Time-Loops

A Post-script on Pre-enactments

A new genre is booming in the art world: the genre of artistic re-enactments, of which Jeremy
Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave is certainly the canonical example. Interestingly, the re-
enactment has recently experienced its temporal inversion: the pre-enactment. The pioneering
cases of pre-enactments, however, vary in political inclination and theoretical outlook. In
most cases, for instance in the performances of the German collectives Interrobang or
Hofmann&Lindholm, the point of pre-enactments is to critically extrapolate from
contemporary developments an image of our social or political future. This understanding of
pre-enactment replicates the popular dramatization of science fiction scenarios by role playing
communities. Rather than reviving events of the historical past (such as historical battles), a
critical, dystopian view is cast on our future (a future of privatization or surveillance, for
instance) by artistic pre-enactors. However, a second and, from our perspective, more
interesting use of the term pre-enactment was made by the Israeli performance collective
Public Movement. What is supposed to be pre-enacted artistically, in the Public Movement
understanding of the term, is a future political event or institution that remains to be invented
rather than simply being extrapolated from contemporary events or institutions. In Chapter 3,
I have described what I consider to be the, by now, canonical example for the nascent genre of
pre-enactments: the Public Movement performance How long is now?

When Public Movement performers blocked crossroads, dancing to the popular tune of Od lo
ahavti dai, the political dimension of this guerrilla performance remained latent. The critical
edge of the performance – using a circle dance as symbol of communal gathering, taking on
national heritage, etc. – must have been hard to decipher for the car drivers who were literally
bumping into this performance. Yet, the situation bore a structural resemblance to political
street protests: the traffic was stopped and public order was disturbed for a few minutes. And
it was precisely this structural similarity (together with the habitual availability of the popular
Od lo ahavti dai choreography) which a few years later allowed to turn the guerrilla
performance into a successful protest format when social unrest broke out in Tel Aviv in
summer 2011. My point is that from a political perspective the case is of interest because the
1
format of these political demonstrations evolved from a form of artistic activism which was
not yet or not quite political – which, in other words, had not made the passage into politics
proper. Instead, the moment of the political was pre-enacted within the field of art. Not in a
merely mimetical way, as in the case of historical re-enactments (remember Evreinov’s re-
staging of the storming of the Winter palace, which is, as I have argued, mimetic by
definition). Obviously, there is no way in which a future event, whose contours remain
unknown by definition, can be replicated in the present. The moment of the political was pre-
enacted by Public Movement because their latently political performance already displayed
structural features which would later facilitate an easy passage into the political field.

It is easy to see how their approach differs from other theatrical variants of “pre-enactment”.
The initial Public Movement performance was never conceived as a play of post-dramatic
theatre; it had nothing to do with theatre at all. It was the performance – or should we say: a
pre-formance? – of a real political event in the future, of something like a futural “Battle of
Orgreave”. Hence, I propose to use pre-enactment as a term for the artistic anticipation of a
political event to come. But this political event cannot simply be extrapolated from well-
known contemporary tendencies (in most cases, not much fantasy is required to develop
dystopian views of our future). Rather, the future event at stake is an intrinsically conflictual
event: the future outbreak of a conflict.

This definition of pre-enactment – as the artistic anticipation of a political event – leads us

back to the difficult problem of how art and political activism relate. As I have argued
throughout this book, as long as no antagonism has surfaced, as long as the moment of the
political (in the strict ontological sense of the term) has not occurred, it is impossible to truly
act politically (in the ‘ontic’ sense of politics). First, as I have proposed in the introductory
chapter, we have to be touched by an antagonistic force (that is, ontologically speaking, by the
force of antagonism) in order to enact the political. We have to be agitated in order to agitate.
And this only occurs, to once more speak Heideggerese, if we are “thrown” into a political,
that is, conflictual situation. Any other position would amount to a voluntaristic
misunderstanding of the nature of political subjectivity. Therefore, as long as a situation is not
experienced as antagonistic, as long as we are not touched by a “real” antagonism, every
enactment of the political will be of the order of a pre-enactment. It will come too early with
regard to the actual emergence of the political. It will thus be the anticipation of the political
rather than its direct enactment. In this sense, a political pre-enactment can occur in every

2
field of the social, including the art field. Art practices, in an entirely experimental way, may
therefore pre-enact political ones – even though they will never be fully identical with
political practices (for in this case they would cease to be art). However, if we wish to
increase the chances of artistic practice turning into political practice in the moment of a
future conflict, artists are well-advised not to imprison themselves within the spontaneous
ideology of the art field.1 And here we have to refine the argument a little. For if art – at some
future point – is supposed to turn into politics, one has to pre-enact not antagonism (which is,
strictly speaking, impossible for an ontological category cannot be enacted straightaway), but
to pre-enact the structural features of political action. This means to act, as it were, in a
political mode even as the moment of the political might not have occurred yet. But what
exactly are these structural features or conditions of political acting?

In Chapter 3, I have proposed strategy, collectivity, conflictuality, and the blockade of streams
of circulation by human bodies as defining features of political activism. We have also seen
that acting politically means acting in an organized fashion. These criteria make up, in my
view, the nucleus of any activist politics worth the name. They, in a sense, constitute the
minimal conditions of political action.2 For the same reason these criteria describe, to different
degrees, the potentially political dimension of art practices. Let me once more rush through
these criteria in order to flesh out the argument. So, why collectivity? For the simple reason
that in the sphere of the political I cannot act in solitude; I will have to “get together” with
others in order to act – which is what Hannah Arendt understands by “acting in concert”. This
can be achieved in a variety of ways, but in any case some sort of collectivity will result from
it, a collectivity which then can be seen as the actual subject of a particular political act.
Secondly, a collective that is not organized to some degree, that does not find at least some
minimal patterns of organization, isn’t really a collective. Elsewhere, there can be loose
networks of people without common denominator, but in politics people do not join
randomly; their mutual articulation into a collectivity has to be brought about. In other words,
it has to be organized. In addition, political action is never without reason or without goals,
and these goals can only be achieved against a plethora of obstacles. There will always be
institutional obstacles, for instance; and, certainly, there will be rival attempts to block our
efforts to achieve these goals. In order to circumvent or overcome these obstacles, strategic
considerations are of importance. Therefore, strategy remains an intrinsic part of political

1
As long as they remain dogmatically individualistic, for instance, it is quite unlikely that their pre-enactment
will do more than merely advancing their artistic career.
2
See the chapter on „minimal politics“ in Oliver Marchart: Die politische Differenz (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010).
3
action as no one acts within a political vacuum. And, finally, since the space of acting is in
fact filled with other collectivities, that is, with competing political actors, political action will
always be conflictual. Conflict, make no mistake, is not merely a particular mode of doing
politics; political action is, in and by itself, conflictual.3 Were it otherwise we would be able
to achieve our goals through non-political means. In this case, there would be no political
adversary, hence, no conflict; there would be no obstacle, hence, no strategy required; there
would be no collectivity, because we could achieve our goals individually; and therefore there
would be no need to organize. For this reason, antagonism – the ontological term for conflict
– is not one among many conditions, it is the very instance that determines all the other
criteria of political action. If it is subtracted from action, we end up with a depoliticized idea
of politics.

From this we can only draw a single conclusion: political aesthetics – as an aesthetics of the
political – has to be grounded on the, to speak with Derrida, hauntological ground, or, to
speak with Reiner Schürmann, upon the an-archic principle of antagonism. Political
aesthetics turns into an aesthetics of antagonism. Not in the sense of an imagocentric
misunderstanding of “aesthetics”: antagonism, as it was said, is an ontological/hauntological
instance that cannot be depicted as such. But there are structural features of antagonism that
can be determined. For if the minimal conditions of activist politics are, in fact, ontic
instantiations of an ontological ground (antagonism), then these conditions, from the
perspective of conflictual aesthetics, must equally apply to artistic activism to the extent to
which the latter is political. This is not to advance any claim as to the conditions of art in
general, of course. My claim is restricted to political art practices. Nor do I wish to deny that
some of these conditions are easily available for non-political modes of artistic practice. There
is a variety of (non-political) artistic practice which is collective, organized, and strategic, no
doubt about that. But as long as conditions such as collectivity, organization and strategy are
not mediated by antagonism, there is nothing truly political to such practice. Artistic positions
might well be mediated, for instance, by competition vis-à-vis other positions. In this case,
however, we are talking about marketing strategies between competing business actors within
the art field, not about strategies between political adversaries. For the same reason, artists
often tend to organise some sort of collective in the form of an artists’ group, a school or a
network – but as long as their organisation is not mediated by antagonism it will be hard to

3
For this reason, antagonism – the ontological term for conflict – is not one among many conditions, it is the
very instance that determines all the other criteria of political action. If it is subtracted from action, we end up
with a depoliticized idea of politics.
4
think of it as a political collective. So, while artistic practice may often resemble political
forms of collectivity, organization and strategy, the minimal conditions of politics are not met
as long as antagonism has not been encountered.

Now, if it is impossible to force such encounter into being, then what should we do? One
option is simply to wait and see. At some point antagonism may break out, or it may never
break out. This is, to say the least, a boring option which deprives us of all agency. How can
we forge a path beyond the politically sterile alternative between voluntarism and passivism?
This is precisely where, as I have indicated above, the concept of pre-enactment comes in. It
is, I keep insisting, impossible for us to directly enact the political – rather, we are enacted by
the political. Yet we can pre-enact the political – in, admittedly, weak and pre-political forms
–, although there is no guarantee that the political will ever occur. To do this, we will have to
anticipate a form of action that meets the minimal conditions of politics. Not cognitively, of
course: We have to anticipate these conditions practically, that is, in our practice. Artistic
pre-enactments of a political event-to-come have to “mimic”, not the event or the antagonism
as such, but the structural conditions of minimal politics of which I have mentioned some
(collectivity, organization, strategy, the bodily blockade of streams of circulation, and, above
all, conflictuality). With a view on a political event-to-come, artistic practice in the mode of
pre-enactment has to be collective, organized, strategic, embodied and conflict-oriented. And
if there’s no conflict by which you are touched – then you have to look for trouble. You have
to see where the hidden lines of latent conflicts run, and you have to try to reactivate them by
pre-enacting their future re-enactment. You’ll have to construct a time-loop.

Perhaps, constructing time-loops is less difficult than it may sound. The history of
contemporary art is full of artistic/political time-loops, and today a new sensitivity seems to
emerge within the art world with regards to similar formats. The topic of “rehearsal” has
become quite fashionable in the last few years. In November 2014, for instance, a conference
was organized at Goldsmith’s College under the title “Repeat! The Logics of Exercise,
Trainings, Tests and Rehearsals”. As is apparent from the subtitle, though, different things get
mixed up in this debate. A rehearsal, as a rule, is the rehearsal of a determinate play or show –
which is the exact opposite of what I have described as the logic of pre-enactments. A pre-
enactment – with its open outcome – cannot be a rehearsal of a determinate event; at best, it
can be the rehearsal of an entirely indeterminate event – the event of the political –, but then
“rehearsal” would be a misnomer. It is thus preferable to think of pre-enactments as training

5
sessions that provide us with the skills necessary to engage in the “actual thing”, should it
occur. A pre-enactment should not be envisaged as the rehearsal of a particular choreography
that is known in advance. It bears more resemblance to what in the world of classical ballet is
called the exercise. It implies the training of basic movements at the bar. It is like a warm-up
for some future event with largely unknown contours, an event that may occur or not.

Let us take as a final example for such time-loop between the artistic and the political the
“happening” as it was invented by Allan Kaprow around the year 1958. As an artistic format,
this was inspired by Kaprow’s early experience of Pollock’s action painting and by the
fashion of American-style Zen Buddhism (whose most famous proponent was John Cage).
According to Kaprow’s beautifully Zenish definition, “Happenings are events that, put
simply, happen”.4 In the 1960s, the term evolved into a household concept when the media
started to describe any kind of event as a “happening”. What is more interesting, however, is
that happenings became an important element of the protest vocabulary of 1968 and after
(remember the story recounted in Chapter 2: Jean-Louis Barrault, the director of the Odéon in
1968, addressing Julian Beck, who spearheaded the squatters of the theatre, with the words
“What a wonderful happening, Julian!”). Hence, Kaprow’s happenings, which were initially
located in the art field, turned out to be pre-enactments of political happenings. Kaprow
himself declined to stage happenings for a political purpose, as he thought this would only
make them “bad” happenings – an indication that he had not managed to free himself of the
spontaneous ideology of the art field.5 Yet in 1971 he did speak approvingly of a happening
by Abbie Hoffmann, the head of the hippie protest group Provos:

Abbie Hoffmann applied the intermedium of Happenings (via the Provos) to a

philosophical and political goal to or three summers ago. With a group of friends, he
went to the observation balcony of the New York Stock Exchange. At a signal he and
his friends tossed handfuls of dollar bills onto the floor below, where trading was at its
height. According to his report, brokers cheered, diving for the bills; the tickertape
stopped; the market was probably affected; and the press reported the arrival of the
cops.6

4
Alan Kaprow: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California
Press 2003): p.16. This notion of ‘Ereignis’ could have been phrased by Heidegger in exactly the same terms.
5
That Kaprow believed he had crossed the line between art and life, which includes the line between art and
activism, was, ironically, the very reason why he never turned into a real activist. Even as he sought to explore
the ideas of ‘un-art’ and of the ‘un-artist’, he always did so from the perspective of art and of the artist.
6
Ibid., p. 105.
6
In the light of our theory of pre-enactment this famous political happening, covered
nationwide on television, appears as a perfect example of political activism modelled upon an
artistic format: the “happening” as invented by Kaprow.7 Yet upon closer inspection, it turns
out that the time-loop may also lead us into the opposite direction, back to the pre-history of
artistic happenings. Going back in time, we may discover that Kaprow’s artistic happening
could have been modelled, inter alia, upon political happenings in the first place (rather than
political happenings being modelled upon artistic ones). To see this, we have to revisit
Kaprow’s initial source of inspiration, the book Art as Experience, published by the American
pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in 1934 and read attentively by the young Kaprow. It was
Dewey who had insisted on the aesthetic dimension of everyday experiences. Kaprow’s idea
of experimentally investigating – in forms of “happenings” and “activities” – into the
aesthetic qualities of ordinary activities such as, for instance, tooth brushing or sweeping a
stage, was anticipated in Dewey’s book from the thirties. Experience, for Dewey, was
characterized by standing out from the general flow of consciousness, but there are plenty of
situations in our daily life that have this quality. Dewey provides us with a list of examples
including “eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book,
or taking part in a political campaign”8.

Surprisingly, this list of examples provided by Dewey turns out to end with a political
happening. Many years later, Kaprow, in his writings, will repeat exactly the same pattern. A
few paragraphs before discussing Hoffman’s political happening, he predicts that traditional
art forms will be surpassed in the future by “assemblage arts” such as “light shows, space-age
demonstration at world’s fairs, teaching aids, sales displays, toys, and political campaigns”
(104). Later he claims that we unofficially approximate the sacred rituals of earlier societies
only “in such sports as surfing, motorcycle racing, and sky diving; in social protests such as
sit-ins; and in gambles against the unknown such as moon landings” (114). In an earlier
article he had suggested affinities between happenings and other practices such as “parades,
carnivals, games, expeditions, guided tours, orgies, religious ceremonies, and such secular
rituals as the elaborate operations of the Mafia; civil rights demonstrations; national election
campaigns; Thursday nights at the shopping centers of America; the hot-rod, dragsters, and
motorcycle scene” (64). In all these lists of examples, it is true, political happenings only

7
For Kaprow, of course, it made “no difference whether what Hoffman did is called activism, criticism,
pranksterism, self-advertisment, or art”, Kaprow: Essays, p. 105.
8
John Dewey: „Art as Experience“, in Stephen David Ross (ed.): Art and its Significance: An Anthology of
Aesthetic Theory (Albany: SUNY Press 1994), p. 205.
7
figure as one option among many. In same they are given a slightly more prominent position
as the final example in a list of “happenings”. However, what if we follow Hannah Arendt
who assumed that political acting is not just one among many forms of acting but, rather, the
supreme case of acting? Is it imaginable that acting in the political mode provides us with the
master-copy of any form of acting? And could it be that, by extension, the political event
turns out to be a master-copy of the artistic “happening”?

We may or may not be inclined to answer in the affirmative. Our answer will largely depend
on whether we are prepared to grant ontological primacy to the political or not. One thing is
for sure, however: artistic pre-enactments, as a format, are not historically original. They, in
turn, have been pre-enacted by political activists under a telling name: prefiguration. The idea
of prefiguration originated in the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s and was further
developed in contemporary social movements. It is based on the conviction that, what regards
a future democratic society, there is nothing to wait for. “‘Prefiguration’ or ‘prefigurative
politics’”, as Mathijs van de Sande explains, “refers to a political action, practice, movement,
moment or development in which certain political ideals are experimentally actualised in the
‘here and now’, rather than hoped to be realised in a distant future. Thus, in prefigurative
practices, the means applied are deemed to embody or ‘mirror’ the ends one strives to
realise”.9 In this respect, prefiguration differs significantly from political strategies that
separate between means and ends. The Leninist vanguard party, for instance, was supposed to
fight for a future communist society in which everyone is free and equal, but as an instrument
of political struggle the party was hierarchically structured and tightly organized. In this
regard, Leninist politics adheres to a logic of postponement. The prefigurative politics enacted
in the assemblies and occupations in 2011, on the other hand, refutes this idea. There is
nothing to be postponed. If you wish for a democratic society, your present actions have to
prefigure the democratic structure and procedures of this society. Therefore, “prefiguration is
a particular way of bridging the temporal distinction between a ‘here and now’ on the one
hand and a future alternative society”.10 Or, in the words of David Graeber, one of the most
prominent advocates of prefigurative politics:

In the early twentieth Century it was called “building the new society in the shell of
the old,” in the 1980s and 1990s it came to be known as “prefigurative politics.” But

9
Mathijs van de Sande: „The prefigurative politics of Tahrir Square – an alternative perspective on the 2011
revolutions”, in Res Publica (2013) 19, p. 230.
10
Ibid.
8
 when Greek anarchists declare “we are a message from the future,” or American ones
claim to be creating an “insurgent civilization,” these are really just ways of saying the
same thing. We are speaking of that sphere in which action itself becomes a
prophecy.11

When we start abandoning the logic of postponement, political activism ceases to be the
frustrating and often time fruitless affair as it is often times portrayed (mostly by non-
activists). It is not the case, from a prefigurative point of view, that a truly democratic society
cannot exist in the here and now and may, or may not, eventually exist only at some distant
point in the future. The future society is brought into existence in the very moment in which it
is pre-enacted. It is already present in the assemblies on city squares or in other forms of
communal gathering that follow self-established democratic rules. But it is only present, of
course, as long as it is pre-enacted. These ideas are highly reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s
performative notion of freedom. For Arendt, freedom only exists as long as people act
together. Freedom, for her, is an action concept. It cannot be manufactured as a determinate
object; it comes and goes in the performative process of acting together.

There is a second reason why the concepts of prefiguration and pre-enactment may help us to
break with the tragic idea of political activism as a never-ending sequence of failures,
debacles and setbacks. The logic of pre-enactment relieves us from the burden of
revolutionary heroism. If your goal is to build a new order on a world-revolutionary scale, it is
quite likely that you will fail. But if your goal is to prefiguratively enact democratic relations
in the here and now, you are bypassing the logic of scale as much as you are bypassing the
logic of time.12 I have started this book with the observation that events of social protest
should not be conceived as short-lived temporal outbreaks, but as a continuous sub-stream
throughout history. We are living in a political continuum; and it is less difficult than one may
expect to pre-enact something which, on closer inspection, has already occurred and does not
stop occurring, if only to a minimal degree and in minimal doses. The heroic view conceives
of politics as a grandiose effort, as a form of rare but “big” politics. Yet, politics, in the sense
of political activism, occurs constantly and occurs on any point of the scale – from the
maximum to the minimum degree of action.

11
David Graeber: The Democracy Project. A History. A Crisis. A Movement (London: Penguin), p. 233.
12
Preferably, of course, democratic relations should extend as much as possible, and it is advisable to develop
strategies of hegemonic “expansion”, but there is no direct correspondence between extension or scale on the one
hand and the democratic nature of these relations on the other.
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For this reason, the construction of time-loops through prefigurative action is a quite
mundane, not particularly spectacular affair. In politics, the laws of linear time get suspended
regularly. By acting in the present we are constantly jumping back and forth in time. In fact,
as phenomenologists have discovered, this is what we incessantly do in our daily lives as well.
For Husserl, the two experiential modes of what he calls “retention” and “protention” describe
the two modes of holding on, in our mind, to a passing event and, vice versa, to anticipate
how this event will unfold within the very next moments. Consequently, the world is never
experienced as a disentangled and isolated instant. Our experience has a temporal imprint
which points beyond the present moment. There is no such thing as the nunc stans – the
“eternal now” – of the mystics, no pure instant of the present. We are either lagging behind or
jumping the gun.

The time-loops of re- and pre-enactments follow a similar logic – only that they are not about
mental perceptions, as in Husserl; they are names for collective, organized, strategic activity.
In this latter sense, acting is always both: re-enacting and pre-enacting. In other words, to
claim that there is no isolated action in the now means claiming that actions are a confused
mix of repetitive, ritualistic, conserving, circulating, institutionalizing, historicizing practices
together with anticipating, renewing, revolutionizing, de-institutionalizing ones. Through our
actions we construct loops in time by linking the historical past to a yet unwritten future –
which is the same as bending an unwritten future towards the historical past. There are only
loop-holes in what appears as linear historical time. Hence, politics, in the activist mode, is
the activity of constructing loops, of twisting time, that is, of re-actualizing alternative
histories by pre-actualizing alternative futures.

Such endeavour is without guarantees. From Allan Kaprow, to whom we shall finally return,
we can learn that “the feedback loop is never exact” – which implies that “something new
comes out in the process – knowledge, well-being, surprise”. 13 Future and presence do not
meet. Politics does not proceed in perfect circles. The feedback, instigated through our
actions, returns, but it goes past the point from where it originated. If Graeber is right that in
the sphere of prefigurative politics action “becomes a prophecy”, then this prophecy is
certainly not self-fulfilling. By constructing the future we will be missing the future. The
future, in other words, is made of unintended effects rather than well-meaning intentions. This
should not prevent us from making a collective and strategic effort. But we should be aware

13
Kaprow, Essays, p. 112.
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of the irrefutable fact that, rather than closing the circle, our actions will always miss the mark
somewhat. Activists of prefigurative politics never move in straight lines towards a clearly-
defined goal. They move in staggering, tottering ways on out-of-round lines towards an
obfuscated goal. Sometimes their actions may appear surprisingly creative and effective,
sometimes clumsy and ridiculously naïve – but this, as such, cannot be held against them. It’s
part of the nature of political acting which, because of its ungrounded and open-ended
character, is closer to slapstick comedy than it is to military discipline.14 For this reason, an
aesthetics of conflictual practice may have more to do with the aesthetics of slapstick and less
with the aesthetics of high art. Its main object of concern is the street, including banana peels
on the sideway, not so much the art piece on a gallery wall. Or, as Allan Kaprow would have
put it: “Artists of the world, drop out! You have nothing to lose but your professions”.15

14
Slapstick accepts and turns the encounter with contingency (the proverbial banana peel) into a bodily art form,
a virtuoso choreography of clumsiness.
15
Kaprow, Essays, p. 109.
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