RITCS Research Cycle
Tuesday
27 January 2026, 18:00–19:30
RITCS, Rue Antoine Dansaertstraat 70, 1000 Brussels
 |
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.
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.’
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.
