intervention

The word ‘intervention’ has legal, political and artistic connotations, but the three senses presuppose different structures or relations. In law, it marks the entrance of a non-party into a dispute: given a situation that opposes two or more sides, another one is introduced due to an interest in the outcome of the litigation that entitles it to have a say; or a supposedly neutral, uninterested part steps in through an act of force by which, it is argued, it stops a situation which cannot be solved those involved from extending indefinitely, or arriving at a critical point. It is curious that, while the first case belongs to civil law, the second applies both to the ‘humanitarian’ intervention of international law and to the action of central banks or governments in rescuing banks or businesses. In art, the structure refers to an already given space or object which is ‘disrupted’ in some way by another object, artist, group etc.; it works primarily through a sense of ‘this shouldn’t be here’, of breaking the normality with which whatever is intervened on is perceived. If in the legal case the original situation is a conflict that calls for a non-party, either interested or neutral, the artistic goes in the opposite direction: it is the intervention that creates conflict, produces a tension. This tension, in turn, while it calls for a resolution, is at the same time and from the start pre-empted by the fact that it will not be resolved, but only interrupted: it ceases to exist once the intervention is over – conserved in memory and documentation, a form of sub-sistence that does not call for a resolution, even though it may still produce effects.
The political sense (that is, if one allows interstate intervention to be classified as ‘law’) is a lot less marked. To speak at a meeting is an intervention; to steer a consensus between two opposing positions (which is similar to, but not exactly the same as, in civil law); to take part in a direct action (which often will have a similar form to an artistic intervention); to write a text; to become involved in a struggle; to bridge the gap between different spheres, levels, institutions; the actions of the community or union organiser, or the party cadre – all of these can count as interventions. In comparison to law, the political sense indicates a party that is not neutral (unlike international law), but already involved, or at least interested in some way (as in civil law). In common with international law and art, it has the fact that it involves an act of force, a ‘jumping into’ that requires no previous authorisation.
The differentiation from the structure of artistic intervention at this point becomes difficult, only one reason for which being that the discrete acts of a political intervention (a text, a direct action) can and often share it. In order to differentiate the two more exactly, it is necessary to move to a different plane – the plane of an ethics of the intervention –, but this move too is unstable: for this ethical plane is in itself political, in the sense that it concerns the relations to others, the relation of one’s conduct to theirs, and the process that is common to both. So if I choose to draw the distinction in such a way that ‘political’ is valued above ‘artistic’, this is not to exclude the possibility of artistic interventions being political; but since I wish to make it from a point of view which is, in itself, already political, this will mean making the artistic into the cipher of what (for the purpose of this distinction) is not politics, and vice-versa. The consequence is that, from the point of view of an ethics of intervention, much of what is ostensibly political (by virtue of having no pretensions to being art) will appear as being, in fact, artistic.
In the case of art, the subject who intervenes is highly undetermined: considering the three possibilities found so far – interested, neutral, involved –, the subject (the artist=x) could be any. The indeterminacy is in part a consequence of the object of the intervention: if it is not an ongoing dispute, process, crisis that calls for a resolution; if, instead, it is the creation of a tension which, rather than demand resolution, is interrupted – how can we determine the subject? Obviously, no-one would go out of their way to do something they were not interested in; but the interest that defines the non-party in a civil law litigation, or the migrants fighting for papers, or the communities defending their livelihoods, is very different from an intellectual curiosity, or a moral sympathy: it refers to a situation where one stands to win or lose. But do we often not intervene politically in a space where we do not share the same predicament of those struggling alongside? Yet the political leap is made when you go from being ‘interested’ (in the lighter sense) to being involved; even if the outcome does not affect you (in your livelihood or existence), your investment is such that it enhances your power to affect and be affected, to the point where your joy (and not merely your happiness) is at stake. Such a degree of investment, of casting one’s lot alongside others’, is not achieved until you have been affected by the process in question; until you sense, but can also to an extent comprehend, the desires, relations, investments it encompasses; until you share a sense of where it is headed, what are its strengths and weaknesses, where it requires intervention. So here a line can be drawn: from the ethical standpoint, a political intervention takes places when you are interested (stand to win or lose) and involved, or only involved; an artistic intervention is when you are neutral. This applies, for instance, to an artistic practice that creates and interrupts a tension that is completely external to and does not communicate in any way with the tensions that envelop the constituency that is its audience or object – a work about migrants that does not involve migrants, or does involve them but, rather than inserting itself in the context of their lives and struggles, only juxtaposes itself onto them; instead of feeding back into them (as a process that helps in their own organisation, as instruments, skills or objects that they can use), it only transposes their situation to another context (gallery, academia, art public). But it applies just the same to a direct action against a detention centre that is organised and carried out without any prior and posterior communication with those inside, any understanding of how it can have its effects maximised through this relation, any attempt at making it not an end in itself, but the outcome of something and the pre-condition for something else.
‘Involvement’ gives another meaning to inter-venire: no longer ‘to come in-between two’, but ‘to come in the middle’. The very distinction between subject/object of intervention, and between intervention and process, is momentarily dissolved. You are partially produced by the process that involves you (‘involve’ and ‘envelop’ share the same etymological root); what you do feeds back into the process, and, in constituting it, constitutes others, and yourself. It is in the interval between these two indefinite movements that intervention takes place. Likewise, the intervention is a moment of a larger continuum that elicits it on the one end (marks the empty space it must occupy, or the blockage it must lift) and surpasses it on the other (intervening is not an end in itself, but a way of producing new conditions, of transforming the situation’s future).
On the one hand, the ‘I’ that acts is dissolved; not a becoming like everyone else, but exactly the opposite: an enhanced capacity to perceive oneself as a singularity, decomposable into the processes by which one has become what one is and is maintained relatively stable; with it, an increased plasticity, a capacity to go beyond the contingent. This immediately opens onto the process as a whole; the web of relations between self and others expands into those among others, and the process and its ‘outside’. The individual sense of space is relativised in favour of all the different positions that have been, are or can be occupied by others and myself. It is only by retracing the movement that led up to ‘here and now’ that the where and when of an intervention can appear. A ‘neutral’ intervener acts externally, unilaterally; through a purely speculative ‘interest’ (however deeply felt), a ‘feeling’ not grounded on any attempt at comprehending the situation from inside by analysing the forces that compose it (however well-informed it may be), a ‘hunch’ not committed to following through with the outcomes. (Often this ‘slash and burn’ attitude is because the ‘real’ intervention is happening elsewhere: one goes somewhere only to return to one’s activist or artistic community, accruing some social capital in the process. For the artist as much as the one who ‘writes a critique’, abandoning authorship and ownership always presents a risk, given that their primary mode of capital accumulation entails maintaining a proper name. A corollary of that is that interventions – by means of art or any other – should not pretend to be blind to their conditions of production, but place them as part of their question.) A political intervention is never autonomous, but always a matter of sensing the spaces that need to be occupied, the blockages to be moved, the connections to be made – which can also mean to ‘let it drop’, even when one disagrees with where things are headed.
On the other hand, the dissolution has to be interrupted at some point: an intervention is always a decision, a break, a certain violence. An involved sensibility demands both the openness to sense the non-totalisable whole of the process, and the determination to act upon that whole in the way that seems the most effective for the process at a given moment. Like becoming a Lenin and a proletarian, all at the same time, except one is never fully either: the background against which a decision is made can never be exhausted (and so an action is always uncertain), and one’s action is never (and should never be thought as) a definitive rupture – even if it the campaign, project etc. in question is at an end. This does not mean that an intervention must necessarily look for resolutions: sometimes there is none to be had, and a sustained tension, a ‘keeping it open’ is the best contribution. But it is (and should be) only ‘an action upon actions’ in a series that extends indefinitely into the future, feeding back into the same or different processes and becoming part of the conditions for future interventions – so that cycle starts again. The violence of the act is against the self as much as against the other, and it is crucial to resist the narcissistic illusion of having the last word, or the urge for instant gratification.
This also means relativising individual temporality in favour of the larger time of the process in question, and the processes of which it is a part, stretching indefinitely towards past and future. An intervention, however isolated, must always be thought in terms of the effects that it can go on producing, beyond its conservation as document or memory; this means that it is less about ‘doing something’ than it is about thinking every step that it should include in order to maximise its outcomes. It has its own strategy and tactics, but these must be thought in terms of the neighbouring strategies and tactics it enters in composition with; and it has a materiality that is all too easily forgotten both in artistic and activist practices: to ‘involve a community’ is a slow work that demands building relationships over time, identifying the most connected nodes in each social network, composing desires and interests in such a way that they enhance each other; to ‘produce an effect’ is tied as much to the intervention itself as to the material forms of its conservation, communication and circulation, who it addresses and how it involves them. Something is political if it produces political effects, yet that it does so is never given by an intrinsic quality (‘it’s an important issue’), but depends on the external relations it creates and that guarantee its in-sistence (the capacity to go on producing effects).
This entails refusing to turn the limits of what can be done into a fetishistic cult of the small and local, often indistinct from self-exculpation for not following through the commitment to the conditions and outcomes of an intervention. There is only so much that can ever be done, but whatever is done should be taken to its maximum limit: willed as something that could return again and again. On the other hand, this relativisation of time also implies refusing the facile option of always standing outside in a position to condemn any small and local outcomes as always already recuperated by an all-powerful totality. The present is at once never enough – and one’s eyes should be on always higher prizes – and something that can only be judged on its own terms, rather than according to a putative endpoint which will never be given: according to the future effects and transformations it enables, which necessarily means being ready to per-sist, to follow them through. This calls for a complex negotiation between the temporality of a finite life (‘what I will see in my lifetime’) and what is in excess of it (‘what can happen once I am gone’ – dead, or not involved anymore), navigating the Scylla of despair (‘we will never get there’) and the Charybdis of complacency (‘there is no more we can do’). Admittedly an impossible, and never-ending task; but one that is both made bearable and necessary by the joy involved in being involved.
Rodrigo Nunes
Rodrigo Nunes has been involved in different community and labour organising, as well as art, projects over the years; and is currently finishing (in the asymptotic sense) a PhD on immanence and philosophy in Deleuze and Foucault at Goldsmiths College, University of London, with a grant from the Brazilian government. He has written on passions like politics, art, and philosophy in publications such as ephemera, Mute, and Transversal; co-edited (with Ben Trott and Emma Dowling) a special issue of ephemera on immaterial and affective labour; and is a member of the editorial collective of Turbulence (<a href="http://www.turbulence.org.uk">www.turbulence.org.uk</a>). Other great passions are music and film – and he is also a DJ, scriptwriter, inept pianist and failed filmmaker. Contact: <a href="mailto:rgnunes@kein.org">rgnunes@kein.org</a> 2008-06-26T05:42:02Z 39 true intervention

2008-06-28T12:02:35Z