Dérivelab has been invited, as part of a day of live radio broadcasts by Inheritance Projects on Saturday 11th of September, to produce a radio gameshow that playfully and performatively reflects our interests in the area of dérive.
For Charlie Woolley's solo show, 'Mysterious Cults', Inheritance will be programming a day of performances, lectures, screenings and radio plays. Inheritance Projects Ltd. is a non-profit curatorial organisation dealing with issues of historicity and heritage through contemporary art, music and performance.
The concept that we have devised and will be trialling in our slot is entitled (g)hostis and is a discursive game of conversational drift, relying on a set of simple rules and irreverently exploring some of the more abstruse districts of theoretical territory.
The idea for conducting this experimental game as a potentially productive artistic or philosophical methodology derives initially from the idea of dérive, ie. drift, a concept arising in Situationist texts meaning the aimless, although reflexive and analytical movement through space. Others, such as Jacques Derrida have evoked the notion of dérive as a deconstructive tool for decontextualising language through a process of iteration and by extension, derivation, thus producing new and unexpected meanings. In seeking to explore new and unexpected meanings this game recalls various anti-logical, anti-linear Surrealist methodologies such as the exquisite corpse.
Let us begin with a quote. In her book Wanderlust Rebecca Solnit describes walking as an antidote to a fractured, postmodern conception of space:
On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between … interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors: one lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.
What if that logic, the logic of dérive were to be applied to language and discourse? What if we were to regard exclusive and alienating theoretical and philosophical soundbites similarly as such 'interiors', as private rooms, discourses or as Wittengenstein may have it 'language games'? As concepts which operate as locked, fragmented interiors and which shut out and exclude other speakers? What if by use of the dérive we might deconstruct the structures of these 'language games', we might wander, drift, between and around them, arriving in unexpected territories and iterations?
With this experiment in dérive we wished to derive its form from its format, namely that of the radio discussion or game. Perhaps if we regard discourse as a series of rules, the distinction between 'game' and 'discussion' becomes already less pronounced. In the syntax of radio the discursive event relies upon the structural elements of a 'host' and a 'guest'; a guest whom the structure dictates is in a way 'hostage' to this structure for the duration of the event.
In his paper 'Hospitality' Derrida deconstructs the notion of hospitality, claiming that
“hospitality” is a Latin word … of a troubled and troubling origin, a word which carries its own contradiction incorporated into it, a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, “hostility”.
He draws out the common etymological source of both 'host' and 'guest' from the latin 'hostis' (or g-hostis) thus deconstructing their apparent oppositional position within the conventions, or structure, of hospitality. In fact both 'host' and 'guest' potentially derive from this latin term 'hostis' – meaning stranger or enemy. The host and the guest are enemies, opponents within a structure of both language and rules or conventions of hospitality, within a discursive game. A host also contains the associative possibility in English of being the vessel possessed by a ghost, by an uninvited guest – held hostage to it: both host and guest are haunted by the linguistic possibility of being hostage, hostage to the other and to conventional structures. Hospitality is haunted by the possibility of hostility. As Derrida states
[in] the final reversal of the roles of host and guest … of the inviting and the invited … the one inviting becomes almost the hostage of the one invited, of the guest.
Levinas links hospitality with ethics in claiming that as host I am hostage to the Other, to the ethical demands of hospitality. Thus ethics are always taking me hostage. But enough derivations, let us return to the dérive, the right of hospitality is primarily a nomadic right for, in the words of Barry Stocker and Forbes Morlock in their translators notes to the Derrida piece,
unconditional hospitality must remain open without horizon of expectation, without anticipation, to any surprise visitation.
As the logic of the nomad is that of drift; the non-instrumental; aimlessness of the dérive, this gives us a new angle on the possibility of dérive, namely the dérive is that whose phenomenological 'horizon of expectation' is open and 'without anticipation'.
Therefore, taking the notion of host and guest as opponents, enemies that are hostage to the structure of a discursive game, it is our intention to extend this logic to the very notion of discourse itself. Returning to the Rebecca Solnit quote, how might we then undertake a nomadic dérive through such language games, through such hostile theoretical territory?
In considering this we have devised our own language game, a game in which the rules are as follows:
・ Each player has a hand of cards, from which they must attempt construct a narrative, argument or discussion.
・ The winner is the player who uses all the cards in her hand, and who is able to bring the discussion to a conclusion.
・ Each player has a hand of randomly dealt cards (10 each for two players, 8 for three, and so on, with the precise amount being entirely variable to suit our preferences).
・ These cards have the name of a theoretical concept (eg 'deterritorialization'), a more general term (eg 'football'), or a person (eg 'Derrida', or 'Duchamp' for example').
・ The player must devote at least one sentence of their narrative to each card they play.
・ If the player speaking finds themselves stuck, or pauses too long, they must draw a fresh card and let the next player pick up the discussion.
・ Or, if they mention an element that is on another player's card, that player can play the card to interrupt, and they now become the speaker.
・ The more competitive players may therefore do their best to avoid mentioning the kind of typical philosophical elements on the cards, but it can also be very enjoyable to keep throwing out opportunities for other players to chip in.
・ Each Player also has 3 interrupt cards that they may play at any time, each card may only be played once. When played the player gets to take over the conversation at the exact point from which they played the card.
The idea of the game from our perspective as an artistic and philosophical experiment is as a way to think outside of linear and discursive structures of instrumentality in a deconstructive and dérive-based fashion. The game could be seen as a methodological experiment in making novel connections, discovering new meanings and new contexts and in undermining the linguistic 'interiors' that some theoretical topics potentially represent. Through a game of discursive drift we hope to open up our 'horizon of expectation'.
(g)hostis will take place on Saturday 11th September at SPACE studios, London at around 3pm and be broadcast on SPACE studios radio and Art Review radio over the internet.
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