I WANT TO LEARN TO LIVE FINALLY

by LUIS BERRÍOS-NEGRÓN

Reflections on HAUNTING THE SPECTRE AND THE METAPHOR

The following is a reflection about my Opening Remarks for The Spectre and the Metaphor Symposium at Research Week, Konstfack, Stockholm, 2018.

M y work explores sensing and displaying the present, dissociative forms that affect our common modes of perception — particularly those caused by global warming and social media. I am personally invested in trying to, at once, address my findings and outputs, while addressing the problems of ‘observation’, reaching-out to explore feelings and sensations beyond visual (or even intellectual) privilege.

Matters such as elusive forms of dissemination, the dematerialisation of sculpture, colonial & digitalised memory, and agential invisibility in cultural production are of keen interest.

To explore these interests – along other ways of doing practise-based research – I initiated and organised the symposiums The Spectre and the Metaphor that took place in 2016, and then again in 2018.

[for information on the entire report of the event and guest’s contributions go to the top of this document / index pages 1–3.]

In my opening remarks for the 2018 event, I pointed to a selection of phrases Jacques Derrida abducted from Hamlet. I began to re-play them as a video loop behind me (see GIF above) in the order they appear in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx… then appearing aleatory during the length of my opening remarks…

I want to learn to live finally
The time is out of joint
That ever I was borne to set it right

This was an attempt to give momentum to the symposium, as well as a call for research to be a possible, open idea of ‘haunting’ — by way of being randomly, persistently present.

In my remarks I stated that — “if you feel you are being blurred and disconnected, of being cut by the increasingly intensified boundaries of nationalism, or of being dissociated from the environment, by the seeming insufficiency of democracy, of history, of justice, of further being disjointed by digitalisation, by the way life, self, and memories are shaped, distorted, and transposed by social media, concerned of having to be away from your loved ones, by the real and impending possibility of being deported, or wondering if you will ever see again the little house you grew up in, by the destruction caused by war or by global warming, or if you even feel as if you have been taken outside of yourself, into the out-of-body experience that is pandering to the art market, by your desire to produce authentic experience in this blurred state, because you may feel you are part of the problem, as part of the western European privilege, or of even being haunted by the overwhelming memories of things you never experienced…

…then the matters of spectrality and of metaphor may be of interest you.

So, today is about ‘haunting’, specifically ‘haunting’ spectrality and metaphor as terms and contexts.

Yes. In a way, it may even be a tautology to suggest that it is worth to haunt an event, to insist and persist, to talk again about the spectre and the metaphor — a clumsy repeating of the same material… to do the boring thing of repeating the same topic, to talk about metaphor, again, and again… especially in this world, this world of art, this world of cultural production, where we change topics and make empty metaphors as much as we change underwear.

And that is the point. I feel strongly, very selfishly, that I cannot quite yet let go of spectrality, as a way to sooth myself, to “learn to live” with these ghosts I mention above, and if possible, to adjust my position, to challenge my perspective, so that I may be able to project these sensibilities through my own research, which is very much my artwork, which is very much my life, striving to go beyond empty metaphors.

So to give momentum to the event today, I will offer a bit about what Jaques Derrida explores in Spectres of Marx…

In it, Derrida pushes to challenge the core convention of history: the chronology of past-present-future that seems to be mechanically assumed. By restating the strong metaphorical claim from Hamlet’s ghost –

“The Time is out of Joint”,

– Derrida begins by arguing broadly (as others not unlike Walter Benjamin before him) that reality is never entirely clear in chronological terms, and surely accompanied by blurrings of translation, auras, dialectics, ideology, melancholy, nostalgia, progress and even expectation — things and conditions that mess with conventional notions of time, of ourselves in the world, of Being… in other words, of ontology.

Once setting forth that instability of traditional ontology, in a play of phonemes, Derrida proposes then a ‘hauntology’… or a study of ‘haunting’, not just by ghosts of things dead from the past, but also, simultaneously, by other ghosts, by spectres of a future, of things to come.

We do receive Derrida’s imminent, but not hysteric sensation… that, as the ghost of Hamlet would claim — “time is out of joint” — such condition of time being disjointed, along with the impact of digital media, would critically destabilize, dissociate, and even ‘superrepress’ our sense of ‘place’ and of ‘memory’. But, to potentialise such unforeseen blurrings, of where we have been, where we are now, where are we going, Derrida sets-off a ‘hauntology’ that ponders –“I would like to learn to live finally”.

Esther Peeren, who is here with us today, is a scholar who has been studying and publishing material about spectres, in literature, and in art. Departing from Derrida, and often challenging Derrida’s positions, Peeren states:

“The spectre stands for that which never simply is, and thus escapes the totalizing logic of conventional cognitive and hermeneutic operations. It cannot be reduced to a straightforward genesis, chronology or finitude and insists of blurring multiple borders” – Spectral Metaphor, pg.10

I read here that Peeren carefully indicates a cautious understanding of the power of metaphor comes with spectrality — of it being, not just a literary matter, or even the recognized greatest neurochemical effect our brain produces, but an amazing force that ‘shapes’ what, and who, we live by.

Ultimately, the haunting of living today is a deep metaphorical interpretation…

And to me, these are the spectres of today… the profitable destabilisation of fact and science, the rise of nationalism, increasing global warming, or the plight of forced migration… all right here, coming from the past, or coming from the future, re-minding us of a memory we might have never lived, but sure must come to terms with, as a manner to device.

Therefore, as we haunt the Spectre and the Metaphor — as topic, and as symposium — we interrogate me, and interrogate the panelists… about the hidden structures of technology, the potentials of immaterial labour, the dematerialisation of sculpture, the flattening of colonial memory, and the nuances of the agency of invisibility, all of which are well-within the broad providence of spectrality and the formulation of metaphor as research matter.

We encourage you to formulate questions for our panelists, as well as we hope you want to join us for our dinner-workshop which we will have after the panel discussion…”

Specific to ‘dissemination’, I wanted to expose my interests to one of the various kinds of methods of research in the arts — to interrogate a group of panellists, and myself, through the symposium as mode of research and of publicity. I hope this registered as a genuine, open-door, still open-ended method of investigation, with you and the public, with research itself as an act of ‘publicity’ and ‘discourse’.

Last, but surely not least, that collective ‘haunting’ as persistence, as insistence upon a subject, is itself a form of sharing and dissemination. The care we take to heed and create awareness about the elusive complexities of spectrality, and about the solemn cognitive power of making metaphor — as literary matter and neurochemical affect — can together yield a worthy hauntological compound, no less as what Esther Peeren coins as the Spectral Metaphor.

I hope you do survey the contributions and materials that are linked by the report’s Index Page as I hope it informs your curiosity about the wide reach of this prescient topic.

//LBN.

Luis Berríos-Negrón (Puerto Rico, 1971*) explores unforeseen environmental forms of sculpture and spatial display being shaped by the forces of global warming. He currently works as doctoral candidate and lecturer at Konstfack and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Parsons New School, and a Master of Architecture from M.I.T. His most recent exhibitions and installations were Impasse Finesse Neverness (Museum of Ethnography and Archeology of Bahia, 2017), Collapsed Greenhouse at the ‘Undisciplinary Learning’ show (District, Berlin, 2016) and Earthscore Specularium (Färgfabriken Konsthal, Stockholm, 2015). Berríos-Negrón lives and works between Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Berlin.