What if… One is not Born an Individual but rather Becomes One

About ten years ago, when I was studying in Brussels at the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios, Bojana Cvejić screened a documentary film

Towards a Transindividual Self: A study in social dramaturgy

Bojana Cvejić and Ana Vujanović

Oslo – Brussels – Zagreb: Oslo National Academy of the Arts – SARMA – Multimedijalni institut, 2022

Book Launch at Kunstnerne Hus, Oslo, Thursday September 22. at 5 PM, featuring Snelle Hall, Ilse Ghekiere, Mike Sperlinger and the authors in conversation.

directed by Marta Popivoda in one of the philosophy classes she was teaching. Popivoda’s film, entitled Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body*, was made following the research Cvejić and peer Ana Vujanović eventually released as Public Sphere by Performance, a 2015 predecessor to the recently published Towards a Transindividual Self: A study in Social Dramaturgy.

Popivoda’s film – which I remember as being made of archival footage depicting Yugoslavian state performances and corresponding counter-demonstrations dating back to 1941–glued me to my chair with an intensity I couldn’t make sense of at the time. As cliché as it may sound, it was as if I was stunned by the realisation that in this film I had found something I never knew I was looking for. I was born in Zagreb, you see. In 1989. Just in time for Tim Berners-Lee to invent the world wide web, for the Berlin Wall to fall, and the stage to be set for Yugoslavia’s infamous unravelling. Mine turned out to be the childhood lived inside the territory of ideological as well as literal warfare governed by the rule of unspoken contradiction. Everyone was relatively safe, is how I explained it to myself at the time, as long as all questions, explicitly political or not, remained un-asked. For a person my age and cultural background, Yugoslavia became one of the explicitly political un-askable questions, which is how – as the new nation’s attention was being directed towards the streamable future – Yugoslavia became a thing of un-speakable past.

Sitting in the dark classroom, I marvelled at the way the images I was being exposed to resonated in me with un-knowable familiarity. Everything from hand gestures and facial expressions to the atmosphere Tito’s voice evoked as he screamed indoctrinating yet hope-inspiring messages at the masses moved me to tears. All I could do in my confusion was sit back and admire the way in which the images I was being exposed to evoked a direct emotional reaction that I didn’t know how to interpret. For, indeed, the emotion I recognised emerged as consciously silent.

In Public Sphere by Performance, that could be considered the theoretical framework within which Popivoda’s film operates, Cvejić and Vujanović establish themselves as author-philosopher duo of note within the context of the European art market with a discussion of «the eclipse of the public sphere throughout the twentieth century as a marker of the crisis of representative democracy.» In a move that will become characteristic of their methodological approach and, dare I say their style, the authors employ Andrew Turner’s concept of social dramaturgy as «an analytical framework for understanding social process that arises in conflict situations.» Where the mention of social dramaturgy allows the authors to apply a dramaturgical sensibility to their thinking philosophy, exemplifying conflict in its capacity to bring those it affects «together in the [resistant] collective» sees them move laterally–from the realm of philosophy to political activism, for example–with a flexibility that echoes the skill of a theatre professional. However disorienting at times, without this kind of multi-directional and pluri-formal exploring of a logical paradigm the author’s eventual work on the notion of transindividuation wouldn’t be possible.

Back in 2015 Nina Power, the senior lecturer of philosophy at Roehampton University, suggested that «[by] addressing the question of the public through the prism of performance, [the authors] acutely outline the past, present and future of the ‘public’ in an era when all of its supports — the welfare state, a strong image of democracy, collective movements—have been marginalised or destroyed.» What might not be obvious until Towards a Transindividual Self, however, is the precise way in which the authors triangulate between (1) crisis, (2) the dynamic spectrum that cross-referrentially binds the public to the individual, and (3) the notion of the performative in order to articulate their theory according to which «the demonstration of the possibility for individuals to act up against political rule» transforms into a performative action capable of establishing «new rules for which it previously didn’t have the power or authorisation.»

With this theory – reminiscent of Karen Barad’s move from interaction to intra-action, the entertaining of which those familiar with Barad’s work will find intensely satisfying – Cvejić and Vujanović articulate transindividuation as relation, «not between already constituted individuals,» but as «the process in which ‘I’ and ‘we’ are being co-formed in the midst of their preindividual conditions and potentials.» Transindividuation, as a result, «does not start with individuals and is part of an ongoing individuation.» (emphasis added) Even more to the point, transindividuation «is a process of individual and collective co-individuation, where no individual can remain unaffected by the social formation and vice versa.»

In a later part of the book, in which the authors explore Yugoslav philosopher Gajo Petrović’s and French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s take on Marx’s theory of alienation, what is arrived at is, in my opinion, one of Cvejić and Vujanović’s most nuanced and exciting contributions. The observation, namely, that «there is no real and unavoidable clash between the individual and the collective in the onto-historical sense. It is only an ideology of individualism (emphasis added) that falsely presents the conditions within and under which we human beings form ourselves as individuals in the first place […].» The authors hold this ideology directly responsible for «an impoverishment or deprivation of the very process of individuation […] where the power of the single individual as a social-political agent is weakened.»

In this uncharacteristically tender move, the authors momentarily draw our attention away from the crux of their argument to suggest that no matter the way one gets there, where one ought to go is towards sensibility. In the reversal of the above mentioned Marx’s theory of alienation – which I cannot afford to elaborate on in this context – it is sensibility, one’s capacity to deliberately and purposefully coordinate between impression (sensory input) and expression (motor output), that creates the condition for successful individuation, which is –contrary to the alienating process that arguably leads to the formation of the individual self – exactly what binds the multitude in the sensitising process of politically-empowering continual co-individuation.

In addition to the dexterity with which they extrapolate their thought experiments, the authors employ an overwhelming number of references in the writing of their philosophy. They anchor their argument with an extensive overview of the philosophical efforts already made within the contextual frame they are interested in and elaborate them using all sorts of non-academic re-sources. Their philosophy, as a result, is virtuosic to the power of virtuosic. The precision of their sensibility astounding, their referential perspective awe inspiring.

A pleasant side-effect of this quantitative method sees the authors unobtrusively debunk the stereotype which posits thinking and doing as functional opposites – they do this by simultaneously studying theory and practice – whilst acknowledging the fact that both have earned professional experience at the intersection between art-making, social-activism, and academic scholarship. More to the point – born in Belgrade in 1975 – both Cvejić and Vujanović attest to having worked in «post-Yugoslav independent cultural-artistic scenes» that «in the midst of the social transition toward neoliberal capitalism tried to position art and culture as public goods, i.e. neither in the domain of the state nor in the that of the market.»

I imagine that many might find this book intimidatingly technical. I myself have often pondered as to why I’m tempted to refer to this book as a textbook, instead of a book of philosophy. Not familiarising oneself, however, with Cvejić and Vujanović’s efforts – and this, I would say, applies to all citizens, not just culture workers and academics – would be a waste of an opportunity, if not downright erroneous. Towards a Transindividual Self, after all, explores a theory of action, of activity, and so writes a theory of action, and activity. And where many think it necessary to write a theory of action in the form of a manifesto, Cvejić and Vujanović dare do something novel, I think, in the Western context. That is to nod towards the potential of their theory «to bring about profound changes without a revolution (emphasis added), as a matter of prefiguring new social relations and understanding[s] of individual self.» Which is why I’m tempted to colour your imagining of the word textbook by bringing up the word manual. For where textbooks promise to explain how things work, manuals promise to at least suggest if not explain how to transform the knowledge of how things work into action.

*Popivoda’s film is available for rental on vimeoondemand.

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/yugoslavia

(Published, 09.22.2022)