ALIC E C R E I S C H E R I N THE STOMAC H OF THE P R E DA T O R S WR I T I NG S AN D C OLLA B OR ATION S E DITE D BY P UJAN K ARAM B E IG I saxpublishers 5 TA B LE O F C O N T E N T S INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 by Pujan Karambeigi T H E P A C K A G E T O U R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 E N E M Y - L O V E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 S H O W D O W N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 R E F O R M M O D E L S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 PROUDHON, THE SOCIETY O F D E C E M B E R 10 TH A N D T H E C L U B O F B A D D E B T O R S . . . . . . . . . . . 51 T H E G R E AT E S T H A P P I N E S S P R I N C I P L E P A R T Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 LETTER S F ROM CANDIDE S T E P S F O R F L E E I N G . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 F R O M W O R K T O A C T I O N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 UNIVER SALISM IN ART AND THE ART O F U N I V E R S A L I S M . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 A N G E L S O F C E N S O R S H I P I . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 6 TA B LE O F C O N T E N T S A N G E L S O F C E N S O R S H I P I I . . . . . . . . . . . .121 A N G E L S O F C E N S O R S H I P I I I . . . . . . . . . . 127 WHE R E AN D WHY YOU S H O U L D N ’ T R E A D A N Y F U R T H E R . . . .131 E S TA B L I S H M E N T O F M A T T E R O F F A C T S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 IN THE STOMACH O F T H E P R E D A T O R S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 A LABOR CAMP I S N O W C A L L E D V I L L A G E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 H I S M A S T E R ’ S V O I C E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 R AT H E R , T H E Q U E S T I O N I S WH ETHER YOU R E A L LY W A N T T H A T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 KEYRING, TEETH, BONES A N D F U N N Y M O N E Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 C A B I N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 F A R E W E L L P R A Y E R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 ANNIVER SARY MARCH F O R R O S A L U X E M B U R G . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 LI ST OF TH I NG S TO P R E PAR E F O R T H E F A T E S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .189 A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .191 E D I T O R I A L N O T E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .193 9 INTRODUCTION R EAD I NG LE S S ON S , PART T WO by Pujan Karambeigi The stage is set: Three actresses are sitting on chairs next to three heaters, with one empty small chair and one small heater behind them and various commodities floating from the ceiling. Jenny, Luise, and Jacqueline hold the texts they are going to read in their hands, waiting for their cue to repeat the words written on the paper. The story is centered around three women working in a factory who win a package tour to Greece in the lottery. Not getting to enjoy their all-inclusive holiday, they instead take the factory to the beach and continue to theorize their conditions from the air-conditioned hotel room, whispering into the heater: Because time abandoned by labor is empty, because it passes unmeasured and unpaid, because we ourselves were now in this time, standing at the airport, like stale air, motionless, moorings lost and without being transformed into money, and, as opposed to film stars, feeling very mortal. […] Value is that which remains, non-value that which decays, and time is the startling of those who are conscious. Time is when one notices how something flows away.1 The speech, neatly distributed across the three characters, could be described as the acting out of a value theory. That is, it might feel like sitting in one of those Marxist reading groups that started 1 Alice Creischer, “The Package Tour,” in In the Stomach of the Predators— Writings and Collaborations by Alice Creischer, ed. by Pujan Karambeigi (Vienna: saxpublishers, 2019). p. 25. 10 INTRODUCTION to pop up in the 1960s and were already losing their charm by the 1970s.2 But we are seated in the Kunstraum Wuppertal, it is 1989, and we are watching the premiere of Alice Creischer’s The Package Tour. The consequence of auto-didactically reading the first volume of Capital while jobbing in factories to make a living, Creischer’s play seems like an educational exercise— ultimately the attempt to coalesce these two types of experience, namely theoretical and phenomenological, into one lesson. I know what you expect me to say now: This is not a book about lessons. Or, even better, I could say it is a book about how to teach a good lesson, a book about how not to fall into the infamous traps of Jacques Rancière’s ignorant schoolmaster: [He] confused people to be educated with a flock of sheep. Flocks of sheep don’t drive themselves, and he thought it was the same for men: certainly they had to be emancipated, but it was up to enlightened minds to do it, and for that, all ideas should be put in common in order to find the best methods, the best instruments of emancipation. Emancipation for him meant putting light in obscurity’s place.3 Long-forgotten or suppressed memories of teachers might resurface now: literally repeating information from the textbook until your head is numb; looking into your eyes and seeing only raw, uneducated material have to form. As much as Rancière’s description of the ignorant schoolmaster appears similar to the character many had to endure growing up, his counterproposal for the “emancipatory master” seems somewhat simplistic and optimistic, almost formulaic.4 Referring to the French teacher and philosopher Joseph Jacotot, who taught painting and piano while being completely incompetent in both, Rancière argues that the emancipatory master is not defined by being knowledgeable. In fact, the content of a lesson seems completely irrelevant and “one can teach what one doesn’t know” as long as the student “is obliged to use his own intelligence.”5 For Rancière, 2 Cf. Philipp Felsch, Der Lange Sommer Der Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: FISCHER Taschenbuch, 2016). Esp. 102–133. 3 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992). 115–116. 4 Ibid. 12. 5 Ibid. 101, 15. 11 INTRODUCTION bad lessons try to convey information, and good lessons establish a situation in which the student is free to learn whatever they want. The form of a lesson is completely detached from its content. However, such a formalism would be only half the truth, or might even miss the point. The twentytwo chronologically ordered essays, poems, performance scores, plays, prose pieces, and critical analyses by the artist, activist, and writer Alice Creischer that are collected in this book offer different trajectories regarding the composition, texture, and scope of a lesson. Starting with fictional texts in the mid-1980s, Creischer soon began to write scores for her pioneering performances and, together with her partner Andreas Siekmann, ended up becoming one of the early champions of the second wave of Institutional Critique that formed in the early 90s around Texte zur Kunst and springerin. A decade later, and often in collaboration with Siekmann, Creischer would begin to expand this institutionally critical grammar towards issues surrounding globalization and transnational structures of exploitation. Notwithstanding these transitions, she would continue to experiment with the structure of a lesson, constantly intermingling and confusing its form with its content. Creischer’s poem series Establishment of Matter of Facts (2012– 13) stages such a conjuncture by juxtaposing working conditions under global capitalism with a specific form of reading. Each poem is based on reports circulated by various nonprofit organizations. For instance, Every Day C—SYNGENTA recounts the working conditions in fields in Burkina Faso owned by the chemical group Syngenta. Another one, Every Day B—Total, depicts the inhuman working conditions in Myanmar enforced by the multinational oil and gas giant since 1992. However, far from rendering these first-person accounts simply transparent, Creischer opted to encrypt the reports, with the first sentence reading: “In 1992, TOT2L 2G1ii9 WITH THi GOniNMiNT OF Mt2NM21 / TO CONnit N2TU12L G2S F10M THi OCi2N TO TH2IL2N9.”6 Creischer’s intervention into the appropriated text thus consists in formulating a code used for encryption (“Every Day” is the code for the Establishment poems) and forcing readers to decode every letter. 6 Alice Creischer, “Establishment of Matter of Facts,” in In the Stomach of the Predators—Writings and Collaborations by Alice Creischer, ed. by Pujan Karambeigi (Vienna: saxpublishers, 2019). p. 143. 12 INTRODUCTION Of course, to claim that reading is a fundamentally political activity dates back to early avant-garde practices and their long bygone utopias. One of the early inquiries into these politics is Yve-Alain Bois’ Reading Lessons (1979) where he characterizes how the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky dreamed of transforming the world through reading: “It must, by forcing the reader to work, elicit another kind of reading, serve as a model for the transformation not only of production but also of consumption, reactive reading […], it must transform the reader.”7 For Bois, the Reading Lessons of the Russian avant-garde were supposed to turn the reader into a conscious subject through experiments in typography, layout and spacing—Bois’ politics of reading were limited to the level of form. The point here is not so much that the Establishment poems rehearse the utopian optimism that circumscribed the Russian avant-garde in the early 1920s—they don’t. They do, however, propose reading as a political activity. As a tedious, laborious, and tiring deciphering of inhuman working conditions, a decoding of global structures of exploitation, reading the Establishment poems is an exercise in confronting a political reality one is implicated in but rarely gets to see. In insisting on texts written and/or told by marginalized workers at the political peripheries of global capital, Creischer highlights that reading is as much a formal experimentation as it is a confrontation with the content of exploitation. If Creischer’s lessons confuse the structural hierarchy between content and form, they aim to stage a struggle. Beginning in 2002, Creischer and her partner Andreas Siekmann started to collaborate with various Buenos Aires-based collectives such as Colectivo Situaciones, a collaboration that would result in the Letters from Candide (2002–03) and in the project ExArgentina (2006). The letters depict the recent economic crisis in Argentina in relation to the “new forms of articulation of action on uncertain ground” that came to emerge as the “state no longer organizes meaning; the market dissolves meaning.”8 Though not their first “militant investigation,” it was one of the first projects in which 7 Yve-Alain Bois, “El Lissitzky: Reading Lessons,” October 11 (1979). 118. 8 The letters are quoted in Creischer’s exhibition brochure for It is March, 24th 2000 which is compelling to be prospective that took place at Culturgest in Lisbon in 2017, curated by Miguel Wandschneider. 13 INTRODUCTION Creischer and Siekmann explicitly tackled questions pertaining to global capitalism.9 The idea was to work in various collaborative formations to uncover the relationships between local uprisings and global structures of exploitation and oppression. Moreover, these militant investigations were eager to define an opposition, to formulate the existence of a struggle. A consistent trope in her work, Creischer already defined the structure of struggle in her early text Enemy-Love (1989). Appropriating a so-called “war-atlas” written in 1915 about the developments on the front in World War I, Creischer writes: The enemy is nothing but a receptacle in which what is loved most is collected. We want to be equal with the enemy. Only that which is equal with itself can be equal. Therefore, no equal can tolerate a second equal next to him. We shall kill the enemy. Otherwise we couldn’t be equal with him. We shall take his position as if he had never existed and possess what is loved most. We shall be so equal with the enemy that we shall hardly be able to remember ever having been anything else but the enemy.10 The central problem in Creischer’s Enemy-Love is the difficulty of identifying the enemies, to understand their position and distinguish them from collaborators. This is not a simple reiteration of a Neo-Darwinian position, a survival of the fittest.11 Rather, as Creischer and Siekmann make clear in one of the many critical writings they have been collaborated on since the 1990s, “militancy should not be universalized but instead directed against our surroundings.”12 Moreover, militancy must omit its xenophobic structure and “its discourse of race war,” they argue in reference 9 The first mention of militant investigations is in a play Creischer wrote for her solo exhibition at the Secession in Vienna in 2001, which was informed by Detlev Hartmann’s thinking, an important figure of the German Autonomia movement. See Alice Creischer, “The Greatest Happiness Principle,” in In the Stomach of the Predators—Writings and Collaborations by Alice Creischer, ed. by Pujan Karambeigi (Vienna: saxpublishers, 2019). p. 65. 10 Alice Creischer, “Enemy-Love,” in In the Stomach of the Predators—Writings and Collaborations by Alice Creischer, ed. by Pujan Karambeigi (Vienna: saxpublishers, 2019). p. 28. 11 This tradition has been resurrected most recently by Jordan B. Peterson. For a response see Harrison Fluss, “Jordan Peterson’s Bullshit,” in Jacobin, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/02/jordan-peterson-enlightenment-nietzsche-alt-right. 14 INTRODUCTION to Foucault’s depiction of the theories of perpetual war of the eighteenth century.13 Militant investigations imply turning things on their head, and carefully considering what Silvia Federici could have meant when she insisted that the emergence of capitalism “was a counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that emerged from the anti-feudal struggle.”14 That is, instead of hallucinating about the (im-)possibilities of an exodus, instead of daydreaming about the all-encompassing capitalism that has obliterated the utopia of an outside, Creischer’s lessons are about localizing this seemingly monstrous and ghostly enemy. They are about pinning the counter-revolution down to concrete words and events in order to define the enemy and regain the ability to struggle. Publishing a selection of twentytwo texts that were written between 1989 and 2019—many of which have never been translated into English or published outside of their initial exhibition context—not only aims to render the manifold transitions of the reunified German (artistic) landscape visible. Moreover, the selected texts problematize Creischer’s constant struggle for a vocabulary to analyze and criticize, to comment and intervene in the social fabric she finds herself surrounded by. Rather than neatly discriminating between form and content, between emancipation and information, Creischer’s lessons suggest various ways of inscribing one into the other, of juxtaposing opposing poles. 12 Alice Creischer, “Where and why one should not continue reading,” in In the Stomach of the Predators—Writings and Collaborations by Alice Creischer, ed. by Pujan Karambeigi (Vienna: saxpublishers, 2019). p. 138. 13 Alice Creischer, “Where and why one should not continue reading,” in In the Stomach of the Predators—Writings and Collaborations by Alice Creischer, ed. by Pujan Karambeigi (Vienna: saxpublishers, 2019). p. 133. 14 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). 12.