RITCS Research Cycle
Tuesday
27 January 2026, 18:00–19:30
RITCS, Rue Antoine Dansaertstraat 70, 1000 Brussels
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Installation view, Eleanor Ivory Weber, No Private Problems, Alma Sarif, 2023. Photo: Fabrice Schneider. |
We kick off this year’s first RITCS Research Circle with a sharing by PhD candidate Eleanor Ivory Weber, who will present her research project “The live does not exist but there is liveness.”
I am exploring the concept of liveness in writing, performance and cinema. The late performance artist and writer Ian White used the term ‘liveness’ to refer to ‘the product of an extraordinary kind of negation.’ My research brings this artistic vision into dialogue with psychoanalytic concepts of temporality including delay, retroactivity and anachronism, notably via the work of feminist Lacanian philosopher Joan Copjec. Unable to state that the live exists, we nevertheless ask how liveness appears in performance, as something at once constructed and contingent, and how this relates to the body, the subject of the unconscious, and desire.
The stage is built onto the step separating the front vitrine space from the passageway leading to the back space. The stage is painted white so as to blend with the walls of the gallery, which are white. The floor is terrazzo. There are performances on Thursday, Friday and Saturday with an audience capacity of about thirty people each time. The entry costs two Euros, which must be paid in a single coin. The choice of a coin of the value two symbolises ‘two in one’. One coin, two Euros. Many things have this structure, one thing holds something symbolically more numerous. In Euro coins, one side is always the same, with a border of stars and the words ‘2 EURO’, while the other side changes according to the nation-state who made the coins that year. The two Euro coins are collected by one of the performers and placed in a black leather pouch. This is the start of the show.
Soup and snacks will be provided! To attend: send us a DM or email jorik.galama@ehb.be.
https://www.instagram.com/ritcs.research/p/DTfLauBDbMw/
The
live does not exist but there is liveness
Eleanor
Ivory Weber
Good evening / thank you all for being here / thank you Jori and Ellen for organising and RITCS for hosting
My talk today is dedicated to the artist and psychoanalyst Elizabeth Newman, who died on Saturday. I extend my deepest gratitude to her for her work and commitment, and my sincere condolences to her family and friends.
Elizabeth Newman, People bring their lives to Art, oil on canvas (1989), in More than what there is (3-Ply 2013)
I think it’s safe to say this is a common effort; that we are all engaged in a common effort, from our various corners, to create something – I’m not sure exactly what. And mostly we are creating something without even realising it, so I think it’s important here to say that; that we are engaged in an ongoing way in some form of faithfulness to keeping the opening open, to doing what is in fact impossible and not giving in to the demand to be merely useful.
It is a practice of repeating our questions and persisting to refuse to cover them over.
The media that I tend to work in are text and what we could call performance, which means I write and think and very occasionally appear on stage doing things like reading or singing or moving objects about for an audience. Usually these appearances are pretty much ‘written’, as they say, which means I know more or less what action will happen, one after the other until the end, which inevitably comes when there’s nothing left to do.
The more I think about it, the more I realise I don’t really know what I mean when I say ‘performance’, and I wish to find a way to speak of it with more soundness.
When you speak a text out loud you see that writing is bound in time, in a different way than other media such as painting or sculpture, or even cinema.
Psychoanalysis teaches us that our speech is always syncopated by its unsaid underside, known as the unconscious. And even the things that are in fact said are not fully disclosed to us. That speech can only happen in time and that meaning is necessarily retroactive. That the consequences and not our intentions of our acts are the judge of our ethics.
In order to speak, there must be an other. In order to say anything it must be addressed, even if to Anon. The practice of psychoanalysis helps us distinguish between the paranoid address, the superegoic address and the subjective address. The practice of art, too.
We could say that making art is a form of speech that shows the necessity of the other and at the same time the contingency of the subjective encounter; for art does not make a demand on us like the superego, who always wants us to sacrifice, nor does art make us paranoid, as if we cannot trust what we know.
This is the ethical stakes of speech, this is why what we say matters. This is how we create a world, which is necessarily a common world.
The reason for delivering a text is that text is what I do. And perhaps when we get to the discussion we will have a chance to speak about what it is that we all do.
The master signifier of my ongoing research on art practice and psychoanalytic theory is the term ‘liveness’, which connects to the live and aliveness and, naturally, to deadness – a beautiful contradiction that art-making has the capacity to put on display.
Here at RITCS I’m working with this term ‘liveness’ to develop and conceptualise what it means to encounter an artwork and perhaps also to make an artwork.
What is the experience of an artwork? Is it something like focus, or embodiment, or a sense of timelessness, or perhaps it is the evanescence of the present? What are the conditions for liveness to appear?
The concept and problem of liveness is the central term of my research, for it condenses the philosophical question of life and the aesthetic question of artifice.
A discussion of ‘liveness’ inevitably requires us to say how we conceive of time. When we speak of ‘liveness’ we inevitably evoke temporality.
Temporality is that earthly, human condition, where we are bound in time and we know it, even when we disavow it.
In an essay on narcissism, American philosopher Joan Copjec describes the thought experiment of the French philosopher Condillac, who imagines a classical marble sculpture slowly being stripped back to reveal the sensual organs of a body underneath: ‘the statue, stripped of its marble, loses its status as classical, abstract ideal and becomes a living, mortal body dependent on and in touch with an external, temporal world. Time itself floods into the body, which now becomes vulnerable to the destructive powers of temporality. No longer frozen in time, the body will slowly decrepitate and eventually die.’
Far from a mere celebration of the fleetingness of the body per se, a flat and opaque reduction of life to biological functioning, performance as I understand it must rigorously insist on the body as both the container of a kind of immortality (the artwork) and at the same time an organism running, which will inevitably ruin itself or be ruined and yet it remains the absolute condition of an artwork. It is this paradox that art makes apparent. Not only performance art in perhaps a more visible way but all art.
Performance is an art form that allows us to consider the side of the audience and the side of the performer or actor more explicitly, for they so depend on each other. It is helpful to study performance art to see how these to sides are there, too, in the other arts, less visibly.
In 1995 in a text called ‘An Unfinished Cinema’, Abbas Kiarostami wrote: ‘When we reveal a film’s world to the members of an audience, they each learn their own world through the wealth of their own experience. As a filmmaker, I rely on this creative intervention for, otherwise, the film and the audience will die together. Faultless stories that work perfectly have one major defect: they work too well to allow the audience to intervene.’
The difference I am interested in is art whose cracks allow for the kind of common creation Kiarostami is talking about, which allow for an interior work on the part of each audience member. This necessarily means the artist has understood that they do not have the final word, that their own creation is reliant on some inner vision that doesn’t belong to them, which they can only access through action, never directly. This is what gives art its social power, if it has any. Such a social relies on the person: that in each of us which cannot be assimilated to positive attributes and still appears every day.
To give this a kind of philosophical twist, in his essay ‘Kant as Theoretician of Vampirism,’ Slavoj Zizek writes: ‘the difference between the vampire and the living person is the difference between indefinite and negative judgment: a dead person loses the predicates of a living being, yet he or she remains the same person; an undead, on the contrary, retains all the predicates of a living being without being one’. In other words, an undead has positive attributes but no being.
This would be one answer to sacrilegious mobsters who wish to defeat even death and install their power forever (it won’t happen). Manifestations of violent power based purely on accumulation lack symbolic power and have no true authority, they have psychically foreclosed even the limit of death. This is what makes their rule more torturous than even monarchic power, which at least admits discontinuity as a condition for continuity.
[slide:
RMD] Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (MIT 1994), pp. 2-3
A
note on
the working title of my project, The
live does not exist but there is liveness.
In the introduction to her book Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (1994), Copjec writes: ‘“The” pleb does not exist; but there is “plebness.”’ In other words, there is no concrete, actual pleb corresponding to a flesh-and-bones person but there is a phenomenon that shows the limit of a given system, which corresponds, too, to the difference between ‘to exist’ and ‘there is’ in logic. We can read this explanation in the slide.
In his essay ‘Performer, Audience, Mirror: Cinema, Theatre and the Idea of the Live’ (2012), the late artist and writer Ian White writes: ‘By plotting the ways in which neither cinema nor theatre are live, I want then to consider exactly the opposite proposition: that in thinking cinema and theatre together, they might be the means by which liveness could be further described both as and not only as the product of an extraordinary kind of negation, and to indicate what has been or might be at stake by doing so.’
I brought these two references together for my title, to work through their riddle, an enigma which serves like a kind of motor. I seek to retroactively theorise the negation which White evokes as a specifically psychoanalytic form of negation, and to do so by way of the theories developed by Copjec and others.
White’s essay and his body of work in general asks – in his typically curious, insistent way – what happens when chronology is cut, and cinema expands? Expanded cinema (a field which for White includes performance art) comes into dialogue with psychoanalytic theories of time as discontinuous and anachronistic.
With this question of ‘liveness’, we must ask which theory of time are we to use to theorise temporality, Capitalist time or Psychoanalytic time?
In a 1925 essay on the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’, Freud brings to his theory of the inner Perception–Consciousness system the concept of discontinuous functioning, whereby something causes the internal investment to be withdrawn and innervation to cease. He says this discontinuous functioning ‘lies at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time.’
This enigmatic phrase prompts one to ask, ‘What causes the nervous investment to be withdrawn?’ One may imagine some external, social factor that would explain the sudden break in the continuous flow of innervation: the subject experiences defeat, a physical or psychic blow, is demoted, criticised, loses out. Yet, Freud suggests that the discontinuity is internal, comes from the current of innervation itself.
Whereas in the Writing-Pad whose pages are lifted, discontinuity is manifestly external (if nothing else, the pad is finite in size), in the psyche discontinuity is internally produced and precedes us. Discontinuity comes before consciousness.
Discontinuity precedes the endless attempts made to cover it over with botox, slogans, water bottles, theory, identity, Cortisone. Discontinuity is a kind of pre-condition for any statement, artistic or otherwise, and it is in some sense timeless, though we who speak are not.
Other names for discontinuous time might be fatigue, delay, anachronism, retroactivity.
Capitalist time on the other hand is based on an affirmation of timelessness as merely continuous, with cessation being conceived as solely oppositional in nature.1 Joan Copjec aligns this non-differentiated time with ‘a future that is anticipated but forever put off’, and argues in her recent book Cloud that this operation devalues the present, which ‘is the moment in which an incision is made in eternity.’2
She continues: ‘The present is that moment at which the link to the moment before is cut and time is from there (re)started’. We can read here a description of the ‘discontinuous method of functioning’ that Freud refers to at the end of his essay.
Elsewhere, Copjec refers to the present in an essay on the film Taste of Cherry (1997) by Abbas Kiarostami: ‘The evanescence of the present refers not to its fragility, its unpreservability or transitory nature, but to the fact that it demands repetition. This gives the present an absolute character, denied by legalist bound to the past as well as the venture capitalist bent on the future.’
Questions: how does the present appear? How is consciousness of the present produced? How does desire mobilise the present – not the present of commodities (always more), but the evanescent present?
The first (commodities) is the present of infinite (en)duration, the insatiable doctrine of the superego, embodied by the promise of progress without end – one might think of entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die philosophy.
The second (evanescent) present relates to a temporality whose very limit opens the question of the subject (Che vuoi?) as an indeterminate end in itself, mortal and yet alive – one might think of filmmaker Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993).
How does the evanescent present make its appearance in the endless present of commodities? The stakes of liveness, which is of course incomprehensible without its unnamed other side, are the fight against the deadening and endless indifference of capitalist time.
End.
1 Cf. p. 164: ‘the misguided assumption that breaks and flows are always antithetical.’
2 Cloud.
