Being dependent: thinking.

An unorthodox genealogy of these deviant uses of the self can be traced all the way back to the practices of self-care in antiquity, where one finds techniques of the self that expose what eludes all control, the elemental of existence: being born, needing to eat, excrete, sleep, and desire. [1] Thinking begins with experiences of “weakness and helplessness” – or at least a thinking that is conscious of, and does not disown, its situatedness and thus roots itself in “ultimate situations” such as “I must die, I must suffer, I must struggle, I am subject to chance, I involve myself inexorably in guilt.” [2] A philosophy conceived in these terms consists in diligent meditation in light of dependencies that, far from absolving responsibility, lay its foundation. It seeks to devise techniques of being that provide answers to what the subject suffers, including, on the one hand, enabling or self-empowering ways of living and, on the other hand, practices of exposure meant to cultivate precisely what exceeds the subject’s abilities.

Chris Kraus, „Gravity & Grace“, 1996, Filmstill

To think, Gilles Deleuze argues, one must penetrate into this realm of powerlessness – everything of significance originates in weakness. [3] Particularly in the present, philosophy, when understood as “an exercise of the virtual production of subjectivity,” is primarily a technique of “autodecapitation” that is needed to break free from the dominant discourses and disciplinary practices and to disintegrate the grand dualisms of reason and feeling, mind and body, man and woman. [4] These exercises of the self harness all sorts of resources – above all the act of writing but also risky self-poisonings or techniques of excessive sensitivity. They are spiritual drills in attenuation that help the subject resist the learned ways of living and prevailing opinions, jettison the normalized ego, and become other – or receptive to the other. Hence, too, the interest among contemporary theorists of the self in the fainting spells and pains of mystics like Teresa de Ávila or Simone Weil. They are examples of great devotions that are felt to be insane because they seem useless yet are highly instructive for a philosophy of weakness. [5] Simone Weil uses her self to de-create the ego. She wills herself – as Chris Kraus remarks – “with all her strength into a place of weakness.” [6] In Aliens and Anorexia, a book in which Kraus, perhaps even more so than in I Love Dick, investigates figures of self-diminishment, Weil is her witness for a theory of sensibility based on the idea of the permeability of the “I.” She probes motifs of a porous self that, rather than absorbing and processing, is pervaded. This open receptivity lets the subject be “outside [their] body” in an eccentric communion with the world “because something else is speaking to [them].” [7] The crucial insight is in the “because”: that the self is decentered by the appeals of the others. One is permeable to alien sentiments that do not stop at the ego’s skin: as if emotion were “a current that dissolves the boundaries of a person’s subjectivity.” [8] For Weil, who has cultivated and trained this form of self-perforation in herself, “a single moment of true sadness connects you instantly to all the suffering in the world,” as though the unhappiness of others were penetrating one’s flesh and soul. [9] The consequence is a “panic of altruism” bringing a heightened awareness of injustice, prompted by the insistent question of who in fact makes one’s life possible and at whose expense one exists. [10] In this way, receptivity, dependency, and responsibility come to be intertwined in Weil to form a transgressive empathy, a self-transcendence by means of ethics (rather than sex or violence).

Sarah Rapson, „Trip“, 2021

Enfeebling oneself: drug fugue.

The experience of impotence and weakness is not only suffered but also desired. Drugs of all sorts are one way to fulfill this desire. [11] The wish to feel free “from the burdens of agency, subjectivity, sovereignty, autonomy, relationality, even humanity,” Maggie Nelson argues, is what makes drug use so appealing. [12] The drug-induced artificial impotence, she writes, beckons with a different kind of freedom, one founded not on willpower but on techniques of self-diminishment; she distinguishes between “forms of abandonment that vitalize and those that thwart,” between wonderful and harmful ones. [13] What makes addiction an epistemic thing is the recognition that we are free and unfree, powerful and impotent at once, just as recovering addicts live with the paradox of being powerless against a substance even as they have the power to resist it. [14] The philosophy of drugs also entails a different thinking about the force of substances: the idea of their material complicity, which decenters human autonomy. Nothing illustrates the agency of substances more clearly than the pharmakon. In its ambivalence and blurry categorization as remedy or poison, it cuts across the registers of human freedom and unfreedom and makes our entanglement in the world of substances palpable. It reveals our permeability to toxic and blissful forces and thus imparts an “uncommon aliveness to the nonhuman” in the human being and their aesthetic capacity. [15]

It is precisely these forces that Lee Lozano taps into when she metaphorically mixes drugs into her pictures. In the conceptual Grass Piece, one in a series of Instruction Pieces, she holds herself to a strict rule: for one month, she will paint while stoned. In 1968, Lozano, an early exponent of Conceptual Art, began formalizing all her creative activities. As though placing herself in research settings, she documents whether and how she succeeds in complying with the constraints she imposes on herself. She submits to a life of following directives: to smoke weed, masturbate, give away money, or avoid the art world. Her conceptual art is a kind of spiritual training; the outcomes of Lozano’s self-experiments, however, are eccentric forms of self-enfeeblement. The restrictions on her freedom are tactics of erosion of the self meant to allow something else to come to light: the forces to which she is subject – be it addiction, her own desire, the laws of the art field, or her marginalization as a woman. In an effort to open her works to energies on a cosmic scale, she thwarts her own agency and disempowers her creative self-will: “I will renounce the artist’s ego, the supreme test without which battle a human could not become ‘of knowledge.’” [16] In this perspective, Lozano is not only one of the most important protagonists of early New York Conceptual Art but also the pioneer of an artistic research that extracts a different knowledge from a de-potentiating use of the self.

Dennis Scholl, „Aufhebung der Diskontinuität“ (Suspension of discontinuity), 2022

Making oneself impotent: neutralization.

Once one has suspended the grand dualisms of freedom and dependency, power and powerlessness, ego and other, an aesthetic of the neutral opens up that homes in on the other’s alterity, the not-known. Maurice Blanchot identifies living in relation to this unknown, neutralizing the familiar categorizations and schematics, and devoting oneself to an alienness that falls through the conceptual and visual cracks as a genuinely artistic objective. [17] Roland Barthes has elaborated this idea of the neutral into a veritable aesthetics of the feeble existence that reflects his idiosyncrasy to all forms of power, empowerment, and arrogance. Under the title The Neutral, he develops a self-culture of becoming-impotent, a praxeology of the mitigation or diminution of the most varied forms of dominance, such as presumption, coercion, or instruction. [18] The “passion of the Neutral” resists the desire to take possession of things by means of simple categories; it renounces the seizing of power, constituting a technique of “nonpower” and leveling the tyranny of the norm. [19] Neutral, to Barthes, are all phenomena in which antitheses have lost their force, all states of suspension and hesitancy: neither positive nor negative, neither male nor female, neither active nor passive but something in-between, something that is difficult to pinpoint, that is not one and not the other. The elimination of the powerful binary attributions unlocks an entire spectrum of gradations and intermediate forms. Nuances come into view instead of the usual polarities; attention turns to subtleties rather than extremes. Such neutralization seizes the subject, too, extending to the forms of its perception and cognition: the ego is weakened so it does not master the object, and it is sensitized to such a degree that it becomes incapable of dominating its counterpart. Barthes examines this “excessive consciousness, consciential hyperesthesia,” in a section titled “Consciousness as Drug.” [20] What makes such a consciousness under the influence exceptional is that it “stands out against an affective background […] and stages the affect” rather than foiling it or being clouded or sabotaged by it. [21] As a sentient consciousness, heightened to the point of “total sensibility” to stimuli, it allows itself to be taken over by what is sensed. Intellect and affect are fused in the hyperawareness of the most minute stirrings of emotion or lucid ideas. This “emotive lucidity” is the defining trait of the sensitive person, who is frowned upon, especially in a world of combative opinions and aggressive controversy. [22] In Barthes, self-neutralization is an act of respect and care, flowing from an ethics of hospitality and reception in which self-assertion is supplanted by “benevolence” and “tact.” Its goal is to enfeeble the discourses and practices of power that prevail in the self. The renunciation of power, for its part, is not something fixed. Neutralization consists in an ongoing operation of weakening. To neutralize power is to take up the struggle against it but in such a way that one is impotent in this struggle, which is to say, without affirming power – and therein impotence, rightly understood, is neutral. [23]

Andrea Winkler, „Untitled (Vests)“, 2021

Disempowerment: potentiated weakening of essence.

If we believe that thinking begins in a feeling of impotence and weakness, we must not overlook the fact that we are dependent on others and at their mercy. We have been conceived, cared for, and nourished by others, typically by female others. Pointing out this constitutive weakness – constitutive of our subjectivation – today and emphasizing that the ethics of self-care are grounded in ethics of the care from others, we must accordingly include care for others: the reception of others, the care for them, and the responsibility for others that, as Emmanuel Lévinas writes, singularizes and subjectivates. The encounter with alterity, to him, is a lacerating experience because it brings us into contact with something that transcends our own ideas. This excessive experience, he argues, insists as a trace of a constitutive “human weakness” that must be updated again and again: “For the little humanity that adorns the earth, a relaxation of essence to the second degree is needed.” [24] This “relaxation of essence to the second degree” means that the constituted subject, to which agency, freedom, and responsibility are attributed, time and again attenuates itself. Lévinas’s metaphor of choice is the “just” war that is “waged against war.” [25] In this war, one must “tremble […] at every instant” rather than criticize injustice, violence, and dominance from a position of self-confidence and make oneself at home in a self-sufficient or arrogant embrace of one’s own morality. One must not only disempower the existing power and resist, in patient self-care, one’s own empowerment; one must tremble even in resisting, must remain weak and sensitive, or, more accurately, must submit, for justice’s sake, to an incessant weakening. Impotence must insist even in the resistance to power: “This weakness is needed. This relaxation of virility” is needed that cannot be brought to an end. [26]

Translation: Gerrit Jackson

Kathrin Busch teaches at the Universität der Künste Berlin. She is currently working on the aesthetic formation of knowledge in the genre of autotheory as well as on figures of a philosophy of weakness.

Image credit: Private collection, public domain; 35: Courtesy of Chris Kraus; 36: ­Courtesy of Sarah Rapson and Maxwell Graham, New York, photo Manuel Carreon Lopez; 39: Courtesy of Dennis Scholl, photo Lea Gryze; 40: Courtesy of Andrea Winkler and HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund, photo Jannis Wiebusch

Notes