Laugh of the Hyposubject
Radio performance, June 17 - July 07.2017
20part contribution by Anna Bromley and Brandon LaBelle
The radio program sets out to trace and document contemporary hyposubjects. Hyposubjects appear as multiphasic, nomadic not-yets, as manifold becomings and bricolages. As such, they figure communities of dissent, resistance, and resilience, which circumvent the directives of technocrats and paternalists.
By unsettling the anthropocentric relations between bodies and things, they offer transhumanist views on togetherness.
As squatters of our “post-factual” present, hyposubjects are imagined as beings intoxicated with sleeplessness and shameless desires, constructing new states of imaginaries from planetary commons.
What types of practices do hyposubjects perform? How might we transmit their entangled, shy, and self-empowering articulations? And might we hear the laughter of hyposubjects as they exit the dominant?
Radio performance, June 17 - July 07.2017
20part contribution by Anna Bromley and Brandon LaBelle
The radio program sets out to trace and document contemporary hyposubjects. Hyposubjects appear as multiphasic, nomadic not-yets, as manifold becomings and bricolages. As such, they figure communities of dissent, resistance, and resilience, which circumvent the directives of technocrats and paternalists.
By unsettling the anthropocentric relations between bodies and things, they offer transhumanist views on togetherness.
As squatters of our “post-factual” present, hyposubjects are imagined as beings intoxicated with sleeplessness and shameless desires, constructing new states of imaginaries from planetary commons.
What types of practices do hyposubjects perform? How might we transmit their entangled, shy, and self-empowering articulations? And might we hear the laughter of hyposubjects as they exit the dominant?
Radio series: a total of 10h, SAVVY Funk, 90.4 MHz in Kassel, 15560 kHz Shortwave.
with guests: Kirstin Mertlitsch, Michaela Ott, No Play Work,
Group, Marina Gržiniz, Vasillis Tsianos, Antje Lind, Anil K. Jain, and Zeynep Bulut,
including a radio drama in/with the paintings of Kirsi Mikkola, spoken by Lulu Obermayer
Wall drawing: graphite, acryllic paint, 650 x 320 cm, at SAVVY Contemporary Berlin.
Commissioned by documenta 14 as part of Every Time A Ear Di Soun.
The German iteration is a new station started from scratch in Berlin—SAVVY
Funk. For SAVVY Funk, artists are invited to take over a 24-hour radio program providing news, weather, and
other programs. Participating artists collaborate with students from the Class for Experimental Radio at Bauhaus-
Universität Weimar, led by Prof. Nathalie Singer and Martin Hirsch, to prepare and operate the radio program.
Prof. Nathalie Singer and her team are also contributing a reading and listening room at SAVVY Contemporary,
where visitors can experience and reflect on radio in the making.
Fotos: Sandy Volz, Stefan Müller, Mathias Völzke
Here you can find a trailer with a compilation of the broadcasts in german language:
and also an English version:
10 bilingual broadcasts à 30 min. (Ger./Engl.)
„Acht Umgebungen des Hyposubjekt-Lachens“ is Anna Bromley's part of „Laugh of the Hyposubject“.
Following on from Donna Haraway’s materialistic-feminist critique of representations, Timothy Morton issues a plea for an updating of ecological criticism in the form of a deconstructionist ecognosis. Based on analyses of literature, he argues that concepts for environmental protection usually arise from the legacy of the romantic
perception of nature and hence, by distinguishing between the environment and the anthro-subject, transport
reactionary policies. He notes that what we grasp as environment today is by no means that which the
environmentalist movement considers worthy of protection and seeks to maintain. On the contrary — in
contemporary capitalist hyper-economies, environment is considered an ugly, contaminated and toxic entity
that fully represents a subjective position.1 In the process, Morton concludes that subjective and objective
positions often overlap and become blurred, so that their contours are no longer easily recognised.
Environment, as a man-made, impetuous geology, manifests itself in hyper-objects that generate unpredictable
futures. These total spatial and temporal structures include, for example, global warming, antibiotics or
capitalism. Their massive spread was only possible because it was facilitated by hyper-subjects.
Hyper-subjects typically take the form of political representatives or scientific experts.2 In their constant activity
they fail to notice new political subjectivities forming beneath their own awareness. I use the word “new” here
because, paradoxically, their effect comes from inconspicuousness, perhaps even the non-agency of their nonidentities,
from the acceptance of a person’s own lack of knowledge and interdependency. In one fragment of
an essay, Morton refers to these as hypo-subjects – in other words, as phenomena that somehow exist “beneath
the radar” and are located in feminist, queer, trans and intra-human communities of the global South and North.
In order to come to the fore self-reflectively, hence ecognostically, they must first cross several layered strata
from outside to inside, namely:
1. The sugar icing of a guilty conscience
2. The hideous stain of shame
3. The night of melancholy
4. The eerie valley of horrors
5. The field of ridiculous, ephemeral and meaningless toys
6. The waters of sadness
7. The territory of desire
8. The dirt track to happiness
I am taking these eight layers, which Morton describes as concentric and which I, with a preference for a
horizontal metaphor of coexistence, imagine as environments, as a topological template for eight thirty-minute
radio conversations with locals from these regions. These will be framed by a prologue and an epilogue in front
of the abstract paintings by the artist Kirsi Mikkola.
Exakt hier startet die Exkursion in die acht Umgebungen. Durch einem weißen Nebel tastet sich die Späherin in rot-gekerbte Flächen vor, deren Karst in eine graue Umarmung fällt. Kleine Finger-Dinger sind mit ihren
schwarzen Bewegungen beschäftigt: Aufwärts, auf und weiter hoch! Ab, in diese scharfe Struktur, wo alles den
perfekten Platz findet und friedlich vor sich schwebend, schaukelnd tönt. Ebensogut könnte es auch singen.
Und in all diesem Singen erschiene dann diese blaue Halb-Wolke. Okay, wahrscheinlich sagt sie nur Wolke,
wegen der Bläue.
Im Atelier der Malerin Kirsi Mikkola ist macht sich Anna Bromley fit fürs Gelände.
Um die Rezeptur emotionaler Überzüge und deren „Darunter“ in Erfahrung zu bringen, telefoniert Anna Bromley nach Klagenfurt. Dort leitet die Philosophin Kirstin Mertlitsch das Gender-Zentrum an der Alpen-AdriaUniversität. Kürzlich ist bei Transkript ihr Buch „Sisters-Cyborgs-Drags“ erschienen. Sein erster Teil beschäftigt sich unter anderem mit der Anrufung, Aktivierung und Intensivierung bestimmter Gefühle durch die Begriffsperson der „Sister“.
Mit Begriffs-Zeug, auf das sich die Geistesgeschichte in bestimmten Perioden kapriziert, um es danach - um einige Erkenntnisse reicher - in die Umzugskisten neuer Denkbewegungen zu packen, kennt sich die Philosophin Michaela Ott aus. Ihre zuletzt bei B-Books erschienene Untersuchung zu Dividuationen beschäftigt sich mit der Geschichte des Individuum-Begriffs und schlägt vor, diesen Begriff an seinen historischen Platz zu legen, um in Dividuationen und als Dividuen denken und handeln zu können. Mit ihr inspiziert Anna Bromley den Bereich der lächerlichen, flüchtigen und bedeutungslosen Spielzeuge.
Someone had left a note saying that melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. Unfortunately, melancholy is more perfidious. Feminist writer Sara Ahmed describes a melancholic universalism that lies exactly in the demand to identify with the structures of a universe that renounces you. So the night of melancholy is rather sleepless but maybe not in an exiting way. In the morning after, Anna invites some members of the No Play Working Group into the radio cabin. Last year, they organized a Feminist Training Camp committed to anti-racist feminist analysis at the nGbK Berlin. The strategies, discussions and experiences of the project were compiled into a poetic-political manual “No play” in which Anna hopes to find tactical inspirations for future nights-of-melancholy.
Consulting the golden No Play manual from time to time, Anna goes down into the eerie valley of horrors which is difficult to reach. The shadowy valley is a zone full of half-suppressed guilt. It reveals half-buried bodies who fell down on the threshold of neoliberal vitality. Between their murmurs, their undead creaks, their images of terror, Anna is pulled into the rotting, crumbling rock. She`d better call Marina Gržinić who can help with necropolitical issues. Gržinić is a research advisor at the Institute of Philosophy at the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana and teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
Anna Bromley sieht sich einem widerlichen Fleck gegenüber, der sich partout nicht abwischen läßt. Sie ruft den Soziologen Vasillis Tsianos in Hamburg an, der sich als Mitglied des Rates für Migration und Kannak-Atack- Aktivist mit digitalen Fingerabdrücken und diskriminierenden Beschämungen auskennt. Er unterrichtet an der Christian-Alberts-Universität in Kiel und an der Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg und forscht zur postmigrantischen Gesellschaft, Rassismus und zur europäischen Grenze.
Durch Kapitulation vermehrt sich zwar das Gewässer der Traurigkeit, aber Kapitulation kann auch der Beginn sein, um sich um sich selbst zu kümmern. Durch diese und andere Paradoxien wird Anna Bromley von der Psychologin Antje Lind navigiert. Als Verhaltenstherapeutin leitet Antje Lind die Berliner Anlaufstelle FAM des Vereins FrauSuchtZukunft. 1983 gründete dieser eines der ersten deutschen Frauen-Sucht-Projekte. Inzwischen betreiben seine unterschiedlichen Anlaufstellen eine frauenspezifische Suchtarbeit, für Suchtmittelabhängige, weibliche Angehörige und Freundinnen von Konsument*innen.
Wie kann das Verlangen nach radikaler Veränderung, wie es sich immer aufs Neue in Protesten manifestiert, in gegenwärtigen Irritation der Subjekt-Objekt-Unterscheidungen tätig werden? Braucht es hier nicht Kompass, Karte und klare Konturen? Im Gebiet des Verlangens wird Anna Bromley durch den Sozialwissenschaftler Anil K. Jain begleitet. Nach seiner Promotion bei Ulrich Beck arbeitet er in verschiedenen Forschungsprojekten, so im Forschungsverbund „OMedeR: Objekte als Medien der Reflexivität“ der Zeppelin-Universität Friedrichshafen und der Universität der Künste Berlin. Seine Schwerpunkte liegen u.a. bei den aktuellen sozialen Transformationsprozessen postindustrieller Gesellschaften; Raum und Gesellschaft; Metapher und Repräsentation; Postmoderne/ Poststrukturalismus.
This morning will take us through abandoned territories. Rumor has it that it is somewhere here, that you can strike the dirt track of happiness. The peeper had already seen it all so we`d better strain our ears now and listen to how the peeper observes the form-ideas of Kirsi Mikkola`s paintings through Lulu Obermayer`s voice.
After roaming the sensitive environments of hyposubject-laughter, Anna decided to drift away from transmission. But before disappearing into the unfamiliar, she needs to revisit the sites of voice, vibration, surface and transmission with Zeynep Bulut who is a Lecturer in Music at Queen’s University Belfast. Her articles have appeared in various volumes and journals including Perspectives of New Music, Postmodern Culture, and Music and Politics. Alongside her scholarly work, she has also exhibited sound works, and composed and performed vocal pieces for concert, video and theatre.
