WRITING TOGETHER “NOTHING IS POSSIBLE”

Kelsey Brod, Katia Schwerzmann

Workshop of the DFG Research Network “Versammeln”

I. “NOTHING IS POSSIBLE”

The project “Nothing Is Possible” was about exploring what happens—on a sensory and conceptual level—when one does nothing. It was a kind of social and aesthetic experiment. We sought collaborators at a non-profit science research park close to Durham, North Carolina, called “Research Triangle Park.” This research park maintains its non-profit—meaning tax-exempt—status thanks to a very minimal contribution to the surrounding community: it offers a coworking space called “Frontier” with free internet. This space is designed for freelance workers who are part of the gig economy. These workers hustle their way from one job to the next in a state of perpetual precariousness. Beyond free internet, working at Frontier gives them the legitimacy of having an “office” outside of their private living space.

During a presentation at Frontier, we solicited coworkers interested in collaborating on “doing nothing” during one hour. (By the way, a similar project was launched a few months after we started, at the Kunstakademie in Hamburg.) We let these co-workers set the price for the said hour of doing nothing and abstained from setting any expectation regarding what nothing is, or what they should do during this hour. Perhaps to our surprise, it wasn’t easy to find collaborators willing to be paid for doing nothing. For instance, as we interviewed potential collaborators, several of these “job candidates” took issue with being paid without having to be productive:

How much would you ask to be paid to do nothing for an hour during your workday?” Answer: “It depends who’s paying? If my employer paid me to sabbath -> (rest) for an hour during the workday, I wouldn’t ask for more than what they’re already paying me to work. If someone outside of work paid me to not work while I’m supposed to be working, it would be much more (not sure what price I’d put on it) since I would be risking my reputation and job to not work.

This experiment was a means for us to challenge productivity and its moral valuation, to reflect on how wages are set, and how surplus-value is extracted in late capitalist societies. It allowed us to put Duke’s social and economic capital in circulation beyond the limits of the institution. No sooner had we finished this social experiment than Covid-19 broke out and a vast amount of the U.S. population was stuck at home, forced to do nothing. Covid-19 became the large-scale version of our experiment. It allowed us to see how attention is freed when there is much less labor to be done. Suddenly, there was space for seeing and feeling what had been left out of the perceptual frame for so long, namely injustice: not only as a philosophical concept but also as the lived, quotidian experience of the U.S. Black and brown population. The killing of George Floyd by the police in front of the cameras—something that happens on a quasi-weekly basis in the United States—suddenly appeared inacceptable to a vast number of white people stuck at home. Within a few days, tens of thousands took to the streets on the side of Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

II. PRACTICE OF THINKING TOGETHER: THEORETICAL PREPARATION

A. Study—Working Against University as a Program for Individualization

What we did during the “Nothing Is Possible” experiment shares similar traits with what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have elaborated under the notion of “Study.” To Harney and Moten, study is not what the student does in order to be ready to sell their workforce inside or outside academia. Rather, study is the activity of being affected, of letting oneself be affected by others—as the condition for working or doing together. Study is contrary to the academic project of individualization. To Harney and Moten, the figure of the student is a prime example of an “affected body” (Da Silva), possessed and dispossessed by the language and practices of others. The University’s job is usually to bring students to overcome this “immaturity” in order to turn them into self-determined individuals ready to join the workforce.¹ Harney and Moten understand the university as a place where everything goes against collective, collaborative production of knowledge.

The concept of study should be replaced in a larger abolitionist framework. The concept of abolition has experienced significant transformations during the past two decades. While the term originally served to describe the abolition of slavery, it now defines a movement against a set of institutions that perpetuates to this day structures of subjection similar to slavery, which Angela Davis calls “the prison industrial complex.” It includes prisons, police, the justice system etc. Abolition doesn’t solely mean putting an end to these institutions; rather it implies changing society to such a degree that these institutions become superfluous. Abolition is destruction through the creation of a new society.

One of the central arguments in Harney and Moten’s reflection in The Undercommons is the idea that we are connected to each other through “bad debt”; a bad debt is a debt that can never be repaid—contrary to the “good debt” that functions as “credit,” that has value and must be paid eventually. While the goal of late capitalist societies is to turn bad debt into credit, tying debt to the cycle of capital and privatization, Harney and Moten insist on the necessity of maintaining bad, unpayable debt as a means of socialization. This kind of bad, unpayable debt is what ties us to one another. It is the common of the Undercommons. From the perspective of bad debt, studying means doing things with each other, doing things for each other, so that we are always indebted to each other. Study is a way of assembling that is not limited to the context of the university. It is a form of sociality. For Harney and Moten, assemblies always entail a level of intellectuality. And intellectuality, on the other hand, is immediately social. Harney and Moten point, for instance, to the “intellectuality” of practices of assembly like dancing, singing, working together etc. In that sense, study could be a fruitful concept for us to think about the political-intellectual potential of all kinds of assemblies and to reflect on what we are doing when we are doing research together. More concretely, and with our work of common knowledge production in mind, study could mean thinking with and through others, rather than thinking in place of others (like in politics) or against others (as is too often the case in academia).

B. Relational Studies

No mourning of the impossible revolutions can get in the way of the human strikers because human strike is not a mission, nor a project or a program. It is the gesture that makes legible the silent political element in everything: women’s lives, the dissatisfaction of rich people, the anger of privileged teenagers, the refusal to submit to the mediocrity of necessity, ordinary racism, and so on.

Claire Fontaine, Human Strike Has Already Begun.

With the collaborative project “Nothing Is Possible,” we sought to go beyond the critique of institutions and its mainly discursive formulations towards critical making. One of the shortcomings of a critique of the institution is that it is part of the reproduction of university as an institution. “It allows us to experience ourselves as if we are outside of the institution while remaining firmly ensconced in its liberal narrative of self-valorization.”² In the early stages of the project, we became aware of our problematic position as Duke collaborators regarding any project that claims to question the institution from the perspective of disconnected observers. We, as professors, students, and affiliated researchers, are the body of the institution; each day we accept to participate in these identities, we organize and reform the institution into what we simultaneously study away from.

With this understanding of our position, we turned toward performance art that interrogates sites of positionality and the relationships in-between. We looked at artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who cooked Thai food in galleries for his audience. We looked at the work by Santiago Sierra that employs immigrants and refugees to sit in galleries, illegally paid at minimum wages. We also looked at performances by Marina Abramovic, such as The Artist is Present which aims to produce immediate, intimate connections with strangers. All of these works create an aesthetic of relationships that might be uniting, rearranging, antagonistic, or alienating.

We agreed that accepting ourselves as part of the institution of the university, with the power to employ participants and offer social (intellectual) capital to the Research Triangle Park was the first, strategic step to reforming ourselves away from the university, while at the same time accepting the impossible position of being inside and outside of it. This position, as problematic and difficult as it is, seems the only one that allows a transformation of the institution: displacing or opening its borders, challenging its conception of knowledge-making and productivity. With our object of study, doing nothing as a bureaucratic and technological dispositive, we refused to make within the existing, institutionally acknowledged boundaries, and we asked the co-workers at Frontier to do the same within the context of their workday.

III. THE PRACTICE OF WRITING TOGETHER

As doing nothing became a generalized condition under the pandemic, we felt that our project might allow us to reflect on this new global context. The challenge was to produce a document that embodied our individual and collective thinking, turning the social experiment into the material of our reflection. We, as professors, postdocs, doctoral candidates, wrote together on the same day, at the same time, in the same shared Google Doc over Zoom. When we started writing, everyone went silent. Over the course of our short meeting, we ended up writing fifteen wild and rich pages.

What is characteristic for this text is that we agreed to keep a floating I. For this reason, the text is marked by a certain degree of deindividualization: the “I” functions as the indexical mark of unidentified bodies of differentiated status within the institution. These people coexist under the I in the text. They accept to be taken for each other: the professor for the student, the postdoc for the professor. This way of writing together goes against the grain of the University as a mechanism of individualization. Someone’s I becomes part of me. I, in return, accept to be identified with a text I might have written differently. I became other. The deterritorialization of the I ingresses institutional hierarchies between professor and student: the authority of the authorial stretches along general sentences, contracts into the particular “Is,” and gets reabsorbed into another. This collectivization differs from the “we” of the natural science papers where the consensus is established in advance and where the roles are highly codified through the order of the names at the beginning of the paper.

Of course, writing together isn’t an easy process. We experienced different levels of participation and engagement. These varying levels of participation followed varying consensus on procedure. Often, only a fraction of the group enacted what had been discussed during meetings.

We decided to not name authors but agreed that the disappearance of the authors shouldn’t amount to the disappearance of who got the work done. This is why we kept a log at the beginning of the book.

How to describe writing-together as a cultural technique with its chain of operation, or—as we called it—its algorithm. Such an algorithm didn’t preexist the act of writing together. As is often the case, how to assemble emerges out of doing the assembling. It entails a certain amount of improvisation—accepting the unplanned, unexpected, unforeseeable. The performance of writing together brings something to existence that couldn’t exist before or without it. It is something else than the sum of its parts. It happens differently every time.

IV. CONCLUSION

Our “Nothing Is Possible” project was a “theoretical practice” in which we tried to do “practical theory.” We could call it “Relational Studies.” Contrary to the relational aesthetics, in which the artist is responsible for the rearranging of relations, we let go of our authorial predetermination and stable “I”s. We used strategy, agreeing to speak the language of the institutions, and adopting their habitus in order to repurpose it. We reappropriated the tools of the University—the language of the institution, its functioning, its internal structure, its bureaucratic rules. In a way, we stole these tools, modified them, repurposed them, and turned them against their hegemonic function. Under “Relational Studies” we sought to produce a relational, embedded critique of institutions, and of knowledge production, that acknowledge our position in the institution, our dependence on it and on its legitimacy, in order to transform it, even if only a little bit.