THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT
by LUIS BERRÍOS-NEGRÓN
Reflections on HAUNTING THE SPECTRE AND THE METAPHOR
I display again the phrase that Derrida abducted from Hamlet in Spectres of Marx. The dis-juncture of time as ‘dissociation’ was identified by one of our audience members at the symposium. Making ‘dissociation’ sensible to everyone in the room was a key to the event, so to innervate what would otherwise be an assumed ‘surface’ between the spectre and the metaphor.
I am working on that innervation by turning the very glassy, reflexive surface of greenhouse – from a spectral, counter-intuitive counter-intelligent ‘parastructure’ of colonialism and global warming – into an indexical method-object of perception, a type of display, a ‘social pedestal’ that is not quite a Bachelardian phenonmenotechnology… more a ‘phænomenotechnic’.
But, that is another story, of my dissertation…
What I will say here is that interrogating these old, putrescent, concealed, colonial infrastructures is now ever more-so prescient, considering how the deep, deliberate blurring of digital and biological worlds is exploited primarily through social media.
It is an anti-affect. A type of traumatic amnesia, an anarchive — one rendering us incapable of registering that which is right in front of us… transindividuating our memories through the indecipherably fast of ‘now’, the secretly encrypted, and dis-located digital ‘anarchive’ that is ‘the cloud’. The greenhouse is its analogue, as the original ‘virtual space’ of environmental dissociation.
Such ‘anti-affect’ is best sampled — in the most cynical of terms — by the blasé way in which Facebook publicly probed their VR technology by ‘going’ to (and instrumentalising) disaster-riddled Puerto Rico as theatre. This happened just a few days after two, unprecedented, back-to-back hurricanes hit the island, as well as many other island-nations on the Caribbean. Such exploitation of VR social media seems to not just anaesthetise the ‘viewer’, but it seems to also ‘amputate’ the mental ‘organ’ that is critical for our ability to empathise across hemispheres.
This is the ultimate instrument of colonisation.
This is why I turned to the research work of Franco-Algerian artist Kader Attia and his recent video and exhibition work titled Reflecting Memory. His research-based art work is itself based on the work of Vilayanur Ramachandran, who works with amputees and their ‘phantom pain’. Attia takes the ‘amputation’ as an embodied metaphor — from the physical and neurological, to the cultural — as a thread of perceptual studies in art-as-research.
I continue to investigate the work of Attia, and of Ramachandran in the context of ‘greenhouse’. How it, as a techno-scientific manifold, dissociates us from the realities of global warming, as a manner in which a kind of ‘phantom pain’ grows as elusive symptom of perception, as direct by-product of neo-colonialism and global warming.
Here is an example of that research, as a video work from my recent residency at the greenhouse laboratories of the Plant Sciences Institute of the Jülich Forschungszentrum in Germany:
Lastly, I would like to point to a key phrase that I have not elaborated further, but that I did utter a couple of times –
“being haunted by a ghost is remembering something you never lived through”.
This phrase is narrated by Derrida in the Ken McMullen 1983 film Ghost Dance, and is reviewed by Bernard Stiegler in this video (min 05:46–6:02).
To me, the phrase differentiates what the condition of memory is to hauntology, as a future spectre, as a type of messianic memory that comes to the present to talk to us in real time. This was the most important aspect when encountering my installation Earthscore Specularium, the greenhouse, not as messianic technology but as a future ghost coming to talk to us in present time, a quality of experience I will continue to explore.
Comments on the dinner-workshop
Dissociative Simon and the Auto-texting Aardvark
After the unruly behaviour of the belated, frozen, dismantling dumplings Florence and I tried to steam, I was thrilled for us to finally make it to the Sound Stage or ‘Studion’. It was such a perfect way to end the evening. It took a little while to conjure the ghost of the evening… as ectoplasmic séances do… but Kevin and Stefan brilliantly created the dark mood for us to lighten-up the end of an intensive day… It was particularly comforting when the apparitions of Florence’s Aardvark, and Maja’s Simon came to visit us, when the final stroke of genius came from Mathew, the ‘ghost writer’, our very own, personally customised harbinger, our smartphone’s messenger predictive Auto-Text.
Thanks for that new knowledge, I very much appreciated how Stefan and Kevin encouraged the group to start ‘conjuring’ their own ghostly Simons, while in the meantime they further discussed what’s between material and immaterial labour. The conjugation of both of these experiences instantiated, in real-time, a critical, material elaboration of spectrality, one genuinely committed to working through the hauntological imperative of Derrida.
To end the evening, in the spirit of re-mediating the idea of cultural amputation and the ensuing phantom pain it may induce, I shared with the group the audio component of the video above [Greenhouse] Dissociated. I just wanted to bring the group a little closer, not just to empathise with the challenges of surgical amputation, but also to provide, through the darkness of the Studion sound stage, a more precise sense of ‘body-image’… hopefully, just the uttering of the words ‘body-image’ by Dr. Ramachandran, as a non-continuous, if non-linear neurochemical mapping of the surface of our bodies, conjured the simple, commonly and consistently shared and layered chemical activations that metaphor induces across our brains.
“Zooming out on my phone and I just saw a video on the phone with the app of the app to the phone that is so good (brown thumbs up).”
That was my Simon.
//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.
