Abstract
In a street artwork by Dimitris Taxis titled ‘I wish you could learn something useful from the past’ (Figure 1), a boy appears caught in the present between a pile of books alluding to Greece’s past – with the titles
Dimitris Taxis, ‘I Wish You Could Learn Something Useful from the Past’ (91 Kerameikou Street, Athens, 2013). Photograph courtesy of Julia Tulke.
The image conveys a sense of resignation and entrapment that stems from the burden of a double debt: a financial debt, pertaining to Greece’s present crisis, and a symbolic debt, pertaining to Greece’s past. The artwork plays with the motif of the ‘burden of the past’, which has been central in Greek literature and culture. Modern Greeks perceive the past as both ‘an asset and a burden’ (Tziovas, 2014: 1), a double trope that underlines the constitutive role history has played in the modern nation’s identity. The classical heritage, particularly, has been key to processes of nation-building (Hamilakis, 2007; Plantzos, 2017: 68) and has functioned as the country’s symbolic capital in Europe. But it has also at times turned into a painful reminder of the discrepancy between the classical ideal and the Greek present, generating an image of modern Greece, as Lord Byron put it in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, as a ‘sad relic of departed worth’ (Byron, 2004[1812–1818]: canto 2, stanza 73; Boletsi, 2018b: 7, 28; Liakos, 2016: 208). 1 In Taxis’ graffiti, the debt of the Greeks to their past – especially the classical past, as suggested by the books referring to Greek philosophers – becomes superimposed on the financial debt at the heart of the so-called Greek crisis. Although these debts are of a different kind, in the crisis-years they became imbricated in multiple ways (Hamilakis, 2016: 238–239; Hanink, 2017; Talalay, 2013).
The metaphor of ruins proved to be particularly effective for conveying this imbrication: in newspaper articles, magazine covers, and cartoons about the Greek crisis, the imagery of material ruins from the classical heritage was called to metaphorically evoke the destructive impact of the financial crisis (Boletsi, 2018b: 7). The press drew lavishly on the double association of ruins with a glorious past and the ruination of the present, casting Greece as ‘an eternal country of ruins, experienc[ing] new ruination’ (Hamilakis, 2016: 237). The ‘iconographic’ ‘comingling of ancient and modern remnants’ in cartoons (Hamilakis, 2016: 237) often suggested not only that the Greeks were untrustworthy when it came to repaying the financial debt but also that ‘the country has disgraced its patrimony’ and squandered its civilizational capital (Talalay, 2013: 269). In such stereotypical discourses, the Greeks thus appeared to be burdened with two debts – to their ancestors and their current creditors – neither of which seemed to be cancelled out by the idea of the West’s debt to (ancient) Greece for laying the foundations for its civilisation (Hamilakis, 2016: 238–239).
Taxis’ graffiti thematizes this double debt, but the relation it stages between past and present functions differently: it yields a critique, one the one hand, of neoliberal ‘good life’ narratives, and on the other hand, of the temporality of debt. The books that refer to the present create contrasts that exemplify the affective structure Lauren Berlant has called ‘cruel optimism’. According to Berlant, the ‘conventional good-life fantasies’ of ‘upward mobility’, consumerism, luxury, ‘job security’, ‘social equality’ and opportunities for all in late capitalism clash today against a ‘precarious public sphere’ that contradicts these fantasies, yet people still remain attached to them even though they cannot attain them (2011: 2, 3). The contrasting titles
In
For Lazzarato, debt is a means of managing the behaviour of indebted citizens and thus also of controlling the future: ‘debt obligations allow one to foresee, calculate, measure, and establish equivalences between current and future behaviour’ (2012: 45–46). The indebted subject has to fulfil a promise – to repay the debt – which minimises the space of political choices and binds the subject to a limited set of predictable actions in the future aimed at realising this promise. The way austerity politics was projected in Western European public rhetoric as a one-way-street without alternatives is a case in point. Debt replaces what Arjun Appadurai calls a ‘politics of possibility’ with a ‘politics of probability’ (2013: 1, 3) that robs the future of its transformative potential. For indebted subjects, Lazzarato argues, the future ‘seem[s] to be frozen’: ‘for debt simply neutralizes time, time as the creation of new possibilities, that is to say, the raw material of all political, social, or esthetic change’ (2012: 49). Taxis’ graffiti exemplifies this temporality of an eternal present that forecloses ‘possibilities for action’ (Lazzarato, 2012: 71): 2 the young boy is literally blocked by a double burden extending from the past to the future.
Asserting the omnipresence of debt today, Lazzarato makes a link between financial debt and the symbolic debt to one’s past:
‘Indebted man’ is subject to a creditor-debtor power relation accompanying him throughout his life, from birth to death. If in times past we were indebted to the community, to the gods, to our ancestors, we are henceforth indebted to the ‘god’ Capital. (2012: 32)
Whereas Lazzarato sees Capital as the ‘universal creditor’ that has now virtually subsumed other forms of symbolic debt (including the debt to the past), in this article I argue that a critical juxtaposition of these two forms of debt, when it moves beyond easy stereotypes, can open up ways of rethinking debt through alternative grammars. Can we revisit discourses of debt – financial and symbolic – through grammars that could restore a form of agency to the ‘indebted subject’ and challenge the asymmetrical power relation between debtor and creditor? The interrelation of the financial debt and the symbolic debt to the past has intensely preoccupied artistic and literary works created during the crisis in Greece. In the following, two such works will be my interlocutors in probing this interrelation: the novella
At stake in this exploration is the subjectivity produced by the discourse of debt. This discourse involves a paradox: as David Graeber argues, debt – unlike other forms of subordination, such as slavery or caste – rests on an initial relation of ‘legal equality’ between two parties: two parties enter a ‘contract’ that puts the debtor ‘in a position of subordination’, but when the debt is repaid, ‘the original position of equality’ is supposed to be ‘restored’ (2011: 233). Therefore, the blame for the dependency, inferiority, and suffering that debt produces for the debtor is not placed on the creditor. Shame and guilt fall on the debtor, who is considered responsible for repaying the debt and ‘at fault’ when failing to do so (2011: 233). As Graeber puts it, ‘it is one thing to tell a man or a woman that they are simply inferior. It is another to tell them they ought to be equals but they have failed’ (2011: 233). Debt thus becomes a convenient ‘way to tell those one has subordinated […] that their troubles are their own fault’ (2011: 233). Therefore, although debt invalidates the indebted subject and deprives him or her of agency and choice, this subject is nonetheless judged according to the liberal notion of a sovereign, willing subject responsible for his or her fate.
In a previous article, I argued that popular narratives of the Greek crisis, within the country and internationally, constructed the (Greek) subject as either active or passive, following the ‘grammar’ of either the active or the passive voice (Boletsi, 2016: 8–11). The predominant moralistic narratives of the Greek crisis projected Greeks as guilty of the debt due to their irresponsible behaviour, thereby casting them as ‘active’ agents, responsible for their plight. By contrast, narratives of the crisis as systemic, mostly from the Left, presented Greeks as powerless victims of an ailing political system or of the forces of finance capitalism, and thus as ‘passive’ subjects. 3 These accounts, as I argued, drew mainly on two notions of subjectivity: the former was premised on the idea of the autonomous, self-defining liberal subject, and the latter on a notion of the subject as conditioned and determined by social and ideological forces (Boletsi, 2016: 8, 10). The narratives grounded in the notion of a free-willed subject, master of his or her destiny, subscribed to a moral discourse of debt that demanded that Greeks be punished for their own mistakes. This insistence on the grammar of the autonomous subject in the rhetoric of crisis is key to subject(ivat)ing indebted citizens. Finance capitalism wants to sustain the illusion of free will, so that the forces of finance can expand without restraint, while the material effects of these forces can be blamed on individuals or nations for not living up to their responsibilities as debtors (Abbas, 2015; Boletsi, 2016: 10).
Setting out to address debt – financial and symbolic – through alternative accounts of subjectivity that disrupt the passive/active binary and power relation between debtor and creditor, I turn to artistic attempts to mine alternative ‘grammars’. Particularly, I focus on the semantic, political, and affective potential of the ‘middle voice’, which I employ not only as a grammatical category but, more generally, as an expressive modality in language and other media. The works I will discuss intervene in versions of subjectivity that dominate crisis-rhetoric and test alternative conceptions of the indebted subject through the modality of the middle voice.
Shedding off the debt 4
Debates about the Greek debt crisis in Greece and Europe centred on ‘judgment’ – one of the meanings of crisis (
In the novella’s first part, the finger-pointing and blame-transfer during the crisis takes centre stage:
When the country went bankrupt our partner countries kept pointing the finger at us; their fingers stiffened. So we started, baffled, to point at one another. ‘This one is to blame’, ‘and this one, and this one, and that one and the other one there in the corner.’
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The finger-pointing is succeeded by a phase of ‘national self-awareness’ that culminates in a carnivalesque frenzy of self-blaming, guilt, and shame:
‘It’s my fault, it’s my fault’ everyone was shouting. ‘Please, it is more my fault.’ ‘No Sir, it’s my fault.’ The ‘it’s my fault’ was about to turn into a self-destructive movement.
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Agitators appear on a public stage and deliver speeches that expose the public sins of several groups, driving people to public confessions, lamentations, and displays of remorse and self-reproach (Boletsi, 2017: 263). By satirically staging a secular ‘Judgment Day’ of sorts, the novella transposes the theological meaning of ‘crisis’ (
In this first part of the story nobody escapes the ‘guilty’ verdict. If, following Lazzarato, in finance capitalism all population groups are ‘indebted’ to the Great creditor of Capital (2012: 7), everyone is condemned to guilt and shame, as the novella’s following scene exemplifies:
‘Yes, yes, we have sinned’ everyone was shouting by then, bailiffs, dockworkers, drivers, registrars, farmers, minute-takers and lawyers, teachers, professors, pilots and tutors, customs officers, bailiffs and judges – no, not judges, let them be excluded – rectors and hookers. All the people, one voice of repentance. But the agitator was relentless. ‘Damn you all communistocapitalists.’
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By satirically inflating the main tenets of the moral discourse of debt, the novella accentuates its premises. In capitalism, Lazzarato writes in his discussion of Marx’s views on the matter, ‘solvency serves as the measure of the “morality” of man’: solvency and insolvency correspond to ‘[t]he “moral” concepts of good and bad’ (2012: 58). The message that ‘the media, politicians, and economists’ convey when there is talk of debt is this: ‘You are at fault’, ‘You are guilty’ (2012: 30–31).
The economic relation of debt for Lazzarato ‘implies the molding and control of subjectivity’ (2012: 33). How is debt constitutive of the subject? If debt is the speech act of a promise of payment, this speech act, Lazzarato argues via Nietzsche, is not simply conditioned on the memory of the promise to repay the debt, but ‘presupposes a “mnemotechnics” of cruelty and a mnemotechnics of pain, which, like the machine of Kafka’s penal colony, inscribe the promise of debt repayment on the body itself’ (2012: 40–41). Nietzsche argues that the creditor takes pleasure in subjecting the debtor to bodily pain and sees pain as ‘the most powerful aid to mnemonics’: ‘A thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory’, he writes (2006: 38). Eventually, debt can drive the debtor to self-torture – something Nietzsche links with Christian morality. The ‘bad conscience’ that debt produces leads man to inflict ‘self-torture with its most horrific hardness and sharpness. Debt towards God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture’ (Nietzsche, 2006: 63). Bringing Nietzsche’s views to bear on today’s finance capitalism, Lazzarato finds that the process Nietzsche lays out applies to the way capitalism constructs ‘a person capable of promising: labor goes hand in hand with work on the self, with self-torture, with self-directed action’ (2012: 42).
The novella enacts this process of becoming-indebted as a (self-)torment through the agitators’ public humiliations and people’s displays of penitence. The same process is also encapsulated by a wall-writing with which the novella begins, featuring the verb ‘βασανίζομαι’ [
The wall-writing
The wall-writing
Moving from grammar to theory, thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Hayden White, and Giorgio Agamben have theorised the middle voice as a form of discourse that resists binary oppositions, such as those between transitive and intransitive, active and passive, subject and object (Agamben, 2016: 28; Barthes, 1970; Derrida, 1982; LaCapra, 2001: 20; White, 2010). In Derrida’s thinking, the middle voice converges with his notion of
In
If the crisis-rhetoric in the novella takes shape as a sadistic process of identifying and shaming ‘guilty’ citizens and making them repent in a ludic tribunal of Justice,
Significantly,
The novella, however, tries to envision a utopian escape from the suffering of indebtedness. After a long-lasting process of blaming, self-chastising, and judgment of collective failures, the country releases the burden of guilt and judgment and enters a new state of ‘lightness’ that entails historical amnesia (Boletsi, 2017: 267). Disengaging not only from the financial crisis but also from the burden of history, which are both projected as sites of collective trauma and neurosis, people try to achieve a debt-less and guilt-less state (Boletsi, 2017: 269). Without compulsory rules and laws, people are free to choose their preferred mode of living based on a wide selection of ideas and worldviews offered by various parties and sects.
One of these parties stands out as ‘having changed the course of the species’, and it is the one that gives the novella its title: ‘the party of the initial complacency’ (‘το κόμμα του αρχικού εφησυχασμού’) also known as ‘close to the belly’ (Dimitriou, 2014: 63). The party’s double title alludes to the happy oblivion of humans when still swimming in the mother’s amniotic fluid, which the narrator likens to the feeling of floating in the sea (2014: 65). In the Eνα κομβικό σημείο ενθυμήσεως γι’ αυτή τη νουβέλα ήταν η αγάπη μου για τη θάλασσα. Κάθε φορά που βρισκόμουν κοντά της, ένιωθα πως κατά κάποιο τρόπο A focal point of remembrance for this novel was my love for the sea. Whenever I was close to her, I felt that in some way
The verb Dimitriou uses for ‘shedding my debt’ –
In Dimitriou’s quote, being in the sea becomes a way of ceasing to be in debt, but this state does not involve an active gesture of
In the novella,
Searching for ways to break with the condition of the indebted subject today, Berardi examines the relation between language and the economy and pleads for rekindling language’s ‘affective potencies’ by allowing it to reconnect with the body (2012: 13, 18). Such a ‘poetic revitalization of language’ could engender ‘a new form of social autonomy’ as an antidote to the ‘subjugation’ of the ‘sphere of affection and language to finance capitalism’ and the ‘growing abstraction of work from its useful function, and of communication from its bodily dimension’ (2012: 13, 19). Berardi describes ‘the process of emancipating language and affects’ through the notion of ‘
When Richard Nixon ‘suspended the convertibility of dollar into gold’ in 1971, debt became untied to a ‘material thing’ (Graeber, 2011: 237). The abolition of the gold standard ‘dereferentialized’ the monetary economy by announcing that ‘the dollar would have no reference to reality’ (Berardi, 2012: 30). Money started inventing the world, disengaged from any material referent, any ‘reference to physical goods’ (2012: 19): this marked the start of finance capitalism and of the ‘hypertrophic growth of debt’ (2012: 31). Berardi traces a similar but earlier process in poetry: the separation of the linguistic signifier from its referent – the ‘dereferentialization of language’ – had already taken shape in the poetry of the symbolists, who forgot the referent, granting autonomy to the signifier (2012: 18, 30). Poetry thus ‘foresaw’ the ‘abandonement of referentiality’ and the delinking of language from the affective sphere that happened with the financialization of capitalist economy (2012: 19). If poetry anticipated this development, Berardi argues, it can now also provide an alternative by reactivating the ‘emotional body’ and ‘social solidarity’ (2012: 20).
The novella also searches for alternatives to the ‘torment’ of an indebted subjectivity. The party of ‘close to the belly’ signals an attempted reconnection with the first body, the body of the mother, emulated by the act of floating in the sea. But if the ‘insolvency’ Berardi calls for requires a relinking of language with the referent – i.e., the body and the material world – this attempt in the novella goes one step too far: resorting to the unity of the imaginary, the fantasy of ‘close to the belly’ disavows the symbolic order and thus any conceptual distinction altogether between signifier, signified, and referent. Ultimately, this eschewing of difference cancels the future instead of opening it up to multiple possibilities, hinting perhaps at the problematic tendency to ‘uniformity’ that typifies many utopias (Jameson, 2005: ix).
Indeed, the development of the future society the novella imagines confirms that this escape from debt is doomed to fail. In the novella’s last part, the nation turns into a ‘coffee republic’ where everybody’s life purpose becomes serving or consuming coffee. What is left of history are just simplified fairy tales and decorative images for coffee cups or touristic products (Boletsi 2017: 270–271):
The cups depicted scenes from the nation’s three-thousand-year history. […] Of course the tourists were stealing the cups as souvenirs but boatloads came to us from Taiwan. […] By painting its history on the cups, the nation was finally relieved from its everlasting burden. It now had the force of a newly born nation.
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As history is consumed by the present, the fantasy of an escape from all debt ends up reinforcing the tendency Fredric Jameson traced in late capitalism to commercialise, subsume, and empty out history (1991). If debt, following Lazzarato, neutralises the future by minimising the space of possibility (2012: 49), the novella’s attempt to
The alternative conception of debt and subjectivity that the middle voice in
Reconfiguring the debt: Between Antigone and Marx
Strouza’s work is a site-specific installation conceived in 2011 as part of the group exhibition ‘Summer in the Middle of Winter’ in Kunsthalle Athena, which was then housed in an unrestored, run-down neoclassical building.
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The exhibition was part of the biannual event ‘ReMap 3’ (from September 12 to October 30, 2011), which that year took place in the Athenian neighbourhood of Kerameikos-Metaxourgeio. ReMap 3 included 50 exhibitions, many of which were set up in the area’s ‘unoccupied buildings, storefronts, spaces and lots’ (Bradley, 2011). The installation revolves around two phrases:
They do not know it but they are doing it I say that I did it and I do not deny it
The phrases are English translations of quotes from Karl Marx’s
Untitled (2011) by Stefania Strouza. Gold spray paint on two sides of a 2.10 x 2.90 m wall. Installation view from the exhibition ‘Summer in the Middle of Winter’, Kunsthalle Athena, Athens, Greece. Photographs by Eva Kourou, courtesy of Stefania Strouza.
‘I say that I did it and I do not deny it’: Antigone speaks here to Creon, responding to his question ‘do you admit, or do you deny, that you have done this?’ (Sophocles, 1994: 43). ‘This’ refers to the funeral rites and symbolic burial she performed for her brother Polyneices despite King Creon’s injunction. Marx’s line is taken from chapter one (‘Commodities’) of
In Antigone’s line, the subject poses as the source of her actions: autonomous, conscious of her deeds, taking responsibility for them. The subject of Sophocles’ line thus appears as the counterpart of the subject in Marx’s line. These roughly correspond to the two versions of subjectivity I traced in dominant narratives of the Greek crisis: active versus passive (Boletsi, 2016: 8–11). As there is no explicit identification of the quotations’ sources in the artwork, the lines can also function independently of their sources, as fragments that resonate in the Greek social and political crisis-scape in which they appeared in 2011. The artwork was indeed conceived as a critical intervention in the rhetoric of crisis in Greece. According to the artist’s description of the installation, ‘the project explores the notion of political and ethical responsibility and the
The placement of the wall-writings on the two sides of the central wall of the exhibition makes it impossible for viewers to see them both at the same time. The writings can never face each other. This placement may suggest their incommensurable content, yet it simultaneously casts them as two sides of the same coin, suggesting their interconnectedness and a shared ground or value. Nevertheless, the figure of the coin still exemplifies an either/or structure: when you toss a coin, you acknowledge that there are only two options; there can be no third side or in-between space. Does the installation suggest that ‘political and ethical responsibility’ (Strouza, 2011) can only be addressed through one of the two versions of subjectivity these lines appear to represent and that the viewer will thus have to choose a side?
Although the quotations may function independently of their originary contexts in the installation, they also evoke Marx’s as she begins to act in language, she also departs from herself. Her act is never fully her act, and though she uses language to claim her deed, to assert a ‘manly’ and defiant autonomy, she can perform that act only through embodying the norms of the power she opposes. Indeed, what gives these verbal acts their power is the normative operation of power that they embody without quite becoming. (2000: 10)
Contrary to a reading of Antigone’s deed in terms of a straightforward opposition to power from a position external to this power, Butler reads the linguistic act that ‘seals’ Antigone’s opposition as deeply ambivalent, because it assimilates Creon’s sovereign discourse and his ‘rhetoric of agency’ in order to oppose it (2000: 11):
Her agency emerges precisely through her refusal to honour his [Creon’s] command, and yet the language of this refusal assimilates the very terms of sovereignty that she refuses. He expects that his word will govern her deeds, and she speaks back to him, countering his sovereign speech act by asserting her own sovereignty. The claiming becomes an act that reiterates the act it affirms, extending the act of insubordination by performing its avowal in language. This avowal, paradoxically,
As an assimilation of the ‘idiom of the one she opposes’, Antigone’s act in Butler’s reading is ‘hardly pure’ and thus ‘difficult […] to romanticize’ (2000: 23).
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As Antigone asserts her autonomy, her language betrays its
This indebtedness, however, does not cancel her agency: rather, it allows her to expose the
The appropriation and subversion of Creon’s sovereign speech by Antigone yields a form of agency disengaged from the subject’s Antigone is not merely the lamenting sister Hegel admired nor the political martyr appropriated by dissidents all over the modern world. She is a lamenting sister and she does die for her cause but she is, more fundamentally, a political actor embroiled in burial, kinship, and polis politics, one who plots, conspires, and maneuvers her way in and out of trouble on behalf of the sovereign form that she considers to be hers by right. (2013: 20)
Albeit from different perspectives and through different arguments, Butler’s and Honig’s readings both refuse to ground Antigone’s subjectivity and agency in
Are there similar cracks in Marx’s line? ‘They do not know it but they are doing it’: rethinking and updating this line, Žižek argues that today the determined subject is in fact a cynical subject who
To illustrate this, Žižek refers to the way people see money according to Marx: money poses as ‘a universal equivalent of all commodities’ and a ‘materialization of a network of social relations’ (2008: 27). People falsely believe that this function is somehow a material, natural property of money, as if a coin’s materiality actually embodies wealth: this idea is at the heart of Marx’s commodity fetishism and the reification of social relations. The same idea also has consequences for the relation between objects and human subjects: it suggests that subjects become passive, determined by ideology, while objects turn into active, determining agents. Questioning the assumption that people do not know this, Žižek argues that they
Žižek draws from Sloterdijk to describe the cynical reason that typifies our supposedly ‘postideological’ era: ‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’ (Žižek, 2008: 30); that is, ‘they know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it’ (2008: 30). People know, for instance, ‘that their idea of Freedom is masking a particular form of exploitation’ and yet adhere to this idea (2008: 30).
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Žižek thereby draws attention not to the unmasking of the ideology that structures social relations (i.e., critique of ideology) but to the efficacy of what he calls the ‘ideological fantasy’ itself (2008: 34). His revision of the Marxian formula seems to give back to the subject a form of agency with regard to ‘knowing’: at least, the subject
The readings of the installation’s lines that I laid out above treat the ‘debt’ we, contemporary readers, owe to these classics –
The artwork’s materiality contributes to this recasting. The gold spray paint used for the wall-writings creates a shiny reflective surface that emulates the metallic texture of the precious metal, enhancing the impression that the installation emulates a coin. If the installation addresses our debt to Antigone and Marx today, the gold colour metonymically raises the question of the
With the installation resembling a
The evocation of gold through the spray paint creates an intricate link between financial debt and the symbolic debt to the ‘classics’ – here,
If gold remains unscathed by time, these ‘golden’ canonical lines should have an eternal value as expressive of universal truths. The installation, however, undermines gold as a ‘standard’ for value. The spray paint is not real gold: it looks like a gold-coating of something impermanent, if not counterfeit. The material referent that could warrant the stable value of these lines is just a coating and is, furthermore, part of an impermanent art form on the decaying wall of an exhibition housed in a dilapidated, unrestored neoclassical building. If, as Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘[q]uoting a text entails interrupting its context’ (2006: 305), this ‘interruption’ unravels here in a precarious space of ruins that contradicts any claim to permanence. The impression of the eternal value of these canonical lines (written ‘in gold’, as it were), which is central to processes of monumentalization, is disrupted: in a space of modern ruins, these lines too appear as ruins of the past with no
The two lines are tied to a material form, but the transience of this form suggests that their value and meaning have to be constantly reassessed in and by the present, just as Butler, Honig, and Žižek revised these lines and just as the installation places them in a new configuration. Against the abstraction and automation of language that Berardi sees as a by-product of the financialization of the economy, the installation reclaims a materiality for these signifiers without, however, resorting to a ‘gold’ standard for their value. The artwork thereby projects the implication of language (and art) in the logic of economic exchange and automation but also finds a way to thwart this logic.
The creditor-debtor relation as a deictic exchange and the agency of the indebted subject
If we are indebted to objects with no intrinsic or universal value, what is it that we owe exactly? The installation restores agency to the indebted subject by allowing the value of the debt to be co-determined by the contemporary debtors – here, the installation’s viewers. The installation’s injunction to the viewer, if there is one, is this: do not take the meaning and value of these lines for granted, read for the cracks in the oppositional structure they initially seem to form, test them in new configurations, treat them, that is, as site-specific wall-writings.
The installation’s set-up, as I previously showed, does not allow the writings to face each other: they seem to have their back turned on each other. Only the visitor’s body moving in the exhibition’s space from one wall to another can trigger an encounter with both wall-writings. Poetry, Berardi argues, or art more generally, is ‘the reemergence of the deictic function […] of enunciation’ and the ‘here and now of the voice, of the body, and of the word, sensuously giving birth to meaning’ (2012: 21). The visitor’s body is necessary for taking the two utterances out of their isolation and abstraction and turning them into interlocutors in a deictic exchange. The installation thereby brings language closer to the body: through the viewer’s movement, it invites a communicative situation between an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ whereby signs acquire their meaning (and value) in the here and now of the exchange (
Deixis introduces a reversible relationship between an ‘I’ and a ‘you’, through which subjectivity is produced in the here-and-now of an utterance (Bal, 1993: 307; 1999: 189). Following Émile Benveniste, Mieke Bal explains that, because the ‘pronouns
The viewer acknowledges her indebtedness to two classic texts that have in so many ways shaped our conceptions of subjectivity and agency. But here this debt does not take the form of burden – as in Dimitriou’s novella. These works of the past are not sacralised objects that weigh heavily on the shoulders of contemporary subjects – as in Taxis’ graffiti. Strouza’s installation fosters a space for re-citing these lines through and beyond their originary contexts, in ways that could make them ‘mean’ or ‘know’ differently in the present. The work thereby opens the possibility of alternatives to the binary choice of an either passive or active, either determined or autonomous subject that these lines formed at first sight. This initial ‘schism’ succumbs to the cracks caused by other readings, which recast these lines, and the subject they project, in the middle voice.
The subject the installation calls forth, reads
The reversibility of the debtor/creditor positions in the installation does not invalidate the distinction between the two nor does it cancel out the debt, but grants agency to both debtor and creditor. The verb