hengel zoegraphy per/forming posthuman lives

Biography 35.1 (Winter 2012) © Biographical Research Center

ZOEGRAPHY: PER/FORMING POSTHUMAN LIVES

LOUIS VAN DEN HENGEL

The aim of writing is to carry life to the state of a non-personal power.—Gilles Deleuze

Starting from Nietzsche’s assumption that art is the great means of making life possible, this article explores and affi rms the capacity of contemporary art to extend life—and life writing—beyond the fi gure of the human organism. It focuses on the different, yet interrelated, practices of biotechnological art and contemporary performance art that constitute key sites for the articulation, ne-gotiation, and transformation of life in a posthuman mode. Its direct objects of inquiry are artworks by, on the one hand, the Australian Tissue Culture & Art Project, whose material production of biotechnologically engineered life engenders new assemblages of humans, animals, and machines, and, on the other, the Serbian artist Marina Abramovic, whose performative practice in my view approaches the human body itself as a site of creative posthuman encounters. I consider these art practices not only as experimental sites where the limits of autobiographical discourse come into play (Smith and Watson, “Rumpled”), but also as material acts by which the differential boundaries be-tween the human and the nonhuman are continuously reconfi gured.

The aim of this article is twofold. First, it seeks to analyze the ways in which the apparent contradiction of “posthuman auto/biography” is enacted in and through specifi c art practices. Second, it aims to actualize the poten-tial of such practices to contribute to the theoretical development of autobio-graphical scholarship. Drawing on various theories of life from the perspec-tive of philosophical posthumanism, new materialism, and the body of work of Gilles Deleuze, I want to re-conceptualize the vitality of contemporary art and its implications for our understanding of the autobiographical, outside of the parameters of classical humanism and beyond the conventional anti-humanism of postmodern theory.

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2 Biography 35.1 (Winter 2012)

Staging an encounter between contemporary art on the one hand and critical theories of human and nonhuman vitality on the other, this essay moves towards a radically post- or non-anthropocentric approach to life nar-rative. I want to call this approach zoegraphy, a mode of writing life that is not indexed on the traditional notion of bios—the discursive, social, and po-litical life appropriate to human beings—but which centers on the generative vitality of zoe, an inhuman, impersonal, and inorganic force which, as I will explain below, is not specifi c to human lifeworlds, but cuts across humans, animals, technologies, and things. Zoegraphy is my attempt to confront the question of how to think and how to write a life that does not have any hu-man body or self at its center, a life which is in fact fundamentally inhuman, yet which connects human life to the immanent forces of a vital materiality.

THE POSTHUMAN POLITICS OF LIFE

Defi nitions of life, and the accompanying notion of the human, have become subject to extensive renegotiation under the impact of advanced biotechnolo-gies and biomedicine, on the one hand, and new technologies of information and communication, on the other (Squier; Zylinska). If, as Nikolas Rose ar-gues, “the central logic of our current engagement with the vital order is not to know but to transform it through technical intervention” (83), then life itself has become somewhat of an open question, a matter of constant variation em-bedded in the ebbs and fl ows of bioscience and global capitalism. In a time and space characterized by Donna Haraway as a “regime of lively capital” (66)—a political and economical fi eld of contestation in which the boundaries between the technological and the organic have imploded—classical categories of life have started to shift, while new and surprising life forms emerge continuously.

The ancient Greeks, as Giorgio Agamben has noted, had no single term to convey the meaning of what we would call “life.” Rather, they used “two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semanti-cally and morphologically distinct: zoë, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (1). In the classical world, bios is socially qualifi ed life, the life of the elite male citi-zens that make up the polis, whereas zoe, as simple natural life, remains con-fi ned to the private sphere of the home or oikos—in fact, the exclusion of zoe is what marks the polis as a properly political space.

Traditionally, as Rosi Braidotti points out, only bios—defi ned as the discur-sive capacity of certain privileged human beings and hence the classical coun-terpart of logos—has been considered worthy of political and philosophical re-fl ection. Zoe, in contrast, represents “the mindless vitality of Life carrying on


Van den Hengel, Zoegraphy 3

independently of and regardless of rational control. This is the dubious privilege attributed to the non-humans and to all the ‘others’ of Man” (37). Of course the very notion of “autobiography,” which has its roots in Enlightenment nar-ratives of “man” as a rational and self-contained subject, directly testifi es to the force of the gendered politics of bios (Smith). At the same time, however, cri-tiques of the humanist subject in life writing do not always or necessarily in-volve a posthuman understanding of life itself—a point to which I will return.

The classical distinction between bios and zoe has become increasingly disjointed under the impact of modern capitalist politics which, according to Foucault, has intimately invested the natural life of the human species in the discursive mechanisms of state power.1 Yet if the entry of zoe into the po-litical sphere is what constitutes the threshold of modernity, contemporary developments in the life sciences have required us to rethink the boundaries between different forms of life even further, through the basic insight that DNA is shared by all living species, for example, or that the human body itself is largely inhabited by nonhuman genomes. As bioscience has opened up the nonhuman dimension of life itself at a cellular, genetic, or molecular level, we witness the return of zoe as a vital force of material generation:

Contemporary scientifi c practices have forced us to touch the bottom of some in-humanity that connects to the human precisely in the immanence of its bodily materialism. With the genetic revolution we can speak of a generalized “becom-ing infra human” of bios. The category of “Life” has accordingly cracked under the strain. (Braidotti 37–38)

Stem cell science, Dolly the sheep, embryo adoptions, recombinant DNA, cell culture vaccines, genetically modifi ed tomatoes, and interspecies organic transplants are only a few examples of recent practices that have unhinged the categorical divide between the individual life of human beings and the col-lective vitality of all living matter, between the discursive politics of bios and the vital politics of zoe.

The increasing interdependence of bodies and technologies necessitates what Braidotti calls a “new materialist” revision of the notion of life, to which a radical critique of anthropocentrism is central. Embracing the non- and pre-human vitality of zoe, Braidotti rethinks life not as a metaphysical privi-lege of human beings, but as an immanent process of variation or “becoming” in which new connections between bodies, species, and technologies continu-ously unfold.2 It would be a mistake, however, to think that the modern col-lapse of bios into zoe implies that a posthuman—or perhaps more accurately, a non-anthropocentric—understanding of life is only a recent possibility. On the contrary, if the notion of the “posthuman” signals anything, it is that we have never been human, that life has always already been overwhelmingly



posthuman, since all living beings are symbiotically related to the biological and technological worlds that sustain them. Equally clear, however, is that today “the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medi-cal, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore” (Wolfe xv). There is, then, an urgent need to account for how the current transformations of life impact our understanding of the human as an embod-ied and embedded being—that is, as an autobiographical subject.

THE ART OF ZOE

Technological interventions into the matter of “life itself” evoke a particular sense of excitement and anxiety today, placing the social, cultural, and ethi-cal implications of bioscience fi rmly on the public agenda. Current debates on the politics of life increasingly involve creative practices in which art, bio-science, and technology come together in co-shaping motion. Bioart, which uses biotechnology as a means of creative expression, is currently emerging as a vital site for the exploration of the cultural impact of the life sciences, even though its value as art does not primarily lie in its contribution to discussions beyond the aesthetic fi eld. Crucially, bioart does not operate on the level of representation or symbolic mediation, but actively intervenes into human and nonhuman vital processes by manipulating biological matter—cells, genes, nucleotides—and by the actual creation of new life (Hauser). Taking life as the subject, rather than the object, of social, discursive, and aesthetic practices, bioart generates assemblages of bodies, technologies, and selves that not only challenge the methodological paradigm of the so-called linguistic turn, but also require a reconsideration of the foundational categories of life and death.

Here, I want to consider how bioart, as a non-representational life- storying technology, presents us with imaginative possibilities for the theory and prac-tice of posthuman life writing that is zoegraphy. I will discuss the work of the Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A) by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, pioneer-ing bioartists and co-founders of SymbioticA, the Artistic Research Laboratory at the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. Through the use of tissue engineering and stem cell technologies, TC&A creates what they call “semi-living” artworks, located at the tenuous border between the organic and the inorganic, between subject and object, be-tween born and made. More importantly, TC&A argues for the political and ethical importance of hands-on experiential engagement with the manipula-tion of living matter, producing new and often unpredictable link ages among academic research institutions, biotech laboratories, art galleries, corporate en-vironments, media conglomerates, and the general public (Catts and Zurr, “Ethics”). Operating within an “ecology” of different epistemological spaces



and tactical media, TC&A not only generates critical debates about life in the age of posthumanism, but also functions as a vector of social and conceptual change.

Tissue culture deals with the growth and design of tissues or cells beyond the boundaries of the organism. This usually involves the construction of de-gradable biopolymer scaffolding that supports and directs the growth of tissue into certain desired shapes under artifi cial conditions that emulate a physiologi-cal environment. While in biomedical practice tissue engineering aims at re-pairing or replacing defective body parts, TC&A uses the technology purely for creative purposes, transforming life itself into a work of art. Their “semi-living sculptures” grow in bioreactors, immersed in nutrient media, and their survival is dependent on human and technological intervention. By constructing their tissue sculptures as “collaborative and dynamic living communities that are in need of care” (Zurr and Catts 84), TC&A stimulates a new sense of the ethical and affective interrelations between human and nonhuman forms of life.

For their installation Semi-Living Worry Dolls, fi rst exhibited in 2000 at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, TC&A created the fi rst tissue engineered sculptures to be presented alive in a gallery space.3 The central element of the work is a microgravity bioreactor, in which certain animal cell lines are manip-ulated to grow into the shape of small doll-like fi gurines. Inspired by the color-ful Guatemalan dolls traditionally given to children to whisper their anxieties to before going to sleep, TC&A has created seven “worry dolls,” whose living bodies express and mediate the mixture of wonder and fear surrounding con-temporary biotechnologies. Part of the installation is a “worry machine” for people to express their worries to the dolls, consisting of a computer program and a website which has presently outlived several generations of the biotech dolls. The many worries posted online—ranging from very personal concerns to specifi c anxieties about art and science—testify to the compelling nature of tissue culture art as a technology of storying lives in a bioscientifi c world.

The social and political force of the Semi-Living Worry Dolls nonethe-less goes beyond the human life narratives engendered by the art installation, as well as the public debate on the politics and ethics of biotechnology that accompanies all exhibitions of living art. As a performative practice, bioart “works” not by producing rational refl ection but through the affective fold-ing of living bodies into new compositions and interrelations. As renée c. hoogland astutely points out in relation to all cultural texts, biological art-works not only offer “cognitive maps of emergent cultural formations,” such as the newly evolving connections between humans, animals, and machines, but also “perform a critical function in the becomings of the body” (“Fact” 225). The radical potential of bioart, both as an aesthetic project and as a critical practice of posthuman life writing, hence lies in the non-narrative



production of new confi gurations of bodily matter, in the making and doing of new connections and encounters in-between human and nonhuman lives.

TC&A invites both the artists and the audience affectively to engage with their artworks and to become a part of their life course by participating in ritualized acts of care and violence. For example, a routine part of their in-stallations is the “feeding ritual,” in which the artworks are nurtured by the artists in the presence of the public and gallery staff—a performance that em-phasizes the temporality of living art while directly implicating the viewer in the responsibilities that result from its creation. Likewise, towards the end of an exhibition viewers are encouraged to participate in a “killing ritual” to ter-minate the life of the sculptures. This happens by the intimate act of touch:

LEFT: “A Semi-Living Worry Doll H.” The Tissue Culture & Art Project. McCoy Cell line, biodegrad-able/bioabsorbable polymers and surgical sutures. 2 cm x 1.5 cm x 1 cm. From The Tissue Culture & Art(ifi cial) Wombs Installation, Ars Electronica 2000. Linz, Austria. Reproduced by permission of Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts.

BELOW: “The Semi-Living Worry Dolls.” The Tis-sue Culture & Art Project. HaCat Cell line, bio-degradable/bioabsorbable polymers and surgical sutures. 2 cm x 1.5 cm x 1 cm. From the Crude Life Exhibition, 2012. Gdansk, Poland. Reproduced by permission of Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts.

The Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr) is hosted at SymbioticA—the Inter-national Centre for Biological Arts, School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, the University of Western Australia.



The killing is done by taking the semi-living sculptures out of their containment and letting the audience touch (and be touched by) the sculptures. The fungi and bac-teria which exist in the air and on our hands are much more potent than the cells. As a result, the cells get contaminated and die. (Catts and Zurr, “Semi-Living” 239)

The reported sense of compassion engendered in those who spend time with these oddly vital and vulnerable entities, and ultimately end their lives, is re-markable, considering that we routinely engage in the “killing” of cells, for example through brushing our teeth. Yet, as Monika Bakke points out, the purpose of the killing ritual is exactly to build “an awareness of the abundance of life with which we share our living space” (31). The ritual changes our per-ception of the air, for example, commonly imagined as an empty space and a source of life, which from a tissue culture point of view becomes an environ-ment populated by microscopic biota that transform it into a deadly force. Sim-ilarly, it creates a new sensibility of the human body not as a bounded organism but as a relational fi eld traversed by myriads of nonhuman life forms, a vibrant entanglement of symbiotic connections to the immanent vitality of zoe.

By creating contact zones in which the clear boundaries between human and nonhuman bodies give way to what Haraway, following Merleau-Ponty, calls “heterogeneous infoldings of the fl esh” (51), TC&A produces a variety of embodied encounters in which the human becomes open to qualitative change. In this sense, their work exemplifi es the more general ability of bioart to create “points of affective openness to the strangeness of life itself” (Mitch-ell 89). If living artworks “encourage in gallerygoers a sense of intensity and presence—a sense that some sort of strange life is around, and perhaps even within, the spectator” (85), this is because they frame the viewer as part of a biological and technological milieu which both enables and exceeds the hu-man organism: the vital matter of zoe from which every living being unfolds. In this way, bioart produces new modes of affectivity and interconnection that displace the centrality of human life in favor of a “trans-species egalitari-anism” (Braidotti 267), a becoming-zoe that takes the fi gure of the human be-yond its limits and reconnects it to the inorganic forces of materiality itself.

The Deleuzean concept of affect or affectivity is crucial to explain how bioart not only encourages humans to form emotional attachments to non-human life forms, but also engenders new constellations of what we could call posthuman subjectivity. Deleuze, whose philosophy has become central to the “affective turn” in cultural theory, does not use “affect” in the colloquial sense of an individual psychological reaction to a state of affairs, but approaches it as a form of intensity that produces an active transformation of a given situation. Affect in this sense needs to be clearly distinguished from its purported syn-onym “emotion”: whereas emotion can be qualifi ed as “a subjective content,



the sociolinguistic fi xing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defi ned as personal” (Massumi 28), affect is the impersonal—or rather, a-personal—transition from one state to another. Affectivity, then, does not belong to the order of the individual or of the human as such, but emerges precisely as the change or variation that occurs when bodies—both human and nonhuman—enter into new relations. As hoogland points out, these relations “are not restricted to intersubjective forms of empathy, sym-pathy, love or, indeed, hatred or disgust, but rather cut across the boundaries between species, allowing for multiple, non-unitary, heterogeneous fl ows of affect in an ongoing process of becoming” (“Affective” 170). Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari describe affect precisely as the “nonhuman becomings of man” (What 169), or in other words, as a becoming-posthuman.

It is precisely the affective power of biological art, as an exploration of how the human can become and transform with the nonhuman, that makes it a creative technology of storying life in the technoscientifi c present. If post-human life writing is a performative contradiction, then bioartists are per/forming this contradiction at the ontological level of life itself. As a material autobiographical environment, bioart enacts what I call zoegraphy : a post-anthropocentric mode of life writing that affi rms life as a force of inhuman vitality that runs through humans, animals, and things, and connects them transversally.4 Rather than addressing life from an already determined view-point such as that of the human “subject” or the nonhuman “other,” zoegraphy invites us to look at life as an experimental and open process of transforma-tion, a continuous production of new relationalities. It encourages a renewed sense of the human not as the ground from which a narratable life proceeds, but as a temporary production of the material fl ow of life itself. In this view, a human being is nothing more and nothing less than a relatively stable moment in a process of perpetual variation. Zoe refers to this “vitality of life as continu-ous becoming” (Braidotti 41), from which the human subject only emerges through a multiplicity of encounters with what it is not.

Writing a human life, then, paradoxically requires us to imagine life from the inhuman perspective of zoe, the impersonal and inorganic fi eld of forces and relations that form the condition of the lived experiences constitutive of any autobiographical subject. Writing a human life means continuously to approach “the inhuman point of view of animals, machines and molecules” (Colebrook, Gilles 128). It is important to stress, however, that writing zoe does not imply looking at life “like” an animal or a machine, nor does it re-quire limiting writing to the life of nonhuman subjects such as cities, rivers, or technologies.5 Zoegraphy does not involve an abandonment of the domain of the human, but asks us to confront the anthropocentric assumptions of con-ventional autobiographical discourse—starting with the categorical distinction



between bios and zoe on which this discourse is constitutively based. As an auto biographical act, zoegraphy is not about “being” posthuman or attaining a nonhuman form (which would in fact make writing impossible), but refers to a process of becoming posthuman: it is, in the words of Deleuze, about fi nding the “zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation” in which the hu-man and the nonhuman enter into a mutual process of becoming-other (Essays 1). In the next section, I will approach the human body itself as such a zone of hybrid becomings and as a vital site of posthuman autobiography.

PERFORMING A LIFE

This essay approaches art not only as a production of embodied life stories but also as a “zone of proximity” where human and nonhuman lives collide and collapse into posthuman becomings. I have introduced the notion of life as zoe to conceptualize the nature of these becomings, in which “life folds over itself to embrace its contact with materiality” (Grosz 23). While the previous sec-tion focused on zoe as a vital fl ow of interactions between humans, animals, and technologies, here I want to draw attention to the nonhuman vitality that runs through human bodies as what Deleuze and Guattari call “matter-movement” or “matter-energy,” a “matter in variation that enters assemblages and leaves them” (Thousand 407). The work of Marina Abramovic, who has pioneered performance as a time-based art form since the early 1970s, serves as my point of departure for exploring the critical potential of this vital mate-riality, of the “‘it’ inside the ‘I’” (Bennett 60). Although performance—which generally takes place through a particular enactment of the artist’s body—has typically been defi ned as a radical merging of art and life, as a vehicle of so-cial change, or as a performative investigation of the human subject (Jones), I want to approach performance as an enactment of life that allows the human to overcome itself, by harnessing affects or intensities that are fundamentally impersonal and inhuman.

Taking the human body as her primary subject, object, and medium, Abramovic has consistently used performance to explore her own physical and mental limits, as well as the affective relational fi eld between the artist and the audience (Stiles, Biesenbach, and Iles). The endurance of demanding situa-tions and sensations is central to her performances, which intensify processes of embodiment and selfhood through focused acts of pain, fear, and vulner-ability, as well as through the forces of movement, time, stillness, and ecstasy. Ranging from short events involving extreme actions such as cutting, burning, and whipping, to durational pieces that last for weeks or months, Abramovic’s works often draw on ascetic practices from various philosophical and mystical traditions. By establishing what the artist—following Beuys—calls an “energy



dialogue” with the public, Abramovic’s works are aimed at mind-body trans-formations on personal and social, as well as spiritual levels.

In tandem with the desire of the classical avant-garde to keep the line be-tween art and life “as fl uid, and perhaps as indistinct, as possible” (Kaprow 188), Abramovic’s body of work is closely related to her personal life story and family history. Her childhood in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugosla-via, marked by the reputation of her parents as heroes of the Resistance and as ranking members of the Communist Party on the one hand and the strict militaristic upbringing by her mother on the other, plays an especially sig-nifi cant role in Abramovic’s early, as well as her more recent, performances. Occasionally the artist has taken an explicitly autobiographical approach, blurring the boundaries between performance art and theatre by recreating episodes of her own life and work on stage.6 Nevertheless, the personal di-mension of Abramovic’s work cannot fully account for the extraordinary vi-tality of her performances. In my view, performance art derives its transfor-mative power (Fischer-Lichte) not from the life of the artist, but rather from the impersonal force of zoe, or from what Deleuze has called “a life” (Pure). To clarify this, I want to turn to Abramovic’s most recent performance.

The Artist is Present was created at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from March 9 until May 31, 2010, as part of a widely publicized ex-hibition of the same name devoted to Abramovic’s career (Biesenbach). A formally minimal, yet extreme kind of durational performance art, the work enacted the artist’s presence in a most literal sense: during opening hours, Abramovic sat in silence on a wooden chair in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, a transitory space which received more than ten thou-sand people each day throughout the run of the exhibition. Sitting motion-less within a square of light that transformed the vast atrium into a ceremo-nial and ritualized space, Abramovic passively invited visitors to take the seat across from her and look silently into her eyes for a duration of their choos-ing. The encounter—or, indeed, the energy dialogue—between the artist and the other participant was the content of the work.

The Artist is Present draws on earlier works of Abramovic that involved acts of contemplative sitting, standing, or lying down. Nightsea Crossing, per-formed by Abramovic and her then-collaborator and partner Ulay between 1981 and 1987 for 90 discontinuous days in various locations around the world, featured the artists sitting motionless at a table for seven hours a day, staring at each other in a meditative state. More recently, The House with the Ocean View (2002), in which Abramovic spent twelve days and nights on a platform in a gallery space without eating or speaking, explicitly addressed the question whether it was possible to change the energy fi eld of the space and of the public by purifying the body and mind of the performer. The



immanent circulation of such energies by virtue of the artist’s durational pres-ence is what marks the radical simplicity of The Artist is Present, as well as the complexity of its execution. Over the course of three months, Abramovic sat on the chair for 716 hours and 30 minutes, and locked eyes with more than 1,500 different people, some of whom sat for one or two minutes, while oth-ers stayed for hours or even a whole day. The entire performance was fi lmed, and all the participants have been photographed.7 Their portraits, published on the exhibition’s website, testify to the emotional force of the encounters, which moved so many visitors to tears that the performance inspired a web-site called “Marina Abramovic made me cry.”

Marina Abramovic, “The Artist is Present.” Performance view. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010. Photograph by Marco Anelli. (© Copyright Marco Anelli, 2010; reprinted by permis-sion of the photographer.)



Not least because of visits by celebrities such as Isabella Rossellini, Lou Reed, and Lady Gaga, the performance became a highly mediatized cultural event, compared by at least one critic to the art world’s equivalent of an audi-ence with the pope (Lambert-Beatty). At the same time, however, the duration-al nature of the work allowed for a much less spectacular, and decidedly slower, development of communal affects, both between the artist and the public and among those who waited in line for hours or days in increasingly vain hopes of taking a turn in the chair. Many of them, including art critic Arthur Danto, novelist Colm Tóibín, posters to a “Sitting with Marina” Facebook page, and contributors to a blog called “Essays about Sitting,” have written rapturously about their experience, often in a quasi-religious language that echoes the nu-merous devotional gestures of visitors during the performance. Although these narratives differ widely in content, they all convey a deep sense of gratitude for what has been variously described as “a journey into the present,” a “shamanic gift of deep intimacy,” “38 minutes of bliss,” a “prayer on amphetamines,” or simply “a moment of a lifetime.”8 Indeed, for some people—the girl who sat twenty-nine times in order to honor and mourn her recently deceased mother; the young woman who brought her terminally ill baby to the chair—the per-formance itself turned out to be a life-defi ning, if not life-altering event.

The myriad life stories provoked by The Artist is Present both online and in situ not only demonstrate the impact of the performance, but also point to the vital role of time-based art as a source of textual, verbal, and visual auto-biographical production. For present purposes, however, I am less interested in the personal narratives engendered by the exchange with Abramovic than in the impersonal nature of these encounters: the folding and unfolding of af-fects, forces, or energies and their qualitative transformations. What concerns me here, in other words, is the pre-individual fi eld of forces or intensities from which both human and nonhuman lives proceed: the immanent vital-ity of zoe. These forces are profoundly inhuman, and yet they act on us and through us in the form of events or becomings that, if only for a moment, take the human beyond itself. Confronting the impersonal dimension of these becomings—which, paradoxically, I can only do by narrating my own experi-ence of the performance—will allow us to extend the writing of life, and art, into the posthuman.

Attending The Artist is Present almost daily from beginning to end, I wit-nessed hundreds of encounters between Abramovic and others, and I talked to many different people about their experiences. Although increasingly dif-fi cult to realize in a neoliberal academic climate, it is vitally important to ex-amine durational performance art for extended periods of time. This is, after all, what such performances seek to do: to take the subject outside of the ex-perience of chronological time—the time of the clock, the biographical time



of a human life—and into the intensive time of duration, or what Deleuze in Proustian fashion would call “time in its pure state” (Cinema 17). Observing a work of performance art for, say, six hours rather than two minutes, produces not an extension but an intensifi cation of perception, which becomes increas-ingly attuned to more than what can be perceived by the conventional senses. While Abramovic’s physical immobility could easily lead to the idea that noth-ing is happening, her almost sculptural presence in fact constituted an energy fi eld criss-crossed by different interconnecting fl ows. I have learnt that it takes time and effort to become aware of these fl ows—constantly changing waves of intensity, rising and falling—and to open up to being affected by them.

I sat with Marina myself once, and engaged in an “energy dialogue” that turned out to last for about three hours. To capture in language the sensa-tion of this affective exchange is diffi cult, not only because performance, as an

Marina Abramovic, Day 45, “The Artist is Present.” Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010. Photograph by Marco Anelli. (© Copyright Marco Anelli, 2010; reproduced by permission of the photographer.)



indefi nite and ever-emergent event, by its very nature resists narration, but also because this particular work dispersed any autobiographical “I” along multiple lines of becoming. The combination of a deep focus on the present moment and the intimate act of looking into the eyes of another person for an extended period of time not only enabled a profoundly moving, and re-markably detailed, communication without language—a direct interrelation that, in Susan Sontag’s memorable words, “entirely frees us from the itch to interpret” (11)—but also steadily unsettled any clear boundaries between my “self” and Marina Abramovic. Like many others, I have felt the artist’s complete openness towards the other, an extended vulnerability paired with an overwhelming generosity and compassion, a gratuitous act of what I can only describe as love, yet love released from all individuality: an amor mundi or, as Braidotti would call it, amor fati : the love of a life that does not bear my or any other name. This compassion is what in the course of the per-formance allowed Abramovic to achieve a state of luminosity palpable to ev-eryone present.

The sheer duration of my encounter with Abramovic repeatedly allowed for an emptying out of the self and the entering into an intensive state of becoming in which all sense of time and space—including the crowded and highly mediatized environment of the museum—disappeared, and my cog-nitive ego receded to make way for the stream of life itself. I have not yet been able to fi nd the right words to describe this experience, but I think that Braidotti, in another context, has beautifully captured the kind of transfor-mation occasioned by this strange and vital becoming:

It marks the point of evanescence of the self and its replacement by a living nexus of multiple interconnections that empower not the self, but the collective, not identity, but affi rmative subjectivity, not consciousness, but affi rmative intercon-nections. It is like a fl oodgate of creative forces that make it possible to be actually fully inserted into the hic et nunc defi ned as the present unfolding of potentials, but also the enfolding of qualitative shifts within the subject. (261)

Being unfamiliar with meditation (or any other mind-altering practice), I had never before experienced the heightened states of receptivity that come with such different levels of awareness, nor the many visual and auditory hal-lucinations that accompanied them. In varying degrees of speed and slow-ness, I saw Abramovic’s face change into many different shapes, varying from babies to wolves to abstract constellations of lines and light. And sometimes, she completely disappeared. If there was a body, it was a body of light and darkness, quicksilver, humming.

Numerous visitors have commented to me on Abramovic’s extraordinary ability not only to produce and focus her own energy fi eld, but also to absorb,



contain, and change the energies of the public. It is important to emphasize that this circulation of energies, which according to German theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte characterizes the most radical forms of performance art, is fully contingent upon an enactment of the materiality—and temporality—of the body: it is only the production of the artist’s body as an “energetic body” that allows the release of a “vital energy” which is sensed by the audience as a transformative force (93–101). It is fi rst and foremost the affective encounter between different bodies—vital materialities intensifi ed through the imma-nent act of being present—from which Abramovic’s work derives its ability to affi rm life as a force not indexed on the human ego, a life outside of the narrow boundaries of the autobiographical “I.” This dissolution of the self into what Sidonie Smith, in a most luminous reading of Virginia Woolf ’s “A Sketch of the Past,” describes as “the anonymity of communal subjectivity” (98) is, in turn, what allows life writing to move beyond the framework of the human being. As an affective space of becoming, The Artist is Present enacts a decid-edly posthuman performance of life, setting into play what Abramovic calls “energy,” what I have described as the material fl ow of zoe, and what Deleuze in his latest work designates the pure immanence of “a life.”

“‘A’ life,” according to Deleuze, is life not marked by any signifi er or proper name: an indefi nite—but not indeterminate—vitality beyond all in-dividuality and personhood, a “pure stream of a-subjective consciousness” (Pure 25). “A life” is not life in general, nor can it be reduced to the lived biography of a human subject: it does not belong to individual beings, but rather points to the moment in which the life of the individual fades away in favor of “an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from . . . the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens” (28). In other words, “a life” is the pre-individual or impersonal force of becoming: it is life as an ongoing process of becoming. “A life,” therefore, does not coincide with the linear progression of bios—the historical time bound to the life and death of the human organism—but expresses “the cyclical, dynamic and molecular time of becoming” (Braidotti 154): the posthuman time of zoe, which only exists in-between the various moments of biographical time.9

Although it is clearly possible to consider The Artist is Present as an enact-ment of the life—and liveness—of the artist, as an intersubjective exchange of personal emotions, and as an aesthetic practice that has become embed-ded in the life history of many different people, I propose to approach the performance fi rst and foremost as an affi rmation of “a life” that propels the subject into becomings beyond the walls of the human ego. The notion of zoe, or the vital materiality of “a life,” is useful here, because it allows us to theorize Abramovic’s work as simultaneously fully autobiographical and radically a-personal—a conceptual shift which, in turn, opens up a critical



perspective on performance art and/as posthuman life writing.10 The under-standing of the human subject as radically inhuman at the level of its bodily immanence is key to this shift: Abramovic, like many other contemporary artists, “locate[s] autobiographical inquiry in the materiality and drives of the body” (Smith and Watson, Reading 176), yet this materiality, as we have seen, is not fully or exclusively human, just as the body itself is defi ned only by the heterogeneous becomings that traverse and compose it, or in other words, by its capacity to affect and be affected. It is precisely to the extent that The Artist is Present managed to connect human beings not only to each other but to the force of “an immanent life that is pure power and pure bliss” (Deleuze, Pure 30) that we can consider this artwork as a posthuman performance of life, an embodied act of zoegraphy.

LIFE WRITING ON THE LINE

In this essay, I have explored the productive force of contemporary art for the development of a posthuman theory and practice of life writing that I have called zoegraphy. Various authors have fruitfully explored the potential of aes-thetic production—in particular, self-refl exive and embodied art forms such as performance—to transform narratively-based theories of autobiography, and the vital role especially of women’s artistic practices to deconstruct and redefi ne autobiographical subjectivity past the limits of classical humanism has been well-established (Smith and Watson, Interfaces ). To recognize the capacity of “live art” as not only an anti-humanist but a posthuman mode of autobiography, however, we need to move beyond the widely used linguistic and deconstructive frameworks of poststructuralist theory and postmodern cultural critique.11 Emphasizing the matter of life itself, the non-representa-tional art forms discussed in this essay require a shift away from linguistic notions such as representation and signifi cation, and call for a renewed focus on the vital materiality of the body and its human and nonhuman affects. For this reason, I have utilized a new materialist notion of life as zoe, an im-manent fl ow of transversal becomings in which human and nonhuman lives continuously collide. By elaborating the notion of zoegraphy, I have attempt-ed to give a posthuman infl ection to existing theories of autobiographical subjectivity and performativity, in order to free life writing from the human point of view and open it to the force of becoming, or what Deleuze would simply call “the outside.”

I have used the notion of zoe to take the life of “life writing” beyond the fi gure of the human organism, beyond the linear time of the biography, and beyond the boundaries of individual personhood—in short, to move life writing into the posthuman. “To write,” says Deleuze, is to fl ee, to escape; it



is to trace “lines of fl ight” that open breaches to what lies outside “the world of dominant signifi cations” (Deleuze and Parnet 32, 31). To write, in other words, “is to become,” but this becoming “has nothing to do with becoming a writer” (32). In fact, if Deleuze laments the fact that certain novelists tend to reduce life to “something personal” (37), it is precisely because genuine writing does not proceed from the domain of the human. Writing, rather, is about putting into play assemblages, conjunctions of heterogeneous fl ows in-between the human and the non-human, in-between writing and non-writing: becoming-animal, becoming-machine, becoming-zoe. . . . The aim of writing is not to assert an autobiographical “I” over and against the world, over and against life, but to become with the world, with life: it is to empty out the self and to open it to encounters with difference, to become open to life itself as an ongoing affi rmation of difference. This is what Deleuze means when he writes that the writer writes in order to become “a sort of great Alive” precisely in so far as he or she is “only too weak for the life which runs in him or for the affects which pass in him,” or conversely, that writing should “carry life to the state of a non-personal power” (37). The aim of zoegraphy is precisely to release us from life as it is presently lived and actualized, and to connect or re-connect the human to the vitality of life as an immanent fl ow of posthuman becomings.

NOTES

1. The medicalization of sexuality during the nineteenth century is one of the most im-portant instantiations of modern bio-power as a mechanism that not only targets the capabilities of the individual human body but seeks to regulate the biological processes of a whole population, for example through demographic studies and public health cam-paigns. As an emerging target of self-knowledge and as a means to manage the reproduc-tion of the population tout court, sexuality, according to Foucault, was “at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life” (145).

2. Zoe hence encompasses both the life of organisms and the “non-organic” or “inorganic” life that goes beyond the organic form. Braidotti’s notion of zoe is in this sense based on the vital materialism of Deleuze and Guattari, who see life as the self-organizing capac-ity of material systems—a conception which rejects the classical opposition between vitalism and mechanism that associates the inorganic with the non-living. In fact, for Deleuze and Guattari, the organism is merely “a diversion of life,” “that which life sets against itself in order to limit itself,” whereas life itself is “inorganic, germinal, and intensive” (Thousand 499, 503). I will not pursue the matter of inorganic life in more detail here. For a lucid and highly elegant elaboration of the notion of the vitality of non-organic matter, see Bennett.

3. Originally called Tissue Culture and Art(ifi cial) Womb, the installation has been exhib-ited in various locations throughout the world, including the recent exhibition Visceral (2011), curated by Catts and Zurr at Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin.



4. More precisely, this vitality needs to be conceptualized as simultaneously pre- and post-human: as Brian Massumi points out, “the extension into the posthuman is . . . a bring-ing to full expression a prehumanity of the human” (128).

5. Conversely, writing about an ostensibly “posthuman” subject such as genomics does not necessarily result in zoegraphy, as shown in Kate O’Riordan’s recent discussion of “genomic life writing.” Both the popular auto/biographies of celebrity scientists such as James Watson and Stephen Pinker and the increasing number of personal genomic life stories produced online clearly affi rm conventional notions of life as bios in their construction of heroic and self-transparent auto/biographical subjects, despite the fact that these narratives are often juxtaposed with the vital matter of zoe in the form of published genome scans.

6. The Biography, a theatre-based work which has been performed in different versions from 1989 onwards, can be described as a performative life narrative, while the 2011 Manchester International Festival saw the premiere of The Life and Death of Mari-na Abramovic, an operatic “biodrama” directed by Robert Wilson, featuring Antony Hegarty, Willem Dafoe, and Marina Abramovic herself.

7. The “presence” of The Artist is Present hence consisted not only in Abramovic’s physi-cal liveness, but in a variety of transitional spaces in-between the live and the digital. A side view of the performance was streamed online through a live-feed video camera, while two other cameras captured the faces of Abramovic and the people sitting oppo-site her—living images that were subsequently used for a real-time video-installation at another version of Abramovic’s retrospective at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow in 2011. Finally, a documentary about the event was made, which premiered at the Sundance Festival in January 2012.

8. These quotations are taken from the blog Essays about Sitting.

9. As Deleuze notes: “A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects. This indefi nite life does not itself have moments, close as they may be to one another, but only between-times, between-moments” (Pure 29).

10. The biography of Marina Abramovic by James Westcott, whose narrative structure draws on traditional notions of bios in order to explain the artist’s life and work, in my view fails to do justice to the a-personal dimension of Abramovic’s art. Although Westcott gives an unprecedented and invaluable account of the artist’s biography, his narrative remains embedded in the very humanism that actually becomes undone in Abramovic’s singular performances of life.

11. For a detailed analysis of why, from a philosophical point of view, postmodernism can be considered a humanism, see Colebrook, “Postmodernism.”

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interest include human rights and personal narrative, autobiography studies, women’s studies in literature more generally, feminist theory, and postcolo-nial literatures. Her most recent books include the second, expanded edition of Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (with Julia Watson, U of Minnesota P, 2010); and Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (with Kay Schaffer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). She guest-edited the 2010 Special Issue of Biography on Personal Narrative and Political Discourse (33.1), and is also the author of numerous articles.

Louis van den Hengel is lecturer at the Centre for Gender and Diversity and the Department of Literature and Art at Maastricht University. He has a background in Classics, and specializes in contemporary gender studies and cultural theory. His current research focuses on affect, materiality, and time in contemporary performance art.

Julia Watson is Professor of Comparative Studies and an Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. With Si-donie Smith she has co-authored Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Inter-preting Life Narrative (expanded edition, 2010) and co-edited fi ve collections of essays on life narrative. Watson’s recent essays are on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and on counter-ethnography. She and Smith are working on projects on testimony and authenticity, and on online lives.

Gillian Whitlock is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at the University of Queensland. She is currently working on archives of asylum seeker letters and artifacts, and a book on post colonialism and life narrative. Her most recent book, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (U of Chicago P, 2007), is a study of the genres of life narrative that were triggered by the “war on terror.”

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