” A short violent thunderstorm interrupted the vacation, but did not bring it to a close. He also made what he called a “Celestial Drawing” of the tree. And on the back of that drawing there is a note, in which he writes: “I think of the tree climb as an aerial dance during which I overcome the discomfort of empty space by installing a resting place in which my body will be supported while aloft.” So, the explosive spring becomes an explosive rest. The minds, looking up to the tree dance were full of other things, thoughts of the fighting (not only in South-East Asia, its 1971, remember? But in the Middle East, in Ireland, in Bangladesh, the list was long). The minds were full of impending exams, maybe wondering about the survey of Andy Warhol’s work that had opened at the Whitney Museum the night before, maybe tipping toward summer to come. The minds were full of knowledge, the knowledge that was coming sideways into the universities. Knowledge out of school overshadowed much.

Now, at Vassar that May, the minds had not long before, in March listened to a lecture by Hannah Arendt. And her topic in that March lecture was “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” Arendt wanted to insist upon the vital importance of thinking. And her talk set other explosions in motion. Thinking was vital because thoughtlessness led to evil, to becoming-Adolph Eichmanns, she explained. First however she felt it important to define this “thinking,” especially given the rampant talk of the death of metaphysics. She put paid to that—what they were all witnessing, she explained, was the collapse of the distinction between the sensual and the supersensual. The tree-watchers could remember this lost distinction as the climbers hung and swayed in the sky. The lecture had, after all, been delivered in the great stone chapel visible behind the tree.
Philosophy is in reality here a memory and an argument. So more of the argument. None of this, Arendt had continued, would affect the basic need to think. It is something to be demanded from every sane person, complete with the warning that thinking is never finished, over and done with. She then pointed to all the difficulty—the way thinking necessarily interrupts one’s other activities, requires withdrawal and the endlessness of it, the way thinking ravels and unravels, like Penelope’s veil. She conjured with Socrates to make her points sharpen, she said: “The Athenians told him that thinking was subversive, that the wind of thought was a hurricane which sweeps away all established signs by which men orient themselves in the world. It brings disorder into the cities and it confuses the citizens, especially the young ones. And though Socrates denied that thinking corrupts, he did not pretend that it improves” All this she told them. And she ended with a long charge. Something like a demonstration. So it’s long, but it’s important, so I’m gonna read it at length:
“For the thinking ego and its experience, conscience, which “fills a man full of obstacles”, is a side effect.” Hannah Arendt declaimed. And she went on: “It remains a marginal affair for society at large except in emergencies. For thinking as such does society little good, much less than the thirst for knowledge in which it is used as an instrument for other purposes. Thinking does not create values, it will not find out, once and for all, what “the good” is, and it does not confirm but rather dissolves accepted rules of conduct. Its political and moral significance comes out only in those rare moments in history when” and then she quotes upon:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,”
When
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

She is quoting Yates’ poem “The Second Coming”. She goes on: “at these moments thinking ceases to be a marginal affair in political matters. When everyone is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action. The purging element in thinking, Socrates’ midwifery, that brings out the implications of unexamined opinions and thereby destroys them—values, doctrines, theories, even convictions—is political by implication. For this destruction has a liberating effect on another human faculty, the faculty of judgment, which one may call, with some justification, the most political of man’s abilities. It is the faculty to judge particulars without subsuming them under the general rules which can be taught and learned until they grow into habits that can be replaced by other habits and rules. The faculty”, she continued, “of judging particulars (as Kant discovered it), the ability to say, “this is wrong,” “this is beautiful,” etc., is not the same as the faculty of thinking. Thinking deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand. But the two are interrelated in a way similar to the way consciousness and conscience are interconnected. If thinking, the two-in-one of the soundless dialogue, actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its byproduct, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances. The manifestation of the wind of thought is no knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this may indeed prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments”, she is an optimist, “when the chips are down.”

So, I am doing a little show-and-tell here. I’ve shown you art, I show you philosophy. We go on. Thinking and moral considerations were incongruous but fell together when things fell apart; they hinged on the particular points, the things seen. Keep the particular in mind now, for obviously the question of the limits of aesthetics is becoming moot. The questions before us are not general, but as specific as the feet, the ropes, the thunderstorm that interrupted that dance, the leaves, the memory of Hannah Arendt’s words. What if there were no limits to aesthetics?

The performance itself was unmarked: it had no time frame, no set beginning or end, no audience to speak of. It was an event infiltrated by other events: the weekend before this May Day 500,000 people had marched on Washington to protest the continuing Vietnam War. That weekend, that May Day students were occupying the administration offices in Vassar’s Main Building. The next month the Pentagon Papers detailing the secret history of the American build-up in Vietnam would be published by the New York Times. Gordon Matta-Clark himself had been busy circulating a public letter of protest, he was protesting the absence of free speech in Brazil and urging an American boycott of the Sao Paolo Biennial. And so this Tree Dance, set against the sky, was set into something bigger than itself, while being uncoordinated, on time and late, existing as a presence and as hearsay or report. This amorphousness leads us to the question of the use of this dance. How can one grasp the dance, combine the morning sight with a March philosophy charge into the tempest of the day and days to come? For in the early seventies, everyone could expect to have their work overtaken by events. Outcomes were unpredictable. It was one of those not exactly rare moments when the chips were falling down. Philosophy has its real time, just as art has its. Sometimes the two coincide and confront one another. Usually, almost always, when it happens art and philosophy are asked to match. But then there are the other exceptional times and this, in the early 70s is one of them, when philosophy is not a match for art, or vice versa. This because neither is a match for history itself. This because both activities are overtaken by history to such a degree that philosophy and art stay separated, confronting one another, sharing a situation shaken by incongruity and shift. This leads us to the practical and historical question of how to see the combination in Poughkeepsie then or in Moscow today this morning. Is it a contest? Is this a premonition? For in the United States much of what took place in the years immediately following 1968 has resurfaced now, today, becoming strangely pertinent and sharp. An ominous repeat in return.
In the United States, Gordon Matta-Clark’s work has become a talisman, he is about to get a huge retrospective, as has Robert Smithson’s. [Can I have the first image please?] And the reason this work becomes a talisman has everything to do with their ability, with Gordon Matta-Clark’s ability, with Robert Smithson’s ability to acknowledge collapse. So, let us set an historical stage: the players, artists and philosophers, come and go now in Ohio and in Buffalo. In January of 1970, so the year before the tree dance, Robert Smithson partially buried a woodshed at Kent State University in the middle of Ohio. Twenty truckloads of earth piled on the woodshed until the beam cracked. In May, four students at Kent State were killed by the National Guard as they marched, like so many others that month, to protest the American invasion of Cambodia. Kent State would forever after, still is associated with bloodshed; by virtue of its place, the partially burried woodshed would forever after be tied to those events too, as if the cracking were prescient. But Smithson had already understood that no thing in art was isolated. He had hitched his sights to entropies.
Sometime that year in 1970 he wrote a note that allowed the philosophy of Michel Foucault to sift into his thoughts. He seems to have been reading Les Mots et Les Choses, called The Order of Things in English. Could painting, a thing, be opened using dialectics instead of ordinary modernist art criticism? – that was his question. He was seeking openness and he was writing, and this is now the note, a part of it: “Nature is not subject to our systems. The old notion of “man conquering nature” has in effect boomeranged. As it turns out the object or thing or word “man” would be swept away like an isolated sea shell on a beach, then the ocean would make itself known. Dialectics could be viewed as the relationship between the shell and the ocean. Art critics and artists have for a long time considered the shell without the context of the ocean.”
He was re-writing, you’ve probably realized this, the last line of the The Order of Things, the one in which “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”
But The Order of Things, Les Mots et Les Choses, had a new preface for the English reader. Foucault began it, the preface by saying by saying that he was writing a set of “directions for use.” “I should like”, he said, “this work to be read as an open site. Many questions are laid out on it that have not yet found answers; and many of the gaps refer either to earlier works or to others that have not yet been completed, or even begun. But I should like to mention three problems.” He knew that these problems were the perennial ones that no philosopher could completely close down, much less solve. Here they came again: the problem of change, the problem of causality and the problem of the subject.
And what of these problems? This discourse, Foucault noted in instructions for use, “is so complex a reality that we not only can, but should, approach it at different levels and with different methods.”
As Robert Smithson was reading these words and thinking not only of them but of his Partially Buried Woodshed [can I have the next, please] and the great Spiral Jetty he laid down into the Great Salt Lake that spring, completely independently of all this, in March of 1970, Michel Foucault, fresh from the upheavals in Paris and the new philosophy department in Vincennes, and newly named to the College de France, made his second trip to the United States. He had been invited to teach at SUNY Buffalo state university, it’s just next to the Niagara Falls. He found various platforms. The university in Buffalo was in the throes of student and faculty strikes, so Foucault spoke off-campus; he endorsed SDS; he gave an interview to the Partisan Review in which he sketched his efforts to make a philosophy of events: he compared Buffalo to Vincennes, American unrest to French unrest and ended with a critique of the Communist Party and a call. Free ourselves from conservatism, both cultural and political, he called: this could mean unmasking the bourgeois rituals in order to transcend them; this would be the real theatre. “This, he’s told the Partisan review, this theater would involve this, quote: “it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair, to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa), one must put “in play”, show up, transform and reverse the systems which quietly order us about. As far as I am concerned, that is what I try to do in my work.”
In Buffalo proper he brought with him a group of lectures and he gave them. There is the one on the author, there is two on the Marquise de Sade, there is one on Manet and one on Bouvard and Pécuchet. These lectures in Buffalo put forward another stage of the open site spreading its arms in several directions at once. They took up the injunctions at the end of his new book, The Archaeology of Knowledge, L'archéologie du savoir, injunctions from a work in progress searching for different use of knowledge, one that looked at its practices hard, asked for more inspection, more detail, more specificity. Asked it to look outside, or acknowledge the outsides. Asked it not to discriminate between objects—it was clear for example, that images and paintings would be equal players. In Buffalo, he continued this work. How did the open site, this open site, allow for philosophical work and works of art to grasp the torrent of incongruity, the injustices? the torn hopes? the achievements?

About the Bouvard and Pécuchet lecture we know nothing.

Before Foucault left the country, to go back to France, he made a special trip south to Mississippi to see the land of William Faulkner, the man, you know, who wrote Light in August.
He was back in Paris when on May 4th [could I have the next?] in Kent State the student protest over the American invasion of Cambodia, part of a great wave of protests that spring, was met by a group of National Guardsmen who decided to shoot, hitting thirteen students and killing four of them. That summer one of those wounded students, was asked if he would give some advice to President Nixon and he said to President Nixon through the reporter “Stop any repression, which is already being readied. Remove all the troops from Southeast Asia as soon as he can. Clean up our lakes and rivers without fooling around before we all die and give the poor people and the black people in this country a chance.” None of this was new and sad to say, none of it today seems old. On the day that Foucault gave that Manet lecture the New York Times had run an editorial entitled “The Hypocrisy of Power,” saying of the government that “the gap between their moral lectures and their political actions is wider than the Mississippi Valley.” And in Vietnam, of course, the war was raging on. In Paris the government had outlawed the Gauche Prolétarienne and more.But let us not rush ahead. These stages in Buffalo and Paris should not be merged in one long platform of a scene. The events on and around them were distinct as well. What of these positions, these faces facing off, these minds filled and filling, these confusions as things and people fell and rose? And, to return to the questions with which we began, what of the role of philosophy? What of the role of art?
Foucault had designed the open site in Buffalo for an American audience; and for that occasion the perspectives and mix of his thinking had been recalibrated and differently lit. Providing more directions for use? On these occasions outside France he, the philosopher, was certainly more direct. In 1977 when writing a preface for the English edition of his friends Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipe (which has been published in France in 1972, but it took five years to get into English). For that English edition Foucault’s preface took the American reader back to the years between 1965 and 70, the years when Vietnam was, as he said, at the gates and inside the walls there was an amalgam of revolutionary and anti-repressive politics, there was a reactivation, he said, of the utopian projects of the thirties. And Anti-Oedipe, he explained to the Americans, could be read as a manual, like an ars, that is to say as an introduction to the Non-Fascist Life. One could take it to everyday life: it was a book for freeing political action from paranoia, for developing one’s own action, thought and desires using techniques of proliferation, juxtaposition and disjunction; it was a book for withdrawing from the old categories of the Negative, Foucault said; it used politics to intensify thought. In many ways this preface returned to the arguments that Foucault himself had already used in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, L’ordre du discourse. And so we turn back to 1970, but now the scene is set in Paris and it is fall.

Foucault gave his inaugural address, L’Ordre du discourse, to the Collège de France that December. He started, without saying so, by wishing for a voice standing there behind him and reciting: “I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens.” They come from the last page of Beckett’s Unnamable.
Was philosophy in its ... proceeding from a fiction? a ghost? a balcony? He continued without pause comme il faut to thank his colleagues, acknowledge his intellectual debts, and reflect upon the opportunity before him. He noted that transgressing the divide between text and commentary could only lead to play or sheer anxiety or utopia. His speech left that door open and proceeded decorously, actually, to examine the order of discourse as he found it. He was, you know, in pursuit of the Will to Truth. Here now was an open site unleashing a long-term research plan. “Let us say”, he said, “that the philosophy of the event should move in the, at first sight, paradoxical direction toward an immaterial materialism.” For the occasion he used every tool in his toolbox.
While preparing his inaugural, he’d written a review of Deleuze’s two new books, Difference and Repetition and Logique du Sens. In many ways this “Theatrum philosophicum,” as the review was called, was a conversation in print with Deleuze about the philosophy of the event and Deleuze’s way of approaching the matter --Deleuze went through passages that became logics of neutral meaning, thoughts of the present infinitive and fixations on mouths. And Foucault approved. He spoke of the need for liberation from philosophical constraints, which perhaps would mean the embrace of stupidity. This was the cue for Bouvard and Pécuchet to make an entrance, an echo of the lecture in Buffalo? But their stupidity led Foucault not to Manet’s painting [can I have the next, please?] but to Andy Warhol’s silkscreened glow, what he saw to be the paradoxical light of stupidity that beckoned from American canned goods, the parted lips and, quote, “the glistening, steel blue arms of the electric chair.” This light was different, immaterial. Except that it was a sudden illumination of multiplicity itself—with nothing at its centre, at its highest point, or beyond it—a flickering of light that travels even faster then the eyes and successively lights up the moving labels and the captive snapshots that refer to each other to eternity, without ever saying anything…” Foucault would use it to announce new storms of thought, a Deleuzian philosophy that was not so much thought as theatre. And Foucault would pull these questions into his inaugural lecture, and borrow this will to theatre, but he was most concerned with the problems that had erupted in the open sites: the material realities of the thoughts and the truths, and the way these material realities interrupted the old rendez-vous of questions and question marks, leaving new questions hanging. To go to work on them he was looking for new tools. He borrowed the grittier techniques of the historians; he expanded his sense of the occasion, the object, the case. This was a time for building and cutting close to the bone. This was a time of Nietzschean materialism. This was a time of trenches and newly excavated finds.
Consider this list: “…a Parisian critic’s careless aside, or a friend’s advertisement in a Dijon newspaper; a novel by Wey or a greater novel by Balzac, an almanac and a caricature, a bloody image daubed on a tavern wall; the worries of a Prefect or the result of a trial at Lons-le-Saunier; political strife at Salins, political quiet in Ornans; Courbet collecting peasant songs, or Courbet at carnival time, whey-faced and black-suited, acting the part of Pierrot de la Mort."
Now, the kinds of excavations Foucault would be led to undertake were not these. He did not turn away from art, but rather toward the problems in the light, to visibility.
His new lists of new objects ran in different directions: to a different use of Nietzsche, for example, and to a practical politics on the street with the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons. This combination of practical politics and historical-philosophical research, as you know, led in 1975 to Surveiller et punir.

But the conditions [can I have the next please] of emergency, collapse and social movement, these conditions of mental ambulance, as Valery Podoroga would say, these conditions have swept through Foucault’s work in 1970 were not peculiar to him or to his work. These were the same conditions that would produce the new materialism in a new chapter of the history of art. And that list I just read you was put together by an art historian T. J. Clark for his book, The Absolute Bourgeois, published in 1973. And there the work of art was placed cheek by jowl next to the stuff of political change after the Revolution of 1848. Here was a time when art could imagine possessing the real symbolic power of the State, although it would have to steal its thunder by contesting the State in public. “Power—no word could be more inappropriate, more absurd, now, when we talk of art,” Clark wrote, which is if anything the reason for his book, he said. “It tries [this book] to reconstruct the conditions in which art was, for a time, a disputed, even an effective, part of the historical process.”

And here there is more incongruity, I’m sorry, and more theatre: for Clark would set up his analysis by following the footsteps of Baudelaire. And he led a new push to build an art history on the sketches left by Meyer Schapiro and Walter Benjamin in the 1930s; but these new art historians in the 1970s would not collect around fascism per se; they studied the aftermath of revolution in the nineteenth century, especially the effects of revolt and political repression visible and invisible in the work of the realists; they too returned obsessively to the work of Manet. All this taking place independently in Paris, in London, in different university locations in the United States and Germany. Historical conditions opened up different ways of seeing paintings. And different ways of seeing power?

Clark focussed on Courbet. The materiality of the paint and the picture in the paint itself led him to The Burial at Ornans, which you see here. He was not much concerned with light, but rather its opposite, the dark, bitumous, tarry opacity in the blacks that swallowed the mourners collecting around the hole in the ground. The pit itself falls out of the bottom of the scene, a rest of that pit that looks increasingly like an explosion. Unless one is looking at the implosions in the blacks. And as Clarks does this, as he lets it sink into the blacks, meaning is not hedged, it is left open and when the painting went on its way from Ornans to Paris the critics found different points of focus, of praise and fury and objection. Even the painting of a master could enact the open site, complete with repression and dissent.
Discourse began to behave like wind. Historical material was and is not to be matched to painting, any more than Foucault would match it to philosophy. This was the matchless situation in the early seventies. And it was from this situation that they all worked and to which we in the United States now return.

[Ok, can we have the video?] It is important to keep the incongruities in all their detail, stages sliding like geologic plates in and around on another, the grind before the quake, a micropolitics becoming a micro-aesthetics although no one was calling it that yet in the early seventies. That this condition was both tearing and gripping at the time was obvious. That it could provide a new base from which to build a consideration of current art and current politics is now clear enough at this present point in the United States. What kind of American stage can I show you today? What kind of consideration do we see in the United States? What kinds of strange new materialism? Is it different? Is it local? The terms we are proposing in Moscow are telling something, as they all add up, about the local limits of our terms and the different purposes. It is possible that the discussion of art and politics in the United States requires the kind of directness Foucault once used. It is clear that the discussion of things there prefers to think either in extremes, wild extremes, or pragmatically and its clear that the historical material is once again heavy with violence.
By way of comparison here is one last stage, it’s my conclusion and it alternates between snow crests [can we have the video, please?] and the gloom of night. It is an American stage being shown by a French artist.
Pierre Huyghe came to the United States in 2003, I think before the war began, to work on several projects which can be said to culminate in the last of them, and this is it, The Journey That Wasn’t, which was finished in 2005. And it shows the real light (it’s night, but it’s the real light) in Antarctica intercut with real, night light in Central Park in New York, both infected by the electric lights of man. The work of art is being struck by both and made by both, because it’s filmed. But this is a work of art that starts from research that lurks backstage: namely, the philosophy and the art with which we began, with non-knowledge zones and non-sites. The Journey That Wasn’t starts even more particularly with a meditation on the two kinds of desert islands, the oceanic and the continental by Deleuze and it starts particularly with a passage from Smithson’s essay on the sedimentation of mind. It references an earthwork by the title Double Negative by Michael Heizer and as you see neither black nor white dominates. The photographic practice never finds its positive resolution—all images are in that way negatives, even the bright ones. This is a double negative in which photographs and their negatives never match. This double negative with no positive wants to leave the dialectic, with all its connotations, behind. The journey left an account which cleared nothing up. They said, their journey would encounter islands and make them disappear, producing non-knowledge zones that would emerge whenever the capacity of language to seize reality would end. The elsewhere remains a story, they said, and the rest is exoticism. And if language, they continued, fails to recount the experience, an equivalence, topologicially identical to the occurrence, has to be invented.

So, no image could recount the matter either. This film is nothing but trouble, a trouble that opens into particulars, into the grind of incongruity, climatic, cultural, in a while, but I think we’ll stop before then, a little bird steps in, a bird that’s both true and false, real and imaginary, it wonders into the scene. And back and forth, in Antarctica, in New York, he steps without a story yet, evidence without a conclusion, particulars without a concept to guide them, they come. The film posits a journey that either wasn’t or will not be completed, a journey in which one is caught between two places, a journey from which one cannot return. And yet, given the times in which we are obliged to see this, historical material crosses these scenes at every step, be they dark or light. The old incongruities activate new incongruities, or are they the same incongruities? explosions? entropies? desires? where is the warmth? what is the warmth? Why can’t we see a cause? Why so black? So white? Is incongruity the pre-condition for a grasp of reality? It is a time of dreadful suspense, and from the perspective of the United States, a time now so full of political movement and illusion that one need not invoke Ground Zero to have the possibility of collapse seem really real. This is the light in Buffalo, actually, shining outside, again. All the questions remain, for they are the perpetual ones, the matchless historical ones and no one can control them. They are and are not only ours. It is one of those times for thinking by any means necessary. Shall we be hopeful? Shall we call in the philosophers? We could use a new set of directions for use, and that’s the end.

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