DARE2 - Barseghian & Kristensen.pdf

Reprint from The Dark Precursor - ISBN 978 94 6270 118 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2017 The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research Reprint from The Dark Precursor - ISBN 978 94 6270 118 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2017 Dark precursor_II_285x195_6 INDEX PdA.indd 281 18/10/17 16:25 The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici Volume II The Dark Precursor in Image, Space, and Politics Leuven University Press Reprint from The Dark Precursor - ISBN 978 94 6270 118 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2017 Dark precursor_II_285x195_6 INDEX PdA.indd 283 18/10/17 16:25 Editor Paulo de Assis Paolo Giudici Authors Volume 2 Éric Alliez Manola Antonioli Jūratė Baranova Zsuzsa Baross Anna Barseghian Ian Buchanan Elena del Río Luis de Miranda Lucia D’Errico Lilija Duoblien฀ Adreis Echzehn Jae Emerling Verina Gfader Ronny Hardliz Rahma Khazam Stefan Kristensen Erin Manning John Miers Elfie Miklautz Marc Ngui Andreia Oliveira Federica Pallaver Andrej Radman Felix Rebolledo Anne Sauvagnargues Janae Sholtz Mhairi Vari Mick Wilson Elisabet Yanagisawa Managing editor Edward Crooks Series editor William Brooks Lay-out Studio Luc Derycke © 2017 by Leuven University Press / Universitaire Pers Leuven / Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Minderbroedersstraat 4 B–3000 Leuven (Belgium) ISBN (2-vol. set) 978 94 6270 118 2 e-ISBN (2-vol. set) 978 94 6166 233 0 D/2017/1869/36 NUR: 663 The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme ([FP7/2007-2013] [FP7/2007-2011]) under grant agreement n° 313419. All rights reserved. Except in those cases expressly determined by law, no part of this publication may be multiplied, saved in automated data files or made public in any way whatsoever without the express prior written consent of the publishers. This book is published in the Orpheus Institute Series Typesetting Friedemann bvba Cover design Lucia D'Errico Cover image Pieter Lozie, “Gent Lightning 20140609 2.55 am,” from Lighting, Rainbow, 2014. Courtesy of ©Pieter Lozie. All rights reserved. Illustrations on pp. “Illustraties page 288, 289, 426, 427, 466, 467 © Lucia D’Errico Press Wilco B.V., The Netherlands Reprint from The Dark Precursor - ISBN 978 94 6270 118 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2017 Dark precursor_II_285x195_6 INDEX PdA.indd 571 18/10/17 16:26 No Voice is Lost or, The Dead as a Witness Anna Barseghian Utopiana, Geneva Stefan Kristensen Utopiana, Geneva Introduction This chapter introduces a project we worked on between 2010 and 2012. Anna Barseghian was born in Soviet Armenia into a family of survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Her family was from the plan of Mush, now in southeastern Turkey. She grew up with the story of Gülizar, a young girl who was abducted by a Kurdish tribal chief, but who resisted and became a hero in her homeland. When travelling in the area, we became aware that Gülizar’s story was also well known to the Kurdish population now living there. We then collected a series of testimonies from people who have a relation with her story, and images from the area: traces and ghostly presences of the Armenians from Mush. This became the video installation Spectrography, shown in Geneva and Valence in 2013 and Istanbul in 2015. Our aim was to show how the ghosts are still present and influence everyday life in Anatolia today. We discovered that not only the survivors but also the dead were witness to the Catastrophe. The history and the story The story took place in 1889, some twenty-six years before the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. It happened in the plain of Mush, now eastern Turkey. Gülizar, a fourteen-year-old Armenian girl, was abducted by Musa Bek, a powerful Kurdish tribal chief, after her uncle Miro, the chief of a village in the eastern part of the plain, had gone to the governor in Bitlis to file a complaint against Musa Bek for his violence towards the Armenians in the region. Gülizar was abducted in the first days of the spring; contrary to other girls in the same situation, Gülizar resisted her abductor and managed to send a message to her family saying she was alive and did not intend to become a Muslim. Eventually, Musa Bek agreed to bring her to the governor in Bitlis and make her perform the Islamic declaration of faith to appease the situation. One day in June 1889, after three months captivity, Gülizar appeared before the governor and all the important people of the region; this young girl said that she was a 338 Reprint from The Dark Precursor - ISBN 978 94 6270 118 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2017 Dark precursor_II_285x195_6 INDEX PdA.indd 338 18/10/17 16:25 No Voice is Lost Christian, that she wanted to come home to her village again, and she also testified against the crimes committed by Musa Bek and his men.1 What followed this event is also important: Musa Bek was indicted and a court case was instructed a few months later in Constantinople; a whole delegation of Armenians from the region of Mush travelled to the capital city (at that time this meant a two-week trip!). Eventually, a few years later, the appeal court sentenced Musa Bek to one year’s exile in Mecca. Gülizar literally became a hero in the aftermath of the court case, a symbol of resistance against injustice and discrimination. She eventually married the son of a priest, Kegham Der Garabedian, an important writer and political activist in the Armenian national movement who became a deputy in the Ottoman parliament from 1910 to his death in 1918. Gülizar’s trajectory did not finish with her death; her story survived in the memory of the people. Among the Armenians from Mush who survived the genocide, her story survived through the lament sung by grandmothers, through being told as a family story among the Kurds living in those places now, and through the oral tradition carried by dengbej (troubadours). Actually, during her lifetime Gülizar had already become what she still is now: a ghost shared by so many people that she can be considered a myth, because her life bears witness to the destiny of the subsequent generations. What is a ghost? A ghost is a being that exists after the death of a person, a presence originating from this person after her or his passing. It is a dead person’s way of being, among the living. The problem of ghosts is to give an account of the presence of an absence, of the way an absence is perceived as such, and this implies a paradoxical experience of time. First of all, let us insist upon the fact that we speak from the point of the living. We do not pretend to take the point of view of the dead and speculate about what they might feel and think from where they are. Our aim is to understand the way the dead are present to the living, what kind of respect is expected from us towards them, what the consequences are if we forget them or if we continue as if they had not existed. The ethical dimension being that our relations with the dead can occasion great violence and injustice to the living, if they are not right, if the presence of the dead is not recognised as it ought to be. There are at least two ways of approaching the presence of the dead for the living; principally, there are the anthropological and the psychoanalytical ways. The first way studies specific social rituals and behaviours around the dead; the second studies the ways past experiences (often forgotten) play a role in present life. In contemporary anthropology, we find significant material on how the trajectory of a person doesn’t stop at his or her death and how their action 1 Her story is told in Les noces noires de Gülizar, written by her daughter Arménouhie Kévonian in 1946. The French version was edited by her grandchildren, historians Anahide Ter Minassian and Kéram Kévonian, and published by Editions Parenthèses in Marseille (Kévonian [1993] 2005). 339 Reprint from The Dark Precursor - ISBN 978 94 6270 118 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2017 Dark precursor_II_285x195_6 INDEX PdA.indd 339 18/10/17 16:25 Anna Barseghian and Stefan Kristensen after death can be beneficial to the living. In a recent issue of the anthropological journal Terrain, writing on “the useful dead” (les morts utiles) philosopher Vinciane Despret (2014, 4, our translation) presents a range of such examples: “persons,” she writes, “once their life is accomplished, . . . are mobilised in very diverse projects and resume work among the living.” One famous example is the case of Brazilian physician José Arigo, who is said to have made surgeries under the direction of a German military surgeon who had been killed during World War 1.2 In an earlier paper on the relation to the dead in Iceland, Christophe Pons points out that the living ordinarily but unexpectedly encounter the dead, and that these encounters are always narrated. Solitary visions or dreams very soon become a social experience. As Pons (2002, 131, our translation) notes, “The encounters with the dead . . . refer to culturally coded experiences, their primary aim is always to be communicated to other living persons, and this is how the exchanges with the dead take place.”3 But as we wish to claim, it can also be a much more everyday presence, a presence continually inspiring the existential priorities of a singular life, as is the case with Gâzîn, a woman dengbej singer we met in Van in the summer of 2010. She doesn’t speak about visions of the dead, but of how the memory of Gülizar that her own grandmother carried inspired her to become a traditional singer (a dengbej) herself. The presence of the dead can be positive or negative, depending on a series of factors, such as the profile of a person’s life, the behaviour of the living, and so on. Such cases are quite obvious if we consider the remnants of Ottoman societies: violence, unburied dead, and impeded or failed mourning have given rise to many disturbances in the presence of the dead in disrupted families and communities, throughout the different communities (not to mention the ongoing violence against Kurds). A branch of contemporary psychoanalysis has specialised in the treatment of such disturbances. In Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s works, a ghost is defined as a “formation of the unconscious that has never been conscious. . . . It passes . . . from the parent’s unconscious into the child’s” (Abraham and Torok 1994, 173). Their idea is that there has been an important event in someone’s life that has been repressed and concealed in a crypt; instead of dying with the person at the end of her or his life, the event is taken up by a person from the next generation, leading her or him to do strange things, for example actions against personal interest. Abraham and Torok (1987, 391, our translation) describe the ghost as “a work in the unconscious of the shameful secret of another. . . . Its law is the obligation of unknowing [nescience]. Its manifestation, the haunting, is the return of the ghost in strange words and actions, and in symptoms (phobic, obsessive . . .) and so on.”4 2 A story recounted and commented on by Pons (2011). 3 “les rencontres avec les morts sont . . . renvoient à des expériences culturellement codées, leur dessein premier est toujours d’être communiquées à d’autres vivants et que c’est par ce biais que les échanges avec les morts ont lieu.” 4 “Le fantôme est le travail dans l’inconscient du secret inavouable d’un autre. . . . Sa loi est obligation de nescience. Sa manifestation, la hantise, est le retour du fantôme dans des paroles et actes bizarres, dans des symptoms (phobiques, obsessionnels . . .) etc.” 340 Reprint from The Dark Precursor - ISBN 978 94 6270 118 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2017 Dark precursor_II_285x195_6 INDEX PdA.indd 340 18/10/17 16:25 No Voice is Lost But the limit of this clinical approach, however useful, is twofold: first, it seems to reduce the ghost phenomenon to a malevolent reality—it is basically seen as a source of harm to the living, since it mostly takes the form of a skeleton in the closet. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it tends to focus on the transmission of traumatic secrets by individuals and families. But the transmission of unconscious contents involves collective processes not reducible to relations between individuals, and simply not intelligible from the individual point of view. Seen as the mere communication of individual unconsciouses, the transmission appears as a strange telepathy. In other words, we need a concept of the unconscious encompassing the collective, an unconscious from which individual life emerges. The transmission of collective traumas and oral culture Transmission is a transversal phenomenon, and our proposal is to understand it with the help of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the refrain (ritournelle), by which they refer to a kind of practice conscious or unconscious, by which a living being (a bird, a child, and so on) delineates a space to dwell in; a habitable, properly subjective, space. This they call the process of territorialisation; in itself, a refrain is a temporal form—that is, a dance, a tune, a bodily characteristic (colour, shape), or any perceptible feature able to structure space, for example, by signifying to others that “this is my territory.” Deleuze and Guattari show that there is a circle between the rhythm of the refrain, its expressive character, and its territorialising function. This triangle (rhythm, expression, territory) is what the refrain produces, which means that the refrain itself is not of the order of meaning; it fulfils what Guattari calls an existential function—that is, the nondiscursive, creative driving force of enunciation. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 316) suggest that this is precisely what art actually consists in: “Can this becoming, this emergence, be called Art? That would make the territory a result of art. The artist: the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark.” It is important to stress that this notion of territory in our reading is necessarily the territory of somebody, not the objective geographical scientific delimitation of space, and that the refrain has an ontological dimension, not merely a semiotic one, inasmuch as it is involved in the very constitution of the self. The essence of art is situated there, in the creativity of a people, in such practices of resistance that are able to delimit a territory where that people may be at home. Actually we are close to the notion of landscape—and it is notable that the sister notion of the refrain discussed in the seventh chapter of A Thousand Plateaus is the notion of face and faciality (visage, visagéité), treated as equivalent to landscape (paysage, paysagéité). The refrain produces a landscape—that is, the possibility of situating oneself in space. And the specific landscape of somebody at a certain moment in history can become so significant and so pregnant for a whole community that it is transmitted and remembered as such. Our proposal is that this is precisely what a ghost is: the expressive rhythmic relation of a subject (individual or collective) to a 341 Reprint from The Dark Precursor - ISBN 978 94 6270 118 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2017 Dark precursor_II_285x195_6 INDEX PdA.indd 341 18/10/17 16:25 Anna Barseghian and Stefan Kristensen person’s land and the people who live there. What is transmitted is this very relation; the ghost is thus nothing other than the possibility of a landscape, and thus is a grounding enabling the subject to feel at home in her or his own existence. In both the Armenian and the Kurdish cases, we have an oral transmission enacted as spontaneous micropolitical resistance against the oppression of a totalitarian state, on the one side, the Soviet oppression of the memory of the genocide, and, on the other side, the negation and repression of Kurdish identities by Kemalist Turkey. The oral form of a song is crucially important to the territorialising power of its refrain. It is always a certain rhythm that participates in giving shape to a subject’s relation with her or his own history, ancestry, and landscapes—the reference to childhood in the very first lines of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994, 311) chapter on the refrain is not by chance: “A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song.” Just as Gülizar’s granddaughter Anahide Ter Minassian, an important character in our video, recalls an episode such as this from her childhood, Anna too grew up in the discrete rhythm of her grandmother’s intimate refrain, and Gâzîn, the Kurdish dengbej singer, also keeps remembering the way her grandmother would tell the story. In this way, the refrain crosses the different territories; the different refrains form different territories, both different and common territories of resistance. To be more precise about the very content of this refrain, we must turn to the way it is sung by the local dengbej Kurdish troubadour singers. Here we’re quoting from the version of Cahido, a dengbej from Mush: Akh le waye, waye! Haji Mousa Bek, I told you, stand up, it’s the morning I swear, I’m Gülo the insane, I told you to stand up Gülo left Khars and you are in Kala Gülo says, “Haji Mousa Bek, what you are doing, God sees it Even if you rip off my flesh with pincers . . .” I know that your faith is as worthy as mine, But I swore not to betray my Andris Pasha, I will not convert, I will not become a Muslim While in captivity, Gülizar undoes her self, the pregnant refrain of the dengbej resounds “I am Gülo the insane,” signalling that she has found another self in this distress. To survive, she had to bring about a real rupture with her previous self; as for any survivor, the past has ceased to exist, and the present of captivity becomes a past that doesn’t go away. When the dengbej sings this phrase, he or she shows that the power of the event is about to change the girl from top to bottom, and madness becomes both a refuge for her and a warning for the persecutor. The evocation of God goes beyond cultural aspects—it concerns the central component of the refrain, that is, the idea that one has to rely on an unconditional instance to be able to constitute one’s self as a subject. In a seminar of the mid-1980s, Guattari (1985) touches on this idea, explaining that it is only by putting the self in relation to God (or the King, or any unconditional 342 Reprint from The Dark Precursor - ISBN 978 94 6270 118 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2017 Dark precursor_II_285x195_6 INDEX PdA.indd 342 18/10/17 16:25 No Voice is Lost figure of authority) that one can have the courage to risk one’s life. The issue is the acting out of the individual establishing a new level of existence. In another verse, the denbej sings that Gülizar “will go to the European countries” and complain about Musa Bek’s crimes and seek justice. The dengbej have well understood the political dimension of Gülizar’s attitude. They develop a new refrain evoking the European countries, the throne of Kemal Pasha,5 the political authorities able to intervene. Gülizar’s territory of resistance suddenly is widened on another scale, from the confined space of Musa Bek’s village to the space of international politics. In yet another passage, she calls out to her abductor, “Musa Bek, let me go,” “I am not worthy of you” / “I’m not for you,” hinting at the ineffable fact of the rape that she was subjected to. Here we touch upon a hidden aspect at the heart of the refrain, and upon the ability to perceive the imperceptible, which is so crucial in the creative process of becoming minoritarian. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 287) write, “There is always a woman, a child, a bird to secretly perceive the secret. There is always a perception finer than yours, a perception of your imperceptible, of what is in your box.” This image is coherent with the other sentence that we constantly heard during our encounters, “Güle6 was very beautiful”—a sentence repeated as a warning to young girls that they could become the object of the predatory behaviour of dominant males. In the secret heart of Gülizar’s story, there is this very fact of the rape, working as the more or less repressed motor of the whole story. Resistance is first and foremost against rape, both affirming its very possibility (likeliness) and the necessity of overcoming it. In a nutshell, we here have two lines of time: something happened in history, but this event is at the same time a past that doesn’t pass. The refrain repeats and keeps alive the meaning of this event, adapting the meaning to present circumstances, intertwining the two modes of temporality. The mythical past of Gülizar’s captivity and struggle and the present of oppression and resistance intertwine and interfere with one another, but the very interference becomes a unity. In the present, Gülizar’s presence is an indestructible past, just as she herself carried the burden of her own past all through her life. As a survivor, one becomes a normal person again, except for this indestructible past that doesn’t pass, and which is perceptible for others only through discrete signs such as the refrains, the ellipses, the absences. This past, in other terms, is the presence of death within the surviving person. The witness is dead, but her refrain is alive According to common sense, a witness has to be alive in order to bear witness. This seems obvious—a judge would not be taken seriously calling a dead person to testify in court . . . But when the content of the testimony is of such 5 “Kemal Pasha” is an ancient Ottoman way to evoke Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic. The appearance of this character is of course anachronistic in a story that happened in the late nineteenth century, but this is a typical feature of oral traditions. 6 Güle, or Gulo, are diminutives of Gülizar, the use of which signals an affective proximity. 343 Reprint from The Dark Precursor - ISBN 978 94 6270 118 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2017 Dark precursor_II_285x195_6 INDEX PdA.indd 343 18/10/17 16:25 Anna Barseghian and Stefan Kristensen significance to the living, the very pattern of the refrain requires the central phenomenon, much more and way above the singular life of the person having lived through the event. As a transmitter of sensations and relations, the witness herself, as such, is dead. Even if it is the same person, there is a splitting between the person as witness and the person as storyteller. Her testimony is necessarily carried by others, and even if Gülizar herself survived her captivity and lived a rather long life until her real death in 1948, she would be a stranger to herself while narrating her story. She was haunted by the young girl that she once was, who in a sense died at the hands of Musa Bek. And this haunting continues as long as this story carries an important meaning to people in this country, in Armenia, and wherever else. The witness herself is a ghost in the sense that as a witness she is no longer present where the event happened. Speaking about this event implies also the absence of the event. This is why the subjectivity of the witness can be carried onto subsequent generations and become a living myth. When a dengbej sings about the event, she or he is Gülizar, singing from her point of view, in her name. We then listen to a dead person, listen to the ghost indirectly, which is speaking through the voice of the singer. The death of the witness thus expresses nothing but the irreversibility of the event, the simple fact that the event defined a rupture in collective history and changed the very possibility of dwelling and unfolding a human life. In other words, the ghost is a political agent—the issue is to be able to listen to it. References champ non discursif.” Seminar, 12 March Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. 1987. 1985. Accessed 13 June 2017. http://www. L’écorce et le noyau. Paris: Flammarion. revue-chimeres.fr/guattari/semin/semi. Abridged translation by Nicholas T. Rand html. published as Abraham and Torok 1994. Kévonian, Arménouhie. (1993) 2005. Les ———. 1994. The Shell and the Kernel: noces noires de Gülizar. Edited by Anahide Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Edited and Ter Minassian and Kéram Kévonian. translated by Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: Translated by Jacques Mouradian. University of Chicago Press. Abridged Marseille: Éditions Parenthèses. translation of Abraham and Torok 1987. Translation first published 1993 (Éditions Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. Parenthèses). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Pons, Christophe. 2002. “Réseaux de Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian vivants, solidarités de morts: Un système Massumi. Minneapolis: University of symbolique en Islande.” Terrain 38: Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as 127–40. Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 ———. 2011. Les liaisons surnaturelles: Une (Paris: Minuit). anthropologie du médiumnisme dans l’Islande Despret, Vinciane. 2014. “Les morts utiles.” contemporaine. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Terrain 62: 4–23. Guattari, Felix. 1985. “Machine abstraite et 344 Reprint from The Dark Precursor - ISBN 978 94 6270 118 2 - © Leuven University Press, 2017 Dark precursor_II_285x195_6 INDEX PdA.indd 344 18/10/17 16:25