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Claudia Fontes: - I want to ask you why
at the beginning of your talk you mentioned Trama twice as an institution.
Reinaldo Laddaga: - I do not remember having mentioned “institution”
but I could have, as long as it has a name, an address, certain
struc-tural stability, I do not say rigid, I do not see why not
call it an institution. Why? Do you have a problem with this?
Claudia Fontes: - We never know how to define ourselves.
We chose “program” because of the duration of the program
that we have planned ahead to last five years, and the main objective
of the program during those five years is to stimulate the relationship
among artists and institutions, and to act as parasites of the institutions,
rather than Trama being an institution itself. This is the best
definition I can give you...
Reinaldo Laddaga: - I think that program repre-sents other
things as well, other aspects. I have no problem with that. I think
I am free of anti-institutional prejudices. An institution is not
bad in itself, the notion of institution.
Gabriela Massuh: - I would like to ask several questions,
one of them very concrete. I was very interested in what you said
about foreigners as witnesses who do not participate. Could you
explain this a little further in the context of this public net?
Reinaldo Laddaga: - I am happy you mentioned this because
the structure of a witness, in any case, seems interesting to me.
I believe that the question of a witness is central in assessing
what is the relationship between community building processes and
the work by an artist.
A classic characteristic of the work is its generic profile quality;
that is to say, Madame Bovary represents the French bourgeois woman
of the XIX c. We do not read “Madame Bovary” as the story
of the specific biography of one Emma Bovary, but as a book that
tells us about the role of the bourgeois women in France, or something
like that, so that there is this example dimension to Madame Bovary.
Here we are discussing what is public and what is private. In the
case of Ruang Rupa, the house is private, the work is public. It
would seem that it is those who belong to the house, who take part
in the house, and anybody may participate in the work, as long as
they are within an art context. The house therefore implies exemplary
conditions, or it should aspire to be held as an example. It should
not only be a place where people live, but a place where people
should aspire to live in such a way that it could be held as an
example. This point of living as a reference to others is being
a witness as well. I am under the impression that when a community
adheres to art genealogy it becomes a witness, no matter how ghostlike
or deluded it may be. At the same time, there are cases like Trama
where there is an active desire to refer to foreigners. There are
degrees of foreignness here, mine would appear to be an intermediate
degree, higher degrees depend on the language and on empirical and
precise conditions, on concrete conditions. A desire for foreignness
is apparent, and this is a hypothesis. If there is such a desire,
it is related to what we see happening here continually, a swinging
movement among us here, this “us” strictly centred in
today’s Argentine and a wider “us” that would take
into account those of us who are in a liminal position, and in different
degrees of voicelessness. On the edge of a con-versation that in
many cases it refers to the con-tinuous and immediate experience
of being Argentine here today. I think that this foreign wish is
a specific desire, that I read as the desire to expose a community
and to divide it from the moment it is exposed.
Gabriela Massuh: - Second question: with re-gards to Hannah
Arendt, I thought of one of the ways in which she defines “understanding”.
She says: to understand is to comprehend what is at stake. Here
I go back to the notion of a public space, the first definitions
you gave were: square, street, university, the place of the ordinary
but also of the heterogeneous, finally, the spot that ends by defining
the state or the na-tion. Before the loss, that you acknowledge
as lost -I prefer to think that the odds are that everything is
not lost- but let us suppose it is lost, then you propose other
public spaces: the web, Trama they are anti-public spaces.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -I think that they are anti-public spaces
if public spaces are the national public spaces: the square, the
university... With reference to what you say, I also believe that
we do not have to give up these places as lost, but even if they
are to be recovered (and I think that today, in practice, they are
lost since from the dictatorship to today, there has been a cons-tant
process, explicit and wilful, to destroy asso-ciation structures
such as the university, the union, and every national space, which
leaves us stranded within a political system of a multitude of individuals
without government) in the midst of this, I believe, that the square
and the university are virtually... (this is, of course, a political
evaluation that I do not know if I am entitled to make. I feel that
it would not be such a good idea if these uninhabited spaces, empty
and chaotic, were to be recovered, because in our pain for the loss
we forget the violence dis-played in these places. Again, this is
a political evaluation). But even so, if the point was to re-cover
these spaces, the conditions for the reco-very would be to start
the building up of power somewhere else. Judging today these spaces
one by one, there are no possibilities to recover them, so building
up power within this national state frame does not offer very much.
I am under the impression -and this is may impression as a semi-foreigner-
that in Argentina a double process is taking place, a level of frustration
and fascination with the destruction of the National State. A fascination
fostered by Argentine lite-rature, a fascination that does not necessarily
imply pleasure but an obsession with the show of the desintegration
of what is national, and with the processes of building power spaces.
Trama does not necessarily aspire to a national dimension. It takes
its place outside what is na-tional; it places itself in conditions
of globalization, open to what is foreign, to foreigners, more than
to the foreign in general, as the other stems in relation to what
is national. I believe these spaces are the condition to build power
that would be the condition -if the point would be recovering the
national- to recover what is na-tional. I believe Trama and the
web are a public space. Better still: we should speak about it as
of a public space to break that polarity, that the public space
should only be national (the square, the university, etc.) and that
the indivi-dual would be on the other side. I mean these are questions
that are up for grabs.
Santiago García Navarro: - I am under the impre-ssion
the these public spaces are becoming far more limited, so as to
reconsider a much greater public space that, in our case, would
be Argen-tina. I am saying this from a purely factual stan-ce, that
is why Claudia wondered why you re-ferred to Trama as an institution.
I think Trama, and other groups that function as germs of institutions
are geared to something wider that is not monolithic.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -I think they are places to exercise one’s
organizing imagination. How is Trama made up? How does one get some
people to come? Is this the best way to do it? Let us say, for example,
is this the best way to discuss, I on this side, and you there?
...it is not entirely clear if there are other options. It would
seem obvious that a discussion depends on asymmetry, on the fact
that I talk more than you, for example, though I may not have more
interes-ting things to say. The fact that there is a follow up;
that individuals come over and speak asy-mmetrically would seem
one of the conditions to establish a discussion. Nevertheless, it
is not clear if it is the best way to do so. It is an exercise in
organizational imagination that is impor-tant, as the situation
we suffer today has to do with the fact that we are at the receiving
end of a re-organizational structure. The dismantling of the unions,
of public education, of public health, all this is in the process
of reengineering the institutions and the kind of organizations
that we suffer. So that it is not wrong for us to see how we can
reorganize a community. In that sense, it seems to me, that this
is a place to invent institutions.
Charles Esche: - I’ve heard you can understand English.
It is a simple question. At the beginning you spoke about society
in quotations marks, and I wonder whom or what were you quoting.
Reinaldo Laddaga: - I was quoting a book by John Urry, called
“Sociology without societies” that questions the term
society to describe what is the result of the processes of the last
two decades: destruction of the welfare state... but perhaps it
is not a good way to put it.
Charles Esche: - I ask because having been born in Great
Britain, where there is at the moment a leader who has declared
the death of society, a quotation that was, I believe, completely
rejec-ted. What I mean is, I believe that the history of Great Britain
post-Thatcher has rejected this idea. I also thought that you were
laying the tension between the notion of society and the notion
of community, and I do not believe this tension exists. Both terms
work out on their own: community is identifiable as individual,
while society is not. When we talk about society we talk about the
roots of society such as socia-lism, and I do not think it is linked
to a national project as you said it was. I think it is still a
use-ful term, not in relation to identifiable indivi-duals, but
in the sense of a remaining possibility of the universal. I think
it is a difficult term to deal with, but in globalisation terms
we have to imagine this possibility. Then when I hear the term in
quotation marks I worry because I be-lieve that the lost chance
of society is the lost chance of the individual and in that way
we go down into very dangerous territory.
Reinaldo Laddaga: - It is an interesting and complex remark; I think
it is absolutely logical that you listen to Thatcher now, when she
says that there are only individuals, that there are no societies.
I do not understand that in the same way as my political and intellectual
upbringing is not the same, and my use of the term society is not
necessarily a disclaimer of the subject. The point you are raising
has to do with strategy, if it is better to use “community”
for this or that project, if it is better to use “society”
for this or that project. It seems to me completely reasonable within
the British context the use of the term society against a certain
conservative history in Great Britain. Be it to recover a dimension
of what is general, and if you want universal, if you wish to use
universal as such. I do not think it is necessarily so in every
context. I believe, any way, that this terminological decision ought
to coincide with strategic chains that are long and complex. I do
not think we truly disagree on this point.
Eduardo
Molinari: - There is something I wanted to tell you, and
I wanted to ask you a question. On the one hand, it seems surprising,
and on the other hand, it seems a shame that after so many years
of violence against the attempts to generate a collective, society,
community project or whatever, there is this fear to name these
projects, or to take them up again. I wanted to ask you a question
that has to do with this: I cannot see how we can be more disintegrated
than we already are… If the projection to eve-rything leads
us to further disintegration, I cannot grasp this idea of yours.
Reinaldo Laddaga: - When I spoke of disintegration I meant
the following: again it is strictly a question of strategy and it
has to do with a question that I see as very complex. I have the
feeling that in this Argentine circumstance, and not only Argentine,
it is necessary to build spa-ces to share. It seems to me this is
something to think about, so that each one of us may think there
are strictly spaces of conversation. I believe there is a specific
use of what is natio-nal related to those conversation spaces that
may be arduous, in my immediate evaluation it has to do with potential
history of the left in the last decades, on building spaces of alternative
power that has turned into the unmitigated ad-vance of the right.
My question is, and I am not militant, and therefore, what I am
discussing are models concretely relate to immediate rea-lity which
have to be created -this is possible if we build community or society
spaces- outside the terms in which it has been done so far, sin-ce
these terms have not worked. When I spoke of disintegration I meant
the following: there is logic in the structure of a community that
relates to the fact that there has to be a closing point without
which the community does not become established. This closing point
should not prevent generalization, nor the universal. What I referred
to is that a closing point is ne-cessary to be able to talk and
to be able to build power. What worries me is strictly this: how
do you build power. One does not build power adding one plus one,
this is obvious. One builds power within the community structure.
It worries me that it has not happened lately, neither in Argentina,
nor in the US. Or may be it happens where the reference to the national
is not central. When I say disintegration I mean it is necessary
to reflect on this closing point, which seems to be the condition
of power building. Where are here though, discussing something else,
rather than the logic of militant general politics, we are discussing
things that are art specific.
Eduardo Molinari: -I was not talking to you from a militant
stance, or from a left wing model, or of any model in particular.
What seems to me a little strange is that within a context of social
projection there seems to be this fear of everything, as if we were
pieces of different parts, parts of parts, but I do not know where
the whole is.
Reinaldo Laddaga: - Neither do I honestly. But I think that
in thinking the whole in the current circumstances one may run the
risk of certain impotence. Because the whole is too much, much too
much, and the whole, in a certain way, leaves us behind.
Nora
Dobarro: -You have not mentioned the word “confrontation”,
and I ask you how do you relate it to the “witness”. Because
(reading Trama’s program) “cooperation and confrontation
program”, that I believe has to do with the universal and the
particular... You also spoke of “reparations” in the beginning:
How does all this relate?
Reinaldo Laddaga: - If I could describe the si-tuation in
a few words, a sort of structural mo-del, as it seems to be, it
is a circumstance of broken links between individuals, between in-dividuals
and the powers that be, starting from the dismantling of the figure
of the National State. It is necessary to repair part of this enormous
breaking up process. I do not think eve-rything can be repaired;
it is necessary to see how it can be done, starting from partial
repairs, because each reparation act is an act for the construction
of power. I do not know whether it is necessary to project a figure
for all of this.
Diana Aisenberg: - I wanted to ask you if you can explain
what goes into making a space public.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -That there are at least three people,
and that they talk.
Lorena Bossi (GAC):
-So you think that goes in the making of a public space?
Reinaldo Laddaga: - Yes.
Lorena Bossi (GAC): - A get together of three people?
Reinaldo Laddaga: -Yes.
Lorena Bossi (GAC): - And that they talk?
Reinaldo Laddaga: -Yes. I think it is best to think of public
spaces as an expansion of that cell ra-ther than think of public
spaces in national terms.
Lorena Bossi (GAC): -It does not have to be ne-cessarily
in national terms, but a meeting of three people does not, as far
as I can see, make a space public.
Reinaldo Laddaga: - Three is, of course, an exa-ggeration,
where do we start then? 400, 500, 800, 1000. What I call a public
space is a situation in which there are at least three people who
talk who would prefer to include, at least, one more.
Carolina Golder (GAC): -I am in doubt as to what you said
on the University, and talking about public University as a synonym
for National Uni-versity and what it represents. Public University
represents for me the fight that is, that was, and -I do no know
which was the term you used- you said you thought that it was over...
Reinaldo Laddaga: -I do not think about that, I observe a
University that is destroyed, without funds. These are the facts.
Carolina Golder (GAC): -I do not agree at all. To start with
it refers to the students’ fights that took place, to all those
people who disappeared fighting for a public university, the fight
today for public education. I feel it is a space one has to defend
with one’s life.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -I agree fully, I have nothing against
it, I obviously prefer a public university, this is so.
Carolina Golder (GAC): -It is one of the fundamental rights
that we owe ourselves.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -I do not find this contradictory with
what I am saying. What I say is the fo-llowing: if what you want
is to defend a public university, it is necessary to build a power
space. I do not think national institutions should be further destroyed.
On the contrary. It is a poli-tical judgement to say that I do not
find a precise reason, from my position, to defend today a national
university, in what specific manner we ought to defend it, and in
what specific manner we ought to defend national institutions. I
am not really discussing that. I am discussing the systematic loss
of power by the people in those places that were structured by the
national State and by institutions that related to the national
State: public education, unions, etc. These places have become deserts.
I think it is perfectly fair to propose recovering these places,
but even so, one has to build the power to do so.
Lorena Bossi (GAC): - What I found confusing was that in
your speech you denied, for example, public space, or not denied,
but you saw the loss of public spaces, the square, the university,
the union groups, etc. but you do find Trama a public space, seeing
that it is a very reduced cell as compared to a university, much
poorer than the university.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -I am interested in the number given by Diana
Aisenberg: 200 and some. It is an intriguing number, because it
is obviously large enough for it not to be a group of friends and,
at the same time, small enough so that we may have trouble seeing
it as a public space. Quite honestly, I prefer to move away from
the figure of the public space because I am under the impression
that what is a public space holds very limited possibilities in
our imagination, be-cause we can only think of squares, the classroom,
the auditorium, these are historical inter-pretations of a public
space. Systems, historical structures of public space that one associates
with forms of socialization that have advantages and defects, that
have, always been open to-wards a certain side, and restricted in
another sense. What can I say? I have trouble in praising anything
that concerns public education, being myself a result of public
education. As far as I remember, primary and secondary education
were places for ideological formation as well, not places where
power was active. This is a historical tradition because historically
the Ar-gentine State is a colonized state. It seems to me that if
one defends that specific form of what is public, one has to remember
that it is contingent, that it is not in its nature, it is a structure,
the result of a process and if we decide that that is what we want,
fantastic, but it seems to me that it ought to be denaturalised,
that the notion of public space ought to be detached from certain
historical figures of public space: the square, the classroom, the
auditorium: spaces that are structured in a specific manner. When
I refer to the net as public space it has to do with the economy
of the local and the foreign in relation to the web or net and the
manner in which this interferes with something that bothers me in
Argentina, and at this point I find it unsettling, which is when
the local speech ends up with “us”, “us Argentines”.
That phrase echoes other “us Argentines” that I remember,
no matter how progressively put it is, and my hair stands on end.
Diana
Aisenberg: -I wanted to ask you if when you say foreign
you have in mind somebody who comes from abroad, or somebody who
does not belong to this net, or following the thread of what Christian
Ferrer said, somebody outside that group of friends organized in
a certain way to an end. Or if one can understand it as the witness,
or as somebody who is foreign because he is outside this cell.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -Yes, yes, I think it is like that. I have
no problem with that. There is a problem that relates to the building
up of identity, of identification, with a level of closure that
has to do with being present so that a community may exist. Now,
how does a community round up? How does, for example, football fans
make up a community? They identify with their T-shirt. In the net
bonding I think there are different conditions, the example is your
own web, this possibility of forwarding to a third party a me-ssage
addressed to a friend. This third party builds up a community structure
in a different way, and this isw what I had in mind when I spoke
of a witness.
Public:- Do you think it is possible to create in-dividual
power? I ask from the point of view of an artist, and whether the
artist needs to create a community, whether he needs to join a second
and third party who want a forth one so as to transcend.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -I thinks so; this is the transformation
that has been taking place in the fi-gure of the artist. The individual
artist, the ge-nius, etc. is a form of individuality that relates
to a definite historical constellation, that credits the individual
with certain qualities, an indivi-dual that becomes universal, as
Charles Esche said, and that, nevertheless finds his space to unfold
in the measure that it is within a commu-nity. There is a community
of art critics, curators, an institutional structure, which is a
co-mmunity structure. In short, the artist has taken this for granted
for the last two centuries. I think it is healthy that artists do
not take it for granted any more, and this is what I think is interesting
about Trama, that it is something managed by artists that know the
institution is not there to receive them. In the case of Argentina,
it has do with the fact that they are no institutions, no budgets,
so there is no dimension of the needs, beyond that, there is still
where there is money, for example, in the US, which is my other
expe-rience. And yet there is there a visible will to take the institution
in one’s own hands, and not to separate, as used to be the
case, the institutional invention from the creation of the work,
and I was getting to this question of community creativity and of
production of the work. I think that a lucid artist today must realize
that work is created under a certain collective impulse, and so
it aspires to the kind of power that has to do with the structure
of the community. Community is a condition to power.
Sonia
Abián: -You said that to be able to esta-blish a
closure is a possibility, or a condition, to build. To be able to
establish a closure it is necessary to have a point of view, that
is, to establish a place and a point. What I seem to have grasped
in general from the beginning of these sessions is the impossibility
to establish a point of view. At least from what was spoken. How
do you see that relationship between reality and language?
Reinaldo Laddaga: -I am going to answer your question in
a very limited way and this is be-cause there is this difficulty
to establish a point of view. It is difficult to establish point
of view because this is a new situation. I honestly think we are
using terms -the question of the dictio-nary is interesting- work,
or artist, in a different sense to the one that was used two decades
ago, and one wonders when should we stop using them, invent other
terms, or simply go on using them, accepting the phenomenon we are
in he-re, in which we say everything half way: “work”,
yes, but no, “artist”, yes, but no. It does not seem like
a mystery to me, we are in a situation that appears to be new, new
in the measure that any situation may be new. Many things are the
same, but a lot is new, not only in Argentina, there is much that
is new, not so much in the new work but in the recomposition of
the relationship between institutions, practices, forms of socialization,
professions, there is a lot new and for the moment we do not know
how to work out this situation clearly. Perhaps it is not necessary
to work it out.
Public: –You mentioned Trama, if I understood well,
as a power cell, small, big, or whatever, and you talked of witnesses,
referring to the foreig-ners who attend the sessions. I wanted to
know if your mention of witnesses refers to the fact that they will
go abroad to spread the news, and this would relate to globalisation,
or they are here only to foster this narcissistic porteño
or Argentine attitude.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -I do not think it is narcissis-tic. It
is undeniable that there is a certain narcissism, but I do not think
it is simply narci-ssism. In the first place, there are no witnesses,
unless one supposes rightly that the witness will tell outside what
he sees, if not, a witness is something else. And he will tell something
will never know about, so that their testimony becomes incontrollable.
It seems to me that the witness operates in part in the current
si-tuations because we suspect that this might be the case, and
that therefore, there may be a condition of opening to the outside.
Public: -How do these foreign witnesses relate to Trama,
are they not a part as well? They are supposed to be part of the
net, even though they are foreign.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -Everybody is a little outside and a little
inside. They are part of a system, na-turally. When I say foreign
I would not like to reduce to this term the people here who have
passports from other countries. When I say this, I keep to a certain
level of abstraction in the re-defining of this situation in structural
terms, ma-king it sound simpler than it is. Which relates once more
to an example structure. The thing is: would we like this situation
to develop further? Could this situation serve as model to others?
Horacio
Abram Luján: -I would like to take up a question
that has already been asked that refers to the public spaces you
mentioned: the street, the university. I think that in a way you
set them aside because you give them up for lost beforehand, because
they are places emptied by specific powers.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -Do I give them up for already lost?
Horacio Abram Luján: -You are talking of the pu-blic
space as one that generates power, it could also be in the street,
but you are bypassing this...
Reinaldo Laddaga: -No, I don’t think so. If they are
lost or not is something one can tell from the outside. Only if
you are fighting for those spaces you can... If they are lost or
not is a strategic consideration, isn’t it?
Horacio Abram Luján: -That is exactly what I wanted
to say.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -That is why I don’t know. I do not
know if they are lost or not. What I say is that the alternatives
are not that space or no-thing. It is necessary to imagine other
spaces, other ways of building up power. That’s it.
Andreas
Siekmann: -I wanted to ask you in what measure your
thoughts are linked to what is being analysed in the US by Ernesto
Laclau, Judith Butler and (Slavoj) Zizek on terms such as contingency,
hegemony and universality.
Reinaldo Laddaga: -A few years ago I conducted a dialogue
between Laclau and Butler, and with-out doubt part of this is under
discussion, es-pecially in what refers to Laclau. Naturally that
this resorting to a witness has overtones of de-construction, and
so does what Laclau and Butler do. It would be far too long to tell
you my differences with Butler with regards to the building up of
the subject and to the idea of appeal, for example, or with Laclau
with regards to the construction of a Lacanian topology of the social,
but I think it is, no doubt, an important region in the context
of the discussion today in the US academy, and therefore, I may
be referring to it.
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