A Study in How to Non- Literally Write Up a Performance
He was enjoying the performance that came before him, it’s wit and intelligent subversion of the most loved of communist symbols, learning and fantasy refiguring the hammer and sickle, but he was anxious too; when exactly would he take over, take up position on the finely crowded stage, cluttered with the paraphernalia of two ex-centric performances. In the minutes and then seconds to go, what difference could it make to the timing of the commemoration or celebration of the GOSR?
He was enjoying the performance that came before him, it’s wit and intelligent subversion of the most loved of communist symbols, learning and fantasy refiguring the hammer and sickle, but he was anxious too; when exactly would he take over, take up position on the finely crowded stage, cluttered with the paraphernalia of two ex-centric performances. In the minutes and then seconds to go, what difference could it make to the timing of the commemoration or celebration of the GOSR?
It’s a banal but always important issue, distance and
proximity, historical and subjective time, the time of some urgency or its
total absence. He remembers the fiftieth anniversary, when they were young and the
Revolution merely middle aged, and how a new form of it seemed almost imminent
in the world wide upsurge of anti-colonial moments and dissatisfaction in the
imperial heartlands, the unfolding of the Cultural Revolution in China; and now
it seems not fifty more years away, the measure of his own ageing, but rather
as if it had never happened, or had just happened and we had not yet had news
of it; some always spectral event, never more and never less than the desires
that made it seem possible. It seems more urgent to deal with that anxiety,
now, today, than what happened, or might have happened a hundred years ago.
He feels that old scansion of the slogans that came and
went, staccato, almost randomly, according to the scenario, a meeting or a
demonstration, changing emphases depending on some more or less radical change
of ‘line’, long live, long live long live death to death to death too ….(Marx,
Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Thälmann, Mao, Naxalbari, Enver… running dogs,
US Imperialism,…) All of this might have begun then, in October, 1917, and only
now is there some kind of rest, rest if not release from the burden of wanting
so much. Now he will try to adopt the postures from which they had shouted
their slogans, these lost mimetics of the revolutionary posture…of rallying or
resistance.
He tries to sleep, he thinks about how, in the short summary
of his vast history of the Revolution E H Carr skilfully takes two paragraphs two cover what takes China Mieveille thirty
pages of more or less turgid and over-dramatised narration and of how Charles
Bettelheim struggled to exculpate himself from what he saw as others’ errors
concerning Soviet economics and he wonders if bad faith and indifferent
writing, and thus even the words of its most ardent advocates, have, in their
own way, contributed to the fall of the ideals of 1917…
His own bad faith, it must be, it might become the very ground
from which to build some kind of a commemoration of or a memorial for a desire
that the GOSR had once come to be, to have been, the figure, the desire and
revolution perishing in each other’s embrace.
The stage is set just as he had asked, the chaise longue exceeds expectations in
its almost queasy Biedermeier blue, the coat hanger is an immense and
impressive device that looms in the background where it will be festooned with
clothing and archive papers, aides-memoire of the situations from which he
might have to speak; there are two screens and a small table with an office
chair and a dictionary lying on it, randomly open. On the screen to the left of
the viewers an extract from Kozintzev and Trauberg’s 1929 film The New Babylon will run for the
duration of the presentation and, indeed,
I will try to use this
soundless clip to time the event; I hope that this Soviet memory of the Commune
will have become the time of my commemoration, as such. For near the beginning,
kneeling with my elbows on the chaise, I will have read out some of Lenin’s
comments on the Paris uprising that I once found to be a vindication of my own
beliefs, but that I now hold to me unsatisfactory, a little like cashing in or
drawing credit from the Communards – I am not sure which.
For example….
So, some of his papers and notes had already been scattered
around the set under the chaise, and the precious little musical box, the ‘petit componium’ lies hidden in an
ordinary, green nylon bag. He plans to reveal the componium right at the end,
to play its funny little hand punched card with is basic but pretty enough
rendering of Jean Baptiste Clément’s song Le
temps des cerises, which once came to stand for the melancholy felt at the
demise of the Paris Commune in the years after 1871.
The Internationale
too came out of the Commune, a secretly written hymn to a future utopia that
would wait until the 1880s to find a tune, and which would then flow around the
world, louder and louder and in so many languages and that’s its fading in our
own time is a miracle of hegemonic volume control in the suffocating regime of
finance and neo-liberal capital and the piteous decline of well-meaning social
democracy. I think it is entailed in the power of the relation Listen/Act, and
I will try to act this out as a memorial for 1917.
I feel uneasy now, and
will feel all the more so when I show the screen devoted to the Internationale,
ill at ease with Eugène Pottier’s phrase ‘du passé faisons table rase…’ as
that’s what I cannot do, fear to do, all this moment on stage will be spent in
saying this, over and over, that there is nothing to recall from or of the GOSR
if it is not our own pleasure in rebellion and our own perfidy in living at the
same time in our bourgeois past, the involuntary and unavoidable perfidy of
being what we are when faced with that which faces, or wants to face, only the
future and the future of a class, the working class, the damnées de la terre, les forçats de la faim.’ So what we had in
common with 1917 was this: that, with equal fervour, we wanted what we could
never have: to be those intellectuals, of whom Comrades
Marx and Engels wrote, in the Manifesto of the Communist party, that they split
off from their class would go over to the side of the proletariat … and so this
cluttered stage is nothing if it is not my table
rase.
At the very end, when I
had intended to re-play Cherry time, this time, live, so as to speak on the
componium, the repeat of a short video seen quite near the beginning, I found
that the fraud of my own guilt had to be called, a point of celebration had to
be found, I had to sing my favourite song of revolution, not one of music hall
sentiment nor of militancy on the march, debout,
debout, debout… but this aimons nous
et quand nous pouvons nous unir pour boire à la ronde ((la ro-o-ooonde, it
sounds)), buvons, buvons, buvons, à l’indépedence du mo-o-o-onde)) THE
ANTHEM OF 1848, the song of Pierre Dupont, and here to follow the track to
another possible beginning…
It seems now that he is truly celebrating something, for he
produces a bottle of Bourbon from under the chaise and pours a handsome slug
into a tumbler and, on the last note of the last word, the mo-o-oooonde, he
downs it, as if for one moment one might have what we once all wanted. Oddly
too, he showed an image of Ingrid Bergman in the film Anastasia,
counter-revolutionary fantasy if ever there were, seated coolly beside Yul
Brynner, and he says how she taught us all ‘how a handbag should be carried’.
It seems trivial on his part, but maybe he is just again crying out of his
entrapment in and old and terrible and reactionary world, which 1917 came to
redeem, but not then and not yet. This retreat to another origin, perhaps, is
another way out, towards the table rase, an age of more credible innocence?
At the beginning it looks like this:
Screen 1 with live shot
of man lying on chaise holding tablet. Looking a tablet and listening to
some song, that we, the audience can hardly hear, he speaks more or less what
we can see, when did it all begin, begin for me, he seems vexed by the question
and if you, the audience could clearly hear what I hear on my tablet it is a
song of the Incredible String Band, written around the time of the 40th
anniversary and it’s called the October Song, though there the relevance ends,
if you like.
I mumble some of the words, I often do when I
start a piece, I’ll sing you this October
song for there is no song before it the words and tune are none of my own…
Yes, saying this, that they are none of my own, is a way of belonging, perhaps
to a collective of some kind, to some other people who recall something they
never knew as if it were from within their experience. Yes, that is what he
will do, drag out of his words and things that happened, or even did not, recalled
or not, something he may be permitted to say about the Great October Socialist
Revolution.
At some point in the event,
I knew that I would have to try to perch myself on the chaise in something as
near as I could get to match the posture St
Theresa of Avila in Bernini’s chapel in Santa Susanna, Rome. I do this from
time to time as the sculpture is so well-known both as a figure of art’s
virtuosity and sense defying capriciousness as well as one of desire so extreme
that the its abstraction or its lack become almost scarily visible. Whatever I
say while holding this position itself becomes less than a position, as such;
more of a risk, an enunciation so at odds with the posture that it becomes, let
us say, its own critical absurdity, and I planned both to shout slogans that
expressed my undying desire for a revolutionary transformation of society, long
live, long live, long live, and to read extracts from the becoming managerial
reports to the congresses of the Bolshevik party in the years after 1917. The
words of (Comrade) Stalin or Comrade Lenin emerging from ‘her’ mouth as I try
to mouth it, the sculpture envision and sever attachment just as, I hope
adopting a posture
Stalin
But while these shouts or cries or readings emerge from his
mouth as he is becoming the Saint, I think that we begin to see this: that he
is torn, torn between his accumulated culture, his own loves and desires, culturally,
he loves late Beethoven and Elvis and Techno and Puccini and he is, and I use the word that
he uses himself, a fag as well; like a number of great Soviet spies before him;
that he is torn between all this and the austere demands of a free society, or the
recognition of an equality between beings in this world that goes beyond any
purely formal conception of democracy. As he writes, shouting and crying out,
this insubstantial or fragile articulation of being torn becomes the ground of
his being in history, in this case in the memory of 1917. It is now a century
ago, and he is over seventy years of age, so you can see that they have
coexisted for so long that he can hardly envisage the now, the anniversary
itself, as anything more than a tiny blip, if it is even that, in the unfolding
of his self, his subjectivation, whatever you want to call it; let alone in the
consciousness of the wretched of the earth who lived before it, who were its
reason and whose reason is as lost as ever it was.
Songs, songs, he thinks all the time through songs, the
beginnings seem to find themselves somewhere near of with a melody. And films
too, there are the New Babylon, which
plays on and on, and we get a glimpse of Les
Enfants du Paradis, different figures of the people who were the supposed
subjects of or for the revolution, those who bore both the joys and burdens of
becoming saved from the long nightmare of capitalism.
Yes, yes, it is that, I
want to talk about the Paris Commune. Under the chaise there are some papers,
some political cartoons from the time of the Commune, and some prints that
served as illustrations to early Soviet pamphlets, as well as Lenin’s famous
comments on the fate of that uprising. He starts to read them out, but now I
find them short-circuited, unimaginative, making place for 1917 to be a success
at the expense of the Commune’s having been a failure, so I will play one of my
screens, a short video of my petit componium, my hand turning it as it jangles
out Le Temps des Cerises. Certain ‘failures’ are survived by a complex of
feelings and investments which carry over the dryness of the end into a means
of living now, to becoming a reminder of sounds and tunes and attitudes, as one
strikes them or hums them, here now, in public, or even just in the shower.
These form part of the memory, the memorial of or for the hopes a revolution
might have figured, their succession and recurrence strike out the moment, one
two three or ten or twenty decades, a moment that can hardly ever be
made, in time, or only in time. I think about what has just gone before me, the
out of time of the hammer and sickle, their out of timeliness.
I think of the
Internationale, I try to show how it pursues its traitors in so many voices, so
many angry hordes. Long live, long live long live (Comrade Marx, Comrade
Engels, Comrade Lenin and then Stalin and Mao and Enver, in the end, yes, we
took our pick thinking that making such a choice might be decisive for what
happened next, but that’s who we were, filled with so much else, yes so many
songs and rhythms.
Look: there is Leonid Brezhnev in 1964, he’s up there on the
screen surrounded by three versions of the Internationale, in Russian, Zulu and
Albanian and they play around him and drown him out, he is dressed as a
bourgeois, elegantly at a huge desk, and he (the speaker, I mean) clicks the
rampant, militant graphemes on his screen and sets the songs in motion while
making for a white dress shirt that is hanging on the coat stand at the back
right of the stage, and he brings it to the Chaise without taking his eyes off
the terrible apparition, his ears filled with the music which might save, but
will surely fade away. Debout les damnés
de la terre, but he slumps on the chaise and shows us the shirt.
Now I’ll tell them an
anecdote. It’s long and maybe too personal, but it controls me at this moment,
this century of uncertainties about endings and beginnings and the order of
their occurrence for us, each of us. Listen, this is too personal, I know, but how
do I know when it began and when it ended? You see Brezhnev (Death to
revisionists, death to the running dogs of of
of … long live Mao Tse Tung), this photograph or one like it came out on
the front page if Time or some other
influential mag and I was walking through the college to me room and my tutor
came rushing down his staircase into the quad and said, urgently, Rifkin, some
and see this, come up and see what I just say, and my tutor came from a family
of academics who knew Eastern Europe and Russia inside out and, indeed, his
father had drawn some of the boundaries of countries at the Treaty of
Versailles, a bit after the birth we are seeing today a 100 years on, and had
founded the Czech Boy Scout movement, so you can see the kind of education I had
as a young would-be communist and he showed me this picture or one very like it
and he said look, look carefully, look at his cufflink, he wants us to see it,
this isn’t Kruschev bashing his shoe on the podium, he wants us to see that
link and he paused and he said this: “that’s it, the Revolution is over”.
So he was telling us some kind of parable, because he showed
us the shirt he held, screwed up, and spread it out, and showed the beautiful
link in one of the cuffs and said it was his shirt and (down with down with down with), whatever, Brezhnev joined the
bourgeoisie from which he longed to split, so he could never split from
Brezhnev, he was nothing more than an abject fellow-traveller, a fag, a rotten
element, and the Revolution never stood a chance, it had no beginning and too
many ends. He always wanted too much, and always what he could not have had.
So I threw myself
into a hesitant torrent of impossibilities, I loved the people because I saw Les Enfants du Paradis at a ciné-club in
Manchester with my mother, and I found there and then and for ever the beauty
of the sound of a film passing through the gate of a 16mm projector, and that
was the gateway to a world or a worlding in me of so many cultures, the menu-peuple of Paris, the substance of the
modern art work in the clicking of the projector, the political and aesthetic
avant-garde merged into a single sonority, oh how I did believe in that, and
from love loved so many irreconcilable objects.
and the fighting revolutionaries of the Battleship Potemkin and the
revolutionary upturning of vision of the Man
with a Movie Camera and the devastating beauty of the doomed prince in Ivan
the Terrible, and I saw these movies in a civic library with vast porticos that
made me want to pass through those of the Soviet magnificence of Moscow and
Leningrad archives, even when there was no longer a Leningrad. And that was
why, at the beginning, I tried to sit like Warren Beatty in Reds and read out what Gorky said about
Lenin saying that one could only love the Appassionata sonata too much and that
this too much was a menace to Revolution, because it seized all of one’s
energy. So, in the Brezhnev screen the Appassionata survived the International
in all its versions and played on and on, and the memory of the GOSR became a
fragment, a figment of everything that was well-meaning and good on one’s, my
bourgeois subjectivation. And that Eisenstein and Marcel Carné and I were all
fags and that was why we wanted, so badly, the proletariat, and its otherness,
and that the day the damnées would be truly debout, we could no longer desire,
perhaps at all.
Long Live,
Death To
Aimons Nous, et quand nous pouvons unir pour boire
à la ronde buvons buvons buvons à l’indépendence du monde
Choose one of the
above three
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