Performing Stillness: community in waiting

Reflecting on my collaboration with the artist-led project, Open City, in this chapter I explore
the potential of an active and resistant – rather than passive and acquiescent – form of stillness
that can be activated strategically within a participatory performance-based practice. With
reference to Open City’s recent work, I examine how the performance of stillness in the public
realm produces an affect that both reveals and disrupts habitual patterns of behaviour, whilst
simultaneously creating a space into which to imagine – or even produce – the experience of
something new or different. The act of stillness can be understood as a mode of playful
resistance to – or refusal of – societal norms; a wilful attempt to rupture or divert the
trajectory of the dominant hegemonic social order. Stillness presents a break or pause in the
flow of habitual events, whilst illuminating temporal gaps and fissures within which
alternative, even unexpected possibilities – for life – might emerge. Collective stillness thus has
the capacity to exceed or move beyond resistance by producing germinal conditions for a
nascent community of experience no longer bound by existing protocol but instead newly
forming through the shared act of being still. The focus then, is to reflect on how the gesture
of stillness performed within the context of an artistic practice – such as that of Open City –
might offer an exemplar for the production of an affirmative form of subjectivity, by arguing
how stillness paradoxically has the potential for increasing an individual’s capacity to act.
Furthermore, this chapter addresses how the collective performance of stillness might
intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated and navigated, through the
creation of new social assemblages for rehearsing and testing alternative – critical, political
and ethical – formulations of community, produced in and through the act of participation
itself.

My investigation of the practice of collective stillness within the work of Open City will both
build upon and contribute to contemporary debates that are attempting to rethink – and
problematize – the terms of ‘community’, by conceiving its constituency beyond the
determination of already defined geographical, social or economic criteria. Recent
theorizations focusing on those models of participation and collectivity specifically produced
in and through art-practice have typically challenged the ‘common notion of the community
as a coherent and unified social formation’.1 Miwon Kwon uses the term ‘invented
community’ to describe those specific social configurations that are ‘newly constituted and
rendered operational through the coordination of the art work itself,’2 produced through a
form of ‘collective artistic praxis’.3 The ‘invented community’ produced through practice, she
asserts, is both projective and provisional, always:

(P)erforming its own coming together and coming apart as a necessarily

incomplete modelling or working-out of a collective social process. Here, a
coherent representation of the group’s identity is always out of grasp.4

Within Open City’s work, the term ‘invented community’ can be used to describe the
temporary relationships, connections and intensities that bind together diverse individuals
within the specific space-time of a participatory performance. In this chapter, Kwon’s notion

1
of ‘invented community’ is apprehended through the embodied evidence provided by the
work of Open City, in dialogue with selected philosophical and theoretical ideas which address
the shared experience of collectivity or togetherness. While Kwon and other theorists turn to
the writing of Jean-Luc Nancy (specifically ‘Of Being-in-Common’ and The Inoperative
Community) in an attempt to redefine community, my interrogation of collective stillness
operates primarily through the prism – of an affective reading – of Spinoza’s Ethics and his
conceptualization of ‘bodies in agreement.’ Bringing the work of Open City into dialogue with
this particular philosophy of ‘collectivity’, I reconsider how new configurations of community
could be actively produced through (art) practice, whilst questioning the specific critical
properties of the ‘invented communities’ that might emerge from the shared act of stillness.5

Open City: Performing Communities

Documentation of Open City postcards produced as part of nottdance07 (Nottingham, 2007).

Open City was established in 2006 by artists Andrew Brown, Katie Doubleday and Simone
Kenyon, and has since involved collaboration with other practitioners and theorists (including
myself). It is an investigation-led artistic project that attempts to draw attention to how
behaviour in the public realm is organized and controlled – and to what effect – whilst
simultaneously exploring how such ‘rules’ – even habits – might be negotiated differently
through performance-based interventions. Open City’s projects often involve inviting,
instructing or working with different individuals to create participatory performances in the
public realm; discrete art works that put into question or destabilize habitual patterns and
conventions of public behaviour. For example, during nottdance07 (Nottingham, 2007) Open
City worked with members of the public to produce a series of public performances that
considered how different codes of public behaviour might be explored through observation,

2
mimicry or as a form of choreography; framing the spaces of the city as an amphitheatre or
stage upon which to perform, hide or even attempt to get lost. Individuals were invited to
participate in choreographed events, creating a number of fleeting and partially visible
performances throughout the city. During this first phase of activity, I was invited to produce
a piece of writing in response to Open City’s work – to be serialized over a number of publicly
distributed postcards – which would attempt to critically contextualize the various issues and
concerns emerging from within their investigative activities. Six postcards were initially
produced which brought my serialized essay together with a specific time-based instruction
written by Open City such as, ‘Day or night, take a walk in which you deliberately avoid CCTV
cameras’ or ‘On the high street during rush hour … suddenly and without warning, stop and
remain still for five minutes … then carry on walking as before’.6

I have since collaborated with Open City (Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday) on a practice-
based research project entitled, Interrogating New Methods for Public Participation in Site Specific
Projects (Japan, 2008) that investigated the affective capacity of different speeds and intensities
of individual pedestrian activity in the public realm.7 In this project, we explored how
performed stillness and slowness could operate as tactics for rupturing or disrupting the
homogenized flow of authorized and endorsed patterns of public behaviour. Through action-
research workshops and instructions publicly distributed on two newly produced postcards
(No.7 and No.8), Open City invited various individuals to take part in a series of choreographed
participatory interventions – journeys, guided walks, assemblies – and the staging of collective
actions that echoed the visual vocabulary of certain stilled social rituals such as memorials or
protests. Extending this investigation, our more recent collaborative research project Performing
Communities (2009 – 2012) further questions how the practice of collective stillness and indeed
inoperativeness within a performance practice can be used to challenge – or offer an
alternative to – dominant behavioural patterns of the public realm, that are habitually
atomizing and utility-oriented, motivated towards a specific individual goal. Stillness is often
presented as antithetical to the velocity, mobility, speed and supposed freedom proposed by
the various accelerated modes by which we are encouraged to engage with the world. In one
sense, stillness and slowness seem to have been increasingly deemed outmoded or
anachronistic, as fastness and efficiency have become the privileged speeds. Alternatively,
stillness has been reclaimed as part of a resistant – or perhaps reactive – ‘counter-culture’ for
challenging the enforced and increased pace at which we are required to perform. Open City’s
intent, however, is not to focus on the transcendent possibilities – or nostalgic dimension – of
stillness. This position could be understood as a form of escape from the accelerated
temporalities of contemporary capitalism, a move towards a slower and supposedly more
spiritual or meditative existence. Instead, Open City attempts to recuperate the creative
potential within those moments of stillness generated by the accelerated technologies of
contemporary society. They attempt to appropriate and re-inhabit the situational ennui
endured whilst waiting or queuing; the moments of collective impasse controlled by
technologies such as traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, and even – if rather abstractly – the
nebulous experience of paralysis and impotency induced by unspoken societal fears, anxieties
and uncertainties.

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(Re)inhabiting stillness produced in and by contemporary society

Open City’s recent performance-based work has explored the potential within those forms of
stillness specifically produced in and by contemporary society. Their interventions reflect on
how such forms of stillness might be (re)inhabited – or appropriated through an artistic
practice – as sites of critical action or for generating new ways of operating in the public
realm.

Observing Stillness, visual research undertaken as part of the project, Interrogating New Methods for Public Participation in
Site Specific Projects (Japan, 2008)

Interventions often mimic or misuse familiar behavioural patterns witnessed in the public
realm, inhabiting their language or codes in a way that playfully transforms and reinvents
their use, by proposing elasticity or porosity therein. Reinvention emerges as a tactic for
breaking down the familiar into a molten state in order to divert its flow, of affecting a change
in perception. Open City’s performances operate as a form of ‘minor practice’ where in Deleuze
and Guattari’s terms the major language – the coded order of the dominant structure – is
deterritorialized before being ‘appropriated for strange and minor uses.’8 Open City’s practice
can be seen as a refusal of or playing within the terms of various oppressive – normalizing and
controlling – societal rules or conventions through a performance-based practice. In this
sense, the work of Open City can be located within a broader cultural tradition of politically –
and often playfully – resistant actions, interventions and models of collective spatial
inhabitation or navigation. The recent resurgence of interest in wandering and other urban
interventions within contemporary art can be traced back to Surrealist errance or aimless
wandering during the early 1920s, into and through the Situationists’ dérives of the 1950s and
1960s. Open City can also be seen as part of a trajectory of artistic activity – epitomized perhaps

4
by Allan Kaprow’s Happenings – intent on blurring the line between art and life, on drawing
attention to those aspects of everyday reality marginalized by dominant discourses and
ideologies. Performed as part of an artistic practice, non-habitual or even habitually
discouraged actions such as aimless wandering, standing still, even the (non)event of doing
nothing operate as subtle methods through which to protest against increasingly legislated
conditions of existence, by proposing alternative modes of behaviour or suggesting flexibility
within even the most restricted situations. Artistic practice emerges as a site of investigation for
questioning and dismantling the normative social structure through acts of minor rebellion
that – whilst predominantly impotent or ineffective – might still remind us that we have some
agency and do not always need to wholly and passively acquiesce.

Life as a work of art

Through art, life is rendered plastic, capable of being actively shaped or made into something
different to how it might habitually be. The notion of ‘life as a work of art’ is not exclusive to
artistic practice however, for various theorists and philosophers have advocated the necessity
of viewing life as a kind of project or mode of invention, suggesting ways in which one’s ‘styles
of life’ or ‘ways of existing’ might be produced or constructed differently to habitual
expectation. The making of life into a work of art involves the rejection of prescribed and
accepted cartographies of subjectivity in favour of a perpetual – daily and life-long – quest for
new modes of creative inhabitation not yet fully mapped out or declared known. Gilles
Deleuze asks:

What are our ways of existing, our possibilities of life or our processes of
subjectification; are there ways for us to constitute ourselves as a ‘self, and (as
Nietzsche would put it) sufficiently ‘artistic’ ways, beyond knowledge and
power? 9

For Michel Foucault ‘this elaboration of one’s own life as a personal work of art’ can be
understood as the search for a ‘personal ethics’ or ‘ethics of existence,’10 a critical operation
that must be activated through the ‘practice of subjection, or in a more autonomous way,
through practices of liberation, of liberty’.11 Félix Guattari asserts that, ‘one is not before a
subjectivity that is given […] but rather facing a process of assuming autonomy, or of
autopoesis,’12 where subjectivity is produced through ‘processual creativity.’13 Similarly,
architectural theorists Arakawa + Gins argue that subjectivity or personhood is not a
guaranteed property of human existence but rather that ‘to person’ is a verb, it has to be
performed.14 In these contexts, subjectivity is understood as a contingent state of being – or
rather of becoming – that is actively and critically enacted by the individual. However, this
‘project’ has perhaps become more difficult to realize due to the increasingly legislated and
homogenized templates – of social behaviour and citizenship – within which a contemporary
life is expected to operate. Here then, the capacity of the individual to become more human is
constantly jeopardized by the trap of various restrictive and repetitious models for existing in
the world – the insidious logic of habit, the pernicious stranglehold of conformity and
expectation. To conceive of ‘life as a work of art’ is to critically attend to the daily pressures
that homogenize and control lived experiences, and to find new ways of rupturing these

5
habitual or repetitive patterns. It is only through attending to such perils and attempting to
remedy their diminutive effects that an individual might move from a state of resentful
passivity towards true action, from being mobilized by external forces towards self-
mobilization.

Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (specifically understood through the prism of Gilles Deleuze’s writing)
offers an extended pragmatic model – or guide to living – where the actual striving or
endeavour towards becoming more human has the capacity to create the very conditions
whereby an individual body is able to become more. In her analysis of the Ethics, Genevieve
Lloyd states that Spinoza’s central concept is ‘conatus – the “striving” through which a thing
endeavours to stay in being’, where the thing’s ‘endeavour to persist in being is identical with
its very essence.’15 In the Ethics, Spinoza formulates a plan or programme through which the
individual might strive to move from the first order of knowledge – an ‘inadequate’ realm
where existence is suffered blindly and passively as a series of effects upon the body – towards
a second order of knowledge, where the individual is able to develop understanding of and
work harmoniously with the causes themselves. Deleuze argues, that in Spinoza’s terms, it is
only through the construction of ‘concepts’ or ‘common notions’ – an understanding of
causality – that it becomes possible to move from the realm of inadequate ideas towards the
production of ‘adequate ideas from which true actions ensue.’16 The ‘concepts’ of the second
order are produced at the point where the individual is able to rise above the condition of
simply experiencing effects and signs in order to form ‘agreements’ or ‘joyful encounters’ with
other bodies. These harmonious synchronicities with other bodies harness life-affirming affects
whilst repelling those that threaten to absorb or deplete power. For Spinoza, a body is defined
by its speeds and slowness – by the relationship between motion and rest – and by its capacity
to affect and be affected.17 Echoing Spinoza, Deleuze suggests that subjectification does not
refer to a person, as such, but rather describes ‘a mode of intensity’.18

‘Bodies in agreement’

In one sense, Spinoza’s ‘bodies in agreement’ or ‘common notions’ could function as an acute
form of ‘invented community’, a specific configuration of bodies and affects brought
purposefully together through a practice. In Spinoza’s terms, the possibility of a new
configuration of community or collectivity emerges from a ‘joyous encounter’ with other
bodies, on the harmonizing of different speeds and affects. Deleuze argues that Spinoza’s
‘common notions are an Art, the art of Ethics itself: organising good encounters, composing
actual relations, forming powers, experimenting.’19 Whilst Spinoza appears to denounce
affects as inadequate ideas that should be avoided, for Deleuze there are certain life affirming
or joyful affects that can be seen as the ‘dark precursors’ of the ‘common notions’.20 For
Deleuze, the ‘Art of Ethics’ is a life-long project – or making of life into a work of art –
involving the conscious selection of those affects that offer possibilities of individual
augmentation (an increase in power through joy) rather than diminution (a decrease in power
through sadness). Within this Deleuzian-Spinozist model, the affective potential of an art
practice might function in itself as a ‘dark precursor’ of the ‘common notions’, by assembling
augmentative affects that in turn call into being an ‘invented community’ of experience. On
one level, the work of Open City performs an analogous role to Spinoza’s scholia, the

6
intermittent sequence of polemical notations that are ‘inserted into the demonstrative chain’
of propositions within the Ethics which for Deleuze:

Operate in the shadows, trying to distinguish between what prevents us from

reaching common notions and what, on the contrary, allows us to do so,
what diminishes and what augments our power, the sad signs of our
servitude and the joyous signs of our liberations.21

Open City performances draw attention to the habitually endured – or suffered – signs and
effects of contemporary experience; striving to remedy the sad affects of contemporary –
capitalist – society through the production or selection of playful, disruptive or even joyful
interventions, events and encounters between bodies in agreement. The disempowering
experience of being controlled – blocked, stopped or restricted – by societal or moral codes
and civic laws, is replaced by a minor logic of ambiguous, arbitrary and optional rules.

Optional rules of engagement

Open City’s ‘rules’ and instructions foreground experimentation and request an ethical rather
than obedient engagement. According to Deleuze, ‘it’s a matter of optional rules that make
existence a work of art, rules at once ethical and aesthetic that constitute ways of existing or
styles of life’.22 To make existence a work of art through the use of optional rules is akin to
giving life the quality of a game, whose rules are accepted only as points of critical pressure or
leverage against which to work; to be approached consciously by one’s own volition, and
modified or dismantled once they begin to stifle action or no longer offer provocation. For
Open City, societal rules and behavioural codes are no longer used to hold things in place, but
rather become worked until malleable, bent back or folded to reveal other possibilities therein.
For example, in one performance on a busy city centre street, a group of seemingly unrelated
individuals suddenly come to abrupt standstill and at once all turn to look over their right
shoulder towards some undisclosed point of interest. On a separate occasion, a small assembly
gradually gathers, remaining immobile at a pedestrian crossing long after they have been
given authorization to cross the road. Performances that encourage dawdling or meandering
in places of habitual speed and purposiveness – such as the high street or in the flow of
commuter traffic – reveal the fierceness of the city’s unspoken bylaws, as the societal pressure
towards speed and efficiency becomes momentarily disrupted by the event of deliberate non-
production, inaction or the act of doing nothing. Such tactics scrutinize everyday actions to
gain an understanding of their causes, and – in Spinozist terms – it is only by striving for
understanding that the body is able to move from passivity towards true action. Within the
work of Open City, repetition of a singular action creates a thinking space in which to
contemplate causality, whilst modifying the intensity of an action operates as a thermometer
for testing the temperature of behavioural permissibility within a given context. Random acts
of collective stillness produce moments of friction within the smooth, regulated flows of
contemporary society; inconsistent glitches and jolts that call to attention its unnoticed
rhythms and temporal speeds. From a point of stillness it becomes possible to witness
heterogeneous temporal durations operating beneath and within the surface appearance of
the dominant structure’s homogeneous flow.

7
Stillness as rupture and the promise of the new

Within Open City performances, habitual and routine actions become dislocated or detached
from their original purpose; or become repeated and exaggerated – quickened, slowed,
intensified, amplified – until all sense of teleological imperative is wholly evacuated, rendered
absurd. For example, a lone person stops still, holding their hand out to check for rain. Over
and over, the same action is repeated but by different individuals; the authenticity of the
original gesture shattered by the reverberations of its uncanny echo.

Documentation of Open City performance-based investigations (Nottingham, 2007).

Félix Guattari describes how the isolation and separation of a ‘partial object’ or ‘fragment of
content’ from its habitual context, grants it a certain autonomy, which in turn might become
the basis of a new ‘existential refrain’.23 He states that:

A singularity, a rupture in sense, a cut, fragmentation, the detachment of

semiotic content … can be at the origin of mutant centers of subjectivation
[…] of new and unprecedented existential harmonies, polyphonies, rhythms
and orchestration.24

Simon O’Sullivan reflects on how this dual presence of rupture and affirmation is also
produced through a form of ‘encounter’, wherein ‘our typical ways of being in the world are
challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted. We are forced to thought.’25 Referring to the
writing of Deleuze, O’Sullivan asserts:

The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and
thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack. However … the
rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of
a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently. This is
the creative moment of the encounter that obliges us to think otherwise.26

8
For O’Sullivan, certain art practices have the capacity to produce such an affective encounter,
and its dual possibilities of rupture and affirmation. Such an encounter does not only disrupt
the familiar but also creates an interval into which something else – a new refrain – might
emerge.

Open City performances attempt to dislocate habitual behaviour patterns from their originary
stimulus or excitation, creating a gap between – a no longer known or present – cause and its
effect. However, the experience of this delay or spacing does not serve to return action back to
realm of Spinoza’s first order of knowledge – where the body only experiences effects and
remains ignorant of their cause – but rather should be understood as an attempt to create a
gap or space of ‘hesitancy’ within which a form of creativity might emerge. Deferral of
reaction is a gesture of both dissidence and affirmation: it is by not reacting that an individual
might augment their capacity to truly act or be affective, for in Spinozist terms, true action
wavers at the mercy of the emotions or passions, at sensation’s beck and call. Reaction is only
ever action in response, more often a force of habit. Extending the gap between cause and
effect, also serves to shift attention away from deliberate or directly purposeful action towards
the process of deliberation or attention. Referring to the work of Henri Bergson, O’Sullivan
argues that ‘attention’ describes a ‘suspension of normal motor activity which in itself allows
other ‘planes’ of reality to become perceivable […] an opening up to the world beyond
utilitarian interests.’27 For Bergson, attention manifests as a form of disinterestedness that
refuses to react to immediate stimulus – or lack of – but rather remains open to other
possibilities of existence or inhabitation, which remain habitually imperceptible in the realm
of the pure past.28 ‘Attention’ offers a way then of potentially accessing planes of reality that are
not usually perceptible, but that might in turn present creative possibilities for imagining a life
differently. Following Bergson, Deleuze remarks that what is produced in the gap between
pressure and resistance – in the refusal to respond – is ‘creative emotion’.29 Wilful or dissident
forms of non-reaction or hesitation disturb habitual rhythms and unsettle familiar patterns by
creating the spacing of a missed beat, an ‘affective gap’30 or vacuum into which something else
might be conjured – the possibility of new behavioural ‘refrains’.

Stillness as pure potentiality

Rather than being understood in purely oppositional or antagonistic terms, in Open City’s work
stillness functions as a form of ‘event-encounter’ which produces the potential of a break in an
already existing formulation of experience, at the same time as a moment of temporary
suspension or reflective attention within which to imagine or affirm an alternative mode of
being. Stillness operates as a double gesture where it creates a stop or block – a break with the
already existing or with the events of the past – and also a moment of attentive pause, a
future-oriented zone of ‘pure potentiality’. Here, stillness offers the simultaneous possibility of
termination and also of a new beginning. Through the act of stillness it becomes possible to
move from a paradigm of resistance – to the present conditions of existence – towards a
paradoxically affirming species of refusal or dissidence that gives permission for, or even
attempts to bring into being, another future-possible way of life. For Open City, the practice of
stillness creates germinal conditions for the emergence of a critical and affirming form of
subjectivity that in turn is based on the collective experience of being still with others. In a
number of projects, Open City have attempted to synchronize the speeds and affectivity of

9
individuals through performances involving collective action, where individuals become
temporally united by a rule or instruction that they are collectively adhering to. Publicly
distributed postcards and written instructions have been used to invite as-yet-unknown publics
to participate in collective action, setting the terms for the possibility of imagined or future
assemblies. In one example of collective action – at noon on a shopping street – around fifty
pedestrians, suddenly and without warning, stop still in their tracks and remain like this for
five minutes before resuming their daily activity. In another, a group of individuals draw to a
standstill and slowly sway from side to side; their stillness becomes a device for affecting a
block or obstacle that limits or modifies others’ behaviour, creating an infinitely imaginable
ricochet of further breaks and amendments to routine journeys and directional flows.

Recent Open City investigations have turned towards those specific moments of stillness made
possible or enabled by everyday technologies: the inconsistent rhythm patterns of stopping,
pausing or circling about on the spot exhibited by someone absorbed in a mobile-phone call,
text messaging or changing a track on their MP3 player. Familiar coded behavioural patterns
and consumer products become a ‘cover’ or camouflage for rather more subversive forms of
practice. Michel de Certeau uses the term ‘creative consumption’ to describe the invisible and
often unexplored ways that individuals use ‘the products imposed by a dominant economic
order’, focusing on what the consumer ‘makes’ or ‘does’ whilst they are perceived to be using
a given product.31 In recent Open City performances, personal technologies become (mis)used
in order to allow, legitimate or even give permission for the disruption of the flow of
movement within the city.

Documentation of Open City: Still/Walk, public performance as part of the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan,
2008).

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Within the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008) recorded spoken-word instructions
listened to using iPod or MP3 player technology were used by Open City to harmonize the
speeds, stillness and slowness of individual bodies, producing the possibility of a new collective
rhythm or refrain. A group of individuals were led on a guided walk in which they engaged
with spoken instructions that invited participation in a series of discrete individual
performances, culminating in a collective moment of stillness – at once spectacle and space of
self-contained reflection. Stilled, the individuals listened to a further spoken text where they
were asked to reflect on how the act of being still might shift in meaning – from the experience
of a controlling or restrictive mode of enforced waiting, to an act of resistant refusal or protest;
from a site of quiet contemplation to one of idle daydreaming. Technologies of
individualization become hijacked to call into being a tentative community, operating within
an existing community – of contemporary capitalism – but differently to it. The alienating or
atomizing affects of personal technologies – which habitually isolate the individual from their
immediate surroundings and from others around them – become transformed into tools for
producing collective action.

During the Radiator festival ‘Exploits in the Wireless City’ (Nottingham, UK, 2009) Open City
produced a map and a set of recorded instructions that individuals could download onto their
own MP3 players or iPods, in advance of a timed performance – a sonically guided walk
through Nottingham city centre. For this performance, Open City invited individuals to
assemble anonymously at a specified time and location (3pm, Saturday 17 January 2009,
Broadway Media Centre). Potential participants were further instructed, ‘When the clock
reads 15:05:00 press play – on your MP3 player – and follow the instructions on the recording
from that point onwards’. On the day, it was impossible to identify who had assembled for the
performance. However, as soon as the instructions were activated, dozens of individuals
suddenly stood up and collectively exited the building heading for the city streets. Over the
next hour this newly emergent collective were directed through a series of synchronized
actions as they traversed the city centre, their bodies intermittently brought into unity before
collapsing back into individual rhythms; coaxed into harmony before becoming imperceptible
once more amidst the city’s crowds.

Documentation of Open City: Guided Walk, as part of the Radiator festival (Nottingham, 2009).

11
Group formations were orchestrated around moments of collective stillness, points within the
walk where a gathering would assemble and become momentarily stilled, silent. These
performances of stillness created a porous or rhizomatic form of community whose edges
remained difficult to discern, for unsuspecting passersby became unwittingly included within
this new community’s constitution in every moment they fell still. During the intervals of
stillness it became possible to witness the visible evidence – and effects – of a new social
configuration existing alongside, or even as an alternative to, the more habitual or typical
social assemblages operating within the city. These brief moments also served to illuminate
the degree to which both collectivity and stillness – specifically where purpose is undisclosed
or ambiguous – contravene expected patterns of public behaviour, revealing in turn the
societal privileging and preference of purposeful and motivated individuality. Loitering in the
public realm generates a suspicious glance; the gathering of groups – however innocuous – is
perceived as a latent threat.

A space of rehearsal

Open City’s collective performances propose the possibility of new social configurations or
assemblages for rehearsing and testing alternative formulations of sociability, which might in
turn anticipate a kind of Spinozist harmony or accord. However, the nature of the
synchronicities within Open City performances, do not in themselves produce the experience of
Spinoza’s ‘bodies in agreement’, and even have the potential to replace one set of societal
rules within another that become equally adhered to without question. In some performances,
the collective actions have begun to function more like marches or drills, their moments of
stillness akin to the act of standing to attention, as bodies become dutifully gathered into neat
geographical grids and regimented patterns. During a recent performance, one participant
reflected on how she ‘wondered what we would be instructed to do next, slaves as we now
were to the collective hive mind of the iPods’, seemingly welcoming the point when ‘we were
given our freedom from the collective mind and permitted to walk at our own natural
paces.’32 Such performances then, perhaps risk just creating another experience of social
conformity and homogenization, operating as a form of schooling or conditioning that seeks
to create ‘agreement’ by making individuals more alike. So too, it might be possible to read
Spinoza’s conceptualization of ‘bodies in agreement’ in such terms, where harmony becomes
synonymous with homogeneity, augmentative agreement shifts towards acquiescent
consensus; where the collective is experienced as a hive, little more than a gathering of drones.
However, Spinoza’s formulation of ‘bodies in agreement’ is not based on a model of
homogeneity or sameness, but rather on the harmonizing of intensities and affects at the point
where they are experienced as most ‘joyous’ or life-affirming to the individual. In Spinoza’s
terms, harmony describes the point at which the different speeds and affects of individual bodies
begin to resonate or chime. This is not the harmony of multiple bodies tethered to the tenor of
a single rhythm though, but the more complex dynamic assemblage of symphony – of divergent
tonal, polyphonic, plural refrains or compositions coming together in agreement whilst
retaining their difference.

In Spinozist terms, the task is one of becoming attuned or sensitized to the individual body’s
speeds and affects, identifying the points at which a body is operating optimally, being as much
as it can be. Each individual body has its own optimal conditions for experiencing joy, a

12
signature resonance that it must attempt to bring into harmony with others. This requires
attending to the sounding of one’s own optimal refrain or harmony, which in turn can only be
truly heard through practicing with others. Here, moments of new or unexpected resonance –
or what Guattari might describe as new ‘collective assemblages of enunciation’33 – cannot ever be
wholly predicted or planned for in advance, but can only be arrived at through the process of
continual experimentation or improvisation. Open City’s performances are simulated events
wherein the individual is encouraged to experiment with – test and differentiate between –
different types of speeds and affects; exploring the vectorial passage from one state to another,
the parameters of their own capacity to affect and be affected. Within a performance, an
individual might consciously move between different states or experiences, between different
speeds and intensities in order to measure both the affectio and affectus. Deleuze differentiates
between the meaning of these two terms in relation to Spinoza’s Ethics thus: ‘The affectio refers
to a state of the affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body, whereas the
affectus refers to the passage from one state to another, taking into account the correlative
variation of affecting bodies’.34 Open City’s performances often stage the passage or transition
between various modes of collective action, moving between those that serve to control or
homogenize behaviour to more augmentative models where unexpected harmonies begin to
emerge.

The neutrality of stillness

The practice of stillness enables a range of affective registers to be tested out within its terms,
for stillness is curiously equivocal. It refuses to be encoded, often remaining difficult to read. A
postcard produced as part of Open City’s contribution to the Dislocate festival (2008) reflected on
this ambiguity, observing how:

Stillness is always more than it seems, a habit of camouflage that refuses to

give much away. Yet under scrutiny stillness becomes a site of perpetual and
shifting transformation […] Stillness thus becomes a foil for infinite and
limitless action.35

Within a single performance, the experience of stillness is capable of both controlling and
liberating action, of homogenizing behaviour but also functioning as a cover for
heterogeneous forms of inhabitation. Stillness could be understood as a form of ‘ambiguous or
fluctuating sign’, which for Deleuze describes something that ‘affects us with joy and sadness
at the same time.’36 The appearance of stillness is ultimately blank or neutral; it is the manner
of inhabitation that determines how it is experienced, whether it produces ‘augmentative
powers’ or ‘diminutive servitudes’, an affective ‘increase or decrease, growth or decline, joy or
sadness.’37 Here perhaps, the challenge might be one of attempting to evacuate stillness of its
oppressive psychological effects, enabling it to remain a space of possibility, or return to its
neutral core. This understanding of the inherent neutrality of stillness might also be extended
to other areas of life, to other emotional situations. Paolo Virno refers to the ‘emotional
situation’ as the ‘ways of being and feeling’ in a given situation. The ‘emotional situation’ he
suggests, is always ambivalent:

13
 That is, it can manifest itself as a form of consent as often as it can as a form
of conflict, as often with the characteristics of resignation as with those of
critical unease … the emotional situation has a neutral core subject to diverse,
and even contrary, elaborations.’38

For Virno, we should attempt to ‘rise up’ from the ‘bad sentiments’ of contemporary existence
towards this neutral core, for this neutrality ‘points towards our fundamental mode of being.’39

Preparing for transformation or change often involves affecting a shift in perception. In one
sense, the mode of collectivity within the work of Open City is less the manifestation of
Spinoza’s ‘bodies in agreement’, but rather a preparatory or transitional practice that is
performed as a gesture of ‘making ready’. Open City’s performances operate perhaps as training
exercises or rehearsals wherein a change of behaviour or perception is anticipated and
prepared for, where the individual is asked to practice differentiation, testing or experimenting
with different ‘ways of existing.’ The performative attempt to affect processual change in state
or understanding can be conceived as a specific form of ritual, a rite of passage.
Anthropologist Victor Turner’s work on ritual performance – especially rites of passage – can
be understood as an attempt to reconfigure the terms by which community is conceived, by
focusing specifically on how ‘experiences in common might be produced.’40 Following Arnold
van Gennep, Turner notes how there are typically three phases in a rite of passage ritual:
separation, transition, and incorporation or reaggregation. Turner describes how:

The first phase of separation clearly demarcates sacred space and time from
profane or secular space and time (it is more than just a matter of entering a
temple – there must be in addition a rite which changes the quality of time
also, or constructs a cultural realm which is defined as ‘out of time,’ i.e.
beyond or outside the time which measures secular processes and routines).41

This first phase is marked by certain ‘symbolic behaviour – especially symbols of reversal and
inversion of things, relationships and processes secular.’42 Having entered the sacred space-
time of ritual, the ritual subjects – novices, candidates, neophytes or ‘initiands’ – pass into an
intervening phase of transition or liminality; ‘a period and area of ambiguity,’43 that often
includes ‘subversive and ludic (or playful) events.’44 Here, suggests Turner, ‘The factors of
culture are isolated […] Then may be recombined in numerous … ways […] Novelty
emerges from unprecedented combinations of familiar elements,’45 as the normative system is
parodied, abrogated or turned on its head.

Separation and suspension

Certainly, within Open City’s performance interventions the experience of space and time is
demarcated differently to that of habitual everyday routine; ‘we are presented … with a
moment in and out of time.’46 The performances operate as a transitional space or liminal

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zone in which to test and experiment with a range of collective configurations, a control-
environment in which to practice different ‘styles of life’ or rehearse the vectorial passage from
one affective state to another. Secular behaviours become isolated from their originary
function or signification – then repeated, inverted or otherwise made strange, producing
‘unprecedented combinations’, new compositions. Actions become separated or detached
from the usual laws of cause and effect, whilst normative constraints momentarily cease to be
applied. Turner describes the liminal phase of any ritual as:

An interval, however brief, of margin or limen, when the past is momentarily

negated, suspended or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant
of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance.47

Through temporarily suspending the logic that habitually governs social behaviour, ritual
practices permit the exploration of alternative ways of behaving or being. Turner asserts that
‘liminal personae’ are able to:

Elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate

states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor
there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by
law, custom, conventions, and ceremonial.’48

Whilst the liminal experience often reinforces and works with existing social hierarchies (by re-
aggregating its subjects back into the social order), Turner describes a form of ‘optional’ or
‘liminoid’ ritual practice emerging in secularized societies. Turner argues that, ‘liminoid
phenomena … are often parts of social critiques or even revolutionary manifestos … exposing
the injustices, inefficiencies, and immoralities of the mainstream economic and political
structure’.49 Rather than being easily – unquestionably – assimilated back into the existing
hierarchical social order, the liminoid subject has the capacity to conceive of things differently
or invite change – they have a transformative potential.

Ritual practices of a liminoid order perform a critical gesture of separation and suspension in
an analogous manner to the rupturing ‘encounter’ discussed by O’Sullivan or the poetic
gestures of extraction and separation which for Guattari are capable of producing ‘new
existential refrains’. Rather than returning a sense of order through the practice of
reaggregation (the third stage of a rite of passage), the intent becomes one of leaving the
situation open – or deterritorialized – in order to invite the possibility of something new.
Ritual practices involving stillness thus maximize this potential for openness, for stillness
marks a pause in the habitual flow of events. It is a reflective interval that is ‘no longer’ and
‘not yet’, that exists between times. Within the work of Open City, collective stillness is not so
much an end in itself, as a state of suspension between the terms of one existing situation and
the emergence of another. Ritual performance suspends the logic of one system – ‘structure’ –
whilst attempting to access a state that Turner describes as ‘protostructural’ or ‘antistructural’,
a ‘latent system of potential alternatives.’50 Within ritual performance this subjunctive world is

15
often accessed collectively. Herein, lies the potential of a further conceptualization of the
‘invented community’ that emerges through Open City’s participatory performance, for all
ritual acts produce a community of novices united or bound by the terms of their initiation.
Turner identifies a form of ‘existential or spontaneous communitas’ – an acute experience of
community or collective subjectivity – encountered by individuals immersed in the liminal
space of a given ritualistic process. For Turner, ‘communitas breaks in through the interstices
of structure, in liminality, at the edges of a structure, in marginality, and from beneath the
structure, in inferiority.’51 Open City’s performances encourage the emergence of a nascent
communitas within those – interstitial, marginal, liminal, impotent – forms of stillness
specifically produced in and by contemporary society.

Stillness as ‘flow’

Following MacAloon and Csikszentmihalyi, Turner describes the altered affective states
within communitas as ‘flow experiences’ where the individual becomes ‘totally absorbed into a
single synchronized fluid event.’52 Flow experiences can be characterized through the merging
of action and awareness; the ‘centring of attention on a limited stimulus field’ where concepts
of past and future are given up; and the loss of ego where self becomes irrelevant.53 Within a
‘flow experience’ a person finds themselves in full control of their actions and of their
environment, which in turn seems to correlate to the understanding of causality characteristic
of Spinoza’s second order of knowledge. Turner suggests that a ‘flow experience’ contains
coherent, non-contradictory demands for action; it is ‘auto-telic – needing no goals or rewards
in itself, ‘To flow is to be as happy as a human can be.’54 Here perhaps, Turner’s description
of flow or communitas begins to approach the terms of Spinoza’s conceptualization of the
beatific ‘joyous encounter’, the forming of ‘common notions’ with other ‘bodies in agreement’.
Turner’s communitas describes the temporary and optional immersion in a collective
experience of controlled or performed anonymity, homogeneity, heteronomy and
submissiveness, where the relinquishing or yielding of certain ‘structural’ habits or behavioural
patterns enables access to another realm of being. Moments of homogeneity or loss of agency
within the controlled environment of a ritual – or performance – require the abandonment of
individual direction, producing a vertiginous – even liberating – experience where habitual
control mechanisms or behavioural patterns are temporarily and optionally given up or let go.
Counter-intuitively, it is only through the loss of one’s structural self – and its markers of
individuality – that it becomes possible to gain access to an anti-structural self or form of
subject-hood, which is predicated on the basis of a form of sociability, of being with others.

Referring to the work of Martin Buber, Turner argues that the form of community or
multiplicity experienced within communitas is not based on the terms of ‘persisting social
groups with institutionalized structures.’55 Instead Buber suggests that,

Community is the being no longer side by side (and one might add, above
and below) but with one another of a multitude of persons. And this
multitude, though it moves towards one goal, yet experiences everywhere a
turning to, a dynamic facing of, the others, a flowing from I to Thou.
Community is where community happens.’56

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Turner argues that, ‘this relationship is always a “happening,” something that arises in instant
mutuality when each person fully experiences the being of the other.’57 For Turner, the acute
experience of togetherness or collectivity experienced within the moment of communitas can
only ever be impermanent, and is always at risk of developing structure. Indeed, he suggests,
the experience of communitas can only ever exist in proximity to or in a ‘figure-ground’
relationship’ with the normative social structure, as a mode of radically rejuvenating but still
temporary suspension.58 Similarly, the experience of stillness might be conceived as a
suspension of habitual or structural norms; the ‘invented communities’ formed through acts of
collective stillness necessarily fleeting and impermanent also. Whilst Kwon appears to lament
the limited life span of temporary invented communities, which she says are always
‘dependent on the art project for their operation as well as their reason for being’, 59 this
impermanence might in fact be considered as the source of their critical strength. The
‘invented communities’ produced within practices such as Open City – especially through acts
of collective stillness – are never lasting configurations, but require continual rehearsal and
reassembly. Collective stillness thus always has a quality of ‘futurity’, by creating the
conditions for an ever-emergent community that is always in progress, or still yet-to-come.
The indeterminate quality of the ‘invented communities’ produced through practiced stillness
resists being fully aggregated back into or encoded within the terms of the dominant social
structure: it remains a community still in waiting.

Emma Cocker, 2010

This essay is a version of a book chapter that will be published in Stillness in a Mobile World, eds. David
Bissell and Gillian Fuller, (International Library of Sociology Series, Routledge, 2011)

1 M.Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The
MIT Press, 2004, p.7. See also Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, University of California Press, 2004.
2 Kwon, One Place After Another, p.126.
3 Kwon, One Place After Another, p.7.
4 Kwon, One Place After Another, p.154.
5 I am not suggesting that Open City interventions have a specifically ‘emancipatory’ function in conventional ‘action-
research’ terms, where the artists might attempt to affect – perceived beneficial and potentially empowering – changes within
an already defined community. Instead – following Kwon – the attempt is to explore the potential of an art practice to
produce the experience of a ‘new’ or ‘invented’ community through the act of participation itself, and to question those forms
of collective subjectivity emerging therein.
6 Text from Open City Card No.2 and No.5, produced for NottDance festival, Nottingham, 2007. Text by Andrew
Brown and Katie Doubleday. This phase of the project is discussed further in Emma Cocker, ‘Pay Attention to the
Footnotes’, in Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Volume 2, Issue 2, November 2009, pp.139–151.
7 Interrogating New Methods for Public Participation in Site Specific Projects was funded through the Arts Council of England,
Grants for the Arts.
8 G.Deleuze and F.Guattari, ‘What is a Minor Literature’, Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, London
and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p.17.
9 G.Deleuze, ‘Life as a Work of Art’, Negotiations: 1972–1990, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p.99.
10 M.Foucault, ‘An Aesthetics of Existence’, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. L. Kritzman, London: Routledge, 1990,
p.49.
11 Foucault, ‘An Aesthetics of Existence’, p.50.
12 F.Guattari, ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’, The Guattari Reader, ed. G. Genosko, Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1996, p.195.
13 Guattari, ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’, p.198.
14 See Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, Architectural Body, The University of Alabama Press, 2002.
15 G.Lloyd, Spinoza and the Ethics, Routledge, 1996, p.8.

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16 G.Deleuze, ‘Spinoza and the Three “Ethics”’, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco,
London: Verso, 1998, p.143.
17 Deleuze asks, ‘How does Spinoza define a body? … In the first place, a body, however small it may be, is composed
of an infinite number of particles; it is the relations of motion and rest, of speeds and slownesses between particles that define
a body, the individuality of a body. Secondly, a body affects other bodies, or is affected by other bodies; it is this capacity for
affecting and being affected that also defined a body in its individuality.’ G.Deleuze, ‘Spinoza and Us’, Spinoza: Practical
Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988, p.123.
18 Deleuze, ‘Life as a Work of Art’, p.99.
19 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p.119.
20 Deleuze, ‘Spinoza and the Three “Ethics”’, p.144.
21 Deleuze, ‘Spinoza and the Three “Ethics”’, p.146.
22 Deleuze, ‘Life as a Work of Art’, p.98.
23 Guattari, ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’, pp.198–99.
24 Guattari, ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’, p.200.
25 S.O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p.1. I would like to thank Simon
O’Sullivan for his timely recommendations and invaluable critical advice in the construction of this essay.
26 Ibid.
27 O’Sullivan, Art Encounters, p.45. O’Sullivan is referring to H.Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S
Palmer, New York: Zone Books, 1991, pp.101–102.
28 See H.Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S Palmer, New York: Zone Books, 1991.
29 Deleuze, Bergsonism, New York: Zone Books, 1988, p.111.
30 O’Sullivan, Art Encounters, p.38.
31 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, 1984, p.xiii.
32 J.Syson, ‘Night Crawl – Stillness, Slowness and Stopping,’Online.
Available HTTP: <http://open-city-project.blogspot.com/2009/06/night-crawl-stillness-slowness-stopping.html> (accessed
1 December 2009).
33 Guattari, ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’, p.196. Italicized in original text.
34 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 1988, p.49.
35 Text from Open City Card No.7, produced for the Dislocate festival, Yokohama, 2008. Text by Emma Cocker
36 Deleuze, ‘Spinoza and the Three “Ethics”’, p.140.
37 Ibid.
38 P.Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, p.85.
39 Ibid.
40 R.Abrahams, in V.Turner, The Ritual Process, Structure and Anti-Structure, New Brunswick and London: Aldine
Transaction, 1969/2009, p.viii.
41 V.Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, The Human Seriousness of Play, New York, PAJ Publications, 1982, p.24.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., p.27.
45 Ibid.
46 Turner, The Ritual Process, p.96.
47 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, p.44.
48 Turner, The Ritual Process, p.95.
49 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, pp.54–55.
50 Ibid., p.28.
51 Turner, The Ritual Process, p.128.
52 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, p.48.
53 Ibid., p.56.
54 Ibid., pp.56–57.
55 Turner, The Ritual Process, p.136.
56 M.Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. R. G. Smith, London and Glasgow, Fontana, 1961, p.51, cited in Turner,
The Ritual Process, 126–127.
57 Turner, The Ritual Process, p.136.
58 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, p.50.
59 Kwon, One Place After Another, p.130.

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