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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.