Factores asociados a la calidad de vida.

The exhibition Les Immatériaux, curated by Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput, and held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris between March and July of 1985, explored the increasingly pervasive influence of new technologies on cultural production and diffusion, combining intersecting artistic disciplines in a rich and broad-ranging exploration whose programme included a Stockhausen premier and a series of film screenings, in addition to the 26 ordered zones of the main exhibition, which occupied the full fifth floor of the Centre Pompidou.150

The limits of individual and contained, rather than dispersed, subjectivity were challenged by an explicit presentation of new machines as extensions ‘de nos

capacités de sentir et d’agir,’ a potential enhancement whose benefits would nonetheless require inquisitive and participatory engagement in order to be understood and managed.151

Indeed, the exhibition was highly concerned with exploring and rendering the breadth of phenomenological experience as this was nuanced and inflected by

technological and material factors. The Petit Journal that served as a print accompaniment to the exhibition stressed the importance of engagement with the exhibition content in terms of these physical and sensory considerations:

L’insécurité, la perte d’identité, la crise ne s’expriment pas seulement dans l’économique et le social mais aussi dans les domaines de la sensibilité, de la connaissance, et des pouvoirs de l’homme (fécondation, vie, mort), des modes de vie (rapport au travail, à l’habitat, à l’alimentation, etc.)152

150_{Bruce Altschuler, ed. Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions that made art history: 1962-2002 (Phaidon,}

2013), p.215.

151_{‘Octave au pays des Immatériaux,’ (film), Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou. [01:20].} 152_{Archives du Centre Pompidou, ‘Le Petit Journal,’28 mars - 15 juil 1985.}

In Biennials and Beyond – Exhibitions that Made Art History, Les Immatériaux is portrayed as an exhibition whose ‘subject was the way in which new materials and technologies have altered our notions of objecthood and the self.’153 Details of the exhibition’s makeup, due to its sprawling, labyrinthine nature and subdivision into 61 ‘sites,’ are now relatively difficult to trace, and information about the exhibition may mostly be found in articles that take selected aspects thereof, their authors dedicating their attention to particular projects or sites within the wider exhibition.

This is with the noteworthy exception of Antonia Wunderlich’s lengthy work,

Der Philosoph im Museum, published in 2008.154 Wunderlich’s book is the most exhaustive work to have been published on the exhibition; it has yet to be translated from the original German but provides much valuable information on the exhibition and its context.

Wunderlich first undertakes an extensive exploration of the cultural and thematic aspects of the exhibition and its context in her earlier chapters, after which there is a detailed exploration of each site in the chapter entitled ‘Phénoménologie de la Visite.’ The latter provides as reliable as possible a recreation of the exhibition experience for those who were not able to experience it directly. Something of the overall effect of the exhibition in its full range of sites and events might otherwise be achieved by mining the Archives du Centre Pompidou, which contain thousands of boxes of documents detailing the exhibition setup and design, as well as documents produced at the various sites of the exhibition during the period for which it was open to the public. 155

Wunderlich’s descriptions, however, succeed in conveying to a greater degree the elements that made themselves apparent to the average visitor, rather than

entailing the kind of cartographical approach or spirit of reconstruction that an archival revisitation of Les Immatériaux would require. Furthermore, these archival documents at the Centre Pompidou are not ordered by any inventory, but rather cover

153_{Biennials and Beyond, p.215.}

154_{Antonia Wunderlich, Der Philosoph im Museum: die Ausstellung ‘Les Immatériaux’ von Jean} François Lyotard (Bielefield: Transcript, 2008). Wunderlich’s book represents the most rigorous published exploration of the exhibition as a whole, including an introductory discussion of the exhibition in the context of the 1980s museum ‘boom’ in France.

Les Immatériaux through an endless sprawl of detail committed to paper that reflects the expansive and interconnected nature of the exhibition itself.

It is important to note that the exhibition was accompanied by a carefully composed bande sonore in which visitors were immersed as they navigated through the sites wearing their individual, compulsory headphones. This soundtrack included readings of excerpts of texts written by various authors, including sections of literary works by Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett, among many others.156

The soundtrack to Les Immatériaux tended to create a thematic, but not necessarily didactic, resonance with the works being viewed and experienced: the exhibition visitor was thus in this way endowed with a further layer of work to be deciphered. I shall discuss in more detail in a later section how this layering was achieved, and how the pairings of texts and visual sites were established and tracked.

In this chapter, I shall focus particularly on the sites and works of the exhibition that incorporated investigations of textuality, of the act of writing and of literary components and on how these zones and their associated considerations lend themselves to subdivision and recombination. In addition to the authors whose works were incorporated in its bande sonore, the exhibition was replete with contributions from prominent French writers and thinkers of the time such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Butor, Bruno Latour, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and the Alamo group, among many others.157

Installations reflecting on the purpose and nature of literature and textuality formed important parts of the exhibition, which in turn adopted these in relation to its own themes so as to represent questions related to the ‘immaterialisation’ of literature and writing, such as the release of narrative modes of writing from the solid, closed form of the printed book.

The problematisation of concepts such as those of production and sources, particularly in relation to writing, was also central to the exhibition’s investigation of textuality, and accordingly most of the literary works displayed at Les Immatériaux

were aligned with the ‘Maternité’ strand of the exhibition’s theme, including sites displaying authorless texts (‘Tous les auteurs’) and rewritable (‘Séquences à

156_{Hui and Broeckmann, eds, pp.75-77.}

157_{The Alamo was founded in 1981 by the Oulipo members Paul Braffort, Jacques Roubaud, Paul}

moduler’) literary works.158 Indeed, most of the sites I shall discuss in this chapter, those involving writing manoeuvres and literary segments, fell under this section dedicated to the exhibition’s thematic current of ‘Maternité.’

Les Immatériaux, then, rather than exhibiting still, finished textual works, offered visitors multiple opportunities to consider composition and inscription as collective, fluctuating and participatory endeavours, in which they were called to intervene in various ways that reworked and steered the formation of the texts on display, rather than viewing texts as the results of a complete process to be received and considered from a passive distance.

Considerations of the processes and methodologies of composition were thus privileged over the works to which these gave rise, almost as insignificant as by- products, in favour of mobilising text and undermining the stubbornly immobile aspect of complete textual works. In this regard, the methodology and manipulations that might be performed on pre-supplied texts are assigned importance across the writing sites of Les Immatériaux, considerably more so than the hermeneutic

interrogation of any inherent quality of the textual and scriptural forms themselves.159 The kind of hermeneutic approach through which literary texts would usually be accessed and received is thus displaced, with meaning and importance instead ascribed to the task of observing the responsive behaviours of literal and written forms as these are subjected to various calculated procedures at each site. In a later section I will discuss and compare the kinds of operations performed on pre-prepared text excerpts at the various sites of composition and interactive writing at Les

Immatériaux.

I shall argue, as this chapter continues, that text is often mobilised in Les Immatériaux as a kind of uniform substance that is drawn upon by the exhibition’s sites, and which is cut like cloth in accordance with the operations to be performed on it. This mobilisation of textual stocks in such a way that treats the literary work specifically - and to a greater extent than other forms of text - as a kind of prior

158_{The topic of ‘Maternité’ is introduced in the exhibition Album as ‘la source du message, ce qui lui}

donne l’existence et l’autorité, son auteur.’ Archives du Centre Pompidou.

159_{This with the exception of ‘Five Words,’ a work displayed at the ‘Mots en scène’ site, which I shall}

resource is very typical of the generative approach to computer-assisted literary creation.160

In this respect, then, the fact that this somewhat subordinated utilisation of literary texts should also prevail in Les Immatériaux is unsurprising: the way in which existing literary texts were taken and reordered was very much in the spirit of

contemporary assisted composition, as this was practiced by the Alamo in particular. Moreover, this was not just the case for the text segments exhibited visually, but also applies to the way in which readings of literary texts were also made use of in the exhibition soundtrack. The readings from literary works in the latter case also bears this sort of anterior quality, whereby the texts are incorporated as pre-existing ‘material,’ sliced as required from the source work, by virtue of thematic or syntactic content that complements a particular endeavour or question from which it remains largely removed – or to which it simply does not originally refer - on the level of the artwork in itself.

It is not the case, on the other hand, that the soundtrack texts are chosen so as to create a kind of thematic or conceptual friction with the works being viewed, but rather they typically supplement the work on show in a way that thematically mirrors or bolsters it. I shall return to this point in a later section.

The exhibition’s promotion of alternative conceptions of textuality and composition thus represented an important step in the development and promotion of alternative experiences of literature, particularly insofar as spatial considerations were identified as facets of textuality calling to be addressed and reworked. I will argue in this chapter, however, that this spatial dimension that was to be incorporated into later digital texts was introduced adjacently, rather than frontally, by Les Immatériaux.

By this, I mean to suggest that the limitations of densely permutated

textualities were exposed by showing these alongside and compared with the more futuristic textures of the audiovisual and plastic works with which these were exhibited. In this regard, then, I argue that Les Immatériaux contributed to the

evolution of digital literature in France more insofar it brought to light the limitations of such text-heavy forms as those displayed at the generative writing sites of the

160_{Indeed, this privileging of methodology and modes of permutation essentially had to be achieved}

through the use of exemplary and familiar semantic fragments whose banality somehow operated as a foil to the innovation performed in the former, making the operations in question more visible and tilting the subject and focus of the work from content to form.

exhibition (of which I shall identify specific examples in a later section of this

chapter) by contrast to the more dynamic, intermedia works surrounding these, which arguably conveyed the kinds of phenomena and themes addressed by the exhibition with greater presence and pertinence.

It is not insignificant that most of the sites of Les Immatériaux that

incorporated works reflecting on writing and authorship were grouped together, as well as being placed towards the exit of the exhibition. John Rajchman, in his article for Tate Papers no.12, ‘Les Immatériaux or How to Construct the History of

Exhibitions,’ includes a photo of the ‘tous les auteurs’ site at Les Immatériaux, the concluding area of the exhibition’s labyrinthine routes, which allowed visitors to participate in real time in digital writing experiments.161

Taking the implantation of writing within the overall space into account, the questions raised by such sites might be considered as deliberately positioned by the exhibition curators as unresolved, largely unaddressed, and in this respect more complex than many of the suggestions presented by the visual and plastic works that were experienced by visitors in the previous sites.

Les Immatériaux did not result in a single catalogue covering the exhibition its entirety, but rather in two major publications, which were produced to document its dimensions in subtly different ways. The first of these publications was a folder of loose papers, with an Inventaire describing the sites of which the exhibition was composed, and a bound Album consisting of notes and sketches relating to these sites.162

The Petit Journal, a 16-page review dedicated to the exhibition, is preserved alongside these more durable publications at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky and the Archives of the Centre Pompidou, and represents a kind of ephemeral and more colloquial counterpart to these, though its texts are no less inviting and no less useful to the reader than those of the larger, permanent publications issuing from the

exhibition.163

161_{John Rajchman, Les Immatériaux, or How to Construct the History of Exhibitions (2009)}

<http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/12/les-immateriaux-or-how-to-construct-the- history-of-exhibitions> [accessed 6 March 2018].

162_{Various authors, Album and Inventaire (1985)}

<https://monoskop.org/images/5/52/Les_Immateriaux_Album_et_Inventaire_catalogue.pdf> [accessed 6 March 2018].

The second significant publication to emerge from Les Immatériaux was a softcover, bound edition, the result of an experiment linked to one specific site of the exhibition, entitled Épreuves d’écriture. This publication was a print adaptation of ‘the records of a computer-mediated discussion among 26 participants,’ among them Jacques Roubaud, Michel Butor and Jacques Derrida. This experiment had been set up by Lyotard and Chaput, and the publication that emerged from it was based on the discussion engendered by a set of 50 terms that had been proposed by the two

organisers and supplied to participants at the outset of the experiment.

The publication of Épreuves d’écriture thus maps out the contributions these terms triggered from the writers involved, which had also been consultable at the exhibition for the time that it was open to the public, in searchable forms that allowed visitors to the site to browse by term or by contributor, for example.164

Antony Hudek notes that Lyotard held this second volume in high esteem, speaking of the project’s results as follows: ‘It is probably a “book” that elicits a kind of beauty, as it were, very different from what I was accustomed to. For me it was a great book.’165 _{The fact that Lyotard refers to Épreuves d’écriture in terms of the} publishable result of the experiment, rather than as the procedural entity the final work documents, as a ‘book,’ in inverted commas, betrays the lingering hesitation felt towards the possibility of asserting such transitory material as ‘literary’ – including such hesitation on the part of those who orchestrated the experiments.

The assertion of the literariness of the procedural dimension of such projects, and of transience and ephemeral components as vital characteristics of the works, would come later, with the theories of the Transitoire Observable collective.166 _Jean- Pierre Balpe, who was present in the exhibition and who contributed to the displays and discussions of writing at Les Immatériaux as a member of the Alamo group, was to become a key figure in the promotion of these procedural and ephemeral qualities as valid literary modes of creation and reading. Francesca Gallo in fact reads the

164_{30 Years, pp.16-17. The project was displayed in searchable form by author/keyword. Album,}

Archives du Centre Pompidou.

Multiple authors, Épreuves d’écriture (1985)

<https://monoskop.org/images/f/f9/Les_Immateriaux_Epreuves_d_ecriture.pdf> [accessed 6 March 2018].

165_{Antony Hudek, ‘From Over-to-Sub-Exposure: The Anamnesis of Les Immatériaux,’ in 30 Years,}

pp.76-77.

166_{Bootz, Gherban, Papp, Transitoire Observable: Texte fondateur (2003)}

publication of Épreuves d’écriture on paper and as a bound work as a stifling of the procedural qualities of the experiment qua work. In ‘Contemporary Art as an

Immatériaux,’ Gallo writes: The book is obviously the wrong format for a work that should have continued to be produced in a digital format like a hypertext (on a hard- drive memory, because the CD-ROM did not yet exist.)167

The main exhibition publications, the Album and the Inventaire, were regarded as contributing to the exhibition’s particularity, and these texts - distinct but

complementary, supplementary but not exhaustive - contributed to the elaboration of a specific model for Les Immatériaux that was to distinguish its orientation and

presentation from the familiar signposting of exhibitions as these are traditionally produced:

Le décalage se situe aussi dans les outils de connaissance et

d’approfondissement qui accompagnent la manifestation: au traditionnel catalogue, se substituent divers produits témoignant d’une démarche différente (Inventaire, identifiant des « sites », Album, retraçant l’itinéraire de travail suivi par les concepteurs, Épreuves d’écriture, publication des résultats d’une expérience d’écriture collective, interactive et à distance.)168

The temptation arises, in Lyotard and Chaput’s capacities as the exhibition organisers, to envisage these as to some extent the ‘authors’ of the sites, the curators of the sites’ content in a more granular and detailed sense. Broeckmann and Hui, in their

Introduction, with reference to Boissier and Broeckmann’s interview, confirm that it was not, in fact, the case that Lyotard actively chose many elements of the exhibitions or the arrangement of the zones’ content in his capacity as curator.169 These sites were, rather, conceived and constructed on a more isolated, thematic basis, and work on elements of the exhibition such as the Album dated back to well before Lyotard even became involved with the project.170 This blockage to the tendency of ascribing ‘authorship’ to the phenomenon of Les Immatériaux and the interlinking of the sites is crucial to understanding the spirit of the exhibition and the kinds of challenges it posed to traditional curatorial practices and approaches to reception.

167_{30 Years, p.135.}