Gustavo Chirolla Ospina
We do not feel that we are outside the era but continue to make shameful compromises with it. This sense of shame is one of the most powerful themes in philosophy. We are not responsible for the victims
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - "What is Philosophy?" 》
Deleuze is interested in screaming. As he pondered the paintings of Francis Bacon, he asked about the significance of the scream. How to depict screaming? It's about making visible, not just a particular sound, but the invisible forces that make it happen. The same problem that arises in music is that Alban Berg knew how to "make music with screams", linking the sound of screams to the silent power of the earth, like Mary's scream in Wozzeck, and the silent power of heaven in Lulu (Deleuze, 2002: 60). In film, Straub and Wheeler value the scream; it is both a speech act and an act of resistance (Deleuze, 1987: 289). Which art movement would make screaming an act of resistance and take us from the aesthetics of screaming to politics?
This article will focus on the work "Treno" by Colombian artist Clemencia Echeverri. Treno, derived from the Greek words threnos (meaning lament) and oide (meaning song), is specifically a funeral song, an audiovisual lament. The funeral song ends with a scream, which Deleuze calls a "cry against death" (Deleuze, 2002: 61). This is not about choosing one artwork as a model for thinking about Deleuze's relationship to contemporary art so that we can console ourselves by applying many of his concepts to interpretations of such works. On the contrary, this article chooses "Traynor" because this work raises a series of questions in its unique way of thinking, which in turn triggers our own thinking. These questions are related to the realm of politics, and specifically to the concept of the people. Screaming questions will be my guide in conducting this investigation.
Deleuze points out that both philosophy and art are about the people. In "What is Philosophy?" ", he co-authored with Guattari
Artists or philosophers are completely incapable of creating a nation; everyone can only summon it with all their strength. A nation can only be created by abominable suffering; it can no longer care about art or philosophy. But philosophical books and works of art contain unimaginable suffering, heralding the coming of a nation. They have one thing in common - their resistance to death, slavery, intolerance, shame and the present. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 110)
Deleuze keeps saying that artists like Mallarmé, Kafka or Klee - rather than more populist artists - insist that art needs the people, but that the people are nonetheless missing. As a result, they had no choice but to summon it with all their might, to summon a people that did not yet exist, a people that was to come. This will be my theme, the special relationship between art and politics, a relationship with missing peoples, a relationship that is yet to come. Perhaps there we can also find the key to thinking about how this relationship is relevant to philosophy.
What does it mean to think about this question in terms of specific geographical and historical contexts? This situation could be described as necropolitics for reasons that I will come to. Let us emphasize for a moment that, as Deleuze and Guattari say, "a nation can only be created by abominable suffering." It is these circumstances that led us to write about the politics of death and the funeral song, The Audiovisual Elegies of Clemencia Echeverri. Yes, this is a lament! But let us remain calm; if we learn anything from Deleuze's aesthetics, it is that, as he puts it, "any work of art points a way to life, finds a way through the cracks" (Deleuze, 1995: 143).
ashamed of being human
Before moving on to comment on the politics of screaming in Echeverri's installations, let us recognize that there is also a philosophical screaming. "Shame! Shame!" This seems to be what we hear everywhere in Deleuze's late works. In an interview with Antonio Negri, the Italian philosopher mentioned A Thousand Plateaus after listing some of the problems that he felt the book's "amazing willingness to theorize" did not seem to address: "I sometimes seemed to hear a tragic tone, in those moments when it was not clear where the 'war machine' was heading". Deleuze replies: "You say there is a tragic or melancholic tone in this. I think I know why. I was struck by all the passages by Primo Levi, in which he explains that the Nazi concentration camps made us 'ashamed of being human'" (Deleuze, 1995: 171-2).
Let us leave aside the topic of war machines, as this might distract us, although Deleuze says in his answer that "artistic movements are in this sense war machines" (Deleuze, 1995: 172). Lévy's expression "ashamed of being human" is taken by Deleuze out of the realm of annihilation, for we also experience this feeling in "extremely trivial situations: in the face of the excessive vulgarization of thought," since what shames us in today's capitalism is that "we have no reliable means of sustaining becomings, or rather of awakening them within ourselves" (173). In "What is Philosophy?" " At the end of Chapter 4, Primo Levi is mentioned repeatedly, and the tragic tone becomes more obvious. Philosophy of geography is the relationship of philosophy to the present, as they say: "We do not lack communication, we have too much communication, we lack creation. We lack resistance to the present" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 108). "Shame in being human" becomes a theme; shame in the face of all the circumstances that plague the existence of today's democracies, shame in the face of "the shame of the possibilities of life we have been given" (107-8). In light of such a tragic fate, Deleuze and Guattari heroically declare: "This sense of shame is one of the most powerful themes in philosophy" (108). Clearly, to resist this status quo, what we need is creation, both of concepts and of felt beings: "Art and philosophy come together at this point: to constitute an earth and people that lack, as correlates of creation" (108).
The May Storm is a thing of the past, and eight years have passed between 1972's "Anti-Oedipus" and 1980's "A Thousand Plateaus." Interview with Negri and What is Philosophy? was published in the early 1990s, there is no reason to think that this tragic tone is strange or new: "We are in a phase of weakness, a period of reaction" (Deleuze, 1995: 121). So there is a very close connection between being "ashamed of being human" and missing people, all surrounded by an aura of tragedy, even a melancholic one. The zeitgeist is tainted by reactionary sentiment and we live in a conservative age. "There is no way to escape abjection except by playing the role of an animal (growing, burrowing, chuckling, contorting itself): thought itself is sometimes closer to a dying animal than to a living, even democratic, human being" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 108).
Deleuze's reading of Primo Levi transcends any humanist commitments, for shame leads us to question our own present, rather than revealing the unjust consequences of longing for human ideals, albeit in a negative way. If so, Deleuze is an undercover humanist, merely a critic of the human as a value that remains a prisoner of a certain belief in the human, a melancholic humanist. But this melancholy is precisely where humanity is today, what humanity has become, from the most extreme to the most trivial, and therefore what makes any humanism possible is the possibility of the distinction between human and non-human, which, as Agamben says, is being eliminated. Deleuze's vitalism actually moves away from this melancholy.
Deleuze's philosophy is clearly anti-humanistic; it contains a rejection of any moral or political doctrine that centers on human nature and values human beings themselves. Not surprisingly, since Kafka: Toward a Minority Literature, co-authored with Guattari in 1975, Deleuze has insisted on the idea of the non-human becoming of the human, and in particular the becoming of animals, as a way to confront and replace the age-old ontological question that has been the cornerstone of every humanism, namely the relationship between humans and animals. This anti-humanism culminates in What is Philosophy? "It is expressed in a concise formula: it is the brain that thinks, not the person - the latter is just a brain crystallization of the former (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 210). Likewise, we will find there an aesthetic that goes against every humanist theory of art; the work of art is not considered the highest expression of the human spirit. Deleuze and Guattari are defining these terms in an anti-humanist way when they claim that art as a form of thought is the creation of sensory being, emotion, and perception; emotion is precisely these aspects of man's nonhuman becoming, just as perception-including towns-are nonhuman natural landscapes (169).
Screams and terror
Francis Bacon wanted to depict screams rather than terror. For Deleuze, it is necessary to distinguish between these two kinds of violence: the violence of the spectacle, which belongs to the order of terror and the image; and the violence of the sense, which belongs to the realm of the scream and the image, where the image has abandoned narrative and representation. Choosing screams rather than horrors, Bacon stayed true to the motto of modern art articulated by Paul Klee: "Not to copy what is visible, but to make it visible." With the scream, the invisible forces that produce it become visible, the forces of darkness become visible through the spasms they produce in the body, the forces of death that terrify us. This visibility occurs "when the visible body fights like a wrestler against invisible forces" (Deleuze, 2002: 62). Then the power of life becomes visible, the power of the body to resist death: "life screams to death." The scream concentrates all these forces into a single action, an action that serves as a sign of struggle. Deleuze calls these affirmative forces liberated in battle the forces of the future (61). All violence in contemporary art hovers between screams and horror, between sensory presence and sensualist performance; however, violence of the latter is more common than violence of the former.
Let's take a look at the work of Clemencia Echeverri. Traynor is an audiovisual installation in which two giant projection screens face each other and occupy the entire exhibition space. As the title states, we experience here a lament: a funeral song for the victims of a political disaster. Like Christopher Penderecki's "Hiroshima Elegy," the victims are the reason for the song's creation. In this case, the lament is audiovisual; the space between the screens is filled with images and sounds, silences and shadows. We see an image of a river, its flow growing on one screen until it fills the entire screen, and then the flow filling the opposite screen until alternating flows are produced, repeated at different intervals; we hear the sounds of water, as well as the sounds of frogs and crickets, which intensify and diminish as they flow through the gallery space. At one point we hear voices, voices calling names, people's names, these screams being carried across the exhibition space by the current of the river. The names are calls from one side of the river (not necessarily to those on the other side), voices calling for another (perhaps the absent one); and finally we see the river dyed red, and as the only response to the previous call we see several pieces of clothing, like ghosts, being fished out of the river, the ghosts of a suffering people. The position of the viewer in "Traynor" is contradictory, on one side and across the river, and at the same time in the middle of the flow, in the flowing water. It is there that the audience is touched by the sound of the call; the scream itself reverberates through the space, reaching the dimension of song. Farmers used the strategy of calling names, like speaking in a tone of voice, to communicate over long distances, and in this way they created a bridge of sound between one bank of the river and the other. In Echeverri's installation, the spoken/sung words become a kind of lament, with no response found on the other side, the bridge broken, the raging river drowning the calling voice.
Even as a funeral song, it would be a mistake to try to read this work as a representation of mourning, or as a symbol of a particular form of violence and the harm it inflicts on an individual or a people; as if the atoning experience of art provided a bridge between the manifestation of conflict and the abhorrent suffering it caused, between understanding and feeling. In both cases, we only get a dramatization and aestheticization of the victim. This work was born out of the powerlessness and insurmountable abyss experienced in the face of violence and a unique form of violence: enforced disappearance. "I don't know what we are going to do, madam. They took my son away", the artist recalls a phone call from a female voice coming from the banks of the Cauca River, a voice that clearly indicated, in her own words, "a clamor and search without answers". The inability to speak on behalf of the victims is a strong self-restraint for the artist; we can no longer give art this declaratory power, and instead artistic practice must confront the impossibility of testimony itself. We'll come back to this later.
As we have seen, there is another side to the problem of representation: the sensory one. How to avoid the spectacle of violence? How to break away from media clichés about violence and its manifestations? I think "Traynor" continues in Bacon's line, but it gives the scream a collective and political quality not evident in the Irish painter's work. In this audiovisual installation, the Colombian artist places the viewer between two giant projections of a river without resorting to horrific or extremely brutal imagery. As the river's flow increases, she succeeds in creating a feeling of drowning in the viewer, placed in the center of the scene. Only at the end, as a hint, do we discover the traces of necropolitics - the clothes - carried away by the river. The point is not to avoid such representations in the name of morality, but to create something else that leaves aside the sensuality and spectacle of death. "Traynor" is a scream, a cry, no horror.
What we need now is to find ways to make the screams collective and political. Let us recall that in order to illustrate the political nature of human beings, Aristotle distinguished between sound (phone) and speech (logos) in his Politics. Through sound, animals and humans can express feelings of pleasure or pain; and only humans have speech, with which they can express what is right, what is wrong, what is just, and what is unjust. For Aristotle, the essence of politics lies in the ability to establish the measure of justice through words. "Traynor" is an elegy, a funeral song in which every word becomes a scream, and fundamentally the whole use of art in this case consists in transforming the phone into a political expression. This is the politics of voices deprived of words (logos).
On the one hand, the scream implies a corporeal dimension, which, as we have already noted, is a struggle between the power of the body and the power of death. On the other hand, it suggests a sequence of expressions, calls and laments as speech acts. The screams begin in the realm of mixed bodies, in the midst of their actions and passions, but then turn into din in the realm of expression. We could say that it is about these two aspects of the same assemblage, which are irreducible to each other, namely the visible and the expressible (Deleuze, 1988: 70-93), the mechanical assemblage of bodies and the collective assemblage of expressions (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 97-98). Let us remember that for Deleuze and Guattari, expression is neither informational nor communicative. Here, the physical scream serves as a call, a collective uproar, adding to its illocutionary meaning, so that it constitutes a particularly political assemblage. As a result, we are no longer stuck in the Aristotelian orbit, since screams are body compositions and noises have a linguistic quality; instead, screams intrude into words, they intrude into speech acts with an intense force. Screaming is political not because it is discursive, but because it represents the body, it is a speech act signed deep within the body.
In "Treño" several voices appear one after another in the same stream, two male voices calling for Nazareno and Ophelia, and a female voice calling for Victor. Each such special sound, begging for a proper name, became a protest against death, a scream that simultaneously contained pain and resistance, mourning and appeal. Within each voice echoes multiple voices, each scream a collective combination of expressions. Deleuze says that throughout the works of Straub and Wheelert, screaming is re-evaluated as a speech act, a speech act that is also an act of resistance (Deleuze, 2006a: 323). Let's review the path that leads us from how to scream to how to do the politics of screaming. First, we are faced with the problem of screaming, whether in music or painting, or in film and video installations; the point is to try to make the force that generates the scream perceptible in every field. Secondly, we encounter a scream that in itself concentrates a relationship of forces, the forces of life that resist death; the key here is to make perceivable the forces that collide in this uncertain battle. In the end, this scream of death, more than anything else, becomes a speech act, an act of resistance.
visible and expressible
Deleuze shows how Carmelo Bene takes a sentence through a series of transformations. "You terrify me..." In Benet's "Richard III," Lady Anne's scream undergoes many changes and various speech acts, causing it to "grow into a war woman, return to a child, and be reborn as a maiden." This is a kind of "intonation singing". Unlike song, which attempts to maintain a constant pitch (tessitura), "in intonation singing we continually suppress it by falling or rising" (Deleuze, 1979: 105). Carmelo Bene's libretto for "Richard III" was packed with allusions, downplaying the importance of the content, and performing a series of precise operations on the variables experienced by the statement, making it "like a musical libretto," Deleuze said. Words no longer constitute texts, and dramatists are no longer actors or directors, but become operators in experimental theater (89).
Clemencia Echeverri deprives words of song of their supposed communicative function. In principle, it could proceed according to that function, as the voice climbs above the water, waiting for a response, but as communication fails, the call becomes a lament that echoes throughout the room. Lamentation is a type of intonation singing that incorporates every voice. Yet it is the entire work, the integration of all the heterogeneous elements, not just the sounds, that properly constitutes the lament as a screaming audiovisual composition. In this sense, audiovisual installations create a relationship between verbal and non-verbal elements.
To talk about the visible and the expressible, Deleuze and Guattari borrow Hjelmslev's terminology when they talk about the form of content and the form of expression. As they are used, these belong to certain aspects of the collective assemblage of mechanical assemblages and expressions of the body. Let's stop at the content level for a moment. It is important to understand exactly what the visible means, as Deleuze does with Foucault, that it does not simply refer to what we see or what we normally perceive. "Visibility is not the form of an object, not even the form that appears in light, but the form of luminosity created by light itself, which allows a thing or object to exist only as a flash, a spark, or a glimmer" (Deleuze, 1988: 52). According to this interpretation, what is visible that belongs to artistic practice is not the reproduction of what we see, but the form in which invisible forces become visible, and in this visible form these forces exist as flashes, sparks, or shimmers. From a more general point of view, that of perception, we can say that in a form of content the imperceptible force becomes perceptible. This content takes the form of luminosity and sound, visual and sonic images, ultimately constituting a complex of sensations.
Have we introduced an ambiguity? If the task of art is to make invisible forces visible from every realm, how can we talk about form in this context? The relationship established is no longer that of matter and form, but that of matter-force. The answer to this objection is that in the latter relation form does not disappear; on the contrary, it is the result of the substance-force relation, which is more immediate and profound. In Pleats, Deleuze explains that Baroque form is not a mold but an emergence through a process of modulation or permanent shaping. "The Baroque is the quintessentially informal art…but informality is not the negation of form" (Deleuze, 1993: 35, revised translation). Something similar happened to modern Baroque artists from Klee to Dubuffet. Infinite folds affect all matter and make form manifest, thus: "In the Baroque, the coupling of matter-force replaced matter and form" (35). On the other hand, according to Deleuze and Guattari's use of Hjelmslev, in addition to the tangible matter, there is also the intangible matter of content and the intangible matter of expression. We find this expression in art, what Deleuze and Guattari call "the transition from the finite to the infinite, but also from territory to deterritorialization" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 180-1). The form of content or expression is subject to "the interlocking of differently oriented frames...the frames and their joints carry the complex of sensations that support the figures and are intertwined with their support, with their own appearance" (187). But alongside the framing system, an operation of de-framing is also taking place, some lines of escape passing through the territory and opening it up to infinity, allowing flows of invisible matter to proceed along lines of absolute de-territorialization. The substance-force coupling passes from the finite to the infinite, from the form of content or expression, from the integration of composite matter or heterogeneous elements, to the abstract plane of composition, the diagram of intangible matter.
Having discussed the scream as a collective assemblage of expression in Traynor, we must now turn to the form of content to discuss the mechanical assemblage of the body. Echeverry's installations present a complete complex of visual and sonic sensations, where installation means manipulating the heterogeneous composition of materials and experimenting with very precise manipulations. First of all: as we have already pointed out, the viewer is placed between two huge projection screens, onto which, at different intervals, the same sequence of images of the river is projected; the water flow intensifies on one side and weakens on the other, and the sound of the water also grows louder and smaller as it circulates through the space. As a complex of light and sound, we can describe it as a vibration, a simple sensation "implying a constitutive difference of levels" that rises and falls in intensity (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 168). Second: a body-to-body tension (a kind of clench) operates between the intensity of sound-the vibration-and the sonic and visual power of the river's turbulence, "when the two sensations resonate with each other, by embracing each other tightly, in a clench that is no longer energy" (168). Third: Through the interplay of light and shadow, crying rumors, noise and silence, a space and time are created; a space full of sound. Fourteen minutes of coexistence of multiple durations, from discrete intervals of time in which the images succeed each other, to the color changes and nuances of the river's ever-changing surface. In these ways, a feeling is created in the viewer, a strange feeling of drowning because she is in the middle of the scene in which she is involved, a feeling that is strange because "feelings are only related to their materiality" (166). This is an audio-visual drowning, a violence of sensory complexes rather than a violence of spectacle.
When Deleuze explains in Foucault how discursive and non-discursive practices, the visible and the expressible, forms of content and forms of expression are intertwined, he claims that this privileging never implies a reduction even in knowledge relations in which the expressible is superior to the visible (Deleuze 1988: 49). The experimental manipulations we have already pointed out show that this is even more pronounced in the field of art. On the one hand, language is used intensively, and on the other hand, there is no need to prioritize the expressible over the visible. However, we are not sure whether this is true for every type of contemporary practice. Stephen Zepke shows that there are at least two lines of development from the readymade; either a conceptual development that privileges the expressible over the visible and the discursive over the perceptible, or a development outlined by Guattari's "aesthetic paradigm" in which the readymade as a sensory being is imbued with the force of life. The second line of development, in which any privileging of the conceptual-discursive implies the "tyranny of the signifier" and the inclusion of transcendent dimensions, is presented as a politics of resistance. From this perspective, Zepke sees certain avant-garde movements, such as the work of Brazilian artist Elio Orticica, as using the ready-made as a mechanism for "sensory-bodily engagement." Otisica credits this mechanism of expression with helping to create a nation (Zepke, 2008: 33-9).
If we want to escape both the "tyranny of the signifier" and the general consensus it enforces, it is necessary to understand that, in artistic practice, there is a functional independence between the form of content and the form of expression, the visible and the expressible. There is also a constant movement between the two, from one to the other, due to resonance, juxtaposition or separation. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this relationship of mutual influence, but still retaining the irreducible nature of the term, as mutual presupposition (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 87). For example, in the work of Straub and Wheeler, there is a disjunction between seeing and speaking, where a voice talks about something and what we see is something else, "the voice is rising, it is rising, it is rising, and what it is talking about passes under the naked, barren ground shown to us by a visual image that has nothing to do with the sound image" (Deleuze, 2006a: 323).
The artistic task of making the inexpressible expressible is what Deleuze and Guattari call fiction. Fiction has nothing to do with memory; rather, it refers to complex material composed of words and sounds (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 171). It has no other purpose than to process language from within, its phonological, syntactic and semantic components, in order to produce a permanent change. Examples of this appear throughout Deleuze's work, including Kafka, Beckett, Gheorghe Luca, Jean-Luc Godard, Pasolini, Benet, and many more.
fiction, people and art
Fiction can be summed up in the formula: "stuttering the language," which is not to be confused with the speech disorder of stuttering. On other occasions the formula refers to Marcel Proust: "Speak your mother tongue like a foreigner". To stutter, or speak like a foreigner, is to keep the language in flux. Fiction, on the other hand, is the creator of giants. For Bergson, from whom this concept comes, it corresponds to a visual force other than that of imagination, which is responsible for "the creation of semi-personal forces or effective beings" (Deleuze, 1979: 173). Deleuze says we need to recover this concept and give it "political content." In this way, his suggestion continues, the idea of utopia should be replaced by "a 'fiction' in which both people and art participate" (Deleuze, 1995: 174). The ineffable becomes speakable precisely because of the excess and colossal power it carries, a power that accompanies abhorrent suffering, but at the same time these "effective beings" contend with the causes of these sufferings. Suffering thus initiates a struggle with death that becomes a political statement shared by both art and people.
Let's return to the theme of the missing people in art and see how it relates to fiction. Deleuze and Guattari wrote: "We are not referring to popular artists or populist artists", "Mallarmé said that books need the people. Kafka said that literature is a matter of the people. Klee said that the people are essential but lacking" (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 381). The relationship between modern art and the people has changed. Artists no longer treat or summon the people as a "constitutive force." This remains the case for contemporary art, unless the evocation of the people is perceived as a reproduction of the consensus. If art continually summons a people that it lacks, it is because it is summoning a people that does not yet exist, a possible people or a future people. What does this absence of the people have to do with what we call a fiction that is common to both art and the people themselves?
First, if the people are not a constitutive force, then art cannot create the people, because "the people can only be created by abhorrent suffering." Secondly, when art appeals to a people who lack, it does not mean that they do not exist, but that they do not exist yet, that they are in the process of becoming. Third, fiction is what people and art have in common because they both share suffering and resistance. Thus there is creative fiction when the ineffable becomes speakable, when suffering and resistance to shame become a political statement; a biopolitics against death.
Let us now return to the Elegy and consider it in terms of the mutual presupposition between the plane of content and the form of expression. In this work, the scream appears on two levels at once, passing from one to the other, for the scream is both a power relationship and a speech act. To scream means to make the insensible perceivable, to make the ineffable sayable in laments and elegy. The sensations of sight and sound are structured in the form of content and create the audio-visual space and time of the installation. What remains to be explained is how the relationship between the visible and the expressible operates in this work. We see a river, we see its flow getting bigger and bigger, we hear the sound rising, rising above the water... There is a movement; it goes from the deterritorialization of the scream as a call or signifier, to its reterritorialization as a lament. What order does this movement obey? What has this uproar produced now? By transforming the speech act into a scream/lament, the ineffable becomes a voice, a force we cannot see, a force of abhorrent thanatopolitics. The visually imperceptible force becomes perceptible through the sound of a scream. The problem remains to capture the force that generates the scream itself, to connect the sound of the scream to the dark force. In this case, the scream is not a response to a visible force that can be exerted directly on oneself, the scream is made for others, against their forced disappearance, against the production of corpses made invisible by the river. This is what necropolitics means, that is, coordinated organizations giving themselves power over life, over decisions about life and death, and executing a systematic plan of death (Giorgio Agamben explores the relationship between corpse-making and necropolitics [see Agamben, 1999: 85-9]). This plan makes the river an invisible place, a place where bodies disappear. Even though we saw the water getting stronger and the sound rising above the water, we heard something through the screams that we didn't see in what we were seeing. But not only does the scream provide us with the sound of the invisible (imperceptible) force that produced it, the scream is also a lament that makes the ineffable speakable, a din of suffering and resistance, a declaration against this making of death in an act of mourning. The speech act of uttering the ineffable takes place in specific situations, in the space created by the composition of visual and sonic images. The flow of the river we see, the sound of its rushing we hear, is conceived as an invisible medium, a hiding place that we can perceive only through screams and lamentations. Only at the end do we see something we have not seen before: the "corpse" (the rags revealed by the turbulence). Hence the close connection between the form of content and the form of expression: the constant change of sounds that fill the room, the different time intervals in which visual images are projected on one screen and then on another, each sound falling or rising in a sing-song way. Finally, everything fades away, leaving only silence and darkness surrounding the audience.
Say the unspeakable. How to understand this statement? We say this is testimony. Words from the Scream are a true testament to the politics of death. The subject of the call is the witness. He is the survivor, a Latin word used to refer to a witness, not any kind of witness (testis), but one who has experienced an event and is asked to testify about it (Agamben, 1999: 17). Survivors are an ambivalent political subject, they are those who are called to bear witness with their screams and have nothing but their screams because they are excluded from the authorized register of the logos and therefore from politics. Strictly speaking, "there is no subject of testimony… Every testimony is a process or a field of force, constantly traversed by currents of subjectification and desubjectification" (Agamben, 1999: 121).
Finally, we must ask: What is the relationship between art and testimony? We cannot pretend that the work is an abhorrent symbol of suffering, that the artist can establish himself as someone who speaks for others, speaking for the victims; art has given up on this declarative power. Testimony belongs only to the victim who speaks for himself. A work of art is not "addressed to..." nor "on behalf of". It is "before". This is a question of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 109). It is the impossibility of this testimony, of substitution, that makes the work of art possible. The point is not that it is about testimony or that it reflects testimony, the point is to scream it and make it political. What the work wants to illustrate is that, through its own means, it makes the imperceptible perceptible and the ineffable something expressive. The work itself does not bear witness, but rather shows the possibility of screaming as testimony. It does not represent conflict, it achieves a strength. As such, it demonstrates the needs of the people, even if they are lacking: "We are not responsible for the victims, but before the victims" (108). Let us remember that in What is Philosophy? ", Deleuze and Guattari say that philosophical books and works of art are as resistant as the people. "Their resistance to death, slavery, intolerance, shame, and the present" (110). In this sense, through this common resistance, a philosopher, a thinker, or an artist may have a becoming that is connected to the people, a becoming-people of thinkers. This is a question of becoming, not of identity: "The people is within the thinker because it is 'becoming people,' just as the thinker, as an equally infinite becoming, is within the people" (109).
Translated by Juan Fernando Mejía Mosquera
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