Abacus: A failure to communicate (but not to critique)

Speaking to audience members after the Saturday night performance of Paul Abacus, it seemed if Early Morning Opera’s production was meant to make a convincing argument about the limits of the nation-state it failed. The narrative of a thoroughly post-modern world shaped by the grand visualizations of statistics spread across six enormous screens and the theater-wide wandering exposition of Paul Abacus did not cohere into a moment of shared understanding or collective action under his banner. But in this rhetorical failure the work succeeds as an interrogation of the presentation forms seen as best practices in our media culture.

It might be useful to consider this argument through the ways in which Abacus performs in a way that speaks through and against dance. Dance in the writings of figures like Friedrich Nietzsche and Alain Badiou has been taken up as a metaphor for thought.* The intersection of a commitment to motion and a restraint of movement figures strongly in these philosophies. Abacus conveys the idea of a dance and thought interrupted, an act and call to action that is subverted by the contrivances common to the presentation of knowledge and organization of people today, TED talks and arena-style megachurches.

As a first consideration, it is important to note that dance is not a march, and in kind thought must avoid following the beat of a drum and shaping the public into an “aligned and hammering body” as Badiou says in his Inaesthetics (59). Contrary to this, Abacus’ talk often appears as a precise arrangement of established presentation styles.

The graphs Abacus employs produce a mechanical dance of visualizations indifferent to insight. The source of the data matters little compared to the striking display of animated line and bar graphs. Form shows itself superior to logic as Abacus insists the patterns display self-evident truths such as in a comparison of Kashi cereal consumption and catholic school attendance rates. Nevertheless, the audience laughs along.

Illustrative of how such performances are regimented and in turn order the responses of their audiences, Abacus calls out to the audience to raise their hands, flash their cell phones, and sing in unison in gestures of call and response. The significance of falling in step with such hailing gestures is made clear later in the talk when Abacus thrusts his own hand into the air and repeatedly chants “nation.”

In addition to employing such common presentation forms, Abacus also resorts to cut-and-paste appeals. For instance, he makes a gesture familiar to any who have seen TED talks when he acknowledges how some viewers might draw away from his post-national view due to the similarities it bears with socialism. He then in kind assures his audience that they should fear not, he has spoken with business leaders and it turns out they are just as eager to tear down all borders, that state restrictions hurt their bottom line as much as our sense of social justice. In this post-state, post-scarcity, post-Post-cereal argument, all momentum seems to be in alignment, if not lockstep.

But dance as a metaphor for thought warns against embracing these appearances of structural unity. Dance rather adopts a “theme of a mobility that is firmly fastened to itself, a mobility that is not inscribed within an external determination, but instead moves without detaching itself from its own center” (Badiou 59). This competing need for an autonomous movement of thought and a call for intervention is registered in appropriately conflicted ways by Abacus.

In terms of autonomy, the position the audience occupies bears little if at all on Abacus. He wanders out of sight, speaking to the cameras. The audience meanwhile is in a balcony, the cheap seats. These spatial relations mirror those of the by-invite-only, multi-thousand-dollar, front-and-center accommodations of the TED conference and the YouTube lookers on. The audience peers silently at the power brokers or chime in at prefigured moments, a managed transparency and interactivity giving them controlled access to power.

Along quite different lines, Abacus screams at his audience to listen to him because something needs to be done. He knows something, and the crowd just needs to listen to him. But, to misuse Foucault in "What Is an Author?" on the potential authorless future, “what difference does it make who is speaking” when everyone shares the same mezzo-level perspective? (120). Abacus appeals to astronauts and cosmonauts being changed by seeing the world from space, but how can privileging this totalizing view be anything but the construction of another border? Why in this post-hierarchical age should anyone listen to anyone else? Should we not delight in our choice to sit in the shadows, in the “anonymity of a murmur” arising from the discomfort about being so suddenly put upon to do something? (119).

Here, along with the point about thought not being regimented, it is shown that thought is not purely impulsive either. Rather:

“dance designates the capacity of bodily impulse not so much to be projected onto a space outside of itself, but rather to be caught up in an affirmative attraction that restrains it. … this force of restraint will be manifested only in movement, but what counts is the potent legibility of the restraint.

[…]

In dance thus conceived, movement finds its essence in what has not taken place, in what has remained either ineffective or restrained within movement itself” (Badiou 59-60).

Following this reasoning, it is sensible that the real dance in Abacus is taken up late in the show by the camera operators. They do not merely choreograph shots in steadicam synch with their bodies. In fact, when they begin dancing they seem to move without much regard for what is projected onto the screens. The stage reclaims its position as a focal point from the screens when their movements cease to be epiphenomena and they become people. In turn the audiences' ways of seeing cease being screened and instrumental and become briefly engaged with a newly active stage.

Outside of any useful considerations of dance, additional commentary on popular modes of presentation are present in the performance. Abacus and a cameraman are shot while retreating backstage. Is this not the nostalgic dream of all modern-day theoretical radicals – to say something so dangerous that the establishment puts out an old-fashioned death warrant with their name on it rather than burying their truth with sidebar excerpts and scrolling commentary? After his death, Abacus returns to the stage without a mic. As the screens go dark, the speakers grow silent, and the stage lights fade, he repeats some of his earlier thoughts. While repetition is a Nietzschean theme that comes up throughout the piece, here is where I found it most valuably employed. Upon his return Abacus seems human. The props are gone, the sermon is over. Abacus addresses the audience in those last moments not as a choir of technocrats but rather as humans touched by his pathos rather than his trend lines.

* Badiou is particularly concerned with thinking infinity. His name came to mind when Abacus raised the question “what is infinity?,” and so it feels fitting that I put the two into some sort of dialogue here.