9/28/2005 (more recent minor corrections are not include)

William Kaizen

Vulgar Politics

"Aux yeux du people/In the eyes of the people," by Way of Introduction

<fig. Rainer Ganahl, Basic Canadian: Aux yeux du people/In the eyes of the people (TK)>

Two sentences caption a photograph by Rainer Ganahl. In the upper right corner: "Aux yeux du people." In the lower right corner: "In the eyes of the people." Given that Ganahl is Austrian and a native Germans speaker, it is not clear which text translates the other. The two texts reinforce this ambiguity, both speaking languages of colonization, speaking for two countries in which democracy, as a politics of the sovereign people, emerged almost simultaneously at the end of the 18th Century. The image to which they are attached is of a makeshift signboard like those used since antiquity to post messages in the commons. Here the common place of information exchange appears decrepit and forlorn. The foundation of democracy in the public square as a place for meeting and disagreement has been displaced. As the automobiles to the left of the image suggest, democracy has been driven elsewhere by new forms of mobility, connected to new types of public and private space. The image is of a place in Canada, a country whose very existence is based on the legacy of colonization and the logic of capitalist competition, expansion and mobility. With the return to democracy in Europe, "the people" were constituted as sovereign only by holding a fundamental contradiction in suspension: that these people were sanction by both universal human rights on the one hand and rivalrous national identities on the other. Contained with this image and the various notions of language, image, place and identity it puts on display, is a kind of vulgar politics as a politics of the people. It is this politics, that Ganahl explores throughout his work and that I will develop.

I take vulgar politics to mean politics based in the dispute over what is given in common, from language to the spaces in which selves and communities constitute themselves. The vulgar, as vulgate, is not just the common tongue shared by a people but the vernacular in the broadest possible sense: as the partitioning of sense in general (both sensation and meaning) that shapes the sensual, sayable and knowable for a given, local community. The vulgar is a politics of the people because it stages the possibility of having a vernacular community and the limits that community. To put pressure on politics-as-usual through the use of vulgar politics is to dispute what is given for consensus. It is to put another reality on display next to the one that has been given, in order to suggest a way to repartition the given. These are politics in the terms that Jacque Rancière establishes when he writes:

Politics, as we will see, is that activity which turns on equality as its principle. And the principle of equality is transformed by the distribution of community shares as defined by a quandary: when is there and when is there not equality in things between who and who else? What are these "things" and who are these whos? How does equality come to consist of equality and inequality?[1]

Vulgar politics is a politics that raises these questions of equality, not from the position of a pre-given assumption of universal human rights, but from a position that questions the meaning of a given discourse through the production of counter-discourse. It is to attempt to forge a new vernacular from the words given to the old vernacular, to shift the very foundations of what constitutes a people, and in whose eyes these people are constituted, by transforming the means of knowledge.

Ganahl's work undertakes this political doubling of reality. It stages both the given institutions that constitute possibilities for knowledge, especially those whose main concern is language and education, and produces new possibilities for knowledge by revealing how current mechanisms of domination exist and by suggesting means of transforming them. His work reflects what lies in the eyes of the people today and tries to stage ways to move beyond the current state of affairs where the people are now constituted through the pseudo-participation of opinion polls, Op-Ed columns and blogs, and where mass consumption, family values and pre-given identities seem to be the only ties that bind communities together. The question posed by his work is the status of the common: given the economic (capitalist) drive toward globalization, how is common sense framed and what possibilities exist for producing new forms of common sense? Today, neither Kantian transcendentals nor genetic science seem adequate as the standard-bearers of the limits of knowledge or that which arbitrates the human or a people, and yet there is still a persistent drive toward universal human rights today and the construction of a global people. In the face of the wave of nationalisms that flared in the many regional ("ethnic") conflicts of the 1990s, and in the current state of unilateral exceptionalism promoted by the United States, it seems that the only connection between people across regional borders is the universal advertising of international corporate goods. Ganahl's work operates on another level, on a more vulgar level, on the possibilities of vernacular being-in-common and of even having a self that can be in common with another. In "The eyes of the people," to write across the face of the decrepit commons with two languages of colonization is to monster the plight of the people and their communities today. It is to use vulgar politics against politics-as-usual by putting on display the need for new stagings of democracy where freedom means more than the right to go shopping. In what follows I will trace how Ganahl both reflects existing conditions that frame the vernacular, and suggests alternatives to them in his use of vulgar politics.

Learning Communities

—On the Libraries and Readings and their connection to counter-discourse and the mechanisms of domination.

<fig. Rainer Ganahl, Reading Frantz Fanon, G8 Summit (2003)>

These vulgar politics were recently on display when Ganahl was invited to participate in the first "Summit of Interventionist Art," (SoIA) held in opposition to the G8 Summit at Lake Geneva, Evian, France, June 2-3, 2003. The SoIA was held on the other side of the lake, in Switzerland, at an art space called the Usine. As its name indicates, the Usine was a converted factory, in a relatively marginal area, just outside of downtown Geneva. Most protest activities were being held there because it was the closest city to the G8 Summit. The Usine was a hub for anti-G8 activism. As part of the SoIA the international, alternative-media group Indymedia was using it as a base of operations. The police conducted a raid one night, making arrests and causing general chaos in their attempt to disrupt the protestors. Nevertheless, the SoIA went on as planned, in a series of lectures, workshops and art events held as part of the general protest movement. Ganahl contributed a Reading of Frantz Fanon's "Concerning Violence," from The Wretched of the Earth, outside, on the street in front of the Usine.[2]

Ganahl had inadvertently held the first of his Readings series ten years before while attending his own exhibition at the Person's Weekend Museum in Tokyo. It was an impromptu event that would change the direction of his work. He had been in Japan for several months, studying Japanese as he prepared for the show. Travel was the norm for Ganahl, who had moved from Vorarlberg in the western-most, Austrian Alps where he was born and raised, to Paris and then to New York, with various stops along the way. The Tokyo exhibition consisted largely of the work he had been making for the past several years exploring the emergence of tele-technologies and the kinds of virtual spaces they create as they pass over national borders, turning the local into the global. He also produced his first "Library" for this exhibition and it was this that began to point him in new directions. Entitled, A Portable, not so ideal, imported library or how to reinvent the coffee table—25 books for instant use (Japanese version), it consisted of a selection of books on a shelf. Books such as Gates's Signifying Monkey, Dan Graham's Rock My Religion, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Outside in the Teaching Machine, Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and Edward Said's The World, The Text, and The Critic were sitting there, on a shelf, for the perusal of visitors to the gallery.

<fig. Rainer Ganahl, A Portable, not so ideal, imported library or how to reinvent the coffee table—25 books for instant use (Japanese version) (1993)>

With the production of both this Library and with his personal difficulties in learning the Japanese language, which he had been studying while working on the exhibition, he realized that his role as traveling artist had begun to "parody the cultural arrogance of the missionary."[3] The Library was meant to be a small offering as a possible point of cultural exchange. It was meant for the kind of "instant use" he had been undertaking in his own study of Japanese using various textbooks as he absorbed the local culture. He decided to go to the gallery on Saturdays and read some of his Library books, word by word, line by line, with whoever decided to join him. He and his readers would each bring to bear whatever knowledge they had in order to interpret and translate the text. With this gesture toward active exchange, Ganahl's work switched from presenting globalization as a finished event whose given consequences could be archeologically explored to a more subtle examination of what knowledge means in process, as it takes place in the midst of global travel and traveling cultures.[4] After this first Library, a major part of his artistic practice would focus on the politics of learning. He would move from his early concern with the spaces being opened up by tele-technologies and globalizing media to a more developed focus on how these spaces are constrained by local, regional limit conditions. His assumption became that, despite so-called "globalization," people still necessarily occupy particular places through culture, but especially through language and education. He turned toward an exploration of the ways in which specific communities take place at the intersection of the global and local, in what he decided to call, in a slightly redolent neologism, the "glocal."[5]

One of the texts that Ganahl and his visitors read together from the Library was the chapter from Said's book entitled "Traveling Theory" in which Said discusses two problems: 1) the reception and re-reception of ideas over time and place; and 2) the function of the particular ideas grouped under the rubric of "critique."[6] He brings these problems together by tracing the reception of critical theory as put forth by Georg Lukács, as then taken up by Lucien Goldmann, and then Raymond Williams. Said suggests that in each instance, rather than misreadings and misrecognitions, social circumstance allowed Lukácsian critical theory (based in the notion of reification) to be renewed by the necessities of each moment in which it was once again resumed. Said describes how Goldmann turned critical theory to scholarly use in the context of post-WII Paris, and how Williams radicalized it once again in the context of the U.K. in the 1970s. These vagaries of critical theory are, for Said, a realization of theory in general, which is inherently incomplete. For Said, in each instance, as it was resumed, the project of critical theory is not misprised or misunderstood but reborn. Said presents his own resumption of critical theory as yet the next turn of the reception screw. For Ganahl, this text was also an opportunity to take up critical theory in his own way, asking himself and his co-readers, how it might be possible to produce critical artwork against the reification of the global at a moment in the 1990s when the art world had begun to turn away from political issues and back towards an all-too-familiar dialectics of beauty versus the grotesque.[7] For Ganahl, the answer was in the various forms his work would go on to take as it presented studying, learning and teaching as art works.

Upon returning to the U.S. from Tokyo, Ganahl attended a seminar taught by Said at Columbia University on the "Representations of the Intellectual."

<fig. Rainer Ganahl, Edward Said, Last Works, Late Style (1995)>

Said was concerned with the fate of the public intellectual, and how, through the uptake of critical theory, it was possible to "speak truth to power" as a radical academic. For Said the intellectual could still work against prevailing norms despite the pressures to become an organ of majoritarian authority, corporate influence or academic trends. In the published series of lectures upon which the seminar was based, Said is vague both about how truth is constituted and how power functions.[8] To this end, he describes the intellectual as an "individual"[9] who examines "the known and available facts with a norm" in order to "project a better state of affairs, and one that corresponds more closely to a set of moral principles."[10] He never examines his claim that the self is an "individual," or what a "fact," "norm," "moral principle," or "better state of affairs" might be, and for whom. Also unexamined, and more to my point, is the value he assigns to the heroic, lone scholar, railing against injustice. In "Traveling Theory," he dismisses Michel Foucault, an author whose work and influence can help to flesh out these ideas. For Foucault the intellectual (and the self in general) is only becomes an individual after it is produced through power relationships. Both intellects and intellectuals are only made possible through particular institutional formations of knowledge and truth. While Said is far more sensitive to this when it comes to the representations of the East as Other in the West, he leaves his own position as intellectual and the assumptions that underwrite it relatively unexamined.[11] In "Traveling Theory" Said turns against Foucault's critique of power, reading it reductively, as if Foucault had suggested power is unidirectional, coming from on high to enslave the powerless. Foucault responded in an interview to this common criticism of his work, which was put forth by Said and many others:

When I study the mechanisms of power, I try to analyze their specificity: nothing is more foreign to me than the idea of a "master" who imposes his own law. Rather than indicating the presence of a "master," I worry about comprehending the effective mechanisms of domination; and I do it so that those who are inserted in certain relations of power, who are implicated in them, might escape through their actions of resistance and rebellion, might transform them in order not to be subjugated any longer. And if I don't ever say what must be done, it isn't because I believe that there's nothing to be done; on the contrary, it is because I think that there are a thousand things to do, to invent, to forge, on the part of those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they're implicated, have decided to resist or escape them. From this point of view all of my investigations rest on a postulate of absolute optimism. I do not conduct my analyses in order to say: this is how things are, look how trapped you are. I say certain things only to the extent which I see them as capable of permitting the transformation of reality.[12]

As this statement demonstrates, Foucault was clearly not reducing power to a unidirectional, univocal flow, but working to disclose the mechanisms by which it produces particular possibilities for knowledge and so for the self. In denies the master in favor of pointing out systems that allow for various types of mastery, and so produce mechanisms of domination that are not fixed but mobile. In doing so, he suggests, both implicitly and explicitly (as above, and as in his last work on sexuality and bio-power), that power moves horizontally, this way and that, and is codified in various forms that are not fixed but constantly traveling.

For Foucault, power is relational. Institutions fix relations of power, however contingently or long term. In Discipline and Punish he locates the institutionalization of knowledge in the formation of state-sponsored education that took place during the 18th and 19th Centuries as a form of disciplinary space that helped to produce the very individual that Said takes for granted.[13] Foucault, as the quote above indicates, did not simply foreclose this self (intellectual or otherwise) in unbreachable walls of power. He recognized that power was multiple and heterogeneous and that selves produce resistances, even within themselves, that are also a kind of power. He called these resistances "counter-discourse," and for Foucault, this counter-discourse, as with all power relations, is always immanent to the system it speaks against. He describes this as the difference between a theory about imprisonment made from the outside, by prison reformers, and the critique of prisons made by prisoners.[14] Notions like Said's "speaking truth to power" come from this reformist position on the outside. They are the work of intellectuals who uphold "universal principles."[15] Against these "universal intellectuals" Foucault proposes the "specific intellectual" who produces a local counter-discourse, always from the inside, always with others, and always working against the power relations in which they are directly implicated.[16] To produce counter-discourse it is necessary (tacitly or not) to acknowledge that one's own specific, local, vernacular community is the basis of communication, that there is no outside to discourse, and that all things given to knowledge are the product of power flowing through a particular social body. It is this self that "compears" (to use a term that Jean-Luc Nancy has coined, meaning to "co-appear" or "appear together")[17] with local community and communication that makes existence possible. This self is filled with the clichés of common sense, but it can also—given an examination of its own implication in the mechanisms of domination—open onto counter-discourse and new forms of knowledge and so point the way toward new types of community. It is in this spirit, more in the spirit of Foucault than Said, that Ganahl takes up critical theory. He takes learning to be a process where selves (including himself) are always already implicated in various interplays of power that both limit the real and open onto new realities, wherever, whenever—but, more precisely, however—they take place. He turns to education from his own position inside particular vernaculars and institutions of learning in order to build new stages for temporary learning communities that both reproduce the existing mechanisms of domination and suggest new possibilities connecting selves to the world.

Ganahl discovered in his first "Readings" this circulation of power as it moved through a contingent, local, learning community. There were several problems involved with the Readings: the text as one prohibitive authority and Ganahl as another; the interpretation of the meaning of the text as well as the interpretation of the language of the text; that the text had perhaps already been interpreted from a mother tongue into English; that the readers moved between English and Japanese in their discussion. As Ganahl and his readers discovered (and I have been one of these readers on several occasions), discourse is constantly being rebuilt from the ground up, from every word chosen and each act of communication, and mastery is never finished but continuously produced against a background of pre-given expectations of how one reads, understands and interprets a text. Rather than act as an individual intellectual or reproduce the divide between schoolmaster and student, Ganahl does intellectual work together with his co-readers, the text acting a catalyst for group inquiry. It is an object to be worked on, for mutual reflection. It is a point of reference, exactly the kind of "fact" that Said appeals to, but taken as a discursive act and a point of further discussion, not stable but a kind of strange attractor. As the different vernaculars of the participants circle through and around the text a new common vernacular is built from this interaction, however temporary. The Readings are a way of learning outside the given system of education. They stage an alternative space for group knowledge production. For several years Ganahl recreated his A portable (not so ideal) imported library… and the Readings associated with it at various exhibitions, in various languages, changing the texts at each venue.[18]

<fig. Ganahl, Imported Reading, Florida (199TK)>

In his following Readings he focused on a few authors—Antonio Gramsci, Karl Marx and Franz Fanon—using their texts repeatedly. Rather than try to site-specifically match the readings to the place of reading, Ganahl traveled the same authors to see how it their work was produced differently in each place it was reread. In this circulation of reading Ganahl makes theory travel, each text finding new life in each rereading, each rereading producing a new stage for a new learning community.

The SoIA events at the Usine, held during the G8 summit, crystallized the potential of Ganahl's Readings to act as counter-discourse. Text and site were brought together so that traveling theory found a home in the midst of on-going political struggles. In taking Fanon's "Concerning Violence" to the streets he was able to turn the a Reading into a more active form of resistance and produce a learning community that not only revealed mechanisms of domination but, in the place of its staging, acted to undo them.

<fig. Rainer Ganahl, Reading Frantz Fanon, G8 Summit (2003)>

The Reading was held for two days on the street outside the Usine, with a core of several readers and various passers-by who joined and left as the reading progressed depending upon their interest. Anyone could choose to participate, to watch, or to walk past. Fanon's text describes the struggle for freedom undertaken by the Algerians as they fought against their French colonial oppression. He recounts the dehumanization of the colonized Algerians, and how the French saw them as animals and exploited them through a Manichean policy of radical otherness. He recounts the response whereby the Algerians internalized the violence of their oppression and could only return violence with violence in an unending "circle of hate."[19] The street where Ganahl held the Reading is known as a place to buy drugs from North African immigrants. While not far from downtown, the area around the Usine is industrial and relatively marginal. The dealers were all black by an unofficial police decree that does not tolerate whites in the (visible, public) drug trade. Both little and much had changed from the days in the 1960s that Fanon describes. The formerly colonized people are still marginalized and other, but they have moved to the post-colonial homeland, fully internalized the will to capital (rather than the will to violence), and are making more money than many of the ex-colonists who had oppressed them a generation earlier. One circle of hate has been broken, but otherness has continued in a marginal although lucrative corner of capitalist production. While the drug dealers did not participate directly in the Reading, their presence lent an extra dimension to the community of readers, as a reminder of how Fanon's text must be re-read and re-received in light of glocal politics.

The anti-G8 protest lent a further point of reflection in how the text could be read. All around during the reading, the protests and police response were taking place. Thousands of activists had descended upon Geneva and all sort of demonstrations were happening, some spilling over into riots. The Readings became another of these street demonstrations. To sit down in protest has a long and continued history, notably during the U.S. civil rights movement where it was used as a non-violent means of resisting arrest. To read Fanon during the G8 protests was to consider a previous moment of struggle and both the use of violence and the trap that it laid for those who turned to it as a solution to colonial and especially economic struggle. The continued appeal of violence was very much still alive in Geneva where a neo-anarchist "Black Bloc" gathered to smash storefronts and automobiles as a means of fighting against international capitalism.[20] To read Fanon's analyses of colonial and post-colonial violence, in a non-violent way, in the midst of an event where violence was all around (including the kind of violence involved in drug dealing and its marginalization), was to take a discourse originally produced as a counter-discourse and to receive it once again as a new form of counter-discourse. It was to produce Fanon anew, in the midst of current, glocal politics as they were erupting. It was to receive an old counter-discourse as a counter-discourse reborn. The G8 Reading enacted vulgar politics by constructing a people, no matter how small, who staged counter-discourse in action, and in this the G8 Reading was even more explicitly than before, the form of reflection and the reflection were one. It was a learning community produced in the midst of on-going politics and various mechanisms of domination that it both reflected and staged anew.

Rhetorical Photography

—On S/L and radical metonymy.

Besides his Reading, Ganahl also spent considerable time wandering around Geneva during the G8 protests, taking photographs and videos of the events. He recounts:

I myself too was walking around taking pictures and filming like everybody else. The city had suddenly turned photogenic for everyone. The police were filming, tourists were filming, Geneva residents were filming, protesters were filming and the press was filming and photographing. Almost everybody was filming and photographing.[21]

The protests made the city even more "picturesque" than usual. The entire populace was armed with the tools needed to capture and reproduce history in the making. In 2003 Geneva the means of image production had become almost completely democratized. This was a process that had begun with the production of inexpensive cameras in the mid-20th century, and was more fully realized in the 1950s and 60s with the mass up take of the Kodak Instamatics and Super 8 film cameras. As the public got access to the means of mass image production, so did visual artists. During the 1960s a whole variety of avant-garde strategies emerged using these and similar technologies: expanded cinema, early video art, and the photographic documentation of performance and conceptual art. Particularly in the latter two, the artist became a journalistic documentarian, recording events in a pseudo-neutral way, as if the mechanical apparatus of the camera were enough to eliminate their point of view. The unskilled camera document in photography, film and video became the very aesthetic which would define art in the late 1960s through the 1970s. It would take the next generation of artists to recognize the ways in which the camera always aestheticizes, the gallery always beautifies and the lens always has a point of view. Whereas artists in the previous generation—e.g. Robert Smithson, Vito Acconci, Douglas Hubler—had turned to the snapshot as if it contained or captured the evidence of an event in a relatively neutral way, it would take the next generation of artists—e.g. Victor Burgin, Mary Kelley, Martha Rosler and Alan Sekula—to bring the cheap camera aesthetic to account.

For this next generation the "decisive moment doctrine" of the snapshot, as Rosler called it, was understood as having a longer history.[22] Rosler linked conceptual photographic practices to the use of documentary images in photojournalism. After ten-odd years of the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam and Watergate, it was no longer possible for these artists to think that through photography one could record an event (any event) in a neutral and unbiased way. The administrative aesthetic of the previous generation was no longer an option. Rosler also recognized that even the most liberal minded documentary photographers working as photo-journalists, reinforced their own position as intrepid "adventurer-artists" who captured scenes of dismay and decay for the edification of the elite.[23] Rather than align her practice with either the pseudo-neutral administrative aesthetics of performance documentation and conceptual art photography, or with the liberal rhetoric of social reformist documentary photography, she turned to what she calls photography as "radical metonymy."[24] In her project The Bowery in Two Inadequate Systems, the direct image of her subject matter—the "bowery bum"—is absent.

<fig. Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Systems (1974-75)>

Her subject is presented through photographs of empty streets paired with the words unkindly used to describe those who sleep on these streets and their existence in general: "lush, wino, alcoholic," "muddled, fuddled," "knocked out, laid out, out of the picture." There are no images of people in any of the photographs and so emotive empathy with the face of the other is cancelled. By literally placing her "subject" (as both subject matter and other as subject) out of the picture, her use of metonymy is radicalized because these images do not seem to re-present directly that whose subject they circle around. The images and words stand in for the absent subject, which is shown to consist only of a material place and set of materialized signifiers linking that self to a place—in this instance: "bowery," plus, "lush, wino, alcoholic." She uses the deskilled strategies of conceptual art to produce a radical rather than a liberal form of photodocumentary. It is radical in as much as it is anti-humanist, taking the "subject" as a self produced at the intersection of various linguistic and social possibilities rather than as a universal given with universal human rights. Despite the title, it is not the Bowery that is inadequately presented here but the absent subject whose construction only takes place metonymically. What this suggests is that photography, like all means of reproduction (and all means of communication), is metonymic in that it produces meaning through substitution, endlessly deferring the "real" for the active production of reality: that a sense of self comes through language and place. It further suggests that this condition is hidden in the normal reception of photography where connotive meaning is taken at face value. What Bowery… puts on display is a splitting of the real, whereby the subject is seemingly absent and so neither the image nor its caption gives easy access to it. Instead the collision of image and caption troubles the means of photographic representation in general. She uses radical metonymy to split the real, and so to suggest that all communicative acts do the same, and that, by putting one real along side another, new possibilities for reality can emerge, or at least, the limits of the given systems can be made palpable.

Roland Barthes had previously invoked this relationship between photography and metonymy in his essay "The Rhetoric of the Image."[25] He adopts Roman Jakobson's use of the term, whereby the substitution of one symbol for another acts as the means for shaping connotive meaning.[26] As Barthes recounts, metonymy normally functions in photography to secure meaning by linking the image to rhetorical ideologies embedded in the community where it is received. In an analysis of a French advertisement for Italian tomato sauce, Barthes describes how the metonymic substitution of pasta, cans, onion, peppers, etc., emerging from a string bag, keyed to the colors red, yellow and green and tied to the name Panzini, all secure the connotive meaning of "Italianicity" for a French viewer. Rosler's radical metonymy is meant to undo these ties, to release the various components of photographic meaning from their given rhetorical message. She separates out image from caption, and evacuates the subject in order to undermine the ability of the various parts of her photographic message to reproduce the given ideology. Rather then give the viewer an image of the "bowery bum," to which they could securely affix their given cultural associations, she puts these associations on display as the subject of representation, disrupting the normal flow of photographic connotation.

Yet, while Rosler emphatically absents the subject of documentary photography, her own role, as adventurer-artist is still intact. Direct images of her subject may have been abandoned, but she still approaches them indirectly, from the outside. Her position in the discursive network that elicits these "laid out" people is still that of an exterior observer. Even while putting a kind of postmodern politics on view in her demythification of the metonymic system swirling around the Bowery, she occupies a position of mastery, of the one who reveals or knows through photographic capture and informational display. Her own place in the metonymic chain of communication is not reflected in the work. Ganahl's work inflects this position by acknowledging his own position in the mechanisms of domination that he represents. He recuperates a strategy from the early documentation of performance art where the artist is included in the event reproduced, but with the political engagement of second-generation conceptual art, making his own point of view integral to the work.

This is evident in Ganahl's "S/L" series where he takes photographs of seminars and lectures that document academia and the production of knowledge from the inside.[27] Ganahl had previously taken photographs during lectures he was attending as tokens for his own remembrance. The idea to turn them into artworks came to him during his attendance at Said's "Representing the Intellectual" seminar. He began to shoot photographs of both speakers and their audience in the places where critical theory was being endlessly re-received. He shot in university classrooms, museums, and public halls, but only at events that he was interested in attending for their own sake because they held some sort of personal interest. The photographs are shown in multiples of two or more, with at least one image of the speaker and one of the audience so that each side of the knowledge exchange is represented.

<fig. Rainer Ganahl, S/L: James Clifford (199TK)>

The slash in S/L is borrowed from Barthes' book S/Z.[28] As in S/Z, it indicates a gap in signification, but while S/Z symmetrically inverts the terms on either side of this divide, the balance of power in Ganahl's images is lopsided.[29] Rather than "seminar/lecture," S/L would perhaps be better put as "S/T" for student/teacher, or "S/A" for speaker/audience, or better still left as S/L but with the references changes to "speaker/listener." There is a benefit to leaving S/L as "seminar/lecture," in that this designation emphasizes the way in which these photographs bring together the event as a whole, including teacher-speaker, student-audience and their institutional relationship.

Altogether S/L shows frozen moments of people caught in the midst of thought, hundreds of Thinkers, not lost in their own Romantic worlds, but rather seen in the middle of temporary communities of those who listen and those who speak. Bodies are seen caught in mid-gesture, in the midst of this transmission process as they swing from attention to boredom, from focused listening and speaking to daydreaming and distraction. The precedent for this kind of documentary photography of people caught in everyday poses comes from street photography, especially in its "indoor" version in Walker Evan's subway images.