Now, three or so years after first trying to formalize our thinking together, one thing we can say without hesitation is that Universal Receptivity is about whiteness (as “universality” usually is…). Keeping in mind that where we and this project have actually ended up may be a different question, we had initially imagined our title as a short circuit: to universalize that which is structurally incompatible with whiteness – that which whiteness must perpetually disavow, must perpetually project onto its others: bottomless receptivity, non-contingent receptivity, indiscriminate receptivity, a receptivity of/to transformation beyond repair.
Universal Receptivity as a seminar took place between October 22, 2018 and January 26, 2019. Its five sessions were held in seven meetings – five in Nuremberg (at the Academy of Fine Arts) and two in Berlin (where, at that time, we both lived). Universal Receptivity as a publication has been simmering ever since then, breaking into a flurry of “finalizing” activity at the beginning of 2021. Universal Receptivity as an idea had been much longer in development, directly and indirectly tied to our growing friendship since an initial introduction by Amy Sillman in 2014, and likewise directly and indirectly tied to our reception of each other’s large projects completed immediately before the seminar – Kerstin’s Entgrenzter Formalismus [1] and Bill’s L’école de la claque [2].
We did our best to nod to the sympathetic resonances between all that’s implied in the subtitle of Kerstin’s book (“procedures of an anti-modern aesthetic”) and the account of modern publicness’ implosion that prefaces Bill’s Claque work in our seminar’s formal title: Universal Receptivity. Über Formen entgrenzter Partizipation. On late summer days in 2018 over coffee and ice cream, we drew up an overly formal course description that offered the seminar as a series of workshops,
[…] dedicated to discussing reception and participation as two modes of human (aesthetic) experience associated with the modern figure of the audience: a group of receivers not usually seen as self-modeled or form-giving, but more often thought of as recipients of something existing autonomously from them. Universal Receptivity considers historical as well as contemporary examples in which the receiver is conceived as an aesthetic starting point. What if participation were the model of how we conceive of our own production? What if reception were to supersede production? What if we come to see ourselves as receivers? To rais[e] these questions with the group, Dietz and Stakemeier begin each of the sessions with a scripted lecture
[…] that maps out the vast implications of this shift in perspective as it traverses popular culture, the sonic and visual arts, and as it reconfigures aesthetic and political theory. With a notion of empowered receptivity, institutionalized boundaries of reflection and production are rendered necessarily permeable.
[…] Prioritizing reception also determines the form of the seminar itself. Designed to enhance all participants’ reflection on their own work, each is asked, after each session, to produce a protocol of the proceedings (in English or in German) from her reception of them. Dietz and Stakemeier will review and comment on the protocols from the previous session and isolate aspects of them to concentrate on in the following sessions […].
The degree to which this structure worked… is something that can perhaps be measured in this publication. Both print and web versions retain the essential structure of the seminar. Our ten scripts (two each corresponding to the five thematic sessions) run throughout the print-version on the bottom half of the page, and are accompanied in a parallel stream by corresponding student protocols (we’re calling them “Comments” now) in the upper half of the page. For the web-version, this parallelism is left (teacher scripts) / right (student comments).
We started by trying to imagine and formulate a structure composed of multiple, entwined co-receptivities – between the two of us in dialogue, between each of us and our students, between students themselves. Over the course of the seminar, and in editing our scripts for publication, we discovered a tendency of this co-receptive structure towards interminability (to use the standard translation of Freud’s “unendlich” in Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse) – to always want to respond to the responses, to keep revising, to keep deviating – an interminability not unlike that other psychoanalytic notion which keeps turning up throughout our texts: durcharbeiten (working through). Already in the course of the sessions, however, we found ourselves unwanting of durcharbeiten’s arbeiten: taking possession of receptivity while attempting to disown our (re)productive faculties was more and more clearly a merely “critical” (read: self-affirming) move. Which is to say: we came to understand that the interminability of circular receptivity, the perpetual postponement of being wronged, is yet another disavowal of receptivities beyond our control. Our carefully orchestrated co-receptivity was stabilizing (even in its damaged frailty), another fantasy of containment. This realization, which exceeds the programmatic “short-circuiting whiteness” notion we opened with, is something most legible in the frequent breaks, twists, and pivots around which our texts fracture again & again. We did our best to invent impossible tasks for our own writing – to make its receptivities materially awkward for any you reading, receiving it. Perpetually though, our un-working will remain in need of breaking our arbeiten at concrete points. In that sense then, because this project is committed to facing receptivity beyond repair, to facing our mechanisms for telling ourselves that we are not subject to a receptivity beyond repair, we understand this publication as a break. As a wrench thrown into our own structure that thrusts it beyond us, petrified, “final,” into your hands.
The generosity of Susanne Dundler, David Grimm, Nele Jäger, Bokyoung Jeong, Katharina Kiupel, Evelyn Kliesch, Simone Körner, Kai Oh, Rebecca Praechter, Valeria Stufelesser, Guoxin Tian, and Hans Wirsching is immeasurable and made this strange “class” possible. Our thanks also go out to those students who attended but didn’t contribute protocols. Jenny Nachtigall gave a wonderful talk during the final session of the seminar and gave us so much more. George MacBeth helped polish our manuscripts into what they now are. Kristina Tautz literally imagined the body of this project into existence.
Finally, we dedicate this work to the memory of Katharina Kiupel.
coming soon ...